<p>How many of you philosophy majors or science majors are atheists? I'm curious to see the reasons behind your beliefs. </p>
<p>I'm personally unsure...I want to think that there is a personal God but then I see it as a little illogical. I guess to get minds off of admissions decisions, we could always talk about religion lol. =]</p>
<p>i may double major in philosophy. i’m atheist. lets hope we don’t start any battles with this thread; it is a valid thing to discuss. my father was just trying to convince me, through logic, of god the other night.</p>
<p>my reasons are simple. there are no reasons for me to “believe” in a god. humans construct gods when they do not understand something scary, complex, or mysterious. we have also used god as a kind of boogey man, to keep society’s behavior in check and make individuals be well behaved and obedient.</p>
<p>i used to be the most pious of little girls, raised roman catholic. but in my teens, the logic of god started to break down for me and like you, i started asking myself questions.</p>
<p>I am a Christian for many philosophical reasons. </p>
<p>The first argument for God’s Existence that is true is the Kalam Cosmological Argument. It is actually a combination of science and philosophy as it comes from the Philosophy OF science family.</p>
<p>The argument can be summed up as:</p>
<ol>
<li>Whatever begins to exist has a cause.</li>
<li>The universe began to exist.</li>
<li>Therefore, the universe has a cause.</li>
</ol>
<p>This is a cosmological argument that gets is strength from the fact that before the big bang, there was literally nothing. </p>
<p>In 1915, Albert Einstein realized through his general law of relativity that the universe, mathematically, must be in a continual state of either expansion or contraction on its own self.</p>
<p>In 1929, Edwin Hubble observed RED streaks behind the stars in our universe. Astronomers know that RED streaks mean that stars are moving away from us and BLUE streaks mean they are moving closer to us. Thus, through Hubble’s observation, he proved that indeed the universe was EXPANDING as Einstein had predicted.</p>
<p>What does this mean then?</p>
<p>It means that, as physicist, Stephen Hawking, puts it, “at one point, the universe was so small that it came to a point that we know as the singularity. If you go back in time far enough, the singularity inverses on itself, leaving literally NOTHING.”</p>
<p>So, at one point, there was NOTHING. not even the singularity.</p>
<p>OUT OF NOTHING, NOTHING COMES. This is a philosophical princilple that cannot be denied.</p>
<p>So, WHERE did everything come from?</p>
<p>The singularity, which was EVERYTHING in the universe just condensed to a smaller size (less than the tip of a ballpoint pen), had to have come from a METAphysical source.</p>
<p>This source was God.</p>
<p>In order to prove this wrong, a person has to prove one of the two premises to be false. Otherwise, the conclusion that the universe has a cause is Logically sound.</p>
<p>NOONE has EVER been able to do this.</p>
<p>Some say that HUME did in 1729 by posing a MULTIverse hypothesis.</p>
<p>HUME has failed. Mathematicians know that in reality, NOTHING can exist for infinity. The HILBERT HOTEL expression proves this mathematically, thus, the INFINITE universes hypothesis is fallacious.</p>
<p>The universe began, it had a cause. That cause was GOD.</p>
<p>The universe began, it had a cause. That cause was chester cheetah. Prove me wrong.</p>
<p>Ok, point being, the vast majority of those who believe in “god” believe it to be a self-conscious entity, right?</p>
<p>But how do we jump from the idea that the universe had a cause to the assumption that the creative force is conscious?</p>
<p>P.S. My sources are Dr. William Lane Craig from the Talbot school of Theology, Stephen Hawking, and Alvin Plantinga from the University of Notre Dame, just to name a FEW. I know of at least 16 others that I could name as valid, professional sources that would throw out HUMES ignorant objections from the 18th century.</p>
<p>The point is, too old for this, that whether it was chester cheetah in your eyes, or GOD in my eyes, the fact that there IS A CAUSE…</p>
<p>That proves to Atheists that they have no right, intellectually speaking, to say that God cannot exist.</p>
<p>i always found this amusing:the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree…</p>
<p>What caused God?</p>
<p>Atheists have as much of a right to say god does not exist as believers have to say it exists. They may not deny a cause, but it is a very big leap to state that since there is a cause, it is GOD.</p>
<p>For the record, I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that it is GOD. I’m just covering my bases. I know that I do not know, and feel that is important.</p>
<p>Yeah, I have yet to see somebody expand the first mover argument to actually very any religion. The closest thing you can say is that the first mover argument tends to point towards deism, but certainly not any modern popular religion.</p>
<p>Yeah, what caused God?</p>
<p>And when I talk about “God” I mean a personal God, namely the Hebrew God Yahweh. </p>
<p>Anything can be God…but there’s no point in praying if you think God was the force at the beginning of time…I don’t worship gravity.</p>
<p>There are many “points” in praying. Prayer is a VERY useful idea even if a personal god does not hear or cannot answer.</p>
<p>why do you have to pray to god? why would he not be able to hear?</p>
<p>i always found this amusing: the big bang. let’s shrink everything down so small so that the laws of nature no longer apply and so we can say it’s possible for nothing to turn into something.</p>
<p>they’re called personal beliefs for a reason</p>
<p>i think Christianity is a great thing, it really frees up the golf course on Sunday mornings </p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>I agree prayer is good…it helps you sort out your thoughts, but to think that some natural force will answer them seems a little silly to me (my opinion). You can just think things through in your head without believing someone is going to answer you in some spiritual way.</p>
<p>i agree with transfermeup. i hope no one here purports to solve/stop a debate that’s been going on for thousands of years. that would be foolish :)</p>
<p>just because it has been going on for thousands, does NOT mean it cannot be solved today. it could be the case, as it is, that there is NOW evidence that proves it to be true.</p>
<p>as far as “WHAT CAUSED GOD”…if youll notice the first premise, it states that whatever BEGINS to exist has a cause.</p>
<p>God, in his METAphysical nature, IS INFINITE. Mathematicians agree on this as well, that infinity CAN EXIST outside of our physical realm. God is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. HE has always been here.</p>
<p>ANother point i want to make,…</p>
<p>NOONE has or will be able to refute my argument concerning the cosmological argument…as weve already seen, the first two premises still STAND as VALID.</p>
<p>ANother point,…CALL the CAUSE whatever you Want. the POINT IS THIS…there WAS A CAUSE. PERIOD. IM calling it GOD. </p>
<p>PROVING TO EVERYONE that that cause was GOD is a different topic ALL together.</p>
<p>does anyone have ANY philosophical arguments at ALL to prove otherwise??? I mean PLEASE tell me that you philosophy atheists out ther applying to UCLA and UCB have at least ONE analytic argument for atheism</p>
<p>OTHERWISE, i am wholly justified in believing in JESUS as the CAUSE of the universe.</p>
<p>It makes no sense to me to try to “prove” the existence of a god with the Big Bang theory when the Big Bang Theory has been neither proved or disproved.</p>
<p>lol i love the creepy ads that scan the text of the page. as in the ad i just saw was some religous drama thing.</p>