No doubt true. But it simply makes sense by a factor of one that mind/spirit  preceed material. No proof, just my thoughts. But I find it even more concievable than material coming out of nothingness. Ultimately, the only rational, yet inexplicable solution is that the mind/spirit always existed.

The first problem is that that all you need from the understanding of science is some form of basic energy field, as close as possible to 'nothing', to account for the Big Bang.

Whereas a 'God' is far more significant than such an absolutely minimal state of existence, therefore much harder to account for.

There may have indeed been, and may continue to be, an indefinite series of 'Big-Bang' events. Given the known random element of such fundamental events, each BB universe would likely have slightly different physics from the others. So there could well have been an all-but-infinite number of chances for a Universe with the minimal conditions for some form of life to emerge, a form which was capable of evolving intelligence. 

We only need a 'universe' where the chance of finding suitable conditions on at least one planet are of the order of one in a trillion or so for it to be pretty much a sure thing, for universes anything like ours, where we now know there are probably 100's of trillions of planets.

Note - wood and oil originate from life forms. Minerals are inherent in any material universe.

Life is only going to arise and flourish where there are basic resources - adequate abundance of the basic chemicals it needs to form more life, and a supply of energy to drive it.

Evolution takes care of the rest. IOW, as more complex forms emerge, they will adapt to use whatever is available. If there were no resources of a kind suitable for life to exploit, it would not have emerged on such a planet in the first place.

Everything we observe points to 'minds' being dependent on, arising from, some complex process, which can only happen if complex physical structures can form and be relatively stable. This in turn requires 'stuff' with the properties of 'matter', rather than just pure energy.

'Mind' seems to be an emergent attribute of life, just as life is an emergent attribute of certain forms of chemistry.

Therefore 'mind' makes no sense as an origin of matter. And according to people like Stephen Hawking, who has spent his life studying the nature and origin of matter and energy and the universe itself, any additional 'cause', such as a super-being, is totally unnecessary to explain the origin of our Universe.

Add to that the fact that we inhabit a vast universe which is mostly very hostile to life, and live on one tiny speck in this vastness, where galaxies and their contents display endless variations, to a large degree random, the idea that some all-knowing creator being set this up just for us, a Universe where the vast bulk of it lies forever beyond our perception, and beyond any chance of affecting us here on on Earth, makes no sense to me.

Proper analysis of the sort of fundamental attributes of physical law needed to allow for life to form suggest it is far more likely than what early simple analysis suggests. Originally they just calculated what would happen if you changed the value of any one fundamental 'constant' even slightly. Realistically, you have to explore the implications of changing them all by varying amounts at once, so the argument from 'fine tuning' is not well thought through.

Your ideas are understandable, from a naive point of view. And getting your mind around the ideas I have just outlined is not easy, it requires time and study.

Reality is vastly more complex and subtle than our finite minds can fully comprehend, without the idea of a 'God' with the power to change everything at any instant hanging around to confuse things.

WOW!  This is me!  Everyone take a look, this is almost verbatim the argument I made over ten years ago when I came on to atheist forums.  What a flashback...

Relrick, welcome aboard.  I'll ask you the same sorts of things that helped me, I was asked questions by Jake...

Do you agree that it's science that gave us an understanding of the big bang?

Do you agree that over time through scientific understand we continue to learn more about our origins?

Do you agree that in 20 years it is possible that science can explain what happened before the big bang?  

Do you agree that it's possible that explanation will not include a god?

Thats mere gap filling. 'We don't know so it has to be a god".

Why do you, NOT WHAT YOU BELIEVE, BUT WHY do you feel the need to insert a who into the cause? You don't believe Thor causes lightening. You know that lightening is not cognitive or caused by a cognition. You don't pray to Posiden to avoid a hurricane. You know that hurricanes are caused by non cognitive processes.

While we don't know if question of finite vs infinite, pre bang, there is no need to insert a who in as the cause.

