A little question to vary the conversation.

Personally I think the whole thing about there being a supernatural entity is entire ridiculous and how anyone with a modicum of intelligence can believe it bemuses me.

Surely the entire question is ontological ?

We'll have to debate this later because I have a long drive ahead of me.

to cross the road, at the end of his long drive. Is it pebbled or paved I wonder?

This doesn't vary the conversation.....you've asked us before.

I'm not really a superstitous or religous person but I reckon I'd stop short of publicly questioning if there was a god just before embarking on a long drive.

But this is the great paradox, isn't it? If you're in a position to insist on being buried, you won't be dead.

There has to be a God, after all this bloke Dawkins keeps writing about him.....

nice one albert

how many of you sinners

got married in church

christened your kids in church

burried a relative from a church

no it isnt harsh

if you do any of the three then why?

so why bother going to church if the people dont believe in it?

ok slowly for the thicko

go back and answer the questions

Because you used to get threatened with 'burning in hell' if you didn't believe and pay your dues.

Notice they don't blame Satan for global warming eh??

The entire religious mantra is based on instilling fear of the unknown, and cannot therefore be true. When someone makes it back from the other side, assuming there is one for the sake of the debate, and tells us what goes on and how, I shall be all ears. In the meantime, I simply cannot believe the evidence.

Oh, and the Catholics shag your kids. That must be naughty eh??

a) yes , nowt to do with me the mrs wanted it
b) yes, nowt to do with me the mrs wanted it
c) not dead yet but if the Mrs wants it !!!!

that did not answer my question either

and i did not stipulate any religion

are you an eel or a slimey toad

answer the bloody question

Every single argument that has ever been put forward in an attempt to prove logically that God exists is refutable.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... ments.html
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... logic.html

So the final recourse of the evangelist is to say "look, don't seek to know why - this is bigger than both of us. Just trust me when I say you gotta have faith".
Which is asking a hell of a lot of a thinking person don't you think?

Fidel Castro??

..it's hardly gonna be a bundle of laughs being in a team of putrid, rotting corpses were bits fall off you when you head the ball...

Jack Ross used to live in Houghton le Spring. Is there an connection?

Is this another Darlo joke? Bit below the belt this time, Snowy....

So how do we know that there's nothing after this life, we don't fact!
We can only judge on the knowledge available to us at the present time, we can go on and on, the chicken or the egg, are we the only habitable planet in the universe etc... but it would be nice to know the truth before we do pop our clogs.
For any sceptics out there check out a book called The Scole Experiment, its an amazing read and i'm sure it will create a fair bit of thought provoking even for the most sceptical of us all.

Btw, I have a copy if anyones interested Pm me :sweet:

ooh yeah there's an unbiased question-is there a God.....
ps- if you say yes then you are stupid.

Anyone prepared to accept that tonights results prove the existence of a supreme being?

We win - despite coming up against a very good team & turning in a slightly below par performance. Then all our promotion rivals lose!!!!!!

Proof I tell ee

dibble you coppped out again after starting a thread you dodged the questions

if you bury somone from a church then you must have some belief
other wise why
a lot of people are going straight to the ground these days without going to church but the family always bring in the clergy to do the deed why?

And as Grabec says, there's the paradox.

How many billions, trillions, and bigger numbers have died and not one has made it back in any communicative form to tell the rest what lies ahead. From any religion.

Only one. The one all the fuss is about and rumour has it he was sent down from there before he lived, therefore was he dead before he was alive and which comes first??

Anyway, when I come back I want to be Claudia Schiffers soap-on-a rope.

Oooh me trousers......... :sweet:

By the way, the answer is a definitive yes. Don't ask me to explain, just have complete and blind faith.

ps: the egg came before the chicken: the bird evolved from a fish, the fish came out of the water and laid an egg which was born a bird.

So do I win then?

Well, anyway, I certainly don't want another incarnation in human form, certainly not in heaven, which sounds pretty boring to me what with all these bimbos you're all mentioning.

I shall have my ashes sprinkled off the Heugh and take my place in the great circle of life

over-simplistic but correct.

It depends on your definition of a chicken, but the first chicken was hatched from the egg of a non-chicken. So the first chicken pre-dated the first chicken egg (an egg laid by a chicken) although it did emerge from an egg which, although laid by a non-chicken, had a chicken in it. So depending on semantics, either could be right.

