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why have multiple souls... isnt one soul good enough for us?
Please explain why your godfather (the one you can’t prove exists) has no decisions? Can’t you see how it has affected your thought processes?
morals? Why do non-believers have morals Christians are lacking? In other words, can you not see Christianity infects people’s minds where they can’t make humane
You claim mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin should be forgiven if they have a last minute confession on their death-bed. What kind of justice/morality is that?!! THEY KILLED MILLONS!
You claim slavery is ok since it is approved in the new testament. It took a civil war and the forced implementation of secular law to remedy that in the States. Do you honestly believe it is ok to own another human? What kind of morality is that? You need to get your priorities straight in life and try to start thinking for yourself. Religion is notorious for influencing normal people to commit atrocities in the name of some god. Remember 9/11? I don’t care how you try to rationalize this, your wrong. Try to think for yourself!!!!
I am thinking for myself. no one thinks for me. God knows everything and all things. Like i said awhile back it all comes down to free will.
I kicked my soul out years ago, he kept leaving his clothes in the middle of the floor. Can't have that.
What a bunch of nonsense, this is trolling not a debate. Talking about souls and spirits to a group of atheists is pretty transparent that this child of god is a fake and not a very good one at that.
Maybe others have said this, but it is intellectually dishonest of you to put the burden of proof on us. You are the one making the claim that god and souls etc....exist. Prove it!!! Not with personal anecdotes, not quoting the bible, prove it with a repeatable, peer reviewed process that shows your assertions. Asking anybody to prove that something does not exist is unfair. If that were an accepted process, then literally any thing that we could think up would be a legitimate possibility. So I'll make you deal. If you prove that unicorns don't exist somewhere on the earth, I'll prove to you that god doesn't exist.
I'm curious what makes you think that unicorns are not still on the earth?
First to your question:
I am an atheist because I haven't, yet, been convinced that their is a god.
Now your post:
Your argument is nonsensical, no one has ever said that existence sprung from nonexistence, just that the universe came from something we don't yet understand. Simple logic will tell you that if there is existence, something exists, for without existence nothing could. As far as your god is concerned, you presuppose existence outside the universe when you invoke it, for your god must exist within existence. If the universe could come into existence perfectly fine from existence, why posit additional entities contingent upon that existence to exist to explain it, just cut out the middleman and appeal directly to existence itself.
Matter had to come from somewhere or from someone. That is the point if you take God out, then were did it come from? That is the question that evolutionists try to avoid.
A better question would be, "where did all the energy come". Of course this question blows up in your face pretty quickly when you learn we probably live in a zero energy universe.
Either you establish a rule (something cannot come from nothing) and you are forced to explain where god came from, causing an infinite regress, or you claim that he did not come from something, i.e. he came from nothing. In this case you have broken the rule and it is no longer valid. To claim it applies to matter and not to god is special pleading. Besides that, there is no way to establish the veracity of the claim "something cannot come from nothing" in the first place. It would be foolish to make the positive claim that something CAN come from nothing, but also foolish to say for certain that it cannot.
No matter what the explanation is for the universe, with a god or without one, the only two options are that something popped into existence out of nothing, or that something has always been (eternal). Either of those seem unnatural to us, as everything we know of on Earth does not fit into either of those descriptions, but I am aware of no third option. Whether that is a god or the universe, or something entirely different remains unknown, and cannot be supported without sufficient evidence pointing to one conclusion or another. You cannot reasonably just pick one to be your favorite and say it is true just because there s no evidence for the others. There is no evidence for your god either.
Lawrence Krauss didn't avoid it when he postulated and proved mathematically that matter can come from quantum fluctuations within a quantum vacuum. Once again, we aren't saying that matter didn't come from something, we are saying that it can't yet be known what it came from. That is the real difference between scientists and theologians, scientists will admit what they don't know, theologians will pretend to know everything.
Evolutionists try to avoid whether there is an origin of matter? I think not. It simply isn't their scientific specialty.
And if, as you posit, matter did need to come from something, why must it be your gawd, chucky?
Jeff - “You are making a claim that space is empty”
I never made that claim Jeff.
---
Jeff - “You claimed that your own body is being destroyed and recreated at the speed of light”
I never made that claim Jeff.
---
Jeff - “No, you call that [creation and annihilation] and you are wrong.”
