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Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?
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RE: Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?
October 7, 2018 at 11:31 pm
(This post was last modified: October 7, 2018 at 11:32 pm by GrandizerII.)
There's nothing much a theist could offer in terms of evidence, if any.
The best they can do is appeal to popularity, recite some philosophical arguments that purportedly show their favorite god is the best explainer of this and that, pretend some vague scholarly consensus favors their specific views, refer to third-hand testimonies of apparent multitudes of eyewitnesses, and allude to supposed miracles which we never get to see for ourselves. And also, personal experiences of fuzzy feelings and bizarre coincidences which they somehow attribute to their favorite god. Nothing impressive or concrete as evidence. (October 7, 2018 at 9:07 pm)Rahn127 Wrote: Does anyone have any tangible proof that a god exists ? Maybe people who believed in Thor or Zeus thought that there was tangible evidence. In both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, though, which make up the bulk of Christian theology, nobody expects tangible (touchable, empirical) evidence of God. They don't think he's (it's) that kind of thing. Roughly speaking, for them, we know about God the way we know about numbers. Nobody has ever touched the number two, but we extrapolate facts about it based on our experiences of two of this and two of that. Working from these basic experiences, Platonists extrapolate an immaterial but eternal ideal called the Good, which Christians identify with God. Aristotelians notice the actualization of potential in the world, and from this develop elaborate and difficult arguments to conclude that there must be full actualization with no potential, which the Christians identify with God. In neither case is this God something you can hold up and show, as you do with your telephone. I'm not saying that their arguments should persuade you, necessarily. Just that the complaints you make in the OP aren't things that are relevant to the main traditions of theology. RE: Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?
October 8, 2018 at 12:39 am
(This post was last modified: October 8, 2018 at 12:52 am by Rahn127.)
Well instead of hard evidence, maybe you could give me a collection of stories, started thousands of years ago, from an oral tradition of passing down stories from generation to generation, that have been rewritten thousands of times with over 30,000 different versions and has thousands of transcription errors with many parts that contradict each other and other parts that simply get everything wrong about reality.
Oh and make it old as fuck, written by unknown authors and put together by people who decided for themselves what would be allowed in their book and what wouldn't. (October 8, 2018 at 12:19 am)Belaqua Wrote:(October 7, 2018 at 9:07 pm)Rahn127 Wrote: Does anyone have any tangible proof that a god exists ? Numbers are labels we put on a defined quantity of existing items. I am touching ONE letter at a time on my ONE phone. Please show me evidence of ONE god. We don't know about an undefined, unknown X, that we label god in the same way we know about numbers. We can demonstrate the number 4 Here are four letters. FOUR. If I put four apples on a table I can demonstrate the number 4. Can they demonstrate their god ?
Insanity - Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result
(October 8, 2018 at 12:39 am)Rahn127 Wrote: Numbers are labels we put on a defined quantity of existing items.It seems likely that this is how people started thinking about numbers. As math progressed, we now have irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, negative numbers, and other things that go beyond simply labeling quantities of existing things. Based on simple evidence of how we think about things, we end up with a world we know through logic and not through sense experience. Probably there's a very large prime number that no human has ever thought or written down. Does it exist, even though no one has ever thought it? Or does it exist somewhere, waiting for us to find it? A lot of people think that such numbers are real things, despite being non-tangible, or even not being directly mappable onto physical reality. I'm not saying God is a number, of course. And I'm aware that lots of people in history have said different things about their religions, which aren't compatible with the Platonic or Aristotelian traditions. Still, I think it's misguided to demand direct sense experience of a thing which educated believers have said from the beginning is not something you can sense. RE: Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?
October 8, 2018 at 1:18 am
(This post was last modified: October 8, 2018 at 1:20 am by Rahn127.)
(October 8, 2018 at 1:08 am)Belaqua Wrote:(October 8, 2018 at 12:39 am)Rahn127 Wrote: Numbers are labels we put on a defined quantity of existing items. And yet people claim to sense it. They claim to have a relationship with it. They claim to love it and to know without a doubt that it loves them back. They claim to know attributes about it when it's something that they can't define in any tangible way. What is the numerical value of X ? They would claim the value of X is infinity and yet they can't demonstrate that the value of X is greater than ZERO.
Insanity - Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result
...or relevant to religious practices both modern and ancient. There are things that have been considered god, that undoubtly exists or existed, that the OP would not consider a god or godlike. In the end, a god is something that is worshiped. Arguments against the existence of god can devolve in an argument over the "worthiness" of something to be worshiped more than it's actual existence.
RE: Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?
October 8, 2018 at 1:33 am
(This post was last modified: October 8, 2018 at 1:34 am by Belacqua.)
(October 8, 2018 at 1:18 am)Rahn127 Wrote: And yet people claim to sense it. Well, all those are different claims than that the thing exists. There would have to be further elaborations of the argument, or different arguments, to explain how "personal relationships" or whatever are possible. As for "defining in any tangible way," I wonder if that's a bit of a confusion. Tangibility is sensory. A definition can't be tangible, as it's made of words. Theological traditions give definitions of what (they conclude) God is, though, as I said, they don't hold that he's tangible. (October 8, 2018 at 1:29 am)epronovost Wrote: In the end, a god is something that is worshiped. Ooh, that seems dangerous to me. Just because people worship a meteorite that fell from the sky, doesn't mean it's really a god. It may mean that people mistakenly believe it's one.
Just look around you. That's all the evidence you should need.
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