Prove that God doesn't exist.

[KeepOurFreedoms]

abcde

 

[TVoffBrainOn]

Bottom line, because I read the bible and called Jesus name........and something happened.

Try it....see what happens.

I tried it in WalMart in Spanish. A hundred people said, "Que?"

funniest thing i read all day

 

[ArmChair General]

Its been a while since Ive had the chance to post, so I really don'ty recall exactly where we were in this debate. I'll try and keep up.

Whose spouting sophistry now, eh?

The thing is, a physical cosmological model that involves 'something' behaving in a particular way 'somehow' in 'someplace' beyond our common-sense world could very well answer ANYTHING.



Inflation is guth's seminal work, fyi.

It makes use of particle physics to bring a fresh perspective to cosmology. While it is arguably the most accepted cosmological model today, it is so by DEFAULT.



It is refreshing for someone to understand the point raised for a change.

I do not think it is a failure on the part of science, merely its inherent limitations.

Science is a materialist, empiricist philosophical conception with a rigorous set of methodology. The basic tenet of this philosophical conception - ALL MATERIAL PHENOMENON HAVE ONLY MATERIAL CAUSES.

And you don't need cosmology to realize the basic frailty of this postulate. There are countless human experiences that are not empirically quantifiable and are not the mechanistic result of some material cause.



You give religion too much credit.

The philosophical basis of christianity does not derive from the gospels - but in hellenistic philosophy of the west.

The notion of the immutability of physical laws are attributable to the platonic and aristotlean schools of thought - not jesus, nor judaism.



Outdated, you say?

No human knowledge can proceed without the benefit of axioms or postulate. Not logic, nor mathematics. Certainly not the natural sciences.

The difference between euclidean and non-euclidean geometry rests on a SINGLE postulate, fyi.



Complexity in a theory is a sure sign of bs, in my opinion.

The scientific precept ockham's razor says as much.



I am flattered that you attribute the cosmological argument to me. Unfortunately, I must decline the honor.

It is, however, couched as a FORMAL ARGUMENT.

While you might consider it mere sophistry, you really need to point out its fallacy for you to dismiss it off-hand.

The simplest way to make this work is if we are a baby universe. Like real-life babies, giving birth to universes is a painful and mysterious process. The basic idea is that you have a background spacetime with small (or zero) vacuum energy, and a little sphere of high-density false vacuum. (The sphere could be constructed in your secret basement laboratory, or may just arise as a thermal fluctuation.) Now, if you’re not careful, the walls of the sphere will simply implode, leaving you with some harmless radiation. To prevent that from happening, you have two choices. One is that the size of the sphere is greater than the Hubble radius of your universe, in our case, more than ten billion light years across, so that’s not very realistic. The other is that your sphere is not simply embedded in the background, it’s connected to the rest of space by a “wormhole” geometry. Again, you could imagine making it that way through your wizardry in gravitational engineering, or you could wait for a quantum fluctuation. Truth is, we’re not very clear on how feasible such quantum fluctuations are, so there are no guarantees.

But if all those miracles occur, you’re all set. Your false-vacuum bubble can expand from a really tiny sphere to a huge inflating universe, eventually reheating and leading to something very much like the local universe we see around us today. From the outside, the walls of the bubble appear to collapse, leaving behind a black hole that will eventually evaporate away. So the baby universe, like so many callous children, is completely cut off from communication with its parent. (Perhaps “teenage universe” would be a more apt description.)

I must admit, I have a hidden agenda here. The thing we are trying to explain is not “why was the early universe like that?”, but rather “why was the history of universe from one end of time to the other like that?” I would argue that any scenario that purports to explain the origin of the universe by simply invoking some special magic at early times, without explaining why they are so very different from late times, is completely sidestepping the real question. For example, while the cyclic-universe model is clever and interesting, it is about hopeless. If we knew the state of the universe to infinite precision and evolved it backwards in time using the laws of physics, we would discover that the current state (and the state at every other moment of time) is infinitely finely-tuned, to guarantee that the entropy will decrease monotonically forever into the past. That’s just asserting something, not explaining anything.