No Jeff, I am not the originator of those terms. Those are the terms used in the text books, classrooms, and in the field. That is where I learned them Jeff. I linked you the Feynman diagram for the annihilation of a electron and positron, resulting in the creation of a pair of photons. This is regularly observed in the laboratory (and in fact is used in a PET scan machine). The resulting photons carry the exact amount of energy/mass, linear momentum, and angular momentum that was contained into the 2 fermions that were annihilated. If as you seem to believe those fermions still exist, then energy, momentum and angular momentum can not be conserved meaning the entire framework of physics is totally wrong. That is an awfully bitter pill to swallow.
---
Jeff - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwXQjRBLwsQ
You probably should take actual physics classes if you want to learn about the subject, instead of watching videos from the new age guru Deepak Chopra.
---
This whole problem stems from the common misconception of conflating matter and mass/energy. Mass and energy are properties, matter is a certain group of particles. Not all particles are matter, for example the photon, gluons, the Z boson, the W bosons, and higgs boson are not matter.
Also for what it is worth, you can create energy too, but with the caveat that you also create negative energy in equal amounts (that way the net total does not change).
cite the text books that claim that matter can be destroyed as a fact, like you claimed it.
"Also matter can be created and destroyed, that is what particle accelerators do!"
participial accelerators do not destroy matter. There is no way to square this circle. It is wrong. They can make matter vanish, yes.
"Jeff - “You are making a claim that space is empty”
I never made that claim Jeff.
---
Jeff - “You claimed that your own body is being destroyed and recreated at the speed of light”
I never made that claim Jeff.
---
Jeff - “No, you call that [creation and annihilation] and you are wrong.”
No Jeff, I am not the originator of those terms."
You did directly or indirectly.
There is no evidence that suggest that matter can be destroyed since we do not know yet what matter is.
When you claim that anything can be destroyed you are automatically claiming that just because you do not see it , then it is destroyed.
All those text books are clearly ASSUMING somewhere that when they mean 'destroyed' they mean vanishes from vision or disappears.
"This whole problem stems from the common misconception of conflating matter and mass/energy."
As i said we still do not know what matter is.
How can you make claims on something that you do not even know what it is?
Find me the paper that explains what matter is and all its possible properties. We are still researching that field.
I gave you the video because it explains the double slit experiment which Einstein couldn't solve, then a kid came up with the idea of consciousness that can effect or even create matter. It goes on the the theory of the holographic universe and others.
THEORIES & Hypothesis, because we do not know yet how matter is created out of space/vacuum.
Einstein proved that matter and time are related, now we know that consciousness and matter are related but we are still searching for a unified theory that unites the quantum world with the theory of relativity. Only after we find the unifying theory, THEN AND ONLY THEN one might be arrogant enough to claim anything about matter.
"Not all particles are matter, for example the photon, gluons, the Z boson, the W bosons, and higgs boson are not matter"
An other fallacy, the argument was if matter can be destroyed, not if there were other thing apart from matter.
"If as you seem to believe those fermions still exist, then energy, momentum and angular momentum can not be conserved meaning the entire framework of physics is totally wrong."
conserved is not destroyed, conserved deals with change, destroyed deals with complete annihilation of an object in a way that it cannot ever come back since it has been destroyed.
Understand the difference.please.
An other thing which you should know.
All physicists know that the current physics has something fundamentally wrong with regards to matter.
We have 2 different theories for matter which are:
The theory of relativity which deals with big things like planets etc..
The Quantum theory which deals with the small things like atoms.
However those theories contradict each other and do not agree on some fundamental aspects.
On the other hand we know for a fact that all big things out there are made up of small things so they must agree but they don't and not by a small margin.
Clearly we are missing a fundamental basic concept in physics OR we have one which is either not correct or misunderstood.
The funny part is that it is in both theories and thus it is possible that we have 2 concepts which are wrong.
That is where we currently stand officially at least.
Support your claims that matter can be completely annihilated since I haven't seen links to papers yet even though you dared to accuse me of only watching videos "of new age guru Deepak Chopra."
I have a physics degree but they don't teach you those things because they are theoretical, schools are to learn basics to get a job.
This subject can only be researched in a thesis or on your own accord.
I am new to this forum, I am also new to debates in general so please forgive me if I am posting this in the wrong place. After reading many of the posts here (by far not all of them) I think I have understood a few things. Here is my summary:
In a sense atheism is a religion since it builds on beliefs. These beliefs though, differs radically from those common in most religions.
