(November 11, 2018 at 3:37 am)Everena Wrote: And, my beliefs are built on the ability to apply logic and conclude what is fairly obvious, combined with numerous shared/mutual experiences and signs that have proven God to me beyond any and all doubt.
Ah... experiences... I think you may find that your brain is fully capable of fabricating those experiences, even apparently shared ones, and keep you oblivious to the fact that they were fabricated, instead making you believe that they're real, external occurrences.
If you apply logic to faulty premises, like these faulty brain states, then it is fairly obvious that the outcome is also faulty.
(November 11, 2018 at 3:48 am)Everena Wrote: Theists are fully aware that higher intelligence was necessary for this to all come to be as it has.
I think you messed up the order here... but it's alright, most theists do that.
Metaphysics, that thing that Thomas Aquinas built up for the Catholic Church, on the shoulders of great Greek thinkers like Plato, posits that the meta-feature of intelligence, call it the concept of intelligence, or the "form" of intelligence, must precede intelligence itself.
God is defined as that which possesses this form, and all other forms, all other meta-features of the world.
So, first humans noticed that there are patterns in the world and they classified those patterns. Then they forgot about this and assumed that the patterns precede the world, leading to the "logical" conclusion that there must be a "pattern origin" that bestows these patterns on everything. The most basic or fundamental pattern being "existence". Without existence, nothing exists, right? God is existence itself, you might say.
But I'm more convinced that existence is a label human minds have attributed to everything that exists, in opposition to things that are imagined... although, one might say that imagined things exist too, it's just that it is a different category of existence to physical existence.
So... even the concept of existence itself has a few caveats to deal with.
If I can say that Darth Vader exists, that the Star Wars Universe exists, even if not as a physical Universe, then, under the same concept of existence, I can easily say that the Christian god exists, just like I can say that the Norse gods exist, or the Egyptian gods, or any of the thousands of gods that mankind has ever believed in.
If I restrict the concept of existence to physical existence, then, along with all fiction, all religions are absent. Consciousness would also be absent, I guess, as it is a product of brain activity, of collective neurologic activity, and this activity would also include imagination... bah...
(November 11, 2018 at 3:52 am)Everena Wrote: I see God as a massive form of energy that always has been and always will, just like our higher selves.
Our higher selves?.... like souls? the forms, there's that word again, the forms of our individual selves? The personality without memory, without experience? The part of us that precedes our life and carries on after our life? Is that it?
Also, if god somehow generated the cosmos, it stands to reason that god would generate time and space, also known as space-time. But you speak as if god is an entity within time, as if time "precedes" god, as if god requires time in order to exist. Have you ever thought about this? Have you ever tried to be more careful with your words so as to avoid this precedence, because it seems to me that you want to make the case that god precedes everything, even space and time.
I say this because it is well known that empty space-time can bring about particles and energy, so, if space-time precedes god, then a Universe can be brought forth without god's intervention.
I know it's difficult for us lowly humans to think in terms of absence of time. Any action we can imagine requires time. Time is always a prerequisite.
But you want your god notion to have action in the absence of time. You want god to create without building blocks. You want god to do magic.
I want to do magic, too... Ever since I was a very young child... but "there's no such thing as magic" in the real world, in the physical Universe... and "there's no such thing as god" seems like an apt corollary justifying atheism as a logical position.
I'm not even touching in the bit that you mention about god being energy... that's too much woo and this post is already too long.
Thank you for reading it in full, I hope I made some sense and, in the process, made you think and be more careful with the way you present your position.