I wish I could jump in the road and push you out of the way of the truck you don't see, like everyone else who's blinded by faith, but unfortunately that won't work.
You know, if I knew for sure that there was nothing after death, I'd probably kill myself. To me, that would be the truck. I think the idea that there might be a hell is a better motivator to live than the idea that this is all there is, because if the choice is between feeling pain or feeling nothing, there are many times when I'd probably choose to go with the latter. Of course, that doesn't prove I'm right or anything.
With time, anything is possible.
Except that before the universe began to exist, there kind of wasn't time.
Correction. Stalin and his government killed millions of people, not atheism.
Well, yeah. Ideas don't kill people, people who believe in ideas kill people.
So if a fairy tale survives 2,000 years, we should regard it as truth?
Fairy tales usually don't even claim to be true, let alone have corroborating evidence from other contemporary sources.
Yes, those are pretty big numbers. May I ask where you got them?
I can't find the original source, but they seem to be from Roger Penrose, the guy who apparently, along with Steven Hawking, basically invented the modern understanding of the Big Bang. William Lane Craig has a very long, complicated-sounding article that mentions the number
over here. If you just want to see the number, scroll near the bottom of
this page.
The odds of anything happening are astronomical if looked at from the right point of view.
Yeah, the odds of any specific thing happening are astronomical, but the odds of something happening at all are 1. However, as far as I can understand it, that 10
10123 thing
is actually the odds of something happening at all -- in 10
10123-1 cases, nothing would have happened and there'd be no universe. And the "we wouldn't be here to know there wasn't a universe if there wasn't a universe" doesn't hold much weight without postulating infinite parallel universes or infinitely repeating Big Bangs, ideas which have less scientific basis and falsifiability than the existence of God.
Then again, it's 3:40 AM in my time zone, so I might be wrong (and I'm watching Red Eye right now).