Present an argument for theism. If not, I can start a new thread where I sum up several arguments against theism.

None of you exist.

The only thing that I know definitely fucking exists is my mind. My conscience. My viewpoint. Call me a solipsist, but this is the only think I know for certain without a shred of doubt.

This could mean 83852 different things. That number was made up.

First, everything else could be simulated by a hypercomputer - this is a keystone of solipsism. In that case, paranormal phenomena, divine intervention, miracles, unexplained phenomena and all sorts of batshit insane ideas would all be plausible if you consider them to be bugs in a simulation. They are akin to the hall of mirrors effect in Doom, or that trippy bug where you drop a paintbrush in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and it floats in midair and you can jump on it and build a never ending staircase with paintbrushes and ascend to great heights! It's fun, but time consuming, so I never did it.

Just because I see it does not mean it exists. Otherwise, my dreams are as real as reality, and my daydreams are a third more controllable reality that I can enter into whenever I want - and perform various violent, erotic tasks on unsuspecting 18+ year old virgins in my head while sitting in Calculus class.

Although, it could be argued that my dreams and daydreams are as real as reality, I am definitely more plugged into reality. I experience things in reality more vividly - such as sex - than I do when thinking about sex.

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Solipsism aside, let's assume everything in this universe is real and it actually exists. There is a way to then prove that God exists, but it is not the God of the xtian bible, or the pantheon of Gods of greek mythology.

No, instead, God is multiple ideas that could be strung together into one word: Creation.

God is what happens when a star dies, its dust disturbing a vast nebula surrounding it causing a new star to be born with planets formed from the metallic elements created by the nuclear fusion of the prior star to start to form, eventually giving birth to a solar system and possible a world where life springs forth.

Life is the most unique and precious phenomenon in the Universe, it is to be cherished as you very well only have one life. Suicide is for pussies, folks.

God is what happens when your dick is inside someone, or someone's dick is inside you, and there is no condom. Conception is God. The slight changes in DNA as the sperm and egg combine and the cells divide into zygotes, embryos, fetuses is God.

God is a concept often exploded way out of proportion. God is the simplest event in the Universe - creation and perpetuation of life. That is all. God is not some bearded old fart that tells you not to fuck your own gender. God is not some fat gluttonous elephant whose statues 'miraculously' drink milk. God is not some pagan Wolf-lady with huge boobs that just so happens to have the same political ideology as extreme feminists.

God is the big bang. God is stellar evolution. God is genetic evolution.

That is all. No Bible needed folks.

We don't need to, The burden of proof is on you, not us.

Goatfangs, if you define a word to mean a myriad of unrelated things, you've practically defined it out of existence. Why do we need the term and concept of "god" when we already have "the universe," "conception," "stellar evolution," etc.?

Too much pot?

Your basic logic is flawed. If we're all part of a supercomputer program, and reality can be a lie, so too can your meager thoughts. If your body and being are part of the "infinite supercomputer," and they are not real, then the same is true of your programmed thoughts.

No such thing.

Scourge - the existence of God beyond mortal comprehension if he does exist at all is as speculative as saying he exists and we can comprehend him. Of course, I say him, he and so forth, It would be a more suitable term as even if we can comprehend it on some level, we don't know the nature of it. Religions being wrong is a given for anybody who actively rejects the hypothesis of God in the first place, though I agree that most people can't separate God and religion, but most people have never given the issue enough thought to need to define the two separately. If God is to exist beyond time and space (and space and space) then he definitely is beyond our comprehension. I had a point when I started typing this, but damn it it's happened again and I've lost sight of where I was going.

This pouty, content-free passive-aggressiveness is unworthy of the Symposium. So is the inane solipsism above by Goatfang.

Shame that a thread in this forum has merited the assignment of two custom titles, but I guess it can't be helped. As Osmium said, if you think the arguments against theism are weak, present your own arguments and stop projecting your own butthurtedness, please.

Which is as speculative as saying he doesn't exist at all.


You misunderstood me. From what I've seen, the atheists have gripes with religion other than the existence of God, and these gripes are what lead them to believe that God doesn't exist. Which, of course, is a flawed reason. Leviticus may say that homosexuals should be stoned to death for being an affront to God, but that doesn't mean God isn't real; it could just mean Leviticus was a dumbass.


Which is my point. Pretty much every definition of a God describes him as living in a place unreachable by humans until after death (ie, transcendence of the mortal realm of perception). In those cases, there can be no proof or disproof of his existence.

As an athiest, I never claim something so foolish as "God does not exist because the Bible hates queers."

All that's proof of is that the Bible hates queers.



My gripes with religion relate to the concept of religion as being obsolete, primitive, counter-intellectual, and heavily flawed. Religion is a front for controlling the weak-minded and the weak-willed.

