UK: 70% of young people are 'not religious' according to a report - Sensationalist Headlines

I could ask the exact same about your god. Why does there need to be a "first place"? Why can't they just have acted forever? Why can't the "initial" cause be the "final" state of the universe? All the more questions to add to the pile of those you haven't answered yet. And what would you say is awareness? And life force that isn't present in a corpse? Are you referring to a person's pulse? The chemical reactions in their brains? Or just more generally their capacity to react to their environment in a way that allows them to flourish? I'm pretty sure the latter is just the result of evolution coupled with natural selection. No need for a conscious being to oversee that.

Assuming no external influence, eternal activity occurring within a system that is incapable of self-producing action is logically impossible. It's a paradox, I'm not sure how much further I can logically reduce that down. I'm referring to the person's actual identity, expanded throughout the body as consciousness. Anyone can understand that the difference between a living man and a corpse is consciousness, and once consciousness has definitely left the body it cannot be revived by any material combination.

We know our understanding of the universe, time, physics, causality, and otherwise all breakdown around singularities. Everything points to a variation of "The Big Bang" being the origin of the universe. This is a catholic priests idea, worked upon for many years and it's likely our best idea yet. Accepting this, we also have to accept that "paradoxes" based on our current understanding of the universe do not apply to the origins of the universe. We may never understand it, but we can understand that my earlier statement applies to our assumptions of that time frame. Logical paradoxes may not apply during the oddities of a singularity due to a variety of things we've yet to learn.

I think this is why an argument beginning from consciousness is a better basis to establish God, as logical arguments can work but really they're all just speculation and end in 'what-ifs' and 'maybes'. Consciousness can be investigated into directly via meditation, and as a Hindu it's required that you understand the position of consciousness [Brahman] before you can further understand the nature of God.

You're just writing various wordings of "something that's not in motion in the first place can't be put in motion on its own" which makes the baseless assumption that the universe was not in motion at some point. You're specifically setting up the scenario to be a paradox by imposing extra constraints you don't know are true. You're just rebranding soul here. In fact I could replace "consciousness" by "soul" in your definition and it would work. "Anyone can understand that the difference between a living man and a corpse is consciousness."? Nope. Plenty of differences between a living man and a dead one. Brain activity for instance. You gotta specify which difference we're talking about. The popular concept of consciousness is just a stand-in for the religious concept of souls. Neither have any indication of existing, there's no way to prove either's existence, and neither are properly and concretely defined. I don't see the point in worrying about the cause of something we can't define and don't even know exist. As far as I'm concerned, if you could reconstruct a person's brain in a completely identical way to the way it was before their death, that person would be alive again. The only thing making that an impossibility are technical constraints, not metaphysical ones.

I love how god is the causeless cause, not infinite time doing infinite things combined with the strongest observer bias of all time, no, it needs to line up with my human understanding of cause and effect.

You can have a living body without consciousness, in fact you do it every day, it’s called sleep.

Consciousness doesn't cease with sleep, it is transferred from one state to another. One is either dreaming or he is in deep, dreamless sleep, but he's not without consciousness.

How would you know?

I'm really trying, but i have no fucking clue where this threat went i must admit.

Ha...so some parts of the Bible are true and others are exaggerations, that's an awesome all-powerful God you've got there, really leading us to the correct conclusion that he himself knows will actually confuse many many people and call into legitimacy of his "divinely inspired book".

Why are you so angry? You don’t have to be like this you know.

If a god can "just be" I fail to see why've the universe can't also "Just be"

Your tree analogy doesn't work because you're ignoring the concept of change. Four billion years ago there were no trees, and yet the particles that make up any tree today also existed then, so the easy answer here is that while trees weren't causeless, perhaps the particles of the universe were. Consciousness is another thing we understand poorly. Although we don't know exactly what it is or how it works, nothing suggests consciousness is supernatural in origin. It is also not logical to claim that something possessing a trait must have been created by something possessing the same trait. It's entirely possible for something non-conscious to have produced something conscious.

I've already pointed out why the first cause argument is nonsense:

I understand where religious people come from, although they have absolutely no choice in what they started to believe in and when, it's always forced on them by another. Any Diety is also jumping a massive gun in terms of what most likely began the universe, if it ever did begin. I sit here baffled far too often as to why anything exists at all. There is just no reason for anything to exist, even the space that things exist in, is just such a fucking crazy concept when you think about it, never mind life and complex chemicals etc. Scientists are doing a fantastic job so far though, considering we've probably only been looking deeply into it for 30,000 years or so, and I follow it very closely.

I came from two parents that were apathetic about religion. Never went to church growing up. Started gaining my faith out of my own interest when I was 19.

Yeah you're right in that, a poor blanket statement by myself. What made you start looking into it? Which one did you choose and why?

