Galen Rupp: “(God) cares about doing your best and doing the most with the things he’s given you.”

It’s exactly how any discussion works. The one who makes the claim (I.e. Gods not real or there are lunar zebras) has the burden of proof for supporting the claim.
im not suggesting *everyone* has to have the some presuppositions as me. Did I ever use the term “we” in my post? No, I said “I’m not… I’ve had…” not we.

(I.e. Gods not real or there are lunar zebras)

Surely you're not so dense that you can't see the difference here. One is a positive and one is a negative. To prove there a positive (i.e. lunar zebras), all you need to do is find one lunar zebra. To prove a negative (i.e. god is not real), you need to search every place at every time, that is to say, you can't prove a negative. You've put an impossible task on your debater and absolved yourself of any need for proof. As I said before, the inability to disprove is not proof.

A better discussion would be: God is real vs lunar zebras are real. You can both prove it with evidence.

Try to not make any presuppositions. Just look at the evidence. If there isn't any evidence for something, then it's fine to say we just don't know. There's no reason to fill the gaps in our knowledge with baseless invention and pretend that it's true.

Any updates on Ruup. All I am hearing is JC cares for zebras on the moon while the pope rides them.

God is just dog spelled backwards. Dogs were mans' best friend before "god" was invented. And I love my dogs and they love me. More than anything "god" has ever done.

Fine, but literally in the post above this one I'm quoting, you said: "God is real, Jesus is real and the pope . . . ."

So you're making a positive assertion. You're not saying "I *believe* that God is real"--which no one can easily argue against--you're making a flat statement, a claim. Okay, support it.

People always believe in the god their daddy told them was real.

Propositional logic can only be applied to a meaningful proposition. "God is ____" is not a proposition until "God" means something beyond vague mystical ideas and hand waving.

The medieval theologian/philosopher Anselm tried this and came up with "that than which a greater cannot be thought." Which is basically internalized, mental hand-waving.

I've never understood why atheist have such trouble believing there could be a creator. The entire universe at one point, didn't exist. Look at where humans are now. So we went from no matter (because something can't be created from nothing) to cell phones and LetsRun and airplanes. That by itself is impossible. So before there was nothing, there was still nothing. Somehow there is something? It's not that hard to surrender your faith to a higher being. It's not proof of a higher being, but please. To act like people of faith are idiots....

Let's unpack this.

1) "There could be a creator." Well, none of us knows *exactly* what happened at The Beginning of Everything--because none of us was there!--so who knows, maybe a "deity" was involved.
And? So? What you, and many other believers, seem to think is not just a) that there *was* a being that got everything started, but b) that there *is* one--oh, and the same one!--NOW: occasionally breaking the laws of physics (so as to work miracles), meting out rewards and punishments, and requiring love, worship, and obedience. Well, b does not automatically follow from a. They are separate propositions and need to be proved separately.

2) "Something can't be created from nothing." This is simply false. There are subatomic particles that exist, then don't, then do, then don't, many times per second, and this is demonstrated in labs every day. They come out of nothing.

Beyond that, cosmologists have shown that "nothing" is an unstable state and that some kind of "something" was essentially inevitable.

3) "Before there was nothing." Time is a dimension of our universe, just as height and width and depth are, and it is meaningless--literally without meaning--to speak of, or suggest, a time "before" the universe, just as it would be to speak of something "outside" the universe.

4) Most people of faith are *not* idiots. While I have seen a few surveys that suggest the average IQ of nonbelievers is *slightly* higher than that of believers, I consider that to be meaningless because the intelligence of people within each group varies so widely.

The simple fact is that people don't get to *choose* their beliefs. If a proposition meets your standards for believability--and those seem to be mostly or wholly unconscious--you won't *choose* to believe that proposition; it will *compel* your belief. Similarly, to the extent that the proposition doesn't satisfy those standards, your believing it will be impossible (though of course you might talk or act as though you believe it). [Can a person's beliefs change? Sure. S/he might be presented with a new proposition, or his/her standards for believability could change. But no person can wake up in the morning and say, "Hey, ya know what, today Imma start believing X" or "stop believing Y." Human brains don't work that way.]

So I don't attempt to change people's beliefs. So long as they don't resort to force, or the threat of force, to impose their beliefs on others, I'm fine with it. Live and let live.

