Morality

[Soli]

Doesn't the world seem chaotic and random if there's no God?

unless one is blind, or their filters are so strong (religion), the world IS chaotic, whether there is any god or not, and has been since before Homo Sapiens, since before Neandertal, since before apes. Well obviously, life on Earth was there a log time before Homo Erectus.

Do atheists have a problem with God OR religion or the books mainly?

I personnaly have a problem with religions, dogma, proselytism, rules, the way the books are interpreted and the way they were forged to exclude what  (the texts) didn't fit, and other things invented by religion like purgatory...

I spent most of my life not as an atheist, believing in some sort of universal mind or vibration, searched, read stuff, always wondering, maybe... Then I studied autism and read scientific books that gave me details about the evolution of the human brain that I had not before realized explaining clearly there could be no god that created the world, or then if there is, it's working quite chaotically, for how to explain the brain and body evolved that way, like the vagus nerve that's outside of the spine which doesn't make any logical sense, but it did make sense when we were fishes and that our eyes were on the side (they migrated to the front slowly, and our brain had to adapt little by little to that), and there was no need for the ancestor of the vagus nerve to be inside the spine then, like the other nerves... Nature doesn't go back, it adapts. The world looks even less like anything organized to me since I understood that.

To me books don't make that much sense, at least some parts of it.

It's fiction, totally invented by humans, based on earlier tales, the Mesopotamians... It's a nice read, but what about the apocryphe books that were rejected as early as 300 After J.C.? They are a good read also. But it's fiction, tales... I heard the Coran is mainly a guide to read the older writings, but I didn't read that one.

[Cin]

Thank you for your replies.

I'm just having a hard time accepting that world is chaotic, it seems like it just didn't fall into place. Strangely I can sort of see chaos everywhere else but earth. Evolution is a strange concept, to me, it feels like evolution must be intelligent to change us to what we are now. I'm trying to remove God from this equation, and what I can't see is evolution not happening without some intelligent force.

Anyway, I have a hard time with religious books, I have to take other people's word for it, some say the bad stuff I hear are just misinterpretations and quotes taken out of context.

That's why I stopped bothering. It's a just book anyway, there are some good stories in it, but I don't see it as absolute truth.

Is there a religion that states what God was doing before life was created on earth? I realize now that religions I know are kind of Earth centric and human centric.

[Colleen M]

Lots of religions talk about what happened before life on Earth.  The Greco-Roman myths start with Titans before the gods, then eventually get around to life as we know it.   The Norse legends IIRC start with Asgard before getting to Midgard.  That's just off the top of my head, anyway.

I don't recall a mythos which has our sun as the third one from our bit of stardust, though. 

[Deborah]

Evolution makes pretty good sense too after you understand the processes and the immense time scales involved.  I have never heard an argument against it that was very good. 


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[Soli]

I'm just having a hard time accepting that world is chaotic, it seems like it just didn't fall into place. Strangely I can sort of see chaos everywhere else but earth. Evolution is a strange concept, to me, it feels like evolution must be intelligent to change us to what we are now. I'm trying to remove God from this equation, and what I can't see is evolution not happening without some intelligent force.

I see exactly what you mean, I felt pretty much like that all my life, but since I never really was someone who is theist,  I came to think maybe we are experiments from other galaxies playing with genetics, like we'd be the result of a science fair contest, something... at least something, otherwise it just became a big blur in my mind. There had to be something.

well no, I found out that chaos brings the new, brings evolution. If everyone followed the rules religiously, there would never be anything new. So what creates? Chaos. Yes 

[Deborah]

Thank you for your replies.

I'm trying to remove God from this equation,

I tried that too and it didn't work.  I even read many books written by leading atheists and I know their arguments inside and out.  And many of their arguments are valid and very good too.   Most were of things I had already been considering.

What I noticed though is that the vast majority of the arguments aren't against God per say but against the idea of God in the Bible and the Quran. 

You cannot quantify or define God.  To me it simply a spiritual reality you feel or not.  It does not depend on a book although books can be useful.  They would say I suffer from "religious hysteria."  Maybe they're right.  But I don't think so.

[Colleen M]

For evolution in a nutshell, look at the peppered moth:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Long story short, the moth was mostly white and the occasional genetic freak black moths were eaten by predators before they could reproduce.  Then the industrial revolution coated England with soot and altered the environment.  In those conditions, the white moths stood out and were eaten by predators, while the genetic freak black moths prospered and multiplied.  So now the peppered moth was black and the white moths were the mutant freaks. They've now cleaned up the countryside a bit and the white moth is making something of a comeback.   

We observed a specific instance of evolution in the wild and then replicated it in the lab (several times, with varying degrees of professionalism).  That's fairly definitive.             

[Colleen M]

I tried that too and it didn't work.  I even read many books written by leading atheists and I know their arguments inside and out.  And many of their arguments are valid and very good too.   Most were of things I had already been considering.

What I noticed though is that the vast majority of the arguments aren't against God per say but against the idea of God in the Bible and the Quran. 

