Does God Exist?

[talktime 0]

Need to disagree here. If science always needs proof, then I would like to ask you would led to the hypothesis of the 18th century that Sun was a giant ball of coal? What lead to the belief that earth had a giant magnet inside it? What lead to the hypothesis of "Hollow Earth Theory" in early 20th century? Einsteins theory of relativity got practically proved only after it was well accepted by the scientific community. Some of the theories of Stephen Hawkings are not close to practical understanding, let alone being proved! The reason is, these hypothesis's made sense in the context of the concerned era. As we came to know about Nuclear Fusion reactions, we could conclude that Sun has a similar chemical process. Similarly God is no wild imagination, but our term for the supreme creator. The day we understand him scientifically, our purpose of existence in this world will be over (atleast mine ).
What my religion tells me, earth goes through a cycle of four epochs. These are called "yuga". In the first Yuga, man is very very close to God, there is no vice, and he understands his purpose of existence very well. He dedicates himself to God, there is no evil anywhere. Evil is defined as hate, jealousy or greed. In the second Yuga, evil gets introduced for the first time. People are by far good but some evil exists. Then in the third Yuga, evil starts gaining predominance over good. In the fourth Yuga, evil becomes an inherent property of nearly every human. What it means is that every person has a certain quantity of hate, jealousy and greed. It is also said that every new Yuga is started with the extermination of the previous Yuga and a select few are chosen to lay the foundation of the next Yuga.

This is exactly what Noah in Old Testament, Manu in Hindu Mythology and Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh did. These three are the oldest literature in relation to God by three different races i.e. Semetics, Indo-Europeans and Summerians. Manu derives the word "Man" in most european languages and "Manav" in most Indian languages. When three speak the same theory, despite their geographical location, we are forced to attribute atleast some amount of truth to these ancient literature.

Now to continue, currently it is the fourth Yuga running, where there is some part of evil in almost everyone. It is said that by the end of the fourth Yuga, man would have found God, evil would be nullified and Man will realise the reason of his existence and then civilization will go back to the first Yuga.

Science needs proof. The hypothesis of a big ball of coal was derived from the hot Sun full of energy and the knowledge that time. The proof was sun itself and according to science you can derive hypothesis from current knowledge and when the knowledge advances you still have to check whether the hypothesis is right. When science advanced it was proven that sun is not made of coal. So science needs proof and it evolves too.
Science evolves with time just like we all did. Science donât go by âsome one told soâ it goes by âshow me howâ .

Some of the people you mentioned (Manu and others) were scientists back then and they wrote the books best to their knowledge. Modern science does not discard any theories because they are old or religious. All theories are welcome if there is evidence to prove that. The concept of life cycles is proven in modern science it is proven by studying old rocks and deep inside earth.

This is just my personal opinion. I donât intend to hurt anybodyâs feelings. I am sorry if any one felt that way because of my comments.
Edited November 13, 2006 by talktime (see edit history)

[torosandoval 0]

Yeah of course i think that God exists, cause in my life i{ve got so many good experiences thsnks god.God bless u all

[Chesso 0]

Yeah of course i think that God exists, cause in my life i{ve got so many good experiences thsnks god.
God bless u all

I haven't had so many great experiences, does that mean he doesn't exist LOL.

[jeremycollins 0]

I think God exists. If not, then who created everything? There has to be some type of "higher power" or, in other words...God. People say "Show me evidence that God exists, then I'll believe it."Well, I say "Show me evidence that God doesn't exist, then I'll THINK about changing my beliefs. Anyone agree?

[Chesso 0]

Not really because if god created everything else, who created god?

 

The question is never ending, even the first time I ever thought about that, it was the first thing that came to mind.

 

EDIT: And for those that love the "he just was" line well here is mine "we just were", same logic.

Edited July 11, 2007 by Chesso (see edit history)

[jeremycollins 0]

Not really because if god created everything else, who created god?

 

The question is never ending, even the first time I ever thought about that, it was the first thing that came to mind.

 

EDIT: And for those that love the "he just was" line well here is mine "we just were", same logic.

Really good point there. As you said, the question is never ending. We will just have to wait and let time tell.

[Chesso 0]

Yeah pretty much lol.Finding out where it all started would be by no means a simple task, the very thought of it makes my head hurt .

