Which Comes First?

[Ryft]

My interpretation of the Bible is that God acts on reality, so therefore he should leave evidence.

(1) Please provide an example of one of those acts from the Bible, and then (2) articulate what sort of evidence you think it should leave behind, such that it would indicate God as the agent to you.

So Jesus was never spatio-temporal?

Certainly he was. However, I did not presume that you accept Jesus as God incarnate. If you do, then that shifts the argument significantly and makes it easier. But if you do not—which I suspect to be the case—then let us disregard this tangent and focus our attention on why you're expecting empirical evidence for something that has no spatio-temporal properties.

Depends on what you mean by proposition.

You know I'm a student of philosophy. Ergo, you should know I mean it in its philosophical sense. (If you follow the Quine school, think 'sentence'. If you follow the Strawson school, think 'statement'. Take your pick; they all predicate the same thing.) For instance, when you said that "reality is real," that is a proposition.

There are things I will accept without evidence.

Good, because we all do it. Now, I'm going to leap-frog passed a bunch of tedious Q&A and get right to the part where you tell me, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." And I'm going to call that baloney and get right to the point, that there is no such thing as "extraordinary" evidence; there is just evidence, plain and ordinary. And since it is empirical evidence for God that you were seeking (Msg. #78), we can continue focusing our attention on why you're expecting empirical evidence for something that has no spatio-temporal properties.

I don't believe in anything that exists outside the material universe.

That did not answer my question, so I shall ask it again: "Would you say that nothing exists unless it has spatio-temporal properties? That existence is defined in empirical terms? I ask this because, if you think it is possible for something without spatio-temporal properties to exist, then what evidence for its existence would you expect to find? Surely not empirical evidence (given its lack of spatio-temporal properties)."

I am saying that it is awfully convenient that God just happens to exist in some special place outside of space and time. I now agree that if a thing spoke existence into being then it would, by definition, have to be outside of that space and time, but it sounds like Special Pleading to me.

That God exists independent of his creation is not something that "just happens to" be the case, but is in fact necessarily the case—i.e., necessary truth, such that "it would be contradictory to deny" (Garth Kemerling, Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names). That which is part of creation cannot be the creator thereof without involving a logical contradiction; God would have to exist and not-exist at the same time and in the same respect. Ergo, (1) it is not something that just conveniently happens to be the case, but rather something that is logically impossible to be otherwise, and therefore (2) does not even remotely commit the Special Pleading fallacy, which occurs only when something is held as an exception "based upon an irrelevant characteristic that does not define an exception" (FallacyFiles.org). A logical contradiction is certainly a relevant characteristic that defines an exception!