Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?

[SteveII]

Steve, do you have any facts or information that would indicate that the proposition "a god exists" is true ?

I just listed like 20 points that qualify for "facts or information". In those 20 points was the unbroken, reported personal experiences of God from like a billion people. Is a billion pieces of "fact or information" enough? 

Let's start by describing the god you believes exists and how you obtained this description.

Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, creator of all there is, the God partially revealed in the OT and then the incarnation described in the events of the NT as a God who sacrificed for us and who wants to have a personal relationship with us. 

Information from: natural theology, revealed theology, inferred systematic theology, personal experience of me and others.


I notice that you seem to have a need to keep the conversation as vague as possible. You actually asked for theists to answer your OP. But I think that you thought you would get answers that you could just dismiss with a condescending line or two about the Bible. Your actual knowledge of the subject is so weak that you need to keep things vague to mask it. If I'm right, you are nothing more than a simple-minded member of the atheist echo chamber. Congrats.

If I am wrong, you will address my evidence point by point as your OP implied you wanted to discuss. 

Which is it? Simple-minded or intelligent discussion.

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1) You have an 'alternative explanation' to the NT that has evidence? That would be a first.

2) There is an 'alternate explanation' to billions of people's experience? Is it a billion explanations or just one covers everyone?

3) There is an 'alternate explanation' why anything exists? Do tell.

4) There is an 'alternate explanation' for where the universe came from? Do tell.

5) There is an 'alternate explanation' for consciousness? Do tell.

1) Not me, per se -- Biblical scholars.  I personally prefer Bart Ehrman's detective work which concludes that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, based on a careful study of the Gospels.

https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Apocalyptic...art+ehrman

2) Billions of people can and do misinterpret their personal experiences, as psychology has shown.

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Gorilla...le+gorilla

3 and 4) You are assuming that the universe came from nothing, which even the big bang theory does not assume.  The universe, in some form, may have existed forever.  After all, energy doesn't seem to be either created or destroyed, just transformed.  We don't really know yet, but your jumping to conclusions proves nothing.  Further, other scientists have speculated how it is indeed possible for something to come from nothing (without anything supernatural involved).

https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-...e+big+bang

5) Consciousness is not a separate being, it is a process of physical bodies and specifically physical brains.  It varies with brain chemistry and structure.

https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Sci...sciousness

So yes, there are alternative explanations for each of your points, and from my perspective every one is more probable than yours because they do no depend on the existence of a whole other spiritual or supernatural dimension to reality.  The more moving parts any explanation requires, the less probable it's likely to be.  Your explanations are way too complicated for what they are required to explain.

I am happy to discuss each point with you in as much detail as you like. However, I am not going to have dueling Amazon book links. Pick one and give me the basics.

I'll start on the one you did actually expand on. The reason there must be a first cause is that a infinite amount of past causes/effects is not logically possible. There is no such possibility as an actual infinite number of anything in the real world. If there were an infinite number of past events, we could never have gotten to the events of today because there would still need to be an infinite amount of events that need to pass before we can get to today. 

No scientist has ever had a theory where things come into being ex nihilo.

[Minimalist]

Evidence refers to pieces of information or facts that help us establish the truth of something.

If only you had some, Stevie.  What you have are the deluded ramblings of anonymous believers.  They have not been examined to determine the credibility of their claims.  You are so quick to dismiss the deluded ramblings of other non-jesus-freak lunatics that you fail to comprehend that your bullshit rests on exactly the same shaky foundation.

[Alan V]

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1) Not me, per se -- Biblical scholars.  I personally prefer Bart Ehrman's detective work which concludes that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, based on a careful study of the Gospels.

https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Apocalyptic...art+ehrman

2) Billions of people can and do misinterpret their personal experiences, as psychology has shown.

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Gorilla...le+gorilla

3 and 4) You are assuming that the universe came from nothing, which even the big bang theory does not assume.  The universe, in some form, may have existed forever.  After all, energy doesn't seem to be either created or destroyed, just transformed.  We don't really know yet, but your jumping to conclusions proves nothing.  Further, other scientists have speculated how it is indeed possible for something to come from nothing (without anything supernatural involved).

https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-...e+big+bang

5) Consciousness is not a separate being, it is a process of physical bodies and specifically physical brains.  It varies with brain chemistry and structure.

https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Sci...sciousness

So yes, there are alternative explanations for each of your points, and from my perspective every one is more probable than yours because they do no depend on the existence of a whole other spiritual or supernatural dimension to reality.  The more moving parts any explanation requires, the less probable it's likely to be.  Your explanations are way too complicated for what they are required to explain.

