Stephen Fry & God
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It all comes down to evidence. The evidence for god is the bible but the bible is chock full of inconsistencies, inaccuracies, violence and so on. In the past it could all be explained away but with today's access to information and knowledge it can't. So the only way to argue against Fry is to deny the bible, but if you do that you also deny the evidence for god. Not an easy argument to make. Which is probably why it's gone very quiet.
Sorry, long post
This was posted by someone who can explain the existence of religion substantially better than i could, i kept it specifically these types of threads
"Default Re: Would the world be a better place without religion?
Everything starts with the need to understand existence. Existence is directly related to survival, without being able to survive, you cannot exist. In simple mathematical terms, existence = survival, you cannot have one without the other. Human beings are animals, we have an inbuilt technique (created by the mechanism of evolution) of survival. We strive to survive - and in doing so we exist.
Early man survived, they hunted, reproduced etc all through an instinct to do this. Why did we bother? We had no choice, it's built into our make up and into the make up of all plants, animals and living creatures. It's not consciousness in our environment that makes us do this because animals are reactive to the world they live in, not proactive. We're the same, we've learnt to react to the environment we live in; we certainly didn't make it!
Step by step, we've learnt to master survival. We've learnt the methods required to ensure our existence, but we cannot master every aspect of our environment. To understand survival we need to ask how something works, the question man has asked since we became conscious. If you know how something works then you can work out how to counteract it if it threatens your existence.
So why change the entire course of mankind by asking "Who?" instead of "Why?".
Early man faced the same environmental dangers we do today. Through the use of tools they could defeat other animals. Shelter defeated the harsh temperatures of the environment. What happens though when they faced something they couldn't defeat; for example, natural disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes and floods?
These things threatened our existence because we could not survive them. Rudimentary logic says that when a natural disaster happens, people will die (some pagans tried to be proactive about this and sacrifice humans to appease the natural order; this doesn't work obviously since they couldn't proactively effect the outcome of a natural disaster).
How do you fight back against something that threatens your ability to exist? Do you attack it? Do you run away from it? What are you supposed to do?
If you want to survive something you cannot beat, you run away, if you're intent on survival that is. The problem with natural disasters is that they could not predict when they were going to happen and hence they couldn't run away. If there is an absence of threat from natural disasters, early man had no idea that this is because a volcano is rigged, that tectonic plates don't shift violently in some areas, that flooding only affects some parts of the globe not all. They simply didn't know that the absence of danger was based on the local geography and other associated factors that we know now. Those people that survived because they lived in a good area of the globe created the concept of faith. It worked for us, so if you believe what we say, it can work for you too. Which leads directly onto:
So what leap could have been made at this point; time for some specious reasoning. In the absence of logic and/or knowledge, the linking of two absolutely unlinked things is possible. Couple this with the knowledge that clever/genius men and women have existed since the start and an impossible link is made. Human beings look for links and patterns, it's part of asking why something works - the combustion engine wouldn't exist if Nicklaus Otto hadn't combined 6-7 separate theories into one overriding concept, it's genius when it works and dangerous when we get it hopelessly wrong. The combustion engine works because it takes a number of faceless ideas (scientific knowledge, the whys not the whos); religion doesn't because it takes natural occurrence and gives them personality, "God made man in his image" - of course it did, how else can we give it personality? We had to compare things we didn't understand to what we knew - another major piece of specious reasoning.
It didn't rain today because I said "Yes" 100 times.
Superstition was born. It was based on actual experience but a specious link was made. If I kill 100 people, then hopefully that volcano will not kill us all; since the volcano has to kill some people, we may as well pick and choose who it kills before it happens to help the rest of us survive. Yes, we're back to survival again.
Polytheism gave personality to those superstitions based on the actual effect they have. By appeasing the superstition you hopefully gave you and your people a chance at surviving. Religion itself is a game of Chinese whispers from this original premise - a premise built on ignorance of the mechanics of the environment and our nature. God, as I said is a speciously reasoned argument - two instances linked despite the fact they have no link.
Across history and including the Bible, our stories are filled with examples of humans beating the superhuman (Hercules, the Odyssey, Noah's Ark, Daniel in the lions den; etc). We allegorise disasters (volcanoes are dragons). They are stories to inspire us, acts that we could not ever hope to achieve - or at least we couldn't then.
