"There is no heaven; it's a fairy story"

[ChrisGB]

Carthage said:

ChrisGB said:

This is the distinction: being attracted to a particular person is one thing.

Saying that the way you have sex is the defining feature of who you are by calling yourself "gay" etc is a choice. You can have same sex attraction and not see it as the defining thing about you. The naming is a choice.

If you are attracted to someone, what you do about that is also a choice.

This is the distinction I made above in your quote, fleshed out. I have not said being gay is a choice. Sorry for the subtlety.

There is some scientific evidence that there is a 'gay gene' though, so that being gay is just as intrinsic as being black, rather than a choice/decision about your sexual orientation.
And to say gay people don't have to act upon it is a little disingenuous.
(If you like, I'll find the study info for you).

(I sort of addressed the disingenuous bit in the post I wrote at the same time as you above).

Happy to read about "gay genes". May I recommend Sexual Orientation and Reason by Stanton Jones in return? Downloadable through google.

Do you want to say that having a "gay gene", if there is such a thing, makes it inevitable that you will define yourself as gay and have sex with the same sex? Is it a very simple matter of cause and effect? The possibilities of an identified gay gene would be delicious - here is a liberal moral dilemma: the parent decides not to want a kid who has the gay gene, is it right to abort?

[fluffnik]

ChrisGB said:

I think I should add from now on in any mention of gay sex that I think gay sex is bad for people pretty much in the sense that I think much non-gay sex is bad for people too, in not being conducive to the common good or stable society or happy families or well-brought-up children etc.

What's wrong with honestly and hygienically conducted recreational sex when you have effective contraception?

Most, if not all, of any ensuing problems are more to do with religiously inflicted brain injuries than the actual getting jiggy.

[ChrisGB]

fluffnik said:

ChrisGB said:

I think I should add from now on in any mention of gay sex that I think gay sex is bad for people pretty much in the sense that I think much non-gay sex is bad for people too, in not being conducive to the common good or stable society or happy families or well-brought-up children etc.

What's wrong with honestly and hygienically conducted recreational sex when you have effective contraception?

It means you see the other as an object for pleasure not as a person. It means that when the contraception fails, you may well need to have an abortion, which is a depriving of a future, you are sacrificing let's say 80 years of something /someone else's life for your recreation. It means that you are putting your energy into that rather than into a more socially useful endeavour such as being a husband and father. It means that you view human well-being as the gratification of urges. It means that you see sex as tit for tat rather than as an expression of love. It doesn't sound like there is any love or joy, just acceptance of a very poor ersatz. I recommend The End of the Affair as an answer to that, but the book, definitely not the film, less than a day's read.

[fluffnik]

wollowizard said:

No you can't accuse god, not until you believe in him.

In a wagging a finger at a big beardy bloke on a cloud way that is true, however:

It gets very tedious repeatedly typing or reading "supposing that the posited deity were to exist though I do not consider this plausible" before every exploration of the necessary demerits of the alleged supernatural entity so it's far better to take it as read when it is long known as the stated position of the poster.

[fluffnik]

wollowizard said:

If it's like that can you tell me how something that doesn't exist does bad things? You failed to answer that to my satisfaction.

Cts says "$DEITY says you mush do this repugnant st or I will punish you in ways both deeply icky and heinously sore for eternity".

[GilbertGrape]

joe_90 said:

mattnunn said:

For there to be an over riding truth to the nature of existence - it would need to be understood by all nature - from my dog, to each blade of grass, and by understood I mean known.

Anything else is only ever human perception.

And that matter why, the universe existed long before any life, and will exist long after.. we will be a mere blink of an eye..

"Psalm 78:39 He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return."

"James 1:11 For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business."

"James 4:14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."

[fluffnik]

Will be back for the rest but I couldn't let this pass...

