Yes, I believe I’m part of God, same as all it exists, we are God, we are energy, we are 1.
Yes. (Jewish)
If there is a cake there must be a baker
There’s the law of conservation of energy: energy can’t be created nor destroyed. Then how did we get the initial energy? The laws of physics must have been violated by some kind of god
No. Conservation of mass and energy only prohibit the total mount of mass and energy changing. The universe could have always existed with that mass and energy. We have good evidence that a lot of mass and energy was spread out by the expansion of a much smaller universe around 13.8 billion years ago, but we don’t know what the universe was like before that, it could have always existed, or it could have been formed by the collapse of another universe, we don’t know for sure.
Anyway, the laws of physics are just empirical observations, they have been proven wrong before. Einstein’s general relativity disagrees with Newton’s laws of motion and, further study reveled that Newton was (very subtly under normal conditions) wrong.
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes ‘nothingness’ as a default state, despite the fact that nothingness seems to be a philosophical concept incapable of actually existing (even in a vacuum there’s zero point energy).
So “how did we get something from nothing” necessitates the task of proving a plausible case for nothingness as an initial state.
And the answer of ‘God’ as a mechanism just kicks the can up the road, as then you are faced with the question of what created God.
If you claim eternal preexistence of God, then you’ve landed at the same rejection of nothingness as an initial state just with unnecessary extra steps.
Eh. Humans have (confidently and incorrectly) assumed such causal links for millenia. There’s thunder, so there must be a thunder god. There’s a sun in the sky, so someone must have put it there. There’s people, so someone must have build them from clay.
What we could conclude logically: There is something - so something, somehow, once began.
That’s it. It’s also kind of recursive. It’s factual, but there isn’t anything meaningful inevitably following from this.
And everything else is an assumption.
You can say “I chose to believe that this somehow was a someone.” You could decide to believe that there was a personal entity as a single cause for all that is. Someone who had somewhat of a consciousness, who willingly and deliberately created everything. You could assume that this someone was eternal and all-powerful and therefore later on or even until right now still alive/active. You could speculate about this entity being interested in creating a specific planet with a very specific ecosystem. You could ponder whether this entiry would be interested enough in one species within this ecosystem to watch, influence, and even hold something like a relationship with them.
A bit far fetched, but sure. You wouldn’t be the first one to assume all these from a simple “There is a cake”.
No, the concept never really made any sense to me. The idea of god doesn’t actually answer any questions about the world, and I find it fundamentally offensive. The idea that our world is created by some higher power that just fucks with humanity for its own amusement and that gets to judge us effectively denigrates humans to sims in some sick and perverted game.
The idea of god introduces lots of questions as well, such as where does god itself come from. Given that we can explain the whole universe through natural phenomena, seems weird to introduce something there’s no evidence for that needs whole lot of explaining itself.
The explanation for tendency towards religion due to a quirk of natural selection makes the most sense to me. Basically, the theory is that there is selection pressure to err on the side of seeing agency where there is none. If the grass rustles then maybe there’s a tiger hiding there or maybe it’s just the wind. If you think it’s a tiger and run away then you survive, but if you think it’s the wind and it is a tiger than you die. Thus the trait of erring on the side of agency was selected for over many generations, and hence why people tend to look for agency behind our world and the universe itself.
Furthermore, the notion is laughably anthropocentric. we now know there’s a vast universe out there with countless billions of galaxies each having countless billions of stars. We are like a dust mote in vast ocean, and to think that we are somehow special and that there is some deity that cares about what we do individually seems absurd.
Religion made sense when humans didn’t understand how natural phenomena occur, and it provided useful traditions that helped groups of humans survive. The rule against eating pork in Islam is a great example of this. People noticed that those who eat pork are more likely to get sick. They had no idea what bacteria and parasites were, but they saw a pattern and attributed it to some higher power not wanting people to eat pork. This improved people’s chances of staying healthy. The mindset of memorizing a bunch of rules and following them blindly helped keep society going.
Today, we understand how natural phenomena work, and more importantly we have a tool for expanding this knowledge in an effective way that lets us discover and understand phenomena that we currently don’t have good understanding of. This tool is science and it works reliably and repeatably. The mindset of following blind rules that religion promotes has long stopped being beneficial to society and has now become a hindrance.
No, all religion is dumb.
Nope and those that do are inherently harmful
Explain
abrahamic religions goal isn’t a happy and healthy life on earth but rather to ascend to heaven. In fact, suffering on earth is a large component to being able to ascend to heaven as far as they are concerned.