An atheist believes in truth as it is shown by the most recent scientific facts. He is always open for the possibility that these facts can change based on new discoveries and research. He is on a road that might lead him to new, strange and fascinating places, constantly keeping past mistakes in mind, not to hit those potholes again. The past has taught him that there are very few, if any, absolute truths in the universe.
He is humble in the face of the universe, always willing to expand his knowledge, never attempting to adjust reality to fit his beliefs.
A religious person however, has his feet firmly planted in the spot he was assigned thousands of years ago. He looks at his surroundings through glasses colored by his ancestors. When something does not fit with his beliefs, he first tries to change it so it does. If that does not work, he ignores it.
Am I wrong? I can't help but imagining what today's society would look like if religious leaders had been successful in their attempts to suppress aspiring scientists and philosophers throughout time.
Although I am opposed to putting labels on people, which is so common in our world, I have to, based on the above, admit to being an atheist.
Hi heueh and welcome.
Since I cannot speak for any other person who identifies as atheist, the following is IMO...
Atheism is not a religion. Also, I do not use the word 'believe' because, in my definition of that word, it requires one to accept something as true without benefit of evidence. However, I do 'think' a lot of things are true, probable, likely, acceptable, sensible, etc.
You also described an atheist as humble. There are plenty who are decidedly not humble.
As cyber has pointed out being an atheist does not mean:
"An atheist believes in truth as it is shown by the most recent scientific facts. He is always open for the possibility that these facts can change based on new discoveries and research. He is on a road that might lead him to new, strange and fascinating places, constantly keeping past mistakes in mind, not to hit those potholes again. The past has taught him that there are very few, if any, absolute truths in the universe.
He is humble in the face of the universe, always willing to expand his knowledge, never attempting to adjust reality to fit his beliefs."
An atheist is a lack of belief in a particular claim, thus it can never be a religion.
I think you are mixing atheism with skepticism and critical thinking.
Though if you are a skeptic you would most likely be an atheist if not enough evidence or logic is presented for a god claim.
However you can be an atheist for the wrong reasons like not wanting to know about any god claims because of prejudice.
You can also be a skeptic and not be an atheist like someone that never heard of a god claim thus he cannot make a decision about his belief/lack of belief yet.
You are quite right, CyberLN and Jeff. Looking at the definition of religion in all available dictionaries, atheism does not fit the bill.
And yet, so much effort are spent by atheists disproving religion that at least I am prone to draw parallels to the dispute between various religions. We all agree religious beliefs are false at best so why waste all this energy arguing with people that are so stuck in their fictional world that there are very little chance of ever convincing them of an alternate view on life?
There are a lot of folks who come to this site, and others like it because they are on the fence. They may be doubting a religion in which they were raised. So these debates with the theists might be the tipping point for them. Another reason some of us debate with theists is because it helps us understand them, it helps firm up our own opinions, and frequently, it's just flat out entertaining.
Apart from , that, the main reason is that We Care.
Theist effect society with their stupidity, thus things which are rather obvious become points of debate.
This includes gay rights, gay marriage, indoctrination, etc...
We are still fighting to make people see that indoctrination in anything is a bad thing, which is quite common sens to us.
Jeff - "then a kid came up with the idea of consciousness that can effect or even create matter. It goes on the the theory of the holographic universe and others."
That is straight up Quantum Mysticism:
'Quantum mysticism is a set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate consciousness, intelligence, or mystical world-views to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered by many scientists and philosophers to be pseudoscience and "quackery".' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism
Jeff - “cite the text books that claim that matter can be destroyed as a fact, like you claimed it.”