What you are doing without realizing is merely reflecting your own "sense of awe" and projecting human like qualities on the universe. That is the same anthropomorphism the Egyptians had when they falsely believed the sun to be a god. "Isn't this grand" and "Isn't this pretty" misses all the nasty stuff in the universe.

We know what the human brain looks like. Thoughts require a material process to manifest. Since the universe is not structured like a human brain, it cannot function like a human brain, thus it is incapable of thought.

We do have plenty of evidence however, that humans throughout our species history are notorious for making up myths and falsely selling them as fact.

The universe does not need any sort of entity or god to exist. Billions of years from now it is highly likely we as a species will go extinct, maybe even sooner. When we go extinct all our fantasies about non material beings will die with us because there wont be a future generation to sell the myths to.

Science is pointing to a "what" not a "who". Just like it doesn't take a storm god to make rain, the universe didn't need a god to come about either. The universe is a thing, so whatever came before would be just as much a thing.

The problem is a you have to prove a spirit exists, and b you have to prove the mind can exist without the material.

Man created the range of concepts that are referred to by the label 'God'.

God cannot be the origin of existence, since he would have to act before he existed.

And he cannot exist in a 'timeless' realm, as often argued, since then he could do nothing.

So 'God' doesn't work as an answer or explanation for anything, except to the ignorant or naive.

possibly 'make sense' that a mind existed in a proposed void pre-bang. Minds live inside craniums and require constant nourishment and protection. As for a spirit, I'm sorry, but you'll have to prove any such thing exists before you get to insist your unsupported opinion is true. It seems obvious from empirical evidence that ideas and feelings of spirit not only come from minds but are minds.

You are appealing to complexity here. The fact we say we don't know what happened prior to the bang doesn't mean there's a 50 per cent chance it was causeless or an anthropomorphic supernatural man-god done it. It simply means no one can certainly say. The correct position is to await evidence not to indulge in wishful thinking. 

I am going to treat you with kid gloves, at least for now. YOU just did what very few believers do when they come here. At least you admitted you have no evidence. THAT is a start.  And FYI, also the first step to the road to recovery.

I'd advise the other theists here to take note to the rare honesty we seldom see here.

Your argument is "If I bet right, I win, but if you bet wrong, you'll lose" You are trying to argue that the atheist has more to lose even if there is no god(no harm done if there isn't a god).

Now, let me explain where you went wrong.

This is the fallacy of Pascal's wager. It is basically bet in favor for a god "just in case" or "cover your ass".

There are a couple of  problems with this. 1. What if you picked the wrong god?(I am talking strictly about logic here) It would be the same as going to a horse track and trying to bet on one horse. What if you pick the wrong horse? But in the case of claims of deities, you are not talking about 6 gods, you are talking about the thousands and thousands claimed in human history.

The other problem with the attitude of "do it just to be safe", is that to be safe you would have to bet on every god being real(or horse since we are making arguments about use of good logic vs bad logic) No one believes in every god claim "just to be safe". But that is literally what you would have to do to be logically consistent.

You also made another fallacy called the "True Scotsman" fallacy.

It is the idea that you can pin down an "ideal" "insert label here"

The word "Christian" is a label, only addressing the claimant's position that the god of Jesus is the one true god. It does not dictate that the person claiming it will automatically be good or bad. People claiming to believe in Jesus are capable of doing both good and bad.

The same is true for "Muslim". Holding the position that Allah is the one true god, will not prevent you from slamming planes into buildings. People claiming to believe in Allah are capable of doing both good and bad.

And the same is true for "atheist". It is a position, not a moral code or a world view. It only states  off position on the claim of a deity.  Just like any other label atheists can be and are capable of the same range of human behavior both good and bad.

"True" this or that is a fallacy because labels are not actions that people use to describe or judge morals. Labels merely are words we use to describe a person's position on one particular subject.

Hope this helps, and thanks for the honesty.

