That's not the big bang theory. The theory describes the actual bang. Actually, calling it the theory is misleading, as there's been several models used to explain the universe's birth and early expansion. There are even theories about what may have been before the big bang.

At the same time, common sense is a nonsensical concept. It places validity at the same scale as comprehension (or even willingness to comprehend). That you can deny something could possibly be true because you do not want it to be, or you do not understand how it could be true, or you do not want to understand how it could be true. Common sense doesn't exist in this context.

Even if you accept that common sense is a useful way to describe how your life experiences filter and inform your daily experiences, so that you use that label to describe how you might decide someone might be lying or up to something, cosmogony is not something that you, or any other human being, has as a life experience on any kind of basis. Common sense simply fails to inform you of what could be true or false about the universe's creation because you have nothing to relate it to. No actual experiences that inform you as to what a universe's creation might be like. Even if you start with the book of genesis, you have to admit that the description is rather vague and deus ex machina (God said this, and did this, and so it was).

While no one has yet presented the archetypal obviously true model of what the big bang must have been like, observations of the universe as it exists today are consistent with the probability that there was a big bang that created this universe.

And you can't coherently dismiss all of the work done on this just because one guy on an internet forum said something that you think doesn't make sense.

CocaColaAddict,

If you find yourself prefacing a statement with "No offense," odds are that what you're about to say is offensive. It's insincere and downright rude to insist that you're not being offensive when you most likely are.

 

 

Is it just me or do makeshiftwings posts always leave you feeling hungry?

*munchesmorepopcorn*

They don't.

And even if they did, it wouldn't be a problem, unless they specifically instructed their followers to "fight falsehood" or "convert the infidels" which neither Judaism nor Hinduism do.

But here you are confusing one story not mentioning some detail with the same story specifically ruling out that detail.

There is nothing in Jewish scripture that rules out G-d having another plan for the Indian people and as far as I know there is nothing in the Hindu religion that specifically rules out the idea that the creator god has a special people he looks after at the other end of Asia.

Zoroastrianism, on the other hand, being situated in the middle with ties to both, did specifically acknowledge the Torah as true and the Temple in Jerusalem as G-d's Temple. And the Hebrew Bible specifically acknowledges Zoroastrian rulers as righteous kings annointed by G-d.

 

Correct.

 

Correct.

 

That's a bit summarising. I think it is more fair to say that for different peoples in different situations there are different truths.

For a desert tribe eating pork really isn't a good idea and neither is eating whale. It would be an economic and health-care disaster for many reasons.

But I don't think G-d would give the same laws to the Eskimos.

 

I don't see that at all.

Neither Hinduism nor Judaism convince their followers that everybody else is wrong. In fact neither religion really care about the beliefs of other people and several other religions are specifically acknowledged as true (or true to an extend) by scholars of those religions.

But I don't think you can claim that Judaism and Hinduism don't have what they need to survive just because they fail on one of the two points you list as essential. Both clearly still exist.

As for G-d answering our prayers, the most-often said prayer in Judaism is the one about a return to Jerusalem. That wasn't answered for almost 2000 years. But did Jews lose faith because of it? In fact it made the faith stronger.

On the other hand, I can imagine that a religion in which the authority answers all prayers would disintegrate quite quickly (as did, for example, communism where such was attempted) and religions that really do convince their followers that everyone else is wrong do have a tendency to become very violent and lose their way within just a few hundred years.

So perhaps you have it exactly wrong?

 

Moses wrote it down.

That was 3300 years ago. It was not the beginning of the universe.

What G-d said when He created the universe or when exactly that happened is not recorded in scripture. The Hebrew Bible just contains a number of Sumerian legends long shown to be useful only as a legal framework, not a literal description of events.

 

You have clearly never been in a synagogue on Shabbes eve.

 

You are confusing one god with the gods of all religions.

2500 years ago religions competed on how excellent each of their gods was. But the Jews (and then the Iranians) were the only ones who claimed that their god was all-knowing and all-powerful. Of course the gods of the others are long gone now.

The city god of Tyre, one of the gods mentioned in the Bible, what's his name, I think "Ba'al", was not believed to be all-powerful or all-knowing by the Phoenician inhabitants of the city. I think he was just good at protecting sea-farers.