ChrisGB said:

3. Personally I think the heart of liberalism is totalitarian – one in the end has to conform on the level of ideas, or one is excluded. Witness the nonsense aligning those who disagree with the gay rights legislation with those who opposed civil rights in the US. Calling yourself gay and having sex are decisions, being black is not a decision.

What us liberals object to is unwarranted intrusion into personal lives.

There are fewer potential consequences for society in gay sex than there is in potentially fertile fking so why should we give a toss what autonomous citizens get up to for mutual gratification when it impacts no others?

Unlike religion gay sex does not attempt to systematically injure the minds of children and as such concerns me far, far less.

ChrisGB said:

But liberalism won’t tolerate distinctions like that – you agree or you are excluded. Is my faith totalitarian?

Being illiberal will exclude you from liberalism...

The Catholic Church is intrinsically totalitarian - consider its name - and has never voluntarily ceded control over anything.

ChrisGB said:

I don’t consider that things are imposed on me, I see that doctrine makes sense. If I don’t agree, I can leave.

So why does the Catholic Church try to force its views on everyone not just its voluntary members?

Edited by fluffnik on Tuesday 1st May 02:09

[fluffnik]

GilbertGrape said:

joe_90 said:

And that matter why, the universe existed long before any life, and will exist long after.. we will be a mere blink of an eye..

"Psalm 78:39 He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return."

"James 1:11 For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business."

"James 4:14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."

Mortality is quite noticeable you know...

[Strangely Brown]

wollowizard said:

joe_90 said:

Which god do you believe in?

There is only one.

Why is it that all religious types insist that there is only one god yet profess to believe in the bible? The bible clearly makes reference to other gods, even to the point that God himself mentions them.

[bikemonster]

Strangely Brown said:

Why is it that all religious types insist that there is only one god yet profess to believe in the bible? The bible clearly makes reference to other gods, even to the point that God himself mentions them.

And the truly interesting thing is that the god of the OT makes it clear that the other gods are every bit as real as he is.

So where did these other gods come from then? Did YHWHYWHYWWH make them? Were they also there all along?

Or was it a mattnunnian case of as soon as somebody believed in them they sprang into being? (There's a Terry Pratchett novel based on pretty much this premise.)

[TheHeretic]

ChrisGB said:

Well, I take issue with deism as an explanation for everything - it is about what started the ball rolling, the rest is more or less what we know about the natural world / science, nothing necessarily to do with the deus of deism.
My elegant expression of everything might be that God created the natural laws we see unfolding in the universe, and it is elegant because it covers the How come anything anyway PLUS everything that came after the beginning. But Hitchens' point is not about the unfolding of the universe, it is about the origin of everything. He doesn't mind the deist claim, but he thinks there are more elegant explanations of why there is something rather than nothing at all - so what are they?

But I do grasp the notion of nothing Krauss is proposing and it is blatantly not nothing, he is calling Ricci tensors, vacuum states and quantum fields his nothing. There are not "various notions of nothing" as he says, there is just no such thing as nothing. The universe is not reducible to nothing. Philosophy is crucial because if you are not going to accept the rules of reasoning, then you can assert pretty much anything and get people nodding along with you, but you will have left the path of reason. There is no such thing as nothing, nothing is that which there is no such thing as, out of nothing nothing comes etc. A grounding in philosophy is needed to test the basis on which you are building whatever thought construction you are into. If you want to argue that these things are nothing, then you need to have thought as consistently about the nothing as you have about the Ricci tensors etc. and Krauss's absence of philosophical knowledge makes his arguments flawed. He has merely found a lot of very small things that account for larger things. This is not creation from nothing. Don't kid yourself that there is experimentation to prove something from nothing, be strict with yourself about what nothing means, and don't think the argument's over because you can equate, for convenience, "nothing" with "not much".


So you are far from agreeing with Krauss then if you say a first cause may well have been. You haven't read what I wrote - Aquinas wrote his "5 ways" to argue against those claiming God was self-evident and needed / could have no rational justification. I agree with Aquinas, God is not self-evident. I have explained how Aquinas might have gone from deism to theism, but my point was that Hitchens' claim is invented. What is the quote from Aquinas please? I think most of your paragraph stems from your misreading, apologies for not being clearer.


