Athiests...

> The presence of a divine being in your mind?
What does it even mean?! Divine being is literally can take any form and shapes, just look on how much religions are here. No science can deny all possibilities here. What it really nullifies for me is authority of Holy Book and such. It claims pretty major amount of things that are pure magic in the end and have no back up in evidence whatsoever.

For me it's awareness of the scope of anthropology. All cultures have superstitions based on simplistic explanations for the natural world. Arbitrarily privileging the judeochristian mythos to be "true" above the others just seems like an obvious cultural bias.

Why specifically darwinism?

It doesn't contradict a divine being per se, but it points out one important thing: an almightly deity cannot be told apart from a lack of an almighty deity because such a being can erase any evidence of it's own existece and make up any evidence that contradict it's existence.

While it my seem like a proof of such a being probably existing, it does add aditional things to our worldview which we in fact don't actually need to desribe the world. Which makes everything more complicated that it needs to be (and the world is already pretty much too complicated for our understanding). If there's no evidence for god's existence than there's no reason to think he exists.

>Athiests, in which way do you feel that modern scientific thought and Darwinism contradict and/or nullify the presence of a divine being in your mind?
I, don't think they do. I mean, even basic logic rebels against specific models of god, but there's always a way to justify the possibility of the existence of some sort of divinity, at least until we know everything about everything, and in all likelihood, that's impossible.

Even if there is no divinity, the concept itself and the teachings that surround it have value beyond the mere existence or non-existence of the deity or deities in question. Particularly in such religions where god is "unknowable", and is thus a conceptual backdrop and focal point, that doesn't necessarily need to exist at all (and being unknowable, effectively doesn't.)

But I'm among those "atheists" who believe in the value of religion and religious teachings, when applied properly, as well as for personal enrichment, and is critical to an understanding of both one's self and of man in general. I believe using religion to define "good and bad" is the lowest form of religion, and that fundamentalists, of all stripes, religious or otherwise, are a plague on mankind and intellectual honesty in general, but spiritual discipline is just another form of mental discipline, and as a more staunch atheist once said, "He who cannot rule himself will be commanded."

But one does not have to believe in a story, to believe in the value, consequences, and teachings of such a tale. In fact, it often aids in proper understanding if one does not. Otherwise one risks, for instance, taking away the lesson from "The Grasshopper and the Ants", that such creatures are sapiently communicating and thus sacred, rather than coming away with a lesson regarding consequences of hedonistic sloth. (Or that the tale of Adam and Eve is literally about the creation of man, rather than a parable as to the condition of man.)

There is nothing wrong with cultural bias.
If silly to pretend to be an elephant when you're a giraffe.

there's nothing wrong with cultural bias in the sense that you prefer your own traditions and religion but if we trying to discuss what is likely to be objectively true a bias is a bias

You have literally no proof that a divine being exist.

>thread went this well

Am I on an alternate reality Veeky Forums right now? Where are the fedora images?

Cultural bias is to pretend that you are giraffe just because you was born near elephants.

Christians how do you accept christ as your saviour while you know full well that the catholic church created the book of daniel centuries after christ's death to legitimize him as the messiah.

I don't. divine beings, gods, etc are too vaguely defined for anything to be said about them. however specific religious ideas (mainly just creationism) can be disproved with science. for christianity in general i think there's better arguments against it from archeology and textual criticism

Oh well...

Your god is uninteresting.

that sounds more like being contrarian against your society's culture. also it's kinda a nonsensical comparison that i can't exactly figure out what you mean by it. christian or hindu isn't an inherent part of your identity like race, species or sex, just something you have a tendency to favor

The scope of anthropology also includes parameters for cultural relativism and trying to understanding cultural traditions for what they are. That includes various ways of understanding the world. Yes, believing in once religious system is kind of a cultural bias, but that doesn't make it less valid to a person that believes it.

The existence of multiple religions also says nothing about the truth of any of them. This thread is about whether modern science contradicts the existence of deities. As other people have said, the two are answering different questions; learning about how other cultures view those deities can't really say anything about whether they exist or not (or in what way they may exist or not exist).

