What is a god?

[Purple Rabbit]

Those with more knowledge on the subject, you mean.

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You are an expert on a book that certainly does NOT mean that book is self-evident to be the truth of God. Or at least his existence. How could it be?

Daystar fails to make the distinction between first person assessment and third person assessment. Only an all-knowing entity can assess the truth of a claim on absolute truth.

To say that you know that statement X is absolute truth is to say that you can validate absolute truth. To be able to validate a statement for absolute truthness one would need absolute truth in the first place. Otherwise one is validating a statement with fallible faculties.

To say that (A) you believe it to be absolute truth is quite different from (B) asserting that it is absolute truth and using that assertion as evidence. One will have to be able to read the mind of god to truthfully state (B).
As Daystar is human and fallible however he can't use argument (B). His only option is to join the rest of infallible mankind. He might be able to understand this argument but if he is willing to I'm not sure.

[Edwardo Piet]

Indeed, very well put.

[Daystar]

Yes, I am aware that is the first prophecy. God stepped in regularly, into the human situation, during the period from Adam through Abraham, Isaac, Moses, etc, all the way to Jesus' day. So there were plenty of interventions of various kinds from Genesis through to the first century.

Yes. But always for a reason that may not be apparent to the casual reader. In other words God doesn't just pop in now and then to save dieing children. Dieing children are a part of sin and God has done all that he can to end that. He did all he could to prevent it.

Jesus didn't seem to give this impression when he said 'whatever you pray, ask for in my name and it will be given you, or granted you' words to that effect.

The Hebrew and Greek words translated as prayer mean to ask, make request, petition, entreat, supplicate, plead, beseech, beg, implore favor, seek, inquire of, as well as to praise, thank, and bless. Not cosmic cash machine, or ticket to immortality. At Genesis 44:18; 50:17; Acts 25:11 the same words are used in application to men. Notice the humility in those acounts. The men praying to the other men would not be so disrespectful as to ask for something contrary to the nature of the person they are addressing.

Paul said: "In everything by prayer and supplication along with thanksgiving let your petitions be made known to God." - Php 4:6, but only so long as you are in agreement with Gods will and purpose. Proverbs 15:29; 28:9; Isaiah 1:15; Micah 3:4.

The case of the flood was a case of supernatural proportions. The Nephilim. Did the JWs teach you of them? Most probably had God not destroyed most of the world the world would have been destroyed entire.

That's a matter for debate. The Genesis account seems to put the blame purely with humans and how their hearts were bad (no mention of hybrid angel/human problems. Peter compares the final 'destruction' with the flood and compares the wickedness of man. Seems we can commit enough evil now without hybrid complications.

Notice that at Numbers 13:31-33 and 14:36, 37 the men who bring back the report want to strike terror in the Israelites and use the Nephilim to do it. Nowhere else other than that report, which cost the reporters their lives, is there any mention of the Nephilim. As far as the matter being up for debate? Okay, but Genesis 6:11 says: "And the earth came to be ruined in the sight of the [true] God and the earth became filled with violence."

The fact is that when God chooses, He supposedly intervenes into human affairs. There seems no evidence of this in the last 2000 years which does seem suspicious or convenient.

I think that you overestimate man and underestimate God. Think about when God was with the Israelites. I mean directly there. They still did horrible things to one another. Those sorts of things happened. You blame God when you should blame man and in doing this you contribute to the problem rather than contribute to the solution. You are, in effect, endorsing the evil. I don't understand why you can't see that.

Proverbs 1:30-33 - They did not consent to my counsel; they disrespected all my reproof. So they will eat from the fruitage of their way, and they will be glutted with their own counsels. For the renegading of the inexperienced ones is what will kill them, and the easygoingness of the stupid is what will destroy them. As for the one listening to me, he will reside in security and be undisturbed from dread of calamity.

Ecclesiastes 9:11 - I returned to see under the sun that the swift do not have the race, nor the mighty ones the battle, nor do the wise also have the food, nor do the understanding ones also have the riches, nor do even those having knowledge have the favor; because time and unforeseen occurrence befall them all.

