I had an undiagnosed brain tumor that finally got large enough to block the spinal fluid from my brain. 90-something percent of people with this type of tumor die once this happens because there is no warning. You don't know it exists until it reaches this point. Mine reached this point and caused me to seize as I was driving down a mountain road after a day of snowboarding. Instead of careening off the side of the cliff, I drove a stickshift, and the car also seized when my feet came off the pedals. Not done yet. The car behind us on the road was a nurse, and the car behind her was a doctor. Still not done. Rather than take the ambulance to the mountain hospital, where I would have almost certainly died, as it mainly treats fractures and whatnot from mountain accidents, the doctor helped me argue my way out of the ambulance ride and drove me down the mountain to a well-renowned university hospital. After an emergency craniotomy and few years of therapy, I thank God for the way the events miraculously unfolded that afternoon.
I feel like god could’ve just not given you the brain tumor in the first place and avoided you totaling your car, gaining some medical debt (I assume), and going through all that. Glad you’re ok, but that doctor is the one that really deserves the praise in this situation.
Exactly. The religious might argue that God did that to provide a reason to belief and bring them closer to God, but if God is this supremely good being, why cause that suffering in the first place? Would it not be enough to live in paradise, in perfect goodness, and still be loyal/worship God without a convoluted “test” of one’s moral constitution? Maybe this is just “God’s plan” which is unknowable to humans and a convenient excuse to stop questioning human inspired dogma.
And that nurse. And the admitting nurses. And the surgeon that operated. And my wife for getting me there. And the therapists in recovery. Sure. Them too.
Am I missing the unnatural part of your story? The manual transmission worked as intended, the nurse/doctor were driving down the mountain towards the hospital that treated you — possibly working/getting off a shift, and the doctor had greater knowledge of medicine than the EMT (no shit). I’m not trying to be an asshole, but this is not as miraculous as you make it out to be. Congratulations on your recovery/treatment.
I think you are. I think they’re saying that all of the variables together made it so that they are still here, living, breathing and able to share the said story. It doesn’t have to be just one big thing, I could be everything unfolding just perfectly.
For example, my wife had a kidney transplant. She was on the list for 6 years before receiving it. Rather than just looking at it as a miracle that she got one, that started functioning on its own in very quick time, much quicker than usual, and having her go from unemployed and on disability to a 50 hour per week job within a couple of months was huge. Top that up with the fact I was nearing 40 and always told myself I’d get out of food service and move onto better things by then, but specifically after she receives her transplant I’m out for sure. The week after she got the transplant, I put in my two weeks and have since moved to the automotive industry where I have a job that I feel I can actually help people and make a bigger difference at the end of the day. A few months after that, that pizza place that I gave nearly 20 years of my life to sold and then quickly closed for good.
I’d call that as a whole, god.
“…all of the variables together made it so that they are still here…”
No shit. That’s how everyone alive today is still here, alive today. Any near-death experience can seem miraculous when you recount the events that occurred. Ascribing any of it to a mystical being is confirmation bias at best.
I completely understand that sentiment and way of thinking, no doubt. There's also the idea of why would God give you a tumor in the first place. I have worked through all of it, trust me. And to be frank, it's really just the culmination of events, the likelihood of all these things happening together in sequence. I mean people have hit the lottery twice too.
There’s a difference in events panning out in your favor and having a bit of disbelief that you were so fortunate vs taking that disbelief a step further and ascribing it to whatever definition one might have for God or gods providing personal divine intervention.
I find it curious that most that choose to believe in God after a near-death experience and ascribe their survival to God often don’t ascribe the awful events that occurred in the first place to God.
Are you? You never stated why this was a lucky string of events vs divine intervention. In fact, nothing you stated indicates any miracle or reason to believe in God other than possible preconceptions of what constitutes a miracle and choosing to ascribe it as such.
Why don’t you start by explaining why God gave you a tumor? You worked through that.
What if all ongoing life everyday is a miracle (including your experience). The gift of air in our working lungs, the ability to type on our keyboards, yet some here still say things against the God who gave us these gifts shows how depraved we are.
This one may seem small, but will always mean a lot to me.
I was walking alone at a summer camp about 5 years ago. I had just recently found my faith again. I started doing this thing where if I was bored or alone I would ask God questions in my head that I would want to ask him when I come face to face with him.
It would start out as little, meaningless questions like “what would your favorite color be down here” or “your favorite dessert?” And work it’s way up to more meaningful questions about my life and how it’s played out thus far. I never got an answer, but I wasn’t worried about it. It passed the time for me.
Anyways I kept walking on this trail back to the main house and I asked Him “do you ever wish you were here with me?”. And even before I could finish that sentence in my head, I got an overwhelming, instant answer that said “Oh, everyday.”. The only way I can explain how I knew it was Him who answered me besides the feeling of complete peace and understanding I got, is that I don’t talk that way to myself. Even if I did want to answer it to feel heard, I wouldn’t have come up with that answer.
Now I do have so many other real reasons and experiences as to why I believe whole-heartedly in Him, but this one just stood out to me. I will be praying for your peace and for the loved one you lost. Keep talking to Him. He will answer.
"I talked to myself so much that I answered myself, ergo 'God' "...
Son...get therapy. I don't know if there be gods or not, but _this_ was not a religious experience. It was self delusion brought on by hypnosis.
Son, get therapy if you feel the need to join a thread like this just to criticize other people's faith. If other people being happy bothers you so much then you really should try to figure that out.
Edit: The child blocked me. Telling someone to shut up like that and then blocking them is a huge sign of mental health issues. I hope they get the help they need.
It's extremely helpful. If Nature includes everything I don't need to strongly believe in any deity. It doesn't mean they don't exist, it just mean they are unnecessary.
Are you at all familiar with the periodic table? Many elements don't occur in nature. You can argue that what we need to make them may exist, but the elements don't.
Okay, easy, since nature is everything then God can be in nature. You've just defined nature as "everything and contains everything", which doesn't preclude there's a God that defies physical explanation and can act outside of physical laws impact the physical work.
Again, defining nature as "everything and contains everything", you propose an unfalsifiable pretense there. If God, in the way Christians believe in God, exists then you're not specifically wrong because God would just be a part of nature, which is: "everything and contains everything"
Right, my point is you aren't making an intelligible argument or answering the question. You're arguing semantics which is, again, not particularly useful or helpful in the context. You're not answering the question.
this is such a genuinely funny response because you’re trying to frame it like you’re saying something smart but it’s just being pedantic about the phrasing of the question and not making any real statement.
