God isn't dead?

>>18402008
I used to be a Theist, but now I'm an Atheist because there's simply no evidence to support the idea of a deity or deities

>>18402016
right i realize this. idk. something feels different. this series of events has kind of opened my eyes I guess.

I still think the scientific method is solid but i dont think it or the lack of evidence necessarily precludes the existence of some higher power at work in the universe.

honestly idk what i think about this anymore. guess i am just lost

>>18402008
there can be no doubt of intelligent design. though behind creation. the thought of a force, all this complexity didn't randomly happen. even those such as Steven Hawkings have come to accept intelligence behind creation.

but i digress. this thought/intelligence/creator is the source of all in our universe, and as such is all the universe, but only as we are our body, its the thought that controls the general flow of all, but not the individual interactions.
all i have to say is the creator is no God, but encompasses all 'gods'. to exist is to pay tribute to the creator, any person that argues that the creator was good or bad is rather misinformed, the creator knew not of experience before creation, and without experience could have no allegiance with either notion. one can never truly know the creator without returning to the source of creation, for to know God would destroy any mind returning it to the source anyway.

>>18402008
>Does /x/ believe in God or a God or Gods?
Yeah.

>some kind of creator deity?

Nah, that shit's wack.

The gods are incredibly powerful spirits, elders to be venerated and apex beings atop a complex spiritual ecosystem, much like the ecosystem we as humans stand atop. They didn't 'create' the universe though, and the idea that the universe had to be 'created' is an illusion caused by our own narrow experiences.

Gods are pretty dope, I'm all for finding a few that resonate with you and worshipping them. Just don't put too much stock in that 'one god created everything' bunk. At most a god may have guided or moulded groups of people.

I'm completely atheist but also very spiritual in a very personal and, as far as I know, unique way. I love living. I understand fundamentally I am just a very complicated chemical reaction billions of years in the making, and yet I'm capable of emotion, opinion, and understanding, and I think that is truly awe inspiring in the most profound way I can imagine. If there is a god I've decided it's either my own consciousness or the entire universe as a whole. On top of that I'm also pretty solipsistic, so there is no functional difference between my understanding of reality and reality itself outside my understanding to me.

But I digress, I think if it's even possible for cause and effect to exist outside our universe, it's impossible to know what caused our universe, and if it's impossible to know it's the same as not existing to me. The universe probably began at some point, and I think time itself began with it, I doubt I will ever know anything beyond that and I don't really consider it an idea worthy of much consideration because I can't impact it and it can't impact me.

this is perfect. exactly what i was hoping would happen. sometimes i love /x/ so much. im basically asea here and was hoping to just get the gamut of opinions. thanks anons, youre the best. keep em coming.

>>18402032
Complexity naturally arises in systems moving from extremely low entropy to high entropy. A good example is a cup of coffee with a layer of milk resting above the coffee, it's almost completely perfectly separated, and therefore, extremely low entropy, like the universe shortly after the big bang. When you stick a spoon in the coffee and stir it up, eventually it will come to a uniform homogeneous mixture of coffee and milk, a very low entropy state, like the universe's heat death. but for a short time during stirring you get fantastic patterns and swirls of milk and coffee, which is a higher entropy than the perfect separation, a lower entropy than the uniform mixture, and more complex than either.

>>18402059
so where did entropy come from? what disrupted the perpetual chaos that should exist for eternity

>>18402078
Entropy is chaos, what do you mean?

>>18402008
Ok, chill out. It doesn't lead to god.

All Scientists (and probably mathematicians) hit a point in their research where the "hard question" arises. That's why it's called the Hard Question. It's a natural progression.

Take the general "Big Bang" theory.. Ok, a sensible theory, but.. what came before it? What exists outside of our boundary? If the Universe existed in a thermal equilibrium and the BB is merely a fluctuation.. Where did that pre-Universe originate?

Our Universe makes no sense. Is there an outside? Is there a before? Why does it exist? The more you think about it the less sense it makes.

The Planet Earth does nothing more than increase Universal entropy. A low-entropy photon leaves the Sun and hits the Earth, is divided into other energy, and then flies back out into the Cosmos with the same total energy but with x20 the entropy. We mess shit up. That's our entire contribution.