You do NOT 'know' there 'has to be a God. You believe it very strongly, of course. To claim you can 'know' such a thing is very prideful and arrogant of you. You are claiming infallibility.

We weren't born for any particular purpose beyond ourselves, it is up to us to give our life some meaning, such as doing what we can to improve our society, and hopefully leave some positive legacy for those who come after us. None of this requires the existence of any external entity, or a particular set of religious beliefs.

Neither does the non-existence of a God imply any of the rest of what you say.

We know there is a degree of order underlying everything, otherwise we would not have any orderly structures in the Universe, no Life, etc. 

We also know there has to be a degree of disorder, randomness, to allow raw matter to be continually shuffled around until higher order structures that the underlying order makes possible are found. The most significant example of this type of process is evolution.

Everyone will die and their consciousness, their spirit will cease to exist. Their is no evidence for anything else that doesn't arise from wishful thinking and a fear of death.

True morals come not from the imagined edicts of an imagined being, but from our natural empathy for our fellows, and the desire to live in a peaceful society, as far as possible.

There is no logic or rationality to justify a belief in God. There is zero evidence that if there is a God, he is what we would think of as 'good'. The evidence of history and the Old Testament in particular, and the nature of life on Earth, and the many imperfections in the 'design' of our bodies, is that if there is a God, he is either incompetent or malicious. What kind of God would create parasites whose life-cycle involves burrowing into the eyes of children and rendering them blind?

This is the flaw in evolution that causes this type of thinking. Humans don't like to face their mortality. If we evolved not to care about death, we would not evolve, but that does not make a god real, it just means we dont want to die. God belief is merely a psychological place card for our parents protecting us. It is our emotional placebo.

But think of it this way, you've gone to a movie knowing it will end. You've gone to a sporting event knowing it will end. Does that mean there is no meaning to the movie or sporting event just because they end? Does that mean you cant enjoy them because you know they end?

There is no meaning to life other than that the individual gives themselves. I wouldn't myself have gotten another cat after the death of my last one thinking that way.  My last cat didn't go to a cat heaven and the one I have now wont either. I still enjoyed the last one as I enjoy the one I have now.

The fact that nothing lasts forever does not make all of life gloomy or bad. It just means it ends. You can live a good life and give yourself your own meaning without a god. There will always be ups and downs in life and we will all die eventually. But that does not mean you have to dwell on it or pity life or yourself because this is it.

Life is a crap shoot. Here is the evolutionary reality.  Most attempts at biological life fail. For every acorn that becomes a fully grown adult tree there are thousands more that simply rot or get eaten by animals.

For every male sperm that makes it to the egg in that same load there are millions more that die. Multiply that by the 7 billion humans you are talking about trillions of sperm that do nothing. And that is just one load, not all the releases in a male's lifetime.  Most female eggs as well, do nothing. The humans that do manage to be born are a FRACTION of the attempts.

Another fact of evolution's history......99% of biological life in evolutionary history has gone extinct. What we see now seems abundant but it is only 1 percent of the entire history of evolution, not including all the attempts that have failed for each individual form of life.

This planet as well will die, the sun will die and eventually the entire universe will suffer heat death. There is no meaning to this other than our ability to measure this reality here and now. But 1 million years from now both you and I will be nothing. The most famous people in human history from our heros to our enemies, from the richest to the most obscure, will not be remembered. Our species will go extinct eventually, possibly even from a meteor strike,

None of that scares me. Pain does, suffering does, and not being around my loved ones and friends scares me. But life after I die will be just like it was before I was born. I dont live in fear of things that are simply part of nature which I cannot do anything about anyway, other than to try to avoid death to extend my life as long as possilbe. But that is all any human can do.

Myth making has always gone on throughout our species history. It does not explain the meaning of life. It is merely our own evolutionary flaw in wanting a parent to protect us and wanting immortality which does not exist.

