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I know god doesn't exist?
- Thread starter Unveiled Artist
- Start date
Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
I think you left a [quote ] out
Arthur P. Dent
Member
Very possible. My first day. I hit reply and removed the extraneous quote and only cut and pasted the relevant parts. Probably screwed something up. Mea Culpa...
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Welcome to the forum...
If I may ask, how does one go from believing that God exists to not believing that God exists? I mean I have tried to do that but it never worked.
Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
You're fine, ha. Highlight the paragraph or sentence you want to reply to. At the bottom it should say +quote. Press that, highlight, press again depending on how much you want to reply.
Click "reply"and below "add quotes". Make sure you don't delete the [quote ] and [/quote ] and you're good to go. Press reply only if you want to address the whole post (or too lazy to highlight all the time
)Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
Welcome to the forum...
If I may ask, how does one go from believing that God exists to not believing that God exists? I mean I have tried to do that but it never worked.
It usually works the other way around I found. Unless you have an awakening moment that all you knew wasn't the truth and you were sucked into a reality until you "awakened" and found out you were wrong. Of course not many believers consider that.... but there are people who didn't believe who had an awakening experience (vis versa) and never went back.
Arthur P. Dent
Member
Welcome to the forum...
If I may ask, how does one go from believing that God exists to not believing that God exists? I mean I have tried to do that but it never worked.
Ironically, it was my wife (christian) that prompted the whole thing. I was indoctrinated as a child just as the vast majority of children are at a young age. Around early high school years / development of critical thinking skills, I started questioning the stories from the bible. The Ark, Passover, A&E the first 2 people, yadda yadda yadda. It wasn't until a Time Magazine article came out in the mid 80's (I still have the magazine) reference the nature of evil. It was my first steps into that wonderful field of philosophy before I even know what philosophy really was. I had also taken Eastern Humanities and was exposed to many OTHER religions that I had never been exposed to before.
I decided to start from scratch and focus on JUST "good and evil", things that I knew to exist and started examining the universe. When stars goes supernova and wipes out planets, is that "evil"? No... Then I thought maybe I should limit my scope to earth. OK... Tsunamis, Hurricanes, Tornadoes etc., they kill millions but are they "evil"? No! Just nature. So then I stepped back further and focused on living things. The plague, parasites... are they evil when they cause death and disease? No. What about higher organisms... when a lion takes over a pride, it kills all the cubs... Is that "evil"? No, just nature. And through this series of thinking, I cam to the conclusion that "good" and "evil" only exist in the mind of man and is limited to that solitary species. Now this was before the internet when I had to go to the library and fight the Dewey Decimal System to try to finds books and repeat the process for every question that came up.
I was just not that motivated TBH. So I "stopped" at "Agnostic Pandeist"... that is... Agnostic in that I definitely didn't KNOW (this was before I even knew what solipsism was) and "Pandiest" as it was my thought that there was a god but only one god and every religion throughout time viewed that same god through their own mortal biases and clouded / skewed judgements and cultural influences hence the plethora of various "gods" and denominations.
Flash forward about 20 years and I meet my future wife, solid christian & great woman. I never lied and expressed my views on religion per above and she accepted that and figured I was just "confused" which is arguably understandable when it comes to religion. Her family was catholic so she wanted to get married in a catholic church which requires pre-marital catholic classes and she asked how I felt about that. I explained I had no issues with taking the classes as long as I didn't have to lie about my feelings. To keep a much longer story a little shorter, the Father who gave the class and I had a lot of long great discussions and he applauded me for actually serious contemplating these topics and wound up marrying us despite my "not coming around" to christianity... as long as my wife was christian and agreed to raise the children as christians, we were "legal" to get married in a catholic church.
Flash forward another 10 years (roughly 10 years ago / me in my mid 40's) and one of our good friends and neighbors go to the same church we go to (yes, I still attend church with my wife when she wants to go to this day... pre-covid of course). Anyway, she asks me to join a Men's Bible Study at our church with my neighbor / good friend (and DEVOUT christian) and to sincerely search for the lord. I love science and research and figured, why not? Hypothetically, this is the MOST important question as it potentially affects my ETERNITY so I hit the deck running. Go to weekly Bible Study classes, listen to their various stories, read what they suggest, i.e. Lee Stroble, C.S. Lewis, William Laine Craig et al and that of course leads me to HItchens, Dawkins, Carrier... So I start reading everything I could get my hands on from both sides and watching a ****LOAD of videos and debates on religion.
