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To Theists: How would the world be different if there were no God?

Beaudreaux

Well-Known Member
There have been several threads going on about evidence for God, yet theists and atheists seem to have difficulty agreeing on what constitutes evidence. Maybe it would be helpful to take a different approach. To quote the great Mr. Spock from an episode of Star Trek:
A difference which makes no difference is no difference.
My question to theists is "How would the world be different than it is now if God did not exist?" Or would we notice anything at all absent without the presence of a deity?
 

Storm

ThrUU the Looking Glass
There have been several threads going on about evidence for God, yet theists and atheists seem to have difficulty agreeing on what constitutes evidence. Maybe it would be helpful to take a different approach. To quote the great Mr. Spock from an episode of Star Trek:

My question to theists is "How would the world be different than it is now if God did not exist?" Or would we notice anything at all absent without the presence of a deity?
I'm not a theist, but the question has potential. So, assuming I'm welcome, there are two ways to take the question:
1) What if I'm just wrong and atheists are right?
2) What would happen if the Godiverse died?

1) Simple - nothing would change, I'd just be wrong.

2) The cosmos (being God's body) itself would die. Fire wouldn't burn, atoms wouldn't vibrate. Even matter might break down. Hopefully, consciousness would dissipate quickly.
 

MoonWater

Warrior Bard
Premium Member
My question to theists is "How would the world be different than it is now if God did not exist?"

I don't believe in god as an actual being but as more of an energy field that permeates everything and everyplace in existence. I feel that if this energy field didn't exist then life would not exist. The universe could still form and there could still be organic material floating about, but there would be no life. As I believe that one's body is basically a computer with the soul as the operator and without the energy field of the universe there would be no souls. without a soul to operate a body, whether it be plant or animal, said body is just dead.

Or would we notice anything at all absent without the presence of a deity?

no because we would all be nonexistent. If the energy field of the universe never existed or suddenly vanished there would be no souls in existence and as such we would not be around to notice anything.
 

Beaudreaux

Well-Known Member
Wow. This thread has been an eye opener. I have learned that Theists lack the capacity for true discussion about faith. According to the responses in this thread it is simply not possible for them to discuss the possibility of God's existence/non-existence. I as an atheist have no trouble imagining a world where a deity exist, but from their point of view, there can be no such thing as a world without God. It is disheartening to see such a lack of imagination. If there is a better example of closed-mindedness, I don't know what it is. "If I were wrong, nothing would exist!" pretty much sums it up for me...
 

Storm

ThrUU the Looking Glass
Beaudreaux, did you miss post #5, or did I just poke my nose in where it didn't belong?
 

themadhair

Well-Known Member
According to the responses in this thread it is simply not possible for them to discuss the possibility of God's existence/non-existence.
You can tell from my previous posts that I am not a person to defend theists, so when I do so I hope you’ll take some notice.

Yes, for some theists it is simply not possible for them to conceptualise a world without their god. The reasons why are interesting and quite hard to ferret out. Any worldview held by a person is built upon words and language. The problem here can arise when the words, as they mean to the theist in question, have taken on a meaning such that it quite literally isn’t possible to describe a godless world in those meanings.

I’m going to cite Fatihah as an example. He/she uses the argument that creation needs a creator. But, when Fatihah’s construct of language, there simply is no other world that can be applied to the universe that doesn’t inherently contain the concept of creation. Asking Fatihah to think outside the creation concept is tantamount to asking a person to think outside language itself. It just isn’t going to happen easily.

When I de-converted I was pretty young but I still remember how my perceptions changed. The very words my thoughts expressed themselves in actually changed in their meanings to me. In essence my concept of what ‘world’ meant inherently contained the baggage of ‘the creator’ within its meaning to me. To have asked me to think of a world without a god would have been asking for a contradiction in the meanings those words had for me.

While I myself get frustrated when confronted with circular logic I can understand why it is there.
 

Kilgore Trout

Misanthropic Humanist
Heck, I can imagine a world without just about anything that I see on a daily basis. I guess some people suffer from a severe lack of imagination.
 

Storm

ThrUU the Looking Glass
Well, to be fair, most of the folks who've answered believe that, one way or another, God is the source of our reality. Without the source, nothing can flow from it. It's like asking what would happen if the sun went out, and then complaining when you get the answer "it would be dark."
 

Kilgore Trout

Misanthropic Humanist
Well, to be fair, most of the folks who've answered believe that, one way or another, God is the source of our reality. Without the source, nothing can flow from it. It's like asking what would happen if the sun went out, and then complaining when you get the answer "it would be dark."

Yeah, that type of answer shows a severe lack of imagination. I could go on for pages and pages about what would happen if the sun went out.
 

ellenjanuary

Well-Known Member
I was an agnostic until that little creep jumped in my head. On the other side of the coin, I once thought I "lost" my love for Gwynnie... and I couldn't even think for three weeks. I can imagine that's what it would be like, to a regular theist, if he was able to "lose his idea of god" for a bit.
 

T-Dawg

Self-appointed Lunatic
To answer what would happen if there was no God, first I must ask you to define what you mean by "God." Do you mean the Christian God and only the Christian God, or do you mean ALL beings that we would call gods? And also, do you mean if it was never there, or do you mean if it suddenly died?

If you mean all divinity suddenly died, then surely the world would be very different, but we would not know the difference -the divinity influences our actions and from them come our thoughts. We would probably continue life, just with a noticably altered psycology - worship would no longer give that sensation that it gives the faithful, people would not be as driven to do evil, and people would not care to resist temptation when it comes their way.

If you mean all divinity never existed, then we could never exist, because the universe and conciousness itself are part of the divinity network. Something cannot come from nothing if there is no divinity, for if something came from nothing, it would be divinity or have been created by divinity.

Now, if you mean the Christian God suddenly stopped existing...
Chaos. God, in addition to creating the world and holding the universe together, plays a similar role in the divinity network to what a buffer plays in an acid/base solution, except that instead of just "acids" and "bases," you have oodles of categories that all hate eachother and want to compete. God stops the little gods, the ones we are not to worship, from messing with our lives. We are not to worship these gods because worshipping them gives them power, in addition to bringing them into existence. A god is created when humans worship it, and a god dies when humans stop worshipping it and forget about it. Each of these human-made gods has a direct influence on the lives of people (particularly the people that worship them), and God is the only thing stopping them from tearing eachother to shreds and bringing the world down with them. If God suddenly stopped existing, each one of the little gods would start controlling people as much as they can and make war with one another, until all the people eventually killed eachother off, depleting the worship supply of the gods and bringing them down as well.
Think of it this way: Without God, Aphrodite could grab your soul, sweep your willpower under the rug and drive you mad over the image of a beautiful woman. Without God, Hades could reach up from the ground and drag you into the underworld prematurely. Without God, Baal could decide to bring famine to a particular area whenever he felt like it. (Sorry, I don't know much about gods of non-mediterranean areas =/)
God keeps all the human-made "gods" in check, and actively campaigns for people to stop worshipping them and giving them power. Take away God, and it's like you've opened up Pandora's Box.

EDIT: Oh, and the laws of nature (ie, gravity) might disappear too. The lesser gods tend to view nature as an obstacle to get around, while God tries to work within the laws of nature that he set up.
And if God never existed, nothing would exist, as the world came from God, and humans came from the world (God created human from dust), and from humans came the lesser gods. Everything that's not divinity has to have an origin. Anything that would be defined a "God" (with a capital G) would have to exist first for the rest of the existence to exist.
 
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