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If God Writes Something With the Stars...

As an atheist, would you believe in God if this happened?

  • yes

    Votes: 4 28.6%
  • no, I would search for or look out for answers the scientific method could provide.

    Votes: 6 42.9%
  • no. Other reasons.

    Votes: 3 21.4%
  • no, I would rather believe in aliens moving the stars, instead

    Votes: 1 7.1%

  • Total voters
    14

thomas t

non-denominational Christian
Saying you would *never* opt for giving up your faith seems the path to guaranteeing you will hold firm to a falsehood.
in my opinion, God is not a falsehood to begin with... and it is just the very basic belief in God that I will never give up (if possible).
If someone comes across saying: hey this is the evidence against the existence of God... I wouldn't trust him... and I wouldn't trust myself, either, in case I find an adspect of truth in what he says.
I depart from the God proposition and I arrive at anything else.
That's how I do it.
I don't expect anyone else to do the same.
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
@thomas t - you gave a "funny" reaction on my post, but I meant it seriously:

In your scenario, how would someone rule out trickery? Drones with lights are just one obviously possibility, but how could you ever exclude the possibility that we're being tricked by a physical method neither of us can figure out by someone more clever than both of us?

Assuming you pass that (potentially insurmountable) hurdle, where do we end up?

If the stars did rearrange themselves the way you say, then this would suggest that my understanding of the universe and its physical laws is completely wrong. If that's the case, then I wouldn't be in a position to say that the only explanation is God, because I would have rejected my understanding that might have let me exclude other potential causes.
 

Andrew Reil

Member
Would you believe him:
a message like "hey, believe Jesus, he is my beloved son!"... and let's assume for a moment there are no language issues.
So when God allocates the stars in a way that we read this message, would you believe in God then?

I'm asking all posters from the atheist side...

best regards
I believe something like this but more will happen at the judgement bar (Philippians 2:10-11). But before that God wants us to choose to follow Him. He will slow release faith to us as we follow Him so as to allow us to grow towards Him but preserve our ability to choose otherwise if we want to. He sent His Son to heal us, if we seek the healing, from the times we do not choose God, making us clean, and holy eventually.
 

TagliatelliMonster

Veteran Member
Would you believe him:
a message like "hey, believe Jesus, he is my beloved son!"... and let's assume for a moment there are no language issues.
So when God allocates the stars in a way that we read this message, would you believe in God then?

I'm asking all posters from the atheist side...

best regards

How would I know it was god that did it?
You are just asserting the causal link.
 

TagliatelliMonster

Veteran Member
Actually, I never would give up my faith, I think.
If there are the two options:
either give up my faith, or
... start thinking about how to reconcile it with the evidence...
I would never opt for 1.
This is at least what I suppose to be my own reaction.

You are surprisingly honest about your intellectual dishonesty.
 

TagliatelliMonster

Veteran Member
there is no intellectual dishonety here.

Saying in advance that you will never change your mind about your beliefs no matter what, is by definition an intellectually dishonest position.

An intellectually honest position would be to say that you would change your mind if new intel / evidence / understanding requires such.
 

Nimos

Well-Known Member
No, this is part of the game, I think,
the edit function was still there so I edited the reply options to include the aliens option.

Any poster is entitled to alter his vote.
:D

I don't think that option is going to be a better solution than option 2 as it automatically include aliens as a possibility. I don't think any atheists would choose "no, I would rather believe in aliens moving the stars, instead". But I think it might illustrate a lot of the issues with these discussions about God and atheists point of view. Because it is not about not wanting to believe in God just for doing so, it's about lack of evidence for a God(s), so choosing to rather believe aliens did it, is equally as "bad" an option as that of God, since it is not based on evidence either.

