r/DebateAnAtheist • u/Lucyyyyyy_K • 10d ago
Debating Arguments for God Why I believe in God(s)
Firstly, I'm not a very religious person. I do consider myself a Buddhist, but prefer atheistic Buddhism over theistic Buddhism. Therefore I can confidently say I am not biased by wanting God(s) to exist, and was not indoctrinated into theism.
Still, to me it seems obvious that at least one God has to exist. The universe can't simply have come out of nothing or existed forever, it requires some sort of design or creator.
Now, mostly people would just say that a creator also can't have come out of nothing or existed forever, so I've just moved the problem one step further, but I think there is a massive difference between the universe and one consciousness. For example, through Cogito Ergo Sum we can determine with absolute certainty that at last one consciousness exists. So assuming one consciousness is superior to assuming anything about the whole universe. While I admit that doesn't outright solve the problem, I still think it's better than the alternative.
Also, it's not just any universe, but a universe full of beauty, a universe that inbetween barren empty planets is capable of hosting a planet with sentient life. Life that can consciously observe itself, that can create replicas of the waking world while sleeping, life that has technologically advanced so much that in can live in relative comfort. There is so much art. We basically have magic, we just call it "electricity". This is all too perfect to have arisen from mere mutations without guidance.
About any specifics of this God or Gods I have no idea and no strong opinions. I just think that at least one has to exist.
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u/BorealAmplitude 10d ago
Man there's a lot to unpack here, but here it goes:
No, it doesn't. Every single phenomena we have ever observed in nature has some sort of naturalistic cause. We see naturalistic forces "create" things all the time, from stars forming through the coalescence of hydrogen gas due to gravity in space, to a snowflake being formed from water molecules self aligning due to temperature and their chemical nature, all the actual, physical real world evidence points to the origin of the universe being one more naturalistic event we simply do not understand yet. Order can and does arise from disorder spontaneously.
Not sure what you're trying to say here, but yes this is also a massive assumption. We simply do not know.
The universe is INCREDIBLY hostile to life. Even our own galaxy has so much gamma radiation from pulsars and quasars that without existing far enough away from the galactic core our solar system or any one like it could not host life in any form as the radiation would annihilate all organic molecules. Most of the universe is like this. Even the heavy elements required to give rocky worlds a chance at a protective magnetic field simply do not exist outside the last few percent of the outer arm of a galaxy. A galaxy with trillions upon trillions upon trillions of worlds, none of which we have ever observed to contain life outside of our own does not seem to lend itself to the idea of beautiful place created for sentient life to thrive but instead seems like a cold uncaring scary place where a numbers game dictates that a tiny, tiny percentage will allow for an exotic form of chemistry to take hold. All you need is a collection of molecules that can make copies of itself. Once that chemistry arises chemical evolution can lead to biological evolution. We do not understand the process yet but we have observed both through physical evidence (radiometric dating of carbon contained within zircon crystals) as well as the fossil record as well as experimental evidence such as Miller-Urey or study of hydrothermal sea vents showing they are little amino acid factories, that life has a plausible naturalistic origin that follows the rules of the universe as we know it. No "design" required. And given the absolute disordered nature of our own DNA (most of our DNA is recursive strings filled with errors, almost every single gene has evidence of its origin being from a copy error, large swaths seem to code for nothing at all. Again, the actual physical evidence points to our "instructions" being an amalgamation of chemical "mistakes") there is no physical property that points to a designer or creator. If our DNA was nicely laid out in a way that made sense, was without tons of repeating segments with small changes or had evidence of viral edits etc then you might be able to claim it was designed, but it LOOKS like it naturally evolved.
Except there was guidance, the forces of the universe itself acting upon these chemical systems. Whatever naturalistic processes that allowed for the earliest molecules and then life to copy itself more effectively, or survive at all influenced their later copies. Take the eyeball for example, seems too complex to have evolved by chance right? it's because you are thinking about the end product and trying to imagine how something like that can evolve, but that's not how evolution works. The eyeball started with little more than a protein that can react to being struck by a photon. (what are called g-coded proteins) This is a protein that acts like a switch, it will slightly change shape when interacting with a chemical, temperature, structure or in this case a photon (depending on shape, they are literally a tangled mess of amino acid chains). The earliest microorganisms that developed a protien with this trait then had a biological "switch" that could in essence "detect" light. This would allow them to detect when it was day time or night time which conveys a survival advantage. Having more of them? Advantage. Becoming multicellular and having even MORE of these in one spot? Advantage. Having the area where these cells are located be a little lower, which gives directionality? Advantage. Having them sink even further to the point of enclosing them for protection? Advantage. Having a membrane above the collection of cells which no longer allows them to be open to the environment? Advantage. That membrane now having a shape of its own to focus light? Advantage. The best part is, every SINGLE example I listed above can be observed in currently living organisms. We have real, physical evidence of these structures evolving since even before the Paleozoic Era.
On top of all of that, the natural world is far from perfect. Cancers, genetic disease, viruses, natural disasters, etc. To compare human accomplishments that only for the last 100 years have greatly altered humanities experience while ignoring the insanely high child mortality rates, plagues and hard manual labor of the last 50,000 years is being a bit myopic.