“It is time to learn quantum field theory, which provides a natural framework for handling the creation and destruction of particles. We have already seen one example, namely, the quantized electromagnetic field, whose quanta, the photons, can be created and destroyed by operators at and a. We need a theory in which particles like electrons and positrons can also be created and destroyed. You are ready for that subject.” - page 579, Principles of Quantum Mechanics 2nd ed., Shankar
“These variables anticommute with each other and with all fermionic creation and destruction operators” - page 643, Principles of Quantum Mechanics 2nd ed., Shankar
“There are further generalizations, namely, to relativistic quantum mechanics and to quantum mechanics of systems in which particles are created and destroyed” - page 143, Principles of Quantum Mechanics 2nd ed., Shankar
“When the quantum number n goes up (or down) by An, we say that An quanta have been created (or destroyed).” - page 197, Principles of Quantum Mechanics 2nd ed., Shankar
“Thus the process makes perfect sense and represents a positron created at d and destroyed at c.” - page 577, Principles of Quantum Mechanics 2nd ed., Shankar
“This is a useful technique even in the theory of stable particles, for which the number of particles is constant; moreover it is easily extended to describe the physical creation and annihilation of particles that occur at high energies.” - page 479, Quantum Mechanics - a modern development -Lbellentine
“The normal product of a set of creation and annihilation operators is a product of those operators reordered so that all creation operators are to the left of all annihilation operators, multiplied by a factor (−1) for every pair interchange of fermion operators that is required to produce the reordering.” - page 489, Quantum Mechanics - a modern development -Lbellentine
“In quantum field theory, in which particles are regarded as field excitations that can be created and destroyed” - page 185, Quantum Mechanics - a modern development -Lbellentine
"physical creation and annihilation" --at least he said physical, meaning not completely destroyed.
"regarded as field excitations that can be created and destroyed” -- the field excitations is being created or destroyed not matter itself, thus it is saying that matter can change state that its field is destroyed.
"cite the text books that claim that matter can be destroyed as a fact, like you claimed it."
Repeat - "like you claimed it."
This is not what I asked, I know that some stupid text books use destroyed to describe vanishing from the physical form, and most declare this assumption, those that don't are just bad books.
It is simply the wrong scientific word or term to describe something that vanishes.
Provide the papers that show that matter is actually being destroyed. Not that a book uses the word "destroyed" somewhere.
Book authors are not scientists in most cases.
Jeff - "then a kid came up with the idea of consciousness that can effect or even create matter. It goes on the the theory of the holographic universe and others."
That is straight up Quantum Mysticism:
You should not rely on Wikipedia so much, it is one of the most unreliable sources of information.
"Clearly the two slit experiments, for the first time in physics, indicates that there is a much deeper relationship between the observer and the phenomenon, at least at the subatomic level. This is an extreme break from the idea of an objective reality or one where the laws of Nature have a special, Platonic existence."
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec13.html
You can call it Quantum Mysticism if you like but the facts are there.
Um, you are confusing mass and matter. Matter can be destroyed, mass and energy cannot.
Mass/Energy equivalence:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equivME/#2.1
Matter is not perfectly conserved:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_mass#Matter_is_not_perfectl...
Electron–positron annihilation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron%E2%80%93positron_annihilation
http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/feynman/AnnihilationTalk.pdf
In annihilation, the masses of both the positron and electron are converted into energy (gamma rays). The energy of the gamma rays is the same as the mass energy of the original positron and electron and so mass energy is also conserved. Not the matter, though, it is annihilated. So, yes, matter can be annihilated, or even created. Pair production is when two photons(non-matter) produce and electron or positron, which are both considered to be matter, so it can actually be created too.
Particles with mass = Matter.
Particles with no mass = Energy.
Mass is equivalent to energy, so you can convert it to energy and vice versa, but the matter is created or destroyed in the process.
"Um, you are confusing mass and matter. Matter can be destroyed, mass and energy cannot."
we are discussing that when we say destroyed, we do not mean that it becomes nothing, that is the assumption.
Didn't think you would fall for such a straw-man.
Matter is still an unknown thing, we still are debating whether it is an actual physical object or a product of vacuum energy(space).
It could also be an illusion that we experience.
Some even say that matter is a result of division in space.(holographic universe theory)
Claiming that something can be completely destroyed into nothing without knowing conclusively what matter is, is unscientific.
You simply cannot claim things which you do not know yet what they are.
What they say is matter is conserved, which is the most appropriate term.
Please do not quote anymore Wikipedia when you want to support any scientific claim.
Every academic knows how unreliable Wikipedia is, especially when referencing it's sources, very biased and unscientific.
"Particles with mass = Matter." --correct
"Particles with no mass = Energy." --......what?
Where is the paper that proves that energy has no mass?
"It is almost certainly impossible to do any experiment that would establish the photon rest mass to be exactly zero."
http://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass....
What they say is that if we want the current theories(which we know that are not 100% correct) to work we need to assume that light has 0 mass.
When you read papers, they are quite humble about it.
The truth is that we do not know yet. We have theories that do not include them that seem to work though.