In other words, whether a religion is true isn't a question anthropology is in the business of answering, nor does it want to be.

it doesn't give definitive proof, but it gives a good case, especially as you watch religions evolve over time and see stuff like cargo cults which i think we can agree aren't true

> He who cannot rule himself will be commanded.
If you think about it, it clearly works opposite way. You can't really command over people if they can't even control their own actions. Idea of command is based on people who execute your orders. People who lack discipline to do task basically couldn't be commanded by any means. *I can't do that* is the one the best defenses again any kinds of external pressure. This is why insane people couldn't really be negotiated with, they can't control what they do and you can't command over them because of this.

Faith isn't something that you can choose to have. If you doesn't believe in God or say in communism why should you pretend to? Just because you was born in the Catholic country or say USSR?

> modern science contradicts the existence of deities
Deities are unscientific because you can't really disprove their existence. Of course you can just believe in any speculative things, but religion as just one of infinity of them have no special value.

Which still has no bearing on whether or not some concept of a deity might be true. It's just a question that science can't answer because there can be no evidence for it either way (partly because the concept isn't clearly defined enough to even figure out how to answer the question outside of faith).

I'm an agnostic atheist (really I just don't care about religion, so don't think I'm arguing for its veracity) anthropologist who's also studied religion heavily. I've studied lots of ways that religions have changed over the years. The only thing religious change means is that culture changes. It's about people and how they modify things over time. In a way you can study some of those changes and declare that some traditions are invented and probably not "true," but that can hardly extend to the supernatural as a whole. Again, that's an issue that science can't deal with; refuting specific claims is different than trying to answer the unanswerable.

Yes, they're unscientific, but religion doesn't try to be scientific (unless you're Ken Ham). They're two different systems that exist for answering different questions.

There are better and more logical arguments for the existence of a divine entity than there are against.

But wouldn't the fact that almost every human culture, no matter how spread out, developed along similar theological lines and mostly came to the same conclusions?

There is a fairly clear trend from polytheism/animism towards a sort of monotheism. One god eventually becomes the principle [G]od.

> religion doesn't try to be scientific
Except when it tries to deny scientific facts when they went against the dogma. Science is a pretty apathetic to deities and such, believers somehow are triggered by evolution, etc.

Intelligent design may become a stronger theory as time goes on but divinity just isn't necessary even for that.

> logical arguments for the existence
Name one that doesn't contradict itself.

> One god eventually becomes the principle [G]od.
The atheism is next step in that process. Infinities of Gods -> Many Gods -> Small Pantheon -> One God -> No Gods, see the pattern here.

>There are better and more logical arguments for the existence of a divine entity than there are against.

There are no sound arguments for God's existence.

Which is why I brought up Ken Ham as an example of when religion oversteps is purpose and said "refuting specific claims is different than trying to answer the unanswerable."

Some things can be answered by science and some can't. The same can be said about religion. There's only really a problem when people on either side try to overstep those boundaries.

Negative god is coming

I agree here, but there are difference from theology that can coexist with science and religion that can and in many ways choose to be opposed to it, the last is pretty major problem.

I have never believed in a deity, even from childhood. I went through a stage in my mid-teens where I thought thunderf00t, the Amazing Atheist and Richard Dawkins were geniuses of religiously-oriented wry wit. I would do the pseud's thing of making myself look smart by explaining to my friends and school pals why i thought religion was poisonous, why science was the way forward, etc, and all based on the odd sarcastic comment I'd heard from one of the aforementioned gentlemen.

Then I came to understand that Western Civilisation and Christianity are so closely intertwined that one cannot appreciate any aspect of the former without understanding the latter. I now consider myself very much Christian, in the cultural sense, but I am still atheist/agnostic with regards to a God. I still laugh in the face of creationists, think Dawkins writes some great stuff (when it comes to Biology) and agree with him also when he says that, regardless of your thoughts on Christianity, it is certainly a bulwark against something far worse (i.e. Islam).

It also saddens me that in an age when Christianity is portrayed as the fusty old grandma of religions, it is considered cool to call yourself Buddhist or Hindu just because you like lotus flowers and yoga.

