Four arguments against the existence of God

[Mudhammam]

You have given a reasonable explanation of how people form thoughts by interacting with sensible bodies. You have not given is an account of to what aspect of the sensible body the thought refers. What I mean is this: at some point raw sensation gets turned into perceptions, presumably via physical processes in the brain. What quality of the external stimuli allows this process to occur? I say there is some immaterial form already there even if it is not alienable from material.

Okay. First, I don't see at all what your conjecture has to do with anything in the OP, so I'm going to reply to this and then if you wish to continue pursuing this thought, make a new thread and I'll gladly oblige. Secondly, as to "what aspect of the sensible body the thought refers," it could be any aspect that is given to perception. With the advancement of physics the past hundred and fifty years, we've had to devise new concepts to understand and describe further aspects that our sensuous experience had not hitherto accounted for. If you want to claim there is a further undiscovered aspect, it's on you to provide the evidence and "cash-value" for whatever speculation you'd like to put forth. Otherwise, you're just making shit up, in this case to suit your unintelligible and inherently mysterious theological beliefs, and that offers us zero additional knowledge (i.e. detail). When you ask, "at some point raw sensation gets turned into perceptions, presumably via physical processes in the brain. What quality of the external stimuli allows this process to occur?" You've already hinted at the answer (again: "physical processes in the brain.") This should be no more difficult for you to understand (except now you have intelligible concepts to work with and plenty left to investigate) than "some immaterial form already there" presumably doing the exact same thing (turning "raw sensation... into perceptions"). How do immaterial forms causally affect physical processes anyhow?

[Simon Moon]

]Parmenides’ argument about being changing can only apply to reality in its fullness, which is the All or One. There cannot be another All because then there would be two alls which is a contradiction. Is this the Christian god? Yes. In the Revelation to John it says that God is All in all.

Of course the umoved mover has to be only one 'All'.

Because if it wasn't, then it wouldn't coincide with your god.

Got it.

Why couldn't it be multiple unchanging things, that in total, equals the 'All'?

Again referring back to the tradition of which the argument is a part, the original question concerns how something can persist in its being while still being capable of change. For example, an oak goes from acorn to sapling to full grown tree, yet remains the same tree throughout all the changes. Thus there must be some aspects of the tree that change, because we do indeed observe the changes, and there must be something that does not change, otherwise you could not call it the same tree from moment to moment.

Not impressed with Parmenides.

Adrian Bardon Ph.D., philosophy professor at Wake Forest, states Parmenides argument like this:

P1. Suppose change is real.

P2. If change is real, then it involves either (a) an object''s coming into existence or beginning to have some property or (b) an objects' becoming non-existent or ceasing to have some property.

P3. If P2 is true then there are different times, which is to say there is a past, present and future.

P4. There are not different times; there is only the present.

Conclusion: P1 leads to a contradiction (P3 and P4 are contradictory).

Therefore change is not real.

P2 seems pretty specious to me.

Why is it necessary for there to be something that is unchanging for something to change, yet retain its identity as the same object? Even if an unchanging thing is necessary, why couldn't it just be existence? Why does it have to be a being?

He seemed to have an idea that change requires absolute change. As if when something changes, it is changing completely, instead of just changing incrementally.

It's almost as if he wasn't aware of differential calculus. Oh yeah, he wasn't. Newton and Leibniz were over a 1000 years in the future.

If I go from being 50 lbs overweight, to normal weight, I did not constantly become a different being.

If I did not already know that Zeno was one of his followers, I would almost believe he was making fun of Parmenides when he postulated his paradox of motion. Almost like an agument reductio ad absurdum.