RE: Proving God in 20 statements
April 2, 2016 at 2:18 pm
(This post was last modified: April 2, 2016 at 2:23 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(March 31, 2016 at 11:39 pm)smfortune Wrote: PROOF >>>
There are no uncaused things. : From Cosmological Arguments
The Universe is a thing.
The Universe is caused (be it internally [self-caused] or externally).
∀x[Tx → Cx], Tu: Cu
1. ∀x[Tx → Cx] P (Premise)
2. Tu P
Proof:
3. Tu → Cu 1 UI (Universal Instantiation)
4. Cu 2, 3 MP (Modus Ponens)
You forgot to name what God does this supposedly proves? Hercules? Hanuman? Xenu?
But this is actually based on a very old joke dating back to the year 1773 when a Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler called French encyclopedist Denis Diderot to a duel of arguments for existence of God. Denis Diderot was against and Leonhard Euler was for. This was all happening in Russian court and when Diderot accepted the challenge Euler said, "Sir, [something like] (a+b.) * n=x, therefore God exists. Refute that!" Diderot, who knew no mathematics, had no answer, retired in confusion and asked permission to return to France. Euler's argument was, of course, nonsense. It was nothing but a practical joke. To this day, there is no mathematical proof of God's existence that anyone of importance accepts.
And this is also called the judo argument because judo is the art of using the opponent's own strength against him because God's existence is a matter that lies fundamentally beyond the ability of man to observe, measure, and reason out; and must be based on revelation and faith alone. This, in fact, is the attitude of almost all the Believers in our Western culture. They wave the Bible (or some equivalent authority) and that ends the argument.
There's no point in arguing with that, of course. You cannot very well reason with someone whose basic line of argument is that reason doesn't count. So when believers resort to arguments in favor of the existence of God that are based on scientific findings then we call them "judo arguments."
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"