Is God is real, why are human beings literally "spec of dust"-tier in the universe?

Is God is real, why are human beings literally "spec of dust"-tier in the universe?

There so, so many galaxies, stars, planets (even planets that are good for life), why then do you conclude that God is real and the Torah/Bible/Quran is true?

Hi, I'm new to Veeky Forums.

Is this the "biased and flawed questions thread"?

Well I understand it's a bit of a loaded question, but the intentions are pure. How DOES one reconcile knowledge of the universe with religious metaphysics?

bump

In the 80s Sathya Sai Baba would die after making things appear out of thin air in front of people.
30 years later there was never evidence.

No. God is human creation to explain the universe surrounding us when human had only poor technology.

It's about human relations to the cosmos which metaphysics concerns itself with. Not the material cosmos per say.

>atheists visit alien world thinking extraterrestrial life will disprove god
>discover aliens each have their own version of jesus

>Christians visit alien world
>discover every galactic civilization recognizes that Muhammad is the last prophet of God.

*tips fedora*

> if God is real why am I so small

You must be joking

>any skepticism of religion is now fedora tier

More like any kind of baby-tier atheism proposal is fedora tier.

Like, you could say the same about fucking everything but it accomplishes nothing.

"Hurr durr, it was used because we were ignorant"
"How does this answer my question, though"

This is one of the most foolish ways to try and disprove God. The potential of humanity is nearly limitless, size simply has little effect on our ability to shape our world. It's not unbelievable to think what we've done to our lands, we can do to our continents, what we've done to our continents, we can do to other planets, and when we're remade our solar system in our image, we can remake the universe as well, given enough time.

Would humanity colonizing and mastering the known universe cause you to believe, OP?

This would honestly be very interesting, in the sense that humans visit other worlds and find every sentient species has some weird cultural quirk identical in each just too strange to be chance.

>The potential of humanity is nearly limitless, size simply has little effect on our ability to shape our world.
Nonsense, it's heavily limited by human nature and by the laws of physics. Colonization of other planets will never happen as long as we're subject to both.

The problem with this (I'm not saying there's an inherent problem, though; God made us the dominant creatures in Creation) is that humans get incredibly arrogant when they do shit like this.

It would be like another Tower of Babel instead of reinforcing the faith in God.

Is that even an argument?

op is the logical consequence of materialism

>le theres all this dead matter everywhere omg we're so small and unimportant all that dead matters is more important....

........

Because I don't subscribe to an overly maturbatory piece of Medieval philosophy that posits we must have some inherent value beyond God somehow loving us.

>How does this answer my question
It's the truth. If the truth doesn't answer your question, then your question was flawed from the start.

>the universe exists on a scale greater than its possible for a human mind to comprehend
>we're still the only life that occupies it despite even conservative estimates concluding that there are tens of thousands of advanced civilizations in our galaxy - one of two trillion - alone

your argument supports, not refutes, the idea of god

>Is God is real, why are human beings literally "spec of dust"-tier in the universe?


Size is not comparative to importance.

>There so, so many galaxies, stars, planets (even planets that are good for life), why then do you conclude that God is real and the Torah/Bible/Quran is true?

I don't see how that relates at all. You defend a religion's metaphysics as true and then defend the historicity of the religion's historic claims and make an argument that connects the two. This is nothing new.

Only if you add your own premises. But then it really isn't OP's argument, now is it?

>it really isn't OP's argument

It's OP's argument entirely

>how can you believe in god when the universe is so big

is quite easily answered by "because we're the only things in it"

Only thing detectable with extremely limited methods and capacity within an even more limited timeframe != only things in the universe over its entire life span.

I just realized the irony here. Atheists asserting that life definitely exists out there despite no hard evidence of the sort but plenty of reason to believe it's possible are basically arguing from faith.

Their belief is an estimation, usually. It wouldn't be the same.

Not really. Mostly between atheists and religious folk it's a tug of war over the anthropic principle and how likely/unlikely a given scenario is.

Like this:

>"Life, as it exists on Earth in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose in a high form in the solar and stellar regions...in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God." - Nicholas of Cusa, Prince–Bishop of Brixen, Vicar General of the Vatican 1447AD

We're one of many many projects, problem solved.

