Does God Exist?

I understand what you are saying but the paradox is that "cause" seems to be long gone now and all that is left is the result.

And to attribute God to this cause is a stretch.

There is "nothingness" and if that is your God then that is a quandary...

You can't ignore human history or science to arrive at any conclusion concerning human religions.

In the first place, science has already proven that humans are the descendants of primates. That's been proven through archaeological and DNA findings.

To deny these 'facts' are to ignore what humans already know about ourselves and our environment. We can't ignore our biology or environment.

You can't jump from what is known to the unknown by sophistry. That's not logical.

So...you were referencing a specific god...namely the one described in the Bible?

ASIDE: "IT" makes lots of sense to me.

Quran on Sun’s Orbit

In 1512 the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus put forward his theory that the Sun is motionless at the centre of the solar system, and that the planets revolve around it.  The belief that the Sun is stationary was widespread amongst astronomers until the 20th century.  It is now a well-established scientific fact that the Sun is not stationary, but is moving in an orbit around the centre of our Milky Way galaxy[7].The Quran mentions the orbit of the Sun:“It is He who created night and day, the Sun and the Moon, each floating in its orbit.” (Quran 21:33)The Quran would have been wrong according to astronomers just a couple of decades ago.  But we now know that the Quranic account of the Sun’s motion is consistent with modern Astronomy.

Expansion of the Universe

At a time when the science of Astronomy was still primitive, the expansion of the universe was described in Quran:“And it is We who have built the Universe with [Our creative] power and keep expanding it.” (Quran 51:47)The fact that the universe is expanding was discovered in the last century.  The physicist Stephen Hawking in his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ writes, “The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century.”.The Quran mentioned the expansion of the universe even before the invention of the telescope!

Mountains

The Quran draws our attention to a very important characteristic of mountains:“Did We not make the earth a resting place? And the mountains as stakes?” (Quran 78:6-7)The Quran indicates that mountains have deep roots by using the word stakes to describe them.  In fact mountains do have deep roots, and the word stakes is an accurate description for them.  A book titled ‘Earth’ by Geophysicist Frank Press explains that mountains are like stakes, and are buried deep under the surface of the earth. Mount Everest (pictured below), the height of which is approximately 9 km above ground, has a root deeper than 125 km.The fact that mountains have deep ‘stake’ like roots was not known, until after the development of the theory of plate tectonics in the beginning of the 20th century.[6]

Sky’s Protection

The sky plays a crucial role in protecting the earth.  The sky protects the earth from the lethal rays of the sun.  If the sky did not exist then the sun’s radiation would have killed off all life on earth.  It also acts like a blanket wrapped around the earth, to protect it from the freezing cold of space.  The temperature just above the sky is approximately -270oC.  If this temperature was to reach earth then the planet would freeze over instantly.  The sky also protects life on earth by warming the surface through heat retention (greenhouse effect), and reducing temperature extremes between day and night[5].  These are some of the many protective functions of the sky.The Quran asks us to consider the sky in the following verse:“We made the sky a protective ceiling.  And yet they are turning away from Our signs!” (Quran 21:32)The Quran points to the sky’s protection as a sign of God.  The protective properties of the sky were discovered by scientific research conducted in the 20th century.

Rex, nothingness does not factor into cause-effect scenarios. In order to have cause in the very first instance, you must have first cause. It's much more of a stretch to believe that you get something out of nothing. That scenario is rationally incoherent. Ask yourself why there should be something rather than nothing.

Cicerone,

Science is empirical. You don't get "proof" from empiricism. You get inference to the best explanation based on the best current evidence. Scientific conclusions are always therefore tentative. When new evidence comes along, quite often those explanations change.

I do not believe that science has "proven" anything of the sort that you suggest.

Since the universe has order and is governed by the ‘laws of science’, we should question how this order came about.  The most effective way to answer this question is to reason to the best conclusion.  Take your mobile phone for example, your phone is made of glass, plastic and metal.  Glass comes from sand, plastic comes from oil and metal is extracted from the ground.  Imagine you were walking in a desert (where there is lots of oil, sand and metals in the ground), and you found a mobile phone lying around.  Would you believe that it came together by itself? That the Sun shone, the wind blew, lightning struck, the oil bubbled to the surface and mixed with the sand and metal, and over millions of years the mobile came together by chance?

Of coarse science is 'tentative.' That's the reason it's the most reliable source for human knowledge. It's the only knowledge base that continues to improve with new knowledge and 'findings.' DNA and radioactive dating are recent human discoveries from which we have learned more about ancestry and learning the age of objects and materials heretofore unknown in human knowledge. Science continues to improve our knowledge of our environment that can't be explained in any religious document.

The origin of homo sapiens was in Africa. The writers of religious documents didn't know about atoms, mathematics, anthropology, DNA or radioactive dating methods.

Human knowledge continues to reveal more about our environment. Religious documents are static with many errors, omissions, and contradictions.

I prefer science over any religious dogma.

No culture ever has done and the first to do so won't last long.

What is your scientific evidence that it will?

Like they needed it.

Havent seen it yet...so I cant comment.

No, you don't get truth from religion and/or emotion. If religion was based on truth, why are there so many different religions based on different gods?

Religion is an accident of birth. The majority of those who believe in any religion learned it from their parents/culture. Why is your god better or worse than the millions of Hindu gods and goddesses numbered to be about 330 million?

Do you think your belief in your god is any less or more than the Hindu that believes in his/her god/goddess?

Prove it.

I can see when you place all religion under the same bubble, you can easily dismiss it. But religions all make truth claims, and they are not all the same. They in-fact, often contradict one another.

So in effect, you're really forced to sift through and deal with the truth claims of religions from a rational standpoint. You will perhaps be able to dismiss some of those truth claims as logically incoherent, but not all of them.

Your sweeping dismissal of religion indicates to me that you've perhaps done little study in in it. Am I correct?

Because it is necessary to consider the effects of different topographies and historical cultural settings on how certain truths are interpreted and acted upon.

Such things effect the bodily physiology.

It seems you are listening for flea farts and calling them God.

Religion like politics "seems" to have truth claims. They are perceived by the person who believes in their religion/political party to be truth, but there are many aspects of both that can be shown to be lies.

They are all 'subjective' truths. That's the reason why many different political parties and religions can exist together.

You wrote,

Your use of ad hominems also proves you really don't have a good challenge to my opinions.