Within 6 months I was an atheist and within a year, a "devout" anti-theist. Not the outcome my wife was hoping for. I joke what I lost in blind faith, I MORE than gained in an absolute LOVE of philosophy and theology. Now I know a LOT of wonderful theists and are very close to many of them. My wife and I are still happily married but she does not want to discuss religion and hates philosophy hence I do Facebook and Discussion groups to discuss theology. I don't fault most theists for their beliefs. I understand they were indoctrinated just as I was and just haven't "really searched for the lord" as I have ;-)! Issac Assimov stated, "The fastest way to atheism is through religious studies" (paraphrased). I have taken several on-line college classes on Biblical History (my favorite linked below) and like Matt Dillahunty who was on the path to becoming a minister, the more I researched and the more I studied, I *Literally* studied the "hell" out of religion ;-)! (see what I did there?!?)
I could go on. As you can see, I am not short on words. But now your turn Trailblazer (if I may); I surmise from your post that you are a theist. May I ask what is your most ardent piece of evidence that supports your belief.
Quick Sidenote / Question: How old, approximately, is the Universe in your opinion. I ask as I've found that YEC's have a propensity to ignore little things like facts and evidence and hence I try not to waste my time having a Socratic Discussion with them.
Thanks, and I look forward to your reply!
Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) | Open Yale Courses
Why would simply saying "I know God exists" carry a burden of proof?
Would you consider it a similarly hopeless task to defend statements like "I know I don't have a green car" or "I know there isn't an amusement park in my town" or "i know that the T. Rex is extinct?"
Arthur P. Dent
Member
\\"Why would simply saying "I know God exists" carry a burden of proof?"\\ Because you making a definitive statement. No one knows *everything*. It would depend on what definition of "god" one was using and the Universe is a pretty big place that we have yet to even start to search. In a nut shell, it's not about possibility but rather probability. I don't believe god exists due to the exceedingly low probability based on our current understanding of the universe and theology.
\\'Would you consider it a similarly hopeless task to defend statements like "I know I don't have a green car"..."\\ Not at all! I KNOW I don't have a green car!
A claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Me not having a green car is hardly an extraordinary claim but an "Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent, Omnisapient, Omnitemporal, Transcendent" entity is the QUINTESSENTIAL "Extraordinary claim"!!!
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
I tend to be not short on words either. There is a lot of evidence that supports my belief in Baha'u'llah and thus the Baha'i Faith. I posted the claims of Baha’u’llah and the evidence that supports the claims of Baha’u’llah on this thread:
Questions for knowledgeable Bahai / followers of Baha'u'llah
I can get into that later, but since you shared your story I want to share my story, which I have written up and posted on this forum already, to a Christian and a Muslim. Below is my story as I posted to a Muslim a few months ago, relating to him what I had posted to a Christian on another thread:
“Here is my story as I related it to a Christian on this forum a few weeks ago. He was telling me about how he went from being a Catholic in his childhood to atheism in adulthood, and how he returned to Catholicism. The context is that he had a spiritual experience but I forgot all the details. So below is the story I related to him.
My story is no doubt a lot different from yours. I never really has any premonitions or spiritual experiences per se, except for the time when I first read Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh with serious intent and absolute desperation. That happened right after I had a life crisis about six years ago and I was at the brink of suicide. I had been at that brink many times before but this time was different because I had come back my religion after a long hiatus about a year and a half before that, so I was at a different place in my life. Before that when I was suicidal I had no hope... Anyhow, what happened was that I picked up that book called Gleanings and started to read it on the bus ride to work and it just hit me like a ton of bricks who God was and who Baha'u'llah was, and I started crying and could not stop. That was the real beginning of my spiritual journey.
Mind you, I had been a Baha'i for about 43 years at that time but I was not engaged and I knew nothing about God because that is not why I joined the religion; I joined because I am an idealist so I was drawn to the teachings and the primary message of Baha'u'llah, the unity of mankind and world peace.
Anyhow, I started in the middle of my story, so now I am going back to the beginning. I like telling stories almost as much as I like hearing them...
To try to make a long story short, my mother and father were raised as Christians, Greek Orthodox and Anglican, but they both dropped out of the Church long before their children were born, probably right after they married sometime in the 1940s. To not be a Christian in the United States was practically unheard of back in those days. So my brother and sister and I never saw a Bible or the inside of a Church and we never gave it a second thought.
