The five best reasons not to believe in God

I believe that god just carries out your fate
look- in norse mythology, odin, thor, loki, freyja, fenrir, they all die, right? everyone knew this right from the beginning, but you can't interfrere with fate
gods just carries out your fate

yes ,because they are retarded atheists

@DukeGusGold said in #42:

yes ,because they are retarded atheists

Why do you claim atheists to be retarded? Are you saying that anyone who doesn't hold your beliefs is mentally deficient?

@obladie said in #43:

Why do you claim atheists to be retarded? Are you saying that anyone who doesn't hold your beliefs is mentally deficient?
Yep that's what they are doing. "I cannot understand this idea therefore whoever came up with it must be retarded."

I understand the atheist outlook.I just don't get belligerent atheism.Science and religion are not mutually exclusive,many great scientists held religious beliefs. In my opinion the problem lies with organized religion and not with anyone's personal beliefs.I encourage you to believe or not believe as you see fit without trying to change the opinions of others.

@DukeGusGold said in #35:

just think how dumb that sounds!
It might sound shocking to you, but it certainly isn't dumb. Actually most genius ideas tend to be shocking, precisely because they innovate and reject something we used to consider true because we never had the insight of questioning it.

@ALucasM said in #30:

i have been a believer all my life.
Yeah, I could have tell. In other words, you never thought for youself since you were born.

@DukeGusGold said in #35:

4 reasons God exists! 1.at what point does inanimate material become animate,awnser is it cant,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

Turns out inorganic material can actually become organic material with the right conditions.
Its not alive yet, but that is the base for RNA, its not inconceivable that a chemical reaction glued all those together. We just need to find the evidence between amino acids and RNA, but the picture is quite clear already.

2. everything in this world was made so perfectly everything working together,no chance this wzs made by accident.
   You are already assumed that "was made" therefore it had "to be made". The world was not "made".

3. If there is no Higher being how come every culture worships them?
   If you are from one religion, your natural thought towards others is that they are wrong. And you are right, you just need to extend the same thought towards your own religion.
   They did not know better.

4. If noone created us what did?
   You answered it yourself. No one created us. Stars and planets are a subproduct that naturally occurs from gravity.
   Some planets naturally develop atmosphere if they have good gravity and relatively low temperature.
   Gravity attracts nearby bodies, some of them happening to have water and other compounds.
   A spinning planet with atmosphere, if close to a star, will produce uneven heat in the planet, evaporating gases, and making room to gases flowing, or "air" currents. (that "air" probably has no oxygen yet).
   Those gases will eventually be present in all 3 states of the matter, that will help spread nutrients all over the planet.
   Once those nutrients are reunited, go back to the link.

We know this stuff.

lol

This is going to be very long, so I'd be honoured if you considered reading it in full. Of course you don't have to!

@J_SEDA_conant said in #17:

God has a plan for everyone. If he needs them saved so they can do his works, he will save them. If he doesn’t need them, they will die.

So my brilliant, kind, altruistic, lovely and devoutly Christian friend died of cancer at the age of 19 (after 5 years of suffering) because he wasn't needed anymore. All part of the plan. Got you. That's amazingly reassuring and comforting to hear, thank you very much!

Also, no, I don’t think there is a bias here. Mainly because, like I said, let’s say there is a 100% chance of death, and they have 3 days to live. Let’s say it’s because of brain cancer. If they somehow survive, then there must be a reason. Cancer doesn’t just go away. And while it isn’t clear, concise, conclusive proof, it’s evidence.

According to not only my (but pretty much every) physician there are no 100%s in medicine. That's because there are things that medical science, for all its glorious advances, just hasn't figured out yet. Medical doctors are not prophets, they cannot see the future. Sure, they can make an informed guess, but that doesn't mean they'll be correct every time. Their prognosis is based on statistical analysis of previous known cases.

There might be several sources of uncertainty there:
a) The disease might be very rare, making it hard to come by an extensive statistic. If only 500 other people have been recorded to be diagnosed with the same disease in the past 50 years, that's not all that much to go by. A prognosis is a statistical estimate. If you record rolling a fair dice 60,000 times you will roughly get 10,000 instances of each number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) of pips. Some might be at 9,974 while others might appear 10,121 times. You get my point, the huge number of times I rolled the dice shows clearly that each event is equally likely at a probability of 1/6. However, if I were to only roll the dice 60 times instead, that number is too low for effectively applying statistics. One number of pips, say 5 pips, might come up disproportionately often, say 17 times. So for low numbers, statistics doesn't give as good of a clue as to what the most likely outcome really is. After 60 times of rolling the dice, I might incorrectly believe that 5 is the most likely outcome.
And after only 500 other patients ever having been recorded with the same rare disease, a doctor might incorrectly believe the disease to be terminal, when it actually isn't in all cases.