As time moved on we ascribed more and more to these superstitions, we gave them life, we placed them higher than life. We gave God existence. It exists because we gave it existence. It doesn't exist because it existed.
We're so far removed now from the original concept that we have no idea why we even believe in God anymore, just that we do. God is nothing more than a linguistic trick (a sophist argument), a word game based on illogical logic, we were afraid to let go of religion because it was tied so closely into the reason we as a species have survived so long; however we are no longer ignorant to why we survived."
This was posted by someone who can explain the existence of religion substantially better than i could, i kept it specifically these types of threads
"Default Re: Would the world be a better place without religion?
Everything starts with the need to understand existence. Existence is directly related to survival, without being able to survive, you cannot exist. In simple mathematical terms, existence = survival, you cannot have one without the other. Human beings are animals, we have an inbuilt technique (created by the mechanism of evolution) of survival. We strive to survive - and in doing so we exist.
Early man survived, they hunted, reproduced etc all through an instinct to do this. Why did we bother? We had no choice, it's built into our make up and into the make up of all plants, animals and living creatures. It's not consciousness in our environment that makes us do this because animals are reactive to the world they live in, not proactive. We're the same, we've learnt to react to the environment we live in; we certainly didn't make it!
Step by step, we've learnt to master survival. We've learnt the methods required to ensure our existence, but we cannot master every aspect of our environment. To understand survival we need to ask how something works, the question man has asked since we became conscious. If you know how something works then you can work out how to counteract it if it threatens your existence.
So why change the entire course of mankind by asking "Who?" instead of "Why?".
Early man faced the same environmental dangers we do today. Through the use of tools they could defeat other animals. Shelter defeated the harsh temperatures of the environment. What happens though when they faced something they couldn't defeat; for example, natural disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes and floods?
These things threatened our existence because we could not survive them. Rudimentary logic says that when a natural disaster happens, people will die (some pagans tried to be proactive about this and sacrifice humans to appease the natural order; this doesn't work obviously since they couldn't proactively effect the outcome of a natural disaster).
How do you fight back against something that threatens your ability to exist? Do you attack it? Do you run away from it? What are you supposed to do?
If you want to survive something you cannot beat, you run away, if you're intent on survival that is. The problem with natural disasters is that they could not predict when they were going to happen and hence they couldn't run away. If there is an absence of threat from natural disasters, early man had no idea that this is because a volcano is rigged, that tectonic plates don't shift violently in some areas, that flooding only affects some parts of the globe not all. They simply didn't know that the absence of danger was based on the local geography and other associated factors that we know now. Those people that survived because they lived in a good area of the globe created the concept of faith. It worked for us, so if you believe what we say, it can work for you too. Which leads directly onto:
So what leap could have been made at this point; time for some specious reasoning. In the absence of logic and/or knowledge, the linking of two absolutely unlinked things is possible. Couple this with the knowledge that clever/genius men and women have existed since the start and an impossible link is made. Human beings look for links and patterns, it's part of asking why something works - the combustion engine wouldn't exist if Nicklaus Otto hadn't combined 6-7 separate theories into one overriding concept, it's genius when it works and dangerous when we get it hopelessly wrong. The combustion engine works because it takes a number of faceless ideas (scientific knowledge, the whys not the whos); religion doesn't because it takes natural occurrence and gives them personality, "God made man in his image" - of course it did, how else can we give it personality? We had to compare things we didn't understand to what we knew - another major piece of specious reasoning.
It didn't rain today because I said "Yes" 100 times.
Superstition was born. It was based on actual experience but a specious link was made. If I kill 100 people, then hopefully that volcano will not kill us all; since the volcano has to kill some people, we may as well pick and choose who it kills before it happens to help the rest of us survive. Yes, we're back to survival again.
Polytheism gave personality to those superstitions based on the actual effect they have. By appeasing the superstition you hopefully gave you and your people a chance at surviving. Religion itself is a game of Chinese whispers from this original premise - a premise built on ignorance of the mechanics of the environment and our nature. God, as I said is a speciously reasoned argument - two instances linked despite the fact they have no link.
Across history and including the Bible, our stories are filled with examples of humans beating the superhuman (Hercules, the Odyssey, Noah's Ark, Daniel in the lions den; etc). We allegorise disasters (volcanoes are dragons). They are stories to inspire us, acts that we could not ever hope to achieve - or at least we couldn't then.