I am happy to discuss each point with you in as much detail as you like. However, I am not going to have dueling Amazon book links. Pick one and give me the basics.

I'll start on the one you did actually expand on. The reason there must be a first cause is that a infinite amount of past causes/effects is not logically possible. There is no such possibility as an actual infinite number of anything in the real world. If there were an infinite number of past events, we could never have gotten to the events of today because there would still need to be an infinite amount of events that need to pass before we can get to today. 

No scientist has ever had a theory where things come into being ex nihilo.

Moving the goalposts fallacy.  You only asked for me to show there were indeed alternative explanations.  I have done so, whether you investigate them on your own or not.  Plus I already offered short summaries.

With quantum mechanics, scientists have already shown that the physical world can behave in non-intuitive ways.  So neither of your arguments, against infinities and against ex nihilo creation, may be correct in reality.

[HappySkeptic]

P13. There are reason to think that naturalism is an insufficient worldview and the existence of the supernatural has better explanatory powers in a variety of these gaps. (from [b]P6, P7, P8, P9, P10)
[/b]

The supernatural has no explanatory power.

[SteveII]

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I am happy to discuss each point with you in as much detail as you like. However, I am not going to have dueling Amazon book links. Pick one and give me the basics.

I'll start on the one you did actually expand on. The reason there must be a first cause is that a infinite amount of past causes/effects is not logically possible. There is no such possibility as an actual infinite number of anything in the real world. If there were an infinite number of past events, we could never have gotten to the events of today because there would still need to be an infinite amount of events that need to pass before we can get to today. 

No scientist has ever had a theory where things come into being ex nihilo.

Moving the goalposts fallacy.  You only asked for me to show there were indeed alternative explanations.  I have done so, whether you investigate them on your own or not.  Plus I already offered short summaries.

With quantum mechanics, scientists have already shown that the physical world can behave in non-intuitive ways.  So neither of your arguments, against infinities and against ex nihilo creation, may be correct in reality.

Fine. My point would have been there are problems with those alternate explanations so they might not actually be explanations to the Christian beliefs/worldview. Silly me, I thought you wanted to have a discussion on...well...a discussion forum. Well, I'm not doing both sides of it.

You can have your over-used quantum mechanics red herring--although I have no idea how it get's you around the infinity problem.

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I once had someone in a discussion propose to me that the mere ability to conceive of something increases the probability that it is true or that it exists.  He gave as reference someone named Sobel, but I've since forgotten to which Sobel he had referred.  I chose to accept his proposition for the sake of argument.  There seems to be a similar question afoot here, as well.  While one may judge the relative probabilities of the various elements of Steve's inductive argument, by accepting that they have a probability, you are implicitly granting that the probability is non-zero, i.e. that the events in question are not impossible.  Any such thing which has a non-zero probability thus becomes valid evidence in an inductive argument, no matter how weak it is.  If that is all that one means when one says that there is a valid inductive case for the existence of God, then, perhaps, but that seems little more than accepting the idea that God existing is a coherent proposition.  It seems that this acceptance is doing most of the work here (though I have no doubt that Steve thinks other facts are doing more work here than that).  So I guess I'm nonplussed about any such inductive arguments unless they can be shown to be doing more work than that.  That is where I suspect the crux of the matter lies.  I'm not going to argue the matter, but I think that Hume's objection that any explanation is more likely than a miracle cuts some ice here.  If that is true, then accepting arguments such as Steve's as inductive arguments for the proposition of God amounts to accepting that certain things that are less probable than other things are actually more probable than the things they are less probable than, and that would simply be irrational.  So, to Steve's argument, I would suggest that for the inductive case to have any merit, we must first assume that the concept of God is coherent, which not all of us do (and if it isn't coherent, believing it is necessarily irrational), and that Hume was wrong.  I don't think it's up to the atheist to prove that Hume was right by providing the explicit alternative explanation to the satisfaction of the theist, that is just a sucker bet.  Given that the argument, even if inductive, is a positive claim, it must refute all defeaters, not simply assert an argument of ignorance with respect to those defeaters, as it seems to be here.

Coincidentally I'm listening to a podcast on Hume/miracles during my commute. I'll finish on the way home and respond.

[Rahn127]

Steve, do you have any facts or information that would indicate that the proposition "a god exists" is true ?

I just listed like 20 points that qualify for "facts or information". In those 20 points was the unbroken, reported personal experiences of God from like a billion people. Is a billion pieces of "fact or information" enough? 

