BLM discussion

Exactly

Or... just maybe... people are born with empathy and logic. This is useful for survival because tribes and villages of people who work together and help each other had more food, had more babies, and passed on their traits to their offspring.

And one way to help reinforce this useful behavior is through allegory. You write stories that teach good behavior, and these stories are also useful and get passed down... which is why every society everywhere in the world has made up a false religion (you can believe yours is true, but you have to admit all the others are false).

So maybe they can be good stories, and of course we can say people like Jesus existed, but all of this without a supernatural God. Maybe the real answer to big questions like "why do we exist" is "we don't know" or "maybe it's not reasonable to assume there's a why to begin with"

Dude... you seriously are going to spam that? That’s just toxic. Okay and I actually have met many many people who take that world-views of everything being so chaotic and there being such a multiplicity of religions that sense simply canning be made of it, and I know the pull towards that type of thinking. However here is something simple: there must be a God, as matter does not explain itself. He created us for a reason, for otherwise why would a being so so? So there is a question to be asked, and that is why we were made

*Why would an all powerful being do so?

And each of the different culture’s religions have unexplainable similarities, such as a flood in which one man built a boat and saved his family etc.

Even ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato reasoned that all matter was brought into existence by a single infinite being

Good point! As well as a woman first unleashing evil, or the strong man of God (or gods as some would say)

"There must be a God, as matter does not explain itself"
In other words "why is there something instead of nothing?"

First of all, that's actually fine. I don't have a problem with beings higher than humans that might have made this reality... really, I don't have a problem with that... but notice we don't have to assume these beings or single being is all powerful, or all knowing, or benevolent. We can easily imagine a God who used up his power to create things then died. Or a God who has infinite power but had no idea how things would turn out. Or a God who doesn't care one way or another about us. Or any combination.

We can also assume God isn't an entity, but the universe itself... so when someone says "where did God come from" you answer "God doesn't have an initial cause because he's special" but we can just as easily say "The reality that we live in doesn't have an initial cause because it's special"

So just the fact that we exist doesn't imply there is a God, and even if it did, it wouldn't imply the kind of God you believe in exists. In fact all powerful, all knowing, ect would be the least likely to exist since it's easier for a less powerful one to exist, and since we're always have to explain away strange things by "God works in mysterious ways."

@therealtechnoblade, lol that is literally the easiest puzzle out of all this. Here is one way to put it. As time goes on matter becomes more broken and dispersed (this is the law of entropy) If there was no beginning, then the universe is infinitely old. But if the universe is infinitely old, then it also must be infinitely destroyed, as it breaks apart over time. This is obviously not the case that everything is utterly ruined, this there must have been a beginning to the universe. But what was that beginning, and how did that occur? Scientists will say, “the Big Bang!” But the problem is, and this is a simple law of physics, what caused the Big Bang? Everything must have a cause to start, except for something which preceded everything and encompasses everything, and that being must be God

Well the problem with that reasoning is that the universe is not particularly special. The problem with saying that he died is that that literally does not make sense for him to be all powerful and beyond reality yet somehow... disappear? That he is the clockworker of the universe who winds it up and just lets it play out (an old idea) doesn’t make sense because there are actually such a thing as miracles, as well as the fact that we can in fact experience pleasure.

The issue is, that if there were just beings higher than us (angels) who created the earth then who created them? At some point we would arrive along the chain of creation to an essence of being that is infinite and eternal

Looks like I’m a little late on that one...

How does that explain anything though? How did the multiverses come into existence? How did the multiverses of the multiverses begin? Eventually you run into the basic problem of what started everything, and there is no scientific way to explain it

@Gabegolder, yep! I think it was... St Ansley who first wrote down that realization just before Aquinas

I don't like "the universe" because that sounds like matter. More fundamentally it's the framework of existence itself, so I'm going to use that.

Existence itself is not special in comparison to what? How can you possibly make such a comparison?

And if it's not so special, then it wouldn't need an all powerful God. It could be done with just a really powerful one instead... and it wouldn't even need to be supernatural, just something powerful enough that simple humans would think of it like a God.

But what brought the “not all powerful god” into existence?

Yes, you have the problem of infinite regression.

First of all, this can be resolved by pointing out we're asking a very human and mundane question (where did ___ come from) about a very non-mundane idea (why do things exist? What is the nature of reality?) So we can say it's not a sensible question.

But even if we agree it's a sensible question, and we try to face the problem of infinite regression, we don't have to stop at "well God is the initial thing, and nothing caused it because God is special" because we can just as easily stop at "well existence itself is the initial thing, and nothing caused it because the existence itself is special"

“God is that which nothing greater than can be conceived, for it would be absurd to imagine a being greater than God. There must be a being greater than which no greater being can be conceived, therefore what exists here in the mind must also exist in reality” — St Anselm

Actually you are closer to the perfect truth then you realize, for God defined himself as “I am that is”
Basically he is existence

The problem is that existence clearly does NOT prove itself, at least according to all that we currently know. I mean... lol it seems kind of silly to imagine “existence” putting together something so very intricate as the human body (for those of you who have studied biology and recognize the sheer complexity and beauty of it.)