What is an athiest?

No thing in the known universe, including the universe, can create itself

One is 'don't know, don't care': never thinks about the question, is not the least bit religious. But most of them never bother to say that they are atheists, because they aren't conscious of what they are denying.

Then there must have always been a universe.

science has demonstrated that the universe is only 14 billion years old

God of ANY religion is entirely unprovable.

However, a CREATOR is clearly evident.

You did not create yourself and yet you exist
No thing in the known universe, including the universe, can create itself and yet myriad of things exist.

Therefore, something unknown within the universe or something outside the universe greater than all the known things within the universe, including the universe, must exist.

This unknown thing can be referred to as the CREATOR.

So, does Atheism only apply to belief in a religious god?

And yet science has demonstrated that the universe is only 14 billion years old, hence the necessity of a creator for the aforementioned reasons.

Actually, what you are close to here, is a very ancient argument indeed, which goes back to Aristotle, called the cosmological argument.

Whether it really applies to the question of the existence of everything is very controversial. But it is worth looking up 'cosmological argument' and also 'Kalaam cosmological argument' if you're interested in the details.

You are right, however, whether or not there is controversy amongst men will have no impact on its validity.

By the way, the idea is first mentioned in the west as an idea of pythagoras' who was said to have learned from the priests of hmnw. thanks.

He might have had his limits, but he always knew the right angle:bigsmile:

NO , he just got off in the wrong tangent

It was a sine of the times.

indeed , indeed

I think that is one type of agnostic, yes, but the base definition might be ,has not made a decision yet. A baby would then be agnostic by default. I am able to be agnostic about many things.

Atheism is belief that there is a No god behind the creation of the universe.

They want us to bend over backward and believe that, everything came from nothing to create everything, (The Universe) in what is now called the big bang

Provided we understand Christian doctrine properly and do our science well, we will find the truth-not a religious truth and another scientific truth-but the truth, the way things actually exist and function. Yet, what about the apparent conflict between notion of creation from nothing and the scientific principle that for every natural motion or state there is an antecedent motion or state?

Thomas points out that the judgment that there is a conflict here results from confusion regarding the nature of creation and natural change. It is an error that I call the "Cosmogonical Fallacy." Those who are worried about conflict between faith and reason on this issue fail to distinguish between cause in the sense of a natural change of some kind and cause in the sense of an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever. "Creatio non est mutatio," says Thomas, affirming that the act of creation is not some species of change. So, the Greek natural philosophers were quite correct: from nothing, nothing comes. By "comes" here is meant a change from one state to another and this requires some underlying material reality, some potentiality for the new state to come into being. This is because all change arises out of a pre-existing possibility for that change residing in something. Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something's existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a taking of something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe. Rather, creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing.

Strictly speaking, points out Thomas, the Creator does not create something out of nothing in the sense of taking some nothing and making something out of it. This is a conceptual mistake, for it treats nothing as a something. On the contrary, the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo claims that God made the universe without making it out of anything. In other words, anything left entirely to itself, completely separated from the cause of its existence, would not exist-it would be absolutely nothing. The ultimate cause of the existence of anything and everything is God who creates, not out of some nothing, but from nothing at all.

Now at this point in time, both scientific cosmology and Darwinian theory come to a definite halt at a certain point when it comes to understanding the origins of life and the Universe.

Cosmology can go right back to within mili-seconds of the start of the big bang, but no further.

Darwinian theory cannot account for the origin of life. It can only account for the way species change, once life exists.

In both cases, science can only hope that one day, it will understand the last steps in these sequences. But that too is a kind of faith.

So dogmatic rejection of religion is very similar to dogmatic acceptance of it, in my view.

Religion has not accomplished a single thing worthy of being considered valuable.