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How Do You Choose What To Believe?

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Atheist | 17:55 Wed 24th Apr 2019 | Society & Culture
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Theland, how do you choose? If it's the voice of God, then you don't have a choice. But if you have a mind, then you can choose. How do you choose?

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Don't be silly Nailit.
Everybody has some inkling of what maybe began the universe, life, and us.
What is your idea?
Stop hating the God you don't believe in.
Why not try hating Unicorns for a change?
Give yourself a break?
// I have a schizophrenic friend who honestly believes that God 'talks' to him. I let it slide, I understand his illness.//

I had a tenant and I asked him hey nonny etc - is the radio telling you to kill me? and he said 'yes'
eek ! he was OK for a long time
no I think you have a choice to listen to gods voice

to listen or say no - that is a load of god-dle-dee gook ! or whatever fave word you have at the time
//Don't be silly Nailit.
Everybody has some inkling of what maybe began the universe, life, and us//
Ive already said, I make no claim. I don't know and am not scientifically minded anyway. The onus is on YOU. You are the one making a claim that we are derived from a dirt man and a rib woman who were deceived by a talking snake and henceforth kicked out of an enchanted garden that was henceforth garded by magical angels with flaming sword until the arrival of a God Man who sacrificed himself to himself to save us from a punishment that he made himself.
Nailit; It is clear that Theland is no match for your ignorance.
Khandro. Thank you for that inane (or should that be insane? always get them confused) remark.
I'd like to thank you for a very well, thought out reply.
I'd like to but...
Do you realise how ridiculous you sound?
Nailit doesn't!
He hijacked the thread, torpedoed all discussion for the sake of a selfish rant.
Time for time out, and leave home to it.
Maybe discussion some other time eh?
Leave HIM to it.
Theland //The Bible is complex. It interprets itself.
It is unlike any other so called sacred book.
Approach it judgementally, and you will be disappointed.
Approach it with humility, with a willingness to learn, and the lights will go on for you.//

In other words, you need to assume that it true before you start and uncritically just take in everything it says with a sense of wonder, no matter how disgusting it is in reality.
I'm no religious expert but relying on Sola Scriptura, now I've looked it up, seems a shaky foundation for belief to me. Everything written was written by fallible humans, and so unless it is demonstrated to be true by testing and logic it can only be taking someone's untested notions as your truth.

Something from nothing is unlikely to seem sense to anyone who has only experience of our marco world, but that experience is limited and leads us to think it is the whole of reality. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics show that there is much more to reality than that. And the maths support it, and do experiments that explain anomalies that puzzled us when we only had the classical Newtonian view of the world. 'Something from nothing' seems to be the normal state of affairs; as is 'nothing from something'. (It's a bit like splitting a zero into a +1 and a -1 for a while, and later putting a +1 and a -1 together to get zero.)

As for abiogenesis, what is the problem ? In a random environment things get produced; and eventually something happens to come together which has the ability to replicate itself. Soon after there's a lot of them. Random copying failures mean that on occassion one copy picks up an advantage and outdoes the original, so evolution occurs. Eventually life emerges because the result finally ticks the boxes for our definition of life. Thought processes are an emergent feature of the complexity that evolves. In a similar manner as a single molecule of water can't be said to be wet, but a lot together has the characteristic of wetness, so a single nerve doesn't think, but a mass of brain neurons does.

All seems very plausible to me, and doesn't rely on blind faith, merely on hypothesises that can be studied.
As usual O.G., you address the 'how' but never the 'why?'

Why should evolution exist? or better still, why should anything exist?
Why shouldn't evolution exist? Things replicate, they get errors, the environment sorts out better from worse. Evolution needs no explaining, as it's obviously inevitable from that which I've just pointed out.

Why should anything exist, why should 'nothing' or 'something' be the default situation, these are good questions: but the point is that some state must be the default, and as we are here considering it, 'something' is clearly the default. Proposing a creator will explain nothing. One simply gets into the old discussion about how the creator came about. And saying that the creator was always there also explains nothing since one can ask & say exactly the same about a creatorless reality.
Ultimately there may well be no 'Why'. A 'Why' needs an entity with a purpose. Accept no such entity, and a need for 'Why' disappears.
There may not be a "why". That is an assumption that there is a purpose to it.
I am not sure we "choose" theland, as such. There are some things I cannot bring myself to believe, even if i wanted to, as they just make no sense to me.
Atheist... not theland...
OG; This BBC website seems to entirely evade its own question, giving lots of possible 'hows' instead. It seems to me to be an act of supreme hubris on the part of man to think that the universe is in some way 'solvable'.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141106-why-does-anything-exist-at-all
I'll check it out, thanks: but as mentioned, there may be no goal and thus no 'why'. 'How' may well be the only valid question to seek an answer to. [i](However we may be able to check through the cause & effect chain and know why one thing happens, because this other thing caused it.)[i]
Seems a decent webpage to me, although I'd like clarity on why they think only flat universes are likely to survive. I find that difficult to visualise as it implies that all universes have an edge, and that doesn't sit well with me. (The idea that a universe is infinite sits even less well as it implies either one is talking about a part of an already existing infinite universe, or that a finite space can expand into an infinite one within a finite time period.)

I think we need to be careful about terms also. Like 'universe' and 'nothing'. I've seen some articles that imply once past the point where you could theoretically reach (going at light speed) then that's a different 'universe'. I don't agree, it's a different neighbourhood in the same 'universe'. And the vacuum of space is often referred to as 'nothing', but that's a very different 'nothing' to what is not in an existing universe where there's not even space nor time.

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