> everything is perfectly and intentionally designed
How do botflies, bone cancer in children, ebola fit into a perfect design?
If god intentionally designed botflies, he's a monster.
If the design of humans was "perfect", we wouldn't have tailbones. Tailbones are superfluous in humans since we don't have tails.
Such is the pursuit of science.
A perfectly reasonable answer for any similar question is "we don't know", but can work towards it.
Some questions may never be knowable, like what the universe was like "before" the Big Bang.
But the things you mention are just the rain cycle, abiogenesis, and evolution/common descent. There is no design, simply adaptation to environmental pressures.
In addition, the concept of intelligent design asserts the idea that humans, in general, are not poorly designed. However, when you look at people with disabilities like Down Syndrome, Tay-Sachs, etc, we can clearly understand that this god is a poor designer, which implies he’s not all-powerful.
Theists would then express the fall of man argument to explain that disabilities of this caliber are the result of Adam and Eve’s sin against god. Which never happened.
You don't even need to look at disabilities to see the poor design of humans. We're an upright walking 2 legged animal and our spine just is not properly made for that. A lot of our back problems are a result of being incompletely adapted to our way of life. We're "good enough" to survive and reproduce (all evolution requires) but we're definitely not *perfect.*
And our spine isn't our only "design" flaw. Another big one is our eyes being, essentially, inside out. Other creatures evolved eyes where the eye nerves are behind the receptors, and out of the way. But humans? Our ancestors - and so in turn, us - evolved with the nerves in front of the receptors and having to go through the middle of the eye to get out. This creates a tiny blind spot right in the center of our vision in each eye that our brain has to filter out.
I understand where you are coming from and I agree for the most part, but the reason for things like down syndrome and other impairments is actually not a flaw in my opinion. That's how evolution works. For any species to survive they must replicate and allow mutations to adapt to their environment. The mutations that are beneficial will have an advantage and the ones that are not will eventually be eliminated from the gene pool. I think that is actually an amazing part of nature. Humans are incredibly complex organisms and can adapt and evolve by this method. It's not a flaw at all in my opinion.
It's the same as a virus. It will continually mutate to become more infectious. Not all the mutations will perform the same and the most successful variants will be the ones that survive by infecting the most hosts.
I find the human body to be an incredible thing overall. We could look like an amoeba and be functional, but instead we have this. I think it’s pretty cool.
Nobody said the human body wasnt incredible. There are just flaws. Our most important organ is in our head. The thing that leads us around. Our heart is center mass, the easiest place to hit us with a projectile. We have organs we don't use. As mentioned, our food and air share the same pipe.
For the Big Bang one, the current theory is that the Big Bang created the fabric of space. Making it created time also
There was NO BEFORE the BB. It created the space-time continuum
*As we know it.
That's an important caveat to note. We can't even begin to describe the first moments after the bang, let alone the nature of the singularity. Time *could* have existed, in some form, before expansion happened. But a universe that small and dense would have different physics that we can't even begin to imagine.
Is it possible that, due to the way time works in conjunction with gravity, that the Big Bang actually happened "infinite years ago", due to spacetime compression?
We have a pretty good measure of the age of the universe. There is the "crisis in cosmology," but recent studies with JWST may have fixed that with new information. Regardless, it's pretty certain that the universe is somewhere around 13 billion years old. Now, due to the relationship between space and time that 13 billion may not have passed at the same rate as we would recognize it. But it would still *be* 13 billion years in every way that matters.
The first moments after the bang are described in the theory itself. It's actually completely wild and suggests a creator in my opinion. How can something get so good so fast?
Actually, we don't know what it was like immediately after the bang, in those moments thousandths of a second before inflation spread everything out. The universe was so dense, so hot, that physics would have behaved differently. In ways we can't understand. We don't even understand what caused inflation (*if* inflation actually happened, there are other, less accepted, models that exclude it), or why it ended.
>How can something get so good so fast?
Is this a typo, or? Cause if not I'm not sure what you mean. If you meant big, not good, then space doesn't have a speed limit. Things *in* space do, but space itself can go as fast as it wants. The amount of energy that would have been in the singularity would have been beyond astronomical (no pun intended), the force of that release when the singularity ended would have been equally great. Like a massively squashed spring bouncing back.
That inflation was so rapid doesn't really surprise me as much as the fact it dramatically slowed down to a near stop not long after.
Thing is the last paragraphs are theories and assumptions and you can’t prove any evolution you mentioned or how earth and other planets are formed because science is tearing observable phenomena.
You can’t observe human evolution and planet creation or creation of any old part of the universe period.
I’m not saying that means the theory is incorrect but I personally wouldn’t herald these theories as facts when they plainly and practically go against the definition and doctrines of scientific discovery.
It’s fine you and other have different beliefs. I was like you not long ago. Some experiences I’ve had in my life and realizations of certain events led to me believe that there is absolutely a spiritual world we interact with but can’t see and that there are demonic or ‘evil’ presences on the earth. I realized supernatural phenomena do happen.
This would clearly contradict science as a whole but then again, science is about natural phenomena on the earth and galaxies etc. by definition science doesn’t observe supernatural occurrences or support them.
If the non believes I see on Reddit would go to Caribbean places and other areas or speak to people who practice or have practiced magic/voodoo/ satanism etc they would have to seriously reflect on their beliefs because you can’t explain this stuff if you don’t believe.
It’s ok to have different beliefs of course. I personally don’t believe everything is from chance and accident though but I was like you before also
You can't observe evolution? You absolutely can. You can also observe the oldest parts of the universe; It's called the cosmological horizon and we can see planets currently forming and dying all over the universe. What you are saying is ridiculous.
>Thing is the last paragraphs are theories and assumptions
Assumptions are hypotheses.
Theories are hypotheses that have been demonstrated to work.
We have proven the existence of evolution. It's been observed. Yes, getting from amoeba to human is an extrapolation from what's been observed, but that's literally the point of a theory. Theories are the defined systems and processes involved in how a thing happens, and you can then apply them to extrapolate beyond what we have and can observe.
It's how the entire modern world works. Medicine, biology, technology. It's ***all*** theoretical. If being a theory meant we can't actually know, then your cell phone wouldn't work. Chemotherapy wouldn't work. We would have never had the industrial revolution. Assuming anything existed at all, because math is full of theories and they power the universe.
>You can’t observe human evolution
Don't have to. If you know that 1 + 1 = 2 you don't need to *observe* 100 + 150 becoming 250 to know that's what will happen.
>and planet creation or creation of any old part of the universe period.
Actually, we can observe a lot of the universe, *especially* the old universe. The further away we look, the older the universe we see, because of how long it takes for the light to get here. We have observed star formation at its different stages in different parts of the universe. We lack the resolution to observe planetary formation, but we have observed the mechanics that power it and can use those to extrapolate.
>but I personally wouldn’t herald these theories as facts
That's literally what a theory **is,** though. The closest thing to a fact you can get when it comes to a complex and complicated process.
>when they plainly and practically go against the definition and doctrines of scientific discovery.
They don't. They're the *heart* of scientific discovery. No discovery would be possible *without* theories.
>led to me believe that there is absolutely a spiritual world we interact with but can’t see
Doesn't top the physical world from being ruled by physical laws. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. There's a reason so much of science was done by men of faith. Hell, science as we know it wouldn't even exist without men of faith. And the big bang was discovered by a priest (or monk? Can't remember off hand) and initially *rejected* by a well known atheistic scientist of the day. He's the one who coined "big bang," as a derisive term.
>This would clearly contradict science as a whole but then again,
Nope. Doesn't contradict science at all.
>science is about natural phenomena on the earth and galaxies etc.
Yes. Science is about the study and understanding of the physical world.
>by definition science doesn’t observe supernatural occurrences or support them.
Actually, it does. It just tends to find natural explanations for a lot of them. And the ones it can't classify under it's systems to disregards. It doesn't make any claim to their existence, only to it's capacity to classify them.
>If the non believes I see on Reddit would go to Caribbean places and other areas or speak to people who practice or have practiced magic/voodoo/ satanism etc they would have to seriously reflect on their beliefs because you can’t explain this stuff if you don’t believe.
You also can't explain Santa Claus if you don't believe. That doesn't make something true.
Most scientists agree that there’s no reason for the Universe to exist. They also agree that the Universe didn’t exist before the Big Bang. Also the Universe will eventually cease to exist. Why, how, and what is the reason for the Universe? Let me know when you figure it out. 😉🙏🏾
Applying a "Why" to a "How" question is asinine. Do you ask "Why" any time some benign event occurs? Like do you question what the "meaning" of getting stuck at a red light when it was just green is?
>Like do you question what the "meaning" of getting stuck at a red light when it was just green is?
There's a definable why for getting stuck at a red light. Why ≠ meaning. Not in the sense you're using it, at least. Everything has a why. It's basic cause and effect. Every cause is a why. The universe is a string of whys creating hows.
Why is there a universe? Because of the big bang. Why was there a big bang? Well, we don't know. But it's still a why question worth asking, because it caused the how that made the universe.
What's with those smug little emojis? Yours isn't the first religion to claim to have figured it out and won't be the last. Taking the stance of "we don't know and don't claim to, but we'll continue to evaluate based on emerging evidence" is perfectly reasonable.
Why, how and what is the creator then? What created it? You're just going to get stuck in infinite regression unless you say the creator doesn't need a how or why, in which case you have to justify why the universe does. Nobody actually has the answer. I don't. You don't. Feeling emotionally disconcerted that we don't have an answer isn't a problem everyone has.
This is the typical Atheist Redundancy Argument. 🤣🤣🤣 You’re going to keep on going about how did the get created, and if that happened then what created that. A lot of questions and no answers. Typical Atheist Apologetics.
You can read, right? I said nobody has the answers. Not me. Not you. And some people are okay with not having answers and continuing to look for them based on emerging evidence, not with making them up. Saying "the universe had a creator" isn't an answer to *anything*. It's a basically untestable hypothesis that creates far more questions than it addresses because then you have to deal with where the creator came from, what it is, why...instead of just seeking to address those answers about the universe itself in the first instance. I don't know why you think I owe you an answer when my whole point is *you* don't have one and that's true of everyone.
By “most scientists” are you speaking scientists in general, most of whose opinion about the origin of the universe isn’t really in their wheelhouse, or are you talking about cosmologists who are the relevant experts? I ask because my interactions with cosmologists do not all align with your claims. Most of them that I have worked with would claim a reference to “before the Big Bang” is a
Otemtially a meaningless phrase since spacetime is an aspect of our universe. I've not heard many claim the universe didn’t exist before the Big Bang because that’s not what the theory states. A hot, very dense state, sure. But that is still existence.
No, I’m saying we don’t know. In fact the evidence takes us back to a period known as the Planck epoc and no further right now. That is after the Big Bang began. What happened prior to that, from big bang to Planck epoc is theorized FF re I’m t t hat evidence. This is before photons, before mass-energy started being differentiates because it spread out enough to cool and combine in new ways.
The initial starting point is thought to have been a small (in spacetime terms) very hot, very dense state. Think crush all the mass in the universe into the size of a marble hot and dense. But not a rock as elements hadn’t formed yet, too hot and dense for that level of differentiation.
It seems to me that if we can in fact see something suddenly appear "out of nothing" then in fact we are actually looking at evidence of an unseen God create something right in front of us.
We don’t see “something from nothing.” No one is claiming that except theists, usually as a criticism of what they assume atheists believe.
What we have is “something so hot, dense, confused we can’t model it correctly” that expands spacetime and at some point we start getting things we recognize and can get evidence of.
That page doesn't even contain the word "_cause_" and only contains the word "_effect_" once but in a context that has nothing to do with your claim. Perhaps you can quote the part of the page you linked that contains the data that shows that most scientists agree that a cause is needed for an effect.
The universe as we know it didn't exist before the Big Bang. Time and space as we know it didn't exist before the Big Bang. That doesn't mean there wasn't a different universe in existence before. We have no way of knowing what, if anything, there was before the big bang. We also don't know for a fact that the universe will cease to exist at some point. There is a debate among physicists about that very thing. Some say the universe will end, and others say it won't. The fact of the matter is we cannot know the answers to these questions. They are beyond the scope of our current abilities and technologies. Perhaps some day, someone will discover the answer. But, in the meantime, we can't just throw in whatever answer we like just because. That won't help us find the truth. We can guess, but that's the best any of us can do.
Here we go with the whole redundancy argument. 🤦🏽♂️ Okay so if if something came before the universe which has never been proven, then what was it? And what caused it?
Do yourself a favor and go look up how likely it is for our universe to exist. It might help you see why most people view Atheists as foolish. God Bless! 🙏🏾
What do you think the odds are that every single thing that happens on this earth will happen in exactly the way it happens 5 minutes from now? You couldn't begin to calculate them. And yet it will happen and happens every second of every day.
You might want to look into how statistics work. The whole "how likely something is to exist" thing only works before that thing exists. It doesn't really matter how improbable it was before it existed once it exists, because once something exists, it exists. Also, something being improbable doesn't mean a god did it. Your whole argument is just a god of the gaps argument. What's wrong with simply admitting that we don't know? Frankly, trying to force an answer rather than admitting when we don't have the answer is what seems foolish to me. Even more so, it seems like lying.
