Dear Banjo,

Merriam-Wbster:

Definition of nothing (Entry 1 of 4)
1
: not any thing : no thing
leaves nothing to the imagination

Again, no mention of objects.
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>>« The sufficient reason [...] is found in a substance which [...] is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself." »<<

Your quote comes from “G.W. Leibniz - The Priniple of Sufficient Reason and his Argument for the Existence of God” (http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil100/leibniz.html) and shows that Leibniz’s answer to the question was, indeed, God and not something science can research.

“Long ago, Leibniz objected to gaps of the first kind after Newton suggested (erroneously, as the religious skeptic Laplace later showed) that planetary orbits would be unstable unless God intervened regularly to repair them.” (http://https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2009/PSCF3-09Larson.pdf)

So Leibniz does not seem to have seen God as sunk in the gaps of scientific understanding of the material world.
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>>Unlike the existence of God, nobody questions the existence of gravitation.<<

Nobody questioned the existence - in the Western, not Oriental meaning of the word that Yuyutsu has in mind - of God in e.g. medieval times, when nobody had the need to postulate, gravitation in order to ask questions nobody asked. I agree, today it is almost the other way around. And who knows how it will be seen in thousands of years.
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Of course, I agree that “neuroscientists research how people have religious experiences linked to belief ”. Some of these specialists believe in God themselves (e.g. Andrew B. Newberg, claiming that humans seek God because our brains are biologically programmed to do so - http://https://www.amazon.de/Why-God-Wont-Go-Away-ebook/dp/B001NJUP7U/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538696693&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=newberg%252C+why+god+want+go+away) some, most of them, not.

This is not the same as doing “research on the existence or not” of God. Like neuroscientists can study the brain of a mathematician working on the proof of a theorem, without being able to say whether or not he correctly proved his theorem (i.e. established its “existence” outside the mathematician’s imagination) he claims to have.

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Dear Not_Now.Soon,

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Thank you for reciprocating with your personal story.

It corresponds to my understanding of the notion of God and the importance it takes in the minds of all those who become ardent believers. While I am personally convinced that God does not exist (until proven otherwise), I am just as equally convinced that the idea of God is so real in their minds that they can literally feel his presence. There is no doubt whatsoever in their minds that he exists.

How many times have I heard people say “God heard my prayers” or “God saved me” as, for example, when victims are miraculously extracted from tons of concrete and rubble after a natural disaster, sometimes long after the rescue operations were officially abandoned and all hope was lost. And how often have I heard those victims attribute their remarkable survival and ultimate rescue to their unwavering faith in God.

Effectively, it was their faith that helped them to wait patiently in the assurance that, somehow, they would be saved. It protected them from panic, stress, fear, anguish, despair and depression. It gave them strength to resist pain, discomfort, heat, cold, claustrophobia, isolation, thirst and hunger. It helped them support their dirty, suffocating prisons, for ten, twelve, even as much as fifteen days, in some cases, never knowing whether it was day or night.

It was their faith that helped them survive, not God. It was a team of trained and experienced rescue operators, not religion, that extracted them from under those tons of concrete and rubble. It was invariably their loved ones, family and friends, who never lost hope and never gave up the search.

By their faith they were saved (Acts 16:31).

That is my honest opinion. That is my belief. There is no God. There is just the comfort of the idea, the concept of God, deeply imbedded and firmly entrenched in the minds of those individuals (and they are legion) who would have great difficulty facing the vicissitudes of daily life without him :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=171skzi5BKc

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Dera Banjo,

>> It was their faith that helped them survive, not God. It was a team of trained and experienced rescue operators, not religion, …” <<

Compare this with a similar situatuiin whre even you will agree that the "driver" is more deserving your gratiture than the "vehicle":

It is thre TAXI-driver (and engineers who built the cab) whom you should pay and thank for bringing you to your destiny, AND NOT the TAXI-cab or the machinery that manufactured it.

