Proof that God exists

[Angrboda]

I'm all for continuing to treat you like a dick.

[The Valkyrie]

I'm all for continuing to treat you like a dick.

Abusing regularly and inserting into random holes?

[Conspiracy_of_reason]

On a side note, I noticed you flubbed your quotation of Khemikal above. (It happens with newcomers.) The link below will give you the basics of BB code so you can understand things (like how to quote segments of another post point by point instead of the whole thing etc.)

https://atheistforums.org/thread-3560.html

Thank you for the help with quotes in posts.  

If we believe what science tells us is certain, then we are wrong. Science provides a framework in which conclusions can be reached based on experimental data. Anyone who understands science knows that. As long as we keep observing the universe, new data can come to light which challenges our previous conclusions.

I agree with you completely, I beleive I said something similar earlier.

Again, science requires little faith on our part. If we misunderstand gravity, there are enterprising theoreticians and experimenters who make it their life's work to correct this misunderstanding. "We might have gotten gravity wrong," is something you hear physicists say in pop science literature. Contrast this with your statement: "Yet we believe science tells us it is certain." Science doesn't tell us it is certain. It tells us that this is the best empirical understanding we have at this point. Contrast with religion. Religion "tells us it is certain." That's why so many reject it.

I don't agree with you on this point. Science has evolved exclusively to meet human needs, it is driven by our faith in theoreticians and experimenters who make it their life's work to correct the misunderstandings - even when science discloses a world we can never control let alone fully understand. Science has been used to support the conceit that humans will eventually understand the world, but what science really shows us is a Universe we cannot understand or control and we will never altar our ultimate destiny, extinction. It begs the question, 'why are we still trying?' and the answer to this is faith.

If you ask people why we continue with scientific study and exploration the answer you will get is because 'we might' ... correct the misunderstanding ... find our way to another inhabitable planet... learn to live beneath the sea ... find a cure for death ... et cetera. We might, we might not, and it is faith that give us the hope to cling on, exactly the same way religion does.

cor

[Amarok]

Paraphrasing: Conceptions of matter that have not been presented are of no concern to me . And are ultimately as baseless as matter that have been presented to me.  Therefore you don't believe in dark matter because no one has any idea what it is.

Nope this is a foolish comparison dark matter is both conceived and evidenced and presented .And yes they theoretically know what it is And are actively studying it .And as simon said we know matter exists thus it's not the same as god . And yes i need no more waste time on concepts of matter that have not been presented . Anymore then concepts of matter that are known and have failed to be evidenced . Both are not evidenced . This is just a rehatach of the tired theist argument "but there might be evidence someday " Do you have it now ? No then don't pester me with such claims . Till then i am justified in not accepting the claim .

Huh?  Huh

Neither have any evidence presented by it's source . So i treat them the same .

Awfully presumptuous and a bit arrogant to say evidence for god does not exist.  All you can say is that evidence has not yet been presented to you.  Or you could say that evidence has been presented, but you refused to see it as evidence.  But to say it does not exist... that's illogical.

I never said it does not exist strawman(considering i plainly said the word DEMONSTRATING) . To your second point . Yup that's the case so why did you impose a position i never stated .

yes, atheism is a belief.  It's a preference and opinion.  Show me how the conscious comes from the unconscious.  You can't.  And since you can't, it's a matter of preference to believe that it did.  Atheists are almost certainly fervently hoping some rationale will come to light one day that will prove their preference, which is antipodal to searching for evidence to disprove their hypothesis.

Nope atheism is the disbelief in a specific proposition . And no atheism is not attached to materialism nor any specific metaphysics. And no i don't hope for anything specific in regards to it. Your adding things to atheism that are not in the negation . 

Theism - belief god(s) exist in absence of proof that god(s) exist.
Agnosticism - no belief, not sure what to believe.
Atheism - belief no gods exist in absence of proof that no gods exist

Nope 
Agnostic Theism -  I believe in god but am not certain he exists 
Gnostic  Theism - I believe in god .And am certain he exists 
Agnosticism- Does not exist in pure form
Agnostic  Atheist   - I don't accept the theist existence of god . But am not certain if he exists 
Gnostic Atheism - I don't believe that god exists . And i'm certain 
 ( this is so because atheism and theism are questions about belief and disbelief . While Agnosticism and Gnosticism  are questions of confidence or epistemology )(not to mention there is a spectrum you can be more or less certain)

Prove the last one.

Don't need to as i'm not making a positive claim . 

t best you could say "I have no seen evidence of a god nor any rationale that sways me to suspect there is a god, but I cannot say for sure there is no god."  To go beyond that is a religion

nope what i can say is the source of the claim god exists cannot provide evidence of that claim . Thus i have no basis to accept that claim . Thus i disbelieve in it . No were in that statement is the notion that a god does not exist . You seriously need to educate yourself before commenting .