I think, I speak for all atheists here, when I say that we have no issue with an answer to a question simply being "we don't know", if there is no good evidence for drawing a conclusion. So again, it's not like "if not A then it must be B", but rather "If not A then X" (Where X can be anything) :D
 

thomas t

non-denominational Christian
Saying in advance that you will never change your mind about your beliefs no matter what, is by definition an intellectually dishonest position.
I don't think that my position is by definition intellectually dishonest.
I only said that I would never change my mind about the very basic beliefs I hold. Meaning that there is a God. And He is good.
EDITED
 
Last edited:

Nimos

Well-Known Member
About the best you could do would be to ask yourself which is most likely, or better, which is the simpler answer (Occam's Razor).

Because let's face it, you would have to make a lot of assumptions about those aliens: that they know our relgious beliefs and books, that they have a reason to deceive us, that they are still natural, living beings that have the capacity to move stars around in the universe so as to be seen as letters from a single vantage point (ours), and on and on and on...

In that scenario, I truly think it might be easier to accept the God hypothesis
I honestly don't think that God would be the simpler explanation, it might be the easiest one, I would agree with that, because it doesn't require anything, as with any other beliefs whether they are religious or non religious. Simply because you risk nothing and don't have to proof anything for simply believing something because you want to.

But God is not a simple explanation, if one want to believe it based on anything other than faith alone.
As I said, even if we have no evidence for aliens or life at all outside of Earth. Earth itself and life here gives it much more credentials than any God, because we know that humans wrote the scriptures, we have no evidences that they were inspired by a God or anything like that. However we have pretty good evidence that physical life can exist in the universe as we are surrounded by it everyday. Also we have no evidence of complex life simply popping into existence, like Adam and Eve, but we have a very good understanding of how life can evolve to become more complex. We also know that somehow life evolved here on Earth and that Earth was not always a planet like we know it today. We have evidence of "former" lifeforms vastly different compared to us, such as dinosaurs, which show that life have looked quite different here on Earth in past. We have also found lots of planets in other solar systems, which seem to match our conditions here on earth rather well, at least in regards to some aspects. We know that it is possible to travel in space, also we can look at how fast our own technological advances have been, simply looking at the past 100 years, the advancement in technology is absolutely insane in that short amount of time, so imagine adding a couple of million years of technology to an alien race. Then being able to manipulate or create stars might not be a huge issue.

Even though that would be completely speculative that they would be able to do that, we still have far more evidence that aliens might be a more plausible answer than that of a God, which we basically know nothing about, except what we wrote ourselves.
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
@thomas t - here's the problem: any one-off event, when compared to a lifetime of experience, is going to be written off as an anomaly.

IMO, if the Christian God were real, we would expect to see evidence for God in keeping with the evidence we have for the Moon: maybe not always visible with the naked eye, but ubiquitously detectable, with all sorts of quantifiable effects that we can measure in all sorts of ways, all of which agree.

We don't have anywhere this level of evidence for your god. This is going to be a problem no matter what elaborate one-off miracle scenario you come up with.

IMO, the world is overwhelmingly not what we would expect to see if the Christian God were real. This is still going to be the case regardless of any hypothetical scenario you can think of to layer on top of the world we see.
 

The Sum of Awe

Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
@thomas t - you gave a "funny" reaction on my post, but I meant it seriously:

In your scenario, how would someone rule out trickery? Drones with lights are just one obviously possibility, but how could you ever exclude the possibility that we're being tricked by a physical method neither of us can figure out by someone more clever than both of us?

Assuming you pass that (potentially insurmountable) hurdle, where do we end up?
Wouldn't it be denial at that point? In essentially the same way that YE Creationists may think that fossils aren't proof of anything, they were planted there, or Flat Earthers discarding the multitude of proofs that Earth is round because it is all tricks?

Doesn't "God exists and moved the stars to spell this out" outweigh "Someone/something somehow made it undeniably convincing that the stars were moved." on the scale of Occam's Razor? Especially when nothing in our technology could 1. black out all of the real stars and 2. Create a light source from who knows how far away it would take to create the illusion - that reaches Earth immediately the next day.