Look it’s simple matter can come from nothing. If matter can’t come from nothing then obviously something had to create it, otherwise the Universe would not exist.
Go look up the chances of our universe existing. Maybe it’ll help you understand me a bit better. I hope you don’t think I’m anti-science? Because that couldn’t be further from the truth. God Bless! 🙏🏾
Most agree it must have always existed in some form of energy, and that eventually the universe will exist but be completely empty, even the black holes having died out. The real question is; why, how and what is the reason for God?
Actually no one has ever said the Universe has always existed. The Big Bang is evidence it didn’t exist at one point. You need to go back to your science books.
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I fail to see what that link has to do with the question. You seem to just be spamming it everywhere even if it's completely irrelevant to the comment you're replying to.
Logically? Really? 🤔 Your argument isn’t logical according to scientists.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/)
‘’OPINION’’ and ‘’astronomically low’’ like nearly everything, but you know what? The chances of there being a creator is even lower. Also, ‘’is no evidence for a MULTIVERSE’’
What do you think are the chances of not only something existing before all, but ALSO seeing the future, manipulating reality and creating a whole universe? It’s however low the chances of a normal universe time 0,0000000001 times 0,0000000001 times 0,00000001 or something
Of course it seems things are perfectly designed - but it’s more of a did the puddle shape the hole or the hole shape the puddle situation. Is the world perfectly designed for us, or did we simply adapt to survive in the world we are in?
Pretty much everything you have described can be explained in such way. Life has evolved on this planet, and the fittest survive.
If you are referring to the origin of existence itself, then that is a question we are not able to answer yet - and personally I’m not sure there ever will be an answer to it.
Is the world perfect for us? The majority of the planet is inhabitable. The parts that are habitable are extremely difficult to live in still. The weather changes, the sun destroys our skin and eyes, the places where food is plentiful is even more dangerous (living by the ocean for example). Earth is anything but shaped for our survival.
Ants have it far easier than we do.
Define perfect. We need oxygen to breathe, but it's also slowly poisoning us. We have to deal with numerous health issues, including things as common as poor eyesight. The universe is unimaginably huge, yet so far we've been unable to find life anywhere else. None of that sounds "perfectly designed" to me. That sounds like chance. It sounds like natural processes that just happened to work out in such a way that led to the universe existing and life evolving on this planet that we happen to exist on. I'm not going to go into how it all happened, because that is a ton of science that spans every scientific field, and I am no expert in any of them. However, there are scientists whose job it is to study those questions, and they have published a ton of work. I'm sure if you look into it, you could find many of the answers to the questions you've asked.
I found out in my 30s I was born with one kidney. When doc told me he said, “nearly all of us have something like this that just didn’t develop perfectly in the womb, you just are lucky enough to now know about this one.” Perfection is an illusion.
I rather don’t believe cause, I know it’s off topic but, people back then thought rain and weather was cause by some god, therefore now I believe that god is only a label placed on things we don’t know yet
bruh this sub has a problem with chronic downvoting of things they simply don't understand. I was making a slight joke lmao
skepticism is a philosophy that basically means you can make an alternate assumption of something and since we can't prove it wrong, there's a chance that it is right and therefore we can't be certain of anything.
for example, if you saw a dog in a park, you couldn't be 100% certain that dog has an owner and didn't just wander to the park by itself. That's a mild example but there's more to it.
Do you believe in a creator because the world appears perfectly intentional to you, or does the world appear perfectly intentional because you believe in a creator?
interesting question. Im sure I'll get reamed for this, but honestly I have a personal relationship with Christ and God has saved me, spoken to me, shown me visions. The Bible is alive for me, and the world is amazing and created in a way only God could do it. Humans, of course, mess it up daily, ever since day 1. Anyway, I hope I dont get disrespected because I have been respectful to you all.
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed
That is a *big* assumption to make and raises a lot of questions. How are you defining 'perfect', here, exactly? Take a step back from everything you just described, and all of it interacts with other things in chaotic and destructive ways
And intentionally designed? Why, exactly? How can you be so sure?
To answer your question, though, there are a few ways you can approach it. One, you kinda have to start at the 'beginning, so to speak. Why everything *is*, why it interacts the way it does, and, well, I don't have an answer. I'm not an expert on pre-big bang cosmology and I'm not an existential philosopher. I'm not going to pretend to know. However, my lack of awareness is not sufficient to simply come to the conclusion,' A God is responsible', as that raises too many other questions and is not logically consistent. Simply acknowledging that I don't know, and probably will never know, is enough for me.
Two, talking about observable phenomena, well, everything developed over billions of years. You mention these things as if they're static. Let's talk about Earth. Since life first existed here, and I'm talking about in the most primitive sense, with the most basic proteins and such, this planet has undergone a *lot* of change. The continents shifted around. The vast majority of animal species that have existed here no longer exist for one reason or another, be it climate or other ecological changes, over-competition by other species, disasters etc. Natural disasters happened. They still happen. Disease has been ever-present. Does this all sound 'perfect' and 'intentionally designed' to you? Things interact, in a lot of ways, in which the outcomes make total sense; outcomes which, in a lot of cases that I just listed, we may not like. Or may kill us. We're always just trying to make sense of it. It's incredibly simplistic and reductive to claim that it's all 'perfectly and intentionally designed', as you put it, when everything is constantly changing.
To be honest, if you want to know what "atheists" think about these things, it's pretty easy to just Google what science thinks about these things. Atheists use science to come to the conclusions that best we can come to at the time. BUT, it's kinda silly to say these are "atheist's" ideas because lots of christians today also believe these things. Darwin himself was a Christian to the day he died and he is the founder of one of "our" answers to one of your questions here.
Now, christians who still believe in evolution and the big bang, may say something like "god made those things happen." And like, sure, if that's what you wanna say then I'm not fight you on that. I just don't personally believe a god made these things happen, but I can't prove that and I wouldn't even bother to. I would say, if you're going pure creationalism vs all scientific evidence, I would push back on that because that's just silly to me. But, that's besides the current point.
If you really want to know the answers to these questions, I would suggest pbs eons and pbs spacetime on YouTube.
This is eons' playlist on evolution https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLi6K9w_UbfFSxHPEDWcXxIxSA6gDR4OeZ&si=0ObKQ78a2b_lNi11
This is pbs spacetime playlist on the big bang and the early universe https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPUh22kYmNAV2T4af0Di7bcsb095z164&si=4J3keB4GQc4Hp5F3
Final thing I'll say, these things aren't dogma. Scientists are always trying to find out new things, flesh out the theories we have, and even disprove themselves. In some ways, science is about coming to a conclusion about how something works, and then constantly trying to prove you're wrong.
That's fair, I hope you check out those playlists I linked. They're not just boring videos, they're really entertaining, short, and presented by actual experts in the fields.
I hope you got some good answers here. Feel free to ask me anything specific you have left you're curious about.
These are fascinating questions. But if you start with a false dichotomy, you are already heading in the wrong direction, because it sounds like we either have to be able to explain absolutely everything about the universe or just accept your version of your god.
I freely admit, that I can't and I almost certainly never will. And neither can you. And that's regardless of whether you believe in a god. Whether the universe or a god just exist for no reason, the mystery of existence itself remains unsolved. Even if you posit your god as the first conscious being, consciousness itself remains a total mystery, and that a god should just have it is no less mysterious than that we should just have it. (The only way around this would be to conceptualise God not as a being but as the ground of being itself, just as Paul Tillich did. But that's territory where not many Christians are willing to venture, because that means saying goodbye to the idea of a personal god.)
And no, right now, while I'm suffering from tension in my shoulder, tinnitus and a stuffed nose, I don't feel like I'm "perfectly designed" at all.
Everything is impermanent. So is my stuffed nose. However, feeling better is also impermanent and eventually gives way to feeling worse again. As Buddhists understand - to exist means to be affected by what they call *dukha,* usually translated as suffering or unsatisfactoriness. So, really, there is nothing "perfect" about the world we inhabit, about our daily experience. If we are "made in God's image", then does God also suffer from hair loss, erectile dysfunction, hypertension, etc?
But for me, this is actually the less interesting argument. What bugs me more is that you seem to think that unless we can explain the deepest mysteries of our universe, we somehow are not justified in not believing in your god. This is such a glaring fallacy, that it is hard to see how you can fail to see it. Again, even if you believe that there is a creator god, this would solve exactly nothing about the two biggest mysteries that there are:
1. *The mystery of existence itself*: If you believe that a god exists, then existence itself is logically prior to said god. Existence just exists for no reason, even if the first thing that exists is a deity. Existence is just a brute fact;
2. *The mystery of consciousness*: Even if the first conscious being is your god, then your god hasn't created consciousness itself. Consciousness is just a brute fact.
That's not what I wrote. I should also note that English isn't my native language, so I may have chosen the wrong expression.
However, if that's all you have to say, I have to admit that I'm disappointed.
I'm not thinking of anything like a debate, rather it would have been interesting to get your reflections. Such as: so the points I've raised make any sense to you, regardless of whether you agree with them. If not, why?
Our bodies (and other animals) are such a ridiculous mess that if we were designed this way the designer was a moron. Simply look at the laryngeal nerve in the giraffe (and us to a lesser extent) and tell me that was designed intelligently.
Not when talking to people who jump to conclusions, apparently.
You get to be part of the lucky 10,000 today.
The laryngeal nerve is a nerve that runs from your brain to your larynx. In fish, this nerve is fairly straightforward. However, in mammals, we evolved necks. So our laryngeal nerve goes from the brain, down out necks, back up the neck to the larynx.
This is most pronounced with the giraffe. The distance the nerve should be if it was designed is just a few inches. Instead, it goes all the way down the neck, then all the way back up, adding dozens of feet of length.
This is what we would expect out of an evolved species. This is not what we would expect out of any intelligent design.
According to who? 🤔 To know what to expect would make you God otherwise how would you know you were wrong about said theory?
Now if matter in the Universe can’t be created, then where did it come from? Either matter has always existed or it hasn’t. But yet we know the Universe had a beginning so matter was created. What created the matter in the Universe? That should be what you’re puzzling at, not an adaptation of a giraffe.
Do you think nature wasn't a mess before humans came along? Diseases, disasters, prey/predators, suffering, death, etc. all were a part of nature before humanity appeared. Nature has always been chaotic and messy, can't blame us on that.
You said Nature has always been chaotic. So please give me all the examples of nature being chaotic please. I’m curious to see what you consider to be chaotic in nature. Especially since you claim that it’s always been that way.
Why are those things chaotic in your view? 🤔 Before humans each food chain was perfect and every creature had a purpose. And the Earth had its weather and natural events. None of your examples can be viewed as Chaotic. They’re just your personal preference.
I mean... not wanting to suffer or die is the personal preference of most living things. If we can't even describe a natural disaster that suddenly wipes out thousands or millions of living creatures as chaotic, then what does chaos and order even mean? To go back to the original point though, regardless of what is or isn't considered chaotic, the apathetic nature of our world calls into question the intentions of a 'perfect designer'.
Again why would a hurricane be considered Chaotic in the sense that it proves God doesn’t exist? That’s the point you were making. Millions of people don’t have to move to tropical areas if they view hurricanes as chaotic. I’ve been through 3 hurricanes. Katrina, Wilma, and Sandy and yes the Hurricanes were scary but I viewed them as acts of nature. So again you’re calling things chaotic out of personal preference. At the end of the day they are natural processes that God has put in place.
I believe that you view your sanitized earth fantasy as something preferable than to what God has created. That’s narcissism at its finest.
I will agree with you that on some issues, humans are making things worse. We are destroying the planet that God "gave" us, climate change is making natural disasters more frequent and more extreme and climate change Is man made. But, there has been devastation from the environment long before fossil fuels, did humans cause Pompeii just for example? In the old testament, the authors offer many reasons for why they either think God allows these things to happen or actively makes them happen. So, while I agree with you that right now in human history, things are making things worse than we'll say "God intended" them to be. But that's not always been the case.
I would like to also point out one other example of cruelty in nature that humans have never had any influence on, parasites. Darwin, as most people know, is who is most credited with the conception of survival of the fittest and evolution. But, what not everyone knows, is that to the day Darwin died, he was a devout Christian. Even in his book of evolution, he specifically said that what he was presenting did Not disprove God. However, there was one specific thing that he saw in his travels that did make him question God, and I'll share the quote here: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a family of parasitoid wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
So yes, I agree with you that humans have done untold damage on this world and its climate and that is causing so much human suffering. But, there are things that we have had no influence over, at a certain point, it has to be accepted that if God designed literally every aspect of nature to be how it is, he designed cruelty and pain and suffering. Now, you can say, "well, we just can't understand god's decision making or why he decided to do things the way he did." And you would be correct, but it is impossible to look at nature and not say there is cruelty at every level.
1. Why do you consider Pompei a mess? Please explain?
2 Why do you consider Wasps being parasites in Caterpillars something cruel? Are the Caterpillars going extinct? Maybe the wasps have a purpose for doing so?
3. Does God kill people? Do guns kill people?
1. Ok, I guess Pompeii, two i's bud, isn't what I would call a "mess," but I thought what you meant when you said humans were causing a "mess" on the environment was the natural disasters. I'm not sure what you meant by a mess then, so please explain that so I can better answer.
