How were you created?

My mom and dad screwed...

given the vast amount of time and the infinite number of chances available, i suppose a critter like me was just bound to happen. no deity in its right mind would ever dream up the bizarre mixture of psychosis, logic and infantile humor which continually revolves around what passes for my mind. though i would love to believe that my grand delusions are the planned result of the workings of some ultimate intelligence, i'm afraid we'll just have to blame random chance and chaos's strange sense of humor.

(bursts into song) 'When a maaaaannnnnnn!!! loves a woman......

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Originally Posted by Oneironaut

Well, at the beginning of our observable universe, matter and energy came into existence (without violating the conservation laws regarding the creation of such things, mind you; all the matter and the energy in the universe, when they are added together, equal zero). The universe was mostly hydrogen and helium, which gravity collapsed together into clumps, which became dense enough to undergo nuclear fusion in their cores, synthesizing the heavier elements. The larger stars, the ones with the most heavy elements, end up going supernova and exploding their contents throughout their galactic region. Over a few generations of stars, the new stars now have planetary disks of heavier elements, which was the case with our Sun. Clumps of matter in the solar planetary disk coalesced together by gravity, until many of them had assembled into planets. On Earth, some sort of chemical process occurred where organic molecules became capable of making crude copies of themselves. The molecules which were more accurate and more efficient at self-replication created lots of copies of themselves, and the molecules which weren't died off. Thus began the process of Darwinian natural selection, a powerful process by which energy from the Sun is able to create amazingly complex machines that are extremely efficient at self-replication. Four billion years of that and here our horny asses are.

There is no reason to posit anywhere in this process the intervention of some amazingly complex designer. Consciousness and intelligence are the most complex things we know of in the universe. The purpose of evolution is to explain how complex things like consciousness and intelligence arise from simple beginnings. The "intelligent design" hypothesis is so obviously untrue because its basic argument goes like this:

Gee, wee need to explain how all these complex things like biological organisms, and especially consciousness and intelligence, got here. So let's assume that there was some amazingly complex, conscious, intelligent creature with magical superpowers. We have no idea how he got there. Maybe we weren't meant to know. He invented all these amazingly complex things which are much much less complex than he is.

Really, think about it. Anything complex enough to design and create all of life would have to be much much more complex than even the entirety of life itself. If your main problem with evolution is that it's hard to swallow that complexity can arise from simplicity, you should have a much larger problem with the God hypothesis, which says there is something more complex than life itself that arose from nothingness.

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Thank you for your intelligent and mature post. I respect your opinion, however i just can't believe that we arose from nothing. The universe is too complex to be just a coincidence, imo. That's the kind of response i was looking for, not a stupid post saying my mom banged my dad =/ I just wanted to see other people's views on the subject. However, we came to be i believe we should embrace existence while we are on earth.

I don't think we arose from nothing either. I find it very hard to believe anything can just pop up out of nothing, which is one reason I find it so hard to believe in a God who did precisely that. I can more easily swallow a universe popping out of whatever quantum fluctuation or whatever set the whole thing off, than I can swallow the idea of an already-formed intelligent universe-creator popping out of nowhere, then deciding to pop everything we see into existence.

It's a completely unnecessary step in the process. It would be like a chemist doing an experiment and saying "Gee, I don't know how this particular chemical reaction took place, so I'm going to posit the existence of a super-intelligent chemical reaction creator who popped into existence 2 seconds before the chemical reaction, miracled the chemical reaction into existence, and he needs me to believe in him on faith." The idea of a universe god is as ridiculous to me as the idea of a sun god. People who have no idea how physics work find it hard to imagine that the sun just came into existence by natural physical law, so historically they have often anthropomorphized it and worshiped it, turning it into a god. Nowadays people do the same thing to the whole universe and laugh at the sun gods of our ancestors. Why? Do they know for a fact that there is no sun god? Of course they don't. That doesn't mean anybody should actually take the sun god hypothesis seriously though, until there's some real evidence for a real sun god. Just because you don't understand the physics behind the sun's creation, or the universe's creation (things our human brains did not evolve good equipment for imagining), that doesn't mean at all that a deity is a responsible, any more than it means a swarm of magical fairies is responsible.

If you bet on theism and win, what do you gain? Eternal life, infinite reward, an endless positive payoff. And if you lose, you lose nothing. For any pleasures you gave up, there was an acceptable one to substitute. If you bet on god and lose, you won't survive death to discover you lost.

To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

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Originally Posted by Reefer Rogue

If you bet on theism and win, what do you gain? Eternal life, infinite reward, an endless positive payoff. And if you lose, you lose nothing. For any pleasures you gave up, there was an acceptable one to substitute. If you bet on god and lose, you won't survive death to discover you lost.

To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

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That's assuming you know God's heart, which no one can claim.

What if God decided that the only way to get into a "heaven equivalent" was to not worship false gods. If everybody is worshipping Christ, Muhammed, or anything of the sort, then you don't get eternal life.

Maybe god just wants people to be good without being scared into being good.

So to say that the gamble will only pay off for theists is to assume that you know God's heart... you know... if It even exists.

The question then becomes, which god? Then you have to sort through all the evidence for god from all the religions to pick the one that seems most probable. But then you discover that none of them actually have an objective repeatable test that there *is* a god, and you have to resort to assuming that they're right. Or 'believing' if you like that word better than 'assuming'. Same thing though.

I suspect if there is a god, he's not going to be that picky. In fact, you might get bonus points and an extra virgin or two to molest if you do good while believing there *is* no god. In other words, do good for its own sake, rather than being told you 'should', or out of fear of eternal damnation or whatnot. And the people who did good to earn 'God points' or to avoid hell perhaps don't get such a good deal. In which case, you might regret believing, and pay for it forever. There's every bit as much evidence that this is the case as there is that it isn't.

God is the one and only greatest possible being. (By definition)

A greatest possible being has the greatest form of existence possible, which is necessary existence, or existence in all possible circumstances. (By definition)

It is at least possible that there is a God. (There is a God in some possible set of circumstances, whether they are actual circumstances, or fictional, yet possible, ones)

A god who exists in any possible circumstances exists in all. (From premise 2)

Therefore,

God exists in the actual world. (In the circumstances in which we actually find ourselves)

It is necessary to assume something which is necessary of itself, and has no cause of its necessity outside itself but is rather the cause of necessity in other things. And this a man calls God.

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Originally Posted by Reefer Rogue

God is the one and only greatest possible being. (By definition)

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Who's definition are we going by? Yours? God's? It's certainly not mine.

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Originally Posted by Reefer Rogue

It is at least possible that there is a God. (There is a God in some possible set of circumstances, whether they are actual circumstances, or fictional, yet possible, ones)

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There's a possibility for a Flying Spaghetti Monster too.

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Originally Posted by Reefer Rogue

A god who exists in any possible circumstances exists in all. (From premise 2)

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OYG! FSM exists too!

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Originally Posted by Reefer Rogue

God exists in the actual world. (In the circumstances in which we actually find ourselves)

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Only if one subscribes to your assumptions would they think that.

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Originally Posted by Reefer Rogue

It is necessary to assume something which is necessary of itself, and has no cause of its necessity outside itself but is rather the cause of necessity in other things. And this a man calls God.

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So, why is it necessary to assume? You lost me here.