Give one reason or argument that God doesnt exist

[austin12345]

Try and give one reason philosophically or scientifically that God doesnt exist, but not one emotionally.

[Mithrae]

So using a common definition - the capacity to do work - it seems obvious that any hypothetical god would have abundant energy. Thus energy is not created in a theistic system, it simply changes form, as we know it does.

Abundant energy to reform energy? Well hypothetically perhaps. But not to create energy. What is your definition of a God? Because humans have the ability to reform energy. But we're not Gods. What you are theorizing is simply a higher form of technology then ours. We have a higher form of technology then the ancient Sumerians. But we're still not Gods. Only more knowledgeable then they were.

Genesis 1
[1] "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

If energy cannot be created then there are no discrete beginnings. Only a never ending series of ever receding cause and effect.

That's logically absurd. There there were an infinite sequence of past causes and effects now, what would the past sequence of causes and effects have been 13 billion years ago?

You objected to the idea of 'God' based on the creation of energy. But even assuming you can validly apply thermodynamics on such a quasi-metaphysical scale, as Olav and Divine Insight have questioned, I'm still not seeing your problem. The word 'creation' bugs you, obviously - fair enough. So you could change it to "In the beginning God formed from his capacity to do work the types of energy known to us as the heavens and the earth." It loses a little of its flair, to be sure, but where's the problem?

[Nickman]

[Replying to post 26 by Mithrae]

For me, it comes down to one point. God either does or does not exists. There is no middle ground. Now if it/he/she does exist and did create the universe then all evidence would point to its existence. The most rational explanation would be that of a deity.

[JoeyKnothead]

From the OP:

Give one reason or argument that God doesn't exist.

The enacting of legislation in an effort to make folks act like he does.

[austin12345]

[Replying to post 21 by Tired of the Nonsense]

That law is dependent upon the existing universe as it is. Science itself asserts that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago in the event known as the big bang literally out of nothing. As Alexander Vilenkin said himeslef all other theories have fallen short of demining an actualy beginning of the universe.

Therefore matter energy etc did come into existence.

[southern cross]

[Replying to post 21 by Tired of the Nonsense]

That law is dependent upon the existing universe as it is. Science itself asserts that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago in the event known as the big bang literally out of nothing. As Alexander Vilenkin said himeslef all other theories have fallen short of demining an actualy beginning of the universe.

Therefore matter energy etc did come into existence.

You would need citations for the bold above, thanks.

[Mithrae]

[Replying to post 26 by Mithrae]

For me, it comes down to one point. God either does or does not exists. There is no middle ground.

Logically yes, but that doesn't make it a simple black and white question. At any stage in human history we could say the same about matter, consciousness etc. etc, but it doesn't answer or avoid the question of what matter, consciousness, god and so on are actually like.

Now if it/he/she does exist and did create the universe then all evidence would point to its existence. The most rational explanation would be that of a deity.

And so it is, from what little I know, but that doesn't mean that it will be obvious to all people. You might as well say that all the 18th century evidence pointed to a big bang 14 billion years ago. Presumably true, as we now know, but they'd hardly collected or understood all the evidence back then. If there were some kind of 'god,' odds are that in a century or three it would be obvious to all people; our current dabbling with physicalism rather than idealism would be comparable to Newtonian mechanics, an intuitively sensible and useful model/approximation but not technically correct. For now there's still too much we don't know, too many questions remaining about consciousness, choice, quantum mechanics vs. relativity, dark matter and energy and so on.

We've come a long way in recent centuries, and as this thread has shown we have not yet disproved theism nor proven a comprehensive non-theistic model, but we do know that there's still a ways to go. Indeed in another century or two, if (as seems increasingly unlikely) we've managed not to fry ourselves to extinction before then, we'll probably have found vast new horizons to explore. But it's possible that among the things we'll have learned with greater assuredness is whether it's best to view reality as objective and nonconscious, or whether we must presume that subjective/conscious characteristics are basic to reality rather than just organic anomalies.

[playhavock]

Try and give one reason philosophically or scientifically that God doesnt exist, but not one emotionally.

There is no ontolgical meening to the word.
There is no emperical evidance for it.
There are no tests we can perfom to show it.

In the past when "God" is used it is latter shown to be natural - thunder, lighting, both attubited to deitys - no longer so.