Personal experiences aren't going to cut it.
First off, you discount the personal experiences from people who are of a different religious upbringing than you are.
Delusions don't count as facts.
Keep trying

Let's start by describing the god you believes exists and how you obtained this description.

Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, creator of all there is, the God partially revealed in the OT and then the incarnation described in the events of the NT as a God who sacrificed for us and who wants to have a personal relationship with us. 

Information from: natural theology, revealed theology, inferred systematic theology, personal experience of me and others.

How did you determine that this god is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, creator of all there is ?

Are you basing all of those attributes upon what others have said ?

A billion people can describe a rock as Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, creator of all there is, but that doesn't make it true.

You have to demonstrate that a god exists and demonstrate that it has these attributes.
You can't just assert it and so far that's all you've done.

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As for all of those theologies. They are the same study of religious belief. That's all.

You're free to believe whatever you want, but again, what you believe doesn't count as a fact or as information unless you can demonstrate that belief to be true.

You must provide something more substantial than personal experience.

Everything you've said from page 1 all comes down to stories people have written down about their personal experiences.

None of those personal experiences can be demonstrated.

If I get a million people telling me how beautiful the beaches are in Hawaii, I can believe them because I can verify their story. I can go to Hawaii. It's a real place.

How do we go about verifying your personal experiences ? Forget all the other billions of people, let's verify your experience.

What happened ? What did you see or hear ?
Or maybe it was a long series of coincidences that couldn't have happened any other way.

A god had to have done it.

I'll await your future fallacies.

[HappySkeptic]

Moving the goalposts fallacy.  You only asked for me to show there were indeed alternative explanations.  I have done so, whether you investigate them on your own or not.  Plus I already offered short summaries.

With quantum mechanics, scientists have already shown that the physical world can behave in non-intuitive ways.  So neither of your arguments, against infinities and against ex nihilo creation, may be correct in reality.

Fine. My point would have been there are problems with those alternate explanations so they might not actually be explanations to the Christian beliefs/worldview. Silly me, I thought you wanted to have a discussion on...well...a discussion forum. Well, I'm not doing both sides of it.

You can have your over-used quantum mechanics red herring--although I have no idea how it get's you around the infinity problem.

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The argument "there can't be an infinite regression to the past" is reasonable when discussing the current nature of our universe.  Infinite regression can best be disproved by thermodynamics.

However, thermodynamics is a property of the current universe, since the big-bang.  Our laws of physics, and even the existence of time itself only has meaning from that moment onward.  There have been proposals that the big-bang actually created two universes, moving in opposite directions in time.

As for quantum-mechanics, we have no theory which can model a singularity, but we know it will be something new.  Quantum mechanics does away with strict causality, and deals with probabilities.  All possibilities are probed, while only one history seems realized in the long-term.

Trying to use common-sense regression ideas to explain the universe fails.  We know it fails.  We don't know all the answers, but inserting "God" has never increased scientific knowledge,, ever.  The big-bang is a better stopping point for infinite regression than any imagined deity, but few scientists think that is the beginning of "existence" itself.

[Rahn127]

On the idea of infinite regression

The energy of the universe exists.
Let's go back in time.

Can you point to a time when the energy of the universe didn't exist ?

There is no such thing as an infinite amount of time before time came into existence.

It's nonsensical

From a cosmological standpoint, we can track the energy of the universe back to the beginnings of the expansion.

If I use my imagination and go back further, the energy of the universe is still there. I don't know what kind of unified state it's in, but it's there. It doesn't suddenly disappear. Where would it go ?

If I imagine even further, I can see the energy of the universe remaining the same.

At this point zero time and infinite time are the same thing.

Just my two cents.

[Minimalist]

Delusions don't count as facts.

They do to religitards.

[Mystic]

The nice thing about God's proof is that it's God's light connected to all things and connects to God and points to him by being a reflection of his attributes and glorifying him accurately and being the balance by which all deeds are held account to. It's rational that God if he exists could bring down a proof and light from him, and not only rational that he can, but rational that he would. The witness is not far, look within yourself, and you will find God and his Guide both with you and beyond you, like blue butt Rafiki told Simba "look harder, see, he lives in you".

The name of God is a living word of truth, and beautiful names of God and his perfect words, they are his proofs, and they come together as chosen ones and a way to God, split after the founder, in Twelve courses/ways back to God, and they are the guides and leaders and stars of guidance to hold on to, and bright suns of which the final stage will be a day without night.