Biblically, it's particularly easy as there's whole nations of folks that just come out of nowhere in the story already. Nothing to say there can't be whole worlds full.

There are more difficult puzzles in religion, to be sure, but this one's pretty easy to pen away.

It's arguing from observations and statistics. Though yes, still a bit of a leap given the gaps in knowledge as to some of the core mechanisms - though even if you plug in the most skeptical odds, saying there's no other life in the universe at all is an even a bigger leap.

The point is that both postures require a leap of faith, something usually abhorred by atheists. Their hypocrisy is astounding.

Atheists of materialist variety don't claim all knowledge is complete, only that all knowledge is obtainable (not that I entirely agree). Even basic physics involves some "leaps of faith" until you have GUT and TOE.

Atheists would claim they bound between testable islands of observation and calculation, subject to change through examination, while the religious leap from a single island of "stone age fairy tales", subject only to interpretation.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Outside of the very few uneducated atheists, most of them just accept what has been said by other scientists without questioning it. When that knowledge is questioned they find themselves angry. Atheists are not any better than religious people.

And less so the materialistic variety that thinks all knowledge can be obtained by science alone and what can't be obtained by science doesn't exist or doesn't matter. Without realizing that the way we currently do science is thanks to philosophy.

>implying you haven't been lied to

The very few educated*
That's just changing your perspective based in what the scientific consensus says. Not any different from accepting the consensus made by a religious council.

The scope of human knowledge is too vast for any one human not to partake in it based, to one degree or another, on faith. Unlike one rather thick book.

But it doesn't require leaps in logic, generally speaking. You can delve deeper into any single field to follow its logic, and get the cliff notes on the procedures in any other. More importantly, each is subject to scrutiny. A scientist can be tasked with backing his shit up, while a pope cannot be. (Though I suppose a priest can, but only via a single source, or another authority working from that same book.)

>And less so the materialistic variety that thinks all knowledge can be obtained by science alone and what can't be obtained by science doesn't exist or doesn't matter. Without realizing that the way we currently do science is thanks to philosophy.
This always irks me a bit - but they have a point when it comes to certain metaphysical subjects, that there's nothing much meaningful you can say about some particular points. Though, occasionally, these points are key to everything.

I suppose the hard core atheists tend to also forget that, while the materialist view can serve as a fine tool to achieve nearly any particular goal, ultimately, choosing goals, is outside the empiricalistic world's privy.

Functionally that's still no different from a believer believing whatever a priest or a theologian says about said holy book vs doing the work and going through seminary themselves.

Except there's no point where you can test the suppositions (well, until you're dead). The guys who wrote the book are long dead, so you can't interrogate them as to particulars either, lest you're among those who believe they talk to Jesus or what not.

You can test materialistic propositions and follow the math behind them - even if you can't ever hope to test them all.

That is true, but you can also examine things like archeological evidence, contemporary historical accounts, and so on. The ultimate issue is that both religious folk and atheists have to make leaps in order to function but only one side ever gets shat on for it.

The old open source vs. closed source code debate.

By understanding that an omnipotent being mustve made the big bang that created it.

Essentially God would be the programmer. And we are a result of that program, same with the rest of the universe

...

>That is true, but you can also examine things like archeological evidence, contemporary historical accounts, and so on.
In addition to the fact that they often don't match up, it only gets you so far. Particularly when we're talking about the working mechanisms and nature of the material world.

There's just a lot more things there is no way to question or examine in religion, while every discovery and theory in the materialist world is questionable and examinable.

Religion, in some ways, has the advantage here, as there's less shifting sand involved, save in interpretation, while core scientific tenants get turned on their head on a comparatively regular basis. But of course, the atheist prefers that world that is so open to change.

Granted, some religions are more open to the idea that the holy works may not include the workings of the material world, and indeed, may not be factually accurate, but instead spiritually so. I suppose would be why so many of your more religiously conflicting scientific theories as to the nature of the universe have their roots in thoroughly religious men.