Not really a sidestep - it was to say that the form of life Hitchens lived in and espoused was totalitarian in its way, so why attack what in his view was also totalitarian? A sidestep? You omit most of what I wrote.


It's easy to invent a religion and dismiss it, and that is all that's happening here. Christianity says the beatific vision is the deepest longing of every human heart, and that it is a free gift available to all. It doesn't say, unless you are a dim fundamentalist, that there is eternal punishment for anyone in particular. So how is the correct view of the religion totalitarian?


I am not avoiding the question. A priest will chuckle at the idea that an outsider could believe sin is something not willed. A dream is not willed. Hitchens is simply mistaken, the catechism can set you right on that. Thinking is not dreaming, I am sure you get that this distinction is crucial.

If healthy morals are so freely available to everyone without religion, how can you say promiscuity, infidelity, broken marriages / homes, fatherless kids, 40 plus million abortions a year etc. are a sign of greater moral progress now the influence of religion has waned? Show me a society that has reduced the influence of Christianity and become MORE concerned about the disabled, those conceived but not yet born etc. Hitchens is saying we know right and wrong without reference to a moral absolute. I am saying this might appear so for a few years, but compare the general consensus on the stuff I just listed 100 years ago with now and compare the relative influence of Christianity then and now. Abandoning goodness towards others in our most intimate relationships has been pretty much corresponding to declining influence of Christianity. Tell me those things I listed are signs of moral progress.



I am not talking about history, I mean today's society has failed people massively. We could have life expectancy and living standards and still be a happy nation, but the way of life we have in a godless state is not conducive to the well-being of everyone, for all the reasons I listed above. 40 million fewer people each year is extermination on an unprecedented scale, there has been nothing like it ever before.

6) I think we can pass over. Matthew 5 is still something every society falls short of, so neither the first nor the worst.

OK, to recap: Where was God for 96,000 years? Well, what would God's "being there" have looked like? Every person has a notion of right and wrong, and everyone makes a choice about refining that or ignoring it, etc. This is a huge moment in life, when we act one way or another with what we know to be right. This moment was available and is available to everyone irrespective of their exposure to religion. To have led an upright life in any age would be I imagine the most one could do in terms of "natural" morality. The key question here I am getting to is - where God "was" only matters in so far as the people then had less chance of an afterlife, and from what I have just said about morality, it can easily be argued that a person's uprightness is not dependent on the age he lives in.
The origins of a religion presuppose a fertile idea-world, and that requires written records, traditions etc., so needed a certain level of civilisation.
If it matters to you that there were 96,000 years of human before God revealed himself to Abraham, you have a human view of God. Why should any one of those millions of humans not be in heaven?
So "sitting idly by" betrays a picture of God as say a lazy human doctor, say.
But this is a little daft - blaming religion for what happened BEFORE the religion was there. It's like saying Why didn't God just create a geocentric solar system and leave it at that, therefore he doesn't exist.
And most obviously, but the rest was fun, I guess I need to say as well that your response is a sort of confusion - God as a poor early version of science / medicine. Knowing God would not have improved life expectancy except perhaps in reducing violent death. This is a typical Sam Harris confusion - to equate religion with a bad attempt at science. If you can't see that they are pretty much entirely separate pursuits then perhaps that needs to be the ongoing discussion.
Williams answers this point calmly and thoughtfully in the Williams Kenny Dawkins discussion on youtube.

One minor detail - you say that someone dying naturally is God killing them off. Do you really want to say that? If your granny dies at 95, has God killed her off? If I decide to suck out the brain of my daughter, being born at term, when her head has left the womb but the rest of her is still inside, completely legal in the US (partial birth abortion), because I in fact wanted a son, this is the same is it - God killing her off? There seems to be some confusion here.