And the Pharaoh of Egypt, himself regarded as a god in the ancient Egyptian religion regularly had to reconcile his needs and wants with the other gods of the Egyptian pantheon because he was indeed not all-powerful and all-knowing and his religion did not assume that he was. (He was just above mere humans, but not above the other gods.)

The native Roman and Greek religions have all sorts of funny stories about their gods making ridiculous mistakes and getting into the weirdest situations they couldn't foresee and couldn't get out of without the help of other gods (and sometimes even humans). None of their gods were believed by them to be all-powerful or all-knowing.

I think you are taking the typical Christian approach to religion. You are assuming that Christianity is the template for all religions and that all religions therefore function like Christianity and try to solve the same problems. They don't.

 

There are also many things in the bible which palpably don't make sense. It is not an argument, it is a propagandist polemic.

 

oh, and this wasn't a thread he created actually, he put this in his blog and I think blogs tend to go to threads anyway...

 

 

There seems to be a basic problem with a whole half of the argument here: those arguing that there is a god, or that a belief in god is commensurate with science, start from an assumption that there is a god. You can't bang on about logical fallacies when you start from one. It is a trend which repeats itself with a depressing monotony. Essentially these people say 'the universe shows no overt evidence of having been created by an omnipotent being, yet despite this, let us posit just such a being, and explain how such a being could make it look as if it weren't there, or create these complex systems to function without the appearence of a driving intelligence behind them.' Essentially, 'the universe doesn't objectively look like it has been built, but we already believe it has been and would like to continue thinking this way.'

Over the years I have become increasingly convinced in the non-existance of a god or gods simply because the arguments in favour are so shoddy. That and there being no satisfactory evidence.
The internal belief that there is a god is not evidence, either. This is effectively the gist of the 'I feel there must be a god' argument. We can reconcile internal states with an abstract 'objective' examination of why we hold those beliefs, but that does not change the external realities (see Simon Blackburn's Essays in Quasi-Realism).

Very few, amongst them makeshiftwings, have made any intelligent arguments so far.

As for this:

This is despicable. It effaces true ethics in the name of 'God.' Justice is not tied to religion, justice is something else altogether. 'Duty' to other creatures is the root cause of ethics - to say this is because of a need to be dutiful to God is dehumanising, it fetishises good conduct in the most profoundly Feurbachian sense. It also absolves us from fully examining our own motives and what ought to motivate us - it becomes a case of following 'God' Will'; a celestial legalism.
Ethics can be traced to our own, natural selves. Two different readers of Darwin, from opposite political spectra, Kropotkin and Spencer, managed (amongst many others) to trace human ethical behaviour back to our altruistic urges and instincts of mutual aid. Not an abstract metaphysical 'duty' to an intelligence whose existance hasn't yet been proven, let alone his/her/it's 'goodness.'
To continue my trend of quoting from video games "The world is a lie. We see it for what it really is.... Laws do not come from divinity, but from reason. The Creed does not command us to be free, it commands us to be wise." (Assassin's Creed)

To turn to a little polemicising myself now, I'd paraphrase Bakunin, when he reversed Voltaire's formula: if there was a God, it would be necessary to destroy him.

MN ONE,

How do you decide what justice is without religion?

 

I wonder if we're going to see any example to solidify such a statement here...

With ethics! With ruthelss self-examination of our selves, our minds, our opinions, our cognitive states.

For example Kropotkin thought ethics comes from our instinctual dispositions towards mutual aid - the desire to aid our fellows. A species which follows these instincts is better able to combat the vicsitudes of a harsh environment by working together, and is therefore more successful.
This eventually becomes 'morality', as these instincts develop through time. We begin to try to avoid the suffering of fellow creatures, thus we arrive at Kropotkin's decree that "without equity, there is no justice, without justice, there is no morality." Our sense of justice comes from within. It is something we own. It is not the enslavment to arbitrary laws.

It comes down to that old trope: Is God good because his actions are good? Or are God's actions good because he is God? If the former, then we are judging the arbiter of morality by our own values, if the latter then how is this morality?

So you make up ethics and a rule set based on them?

What's the difference between your ethics and the rule set based on them and a religion?

 

Can you name one of those human tribes that follows such an approach and was able better to combat anything?