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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 15, 2016 at 1:56 am
(This post was last modified: April 15, 2016 at 1:59 am by Fake Messiah.)
Just like it is with magic the essence or nature of god is that it must be unexplainable. If you explain a miracle or even manifestation of deity then it's not god anymore. Is it? Or am I wrong? So another question is could there ever exist in our universe anything that can never be explained?
And also don't forget:
(April 14, 2016 at 9:14 am)RozKek Wrote: (April 14, 2016 at 8:05 am)ChadWooters Wrote: A fairie is not that which the greater than which cannot be conceived.
Do you phrase like that on purpose to fry people's brains?
It's the way religious people go, since they can't use logic or evidence they just blab out some retarded shit. For instance if you ever heard or read any Sunday given sermon. Here is a sample paragraph from a sermon written by Charles G. Finney [ source link]. It is totally incomprehensible. It's not logical, emotional perhaps:
"There are, as you know, two kinds of fear. There is that fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, which is founded in love. There is also a slavish fear, which is a mere dread of evil and is purely selfish. This is the kind of fear which was possessed by those people spoken of in the text. They were afraid Jehovah would send his judgments upon them, if they did not perform certain rites, and this was the motive they had for paying him worship. Those who have this fear are supremely selfish, and while they profess to reverence Jehovah, have other gods whom they love and serve".
There are hundreds of sermons like this preached every Sunday. It's like listening to Sarah Palin. And also all the religious people are actually fanatics, because today you have to be a fanatic to refuse all the scientific evidence and stick to your stubbornness. So what is the point of arguing with fanatics?
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"
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 15, 2016 at 1:07 pm
There can be no evidence for God
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 15, 2016 at 1:57 pm
Well, no credible evidence, at least not so far. Anything can be offered up as evidence, it's just that everything usually presented doesn't actually evidence what the submitter wishes it does.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 15, 2016 at 6:14 pm
(April 14, 2016 at 9:35 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: Math may just be a concept of the mind.
It's a bit more complicated than that. To say something is simply a concept in the mind does not account for its objectivity. How is it that various people can come to complete agreement with respect to some concepts like the nature of mathematical objects. I think most people would say that mathematics is objective. But in what way is it objective?
Something is objective if it exists and could be known independently of who knows about it or even if no one learns anything about it at all. People can know about physical things because they are objects. For example, when different people see various apples, those apples serve as the basis for what anyone could learn about apples: rounded, nutritious, grows on trees, etc. That’s real knowledge about a type of actual objects, in this case apples. The meaning of objective is obvious when talking about physical things. The objectivity of other types of things is less clear, but philosophically justifiable; things like forms are objects of knowledge.
People also know about mathematical objects. Just like apples, everyone can agree that triangular form share common features. It does not matter that the triangular form never exists apart from something shaped like a triangle. If it has a triangular form, it has three sides, encloses an area, and the sum of its angles is 180 degrees.
Some things are better examples of the triangular form than others. Those examples are objectively better or worse to the extent that they conform to the triangular form, despite what other accidental features they may have. For example a glass prism is a better triangle than a yield sign, but being made of clear glass versus painted metal, has no bearing on the fact that both, objectively speaking, are triangular. The principle here is that most everything is also a kind of thing something. Every particular apple is still a kind of apple. Every expression of the triangular form is a kind of triangle.
The only way I could continue would be to explain the difference between conception and imagination, but it probably wouldn't actually interest you anyway. I have never met an intellectually inclined atheist than wasn't also a nominalist, even if they didn't realize it. The two seem to go hand in hand. I suspect that there is an unconscious recognition by atheists that allowing for any kind of actual objectivity could undermine the fundamental assumptions of atheism.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 15, 2016 at 11:57 pm
In response to the OP title, for a start, much better arguments for God's existence. In other words, arguments that emphasize stuff no "non-God" explanation could plausibly account for. I have never seen such an argument.
But nothing beats spectacular empirical evidence witnessed by independent groups of sane and rational beings.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 16, 2016 at 1:04 pm
(This post was last modified: April 16, 2016 at 1:06 pm by Angrboda.)
(April 15, 2016 at 6:14 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: (April 14, 2016 at 9:35 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: Math may just be a concept of the mind.
It's a bit more complicated than that. To say something is simply a concept in the mind does not account for its objectivity. How is it that various people can come to complete agreement with respect to some concepts like the nature of mathematical objects. I think most people would say that mathematics is objective. But in what way is it objective?
Something is objective if it exists and could be known independently of who knows about it or even if no one learns anything about it at all.
