You have to be careful here, because you cannot prove God isn't real or that a religion is false.
You can prove the earth is not flat, however.
The certitude one can achieve through evidence for (or against) the claim that the Earth is presently flat, can never be obtained for an assertion regarding a past event.
You're mixing apples and oranges.
Or, put another way, the pure idea of God is not falsifiable. The Christian God however, might well be.
What's the difference between "God" and "a specific God"?
So I would argue that you can prove a religion is false/incorrect by comparing the claims of it's holy book to the available historical records. If they don't match, I think we can agree that at least one set is false.
Most of religion is in the interpretation of that religion's holy literature. Interpretations can and do change, and not everything is as clear as one might think.
Famously, in Christianity, God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Perhaps this God was from Venus, and experienced 6 days of 2802 Earth hours.
World wide flooding can be explained with localized floods based on knowledge of the explored world at the time the writing was done. Same with most writing from those times.
Lastly, most modern interpretations of holy literature don't claim everything in the text is fact or historical, but rather it has a mix of historical events and stories which promote religious principles.
Then why is it stated that the Earth was created in 6 days? To confuse us?
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/bibli...
My favorite, by Michael Shermer ( https://michaelshermer.com/articles/genesis-revisited/):
In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers appear to be more than 4,004 light years from Earth. In fact, some of the fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, so He created “tired light” — light that slows down through space — so that the 4004 B.C. creation myth might be preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors, including Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Nova and Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing (can God make a planet so big that he could not lift it?), He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants. And in the land God placed fossil fuels, natural gas, and other natural resources for humans to exploit, but not until after Day Six. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God saw that the land was lonely, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the land’s strata, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. Since this caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt God brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.
And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.
And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.
By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.
Which mainstream religion claims the Bible is 100% historical fact? I ask because I'm interested in your definition of "mainstream" and "100%."
When I google, I find various resources from Catholic and Evangelical groups that say the Bible is 100% true.
You mention "Catholic," but there are lots of different types of Catholics. If you mean "Roman Catholic," you are incorrect in believing that it teaches the Bible is 100% fact.
Same with "Evangelical." There must be thousands of different evangelical religions. Please name the mainstream one that teaches that the Bible is 100% fact.
As stated previously, I think it will be interesting to find out what is meant by "mainstream."
https://web.archive.org/web/20061115025545/http://www.spurge...
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was formulated by more than 200 evangelical leaders at a conference convened by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy[1] and held in Chicago in October 1978. The statement was designed to defend the position of biblical inerrancy against a trend toward liberal conceptions of Scripture....
[T]he December 1986 conference adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Application....
Signatories to the statement came from a variety of evangelical Christian denominations, and included Robert Preus, James Montgomery Boice, Kenneth Kantzer, J. I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul and John F. MacArthur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_...
Notable signatories are listed at the Wikipedia article.
If you offer a definition or description of God, I will give it a shot.
Interpreting/expanding what you wrote, I think you're saying that God is:
* something that currently lives, or maybe lived in the past ("being"),
* that is not limited in any way ("all-powerful"),
* that created, from nothing, everything other than themself that has ever existed and that will exist in the future ("the universe")
Is that close?
No, not really. You can choose to reject this information and call it untrue, but you have not proven anything either.
All you've managed to do is assert you have a belief in some information that might be contradictory with someone else's. What you really have is nothing.
The burden to prove something is not true is on the person claiming something is not true.
In this case, there is no empirical test that can disprove the existence of a God or Gods, and thus religion.
> Today if you belief in Zeus, Baco or Heraclite you are interned fast
Last I checked, you can believe whatever you want in the US. Perhaps you're in another country though.
> Any serious religious believer should be put into clinical custody and in the worst cases these people should be interned into an asylum with the rest of the mentally ill people.
Religion is a lot of things. A moral compass, explanations for life events, explanations of the unknown, inspiration, community, etc.
A lot of things we think we know today, will be disproven tomorrow. That's how science is supposed to work. Perhaps in 100 years all this "Global Warming All The Things" will be viewed like some sort of religion today. Perhaps not, we literally don't know what we don't know with a lot of these things.
Lastly, I'm not religious in the slightest bit - but I do think being as hostile as you are here towards billions of people around the world is... unfortunate.
Citation please.
You are free to believe whatever you want.
If I come along and assert you're wrong for believing that, I must prove why. Otherwise, I'm just rejecting your belief and inserting my own belief.
To claim that the universe was created by nothing requires pretty enormous evidence, which presently does not exist.
So then the question: why do you think the universe was created?
The assertion comes from the religious. That there is a God and He is responsible for the life, the universe, and everything.
Atheism isn't the belief that there is no God. It's the lack of belief in any God.
No, that's the modern Dawkins-cult claim, commonly proselytised by Internet Atheists. Atheism has always been a more assertive position - there is no god.
Atheists' attempts to encroach on the much more rationally safe territory of agnosticism is crafty, but a sign of defeat.
Not Internet Atheism, HN is being read worldwide. Just an European with common sense. We tought like that since decades.
The wishy-washy recent re-definition of atheism as "without belief" was given modern impetus by Anthony Flew (who later converted to deism) in the late 1970s and popularised by the "New Atheists" - especially as an internet debating tactic - in the early part of this century.
Yes, religion does assert this, but that is also the defacto resting state for mankind. Allow me to explain:
For nearly all of human history, certainly all of recorded human history, there has been a strong belief in a God or Gods. It's a relatively recent concept that there might not be a God.