Kind of really hard to explain into words. It was somewhat of a mental "push" that it's something I should make a part of my life. I have always sought some sort of moral compass and having a faith was the best one to presented. I've always been one to reject moral and cultural relativism. I think I have always believed there was a God out there. I can't remember a time I didn't, even when I spent much of my youth without church or even caring about having faith as something important. My mother was/is Presbyterian, so that's where I started. But the past couple of years, I've become disillusioned with the ability to just pick and choose which denomination of faith you wanted, with the lack of consistency. My church broke off from the main Presbyterian USA branch to become non-denominational, and it has changed so much since then that it isn't the same church I joined 10 years ago. This conflicted with my need for consistency and moral absolutism, so I've been drawing myself to the Catholic Church, which has had the same message for 2,000 years. Conveniently, it is also the church my fiance is a part of, though she is non-practicing. In a year or so, I will probably be formally joining the Catholic Church.

Looks like the UK is going for a less religious build order.

I'm a little late to the conversation, anyways. Christianity is in the process of a paradigm shift, to a better interpretation of the bible. Peterson (youtube link) is at the head of the change/s. Makes more sense, no? The idea of this blind faith in 'god' (depends on what's defined as god), in an old man in the sky just doesn't cut it for me, however. The bible, as an ancient complex text, used to teach virtue combined as a basic guideline for living life, is different matter entirely. The stories aren't meant to be taken literally, think along the lines of Jungian thought/psychology. To keep it short: Peterson's christian perception: God = good behaviour, nature, virtue, don't be a dick Evil/chaos = Hell is all the bad shit that happens to you, as a result of not following/acting in a virutous manner. Similar to Karma I highly recommend Peterson's youtube series, although, i'd be surprised if no-one on here's heard about him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ

Maybe protestant sects, but I wouldn't say Christianity as a whole. As for "better", that is subjective.

Maybe protestant sects, but I wouldn't say Christianity as a whole. As for "better", that is subjective. True, i don't want to speak for all the various groups/sects. Some churches won't evolve their traditions, and are dying a slow death as a result. Look at the church of England for example. As for 'better', have any other alternatives? Atheism leads to nihilsm and existential crisis, none of which are helpful. I mean sure, we can keep delving into the past, building bigger and better microscopes and particle accelerators to find the 'original' particle. From my minimal understanding of the 'god particle', i'm sure that particle is made up of even smaller particles. Where does it end? Maybe we should be focusing on moving forward instead? Which brings us back to the start, what's the alternative? The stoics had a good understanding on how an individual should live life thousands of years ago. This Peterson fellow seems to be picking up where they left off. But hey, nothing's perfect or certain in Philosophy.

Atheism leads to nihilism and existential crisis Trends such as 70% of young people in UK not being religious shows that this is wrong. Believing in something illogical and possibly rejecting truth just to fend off an existential crisis is also not helpful. If you just define 'God' as a concept encompassing everything good, then you're not far off from atheists anyway: many probably agree with your 'virtues' just without calling them 'God'. Virtue doesn't have to come from an external source, and it certainly doesn't have to be taught by the bible.

Why? I've never understood this line of thought. Why would you require a supreme being to tell you to know what's good or bad? Can't you just come up with a few axioms that appear to benefit the common good along with your personal well-being and then expand from there? As for the existential crisis, I don't get it either. I'd rather exist for no explicit purpose, and come up with my own, than end up realizing that some higher being already made that choice for me and I'm just the puppet of destiny. That'd feel like slavery.

I find the idea of moral absolutism to be pretty strange. Personally, I think there are only moral relativists, arrogant moral relativists, and people who let arrogant moral relativists do their thinking.

I can understand the existential crisis angle I guess, I get kind freaked out imagining what dying is like considering there's nothing afterwards and all ive ever experienced is existing so what would not existing EVEN BE LIK- aaaaaaaaaaaa But, again, I don't see how just accepting some easy answer and conditioning yourself not to ask those sort of questions any more is any healthier than just finding a string of entertaining distractions that momentarily stop you thinking about the inescapable void each of us are hurtling towards, probably much faster than we realise. As for Nihilism, I mean, What's so bad about that? Life really is essentially meaningless, in my opinion. The earth could explode tomorrow and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to the universe at large. Everything would carry on without us. Doesn't mean you can't find your own meaning, your own reason for living. Why do you need someone else to tell you what to live for? Why does the lack of a grand overarching scheme devalue your experience?

I think the right way to moral absolutism is through Kant's ethics: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law."

Not everyone wants the same universal laws though, so that's still relativist in a way.

It's not a matter of wanting something to being a universal law, it's acting by what you would consider all people accepting as a universal law. For example, everyone can get behind the idea that murder is not acceptable. That transcends time and culture.