If the stars did rearrange themselves the way you say, then this would suggest that my understanding of the universe and its physical laws is completely wrong. If that's the case, then I wouldn't be in a position to say that the only explanation is God, because I would have rejected my understanding that might have let me exclude other potential causes.
But assuming God did this should allow you to keep most of your understanding of the universe and its physical laws aside from the existence of God. Why, if you saw this, would you instead believe "Everything I thought I knew about physics was wrong!" over "God must exists but my understanding of physics isn't necessarily contradicted.
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
Wouldn't it be denial at that point? In essentially the same way that YE Creationists may think that fossils aren't proof of anything, they were planted there, or Flat Earthers discarding the multitude of proofs that Earth is round because it is all tricks?
Well, no.

There are a million ways that the world around us contradicts the assumption of a god. One spectacular "miracle" that, on its own, may point to God's existence isn't necessarily enough to tip the balance to "God must exist."

Doesn't "God exists and moved the stars to spell this out" outweigh "Someone/something somehow made it undeniably convincing that the stars were moved." on the scale of Occam's Razor? Especially when nothing in our technology could 1. black out all of the real stars and 2. Create a light source from who knows how far away it would take to create the illusion - that reaches Earth immediately the next day.
Not only could our technology do it, it would be impossible by the laws of physics as we know them.

I think if that I were to find myself in that situation, Occam's Razor would suggest either:

- that I was suffering from severe mental illness, or
- my environment was being manipulated akin to the Truman Show.

Occam's Razor says that "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Neither of the two scenarios I listed involves inventing a super-powerful magical entity to explain things.

But as I was getting at: if I could somehow confirm that the stars really did move, my understanding of the physical laws of the universe would be so unreliable that I certainly wouldn't be in a position to say that God is the best explanation.

But assuming God did this should allow you to keep most of your understanding of the universe and its physical laws aside from the existence of God. Why, if you saw this, would you instead believe "Everything I thought I knew about physics was wrong!" over "God must exists but my understanding of physics isn't necessarily contradicted.
If the stars were to rearrange themselves in the sky as described, even if God did it, this would imply that my understanding of physics is fundamentally wrong.

Edit: on that last point, since I think we may be coming at this from different perspectives: I see physical laws as immutable and applying to everything real. If God exists in reality and is not subject to some physical law of the universe, then the law isn't actually a law at all.
 

The Sum of Awe

Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
Well, no.

There are a million ways that the world around us contradicts the assumption of a god. One spectacular "miracle" that, on its own, may point to God's existence isn't necessarily enough to tip the balance to "God must exist."


Not only could our technology do it, it would be impossible by the laws of physics as we know them.

I think if that I were to find myself in that situation, Occam's Razor would suggest either:

- that I was suffering from severe mental illness, or
- my environment was being manipulated akin to the Truman Show.

Occam's Razor says that "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Neither of the two scenarios I listed involves inventing a super-powerful magical entity to explain things.

It seems like there would be a lot less entities multiplied unnecessarily for a truman show explanation than a God explanation - there are a lot more "ifs". Both sides require the assumption of something that has incredible abilities one side assumes God and the other side assumes astounding technology that we have no evidence exists.-

What I originally thought Thomas T meant was that it is so undeniable that the stars are moved that it doesn't just appear that way in the sky, but even through telescopes, in space, etc. To create an illusion on that scale would be impossible as we know it today whereas certain concepts of God is compatible with how we understand the universe.


But as I was getting at: if I could somehow confirm that the stars really did move, my understanding of the physical laws of the universe would be so unreliable that I certainly wouldn't be in a position to say that God is the best explanation.


If the stars were to rearrange themselves in the sky as described, even if God did it, this would imply that my understanding of physics is fundamentally wrong.

Edit: on that last point, since I think we may be coming at this from different perspectives: I see physical laws as immutable and applying to everything real. If God exists in reality and is not subject to some physical law of the universe, then the law isn't actually a law at all.
Why should God, being beyond the physical world, be subject to the physical laws? Just as a video game developer isn't bound by the physics of the game or the writer isn't bound by the physics of their story.
 

Clara Tea

Well-Known Member
Albert Einstein may have proven that it's impossible to move at the speed of light.

How Can the Universe Expand Faster Than the Speed of Light? | Space

Universe expanding faster than the speed of light.