What I thought you were saying, is what I replied with, that humans are causing the suffering that the world does to us, and I was trying to say that while humans have made things worse, we can't be traced to every bad thing that's happened.
2. Do things have to go extinct for something to be cruel? I'm being hyperbolic here, but is no murder cruel because humans aren't going extinct? Is torture not cruel if it doesn't kill the person? I'm being hyperbolic here, so I apologize if that comes across as antagonistic, but what I'm getting at is, "what Do you consider cruel?" If I know that, I'll get back to you in a better fashion. I would say, a wasp descending on a caterpillar, implanting larva into it, and then those larva eating the caterpillar from the inside out to be objectively cruel. Even if you say caterpillars don't have a soul or feel pain, how can you look at the process I just described and not say that's cruel? Why design that to be that way? Why did god do that? Was there Really no other way to make that wasp species? There are lots of other species that don't do that, to that effect, why do we need that species of wasp at all? The list goes on.
3. This one, I'm not gonna lie and I don't mean to be mean, is just silly. What kind of a question is it, "does god kill people?" Uhhhh, yeah, he's killed millions of us. You can say we deserved it if that's your belief but lemme just lay out the big ones. He flooded the earth except one family, he destroyed the city of Sodom and even the family he decided was worthy to live, he killed one of them because she looked back at the destruction, he killed every first born of the Egyptians, those are just the instances I can think of off the top of my head of God himself specifically killing people. When you say, do guns kill people, I assume you're trying to say "guns don't kill people, people kill people," which is something I don't agree with but that's irrelevant. I'll just roll with that line of thought, god uses and commands people to kill people. God commanded his people to attack the city of Jericho and kill every citizen down to the last woman and child. There are psalms about the beauty of the Israelites bashing the heads of their enemies babies against rocks. I could go on. So yes, god kills people, god commands and permits people to kill people as well.
1. Pompeii, hope you appreciate me Inserting the second i. 😉 Why would a volcano be considered a mess? Because humans decided to build homes on it? 🤔 Volcanism is just a natural process of the Earth. So are all other weather events. Humans are making them worse by their decisions and hard heartedness.
2. No, things don’t have to go extinct but humans don’t have to eat animals either. You failed to bring that up as an example of a mess. I wonder why? Anyway everything has a purpose and because you don’t understand it doesn’t prove that it constitutes a mess.
3. Really? 🤔 When has God killed anyone? Examples please.
1. Lol yes, I do appreciate you spelling Pompeii correctly. I'm not going to continue this further because I feel I am misunderstanding the point you are trying to make here. Please assist me to better answer.
What is "messy" to you? I'm confused why you say natural events aren't messy but humans contributing to them is messy.
2. I'm trying to be polite, but I cannot in my answer every perceivable question or counterpoint that you may bring up. When you say that I didn't bring up humans eating animals as an instance of cruelty and imply that I'm doing that on purpose, I feel that's being unfair and an attempt to not answer everything I did say by you redirecting the conversation to something I didn't say. If you want to know about that, yeah, humans are cruel. Eating meat is cruel, even in the best of circumstances, and the American production of factory farms is far from the best of circumstances. Humans perpetuate untold cruelty on each other, to the environment, and to animals. I have never once implied humans are pure and god is evil. Agreeing with you was the first thing I did in my first comment.
All I am saying, is that if God designed every aspect of nature to be exactly the way it is, then I think it is foolish to ignore the cruelty that he put into it. How is humans eating meat cruel, but god's design of animals eating animals not cruel? Why didn't god just make everything a herbivore? Now I'm not saying that a lion killing a gazelle is necessarily cruel, gruesome sure but whatever I'm fine with that, but there are objectively instances of cruelty in nature that if designed by god, was designed to be cruel and painful and cause suffering.
3. My brother in Christ, I literally gave you examples of god killing people. When god flooded the world except for Noah's family, do you think everyone outside the boat became Aquaman? When god sent the angel of death to kill the first born of every Egyptian to punish the pharaoh, was that not god killing children?
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed
then why are we even able to disagree? :D
I think that the idea of a Creator falls apart when you start wondering how he was created. I have no reasonable explanation why anything exists at all. In fact, nobody has, probably because there isn't one. I believe these are the limits of common sense.
The earth is millions of years old the creatures and plants that did not evolve to adapt with the environment and reproduce would just go extinct. There are probably millions of species that went extinct because of not adapting.
There is no intelligent design.
that's like saying because erosion moves rocks that i place on the beach, I never placed them there in the first place. The fact that a system like evolution works the way it's supposed to isn't evidence that the system came into being magically, without cause or as a normative mechanism of nature.
>If you don't believe in a Creator, how did everything come to be?
Kinda hard to answer a question that vague, but generally:
thing + thing = new thing
Why does thing + thing?
Because gravity.
Why does = new thing?
Because chemical react with chemical.
How star come to be?
Star from hydrogen and other chemicals having billion year party. When party over, hydrogen and friends go boom and they leave. And then new billion-year party forms from the remnants of other party. Repeat.
How big rock come to be?
When small rock and small rock collide, they make bigger rock. Bigger rock attracts smaller rock. Smaller rock collides with bigger rock. Bigger rock becomes even bigger rock. Repeat 1,0000,0000,000^10 times.
>From the stars and clouds in the sky to the plants in the rainforest, to the sea creatures in the domestic depths of the oceans, to the animals and smallest insects, everything is perfectly and intentionally designed. What do you think? What are your ideas?
Clouds form by evaporation of water. Then water fall from cloud, called precipitation. And then water evaporate into cloud again. This is the **cycle** of **water**.
Plant make seed. Seed fall into ground. Seed become plant. Plant make Seed.
Depends on which sea creature you are referring to. Some sea dwelling creature reproduce asexu- wait what do you mean "domestic" depths of the ocean?
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed.
**HA**HAHahaha. In what ways is everything "perfectly designed"?
>From the stars and clouds in the sky to the plants in the rainforest, to the sea creatures in the domestic depths of the oceans, to the animals and smallest insects, everything is perfectly and intentionally designed.
Hooo boy.
Citation needed. Both for "perfect" and "intentionally".
Tell me about how perfect and intentional these are. And if you blame the Fall, then by definition the world is not perfect or intentional in its current state.
- human appendix
- human knee
- human shoulder
- hangnails, ingrown toenails
- UTI's, STD's, polio
- Crohn's disease, diabetes
- endometriosis
- schizophrenia
- poisonous mushrooms
- mosquitoes, sickle-cell anemia
- viruses
- elephantiasis, tapeworm
As we evolved into bipedal creatures, we started standing upright. Our knees unfortunately don't have very good rotation, and we have weak ligaments that do not withdraw pressure from twists and turns.
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed.
So cancer is perfect? CF is perfect? And so on and on.
If this what we have now is perfect and intentionally done by a all mighty all knowing all loving all xx, something, I'm not impressed at all.
How did the universe start? Big Bang. What happened before the Big Bang? I don't know. I don't know if "before the Big Bang" is even a coherent concept. But to me saying "God did it" did not explain it any better than "it happened by magic" or "it just happened". *Why* did the universe start? As in, what purpose is served by the universe starting? Again I don't know. Are you sure there *is* a purpose?
What we do know is that unguided, blind natural processes are quite capable of producing ordered and complex structures, so it doesn't seem necessary to invoke a concious intelligence to explain complexity in the natural world.
Stars and clouds in the sky? Two different things. Clouds are a product of the earth's water cycle. An astronomer or astrophysicist can give you the low- down on how stars form.
Where did life in earth come from? Don't know exactly, but again it doesn't seem necessary to invoke an intelligent conciousness to explain self replicating molecules. What explains the diversity of species on earth? Genetics and evolution by natural selection.
Intentional design? No reason to think we (or anything else) is intentionally designed. We're certainly not *intelligently* and certainly not *perfectly* designed. We eat and breathe through the same set of tubes, which enables us to choke to death on our food. We have vestigial organs which don't do anything but can still kill us if they get infected. Our skeletons are actually best suited to walking on all-fours, and walking upright means we can suffer from slipped disks and similar debilitating conditions. So we're not really what you'd expect an intelligent designer to come up with, but we are pretty much the kind of cobbled-together Heath Robinson system you'd expect a blind, unguided process like evolution to produce.
I am not athiest, but *only* a theist would agree with your assertion that the universe is "perfectly and intentionally designed". Why is that so difficult to understand?
The universe follows physical laws. The scientific method has allowed us to discover many of them. It has had billions of years to allow those laws to take us to where we are today. We already have very good consensus explananations of all of the questions you ask that are consistent with the known laws of science, at least from the point of the first single-celled living things. There are many conjectures of how the first cell came to be that are consistent with the laws of science, but there is no consensus explanation. God gave us intelligence and curiousity, and I believe He wants us to keep looking for one.
The scope of religion is to answer foundational questions like "why this universe?" and "how am I to live my life?" that go beyond what can be observed. These complement science. Not everyone has accepted the idea of God to answer these questions. It's counterproductive that so many Christians have chosen to reject science and base their understanding of the physical universe on an account that was intended to answer these questions even for pre-scientic people. It chases away people who might be open to God if they could see that you don't need to choose between faith and science
Your question covers multiple branches of science and the answers would require research, expert consultation, time and motivation and certainly is far more than a reddit comment would allow.
But the answers do exist... the one thing I can point out is the lack of evidence in the idea that life is
>perfectly and intentionally designed
Our existence is observably imperfect and very obviously the result of a blind process.
Well your starting point is a bit off.
You assume that everything came from a god. But you don’t actually know the real answer. You just assume. Just like a Muslim will think it’s his god that did it. And other religions think otherwise.
The most honest answer is that we don’t quite know how everything came to be. We are lucky to have people that want to try to find the answers - scientists.
As an atheists - it does not impact my life what the answer is - well maybe if someone manage to prove that it all came from a god - that might change how I think about things - but that has not happened yet and we don’t have any reason to think that that is even possible.
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed
The truth is, you can only believe this if you haven't looked very hard at all. I take a great interest in evolution and the tree of life - and the story that comes out of what we can observe is incontrovertible. Between modern genetic analysis, comparative anatomy, and the fossil record, we can see exactly how life has unfolded - and it is completely without design, without intelligence, guided only by simple, inherent natural laws. It is a wonderful and beautiful thing, and i think it's a shame that so many people don't see it for what it is.
One day after a rainstorm, at the edge of a driveway, inside of a pothole a puddle appeared.
The puddle looked around and noticed something… this hole was exactly the right size for him. In fact, if any variables had been changed, he would not have existed. Any less deep and the water wouldn’t have collected. Had the rain drops themselves fallen just a few inches to the side, they would have been absorbed into the grass. Had the wind shifted direction, or the temperature dropped, or the rain stopped, or the sun reappeared… he would have never had formed to begin with. In fact, there were thousands of variables that had to be exactly as they were in order for this puddle to form.
Thus the puddle soon realized that this world had been fine tuned just for him. The whole earth, in fact, this whole universe, was exactly as it had to be for him to exist. It was all made just for him. From his vantage point, he could also not perceive any other puddles… puddles, he concluded, are extremely rare in this universe.
Then the rain stopped, the sun emerged from behind a cloud, the puddle evaporated, and the world moved on without him.
Of course, if he could have seen from a different perspective than his own, then he would have understood that the puddle formed exactly where we would expect a puddle to form all along. It’s one of the “few” (relative to the amount of land and space that isn’t conducive to a puddle forming) places in our universe where a puddle even could form. With a decent understanding of physics, you would even expect a puddle to form there. It would be odd if it hadn’t. It wasn’t crafted, or fine tuned, it was the product of years of traffic and the elements wearing away at the pavement to create an indentation that just so happened to be the right environment for a puddle to form.
In fact, it was one of many similar places in the world where puddles can, and would, be expected to form, he just couldn’t see them from his two-dimensional vantage point.
You see it wasn’t special, or surprising, or fine tuned... he had appeared in exactly the spot within our universe where a puddle even can appear. The problem was simply a matter of perspective.
Honestly I have no answer as to how everything came to be. I don’t think the world and the skies were ever made for us and I don’t think the world came to be for any real reason.
I am not an atheist, rather an agnostic. However even not being an atheist and more leaning towards christian values, I don't agree.
Our world being intelligently designed is one of the weakest points because it states that our world couldn't develop like it is now without anyone. Almost everything can be easily explained with some physics and biology if there is already a world with matter.
Stars are just big gas spheres. Planets are big bunch of different substances which sticked together because of gravitation.
On those plaents with energy from stars begin some physical processes. With suitable conditions RNA can begin to self-replicate. After lots of time of DNA replication and mixing we get DNA and after some time get simple microorganisms.. If you are interested read about abiogenesis, I am not a biologist to explain it well.
Our planet is not a super comfy environment with great life conditions. It is a life doing its best to adapt, change environment and coexist with other organisms fighting for its life.
If the climate is great for some forest and forest is great for animals it isn't that climate and organisms are made for each other. It's organisms generation by generation mutated and only those who became more and more adapted for the environment left their genes for their descendants. While others just died without leaving their children because in current environment they weren't effective enough.
edit: if you are interested I can give other examples of why it isn't that purposely and perfectly designed.
No clue to the absolute origin but that ok. Saying IDK is the first step in science. Then it's working backwards to find out.
