Poll: Atheist, Deist, Theist?

I'm not certain that a Creator exists, but in view of the available evidence, it seems like a not-unreasonable bet -- depending of course on what the stakes are. (The degree of confidence you want in any Proposition X will depend in part on what happens if you're wrong.)

And over the long term, following the Summary of the Law that Jesus stressed -- which can be recast as, 1) face the facts, and 2) seek the best for others as you do for yourself -- appears to be adaptive behavior for individuals and cultures.

The Summary of the Law is by no means uniquely Christian, incidentally; it's Jewish (hey, Jesus was nothing if not a good Jew), and also finds expression in other faiths.

Shameless self-promotion: I blog about topics like this at http://www.questioningchristian.org.

I think it depends which God you ask if someone believe in.

For example, the Platonic idea of The Good is a pretty abstract philosophical concept which does not exist in the physical world - rather the physical world is some kind of shadow or reflection of this Good. You can't really prove or disprove the "existence" of this interpretation of reality, although some would say you can apply occams razor to it. Plato would argue that you cannot not belive in this, if you just consider the question reationally.

On the other hand, the biblical God Yahweh is a beeing with a physical shape and with intentions and emotions, which walk around in the physical world in historical times and interact with people (and killing them left and right!). The existence of this beeing could easily be proved if you meet him, but cannot strictly speaking be disproved as long as he remains in hiding. But the evidence can be weighed the same way we weigh evidence for the existence of mammuths or unicorns.

The christian notion of God has historically been kind of a mixture of these two ideas (and to a lesser degree many other). Due to this complexity of the concept "God", it is not even clear what it means to believe or don't believe in God.

When I was young I was brought up without any conversation whatsoever on religion. I do remember returning home from school one day (Church of England, so we said the lords prayer at assembly) and I asked my mum, "Mum, is dad in heaven?" and she just looked at me and replied "Don't be silly, he's at work." That pretty much resolved my religious beliefs until I was around 14.

At 14 I slowly converted to Christianity and at about 15 I would probably have called myself an Anglican. This, however, went down hill extremely quickly. I remember my youth group got a talk from a parishioner who said we shouldn't listen to sinful music like 'Marilyn Manson' or other rock and roll. Me and a few friends went to our group leader after the guy left and said 'if you bring someone here preaching that bullshit again we're gone', I can't exactly remember how many weeks went past before I never went back.

After leaving, I quickly began realising that a lot of what I was being taught was complete BS, that they were trying to get me to question science. Well I'm a sci-fi writer, that shit doesn't stick with me. I quickly learnt that all the religious phenomena are merely a form of hypnosis.

Today I believe nothing. I am not an atheist, I see it as another bullshit religion just with a non-existent god at the top, because all I hear are people like Richard Dawkins preaching in the belief that there isn't a god... but any form of belief in the absence of evidence (the existence and thus non-existence of god is fundamentally unprovable) is FAITH, they have faith there isn't a god. I mean fundamentally Christians believe in the existence of a hypothetical entity, where as Atheists like Dawkins believe in the non-existence of a hypothetical entity. It's the opposite side of the same coin, where as what I believe most atheists really believe is that the 'coin' doesn't exist.

That's an unfortunate misunderstanding about atheists, unfortunately embraced by most atheists. It's like when they discovered they don't believe in a god anymore, any trace of evolution in their view of the universe just freezed. This is bullshit. I can easily call myself secular humanist, vaguely militant-atheist, zen-atheist (there's also zen-christians and zen-buddhists, don't worry), and I doubt very much I will die with the same labels.

People change, and people are different. Grouping the understanding of life of Einstein or Gates in the same category as every 15-year old who just rejected religion is a limitation I strongly hope we'll overcome in the coming years.

I don't understand the causation/design argument. Anything complicated enough to create the universe must be just as, if not more, complicated as the universe It creates. If God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster created our universe, then such Entity must be at least as complex as our universe, begging the infinite regress of who created said Entity and why is said Entity so complex? Causation itself is a red herring. The universe is, period, properly viewed in imaginary time, not real time. In imaginary time, it is neither created (caused) or destroyed. It just is. And if you don't understand that, I suggest you re-read 'A brief history of time'. Thus if the universe has no cause then structures within like ourselves should need no Designer, otherwise, who designed the Designer? Design in an un-caused universe ends up being an illusion given to us by natural selection. Within (real) time, natural selection works, creating things like human apes and elephants. Within imaginary time, nothing is created nor destroyed. Natural selection explains design. Imaginary time shows there is no beginning, no need for a cause. Clinging to the god delusion is going to require more than first cause and design arguments boys and girls. There is one sense in which God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster do exist, and that is, they exist as memes. They are viruses which hijack the human mind and in some cases cause the human it hijacks to hijack, say, airplanes. There is a great poster out there with the words, "Imagine no religion" superimposed over a picture of the twin towers. Without God, the meme of God, that is, those towers would still stand. I think its time this species grow up and get rid of the god delusion or else we bloody well deserve to go extinct.