2 Questions to blow your mind!

Wow you are asking one of the most important question that people have been asking for thousands of years. I the end we can not prove it one way or another. However in the end it comes down to personal belief and for me that comes down to personal experience of God. I hope this helps.

 

To be honest, nobody could possibly claim to know the answers to either of those questions and that's why they should make the best of the time they are alive. I'll find out what happens when I die when I die, until then I'm more bothered about what happens when I'm living.

 

A quick little tangent first: There's no evidence supporting the idea that any god, or other supernatural entity for that matter, ever existed aside from the religious scripts (which should be taken with a huge grain of salt considering they include some absolutely insane historical accounts) and the claim that some people simply "feel him" in their hearts. I'm rather comfortable stating God doesn't exist, and if people believe he does, that's fine too. But given the complete lack of evidence, I think my position is a pretty sound one.

I'm not really blown away by either of the questions, and answered them in my head pretty quickly.

1) The religious answer to this is that the Judeochristian god has always existed, and will continue to exist forevermore.

2) I'm not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure the answer is we have absolutely no idea yet.

Other people may have some different, or more complete answers, so I'll gladly defer to them.

 

I love these questions. They're so epically huge and unanswerable that I feel peacefully at one with the universe. I don't really want to know the answer honestly. I think it'll be a lot more fun to figure it out on our own.

 

1. Not going to answer this question, as my agnostic beliefs pretty much sum it up.

2. The universe doesn't end. If you could freeze time, there would be a center and end points of the universe somewhere, but time doesn't freeze, and the universe is constantly expanding. So, technically, there is no center or end points in the universe.

All the best.

 

I think you have misunderstood the position. People like me take the null position that there is no afterlife and no gods because there is no evidence or reason to think there are these things. Often the response to this is along the lines of "Duh! How can there be evidence? These are outside the realm of science." The problem is that admitting that there is no evidence or reason to believe simply because there can't be doesn't exactly make your position any more believable or reasonable. If anything it makes it less so. And to ask how we know these things don't exist is to flip the burden of proof.

To use an analogy here, if I were to say that I believed in invisible unicorns, one might be inclined to ask why. An argument like "you don't have any proof that they don't exist" isn't a good argument. You can't prove that something doesn't exist. That doesn't make it reasonable to believe that unicorns do. And the argument that you can't prove or disprove unicorns, so I'm somehow justified in believing in them is just as vacuous as well. The only reasonable position is the null position, which is that we shouldn't believe in something unless there is good evidence for it. I see no reason to put gods or an afterlife in a special category.

As has been stated, I believe most religious people believe their deity always existed. And I don't think we have an answer to where the edges of the universe are exactly. We know how far we can see into the universe, but this is due to the time light has had to travel. We can't see further than the light that has traveled to us, and without a really good model of how the universe works and how the universe began, we can't really say where exactly the edges of the universe are. I don't know much about what models of the universe we currently have or how accurate they are expected to be, so I suppose I can't really comment.

 

I can answer the first one.

"God" is actually a cosmic entity playing one huge game of The Sims (us).

"God" lives in a world like ours, and was created by a higher power (that we shall call "God^2"). Everyone in "God"'s world is just like "God" and has a Sims game, which are worlds in our universe similar to Earth.

"God^2" is actually a cosmic entity playing one huge game of The Sims ("God")

"God^2" lives in a world like ours, and was created by a higher power etc etc

Gives you something to think about, for sure.

 

I've been here , a speck of time, but it seems like a long time to me
Thinking about these topics, bogles my mind
I personally like to think of some type of creator and that my thoughts are connected to some higher power, call it what you will, that I am not alone and when I pass on there will be some type of different existence , maybe reincarnated, no one knows, but I'm going to try not be fearfull about it.
Sort of like at birth, did not even know what was happening.

 

Those two questions are some of the fundamental foundations which I've built my atheism on.

 

These words: 'god,' 'spirit,' 'deity' - what do they mean? A meaningful consideration of the existence or attributes of one can't be had unless these words are logically defined.

 

i hate when people do this shit.
like on yahoo answers in the religion and spirituality sections....thats all i hear...

"hey atheists, how do you explain this?" blah blah

you can't prove or disprove god.
its a matter of believing

 

The universe is not finite but not bounded(curled up). If you "draw" a triangle with one edge on earth and the other two in the microwave background the angles add up to 180 degrees not 270 degrees which means the universe is flat (the space-time is flat). This means that either the universe is infinite meaning that it doesn't have a end or it's finite and does have an end. But what this end would look like is a difficult concept as nothing would exist out side the universe (bearing in mind space it self is something). But if the universe is very big(I mean really big) and string theory is correct then you wouldn't be able to get to the end of the universe(even if it's finite) as the curled up dimensions would mean you would go in a circle into you went back to the place you started. That's at least what I picked up here and there feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about something there.

 

I think this sums up my position pretty well.

1) Depends on which religion you are referring to. Aphrodite (Venus) has a pretty interesting birth story. The Judeochristian God is a bit more boring-he has always existed. But I'm puzzled as to why this makes you believe. This statement points towards the opposite direction imo. It's actually a question many atheists love to ask. coughDawkinscough
2) From what we know, it doesn't. It's constantly expanding.

 

I like the theory that our universe is a computer simulation in another universe, and that universe is a computer simulation in our universe in the future. That nicely ties up all loose ends, like a snake eating its own tail - please don't ask which universe came first though.

 

You'd be interested in looking up theories about multiverses/parallel universes. Very interesting.

As a Catholic, I can only tell you that I can't prove that God exists, and no one should ever attempt to prove it, which is where faith comes in.
This is why it upsets me when people think it's a contradiction for scientists to be religious. As a true scientist, you should believe that there are set truths and that we come closest to the "truth" by approaching a problem from the most perspectives.

 

One can be an agnostic atheist -- you do not believe in God (the atheist part), but you do not have proof he does not exist (the agnostic part -- agnostic means to be without knowledge), and you would believe in him if proof was given. Just as you might not believe in a teapot flying around the sun, but you do not have proof there is no teapot, and you would accept the teapot existed if proof was given that it was there.

Some atheists might not believe God existed even if proof was given, but some might.

 

You kind of remind me of myself. I used have those questions and others and still do. But I tend not to let it bother me anymore. Anyways I never could figure out the answer to those questions. I also had questions such as 'What exactly is time?' and 'How do we know it exists?' Or 'Is this all a dream of God?' Can you or anybody answer these questions?

 

I feel like I just explained this (on another question) but I'll play along. "Hey atheists" questions are stupid. As it is the religious people who believe in god, the burden to prove god is on them, the burden to disprove god is not on us.