Paven wrote:Quinny wrote:Paven wrote: Exactly. So prove to me why there is no God.
Happily - once you've proved to me the non-existence of the tooth-fairy
But the two are completely different. For example, we know when a child loses a tooth the parent will remove the tooth and perhaps replace it with money under the pillow in the next morning. That is of course the role of the 'tooth fairy'. However, the role of God is supposedly to maintain existence and create the universe (or whatever) but we aren't aware of who or what created that.
Actually, they're not completely different. It is all about demanding proof for the nonexistence of something which you cannot logically do. You said previously that if an atheist makes a claim that God does not exist then it is up to the atheist to prove that. You simply can't do that, any more than you or I can scientifically prove the nonexistence of the tooth-fairy.
To me a God creating the universe would make sense, it fills the gap of human knowledge that I doubt we'll ever be able to effectively explain. Until we can, I don't feel comfortable to judge whether God exists or whether he doesn't exist.
And you're right: we might be clever enough to know with a level of certainty what happened almost immediately after the big bang, but physics will never be able to determine what caused the BB to happen in the first place. And you know what? I'm comfortable with the idea that physics was playing to a completely different set of rules in that initial fraction of a millisecond. I don't need a God-figure to fill in the blanks in our knowledge.