As time moved on we ascribed more and more to these superstitions, we gave them life, we placed them higher than life. We gave God existence. It exists because we gave it existence. It doesn't exist because it existed.
We're so far removed now from the original concept that we have no idea why we even believe in God anymore, just that we do. God is nothing more than a linguistic trick (a sophist argument), a word game based on illogical logic, we were afraid to let go of religion because it was tied so closely into the reason we as a species have survived so long; however we are no longer ignorant to why we survived."
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David, I congratulate you......................................
If you typed that in manually. Not for the typing but either for overcoming the tediousness of the spell checker or for the lack of typos.
And I congratulate you for a longer post than mine.
But I prefer the: "If there is a God there must be more than one because a singularity cannot exist" logic.
It's a lot easier to type and read.
Apart from that, the reasoning does not answer the question posed in the title.
If you typed that in manually. Not for the typing but either for overcoming the tediousness of the spell checker or for the lack of typos.
And I congratulate you for a longer post than mine.
But I prefer the: "If there is a God there must be more than one because a singularity cannot exist" logic.
It's a lot easier to type and read.
Apart from that, the reasoning does not answer the question posed in the title.
But Davi , logic is only part of intellectual mind, it is not part of instinctive mind , nor is it part of mind higher than intellect - that we call intuition.
After countless ages 'The seat of Consciousness' of most humans is now somewhere on the plane of intellect . Though not always, - at moments it drops down to the instinctive level, at other times more sublime - reaching higher to areas where we will one day inhabit., but at present only sporadically receiving impressions from the higher regions .
i.e. on an intuitive level people (mostly subconsciously) 'know' that there is god ; however , how we interpret that on the intellectual level accounts for all the diverse religions. Then it has become what we 'believe' - ( a faint reflection of what we 'know')
The human body ( and almost all other living things ) is beyond the ability of mankind to create from a kit of basic chemicals therefor there has to be a creator with super human ability and knowledge. Hence there had to be a God to be that creator who designed and created the fantastic human body ( as Adam and Eve ).
Like wise before mankind understood how water could fall from the sky as rain there had to be a god who created and supplied rain. That was the rain god.
Understanding evolution means mankind no longer requires a God to explain how human, animal and plant life was created.
But God is so strongly implanted into the history of mankind that it will be decades before God is redundant.
That said a belief in a super power God provides a lot of support and comfort for many many people.
Like wise before mankind understood how water could fall from the sky as rain there had to be a god who created and supplied rain. That was the rain god.
Understanding evolution means mankind no longer requires a God to explain how human, animal and plant life was created.
But God is so strongly implanted into the history of mankind that it will be decades before God is redundant.
That said a belief in a super power God provides a lot of support and comfort for many many people.
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That's all very well, bernard. But when faced with an expletive like, "thank God", "Oh God", or "for God's sake" and "thank that mythical being created in our subconcious to alleviate our wories about natural disasters" etc.
I'd still prefer, "thank God!"
Or to be fair: if I had a choice of saying "May Allah have mercy upon you"
and "May that mythical being created in our subconcious to alleviate our wories about natural disasters have mercy upon you". I'd still prefer "May Allah have mercy upon you."
Not true bernardo , because evolution is understanding 'change in form' after life arose ( & there is much dispute about the actual processes at work there..)
Abiogenesis : how life began - is not known by institutional scientists .
only speculation exists; some think it arrive here from elsewhere (panspermia), but that’s only pushing the problem back a step.
I'm afraid I cannot give the Bible any credit for being evidential of a god. It is a book written by men, and superstitious ones at that. I think the Beano provides as much evidence of a giant who eats cow pies... or is that the Dandy?
Much, much longer than that in some parts of the world...
...er, such as the strongly Roman Catholic countries of South America, for example.
Phew!
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Theologically speaking, wouldn't the Vatican City be after South America to fall to atheism?
Much, much longer than that in some parts of the world...
...er, such as the strongly Roman Catholic countries of South America, for example.
Phew!
Would the Vatican City cease to exist as a state if there was no belief in God?
Therefore, in extrapolation, do all cities, shrines, places of worship/pilgrimage etc have a vested interest in perpetuating the belief in God?
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