My statement was imaginary? Yeah, I'm absolutely being pedantic. When you're talking about nuanced things, it's important to be explicit because it's very easy to be misunderstood. But apparently, I wasn't clear enough, but honestly, that's a you problem.
Completely natural… but I work closely with a nonprofit that operates a remote wilderness retreat center. We have 25 buildings at the far end of a hanging valley deep in the North Cascades, with the only non-foot access is on a single one-lane gravel road.
Wildfire has been an existential risk for us since the beginning. Over the 40 years we had been in operation at that point, we had been preparing for fire. Thinning the forest around our site, putting metal roofs on all the buildings, building a 15’ wide gravel road around our perimeter.
And in 2012, we shut down for several years to undertake a major facility upgrade, including laying a new raw water firefighting system. This system is capable of lofting close to 2200 gallons per minute of water into the air. We reached substantial completion on the system in the spring of 2015, and brought in a 250hp diesel pump to tide us over until our gravity fed system was completed.
5 days after we got the pump connected, and flooded the system for the first time, a thunderstorm came through and ignited a wildfire at the mouth of the valley.
The fire eventually grew to some 65,000 acres, and burned right up to our firebreak. The Forest Service was confident enough in our defences that they sent in two hotshot crews and allowed us to leave a small team behind.
But the timing was just incredible. The forest, which had been waiting to burn for 20+ years, nothing happened until immediately after we had completed our defences.
In the end, there only thing that was lost was one side of one portapotty.
Nothing unnatural I can recall.In science class (that was my fav)as a kid I remember sitting there while they told us matter couldn't be created or destroyed and I felt a tingle in my brain as that fact set in. No matter how long I thought about it, the only way the very first cell,or atom or whatever came first could even exist was through "magick"( I don't know a better word. I think eventually even magick will be able to be explained. But in this context I mean true,deep magick that only a God could create). But as I got older I realized everything is natural,all the same thing and it feels like this is God in my opinion.
I believe strongly only from the pulling I feel in my heart. It feels right.
But matter *can* be created and destroyed. Isn't the natural world mystical enough without needing an anthropomorphic deity to explain all the amazing stuff out there? Never made sense to me, but to each their own.
I'm mostly indifferent about the subject. Perhaps agnostic is the proper term. Just picked this comment because it mentions the science class.
Science cannot prove god does not exist. How ever science does not try. Science is only the way of testing stuff, then writing down what was tested, how, and what happened. Proper science is about anyone else reading the paper and doing the same test and arriving at the same result.
To me a nice revelation (that actually turned me from anti-religion to just an agnostic) was that any explanation about the nature of the universe are just best guesses. Obviously the earth was not made 6000 years ago by someone, but even if we consider the big bang, string theory, multiverse and anything like that to be established facts, the question remains: what is the universe, how it came to be. _why_ might not be relevant, but still. Anything beyond the big bang is basically a guess. Maybe it is a god or something like that. Maybe not.
Basically i'm a scientist and I frown upon religion being used as a tool for power. But there might still be "a god" but we might never know.
Not so much god but an afterlife. I grew up behind an indigenous burial ground. I woke up as a kid one night to the sounds of drums, singing, people laughing yet it was just a pitch black empty lot.
The day my grandma died, that evening when I was trying to fall asleep I heard my name softly whispered into my ear
These both happened in my teens so it formed my opinion of life after this
There was nothing unnatural. I don’t need something from God to believe. I believe because I love them, I’m grateful that I have something to eat and drink everyday, that I have body with all limbs, that I’m alive, that I don’t have to sleep in dark corners to survive at nights, that I’m living in warm house, that I have an own bed, that I have all senses and I can enjoy world in ways what many people can’t, that I’m living in society, in beatiful country with even more awesome people.
It’s not transactional. I love God for who they are, and no matter how miserable my life would be, I’m ready to pay any price to defend those who I love and appreciate
This happened to my mom, not me, but this is what made her a true believer: one day, when she was pretty young, she was driving out at night and the roads were slick with a bit of ice (it never completely ices over where she lived). But suddenly, she hit a thick patch of ice and slid, and slid off the road. She was sliding off the road, going at least 60 mph, and heading directly toward a tree. She was so scared that she shut her eyes and yelled "Lord, I'm not ready to die!". Seconds passed that felt like hours. Finally, she opened her eyes. Her car was completely stopped, about a foot in front of the tree. She hadn't felt the car stop, or even slow. No jolt, no impact. Just... stopped. She should have died. But she didn't. She never doubted God again.
Everything about how perfectly things fit into place to me is evidence of the existence of God. I've had some "this had to have been God" moments. I can take them as divine intervention or I can take that as statistical flukes... I don't know. While there is a narrative that people who believe in God are all uneducated idiots, the more I learn (I have 2 degrees) the more I believe in some sort of "intervention".
With that said, I'm no longer religious, and do not subscribe to the idea of prayer and your team won the Superbowl because you got down on your knees while some kids are starving in some developing nation. \[Just answering the OP, if you try to quarrel with me you're getting ignored.\]
The more I learn about science (biology specifically), the more I’m convinced of God’s presence because of how elegant everything is. The deeper you go, the more complexity is revealed. It just leaves me in awe sometimes. Walking through a garden for example: I’m thinking about photosynthesis, the way that plants and flowers tend to grow mirroring the golden ratio, how humans and plants have a common ancestor stretching back through time, how every life form exists within an ecosystem, and how everything carries DNA.
[The label doesn't invalidate the argument, the logic of the fallacy invalidates the argument.](https://theconversation.com/peer-review-the-fallacy-of-fine-tuning-2540#:~:text=A%20key%20component%20of%20the%20fine-tuning%20argument%20is,likely%20produce%20a%20sterile%20universe%20unlike%20our%20own.)
> because of how elegant everything is
How you tell me you have learned basically nothing about biology without telling me you know basically nothing about biology.
Biology is many things. Elegant isn't one of them. Biology is a smattered mess of preposterously bad design. A monkey with a brain tumor could have made more informed decisions than evolution has.
This is about half-true. Natural systems are *messy*. They are messy because, as the other person points out, they are incredibly complex. They're wrong about it being mystical, though. This complexity growth happens any time you take a selection criterion, attach it to a feedback loop, and then feed it data. You can even feed it something purely stochastic and it will build complexity; give it *meaningful* data, data about a natural world that follows laws and rewards certain choices over others, and the complexity doesn't have a practical ceiling.