I still hope that we can have a civil conversation.


Debates are unsatisfactory for the reason I gave - they tend to be hurling of sound-bites, like those of CH above, not a sustained effort at thinking. This is where the Williams Kenny Dawkins one differs. As for who wins these debates, two of the three posted were by believers, so there is obviously a difference of perception about the outcome of these depending on the prejudices you start watching them with.
Can I name one thing explained by religion? OK, let me try. Portiuncula. Will that do? This sounds like a Sam Harris sort of question, and he is not serious, in the way WL Craig isn't, by which I mean I think they are just not very clever.

1)
You really want to take issue with Deism as an expanation for everything? That seems to fly in the face of everything you have talked about previously, particularly when it comes to your spaceless, timeless, non-entity in another dimension type being. Do you know what deism is? Are you going to argue that a personal God is much more likely than a deist god?

Your 'elegant expression' covers HOW everything came about, PLUS everything that came after? Well, a Deist answer would suit you far better than a theist one then, I'm afraid. A desit God merely has to start the expansion. that it is. Natural laws take care of everything else. You genuinely think that ka mystical God think is a better explanation for galaxies, nebulae, planets, moons, etc, than science is? We know so much about these things, (also very little), but I find it hard that you take issue with deism, but cuddle up to theism as a better explanation. That makes no sense at all. As to more elegant claims to why there is something rather than nothing, (an age old fall back for the religious, I might add), Krauss explains that in physics, (you again seem to have issue with the definition of nothing), he is proposing that there is no such thing as nothing. You have a sea of virtual particles, and so on and so forth. As he says, "nothing is not nothing anymore". That is blananetly not nothing at all, and you seem to have a childlike clutch on that word. You don't seem to realise that physically, there may well not be something called 'nothing'. It may be impossible to have nothing. What we thought as of nothing no longer exists in physics. Philosophically, nothing is different. Nothing is nothing, but krauss has tried to explain this. You seem to be in a bit of a myre with this nothing subject, and keep harking back to needing a grounding in philosophy. That is not required if your issue is simply the definition of nothing when it comes to physics. Krauss's argument is not flawed, just because you are having issues with the use of the word "nothing". Get over yourself. You say the argument isn't over, well, I don't even see it as an argument. I see it as some people grasping onto the word nothing in a hope to either discredit the notion of there being no such thing as nothing in physics, (I have his book by the way, and a very good read it was too. Even in that he doesn't redefine nothing as 'stuff'. It is entirely about changing our perception about what we once thought of as 'nothing'. This nothing tangent really is a petty interlude).

2)
"Far from agreeing with Krauss"? Are you obsessed with Krauss? No-one knows what initiated the singularity to expand, so mentioning that Krauss has a different view means nothing. Sorry, but if you are just going to insist I am misreading everything, why the hell should I bother? I never mentioned Aquinus. I was talking about the logical step from Deism to Theism, which is clear from your reply that you see theism as a better explanation that Deism. Your original question was what is the quote. The rest I think was a meandering mess, and didn't really address anything. I don't actually think Hitchens was using a quote of Aquinus. I think he was merely saying that even a thinker like Aquinus could not logically argue in favour of theism over deism. It's like saying "Even Rooney couldn't score from that angle", then you asking for video footage of him failing. Tell you what, you argue deism to theism, logically, and I will concede that.

3)
Yes, really a sidestep. Countering "religion is totalitarianism' with "yeah, well so was fascism"! I explained why religion is totalitarianism. As for omitting the rest of your stuff, the bilge about gay being a choice, unlike being black was ignore-worthy, and all the talk of liberalism had nothing whatsoever to do with the original point you were seemingly supposed to argue against.

Let me ask you a question... How does one enter heaven, remembering that anyone not going to heaven, has to go elsewhere? What are the criteria?