But both theories have 1 or more basic concepts missing that makes them disagree when we all know they should agree since everything big out there is made up of something small.
With so much uncertainty in theoretical physics no one can claim anything for certain without showing the experiments that proves it.
Including that energy has 0 mass. Maybe that is the missing fundamental principle(or part) which can help us make a unified theory.
Though i do not blame you for making this mistake since you need to actually read some papers on the matter to understand some of the assumptions which are made in theoretical physics.(i still know just a few)
most papers build on other papers assumptions and it gets lost which are assumptions or not.
Have a read here to understand what we are talking about, because it seems clear to me that we need a deeper understanding here:
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae635.cfm
When it was tested with plank mass, the vacuum resulted to have infinite energy before re-normalization.
This is one of the reasons why we do not know what a black hole is, we are missing a fundamental concept that can explain it and why it seems there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy that seems to be spinning too.
A possible candidate that could fit to solve this is the power of spin which is mostly neglected in general relativity but we know that it is there.
The planet does not go around the sun, it spins around the sun in an elliptical motion.and the sun is not standing but moving through space, spinning around the black hole in the center of our galaxy.
Einstein discovered that space is curving, but i think it is not only curved but spinning like the water going down the drain.
The question is what is spinning?
"Mass is equivalent to energy, so you can convert it to energy and vice versa, but the matter is created or destroyed in the process."
"Mass is equivalent to energy" ....depending what you are doing, one could say that the amount of energy is represented by the mass, mass could be just 1 property of energy.
From your own link:
The only combination of answers to questions (1) and (2) that is inconsistent is to say that mass and energy are the same property of physical systems but that the conversion of mass into energy (or vice versa) is a genuine physical process. All the other three combinations of answers to questions (1) and (2) are viable options and have been held, at one time or another, by physicists or philosophers as indicated by the examples given in Table 1.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equivME/#2.1
"In annihilation, the masses of both the positron and electron are converted into energy (gamma rays)."
Yea I grant you that they might use those words but they do not mean that they are destroyed but converted into energy.
I would say even that it changed is composition so for us it would not appear to us anymore.
Matter is a label we give to something we do not fully understand.
This goes in terminology now, which technically if you don't see something, then destroyed/annihilated becomes a valid term.
But the original post that I objected was that something can be created out of nothing or destroyed into nothing.
Changing the subject like this just not gonna work.
Up until now no one ever proved that anything was created out of nothing and nothing was destroyed to create anything.
Actually we haven't ever experienced what nothing is.
I am not the one attacking a strawman. Not once did I say that it was turned into nothing, I said that the mass was converted to energy, and that matter was not perfectly preserved. I don't really need to respond to the rest of this, as it is a huge strawman, you are simply characterizing my argument incorrectly. Nothing, as a physical reality, doesn't exist. No one ever said that something becomes nonexistent, not a single time in this thread, so you are attacking a position nobody ever held in the first place.
"Not once did I say that it was turned into nothing"
I said you fell for a straw man, not that you made it.
First he said destroyed/created then he changed it to conserved, if he said conserved from start there wouldn't have been misunderstandings.
"No one ever said that something becomes nonexistent, not a single time in this thread, so you are attacking a position nobody ever held in the first place."
When you say to a theist or in leimen's terms that something is created or destroyed, he understands that something can be created out of nothing or destroyed completely,(doesn't exist anymore.)
That is what I thought he meant when he commented on 'shok of god' copy pasting that quote.
now if we decide to call the disappearance of matter being destroyed, then it must be correctly declared.
We still do not know what matter is, claiming anything on its disappearance is not scientific.
For me destroyed means destroyed, non existent anymore.
If i was wrong on the interpretation then I apologize.
Btw
That is straight up Quantum Mysticism:
That is a genetic fallacy.
Just because something is mystic(which is not the case) then you are alluding that it is less reliable.
I am starting to doubt that you actually know anything about science at all.
you seem quite not informed about anything new in physics.
i think there is a problem with the introductory statement of this forum, because i believe that not all atheist believe in BIG BANG, what i mean is, i dont believe in bigbang because i know that it is not right or wrong but because, big bag is still a theory that is presented the way every theist did to their religion. so an atheist does not necessarily believe in BIGBANG. but i can not say that bigbang is wrong, the only thing is i am not in a position to say whether it is right or wrong because this matter is beyond my understanding. but to say that theistic point of view is illogical is easy to say for me because it is obvious that they are.
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