The following denies the definition of God as the Origin that has always been.
"This omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creature, if it indeed was able to create all we know, has to wonder about it's own origin also, which makes this argument a circular argument fallacy."
One cannot decide to redefine the term God, so they can win an argument. Such is like the redefinition of faith so that religion looks stupid. Being a deist I find such arguing insulting to everyone involved. Faith does not and never has meant "believing in something with no evidence." Faith historical has always been explained as believing that the Sun will rise, because it has risen everyday of our lives.
Thus faith is the expression of both belief and doubt at the same time. The belief comes from past experience and the disbelief comes from the experience of being wrong about what will happen in the future, which is unknown. Yeah one should know that the scientific method comes from religion and not the other way around.
If your interested check out : Ortega y Gasset 4 rules to uplift society in postmodernism. We can't think for ourselves enough in my opinion.
Nice post and subject by the way.
Hi there @commonlaw, thanks for the response, I appreciate that a lot :-) Since you're a deist and I'm an atheist, I hope and think we can respectfully disagree on some points ;-) First, I think that there's no argument here; religion, faith and science all fail to conclusively explain if and how the universe started. The difference is just that science is honest about it and simply says: we don't know. A true scientist will also never say that God doesn't exist, only that God is not needed to explain stuff. God just never enters the picture.
The Big Bang theory holds that the question "What was there before the Universe?" simply makes no sense. Time itself came into existence so there was no "before" before. Deists on the other hand have a transcendental and supernatural God that exists outside space-time. He has to have a brain if he created us in his image, so the thought to create the universe had to have come before the actual creating of that universe, hence God isn't "timeless", or at least he experiences time and cause and effect. This means you have to apply the same rules to explain God itself; He must have had a creator to. And so on and so forth.
That said, I really don't know where I changed the definition of God. Also, I cannot stress this enough, it's only my opinion. And I just wonder why people believe so many strange (in my mind) things. I often wonder if the human mind is even meant to understand the real nature of reality.
If you mean to say that religions made the first schools, then maybe you're right. Otherwise I wouldn't know what you mean here. The scientific method is a purely human thing, evolved by our interacting with the natural world, trying to come up with other explanations than a supernatural all knowing creature. Religion was here first probably, but science doesn't come from religion. And religion doesn't come from science either. They are both different, largely incompatible, world-views.
If it doesn't mean belief without evidence, then what does it mean? I don't have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. You don't use the word "faith" to point at something you trust will happen. I don't have faith in the sun rising each day. I know it will because it has risen every day of our lives. And if you say "faith" implies "doubt" also, which I would agree to, does that mean you doubt the existence of God? And if so, do all Christians think as you do? I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here...
I would follow your suggestion, but this is a topic I've been studying for decades now, and my mind's pretty much made up, I must admit. We can argue about definitions maybe, like what is faith, is it the same as trust or belief, that would be an endless discussion, these types of faith-related discussions usually are, not only between deists and atheists, but between different faiths as well.
Maybe we'll never agree on some topics, but it's important to at least try to understand our fellow humans, especially when it comes to something so deeply ingrained in our cultures and minds like faith and religion. And even though I'm not convinced that a God exists, I'm also not convinced about the purely material and mechanical explanations science has come up with regarding the deeper questions in life. Consciousness is the tool we use to understand stuff, but we cannot use that tool to examine the tool itself in any scientific way.
Thanks again for sharing your opinion here and I'm glad you also think that we need to think for ourselves. Sorry for the many words, but your well thought out and genuine response deserves no less, I really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us :-) <3