4)
So not willing something is not a sin? Where does that leave someone who is mentally ill, psychotic, who has killed many? Heaven? No sins attributed? Where is the line drawn for will, and where in the Bible does it say that dreamt, or un-willed thoughts are not sinful? Is lust a choice, or a natural thing? Which catechism are we working with? How can there be so many from one supposed holy work? What is the catachism I am working from is different to the others? The catechisms are a work of 'holy' men, and I have no more reason to give them weight as I have any other announcement of the church, that has been turned over at a later date. I'll just use the bible, thanks very much.

5)
Can you show how today's society has failed man massively, certainly any more than any other period in time? Life expectency? Infant mortality? Health? Crime, and so on? Just saying having a godless state is not conducive to well-being is a baseless, and meaningless sentence. Explain what you mean, and back it up with figures. Again with abortion. It's like a label you have on your head. Extermination! The population is rising all the time. Exterminate it is not. How many are for medical reasons? How many are because of risks to the mother? How many are for genetic issues? Do you have issue with IVF? Of course, this has little to do with the original question which was "without religion we would not know right or wrong" or some such. That is entirely nothing whatsoever to do with Matthew 5. It is about the claim by some apologetics, (some who Hitchens has debated directly), claiming that without a law-giver, there can be no laws, and they replace law-giver with God. It is a simple, yet absurd argument, and has been defeated over and over again.

6)
Mankind is not perfect. The golden rule is also something we fall short of, and that was far earlier than Matthew 5. As for the first, as I explained, Dawkins was not talking about Christianity, rather religion being the first attempt to make sense of things, and it was the worst explanation. I'm not sure what is tricky about that.

7)
I have no idea what a God being there, or not being there looks like. I am not the one making the claim that he is there. Clearly I have a human view of God, mainly because it has mans fingerprints all over him. Remember, Chris, I am not making the claim to what God is, or is not. You are. You assert he is there, he is this, he is that. However, as usual, you seem unwilling, or unable to tell us how you kn ow these things. No-one is blaming religion for what happened before religion was invented, (important word, invented). They are asking what GOD was doing in that time. A very different question. It is not like saying why didn't God just make geocentric anything. Nice attempt to cheapen perfectly valid question. It is a simple question...

"If God is all loving, nice, fluffy, and has our backs, then where why did he only feel he needed to appear 4000 or so years ago?"

You don't feel that is a valid question, fine, but don't attempt to muddy it with stuff you can neither prove, or argue with any knowledge of. As for the Sam Harris confusion. You do not feel religion was mans first attempt to explain things? Earthquakes, seasons, death, suffering, and so on? That also falls in with the 'first and the worst explaination' stuff. What do you think religion came about for?

If you think that god has power, and control, and an all powerfull, omnipotent personal God grasp on everything, then yes, if my 89 year old granny died, God had a say in the matter.

You're back on abortion again, which God himself does by the way, Hosea 9:11-16. He makes all the women of Ephraim misscarry. Are all misscarriages Gods work then? What do you feel about IVF?

Christopher is just soundbytes? Really? No sustained effort at thinking? remember, the pressure is always on the one making the claim. As CH often says at a debate, 'it won't take him that long, after all, the burden of proof is on the religious". The arguments put forward by the religious are not new ones, and the rebuttals are the same ones, mainly because very little new, fresh ideas come from the other side. So you masy see them as soundbytes, that is your perogative, however, when challenging a claim it is often easy to pick them off, particulalry when that argument is based on an utterly unproven, sustained, or baseless assetion.The problem here is that if God is going to be the answer, you have to define what God is. You have tried in the past, but if your assertion is true, then I have yet to see how you know it?

Sam Harris is not serious in the same way Craig is not? Seriously? As for Portiuncula, how is that explained by religion? It is a building used by the religious, nothing more. Not a very clever question? Do yopu realise how many people, seemingly yourself included, cite God as a reason for something? Is that also a ridiculous, and unclever answer?