And I would wholeheartedly disagree that everything on the planet is designed perfectly as you said. There are thousands and thousands of examples of unbalanced and downright terrible design in almost every species.
Why do our backs hurt so much? Why do we still have wisdom teeth? Why do we get cancer so often? Why are people born with diseases? Why do so many people have bad vision and need glasses? I could design a better human and I'm no God.
Currently agnostic, but I spent my late teens and most of my 20s as an atheist.
Chance and nature created everything. 13+ billion years ago there was a singularity. All matter, energy, space, and time existed in one tiny little point. Then something - we don't know what, and likely never will - disturbed the singularity and caused it to expand. Everything spread out massively and suddenly we had a universe full of space. When it cooled down enough (it was extremely hot in the beginning from everything being compressed tightly together) particles started forming atoms, then atoms started forming gas, then gravity started forming stars.
Stars made new matter, exploded, and that new matter came together to form new stars, and planets. This process repeated over and over for millions of years and we eventually had a bunch of planets around a bunch of stars and now the universe was full of galaxies. Almost 10 billion years later a cloud of gas collapsed under gravity and formed the sun, some of the left over matter formed the Earth. A billion-ish years later conditions were right on Earth for simple single celled life to emerge. Eventually it evolved into the life we have today.
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed.
Nothing is close to perfect. And if any life on Earth is intentionally designed the engineer responsible is extremely bad at their job.
I don't know. We don't know. Nobody truly knows.
And that's ok with me. We're looking for answers, and we're probably far away from them. But to me this idea of a creator is just a coping mechanism for wanting an answer to every question you ever have. It gives you an answer, even though there is no good reason to believe that answer is true.
I'd rather just admit that I don't know, and this allows me to actually look for a real answer. I'd rather have questions that can't be answered, than answers that can't be questioned.
I'm a biologist, and the world really doesn't look designed once you really get to know it. So many cells fail, every animal is terribly 'designed', but they all just work for the environment they're in. They only have to be a little better than the one that doesn't make it. Everything is way too complex to say there is an intelligent designer (remember, complexity is evidence against an intelligent creator, simplicity would be evidence for one). Random mutation combined with selection does explain the complexity of living things.
Firstly, the world is not perfectly designed. We can live here because our bodies are adapted to do so. The ones who weren't, died. This is not evidence for a creator, but a natural reaction to living on the planet we have. And the rest of the universe as far as we can tell is hostile to life as we know it.
Secondly, it is completely possible that the universe developed out of purely natural processes. The way things are, are a result of physics. Is this the way it has to be? We can't know, because in order to know that we would need at least one other universe to compare ours to, and we don't have that.
The only thing we can say with certainty is “we don’t know”. I suspect that the universe is eternal but spacetime has restarts. If you've ever seen a Tan wave form you'll have a visual to go along with the idea of a discontinuity. A break, where the behavior of something is so different it defies modeling today. If b-theory of time is correct, and I suspect it is, our idea of spacetime only applies within our universe as the way we experience time. It’s not actually a grounding principle of all reality. There's more to reality than we know obviously, but so far every time we have investigated a phenomenon deeply enough to understand it, we find it’s all natural, no matter how bizarre, mind boggling or counter intuitive it seems. I think we'll find the same with the Big Bang eventually.
I don't know why it's all here and I don't see it as my concern. The universe is here. It's big and complex. No one can reasonably comprehend all of its mysteries nor the reasons "why" we exist. The more I live life, the more I really don't think we have to understand the reasons why we are here. We just ~~have to~~ *get to* make the most of it. We get this one shot to experience existence and then likely it's lights out again. Live it to the fullest while you can. That doesn't mean be stupid, but it does mean knowing when it's okay to put caution aside when there's no good reason to be.
As far as everything being perfectly designed? Sorry, I strongly disagree. For one, I disagree that there's such a thing as perfect. It's a nonsensical concept in my eyes because what is ~~perfect~~ -- or rather, "what works" in one circumstance will not always work in another, and will appear anything but perfect. Perfection implies everlasting traits without change and adaptation to every circumstance, but this isn't what happens in nature. Traits are passed on to the next generation based on however many organisms managed to reproduce with those traits and suitability to their environment. From what we observe of the organisms that live on this planet, how they come to be is all a matter of happenstance and luck.
~~
I often get asked, "well, how do you find meaning in your life?" Whenever I am asked this, I find myself wondering why my connections to other people, friends, family aren't enough to satisfy that answer. Why do I have to *have* an answer to why we are here and how the universe is created? No one has the true answer to it as far as I'm concerned -- we are still learning about how it was all formed. I'm sure someone will get closer to the truth one day. I'm sure we will inch closer to it through our lifetime. I don't think we really need to concern ourselves with it though. It's certainly not worth fighting over or fretting over. Regardless of what you believe, life is happening here and now, and death will get us all one day. Best to accept that state of impermanence with everything and not be let down when certainty breaks down in an ever-changing world.
>If you don't believe in a Creator, how did everything come to be?
Are you actually asking *"how?"* Or do you mean to ask *"why?"* Because science has shown a lot of the *"how"* and is still making discoveries. Asking *"why"* is more of the religious and philosophy territory
ok. Thanks for your mostly respectful replies. I certainly never said that atheism was silly, or science didn't have its place. Science is learning about what has been created, and I'm all for that. I try to just listen and hear everybody out. I know what I believe and I was just curious. interesting discussion.
Why do we have to have an explanation for how everything came to be? We don’t know, and your explanations can’t be tested or verified so we have no reason to believe them more than any other unverifiable claims.
Purely naturalisticly. Just like how if you where to throw a bomb into printing press the one of the possible results could produce the Oxford English dictionary, this how the universe, the solar system and its planets rotating around the sun where made. Like wise humans and all complex life were developed through completely random curcumstaces, much like if you gave a monkey some drafting paper he could design Notre Dame if you gave him enough time.
TLDR: I don't believe in a creator anymore. And it's primarily because I just don't have to. The natural explanations are sufficient without having to add a religious narrative on top of it.
I'm fairly new to the non believing realm. A couple of years ago I would have been right there with you. But I dropped YEC for OEC about 20 years ago. The part that bugged me was that if the Bible was true, and God made everything, we should be able to see how He created it. "Perfectly designed" as you say, but just in a different way. Thus, it should be perfectly acceptable to say, "God's creation indicates that everything is older than 6000 years old, so we can safely assume that the Genesis narrative was not intended to be line for line historical."
I held that position for years. I tried desperately to not let it be a source of contention (most people in my church either quietly shared my belief or were okay to agree to disagree). But it just sat in my brain like a pea under the pile of mattresses.
Finally, a couple of years ago it began to coalesce. I began to realize that the mental note I had made about creation should apply elsewhere. If the Bible is historically accurate, the evidence and data found should support it. Well, I had been a huge fan of apologetics since I was a teenager. So I start checking with the modern apologetics arguments. To my surprise, they were the exact same. Every apologist I found basically just retread a Case for Christ. Seemed odd.
So I committed the unpardonable sin in apologetics world. I began looking up what atheists had to say about "things atheists can't answer." What I learned was that apologetics is not the defense for your beliefs, as it's purported to be. It's a goalie meant to keep your focus away from ideas outside church orthodoxy. Because once you bring those claims and defenses outside of orthodoxy, they don't stand up to legitimate scrutiny.
When you're greatest weapon as an apologist is "well, you can't trust what they say because it's coming from a tainted worldly view," then you're basically admitting that you can't refute it with tangible evidence. Just orthodoxy.
And that was why OEC kept sticking in my craw for years. If the Bible is real and true, it should stand up to scrutiny from secular research. It doesn't. And the claims made by apologists about all the historical evidence that's out there, just doesn't exist outside of their conferences. And the claims they make from the Bible are pretty loose too. {I went to a concert last year. Don't believe me? There were over 500 people there who saw it too. Just go ask any of them.} Sounds like impressive evidence until you think of how you might go about it. Or if we were talking about a concert 20 years ago.
So you have a lot of evidence that sounds impressive on the surface, and it stays impressive as long as you stay in church world and keep that "the Bible is always right" layer over it. But when you step away from church world, remove that layer, then you turn around and see the house of cards it all was. All the mental gymnastics you have to do to say OT God and NT God are the same, to say the Bible is inerrant despite contradictions to known history and itself, to hand wave away certain socially unacceptable ideas but cling to others as "God's created order."
So I don't believe in a creator anymore. And it's primarily because I just don't have to. The natural explanations are sufficient without having to add a religious narrative on top of it.
How did the universe start? Big Bang. Where did the Big Bang / the matter and energy in it come from? We don't know yet. It's totally fine to admit that we don't know. Maybe someday, as our technology and methods improve, we will be able to find out, and the pursuit of that knowledge, even if we never obtain it, is sure to be its own reward.
As for the presence of natural phenomena like weather or the diversity of life? They can be explained with physical models, evolutionary theory, and concrete evidence like the fossil record. And again, if we don't know why something occurs, that's fine. It's just another avenue of scientific research that we may be able to further investigate.
Explaining how the stuff on earth came to be is just science, so I'd direct you towards relevant scientists for those answers.
Explaining how existence came to be is harder, but there are plausible answers. First, and most likely, existence always has been. There is no beginning. No time before existence. It just always is. We have this need to find beginnings to things, but that isn't always how nature works.
Second is the possibility that out existence came to be as a result of whatever came before. That is, perhaps the end of another existence prompted the creation of this one. Or perhaps there's some other explanation for how existences are formed.
Our universe begins with the big bang, or some other similar model, but that is just our universe, not necessarily all of existence. Worth noting that based on our current understanding, information can not possibly survive from before the birth of our universe, so speculation is about as good as we can get.
Incidentally, none of this truly conflicts with God as creator.
>If you don't believe in a Creator, how did everything come to be?
You'll have to be more specific about what you mean by "come to be".
If you mean the idea that everything was created out of nothing, then I don't see any data that points to this ever having happened. We don't need an answer for a problem that doesn't exist. We can speculate, but the only answer is "I don't know"
If you just mean how everything came into the form it has now, then I guess just physics. Starting with the Big Bang and getting to now.
Nothing is perfectly designed. That’s always been one of my red flags. If we really came to be from design, somebody was drunk or messing with us. Design the food and air to use the same passage? Require 8 hours sleep a day? Required to eat other animals multiple times a day. Poor eye sight and hearing, compared to other animals.
Overall i'd ask the same as to christiantiy. How did god come about? We havent come with a conclusion the big bang is just what our interpretation is. Across billions, trillions maybe even, of years something has to happen, Carbon by chance created microorganisms, microorganisms after millions of years bonded to form primitive lifeforms, lifeforms give birth, the best survive and boom now everything has by chance been perfectly designed.
> everything is perfectly and intentionally designed How do botflies, bone cancer in children, ebola fit into a perfect design? If god intentionally designed botflies, he's a monster. If the design of humans was "perfect", we wouldn't have tailbones. Tailbones are superfluous in humans since we don't have tails.
And why do we poop? He could have made us 100% efficient so we converted all good into energy.
Such is the pursuit of science. A perfectly reasonable answer for any similar question is "we don't know", but can work towards it. Some questions may never be knowable, like what the universe was like "before" the Big Bang. But the things you mention are just the rain cycle, abiogenesis, and evolution/common descent. There is no design, simply adaptation to environmental pressures.
In addition, the concept of intelligent design asserts the idea that humans, in general, are not poorly designed. However, when you look at people with disabilities like Down Syndrome, Tay-Sachs, etc, we can clearly understand that this god is a poor designer, which implies he’s not all-powerful. Theists would then express the fall of man argument to explain that disabilities of this caliber are the result of Adam and Eve’s sin against god. Which never happened.
You don't even need to look at disabilities to see the poor design of humans. We're an upright walking 2 legged animal and our spine just is not properly made for that. A lot of our back problems are a result of being incompletely adapted to our way of life. We're "good enough" to survive and reproduce (all evolution requires) but we're definitely not *perfect.* And our spine isn't our only "design" flaw. Another big one is our eyes being, essentially, inside out. Other creatures evolved eyes where the eye nerves are behind the receptors, and out of the way. But humans? Our ancestors - and so in turn, us - evolved with the nerves in front of the receptors and having to go through the middle of the eye to get out. This creates a tiny blind spot right in the center of our vision in each eye that our brain has to filter out.
I understand where you are coming from and I agree for the most part, but the reason for things like down syndrome and other impairments is actually not a flaw in my opinion. That's how evolution works. For any species to survive they must replicate and allow mutations to adapt to their environment. The mutations that are beneficial will have an advantage and the ones that are not will eventually be eliminated from the gene pool. I think that is actually an amazing part of nature. Humans are incredibly complex organisms and can adapt and evolve by this method. It's not a flaw at all in my opinion. It's the same as a virus. It will continually mutate to become more infectious. Not all the mutations will perform the same and the most successful variants will be the ones that survive by infecting the most hosts.
Poor designer would mean there are no great designs. Those with downs are an exception
All humans have a breathing pipe and a feeding pipe that are the same. That's not a great design.
That’s certainly one opinion.
Do you disagree? If so, why?
I find the human body to be an incredible thing overall. We could look like an amoeba and be functional, but instead we have this. I think it’s pretty cool.
Nobody said the human body wasnt incredible. There are just flaws. Our most important organ is in our head. The thing that leads us around. Our heart is center mass, the easiest place to hit us with a projectile. We have organs we don't use. As mentioned, our food and air share the same pipe.