The baby-universe idea at least has the chance to give rise to a spontaneous violation of time-reversal symmetry and explain the arrow of time. If we start with empty space an evolve it forward, baby universes can (hypothetically) be born; but the same is true if we run it backwards. The increase of entropy doesn’t arise from a fine-tuning at one end of the universe’s history, it’s a natural consequence of the ability of the universe to always increase its entropy. We’re a long way from completely understanding such a picture; ultimately we’ll have to be talking about a Hilbert space of wavefunctions that involve an infinite number of disconnected components of spacetime, which has always been a tricky problem. But the increase of entropy is a fact of life, right here in front of our noses, that is telling us something deep about the universe on the very largest scales.

Your presupposition of adding a God to basically 'fill in the blanks' is a waste of time. If we are honest in discovering the truth, then we can'not just add something to complete the problem. If you expect to be taken seriously with your God theory, then you must give it the same skeptical treatment that you have given other theorys.

 

[ArmChair General]

numinus

"No human knowledge can proceed without the benefit of axioms or postulate. Not logic, nor mathematics. Certainly not the natural sciences."

You are exactly right. Most people start out with presuppositions but are unaware that that is their starting point. Evolution is a great example of this. Evolution is assumed to be correct and therefore all data must be interpreted in accordance with the presupposition of evolution.

Should the presupposition prove to be erroneous, the data/observation do not change. The data does not support any specific theory. It is human interpretation of data/observations that support theories.

If you assume there is no God, you must interpret any data naturalistically, so as the exclude the existence of God. Since the existence of God can't be proven or disproven, by science, both conditions are equally unknown in the eyes of science. A true scientist knows this and understands that automatically excluding one condition from a theory has the potential to result in the entire tehory be discredited should any portion be discredited.

Presupposions, axioms, undemonstrable assumptions, all affect one's interpretation of data.

My interpretation of the Big Bang is that it may very well be true although it can't be proven, and that conditions of the Big Bang were so finely tuned as to require some form of intelligence.

you assume there is a God, and no your other thread does not prove it. Its a load of BS. and No, you are not worth my time (which I have a limited amount of) to explain why. I would suggest you submit your theory to be peer reviewed, real scientists would have the time to explain how your full of ****.

 

[ArmChair General]

Ever wonder why more than 90 % of the world's population believe in a creator in one form or another?

Oh and btw, more than 90 % of the world's population believe in a creator in one form or another.

The people that the truth 'escapes from' consist of a painfully small minority - perhaps comparable to the statistical occurence of insanity in any given population.

Go figure.

The question itself is novel. Social scientists, for example, have long considered religion as 'sui generis', not as a behavioral predisposition that arose because in some way it contributed to the survival and reproduction of its participants. For Dawkins (The God Delusion) ans Dennett (Breaking the Spell), religion is primarily the misbegotten offspring of memes that promote themselves in human minds: essentially, religion as mental virus, thus something adaptive for “itself” and not for its “victims.” Or it could be a nonadaptive byproduct of something adaptive in its own right. For example, children seem hard-wired to accept parental teaching, since such advice is likely to be fitness-enhancing ("This is good to eat,” “Don’t pet the saber-tooth"). In turn, this makes children vulnerable to whatever else they are taught ("Respect the Sabbath,” “Cover your hair") as well as downright needy when it comes to parentlike beings, leading especially to the patriarchal sky god of the Abrahamic faiths.

For Dawkins in particular, not only is religious belief bad, and unjustified, but, given the susceptibility of young children to adult indoctrination, the very teaching of religion to defenseless children is a form of child abuse. Other, related hypotheses of religion include the anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s grandly titled Religion Explained, which argues that natural selection would have favored a mechanism for detecting “agency” in nature, enabling its possessor to predict who is about to do what (and, often, to whom). Since false positives would be much less fitness-reducing than false negatives (i.e., better to attribute malign intent to a tornado and take cover than to assume it is benign and suffer as a result), selection would promote hypersensitivity, or “overdetection,” essentially a hair-trigger system whereby motive is attributed not only to other people and mastodons, but also to trees, hurricanes, or the sun. Add, next, the benefit of “decoupling” such predictions from the actual presence of the being in question ("What might my rival be planning right now?"), and the stage is set for attributing causation to “agents” whose agency might well be entirely imagined.

