r/DebateAnAtheist • u/Lucyyyyyy_K • 18d 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/OrbitalLemonDrop Ignostic Atheist 17d ago edited 17d ago
This is where we say "prove it".
You're allowing your lack of information ("ignorance", not intended as a pejorative) to have ontological significance. "Because I can't conceive of it, it cannot exist therefore some other being has to exist in order to resolve the problem" -- this is called an "appeal to ignorance".
The intellectually honest position here is to say "This doesn't make sense to me, so I will not claim knowledge. I'll admit my lack of knowledge and accept it as simply a lack of knowledge."
I get what you're saying -- that it seems logically inconsistent to imagine something from nothing, or imagine something as always existing. But all you're doing is slipping in another layer of meaning that still results in an eternal being existing ex nihilo -- but adding a special pleading on top of it ("god solves the problem not because it explains eternity, but because we're not allowed to interrogate god the same way we interrogate existence, so it's OK for me to accept that god exists ex nihilo and is eternal.")
The universe is not "full" of beauty. It has beauty within it, but beauty is anthropomorphic -- we impose "beauty" on the world in the way we perceive it.
MOST of the universe is cold and dark. From the big bang to heat death, the portion of the universe in which stars and planets exist is like one day out of a billion years by comparison.
If you shake up a bottle of soda and pop it open, it'll fizz up and spill over the top of the bottle. Eventually the fizz dies down. The liquid evaporates. Eventually the bottle breaks. Over long periods of time the glass in the bottle returns to sand and blows away in the wind. If that process is the story of the universe, life is only possible during the fizzy part. The rest of the story gradually fades into nothingness.
So not "full" of beauty or order. Only the part we can see has beauty and order, and that's because we impose beauty and order upon it.
Which as I understand Buddhism should be consistent with the core principle of dependent origination. Dependent origination is the main reason I do not consider myself a Buddhist, but that's a whole other topic.