Again, that is not pessimistic or fatalistic, anymore than saying the earth rotates around the sun is. It just means that the reality is that this is it. That does not mean you have to dwell on that or make yourself sad over a nature you ultimately have no control over. Just be yourself, do the best you can and make yourself happy by giving life the meaning for yourself you want.

An apostle says- first there was the physical and then the spiritual. That means the material came first, because the physical is material.

You call me an apostate like that is a bad thing. Living in reality is not a bad thing. Making up fictional beings and falsely believing them to be fact IS  a  bad thing because it teaches you to be satisfied with ignorance.

So yea, I am an apostate and proud of it because I don't live in Candy Land like you.

If our species never question social norms our species never would have left the caves. The sun is not a god. The moon is not made of cheese and invisible friends are merely the childish fantasies adults use to placate their insecurities.

You want to live in the year 329 mentally, we cant stop you. I think today is much more filling knowing what black holes are. Having modern computers and cell phones. I think the internet is going to be a boon to humans freeing them more and more from your ancient myth.

You can believe in your magic man all you want, I'm not going to dwell in fantasy. If you want to be left in the past, so be it. But you cant sell me your superstition any more. I do not need your god or any for that matter to live life or be good. Sorry you cant handle that, that is your baggage, not mine.

I've always had a problem with the cause and effect argument and perhaps one of my comrades here can help me.
Cause and effect involves a temporal (time based) relationship, that is it is agreed that cause always precedes effect.
If then, the absolute beginning of the rapid expansion of the universe that brought about both space AND time is considered the effect, WHEN could there have been a 'cause'? Keeping in mind that there could have been no 'before' as the temporal simply didn't exist until something less than the Planck instant. The universe therefore MUST be a causeless effect.

I'm familiar with Craig's 'virtual' time notion, I don't buy it as anything more than a pretty lame apologetic...

So... am I wrong?

LC >;-}>

Quantum Theory does seem to point to 'uncaused' events. Radioactive decay seems to be a common example of a purely random event, IOW there is no indication of any specific prior event triggering the decay event.

Another interpretation of such random behaviour is that space is pervaded by some low-level energy field which is randomly varying in strength and direction. If it twitches in just the right way in the nucleus of an unstable atom so as to trigger decay, that might explain the random nature of the decay event.

It also could be due to the apparent fact that no physical force or particle position or energy can be precisely defined at any instant -  Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - so there is a non-zero probability that almost anything could happen. With things like unstable atoms, the changes from normal needed to allow decay to happen are so small that it is likely to occur at a detectable rate.

The other fundamental misunderstanding Theists usually have is the a 'cause' must be 'greater', in some sense, than the effect. Which is totally not necessary, as can be seen all the time in everyday life.

 Which denomination are you  a part of? What is your clear definition of proselytization? 

Also, there is a lot of evidence through archaeology of the historicity of the Bible. I won't go on about the science and such, however.

Christianity is not just a pietist order that works at perfecting themselves "Morally and ethically" but it is the worship of the one and only God that has extended to us love by showing himself and giving us the gift of being with Him in heaven. Yes, it angers us that Christians are hypocrites; however, we are all sinful and that nature does not leave us until Christ comes again and those God has saved will enter in heaven to be with God. 

My definition of proselytization is sharing the good news of God's love in the form of a sacrifice worthy enough to close the chasm between God and man and our sin, and then continuing to teach and preach God's word as the church (a rough definition). 
 

  It doesn't matter what my reaction is does it ?  You have the ultimate TRUTH™ and I'm just a deluded atheist too busy giving in "to lusts without guilt or shame".

So you won't give any effort to respond to the argument? 

It does matter what your reaction is, because without dialogue, then what is the point of this atheist forum? 

Another attempt to retro fit science to prop up a fictional super hero.

You know this is bullshit because if a Muslim used this same argument you would not become a Muslim.

There is nothing outside biological evolution that manifests into a consciousness. There never was or ever will be a non material "entity" that thinks. Volcanos were never human. The polytheistic gods of Rome and Greece were not real, and neither are the monotheistic myths still falsely believed today.