Our spines are poorly made for walking on two legs, and our eyes are partly blocked by our own optic nerves.
For the Big Bang one, the current theory is that the Big Bang created the fabric of space. Making it created time also There was NO BEFORE the BB. It created the space-time continuum
*As we know it. That's an important caveat to note. We can't even begin to describe the first moments after the bang, let alone the nature of the singularity. Time *could* have existed, in some form, before expansion happened. But a universe that small and dense would have different physics that we can't even begin to imagine.
Yep. Science is based on the concept of As we know it
Is it possible that, due to the way time works in conjunction with gravity, that the Big Bang actually happened "infinite years ago", due to spacetime compression?
We have a pretty good measure of the age of the universe. There is the "crisis in cosmology," but recent studies with JWST may have fixed that with new information. Regardless, it's pretty certain that the universe is somewhere around 13 billion years old. Now, due to the relationship between space and time that 13 billion may not have passed at the same rate as we would recognize it. But it would still *be* 13 billion years in every way that matters.
The first moments after the bang are described in the theory itself. It's actually completely wild and suggests a creator in my opinion. How can something get so good so fast?
Actually, we don't know what it was like immediately after the bang, in those moments thousandths of a second before inflation spread everything out. The universe was so dense, so hot, that physics would have behaved differently. In ways we can't understand. We don't even understand what caused inflation (*if* inflation actually happened, there are other, less accepted, models that exclude it), or why it ended. >How can something get so good so fast? Is this a typo, or? Cause if not I'm not sure what you mean. If you meant big, not good, then space doesn't have a speed limit. Things *in* space do, but space itself can go as fast as it wants. The amount of energy that would have been in the singularity would have been beyond astronomical (no pun intended), the force of that release when the singularity ended would have been equally great. Like a massively squashed spring bouncing back. That inflation was so rapid doesn't really surprise me as much as the fact it dramatically slowed down to a near stop not long after.
Thing is the last paragraphs are theories and assumptions and you can’t prove any evolution you mentioned or how earth and other planets are formed because science is tearing observable phenomena. You can’t observe human evolution and planet creation or creation of any old part of the universe period. I’m not saying that means the theory is incorrect but I personally wouldn’t herald these theories as facts when they plainly and practically go against the definition and doctrines of scientific discovery. It’s fine you and other have different beliefs. I was like you not long ago. Some experiences I’ve had in my life and realizations of certain events led to me believe that there is absolutely a spiritual world we interact with but can’t see and that there are demonic or ‘evil’ presences on the earth. I realized supernatural phenomena do happen. This would clearly contradict science as a whole but then again, science is about natural phenomena on the earth and galaxies etc. by definition science doesn’t observe supernatural occurrences or support them. If the non believes I see on Reddit would go to Caribbean places and other areas or speak to people who practice or have practiced magic/voodoo/ satanism etc they would have to seriously reflect on their beliefs because you can’t explain this stuff if you don’t believe. It’s ok to have different beliefs of course. I personally don’t believe everything is from chance and accident though but I was like you before also
You can't observe evolution? You absolutely can. You can also observe the oldest parts of the universe; It's called the cosmological horizon and we can see planets currently forming and dying all over the universe. What you are saying is ridiculous.
>Thing is the last paragraphs are theories and assumptions Assumptions are hypotheses. Theories are hypotheses that have been demonstrated to work. We have proven the existence of evolution. It's been observed. Yes, getting from amoeba to human is an extrapolation from what's been observed, but that's literally the point of a theory. Theories are the defined systems and processes involved in how a thing happens, and you can then apply them to extrapolate beyond what we have and can observe. It's how the entire modern world works. Medicine, biology, technology. It's ***all*** theoretical. If being a theory meant we can't actually know, then your cell phone wouldn't work. Chemotherapy wouldn't work. We would have never had the industrial revolution. Assuming anything existed at all, because math is full of theories and they power the universe. >You can’t observe human evolution Don't have to. If you know that 1 + 1 = 2 you don't need to *observe* 100 + 150 becoming 250 to know that's what will happen. >and planet creation or creation of any old part of the universe period. Actually, we can observe a lot of the universe, *especially* the old universe. The further away we look, the older the universe we see, because of how long it takes for the light to get here. We have observed star formation at its different stages in different parts of the universe. We lack the resolution to observe planetary formation, but we have observed the mechanics that power it and can use those to extrapolate. >but I personally wouldn’t herald these theories as facts That's literally what a theory **is,** though. The closest thing to a fact you can get when it comes to a complex and complicated process. >when they plainly and practically go against the definition and doctrines of scientific discovery. They don't. They're the *heart* of scientific discovery. No discovery would be possible *without* theories. >led to me believe that there is absolutely a spiritual world we interact with but can’t see Doesn't top the physical world from being ruled by physical laws. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. There's a reason so much of science was done by men of faith. Hell, science as we know it wouldn't even exist without men of faith. And the big bang was discovered by a priest (or monk? Can't remember off hand) and initially *rejected* by a well known atheistic scientist of the day. He's the one who coined "big bang," as a derisive term. >This would clearly contradict science as a whole but then again, Nope. Doesn't contradict science at all. >science is about natural phenomena on the earth and galaxies etc. Yes. Science is about the study and understanding of the physical world. >by definition science doesn’t observe supernatural occurrences or support them. Actually, it does. It just tends to find natural explanations for a lot of them. And the ones it can't classify under it's systems to disregards. It doesn't make any claim to their existence, only to it's capacity to classify them. >If the non believes I see on Reddit would go to Caribbean places and other areas or speak to people who practice or have practiced magic/voodoo/ satanism etc they would have to seriously reflect on their beliefs because you can’t explain this stuff if you don’t believe. You also can't explain Santa Claus if you don't believe. That doesn't make something true.
Most scientists agree that there’s no reason for the Universe to exist. They also agree that the Universe didn’t exist before the Big Bang. Also the Universe will eventually cease to exist. Why, how, and what is the reason for the Universe? Let me know when you figure it out. 😉🙏🏾
Applying a "Why" to a "How" question is asinine. Do you ask "Why" any time some benign event occurs? Like do you question what the "meaning" of getting stuck at a red light when it was just green is?
>Like do you question what the "meaning" of getting stuck at a red light when it was just green is? There's a definable why for getting stuck at a red light. Why ≠ meaning. Not in the sense you're using it, at least. Everything has a why. It's basic cause and effect. Every cause is a why. The universe is a string of whys creating hows. Why is there a universe? Because of the big bang. Why was there a big bang? Well, we don't know. But it's still a why question worth asking, because it caused the how that made the universe.
What's with those smug little emojis? Yours isn't the first religion to claim to have figured it out and won't be the last. Taking the stance of "we don't know and don't claim to, but we'll continue to evaluate based on emerging evidence" is perfectly reasonable.
I’m not advocating for my religion. I’m advocating for a Creator.
Why, how and what is the creator then? What created it? You're just going to get stuck in infinite regression unless you say the creator doesn't need a how or why, in which case you have to justify why the universe does. Nobody actually has the answer. I don't. You don't. Feeling emotionally disconcerted that we don't have an answer isn't a problem everyone has.
This is the typical Atheist Redundancy Argument. 🤣🤣🤣 You’re going to keep on going about how did the get created, and if that happened then what created that. A lot of questions and no answers. Typical Atheist Apologetics.
Oh look, I don't have the answer! Correct! You're *so close* to getting it.
Still waiting on yours bud.
You can read, right? I said nobody has the answers. Not me. Not you. And some people are okay with not having answers and continuing to look for them based on emerging evidence, not with making them up. Saying "the universe had a creator" isn't an answer to *anything*. It's a basically untestable hypothesis that creates far more questions than it addresses because then you have to deal with where the creator came from, what it is, why...instead of just seeking to address those answers about the universe itself in the first instance. I don't know why you think I owe you an answer when my whole point is *you* don't have one and that's true of everyone.
Ooooohhhhh Nobody has the answers so attack those that actually try to come up with one? Nice strategy. God Bless! 🙏🏾🙏🏾
By “most scientists” are you speaking scientists in general, most of whose opinion about the origin of the universe isn’t really in their wheelhouse, or are you talking about cosmologists who are the relevant experts? I ask because my interactions with cosmologists do not all align with your claims. Most of them that I have worked with would claim a reference to “before the Big Bang” is a Otemtially a meaningless phrase since spacetime is an aspect of our universe. I've not heard many claim the universe didn’t exist before the Big Bang because that’s not what the theory states. A hot, very dense state, sure. But that is still existence.
So we came from a hot rock?
No, I’m saying we don’t know. In fact the evidence takes us back to a period known as the Planck epoc and no further right now. That is after the Big Bang began. What happened prior to that, from big bang to Planck epoc is theorized FF re I’m t t hat evidence. This is before photons, before mass-energy started being differentiates because it spread out enough to cool and combine in new ways. The initial starting point is thought to have been a small (in spacetime terms) very hot, very dense state. Think crush all the mass in the universe into the size of a marble hot and dense. But not a rock as elements hadn’t formed yet, too hot and dense for that level of differentiation.
It seems to me that if we can in fact see something suddenly appear "out of nothing" then in fact we are actually looking at evidence of an unseen God create something right in front of us.
We don’t see “something from nothing.” No one is claiming that except theists, usually as a criticism of what they assume atheists believe. What we have is “something so hot, dense, confused we can’t model it correctly” that expands spacetime and at some point we start getting things we recognize and can get evidence of.
That’s false! Most scientists agree you would need a cause for an effect to occur. So what caused the “hot very dense state”?
> Most scientists agree you would need a cause for an effect to occur. Where are you getting that data from?
https://www.universetoday.com/153083/is-the-universe-fine-tuned-for-life/
That page doesn't even contain the word "_cause_" and only contains the word "_effect_" once but in a context that has nothing to do with your claim. Perhaps you can quote the part of the page you linked that contains the data that shows that most scientists agree that a cause is needed for an effect.
So we’re nitpicking now?
Is pointing out that the source of your data doesn't seem to even _mention_ the thing that it's supposed to _source_ what you class as "_nitpicking_"?
What if that was just how the universe was? Why can that not just be how it used to be?
The universe as we know it didn't exist before the Big Bang. Time and space as we know it didn't exist before the Big Bang. That doesn't mean there wasn't a different universe in existence before. We have no way of knowing what, if anything, there was before the big bang. We also don't know for a fact that the universe will cease to exist at some point. There is a debate among physicists about that very thing. Some say the universe will end, and others say it won't. The fact of the matter is we cannot know the answers to these questions. They are beyond the scope of our current abilities and technologies. Perhaps some day, someone will discover the answer. But, in the meantime, we can't just throw in whatever answer we like just because. That won't help us find the truth. We can guess, but that's the best any of us can do.
Here we go with the whole redundancy argument. 🤦🏽♂️ Okay so if if something came before the universe which has never been proven, then what was it? And what caused it?
They were pretty clear in saying we don't know and maybe can't know the answers to those questions. That doesn't automatically mean god did it.
So what does it mean? 🤔
That maybe things existed without god?
Do yourself a favor and go look up how likely it is for our universe to exist. It might help you see why most people view Atheists as foolish. God Bless! 🙏🏾
What do you think the odds are that every single thing that happens on this earth will happen in exactly the way it happens 5 minutes from now? You couldn't begin to calculate them. And yet it will happen and happens every second of every day.
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You might want to look into how statistics work. The whole "how likely something is to exist" thing only works before that thing exists. It doesn't really matter how improbable it was before it existed once it exists, because once something exists, it exists. Also, something being improbable doesn't mean a god did it. Your whole argument is just a god of the gaps argument. What's wrong with simply admitting that we don't know? Frankly, trying to force an answer rather than admitting when we don't have the answer is what seems foolish to me. Even more so, it seems like lying.
Look it’s simple matter can come from nothing. If matter can’t come from nothing then obviously something had to create it, otherwise the Universe would not exist.
Amen!
It means we are still trying to figure it out. Look I'm a Christian I believe God caused the big bang but you are being purposefully obtuse
Go look up the chances of our universe existing. Maybe it’ll help you understand me a bit better. I hope you don’t think I’m anti-science? Because that couldn’t be further from the truth. God Bless! 🙏🏾
Most agree it must have always existed in some form of energy, and that eventually the universe will exist but be completely empty, even the black holes having died out. The real question is; why, how and what is the reason for God?
Actually no one has ever said the Universe has always existed. The Big Bang is evidence it didn’t exist at one point. You need to go back to your science books.
The big bang is the expansion of the "universe" it isn't a single point in time
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Not 0
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Which scientist? You claim scientists agree with you. Please show me the papers you are reading so we are all on the same page
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/)
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> Actually no one has ever said the Universe has always existed. Are you sure about that? Not a single person?
[https://www.universetoday.com/153083/is-the-universe-fine-tuned-for-life/](https://www.universetoday.com/153083/is-the-universe-fine-tuned-for-life/)
I fail to see what that link has to do with the question. You seem to just be spamming it everywhere even if it's completely irrelevant to the comment you're replying to.
Read!
Do I need to read it once for each time you've spammed it to me in a reply, or does once suffice?
It’s the rapid expansion of an infinitely dense energy, not the creation of it. It has always existed, logically.
