The absurd need for logical proofs for God

[Abaddon_ire]

Nobody can demonstrate that any god is real. that is the beginning an end of it

[GUBU]

We don't want logical proofs for god, we want evidence of its existence. One reason being is that you can construct logical scenarios in which a god exists but which don't conform to reality. One of the main failings of classical Greek philosophy was that the philosophers were so insistent on logic they often neglected to check reality.

[The Grand Nudger]

On a side note I would like to hear someone's thoughts on the equivalence between the existence of other minds and the existence of God. A result established recently by Plantinga and others. If one has enough "belief" to think there is an outside world and creatures like himself, this exact inference from a sample of the size of a singleton (only himself) to the entire human population is what he should apply to the orderly things around him to reach a supreme being.

Sure, np.  First, let's ask if anyone actually established the equality of the concepts.


An atheist believes that.....
1-they have a mind.
2-there is an external world.
3-there are other minds.

A theist believes.....
1-they have a mind.
2-there is an external world.
3-there are other minds.
4-at least one of those minds is a god.

Nope.  Looks like there's an additional commitment, right off the bat.  That 4th commitment is a doozy - no matter how you intend to rationalize it.

I can tell that you're struggling with this...but...if it helps...you don't need an argument for a gods existence. You wouldn't be the only person on earth doing something for reasons that you cant explain in a strictly rational way....though, I have to say......most of the things that believers point to god for are much easier to establish some other (and explicitly rational) way. It's one of those things where two people who love hotdogs have different reasons or no reason at all for handing out free hotdogs...but....... either way, people are getting hotdogs.

We establish the existence of minds, for example, by reference to behavior. By "we" I mean all of us, even you. You believe that some aspect of this world demonstrates that a god engaged in a specific and recognizable behavior. An act of creation, for example. Interdiction, for another. I could go on, but, we following?

[Peebothuhlu]

To paraphrase the great James. T. Kirk.

"What does a diety need with a prophet?"

(The original quote being "Uhm. Excuse me, but why does god nned a space ship?" )

Cheers.

Not at work.

[The Grand Nudger]

Spock, beam me back to 1492 so I can beat this man like...it's....my...............job.

[purplepurpose]

A lot of men kill themselves and drink insanely. In our miserable world, believers aren't that bad with their ideas.

[Apollo]

When we say "God", we are really talking about an entity with intelligence and intent.  Intelligence and intent are characteristics born out of problem solving learning and skill set dealing with environment (spacetime). All living things are intelligent and have intent in their own way to be able to fetch food or safeguard themselves against predators to be able to survive and replicate.  Lions, oak trees, bacteria, humans, jellyfish, all are no exceptions.

So the idea of intelligence and intent leads us to the notion of an existing spacetime that must exist first and foremost for intelligence and intent to later exist from composition of various states of surviving.  You can't have a god till you have spacetime first and foremost––Or if god is spacetime itself then spacetime doesn't have intelligence and intent.  You can't have both ways. God is very specific.  It communicates.  It plans. It designs.

But what is spacetime anyway. Well, we can only speak in terms of our universe as that's the only example or sample we have in front of us. Anything else would merely be a hypothesis. A hypothesis still based on the sample in front of us nonetheless.  You say anything that's not rooted from the confines of this sample and you'd be talking gobbledygook.

To make a very long story very short, spacetime as we know it is made up of quantum fields. Higgs, quark, electromagnetic, so on and so forth, giving rise to what we call elementary particles––12 of them as we know them in the form of Standard Model.  That's your actual elementary table right there. These particles are governed by four forces. Gravity, electromagnetic force, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force.

That's it. Our reality is confined to standard model and four forces.  There is not a thing in our world (the world of humans and animals etc) that is not governed by these things.  Of course, our universe is made up of more unknown "things" that we have no clue about and there is more of that "unknown shit" than all the matter combined in the cosmos, including us, but those "unknown things" (dark energy and dark matter) still doesn't affect our reality.  It interacts at the levels of galaxies etc.

So this leaves us thinking about where that god and his/her/their intelligence and intent is coming from. Remember, the intelligence and intent is very precise. Targeting just the right people to say just the right things etc etc. It knows no subtlety so some kind of weird mysterious blind energy that works in mysterious ways is out of the window if that's going to be your next defense of the indefensible.  I've to say there isn't much room left.  If there is a "god", that god would still be made up of the same matter rest of our reality is made up of otherwise IT WON'T BE ABLE TO INTERACT WITH our reality.