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Dear Yuyutsu,

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You wrote :

« … we ought to have faith in God, worship and love Him with all our heart, mind and resources … »

In my opinion, any “God” who expects anybody to worship him is not a God. He is a narcissist. And anybody who worships a God who does not expect to be worshiped is, in my opinion, a hypocritical sycophant or a meek, despicable worm.

I can’t imagine any honest, honourable person acting in that fashion.
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« … nothing can simultaneously exist and "probably not exist" … »

Probability is not certainty. “It will probably rain tomorrow” does not mean that it will necessarily rain tomorrow. It simply means that there is more chance that it will rain than there is that it will not rain (> 50% chance that it will rain). Perhaps it will not rain at all.

“God probably does not exist” does not exclude the possibility that he does exist. God can simultaneously exist and “probably not exist”. I consider that the probability that he does not exist is about 99.9%, and that there is a very slight possibility (0.1%) that he does exist.
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I indicated that “I’m just an ordinary person” and you replied :

« This describes your personality, rather than yourself, who has that personality »

By describing myself as an “ordinary person” I am indicating an essential feature of my identity – just as my DNA is also an essential feature of my identity.
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« To escape all definitions, you should probably not think of God at all »

About 13 million years ago, human and chimpanzees’ genes split. That was the beginning of primeval man. He had not yet invented any religion or concept of God. He was just an ordinary person. That’s how I see myself today.

I listen to what other people have to say and discuss whatever preoccupations they may happen to have. But I’m not the sort of person who allows himself to be overly impressed by other people’s imagination, however fertile it may be.

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Thank you for sharing yours as well Banjo. The one thing I can add though is not just feeling a presence, but also just something besides themself there. Either something like a peace fall on them when moments ago they were falling into panic, or a force help them that they can't take credit for. A kind of otherness that takes place, outside of just trusting that everything will be ok and helping people cope. (Though that is pretty good on it's own too). This is why I like to hear people's experiences. Because it usually challenges our views of how things work or how they should work.

As for the God of the gaps. I don't think of God as an explanation to fill in where science has holes. I think that science is good for learning and understanding the world around us. But it's not the authority of how the world works. Instead of God filling in the gaps of our understanding, my hope is that science will continue to learn and finally catch up to what's said in the bible. Realize a truth that God has given us, and be able to explain why it's true. As of now, there are things in the bible that are believed and trusted long before there's an explanation to give it merit from understanding it better, or from study, or from experience. Yet they are trusted because God is trustworthy. My hope for different scientific fields is that they will one day catch up with what God already taught.

(Continued)

(Continued)

However, sometimes it takes a while for science to catch up with things already known. Several years ago there was a scientific study about discovering something I thought was common sense. A nature article explaining that animals morn the loss of a loved one. First about a mother in a herd staying behind for a while to stay with a calf that died, before catching up to the rest of the herd, and a second of an ape silent and distant from other apes after another ape he was chatty with died. At the time the article made it out like this was a great scientific discovery about animals, but anyone who's owned pets would say it's common sense.

Regarding the first law of Thermodynamics, I agree we don't know the limits of that observation. I don't know of any experiments that have countered the rule, but that doesn't mean in vastly different conditions there would be vastly different results.

Moving onto another law. The second law of Thermodynamics has a good amount of observations to strengthen that perspective. However, the fact that Earth has life on it at all and any study on how complex life is (either as a study on an individual anatomy, or a study on an ecosystem), then that alone is a big counter to the idea that the longer the timespan the greater the entropy. We should not have had the chance to be born if that was the case. With this in mind some of scientific philosophy and understanding can just be wrong, which is again why I count God as the authority. Hopefully one day more fields of science will catch up with what's already in the bible.

(Sorry if that sounds close to the god of the gaps reference. I think scientific inquiry is important for the same reasons why experience and life stories are important. Because even if we don't have an explanation for why things happen, both science observations and life's observations challenge us from just philosophizing our answers and being wrong about them more then enough times).