It is indisputable fact, that even today, in 2020, you are among the extreme minority of living people that do not believe in a God or Gods[1].
Therefore, being the newcomer, sporting a new assertion that there is no God, you must provide evidence to support this contentious claim. Since you cannot provide any evidence, and since no evidence currently exists to support this contentious claim, all you have left is a contradictory belief.
> Atheism isn't the belief that there is no God. It's the lack of belief in any God.
It is true one definition of Atheism is the absence of belief in a God. It becomes a belief when an assertion is made such as "God does not exist", because of the lack of evidence to support this claim[2]. That is the belief there is no God, because you have no empirical evidence to support your belief.
Belief means "confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof"[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
I see no Zeus throwing rays in Athene's sky nowadays.
And the Roman Empire with the Greek/Roman Gods was VAST. Huge. Hu-ge. Europe and a good chunk of Northern Africa.
Have a look on the Parthenon, please. Those are the scraps of their beliefs. That's all what's left. Marble, and ruins.
The only usable things from the Romans/Greeks were the practical ones:
- Greek/Latin
- Math
- Philosophy
- Arts
- Pillars of science with Aristhotle, even if he was wrong. Science allowed the world to correct his failures.
It's unreasonable to suppose that the burden of proof lies with the party in the minority or with the person positing a change in analysis rather than the one making the claim in the first place.
The idea that people who believed disease was caused by bad smells or evil spirits accepted an unfalsifiable claim uncritically does not mean we are forever stuck with it. This would literally mean that any group of people would be stuck with every unverifiable belief from the last millennium either forever or until we could democratically convince the majority. Truth isn't a democracy.
Science and logic says that we not only reject verifiably false claims we reject those that just don't make testable claims in the first place. Every mainstream religion is a mixture of potentially falsifiable claims with vague hand waving that is neither here nor there. After dismissing the actual it is not necessary to address the hand waving. If it doesn't make any claims its not worth discussing.
The notion that god doesn't exist doesn't require absolute mathematical as its a probabilistic statement of my confidence as to the likelihood of the existence of a literal creator not a mathematical one as in fact are most of your statements about most things. When one feels sufficiently confident in an analysis one often feels sufficiently confident one says such a statement is false. After dismissing the reality of 99 it is entirely reasonable to consider dismissing the existence of god even while acknowledging that this will probably never be a scientific answer to unfalsifiable claims. The notion that the deist may dismiss the need for evidence while the atheist is required to submit proof of a negative is just another sort of burden shifting.
- improbability
- lack of proof
- zillions on contradictions on their own manual
As I said, the burden of proof (God existence) it's up to the believer, not mine. Science says "nope", or unprobable enough clashing with near all common logic facts to not being declared a myth.
It literally doesn't, and cannot, say "nope". It wouldn't be science if it passed any judgement on Religion, because it literally cannot provide evidence to support or contradict Religion.
> Religion should be declared a myth
That's your opinion, which is fine. I share your opinion too, but that's all it is.
As an aside - from observation, the use of "Science!" has become it's own sort of religion. Blindly offering "Science!" as a reason something is true or untrue is totally the antithesis of actual science, and unfortunately is becoming far too common.
I would suggest that every mainstream religion is so full of holes after you reject such claims as to have little remaining value. I have not personally evaluated thousands of individual belief systems due to lack of time and energy but evaluated enough to have developed the theory that there aren't any good ones among the philosophies that would self describe as religions and especially those that make supernatural claims.
It's the religion cult the accountable one who need to probe their magic.
> "Science!" has become it's own sort of religion
No, Unicorns are better. And magic. Magic explains everything.
In short, not all atheists would say "I believe there is no God," and even if they did, not all beliefs are religions.
Flat eartherism is probably 99% trolls masquerading as a movement.
At least on YouTube, the main channels seem to put up exclusively pseudoscience. I didn't know how religious the movement was until I saw "Behind the Curve" from HBO.
I mean, there's contrarians, who believe all sorts of weird things just because they like the satisfaction of being proven right (which means they tend to only believe things that it seems like some fringe has evidence for somewhere.)
But other than them, if you're taking a heterodox position on something, it tends to be because it confirms or fits in better with the rest of your existing world-view in some way.
And in what world-view, does hypothesizing the Earth to be flat make things you already believe make more sense? A Creationist one.
The best I've found:
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers
Or:
He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing
--
Funnily enough, Big Bang started as a Christian theory
I don't think that's completely accurate, but it would be fair to say that resistance to the Big Bang theory was exacerbated by anti-religious sentiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Bi...
In which religion does a baby turn water into wine? There's no babies doing that in the Bible.
For the fantastical accomplishments of people of thousands of years ago to be believed, there needs to be more concrete evidence than stories passed down for generations. In this situation, it's unlikely that such evidence survived, so the best we could do is replicate what happened in the past and determine whether or not such an accomplishment could have happened given the technology of the past.
I believe that people 5000 years ago could build awe-inspiring structures from stone because there's plenty of evidence of such capabilities (i.e., the great pyramids). I don't believe that someone turned water into wine instantly, because, afaik that is not possible, thus, at best, the event in question was some sleight-of-hand magic trick.
That’s only to say you have a more fundamental disagreement than the truth about this one incident.
FE videos might be removed because they explicitly promote falsehoods as fact. By that standard, religious videos would be similar.