The thing is if God exists, then you know as well as I do, you’re in trouble. So, if you’re going to the route of not believing, when all the evidence seems to point the opposite direction, you’d better be sure or you and every believer you affect with your posts is in for a real surprise at the end.

If you ARE right though, when I die, nothing happens and my faith has done me no eternal harm, so what difference did it make in life. My faith leads me to do good things, so where is the harm in that?

Secondly, if you believe in nothing, nothing is still something. Do you think it would make a difference to take the number 0 out of mathematics? So you have faith in nothing. At some point you’ll have to come to terms with that.

Now as far as that great mystery of the beginning, you have to understand that something beyond our measure caused it. You are dealing with it by not addressing it. Good for you, God-of-the-gaps, explains it all away. So what then? Darwin-of-the-gaps isn’t any better. You want to know the truth? These are things you have to address or how can honestly sit there and try to tear down everyone else’s belief, be it buddhism, hinduism, christianity, darwinism, or whatever, unless you have some idea of the truth?

Now I don’t want to start an argument, that is not what I am trying to do. I just want you to consider what I’m saying instead of just dismissing it with simplistic, ambiguous answers. I am playing along with your theories and actually trying to give you specifics of why I disagree with what you’re saying. That’s how debate works.

Sorry, now I’m just rambling. Thoughts?

The beginning of the universe is a great mystery that may never be solved. That doesn’t mean that god exists by default. That’s god-of-the-gaps in his last refuge.

I like the word atheist because it means “without belief in gods.” That describes me. If atheist meant “convinced that there certainly is no god” then it probably wouldn’t describe me. We’re coming back around to the point of my original post. I don’t think it takes faith to not accept an idea like god.

Even Stephen Hawking, (called the smartest man to ever live, though I’m not sure how you can know that) has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the definite beginning of everything and that something that transcends time, space, and matter had to get it started. He never specifies what that is, though I suspect he believes in some form of God based on things he has said.

It seems to me that you are trying to say that, even though we know nothing can possibly come from nothing, there was no cause for our beginning. It seems as though you are saying that it just happened on it’s own which is scientifically impossible. Am I correct?

If you aren’t absolutely sure there is no God, you may fit better into the category of agnostic.

You may be right that it’s easier to believe in something than nothing. That could be built into us as a survival instinct. When early humans saw a rustling in the grass at night, the ones that assumed there was an attacker there probably survived at higher rates than those who assumed it was just the wind. Seeing agency in everything was a survival benefit, even if there were a few false positives. But that doesn’t mean that the figure in the shadows that we imagine is always real.

What word then would you choose?

I am of the opinion that the scientific laws that are in place and have been for ages, (specifically things like the laws of thermodynamics, einstein’s theory of relativity, etc.) point to a definite beginning for everything. That would include time, space, and matter. Since those same laws dictate that nothing comes from nothing, the something we have now had to be caused by something. This something had to transcend the things we know - time, matter, and space. It had to be something with it’s own will and intelligence. I call this God. You can call it what you want. That’s the beauty of free will.

All I’m saying is that it takes an awful lot of faith to believe in nothing when everything points to something (geez that’s an ambiguous statement). What I mean is (and I know how you dislike analogies, but admittedly you have me at a loss for anything else currently) have you ever tried to convince a child there are no monsters in their closet when they are absolutely sure there are?

It’s easier to believe in something than nothing.

Thank you Dan for some real honest-to-goodness debate. If the so-called “Christians” of the church asked a fraction of the questions of themselves that you do, those that were reaffirmed in their faith would be an unstoppable force.