Because the discussions and statements you are referring to are not abstract conversations about how our existence came to be. That's just what religious people quickly resort to when they run out of facts and arguments to support supernatural stories such as talking snakes/serpent, reanimation of dead people, giant boats filled with animals waiting out worldwide floods, babies conceived without sex, people living in giant fish, etc. Atheists are highly skeptical any of that stuff happened at all, much less at the desire or behest of a god having all kinds of strangely human emotions.

This is false. My grandfather was an atheist, my father a Christian, and one of my brothers is an atheist.

I respect this. I honestly wish I could write half this well!
no sarcasm.

I appreciate your thoughtful post. But everything, all matter, had to originate somewhere. I'd matter can't be created or destroyed, then the big bang, without a creator, has some flaws. All the matter in the universe was then present before the big bang, in whatever form. And then it got super hot and expanded. So I don't think all the matter in the universe simply created itself. Also, there are quite a few scientist who dispute the entire concept of the Big Bang, and simply insist that the origins of the universe remain unknown. These are not Christian Scientist. I strongly suggest you do opposition research on this.

Needless to say, it's not crazy or even far fetched to believe the process could be guided by a higher being. There isn't concrete proof, but there also isn't any kind of concrete proof that the universe wasn't created by a deity. You can borrow standards from certain faiths and apply those standards to that theology and poke holes in the theology, but ultimately nobody truly knows. But I think it takes a lot of faith to think that all matter in the universe created itself. Probably as much faith as it takes to believe in a deity.

not knowing how something happened doesnt make literally *anything* (i.e. god) a good surrogate.

Well when there can't be a scientific explanation for the origins of the universe, and there simply can't be at this time, then people are reasonably going to assumer there was a higher power.

DS, I explicitly *acknowledged* the possibility, however unlikely, of there having been some kind of "creator" AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING. But that was then, and this is now; one does not get to *automatically* infer that, if there was some kind of deity operating then, that therefore any deity (much less the same one) is operating in the universe NOW. They are two separate propositions and must be proved separately. I see no verifiable evidence that there is any kind of supernatural being operating in the universe now, and so far no one has presented any to me, though I remain open to it.

Now, as to the question of what happened When Everything Began: We can say that a) some kind of being started the universe, or b) it just started on its own. Either one, of course, is contrary to our human experience; but we know from physics, and especially from quantum mechanics, that human-scale experience and intuitions are not adequate to describe or really understand the very large, the very small, or the very energetic. So we're left to think that a "Creator" was somehow "just there," or else that the universe was somehow "just there." Because I encounter the universe every instant of my existence, and I encounter this "Creator"--well, never, I tend to favor option b.

But it honestly doesn't matter much to me, either way. What's important to living my life is that I've been given no good reason to think that any god(s) operate in the universe now. As a result I don't believe in any.

I am with Albert Camus, who was an 'apatheist', which is basically someone who is unwilling to grant entire question of a deity any importance whatsoever. I do not consider the question of "god" relevant to the human predicament. Either we will arrive at a reasonable way of treating each other and our home on Earth, or we will not. The final result is relevant to humans alone. Debates about various forms of deity--or lack thereof--is really a way of eliding matters of power and and culture, a way to talk about organizing society that claims authority externally, a kind of red herring. It is useful to many people, for a variety of reasons (and all too often selfish reasons, thought by no means always), to claim the authority of a deity or the certain non-existence of one. But all the "god talk" and "no god talk" is really a way to brand a magical imprimatur on the views of one group, usually over one deemed to be less powerful and less "chosen", over another. It would be far more honest to say "I believe this," even if it means your tribe is going to take what it needs, and to hell with the others. Of course there is an alternative, sharing, but that takes real commitment, and not everyone really wants to share.

I think this is kind of a distant, cynical outlook. I think many people believe in God because they believe in God- not for some selfish motive to construct society around religion in a way that serves him. Most people aren’t cult leaders. And in regards to Christianity, many people genuinely believe Christ fulfills their life and gives them joy. So naturally, they want other people to expierence that. Some people abuse religion, most don’t. Whether God is real or not, you can debate, but when people talk about religious in these cold, callous terms, they demonstrate they really don’t understand their fellow humans.