Experts
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Agree
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Iconic Philosopher of 20th Century
Agree
To pray is to think about the meaning of life. ... To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
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Christian Teacher
Agree
In Genesis, you are reading a description analogous to Flatland. The concept is that, a God, who is in a higher dimension than are we, a God who has the same kind of relationship to us which the sphere had to Flatland, that, this kind of being touched our little "Flatland" so to speak, and in violation of all of our laws of science created matter out of nothing. God is so superior to us, he exists in such a higher dimension than do we that what is natural and ordinary to him is miraculous to us.
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United States President
Agree
[My baptism] came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.
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Australian Prime Minister, 2007-
Agree
You can't simply have, in my own judgment, creation simply being a random event because it is so inherently ordered, and the fact that the natural environment is being ordered where it can properly coexist over time. ... If you were simply reducing that to mathematically probabilities I've got to say it probably wouldn't have happened. ... So I think there is an intelligent mind at work.
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Novelist, Essayist, English Professor
Agree
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
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Political T.V. Host, Comedian
Agree
Religion to me is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need. But I'm not an atheist, no.
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Leader of Al Qaeda
Agree
All praise is due to Allah, who built the heavens and earth in justice, and created man as a favor and grace for Him. ... and from His law is retaliation in kind: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and the killer is killed. And all praise is due to Allah, who awakened His slaves' desire for the Garden, and all of them will enter it except those who refuse. And whoever obeys Him alone in all of his affairs will enter the Garden, and whoever disobeys Him will have refused.
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Neutral
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3rd United States President
Neutral
Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
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Disagree
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Iconic Philosopher of 19th Century
Mostly Disagree
The Christian concept of a god — the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit — is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type.
Iconic Philosopher of 20th Century
Disagree
My conclusion [to the question: is there a god?] is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.
Philosopher
Disagree
It's not that [theists are] lacking in labels and characteristics to attribute to their gods, it's just that so many of these characteristics contradict each other. To put it simply, not all of these characteristics can be true because one cancels out the other out or a combination of two (or more) leads to a logically impossible situation. When this happens, the definition is no longer coherent or understandable.
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Psychology Professor
Mostly Disagree
My criticism of religion [...] was defensive, meant to counter the argument that morality can only come from a belief in a soul that accepts God's purpose and is rewarded or punished in an afterlife. I think the evidence suggests that this doctrine is false both logically and factually. I don't make a point of criticizing religion in general. Some hard-headed biologists and evolutionary theorists believe that an abstract conception of a divine power is consistent with conventional Darwinism.
Evolutionary Biologist, Writer, Atheism Activist
Disagree
God is a delusion. ... Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles - except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand.
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Father of Communism
Disagree
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. ... Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
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Ambiguous or Flip-Flop
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Physicist, Icon of the 20th Century
Neutral
I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
Physicist, Icon of the 20th Century
Disagree
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.
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Arguments
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If you
disagree, then you
possibly
disagree with:
Does God exist?
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Both western and eastern religions assert that the world is a just place, whether that is made possible by God, or through the subtle workings of the Law of Karma. In contrast, from an atheists perspective, the universe is at best an amoral place. Bad things happen to good people and vice versa; morality is only enforced, if at all, by humans, not God; morality a muddled mosaic of meaning undermined by mortality.
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My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. ... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. [The] very act of trying to prove that [...] reality was senseless [forced me to assume] my idea of justice--was full of sense.
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The moral design of nature is as bungled as its engineering design. What twisted sadist would have invented a parasite that blinds millions of people or a gene that covers babies with excruciating blisters? To adapt a Yiddish expression about God: If an intelligent designer lived on Earth, people would break his windows.
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If you
disagree, then you
necessarily
agree with:
Does God exist?
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Many religious thinkers do not find a purely scientific account of the universe plausible. Areas where the scientific explanation is questioned include the universe's origin, life on earth, human consciousness, and human morality.
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You can't simply have, in my own judgment, creation simply being a random event because it is so inherently ordered, and the fact that the natural environment is being ordered where it can properly coexist over time. ... If you were simply reducing that to mathematically probabilities I've got to say it probably wouldn't have happened. ... So I think there is an intelligent mind at work.
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...it seems to me that physics is in a better position to give us a partly satisfying explanation of the world than religion can ever do, because although physicists won't be able to explain why the laws of nature are what they are and not something completely different, at least we may be able to explain why they are not slightly different. ... Religious theories, on the other hand, seem to be infinitely flexible, with nothing to prevent the invention of deities of any conceivable sort.
