My last days as a believer

I've managed to dig up an almost four-year-old discussion on a web forum where I argued (with cringeworthy levels of smarm and fake logic) for the existence of God (of the generic Deistic variety) against a few atheists.

Worthy of note is the fact that I was a college senior and most of the people I was talking to were high school students or younger college students, and yet they tend to come off sounding more rational than I do.

Here are some choice quotes of myself from that thread:

Quite simply put, all physical events have a cause. The Big Bang was a physical event. Now, as to its cause, we have two primary competing theories:

1. It is either a) impossible to know the cause, since observation of anything within the singularity is by definition impossible, or b) it was caused something that defies every rule of physics and mathematics that we have, and
2. It was caused by a supernatural being, force, or event.

I prefer to follow option 2. Regardless of the fact that it's a cop-out explanation, at least it's an explanation.

So I was happy to stick with a cop-out, just because I could pretend it was an explanation.

I mentioned the cosmological constants before. I'm not going to be a proponent for intelligent design, but I think that the fact that the constants came out to be exactly the values that would support life is pretty good evidence that SOMETHING made them that way intentionally. If any of the constants had been slightly different - somewhere on the order of 1*10^-60 - life of any form would be a physical impossibility. In fact, the universe as we know it might not exist. It could be a sparse cloud of free-floating hydrogen atoms, or an unstable, dense, decaying nuclear universe devoid of anything much lighter than solid matter.

Ahh, the good old 'fine tuning' argument, complete with numbers pulled out of thin air! Always a classic.

The very definition of 'supernatural' is 'something outside of natural existence.' The laws of physics just don't apply to it. It could be a physically-detached intelligence, some underlying force within the fabric of spacetime, I don't know. Supernatural entities are not necessarily bound by physical constraints. Their existence is something nearly inconceivable to a natural entity.

No evidence? No problem! Define your concept as unexplorable, then assert, assert, assert!

Personally, I think a life devoid of faith in a higher being would be a life I wouldn't want to experience. I can't see why you would continue to live if your future consists of being forgotten in the passage of time and eventual cataclysmic destruction of the universe that will erase all traces of human existence from... well, existence. I mean... how can you derive any meaningful purpose from life if your life is, in the long run, utterly without meaning or merit?...
My point was that since the universe will eventually be destroyed, there is no reason for life to be here in the first place. The entire concept of life is meaningless, and intelligent life is just a cruel joke fate plays on us. Unless, of course, there's something out there greater than life itself.

In other words, "I don't like the idea that the universe has no ultimate purpose, therefore I will simply believe that it doesn't, even though I really don't have any good reason to do so."

I believe in evolution, too. I'm not blindly ignorant of scientific fact :) I just don't think it's plausible to say that the universe is set up the way it is by random chance.

Besides... how does something create itself?

Nothing can create itself. It's a logical impossibility caused by the fact that every physical event has a cause other than itself -_-

I said, with precisely zero sense of irony.

God doesn't hate anyone. He hates things. Like war. And killing.

Says the guy who hadn't yet read the Bible all the way.

You really think God ought to micromanage the weather?

In response to "Would God allow something like the Hurricane Katrina to happen if he existed?" Yes, I really was that trite and thoughtless about it.

... why does God have to prove Himself to you the way you want Him to? I'd say that the fact that humans exist at all is pretty good evidence of the existence of divinity.

... who would be a better person to judge what's right and wrong than the one who INVENTED "right?" You?

I'm not saying that the Bible tells you what is right, but there's certainly nobody with a higher level of cognitive function than the being who created cognitive function -_-

Seriously, I was a moron.

There's more gold in the rest of the thread. Enjoy.