There are much more rational reasons that God does not exist.

Is it really just as speculative, though? With religion out of the equation, we have no ramblings of supreme beings or universal creators, and so why would anybody suppose there is one - especially as there is no evidence to suggest there is?

That may be an argument for why god and the Bible are immoral, but I severely doubt that anyone seriously believes it disproves god's existence. It's also an effective way to disprove the theistic claim that the Bible is a morally flawless text. The fact that theists manage to retain their belief in its virtue while having no trouble adapting to the vastly different morality that is prevalent in today's society is a magnificent feat of cognitive dissonance.

God's existence is put into great doubt by the concept's inherent vagueness. God's fundamental attributes are also logically inconsistent and clouded. It is an extraordinary claim with no evidence whatsoever. All the arguments that I've read for the existence of god are utterly flawed in one respect or another. Theists do not appear to be blessed in any way. What reason is there to believe? The world makes an enormous amount of sense without invoking god's existence, and although science will never become omniscience, it is the only sensible way to go about exploring nature.

The thing is, the atheists only ever fight the theists on their own terms. We're not the ones ascribing human qualities to this "eminently unknowable deity", it's the religious people doing that. So once you bring your god down to the human level, expect the atheists to fight it on your terms, with logic, reason, science etc. If theists want to make god all on high and above, well fucking keep him there. Don't bitch about how we've disproved god by logic, that's your fault for bringing him within the realms of our petty logic.

Eg, the bible claims that god is benevolent. Benevolence is a human quality, in fact, it's probably the most human quality of god if you look at the others of omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. Well, we'll call it how we see it. God doesn't seem like a very benevolent "thing" at all, based on our understanding of benevolence, which is why the question of evil hasn't been answered, either on this board or by anyone else.

Well, you usually don't even have to use logic to demonstrate that God is bullshit. For example, in the context of the Christian God, one can usually just point out the many, many contradictions between the OT and NT (both internally and with eachother) and the fact that many of the qualities that the traditional Christian God displays run completely against what is suggested in the bible. That tactic works quite well against those who disapprove of abortion on religious grounds too.

It also takes a lot of faith not to believe there is an invisible, undedectable amusement park on Uranus... oh, wait

It's not a matter of disproving his existence, something most theists refuse time and time again to understand. Something that has no evidence going for it automatically is considered bullshit by all, except in the case of religion of course, where it is considered "sacred" and "holy". To use Russel's teapot analogy:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

Point being, there is no reason to believe in God, therefore atheists don't. How many people have, through observation and logic, deduced that a God must exist in this modern age? Very few, most of them are either born into their religion and indoctrinated so far into it they can't tell the truth from the bullshit or they have some sort of crisis and turn to religion for comfort.

If you accept that God exists without any kind of evidence, using that particular piece of pseudo-intellectual bullshit they call "faith", then anything is open to absolute belief. Why keep it at God? I have faith that you are all unicorns attempting to poison metal with fluffy music and -core bullshit. The usage of "faith" is akin to mental suicide.

That being said, most atheists are really agnostics. I doubt you've ever heard someone say "God, absolutely and without a single trace of doubt, doesn't exist". If you have, chances are it was hyperbole and not a valid intellectual point, since there is almost nothing that is certain. Chances are if you're an atheist you're like me, you don't believe in God the way you don't believe in trolls - sure, they can exist and you can't deny that, but the chances of them existing are so infinitesimally small you might as well consider their existence zero.

That being said, I challenge any theist here to come up with a decent reason for why we should believe in God.

Agnostics don't believe gods to be highly improbable; they believe anything outside of our current understanding to be equally probable as anything else within that sphere. Atheists, on the other hand (or at least the more aware) believe the existence of ALL gods to be improbable, and of some, such as Yahweh/Allah to be impossible. At least, that's how I see it. So I'm an atheist.

Agnostics believe there might or might not be a God. There's varying degrees of agnosticism, atheists just lay on one of the extremes of the spectrum, as theists lay on the other extreme. Obviously not all theists will be 100% sure of God's existence, therefore they will be somewhere between the middle and absolute theism, whereas there might be agnostics that lean more towards atheism, and there may be those agnostics which do believe it is a 50-50 chance.

Atheists don't KNOW there isn't a God (at least not most of them) they simply think the probability of his existence is so low it might as well be zero. That's still technically agnosticism, since there is still a minute amount of room for God's existence, but it's so small it's negligible.

What's with all the trolls lately?

Of course, nonexistence is lumped in together with the probablility of gods existing in the agnostic's eye, though I thought that was obvious and didn't need any explaining.

I had a quick read over the posts and suffered a strong sense of butthurtedness, so here's my take on atheism. Note that this is coming from and Atheist, Anti-theist and Engineering postgrad, so pardon the harshness, lack of restraint and truth.

