of course it's my perogative, but Pete, you mention that i have missunderstood your meaning in this thread maybe you should have been a bit clearer with your opening statement. This debate between us is about your first post and my answer to it, your enquiry and my rebuttle of religion and a god.
Oh and personal digs, my my your slacking.
OK, I have edited this post and changed what I originally wrote because of a new context, that context not being what I first thought and I'll apologise to Tom for misreading his intent here.
I will answer this accordingly:-
We live in a world and experience a world that constantly remind us of the connection between cause and effect.
In other words, for every possible event, there is a reason that event occurred, and this applies on the macro-level of stars exploding down to the micro level of sub-atomic particle collisions.
We live in a universe that in entirely causal in nature and even when we think we have discovered something that seemingly happens for no reason, this always turns out to be due to a lack of understanding or ignorance of certain functional operands.
And so, my point is this, if you had to choose whether we had a case for a god (creator) or not, then if we ponder the latter, we have to countenance the idea of this whole universe and everything in it, including the laws of that universe and evolution etc etc are entirely the product of spontaneously self-creating.
In other words, first there was nothing, absolutely nothing, no particles, no gravity, no light, no time and even no god, and then all of a sudden we have a universe ...Pow!
The alternative to this is to consider a creator who, for some, as of yet unknown reason, created us.
Now, what is more likely, and what is more evidence orientated, a world creating itself or a world created by a creator?
The fact we are not in possession of the whys and wherefores of god's decision to create us is completely academic here because we must go with the evidence and I realise it's all circumstantial but at least we have that whereas with the alternative, there is no evidence whatsoever of spontaneous self-creation anywhere in this world that is supposed to have created itself.
I hope that makes my position clear Tom !