>Scientific thought
Because of scientific thought I just think any supernatural claim is an opinion since they don't provide a falsifiable hypothesis or otherwise sufficient reason to believe their claims even more so a divine being/god since that area tends to be quite nebulously defined.
This does require me to hold the opinion that the scientific method is a valid epistemology but I think that's pretty reasonable as far as opinions go (in my opinion).

>Darwinism or "Modern evolutionary synthesis" if you want to use the less wrong version
Removes explanatory power from various creator myths by filling in gaps that opinions used to exist in. Otherwise it does nothing to contradict or nullify the presence of a divine being.

Strictly speaking, it doesn't. I cannot either prove or disprove the existence of God, gods, or just the supernatural in general. I just choose not to believe, which ultimately is just the same type of decision as belief in God and that shit is, it's all just rooted in faith in your beliefs.

Now, that being said, I highly doubt the existence of any sort of supernatural entities given current scientific advancements. To say it's highly improbable that the supernatural actually exists is a bit of an understatement in my mind, but I still can't confidently say it does not exist, as I have no solid proof it doesn't.

> It is considered cool to call yourself Buddhist or Hindu
Well, Christianity does nothing to present itself as cool despite here is huge potential to it. Guys are literally using execution/torture device as symbol.

You choose not to believe.

Zero upside.

Infinite downside.

But you think you are rational.

Dat military.

i know it can't prove anything per se. but when religion changes due to cultural change it really lowers the likelihood of it being true. if a religion was true it wouldn't change (though perhaps there could be a change in power dynamics in polytheism like Zeus being overthrown like Cronus) due to culture, it would be divine revelation. for example, christianity has remained relatively static for quite some time, but this only came about once individuals' "divine revelation" was no longer able to change an established orthodoxy of doctrines. if their divine revelation was real it should have brought them together, not the raw power and influence of the church as an institution. i agree that this doesn't really prove anything to be false by itself, especially just the vague concept of a deity by itself. but it shows that the individual religions are very unlikely to be true

> Infinite downside.
What downside? God could as well be the one who punish believers in hell just for the irony.

You're implying here that it's the atheists and scientists who have been actively opposing Religious institutions since the time of Darwin and not the opposite.

>basing "belief" upon a gambit
That's not belief, friend.

Should I also believe in Odin and die in glorious battle to avoid an eternity in Hel, or perhaps I should bow five times a day to Mecca so that I don't end up in Jahannam. Maybe I should even sacrifice to Zeus and Hera while I'm at it so that I don't end up in the Fields of Punishment.

That's not how it works, and if you were truly a man of faith you would understand that.

This thread is cute, filled with agnostics.

Agnostic Atheists are boring as fuck.

>“If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.”

God is not objective yet, you MUST believe, everyone believes something. If you subscribe to science you belive what they are telling you to be true, to be observable time and time again - YOU do not know it to be true. You belive, everyone has belief. It is more fun to believe in a being an individual that is our reasoning for everything.

TO answer your question OP. Science answers how, Religion answers why. Science is denying the parts of religion which attempt to tell you how, but science can never answer you why. Religion and more generic philosophy does that.

> Religion answers why
Most of the time the answer is that God works in mysterious ways.

I base my beliefs on what I know to be true.

Infinite upside

No downside

Because unlike you, I actually am a rational person.

> being cucked by jews
No downside

Odin is Nimrod, the King of Babylon.
Very few people pray towards Mecca, as we live on a globe.
Zeus and Hera are none other than Adam and Eve.

Because I worship the Truth, I know these things to be true.

You do recall the Jews contrived to have Jesus murdered, yes?

So that you're basically on their side?

>God is not objective

kek

>God is not objective yet, you MUST believe
>Religion answers why

Empty rhetoric and pretend confidence, that's all religion offers.

God will do as He says, as He told His prophets, and as He said through His Son, Jesus.

Unbelievers are cast for eternal torment in a lake of fire.

Well he told me that you fucked a dog once.

Well I prefaced it with "for me" since that's how I think. The fact that these religions come and go with cultures strikes me as undermining the "truth" of any particular religion.

> Zeus is Adam
> Chris is Second Adam
> Jesus Christ is Zeus Krishna
You are unto something here, user.