Boyer’s work, in turn, converges on that of Stewart Guthrie, whose book, Faces in the Clouds, made a powerful case for the potency of anthropomorphism, the human tendency to see human (or humanlike) images in natural phenomena. The perception of patterns where none exist (some recent, “real” examples: Jesus’ face in a tortilla, the Virgin Mary’s outline in a semimelted hunk of chocolate, Mother Teresa’s profile in a cinnamon bun).

Not all biologically based hypotheses for the evolution of religion are negative, however. In Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson explored the possibility that religious belief is advantageous for its practitioners because it contributes to solidarity, including but not limited to moral codes, that benefits the group and wouldn’t otherwise be within reach. That notion, appealing as it might be, is actually a logical and mathematical stretch for most biologists, relying as it does upon group selection. The problem is that even if groups displaying a particular trait do better than groups lacking it, selection acting within such groups should favor individuals who “cheat.” Mathematical models have shown that group selection can work in theory, but only if the differential survival of religious groups more than compensates for any disadvantage suffered by individuals within each group. It is at least possible that human beings meet this requirement, especially when it comes to religion, since within-group self-policing could maintain religiosity; it certainly did during the Inquisition.

The biologist Lewis Wolpert seeks to examine this problem in a book whose title derives from an exchange between Alice and the Red Queen, in which the latter points out that “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Wolpert describes and interprets various widespread logical fallacies, examining their diverse origins in brain pathology, neurochemical impacts, and other cognitive limitations, in seeking to understand why so many people, in the words of H.L. Mencken, “believe passionately in the palpably not true.” His book is a useful index of hallucinations, confabulations, and other self-delusions, with the intriguing added thesis that much science is itself counterintuitive (the earth’s going around the sun, the mutability of species, quantum “weirdness,” and so on).

Wolpert maintains that “true causal reasoning” is unknown among other animals and often highly flawed in our own species. Yet, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has pointed out, people simply cannot look at the world “in dumb astonishment or blind apathy,” and so they struggle for explanation, valid or not, a process that results inevitably in beliefs. Wolpert then suggests that “those with such beliefs most likely did better.” But the bulk of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast details inaccurate beliefs: How might the holders of false beliefs “do better”? In short, what is the adaptive significance?

One possibility is that faith in an afterlife, in buried golden plates inscribed by divine guidance, or in bright-blue elephant-headed gods is not false after all. Another is that such beliefs have beneficial byproducts, like a placebo. For now, however, it isn’t clear how attachment to one or many gods actually pays off, since, although a deity may have turned water into wine and helped bring down the walls of Jericho in the distant past, such beneficence hasn’t been reliably documented in recent times.

Barbara J. King enters the fray with Evolving God, a knowledgeable trip into the prehistory of religion, enlivened by a refreshing orientation toward nonhuman primates as well as early hominids. Evolving God has the added merit of pushing beyond the Abrahamic “big three,” including a handy account of religious archaeology. King’s touchstone is “belongingness,” the idea that “hominids turned to the sacred realm because they evolved to relate in deeply emotional ways with their social partners, ... and because the human brain evolved to allow an extension of this belongingness beyond the here and now.”

King is convincing about the merits and allure of belongingness, but less so, indeed, she is distressingly silent, when it comes to the adaptive significance of cozying up to the ineffable. If, as she suggests, “at bedrock is the belief that one may be seen, heard, protected, harmed, loved, frightened, or soothed by interaction with God, gods, or spirits,” then what in the real world of biology and reproductive fitness has anchored human biology to that bedrock? A feeling of belongingness sounds nice, as does one of cheerfulness, or the contentment that comes from having a full belly, but to be adaptive, one ought to get a genuinely full belly.

King is quick to dismiss a “genetic approach” to understanding the evolution of religiosity, heaping what may be appropriate scorn on the simplistic, overhyped claim for a “God gene.” But she doesn’t seem to realize that any evolutionary approach is necessarily, at its heart, a genetic one. We must conclude, sadly, that a convincing evolutionary explanation for the origin of religion has yet to be formulated. In any event, such an account, were it to arise, would doubtless be unconvincing to believers because, whatever it postulated, it would not conclude that religious belief arose because (1) it simply represents an accurate perception of God, comparable to identifying food, a predator, or a prospective mate; or (2) it was installed in the human mind and/or genome by God, presumably for his glory and our counterevidentiary enlightenment.