The problem with this is that there's no way to demonstrate that what is known is independent of the nature of the knowers. We're all human and so we may share certain cognitive realities that are universal within the species, but yet are not truly universal. We can't be sure that mathematics is independent of the nature of the knower, so we can't simply conclude that it is objective. This is a systematic flaw with your definition of objective when applied to concepts.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 16, 2016 at 1:54 pm
(April 12, 2016 at 12:01 am)Goosebump Wrote: (April 11, 2016 at 11:50 pm)snowtracks Wrote: Scientific Method yielded the following -
The universe's expansion rate has been balanced at just the right rate to make advanced life possible. if the expansion rate were to rapid, stars and planets would not form since gravity wouldn't have adequate time to pull together the gases and dust that make up these bodies. If the expansion rate weren't rapid enough, the stars formed would rapidly collapse and become black holes or neutron stars. What determines this expansion rate is gravity and dark energy (a property that stretches the universe's space/time surface.
In the book 'The Grand Design' by Hawking, Modinow, of which I have in eBook form, in chapter 7 this statement is made.
"the laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without the possibility of the development of life as we know it".
Goes on to say that the Cosmological Constant (the energy density that causes the universe's expansion, referred to as dark energy) has a value 10^120” (as a comparison, the est. atoms in the observable universe is 10^80)
--- http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how...e+universe ---
Continuing "the one thing that is certain is that if the value of the Cosmological Constant were much larger than it is, our universe would have blown itself apart before galaxies could form--once again--life as we know it would impossible".
The sample size is one (scientific); the multiverse is hypothetical set of finite and infinite possible universes. So there it is, the scientific method rules out chance.
*** emphasis mine ***
I put in some line breaks in the above quote to make it a little more legible. Just in case anybody that want's to know why I said what I'm about to say wants to read it.
In bold above you say: "So there it is, the scientific method rules out chance."
Just to be clear, No it didn't. And nothing you posted does either. 10^120 doesn't mean 'Biblical God', it means an inference to the best explanation: choice between 'chance' or 'directed'. Dawkins - gives a 10^120 explanation. Poor guy has developed a fuzzy brain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4E_bT4ecgk.
Atheist Credo: A universe by chance that also just happened to admit the observer by chance.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 16, 2016 at 2:20 pm
(April 7, 2016 at 1:40 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: (April 6, 2016 at 2:29 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Never seen a good coherent definition or an explanation of how its supposed to operate. I would suggest that you haven't really dipped your feet into the more profound theological works. Spinoza put forth a very good summary of Pantheism. Whitehead fairly represents Panentheism. Plotinus is a good start for the "God of the Philosophers" also called classical monotheism. Thomas Aquinas goes into considerable depth developing the Christian God. So unless you were hoping for a two sentence dictionary entry, I really cannot understand how anyone can consider these various conceptions of God ill-defined. As for incoherent, I think that demonstrating that Spinoza, for one, is incoherent would be a herculean task, imo, and a critique of Aquinas deserves a more comprehensive treatment than most here are willing to give.
I've seen them and they remain ill defined and sometimes contradictory.
Spinoza for example equated all nature with god and deprived god of the attributes of intelligence, feeling and purpose this to me makes the god part irrelevant. See how ill defined god is here, it is hard for me to understand how you can see this as a good description of god, particularly when you ascribe all the things to god that Spinoza specifically eliminates.
Quote:"Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...." Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God is the antithesis to the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God who cares about humanity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 16, 2016 at 2:48 pm
God reminds me of those TV psychics who refuse to provide proof "because it would be an abuse of their powers".
Why doesn't he just burn next week's lottery numbers onto one of his many altars somewhere? Or maybe a few lines on how to cure cancer? Just once.
It would be a piece of piss for an omnipotent being.
As it is, god's behaviour is completely indistinguishable from the behaviour of someone who isn't there at all.
I must not be nasty. I must not be nasty. I must not be nasty. I must not be nasty. I must not be nasty. I must not be nasty. I must not be nasty. I must not be nasty.
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RE: What would you consider to be evidence for God?
April 16, 2016 at 2:54 pm
(This post was last modified: April 16, 2016 at 2:57 pm by TheRocketSurgeon.)
Um, unless Leonard Susskind has changed his mind drastically in the past three years, I just read his book, and another which declares that Dr. Susskind is (quote) "a card-carrying atheist".
In his book, he discusses the anthropic principle (aka the "fine tuning" argument, that the universe was made for us), before dismantling it with the latest discoveries in physics (mainly the multiverse concept, explaining why it is more likely the case).
PS - That video is a horrible cut-and-paste job, grabbing only little quotes and then adding commentary! The person who made it should be ashamed.
A Christian told me: if you were saved you cant lose your salvation. you're sealed with the Holy Ghost
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
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