First time I see this thread, otherwise I'd reply to it before.
There are a few thins I want to clear before jumping on my opinion about it.
First of all you have to watch all 5 videos of Richard Dawkins about "Growing up in the Universe". They are all on YouTube, so you can easily watch them as a movie, because each last 50+ minutes and it also has English subtitles. This mostly goes for Hell:
Quote (Hell)
As far as I think, there is probably something that could create our universe and life but it is just beyond our mind.
- In these 5 videos (watching for 5 hours) you will notice that ANYTHING that would be created, needed a creator (because our universe explains that). Which means, if someone was to "create" (this means just make him, not evolution - same goes for the whole world, universe) a human being, he has to be more complex himself. Why? Because laws of physics say so - and if you say you can't explain it with laws of physics, you obviously don't know enough about physics and all you say is that it can't be explained without knowing the basics - like most people do a mistake here. And by someone being even more complex than a human, world or the universe, it means he needs a creator of himself (again, I suggest you read books: Prior laws and Laws of Physics). Which obviously indicates that nothing can be created without having a creator, not even this mystic being called "God" (may it be energy, a used-to-be-person, as some say it "spirit", cosmic essence...) which comes to the conclusion that the pure definition of God is false. Here are all 5 links for Richard Dawkins' videos:
- (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHoxZF3ZgTo) Waking up in the Universe
- (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGyh1Qsw-Ak) Designed and Designoid Objects
- (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT1vXXMsYak) Climbing Mount Improbable
- (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igTWNidwnk) The Ultraviolet Garden
- (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm-0Z0ceezQ) The Genesis of Purpose
You have to watch these videos in this order, because they connect to each other, and you gotta watch them ALL if you start watching one.
Do not dare to say "That's not true" or "I don't agree with you" or "You are speaking nonsense" or "You are deluded" to me before you watch all 5 of these videos. Because these 5 videos are just a start of the actual knowledge you should be dealing with in 21st century.
I read a lot about Astronomy, Math, Physics, Nanotechnology, and things similar to that like Singularity. And I warn you again, before you are on the same knowledge of things as me, don't you dare criticize me without concept. Now I shall revise some quotes above.
Added (2010-10-03, 11:33 Am)
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Quote (Ateist)
I dont really know what to believe in. Which is also a part of my atheism.
Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. (from Wikipedia)
Atheists go to this extent that they do not believe in "force" or "spirit" or "God" or some sort of "energy" that is ‘beyond their mind’. And that's about it. Their so called ‘belief’, or how I'd rather call it, thought of how things began can vary from atheist to atheist - it doesn't mean they all think the same thing.
"What is the difference between an Atheist and a Christian?" Well ... Christians do not believe in Ba'al, Thor, Ra and many others. The only difference between them is that Atheist went one God further.
Quote (Ateist)
I think the universe was created by nothing, because nothing doesn't exist.
Another misinterpretation of a word ‘nothing’. I'll give you a quick example of what I mean: Imagine the very back of your head. The part where you can't see with your eyes, and you can only see it if you look at the double mirror. That part is called nothing because you have to ‘believe’ that there is actually something on back of your head - how do you know for sure that mirrors actually show you what your eyes would've shown you otherwise?.. Again, watch all 5 videos I linked above and you will see that you cannot use the argument "nothing" to explain things, because there always is "something".
Now, to actually discuss something like this, YOU have to read the book of Richard Dawkins (yes, again him - he's just awesome) called (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion) The God Delusion. Now, the title might be a little misleading (like he explains in the book) - however, the book looks like this: it will criticize religion to it's full extent, it will explain to you a difference between 7 different parts of "point of views" (like Agnosticism, Atheism, et cetera).
After reading this book you can be 3 different things:
- You now fully understand why religion is based on nothing but it's only appeared to be that it is ... you are a complete Agnostic, leaning on Atheism.
- You finally let your brain work around this subject for the first time, you can see the flaws in religion, but you might still have some little tiny bit of it, but you won't believe it.
- Now this last one goes only for the "true" believers. If you truly believe in God, you follow it by the word of it, your thinking will not change to the extent of God, you will only think wider about it.
So basically EVERYONE has to read this book, because it gives you a nice insight may you be a God believer or not.
[size=7]There is also a very nice excerpt in a book saying how you can know that God by the Bible doesn't exist. There are actually 2 simple ways:
- There is nothing allmighty, because not even allmighty can create a rock that he cannot lift himself.Added (2010-10-03, 11:34 Am)
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- (By book of Basic Laws you should know that things you say exist, you have to find evidence for them, you have to show the basics and actual research for it - and then you can say it exists ... now, people actually said that there is some(one)thing called God that exists, but he doesn't need evidence for it. Christians actually say this: Prove that he isn't there!!! - isn't this a contradiction to all other things we call "proven" ... we just somehow agreed that we don't have to prove existence of God, because ... "HE'S GOD"). Now, may I say the same? I state there is a tea-pot in the orbit of Mars. And since I state that it's too small to actually see it with our telescopes, you can't prove that it isn't there. And since you can't prove it isn't there, it means there is!!!! There you go folks, start believing in tea-pot that orbits Mars.