[jeremycollins 0]

I really can't agree more. You would just cause a major migraine trying to solve this puzzle. If it's meant to be solved, it will be solved in it's own time. Whenever that is.

[PhilosophiX 0]

Hold the bus here!

 

There's a lot of talk about scientific proof going on here, and it must be said, right here and now, with great emphasis upon this fact before it continues:

 

There is no such thing as scientific proof

 

A theory can be supported, but it can never be proven. This is why:

 

You come up with the hypothesis that all swans are white. You select a sample of 100 lakes and monitor them, observing and writing down the colour of every single swan you see. After three months you have recorded 37,343 sightings of swans and they are all white. That supports your theory that all swans are white, but it doesn't prove that all swans are white. You can sit a a million lakes for a million years, and observe ten trillion swans, and even if they are all white, you still haven't proven that all swans are white, you have only supported your theory that all swans are white. Why?

 

Because all it would take is for one person to observe a pink swan, or a black swan, and your theory is instantly disproven.

 

So you see, you can disprove a theory, but you can never prove a theory.

 

Science is not about proving anything. Science is about building a model of how the world works (called a theory). A theory is incredibly useful, it lets us understand the universe from a particular point of view. A spaceship can be accurately sent to anywhere in the solar system using nothing more than Newton's equations to plan its trajectory. Even though we know Newton's theory doesn't explain everything, and Einstein demonstrated that Newton's equations break down at larger distances, the later theories allowed us to understand when and when not to use the earlier theory - just as the earlier theories allowed us to get to the later ones. When the model is shown to be wrong, the theory is adapted, thrown out, or moved aside. Scientific progress is about paradigm shifts towards greater understanding.

 

So please, before using science to try and further an argument, at least try to understand what science really is.

 

And while on the topic of god, my own personal belief is that 6 million years ago our monkey ancestors began to eat the Tabernanthe iboga roots. At this time we came down from the trees and began to wander the plains of Africa, while our primary food source was meat, our back teeth adapted for grinding which suggests that we were eating these roots as a secondary food source. This is very interesting, since these roots contain indolic alkaloids, especially ibogaine, which is supposedly the compound responsible for hallucinogenic effects. Fascinating.

 

100 thousand years ago, mankind arrived in his current form, although his intelligence was a bit iffy, only 30 thousand years ago was there a great spark of creativity and you start seeing necklaces, art, better tools... so with all this creativity and thought about what the universe is all about then obviously someone is going to suggest a "creator". So someone jumped in that and became the creator's representative for the tribe (witchdoctor / holy-man), because that gave him power. Then when tribes became villages and the witchdoctors got themselves organized they became priests in the villages and towns, and they did so because it gave them power and wealth. Because humans came from nothing, they get all attached to consciousness (cogito ergo sum), and they can't cope with the ultimate finality of death, so a psychological process kicks in called Cognitive Dissonance, where they rationalize death away by clinging to what the holy-men are saying (to make a quick buck), because that makes the thought of death bearable...

 

I'm a Hindu. So I believe everyone is entitled to hold their own belief system and worship as many (or as few) gods as they want, as long as they don't try to force people into their religion, or staying in their religion (not pointing any elbows). I look forward to the day when children are raised as non-religious and given the choice to pick the one (or none) that suits them when they come of age. Alas that is unlikely since I see a lot of kids who are brought up with the same beliefs as their parents, without ever being given the opportunity to question these assumptions.

 

So to come back to the point, I gaze at the universe and I see a beautiful and terrifying natural phenomenon; one that is all the more wondrous for the fact that complicated beings such as us evolved and are now able to admire it.

[RedWaffle 0]

Science can only prove so much. Their are many things that can't be explained. That's were religion comes in. Religion helps to explain the unexplainable. Though the Big Bang Theory best describes what happened to create the universe:The Big Bang is a cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe started from a tremendously dense and hot state, and has been expanding ever since. The term is also used in a narrower sense to describe the fundamental 'fireball' that erupted at or close to time t=0 in the history of the universe.Observational evidence for the Big Bang includes the analysis of the spectrum of light from galaxies, which reveal a shift towards longer wavelengths proportional to each galaxy's distance in a relationship described by Hubble's law. Combined with the assumption that observers located anywhere in the universe would make similar observations (the Copernican principle), this suggests that space itself is expanding. Extrapolation of this expansion back in time yields a state in the distant past in which the universe was in a state of immense density and temperature. This hot, dense state is the key premise of the Big Bang. Observations now place the age of the universe at around 13.7 billion years.Theoretical support for the Big Bang comes from mathematical models, called Friedmann models, which show that a Big Bang is consistent with general relativity and with the cosmological principle, which states that the properties of the universe should be independent of position or orientation.