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Those with more knowledge on the subject, you mean.

---

You are an expert on a book that certainly does NOT mean that book is self-evident to be the truth of God. Or at least his existence. How could it be?

Daystar fails to make the distinction between first person assessment and third person assessment. Only an all-knowing entity can assess the truth of a claim on absolute truth.

To say that you know that statement X is absolute truth is to say that you can validate absolute truth. To be able to validate a statement for absolute truthness one would need absolute truth in the first place. Otherwise one is validating a statement with fallible faculties.

To say that (A) you believe it to be absolute truth is quite different from (B) asserting that it is absolute truth and using that assertion as evidence. One will have to be able to read the mind of god to truthfully state (B).
As Daystar is human and fallible however he can't use argument (B). His only option is to join the rest of infallible mankind. He might be able to understand this argument but if he is willing to I'm not sure.

What I was saying was a great deal more simple than that. One who has studied the Bible knows more about it and what it says than one who doesn't.

[Tiberius]

What I was saying was a great deal more simple than that. One who has studied the Bible knows more about it and what it says than one who doesn't.

The problem with this reasoning is that even different biblical scholars disagree on what words mean in the Bible. They are all working from an angle, and if a biblical scholar wants to bash gay people, he will find a passage in the bible to do that.

You are of the anti-science kind. You simply close your eyes to the evidence in front of you, and hold that the Bible cannot be wrong, and so the evidence (or at least our understanding of it) is wrong. Never have you thought "maybe the Bible is wrong", because that goes against your religion.

[Daystar]

What I was saying was a great deal more simple than that. One who has studied the Bible knows more about it and what it says than one who doesn't.

The problem with this reasoning is that even different biblical scholars disagree on what words mean in the Bible. They are all working from an angle, and if a biblical scholar wants to bash gay people, he will find a passage in the bible to do that.

So what you are saying is that nothing in the Bible can be true because scholars disagree upon it? How is this similar to science.

You are of the anti-science kind. You simply close your eyes to the evidence in front of you, and hold that the Bible cannot be wrong, and so the evidence (or at least our understanding of it) is wrong. Never have you thought "maybe the Bible is wrong", because that goes against your religion.

See? You make the assumption that the Bible is wrong and call that evidence based upon nothing. You do the same thing you acuse me of doing only you do it from an uneducated (ignorance of the Bible) view.

And I don't do that with science you only assume I do because I believe in the Bible. Round and round we go. Never stops, never moves forward.

The Bible says the soul is literally the blood of any living animal or man or figuratively the life of that animal or man. Most Bible Scholars agree, but religion says that the soul is immortal. A part of us that lives on after we die. They got this from pagan teachings going way back and then introduced to Socrates and Plato. All of this is well documented.

So Socrates and Plato are a good read to the intellectual, no? But they teach the nonsense of the soul that religion teaches. Religion claims the Bible as inspiration but they don't know it so well.

The Atheist - reading Socrates and thinking that is cool, learns everything about the Bible not from the scholars but from the religious, and while the Bible teaches a more practical version of the soul than Socrates or religion you judge the Bible from the religion.

Does that all make sense to you?

[Edwardo Piet]

Daystar,
It doesn't matter how much you study the bible. Where's the evidence? If you can present any then fine. But it has to be verifiable. If you can only merely proclaim that its evident then thats not evidence. Anyone could do that about anything. That wouldn't make it evident.

[Purple Rabbit]

That's right EvF, you'll have to verify the meaning of the book in the real world.

Suppose there is this little book with in it just one statement. Let's say it reads "A=A". That's all.

The statement itself is valid, sound and logically true. You can't dispute it in that way. It's called the Law of Identity (LoI) in cicles of mathematics and philosophy. And maybe a religion can be build on that statement alone. Deducing the absolute truth from it.