The other thing that this god would need is collaboration.  You need a whole fucking civilization to be able to make a coffee cup that can keep your coffee hot for 5 hours, much less the self-replicating DNA molecule which has a lot more complexity.  So a civilization must exist, with intent and intelligence, to create complex things (DNA) and then we can say aha, that's how it's done.  So if your god is actually some advanced alien race that created some self-replicating molecule in a lab then it's a hypothesis that we can all accept rooted in some plausibility––although the question of how that civilization came about remain the same.  But anything else is just some primitive human imaginative guess work that can't satisfactorily answer some basic fundamental question we are now able to answer using high school science.

[The Grand Nudger]

A lot of men kill themselves and drink insanely. In our miserable world, believers aren't that bad with their ideas.

They're the worst.  Without this sort of stuff we would have good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things - but to convince a good person to do a bad thing...well.

There is nothing redeemable about believing that an asshole in the sky runs shit. There is absolutely no floor to human behavior in this mode of thinking. Any horrid whatsit that a person has ever done or ever could do is a thing that can be asserted to be gods will - and that's how uniquely bad ideas are turned into the conceptual fabric of the universe.

I prefer a suicidal drunk to a homicidal true believer. You can help the drunk - there's only one way out for the other guy.

[R00tKiT]

That sure is a poor justification for your specific mythology. Or, it is you admitting that you are unable to demonstrate the existence of a god.

I am unable to demonstrate deductively the existence of a god. And it's not a problem. Deduction only works if we provide ourselves with a general enough set of axioms. In the context of the existence of god, such axioms will take the form of an exhaustive list of the most elementary facts about reality we can all agree about, unfortunately such a list doesn't and cannot exist.

Sorry to inform you, but actual demonstrable, falsifiable, repeatable evidence for the existence of gods would be a world changing event.

Sorry to inform you, such an event cannot logically take place. The god of abrahamic religion can never be perceived by our finest machines. And again - and this is the relevant part- it's not a problem. Think about it, we now know that there are fundamental limits to what we can measure (e.g. the uncertainty principle, the Planck constant, etc.) . We can never surpass these limits regarding our own observable reality, let alone that of god.

Prophets, of all religions, have come and gone all throughout history. They all seem to be very appealing, charismatic, convincing (to those who don't understand good standards of evidence), yet, while you believe Joseph Smith was a charlatan, all the Mormons believe the same about Mohamed, and we think they were both full of shit. And the interesting thing is, you  and the Mormons give pretty much the same reasons for dismissing the other's prophet, that we give for dismissing both.

I think it's unfair from a historical perspective to compare an obvious fraud with an abrahamic religion. And what you think without referencing any evidence is irrelevant. As long as you can't substantiate your claims about Islam which led you to dismiss it, you are the one having trouble with standards of evidence.

Everything that surrounds me is not evidence for a god. It is evidence that those things exist.

You are doing inference right now from what surrounds you. You only saw one person probably (yourself) typing words in the keyboard then sending them in this forum. Despite that you are convinced that all these members are actual people doing the same thing. There, we have an inference, which you do automatically, from the smallest sample (you only) to all the members of the forum.

Claims of prophets, are just that, claims. The fact that ancient text exist that claim that these people were prophets, barely rises to the level of hearsay evidence. 

Muhammad came up with the Qur'an as a literary challenge. A challenge which was relevant to his time. It's a very complicated topic, but overall, it's easier to explain his biography if he were a prophet than if he weren't. Many christian apologists today acknowledge he was sincere. The only hanging point worth a dicussion is whether his inspirational spells (i.e. the Qur'an) were the product of his subconsciousness, that is, the manifestation of some natural mental disorder like temporal lobe epilespy, or coming from up high. And the former doesn't look very defensible.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/793843/
Overall claims of prophets are actually more than claims, they either have a challenge relevant to their time and surroundings (Muhammad's contemporaries were highly proficient in Arabic, an extraordinarily eloquent book belittling their deities like the Qur'an is really, really miraculous for these folks ; Moses' contemporaries practiced sorcery, a staff turning into a serpent is then a "suitable" miracle, etc. 
No atheist will complain if they saw Moses' staff in action. But they complain a lot with Muhammad's miracle - the only miracle that exists today -, and it's not difficult, with all that has been said in mind, to understand why.

Please help us out, and create a logical syllogism, that ends with the conclusion, "therefore one must accept hard solipsism". Because I sure am having a hard time going from your word salad, to "therefore one must accept hard solipsism".

I will come back soon with a brain-juice syllogism. For now, it's not hard to see how denying any inference whatsoever leads to denying all other minds - because inference and analogy are the only way to establish the existence of other minds. If you deny all other minds, you believe in your mind only, which is the definition of solipsism.

[The Grand Nudger]

I see that the point of this thread is lowering the bar - but will it matter?

You can't offer deductive logic..but you can't offer inductive logic either.........so.......?

In any case, as a point of fact, Big Mo didn't come up with magic book at all. Not one word.