Here's an example for one such disease: Naegleriasis, very rare, kills mostly 5-14 year old children (with a case-fatality rate of 98.5%) who were innocently playing in water in the summer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naegleriasis#Epidemiology

b) There might be undiagnosed cases of the same disease that behave in a benign manner therefore never being discovered and healing on their own. Doctors by definition cannot know about such cases, should they exist. That's why case-fatality rate is not necessarily the same as infection-fatality rate. The IFR is always ≤ the CFR, because of the potential for unknown asymptomatic cases. What is to say that a benign case like this might not by some fluke produce symptoms (or be discovered by coincidence), leading to a severe prognosis only to then end like it always does?

c1) Sometimes a diagnosis is just plain wrong. It might be something completely different than what the doctors believe it to be. Sure it may appear indistinguishable from the suspected (and diagnosed) disease via the standard imaging techniques and diagnostics, but that doesn't necessarily mean it IS the same. The appropriate diagnostic procedure might not have been discovered yet.

c2) Sometimes a diagnosis is wrong due to human error as well. There have been cases in which someone was diagnosed with a disease they did not have due to two flasks being accidentally swapped. Obviously this would usually be easily recognised in hindsight, but I'm just trying to list all possible events that could conceivably lead to an erroneous prognosis.

d) Every patient is different. Due to genetic variability there are some patients to which something that applies to 99.9% of the population might not apply. Take Guðlaugur Friðþórsson for example. He survived "six hours in 5 ºC (41 ºF) cold water after his fishing vessel had capsized and furthermore trekked, for another three hours, across [Icelandic] lava fields to reach a town for help in freezing conditions.". I know I wouldn't have survived all of that, I would have died of hypothermia after 15 - 30 minutes in the water like the rest of his crewmates. But it turns out he's a fluke of nature. They subsequently did a physiological study on him and found out that unbeknownst to him and his previous physician his resistance to cold is phenomenal. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guðlaugur_Friðþórsson

We might expect to find other people like Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, who instead can survive seemingly terminal brain cancer, because their bodies have some sort of unexplained defence against it that 99.9% of the population lacks and that medical science therefore doesn't know about. From such cases, we might find out what that defence was, or we might not. There are certainly cases where we did find out, like in the case of HIV. There are some patients who are nearly immune to Aids (the disease caused by the virus), even when they are clearly infected with the HI virus. Given that untreated HIV infection results in a case-fatality rate near 100%, this came as quite a surprise to medical scientists. Here's a very short article about that: https://cbs.umn.edu/blogs/cbs-connect/new-study-reveals-why-some-people-may-be-immune-hiv-1

In short: Medical doctors are fallible like everyone else.

Cancer is not one well-understood disease. It's an umbrella term for a vast variety of different diseases, some of which are not understood very well at all. That's why sometimes people who have previously been diagnosed with a type of cancer later are found to be cancer-free, much to the astonishment of their doctors. I wouldn't bet on it, it's pretty rare. I would still seek out evidence-based medical treatment if I were to be diagnosed myself. But it's clearly not impossible per se. Because again medical doctors, like all of us, are not infallible and not all-knowing.

What may account for such instances?
It seems as if such instances in your opinion can only be "miracles". Either you can explain it, or it's evidence for God (to your credit, you say that it does not constitute definitive proof of God's existence and I agree). As you say: "[...] there must be a reason."
Well, in my opinion that's a false dichotomy. A false "either X or Y" you have constructed. Above I've listed a number of carefully considered alternative possibilities {a) through d)} how unexplained phenomena like the seemingly spontaneous healing of a seemingly terminally ill patient could conceivably come about. In the case of the little girl from your movie, nobody knows how she was healed.

But to me it seems imprudent to squeeze God into the gaps of human knowledge. This God of the gaps (I'm talking about the concept, not necessarily your God specifically) is often cited to be responsible for "miraculous" healings like her's, but is less often mentioned to have saved the cancer patient who has received effective evidence-based chemo therapy or radiation therapy. He's not nearly as often credited with giving some people near immunity to Aids or with giving Guðlaugur Friðþórsson incredible resistance to cold due to his unique physique. He's almost always invoked when something unexplained (and perhaps unexplainable) happens. Only where humans cannot figure out how something worked, only where there's mystery and a great unknown do people invoke the God of the gaps, because "[...] there must be a reason."

While other people actually attempt to discover what has actually happened and in some cases (such as the near immunity to Aids) are able to do so. Potentially alleviating a tiny fraction of the world's suffering.