[tommy5x 0]

Though current evidence supports the possibility of the big bang, theoretically it is a certainty. Before the universe there was nothing? If there was nothingness, it had to be infinate, finite nothingness is not plausible. Infinity in turn must create infinate possibility of infinate things occuring therefore infinate things must have and must still be. If this is true and by all logic it has to be, a singularity did occur, yet at the same time, there is a god, a giant chicken did lay an egg containing the universe and Atlas was forced to hold up the heavans.

[PhilosophiX 0]

Though current evidence supports the possibility of the big bang, theoretically it is a certainty. Before the universe there was nothing? If there was nothingness, it had to be infinate, finite nothingness is not plausible. Infinity in turn must create infinate possibility of infinate things occuring therefore infinate things must have and must still be. If this is true and by all logic it has to be, a singularity did occur, yet at the same time, there is a god, a giant chicken did lay an egg containing the universe and Atlas was forced to hold up the heavans.

Before you were born; of your own big bang as it were - you were nothing, nonexistent... did you come from an infinite nothingness or a finite nothingness? No. Nothingness is merely an absence of something - finite or infinite can't be attached to it. Nothingness is a human concept. Do not imagine that because we can not peer back beyond the big bang; that means the universe came from nothing. More likely our universe is just one small cyclical system within a much larger whole. For example: If the universe were held within an apple, everyone within that apple universe would be industrially debating whether or not their universe came from nothing - indeed the apple didn't exist before it began to grow upon the tree - but the tree, the system within which the apple formed, had been around for a lot longer. Unable to see that - they assume their apple universe came from nothing. To continue the metaphor; many apples had grown upon it, and many would continue to grow upon it.

 

We come again to the oldest and most obvious cliché of philosophy; 'what came first, the chicken or the egg?' ... The egg came first. The creatures that evolved into chickens, before they had taken on all the aspects of 'chickeness' were obviously laying eggs, there was never a definite point when an egg was laid by something different and out popped a chicken -- instead, so very slowly and over time, something evolved into a chicken. It would be very hard to find a definite point where this happened. You could slip back in time, and eventually you would come to a point where you could say very definitely that these weren't quite chickens, but these ancestors that weren't quite chickens, obviously, laid eggs. Still, slowly over time chickens may evolve into something else, and they will probably still be laying eggs.

 

Perhaps, the universe is an egg as it were - a seed laid by an earlier version - but not necessarily. Animals replicate by reproduction - there is no evidence to support that this would be the case with the universe, it could just as easily be an isolated event that occurs now and then due to the maths of the multiverse - like an eclipse - an eclipse is not born of a prior eclipse, it merely happens because the planetary bodies just happen to be set up in the right way. The maths work out, and we get a beautiful eclipse. More likely, the universe & the multiverse, just happen to be set up the right way.

[tommy5x 0]

But this train of thought then eventualy replicates the watchmaker argument.If you look at a watch, you can easily tell that it was designed and built by an intelligent watchmaker. Similarly, if you look at some natural phenomenon X (a particular organ or organism, the structure of the solar system, life, the entire universe) you can easily tell that it was designed and built by an intelligent creator/designer.

[Chesso 0]

Don't forget some "intelligent" things have been made through pure chance and complete accidents eh.

[develCuy 0]

I really respect the faith of people, if Ala is the name of God in your language(Yave to me) then I believe in Ala.REALLY EASYYes!!! of course, you only have to believe!!!, then you be able to believe in the Holy Bible, and get saved by faith.WHAT IS HARD?Is hard to be ignored, killed, injured, etc, etc, because your believes and pray for that souls. Is hard to believe in a hidden God and be named: lunatic, ignorant, and bless those mocking. But that is love, your most powerful weapon is: to pray. God is Powerfulness and he have control of everything.SCIENCE IS IGNORANTHuman have a very very very limited brain. Our capacity to process the nature of God is impossible, like an ant can't understand human businesses, human can't understand God. You only have to wait for his mercy, thats what I do, and that is what works for me.CAN'T BELIEVETrust :PBlessings!