Then when my brother was in his early 20s he got curious about religion so he read about all the great world religions, especially Christianity. As I recall he told me he read the Bible cover to cover five times. Then after all that he discovered the Baha'i Faith and read about it. I do not recall how long it was before he became a Baha'i, but it was in 1968. Then he told my sister and me about it in 1970 and we both read about it and became Baha'is shortly thereafter. About five years later he told my mother about it and she became a Baha'i, so that was the whole nuclear family because my father had died in 1964, before he ever heard of the Baha'i Faith. My father had one sister who was a confirmed atheist but all my mother's brothers and sisters were either Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox.
I said I was going to try to make a long story short, but that has not worked out very well so far, so now I am going to try to be more concise and you can ask me any questions about the last part of my story if you want to. So after I became a Baha'i I had a lot of psychological problems. This was unrelated to the religion, but rather owing to the difficult childhood I had, so I was not very active in the religion for very long and eventually I dropped out of activities. I was in "recovery" for a long time, but I was also in college for over 15 years so I was very busy, However, I never lost my belief in Baha'u'llah, although I was not tight with God at all because I was never close to God in the first place, and I was angry at Him for my suffering for about 10 years before I returned to the religion..
The last part of this story starts in January 2013, when I decided to try to engage with my religion again and to try to resolve my issues with God, and that is when I first came to forums. First In I started posting in a Baha'i forum and after that I branched out to other forums. That is when I started learning about Christianity and to a lesser extent about Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. About a year after that I started my own forum but after that I started posting on a forum that was primarily nonbelievers and that became my primary forum until I left about two and a half years ago and came to this forum. I recently returned to that atheist forum so now I am here and there. I like talking to atheists because most of them are very sincere people, they just don't see any evidence for God. But also I have an atheist bent, although I never doubted God’s existence for one minute.
The last seven years has been quite a spiritual journey, and I think I have grown more in these years than in all the previous years put together, in spite of all the counseling and support groups I attended during the previous years. I believe it was my willingness to give my religion and God another chance as well as the participation in forums that helped me grow spiritually. I am quite an introvert so this gives me an opportunity to socialize without going out. Let me put it this way: My ordinary lifestyle is sheltering in place, so now everyone has experienced the way I normally live.
I sure hope I did not bore you to tears.”
Proof of Islam?
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Quick Sidenote: It is a Baha'i belief that the Universe has always existed. Below is a passage that explains it:
“As to thy question concerning the origin of creation. Know assuredly that God’s creation hath existed from eternity, and will continue to exist forever. Its beginning hath had no beginning, and its end knoweth no end. His name, the Creator, presupposeth a creation, even as His title, the Lord of Men, must involve the existence of a servant.
As to those sayings, attributed to the Prophets of old, such as, “In the beginning was God; there was no creature to know Him,” and “The Lord was alone; with no one to adore Him,” the meaning of these and similar sayings is clear and evident, and should at no time be misapprehended. To this same truth bear witness these words which He hath revealed: “God was alone; there was none else besides Him. He will always remain what He hath ever been.” Every discerning eye will readily perceive that the Lord is now manifest, yet there is none to recognize His glory. By this is meant that the habitation wherein the Divine Being dwelleth is far above the reach and ken of any one besides Him. Whatsoever in the contingent world can either be expressed or apprehended, can never transgress the limits which, by its inherent nature, have been imposed upon it. God, alone, transcendeth such limitations. He, verily, is from everlasting. No peer or partner has been, or can ever be, joined with Him. No name can be compared with His Name. No pen can portray His nature, neither can any tongue depict His glory. He will, for ever, remain immeasurably exalted above any one except Himself.” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 150-151
Arthur P. Dent
Member
This raises a point that I had in my infancy of questioning religions / god(s). Even back when I still believed, one of the many things that confused me was even trying to understand (the typical) “god”. Most religions, to include yours per above, claim that their god is “above understanding”. The human brain can hardly wrap its mind around billions of years let alone infinity! Then when you start chaining these “infinities” together, infinitely strong, powerful, wise yadda, yadda, yadda… it seems like a fools errand and demonstrates extreme hubris to even TRY to fit “god” into human terminology.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
As a Baha'i, I believe we can know some of God's Attributes and we can know God's Will through what the Messenger of God reveals, but we can never know the Essence of God, God's intrinsic nature. I fully accept that and I actually like the idea that God is a mystery and that I know all that I need to know about God and all I can understand, (at least during this age of history, because I believe there will be more Messengers of God sent throughout all time.) The following is one of my favorite passages.