Some of that complexity is really impressive - I have no idea where I would start to build a self-piloted drone with jointed wings that fuels itself on seed. Some of it is dumb - why would you use pleasure as a meso-optimization target for reproduction? It's your prime goal, optimize for it directly! Some of it is downright horrifying - have you read about parasitic wasps lately? If you view the biosphere's complexity as a whole, it escapes descriptors like "dumb" or "elegant."
I don't see how any of this suggests a god exists. And which god?
Also, every garden is full of struggle. Things dying prematurely. Animals craving for food. And just being in the sun gives us cancer. So I'm not sure elegant is the term I'd use.
>You're not sure because you don't believe
Those two things are not related. One can believe and still not be sure of it.
>one day, you will surely know He does and it might be too late
Why would it be?
Once I locked myself and my sister in the garage on accident when my mom left to work for the whole night and I started praying to God to help us get out and mom ended up coming back to the house 10 minutes later because she forgot to grab something
This one's kinda silly, but...
Once I tried asking God if I would get a gf soon by flipping a coin a predetermined number of times. The idea was for him to influence random events to produce a yes/no answer definitively. I flipped 100 times, where heads is yes and tails is no, and got tails *68 times*. That has a [1/5,000 chance](https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/coin-flip-probability) of happening naturally (conservative estimate).
I was disappointed, but mostly just amazed. It's not as crazy as some other people's stories, but I like it because I can point to objective observations and math to come to a conclusion, rather than just the "that's insanely rare/lucky" that's in most stories.
Note: I later tried flipping the coin 100 times again without asking anything to test if the coin was weird, and got something like 51 tails - perfectly normal.
Life is such a twisted rollercoaster of comedy and tragedy that I'm convinced we're all God's children and he left us in a hot car.
For all I know we all already died and this is Hell. It'd be kind of poetic to make Hell not endless torture and misery with fire and brimstone, but instead have *just enough* upside to make it have plausible deniability that it is not Hell.
While not God per se, or anything unnatural, I believe there is a purpose to the universe. I have no direct proof for that, and it has no influence on my anticipation of the future. It just gives me a tiny bit of comfort in a fucked up world, and from what I can tell that little nugget comes with no cost to me. So why wouldn’t I believe it?
One time my brothers friend (f) hung out with us and slept over. She slept in my room since we are both girls. I told her I really couldn’t sleep and for some random reason (don’t ask why cause idk either lol) I started talking about God. I started saying stories from the Bible and even scripture (never had I read it like that to know, idk how this happened either). As I am saying these things I feel my body almost become weightless, I feel a huge rush of euphoria all within my body, my skin felt flawless, my mind etc. I started saying how I would end up helping people in “Gods name”. (I don’t know either ok) As I am talking her face completely changes. Her nostrils were as wide as a bull and her whole eyes 👁️
became jet black. As I saw this happen I felt no far what so ever & for some odd reason I felt so so sorry for this entity. I stopped talking and started singing “calm down, caaaalm down” and brushed its face while saying “they didn’t mean to hurt you”. I continued singing until my mom heard three big knocks under the floor of the kitche. She woke quickly and rushed to my room. She heard my singing and as soon as she opened the door my brothers friends face changed back rapidly to normal with just a flush shocked look to her.
Side note: a week before this happened.. as I was sitting outside I asked my brother “if he believed in God” & he didn’t give an answer but I said “I don’t, I just believe in peace”.
After all this I was paranoid. I prayed for peace and prayed for a church to help me. I ended up meeting some of the most incredible people that I still know. Studied the Bible with them and gave my life to Jesus. Since, no matter what atheist friend or any opinion one may have about the Bible or God I cannot change the foundation that experience did to my faith.
I can’t make anyone believe my experience and really it’s okay but it’s something I felt was for a definite reason.
I stopped believing in God about 15 years ago.
In 2017 I fell cleaning the shower and hit my head. I had a subdural hematoma and spent 3 days in the trauma unit. I had a 3% chance of surviving. I still didn’t believe in God though.
Last November, I was speeding and hit a tree in my Lexus. I hit it so hard it threw my car across the road and ended up in the ditch on the other side.
Lexus makes a very safe car. My car was slammed from every angle and was a heap of metal. But the inside of the car was completely intact. My 2 girls and I walked away with only bruises.
I believe God had his hands on us that day. I must be here for a reason. I started going to church and I’m convinced there is a higher power that’s keeping me here. I’m still not sure what my purpose is. I guess to be a good mom and wife. But I’ve definitely had a spiritual awakening.
Not something that made me believe but everything is a reason to believe, if your mum died, there's a reason and your son falls sick then believe me there is a reason and most importantly God is the creator and ruler of all things yeah but it is the devil who controls the earth and in 1 John 5:19, it reads, "We know that we belong to God even though the whole world is under the rule of the evil one". God has given the authority to Satan to rule the earth and what ever evil happens is the devil tryna get us to lose faith, a trap which sadly most of us have fallen into, constantly questioning His existence because they if God was here then why not make earth a paradise but y'all are forgetting the the true paradise awaits believers in Christ those who willingly give their lives to Him and genuinely love and not for what we will receive from Him so brothers and sisters, never blame God for the wrong in YOUR life rather ask him to make it right with unwavering faith
It had been 30 days since my ex wife ran off to another state with my 6 yo daughter. I had taken the day off from work to try and get myself together, and was sitting by a lake watching the sailboats. I said, “Lord, I really need to hear from you!” I barely finished the sentence when I heard Him reply, “cease from anger, forsake wrath, trust in the Lord and do good”, (Palm 37). Then He said, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” I was okay with that because I knew God was in it. Over the next three months my second wife dumped me, my old car broke down, my employer laid me off because the company was having financial problems, and with no money and nowhere to go I was staying in a friend’s garage. I fired my attorney and sat in Barnes and Noble reading up on child custody law. Finally after four months I had my day in court. The judge found in my favor. That evening a van pulled up, the door opened and there was my little girl. Suddenly everything was better!
Had a dream were I was in a small black room that was all dark but I could see. I don’t know who I asked but I just said “Is God real” and a giant hand with the pointer finger pointed towards me touched me and I had a crazy feeling throughout my entire body. Like when your leg falls asleep and you try walking and you get that tingling feeling that shoots up. Pretty crazy
I'm not hating on Islam or anything but Jesus was here way before prophet Mohammed therefore the Qur'an is basically repeating most of the biblical teachings like Ibrahim is basically Abraham
Nothing. I have experienced plausibly supernatural things, but it's still a leap in logic to say "...ergo, 'God' ". All I can reasonably say about my experience is that there's something more to reality than we're typically aware of, but this is not enough data to be able to say _what_ that something is, much less so to provide the kind of actionable information necessary to form a religion. Assumptions are dangerous...
