(January 9, 2015 at 8:16 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Can you put forth a definition of robvalue that captures everything that you are?

Yes.

(January 9, 2015 at 8:32 pm)IATIA Wrote:

(January 9, 2015 at 8:16 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Can you put forth a definition of robvalue that captures everything that you are?

Yes.

Enlighten us.

Alpha male: Perceived probabilities? Do you mean that you and your mate agreed that this was too much of a coincidence so must have a special explanation? And out of the infinite possible non-standard explanations, you decided it was God communicating with you? In other words, you had no rational explanation so just made one up, and managed to convince your mate. For a claim to be worth anything, it must be able to be investigated by anyone who wants to. I hope you would not draw conclusions in the field of law based on one guy guessing explanations and then convincing one other guy, and saying this puts it beyond reasonable doubt. Would that stand up in court?

You have no evidence it was God, that is your imagined explanation with no basis other than you don't accept natural explanations.

Also, you can't start attributing things to "God" before you have defined what God is, and demonstrated it exists at all. Otherwise you might as well say the magic teapot orbiting the sun gave you a nudge. And is is the point; how can distinguish between a magical teapot nudge, a God nudge, or metawind upsetting your spiritual essence?

Chad: I'm not looking for a definition of God that encapsulates everything. I'm just looking for enough that demonstrates you actually know what it is. Since I nor anyone else have had any actual experience of a God (unsubstantiated claims aside) it needs to be shown that it is something other than wishful thinking. Still no one has been able to even tell me what supernatural being means. Defining something doesn't mean telling me what it is not; it's not in time, it's not physical, it's not natural... That gets me no closer to what it actually is. And yes, not only could I give a definition of me pretty well, I have been observed frequently and can even submit DNA for testing. I'm a human, and we have reams of scientific data on humans, what they are, how they work, what they are capable of, and so on. For God, we have nothing. Just what he has supposedly done, and reasons we can't detect him.

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Alpha: you do seem to agree faith is not a good way to find truth, at least you didn't deny it. If you were born in an islam country, your faith would have been almost certainly in islam. They can't both be right, and there is now way to tell which is right.

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Rayaan: thank you for your contribution I see you've had a decent go at defining God there, more than anyone has tried to do so far in this thread. By your own admission it is incredibly vague, because it's so different to anything else. But why is that? It's because we know almost nothing about it, we've had no experience of it. All of its attributes are very abstract. These are all indicators of an abstract, rather than real, God. I see no way a God with your definition could ever be tested for, and as such I see no reason to presume anything like that does or even could exist. Defining what "exist" even means is important, because once you remove the physical and such, you're talking about a kind of existence we also have no experience of.

What would ever give anyone a good enough reason to think that something so bizarre, alien, and impossible sounding exists in the first place?

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But by all means keep it coming, and I would very pleased to see a testable claim put forward

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The definition of God is important, because how can you test for something if you've not been told what you're testing for? And why should anyone believe you have good reason to believe something is real, if you can't describe it in a way that it exists in any meaningful way? I would suggest that God in fact has to be natural, to be testable. So my advice would be to start with that.

Atheists take their own identity as an experience created by the mind but with no reality aside from that experience (as obviously we are not the physical brain or the body but those things from an Atheist perspective create the you).

Theists take their own identity as having spiritual existence and not simply an experience created by the mind. If you believe in the latter, then our own identity is proof of a supernatural world. The creator would be of this nature, a spirit.

So to know God, is essentially to recognize what you are. If you can recognize your spiritual substance and that you are not just an experience created by the mind with no reality beyond that, then you know God is likewise a spirit but one that is ultimate.

What does spiritual mean, and how can I test it to see that it is real, or a real quality?

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I can't believe in someting if I dont even know what it is.

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Just like God, people tell me what spirituality is not, but not what it is, in any meaningful terms.

I've heard it's "the non physical side". That makes the unfounded assumption that there is in fact anything other than the physical.

I'm not claiming that there isn't more than the physical, just that, like God, there's no good reason to think that there is.

(January 9, 2015 at 8:46 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Can you put forth a definition of robvalue that captures everything that you are?

(January 9, 2015 at 8:32 pm)IATIA Wrote: Yes.

Enlighten us.

robvalue is the product of two cells that chemically combined into a single cell with the capability of division. Due to the complexity of this cell, it was able to divide again and again in accordance with the self contained chemical instruction set. At first the cell divisions were random until the nature of the zygote was able to start producing specialized cells leading to the formation of an embyro. This embryo continued development throughout the term of it's incarceration within the mother's womb. Eventually it was developed enough that it realized it no longer cared to be swimming around in amniotic fluid and preferred air and sunlight. Behold, a baby is born. These biochemical interactions within this baby continued to develop, taking in outside information through the senses and building a structured memory and reflex system. Though the DNA controlled the major developments, there are still a sundry of random instructions, such as overall appearance, fingerprints, personality, etc.. Eventually, this child has grown into adulthood. This human has made friends and interacted with family, teachers, perhaps government officials and left a traceable mark on society. If I were so inclined, I could find information on this person through the internet, public records, friends and family. I could ask for a phone number and talk to this person. If I were a psychiatrist, I could do a mental evaluation of this person. If necessary to prove this person alive and similar to other human beings of known quantity, I could meet with robvalue in person. Touchy feely sort of thing.

Now, to do a complete analysis of robvalue would require extensive lab time and resources and volumes of information collected into several blu-ray discs.