David Hume began his essay The Natural History of Religion (1757) as follows: “As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.” So far we’ve been concerned with religion’s “origin in human nature.” Next, its “foundation in reason.”

 

[9sublime]

Ah, you require proof from others and not from yourself.

I don't make up things in my head and regard them as proof, if thats what you mean.

 

[numinus]

I don't make up things in my head and regard them as proof, if thats what you mean.

Neither do I.

The facts remain:

- the cosmological argument is a FORMAL argument to which you have given NO refutation;

- you have asserted something that, by your own admission, has no proof.

By any standard of debate, I say you have conceded.

 

[numinus]

Its been a while since Ive had the chance to post, so I really don'ty recall exactly where we were in this debate. I'll try and keep up.




The simplest way to make this work is if we are a baby universe. Like real-life babies, giving birth to universes is a painful and mysterious process. The basic idea is that you have a background spacetime with small (or zero) vacuum energy, and a little sphere of high-density false vacuum. (The sphere could be constructed in your secret basement laboratory, or may just arise as a thermal fluctuation.) Now, if you’re not careful, the walls of the sphere will simply implode, leaving you with some harmless radiation. To prevent that from happening, you have two choices. One is that the size of the sphere is greater than the Hubble radius of your universe, in our case, more than ten billion light years across, so that’s not very realistic. The other is that your sphere is not simply embedded in the background, it’s connected to the rest of space by a “wormhole” geometry. Again, you could imagine making it that way through your wizardry in gravitational engineering, or you could wait for a quantum fluctuation. Truth is, we’re not very clear on how feasible such quantum fluctuations are, so there are no guarantees.

But if all those miracles occur, you’re all set. Your false-vacuum bubble can expand from a really tiny sphere to a huge inflating universe, eventually reheating and leading to something very much like the local universe we see around us today. From the outside, the walls of the bubble appear to collapse, leaving behind a black hole that will eventually evaporate away. So the baby universe, like so many callous children, is completely cut off from communication with its parent. (Perhaps “teenage universe” would be a more apt description.)

I appreciate the effort you put into this but, quite frankly, I don't need a lecture on cosmology.

Physical cosmology assumes that the universe is a contingent phenomenon, hence has a finite existence. Therefore, there most definitely was a time when the universe was a 'baby'. I most definitely agree.

However, you assume that inflation is true without considering what exactly this means - that the universe is homogenous throughout the hubble radius.

What you see 15 billion lightyears away is the universe 15 billion years ago, correct? Curiously though, the background radiation 15 billion lightyears away is the same here. Any big bang cosmology would say that is impossible.

Enter inflation. A plank time after the big bang, the baby universe underwent an inflationary stage where the rate of expansion was more than a THOUSAND TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT. That is apparently the reason why the universe appears to be homogenous.

What do we make of the invariance of c, then - the cornerstone of ALL known physical laws?

Another thing is cosmological constant lambda - or the tensile vaccum energy of space? You are talking of an energy density that remains constant as space expands thereby preventing gravity from pulling the universe into a big crunch.

Consider a box of lambda that is not diluted as you increase the volume of the box. The only way you can do this is if you create lambda out of nothing, correct?

Furthermore, einstein's field equation predicts that under the action of lambda, all matter in the universe would have 'escaped itself' long before the 15 billion year estimate of its age.

Unless you can turn the effects of lambda on and off arbitrarily, that is.

I must admit, I have a hidden agenda here. The thing we are trying to explain is not “why was the early universe like that?”, but rather “why was the history of universe from one end of time to the other like that?” I would argue that any scenario that purports to explain the origin of the universe by simply invoking some special magic at early times, without explaining why they are so very different from late times, is completely sidestepping the real question. For example, while the cyclic-universe model is clever and interesting, it is about hopeless. If we knew the state of the universe to infinite precision and evolved it backwards in time using the laws of physics, we would discover that the current state (and the state at every other moment of time) is infinitely finely-tuned, to guarantee that the entropy will decrease monotonically forever into the past. That’s just asserting something, not explaining anything.