Jesus contrived to have himself murdered.

Jesus lying to send people in Hell. I heard he was a dangerous criminal who pretended to be royalty and was even executed because of that.

Zeus is Adam.
Jesus is the second Adam.

By the sin of the first Adam, humanity was lost.

By the sacrifice of the second Adam, Jesus, some of humanity will be saved.

Your krishna nonsense is demonology.

Correct. He came to die. And He provoked the conspiracy of Jews to kill Him to do so right when He said they would, on Passover.

But murder starts in the heart, so if you wish someone dead, you have violated Thou Shalt Not Murder.

Even if you just call a man a fool, you violate that commandment.

If in your head God lies, be an atheist.

>It is more fun to believe in a being an individual that is our reasoning for everything.

It's fun to walk around without pants too

> krishna nonsense
*tips fedora*

You'd have to tip 330,000,000 fedoras

Why respond to this troll?

I dunno, honestly this whole board is full of shit.

ad hom

Not an argument.

Why bother? I know I'm not going to change anyone's mind, but if you're not even willing to intellectually entertain the other side's position, why even BE here?

Racking up GBP.

No, it works exactly like that. If somebody can't control their actions, you can work out their behavior patterns and then manipulate them into doing what they want.

Doing what YOU want, sorry, fucked up.

Mainly materialism however it was the study of comparative religion that really did it. Seeing that even the old religions aren't all that unique in their history and how they all bear the marks of human fabrication, the only advanatage they have over newer religions is the veil of time which helps distort this greatly.

You do not know what god is true, and you should absolutely get informed on the topic, since you may err in your raving calculations.

For instance, what if you were captured in your world by a few lunatics that want to destroy you by forcing your wills to kill each other and then blame you all for it.

You could then be forced to a life of prayer where you are chrisians being "rescued" of an evil entity while "god" helps you destroy mankind (whom are demons) by merely destroying it "himself".

Divine Being as a general idea? Not so much. Science at the get go doesn't look to contradict a divine being, rather the "evidence" for a divine being is not scientific.

I can understand why some would take up Deism, but the simple fact is that is a philosophical position. There's nothing in our current understanding of the Universe that requires the "God' factor in calculations.

If we're to address specific gods, we can take the Christian one. As Paul said, the Resurrection is where the faith stands and falls.

Immortality or resurrection has been one of mankind's most passionate and futile pursuits. No matter what medicines we compose or rituals we perform, the laws of Thermodynamics keep a dead human body dead.

In my opinion the account of the Resurrection is not very good against naturalistic scrutiny, and in conclusion, I think Jesus of Nazareth died in a terrible manner and is now dust in this earth. Believing he rose again is a matter of faith, and more power to you if you hold that.

>""""athiests""""
>""thiests"'"'
>""""ie""""

Fucking philosofags and religionfags can't even spell. This is a history board. gtfo

RRREEEEEEEE-

>history & humanities
>& humanities.

>modern scientific thought and Darwinism contradict and/or nullify the presence of a divine being in your mind?

They don't. But there is no reason to have "the presence of a divine being" in my mind in the first place.

The modal ontological argument is valid. But you need to buy into the conceptual schema of medieval perfections: a scale of qualitative perfection that can culminate in an actual infinity. To me it seems straight forward though, to "be greater than" in this sense of qualitative perfection is just to have more of it, having an immutable/necessary existence means having existence to oneself entirely, where to have a contingent/mutable existence is to have one's existence derived from another, meaning that in itself it has no existence, "some x" is more than "no x", so the necessary being has "more existence" and is "greater" in this sense of medieval perfections.

Now Kantians and Fregeans want to deny that "existence" can be a first order predicate that we can do this kind of stuff with. But that is one philosophical tradition out of many. Many schools of philosophy have rejected this picture, not just scholastics but also modern analaytic philosophers like Meinong. You can press on this point, but just invoking a Kantian/Fregean position without justifying why we should buy into it over contrary positions is not enough.

