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I wish I had had your keen intellect when I was 9. Instead I wasted 60 years of my live believing in rubbish like the rapture and tribulation, even I blush to admit preparing for it a few times and then sitting around like a fool for a day on a couple of occasions waiting for it to come before I eventually caught on it was just rubbish. That along with believing prayers were answered when in reality they were just empty words thrown at an empty sky and all the other nonsensical rituals Christians perform as an expression of their faith. I look back on my life and exclaim sorrowfully, "What a criminal waste of what could have been a good life!"
I wish I had had your keen intellect when I was 9. Instead I wasted 60 years of my live believing in rubbish like the rapture and tribulation, even I blush to admit preparing for it a few times and then sitting around like a fool for a day on a couple of occasions waiting for it to come before I eventually caught on it was just rubbish. That along with believing prayers were answered when in reality they were just empty words thrown at an empty sky and all the other nonsensical rituals Christians perform as an expression of their faith. I look back on my life and exclaim sorrowfully, "What a criminal waste of what could have been a good life!"
What would you have done differently if you'd stopped believing in the God of the Bible earlier in your life?
What is it that you missed out on?
Atheism can take many forms, from disbelief in God to the complete rejection of Him because they view Him as an evil entity by virtue of His unwillingness to stop evil. It was Edmond Burke who said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” We might be able to extend that to "A God who is able to stop evil from triumphing and does nothing must of necessity be evil Himself."
This idea is repugnant to theists naturally so they have invented all sorts of excuses for God. We've heard them a million times around here: "God's ways are mysterious" "God is honoring man's free will" "It's Adam's fault, not God's". They're all pretty silly and without merit. The only one that may be closest to the truth is that there must be a system of justice in the supernatural world that is completely unlike the one we have here. In God's world people suffering horribly is not bad or evil, just unfortunate. We down here who do the suffering cannot fathom such a system. It seems abhorrent to us.
It would be so easy for me to just stop believing there is a God were it not for this pesky detail:
"The 2010 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica contains 32 volumes, 50 million words and 300 million characters. It requires roughly 1 gigabyte (GB) of disk space to store. A single byte (or 8 bits) can represent 4 DNA base pairs. In order to represent the entire diploid human genome in terms of bytes, we can perform the following calculations: 6×10^9 base pairs/diploid genome x 1 byte/4 base pairs = 1.5×10^9 bytes or 1.5 Gigabytes, about 2 CDs worth of space!"
I hope you got that. The human genome could hold the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and still have room left over for another half of the set. To my mind this kind of gigantic organization of coded information could not have come about by accident. The odds of something like that happening on its own are so infinitesimal as to render the number virtually incapable of being written out.
So I personally can accept there is a Higher Intelligence out there and I can even accept that this Intelligence operates on a morality totally different from ours, but I cannot accept that this Intelligence chooses to foist its warped sense of morality on we who have to suffer under its pernicious set of evil laws.
So I may believe in God but I am under no obligation morally, religiously or otherwise to acknowledge Him or to hold Him in anything other than complete and total indifference. I think by that definition it makes me an atheist who believes in an evil God, strange as that may sound.
Your entire argument is that you believe in god because of your inability to comprehend an element of nature.
Don't understand how? God.
The great mountain is shaking and fire is exploding out the top. We don't understand how or why, therefore the mountain must be a god or a great spirit!
That's the same god-of-the-gaps fallacy that's caught you.
To the rest of your post, you're creating a caricature in your head for the kind of god you think might exist instead of examining the evidence and drawing a conclusion based only on the evidence.
I use the term, "God" generically. When I say "god" I mean a higher intelligence of some sort. You're right, There is no scientific objective evidence, just subjective evidence of the highly organized universe and world we live in.
Evidence is not subjective. Facts are evidence. If it's not a fact then it's not evidence. Hypothesis is not evidence. Correlation is not causation.
Intelligent design is bogus and easily refutable with some observations of less-than-intelligent designs in humans and other animals. An example is the laryngeal nerve. Another example is regarding the breathing and eating tubes in humans being the same tube, resulting in choking and drowning deaths meanwhile animals like dolphins have 2 separate tubes. Brilliant, god. Nice work. Another example is mixing reproductive organs with waste disposal organs. BRILLIAN DESIGN, THERE, BUDDY.