I think you are fully aware how ulitmately fatal your argument is.

We are talking of two fundamental 'forces' - gravity on one hand, acting to crunch the universe on itself and lambda on the other, acting to expand it.

For a static universe, neither expanding nor contracting, these 'forces' must necessarily be equal, or omega (their ratio) equals 1.

For a 15 billion year old universe expanding at a rate of the hubble expansion, you need an omega between 0.(add 49 9's) and 1.(add 48 zeroes and 1). A small deviation from this will quickly result in either a big crunch or an entropic heat 'death'.

You may not wish to state it outright but that is a bit contrived to be the basis of any scientific 'theory', wouldn't you say?

The baby-universe idea at least has the chance to give rise to a spontaneous violation of time-reversal symmetry and explain the arrow of time. If we start with empty space an evolve it forward, baby universes can (hypothetically) be born; but the same is true if we run it backwards. The increase of entropy doesn’t arise from a fine-tuning at one end of the universe’s history, it’s a natural consequence of the ability of the universe to always increase its entropy. We’re a long way from completely understanding such a picture; ultimately we’ll have to be talking about a Hilbert space of wavefunctions that involve an infinite number of disconnected components of spacetime, which has always been a tricky problem. But the increase of entropy is a fact of life, right here in front of our noses, that is telling us something deep about the universe on the very largest scales.

Please refrain from using entropic models in this discussion because it simply won't fly, even within the scale of our solar system. Conventional science says that the solar system was formed from a swirling, thermally homogenous cloud of dust by virtue of GRAVITY alone. That's a movement FROM MAXIMUM TO MININIMU ENTROPY right there, in complete defiance of the laws of thermodynamics, and right under our noses to boot!

The truth is, there is NO other explanation for an expanding universe other than the cosmological constant lambda. And even if you are inclined to accept it at face value and ignore how curious this 'thing' is, you are still confronted with violations of the lorentz invariance and the conservation of mass and energy.

And why stop there? Why not violate all the laws of physics? Every single one of them are intimately related to the above laws anyway.

Your presupposition of adding a God to basically 'fill in the blanks' is a waste of time. If we are honest in discovering the truth, then we can'not just add something to complete the problem. If you expect to be taken seriously with your God theory, then you must give it the same skeptical treatment that you have given other theorys.

And if you expect to be taken seriously, you would realize that your scientific babble is nothing more than 'filling in the blanks' in a more technical and complicated language.

Tell me - have you ever seen a space-time singularity in your life? Have you ever measured the effects of inflation? Have you ever held some lambda despite it being the most abundant thing in the universe? Have you ever measured a planck lenght, time or energy, hence effectively piercing heisenberg's uncertainty?

Hmmmm?

 

[9sublime]

Neither do I.

The facts remain:

- the cosmological argument is a FORMAL argument to which you have given NO refutation;

- you have asserted something that, by your own admission, has no proof.

By any standard of debate, I say you have conceded.

I've never argued that the universe didn't start from a baby universe, but just because we dont know how it first started doesnt automatically = Creator, and it certainly doesn't = The Christian God.

 

[numinus]

The question itself is novel. Social scientists, for example, have long considered religion as 'sui generis', not as a behavioral predisposition that arose because in some way it contributed to the survival and reproduction of its participants. For Dawkins (The God Delusion) ans Dennett (Breaking the Spell), religion is primarily the misbegotten offspring of memes that promote themselves in human minds: essentially, religion as mental virus, thus something adaptive for “itself” and not for its “victims.” Or it could be a nonadaptive byproduct of something adaptive in its own right. For example, children seem hard-wired to accept parental teaching, since such advice is likely to be fitness-enhancing ("This is good to eat,” “Don’t pet the saber-tooth"). In turn, this makes children vulnerable to whatever else they are taught ("Respect the Sabbath,” “Cover your hair") as well as downright needy when it comes to parentlike beings, leading especially to the patriarchal sky god of the Abrahamic faiths.

And yet, for human beings who are supposed to be 'predisposed' to think causally, religion seems to be an enduring malaise, no?