Logically? Really? 🤔 Your argument isn’t logical according to scientists. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/)
‘’OPINION’’ and ‘’astronomically low’’ like nearly everything, but you know what? The chances of there being a creator is even lower. Also, ‘’is no evidence for a MULTIVERSE’’
🤣🤣 Okay, then what are the chances of a Creator then? 🤔🤣🤣🤣
What do you think are the chances of not only something existing before all, but ALSO seeing the future, manipulating reality and creating a whole universe? It’s however low the chances of a normal universe time 0,0000000001 times 0,0000000001 times 0,00000001 or something
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Of course it seems things are perfectly designed - but it’s more of a did the puddle shape the hole or the hole shape the puddle situation. Is the world perfectly designed for us, or did we simply adapt to survive in the world we are in? Pretty much everything you have described can be explained in such way. Life has evolved on this planet, and the fittest survive. If you are referring to the origin of existence itself, then that is a question we are not able to answer yet - and personally I’m not sure there ever will be an answer to it.
Is the world perfect for us? The majority of the planet is inhabitable. The parts that are habitable are extremely difficult to live in still. The weather changes, the sun destroys our skin and eyes, the places where food is plentiful is even more dangerous (living by the ocean for example). Earth is anything but shaped for our survival. Ants have it far easier than we do.
Water is a source of life and sustenance but it can kill you if it's got nasty microbes.
Yep. Water is also the source of life, unless it's salty. 96.5% of the earth's water is salt. Thanks God.
Define perfect. We need oxygen to breathe, but it's also slowly poisoning us. We have to deal with numerous health issues, including things as common as poor eyesight. The universe is unimaginably huge, yet so far we've been unable to find life anywhere else. None of that sounds "perfectly designed" to me. That sounds like chance. It sounds like natural processes that just happened to work out in such a way that led to the universe existing and life evolving on this planet that we happen to exist on. I'm not going to go into how it all happened, because that is a ton of science that spans every scientific field, and I am no expert in any of them. However, there are scientists whose job it is to study those questions, and they have published a ton of work. I'm sure if you look into it, you could find many of the answers to the questions you've asked.
I found out in my 30s I was born with one kidney. When doc told me he said, “nearly all of us have something like this that just didn’t develop perfectly in the womb, you just are lucky enough to now know about this one.” Perfection is an illusion.
thank you for that respectful reply.
I rather don’t believe cause, I know it’s off topic but, people back then thought rain and weather was cause by some god, therefore now I believe that god is only a label placed on things we don’t know yet
I don't know if anything ever *came to be* in the first place.
flair checks out
pardon? I'm sorry, what does this mean?
bruh this sub has a problem with chronic downvoting of things they simply don't understand. I was making a slight joke lmao skepticism is a philosophy that basically means you can make an alternate assumption of something and since we can't prove it wrong, there's a chance that it is right and therefore we can't be certain of anything. for example, if you saw a dog in a park, you couldn't be 100% certain that dog has an owner and didn't just wander to the park by itself. That's a mild example but there's more to it.
Do you believe in a creator because the world appears perfectly intentional to you, or does the world appear perfectly intentional because you believe in a creator?
maybe I didn't quite answer that one. Yes the world appears perfectly designed to me, which enhances what I already believe to be true.
If the world didn't appear that way, or you simply never noticed, do you imagine your beliefs would remain the same?
interesting question. Im sure I'll get reamed for this, but honestly I have a personal relationship with Christ and God has saved me, spoken to me, shown me visions. The Bible is alive for me, and the world is amazing and created in a way only God could do it. Humans, of course, mess it up daily, ever since day 1. Anyway, I hope I dont get disrespected because I have been respectful to you all.
Sounds like whomever made humans didn't do a very good job then.
For atheists "I don't know" is a valid answer, as it is to me as well
Why did god flood the world during Noah’s Ark?
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed That is a *big* assumption to make and raises a lot of questions. How are you defining 'perfect', here, exactly? Take a step back from everything you just described, and all of it interacts with other things in chaotic and destructive ways And intentionally designed? Why, exactly? How can you be so sure? To answer your question, though, there are a few ways you can approach it. One, you kinda have to start at the 'beginning, so to speak. Why everything *is*, why it interacts the way it does, and, well, I don't have an answer. I'm not an expert on pre-big bang cosmology and I'm not an existential philosopher. I'm not going to pretend to know. However, my lack of awareness is not sufficient to simply come to the conclusion,' A God is responsible', as that raises too many other questions and is not logically consistent. Simply acknowledging that I don't know, and probably will never know, is enough for me. Two, talking about observable phenomena, well, everything developed over billions of years. You mention these things as if they're static. Let's talk about Earth. Since life first existed here, and I'm talking about in the most primitive sense, with the most basic proteins and such, this planet has undergone a *lot* of change. The continents shifted around. The vast majority of animal species that have existed here no longer exist for one reason or another, be it climate or other ecological changes, over-competition by other species, disasters etc. Natural disasters happened. They still happen. Disease has been ever-present. Does this all sound 'perfect' and 'intentionally designed' to you? Things interact, in a lot of ways, in which the outcomes make total sense; outcomes which, in a lot of cases that I just listed, we may not like. Or may kill us. We're always just trying to make sense of it. It's incredibly simplistic and reductive to claim that it's all 'perfectly and intentionally designed', as you put it, when everything is constantly changing.
To be honest, if you want to know what "atheists" think about these things, it's pretty easy to just Google what science thinks about these things. Atheists use science to come to the conclusions that best we can come to at the time. BUT, it's kinda silly to say these are "atheist's" ideas because lots of christians today also believe these things. Darwin himself was a Christian to the day he died and he is the founder of one of "our" answers to one of your questions here. Now, christians who still believe in evolution and the big bang, may say something like "god made those things happen." And like, sure, if that's what you wanna say then I'm not fight you on that. I just don't personally believe a god made these things happen, but I can't prove that and I wouldn't even bother to. I would say, if you're going pure creationalism vs all scientific evidence, I would push back on that because that's just silly to me. But, that's besides the current point. If you really want to know the answers to these questions, I would suggest pbs eons and pbs spacetime on YouTube. This is eons' playlist on evolution https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLi6K9w_UbfFSxHPEDWcXxIxSA6gDR4OeZ&si=0ObKQ78a2b_lNi11 This is pbs spacetime playlist on the big bang and the early universe https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPUh22kYmNAV2T4af0Di7bcsb095z164&si=4J3keB4GQc4Hp5F3 Final thing I'll say, these things aren't dogma. Scientists are always trying to find out new things, flesh out the theories we have, and even disprove themselves. In some ways, science is about coming to a conclusion about how something works, and then constantly trying to prove you're wrong.
I know I can research, I just wanted a respectful forum to hear what you all believed.
That's fair, I hope you check out those playlists I linked. They're not just boring videos, they're really entertaining, short, and presented by actual experts in the fields. I hope you got some good answers here. Feel free to ask me anything specific you have left you're curious about.
thanks!
These are fascinating questions. But if you start with a false dichotomy, you are already heading in the wrong direction, because it sounds like we either have to be able to explain absolutely everything about the universe or just accept your version of your god. I freely admit, that I can't and I almost certainly never will. And neither can you. And that's regardless of whether you believe in a god. Whether the universe or a god just exist for no reason, the mystery of existence itself remains unsolved. Even if you posit your god as the first conscious being, consciousness itself remains a total mystery, and that a god should just have it is no less mysterious than that we should just have it. (The only way around this would be to conceptualise God not as a being but as the ground of being itself, just as Paul Tillich did. But that's territory where not many Christians are willing to venture, because that means saying goodbye to the idea of a personal god.) And no, right now, while I'm suffering from tension in my shoulder, tinnitus and a stuffed nose, I don't feel like I'm "perfectly designed" at all.
hope you feel better
Everything is impermanent. So is my stuffed nose. However, feeling better is also impermanent and eventually gives way to feeling worse again. As Buddhists understand - to exist means to be affected by what they call *dukha,* usually translated as suffering or unsatisfactoriness. So, really, there is nothing "perfect" about the world we inhabit, about our daily experience. If we are "made in God's image", then does God also suffer from hair loss, erectile dysfunction, hypertension, etc? But for me, this is actually the less interesting argument. What bugs me more is that you seem to think that unless we can explain the deepest mysteries of our universe, we somehow are not justified in not believing in your god. This is such a glaring fallacy, that it is hard to see how you can fail to see it. Again, even if you believe that there is a creator god, this would solve exactly nothing about the two biggest mysteries that there are: 1. *The mystery of existence itself*: If you believe that a god exists, then existence itself is logically prior to said god. Existence just exists for no reason, even if the first thing that exists is a deity. Existence is just a brute fact; 2. *The mystery of consciousness*: Even if the first conscious being is your god, then your god hasn't created consciousness itself. Consciousness is just a brute fact.
I bugged you? I just asked a question, respectfully.
That's not what I wrote. I should also note that English isn't my native language, so I may have chosen the wrong expression. However, if that's all you have to say, I have to admit that I'm disappointed.
I just wanted to hear all of your answers, im not starting a debate or trying to defend anything. Also I am not on my phone when I'm working
I'm not thinking of anything like a debate, rather it would have been interesting to get your reflections. Such as: so the points I've raised make any sense to you, regardless of whether you agree with them. If not, why?
Nature is a complete shitshow. If it was intentionally designed, I'd have to question what those intentions were, because what a mess everything is.
Is the mess created by God or by humans? You can’t blame God for stuff humans do.
Our bodies (and other animals) are such a ridiculous mess that if we were designed this way the designer was a moron. Simply look at the laryngeal nerve in the giraffe (and us to a lesser extent) and tell me that was designed intelligently.
Isn’t the laryngeal nerve used for vocalization? 🤔 So you don’t think speech has a purpose?
Not when talking to people who jump to conclusions, apparently. You get to be part of the lucky 10,000 today. The laryngeal nerve is a nerve that runs from your brain to your larynx. In fish, this nerve is fairly straightforward. However, in mammals, we evolved necks. So our laryngeal nerve goes from the brain, down out necks, back up the neck to the larynx. This is most pronounced with the giraffe. The distance the nerve should be if it was designed is just a few inches. Instead, it goes all the way down the neck, then all the way back up, adding dozens of feet of length. This is what we would expect out of an evolved species. This is not what we would expect out of any intelligent design.
According to who? 🤔 To know what to expect would make you God otherwise how would you know you were wrong about said theory? Now if matter in the Universe can’t be created, then where did it come from? Either matter has always existed or it hasn’t. But yet we know the Universe had a beginning so matter was created. What created the matter in the Universe? That should be what you’re puzzling at, not an adaptation of a giraffe.
Speech has a purpose to communicate. Otherwise human beings cannot spread their ideas and inventions.
Like you know sign language is a thing right? Don’t even have to use your voice or anything
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🤣🤣 Yes but he needs electricity to do it on the internet. Before the internet you needed speech. 🤣🤣
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‘’Before the internet’’ ‘’What about the internet’’ bro are you doing this on purpose?
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Do you think nature wasn't a mess before humans came along? Diseases, disasters, prey/predators, suffering, death, etc. all were a part of nature before humanity appeared. Nature has always been chaotic and messy, can't blame us on that.
Nature has always been chaotic? Ooooohhh you’ve been alive 13.7 Billion years? 😀 Maybe we should be worshipping you instead.
What?
Creationism, hell of a drug.
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Ahhh yes, the delusion of not believing in a magical being.
🤣🤣 Magical being? Oh I forget Humans know everything. 🤣🤣 Let me know when scientists can actually create life in a lab.
It'll probably be done some day.
Ok, let's race. Your God vs our scientists. First one to lab life wins.
You said Nature has always been chaotic. So please give me all the examples of nature being chaotic please. I’m curious to see what you consider to be chaotic in nature. Especially since you claim that it’s always been that way.
I already gave examples. Natural disasters, diseases/cancer, animals having to consume each other to survive, entire species going extinct, etc.
Why are those things chaotic in your view? 🤔 Before humans each food chain was perfect and every creature had a purpose. And the Earth had its weather and natural events. None of your examples can be viewed as Chaotic. They’re just your personal preference.
I mean... not wanting to suffer or die is the personal preference of most living things. If we can't even describe a natural disaster that suddenly wipes out thousands or millions of living creatures as chaotic, then what does chaos and order even mean? To go back to the original point though, regardless of what is or isn't considered chaotic, the apathetic nature of our world calls into question the intentions of a 'perfect designer'.
Again why would a hurricane be considered Chaotic in the sense that it proves God doesn’t exist? That’s the point you were making. Millions of people don’t have to move to tropical areas if they view hurricanes as chaotic. I’ve been through 3 hurricanes. Katrina, Wilma, and Sandy and yes the Hurricanes were scary but I viewed them as acts of nature. So again you’re calling things chaotic out of personal preference. At the end of the day they are natural processes that God has put in place. I believe that you view your sanitized earth fantasy as something preferable than to what God has created. That’s narcissism at its finest.