Then define agnosticism.  Can't have two words meaning the same thing

Simple it's a level of uncertainty in contrast with gnosticism which is certainty . This has little to do with atheism or theism as they are a different question . 

Yawn.  Heard that a million times.

And yet you fail to comprehend it

[The Grand Nudger]

I can say with complete and unassailable authority that "faith" isn't the reason I keep trying at anything in life, Cor.  I honestly doubt it's why anyone does..and if it were, that seems like an incredibly impoverished life.

It's certainly not what science is doing, why it's done, nor is it driven by yadda yadda yadda.

I'm the most meaningful sense, we seek to explain the universe because we do -not- have faith in it.  We're not content to hope that malaria will go away and life will go on, none of our prayers were working. I doubt that the universes heat death really informs anyone's actions today.  We keep at it because it keeps working....and that's the crucial, practical, difference. No one has faith in theoreticians or experimenters. We demand that they show their work, and they do. Whether science ever discovers every mystery of the universe is irrelevant. It discovers plenty today and that plenty is important enough. More is icing, because the universe doesn't owe us jack. Some of us even think it's fun and exciting...imagine that, no other motivation required.

We get this song and dance with regularity, here, and it's -always- been bullshit. Sometimes troll bullshit, sometimes earnest bullshit...but always bullshit. I don't think there's a variant of the conflation between faith and science that I haven't heard over the years. Yours is a variant of "the promissory note of science". We generally see it in criticism of alleged scientism, and..ofc, how science is totally like religion...faith faith faith faith faith.

Compare this with a less novel concept of faith in contrast. Gods never show their work, they do not produce results..and have solved precisely zero of these mysteries of the universe....and yet people to continue to grant them credibility. If the thing religious people are doing is "faith"..you can use the word faith all you like to describe science or confidence in science...but it;s painfully obvious that you're still talking about two things that are as different as night and day.

This is a semantic game, not a profound comment on the nature of science or it's relationship to faith, or our relationship to either.

[Simon Moon]

My hypothesis is that theists have not met their burden of proof. I have no justification to believe a god exists. That position for me, is a provisional one. If I was presented with demonstrable evidence and reasoned argument to support the claim that a god exists, I would no longer ba an atheist.

You're agnostic because you have no knowledge that a god exists.  An atheist goes beyond simple lack of knowledge with the assertion that there are no gods.  That assertion requires knowledge, evidence, rationale, something.

Yes, I am agnostic for the reason you mention.

But you are wrong about atheist asserting that gods don't exist. Just disbelieving that they do exist is all that is needed for the atheist label.

Even if you look at the etymology of the word, it proves our point:

Theist - belief in the existence of a god or gods

A + theism - The "A" prefix means "without" or "not". Added to theist, it means "without belief in a god". There is nothing in the definition of atheism that requires an assertion that gods do not exist.

I don't know why atheists take nomenclature so personally; it's just a label to succinctly convey information about an ideology.  Why does it matter if the label is spelled a+t+h+e+i+s+t or a+g+n+o+s+t+i+c???

Because we are not just having casual conversations here. We are having conversations that require specific, formal, definitions, so we are not talking past each other. Colloquial definitions won't do.

fehjgsef = person who believes gods exist
fhadjkbb = person who doesn't believe anything
jgbrjebt = person who believes no gods exist.

The first word describes a theist.

I am not sure what your second word means, because everyone has beliefs. If you mean "a person that does not believe in gods", then it is describing an atheist.

The third word describes a strong or explicit atheist. Some atheists are this type. Some simply lack belief in gods, or weak or implicit atheists.

Sorry that you are so hung up on the words, and are unable to understand the nuances of the actual position.

Pick one.  Why does it matter how it's spelled?  Why contort atheism to mean agnosticism?

i don't contort atheism to mean agnosticism. They are answers to different questions.

i understand that one of those words relates to knowledge, and one relates to belief.

[Amarok]

You're agnostic because you have no knowledge that a god exists.  An atheist goes beyond simple lack of knowledge with the assertion that there are no gods.  That assertion requires knowledge, evidence, rationale, something.

No they don't . An atheist can be  someone who lacks belief in god (negative atheism ) . But and agnostic atheist is someone who lacks belief in god  but claims no cetainity in his rejection . 

Negative Atheism -  A lack of belief or rejects the claim of theism 
Agnosticism - Not claiming certainty  about said rejection of theism 

I don't know why atheists take nomenclature so personally; it's just a label to succinctly convey information about an ideology.  Why does it matter if the label is spelled a+t+h+e+i+s+t or a+g+n+o+s+t+i+c???

Because ones about a lack of belief the other is about a lack of certainty . And one can be both.

fehjgsef = person who believes gods exist
fhadjkbb = person who doesn't believe anything
jgbrjebt = person who believes no gods exist.

