Ask Lemmy

Honestly the whole "if there's no god then how do you know right from wrong" argument is astounding to me, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face.

'If God isn't real, why do you say oh my God?'

That was from the deputy head of my school...

Pascal's Wager

The Bible. Never understood how anyone could read that and believe. The answer I leaned much later on is that they don't read it.

I had one guy who told me that he believed that God made the white people.

And that the black people evolved from monkeys.

And the people like me who are Native American and the Indians and Chinese and whatnot are all products of miscegenation between the white people who have souls and the black people who do not.

Surprisingly, being told that i am the proud possessor of some undefinable fraction of a human soul was not enough to get me to participate in their religion.

All of them.

They're all stupid.

Not necessarily God but intelligent design. I saw someone talk about a banana being the perfect fruit and how well it matched the shape of our hands. So obviously someone planned that out. Must've been God, the same being that releases half a dozen new apple varieties every season.

Chicken and Egg argument. Christian apologist said it's only a paradox for atheists. God just made eggs and chickens at the same time.

Of course, as an atheist who has seen dinosaur fossils... Eggs existed hundreds of millions of years before chickens.

If there were no god wed all have no morals.

If violently abusive rapist psycopath threatening to torture you is your only reason for being nice, maybe you're a pos to begin with?

I believe in God but found the arguments in The Brothers Karamazov (and yes I read the book) to be misguided. There's a part in particular where a quasi-villainous character loses faith in God and suddenly goes right to murdering other characters who have been getting on his nerves. The whole thing takes Nietzsche to a whole new level. We aren't the sum of our schools of thought; in fact, in my faith, God doesn't really care about faith as much as he cares about how good we are. I've never met anyone before who doesn't have at least some innate sense of some kind of boundaries.

"It's not a cult." Wake up Karen, it's a cult.

How would anything have been able to form, i.e. make more order, without decreasing entropy?

Of course there are multiple errors in that thought.

1. Entropy does not mean an actual grade of (dis-)order or organization. It's one model to grasp certain processes through that concept. Outside of these the model doesn't hold.
2. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy cannot decrease in a CLOSED system (i.e. mass, energy, information flow at the boundary = 0). It doesn't mean that within that system there can't be local imbalances. For example: For a plant to be able to "order" - to use this term - its molecules to cells, Hydrogen atoms had to have been fused to Helium in our fusion reactor 150 million km away that we call sun which increases local entropy.

Of course there's more wrong with it, but those would be the blatant ones for me.

The weirdest to me are variations of, "If God didn't exist it would make me feel bad." Uhh???

"how else would you know the right thing to do?"

queried by a zealot at a picnic table in the park.

Weirdest would have to be that miracles were actively occuring at their Penacostal church. On the one hand, if that were true it would be strong evidence for a god. On the other hand, I don't believe the claim is true.

A lot of believers point towards the fine-tuning argument. It's "the god of the gaps." Essentially, the argument boils down to the claim that since we don't know why various laws and properties of nature and physics are the way they are, there must of have been a god that set them. Like many theist arguments, it falls apart when you consider that the lack of an alternate explanation doesn't mean that there is no alternate explanation and that the believing explanation has to be correct.

As an atheist, I think the strongest argument for god is the moral argument. It's simple. For objective morality to exist, there must be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-moral being capable of establishing it (that is, a god). Objective morality exists, so God exists.

It's easy to look at that and say "Well, objective morality doesn't exist. End of story!" I think there is a decent argument that can be made for the existence of objective morality, though I don't believe in it. Still, do I not believe in god because I think objective morality doesn't exist, or do I think objective morality doesn't exist because I don't believe in god? If I'm being honest, it's more the latter than the former, and that's not really a great way to come to the conclusion.