[Frooxius]

I'm a Christian myself, and I used to question God like you cannot imagine, there's not a damn bit of proof for his existence, but in the end, I just had faith that's all.

First let me say: I respect your right to have any beliefs you want and that's not an issue for me (some people think that when people disagree or challenge someone's belief, they don't respect that right, so I want to say that up front) and also thank you for your response.

But I would like to ask: If there's no proof for existence, why believe it at all? I myself care if my beliefs are as close to the truth and reality as possible, which is why I look for sufficient evidence to prove they're true.

Believing something on faith like that is essentially believing without reason, without knowing with any degree of certainty that the belief is true.

You can "justify" believing absolutely anything on faith. Person could say that he has faith that universe was made by a transcendental coughing potato. Or some could even say they believe on faith that we should kill all blond haired kids at age 5 to be rewarded by that coughing potato with endless wealth (I'm not implying that your case is anything like that of course, I am just demonstrating why I think believing something on faith is not a good reason to believe).

But with logic, reasoning and evidence, we can find out that such behavior is harmful to people and to the whole society and that it doesn't have anything to support it and we can justify this and forbid any such actions.

Here's the thing about science that I've noticed; it gives people some sort of insignificant proof to grasp and use for themselves (not saying Atheists do this specifically). For people who support abortion (completely disagree) , they've looked to science to tell them that yeah the baby isn't technically born, so you're not technically killing it. But here's the thing, take a step back; if you didn't kill the child it might do something great.

I think your view of science is quite distorted. It's quite the contrary - science finds very significant evidence to support certain position and it accumulates more over time and keeps perfecting its positions as new ideas and data come in - at any time it provides the best possible explanations for our observations.

Abortion is a bit different topic. There are atheists who are against it even. I'm not necessarily against it - of course we should try to do it as little as possible, but if the person isn't ready for a kid or doesn't want one, or her life is even in danger, then I think she should have the right to decide to stop it - that is before its remotely human.

You can't really argue with "It might do something great". There's potential for anything anywhere - we just don't know, so it's not useful to base any decisions on. For example one might as well argue that the kid would grow up to be a murderer or thief and do terrible things to other people and abortion prevented that.

Plus you could use the same kind of argument for even ridiculous claims: for example someone could argue that at any moment, if you conceived a child, he might grew up to do something incredible and yet you're wasting time with something else. So you should be conceiving children every single moment, because by not doing that, you're preventing from many possible new Einsteins being born.

Abortion doesn't stop from children being born completely. It is just in cases where the person for some reason doesn't want to / can't have children - but other people will keep having children all around the world, many of them possible "new Einsteins".

There's possibilities for anything everywhere, so stopping or preventing some of them happening - either by action or inaction doesn't really matter, because the amount of possibilities is overwhelming.

And you don't even know in advance what kind of child would it grow up to be, so arguing with what it can grow into doesn't carry much weight.

But abortion is up to individuals, science only tells us how the child develops and how it transforms into human, when the nervous system starts developing and working. It describes the world, the decisions made upon this description are completely up to people making them.

The closer you look, the less you see. Not to say you shouldn't go into detail and learn, but you've got to get the whole picture first. Science pretty much goes into so much detail that they often miss the point. Scientists finding that at a certain age the baby ain't alive, is pretty much useless information. I don't care if the heart's beatin' or not, at one point it could've been, and they could've done something great. But the scientist said it wasn't technically alive...

I don't think science really misses the point, but rather that you miss the point of science. Like I said above, science is rather descriptive. It might say it's not "alive" (in the sense of not having any brain and perceptions), but it doesn't tell you if you should abort it or not (it can tell you risks of both decisions though), but the decision is up to the individual - and if you don't want abortion, then don't have it.

And like I said, you could very well argue that it would grow into a thief, murderer or rapist and by aborting it before it's even alive, you prevent that from happening without absolutely any pain, because there was no person yet at all!

Or think of the mother - is her life worthless? What if having baby changes her life in a way (or even threatens her life) that she spends it taking care of the baby and turns town possibility that she could do something great. Therefore by not aborting the baby, you prevented a person from doing something great - and this person's heart and brain were already working and well developed.

