Quote from: zenitzz on July 26, 2015, 10:20:37 PM

Quote from: BADecker on July 26, 2015, 08:08:02 PM

Quote from: zenitzz on July 26, 2015, 06:44:47 PM

This appears to be an argument by people so caught up in their own religion that they cannot imagine any person living without religion of some sort. In fact, atheism fulfills none of the properties generally held to characterize religion.
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.

Atheism involves no belief, no dogma, no faith: it is simply the absence of theism. It does not involve any kind of worship, rituals, faith, prayers, etc, and it has no spiritual leader and no sacred text. Although individual atheists have philosophies by which they live (whether they be based on secular humanism, objectivism, etc), there is no clearly defined philosophy common to all (or even most) atheists.

In fact, perhaps the only thing on which atheists would agree is the wrongheadedness of the single main characteristic of a religion: a belief in supernatural beings or gods.

If an individual does not believe in astrology, for example, such disbelief would not be held to constitute a religion (anastrology?). Alternatively, we could ask: Does 'not collecting stamps' constitute a hobby? or If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color.

Religious belief requires a leap of faith because it postulates the existence of entities that we have no good evidence to believe exist. Atheism, on the other hand, does not require faith because it involves believing in nothing beyond that which we have evidence for and experience of.

Currently, science believes officially that there is nothing more than the physical to life. All of the supposed consciousnesses and free-will activities are nothing more than bio-electric activities of the brain and nervous system. This means that everything operates by cause and effect. Why? Because some many things stimulated the brain and nervous system to act the way it did... produce the illusions that we call consciousness and free will.

However, even if science gets to the point where it literally discovers that there is some outer thing that is a part of us, and upholds or acts with or is upheld by the brain and nervous system, even then science will have to prove that this thing is not operating through cause and effect.

Cause and effect rules in everything that we see, know, and understand, especially in science. Even the quantum mechanics and quantum math that suggest that in some cases effect can come before cause, have to do with the manipulation of the order of things in the universe by mankind. Thus, there is cause and effect in all that seems to be the reverse order of cause and effect. But it is reverse cause and effect that is caused by man, making cause and effect to still rule.

What, if anything, was the Great First Cause that started things going?

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There is extreme complexity in the universe. This complexity includes the mind of mankind, the illusions of free will and emotion, math that is so great that we haven't been able to thoroughly calculate dimensions beyond 6 or 8, even though we have parts of as many as 30 dimensions or more, mathematically.

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We see nothing other than entropy in all things. Everything is wearing out, eroding, falling to pieces, etc. The more complex something is, the faster it seems to wear out with regard to its complexity. This is why life doesn't last much more than a hundred years for people. Yet, in all this entropy, we don't see anything that could have started the complexity. The complexity is dying, but we don't see anything that could have started it.

If the mind of man wasn't so complex, if he wasn't so able mentally, then we might be able to say that whatever started the universe might have been backward. But this isn't the case. Even today, after thousands of years of entropy, the mind of man is still great. Obviously, by the way cause and effect, and entropy work together, the mind of man must have been far greater in the distant past. After all, entropy doesn't suggest evolution. It suggests devolution.

Because the mind of man - and even the whole universe - was far advanced in the past, much more than entropy has allowed it to remain, the THING that was able to start the whole universe going, the THING that was able to dictate the multiple thousands of years of cause and effect ('cause that's what we see in everything), and WHATEVER IT WAS that was able to produce such extreme complexity back then, must have been way more complex in itself that anything we see.

Advancement does not arise from entropy. And we see nothing other than entropy, operating through cause and effect. And a thing that could cause-and-effect the mind of man into existence way back before there was much entropy (or any), certainly falls into the category of God Almighty... at least with relation to anything that mankind can think of or be.

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If you don't like the above, change your science. Because what is above is essentially what the laws and facts of science say.

If you are going to go against pure science, you have a religion, you are operating in faith and belief rather than fact.

The closest thing you can say is "I don't believe God exists. It is an act of faith on my part, because science shows that He does." Some day we may have science that shows something different. But we don't have such now, or else don't use it at all today.

You said "I do not believe God exists" so what is your religion? or you are Atheists? and I do not agree with this too "you operate in faith and belief rather than fact"
facts are facts and it is different with faith

No, I said:

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If you don't like the above, change your science. Because what is above is essentially what the laws and facts of science say.

If you are going to go against pure science, you have a religion, you are operating in faith and belief rather than fact.

The closest thing you can say is "I don't believe God exists. It is an act of faith on my part, because science shows that He does." Some day we may have science that shows something different. But we don't have such now, or else don't use it at all today.

In other words, if you follow science, you essentially believe God exists, according to some of the basic facts of science.

If you accept science as fact, and you don't want to accept that God exists, you have essentially turned science into a religion for yourself, by believing something that does not go along with scientific fact.