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God doesn't exist; may everyone convert to our way of thinking despite having no proof of non-existence

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I will tell you this:  Your argument isn't creative and has been used almost verbatim.

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johnm214 said:
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I don't think you've made a valid point.

Support your premise that the bible says god will heal his followers if they pray enough or whatever.  Diabetes could be said to directly support faith, as would all illnesses.  I'm reminded of the story of job and god showing satan he wouldn't loose faith.

I don't see how illness cuts against faith at all.


So show where the bible promises health and healing in exchange for being a good christian?

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OrgoneConclusion said:
I am totally stupefied by Christians. Which part is difficult for them to grok:

Premise: Jesus can heal any illness for those who have faith in him.

Christians claim to believe in Jesus.

Christian health is somewhat worse than atheists/agnostics which is TOTALLY counter to the premise.

Where is the cognizant dissonance?

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OrgoneConclusion said:
6. God used that time (multiple hospitilizations for diabetic complications) to show me that I needed to take Him more seriously.

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skcorrelyt said:

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OrgoneConclusion said:
6. God used that time (multiple hospitilizations for diabetic complications) to show me that I needed to take Him more seriously.

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how could one love a "God" that put them through misery to get his message of love across?

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undergrounder said:

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skcorrelyt said:

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OrgoneConclusion said:
6. God used that time (multiple hospitalizations for diabetic complications) to show me that I needed to take Him more seriously.

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how could one love a "God" that put them through misery to get his message of love across?

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how could you love your "Mother" who sent you to your room when you were naughty because she loved you and was trying to teach you a lesson?

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blewmeanie said:
I just dont see a reason or a necessity to invent a god. I'm not even suggesting that atheism is the route to take, but why not simply observe the facts

Collect data

Examen any aparent patterns that may exist

Using these facts build a predictive model

Use the predictions about what should happen to collect more data.

Use that data to modify your model abandoning the
impossible, and keeping only what is certain

Repeat until perfect

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Your going to have to help me out, you lost me with this one. God is an equation? I think you must be using "equation" in an abstract way that I dont quite understand. Please elaborate.

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I just looked up monadology, and I would say its ridiculous, but its no more bizarre than any of the other new ideas about matter, and space lately. Check out physicsforums.com if your interested in such things.

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LOL you looked it up did you? no idea how you could possibly understand it without a week of thinking and reading, its a pretty hard theory to understand.

It's not a new theory, it was written in 1714, before atomicism, before microscopes, around the same time as Newton, before Relativity theory, before String Theory, the same time any type of physics was being invented.

Instead of atoms, there are monads - the basic matter of the universe. Leibniz says that scale cannot continue getting infinitely smaller, there must be a limit where time and space breaks down or stops, a view many theoretical physicists hold today.

By this reasoning, then the SMALLEST particles, whatever their name, must be INDIVISIBLE. For to be divisible, means they can become smaller, which is impossible. Thus, monads must have not dimension, nor extension, nor length, nor space. That is, they must have no physical existence.

He goes on.. but they must have SOME properties, or they would not be 'things' at all... and further, they must differ in these properties, or they would all be the same thing. So how can you have a property but no mass? You OWN your PERSPECTIVE on the all the other monads nearby. Say you are a monad, then you OWN your distance to the front door as a special property of you. Similarly, if your front door was a monad, it owns this relationship from you to it. Thus, the monadology is a relational theory, whereby the fundamental units of the universe are defined by their relations to all other things, not their single position in space/time. If it helps, picture roughly each monad as a glass sphere, reflecting the world around it... Having no mass or space itself, but having a perspective of all the other monads nearby. It does not exist at a point in space, but because its perspective will differ slightly from all the others, it retains space-like properties nonetheless.

...

i could go on, but the information is out there..

If you looked up String Theory or M Theory, the basic ideas would match almost perfectly.. fundamentall, though, both involve a non-physical mathmatical reality that generates the physical reality on top of it. Newton and Leibniz had a famous argument (Leibniz vs. Clarke) that amounted to an absolute theory vs. Leibniz's relativity theory. Newton won the day, though Leibniz was proved right with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity... recent physical theories are also proving to be more and more like Leibniz's monadology.

And the important thing, Leibniz didn't own a hadron collider, or a microscope, or even a significant laboratory... he just used his head. This is how it must be, for the world to make sense. Anyway...

Concerning the God-as-equation analogy:

Think of each monad as a simple equation. Say... Z = Z2 +  C. If you run that equation, it generates devastatingly beautiful, infinite complexity:


(The Mandelbrot Set, Z = Z2 + C)

In order to create a universe of infinite complexity, God doesn't need to run around moving everything constantly and changing things and giving people diabetes, all he needs do is define a simple equation, insert the values, and let the complexity start itself. Think DNA or the Big Bang for further examples... So what God did was figure out an equation for all the monads at the start of the universe. After he defines the values, he sits back and lets the universe run itself. So what does values does he choose? He chooses the ones that bring the most good to the world out of all the possibilities. Like a chess player he can run through all the iterations of all the infinite possibilities and go... OK, Bingo - ill pick these numbers here, and let's get this universe thing going. BAM! Big Bang, the great experiment begins...

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"In his later work, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Greene states that "the familiar notion of space and time do not extend into the sub-Planckian realm, which suggests that space and time as we currently understand them may be mere approximations to more fundamental concepts that still await our discovery."

Monads anyone?

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undergrounder said:
Thats fine man, but tell me how that method can explain what happened before the Big Bang for instance. Space and Time started at that one point, there's no -before- in a traditional sense, but how does science explain what caused the Big Bang?

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It doesn't. There is a general acceptance that science cannot theorise about what happened before then because there is no scientific way to do so

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- everything breaks down. So do you just forget about it and say it's not a question worth asking? If faith or belief don't work for you, then why not logic?

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Logic tells me we need more data, and assumptions are like assholes, theorizing about god seems to involve allot of them.

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LOL you looked it up did you? no idea how you could possibly understand it without a week of thinking and reading, its a pretty hard theory to understand.

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Think of each monad as a simple equation. Say... Z = Z2 +  C. If you run that equation, it generates devastatingly beautiful, infinite complexity:

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Oh you fucking hippie, you just had to bring up fractal's. There really should be a rule about that.