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This is a favourite topic of mine. Want to debate?

I would be happy to debate as well, or join in. However I would ask that you begin by defining 'god'.

there is your first mistake......define God on WHO'S account.....there is no reasonable definition....unless you decide to use the christian sense of the term...in which case I withdraw from this debate....

Let us say for example you choose to take the god of christianity as described in the bible. This gives you a general basis on which to begin to debate on whether or not such a being exists.

Similarly we could deine god to be one of the gods of the Greek pantheon, again it would give us a basis on which to work on debating thi gods presence or lack thereof.

However, if we have no definition of god (even a loose one) then we cannot debate it's existence coherently. While you can debate it cannot exist, I can debate that it can because how I define a god is entirely coherent in some way and cannot be gainsayed by any of your arguments - for example I may be arguing the case of a personal god as a spiritual fellow to myself, while you are busy debating the existance of a creator god of the universe.

So we need to have sme definition of god, no matter how rudimentary, upon which to base our discussion.

P.S. Why would you withdraw if the christian god was used?

hmmmm.... I see your point. The idea i was thinking of (although i didn't phrase it correctly) was more of did god create the universe, and does he watch over us as the steroetypical 'exsisting' God does. sweatdrop sorry.

I think that if someone says do you believe in god then they immediately link it with the bible and all the stuff you have to believe in that too, so basically if you ask someone if they do and they could say no because of the bible, not really god. But there are so many different gods, its hard to believe in one certain one - of course you want to believe in the nicest one - the christian god - but in other religions they have many gods for good and bad things.

I myself am an athiest, i believe in science in how we got here. I think that some of the things the bible says is good, like do not steal, do not lie, do not commit adultery, do not murder etc etc, but reall those have nothing to do with the bible. If you were a decent person then you wouldnt need a book to tell you how to behave

I think you have the wrong idea about science. Unlike religion science doesn't claim to assign purposes to things. Science describes the natural world as we can observe it and creates rigorous laws or theories on how it works so we can describe it better. (Trivia: Did you know science as we know it now ued to be called 'natural phislosophy'?)

As for the plausability of things occuring as they have. Science has discovered that the probability of things happening they were is 1. Ie 100% chance. This is fairly simple really, obviously it has happened, while it may appear unlikely in hindsight, it is obviously what occured and cannot be denied. To give you an example:

Let us say you shuffle a deck of cards and draw the cards out in a random order. No matter what combination you drew, the chances of that exact combination occuring are 1 in 8.0658175170943878571660636856404e+67! Yet you just drew out that exact combination then. Are you going to say that the laws of probability cannot account for your combination just because in hindsight it looks incredibly unlikely? wink

You are right in you concluding sentence though, science is not why anything is here, science is simply a way to describe things - like we use English on here to describe our thought. It has definitions, laws, theories, hypothesise and a whole system of it's own to describe itself and also to correct itself (science doesn't claim to be infalible).

Science is merely the description of how and in what way something happened - to the best of our understanding. Science makes no claims on why things happened, and doen't try to claim how you should live your life or even (in a general sense) what is best for you (other than proper nutrition, exercise etc to maintain your body). Science is a way to understand how things work...

Hee hee, I disagree. God is an entity created in our mind's to quell fear, not science. A philosophical essay I wrote long ago states religion as thus:

"The world and it's inhabitants are like a bird egg, Mankind being the yoke, and Religion being the shell. Religion serves to hold mankind in place, to keep it from prematurely being struck with the true realization of how large and empty the world is, devoid of any god-being. Religion serves not as an obstruction to science, nor as an escape from reality, but like a shell keeping mankind stable.
Mankind will one day see through this protective guise and see the real world, and become the bird that is birthed from the shell, and fly to a point of higher awakening. For now, religion serves to explain what is outside the shell... and what is outside it is a massive wad of unexplainable phenomenon that the army of science slowly is beginning to conquer."

Uhhhhh... that sums up my view on the subject.