The first is a theist (could be Agnostic or Gnostic ) 
The second is a nihilism 
The third is Positive Atheism 

Pick one.  Why does it matter how it's spelled?  Why contort atheism to mean agnosticism?

No i don't have to pick one .as they mean different things. One is a question of belief the other is a question of confidence .

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Atheism 

Positive atheism - The belief that no god exists 
Negative atheism - The rejection of the theistic claim that god exists 
Agnostic atheism - A person who lacks certainty  on the question of gods existence . 
Gnostic Atheist - A person who has certainty  no god exists

[vulcanlogician]

I don't agree with you on this point. Science has evolved exclusively to meet human needs,

Like the "human need" to accelerate particles to near light speed, have them collide with other particles, and then record what happens in the aftermath?

it is driven by our faith in  the curiosity and dedication of theoreticians and experimenters who make it their life's work to correct the misunderstandings - 

FTFY

If you ask people why we continue with scientific study and exploration the answer you will get is because 'we might' ... correct the misunderstanding ... find our way to another inhabitable planet... learn to live beneath the sea ... find a cure for death ... et cetera. 

That's what people say in defense of science. What drives science first and foremost is intellectual curiosity. The thing that drives religion is a lack thereof.

We might, we might not, and it is faith that give us the hope to cling on, exactly the same way religion does.

You may have a point about faith giving us the hope to cling on... I am reading some philosophy right now that is trying to make this case. I am going to post a thread about it in the next week or two. Hopefully you'll respond to it. For now, I will simply say that, yes, for battered and broken individuals, religion may provide a sense of transcendence which endows them with the enthusiasm to press on despite difficulties. But at the societal level--in modern times--religion is little more than a stumbling block.

[Conspiracy_of_reason]

Yeah, I chunk it up for clarity most of the time.  There is no such thing as a "common reality of religion", as all of the warring sects and every apologist who comes here with a different story about the same magic book makes perfectly clear.  Every religion has it's fair share of devils, the rituals never work.  

You and I seem to be having a perfectly intelligible conversation with the inclusion of 'Religion', we are not struggling with the concept, are we. Basic linguistics would suggest without a common understanding we could not be having this conversation. We would appear to have a common reality of religion.

There's a crushing mound of evidence the sun will rise tomorrow as well.  It's a fun little chestnut we call orbital mechanics.  

This is an interesting approach.

I'm suggesting that the sun might not rise tomorrow because science and its observations are historical and do not provide any evidence of future events, observations like orbital mechanics. Your response to this is the sun will rise because of orbital mechanics?

This is the kind of circular reasoning a Christian might deploy when saying the bible is real because god says so in the bible. Somewhat unconvincing.

It doesn't matter what I believe.  All that matters is that by referencing examples we are setting metrics.  If a person mentions progress..you ask them what they mean..and they say x, y, and z....there you go.  We could only insist that we haven't made progress or that it's some murky non-thing -before- a person lists off what they're using as metrics.  After that - it's just an issue of checking the numbers.  

No, we are not setting metrics, we are plucking arbitrary notions out of thin air. This is not empirical nor is it scientific, it's just made up. Mind you, if we wrote it all down you could create your own 'magic book' of progress.

Why would humanity have to have some universal goal for there to be progress?  Most of the time that's not how progress is made...though I'm sure it would help if we all came together to do something.  Just an interesting thing that stuck out, sidebar. 

When Flemming discovered penicillin was good for killing bacteria he and pretty much the rest of human thought it was progress, in fact, he won the Nobel Prize for it. On the face of it, this looks like progress, people can get cured of bacterial infections fairly easily with a course of antibiotics, we relax our behaviours around wound cleaning and general hygiene because infections are not a big deal. Fast-forward to today, bacteria have mutated, evolved to be resistant to antibiotics, but we have fallen out of practice on how to keep wounds clean and general hygiene. so what once looked like progress has turned out to be nothing of the sort, in fact, it's made the situation worse because these new strains of bacteria are super resilient to basic hygiene and are getting stronger. The situation is so bad the WHO has issued a warning.

Unless we use some kind of Universal measure that is independent of humans we cannot measure progress objectively.

Progress doesn't always bring the happy feels, ask the luddites.  Does how you feel about something change the fact that we've raised the global life expectancy?  If you felt differently about it..would it go down, or up?

Here's a fun one, why isn't the desire for life an "objective measure"?  You either do or don't want to live.  You either are or are not alive. Objectively desiring something objective seems like a hell of alot of objectivity for something that isn't an "objective measure".  

Because 'desire' is a personal subjective experience.

IDK, 365 days...12 months, 1 year.  Seems like an independent universal measure.  Either you can expect more of them or you can't, and it doesn't seem to matter how you or anyone else feels about it. 