Debates are interesting, and often feisty affairs, and yet I wonder if you would consider the other side to be soudbytes? You are obviously not averse to the soundbytes given by the religious with no backing. I suggest you watch 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse' for a 2 hour discussion by 4 great men. No soundbytes there. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennet.

[NobleGuy]

carmonk said:

NobleGuy said:

Well quite, but if it's not made of matter then it's not a hydra (magical or not). It's something else. It may perhaps be someone else's idea of a "God". If when carmonk says "magical hydra" he means "something God-like" then perhaps the magical hydra did create the universe. In that context the magical hydra is as good an explanantion, but only because he really means "a God of some kind".

So if god decided he wanted to be a hyrda - made of matter - then you're saying he couldn't? Because if you are then you're not talking about a god, and if you're not then what I say stands.

He could now that there is mater, yes.

You said it's just as likely that a magic hydra (made of matter) created the universe as it is that a God created the universe.

God couldn't be a hydra made of matter prior to creating that matter - therefore the possibility that a magic hydra (or a wicker buffalo...) are potential creators is logically less than the possibility of it being a God that did it.

And of course we all know it was just a stupid off-the-cuff remark to denigrate religious believers because you believe you're so intelligent, I'm just interested to see if you'll accept it...

Edited by NobleGuy on Tuesday 1st May 09:37

[CommanderJameson]

NobleGuy said:

He could now that there is mater, yes.

You said it's just as likely that a magic hydra (made of matter) created the universe as it is that a God created the universe.

God couldn't be a hydra made of matter prior to creating that matter - therefore the possibility that a magic hydra (or a wicker buffalo...) are potential creators is logically less than the possibility of it being a God that did it.

And of course we all know it was just a stupid off-the-cuff remark to denigrate religious believers because you believe you're so intelligent, I'm just interested to see if you'll accept it...

Edited by NobleGuy on Tuesday 1st May 09:37

Of course, you're overlooking the fact that the hydra is fking magic, and therefore questions of matter are irrelevant. Magic hydra is magic, and all that.

There is no logical different between the hydra and god. If god made stuff from nothing (caveats surrounding the nature of nothing as discussed above, noted), then he too is magic. That's the thing with magic; it's magic.

[NobleGuy]

CommanderJameson said:

NobleGuy said:

He could now that there is mater, yes.

You said it's just as likely that a magic hydra (made of matter) created the universe as it is that a God created the universe.

God couldn't be a hydra made of matter prior to creating that matter - therefore the possibility that a magic hydra (or a wicker buffalo...) are potential creators is logically less than the possibility of it being a God that did it.

And of course we all know it was just a stupid off-the-cuff remark to denigrate religious believers because you believe you're so intelligent, I'm just interested to see if you'll accept it...

Edited by NobleGuy on Tuesday 1st May 09:37

Of course, you're overlooking the fact that the hydra is fking magic, and therefore questions of matter are irrelevant. Magic hydra is magic, and all that.

There is no logical different between the hydra and god. If god made stuff from nothing (caveats surrounding the nature of nothing as discussed above, noted), then he too is magic. That's the thing with magic; it's magic.

Rubbish. A magic hydra that requires no matter isn't a hydra at all. Like I said some pages back it's something else, but it isn't a hydra. If you're saying it's something a bit more God-like then I'd tend to agree because when carmonk says "magic hydra" he is in fact simply replacing the term "a God of some kind" with that phrase... Keep up.

[mattnunn]

Just to further question the notion of nothing. As far as i understand prior to the big bang there was no atomic structures, non of the elements on the periodic table existed, the forces that bind atoms did not exist, the universe as it was at the moment of singularity and for a long time after was atomically the structural equivalent to a primordial soup of elementary particle's mass and nothing much else, am i correct? Because whilst it's not something we recognise it's not nothing.

[CommanderJameson]

NobleGuy said:

Rubbish. A magic hydra that requires no matter isn't a hydra at all. Like I said some pages back it's something else, but it isn't a hydra. If you're saying it's something a bit more God-like then I'd tend to agree because when carmonk says "magic hydra" he is in fact simply replacing the term "a God of some kind" with that phrase... Keep up.