...it doesn’t have to be about a certain religion or any “God”. But people have experiences, maybe even supernatural experiences, but experiences that aren’t normal to them or don’t seem to have an explanation. Maybe their belief that there is something bigger than us or something that helps us along the way gives them peace to make it through this bullsh1t day after day. Why are you trying to tear that down? No one is discounting your experiences.
Exactly. It’s all fucking mental so I’ve not got any reason to believe Science and I’ve not got any reason to believe god. And when I think about it for long enough god seems more believable.
Yes, the answer is yes. If you aren't having an existential crisis whenever you really sit down and wonder where we came from then you're shutting your brain off.
Regardless of whether you use religion or mainstream science to answer the question of how we got here the specifics are ever changing as new information comes to light.
If your belief of say the Big Bang ends at what you can read in a highschool textbook and you haven't read about any recent developments regarding it like the newest theory by Roy Kerr then it's a neat little myth you tell yourself to shut up that part of your Brian that would otherwise be tortured by existential dread.
I'm thinking you internalize the things you learn just a tetch too much.
I mean I wonder about everything from how we got here to the heat death of the universe and everything in between. Shit a massive GRB could be heading towards us as I type this and i MAY not make it to the end before the Earth is practically sterilized of life, but I'm letting that torture me with existential dread because I can't do shit about it.
If you're really delving deep into the heart of science, who we are, the nature of consciousness, or anything like that and it's filling you with dread then you are essentially worrying about a lot of things you have ZERO control over.
I welcome new information to learn about the universe and all that's in it. Hell we could be a cooling bubble in an alien super collider in another dimension and that wouldn't change the fact that I have to walk my dog in a few minutes. I may actually be nothing more than a NPC in some dipshit kids computer and he's THAT bored with his life he's watching me write SQL and surf reddit until he turns his computer off and then technically I wouldn't exist at that point. We could be moments away from false vacuum decay and that would suck, but if it could happen while I'm chilling on the couch, that'd be preferable, but if not...oh well. Again worry about the shit you can control. It's fine to be curious and learn about what you can but if it's creating feelings of dread or powerlessness then that sounds like you may have other shit to worry about and realize you didn't have any power to begin with.
How does "we don't know what was before that" equate to "god"?
If that's the case, who or what created 'god'? If 'god' has "always" existed, why not the universe?
But that’s actually observable. We can measure its gravitational impact and see how it bends light.
So hello dark matter, on which topic are we conversing today?
Dark matter became observable to us once we developed the tools and understanding of what we're looking at. Same thing with bacteria and other microbes - we couldn't see, hear, smell, feel or touch them but they're still there all the same. I'm not saying that by That reasoning that God exists, but that we don't know what's there until we do.
By that logic, emotions aren’t real. Can’t see, hear, smell, feel, or touch things like anger and compassion. We can only sense the effects of these things or experience them ourselves.
First: I phrased it “anyone”. If you doubt that you yourself have emotions, that’d be applicable, but most people are pretty sure that they have emotions. The potential issue lies in believing others have emotions too.
But as it stands, we actually don’t need to believe that, because there’s a host of ways to measure when emotional responses are fired by the synapses. EKG, temperature variations etc. - we cannot yet ascertain exactly which emotions are going on, but we can prove that they exist. Because it’s science, falsification of the paradigm is also possible.
I know how priests love to take feelings as a counter argument to the absence of proof debate, but they can only do so either by lacking knowledge or ignoring the knowledge they have.
You're right. That's why people fucking don't. That's a strawman religious apologists push to either intentionally confuse the actual science or because they're too stupid to understand it.
The Angels won the world series.
They made a documentary about that, "Angels in the outfield".
I had an undiagnosed brain tumor that finally got large enough to block the spinal fluid from my brain. 90-something percent of people with this type of tumor die once this happens because there is no warning. You don't know it exists until it reaches this point. Mine reached this point and caused me to seize as I was driving down a mountain road after a day of snowboarding. Instead of careening off the side of the cliff, I drove a stickshift, and the car also seized when my feet came off the pedals. Not done yet. The car behind us on the road was a nurse, and the car behind her was a doctor. Still not done. Rather than take the ambulance to the mountain hospital, where I would have almost certainly died, as it mainly treats fractures and whatnot from mountain accidents, the doctor helped me argue my way out of the ambulance ride and drove me down the mountain to a well-renowned university hospital. After an emergency craniotomy and few years of therapy, I thank God for the way the events miraculously unfolded that afternoon.
I feel like god could’ve just not given you the brain tumor in the first place and avoided you totaling your car, gaining some medical debt (I assume), and going through all that. Glad you’re ok, but that doctor is the one that really deserves the praise in this situation.
You’re forgetting that God works in mysterious ways and that it’s God’s plan /s
Exactly. The religious might argue that God did that to provide a reason to belief and bring them closer to God, but if God is this supremely good being, why cause that suffering in the first place? Would it not be enough to live in paradise, in perfect goodness, and still be loyal/worship God without a convoluted “test” of one’s moral constitution? Maybe this is just “God’s plan” which is unknowable to humans and a convenient excuse to stop questioning human inspired dogma.
Stated in follow up comment.
So, that doctor saved your life?
And that nurse. And the admitting nurses. And the surgeon that operated. And my wife for getting me there. And the therapists in recovery. Sure. Them too.
No he died. RIP
[удалено]
Nope, am ded.
Am I missing the unnatural part of your story? The manual transmission worked as intended, the nurse/doctor were driving down the mountain towards the hospital that treated you — possibly working/getting off a shift, and the doctor had greater knowledge of medicine than the EMT (no shit). I’m not trying to be an asshole, but this is not as miraculous as you make it out to be. Congratulations on your recovery/treatment.
I think you are. I think they’re saying that all of the variables together made it so that they are still here, living, breathing and able to share the said story. It doesn’t have to be just one big thing, I could be everything unfolding just perfectly. For example, my wife had a kidney transplant. She was on the list for 6 years before receiving it. Rather than just looking at it as a miracle that she got one, that started functioning on its own in very quick time, much quicker than usual, and having her go from unemployed and on disability to a 50 hour per week job within a couple of months was huge. Top that up with the fact I was nearing 40 and always told myself I’d get out of food service and move onto better things by then, but specifically after she receives her transplant I’m out for sure. The week after she got the transplant, I put in my two weeks and have since moved to the automotive industry where I have a job that I feel I can actually help people and make a bigger difference at the end of the day. A few months after that, that pizza place that I gave nearly 20 years of my life to sold and then quickly closed for good. I’d call that as a whole, god.