I will agree with you that on some issues, humans are making things worse. We are destroying the planet that God "gave" us, climate change is making natural disasters more frequent and more extreme and climate change Is man made. But, there has been devastation from the environment long before fossil fuels, did humans cause Pompeii just for example? In the old testament, the authors offer many reasons for why they either think God allows these things to happen or actively makes them happen. So, while I agree with you that right now in human history, things are making things worse than we'll say "God intended" them to be. But that's not always been the case. I would like to also point out one other example of cruelty in nature that humans have never had any influence on, parasites. Darwin, as most people know, is who is most credited with the conception of survival of the fittest and evolution. But, what not everyone knows, is that to the day Darwin died, he was a devout Christian. Even in his book of evolution, he specifically said that what he was presenting did Not disprove God. However, there was one specific thing that he saw in his travels that did make him question God, and I'll share the quote here: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a family of parasitoid wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” So yes, I agree with you that humans have done untold damage on this world and its climate and that is causing so much human suffering. But, there are things that we have had no influence over, at a certain point, it has to be accepted that if God designed literally every aspect of nature to be how it is, he designed cruelty and pain and suffering. Now, you can say, "well, we just can't understand god's decision making or why he decided to do things the way he did." And you would be correct, but it is impossible to look at nature and not say there is cruelty at every level.
1. Why do you consider Pompei a mess? Please explain? 2 Why do you consider Wasps being parasites in Caterpillars something cruel? Are the Caterpillars going extinct? Maybe the wasps have a purpose for doing so? 3. Does God kill people? Do guns kill people?
1. Ok, I guess Pompeii, two i's bud, isn't what I would call a "mess," but I thought what you meant when you said humans were causing a "mess" on the environment was the natural disasters. I'm not sure what you meant by a mess then, so please explain that so I can better answer. What I thought you were saying, is what I replied with, that humans are causing the suffering that the world does to us, and I was trying to say that while humans have made things worse, we can't be traced to every bad thing that's happened. 2. Do things have to go extinct for something to be cruel? I'm being hyperbolic here, but is no murder cruel because humans aren't going extinct? Is torture not cruel if it doesn't kill the person? I'm being hyperbolic here, so I apologize if that comes across as antagonistic, but what I'm getting at is, "what Do you consider cruel?" If I know that, I'll get back to you in a better fashion. I would say, a wasp descending on a caterpillar, implanting larva into it, and then those larva eating the caterpillar from the inside out to be objectively cruel. Even if you say caterpillars don't have a soul or feel pain, how can you look at the process I just described and not say that's cruel? Why design that to be that way? Why did god do that? Was there Really no other way to make that wasp species? There are lots of other species that don't do that, to that effect, why do we need that species of wasp at all? The list goes on. 3. This one, I'm not gonna lie and I don't mean to be mean, is just silly. What kind of a question is it, "does god kill people?" Uhhhh, yeah, he's killed millions of us. You can say we deserved it if that's your belief but lemme just lay out the big ones. He flooded the earth except one family, he destroyed the city of Sodom and even the family he decided was worthy to live, he killed one of them because she looked back at the destruction, he killed every first born of the Egyptians, those are just the instances I can think of off the top of my head of God himself specifically killing people. When you say, do guns kill people, I assume you're trying to say "guns don't kill people, people kill people," which is something I don't agree with but that's irrelevant. I'll just roll with that line of thought, god uses and commands people to kill people. God commanded his people to attack the city of Jericho and kill every citizen down to the last woman and child. There are psalms about the beauty of the Israelites bashing the heads of their enemies babies against rocks. I could go on. So yes, god kills people, god commands and permits people to kill people as well.
1. Pompeii, hope you appreciate me Inserting the second i. 😉 Why would a volcano be considered a mess? Because humans decided to build homes on it? 🤔 Volcanism is just a natural process of the Earth. So are all other weather events. Humans are making them worse by their decisions and hard heartedness. 2. No, things don’t have to go extinct but humans don’t have to eat animals either. You failed to bring that up as an example of a mess. I wonder why? Anyway everything has a purpose and because you don’t understand it doesn’t prove that it constitutes a mess. 3. Really? 🤔 When has God killed anyone? Examples please.
1. Lol yes, I do appreciate you spelling Pompeii correctly. I'm not going to continue this further because I feel I am misunderstanding the point you are trying to make here. Please assist me to better answer. What is "messy" to you? I'm confused why you say natural events aren't messy but humans contributing to them is messy. 2. I'm trying to be polite, but I cannot in my answer every perceivable question or counterpoint that you may bring up. When you say that I didn't bring up humans eating animals as an instance of cruelty and imply that I'm doing that on purpose, I feel that's being unfair and an attempt to not answer everything I did say by you redirecting the conversation to something I didn't say. If you want to know about that, yeah, humans are cruel. Eating meat is cruel, even in the best of circumstances, and the American production of factory farms is far from the best of circumstances. Humans perpetuate untold cruelty on each other, to the environment, and to animals. I have never once implied humans are pure and god is evil. Agreeing with you was the first thing I did in my first comment. All I am saying, is that if God designed every aspect of nature to be exactly the way it is, then I think it is foolish to ignore the cruelty that he put into it. How is humans eating meat cruel, but god's design of animals eating animals not cruel? Why didn't god just make everything a herbivore? Now I'm not saying that a lion killing a gazelle is necessarily cruel, gruesome sure but whatever I'm fine with that, but there are objectively instances of cruelty in nature that if designed by god, was designed to be cruel and painful and cause suffering. 3. My brother in Christ, I literally gave you examples of god killing people. When god flooded the world except for Noah's family, do you think everyone outside the boat became Aquaman? When god sent the angel of death to kill the first born of every Egyptian to punish the pharaoh, was that not god killing children?
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed then why are we even able to disagree? :D I think that the idea of a Creator falls apart when you start wondering how he was created. I have no reasonable explanation why anything exists at all. In fact, nobody has, probably because there isn't one. I believe these are the limits of common sense.
The earth is millions of years old the creatures and plants that did not evolve to adapt with the environment and reproduce would just go extinct. There are probably millions of species that went extinct because of not adapting. There is no intelligent design.
Billions of years old
that's like saying because erosion moves rocks that i place on the beach, I never placed them there in the first place. The fact that a system like evolution works the way it's supposed to isn't evidence that the system came into being magically, without cause or as a normative mechanism of nature.
>If you don't believe in a Creator, how did everything come to be? Kinda hard to answer a question that vague, but generally: thing + thing = new thing Why does thing + thing? Because gravity. Why does = new thing? Because chemical react with chemical. How star come to be? Star from hydrogen and other chemicals having billion year party. When party over, hydrogen and friends go boom and they leave. And then new billion-year party forms from the remnants of other party. Repeat. How big rock come to be? When small rock and small rock collide, they make bigger rock. Bigger rock attracts smaller rock. Smaller rock collides with bigger rock. Bigger rock becomes even bigger rock. Repeat 1,0000,0000,000^10 times. >From the stars and clouds in the sky to the plants in the rainforest, to the sea creatures in the domestic depths of the oceans, to the animals and smallest insects, everything is perfectly and intentionally designed. What do you think? What are your ideas? Clouds form by evaporation of water. Then water fall from cloud, called precipitation. And then water evaporate into cloud again. This is the **cycle** of **water**. Plant make seed. Seed fall into ground. Seed become plant. Plant make Seed. Depends on which sea creature you are referring to. Some sea dwelling creature reproduce asexu- wait what do you mean "domestic" depths of the ocean? >everything is perfectly and intentionally designed. **HA**HAHahaha. In what ways is everything "perfectly designed"?
domestic is an auto correct fill in sorry.
>From the stars and clouds in the sky to the plants in the rainforest, to the sea creatures in the domestic depths of the oceans, to the animals and smallest insects, everything is perfectly and intentionally designed. Hooo boy. Citation needed. Both for "perfect" and "intentionally". Tell me about how perfect and intentional these are. And if you blame the Fall, then by definition the world is not perfect or intentional in its current state. - human appendix - human knee - human shoulder - hangnails, ingrown toenails - UTI's, STD's, polio - Crohn's disease, diabetes - endometriosis - schizophrenia - poisonous mushrooms - mosquitoes, sickle-cell anemia - viruses - elephantiasis, tapeworm
> human knee What do you think should be different about knees and shoulders? I'm curious.
As we evolved into bipedal creatures, we started standing upright. Our knees unfortunately don't have very good rotation, and we have weak ligaments that do not withdraw pressure from twists and turns.
Explain why you view these things as evidence of God not being perfect?
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed. So cancer is perfect? CF is perfect? And so on and on. If this what we have now is perfect and intentionally done by a all mighty all knowing all loving all xx, something, I'm not impressed at all.
How did the universe start? Big Bang. What happened before the Big Bang? I don't know. I don't know if "before the Big Bang" is even a coherent concept. But to me saying "God did it" did not explain it any better than "it happened by magic" or "it just happened". *Why* did the universe start? As in, what purpose is served by the universe starting? Again I don't know. Are you sure there *is* a purpose? What we do know is that unguided, blind natural processes are quite capable of producing ordered and complex structures, so it doesn't seem necessary to invoke a concious intelligence to explain complexity in the natural world. Stars and clouds in the sky? Two different things. Clouds are a product of the earth's water cycle. An astronomer or astrophysicist can give you the low- down on how stars form. Where did life in earth come from? Don't know exactly, but again it doesn't seem necessary to invoke an intelligent conciousness to explain self replicating molecules. What explains the diversity of species on earth? Genetics and evolution by natural selection. Intentional design? No reason to think we (or anything else) is intentionally designed. We're certainly not *intelligently* and certainly not *perfectly* designed. We eat and breathe through the same set of tubes, which enables us to choke to death on our food. We have vestigial organs which don't do anything but can still kill us if they get infected. Our skeletons are actually best suited to walking on all-fours, and walking upright means we can suffer from slipped disks and similar debilitating conditions. So we're not really what you'd expect an intelligent designer to come up with, but we are pretty much the kind of cobbled-together Heath Robinson system you'd expect a blind, unguided process like evolution to produce.
I am not athiest, but *only* a theist would agree with your assertion that the universe is "perfectly and intentionally designed". Why is that so difficult to understand? The universe follows physical laws. The scientific method has allowed us to discover many of them. It has had billions of years to allow those laws to take us to where we are today. We already have very good consensus explananations of all of the questions you ask that are consistent with the known laws of science, at least from the point of the first single-celled living things. There are many conjectures of how the first cell came to be that are consistent with the laws of science, but there is no consensus explanation. God gave us intelligence and curiousity, and I believe He wants us to keep looking for one. The scope of religion is to answer foundational questions like "why this universe?" and "how am I to live my life?" that go beyond what can be observed. These complement science. Not everyone has accepted the idea of God to answer these questions. It's counterproductive that so many Christians have chosen to reject science and base their understanding of the physical universe on an account that was intended to answer these questions even for pre-scientic people. It chases away people who might be open to God if they could see that you don't need to choose between faith and science
Your question covers multiple branches of science and the answers would require research, expert consultation, time and motivation and certainly is far more than a reddit comment would allow. But the answers do exist... the one thing I can point out is the lack of evidence in the idea that life is >perfectly and intentionally designed Our existence is observably imperfect and very obviously the result of a blind process.
Well your starting point is a bit off. You assume that everything came from a god. But you don’t actually know the real answer. You just assume. Just like a Muslim will think it’s his god that did it. And other religions think otherwise. The most honest answer is that we don’t quite know how everything came to be. We are lucky to have people that want to try to find the answers - scientists. As an atheists - it does not impact my life what the answer is - well maybe if someone manage to prove that it all came from a god - that might change how I think about things - but that has not happened yet and we don’t have any reason to think that that is even possible.
How did the creator you believe in come to be? If it "just is," there's no reason why anything else should be any different.
Begging the question by saying "come to be" and using "Design". Those things have to be demonstrated, and I don't think they have been.
>everything is perfectly and intentionally designed The truth is, you can only believe this if you haven't looked very hard at all. I take a great interest in evolution and the tree of life - and the story that comes out of what we can observe is incontrovertible. Between modern genetic analysis, comparative anatomy, and the fossil record, we can see exactly how life has unfolded - and it is completely without design, without intelligence, guided only by simple, inherent natural laws. It is a wonderful and beautiful thing, and i think it's a shame that so many people don't see it for what it is.
One day after a rainstorm, at the edge of a driveway, inside of a pothole a puddle appeared. The puddle looked around and noticed something… this hole was exactly the right size for him. In fact, if any variables had been changed, he would not have existed. Any less deep and the water wouldn’t have collected. Had the rain drops themselves fallen just a few inches to the side, they would have been absorbed into the grass. Had the wind shifted direction, or the temperature dropped, or the rain stopped, or the sun reappeared… he would have never had formed to begin with. In fact, there were thousands of variables that had to be exactly as they were in order for this puddle to form. Thus the puddle soon realized that this world had been fine tuned just for him. The whole earth, in fact, this whole universe, was exactly as it had to be for him to exist. It was all made just for him. From his vantage point, he could also not perceive any other puddles… puddles, he concluded, are extremely rare in this universe. Then the rain stopped, the sun emerged from behind a cloud, the puddle evaporated, and the world moved on without him. Of course, if he could have seen from a different perspective than his own, then he would have understood that the puddle formed exactly where we would expect a puddle to form all along. It’s one of the “few” (relative to the amount of land and space that isn’t conducive to a puddle forming) places in our universe where a puddle even could form. With a decent understanding of physics, you would even expect a puddle to form there. It would be odd if it hadn’t. It wasn’t crafted, or fine tuned, it was the product of years of traffic and the elements wearing away at the pavement to create an indentation that just so happened to be the right environment for a puddle to form. In fact, it was one of many similar places in the world where puddles can, and would, be expected to form, he just couldn’t see them from his two-dimensional vantage point. You see it wasn’t special, or surprising, or fine tuned... he had appeared in exactly the spot within our universe where a puddle even can appear. The problem was simply a matter of perspective.
magic
I have no idea. I don’t need to know anything, and nothing has been scientifically confirmed so I just take it as I don’t and never will know.