How do you know that a magic hydra requires no matter? It's magic. The whole point of deities is that they're magic. If they weren't magic, they wouldn't be deities. You can't be "a bit more godlike". It's like being a "a bit more pregnant".

If god isn't matter but it can affect and create matter, then how does that work? Magic, that's how.

Like a cosmic Paul Daniels.

[CommanderJameson]

mattnunn said:

Just to further question the notion of nothing. As far as i understand prior to the big bang there was no atomic structures, non of the elements on the periodic table existed, the forces that bind atoms did not exist, the universe as it was at the moment of singularity and for a long time after was atomically the structural equivalent to a primordial soup of elementary particle's mass and nothing much else, am i correct? Because whilst it's not something we recognise it's not nothing.

According to the science as it stands now:

There was no "prior to the big bang".

Spacetime did not exist.

There was no "before".

What flavour is a square?

[TheHeretic]

CommanderJameson said:

According to the science as it stands now:

There was no "prior to the big bang".

Spacetime did not exist.

There was no "before".

What flavour is a square?

A squares banana flavored, obviously.

I think what the scientists think what happened before the big bang, (without getting into any 'there was no before' arguments), was that it is a case of as we know it. There was no before or time, or energy, etc, as we know it.

I think Mattnunn is mistaking the conversation about nothing, with what was after the singularity, which was not nothing. It is essentially the 'dark matter' question with regards to whether nothing in physics is actually nothing, or whether it still has weight, or energy, in which case it is not nothing. Nothing may be unachievable with things popping in, and out of existence.

[carmonk]

NobleGuy said:

carmonk said:

NobleGuy said:

Well quite, but if it's not made of matter then it's not a hydra (magical or not). It's something else. It may perhaps be someone else's idea of a "God". If when carmonk says "magical hydra" he means "something God-like" then perhaps the magical hydra did create the universe. In that context the magical hydra is as good an explanantion, but only because he really means "a God of some kind".

So if god decided he wanted to be a hyrda - made of matter - then you're saying he couldn't? Because if you are then you're not talking about a god, and if you're not then what I say stands.

He could now that there is mater, yes.

You said it's just as likely that a magic hydra (made of matter) created the universe as it is that a God created the universe.

God couldn't be a hydra made of matter prior to creating that matter - therefore the possibility that a magic hydra (or a wicker buffalo...) are potential creators is logically less than the possibility of it being a God that did it.

And of course we all know it was just a stupid off-the-cuff remark to denigrate religious believers because you believe you're so intelligent, I'm just interested to see if you'll accept it...

Edited by NobleGuy on Tuesday 1st May 09:37

You've missed the point by a mile. You look at what's around us (the universe) and invent some 'thing' that is defined solely by its ability to create exactly what you see, and you call it god. This god has no other attributes than an ability to create the universe and some others that you arbitrarily assign to it. Therefore it is not a 'thing', it is just something you made up to fill a hole. I made something up too, a magic hydra, and my hydra is just as likely as your god. There are billions of other 'things' that are just as likely as your god and my hydra and the evidence for any one of them is zero.

[IainT]

TheHeretic said:

I think Mattnunn is mistaking the conversation about nothing, with what was after the singularity, which was not nothing. It is essentially the 'dark matter' question with regards to whether nothing in physics is actually nothing, or whether it still has weight, or energy, in which case it is not nothing. Nothing may be unachievable with things popping in, and out of existence.

I find this aspect of nature to be one of the most interesting 'recent' discoveries - that the universe probably contains a net balance of zero energy with particles and anti-particles being in perfect balance. It's one of the most elegant possible explanations for the start of our universe and seems to be compatible with what we observe happening at the quantum level. It also seems far more likely than a Deist entity and is part of the scientific explanation that describes our world perfectly.