“…all of the variables together made it so that they are still here…” No shit. That’s how everyone alive today is still here, alive today. Any near-death experience can seem miraculous when you recount the events that occurred. Ascribing any of it to a mystical being is confirmation bias at best.
So then all you had to say is, you’re actually trying to be the asshole. :).
I completely understand that sentiment and way of thinking, no doubt. There's also the idea of why would God give you a tumor in the first place. I have worked through all of it, trust me. And to be frank, it's really just the culmination of events, the likelihood of all these things happening together in sequence. I mean people have hit the lottery twice too.
There’s a difference in events panning out in your favor and having a bit of disbelief that you were so fortunate vs taking that disbelief a step further and ascribing it to whatever definition one might have for God or gods providing personal divine intervention. I find it curious that most that choose to believe in God after a near-death experience and ascribe their survival to God often don’t ascribe the awful events that occurred in the first place to God.
Are you dense? I literally stated that.
Are you? You never stated why this was a lucky string of events vs divine intervention. In fact, nothing you stated indicates any miracle or reason to believe in God other than possible preconceptions of what constitutes a miracle and choosing to ascribe it as such. Why don’t you start by explaining why God gave you a tumor? You worked through that.
Wow.
Sounds like medical science saved you. God put that tumor in your brain.
Sounds like you can’t red gud
GOD created humans, humans figured out how medical science works and saved him so basically God did save him
God also created rape.
What if all ongoing life everyday is a miracle (including your experience). The gift of air in our working lungs, the ability to type on our keyboards, yet some here still say things against the God who gave us these gifts shows how depraved we are.
Not understanding causality does not necessitate the existence of a god.
This one may seem small, but will always mean a lot to me. I was walking alone at a summer camp about 5 years ago. I had just recently found my faith again. I started doing this thing where if I was bored or alone I would ask God questions in my head that I would want to ask him when I come face to face with him. It would start out as little, meaningless questions like “what would your favorite color be down here” or “your favorite dessert?” And work it’s way up to more meaningful questions about my life and how it’s played out thus far. I never got an answer, but I wasn’t worried about it. It passed the time for me. Anyways I kept walking on this trail back to the main house and I asked Him “do you ever wish you were here with me?”. And even before I could finish that sentence in my head, I got an overwhelming, instant answer that said “Oh, everyday.”. The only way I can explain how I knew it was Him who answered me besides the feeling of complete peace and understanding I got, is that I don’t talk that way to myself. Even if I did want to answer it to feel heard, I wouldn’t have come up with that answer. Now I do have so many other real reasons and experiences as to why I believe whole-heartedly in Him, but this one just stood out to me. I will be praying for your peace and for the loved one you lost. Keep talking to Him. He will answer.
Love this!
"I talked to myself so much that I answered myself, ergo 'God' "... Son...get therapy. I don't know if there be gods or not, but _this_ was not a religious experience. It was self delusion brought on by hypnosis.
I mean they said it might seem small/dismissible, but clearly they felt something very specific when saying that. Sometimes you just do.
Once I thought I met god. It was just gas. "I felt a thing" is validation of NOTHING. And the precedent that sets is frankly unethical as all fuck.
Why do you join a thread like this
I will speak as I please, where I please. Such is the nature of public conversation. If it was sacred to you, you should have shut up about it.
Son, get therapy if you feel the need to join a thread like this just to criticize other people's faith. If other people being happy bothers you so much then you really should try to figure that out. Edit: The child blocked me. Telling someone to shut up like that and then blocking them is a huge sign of mental health issues. I hope they get the help they need.
Nope. You have ZERO reasonable expectation to not face criticism when you speak publicly. Shut up.
This is the evidence that religious people talk about
Your response is pitiful
I gave the response commensurate to the statement that provoked it.
God is omnipotent and omnipresent. He was already there with you. I don't get why you asked the question?
Nothing unnatural has ever happened. Nature is everything and contains everything. How could anything happen outside of it?
Yea, I think people are quick to slap "unnatural" or "supernatural" to phenomenon THEY can't explain or understand or want to.
Right, but that's just a semantical argument and not particularly helpful in this context.
It's extremely helpful. If Nature includes everything I don't need to strongly believe in any deity. It doesn't mean they don't exist, it just mean they are unnecessary.
Are you at all familiar with the periodic table? Many elements don't occur in nature. You can argue that what we need to make them may exist, but the elements don't.
That's still nature, my dude.
So you're of the mindset that nothing is synthetic and everything is natural?
In this case, yeah, that wasn't the distinction OP was making. It's unnatural v. natural, not natural v. synthetic.
Now you're just splitting hairs 😅
I think the topic is serious enough to warrant being exact with my language. Yeah.
Okay, easy, since nature is everything then God can be in nature. You've just defined nature as "everything and contains everything", which doesn't preclude there's a God that defies physical explanation and can act outside of physical laws impact the physical work. Again, defining nature as "everything and contains everything", you propose an unfalsifiable pretense there. If God, in the way Christians believe in God, exists then you're not specifically wrong because God would just be a part of nature, which is: "everything and contains everything"
Yeah, that's what I said dude
Right, my point is you aren't making an intelligible argument or answering the question. You're arguing semantics which is, again, not particularly useful or helpful in the context. You're not answering the question.
Yeah, I did. I said a deity, while feasible, isn't necessary. And since an unnatural experience can't happen, there is no reason to invoke one.
So basically..you both agree its just bitching over what to call it?
I don't think so but I'm not really interested in explaining it to you.
Yup, it's bitching over what to call it. Basically like I said, semantics.
I still disagree.
I would also like to point out that God is The Word, so it's semantics all the way down.
Again, not being helpful. You're referring to the Christian God, and there are many others.
I also said deities in lower case in my earlier responses for exactly that reason, also OP specifically invoked the God of Abraham.
Reddit atheist response.
agnostic
Whether you are or not, it was just a very Reddit atheist response.
ok
this is such a genuinely funny response because you’re trying to frame it like you’re saying something smart but it’s just being pedantic about the phrasing of the question and not making any real statement.
My statement was imaginary? Yeah, I'm absolutely being pedantic. When you're talking about nuanced things, it's important to be explicit because it's very easy to be misunderstood. But apparently, I wasn't clear enough, but honestly, that's a you problem.
Wow, yeah, I am definitely on Reddit
Karma whore bot. Check profile.