How is this example related to progress?

You reject science or human progress?  You can reject the latter if you like...but not because there's no such thing, or because it's a victorian word that has no place in science, or because there's no "universal goal", or because there's no objective or independent standard.  There is such a thing and here we are (and all that we are) as a testament to it.  Lots of words and concepts are putatively victorian.  We haven't had to band together into a universal goal to effect it as of yet, and it abounds with needling detail on the specific and objective metrics we use to assess it.  

I reject the notion of progress and by extension that science drives progress.

Imagine everything else is shit.  We're doing no better anywhere else......but we live longer.  Isolate that one metric from all the noise.  Can you tell me, without irrelevance and rationalization...why a level headed person might hesitate to call that progress?  Just that alone?  Of course that's not the only metric being referred to when a person discusses human progress, is it?  If we listed every category we're doing better in it would take us eons.

You could -only- be insisting that the things we call progress...while they objectively do exist and have occurred and are an improvement over old metrics..aren't all that we make it out to be.  They just aren't so awesome, lol.   Well...the luddites didn't think so either...and yet the very things they destroyed, and the very force they attempted to resist....was a component of human progress all the same.  You won't find me smashing up any cotton mills.

Longer life = faster resource depletion, faster transmission of pandemics (black death took hundreds of years to get across Europe, bird flu took days to arrive from China), less living space, more disputes and wars, more poverty, more extreme poverty (right now more than half of the world's population lives in poverty, over 1.1 Billion live in extreme poverty any increase in Western longevity negatively impacts these figures)... do I need to go on.

Your point is predicated on your own very narrow, very privileged worldview. For every item you call progress there are hundreds of issues why others would not see it that way because it is an individual viewpoint and not a paradigm for the human race.

You have no idea what living longer will do for our great, great, great grandchildren, but they are humans too and you cannot call 'progress' without acknowledging the potential impact of what we have wrought, and you simply do not have the information to do that. We may well be back to cotton mills if we exhaust the ability to produce power (resource depletion). I don't know if any of this will come to pass, neither do you and any call is one of pure belief, but I'm not the one calling religion out am I? We could call arbitrary measures, just call them out without recourse to reason or logic, or even science, but that way lies religion and you can't have your cake and eat it.

cor

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Like the "human need" to accelerate particles to near light speed, have them collide with other particles, and then record what happens in the aftermath?

No, like the need to observe it and theorise about it.

FTFY

Very kind but it was better the way it was.  

That's what people say in defence of science. What drives science first and foremost is intellectual curiosity. The thing that drives religion is a lack thereof.

Firstly, I'm glad you finally see science serves human needs. To be fair your comment about religion is unfounded, anthropologically speaking religion is far more likely to have been driven by the need to protect the individual by forming larger social groups (not that we know for certain). Society is a great defence strategy though.

You may have a point about faith giving us the hope to cling on... I am reading some philosophy right now that is trying to make this case. I am going to post a thread about it in the next week or two. Hopefully, you'll respond to it. For now, I will simply say that, yes, for battered and broken individuals, religion may provide a sense of transcendence which endows them with the enthusiasm to press on despite difficulties. But at the societal level--in modern times--religion is little more than a stumbling block.

Don't underestimate how deeply the structures of belief are embedded in the human psyche. There must be an evolutionary reason why religion, in some form or other, has sprung up across the globe in disparate cultures*, and why science has successfully supplanted it in the West. It seems an unlikely coincidence when there are plenty of other social constructs that arose before science that didn't challenge it. A good scientist never misses a clue.

*I have read somewhere (but I can't remember where) that there have only been two recorded incidents of isolated cultures with no formal religious structures (although they had informal belief structures similar to 'luck' and 'fate'). That is a statistic worthy of scientific attention.

cor

[vulcanlogician]

There must be an evolutionary reason why religion, in some form or other, has sprung up across the globe

Maybe for the same reason that the appendix sprung up in human biology. It served a purpose once. 

But now the question is: is it harmless or does it need to be removed? I tolerate religion so long as it is harmless. Otherwise, it has to go.

You seem to be missing something about evolution. It sometimes leaves us with useless artifacts. I got my wisdom teeth removed because (not only did they serve no purpose) they caused me a great deal of pain and strife. Of course our broad-jawed ancestors used to chew food with their wisdom teeth. However, the modern sapien jaw is shaped in a way which renders them useless. Perhaps religions are the "wisdom teeth" of society.

IMO Science hasn't replaced religion until "science centers" are found every other block and is is common for people to visit them once a week or so. Wouldn't that be neat? But it ain't gonna happen. You know why? Because science is a completely different enterprise. I admit that in ancient times, religion provided explanations for things and (in this regard) science has replaced it. But I disagree that science has replaced religion in regard to being an "object of faith."