Belief and Knowledge

[Whateverist]

I have never said "God must therefore exist". I have never claimed I can prove the existence of God. If you are going to argue against my position...then please argue against my position. Stop making up positions to argue against and pretending they are mine.

Okay. If all you wish to argue is that belief in god is permissible, no problem. Beyond a doubt it is possible to configure a world view in such a way to allow for a god. You are the proof.

Live and let live is a pretty good creed, but rather hard to find among the xtians I have known. So how do you feel about atheists? Does it bother you at all that we don't shape our world views around your god? I appreciate that you aren't arguing that we should do so.

[bennyboy]

Okay. Here's one more for you, since we're on the same page:

"_____ is exactly something we should expect to see if the universe has no God."

See, Christians use order as an argument that God must exist. Then, in the next breath, they use QM as evidence that something is intrinsically unpredictable about the universe, and that God must therefore exist. They use all the laws of the universe as proof of God (a watch must have a watchmaker). They then throw out this deterministic vision of Theistic perfection and praise God for our (indeterministic) free will.

Everything makes sense? Hallelujah, must be the design of God. Everything is chaos and confusion? Hallelujah, that unpredictability must be the hand of God. As far as I can tell, every piece of evidence we have is taken as evidence for God, even when it turns everything we have already learned or observed upside down.

And "THIS is exactly something we should expect to see if someone intends to bend everything we know, or ever will know, into support for something that cannot be seen or demonstrated to exist."

I have never said "God must therefore exist". I have never claimed I can prove the existence of God. If you are going to argue against my position...then please argue against my position. Stop making up positions to argue against and pretending they are mine.

Your response is funny, because you are doing exactly what you just (falsely, mind you) claimed I did. I never said YOU made those claims, I said that THEY (Christians) made those claims. So "stop making up positions to argue against and pretending they are mine." If you think I'm making straw-man arguments for you, go ahead and point them out.

What I DID do is refer several times to your claim that "the observance of effects without local causes is exactly something we should expect to see if an unseen God exists and interacts with this world." I have shown that Christians have followed the form "X is exactly something we should expect to see if an unseen God exists" with all different kinds of evidence, much of it internally condradictory.

You claimed that my previous list of possible invisible influences on causality, including Magic Space Monkeys and the Matrix, all constituted God. So my point (which you have avoided with your red-herring hypocritical accusations of straw man argumentation) is this: given ANY philosophical device, posited to be conscious or not, wouldn't the expectation of reality as confirming evidence be a simple complement to the fact that the device was CREATED to explain that reality?

Let's try and see:
1)
ASSERTION: I posit that the eternal dance between Yin and Yang is the seed from which all other things have been created.
INFORMATION: Large bodies act deterministically according to simple laws, and QM particles act (for the most part) indeterministically, according to different laws.
CONCLUSION: This dualistic harmony and division of reality at levels is exactly something we would expect to see if Yin and Yang are real.

2)
ASSERTION: we live in the Matrix
INFORMATION: Objects are well-defined according to dimensions, material properties, etc.-- i.e. the main "ideas" of things are always consistent. However, the QM building blocks of those things are dynamic, ever-changing, and occupy less than .00000001% of space.
CONCLUSION: This lack of clarity at the finest "resolution" of reality is exactly something we would expect to see if we were living in the Matrix.

3)
Get it?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

^^ Never before have I laughed so much during a rebuttal.

[Whateverist]

Get it?

Possibly not, but that wouldn't change the fact that you've made your point with great clarity and precision.

[FatAndFaithless]

Preparing for Woodified spin in 3...2...1...

[Mister Agenda]

Retraction accepted, belatedly.

You misunderstand me. Making the prediction ahead of time would be evidence that it was actually useful in making a prediction. Going back after something has been discovered to see if you can retrofit it into indicating prior knowledge is childish.

When it was discovered by Hubble that the universe was expanding. Did that evidence bolster or weaken General Relativity? It bolstered it, because although nobody predicted an expanding universe, they should have....because it was an implication of the theory.

And if it had not been expanding, it would have 'bolstered' something else, which would probably be similarly an obvious implication...in retrospect. Einstein dropped the ball by not predicting an expanding universe. The theory had to be revised to account for it, and Einstein regarded it as his biggest blunder. General Relativity required the smallest fix to retrofit, if you want to call that 'bolstering'.

The same is true here. It doesn't matter that nobody predicted the appearance of effects which do not have local causes....it is still an implication of an existent God.

Are you a Nostradomus believer too? Because THOSE predictions are also easy to retrofit, but useless beforehand.

---

Baseless assertion. You must realize that this is an argument from ignorance; we observe something that to date defies explanation, therefore God.

Negative....not an argument from ignorance....there is no explanation which defies us because we know these effects do not have local causes. I am claiming the observance of effects without local causes is exactly something we should expect to see if an unseen God exists and interacts with this world.

And it's a mere claim, with nothing of substance to back it up. Why would we expect that, if God? Is God incapable of interacting with the world in a way that appears natural? Is no other explanation for the phenomenon reasonable?

[comet]

do people really think we can have "faith" or "belief" without knowledge of something? I hear many people say you don't need notin to have faith. I neva heiourd of such crazyness. "you mean you believe in that for no reason at oil"?

[FatAndFaithless]

...You might want to invest a few seconds in spellcheck. What exactly are you trying to say?

[bennyboy]

do people really think we can have "faith" or "belief" without knowledge of something? I hear many people say you don't need notin to have faith. I neva heiourd of such crazyness. "you mean you believe in that for no reason at oil"?

I believe if you think your goofy spelling is funny, nobody will laugh. Covering illiteracy with annoying stereotypical "accents" won't fool anyone. If your spelling and grammar suck, just own it, and do the best you can.

[comet]

do people really think we can have "faith" or "belief" without knowledge of something? I hear many people say you don't need notin to have faith. I neva heiourd of such crazyness. "you mean you believe in that for no reason at oil"?

I believe if you think your goofy spelling is funny, nobody will laugh. Covering illiteracy with annoying stereotypical "accents" won't fool anyone. If your spelling and grammar suck, just own it, and do the best you can.

Sorry, I was drinking,

But anyway, if you can't get through the wording to see the meaning that might be telling. I posted it so I did (and do) own my suck ass writing and understand I am not funny, it doesn't mean I can't try and have fun. You might want to think about the need to address such a meaningless post too.