But Jack, you can't explain a god, he's to awsum and stuffs.

obviously, n00b

@Kingdroid et. al.

There are some very intelligent people in this world who believe in a God, be he/her/it Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or any of the other thousands of religions in the world. Dismissive attitudes as get expressed here by the militant athiest community on here (as Kingdroid clearly reflected above) don't lead to discussions, but instead lead to ill will and even dissent and hatred. Civility and respect are key to discussing even the most divisive topics in the mopst heated debates and the lack of respect the statement above reflects just makes me realize that militant athiests aren't worth wasting my effort on.

Draugnar, that is the kind of response I expect from people who are unable to continue the discussion, and turn to pointless tangents to distract from that fact.

It goes like this: Point X is a corker, and I don't know how to respond. Therefore, I'm going to bring up the argument from numbers/qualification (X person is a believer, therefore it must have some validity!) or the argument from meaness (Atheists are disrespectful, therefore their arguments are less valid!)

And their both modern fallacies, sir, and have no bearing on if the world view is any more or less correct. If there is no God, then no amount of distinguished believers would be able to will him into existence. And if there is one, no amount of distinguished nonbelievers would kill him.

I mean, I've seen a quote around that says "If all atheists left the USA it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population." It makes me happy that we apparently are contributing, but it doesn't make our arguments any more or less valid. That exists independently of our percentage of prisoners in the US. :)

@Jack - my reference wasn't to you. It was to Kingdroid's dismissive and disrespectful response. I would say the same to him on this discussion whether I was a devout Christian (or any other religion) or a confirmed athiest. You have, from what I've read, argued the merits of your case. I have no qualm with that. I do have a qualm with comments like:

"But Jack, you can't explain a god, he's to awsum and stuffs.

obviously, n00b"

Comments like that are intended to belittle an entire group of people and are nothing but an ad hominem attack on said group that contribute nothing positive to the discussion, only serving to inflame the ire of one side while hurting the cause of the other.

Please not that I told CM he was hurting his own case (and the case of Christianity) as well, so I'm not one sided in this view. As it happens, I'm not a hard core Christian and, well fuck, I tend to be more a deist with some theistic leanings than a true theist and have my own issues with the God of the Bible as represented in both the OT and the NT.

I'm just going to throw my two cents in here...actually, Maimonides' two cents. Maimonides, the great medieval rabbi, presented the following argument (I've summarized):

God is not corporeal, and lacks all corporeal properties. Existence is a corporeal property; therefore, God does not exist.

@Mosh - cute little saying but it backs a bad assumption. It assumes existence is a corporeal property. The soul isn't corporeal, so by extension, the soul must not exist.

I would accept that as true, sir. Or at least provisionally true. :)

Inafter Draugnar misinterprets a post because he's blind with raaaaaage.

Calm down Draug.

Lol@Militant Atheist. I'm 18 years old, live with a strong Catholic family, have a strong Protestant upbringing. lol.

I don't even consider myself Atheist, let alone militant. I could give less than 0 fucks about what you believe.

Catholic family *and* Protestant upbringing. Interesting combo there...

Yeah, it really is. My step-family is Irish-Catholic, and my Mom's side was extremely protestant. Like, I couldn't read Harry Potter because it dealt with magic (luckily my mom let me anyways much to my grandparents chagrin). They didn't much like fantasy either.

and my dad's side didn't have any strong religious backing as far as I know. Just for the sake of knowledge, step-mom, not step-dad.

@Draugnar: Certainly, the soul does not exist, at least outside of human thought. In fact, not only the soul, but Truth, Beauty, Perfection, and the number "4" only exist insofar as humans perceive them to exist.

I take the materialist position: only that which can be physically measured can be said to exist. Atoms exist; laws (of every kind) do not.
This is not to imply that only things that exist are important. To the contrary, the ability to perceive that which does not exist is what makes humans great.

I hope I have clarified my position.

@Noah - That's fine for you to believe that, but you claimed to be quoting a rabbi. It isn't so fine for him to believe that. And yes I saw it was a long dead rabbi from centuries ago.

Wow! Talk about an odd autocorrect. Mosh to Noah. And considering the thread topic... :-)

@Moshe ''I take the materialist position: only that which can be physically measured can be said to exist. Atoms exist; laws (of every kind) do not.''

Can you measure the size of the universe? How about a black hole? Or 1 000 years ago could a European measure the length of the Mississippi river? Do these things exist?

Best of all can you measure infanity? If not then something is wrong with Jack Klein's (the universe starts and ends repeatedly without the need for a God or a prime mover) infinate universe, you can't have it both ways.

@fulhamish: To start with, I realize know that when I say "exist", it is shorthand for "know to exist", which is the most anyone can claim. Thus, 1,000 years ago a European would not know the Mississipi river existed, and indeed, a map of what Europe believed to be the entire world would not have included the Mississippi.
Now we know more, and can measure both how long it is and for how long it has been flowing. There's a certain subjectiveness to existence

The size of the universe (at least the observable parts) has been estimated, as has the event horizon of a black hole. and it would be pretty extraordinary to claim that four doesn't exist, but infinity does. Multiple universes, separated either temporally or spatially, are just as extraordinary a claim as God. Unless there is a corollary you can measure in this universe, you have no basis for saying they exist.

Perhaps it would be better to say that only things which can in principle be measured exist, but that's not fundamentally stronger than saying things that can be measured. Our perception of the possible can also change.
@Draugnar: You're right, I jumped from Maimonides to my own beliefs. I've taken the time to look back at your comment, and you are one hundred percent right. The soul does not exist, to exactly the same extent that God does not exist.
The reason I quoted Maimonides is that he very firmly believed in God, and made belief in God and various attributes of God at least 3 of his 13 Principles of Judaism. And yet, here is his proof of the nonexistence of God. But again (and this is still according to Maimonides; I say again because it's been said before) there must have been a primordial cause, and he says that this primordial cause was God, who is pure intellect. Please don't make me try and explain all of Maimonidean philosophy, it's frightfully complicated and I've barely studied it.