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If you
disagree, then you
necessarily
disagree with:
Does God exist?
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The answer lies at the heart of one's personal philosophy or religious belief. For theists, the meaning of life is to serve God. For atheists, the meaning of life is generally more complex to define. For a theist, life cannot be meaningful without God - an assumption vigorously challenged by many atheists.
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What makes our lives meaningful is that we find the activities we engage in to be worthwhile. Our determination to carry out projects we have created for ourselves gives our lives meaning. We feel that life is meaningless when most of our desires which we regard as important are frustrated. Whether we regard life as meaningful or meaningless depends on the degree to which our important desires are frustrated.
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I think in a very positive way. ... I think that man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. ...man can only attempt to make something very, very positive by trying to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves, by prolonging possibly his life by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors.
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If you
disagree, then you
possibly
disagree with:
Does God exist?
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The belief in an immaterial soul requires that central aspects of a person, such as consciousness, memories, and personality, are not contingent upon our physical bodies. The concept was first formalized in western philosophy by Rene Descartes in the 17th century, who proposed that our soul interacts with our body via the pineal gland in the brain. That theory has since been rejected by mainstream science.
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The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.
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Imagine a world in which each of us has a special inner core - a ‘real self’ - that makes us who we are, that can think and move independently of our coarse physical body, and that ultimately survives death, giving meaning to our otherwise short and pointless lives. This is (roughly speaking) how most people think the world is. It is how I used to think -and even hope - that the world is. I devoted 25 years of my life to trying to find out whether it is. Now I have given up.
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If you
agree, then you
possibly
disagree with:
Does God exist?
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With the scientific method, it is an empirical question as to whether a person's belief in God has a genetic component. From a religious point of view, the idea that a person's fate is predetermined from material causes may undermine the concepts of free will and spirituality.
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The idea of a God gene goes against all my personal theological convictions. You can't cut faith down to the lowest common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist thinking.
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Buddha, Muhammad and Jesus all shared a series of mystical experiences or alterations in consciousness and thus probably carried the gene. This means that the tendency to be spiritual is part of genetic makeup. This is not a thing that is strictly handed down from parents to children. It could skip a generation. It's like intelligence.
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If you
agree, then you
possibly
disagree with:
Does God exist?
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People who believe in God generally believe that a purely analytical and scientific method of forming knowledge is constrained to a subset of reality that cannot encompass God. Atheists on the other hand, typically say that God is merely one of numerous theories that lack coherence and supporting evidence, and that these shortcomings already constitutes sufficient proof of God's non existence.
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Scientific proofs [...] are valid only for things perceptible to the senses, since it is only on such things that scientific instruments of investigation can be used. To desire a scientific proof of God would be equivalent to lowering God to the level of the beings of our world, and we would therefore be mistaken methodologically in regard to what God is. Science must recognize its limits and its inability to reach the existence of God. It can neither affirm nor deny his existence.
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The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference. ... The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie...
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Indirect Arguments
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If you
agree, then you
necessarily
disagree with:
Is the world explainable without God?
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This philosophical question is a form of the Cosmological Argument or First Cause Argument. The question is whether it makes sense that the universe "came into existence from nothing". Modern physics suggests that the notion of time, and hence cause and effect, break down at the time of the big bang, rendering the intuitive demand for a "first cause" meaningless.
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...you have a choice. You can either say, "Well, that's just the way it is; we're here because we're here." That seems to me unduly intellectually supine. I would like to understand why the world is the way it is. Shortcutting some detailed argument, I would say that for me the most satisfying insight is that the world is indeed not 'any old world,' but a creation whose given law and circumstance has been willed by its creator to be capable of fruitful process.
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If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The [First Cause] argument is really no better than that.
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If you
agree, then you
possibly
agree with:
Is the world explainable without God?
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The theory of evolution is that life evolves as organisms randomly mutate, where the ones with traits best adapted to their environment survive and reproduce their successful mutations. Soon after Charles Darwin proposed this theory in the book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, it became widely accepted by the scientific community. Its truth is central to modern biology and it remains the only scientific theory that could explain complex life without a creator.
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Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions. But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time. Personally, I am a young-Earth creationist. I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself.
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It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, ... goose bumps that uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up long-gone fur.
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If you
agree, then you
necessarily
disagree with:
Is the world explainable without God?
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Miracles are events attributed to divine intervention. From a scientific perspective, miracles have no place because they violate the laws of physics and are unreproducible via experiments. As such, scientists tend to attribute miracles to the fallibility of human interpretation of events.
