Why do you believe in God?
I've encountered many theists on Opposing Views, as well as in person at the university I am attending. I am always curious as to the various reasons for believing in a supreme deity, or, as it may be, multiple deities. I pose the question to all the theists out there - Why do you believe in God?
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To base one's belief in a God from a book does not consider that there are many books of the Bible that were not included in the Bible. Many were left out for political reasons of the church . Some passages taught that one does not need a church to pray to a God. Other books had women viewed as equals. Some Bible stories are re-tellings of tales from older cultures. How about the possibility that if there is a God that the true religion is one that doesn't presently exist and may have died out years ago such as Ancient Sumerian, since there are several areas where Christianity, Judaism and Islam overlap. And how accurate can something be if it has been copied from other copies by hand before there were copying machines and then translated from other languages? The meaning of many words and phrases written years ago in Old English is not always the same as how we would say things today so over 2,000 years there must be some typos or exaggerations in there.
Throughout history newer religions have called older more established ones to be Pagan religions. I believe that what can possibly be the future of religion will not be tied to dogma and therefore all current religions are Pagan in that context. :)
There is no shred of verifiable and falsifiable evidence that any god or gods exist.
Science can explain most of what we observe without invoking anything supernatural and for everything else it is more intellectually honest to simply say "we don't yet know but are searching for it".
Evolution is a fact and a purposeless gradual process in which live evolved from a single replicating cell to all current life forms including us.
The universe does not owe us anything and owes us no comfort.
We share a common ancestor with all life forms, most recently with chimpanzees but we have a much more evolved brain.
This means that we have the capacity to give our own life purpose. Again no need to invent anything supernatural.
Again, evolution shaped our basic morality (the golden rule) which religions have hijacked and turned into a royal mess that has cost millions of lives.
It's time we leave all this superstitious nonsense behind and start living the only life we have to the fullest and help our fellow-men do the same.
There's much truth in what you say, but what scientific experiment told you that evolution was a "purposeless" process?
Cell copying happens with very high fidelity but copying errors do occur randomly. We call them mutations. They happen naturally but can happen more frequently when we eat carcinogenic food , smoke cigarets, get too much sun exposure, … Without such rare random mutations life would not have evolved. There is no evidence that a supernatural being is at the steering wheel directing when, where and to whom these mutations should happen.
Most mutations have no effect. Some cause the organism to die before reproducing which means that its effect is selected out. Others improve the chances of the organism to reproduce which causes this mutation to proliferate over time in its gene pool.
Here is a simple example of “nature” gradually selecting or deselecting small random mutations over a very long time. A gazelle needs fast legs to escape from its predator. If a mutation causes a gazelle to run slightly slower that its peers, it is more likely to become dinner than its peers. If that gazelle is eaten before it had a chance to reproduce, this mutation will not be passed on to future generations. On the other hand, if a mutation causes a gazelle to slightly run faster than its peers, it is much more likely that one of its peers becomes lunch for its natural predators. It therefore has more chance to mature to reproductive age and pass its genes to the next generation and the gazelle gene pool.
Mutations also occur in the natural predators of gazelles, causing an evolutionary arms race where the gene pool of both the hunters and the hunted shift in the direction of higher speed - up to a point. Super fast muscles may burn more energy than what is economical to store or than the available food supply can sustain or may only allow that animal to run faster for a duration that is not fast enough to catch a prey, ...
A species may become such a fast hunter that in a short period of time it can feast on all its natural prey but then goes into a period of famine when only the super fast ones survive (it is really an arms race between the slow and the fast ones of the same species). Some may have a mutation that makes no difference in times for abundance but gives them an edge in times of famine because when starving to death they may try to eat something they have never needed to try before and surprise surprise, they can digest it and they, not the faster ones survive.
The possibilities are endless and impossible to predict. Mutations may give a creature starving for food the ability to better digest plants and fruits instead of hunting for meat , the ability to survive under ground, on the ground, in the water , in the heat, in the cold, in abundance of water, in lack of water, at high altitude, climb in the trees to protect itself against fast predictors. Such diversions lead to speciation, over time splitting the gene pool in subgroups. A sudden flood or a new river may split a species in two and over time they evolve so far away from each other that they no longer can produce offspring together, ...
Again there is no evidence that a supernatural being is at the steering wheel of events that change the natural environment of any organism, plant or animal (including us) such as earthquakes, underwater earthquakes that cause tsunamis, floods, lightning that causes fires, meteor strikes or volcano eruptions that can reduce the amount of sunshine that reaches our planet, …
Combined, the total unpredictability of natural events and the total unpredictability of the reaction to random mutations and the total unpredictability of these combined effects on other creature with absolutely no evidence that there is anyone at the steering wheel driving this to an intended outcome (like a god creating the universe with us in mind or a god creating evolution as its mechanism to intentionally create humans the way we are now leads us to the only credible scientific conclusion that this whole process is a purposeless process.