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Originally Posted by regular.joe
From a religious stand point, saving my everlasting soul from damnation is a fairly sound premise. I guess this only counts if I have a soul.
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I think you are confusing a conclusion with a premise. A premise is basically where you set up the ground rules for the argument. To steal an example, we have the argument: "Since all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, it follows that Socrates is mortal." The premises of the argument is that Socrates is a man, and that all men are mortal. This argument is both valid and sound.
Your conclusion is basically "Religion will save my everlasting soul from damnation." This requires many premises, one of which would be "I have an everlasting soul." Even one premise being false leads to the entire argument being unsound, and your conclusion is based on many extremely questionable premises.
Quote:
Originally Posted by regular.joe
We have such sophisticated notions of who we are in these modern ages. Based on mountains of scientific observation. We use this mountain of observation and our sophisticated notion of who we think we are to disprove the existence of God? I think this is laughable.
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Science does not try to disprove the existence of God; scientists are acutely aware of their lack of all-encompassing data. Science simply requires a logical reason or empirical observation to support a belief. What puts religion and science at odds is that science is so darn SUCCESSFUL! Look around you at all the things you are thankful for, and even those you don't usually consider. Your family is healthy, you have plenty of food and shelter, and you have all these nifty gadgets. None of that came about by someone kneeling and praying to a god, or beamed down like mana from heaven. All of that, every single scrap, came from people going out, looking at the world, and figuring out how it works so it would work for them. The process is painstaking and difficult but it WORKS. What has religion given us?