Is there God?

[Noetical]

Has anyone noticed that all the people who ask these questions do so in absurdly general ways that cannot be answered in focus to produce any real answer or clarity?

When you ask "Is there a God"
it is essential that you provide SPECIFICALLY how you define god, ok?
What your definition of god is/what you think god is.

Because God, like many words given to things which dont exist in the Physical realm, is a concept/mental construct, created to define that which has not been and can not be concretely defined, because the subject matter of the word is not examinable, and is not man made with a specific definition like the word 'Tragedy" for example, but a word which represents something we speculate about but do not know in an empirical sense.

To further clarify, another word which represents a concept is "happiness" there is no concrete universal definition of what constitutes the feeling of happiness, people will refer to happiness as pleasure, or contentment, or the absence of suffering or fear, but there is no way to purely and absolutely define that which is the feeling of being happy. The amount of words that exist which mean roughly the same thing are enough alone to evidence this "joy" for example.

When you ask a question like "is there a god"
you cant hide behind the ambiguity of the concept of God.
If you state specifically what you think it is it can perhaps be falsifiable or at least more specifically analyzed.

Maybe you should sit down and think about "What is God?" instead.  

[bluecherry]

Yup, to answer "Is there a God?" you have to be able to first answer "What is God/ What is a god?" 3nodding If you can't give an actual finite, limited nature to what something is (meaning, a specific identity) that you are proposing the existence of then it can't exist now can it? For anything to exist, it has to be something *in particular.* (Which is not to say everybody has to define things in exactly the same terms though, but certain key ideas need to be constantly represented in some form as part of the requirements of a valid concept.)  

[Gman6817]

I guess I came into this kinda late but here goes... (if you want to know my answer just skip to the end)
I don't think the existence of God or a god needs to be pondered over very much anymore. Metaphysics, which is essentially the study of whether or not gods exist, began in ancient Greece. That was back when science was young and they could not explain nearly as much about how things work as we can today. Religions and the concept of gods were the results of humans encountering things that they did not know how to explain, the result being magic or some super being. Simple as that. Today's religions are just the evolution of those ancient religions. For example look at the history of the hebrews. It's interesting to see how their beliefs evolved out of polytheism and through exposure to other ancient religions. It gets more and more elaborate but basically the modern major religions (with the exception of hinduism and buddhism) are just the clumping of older religions. The reason people still believe is the same reason humans have always turned to religion: lack of education.
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there is no point in pondering the existence of a god because we are able to explain so much about our world and our universe, and we're always learning more, that we no longer need to use a god as an explanation even for things we still don't fully know about because history tells us that we will someday.
To wrap it up; No, I do not believe in any god and I believe that Good and Evil is a viewpoint and is not set in stone (not to say I'm for killing or stealing or anything like that).  

[bluecherry]

Yes, anthropology provides a much sturdier argument for where the proposition of the existence of any deity or deities came from than looking to the nature of the rest of existence. It seems like fear of the unknown drove people to start the whole "god of the gaps" business and also other people latched onto these kinds of proposition for special beings and co-opted them for various political purposes, such as noticing something like, "Hey, people are getting sick after eating pigs a lot. How can we get the fools to stop eating pigs and getting sick from it? I know! We'll tell them 'god' says it is bad to eat them, maybe they've been cursed as a food source, and that they shouldn't eat them and add that into part of a supposed system of rewards and punishments for following 'god's' orders . . . a system which will primarily bare fruit after death. That way, we don't have to worry about anybody in our life time too blatantly proving us wrong. ninja "

 

[MyBrotherJake]

I can see no good reason to beleive in God. So I don't.  

[Sun-Xiao-Hu]

God is only a manifestation of our need to have meaning. We hold on to the thought that god might be out there, only to have that warmth of knowing there is a reason to live. A reason to carryout our lives with good meaning. Let me explain... a after life is like a reward for living a virtues life based on the codes of your religion. So without religion what do we live for? There is no warmth. A life without religion is freeing yourself from a illusion.
Religion also keeps people together, something that many people share in common. Religion brings us together in to a unified circle. All within this religion abide to it's rule, promoting good behavior. Not a state of nature. When i comes down to reality, we are only composed of cells, tissue, elements, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, there is no soul particle, just the blueprints of life. There is a god... God is the people who believe in him/her.  

[RobX2000]

I personaly don't believe. if you do more power to you. but everything I have seen and done points to the lack of a god. god is for the person that can't believe there is an end to their story. they need to live forever.