...the more staunch of the atheists would then in turn deny the value of spiritual pursuits, and yes, that is a shame.

God or Allah or any other diety is almost certainly not real, but their no way to determine if their is any higher power objectly because any being would not be subject to our laws and way of thinking

My theory: Humans have a bias towards ourselves, so we constructed deities that take after us and care primarily about us, despite being such a small spec in the universe.

Why did uncontacted peoples on Earth not have their own version of Jesus before meeting Christians, then?

Some of them did, if you stretch the interpretation enough, and they all religion of one sort or another.

There is no definite assertion that life exists out there. The more information we uncover about different life strategies/extremophiles, earthlike planets etc., continues to support the idea that life (or something of am equivalent but cannot be called life as we currently understand it) may be out there, hence the search for evidence one way or the other. Nobody declares that it definitely exists and then stops looking at exoplanets because they consider the matter settled.

Indra's net

Bigness or smallness is an illusion

Simple.
Size is not relevant to importance.
99% of an atom is void, 99% of the universe is void(and a ton of the rest is inhospitable)

>It's arguing from observations and statistics.
"dude, there are like so many blobs of rock and gas floating out there" is not statistics.

The number of exoplanets in the habitable zone of their star are observations.

still doesnt mean much.
Venus and Mars are also in the habitable zone, just for starters.

Sikhism is the only religion I'm aware of that talks about god creating life on other planets.

When you set that against the scale of the universe, and the fact that we are not made up of any particularly exotic matter (carbon being the fourth most common element in the universe, water being the third most common molecule, and even resulting extraterrestrial amino acids aren't unheard of), then you start getting into what science refers to as a "statistically insignifigant chance" of there not being life elsewhere. Even if the odds of it occurring anywhere are infinitesimal, there should billions upon billions of planets with life in the universe, and if the odds are better, trillions upon trillions.

Intelligent life, as we would recognize it, is another thing though. Odds are still good for it on those scales, even assuming vanilla life is rare, but it maybe it only occurs in one in a million galaxies or some such. It's much harder to determine, as the process is much more complicated.

And if you tune the odds to the extreme, there is a chance there's no other life in this galaxy, even if it seems unlikely. If that's the case, given universal expansion and assuming FTL isn't a thing, we will never come across another lifeform. So, from our perspective, that would effectively mean there's no other life in the universe, as eventually, this galaxy and those few that merge with it will be our entire observable universe.

Tons of religion, if not the majority of them, talk about other worlds - even if it's usually more akin to planes of existence with spirits, it's much of an interpretive leap to make. Additionally, among those, being of/from/beyond the sky is pretty common parlance.

>then you start getting into what science refers to as a "statistically insignifigant chance" of there not being life elsewhere.
Still not working logically.
The Sahara is also big as fuck, and made out of some pretty fertile dirt, but it's mostly a death zone, for all intents and purposes.

While i'm not denying aliens, since it's likely, the "it's statistics" thing is false, since you can't do statistics with a target sample of 1.

You can, it's just you can't very good statistics. No one has a solid number on the Drake equation. We'll need to get a better handle on how exactly life came to be first, but there's plenty of working theories and successful experiments of how it could happen, so it's just a matter of extrapolating what are the odds of those chemical conditions happening elsewhere and similarly sustaining themselves are.

...and we've found tons of potentially habitable planets within our tiny narrow view, and yes, have two sitting on either side of us. Given that there must be countless trillions of candidates (really, a practically infinite number), if there are any odds at all for life, there's a whole lot of it out there, even it if could be that all of it is forever out of our reach.

And more recent discoveries suggest this solar system isn't even the most likely sort to generate life. We found seven Earth-sized beasts, three in the temperate zone, one with oceans, orbiting around a red dwarf, which lends to theories that Earth-like planets are more common among them, and those stars are more common than our own. That star will remain stable for about a hundred billion years, while ours has a total of then - less than one left in it before it gets too hot here, and less than four beyond that before it's completely useless for life.

So given all that, statistically, life has to be out there - whether it's smart, complex, or forever beyond our reach, is more statistically debatable, and kinda requires knowledge we've yet to pick up.

>total of then
total of ten*