Relgions offer no reasons to think they are right - real study offen shows they are wrong about claims. Negive archoligy finds for meny relgion claims.

No positve proof that any relgion is true.

No logical augment for it.

Thats a few.

[Bust Nak]

Try and give one reason philosophically or scientifically that God doesnt exist, but not one emotionally.

That no one have provided arguments to show God's existence, to the standard that I required for all existential claims, is a great philosophical reason that God doesn't exist.

That no one have provided empirical evidence to show God's existence, to the standard that science required, is a great scientific reason that God doesn't exist.

Infact, I would count each failed attempt at showing God's existence, as individual reasons for God's non existence, so there are countless reasons.

[bernee51]

W[quote="austin12345"]
Try and give one reason philosophically or scientifically that God doesnt exist, but

Well so far we have several....I guess that answers you question.

next please....

[Tired of the Nonsense]

That's logically absurd. There there were an infinite sequence of past causes and effects now, what would the past sequence of causes and effects have been 13 billion years ago?

The sequence of past causes and effects 13 billion years ago would still be infinite, just as minus 13 billion from the infinite still equals the infinite. That's that way infinite works. The concept of infinite is an inherently logically absurd concept for finite beings to wrap their minds around.

You objected to the idea of 'God' based on the creation of energy. But even assuming you can validly apply thermodynamics on such a quasi-metaphysical scale, as Olav and Divine Insight have questioned, I'm still not seeing your problem.

Here at least we are in agreement because I'm not seeing my problem either.

The word 'creation' bugs you, obviously - fair enough. So you could change it to "In the beginning God formed from his capacity to do work the types of energy known to us as the heavens and the earth." It loses a little of its flair, to be sure, but where's the problem?

It's not creation that bothers me so much. It's the concept of some sort of a discreet beginning where once nothing existed. No such phenomenon is ever observed to occur, and assuming that such a beginning MUST occur at some point risks doing that old assume thing to you and me, since it absolutely flies in the face of all observation.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

Even in Genesis there was no discreet "beginning." There was already God. The universe came from "something else," and that something else is given the name "God" in Genesis. What did the ancients know that we don't know, one wonders? What was God's beginning, and what came before that? Genesis does not give us that information. It does tell us however that before the beginning of the universe, there was already something else. That's what we observe in an unbroken chain anyway, cause preceding effect. The idea of things existing fresh and new where once none existed is an arbitrary human misconception anyway. We might regard you are a distinctly unique individual, something which came into the universe as a distinctly new thing where no such thing had ever existed before. But in reality that is a philosophical conclusion, a matter of human convention. For example, you began as a discrete unique organism, as we all do, at the moment of your conception when the ovum and sperm united and created the zygote which grew into you. We consider you to be a unique individual where none such existed before, But in physical terms the material that formed the zygote that became you preexisted you. You came from "something else," and every part of your body has existed as an infinite number of other things in the past. You are a continuation of things that went on before your conception, although uniquely assembled. All of the material in your body is tens of billions of years old, AT LEAST. The possibility must be considered that the material of your body is infinitely old, since energy cannot be created or destroyed. What we observe you see is an unbroken string of effects preceded by a cause, all the way back to the big bang. Does that mean the big bang represents the first cause? WHY SHOULD IT? Was the big bang the result of a first cause? WHY MAKE SUCH AN ASSUMPTION? We simply cannot answer these questions currently. So why make up answers? In truth we have no experience with any uncaused causes. We simply observe that the big bang is the earliest cause we know of. But that does not imply that it is not itself the effect of some earlier cause. If we think of the universe in terms of having been born rather than created abruptly from scratch, not a discrete beginning where nothing was before in defiance of everything else that we observe, then it's clear that something preexisted the big bang. On that point at least I believe theists would have to declare their agreement. Theists declare that which preexisted the big bang to be God, a position difficult to "prove" wrong, since we do not KNOW the answer to what preexisted the big bang. Cosmologists and physicists are now more and more commonly referring to the possibility of something preexisting the big bang as the "multi-verse, " a concept which fits in with string theory and certain other observations concerning the condition of the observable universe. I personally am not prepared to declare anything about a condition prior to the big bang simply because no such hard information exists as of yet. Making up an answer and declaring it to be true gets us exactly nowhere, you see. One hard piece of experimental information that we do have however, is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. That does imply rather forcefully that something existed prior to the big bang.