You cannot quantify or define God.  To me it simply a spiritual reality you feel or not.  It does not depend on a book although books can be useful.  They would say I suffer from "religious hysteria."  Maybe they're right.  But I don't think so.

The Abrahamic deity is just low-hanging fruit.  He's familiar to the western world, we're quite certain he's derivative plagiarized fiction, we know he's a bad guy, and we know he's been used as the excuse for a staggering amount of evil by a variety of churches.  That's a pretty good explanation for why the poor dumb schmuck is just destined to be Public Enemy Number One.         

Still, there's not really any need for divine intervention in any field of science.  Even cosmology and biogenesis may not know everything, but there's not really enough room left in what they don't know for anything deserving to be called a god.  At this point Occam's Razor argues against divine beings as they're really just overcomplicating otherwise elegant explanations.  Admittedly that's not definitive, but we're simply running out of places for "the god of holes" to hide. 

I'd also point out that positively arguing against any divine being anywhere any time is a fool's errand and you're not going to see the brightest even attempt to prove a negative.  That's simply too amorphous a target to even pretend you're not punching water.  I may not be able to prove there is no god, but I also can't conclusively prove that there is not a teakettle orbiting Mars.  Still, why would anybody ever expect me to prove there isn't a teakettle orbiting Mars without some minimal reason to believe there at least might be one up there?  The same standard applies with gods, as the Invisible Pink Unicorn satirizes.  Properly, the burden of proof in a logical argument rests with the positive assertion and I've heard of very few theists even attempt to pick that up.  None have ever actually even gotten close to succeeding.  If theists can't make a compelling argument in the first place, how can atheists be expected to refute what doesn't exist?       

Still, I'm reminded of the atheist joke to the effect that, "I prefer to believe that we are both atheists, I simply believe in one fewer god than you do."  If you don't believe Loviatar exists, or Dagda, or Quetzlcouatl, or Aten, or Crom, or any of a few thousand other examples, what makes the one you do believe in different?  There's a reason the "Obviously Zeus is a myth but Jehovah is real" view is compared to "Obviously Batman and Superman are comic book characters but I have a personal relationship with Spiderman."           

           

[Cin]

For evolution in a nutshell, look at the peppered moth:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Long story short, the moth was mostly white and the occasional genetic freak black moths were eaten by predators before they could reproduce.  Then the industrial revolution coated England with soot and altered the environment.  In those conditions, the white moths stood out and were eaten by predators, while the genetic freak black moths prospered and multiplied.  So now the peppered moth was black and the white moths were the mutant freaks. They've now cleaned up the countryside a bit and the white moth is making something of a comeback.   

We observed a specific instance of evolution in the wild and then replicated it in the lab (several times, with varying degrees of professionalism).  That's fairly definitive.           

Interesting, but now I'm confused cause it seems white moths went extinct, so it's extinction or evolution?

[Cin]

My understanding is that evolution is some kind of external entity acting on biological creatures, and changing them in appropriate ways.

I know things cannot be disproven, but I've always thought there's a difference between unicorns and God, because so many religions have God of some kind In their books, which makes it more credible.

Is it safe to say we cannot see evolution actually happening in real time or is there some animal that evolves fast that has been observed?

I have heard that science has incomplete fossils, like a head or a tail, and they imagine the rest of the creature, isn't that kinda like faith? Sorry, don't mean to sound anti science.

[Cin]

I have a better understanding of morality now. It's all about society, we like living together since we're social, and killing and stealing was thought to be detrimental to society, and it kinda started from there. I guess early man started punishing people who committed crimes and it just became good and bad as we know it.

[Eevee]

So that pretty much wraps up morality then. If you want to know the depths of evolution, we might be able to add some insight, but I doubt any of us are experts. What really helps there is delving into some deeper research. Just like morality, it doesn't work if you just fill in the blanks with something without evidence. Here's a great website that goes over it:

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html

Also, you asked about any evolution that we have actually observed. We have actually set up a speciation event with fruit flies in a lab.

[Colleen M]

Evolution includes extinctions.  White moths still happen, but the species is now black.  If white moths never happened and were truly extinct at this point, we still have a species of black moths which appeared due to a change in environment.  But consider neanderthals, Australopithecus, and so forth.  They used to walk the earth, they don't anymore because Homo Sapiens Sapiens (that's us) was better able to survive and prosper.  Admittedly, neanderthals appear to have done some cross-breeding with Europeans before disappearing.  One species going extinct and another taking its place in a changing ecosystem happens a lot in evolution.  The most vivid is the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.  Something like 75% of all animal species alive before perished during the event, but the 25% remaining diversified and flourished.  No tetrapod over 25kg made it.

In non-biological terms, did you know that Studebaker was the only American carriage manufacturer to survive the transition to automobiles?  One kind of business disappeared when the market changed, because another kind of business was better able to please customer demand in the new environment.  The only survivor changed and became unrecognizable in the process, but it was still Studebaker.  It's not entirely the same as animals, but it's broadly very similar kinds of forces at work.  Although we have to be careful with "social Darwinism" as it's led to some very ugly (Auschwitz, for example) places.  Please treat it as only a broad analogy intended to illustrate rather than a pure translation.       