I have a giant glaring suspicion that what you think is "subjective evidence" isn't evidence at all.
For me, when we're talking about Jesus' resurrection or even Jesus' existence, my feeling as it relate to New's outrageous claims, is that evidence is evidence. What we as skeptics are interested in is objective evidence--the kind that cannot be manipulated or slanted by apologists to defend their indefensible position that there is overwhelming physical and historical written corroborating evidence Jesus rose. That is simply not true and I think New knows this but is unwilling or unable to admit it to himself because it would shatter the fragile foundation his fragile faith rests on.
We all pretty much know the "evidence" Christians rest their faith on: 4 gospels they believe were written by eyewitnesses to Jesus' resurrection but which historians of all stripes and persuasions have confirmed were NOT written by eyewitnesses but rather by ANONYMOUS Greek scholars written outside of Israel who were writing 50-100 years after this fabricated resurrection.
That and a handful of historians who don't even mention the name Jesus, only "the Christ" which could be anybody. That's it. That's all they've got. But if New has something we've never heard of that convinces him I'd love to hear it and consider it as something I've never heard before. But New runs away when asked for it with "Oh no! You're not going to suck me onto that merry-go-round!" I mean is that a dodge or is that an evasion?
I use the term, "God" generically. When I say "god" I mean a higher intelligence of some sort. You're right, There is no scientific objective evidence, just subjective evidence of the highly organized universe and world we live in.
Why you continue to call it a "highly organized universe" I'll never quite understand, but I think if you were a general in the army and saw your troops running and shooting in every direction, you would think you were running a highly organized war campaign.
Why you continue to call it a "highly organized universe" I'll never quite understand, but I think if you were a general in the army and saw your troops running and shooting in every direction, you would think you were running a highly organized war campaign.
learn, its organized. There is nothing wrong with that statement. Even the randomness is predictable to a large extent.
learn, its organized. There is nothing wrong with that statement. Even the randomness is predictable to a large extent.
would you use the word unorganized?
Organized is subjective.
To one person, an organized desk might be a paper-strewn mess to someone else.
People are trying to imply "ordered in such a way that couldn't occur on its own" when they say "organized." People try to imply an intelligence behind the design, of which there is of course zero evidence.
Anarchic chaos within the laws of nature is not organized.
Just because you can measure and predict movement or behavior does not mean what you're observing is organized.
To one person, an organized desk might be a paper-strewn mess to someone else.
People are trying to imply "ordered in such a way that couldn't occur on its own" when they say "organized." People try to imply an intelligence behind the design, of which there is of course zero evidence.
Anarchic chaos within the laws of nature is not organized.
Just because you can measure and predict movement or behavior does not mean what you're observing is organized.
leave intellect behind it out. I don't see that.
but just because I don't see intelligent design behind it doesn't mean I am buying into the phrase the "universe is unorganized" or "organized is subjective." as more valid than the statement that "the universe is organized."
infact, when I compare the two side by side.
"universe is organized"
vs
"universe is unorganized"
I am left asking myself why you can't defend your position without using "subjective"?
Your entire argument is that you believe in god because of your inability to comprehend an element of nature.
Don't understand how? God.
The great mountain is shaking and fire is exploding out the top. We don't understand how or why, therefore the mountain must be a god or a great spirit!
That's the same god-of-the-gaps fallacy that's caught you.
To the rest of your post, you're creating a caricature in your head for the kind of god you think might exist instead of examining the evidence and drawing a conclusion based only on the evidence.
It’s not a god-of-the-gaps argument. Thrillobyte is using inductive reasoning, based on factors like the unfathomable amount of organized information in DNA as well as the unfathomable odds that conscious life could originate from non-living material. It’s reasonable to consider that there might have been a purposeful intelligence behind all these miraculous “coincidences.”
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I blush to admit preparing for it a few times and then sitting around like a fool for a day on a couple of occasions waiting for it to come before I eventually caught on it was just rubbish. That along with believing prayers were answered when in reality they were just empty words thrown at an empty sky and all the other nonsensical rituals Christians perform as an expression of their faith. I look back on my life and exclaim sorrowfully, "What a criminal waste of what could have been a good life!" 
To my mind this kind of gigantic organization of coded information could not have come about by accident. The odds of something like that happening on its own are so infinitesimal as to render the number virtually incapable of being written out. 
