re: What good reason is there to believe in God?

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Exactly. What is the point of going through this tedious game of good vs evil if the goal is heaven?


Which one is more rewarding and fulfilling, winning the Lombardi trophy or being given it?

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I thought going to heaven to be with God was the ultimate goal. If that’s the case then who cares how you got there?

Judging from the comments in this thread, going to heaven to be with God is the most rewarding and fulfilling of all.

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So, you've examined all 40 billion planets in the Milky Way that might be able to sustain life and know that there are no "signs of life" on any of those 40 billion planets?

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Imagine how narcissistic a person would have to be to believe that of the endless space out there, we are the only living beings.

And just imagine of the countless number of planets in that endless space, that God picked our planet (out of potentially billions…trillions?) to send his only son to save.

Imagine the narcissism necessary to swallow that heaping pile of propaganda. It boggles the mind.

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the size of the universe is irrelevant

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Do you even physics?

Of course the size of the universe is relevant.

If there is intelligent life on a planet 1 million light years away, we would never know. We don't have any instruments that can inspect something that far away.

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And just imagine of the countless number of planets in that endless space, that God picked our planet (out of potentially billions…trillions?)

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Off by like 10 orders of magnitude. The number of planets out there is mind numbingly huge.

If a god created all that, you know he’s dicking around on other planets, too. Maybe that’s why he got bored with ours.

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A virgin gave birth…to some dude that was murdered and came back to life…and now lives in the clouds with His Dad.

What’s not to believe?

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So how far are you willing to go in the other direction? Does anything that is immaterial exist?

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YOUR point is the false premise. We don’t need to know how life is created, to be able to state definitely that life is possible.

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Our existence isn't proof life exists everywhere. If we assume life is possible, they just need to be like earth: a comfortable distance away from a star similar to our sun, made of rock, big enough to have a molten core, have a protective atmosphere...we already are observing plenty of planets that exhibit those traits. Definitely there is something in that equation that we are missing. So no, it's definitely not a false premise. I'm using science and y'all are creating unfalsifiable theories.

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Our existence isn't proof life exists everywhere.

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No one makes this claim.

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If we assume life is possible,

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We don’t have to assume this. We know this.

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they just need to be like earth: a comfortable distance away from a star similar to our sun, made of rock, big enough to have a molten core, have a protective atmosphere

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A good place to start the search, but not necessarily the only conditions under which life may emerge.

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So no, it's definitely not a false premise. I'm using science and y'all are creating unfalsifiable theories.

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Maybe I misunderstood your point, but the idea that we have to nail down exactly how life emerges to know that a) life does emerge b) has emerged on planets other than earth is false.

We just have to find it. The falsifiable null hypothesis here is that there is no life anywhere except earth. Obviously we can never prove that negative, but we can gather enough evidence with enough power to say we accept the null hypothesis. But we’ve got a long way to go for that.

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Clearly, they are claiming that life exists elsewhere because we exist.

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Agree with elsewhere, the everywhere part of your statement is what I disagreed with.

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My position is to push back on the notion that there is other life in the universe because of the vastness and number of planets in the universe.

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Those things do increase the probability of life elsewhere, though. Agree that we can’t state it definitively.

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One cannot claim that life exists on other planets unless we know how life is created.

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This is still false.

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As I've posted before, we have observed many planets that are similar to earth with no biosignatures. Perhaps we will find some in the future, but we haven't yet. And we can test your null hypothesis with greater and greater telescopes and space exploration.

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Which we are actively doing, so somewhere someone smart thinks the probability of non-earth life is >0. I would GUESS that life is pretty common in the universe, but who knows.

I do know that finding non-earth life would be the single largest discovery in human history.

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They are living cells, they aren’t living organisms which is what we are debating.

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That is cool. So, you are asking specifically about intelligent life, right? Life that is of an equivalent nature to human life.

Does that mean you are open to considering that "living cells" may exist on other planets?

I agree with you that intelligent life does not begin until a sperm fertilizes an egg (in the case of humans). I'm a "life begins at conception" guy, and am anti-abortion.

We obviously currently do not fully understand the mechanism by which intelligent life begins, but we do have the ability to study it because it happens right here on Earth thousands of times each day.

I believe that someday we will figure it out. And that will probably be a bad thing, because we'll experiment and create some form of life that won't be pleasant for the being that we create, or for the humans around it, or both.

I think the possibility that life similar to human life exists on other planets is extremely small. But not zero.

I also believe that the human race will most likely go extinct before we discover that intelligent life exists on other planets.

Life is such a fleeting thing. If we don't end up exterminating ourselves, Mother Nature will do it for us.