We are meaningless, and far from "Gods chosen ones".. but, that doesn't mean there aren't mysteries out there.

>>18402087
It's not a hard question if you let go of the notion that all questions have answers. It's completely possible that no matter how hard we try it is literally impossible to answer questions like "what caused the beginning of the universe?" or "what is outside the universe?", The universe itself does not need to be understandable to our big-ass monkey brains, it only needs to be capable of creating them. "Meaning" itself is also a construct of our minds, therefore our existences and our universes have only as much meaning as we conscious minds give it. It's completely valid in my opinion to believe that we exist to "know" the universe, for example.

>>18402086
entropy is a measure of sustainability, or chaos i suppose, but it is not chaos itself. entropy exists because order does. what i was getting at is what caused the order? if all things tend to a state of chaos how can order exist in the first place, even if your universe is not eternal the container of it has to be, how can order exist is an eternal vassal if it is constantly tending towards chaos and always has been and always will be

>>18402101
Why does the universe need a container? If the universe needs a container, why doesn't the container containing our universe also need a container?

I believe everything understandable exists within the universe, and everything outside the universe is definitively unknowable, and if it's unknowable, it's the same as non-existent to me.

Entropy is a force, it's a general tendency for the universe to move away from order into chaos. We observe this tendency everywhere we can look, and we don't see a single exception anywhere in the universe. It's illogical to assume that this was any different in the past or will ever be different in the future (note I'm not saying it's impossible that things can violate this law of entropy, I'm just saying until we see anything do it we should assume nothing can). Working off this assumption, we can assume that the universe in the distant future will reach maximum chaos, minimum order, and in the past the opposite was true. Right now it seems that the universe began with maximum order and has been moving to chaos ever since, and I'm telling you that this idea fits with our understanding of complexity, In extremely ordered systems and extremely chaotic systems there is very little complexity, but between the extremes we observe maximum complexity.

If you're asking why did the universe begin with order and why does it move to chaos, I believe we will never have an answer to that question. Just like we will never have an answer to the questions "Why is the speed of light 299,792,458 m/s", or "why does gravity not attract matter 100x stronger than it currently does?". It's just a fundamental quality of our universe, and asking for a "cause" seems illogical to me.

>>18402115
at one point the container has to be infinity. a continuum.
>I believe everything understandable exists within the universe, and everything outside the universe is definitively unknowable, and if it's unknowable, it's the same as non-existent to me.
thats like me saying i everything on the moon is unknowable to me so to me it doesn't exist. i can understand having end points in theory but you still have to acknowledge something exists past what you currently know. that is its self will always be true, because absolute truth is unknowable as i said in my first post.
>If you're asking why did the universe begin with order and why does it move to chaos, I believe we will never have an answer to that question.
my friend, the answer is God/the force behind creation. and you yourself accept that we can never know right, i accept science, any religious person that doesn't is pretty blind, science explains what, religion is opinion on why. but all who come to know enough come to accept that there had to be intelligent design, even if never speculating on that intelligence.
>don't see a single exception anywhere in the universe.
what about life? it gets more complex the more cycles it goes through, doesn't that defy entropy?

>>18402134
-No, everything on the moon, as far as we can tell, is understandable, just unknown, there's a difference between a question unanswered and a question without an answer, and I know that there is no way to truly distinguish the two, which is why I stated it as a belief, not an understanding, does that make sense? A belief is based on personal, subjective experience.

-You can call it whatever you want, I don't mind, if you find god as the answer to unanswerable questions, that's cool, but it's not satisfying to me, because attributing it to god is the same as attributing it to literally anything else, since there's the same amount of evidence for all options (zilch). I believe it's more honest to just leave it as "unknown" and if god reveals himself and takes responsibility for these unknowns then I'll agree in your assessment.

-No. Life does not defy entropy. Life may be able to reverse entropy in a particular system, but in doing so it increases entropy somewhere else in the universe by far more than what was (temporarily) reversed. Fusion in the sun creates energy in the form of light, that light drives photosynthesis, but the glucose molecules formed from photosynthesis contain less energy than the light the plant absorbed from the sun, because it takes work to make those glucose molecules and doing that work creates heat which is removed from the plant by evaporation, by contact with the air and soil, and by infrared radiation. Photosynthesis is only between 0.1% and 2% efficient. In ecology it's generally stated every level on the food chain only gains about 10% of the useable energy of it's food. The rest is lost as heat. That heat warms the planet and it's atmosphere, and the planet and atmosphere lose that heat into space via infrared radiation.