As a matter of fact I have encountered a web community that indeed does so. They read subtle and profound meaning in this simple statement. Their point is that the statement is irrefutable. It cannot be denied, much like the christian dogma about the bible being absolute truth. They claim LoI to be absolute truth, i.e. that it applies to every possible world. And that it is beyond all logical systems invented by man, while supporting them all. In their eyes it cannot be formulated in any falsifiable way. For how can absolute truth be formulated in a falsifiable way? In their eyes it is knowledge that is beyond mathematical truth. As an example I give you a typical quote I encountered:

All things are caused, or, A=A as the basis of causality where "cause" is defined as "that which is necessary for something to exist":

Under this definition of "cause" it becomes immediately apparent that all things are caused - since any given thing requires what it is not for its existence ( its "being" is necessitated by relation to other things): those other things are necessary to its existence and are therefore causal to it. Any thing is caused by "not that thing". In many respects this is a re-stating of the above and conveys the same essential meaning. In Buddhism this is known as co-dependent origination - that things gives rise to each other due to the necessity of their relation.

So there is a relation being made to buddhism and holistic thinking. A truly new religion is born with dogma, unfalsifiable claims of absolute truth and strict interpretation of holy words.

Well, where are they wrong? The Law Of Identity is true in every sense you can think of. Or is it?

Their claim is that it applies to every possible world, so it has to apply to the world we see around us. Can we verify in the real world that A is A? Well, as a matter of fact it turns out that there are some philosophers that have pondered this seemingly futile question, among them Leibniz, Kant and G.E. Moore (the origin of LoI is possibly falsely ascribed to Aristotle though). It lead to the formulation by Leibniz of the so called Identity of Indiscernibles. In short it reads that no two objects exactly resemble each other. And this poses a serious threat on the application of A=A to our world, for it means we have to know all properties of an object A to identify it properly and to be able to equate it to an object we earlier identified as A. But at the same time we can in reality never be sure to know ALL it's properties. Because that would imply that we had access to absolute truth beforehand. In other words, there is a fundamental problem with applying A=A to our world because we have no direct access to truth. We have to observe, to measure and to assume identity. This is closely connected to the central question of epistomology: how can we know anything? It turns out that there is no shortcut to glory in the real world, no A is because A is. Only the all-knowing, if such beings exist at all, have access to absolute truth. Fallible beings need means of verification and falsification. So we arrive at the insight that verification or falsifiability is central to human knowledge.

Btw, the analogy of christian dogma with the A=A religion is not overly accurate, but not to the advantage of christianity. A=A is in itself logically sound, valid and consistent where the bible arguably fails these logical tests.

When you say that the bible is truth, it is you who is uttering the words, not a deity that has reveiled him/her/itself to everyone. Therefore you as a fallible person will be held accountable for the claim you make and the call for falsifiable and verfiable evidence is the only way in which we as fallible beings can possibly exchange information about the world that we share.

[Edwardo Piet]

Yes. Very interesting. So basically you can't just use anything to prove anything
The claim needs to be backed up by evidence. Not by itself. A claim can't back its own truth if its just in words.
Because the words for example "God exists" is not the same as God being proved in the real world. At all.
It wouldn't be proof of the existence of Zeus in reality if I merely wrote down on a piece of paper "Zeus exists" or "Zeus=Zeus".
There needs to be evidence in the 'real' world.

[Purple Rabbit]

Yep, that's about it. And even that method is open to challenge. Isn't life beautiful?

[Edwardo Piet]

Indeed. Its much more amazing that we are part of nature and life came about through evolution than that the universe or life was created by some creator. Its pathetic if its just 'created' its much more amazing if it happens gradually. And if it happens gradually WIHTOUT a creator. The fact evolution can of course happen without a God for example. Isn't it much more impressive that our morals and the universe itself come about naturally on its own rather than just being 'granted' by a creator?
And wouldn't a really powerful God be able to do all this without existing anyway because he's not bound by logic or the laws of the universe? He's above everything?
Lol