Your god, on the other hand, has no public records, no phone number, no body to test, inspect, touch, feel, see, smell, hear or taste (no robvalue, I have no intention of tasting you). No evidence whatsoever. None. Zilch. Nada. Your god has only made it's existence known through a book it says it wrote.

No one's ever said that about me before I feel so validated

You are welcome sir.

(January 8, 2015 at 10:32 am)robvalue Wrote: This is something I've been wibbling about recently so I thought it's time for another challenge, following the amazing success of the worship one. Here's my challenge to theists.

To my understanding, there are two factors of any claim which decide whether or not the claim is of any use at all. If it fails on any of these, it's pointless and not even worth addressing with argument or evidence. Here we go:

1) Coherent/consistent: The claim has to make sense. You have to define what you are talking about, in clear terms. It must be consistent with itself, and with the things we know about reality. If it's not coherent, there's nothing to test, I don't know what you are even claiming. If it's not consistent with itself, it's impossible. If it's not consistent with reality, it's also impossible, because we would have to throw out everything we think we know already just to consider this new claim. The reason for throwing out any conventional theory would have to be included to make this consistent.

2) Testable: The claim must be able to be investigated, in some way. If you are saying your claim is true, then you are saying you have reached that conclusion via some sort of method. So there must be some clear way in which the claim can be tested to find out whether it is true or not. If there is no way to test it, then that means the claim is either only true "for you" which makes it meaningless to anyone else, or it's just an assertion not backed by anything as you've refused to say how you even got to it in the first place. If there is no way to test your claim, no one can determine whether it is right or wrong. And if this is the case, no one can prove whether the opposite claim is right or wrong, either. So you are just arbitrarily choosing one of two positions, with no rational reason.

So my challenge is, can anyone come up with a non-trivial claim about God that meets these criteria? I have yet to see a single one. Only at that point does it make sense to even consider the evidence being presented, and to find out whether the claim is true, or most likely true.

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Also, if you want to present a case that claims which don't meet these criteria are still of any value to people other than yourself, please do.

Might I take a whack at it? I'm orthodox Christian btw and let it be known I'm not going to be writing necessarily about the Christian god.

1) Consistent - I believe that there could be a deity somewhere outside any physical limits of the universe/multiverse that was in some way responsible for the start of it all. Doesn't have to be humanoid or a spirit or anything because since it's outside of any physical definitions/ calculations. Call it a unicorn for all I care. So an unidentifiable entity beyond what we can see, touch, hear is the thing I'm trying to talk about. Since it's outside the "physical" universe/ sphere we can't sense it the way we sense humans or animals. But no harm in believing.

Testable- has anyone seen the matrix? He says something like "how do you define real? What you think is real is just electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
For all you know everything you see, hear, taste is not really there but something is tricking your brain with electrical signals.
That means there is the possibility that when you're walking you're not really walking but your brain thinks that you're walking. Maybe in reality you're lying in a forest and a little goblin is watching over you and controlling your brain signals. Imagine . . . you think you're smelling flowers but actually an elf is looking straight at you.
Maybe God is looking at you in heaven as you think you live your life in a small point in a universe that doesn't really exist. Maybe life is just a training program for heaven? Maybe there is no Omniverse but just one plane of existence in singularity- heaven?
BUT that makes no sense. Everything in this world is testable because it is made of matter. But a deity need not be made up of atoms. Maybe it's just some "thing" that isn't matter. Maybe it's just energy or something else. Sooo . . . Hope I answered sufficiently.

If not please write your point of view.

Of course you can Thank you for your answer, I liked it.

Indeed, what is real and unreal is a very difficult question. It's referred to as the problem of solipsism. We need to make certain assumptions in order to function at all. We either all agree that we have made them, or we cannot ever talk about anything. We assume our senses are giving us some roughly accurate view of things that are in some way real. We assume we can learn about this reality, whatever it is. That's about the minimum you need, or else no conversation can progress because nothing means anything. They cannot be fully justified (not yet anyhow, maybe never) except as a pragmatic approach.

After that, we have possibilities. Indeed yes, there could be some sort of thing that created our reality. I'm impressed to see you not shoe-horsing Yahweh in instantly on the sly, like is so often tried. My stance is that our knowledge points to a universe going back to virtually the Big Bang with good, natural explanations, and no need for any continuing interaction with the creator thing. So if it did create it, it's done with us, pending further information. At best it is observing, or interacting in ways specifically designed to be indistinguishable from what happens anyway. And expecting it to be intently observing our insignificant planet is a bit of a stretch.

If the creator is outside our reality, which seems the most plausible thing, then I would say it's impossible to test for it in any way, whether it's material or not. We are stuck with what is in this reality, unless some amazing new technology comes along.

So my conclusion is that there could be some external creator, but if so it is irrelevant, and untestable. There is however no good reason to assume there was a creator.

I think you came to kind of the same conclusion, but I tend to not put much stock in "could be" unless there is a reason to think there actually is. Adding unnecessary elements in an explanation tends to be a bad thing to do. Sure, almost anything "could be" the case, I don't deny it. Science instead worries just about what it can test, and doesn't speculate further except for new potential hypotheses with some grounding.

Very good answer I'm not trying to conclude that I'm right and you're wrong or anything, I think we approach the same results but from slightly different angles. My answer is a testable God claim is probably impossible, and you seem to agree.