I poise a question.

[Esquilax]

I understand what you mean FiniteImmortal.

Shouldn't you be arguing with him, since he claims evil has no existence beyond being the absence of good, and you've claimed in another threat that the bible states evil has a separate existence outside of god?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I understand what you mean FiniteImmortal.

Shouldn't you be arguing with him, since he claims evil has no existence beyond being the absence of good, and you've claimed in another threat that the bible states evil has a separate existence outside of god?

[MindForgedManacle]

I don't see the need to get too deep in analyzing what may be a candidate for an existing god when it comes to failing meaningful criteria prima facsia. I don't need to bother with an god that hasn't made a truth claim, and hasn't claimed to have created me, or hasn't attempted to describe me in a coherent way that conforms to reality as I know it. There may be someone who had a dream that there was a god of hurricanes of Jupiter. Whether there is or isn't, has no bearing on me and is wholly irelevant to me or our lives here on earth. The only God that is worth exploring it one that has relevance to reality. Such as, has compelling answers for the 4 main questions that fuel our lives. 1) Origin. 2) Meaning. 3) Morality. 4) Destiny. Any worldview worth entertaining must have meaning answers or at least interaction in a coherent way concerning all these simultaneously. And each idea answer must be logically consistent, empirically adequate, and be existentially relevant.

So a god has to claim to have created you (among other things) to be worthy of consideration? Now that's a can of worms. And if a god exists, it by definiton has relevance to reality because, duh, it exists.

1) This is one where, as far as religions have been concerned, has been utter nonsense, with no empirical justification beforehand, so it fails one of your own criteria.

2) Is subjective by definition, regardless if a god exists. In other words, even if a god exists and created everything for a specific purpose, whether or not you find meaning in that will necessarily depend on your own in-built values and preferences, hence subjective.

3) I don't see the relevance of a god to this. He's a subject, hence his views on morality would't a priori matter to us more than our own and would necessarily be his own subjective views on it.

4) I don't really see what this has to do with worldviews. It assumes destiny is actually a thing.

I have explored panthiesm, and it fails to me in that, a real God must be infinite in nature (in order to be God) and so a an infinite being swallows up an finite number of gods. If there are an infinite amount of Gods, thats the same as an infinite God. You can't multiply infinity times infinity, contrary to my childhood arguing games with my sister.

And this is where you're not making sense. When you capitalize the 'g', I can only assume you mean your god. But then that means you're saying "Only my God can be God", a tautology. This is what I mean when I say you assume your position to be true, when I'm asking you how you know it's true.

I think you need to go read more about pantheisms. Spinoza's pantheistic god was infinite, because it possessed infinite attributes. And from what I think I understand of Hinduism, the Brahman is infinite.

The reason you can't multiply infinity by infinity is because it's a concept, not a number. :p Further, all infinites are not equal. There are in fact greater and lesser infinities, so an infinite number of gods could possibly be 'greater' than a singular infinite god.

I don't see how the Big Bang is any different or less supernatural of a beginning that God speaking matter and time into existence. From Nothing comes everything, from an infinitesimally small singularity, expanding to the unknown depths of the universe... Seems equally explosive and awe-inspiring to me. Maybe two desciptions of the same event?

Because the Big Bang 1) refers to an expansion event which has a great amount of evidence to support it. 2) whatever the state of the universe prior to this expansion is not currently known and may be empirically unknowable. Even the idea of an infinitesimal singularity is quite possibly wrong since singularities are mathematical objects usually indicating a flaw in the theory, which in this case is the lack of a theory of quantum gravity. It's certainly not the case that we know there was 'nothing' before it. 3) This is what I mean by apologists just retconing their preconceived belief to try and fit what is later discovered. There's is nothing in the Biblical account that sounds anything like an expansion event, it's just God saying something and light appearing.

About imagining a God who is wholly evil, how does that work? If there really was a God that is behind all this that is wholly evil, would the world look the way it does? How would you define love? It slipped by the evil God while he was tying his shoes? People love to indite God by saying if a loving God existed, there would be no evil in the world. This is a moral pronouncement that has implications of ought. The world ought to be better, people ought to respect and love eachother, but alas, we make selfish choices and do henious things to eachother. We push God out of every facet of our lives, then when 9-11 or a Tsunami hits we wonder when the coward is hiding. We want it both ways. Moral pronouncements require a moral framework, it can only come in two flavors: Humanist, or Transcendent.

What you're talking about is the logical problem of evil, which I didn't bring up. As for how the world could be like it is if there is an evil god, that's easy. I can just run a Free will defense for the existence of good. If the evil god wanted there to be a world with moral evil, he needs to allow for free will to exist. So the evil god has to allow for some good in order to allow for the greatest evils. And this could further be augmented by saying that the evil god intends for an ultimately evil end, which necessitates moral evil for some reason. This is literally just a flip of the Christian apologist answer, so you can't deny it without special pleading.

Everything does in fact go through an evolutionary process, and everything in nature as well as convention that has ever been observed has been by guided means. Look at cars, phones, weapons, aircraft etc., every change was brought about by reason and engineering as more streamlined design. Micro-evolution in nature is, of course irrefutable. Making the leap from primordial soup to a bangle tiger is still at best, an interesting, though problem-ridden theory. The destruction of pieces of information in a DNA chain by radiation over time has never been demonstrated to produce more increasingly complex organisms.

And you turn out to be an evolution denier; why am I not suprised? "Macro-evolution" has been demonstrated repeatedly both experimentally in a lab and in nature itself. To say it's a "problem-ridden theory" is only something someone who is speaking on something they don't understand or know of.

I'd like to see a quote from God that has been proven to be false, or in any way spurious. He claims to be truth. He either is, or isn't.. and if he isn't he isn't God.

Without God being proved to have existed, that's a non-sequitur because if he doesn't exist, he can't make any statements at all.. It further ignores my point entirely, which was that "the scope of a mind does not change the fact that the mind could be wrong or have ulterior motives". And you further just assume he exists by saying that a being who claims to be God, and yet is proven wrong on some matter, isn't God. That's you assuming there is a referent to your belief before evidencing it.

I agree, to a point. Complexity multiplies morality. A cow can't be very good or bad. A Dog, a little more one one or the other. A child even more. An average man, capable of much good or bad as history shows, a genius; the devil incarnate or a righteous and noble hero. (think Hitler vs. Gandhi).

Okay.

[Optimistic Mysanthrope]

I completely agree. Although I also extend that view to include volcano gods.

There are actually an endless list of cartoon gods, golf course gods, and reality-show gods I find particularly boring, so i omitted them from this discussion. Motorcycle gods, and a few others i find more interesting, but alas, they don't make the cut for real God candidacy at this time. So far, only one seems logical.

Yeah, um....that's the one I was referring to.

Because, If god exists in the universe, but dwells in another dimension (which physics describes 11 or so dimensions according to sting theory, if i remember correctly) and is timeless, ie., claims to know the beginning from and the end, and has always existed, that by definition is an infinite being. Physics also accounts for things that exist with no physical mass, such as photons, which move at the speed of light, which from their perspective (if they had one) would be of infinite time. To be omni-present and all-knowing, infinity would be an obvious prerequisite.

If god dwells in another dimension of this universe (which is kinda silly, you may as say that god lives in the Y axis), if god is timeless, if god is omnipresent and if god is all-knowing.

You haven't demonstrated why a real god has to have these qualities and it's probably just as well.

Again, an infinite God encompasses all the God-needs of the universe, there need not be any other applications. The position has been filled.

Just because something doesn't need to exist doesn't mean that it can't exist. Why can't there be more than one infinite being? More importantly, what is an infinite being?

While I admire Niels Bohr's contributions to humanity, he only described the mechanical process of what we observe. He didn't actually do it. Gandalf, even in his younger years couldn't have pulled it off, I'm talking about the cool Gandalf from the book, not Peter Jackson's abortion.

You seem to have missed the point. There are literary accounts of both Niels Bohr and Gandalf, but only one of them has objective evidence to support claims of their existence.

Now re-read the above sentence but substitute "Niels Bohr" for "Big Bang" and "Gandalf" for "creation of the universe by supernatural means".

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How about this: The Almighty One created the universe and all life within to be His personal playground, filled with a self replenishing supply of potential victims to torture, mutilate and generally fuck with. He created us in His own image, that we might emulate His nature and inflict His abominable will upon each other. He gave us rules that we might break them. He gave us guilt that we might torture ourselves and He made us love so that we feel loss all the more. Diseases were created to plague us. He then created religions and set them against each another, all so that we might kill, maim, torture, persecute and oppress one another, while dedicating our lives to the worship of the Great Infernal One; billions of souls, crying out in a sycophantic exaltation of a God that doesn't love you and a world that doesn't care.

Now tell how that differs from reality.

While even on my most trying days, my view of the world isn't quite that dismal, the world does seem to frequently make me wonder how much further we can veer of track before our wagon goes sailing off the sidewalk. Yes, we as humans are nasty turds. We only can declare ourselves as nasty turds because we can imagine what it should have been. We always compare our situations to the unspoken moral law that exists, and has always existed within us. But, we're not supposed to admit that, because it brings in a host of complicated ramifications. We know innately when we do a dirty thing to someone. Guilt is an inseparable thing hardwired into us to remind us we are falling short of what we innately know to have been true and right. If we think divorcing ourselves from guilt will ease our troubled minds, it won't work. The world doesn't go away when we close our eyes. When we start deleting parts of the societal operating system, the thing will crash. And when things crash hard in this modern age, the Astrodome post- Katrina would look like a nice vacation getaway. When removing a fence, it is a good idea to find out why it was put there in the first place. We are blindly following in our poor ole Roman ancestor's footsteps towards an utter failure of epic magnitude.
Glad to keep the discussion light.

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Ok, so are you saying that my brief description of a world created by a wholly evil god conforms to reality or not? If not, why? If it does, why do you think that claims a wholly benevolent god have any merit beyond wishful thinking?

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I couldn't help but notice your lack of rebuttal to my example of a "direct" quote of a claim from God that has been proven to be false. By own admission, such an example disproves god.

[Bad Writer]

When people say that they KNOW god has been good to them, how do they know it's god doing all these great things for them? Conversely, when something bad happens, why is that not attributed to the same god? If this deity has his hands wrapped up in our affairs enough to cause good things to happen, does that mean he's taking a smoke break when a tsunami hits south-east Asia?

[Godlesspanther]

My question is simple, from my understanding that god is good and basically all good things are of god. However, the problem with this is, the one who is saying god is good is god himself. So how do you know that god is not lying?

Because He has been extremely good to me, and why I have no idea other than to say somehow He loves me.

Ever Grateful To Him,

GC

That's a bit arrogant.

What about all the people who are suffering? Is god not good to them? Does god hate them?

[Lion IRC]

I understand what you mean FiniteImmortal.

Shouldn't you be arguing with him, since he claims evil has no existence beyond being the absence of good,

Why would I argue with him? He is correct and that's why I agreed with his point.

...and you've claimed in another threat that the bible states evil has a separate existence outside of god?

False. I see you haven't learned how to use the quote function when it comes to misrepresenting my position.

Go back and read that thread again and try to learn something about the ONTOLOGICAL existence of evil which is NOT a creation of God but which arises philosophically and consists in the thoughts/actions of those who think and do evil which is OTHER than the "good".

Here's a little koan to help you get a grip on this.
"Does nothing exist?"
... or is it merely the incidental word we use as an ontological idea.

I'm surprised non-stamp collectors...err...I mean atheists have difficulty with this.

[Cinjin]

God's creation, God's defination of good. That does not mean everyone will agree. For instance I don't think those sentenced to Hell will think He is 'good.'

Somebody PLEASE make a record of this post for the next time GC, Drich or any other filthy christian claims that we non-believers simply "escort ourselves" into everlasting hell.

[Darkstar]

When people say that they KNOW god has been good to them, how do they know it's god doing all these great things for them? Conversely, when something bad happens, why is that not attributed to the same god? If this deity has his hands wrapped up in our affairs enough to cause good things to happen, does that mean he's taking a smoke break when a tsunami hits south-east Asia?

I'm sure you want the theists to answer this, but *spoiler alert* the actual reason is Confirmation bias.

[Bad Writer]

When people say that they KNOW god has been good to them, how do they know it's god doing all these great things for them? Conversely, when something bad happens, why is that not attributed to the same god? If this deity has his hands wrapped up in our affairs enough to cause good things to happen, does that mean he's taking a smoke break when a tsunami hits south-east Asia?

I'm sure you want the theists to answer this, but *spoiler alert* the actual reason is Confirmation bias.

Dammit! You ruined all the fun!