1/3

We also have to justify that P5 is coherent, if the scale of perfections was a potential infinity rather than an actual infinity it would't make sense since a a being "that which no greater can be thought of" would not be a coherent notion. Where before there would be a quantitative notion of "greater" invoked, here a qualitative notion of "greater" would have to be assumed such that to have the highest degree of some quality would be to have it just as it is. ( kind of like having the platonic form of it, rather than something that merely takes part, like a perfect triangle, rather than an imperfect triangle like the one's we can draw)

Presumably we are going to have to limit which kind of qualities are actually "good making" qualities, as one cannot be a perfect triangle and a perfect circle at the same time. The Scholastic notion of "The Transcendentals": where Goodness,Being,etc are all convertible and count as the "good making" qualities, can ground this, but obviously one would have to go read up on the coherency of that doctrine( and all the different variations on it) in order to justify it. Ceterus paribus the argument is sound, but there are allot of different points to press on to try to refute it, but that is the same with every philosophical argument that makes a non trivial claim anyways.

2/3

Gx- That which no greater than can be thought of exists

1. (P -> Q) -> ( ◊P -> ◊ Q) Axiom 1
2. Gx -> □ Gx Because: It is greater to necessarily exist than to not necessarily exist.
3. (Gx -> □ Gx) -> (◊ Gx -> ◊ □ Gx) From 1 and 2.
4. (◊ Gx -> ◊ □ Gx) From 2 and 3.
5. ◊ Gx Assumption: There is nothing contradictory inherent to the concept of “That which no greater can be thought of”.
6. ◊ □ Gx From 4 and 5
7. ~ □ Gx -> ~ Gx From 2
8. ~ Gx -> ~ ◊ □ Gx Axiom 2
9. ◊ □ Gx Re of 6
10. ~ ~ Gx From 8 and 9
11. ~ ~ □ Gx From 7 and 10
12. □ Gx From 11

3/3

Nobody takes ontological arguments seriously. I don't why you even bother.

Actually, allot of contemporary philosophers take it seriously, a handful champion it outright.

youtube.com/watch?v=R_3Lwk6V3qY

>Athiests, in which way do you feel that modern scientific thought and Darwinism contradict and/or nullify the presence of a divine being in your mind?

It points more towards polytheism being right

Wrong. Even Christian apologists recognize ontological arguments are unconvincing, and the only relevant philosopher that "champions" the ontological argument is Plantinga.

I just posted a video by one who does. Godel did as well.Charles Hartshorne did as well. As did Norman Malcolm. And that is merely in 20th century philosophy,

On the SEP page there is a large list of contemporary works by authors who thought that the style of argument is worth taking seriously enough to write books on.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#OntArg21sCen

Furthermore, any consensus against ontological arguments is weakened by the fact that there is no consensus on just what exactly is wrong with them.

But why?

> there is no consensus on just what exactly is wrong
Well, that because there are too many things that wrong with them so you are free to choose a point that you hate more than others.

> the modal ontological argument
> Imagine the most perfect waifu
> To be perfect she must be real
> q.e.d.
The modal ontological argument is valid only if you agree with certain view on reality of modalities, but such views allow all kinds of a fictional entities and this is clearly overkill... I am not saying that it isn't legit, as it allows waifus after all.

> you can work out their behavior patterns
You also can do exactly this with people who can control themselves. It isn't like they have no logic, value or principles behind what they choose to do and somehow free from patterns.

This. I don't deny the possibility of the existence of a divine being, but the one supposedly revealed in the Jewish and Christian scriptures (as well as the Qur'an) necessarily CANNOT exist. You cannot have evolution and a historical Adam.

Not that faggot. It's not that such a god can't exist, but that such accounts must be read metaphorically or treated as myth. A literalist reading of the Bible is not compatible with evolution as the Young Earth Creationists themselves clearly realise.

Of course some might say that a Bible that contains passages that are not true that are not clearly labelling within the text as metaphorical can't be the revealed message of a god who wants to be understood.

>But you need to buy into the conceptual schema of medieval perfections

So it's "valid" if you ignore ~500 years of advances? By that "reasoning", I can claim to have cured you of cancer with magic, it's "valid" if you ignore logic and reason, I'll be expecting my check for $1,000,000 from you any day now.

Yes, but a person who can control themselves can over-rule their instincts or act on them as they chose and so counter your attempt to manipulate them.