But hm, if I went on the TV saying that, people would tell me I'm crazy and probably even lock me into a mental institution (yeah, they would -.-). However, if the existence of a tea-pot orbiting the orbit of Mars was written in some dusty old book that was written by that tea-pot's spoon and if that the existence of such a tea-pot would be preached by many people so called priests and if it was given a remind of it's existence on every Sunday in the church, then I think people would believe in such a tea-pot ... can you imagine?[/size]
Quote (Ateist)
I believe that there are an infinite amount of parallel universes having their own time of period (which means that we exist in an infinte amount of times in our life). Though I dont believe that the universes are linear, in some kind of way.
Again, you should read a lot of books concerning Physics and Astronomy - and by a lot I mean A LOT.
Because it seems to me that you try to "believe" in things that seem "likely" to you, not "almost certain".
I'll give you a quick example: Search the word "Quasar" on Internet and read the articles about how waves of motion and vision goes through them. Now I might have left some quotes opened to the debate, because we are not on the same level of knowledge and therefore we cannot discuss it on different grounds.
But I will start talking about how I see the universe and life.
Myself always use TAP (or so called "temporary agnosticism in practice") discussions that I discuss. This meaning that you cannot know for certain that some things exist, but the evidence, prior knowledge and researches about it tell you the very likely idea.
The idea of the grandest scientists of late 20th and whole 21st century is that parallel universes have around 65% chance of existence, which is quite low. The reason about is that there is basically a very huge lack of evidence for it, prior knowledge tells us that even if they would exist, it wouldn't affect ours and researches tell you that if it would interact with our universe, we would know it. That might seem that I'm talking that I do not "believe" in there being a parallel universe, but I actually have a really open mind about it. I think there are parallel universes, but I do not state that they ARE, I just "think" they are.
Added (2010-10-03, 11:34 Am)
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Now, the point why I actually replied, and which I also strongly think possible, is this: Scientists, most high Mathematicians and Physicist say there is almost 100% chance (this is statistic, do not think this means this is certain although it's 100% - check for example "chance of having birthday on the same day as my classmate" on google or something, you will see the idea) that we live in a Virtual Reality. Now, some of you will almost certainly reply to my post saying "oh lol, we live in VR ..." or something like that, making fun of it or misinterpret it. I also state this because I've read a lot about this matter and I support it to it's extent. The reason for this thinking is the actual evidence. We have made VR's before, where we copied a random person's emotions and attitude into a "game" which was consistent of a room and this man inside. All this man knew was the objects inside the room and he acted accordingly, he lived his life for 1 month only being inside that room doing things that were available to him. Then we opened the door which was invisible before, and he started to act differently. The experiments like this are many (you could also say that the game called The Sims is one of them), just it's a different extent of things. Prior knowledge tells us that this is very likely possible, specially how things interact in our world. As for researches, they show almost certainty about it.
All what I've noted above might be hard to understand just by reading a few lines I "might" have made up with. That's why you actually have to read about it in books, Internet, et cetera.
The thing people procuring this wanted to make is something like this: Imagine yourself being put in a dark room, away from everybody, having just food and shelter for a month. And let's say after that month you are brought outside, losing most of your memory, lack of speaking complicated things (since you were so psychologically damaged) and lack of doing things swift. In that moment you would think this is the very edge of your possibilities, that this is all you can do. But eventually, when you would have been given a care from Psychologists, you would start to remember things and stuff would become more clear to you.
This means that at the moment the origin of Universe and how Life began might be a little complicated to you, but once you are given the knowledge about it (TAP, like above), you get a wider thinking about things that seemed complex to you. This means that when you would actually "awake" or however some people will call it, things will get simpler just by thinking it.
A good quote was made in the movie Inception (2010) if you haven't seen it yet, by Leonardo DiCaprio: "It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."
Writing this reply makes me think of so many things that I could have said here, but I don't think the entire forum would have enough space for it. All I can say is that Inception is a nice way of saying that dreams could be connected to the VR. How so? Ever heard of Lucid Dreaming? If not ... have you ever been sleeping and dreaming, but you actually knew that you were dreaming? If you haven't you should read about it a little. But if you have, you know what I am talking about, but you have probably experienced only a few seconds of it. In that state of mind you can actually control your dreams however you like, you can control your dreams to show you what you want to see and to actually FEEL what you want. For example, some people who haven't been skydiving before wanted to Lucid Dream sky-diving and it actually gave them the same feeling when they actually went sky-dive a year later.
This might seem to you "oh bullshit" or "yeah right" or "maybe", but what if I told you it's been proven a few decades ago and that a lot of good scientists and other people use it? For example, there is one guy describing that he was dreaming for 2 hours in real life, but in the dream, his dream lasted around 2 weeks. Imagine doing things of 2 weeks in only 2 hours, but yes, he had years of training every day. Even when I read this, it seems a little fictional, but you can actually read about this on Internet - (http://www.lucidipedia.com/misc/index.php) Lucipedia.
Oh and Ate, if you ask me, you are 80% Agnostic and 20% Atheist, meaning you're not an Atheist as you present yourself as. And don't think that's a bad thing, it's actually better then it could be. Being a complete Atheist is presented almost the same as being a complete Christian, just in a different way, different point of view.
Added (2010-10-03, 11:53 Am)
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Oh yeah, there is one thing I forgot to add.
A video of Richard Dawkins (yes, him again) about how our Universe is queer. This video probably gives you the best insight of things you were searching the answer for, Ate.
(http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html) Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe
