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Is it rational to believe in God?
Jakarta Post/Yahoo Philippines ^ | Giovanni Serritella

Posted on 12/22/2011 4:54:48 PM PST by WilliamIII

The world's most famous physicist Prof. Stephen Hawking has declared that God does not exist.

Hawking joins the opinion of several other world-class scientists like Richard Dawkins, Peter Atkins, James Watson, Victor Stenger and many others who deny the existence of God in the name of the latest advancements in physics, biology and other scientific domains. The so-called "New Atheism" (championed by Richard Dawkins) sees God as a delusion, a by product of the mind of superstitious and scientifically uneducated people. "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing ... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists and why we are here". This is the conclusion of The Grand Design, Hawking's latest book.

...Hawking states that a "law of gravity" exists and this (not God) creates the universe. Hawking surely also believes that gravity itself exists (since a law of gravity without "gravity" to describe would be meaningless). Now, if we say that X creates Y, we must presuppose the existence of X in the first place to bring Y into existence. Likewise, we must presuppose the existence of gravity to bring the universe into existence.

But Einstein's theory of relativity shows that this is illogical because it is like saying that gravity existed "before time" which is absurd. Did gravity spontaneously generate itself then?

(Excerpt) Read more at ph.news.yahoo.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: faith
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To: WilliamIII
Think for yourself.
41 posted on 12/22/2011 5:29:41 PM PST by Glenn (iamtheresistance.org)
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To: WilliamIII

I have always felt that God was probably a mathematically or scientifically provable fact. It is just that God is so complex that we don’t have the ability to do so.


42 posted on 12/22/2011 5:29:45 PM PST by yarddog
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To: txhurl
There are no atheists on a crashing jet plane.
Oh yea, I don't believe in atheism!
43 posted on 12/22/2011 5:29:51 PM PST by phs3 (FUBO)
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To: WilliamIII

Golf clap, Dr. Hawking.

Tell me, is it rational to love or feel anything or anyone?

Prove to us that you feel a feeling or love someone.

Prove it.


44 posted on 12/22/2011 5:31:57 PM PST by combat_boots (The Lion of Judah cometh. Hallelujah. Gloria Patri, Filio et Spiritui Sancto.)
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To: WilliamIII

If it were rational, there would be no such thing as faith. And if there were no faith, there would be no trust. And if there was no trust, there would be only fear.

And yet Scripture tells us that nature makes God evident to anyone who pays attention.

However, if science was left to explain the universe, there would be no love because love cannot be tangibly studied or weighed. Science cannot describe, measure or quantify love so it would have to declare that it didn’t actually exist either.


45 posted on 12/22/2011 5:32:10 PM PST by OrangeHoof (Obama: The Dr. Kevorkian of the American economy.)
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To: hellbender
Right.

For the law was given by Moses, (everybody gets it, but nobody can do it) but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (few get it, but it's free to everybody). John 1:17.

46 posted on 12/22/2011 5:35:17 PM PST by PapaNew
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To: Doe Eyes
Ahh, but therein lies the fallacy of the atheist's view. Religion believes in the supernatural, the mystical--God is ever existing, the infinite mind. He is his own origin. We admit that we cannot answer that question, because He is a spiritual, mystical, supernatural being.

If you're an atheist, that dog just won't hunt. You must have a non-supernatural, non-mystical source for everything that happened, including the source of all of these things like gravity. Hawking's claim that there could have been an infinite number of universes and this one just happened to have gravity is double speak for magic.

The fact that Hawking and Dawkins are ultimately forced to resort to magic for an answer proves just who weak their argument is.

Religion allows "magic," relies upon "magic." Pure, atheistic science doesn't allow for "magic."

Thus atheism is a religion, because it has to rely on "magic."
47 posted on 12/22/2011 5:37:36 PM PST by Sudetenland (Anybody but Obama!!!!)
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To: WilliamIII
If the Torah teaches something, and every organized civilization on earth behaved accordingly for thousands of years, yet NOT ONE knew what He said, sounds like things go according to the teaching, no matter what we think. If there were prophecies in Torah that span thousands of years, yet NO ONE knew they were there, and things STILL go according to same, no matter what, doesn't that indicate SomeOne knows what is to come? Yet such a charge does not imply overt direction; He says how things will go, we misunderstand it completely, and yet we do whatever according to OUR choices, yet things turn out exactly the way He said they would all along the way.

Sounds like G_d to me.

48 posted on 12/22/2011 5:39:40 PM PST by Carry_Okie (The RNC would prefer Obama to a conservative nominee.)
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To: Iron Munro
Either you have faith in God or you have faith that the magnificence of the universe

Some of us are content in not knowing how everything was created. We don't have to cling to some made up story to get through the day.

49 posted on 12/22/2011 5:42:11 PM PST by Doe Eyes
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To: WilliamIII

Not when you have had a revalation...


50 posted on 12/22/2011 5:43:14 PM PST by Shady (The undeniable truth of the Obama Administration...The numbers do not lie.)
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To: WilliamIII

Is it rational to believe that we are all here ‘just because’, or that this planet and human beings are some kind of random happening?


51 posted on 12/22/2011 5:43:51 PM PST by dfwgator
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To: MHGinTN
Despite Hawking talking thingy he uses, I cannot quite believe its his thoughts. He is the dummy and the assistant is the ventriloquist with the idea's...sorry about his physical condition, but he's not too smart and disturbing to listen to....
52 posted on 12/22/2011 5:44:15 PM PST by goat granny
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To: WilliamIII

You’d be crazy not to.


53 posted on 12/22/2011 5:44:49 PM PST by BenLurkin (This is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion or satire; or both)
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To: Graybeard58; sillipuddi
To me it's not a difficult choice. Steven Hawking has his super brain power and I have my Savior.

I think Poster 25 cuts right to the heart of the matter and puts the "universe creates itself" theory in perspective:

"It's kinda like a tornado .. tearing through a salvage yard and creating a corvette in it's wake!"


54 posted on 12/22/2011 5:46:06 PM PST by Iron Munro ("Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight he'll just kill you." John Steinbeck)
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy

Hermetically sealed “rationality” that refuses to consider evidence that demands a verdict is, of course, irrational. We are witnesses to the Age of Rationality producing the Age of Irrationality.


55 posted on 12/22/2011 5:49:51 PM PST by PapaNew
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To: Iron Munro

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-say-turin-shroud-is-supernatural-6279512.html

The evidence keeps mounting that something happened in Israel about 2000 years ago.


56 posted on 12/22/2011 5:51:24 PM PST by Bill C of BDroppings (bdroppings.blogspot.com)
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To: MHGinTN

The example I like to use is “throwing a stick of dynamite into a bauxite mine, and when the dust clears there’s a fully functional Boeing 747 sitting there fuelled up.”

Entropy by definition precludes the entire “self forming” idea of the universe, because order CANNOT come from disorder. There MUST BE an intelligence guiding material for it to make any sense.


57 posted on 12/22/2011 6:01:06 PM PST by Don W (You can forget what you do for a living when your knees are in the breeze.)
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To: Sudetenland
The "great" Stephen Hawking's model for the "spontaneous" creation of life and the universe around us contains about eight or so "coincidences" to which he admits and fluffs off.

And then of course we ask:

"How does Hawking know that God didn't create the conditions and coincidences that make the creation of the universe and life appear to be spontaneous?"

Think of an aborigine contemplating an automatic manufacturing machine churning out thousands of donuts an hour with no visible human intervention. Once the machine is tuned up and ready to go the operator can stand back and let the machine do its job. But to the aborigine the operation of the machine is unfathomable - it appears to "spontaneously create" donuts.


58 posted on 12/22/2011 6:02:04 PM PST by Iron Munro ("Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight he'll just kill you." John Steinbeck)
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To: mylife

If you REALLY want to cut through the pure blather of guys like Hawking, and the dear departed, now sizzling and frying Chris Hitchens, forget about ooze and primorial “soup” and think about how such elegant, and intricate miracles as sight, taste and smell “just happened.

Everybody conveniently “forgets” that even Darwin, in “The Origin...” admitted that unless definite examples could be found which prove the evolution of the eye, his theory of evolution could not stand up. He realized the folly of claiming that something of so complicated and technical composition had just happened, unless one had “Exhibits A, B & C, etc. to substantiate it.

But old Darwin died and went on to face the God he’d denied, and his God hating, God denying accolytes ignored the above-cited admission of Darwin in his unscientific book, and continue to perpetuate the totally fabricated farce of evolution.

Also; poor, bumbling, lost-as-a-goose-in-an-ice-storm Darwin and his contemporaries; lacking the optics and electronic magnification to see the wonders and grandeur of the microscopic world, based their entire “chewing gum, spit and baling wire” lash-up of evolution, on the belief that a single “simple” cell was nothing more nor less than a glob of protoplasm very much like a tiny morcel of gelatin.

Modern technology has revealed how pathetically far they were from the truth, or any clue of actual science! Any ONE living, so-called “simple cell contains so much code within its DNA, that if it were unwound and printed out in normal typeface, the code in ONE cell would fill 1000 volumes of 600 pages each! So forget about slime and ooze. Answer the question of WHO WROTE THE CODE which DIRECTS cells to reproduce themselves! IMHO, that’s the MONEY question.


59 posted on 12/22/2011 6:04:37 PM PST by Tucker39
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To: eddie willers

lol I remember that.


60 posted on 12/22/2011 6:04:56 PM PST by ecomcon
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