Are You Religious?

[James]

I think the real key to whether you decide there is a God or not is to decide if you need a God or not. Frankly, I can barely handle existing WITH a benevolent God and a human Saviour. I cannot imagine my despair if I did not believe. That's part of why I, personally, will never be an atheist. I certainly have doubts, but I would never have enough FAITH to be SURE there was no God.

Isn't that more hoping that God exists rather than actually believing God exists? One of the reasons I can't just become truly religious is because everything to me seems to point away from God or similar divinities. I could go to church and pay my tithes, I could preach the capital w Word, I could swear on a stack of Bibles that I believed the messages within, but I wouldn't really think it was all true. Even if I desperately wanted, say, Christianity to be true*, that wouldn't affect my judgement of whether Christianity's premises are valid or not.

In any case, I can certainly understand why you believe given your mindset, but I don't understand your mindset itself. What about the lack of God would turn you into unimaginable despair? If God doesn't exist, then he hasn't this whole time, and you certainly haven't been in unimaginable despair as far as I can see. Obviously things like motivation and hope can take hits, but there are certainly ways for atheists to have high levels of these.

Also, I think your quote

I think the real key to whether you decide there is a God or not is to decide if you need a God or not.

sums up religion pretty well, IMO.

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* (I don't, and not because its truth would mean I was wrong; I truly would rather it wasn't true.)

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inb4 "omg u onlee athsizt bc u don want gawd 2 b tru"

Also, an interesting thing I just saw on reddit, via FB:

http://www.reddit.co...ssure_you_i_am/

It has an interesting point, although I would ignore the last two paragraphs. They explain what the point is (if you didn't get it while reading), but they have bad word choice (e.g. "hypocrisy") and a pretty unfairly harsh tone, and they kinda distract from the point.

[geodave]

Well, I'm not sure I can explain this clearly, but I have a depressive personality. When I consider the pain and suffering that exists in this world (as well as the pain and suffering I've gone through*), if there were no other reality than this, I'd ALWAYS be depressed. So, I guess, hope is part of my belief system.

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I had cancer when I was younger, and I went through a painful divorce

I guess if NOT believing gives you more hope, that's reasonable. Not TRUE, in my opinion, but reasonable.

[IceyLava108]

snip

This.

[ManipulatorGeneral]

Back over to James: My initial exploration is whether an infinite temporal regress is possible. If not, this would entail that the first cause could not exist within time, else it would contradict itself because it would also be part of the regress and thus not the first cause. I simply find the timeless, changeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal, and eternal qualities of God most suitable for a first cause, offering the most reasons why the infinite regress could be averted, why it could and should create the universe, and even why existence has progressed from its initial form to the point it did today rather than fizzled out (because it's under the control of a being who knows how to prevent a fizzle). Do you have any origin theory at the moment? Other atheists I've questioned on this hold to the Hawking spontaneous creation model, but I find this unsatisfactory. I find it failing to overcome the initial infinite regress problem, an inadequate motive for ever creating anything, a wholly inadequate reason why it arbitrarily produced a universe, and no particular reason why such universe would have survived this long either.

You have stated that you don't yet know the origin of everything and will just wait for the problems to be worked out, but that's precisely why potential issues with the theistic model don't bother me much. I can trust that God has an answer for something I don't know or understand (and there are dark personal events I still don't know the reason behind) and could dismantle any of my objections with that answer, merely because of the nature of the God concept. What I'm unable to accept is the idea that this universe is the chance result of an astronomical chain reaction of contingencies when it could instead be an astronomical chain reaction of intelligent planning. Following from that, I could also introduce separate ideas about how we deeply search for an objective purpose and what that means, whether we would be as likely to feel that need if there was no cure, and why no other species feels the need for purpose if it's natural to want such knowledge; I've heard well-written explanations of this (evolution progressed to the point of philosophical thought in humans), but they again depend on contingency rather than God's deliberate effort. It's all dependent on what you have the capability to accept, one or the other; after philosophical and also personal inspection (this thread will definitely reach this area next, thanks Dave), atheism became beyond my scope to reconcile with existence as I perceived it. (Thanks again, there were new crevices of these thoughts I hadn't explored before, and I'll want to have them challenged and thus developed.)

[BitBuster]

If God can exist forever, I don't see why matter can't exist forever. Both are equally incompatible with what we "know" about beginnings and ends (actually, doesn't science hold that energy and matter are never destroyed, only transferred?).

[Markus]

...and no particular reason why such universe would have survived this long either.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

What I'm unable to accept is the idea that this universe is the chance result of an astronomical chain reaction of contingencies when it could instead be an astronomical chain reaction of intelligent planning.

There might be billions of universes in which it isn't possible for life to exist. We obviously are not in one of those universes.

The reason our universe is so perfect is because it has to be. There's really no luck or planning involved.

If God can exist forever, I don't see why matter can't exist forever. Both are equally incompatible with what we "know" about beginnings and ends (actually, doesn't science hold that energy and matter are never destroyed, only transferred?).

There's no problems with matter not being destroyed AFAIK. But there is the problem of what God was doing during the infinite years before he created our universe.

[BitBuster]

There might be billions of universes in which it isn't possible for life to exist. We obviously are not in one of those universes.

Yes! Or, alternately, there have been billions of years in which life did not exist...we are not in one of those epochs.

But there is the problem of what God was doing during the infinite years before he created our universe.

Well, he's God. Who are we to understand what he does (or wants) to do? I can buy the idea of a being who wouldn't need to create us. That, however, raises the question of why he did create us.

[geodave]

But there is the problem of what God was doing during the infinite years before he created our universe.

Again, before there was a universe there probably WASN'T any time. You see how we cannot really understand eternity.

[BitBuster]

I still maintain that that doesn't make sense. Time isn't something that actually exists; it's a reflection of how we measure the speed with which atoms vibrate (or something like that). "Time" has no more inherent meaning than distance measurements or weight measurements. They're human constructs.

[geodave]

Well, I grant you that the way we think of time is our own construct. But the fact that we move through time (at a steady rate apparently) and in only one direction -- we didn't think that up ourselves. We have a start and end point in time, so in that sense one's entire existence has a "time" dimension.

My point is that there is an external reality, and the time we experience and are stuck in doesn't exist there like it does here.