I always ask people why they are religious. And if they believe in God, why?
The answer is varied and complex, and to fools hereditary… 
I think it starts when you look at the complexity of the creation, or to those who do not believe in Devine intervention, if you look at the universe and humanity and earth evolving via amino acids or whatever.
If you look at creation, and the complexity thereof, it is my opinion that there had to be intervention by God/Alien/Supreme being, whatever you choose to call Him.
Yes, I have read the works of the likes of Richard Dawkins and those who find it more convenient to believe that evolution is at the forefront of everything.
I know this is not a God vs. Evolution debate, but some facts can not be ignored, and in my case I call God the Creator as opposed to Darwinism and the likes for example:
Design of ProteinsScientists have been attempting to be able to determine a protein’s native conformation (or folding) by examining the amino acid sequence. Despite years of study, the ability to do this using even the fastest computers is beyond our reach. For example, for a typical 100 amino acid protein (moderate to small in size) could exist in any of 3200 possible backbone configurations. Using a super fast computer (1012 computations/sec) it would take 1080 seconds, which exceed the age of the universe by a factor of 60 orders of magnitude! This fact alone may give you a better perspective on the mind of God.
IBM is now making a new supercomputer to attempt to address the protein folding problem. A $100 million research initiative will build a supercomputer 500 times more powerful than the current record holder and be able to process 1015 computations/sec. Dubbed “Blue Gene,” the computer will include over 1 million processors, each capable of 1 billion operations per second. Using special estimation techniques, the computer may be able to solve the protein folding of a small protein in about a year. However, at the end of that time, researchers may discover that it didn’t work. If the estimations are not close enough to actual conformations, the folding may be incorrect. Calculating the exact folding of all positions would require 1077 seconds, only 57 orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe. This is what we in research call a long-term project!Service, R.F. 1999. Big Blue Aims to Crack Protein Riddle. Science 286: 2250
Berendsen, H.J.C. 1998. Perspectives: Protein Folding. A Glimpse of the Holy Grail? Science 282: 642-643.
I know much more is to be said and proven on religion or God, but this should at least start the discussion ;D
split to:
http://forum.skeptic.za.org/index.php?topic=36.0
I doubt very much that they believe it because it is more convenient. The evidence for evolution and natural selection is overwhelmingly the cause of that belief, I would think.
The fact that a simple protein cannot easily be expressed in terms of information in a computer says nothing about the creation or development thereof. All it illustrates is that it is very complex. But all this complexity and more can be explained by natural selection and other scientific theories that have been proven. There is no need to invoke god to explain it.
The argument that there must be some form of creator by analogy to our usual appraisal of created things is called the “Argument from Design,” formulated originally by William Paley, and comprehensively refuted by David Hume.
The argument that there must be some form of creator because without such we have no other explanation is either the “Argument from Incredulity” and/or a “False Dichotomy.” Just because we can’t explain certain phenomena scientifically means only that we do not understand them; it is bogus to take this to imply that we never will unless we posit some responsible superbeing. Also, complexity that foxed us in the past has in many cases yielded to close scrutiny, e.g. lunar and solar eclipses, nature of certain diseases, etc.
To conjecture an ineffable force as an explanatory principle for all the things that boggle our minds is, bluntly put, intellectual cowardice. It is the quickest path to cease enquiry, and the only reason we had the Dark Ages for so long. So much more admirable to say, “I don’t know. But I will do my utmost to find out.”
Anyway, the title of this thread poses the question, “Why are you religious?” Well, I’m not - at least not in the sense of having blind faith in the existence of any kind of god. The most cogent answer to the question that I have come across so far is the one given by Martin Gardner, CSICOP founder member and eminent sceptic: “Because it comforts me.” See, he’s only concerned with the utilitarian aspect of his belief, and does not attempt to wield it as a cudgel to convince others, or score brownie points, and so on.
And that I can accept without caveats.
'Luthon64
He needs to believe in it? 
If your question is about Gardner, I can’t, of course, presume to speak for him. I do, however, suspect that he grew up in a religious time (he’s over 90 now) and setting in the US, and that, of his religious views, a fair portion was born of habit - not the nun’s kind, either. ;D
'Luthon64
I’m not religious. I agree with Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses. It’s a crutch for the weak
i’m not religious either, although i was when i was a kid, mostly because of peer pressure (good old apartheid era christian government schools, yay) and just a lack of worldly knowledge. As soon as i started thinking for myself, that changed.
When someone who i think of as an intelligent person reveals to me that they are religious, and believe that there is a personal god who answers their prayers, and a heaven and hell, they may as well have told me that they were abducted by aliens the previous evening. The belief in religion is just as insane as belief in alien abductions, it’s just that it’s a popular insanity protected by law.
As for the argument by design, it is at best disingenuous. Arguing that looking at the complexity of the world around you leads to the conclusion is that there is a designer, also leads you to the following problem: the designer must be at least as complex as his design. If when looking at a complex thing you posit a designer, then who designed the designer? Either you take the position that it’s ‘turtles all the way down’, or you wimp out and make some hand-waving, ad hoc excuse for why your principle doesn’t apply to the designer himself. Don’t expect to be taken seriously with either response.
That Gardiner is a fideist,because of comfort speaks ill of his otherwise skepticism.He does not feel good about the paranormal but would he say that those who are so comforted are right to be so? Faith is just the say so of credulity!
The argument suffers from question begging that God wanted us!
The main reason why I’m no longer religious is that I’ve seen the danger of gambling and I’ve decided to stay away from it! If we look at religion as it actually is, we can clearly see that it is no different from gambling, people betting on the probability of something beyond that no one knows about, calling it God. The fact of the matter is an assertion that there is such a thing as division in reality, and people are willing to bet their lives that there is devision, when in fact this is impossible.
The fact that people imagine a division means that they have to choose a side between this division, God and the Devil, life and death, heaven and hell, order and chaos. When we think only for a second we realise that there is God because there is the Devil, life because there is death, heaven because there is hell and so on. It is like trying to imagine a centre of an object without the object, simply impossible. The fact of religion and its fuel, division, is dependant on people betting that either there is a centre or there is an object, not both, they are two independent entities from which to choose from. The startling fact though is that asking why anyone is religious is the same thing as asking why anyone is scientific, because it is now a dawning fact that religion is not that different from science, either you are with us or against us!
I think that science is the latest institution we are witnessing crumbling right in front of our eyes, just like religion, that seeks to monopolise information for its own benefit to the detriment of others, the imaginary thought that there is us and them! :o
Believers will strongly disagree with you.
My take here is a bit different. We first recognise certain physical properties because of their manifestations, rather than through a contrast with their opposite. You know an oven is warm because it gives off heat which you can feel, not because you realise that it doesn’t feel cold. Next, most people do seem aware that the existence of polar opposites does not rule out an intermediate scale of transition, i.e. the proverbial greyscale between black and white. This fact would not prevent you from distinguishing black from grey, even if you had never seen white itself.
Huh?
And how, please, do you think that it is “a dawning fact that religion is not that different from science?” I would ask that you draw specific parallels between science and religion that demonstrate this rather amazing contention.
Interesting. But how (and why) do you think it is crumbling?
Science “seeks to monopolise information for its own benefit to the detriment of others?” Well, no doubt that would explain why all those benefits like longevity, disease control, creature comforts, wealth, technology, and on and on and on are so meagre. Sheesh!
'Luthon64