>>18402152
right, well you've got me beat, i'm at the lengths of my knowledge on entropy.
but i will say this, there is a source for all things that exist, and all things must inevitably return to their source. you will know after your experience is through who we really are

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>>18402134
>but all who come to know enough come to accept that there had to be intelligent design, even if never speculating on that intelligence.


Dude, you're still thinking within human constraints.

All of our models, and experimental verification of these models (see: Relativity confirmed by GPS satellites) strongly suggest that time and space are a single thing, often refereed to as the space-time continuum. This is science, and is very hard to dispute, now I will move into my own personal ideas, which are much easier to dispute.

So the idea of intelligent design comes from the idea that the universe must have a 'cause'. There had to be something that made the universe come into being. An 'unmoved mover' as the ancients would sometimes say.

This stems from the fact that our universe and everything we can observe is ruled be 'causality', the time-dependent process by which a cause has an effect. Why do I say this is time-dependent? Because if you reversed time theoretically, you would see an effect come before a cause. Look up 'reverse arrow of time' for more on this.

So we all want to wrap things up in the idea of a creator because of causality, right? But wait. Space and Time are connected, and causality is dependent on time. This is a special version of the whole 'what is the universe inside of' problem, but for time. What is time inside of, if you will. What was before time?

Well there's a pretty simple answer. Without time, you can't have causality. Without Causality, an effect doesn't need a cause. If an effect doesn't need a cause, you don't need a creator.

Some of the ancient Greeks didn't see any contradiction in the idea of unlimited recursion in the early universe. Given our ideas about 'arrows of time', relativity, causality and paradox, I think they were almost at the proper conclusion. Namely, the universe doesn't need a creator, and imposing on upon it is a result of anthropic bias. Make sense?

>>18402185
That would be fucking sweet bro. If there is "experience" as we currently know it outside of our lives, or something else besides infinite oblivion that will be a real adventure.

It was a pleasure shitposting my precious time on this earth away with you, friend. I only hope you understand that very complex systems may seem well-ordered, but truly well ordered systems are actually very simple, as are very chaotic systems. Complexity arises in a middle ground between order and chaos, like the swirls of milk in a cup of coffee, complexity itself is fleeting and natural, even if the entropy that drives complexity is unexplained.

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>>18402195
I agree with you completely. If it's even remotely possible that the universe had a "cause", that cause would exist outside of the universe, and therefore would be unknowable, and something unknowable is identical to something that doesn't exist, in my opinion.

If you accept the Holy Spirit within you, such as by Baptism... Well, it's hard to ignore the fact that something happened. You feel it and KNOW it deep in your bones even if you were doubtful before. Faith being 'proven' is something you have to personally experience.

Ancient astronaut theory

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>>18403122
This

Also, "life" here is like a school for what happens after. Your actions in this life will greatly impact what will happen to your soul when your physical body dies.

Praise the Lord.
I recently converted to Christianity and it's actually a great relief.
I do not care anymore about money and material goods anymore. I do not envy the rich anymore; they're blinded fools. It's all useless, the soul and the pureness of your heart is what matters.
I fear no man. I don't fear death.

See you on the other side brothers

I wonder why when we pray we never get a response. Why can't we ever hear back or get any indication that someone is listening? I pray all the time, not even asking for anything although it happens in times of need, but nothing in return. I feel I'll always have faith in a higher power/God, but it seems my efforts are useless. Why can't things just go right /x/? Does someone or something actually care for us out there?

>>18403122
I was baptized and this isn't true at all for me.

>>18403167
Hmm.. you have never felt the holy spirit?

We get signs and indications all the time but sometimes we don't pay attention to them. We brush off those feelings like we know better until something happens and we see it was right. As said 'BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD.' We need to slow down and listen.