For Dawkins in particular, not only is religious belief bad, and unjustified, but, given the susceptibility of young children to adult indoctrination, the very teaching of religion to defenseless children is a form of child abuse. Other, related hypotheses of religion include the anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s grandly titled Religion Explained, which argues that natural selection would have favored a mechanism for detecting “agency” in nature, enabling its possessor to predict who is about to do what (and, often, to whom). Since false positives would be much less fitness-reducing than false negatives (i.e., better to attribute malign intent to a tornado and take cover than to assume it is benign and suffer as a result), selection would promote hypersensitivity, or “overdetection,” essentially a hair-trigger system whereby motive is attributed not only to other people and mastodons, but also to trees, hurricanes, or the sun. Add, next, the benefit of “decoupling” such predictions from the actual presence of the being in question ("What might my rival be planning right now?"), and the stage is set for attributing causation to “agents” whose agency might well be entirely imagined.

And you may say exactly the same for moral constructs, no?

Curious how civilizations arising from very different conditions are 'imagining' the same thing!

Boyer’s work, in turn, converges on that of Stewart Guthrie, whose book, Faces in the Clouds, made a powerful case for the potency of anthropomorphism, the human tendency to see human (or humanlike) images in natural phenomena. The perception of patterns where none exist (some recent, “real” examples: Jesus’ face in a tortilla, the Virgin Mary’s outline in a semimelted hunk of chocolate, Mother Teresa’s profile in a cinnamon bun).

Irrelevant when one speaks of a 'faceless god'.

Not all biologically based hypotheses for the evolution of religion are negative, however. In Darwin’s Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson explored the possibility that religious belief is advantageous for its practitioners because it contributes to solidarity, including but not limited to moral codes, that benefits the group and wouldn’t otherwise be within reach. That notion, appealing as it might be, is actually a logical and mathematical stretch for most biologists, relying as it does upon group selection. The problem is that even if groups displaying a particular trait do better than groups lacking it, selection acting within such groups should favor individuals who “cheat.” Mathematical models have shown that group selection can work in theory, but only if the differential survival of religious groups more than compensates for any disadvantage suffered by individuals within each group. It is at least possible that human beings meet this requirement, especially when it comes to religion, since within-group self-policing could maintain religiosity; it certainly did during the Inquisition.

Sounds like lamarckian evolution to me. No self-respecting biologist would subscribe to it, fyi.

The biologist Lewis Wolpert seeks to examine this problem in a book whose title derives from an exchange between Alice and the Red Queen, in which the latter points out that “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Wolpert describes and interprets various widespread logical fallacies, examining their diverse origins in brain pathology, neurochemical impacts, and other cognitive limitations, in seeking to understand why so many people, in the words of H.L. Mencken, “believe passionately in the palpably not true.” His book is a useful index of hallucinations, confabulations, and other self-delusions, with the intriguing added thesis that much science is itself counterintuitive (the earth’s going around the sun, the mutability of species, quantum “weirdness,” and so on).

Wolpert maintains that “true causal reasoning” is unknown among other animals and often highly flawed in our own species. Yet, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has pointed out, people simply cannot look at the world “in dumb astonishment or blind apathy,” and so they struggle for explanation, valid or not, a process that results inevitably in beliefs. Wolpert then suggests that “those with such beliefs most likely did better.” But the bulk of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast details inaccurate beliefs: How might the holders of false beliefs “do better”? In short, what is the adaptive significance?

And the good biologist is in a position to point out logical fallacies, I suppose.

One could very well point out logical and mathematical paradoxes (and they exist, quite frankly) but one couldn't possibly claim logic and mathematics are inherently flawed. It merely shows they are LIMITED.

 

[numinus]

One possibility is that faith in an afterlife, in buried golden plates inscribed by divine guidance, or in bright-blue elephant-headed gods is not false after all. Another is that such beliefs have beneficial byproducts, like a placebo. For now, however, it isn’t clear how attachment to one or many gods actually pays off, since, although a deity may have turned water into wine and helped bring down the walls of Jericho in the distant past, such beneficence hasn’t been reliably documented in recent times.

Or, more possibly, religion is an expression of an intuitive truth.

And so, while religions, societal norms, expressions of beauty, etc, indeed evolve, the existence of god, morality and aesthetics are immutable.