The simple fact is it is all in your head. You are NOT doing anything differently than the ancient Egyptians did in projecting human qualities on the sun thinking it was a thinking being. You are not doing anything differently than Muslims or Hindus.

Deity belief of all stripes past and present, merely exist because humans attempt, in mythological form, to replace their parents and attempt to avoid facing their finite existence. It is merely gap filling in the form of a mental placebo.

Understand why you reject the gods of others and you'll understand why I reject your pet god claim as well.

You have a superstition, a comic book hero you falsely and desperately want to be real. Your "feelings" may feel real, much like an amputee still feels his foot even though it is not there. The brain is very capable of fooling itself and our history of dead gods is plenty of evidence to me that all gods are merely made up shit.

This is merely verbal cold water on your face in the hopes you snap out of it. Reality is much more awe inspiring with all the good and bad that happen. There is no man in a white rob pontificating from the clouds about his favorite minions. There is no man with a pitchfork re arranging the neurons in your head to get you to do bad things. There is only you falling for a placebo.

At least the best cosmologies we've got right now agree the Universe came from something pretty close to nothing

Wow, I love watching two different religions battle. It would be like being at a si fi convention with one person arguing the existence of Klingons while the other argues for the existence of "the force'.

Furry, when your book says "nothing" in claims to our origins that was an utterance of ignorance. That "nothingness" if you are going to claim a god still requires a god. What you are doing is retrofitting after the fact. All the word means is "poof". "god did it". It is mere gap filling written by people who had no clue what they were saying.

It would make just as much sense to claim that a snarfwidget "poof" created everything out of nothing.

Our universe is the result of a "what" not a "who".  The universe does not need us to continue nor does it need a god as a cause. Our current knowledge of that "singularity" does not need a god to explain. Background radiation and quantum physics explain quite aptly our world without making up an invisible brain with magic super powers.

What you are doing is no different than a 3 year old pointing to the sky and saying "the sky is blue". That does not demonstrate by any stretch that the 3 year old knows the reason why it is blue.

The word "nothing" in reference of those holy text is merely their pondering of what life was before they were born.

Those texts have far too much absurdity in them to consider them relevant to modern science. Muslims and Christians try to pull this too and it is not a new tactic nor is it a credible tactic.

I am not saying you are a dumb person. I am saying that you are human and you merely like the idea of the Jewish tradition so much that you are willing to try to retrofit science to it to falsely make it work.

I've had Muslims point to a red nebula and quote a Koran verse as evidence that their book is a science textbook. I've had another Muslim quote the Koran "mountains moving" as evidence that it explained plate tectonics.

A few years back, just to challenge myself, I spent three days with almost no sleep picking through a Christian's argument about how his book explained science. Everything from the creation of the earth, to knowing about galaxies and so on. Not one of those quotes DEMONSTRATED empirical knowledge.

The bottom line is NO HOLY BOOK IS A SCIENCE TEXTBOOK nor can it substitute as one.

All everyone is doing here, including you, is taking words out of context from ambiguous quotes that do not contain empirical demonstrations of knowledge.

I even had a Christian try to claim that Aquinus knew about quantum mechanics. None of you are right. You cannot take a book of myth and pretend it is a textbook that can be used in a science class or a science lab. They cant and you cant.

Scientific method and science is not dependent on belief in God/Yahweh/Allah/Jesus or Thor.

All those beliefs and books were not written through testing, falsification or independent review, because that was not the intent of the writers. The writers merely had a deity they wanted to sell and made very bad guesses about the nature of reality.

I like you Furry, but you really are not doing anything differently that we have not debunked before.

Trinity123,

Wrong.

An 'infinite' universe does not mean one that has lasted an infinite time, so 'heat death' does not arise as an issue. It just refers to the size, not the age.

That is a very basic error on your part. It betrays very poor comprehension.

                                                                        Geez,   .....even God will be dead by then.

Which assumes God exists...