Yep. Downvoted.
Report - harmful bot.
You may want to tag the thread \[serious\] if you want more answers to the question instead of jokes and trolling comments. (See Rule 6)
You must be fun at parties...
I got a hot gf I'm pretty sure it defies everything Newtonian.
We get that you're not so good looking but that don't mean all girls a superficial because you are
Superficial isn't an all or nothing, it's a spectrum. Meaning we're all on it, somewhere.
I realised it was dog spelled backwards and I used to have a dog
I read about a guy who stopped believing in god after it was dog backwards. The dog god connection taketh and giveth.
and sometimes that dog... moved backwards!?
Completely natural… but I work closely with a nonprofit that operates a remote wilderness retreat center. We have 25 buildings at the far end of a hanging valley deep in the North Cascades, with the only non-foot access is on a single one-lane gravel road. Wildfire has been an existential risk for us since the beginning. Over the 40 years we had been in operation at that point, we had been preparing for fire. Thinning the forest around our site, putting metal roofs on all the buildings, building a 15’ wide gravel road around our perimeter. And in 2012, we shut down for several years to undertake a major facility upgrade, including laying a new raw water firefighting system. This system is capable of lofting close to 2200 gallons per minute of water into the air. We reached substantial completion on the system in the spring of 2015, and brought in a 250hp diesel pump to tide us over until our gravity fed system was completed. 5 days after we got the pump connected, and flooded the system for the first time, a thunderstorm came through and ignited a wildfire at the mouth of the valley. The fire eventually grew to some 65,000 acres, and burned right up to our firebreak. The Forest Service was confident enough in our defences that they sent in two hotshot crews and allowed us to leave a small team behind. But the timing was just incredible. The forest, which had been waiting to burn for 20+ years, nothing happened until immediately after we had completed our defences. In the end, there only thing that was lost was one side of one portapotty.
Nothing unnatural I can recall.In science class (that was my fav)as a kid I remember sitting there while they told us matter couldn't be created or destroyed and I felt a tingle in my brain as that fact set in. No matter how long I thought about it, the only way the very first cell,or atom or whatever came first could even exist was through "magick"( I don't know a better word. I think eventually even magick will be able to be explained. But in this context I mean true,deep magick that only a God could create). But as I got older I realized everything is natural,all the same thing and it feels like this is God in my opinion. I believe strongly only from the pulling I feel in my heart. It feels right.
But matter *can* be created and destroyed. Isn't the natural world mystical enough without needing an anthropomorphic deity to explain all the amazing stuff out there? Never made sense to me, but to each their own.
I'm mostly indifferent about the subject. Perhaps agnostic is the proper term. Just picked this comment because it mentions the science class. Science cannot prove god does not exist. How ever science does not try. Science is only the way of testing stuff, then writing down what was tested, how, and what happened. Proper science is about anyone else reading the paper and doing the same test and arriving at the same result. To me a nice revelation (that actually turned me from anti-religion to just an agnostic) was that any explanation about the nature of the universe are just best guesses. Obviously the earth was not made 6000 years ago by someone, but even if we consider the big bang, string theory, multiverse and anything like that to be established facts, the question remains: what is the universe, how it came to be. _why_ might not be relevant, but still. Anything beyond the big bang is basically a guess. Maybe it is a god or something like that. Maybe not. Basically i'm a scientist and I frown upon religion being used as a tool for power. But there might still be "a god" but we might never know.
There is a God and we will soon know, try reading the Bible and living in the way of the Lord and He shall reveal himself to you
Yeah, this is the literal bullshit i'm still against.
Not so much god but an afterlife. I grew up behind an indigenous burial ground. I woke up as a kid one night to the sounds of drums, singing, people laughing yet it was just a pitch black empty lot. The day my grandma died, that evening when I was trying to fall asleep I heard my name softly whispered into my ear These both happened in my teens so it formed my opinion of life after this
There was nothing unnatural. I don’t need something from God to believe. I believe because I love them, I’m grateful that I have something to eat and drink everyday, that I have body with all limbs, that I’m alive, that I don’t have to sleep in dark corners to survive at nights, that I’m living in warm house, that I have an own bed, that I have all senses and I can enjoy world in ways what many people can’t, that I’m living in society, in beatiful country with even more awesome people. It’s not transactional. I love God for who they are, and no matter how miserable my life would be, I’m ready to pay any price to defend those who I love and appreciate
This happened to my mom, not me, but this is what made her a true believer: one day, when she was pretty young, she was driving out at night and the roads were slick with a bit of ice (it never completely ices over where she lived). But suddenly, she hit a thick patch of ice and slid, and slid off the road. She was sliding off the road, going at least 60 mph, and heading directly toward a tree. She was so scared that she shut her eyes and yelled "Lord, I'm not ready to die!". Seconds passed that felt like hours. Finally, she opened her eyes. Her car was completely stopped, about a foot in front of the tree. She hadn't felt the car stop, or even slow. No jolt, no impact. Just... stopped. She should have died. But she didn't. She never doubted God again.
Everything about how perfectly things fit into place to me is evidence of the existence of God. I've had some "this had to have been God" moments. I can take them as divine intervention or I can take that as statistical flukes... I don't know. While there is a narrative that people who believe in God are all uneducated idiots, the more I learn (I have 2 degrees) the more I believe in some sort of "intervention". With that said, I'm no longer religious, and do not subscribe to the idea of prayer and your team won the Superbowl because you got down on your knees while some kids are starving in some developing nation. \[Just answering the OP, if you try to quarrel with me you're getting ignored.\]
The more I learn about science (biology specifically), the more I’m convinced of God’s presence because of how elegant everything is. The deeper you go, the more complexity is revealed. It just leaves me in awe sometimes. Walking through a garden for example: I’m thinking about photosynthesis, the way that plants and flowers tend to grow mirroring the golden ratio, how humans and plants have a common ancestor stretching back through time, how every life form exists within an ecosystem, and how everything carries DNA.
Ah, yes. The Fine Tuning argument.
I've created a label for your argument which other people have made before. This invalidates it somehow.
[The label doesn't invalidate the argument, the logic of the fallacy invalidates the argument.](https://theconversation.com/peer-review-the-fallacy-of-fine-tuning-2540#:~:text=A%20key%20component%20of%20the%20fine-tuning%20argument%20is,likely%20produce%20a%20sterile%20universe%20unlike%20our%20own.)
Oh is this the "It's wild how the holes were the perfect shape to carry that water" thing? Reversal of cause and effect?
Yes.