Think of the universe as a checkerboard. That board (called the metric) is expanding. Parts of the metric are going away from one another faster than the speed of light.

Nothing can travel across the metric faster than the speed of light in a vacuum without being beyond our ability to detect it. So, the metric, itself, may exceed the speed of light.

Cherenkov radiation - Wikipedia

Light slows in a medium (this is why a spectrum separates light colors, because higher frequency blue light is not slowed as much through the medium).

Particles (such as neutrinos) can ram into other matter (rarely happens, but happens), and that gives off particles that exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, and gives off electromagnetic radiation (perhaps visible light or gamma radiation). This is called Cherenkov radiation.

IceCube – IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube observatory is a mile under antarctic ice (to block ordinary subatomic particles, since only neutrinos can penetrate to that depth). Dr. Fred Reines, Nobel Laureate for first detecting neutrinos, told me that his neutrino detectors had small gas filled tubes (very expensive). Cheaper, IceCube puts scintillation (light flash) detectors around a mile of antarctic clear ice. It observes neutrinos indirectly when neutinos crash into regular matter, and give off Cherenkov radiation (light) as those particles exceed the speed of light in the medium.
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
It seems like there would be a lot less entities multiplied unnecessarily for a truman show explanation than a God explanation - there are a lot more "ifs". Both sides require the assumption of something that has incredible abilities one side assumes God and the other side assumes astounding technology that we have no evidence exists.-
A god would be an entirely new class of entity. I already know that humans exist. I already know that humans can be fooled. Why invent God?

What I originally thought Thomas T meant was that it is so undeniable that the stars are moved that it doesn't just appear that way in the sky, but even through telescopes, in space, etc.
Sure... though he still hasn't explained how this could ever be undeniable.

To create an illusion on that scale would be impossible as we know it today whereas certain concepts of God is compatible with how we understand the universe.
Please describe any of these concepts of God that you think are compatible with our understanding of the universe.

Why should God, being beyond the physical world, be subject to the physical laws? Just as a video game developer isn't bound by the physics of the game or the writer isn't bound by the physics of their story.
Physical laws are descriptive, not prescriptive.

A physical law is an inference that we make from observation:

1. We come up with a hypothesis for how things work.
2. We note that everything we see seems to be consistent with the hypothesis.
3. We test the hypothesis in a rigorous way and confirm that yes: all observations support the hypothesis being true.
4. We then infer that the hypothesis is universally true.

If you tell me that you've observed something that actually exists that doesn't follow (what we consider to be) a physical law, then you're telling me that the "law" fails at step 2 and step 3, which means it isn't a law.
 

The Sum of Awe

Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
How Can the Universe Expand Faster Than the Speed of Light? | Space

Universe expanding faster than the speed of light.

Think of the universe as a checkerboard. That board (called the metric) is expanding. Parts of the metric are going away from one another faster than the speed of light.

Nothing can travel across the metric faster than the speed of light in a vacuum without being beyond our ability to detect it. So, the metric, itself, may exceed the speed of light.

Cherenkov radiation - Wikipedia

Light slows in a medium (this is why a spectrum separates light colors, because higher frequency blue light is not slowed as much through the medium).

Particles (such as neutrinos) can ram into other matter (rarely happens, but happens), and that gives off particles that exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, and gives off electromagnetic radiation (perhaps visible light or gamma radiation). This is called Cherenkov radiation.

IceCube – IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube observatory is a mile under antarctic ice (to block ordinary subatomic particles, since only neutrinos can penetrate to that depth). Dr. Fred Reines, Nobel Laureate for first detecting neutrinos, told me that his neutrino detectors had small gas filled tubes (very expensive). Cheaper, IceCube puts scintillation (light flash) detectors around a mile of antarctic clear ice. It observes neutrinos indirectly when neutinos crash into regular matter, and give off Cherenkov radiation (light) as those particles exceed the speed of light in the medium.