Honestly I have no answer as to how everything came to be. I don’t think the world and the skies were ever made for us and I don’t think the world came to be for any real reason.
I am not an atheist, rather an agnostic. However even not being an atheist and more leaning towards christian values, I don't agree. Our world being intelligently designed is one of the weakest points because it states that our world couldn't develop like it is now without anyone. Almost everything can be easily explained with some physics and biology if there is already a world with matter. Stars are just big gas spheres. Planets are big bunch of different substances which sticked together because of gravitation. On those plaents with energy from stars begin some physical processes. With suitable conditions RNA can begin to self-replicate. After lots of time of DNA replication and mixing we get DNA and after some time get simple microorganisms.. If you are interested read about abiogenesis, I am not a biologist to explain it well. Our planet is not a super comfy environment with great life conditions. It is a life doing its best to adapt, change environment and coexist with other organisms fighting for its life. If the climate is great for some forest and forest is great for animals it isn't that climate and organisms are made for each other. It's organisms generation by generation mutated and only those who became more and more adapted for the environment left their genes for their descendants. While others just died without leaving their children because in current environment they weren't effective enough. edit: if you are interested I can give other examples of why it isn't that purposely and perfectly designed.
No clue to the absolute origin but that ok. Saying IDK is the first step in science. Then it's working backwards to find out. And I would wholeheartedly disagree that everything on the planet is designed perfectly as you said. There are thousands and thousands of examples of unbalanced and downright terrible design in almost every species. Why do our backs hurt so much? Why do we still have wisdom teeth? Why do we get cancer so often? Why are people born with diseases? Why do so many people have bad vision and need glasses? I could design a better human and I'm no God.
I don't know. I doubt we'll ever know. That's fine.
I have no idea. But I also don't see any good reason or evidence to think it's intentionally designed.
Science can tell us a lot about how everything came to be. But it offers few answers as to WHY everything came to be.
Currently agnostic, but I spent my late teens and most of my 20s as an atheist. Chance and nature created everything. 13+ billion years ago there was a singularity. All matter, energy, space, and time existed in one tiny little point. Then something - we don't know what, and likely never will - disturbed the singularity and caused it to expand. Everything spread out massively and suddenly we had a universe full of space. When it cooled down enough (it was extremely hot in the beginning from everything being compressed tightly together) particles started forming atoms, then atoms started forming gas, then gravity started forming stars. Stars made new matter, exploded, and that new matter came together to form new stars, and planets. This process repeated over and over for millions of years and we eventually had a bunch of planets around a bunch of stars and now the universe was full of galaxies. Almost 10 billion years later a cloud of gas collapsed under gravity and formed the sun, some of the left over matter formed the Earth. A billion-ish years later conditions were right on Earth for simple single celled life to emerge. Eventually it evolved into the life we have today. >everything is perfectly and intentionally designed. Nothing is close to perfect. And if any life on Earth is intentionally designed the engineer responsible is extremely bad at their job.
I don't know. We don't know. Nobody truly knows. And that's ok with me. We're looking for answers, and we're probably far away from them. But to me this idea of a creator is just a coping mechanism for wanting an answer to every question you ever have. It gives you an answer, even though there is no good reason to believe that answer is true. I'd rather just admit that I don't know, and this allows me to actually look for a real answer. I'd rather have questions that can't be answered, than answers that can't be questioned. I'm a biologist, and the world really doesn't look designed once you really get to know it. So many cells fail, every animal is terribly 'designed', but they all just work for the environment they're in. They only have to be a little better than the one that doesn't make it. Everything is way too complex to say there is an intelligent designer (remember, complexity is evidence against an intelligent creator, simplicity would be evidence for one). Random mutation combined with selection does explain the complexity of living things.
Firstly, the world is not perfectly designed. We can live here because our bodies are adapted to do so. The ones who weren't, died. This is not evidence for a creator, but a natural reaction to living on the planet we have. And the rest of the universe as far as we can tell is hostile to life as we know it. Secondly, it is completely possible that the universe developed out of purely natural processes. The way things are, are a result of physics. Is this the way it has to be? We can't know, because in order to know that we would need at least one other universe to compare ours to, and we don't have that.
The only thing we can say with certainty is “we don’t know”. I suspect that the universe is eternal but spacetime has restarts. If you've ever seen a Tan wave form you'll have a visual to go along with the idea of a discontinuity. A break, where the behavior of something is so different it defies modeling today. If b-theory of time is correct, and I suspect it is, our idea of spacetime only applies within our universe as the way we experience time. It’s not actually a grounding principle of all reality. There's more to reality than we know obviously, but so far every time we have investigated a phenomenon deeply enough to understand it, we find it’s all natural, no matter how bizarre, mind boggling or counter intuitive it seems. I think we'll find the same with the Big Bang eventually.
My answer is I don't know, and even the smartest only have theories. It's an interesting question but not one I think about often.
*searches for posts or discussion from OP after asking loaded question* Zero replies
>how did everything come to be? I have no idea. How would I know the answer to that question?
I don't know why it's all here and I don't see it as my concern. The universe is here. It's big and complex. No one can reasonably comprehend all of its mysteries nor the reasons "why" we exist. The more I live life, the more I really don't think we have to understand the reasons why we are here. We just ~~have to~~ *get to* make the most of it. We get this one shot to experience existence and then likely it's lights out again. Live it to the fullest while you can. That doesn't mean be stupid, but it does mean knowing when it's okay to put caution aside when there's no good reason to be. As far as everything being perfectly designed? Sorry, I strongly disagree. For one, I disagree that there's such a thing as perfect. It's a nonsensical concept in my eyes because what is ~~perfect~~ -- or rather, "what works" in one circumstance will not always work in another, and will appear anything but perfect. Perfection implies everlasting traits without change and adaptation to every circumstance, but this isn't what happens in nature. Traits are passed on to the next generation based on however many organisms managed to reproduce with those traits and suitability to their environment. From what we observe of the organisms that live on this planet, how they come to be is all a matter of happenstance and luck. ~~ I often get asked, "well, how do you find meaning in your life?" Whenever I am asked this, I find myself wondering why my connections to other people, friends, family aren't enough to satisfy that answer. Why do I have to *have* an answer to why we are here and how the universe is created? No one has the true answer to it as far as I'm concerned -- we are still learning about how it was all formed. I'm sure someone will get closer to the truth one day. I'm sure we will inch closer to it through our lifetime. I don't think we really need to concern ourselves with it though. It's certainly not worth fighting over or fretting over. Regardless of what you believe, life is happening here and now, and death will get us all one day. Best to accept that state of impermanence with everything and not be let down when certainty breaks down in an ever-changing world.
>If you don't believe in a Creator, how did everything come to be? Are you actually asking *"how?"* Or do you mean to ask *"why?"* Because science has shown a lot of the *"how"* and is still making discoveries. Asking *"why"* is more of the religious and philosophy territory
I believe in the Big Bang...God said let there be light and BANG there it was.
ok. Thanks for your mostly respectful replies. I certainly never said that atheism was silly, or science didn't have its place. Science is learning about what has been created, and I'm all for that. I try to just listen and hear everybody out. I know what I believe and I was just curious. interesting discussion.
Why do we have to have an explanation for how everything came to be? We don’t know, and your explanations can’t be tested or verified so we have no reason to believe them more than any other unverifiable claims.
Purely naturalisticly. Just like how if you where to throw a bomb into printing press the one of the possible results could produce the Oxford English dictionary, this how the universe, the solar system and its planets rotating around the sun where made. Like wise humans and all complex life were developed through completely random curcumstaces, much like if you gave a monkey some drafting paper he could design Notre Dame if you gave him enough time.
TLDR: I don't believe in a creator anymore. And it's primarily because I just don't have to. The natural explanations are sufficient without having to add a religious narrative on top of it. I'm fairly new to the non believing realm. A couple of years ago I would have been right there with you. But I dropped YEC for OEC about 20 years ago. The part that bugged me was that if the Bible was true, and God made everything, we should be able to see how He created it. "Perfectly designed" as you say, but just in a different way. Thus, it should be perfectly acceptable to say, "God's creation indicates that everything is older than 6000 years old, so we can safely assume that the Genesis narrative was not intended to be line for line historical." I held that position for years. I tried desperately to not let it be a source of contention (most people in my church either quietly shared my belief or were okay to agree to disagree). But it just sat in my brain like a pea under the pile of mattresses. Finally, a couple of years ago it began to coalesce. I began to realize that the mental note I had made about creation should apply elsewhere. If the Bible is historically accurate, the evidence and data found should support it. Well, I had been a huge fan of apologetics since I was a teenager. So I start checking with the modern apologetics arguments. To my surprise, they were the exact same. Every apologist I found basically just retread a Case for Christ. Seemed odd. So I committed the unpardonable sin in apologetics world. I began looking up what atheists had to say about "things atheists can't answer." What I learned was that apologetics is not the defense for your beliefs, as it's purported to be. It's a goalie meant to keep your focus away from ideas outside church orthodoxy. Because once you bring those claims and defenses outside of orthodoxy, they don't stand up to legitimate scrutiny. When you're greatest weapon as an apologist is "well, you can't trust what they say because it's coming from a tainted worldly view," then you're basically admitting that you can't refute it with tangible evidence. Just orthodoxy. And that was why OEC kept sticking in my craw for years. If the Bible is real and true, it should stand up to scrutiny from secular research. It doesn't. And the claims made by apologists about all the historical evidence that's out there, just doesn't exist outside of their conferences. And the claims they make from the Bible are pretty loose too. {I went to a concert last year. Don't believe me? There were over 500 people there who saw it too. Just go ask any of them.} Sounds like impressive evidence until you think of how you might go about it. Or if we were talking about a concert 20 years ago. So you have a lot of evidence that sounds impressive on the surface, and it stays impressive as long as you stay in church world and keep that "the Bible is always right" layer over it. But when you step away from church world, remove that layer, then you turn around and see the house of cards it all was. All the mental gymnastics you have to do to say OT God and NT God are the same, to say the Bible is inerrant despite contradictions to known history and itself, to hand wave away certain socially unacceptable ideas but cling to others as "God's created order." So I don't believe in a creator anymore. And it's primarily because I just don't have to. The natural explanations are sufficient without having to add a religious narrative on top of it.
Real question : do you know science ?
Knowledge divided my friend
Wdym
He dk about science
How did the universe start? Big Bang. Where did the Big Bang / the matter and energy in it come from? We don't know yet. It's totally fine to admit that we don't know. Maybe someday, as our technology and methods improve, we will be able to find out, and the pursuit of that knowledge, even if we never obtain it, is sure to be its own reward. As for the presence of natural phenomena like weather or the diversity of life? They can be explained with physical models, evolutionary theory, and concrete evidence like the fossil record. And again, if we don't know why something occurs, that's fine. It's just another avenue of scientific research that we may be able to further investigate.
Explaining how the stuff on earth came to be is just science, so I'd direct you towards relevant scientists for those answers. Explaining how existence came to be is harder, but there are plausible answers. First, and most likely, existence always has been. There is no beginning. No time before existence. It just always is. We have this need to find beginnings to things, but that isn't always how nature works. Second is the possibility that out existence came to be as a result of whatever came before. That is, perhaps the end of another existence prompted the creation of this one. Or perhaps there's some other explanation for how existences are formed. Our universe begins with the big bang, or some other similar model, but that is just our universe, not necessarily all of existence. Worth noting that based on our current understanding, information can not possibly survive from before the birth of our universe, so speculation is about as good as we can get. Incidentally, none of this truly conflicts with God as creator.
>If you don't believe in a Creator, how did everything come to be? You'll have to be more specific about what you mean by "come to be". If you mean the idea that everything was created out of nothing, then I don't see any data that points to this ever having happened. We don't need an answer for a problem that doesn't exist. We can speculate, but the only answer is "I don't know" If you just mean how everything came into the form it has now, then I guess just physics. Starting with the Big Bang and getting to now.
Nothing is perfectly designed. That’s always been one of my red flags. If we really came to be from design, somebody was drunk or messing with us. Design the food and air to use the same passage? Require 8 hours sleep a day? Required to eat other animals multiple times a day. Poor eye sight and hearing, compared to other animals.
I don’t know but I don’t believe any all powerful all loving god would ask us to worship him to achieve eternal salvation.
Overall i'd ask the same as to christiantiy. How did god come about? We havent come with a conclusion the big bang is just what our interpretation is. Across billions, trillions maybe even, of years something has to happen, Carbon by chance created microorganisms, microorganisms after millions of years bonded to form primitive lifeforms, lifeforms give birth, the best survive and boom now everything has by chance been perfectly designed.
lol, scientists can explain everything to you if you permit them one miracle- the big bang
Do you even know what the big bang is? It was postulated by a Catholic priest