Some other forums worth exploration:-

http://biologos.org/

http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/index.php

These avoid the 'God of the gaps' arguments.

Without God we would have never tsken our first breath. Without God we will not be able to take our next breath.

I talk to God all the time. I'd be certifiable if I didn't believe he's real and yet still talk to him.

Well, being and atheist I certainly don't believe in any gods. I simply haven't seen any evidence for one yet. I also happen to be an antitheist, thinking that religion is something rather harmful to humanity since it encourages belief without evidence and trust in one's gut feeling when the gut is as suitable for making decisions with as your biceps is for speaking with. :P

Add that there seems to be a whole lot of cherry picking and spinning religious texts nowadays and you have a belief system that I'd not want to be a part of.
I believe things when they have significant evidence for them, not because they're written down in some holy scripture or because it's comforting or because I can't think of any other explanation for things.¨

Personally, I'd like there to be some kind of afterlife. I had a friend, a 17-year old girl, who died earlier this year due to a completely preposterous accident. I'd love to see her again, but I'm still not gonna believe in an afterlife for such a reason. Reality is what it is, not what I'd like it to be. I want to believe verifiably true things, not comforting things.

Also, some responses to other posters:
Oldslim: We breathe through muscle contractions caused by nervous signals from our brain. Where exactly does a god enter the equation?

MrJoe: Some people can talk to the voices in their head. Doesn't mean they're real. I could talk to my invisible friend Molgan, doesn't make Molgan real. :P
My point is, you could direct your talking to anything, but that doesn't mean that thing'll be there to receive your words.

D3

Hi DDreamer,

Thanks for your comments however I want to challenge your comments about belief in God not being based on evidence.

There appears to be an increasing tendency to spread a number of myths about religious belief in general such as the church tried to persecute Galileo for saying the Earth went round the Sun etc. when in depth historical study reveals a very different situation.

Evidence abounds in a number of areas. we need to consider how we handle evidence. There is so much evidence which has been examined critically at university level that to ignore it means we are choosing to follow a philosophy rather than collect evidence.

Take for instance the documents of the New Testament. There are about nine documents relating to figures such as Plato and Julius Caesar which are dated to about 1000AD and historians consider they are sufficient evidence to believe in the said gentlemen. The New Testament documents number somewhere between 13,000 - 18,000 and the gap between the writing of the New Testament documents and the life of Jesus is only a few years.

Western science has developed as a direct result of the story of the creation in the allegorical account of creation in Genesis. Genesis assumes that a Creator God made an orderly and predictable world which because it was made by a Creator external to the world permitted examination of what makes the world work.

For further reading a good book is "Who moved the stone" by Frank Morison and there are scores of other brilliant books worth getting. Two formidable authors are Alistair McGrath and John Lennox both of whom provide a wealth of evidence.

Another totally different area of evidence/incident which at least makes you stop and think concerns incidents such as I've summarised below:-

A vicar visited a dying lady in an iron lung and when he left her he kissed her forehead. Some months later in a room of people one person said she saw a lady go up to the vicar and kiss his forehead and she said she was returning his kiss.

Another lady had a relative tell her he had died some time before the news arrived that he had been killed in a spitfire crash.

There's a number of such stories. How do we deal with them?


There is evidence. The issue is what do we accept as evidence and how do we deal with it.

Since the time of the Enlightenment, science has sought to objectify existence. The belief was that if we just had enough information and developed the tools to study it, we could "know" everything.

In the early 20th century, a field of physics known as quantum mechanics began to develop. Quantum mechanics was a product of this objective search for what is "true" and "real". But QM led to a shocking conclusion. There IS NO UNDERLYING OBJECTIVE REALITY. There is an element of randomness to reality that CAN NOT BE QUANTIFIED. Therefore, objective science CAN NOT DETERMINE REALITY WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY. Certainty, therefore, can only be experienced subjectively as it does not exist objectively. A requirement for faith IN SOMETHING is built into reality itself. How ironic is it that in its search for objective truth, modern science has undercut its very raison d'etre by determining that there IS NO SUCH THING.

DDdreamer, Who do you think made that oxygen that we breathe?

Never have and probably never will.