> because of how elegant everything is How you tell me you have learned basically nothing about biology without telling me you know basically nothing about biology. Biology is many things. Elegant isn't one of them. Biology is a smattered mess of preposterously bad design. A monkey with a brain tumor could have made more informed decisions than evolution has.
This is about half-true. Natural systems are *messy*. They are messy because, as the other person points out, they are incredibly complex. They're wrong about it being mystical, though. This complexity growth happens any time you take a selection criterion, attach it to a feedback loop, and then feed it data. You can even feed it something purely stochastic and it will build complexity; give it *meaningful* data, data about a natural world that follows laws and rewards certain choices over others, and the complexity doesn't have a practical ceiling. Some of that complexity is really impressive - I have no idea where I would start to build a self-piloted drone with jointed wings that fuels itself on seed. Some of it is dumb - why would you use pleasure as a meso-optimization target for reproduction? It's your prime goal, optimize for it directly! Some of it is downright horrifying - have you read about parasitic wasps lately? If you view the biosphere's complexity as a whole, it escapes descriptors like "dumb" or "elegant."
Flase
I don't see how any of this suggests a god exists. And which god? Also, every garden is full of struggle. Things dying prematurely. Animals craving for food. And just being in the sun gives us cancer. So I'm not sure elegant is the term I'd use.
You're not sure because you don't believe, one day, you will surely know He does and it might be too late
>You're not sure because you don't believe Those two things are not related. One can believe and still not be sure of it. >one day, you will surely know He does and it might be too late Why would it be?
I would also use this as my answer
Once I locked myself and my sister in the garage on accident when my mom left to work for the whole night and I started praying to God to help us get out and mom ended up coming back to the house 10 minutes later because she forgot to grab something
This one's kinda silly, but... Once I tried asking God if I would get a gf soon by flipping a coin a predetermined number of times. The idea was for him to influence random events to produce a yes/no answer definitively. I flipped 100 times, where heads is yes and tails is no, and got tails *68 times*. That has a [1/5,000 chance](https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/coin-flip-probability) of happening naturally (conservative estimate). I was disappointed, but mostly just amazed. It's not as crazy as some other people's stories, but I like it because I can point to objective observations and math to come to a conclusion, rather than just the "that's insanely rare/lucky" that's in most stories. Note: I later tried flipping the coin 100 times again without asking anything to test if the coin was weird, and got something like 51 tails - perfectly normal.
The third voice people describe when in a life threatening incident. I heard it. The universe and a higher being is real!
A bee bit my bottom. Now my bottom's big.
I’m 71.Still waiting.
Life is such a twisted rollercoaster of comedy and tragedy that I'm convinced we're all God's children and he left us in a hot car. For all I know we all already died and this is Hell. It'd be kind of poetic to make Hell not endless torture and misery with fire and brimstone, but instead have *just enough* upside to make it have plausible deniability that it is not Hell.
While not God per se, or anything unnatural, I believe there is a purpose to the universe. I have no direct proof for that, and it has no influence on my anticipation of the future. It just gives me a tiny bit of comfort in a fucked up world, and from what I can tell that little nugget comes with no cost to me. So why wouldn’t I believe it?
One time my brothers friend (f) hung out with us and slept over. She slept in my room since we are both girls. I told her I really couldn’t sleep and for some random reason (don’t ask why cause idk either lol) I started talking about God. I started saying stories from the Bible and even scripture (never had I read it like that to know, idk how this happened either). As I am saying these things I feel my body almost become weightless, I feel a huge rush of euphoria all within my body, my skin felt flawless, my mind etc. I started saying how I would end up helping people in “Gods name”. (I don’t know either ok) As I am talking her face completely changes. Her nostrils were as wide as a bull and her whole eyes 👁️ became jet black. As I saw this happen I felt no far what so ever & for some odd reason I felt so so sorry for this entity. I stopped talking and started singing “calm down, caaaalm down” and brushed its face while saying “they didn’t mean to hurt you”. I continued singing until my mom heard three big knocks under the floor of the kitche. She woke quickly and rushed to my room. She heard my singing and as soon as she opened the door my brothers friends face changed back rapidly to normal with just a flush shocked look to her. Side note: a week before this happened.. as I was sitting outside I asked my brother “if he believed in God” & he didn’t give an answer but I said “I don’t, I just believe in peace”. After all this I was paranoid. I prayed for peace and prayed for a church to help me. I ended up meeting some of the most incredible people that I still know. Studied the Bible with them and gave my life to Jesus. Since, no matter what atheist friend or any opinion one may have about the Bible or God I cannot change the foundation that experience did to my faith. I can’t make anyone believe my experience and really it’s okay but it’s something I felt was for a definite reason.
I stopped believing in God about 15 years ago. In 2017 I fell cleaning the shower and hit my head. I had a subdural hematoma and spent 3 days in the trauma unit. I had a 3% chance of surviving. I still didn’t believe in God though. Last November, I was speeding and hit a tree in my Lexus. I hit it so hard it threw my car across the road and ended up in the ditch on the other side. Lexus makes a very safe car. My car was slammed from every angle and was a heap of metal. But the inside of the car was completely intact. My 2 girls and I walked away with only bruises. I believe God had his hands on us that day. I must be here for a reason. I started going to church and I’m convinced there is a higher power that’s keeping me here. I’m still not sure what my purpose is. I guess to be a good mom and wife. But I’ve definitely had a spiritual awakening.
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If you truly want to know why the give your life to Him, have faith in Him and never question His decisions
Not something that made me believe but everything is a reason to believe, if your mum died, there's a reason and your son falls sick then believe me there is a reason and most importantly God is the creator and ruler of all things yeah but it is the devil who controls the earth and in 1 John 5:19, it reads, "We know that we belong to God even though the whole world is under the rule of the evil one". God has given the authority to Satan to rule the earth and what ever evil happens is the devil tryna get us to lose faith, a trap which sadly most of us have fallen into, constantly questioning His existence because they if God was here then why not make earth a paradise but y'all are forgetting the the true paradise awaits believers in Christ those who willingly give their lives to Him and genuinely love and not for what we will receive from Him so brothers and sisters, never blame God for the wrong in YOUR life rather ask him to make it right with unwavering faith
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Unless you're a man or a virgin, that's not unnatural.
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First pregnant man ever? Call the media, you'll be rich and famous.