“Wert thou to ponder in thine heart, from now until the end that hath no end, and with all the concentrated intelligence and understanding which the greatest minds have attained in the past or will attain in the future, this divinely ordained and subtle Reality, this sign of the revelation of the All-Abiding, All-Glorious God, thou wilt fail to comprehend its mystery or to appraise its virtue. Having recognized thy powerlessness to attain to an adequate understanding of that Reality which abideth within thee, thou wilt readily admit the futility of such efforts as may be attempted by thee, or by any of the created things, to fathom the mystery of the Living God, the Day Star of unfading glory, the Ancient of everlasting days. This confession of helplessness which mature contemplation must eventually impel every mind to make is in itself the acme of human understanding, and marketh the culmination of man’s development.” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 165-166
So?
IMO, the only people who have a burden of proof are people who are trying to convince others of their position. If I don't care whether I'm believed, I have no obligation to defend any claim I make.
Sure... but that applies to T. Rexes, too. We have no way to tell if a population of T. Rexes was transplanted to some other planet.
And they arose from non-life once; with enough other planets, maybe they could have arisen independently again.
On the issue of T. Rexes on other planets, "the Universe is a pretty big place that we have yet to even start to search."
Isn't "exceedingly low probability" the same reason you don't think your car is green? I mean, paint exists. It's entirely in the realm of possibility that some vandal painted your car green while you weren't watching it and you'll only find out the next time you look at it.
Do you, though?
You brought up solipsism when talking about knowledge of God's God's non-existence; it's just as much a problem for any other knowledge claim.
I mean, if you're dreaming or hallucinating right now, or if you're being somehow fed false stimuli of a simulated universe, there's no way of telling what sort of cars you own in real life.
Your thinking seems a bit confused.
For you to say that you know you don't have a green car, it's you who have to dismiss a large number of very non-extraordinary claims. The fact that paint exists and that it sometimes gets put on cars is not at all extraordinary.
And gifts and inheritance also aren't extraordinary: maybe a relative has left you a car, but you haven't been notified yet.
My point in all this is that there's quite a bit of uncertainty around all sorts of claims. I'm not sure how the statement "I know God doesn't exist" is fundamentally different from other more everyday knowledge claims that people generally don't bat an eye at.
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe you can't say that things never happened simply because they happened to me and not to everyone.
I believe it is because I can testify as to what happened. I watched Nebraska lose to Iowa in football Friday. If you didn't watch it or see the score my experience is still evidence to you that it happened.
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe one can accept testimony as to whether one has a red car or not, it is not as easy to be sure by looking in the driveway, considering the person could have the car hidden. One can easily examine whether a town has an amusement park or not. It is not so easy to verify God since He can't be seen, so it remains as a matter of testimony.
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe your belief about God has no basis.
Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
I don't know how your two comments connect. I've never heard any theist give evidence outside his personal experience (i.e. I can testify...). What objective evidence would there be for god and why would theist try to prove there is when it's not based on that?
When a car is stolen, there's generally some span of time between when the rightful owner no longer has a car until they realize that they no longer have a car. If you happen to ask someone whether they have a red car during that span of time, they might sincerely answer "yes" even if the truth is that they don't have a red car anymore.
Can one?
How would you determine that there isn't a subterranean amusement park under your town?
What about a secret amusement park for a select few, that's disguised as something else?
And what if I've decided that my personal definition of "amusement park" includes any place where people experience joy? Can you really say that your town doesn't have an amusement park then?
Why would it be "a matter of testimony?"
Arthur P. Dent
Member
OK... So you're basing your belief on god via hear-say?!? How does one ascertain THAT particular prophet was authentic yet ALL the other various prophets throughout history from before Jesus to Marshall Applewhite were FALSE prophets?!?
I agree, it's a eloquent verse, but the Bible, Koran and MANY other works contains just as eloquent quotes. You previously stated your belief was NOT based on Personal Experience / Personal Faith but rather "Evidence". I am hoping you have something more concrete else I suspect we may have different definitions of "evidence".
Respectfully.... Arthur