And (Ken Ham's Ark aside) unicorns generally aren't the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn specifically.  "We know that she is invisible because we can't see her, and we have faith that she is pink."  And perhaps most importantly--this is the reason she was invented--she can't actually be disproven any more than Allah, Jehovah, etc.  She's a satirical exercise purely to put the shoe on the other foot and demonstrate how ridiculous it is when theists shift the burden of proof and demand atheists prove an imaginary being doesn't exist rather than being able to make a solid argument themselves.     

[KathyLauren]

Interesting, but now I'm confused cause it seems white moths went extinct, so it's extinction or evolution?

Evolution is a loaded word.  It describes the outcome, not the process.  The process is natural selection, which is the survival of those individuals best able to survive.  And, yes, extinction (i.e. failure to survive) is one of the main mechanisms of natural selection.

[Cin]

Thanks again for all the replies.

I don't meet atheists regularly, and I kinda ignored science  in school and I'm giving it another try. I always thought evolution was true though, but man Is unique.

If I didn't have God, I would have a hole or a feeling of  emptiness. I have always had this question in my mind, and that is if being atheist, makes you feel lonely?

From your point of view, life is just the sum of its parts. I.e, we developed morality cause we started differentiating what's beneficial to us as a species and what is not. Nothing more, nothing less.
.

[Colleen M]

I'm going to admit I still think worrying about loneliness is irrelevant.  It's like worrying whether being sober will make you unhappy, when the real question is what do you have to do to be a healthy responsible adult. 

That said, why on Earth would being an atheist make anybody lonely?  We aren't counting on some mystical being to bail us out at the end, which is why atheists (generally, there are exceptions) tend to worry more about what we can do to make this life more pleasant rather than muddling through and expecting the next time around will be better.  We appreciate life on a level that theists will never grasp because we commit to it wholeheartedly with no reservations and nothing held back for the next level.  Our friends and lovers are the only ones we'll ever have and we appreciate them all the more for it.  We have true companionship and need neither gods nor gigolos, holding their inauthentic company to be of equal value, and for the same reason. 
 
And don't sell short the sheer joy of life without gods. Theists see the human body and imagine it's a perfect work of divine art; we see a work in progress and imagine how we can make it work better and longer.  We can both look at a rainbow and see beauty, but there are more suns in the sky than there are grains of sand on the Earth, most of them with several planets.  For a theist, the rest of the universe is mere filler as our own planet is by definition the only special one.  An atheist sees so much more in those billions and billions of unique stars with each one special in its own right.  For example, we see planets which rain diamonds just in our own solar system and can only imagine what kind of marvels await throughout the universe.  We are on a spectacular life-altering journey of wonder and discovery, and while there are many things we don't yet understand, the only thing we will never comprehend is why theists not only don't want to come with us, but often want to hold us back. 

Similarly, morality is a concrete effort to improve the human condition on this planet.  The Dark Ages certainly suggest that many theists at one time saw little nobility in attempting to better people's living conditions, but I'd hoped The Enlightenment brought at least a few around to our point of view.  For an atheist, morality really is its own reward in a better social environment.  I can't quite wrap my head around the idea that a fanciful posthumous reward is even equal to that, let alone better somehow.                   

[Cin]

I say loneliness, cause hope, prayer, God, these things play a significant role, so if you took that away from me, I would have a giant void in my being.

What is hope to an atheist? When I hope something goes my way, I have God in mind.

As for space, I know it's amazing but we have so much to discover but we're never going to live long enough to know everything, so unless our conscience lives on, it just comes to an abrupt end.

I guess problem lies in me because who knows if things do come to an abrupt end.

I believe in both kind of modalities really, being a good person so that everyone can benefit from each other, also heaven and stuff cause it seems kinda fair...

But I'm looking at my own version of heaven, some say I'm already a sinner, but that would make God kinda messed up. I don't know all the answers, and I don't get along with theists much.

[AnonyMs]

I don't meet atheists regularly, and I kinda ignored science  in school and I'm giving it another try.

I dont think I've met anyone in real life who is religious in many years. I suppose there must be some, and I'm just not aware of it. It seems strange to me to think what it must be like in a religious community. I can't imagine it.

[Deborah]

I dont think I've met anyone in real life who is religious in many years. I suppose there must be some, and I'm just not aware of it. It seems strange to me to think what it must be like in a religious community. I can't imagine it.

My experience is the opposite.  If I go out to lunch with any of my friends from work, the vast majority prays before they eat.

[Cin]

I dont think I've met anyone in real life who is religious in many years. I suppose there must be some, and I'm just not aware of it. It seems strange to me to think what it must be like in a religious community. I can't imagine it.

It's like any other community. I don't really follow any religion and I can't quote from the book, I can't take the book too seriously, some people give me a hard time about it, but other people are very kind. Overall,  I like it.