Ok, so tell me. Where did morals come from? How did we just assign one action as good and another as bad? There must have been some authoritative figure that said, at some point in time, “stealing is bad, killing is bad, but generosity is good”. Also, think about people with messed up morals. Why do we not like their morals? It’s because we as a community agreed on a set of rules, but somebody had to come up with those rules, whether it was multiple people or just one. So your statement is somewhat invalid because, as another example, the entirety of math hinges on the fact that someone said 1+1=2 and everyone agreed that this guy “said so” and must be right. Nobody ever thought to question it.

Allow me to address your point about maths. Maths is a deductive framework. It indeed has so-called "axioms", which cannot be contradicted. 1+1=2 is not one of those axioms (it follows logically from the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, although the proof is more than 100 pages long, which might seem a bit excessive for such a seemingly trivial fact). But it might as well be (it just turns out not to be necessary to make it an axiom because it already follows from other, more fundamental, desirable axioms). In mathematics you are allowed to make up any axiom you like. Maths is very flexible and allows for arbitrary abstraction.

In maths you first invent an axiom. Then that axiom is the basis for everything that follows, it is an incontrovertible fact within its branch of mathematics (its mathematical theory). Mathematicians like to study the logical consequences of that axiom. The structure that this axiom (or set thereof) imposes onto said field of mathematics.

Invoking the axiom is not an appeal to authority. You are not saying "Because the great mathematician John von Neumann has said X, Y is true." or "Because the great David Hilbert demanded that maths shall be consistent, complete, conservative and decidable, it surely is". As a side note, it later turned out that Hilbert's demands cannot be met simultaneously (that's the contribution of Kurt Goedel and others). The great Hilbert (and he truly was a great mathematician) was wrong. And Goedel's incompleteness theorem wasn't met with appeals to the great Hilbert by other mathematicians. It was carefully examined, checked for its logical correctness and eventually accepted (because it's true, no matter how unpleasant Hilbert finds it).

It's more like "If axiom A, then theorem T." Mathematicians study the internal (hopefully self-consistent) logical structure of a "universe" of sorts, an axiomatic universe of their own making. That's what I meant when I said that maths is "a deductive framework". All true statements that mathematicians discover are only true within the framework of that axiomatic structure, having been logically deduced from the axioms thereof. Outside of that framework they don't apply. They don't need to describe the real world. You can have a seemingly impossible number that becomes negative when multiplied by itself (the imaginary unit i). You can have negative numbers (although nobody has ever seen a negative amount of sheep or rocks or what have you). You can construct whatever you like in mathematics. It's not a natural science.

When I said you might be constructing an appeal to authority in #12, I meant that you appealing to people who have survived cancer and might therefore be construed to be knowledgable about what it's like to face death (and narrowly defy it) would constitute such an appeal to authority. At least if you were to argue that such people should know better than the rest of us whether or not there is a life after death, a God, etc.
Now, I didn't mean to imply that you are arguing that. I was merely musing on the hypothetical. The "What if you were to argue that?". I should probably stick to only addressing what you are actually saying, sorry for the misunderstanding.

My main point there was that merely asking some group of people (like cancer survivors) for their opinion on the existence of God hardly constitutes evidence for such existence.

As an analogy: Had I asked a group of physicists in the early 2000s about their opinion on the existence of the Higgs boson, that could have given me an idea about how this group of people think the world works (a pattern of opinion), but it would hardly have constituted evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson itself (the Higgs boson has since been discovered experimentally in the year 2012 and this detection was the actual evidence for its existence, not the opinions of even the most learned among us).

Similarly, an opinion poll on the existence of God among cancer survivors gives me just that. An opinion poll. It tells me how many of them believe in God. But it can hardly be construed as evidence for God's existence.

As to where morality comes from, that's an entirely different discussion, isn't it?
I'm aware that there are people who argue it is objective and could only have been given by a singular, intelligent, moral-lawmaker.
I'm also aware that there are people who argue that morality is subjective and ever changing.
I'm sure there are more standpoints than that. I'm not a philosopher of morality though and this wasn't our original main topic (and this post is way too long already), so I won't be discussing it here if that's alright with you?

That’s not what I said. Read it again and you will understand that I am not trying to prove the existence of God, I am merely providing unexplainable evidence that points towards a miracle, which in turn provides evidence for God.

Duly noted, you don't try to prove God's existence. You want to present evidence that points towards God. Understood.
But as I have already explained above, I don't see how some event not having been explained constitutes evidence for God.