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Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water"; so they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet." They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine.
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There do not seem to be any exceptions to this natural order, any miracles. I have the impression that these days most theologians are embarrassed by talk of miracles, but the great monotheistic faiths are founded on miracle stories—the burning bush, the empty tomb, an angel dictating the Koran to Mohammed—and some of these faiths teach that miracles continue at the present day.
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If you
disagree, then you
possibly
disagree with:
Does belief in God have a significant genetic component?
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The belief that we control our decisions is seemingly undermined by the fact that the future is an inevitable consequence of the past. When we put our foot on a car's accelerator, we know that this causes chemical combustion in the car, and that the car has no choice but to go faster. Similarly, the putting of our foot on the accelerator was also caused by chemical combustion - one in our own brains. For this reason, many philosophers and scientists regard free will as illusionary.
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Situation-action machines are built with a bunch of rules that say, "If in situation X, do A," "If in situation B, do Z," [etc.]. A choice machine [looks] at the world [and] says, "If I did this, what would happen? If I did that, what would happen? ... It builds up an anticipation of what the likely outcome of one action or another would be, and then chooses on the basis of how much that outcome is valued or disvalued. They're both machines, but [the latter] is much more free than the other.
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I don’t think "free will" is a very sensible concept, and you don’t need neuroscience to reject it — any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will! Most thoughtful neuroscientists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of rationality — that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning.
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If you
agree, then you
possibly
agree with:
Is God just?
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The Law of Karma is a concept from Indian religions, where a person will always have to face the consequences of their moral actions. While simplistically, it can be interpreted as the principle that eventually good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, the theory actually suggests a much deeper symmetry between the past and present across the evolution of a person's psyche.
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Comments
Collective
Agree
Atheists want easy answers.
Atheists eliminate the possibility that God exists through their insistence on His fixed, measurable, dead definition. They fail to grasp that God wouldn't be God if He was easy to understand or easy to let into your heart. The fact that He challenges us scares the atheist. The fact that He is unfathomably and immeasurably greater than the mind of an atheist is more than the atheist's ego can tolerate.
The real atheist is rare, because he is an abhorrent creature, who cares nothing but for himself. Richard Dawkins does not live up to his own ideal, for he treats Truth with great respect, even when he misses the mark, which is frequently when he steps outside what he actually is an expert in. Truth is an ideal of God, and God must chuckle when he sees Dawkins paying Him homage without even realizing it.
Atheists get confused that God doesn't have a precise meaning. Well: God is meaning. They get confused that God doesn't make sense. Well neither does the fabric of the universe itself, whether that be through logical paradoxes, Godel's theorem, or quantum theory. God is all of it. In the moment when we realize chasing knowledge itself is merely a game within His great plan, we get a tiny glimpse at true awesomeness. You want to throw the most beautiful thing your consciousness can ever experience because it's not easy to understand and spend the rest of your life washing dishes? That is atheism. Or do you want your life to be a wonderful adventure where in return for a little humility He reveals his true nature? That is believing in God.
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Edit (wiki edits require login)
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Disagree
Before we can even ask whether God exists, we have to ask what do we mean by God. When this is done, believers in God fall into two camps. Those that: 1. Come up with a precise definition of God, but one that can't make logical sense. 2. Change the definition of God to something sufficiently nebulous such that it doesn't mean anything. Let's start with 1. A god that isn't a just god isn't much of a god to believe in. Why follow him if he has no sense of justice? Yet all the evidence suggests that God is not just. Christianity needs to invent the concept of heaven and hell to even out the moral imbalance that exists here on earth. But how can an all knowing all loving God create people who he must have known in advance were going to spend an eternity in hell? It just doesn't make any sense. Moving onto 2. Here we have philosophers who reflecting on the poignancy in life, decide to label that sublime feeling God. That's fine, but at that point the word "God" doesn't really mean much. And it certainly means something very different to what most people mean by the word. The other issue here, is the whole concept of arguing for God is pointless. It's supposed to be a matter of faith. I.e. you switch your brain off, and let God in. As soon as you feel the need to start justifying His existence, He already doesn't exist.
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Edit (wiki edits require login)
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Individual
Neutral
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gave their takeonit
on 22 Dec 2008
Neutral
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Disagree
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gave their takeonit
on 04 Mar 2009
Disagree
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Editorial
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gave their takeonit
on 13 Sep 2008
Editorial Comment
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