I did a book report on A Brief History of Time back in Grade 8 (to allow me to pass that year, as I had not bothered to do… well just about all the reports otherwise out of boredom). I found myself hooked by Dr. Hawking’s writing style and clear-even-to-13-year-old-me writing style.
I don’t usually sit down with a book and just read anymore - nowadays, it’s usually a few pages here-and-there in-between something else, or an audiobook. But for this one, I think I’ll pull up the ol’ armchair, grab a beverage, and take it all in.
I’m firmly in the “No,” camp, but if you have any specific beliefs then feel free to go ahead, as long as you’re not being a dick about it.
No religion gives you an excuse to mistreat people in any way whatsoever.
We already have a word for that–it is called the universe. Why confuse things by naming the universe ‘god’, and then backtracking on all the things history has associated with god, like being conscious, omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, interested in who we sleep with, jealous, vindictive, requiring blood sacrifice, OK with slavery, able to make covenants, willing to forgive the worst sins as long as someone believe he exists with no evidence, able to raise the dead, willing to accept symbolic substitutional sacrifice for the atonement of sins, etc. Are any of these things properties of ‘the universe’? Add to that that now you have to explain how god created himself–the argument of a transcendent creator is that he is not part of the universe, and so created it, but if god is the universe, who created the god-universe? If the universe is none of these things, then it isn’t god. If the universe is none of these things but is nevertheless god, then god isn’t what humans have defined god to be, and so it is a futile exercise anyway.
Make sure to read the fine print:
“…some assembly required… assorted sizes… assorted genders…may be past expiration date…gently used…”
Does anyone ever think of the pivot? You spend your entire life being chaste and spiritual. No drinking, no sex, no drugs, honest. ethical, kind, … you eventually pass away. You arrive at heaven and it is more splendid than you could of ever imagined. Right after you arrive a young man arrives. He just blew up a bus load of children that belong to a religion he doesn’t like. God then chucks you and 71 other virgins into a room so that this jerk can you rape you. That sounds fair. :-\ /s
… I think we are the biological, thinking, tiny appendix of the universe that considers about itself. but you dont need a “god” for that."
I’m not thinking that a god/universe cares about who I sleep with, or is any way shape or form like a sky god willing to accept sacrifices, etc., but I am open to the possibility that the universe is not “merely” a mechanical process, but I certainly don’t have the physics to defend any potential thoughts I may have on the matter. I fully accept that understanding the universe is far beyond my feeble brain’s comprehension.
Agnostics don’t like to get boxed into anything, we like to straddle many fences and bob and weave in any fight. And mix metaphors.
Hopefully, he didnt reprise his disastrous “aliens will visit us and destroy us” claim.
If anything, aliens will visit us and the extraterrestrial microbes that they unintentionally expose us to will destroy us.
A tiny minority of a minority would believe in the existence of an allpowerful god who, nevertheless, never bothered to use his allpowerfulness (and, while he could have created/modified the universe in any way if he so chose, he, nevertheless, did nothing in this regard). An even smaller minority would ever worship this inactive deity.
C’mon. The tenet of an allpowerful god necessitates the tenet that said god (1) created the universe, (2) for some reason, cares an awful lot about the species Homo sapiens on the planet Earth.
As individuals, we cannot even hold in our minds at one time everything humanity presently knows. We specialize our knowledge by necessity, and carry only the loosest tags and impressions of understanding about things beyond that specialization. I don’t just mean “having a doctorate in physics, but knowing nothing about poetry”. Maybe you’re a polymath, who gets cited as an expert in physics, philosophy, and culinary studies–yet your life does not revolve around city planning, or open-heart surgery, or semiotics specifically, or stagecraft. Those who do live in those spheres may hold knowledge you’ll never, ever see. Never dream of, never enter into your calculations.
Yet we are so very quick to believe there is nothing we do not, or cannot, know. We can, apparently, wrap our heads easily around the vastness of infinite possibility and decree “nope, there’s nothing there” with a calm certainty.
When an athlete points to the sky after making a goal, I wonder what God’s bet was on the spread and why he/she/it is so invested in the Houston Oilers.
I don’t think anyone is saying that “there is nothing we do not, or cannot, know.” I suspect that much that is true about the universe is well beyond our cognitive capacity. But while there is much we do not know, there is much that we DO, and one of those things is that what we know about reality is incompatible with most, if not all, definitions of God that would actually be meaningful.