>>18402048
Known Known
Known Unknown
Unknown Unknown

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I'm a Norse Paganist i believe in the Germanic Gods

>>18402048
>atheist but also very spiritual
top jej

>>18402099
This guy. Most searching for meaning is intellectual masturbation. I believe the Bible, where it describes men being created in God's image. We create, whether actively or passively, we're always refining and creating our reality. Sure, everyone gets what looks like a different kit, but internal work yields external results, and external work yields internal results. Doesn't matter what color/creed/orientation/whatever you are. You are responsible for your own reality, and we all have to come to grips with it eventually.

>>18403122
Got baptized as a teen, and felt nothing like that. Only when I started following he Old gods did I really start to understand faith.

>>18403167
In my experience, most of the time answers are indirect. Pay attention, but be open to the idea that you're praying to the wrong god.

it's easy to believe the strings are being pulled by a higher power, but i'm pretty sure that's just because we lack perspective

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>>18404959
Its just random

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>>18402008
Kill urself

OP I wish the best for you going forward in life and really, truly hope this thread is something positive and important for you. You do you dude, and no matter what you find or believe, bear in mind you don't really need to be committed, you know? A shifting world view reflects the knowledge you've accrued w time so don't like.. beat yourself up I guess.

I hope that doesn't come off as condescending. I don't mean it like that.

As for my own "world view" I work w the Cthulhu pantheon. Personally I don't subscribe to the whole "this individual deity created this and that thing". More what someone said above, they probably only influenced small cultures and groups of people at most. It's kinda funny, bc actually before I got into all this spiritual nonsensical bull shit I did believe in some sort of "higher power" in regards to there being some sort of intelligent design or push, but now that I'm in this? I'm still early in this, but more than anything it's made me even more aware of how fucking tiny and insignificant everything is; even supposed deities, fuckers I've had very real interactions with. Funnily enough, I'm more and more coming to subscribe to the notion that there is no "system" or "God" and it's more a mess of multiple pantheons leeching energy off humanity in a kinda sad effort to survive, varying spirits within different realms trying to get by, etc... more and more I'm subscribing to the "coincidence" paradigm where things simply "are"? They happened bc the environment was ripe for it. Because the situation, evolution etc. bred a proper grounds for life to happen.

Idk. Nothing owes us shit, everything's out to take care of itself and the best we can do is try to supersede that imo... I suppose that's where my "belief" comes in. The idea that maybe we're supposed to be our own "God"? Overcome human issues. Overcome conscious, sentient isolations and care for one another, support, understand. etc. etc.

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>>18402016

I used to be Atheist, but now I'm Theist because there's simply no evidence to refute the idea of a deity or deities.

I like that logic. Really takes the thinking out of the equation, which saves just a ton of effort that can be put to good use elsewhere, like being insufferable.

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Gods not dead, just sleeping.

Have you heard that saying that no one remembers the millions of things you did right but they will cling on the any mistake you make? I think that it's like that with God(gods) and miracles. What's not miraculous about the beauty of flowers blooming in the spring, the sound of water freely flowing, or a mother giving life for the first time? I believe God is everywhere in nature and we only focus on the evil in the world and therefore believe it is a bad place and there is no one higher or else they would make it better. That's the (d)evil in the world and I've been doing a lot of research lately and I think that the government knows there is a higher power but they push science and technology as facts and proof so that you don't beLIEve in it and ridicule the 'Jesus freak' that spreads love and happiness. Question of belief is a little redundant to me now because I can choose to beLIEve in an apple or not but it doesn't change the fact that it's there and it's real.


I feel like I've always felt it in my being that God or a higher power is real and maybe that's why after all these years I can never throw out the bible I've been planning on throwing out for almost a decade now.

I think the question of belief really depends on a person's own personal experience, any reswarch theyve done, and their outlook of the world.

>>18402008
I like the idea that the creator of this micro-reality (in a sense) is you/me/whoever is conscious in the machine. I basically adhere to the matrix meme idea but I don't think it's malevolent.

Our parallel self wanted to do a bunch of stuff on its own but now it's getting restless.

I think there's somewhere big and real outside of this, and the creator of this reality is just another one of many who "live" there. Unlike here, in that place everyone is truly unique, so there are no races, species, etc.