"Can you measure the size of the universe? How about a black hole?"

Yes and yes.

"Best of all can you measure infanity"

Infinity is a measurement. So it's like the number four.

As a final remark, I would like to say that I, like Maimonides (though perhaps less so, and I mean to draw no other comparison between the two of us) believe with perfect faith in God the Creator, Blessed be He, complete and indivisible and the sole true perfection (and therefore indescribable), who gave His commandments to the Jewish people
No ad hominem remarks, please.

@Putin, off topic, but did you catch what was said yesterday about your namesake, Vladimir Putin?

The Kremlin's top political strategist, Vladislav Surkov, told reporters that "Putin is a person who was sent to Russia by fate and by the Lord at a difficult time for Russia ... preordained by fate to preserve our peoples."

I thought that was interesting... inconsequential, I'm sure, but interesting in light of the recent anti-religion/anti-church stance of the nation (as the U.S.S.R., of course).

Yes the Orthodox church has returned to prominence. Putin has always been an open Christian.

@ Moshe, The Mississippi probably had a different course 1 000 years ago, all those ox bow lakes and meanderings through the true delta. We might be able to have a good stab at measuring its length but it would not be accurate. Let's go back 20 000 years and things become much more problematical (e.g., the influence of the ice age). So not only did western man not know that it existed then, we have little precise or indeed accurate (in a scientific sense) knowledge of its length.

Black holes are something that we are pretty sure exists yet no one has ever seen the surface of one, we calibrate them by their effects. This of course is just the arguement that a religious person would make for God.

The size of the universe can only be measured if we qualify it with the word ''observable'' and even then only approximately. I do hope that it is not being said that there all the constituents of the universe are onbservable that would reveal a gross misunderstanding.

Finally I am intrigued by the remark ''Infinity is a measurement.'' Of what exactly?

I'd be curious to see the measurable effects that would lead one to theorize there is a God. And not something silly like a God of the Gaps or suchlike.

If God exists and influences the universe (which is what you're implying), then how he influences the universe must be measurable. Do tell where I can measure the God Factor?

The universe did not form spontaneously. That violates the Conservation of Mass Law.

It amuses me that you attempt to use science(natural laws) to suggest that a supernatural entity exists.

I can usually handle some kind of private religious belief, but the "God of the Gaps" is worthy of only contempt... because as our knowledge increase, he seems to continually lose gaps where he is needed to explain something we don't understand yet.

Saying "goddidit" isn't useful. Or educating. Its basically throwing your hands up and saying that because you can't figure it out, God must have done it. I'm not sure if its more pathetic, or just simply arrogant (Because if we can't figure it out right NOW, then its not POSSIBLE for anybody to figure it out later).

I apologize slightly for my tone, but the God of the Gaps argument is quite possibly the silliest shit around.

Gunfighter I completely agree. Jack will come back to two arguments: 1) The universe could be on a never ending series of expansions and contractions. In my view this just shifts the prime move or creation back a stage or six and does not really adress the argument. and 2) if it was created then how was the creator itself created?

The second point is a better one than the first and is more difficult to refute. The theist will reply that the creator must lie in a dimenension other than time and space as we calibrate them. Jack will probably reply that he finds this incredulous and that is where the debate will likely stop with both sides shouting past one another.
In my opinion the explanation given by the theist as at least as good as anything that the atheist can come up with, but I acknowledge that we are now entering the realms of faith, on both sides of the argument. In fact as far as the origin of the universe is concerned one really must be an agnostic.

Incidently the quantum fluctuation argument is often martialled at this point by the atheists, but all who have studied this speculation (I hesitate to call it a hypothesis or theory) conceed that a minimum ground energy must be pre-existing. This is because energy and mass are exchangeable, therefore this is really no argument at all, given the conservation of mass law which you so eloquently point to above.

Lying does not help your case, Ful.

Jack has mentioned the God of the Gaps argument several times. I think that, for example, the origin of the universe, the origin of the first self replicating cell and the perfect setting of the physical constants, point more to a little more than this. We have recently had the debate here about the limitations of the theory of Natural Selection as an explanatory tool of human behaviour ( I recomend Gould and Lewontin on this in particular), so how might we explain, for example, love, charity, altruism, music, literature art and , even, science itself? Move on Jack there is no gap here, just the one the New Atheists themselves wish to conceal.

@Gunfighter: according to the Big Bang theory, the matter in our universe didn't form spontaneously. All the matter and energy in the universe was packed into an unimaginably small point. Then this point expanded to enormous proportions, forming our universe. No mass was lost or gained, so the Law of Conservation of Mass holds.

@Gunfighter
The Big Bang theory does not describe the instance that the first bit of mass was created. It is essentially (I hate butchering physics) an extrapolation back towards a singular moment where all the universe's mass was infinitely dense and hot.

It is theorized based on observable (!) cosmological and relativistic principles. That is why it is widely accepted in the scientific community. For the most part, scientists try not to be foolhardy enough to suggest that we know how mass was first created.

In fact, there is a theorized time called the Plank epoch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_epoch) where our understanding of physics breaks down.

The Big Band theory, similarly to Einstein's relativity, has been commandeered for philosophical and religious debates when, really, it has no place being there.

That being said, I'll agree with Klein in saying that the God of the Gaps argument seems like an archaic argument for God's existence. It leaves enough room open to question that maybe an intelligent creator exists/existed but falls way way way short of being anywhere close to a solid reason to be a theist.