Again, you seem to be under the impression that there are only two possibilities:

1. Something can be explained, i.e. it lies within human knowledge. Then it's not a miracle and not evidence for God's existence.
2. Something can't be explained, i.e. it doesn't lie within the sphere of human knowledge. It lies squarely in the gaps of human knowledge. Therefore it's a miracle and thus evidence for God's existence.

I say this is a false dichotomy. Something can be unexplained and still not necessarily be a supernatural miracle. Remember my points a) thorough d) above.
Me not being able to explain X is not evidence for explanation Y. Logically speaking. It just means that I cannot explain X. A large number of explanations might be possible. Y is not necessarily the only one. That's my point.

Yeah? Then number one, how long did it stay in a tiny, dense state? Number two, what caused it to expand? Number three, why didn’t it expand any time before when it did? I agree that the logic behind how God would exist is confusing, as he has been there forever, which is something us humans can’t understand or comprehend. Likewise, you could easily argue that “the Big Bang theory is just incomprehensible for humans to understand”. But we have reason to believe that a universe that didn’t completely implode on itself did not come from a huge mess of atoms and particles.

Number one: Not for long, that's for sure. 10^(-43) seconds into the expansion the universe had a temperature of about 10^32 kelvin (or celsius or whatever unit you like, in either case it was a lot). A few minutes into the expansion the temperature had decreased to a measly 1 billion kelvin.

379,000 years in the temperature had dropped to 3000 kelvin. That was the temperature that first allowed electrons to combine with protons to form neutral hydrogen. As the photons in the early universe don't interact with electrically neutral atoms like hydrogen anymore (they did constantly interact with the ions before recombination, thereby rendering the universe opaque), they are now for the first time able to travel freely. This therefore marks the decoupling of matter and radiation. This ancient radiation still pervades the entire cosmos and is directly detectable as the cosmic microwave background radiation (discovered by accident in 1969 by two radio-engineers who had never before heard of that prediction made by the Big Bang model). It can be picked up by radio telescopes both on the ground and in space (like the WMAP and Planck space observatories). It's a kind of "baby picture" of our universe.

You can read about the timeline in more detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe
You can see the universe's baby picture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background

Number two: This question is a little harder to answer. Cosmologists believe a phase transition in the early universe to have caused cosmic inflation (a very short period of very rapid expansion in the very early universe). However inflation theory is still an active field of study, it's by no means finished. Also you'd be better off talking to an actual cosmologist about this stuff, as I only have perhaps slightly more than a lay-person's understanding of inflation.

As to the metric expansion of space itself, which is still and likely always will be ongoing. It's a generic and observable property of the universe we inhabit. It's modelled (on large scales, on small scales gravity binds individual neighbouring galaxies together) by the concisely named "Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric", which you can read about here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker_metric

Essentially the universe expanding is an adiabatic process, abiding by the first law of thermodynamics. The expansion rate intimately depends on the pressure of the universe as well as its energy density (how much matter and energy there is per unit volume), which both decelerate the expansion, and the value of the cosmological constant (i.e. the amount of dark energy), which accelerates the expansion. During different times of the universe's history it was dominated by either radiation, matter or dark energy content, depending on their respective densities. Currently dark energy dominates, accelerating the expansion of the universe (measurably).

Number three: Why didn't it start sooner? No clue. I don't think anyone knows. I'm not even sure whether it's a coherent question or not. If time began shortly prior to that near initial hot and dense state that the Big Bang describes (nobody knows whether or not it did), then it might not even make much sense to ask about a "sooner". Sooner than the beginning of time?

Lastly:

Likewise, you could easily argue that “the Big Bang theory is just incomprehensible for humans to understand”

No, I wouldn't say that. I'd say it's not the most intuitive thing to understand, but it is comprehensible. People study it. They wouldn't (be able to) if they didn't understand, would they?

But we have reason to believe that a universe that didn’t completely implode on itself did not come from a huge mess of atoms and particles.

How so? Only a universe with an excess of mass-energy would have gravitationally collapsed in on itself. Our's thankfully didn't have enough mass-energy to do so.

Also, the Big Bang theory doesn't say that there was a huge mess of atoms and particles as you say. It says that there was a very ordered, extremely homogeneous and isotropic, super dense, super hot initial state (with very low entropy). It was way too hot to be filled with particles, much less atoms yet. Those came only minutes later, when the universe had cooled substantially. The processes are called baryogenesis and Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Before that the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force) were likely unified into one, particles like we know them today were impossible, there was only energy (I think, you'd have to check with a cosmologist again). And before that? Nobody knows.

To anyone who bothered reading any of this, thank you for your time, I hope I didn't waste it!