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What did everyone put for the 'certain' there is no God question?

I "feel" pretty sure there is no God because it is extremely unlikely due to zero lack of evidence. However - I couldn't say anything was "certain" about it so I had to answer 0 certainty.

I am either being a pedant or read the question wrong.

Last moth we were all certain ancient Eurpopeans were 'black or dark' skinned... this week the same people are saying they're not certain in New Scientists. Is anything really certain?

Roundcat 3 Apr 3
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0

God is impossible. Fairies and unicorns might exist, but God has to jump through more hoops to qualify as what he is claimed to be, and it turns out that it's impossible for him to jump through them all. The universe we're in could be virtual, so it would be easy to program in fairies and unicorns from the outside - that is why they shouldn't be labelled as impossibilities. The same cannot be done with God though. You could certainly have something on the outside pretend to be God by performing magic tricks where the normal rules of our virtual universe are broken (without breaking the rules of the system that supports it), but that isn't a God - it could just be someone like us on the outside pressing buttons. God has to be fundamentally superior to qualify as God, and that's where he runs into difficulties. While we can't explore him with science, he would be able to explore himself that way to try to work out what he is, and we can think through this process for him without needing any access to him, so let's do that.

One of the requirements of God is that he understands everything, but if he understands everything, he must be able to reduce it all to rational mechanisms, and that removes any possibility of him running on magic, rendering him an ordinary being rather than anything supernatural (in the magic sense of the word).

Having stripped God of one kind of supernatural status, we should check the other kind. God doesn't exist in a higher realm than us - our universe, even if it's virtual, resides within the same realm as he does. Indeed, for anything in one realm to interact in any way with another realm, that interaction reveals that they are necessarily part of the same system, and so they are really the same realm. There cannot be such a thing as supernature, so God is just another inhabitant of our realm. Our universe can certainly be a subset of his realm, but that makes it a part of his realm.

God is superior to us, but how? He is just an ordinary being with no magical capabilities and he resides in the same realm as we do. We cannot turn ourselves into Gods by wiring people into virtual worlds and claiming to be superior by being on the outside, so this is not a mechanism that God can use to qualify as God. We also don't consider ourselves to be superior to disabled people (even if they have almost no brain function at all). In the same way, we are not fundamentally superior to other species of animals, and nor are we inferior to those that can outperform us at some tasks. There is nothing that God can do to raise himself up to a superior level: whatever capabilities he has, he has them by luck, just as we do. Any one of us who had been given the same capabilities and put in the position to run everything would be able to do the same job. What we're really talking about is not a God, but a powerful alien who is in the position he is in by luck (if he exists at all). Such an alien could exist, but we should not make the mistake of calling it God.

God is supposed to be the creator of all things, but he clearly didn't create the powers with which he creates things, nor did he create the knowledge (of all things) that he supposedly had from the start. He can't have acquired those things by magic, because to do so would require him not to understand the process by which this happened, so he has to understand where his knowledge and capability were generated from, and they have to have come into being through a rational process (such as evolution), which again shows him to be a natural being rather than something special.

When we create things, we do so by rearranging stuff that already exists. When God creates things, he has to do exactly the same. If he makes things out of nothing, that requires him to do magic, and he isn't allowed to do magic because he'd be banned from understanding how it works, so he has to have a rational understanding of how he creates things, and this renders his acts of creation just as ordinary as ours. If he can make things out of nothing in some rational way (where the nothing might not really be nothing), we could do the same if we were in a position to do so, which means again the only thing that makes him different from us is his luck of being in the position he's in. It is not our fault that we're in a less powerful position than him, and it is not to his credit that he is in a more powerful position than us - it is all down to plain luck. He can be nothing more than a lucky alien.

God is goodness. But what are good and bad? Morality is just a simple rule about harm management in which we try to minimise unnecessary harm so that we all have better lives than we would otherwise. There is nothing magical about morality: it's simple mathematics that can be calculated by machines. Not only that, but there is no such thing as free will - everything we do is driven by cause and effect reactions, possibly with some random inputs to that). No one is truly to blame for anything bad that they do - they cannot help but do what they are programmed to do. We all try to do the best thing at any point where we have to make a decision, and some of us make more harmful decisions than others, but all of those decisions are dictated for us by the way our brains have been set up, both through genetics and programming. A person who has been brought up in a place where other people are all selfish will likely become selfish too - when other people keep grabbing your things off you, your only way to get anything is to grab things off others, so there's huge pressure on you to behave that way. Those who don't behave that way despite being extensively abused by others aren't inherently better, but just have the luck (or misfortune) to have genes that predispose them to behave better, or they've been influenced by something specific that has happened which has made them understand that it isn't the right way to live.

People who believe God is possible have miscalculated, though nothing like as badly as those who believe he exists. When "God" studies himself, he realises that he's just an ordinary being who by luck has access to the biggest levers of power. He knows full well that he is just a powerful alien, and that anyone who believes him to be a God is deluded. He is not supernatural. He did not create everything. He is not a power of pure goodness. He has no inherent superiority over any of us, just as the universe has no superiority over a single photon. Perhaps this Alien is a God of love, but I love every particle of matter in the universe, every bit of energy and every part of the fabric of space, so does that make me such a God too? What else might there be that could qualify this powerful alien as a God? Nothing. Precisely nothing. The existence of this powerful alien cannot be ruled out, but it is not God.

0

If there was a god, there would be a difference in cancer remission rates by different religions or faiths.

0

Is anything ever completely 100% certain? Nope. However, I would argue that their does come a point when the evidence is so overwhelming it becomes peverse to deny it. This is what most people would call a fact. I myself did not tick the '100% sure' box, but I would say for all intents and purposes that I was as sure as sure can be that there is no such thing as a god

0

The strong point about science is that it is open to changing its mind when new evidence comes up or when a better interpretation of the evidence is presented. Religion is not like that - no matter what the evidence, religious people are not open to changing their minds. I am as certain there is no god, as I am that the theory of evolution by natural selection is correct, but despite that, if evidence is brought forward, I am open to changing my mind about either.

1

I put "not 100% certain" because I have no way of searching the entire universe or multiverses to confirm my disbelief. But common sense leads me to believe that there is no god...because of the lack of evidence. The gods in holy books don't even count as possibilities.

0

I think that question has as many answers as the people responding to it....some feel quite certain about things that can not be proved or disproved. Others tend to be a little more fluid. Most people I've talked with admitted that over the years their opinions have changed - sometimes just a little, sometimes a lot. Personally, I can imagine a scenario where some entity (life force?) could push the button, so to speak, which starts the chain of events we refer to as evolution. No either/or - the two theories can both simultaneously exist. One thing I'm quite sure of - IF there was some sort of creator who started all this - he/she/it "left the building" a really long time ago. 😉 😉

0

I tend to steer clear of absolutes.

darl Level 3 Apr 3, 2018
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I put 100% sure, because as of yet there is no real evidence of there beign any god. Having no explanation for some things to me is not actual proof, but more like ognorance.

3

Science is always changing theories. Nothing is stagnant.

1

There is no God at least in the sense it has been traditionally defined. I am open to the idea that there may be beings and advanced civilizations that defy our current thinking about the limits of technology. But a singular all-powerful being that brought the universe into existence and is aware of the day to day trappings of each and every one of us and judges all of us for our deeds, no. That there may be many universes, that there is a cycle of universes being created and destroyed over unfathomable time scales, very possible.

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