No it can't. Eggs existed for millions of years before chickens did.

I assume that you're talking about science there?

correct, yeah

the question should be "what came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?"

...but you would also have to define what a chicken egg is - an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg with a chicken in it.

Depends at what level. You could say that advanced theoretical physics is nothing more than a question of faith.

The point is, on the margins you can only engage in science if you have faith in it. For instance, have you ever seen a proton, neutron or electron?

Weee--lllll...... although Theology used to be called "The Queen of Sciences" you won't find many if any who would describe what they are doing as science. Trust me on this, I know some. However there are devout Catholics that are quite happy to accept Evolution as how life on Earth developed - Ken Miller for one, who is a devout Catholic and a leading Professor of Biology in the US.

All of which seems to make Dawkins foam at the mouth and write even more arrogant assertion that's got about as much to do with science and the scientific method as it has with the production of leather goods in Norway. It's quite entertaining in a way, I've just started on The God Delusion and he's so arrogant that it's actually funny.....

Wasn't Darwin himself religious?

Darwin was probably best seen as Agnostic. He initially had religious faith, but stopped believing. Asking why will probably get different answers depending on who you ask, but evidence from his own papers is usually considered to show that the early death of one of his children (a daughter I think) was a key event. He certainly never described himself as an atheist though.

An Atheist is someone that beleives that there is no God.

An Agnostic is someone that is unconvinced that there is a God but doesn't want to say definitively either way.

A Deist believes that there is a God, but that God doesn't or can't intervene with the Universe - ie is a watcher at best.

A Theist believes that there is a God, and that God can intervene in our world.

A Richard Dawkins believes that unless you are an Atheist, you are at best deluding yourself and at worst mentally ill.

Stop this debating!! there is a God, so there - just believe or you will be condemned to the bowels of hell for eternity.

I wonder what animals think about all of this?
I'll go and ask the dog.

Linguistically, an Atheist is someone that is not a Theist - a-theist. The definition now seems to be someone that rejects the existence of any and all versions of God. So someone like Anthony Flew is no longer truly an atheist because he now believes that there is or at least could be an entity called God - he now describes himself as a Deist. This is a long way from a Theist position, and although his position has changed he still rejects all established religions. In that sense, you could argue he his an anti-theist I suppose, but not a true atheist.

By the way, here's an example of Dawkins arrogance. So sure is he of the strength of his argument, he sees the book as a way of "converting" believers into atheists - that purely through reading his book they will have a sort of reverse Road to Damascus experience and go "He's right! I no longer believe in this God I've followed all my life!" and lists a large number of organisations in the back that can help these new "converts". He says as much in the preface. Poor Richard, something tells me he's going to be disappointed....

he just tilted his head to one side, jumped up and was quite happy when I gave him a biscuit. He then trotted off out the back. I'm not sure what his answer was, really.

You gave God a biscuit Praise the lord, we're saved.

Ah, but according to someone like Paul Davies in his book "God and the New Physics", Cause and Effect is a consequence of the existence of time - that the relationship is essentially defined by one following the other which only makes sense if there is time. If we accept that the thing we call spacetime came into being as part of the Big Bang, time did not exist before that. As a result, cause and effect couldn't operate - there was no time for it to do so. Therefore it is entirely possible to postulate that the effect (ie the Big Bang) did not need a cause. Saying that time existed before the Big Bang, meaning that there could be Cause and Effect, implies an infinitely old Universe, which in turn implies the idea of a First Cause is meaningless.

Nope
Neither have these people. But their work is very tangible http://www.blindscience.org/ncbys/Blind ... nID=879032

The trouble is that these 'explanations' were meant to account for the mystery of how existence came about, but turn out to make things more problematic than ever.
The 'God solution' becomes self -contradictory, at least as most people pose it, because God is supposed to have created everything from nothing. But nothingness implies no-God, as well as no-everything else. So this 'explanation' entails both that God did and didn't exist at the same time. Surely this isn't an answer, but just another way of posing the original question?
As for the scientific 'answer' Albatross mentions....aren't cause and effect axiomatic concepts in human knowledge/understanding? If you postulate a state of affairs, pre-big bang, when time and causation didn't exist, this can strictly speaking make no sense to human beings. What could it possibly mean? It's outside our experience/rationality and therefore doesn't make sense (I think)

There is no god. None residing within 30,000 miles of Bescot anyway.

And if there is then he is a bleeding tool