Okay, subatomic particles can apparently. Stars, planets, what have you cannot exceed the speed of light. This is the explanation I can find: Is the reason that nothing can go faster than light because we have not tried hard enough?.

Space expanding at the speed of light doesn't mean galaxies can accelerate away from each other at the speed of light. travel. Expansion of the universe - Wikipedia.
 

The Sum of Awe

Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
A god would be an entirely new class of entity. I already know that humans exist. I already know that humans can be fooled. Why invent God?

I should clarify that I'm not saying that this event would be undeniable proof of God, there's always other explanations that could just as well be right. I'm only saying that probability wise, it seems more likely that God would be behind it than any physical explanations. This event would be something we consider physically impossible, the only other explanation is that it isn't really happening: it's an illusion created by technology beyond our understanding or everyone everywhere is hallucinating - both take the extra step to consider "this is not really happening" on top of the belief in something we have no proof of.

Knowing humans exist and knowing we can be fooled doesn't help the case much because we don't know of any humans that are able to move stars or convince everyone they did. To imagine a human with extraordinary abilities or technology that we don't know exist is the same as imagining a God where beyond-comprehension tends to come with the name.

Sure... though he still hasn't explained how this could ever be undeniable.
Maybe I chose 'undeniable' as the wrong word. There's no way we could know with 100% certainty that these stars actually arranged in this order unless we went up close to them and observed, but it still becomes relatively hard to deny if people in space and people looking through the hubble telescope are seeing the same thing.


Please describe any of these concepts of God that you think are compatible with our understanding of the universe.


Physical laws are descriptive, not prescriptive.

A physical law is an inference that we make from observation:

1. We come up with a hypothesis for how things work.
2. We note that everything we see seems to be consistent with the hypothesis.
3. We test the hypothesis in a rigorous way and confirm that yes: all observations support the hypothesis being true.
4. We then infer that the hypothesis is universally true.

If you tell me that you've observed something that actually exists that doesn't follow (what we consider to be) a physical law, then you're telling me that the "law" fails at step 2 and step 3, which means it isn't a law.
I highlighted the important bits. If God exists, or something else non-physical, they can't be encapsulated in our understanding of things based on observations of the physical universe. These laws may strictly apply to all things we know of, but perhaps there is more than we know.
 

rational experiences

Veteran Member
As a human just talking like everyone else I would assess the status another equal human portrayed in talking.

Whether self idolisation human is involved.

From word use talking words describing by words stories.

As everything existing does. Is natural and we are all just humans.

Science owns status idolising self by explanation word usage.

Human egotism.

My human father is an adult man. Complete self owning future deceased adult.

Son baby from human mother female life owns new presence by act sex.

Son a baby just a human. Just a baby.

So I would ask why a human talking would place a man son baby coming back in clouds.

Now clouds also own imaged visions of UFO type bodies asides an image of a man human adult

Yet baby human sexual intercourse gained images are also in those clouds. Seen in photographed cloud mass. Baby human images.

Rationally I would ask where did machines came from originally.

My brother a human would tell me science by human ownership inventor machine tried to force nuclear time shift upon gases. To own invented machine origin. Designer human.

And it is why cloud radiating glowing burning with son of god returning brings natural daylight changed mass that fell out and burns us to death as a warning son of god event sacrificed holy human father's life.

As equally and rationally we are all just humans talking first.

Would be what I would say just thinking just existing equal human and telling stories first.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Would you believe him:
a message like "hey, believe Jesus, he is my beloved son!"... and let's assume for a moment there are no language issues.
So when God allocates the stars in a way that we read this message, would you believe in God then?

I'm asking all posters from the atheist side...

best regards
So I go out on the next clear night, I look up, and I see ─ what ─ words spelt out across the sky?

What does the message say? Бог был здесь ? لقد غيرت رأيي ─ الكحول جيد ? I can't imagine a less efficient way to communicate with the small fraction of earth's humans that can read this alphabet and grok this language than by moving stars and galaxies around ?

But no, I wouldn't conclude God did it. That would explain nothing. I'd want to know how whoever did it achieved that effect, and why they'd bother.
 
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