I have major issues with the whole Agnostic and Atheist distinction. Binary distinctions (well, ternary if you count Deists) are usually bad in any kind of practical thinking. Some people are 100% convinced that there is no God, while some might be 60% convinced. To me, if you are >50% convinced that there is no God, you are an Atheist. Personally, I am at (100 - 1e-20) percent, and will convert to believing in God if he comes down, cooks me breakfast, explains to me the meaning of life and apologizes for the troubles he has caused me and my fellow man over the years.

I personally have issues with people that are unwilling to change their minds when presented with new evidence or when a change of mindset improves the situation for themselves and others. I also detest people that make important decisions, which usually affect others, based on spiritual and cosmic guidance. People that believe in God are more likely to fall into both of these categories than Atheists.

I have said many times that God absolutely doesn't exist. In fact, many people I know are similarly inclined in their treatment of religion. I think once you can separate your own childhood experience of people telling you what to believe, and your later years of learning about truth yourself, it is hard to swallow the religion pill. Especially when the pill tends to be bitter and a placebo to your real problems.

The whole idea of one's decision making and beliefs on ancient texts scares me. A lot. If the bible was written by a leading ethics professor in the 1960s, it would probably include quite a bit of racism and bad advice, now shown by science to be complete hogwash. This is only 50 years ago. Now imagine a text written by semi-literate people recalling 2000-year-old events that occurred before they were born. Now add to this the distortion produced by multiple edits, translations and chapter selection as well as re-interpretation by priests and church goers. The fact that any adult still uses an religious text for moral guidance scares the shit out of me to be honest.

Religious belief is an immature remnant of our evolutionary past employed to counteract our fears of death, disease, sex, famine as well as a means to control large groups of people. It is a symptom of the greater disease of credulity. Credulity, religious or otherwise, is probably the most dangerous human trait. It allows large groups of people to act irresponsibly and irrationally while believing that their actions are morally justified and logically valid.

If that is supposed to offend any other atheists, I don't see how it could. I personally agree one-hundred percent. When I allow the existence of a god or gods to fit into possibility, that doesn't mean they've entered the realm of probability; they merely have a .00000000000000001% chance of existing logically.

Doesn't offend me, either. In fact, I like the way he laid out the description of using the Bible as a moral code--how obsolete it is and it's relation to the time period in which the texts were written.

We all need to remember that religion didn't spread (Christianity and Islam most of all) because it was something that was easy to believe or that made sense. It spread through warfare and having it forced on new people. It was used to effectively slaughter old-world religions such as Greco-Roman mythology and Norse mythology and the like. It wasn't spread through the friendly-though-annoying way modern Jehovah's Witnesses go around talking politely of their benevolent loving god. It was spread through violence and bloodshed. Oppression and torture. And likely more than anything, in the name of controlling the masses.

Wasn't trying to offend other atheists with my posts. Our creed are hard to offend from my experience

Religion is designed to be easy to teach to children, especially the whole authoritative figure watching everything you do part of most religion. God in most religions is a combination of the Boogie Man and Santa Claus. It/He/Whatever tries to scare you into behaving according to a prescribed doctrine as well as provide gifts in the current and after live if you do behave.

I think the spread of religion is through a combination for force and engineering. Religion has evolved, through a process like natural selection over the years to be more and more palatable and addictive. It mutates over time and new versions of old faiths either fit into new niches of human needs or dies out. Zeus' popularity declined as the Greeks' power waned and new gods and a new religion emerged with the Romans, copying heavily from the Greeks. Same goes for Judaism to Christianity to Islam, with small modifications to doctrines for their specific populace.

So God is everything ?
By what you state God is nothing. Or God is every single space of existence within the universe.
So what about outside the universe ? Would, let's say, a flying dog strapped to an enromous blue egg be God outside of the universe ? Is uncreation God ?

And to carry on from that, Judaism waned and Christianity was built on what was seen as, shall we say, a "Judaism selling out," and Islam was built on Christianity in the same way.


So, what's next?


UFO cults are next--maybe. There has been a steady increase in UFO cults as science fiction and spirituality have merged as people disenchanted with "regular" religion look for something new to believe in. All intelligent people mock Scientology, but we can't ignore how massive that "religion" has become, and that's little more than a gigantic operating UFO cult. And once life is discovered from a source outside of the Earth, Europa for instance, UFO cults may grow larger. Old world religions will have to re-write their books.


I think, in a lot of people, the need to believe in something is in-born. Like, there has to be a greater power out there for many people. There can be any number of psychological reasons behind this, though, that I'm not going to bother trying to get into.


What, then, might happen should a real entity from another world land, say, in the mall in front of the Capitol building in Washington D.C. or outside the United Nations? Will we attack it, try to communicate with it, or will the petty humans kneel before it the way the Aztecs did when they thought the first arriving white men were gods?