You can't just argue this way, with what "might" be, because at any moment, there "might" be a lot of things. I think it should be up to individual person - if they don't want to have abortion, then don't have it, nobody forces you. If you can't have child at the moment or don't want to (because you wouldn't be able to take care of it for example), then you can abort it. You can always have child later, that can grow up into even a better person than the first one would. But you just can't know that.

The field of science practically has an entire community trying to disprove that there was ever a God. Faith is believing even though you have no reason to.

This is not true at all though, I think you've been exposed to (not by any fault of your own) quite distorted religious view of science, that doesn't actually apply to reality. You're confusing the burden of proof here. In science, you don't work to "disprove something", you work by forming a hypothesis and then performing an experiment to verify it: simply put, you make a claim and then you gather evidence to support that claim.

Working the other way is flawed and doesn't lead to you anywhere. Believing things on faith without reason is not a good reason to believe something, because you essentially don't care if it's true or not.

We can postulate infinite number of mutually exclusive unprovable claims - how can you then decide which one to believe and which one not to?

For example, let's say there is a god, who wrote the Bible exactly the way it is. But his actual intention was to see if people will "fall for it" and believe what he written there and he'll send actually these people to hell and reward these who think about it and reject the claim on the grounds that there's not sufficient evidence.

In other words, his intention is to find what people will fall for the religion and believe it even if there's no reason to believe in him so he can punish them and reward these who use solid evidence to base their evidence on. Sort of a huge universal "intelligence/rationality" test. :-)

You can't tell a difference between god that wants you to believe in him and god that makes it look like he wants you to believe in him, but actually doesn't (but doesn't tell you that, because he wants you to figure it out yourself).

Rational thing is to just reject any claims until there's sufficient evidence and proof to support them, which means rejecting both gods, since there's not really any reason to believe in either one of them.

Of course again - you have right to believe whatever you want, but my question is: Do you care if what you believe is actually true?

To apply faith to something I know quite well... Faith is like losing a football (american) 21-0 in the 4th quarter, going 3 and out every drive, but still believing that you can do something with the ball with 2 minutes left. You have no reason to believe that you can do anything, but you've got faith. If you sat there and looked at the stats and decided it was "simply impossible" you're pretty much just giving up. You've missed the point and by now you've lost the game.

That's different kind of faith. Before you talked about faith as in believing something without a reason, but now you talk about faith more in sense of hope and self motivation, which is quite a different thing.

This is a bit problematic when debating faith with people - they tend to clump various meanings of faith into one.

I don't understand the analogy very well since I don't know almost anything about american football, but generally: self motivation and hope is okay, but it should also be based on some grounds.

If you don't base your motivation and hopes on any solid ground, anything you build on top of that can crumble catastrophically.

Believing "I can still win the game" isn't really the same as "I believe there's a god". And even if the game is not-winnable (which is what I think your scenario implies) and you can't really reasonably change the result, then believing that you still have chance of changing it is not very reasonable and you're rather deluding yourself.

But that doesn't mean you stop trying to the last minute, there are plenty of reasons: So you can have chance to at least do some last score, even if it doesn't help you win, but makes you look a bit better, so you don't look like a quitter, so you can have sense of self satisfaction that you at least gave it your best.

However I'm not saying that faith can't help people cope and give them hope - but that doesn't mean that it's actually true. People can be simply deluding themselves to feel better and I personally rather base my hopes and expectations on reality as much as I can, because that way I can actually do the best I could and have reasonable expectations of what might happen.

The point is you don't need faith for any of this. You can look at the facts and find plenty of other reasons to motivate yourself and find hope - and you build it on much more stable and solid grounds.

In my opinion, we can do our best if we fully open our eyes to the world, instead of making up things that feel comfortable, but we don't know if they're true or not (or even if we know they're not true and people believe them anyway).

It's like if you're in a burning building and your only way is to jump out of a window: You can just jump without looking and have faith that the window you choose has garbage container under it that will cushion your fall - but you don't know, because you haven't looked. It might be there and cushion your fall, but it might be under completely different window and you hit the ground.

But if you actually take a moment to look if it's there, you will know under which window it is and where it's the safest to jump out. There might be no garbage can at all, in which case you can find another strategy - for example trying to climb from the ledge or even start yelling for help or find some rope and prevent any serious injury.

Looking at the facts and evidence allows you to work with the reality much better, rather than believing that things are the way you hope and in many cases hitting the ground hard.