Barbara J. King enters the fray with Evolving God, a knowledgeable trip into the prehistory of religion, enlivened by a refreshing orientation toward nonhuman primates as well as early hominids. Evolving God has the added merit of pushing beyond the Abrahamic “big three,” including a handy account of religious archaeology. King’s touchstone is “belongingness,” the idea that “hominids turned to the sacred realm because they evolved to relate in deeply emotional ways with their social partners, ... and because the human brain evolved to allow an extension of this belongingness beyond the here and now.”

King is convincing about the merits and allure of belongingness, but less so, indeed, she is distressingly silent, when it comes to the adaptive significance of cozying up to the ineffable. If, as she suggests, “at bedrock is the belief that one may be seen, heard, protected, harmed, loved, frightened, or soothed by interaction with God, gods, or spirits,” then what in the real world of biology and reproductive fitness has anchored human biology to that bedrock? A feeling of belongingness sounds nice, as does one of cheerfulness, or the contentment that comes from having a full belly, but to be adaptive, one ought to get a genuinely full belly.

King is quick to dismiss a “genetic approach” to understanding the evolution of religiosity, heaping what may be appropriate scorn on the simplistic, overhyped claim for a “God gene.” But she doesn’t seem to realize that any evolutionary approach is necessarily, at its heart, a genetic one. We must conclude, sadly, that a convincing evolutionary explanation for the origin of religion has yet to be formulated. In any event, such an account, were it to arise, would doubtless be unconvincing to believers because, whatever it postulated, it would not conclude that religious belief arose because (1) it simply represents an accurate perception of God, comparable to identifying food, a predator, or a prospective mate; or (2) it was installed in the human mind and/or genome by God, presumably for his glory and our counterevidentiary enlightenment.

I am amused at how you use the word 'evolve' abundantly in this post when the word implies a transition to something better.

And when one defines 'better' by some standard, whether survival, quality of life, convenience, etc., you are in fact, defining a principle for which everything must proceed, no?

David Hume began his essay The Natural History of Religion (1757) as follows: “As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.” So far we’ve been concerned with religion’s “origin in human nature.” Next, its “foundation in reason.”

But the thing is, the question of the thread, (god's existence) is not exclusively a religious question. It is a philosophical inquiry that branches out to a multitude of schools of thought.

And when you consider the 4 main branches of philosophy - metaphysics, politics, ethics and aesthetics - you would realize that rejecting god's existence would throw all human knowledge in chaos.

Now that you have shown what other people say, I'm curious at what YOU have to say.

 

[numinus]

I've never argued that the universe didn't start from a baby universe,

That's what finite and contingent means - something that is CAUSED by something other than itself, has a beginning and an ending.

We all know that the universe is finite and contingent.

but just because we dont know how it first started doesnt automatically = Creator, and it certainly doesn't = The Christian God.

I'm sure you are thoroughly befuddled by now.

Something cannot come from nothing. I'm not even sure if you can imagine absolute nothingness. It certainly is beyond any scientific speculation I have ever encountered.

Ironically enough, science points to a space-time singularity as cause of the universe - something that is both NOTHING AND EVERYTHING AT THE SAME TIME.

Are you going to peddle this to me and to everyone else in this forum in lieu of a creator?

 

[Mare Tranquillity]

That's what finite and contingent means - something that is CAUSED by something other than itself, has a beginning and an ending.

We all know that the universe is finite and contingent.

Could you please demonstrate how it is that we all know that the Universe is finite and contingent. All I have ever seen is speculation on this subject, not hard scientific facts.

 

[numinus]

Could you please demonstrate how it is that we all know that the Universe is finite and contingent. All I have ever seen is speculation on this subject, not hard scientific facts.

LOL

You don't see that from the materialist premise of science?

Can you give an example of a scientific phenomenon that is infinite and incontingent?

 

[9sublime]

LOL

You don't see that from the materialist premise of science?

Can you give an example of a scientific phenomenon that is infinite and incontingent?

If God actually existed, then he could, if he wanted, make himself avaliable for scientific study. However, he would be infinite and incontingent.

I don't see how you can be so obsessed with science and still get your kicks out of following religion.

You don't know that nothingness can't exist, you don't know what happens after you die, you don't know what is out there on the far stretches of the universe. You just like to think you do.