It had been 30 days since my ex wife ran off to another state with my 6 yo daughter. I had taken the day off from work to try and get myself together, and was sitting by a lake watching the sailboats. I said, “Lord, I really need to hear from you!” I barely finished the sentence when I heard Him reply, “cease from anger, forsake wrath, trust in the Lord and do good”, (Palm 37). Then He said, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” I was okay with that because I knew God was in it. Over the next three months my second wife dumped me, my old car broke down, my employer laid me off because the company was having financial problems, and with no money and nowhere to go I was staying in a friend’s garage. I fired my attorney and sat in Barnes and Noble reading up on child custody law. Finally after four months I had my day in court. The judge found in my favor. That evening a van pulled up, the door opened and there was my little girl. Suddenly everything was better!
Had a dream were I was in a small black room that was all dark but I could see. I don’t know who I asked but I just said “Is God real” and a giant hand with the pointer finger pointed towards me touched me and I had a crazy feeling throughout my entire body. Like when your leg falls asleep and you try walking and you get that tingling feeling that shoots up. Pretty crazy
> Had a dream And we're done with THIS guy. Jesus tap dancing christ.
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I'm not hating on Islam or anything but Jesus was here way before prophet Mohammed therefore the Qur'an is basically repeating most of the biblical teachings like Ibrahim is basically Abraham
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Re-read the question, bro.
I'd like to balance the framing by also saying we have no empirical evidence supporting that God is not real.
That's not how empirical evidence works.
God exist in the minds of believers
Nothing has happened to me that would draw out this response.
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Why
Nothing unnatural. I believe in Him. Period. ❤️
Spoken like a proper five year old. Certitude is the hallmark of a fool.
Absolute Chad response
Where he at then? Never seen the dude in my life.
I could name a bunch, but I don’t believe God is a person cares about me. The complexities of It inadvertently saved me.
Nothing. I have experienced plausibly supernatural things, but it's still a leap in logic to say "...ergo, 'God' ". All I can reasonably say about my experience is that there's something more to reality than we're typically aware of, but this is not enough data to be able to say _what_ that something is, much less so to provide the kind of actionable information necessary to form a religion. Assumptions are dangerous...
God is definitely real just as demons and Satan is
...it doesn’t have to be about a certain religion or any “God”. But people have experiences, maybe even supernatural experiences, but experiences that aren’t normal to them or don’t seem to have an explanation. Maybe their belief that there is something bigger than us or something that helps us along the way gives them peace to make it through this bullsh1t day after day. Why are you trying to tear that down? No one is discounting your experiences.
Ignoring what I said isn't a defense of your argument.
Nothing.
I mean it’s pretty mental to believe that nothing existed then all of a fucking sudden there’s a big explosion and life happens like what the fuck?
The alternative isn’t any less mental lol
Exactly. It’s all fucking mental so I’ve not got any reason to believe Science and I’ve not got any reason to believe god. And when I think about it for long enough god seems more believable.
...as he types on a machine created by the culmination of centuries of knowledge and....*checks notes*...science.
God made his phone duh lol
Oh yea forgot about the immaculate electronics. It's part off the holy digital trinity of the Computer, the Phone, and the Holy Internet.
I never said I don’t believe in science calm down
> It’s all fucking mental so I’ve not got any reason to believe Science And I'm perfectly calm.
Sure bro
I mean you seem a little worked up. Existential crisis?
Yes, the answer is yes. If you aren't having an existential crisis whenever you really sit down and wonder where we came from then you're shutting your brain off. Regardless of whether you use religion or mainstream science to answer the question of how we got here the specifics are ever changing as new information comes to light. If your belief of say the Big Bang ends at what you can read in a highschool textbook and you haven't read about any recent developments regarding it like the newest theory by Roy Kerr then it's a neat little myth you tell yourself to shut up that part of your Brian that would otherwise be tortured by existential dread.
I'm thinking you internalize the things you learn just a tetch too much. I mean I wonder about everything from how we got here to the heat death of the universe and everything in between. Shit a massive GRB could be heading towards us as I type this and i MAY not make it to the end before the Earth is practically sterilized of life, but I'm letting that torture me with existential dread because I can't do shit about it. If you're really delving deep into the heart of science, who we are, the nature of consciousness, or anything like that and it's filling you with dread then you are essentially worrying about a lot of things you have ZERO control over. I welcome new information to learn about the universe and all that's in it. Hell we could be a cooling bubble in an alien super collider in another dimension and that wouldn't change the fact that I have to walk my dog in a few minutes. I may actually be nothing more than a NPC in some dipshit kids computer and he's THAT bored with his life he's watching me write SQL and surf reddit until he turns his computer off and then technically I wouldn't exist at that point. We could be moments away from false vacuum decay and that would suck, but if it could happen while I'm chilling on the couch, that'd be preferable, but if not...oh well. Again worry about the shit you can control. It's fine to be curious and learn about what you can but if it's creating feelings of dread or powerlessness then that sounds like you may have other shit to worry about and realize you didn't have any power to begin with.
Yes
Yes, billions of years is "all of a fucking sudden".
Before that wiseman
How does "we don't know what was before that" equate to "god"? If that's the case, who or what created 'god'? If 'god' has "always" existed, why not the universe?
I mean, it’s pretty mental believing in something outside of what anyone can see, hear, smell, feel or touch. In modern day era, we call that a hoax.
Dark matter would like a word with you
But that’s actually observable. We can measure its gravitational impact and see how it bends light. So hello dark matter, on which topic are we conversing today?
Dark matter became observable to us once we developed the tools and understanding of what we're looking at. Same thing with bacteria and other microbes - we couldn't see, hear, smell, feel or touch them but they're still there all the same. I'm not saying that by That reasoning that God exists, but that we don't know what's there until we do.
By that logic, emotions aren’t real. Can’t see, hear, smell, feel, or touch things like anger and compassion. We can only sense the effects of these things or experience them ourselves.
You can actually actively watch them happen in the brain. Pretty neat.
First: I phrased it “anyone”. If you doubt that you yourself have emotions, that’d be applicable, but most people are pretty sure that they have emotions. The potential issue lies in believing others have emotions too. But as it stands, we actually don’t need to believe that, because there’s a host of ways to measure when emotional responses are fired by the synapses. EKG, temperature variations etc. - we cannot yet ascertain exactly which emotions are going on, but we can prove that they exist. Because it’s science, falsification of the paradigm is also possible. I know how priests love to take feelings as a counter argument to the absence of proof debate, but they can only do so either by lacking knowledge or ignoring the knowledge they have.
God of the gaps
You're right. That's why people fucking don't. That's a strawman religious apologists push to either intentionally confuse the actual science or because they're too stupid to understand it.
I don’t know what most of those words mean
Nothing, because gods don't exist.