I think it's also fair to note that the devils and demons of most world religions have been far kinder and humane than the gods themselves.

Suddenly got reminded of the Devil's quote (played by Al Pacino) in Devil's Advocate: "God is an absentee landlord". It seems kind of convenient that the devil is blamed for the bad and god gets all the praise for the good. Reminds me of the moto from a Dilbert cartoon about how a corporate management hierarchy works: "Accolades flow up, blame flows down".

I personally like the Greek and Roman gods much more those of monotheistic faiths like Yahweh of Christianity. Those gods had many more flaws and were made up in such a way that they had complex inter-deity relationships, almost like a soap opera. For me, the idea of a perfect deity blaming everything on the devil, who once was under his own training, just draws way too many parallels with bad management to be funny, especially considering my numerous encounters with similarly poor manager-types.

I've brought that up a lot: How many Holy Wars have been fought for Satan? I'm pretty sure the number is still zero.

There are far more logical reasons to not believe in God, than there is to believe in one. A simple history lesson will tell you that.

While its true that people may have logical reasons why God may not exist (notice the fact that I disbelieve that any of you will have anything concrete), to claim that faith is illogical (it is) and then demand logical reasoning is a bit absurd. In the end it all depends on the person. Is the person willing to suspend his rationality based on what he knows and what he feels?

Plus God is more Metal than that little Satan bitch. Wars have been fought in his name.

What, exactly, would you consider "anything concrete"?


You are contradicting yourself. You say that people "may" have logical reasons for disbelieving in god, you even refuse to concede that anyone here has those reasons.... and then you admit that faith is illogical? So you're effectively saying that you are the one who is illogical and irrational.
By the way, you don't "know" anything. You might "feel" something, you might "believe" in something, but you can never "know". Knowledge is the antithesis of faith.


What a brilliant argument, worthy of the Symposium. I'm convinced. Hallelujah!

God is the essence of an abstraction, so where you're getting this "concrete evidence needed" shit is beyond me. The only part of a god grounded in reality is that it is man only with limitless powers (omni-insert-adjective-here). And the most convincing evidence for a god is that... Well, there is none. Sorry to get your hopes up.

I am doing an extremely poor job in expressing myself, for that I apologize. Yes, I do believe in God and yes I do accept the irrationality of faith in God. I do understand it is very illogical, but just because it is illogical doesn't mean that not believing in God is logical. I understand when people make comments about not believing and give some rationale, but the logic behind it isn't concrete. I asked whether anyone actually had any solid proof God was nothing more than imaginary fairy used as a mascot of human progress because I believe no reason presented so far is concrete.

Something concrete would be something testable through the scientific process with repetition of results. While people may have persuasive arguments, in the end they are still only persuasive arguments. The arguments may make sense, but still, they're nothing but one-sided statements if there is no solid evidence. And yes. I do understand that I cannot prove God exist, and to a lot of people the reason of something that can create reality as we know it is probably not bound by its creation is too much to swallow to a lot of people. But so is attempting to discredit the idea of God based off inaccuracies of man-written scriptures.

I hope I expressed my thoughts more efficiently as ridiculous they may appear to all of you.

And again. We don't need to. The burden of proof is on you. I could say one of my ancestors was mauled to death by an invisible tiger 2000 years ago. It wouldn't be your job to prove me wrong. For you to believe me, I would need to prove that it happened, not you proving that it didn't.

Yes, it does. How could it possibly not be logical not to believe something you know is illogical?

You might want to dwell on your own statement for a while. I'm not trying to de-convert you or anything, but I think that what finally made me abandon my theism was strongly related to my own admission that my theism was baseless and indefensible. It wasn't so much the admission itself as it was the long period of reflection that followed: "Why am I doing/believing something I know to be indefensible? Does this make me anything but a hypocrite?"

The burden of proof falls on those who tell me God exists. Prove it to me, I'll believe you. Until then I'll go on being a baby-sodomizing Atheist.

He's too busy throwing around "butthurt" as if we should all suddenly feel deeply offended and flock to theism because we're "butthurt." If in your eyes, someone's "butthurt" simply because they disagree with some concept or whatever, you are seriously a mongoloid for simply holding that opinion.

There is no logic in god, there is no logic in yetis/sasquatch/big foot, and there is none in unicorns. None have logical or evolutionary reasons for existing; therefore, we can safely say that none exist.

This is trolling. When somebody makes a controversial thread in his first few posts, then drops off the face of the earth, it's a sure sign.

I'll reply to it anyway, although it is very foolish.

The conclusion of the OP could just as easily be that nobody knows that pigs can't fly because no one has tested every pig roaming the surface of the planet, and even if someone had, there might be flying pigs in the past that weren't examined. Or maybe the flying pigs are in a distant solar system!