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Widely attributed to Voltaire but not actually found anywhere in his writings. It actually was uttered by HL Mencken.
In my personal experience of fundamentalism, it would better be phrased as "afraid not to laugh" since it is comedy after all. We were always bucking each other up to seem joyous and thrilled to be alive.
Reminds me of how I always like to note; "What doesn't kill us, God is curious to find out."
If you posit that god is a necessary cause for existence, it just kicks the can down the road, because now you still have a different uncaused thing: god. Making an exception for god would be a special pleading fallacy.
You also have the problem that even if there is a creator it doesn't mean that it's yours, or your understanding of him.
Even time itself breaks down as you approach the "big bang", near as I can understand this stuff without being a mathematician or a physicist. So I think people of all persuasions should quit making confident pronouncements about this until more data is available.
Only problem with what you explain is that one must adhere to the principles of logic and reason to agree with you. For some that is an obvious problem that for some reason can't be overcome.
That seems to be the only place left for invoking God -- at the very beginning of the Universe, about which we still have little to no understanding.
In the past the pattern has always been that God is attributed to some event that we don't know anything about -- the God of the gaps. Why did the crops fail? Why were we subjected to that devastating storm?
Maybe we should note what was said by Charles Alfred Coulson, who wrote in his 1955 book Science and Christian Belief:
There is no 'God of the gaps' to take over at those strategic places where science fails; and the reason is that gaps of this sort have the unpreventable habit of shrinking.
It will be some time before science understands exactly how our Universe began, if ever. As Sagan said,
"Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened -- the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear."
The "little to no understanding" is evident when we insist on this notion about "the very beginning."
Is it really that hard to understand there really can't be a beginning? Simple to understand because at any point one would like to think as the beginning, there is the immediate question as to what was there before then? What was happening before then? Time is a human construct after all. We can't help but think in terms of all things with a beginning or end, but is it not obvious that we're talking about something that cannot have a beginning or end? Just like the edge of the KNOWN universe. What is on the other side of that?
Eternity. Infinity are things we humans are simply not generally capable to understand along these lines...
Doesn’t the same apply to those who fill in that blank by believing that a creator does not exist?, i.e, “Believe without evidence”.
We have the evidence. No credible evidence for any of the many different alleged gods, and a universe full of natural forces that allows for complex objects to be created without the need of an intelligent agency.
If that was God, He's sure a slacker. Why did he wait 13 billion years -- nearly 99% of the age of the Universe -- to cause Humans to appear? And why did He go through that dinosaur phase?
Anyway, the story fails with "Let there be light," which is attributed to God's beginning. But light was unable to propagate at all until 300,000 years after the beginning. Seems a bit of an oversight.
That's 99% of the KNOWN universe. The observable universe. Then there is all we've got to consider with respect to the infinite amount of time and what was going on well before the known universe came into being.
Provide a better answer, and we can talk. But at this point, logic requires that SOMETHING started it. You want to call it a big bang? Ok. Sure. What fired that off. Until you can explain that, I'll go with the idea of a Creator.
You don't see the problem with this logic of yours? Still?
What requires a start to something that is obviously infinite in nature? I can understand how you WANT to attribute God to all creation, but that's not logic. Until you can explain how God came to be in the first place too, why do you insist anyone explain such a thing? Until you can accept an explanation that doesn't fit into your box of assumptions, needless to say you won't be able to consider the other reasonable and logical alternatives that make a whole lot more sense than simply filling this void of knowledge and understanding with the God place holder.
You don't see the problem with this logic of yours? Still?
What requires a start to something that is obviously infinite in nature? I can understand how you WANT to attribute God to all creation, but that's not logic. Until you can explain how God came to be in the first place too, why do you insist anyone explain such a thing? Until you can accept an explanation that doesn't fit into your box of assumptions, needless to say you won't be able to consider the other reasonable and logical alternatives that make a whole lot more sense than simply filling this void of knowledge and understanding with the God place holder.
Basically, his answer was that if you can't prove something else, it must be that god done it.
That qualifies him to be a sheep herder in Galilee.
Even then...so what? So what if the universe is 100 TRILLION years old? Does that change the fact that it needed to be caused/created?
You complain here about assumptions and yet you insist on the biggest one of all...
These measurements with regard to the age of the observable universe are not really assumptions BTW. No more than we're assuming the speed of light. Surely you at least recognize the age of the observable universe to be a great deal older than all life forms on earth. Right? Or are you questioning even what we can and do know about such things?
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