Does God exist? (18 Viewers)

[KFunk]

*TRUE*, I feel that I should repeat this:

If you accept that faith based claims are outside of empirical enquiry then I want to ask how you decide whether to endorse, through faith, one claim over another (and also to point out that, across individuals, the determining factor often turns out to be cultural background - which is fairly telling in my mind).

 

[*TRUE*]

The first part of that sentence appears to be meaningless rhetoric, the second half I'm guessing is about things in your life that your attribute to god... The question would be why do you attribute them to god?

Maybe meaningless rhetoric to you , not to me.
Because they were God. Its actually hard to explain without my getting personal
It started with an experience when i was four. .. i dont think i should write too much about my life on here.
I needed him and he came without my expecting him or knowing him at all...
I really dont think you can understand, and im so bad at explaining things
Emy is better at this than me...maybe wait till she comes back?

 

[*TRUE*]

*TRUE*, I feel that I should repeat this:

If you accept that faith based claims are outside of empirical enquiry then I want to ask how you decide whether to endorse, through faith, one claim over another (and also to point out that, across individuals, the determining factor often turns out to be cultural background - which is fairly telling in my mind).

Hi
I dont know how to answer. All i can say is , it is so personal. I dont want to try to explain anyone else's beliefs. Mine are based on my own life.

 

[Graney]

I don't think you quite understood what I said. I'll repeat it for you.
"the absense of empirical evidence is not reason in itself to not believe in something."

Why should we believe anything that doesn't stand up to empirical evidence? What is the other decent reason to believe anything?

 

[*TRUE*]

I should add that my faith in God has never been a head issue to me , it is totally tied up in my heart. I struggle to argue ( i argue everything else , LOL)it because i have had faith in God for as long as i can remember , since i was a really little girl.

 

[KFunk]

I don't think you quite understood what I said. I'll repeat it for you.
"the absense of empirical evidence is not reason in itself to not believe in something."

I think this claim rests on a misunderstanding. There is an important difference between believing god does not exist and not believing that god exists (let's call these respective propositions ~G, i.e. god does not exist, and G, i.e. god exists).

A lack of evidence for G is reason not to believe in G, but it is not reason to believe ~G. In other words, a lack of evidence either way gives you reason to hold the agnostic position where you don't believe G or ~G. Earlier in this thread I used the following analogy:

I have no reason to believe that I have an even number of eyelashes. Similarly, I have no reason to believe that this is not the case. Therefore I should hold the 'eyelash-agnostic' position of neither asserting that I have an even number of eyelashes, nor the negation of this claim.

In summary: a lack of evidence doesn't prove a negative existential claim (~G), but it gives reason not to assert a positive existential claim (G).

 

[Enteebee]

Rather than deal with the other peoples arguments you resort to personal attacks. Pathetic.

I dealt with your arguments. I find your pseudo-science pathetic.

I don't think you quite understood what I said. I'll repeat it for you.
"the absense of empirical evidence is not reason in itself to not believe in something."

Nope. I understood it and I disagreed. Explain to me why the absense of empirical evidence for a cancer-causing agent shouldn't be taken as evidence that there is no cancer-causing agent? Obviously we'll never know for certain, but we make do with the best facts we have and we create a probabilistic truth.

You miss the point I was trying to make. I was trying to show the nature of energy in our universe. And thus with an understanding of that nature, we can make inferences about it's origin.

No I didn't, if you can explain how you made any point which is not covered by the law of conservation of energy you win a gold sticker.

Well, you thought wrong. You see the reason you and I exist, the reason we can beat away at hard, solid matter, made of energy is because of the value energy has. It's a physical entity. The point being, energy is of something. And because it's of something, energy which has no value (or a value of 0) can not exist. Unlike other entities or bodies which do not have values (that is to say what we can expect to be created spontaneously) energy has a value.

Perhaps you could share with me the physics paper(s) which state that "energy has values[1] which need to be defined[2] thus energy had to be created[3]"

 

[darkliight]

KFunk, but what if the claim was "you have 70 billion eyelashes"? Most people don't stop at God exists or God does not exist. They're fairly specific.

 

[KFunk]

I should add that my faith in God has never been a head issue to me , it is totally tied up in my heart. I struggle to argue ( i argue everything else , LOL)it because i have had faith in God for as long as i can remember , since i was a really little girl.

I am unsure why you keep posting in this thread, since your views are based on a central assumption without any argument/reasoning. The only option that is really open to you is to engage in hand-waving in order to convince others to accept your assumption.

I've rejected a number of things that my heart was tied up with since I was young - notably free will and objective morality. I made the choice to critically examine my beliefs. For a moment of rhetoric --> Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." (Apology 38a)

 

[*TRUE*]

I am unsure why you keep posting in this thread, since your views are based on a central assumption without any argument/reasoning. The only option that is really open to you is to engage in hand-waving in order to convince others to accept your assumption.

I've rejected a number of things that my heart was tied up with since I was young - notably free will and objective morality. I made the choice to critically examine my beliefs. For a moment of rhetoric --> Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." (Apology 38a)

I beg your pardon Kieran. I will take my unexamined life away right now.

 

[TacoTerrorist]

ITT: Dogmatic elitist fundamentalist atheists attack anyone who disagrees with their unfounded conclusions.

 

[Enteebee]

I am unsure why you keep posting in this thread, since your views are based on a central assumption without any argument/reasoning. The only option that is really open to you is to engage in hand-waving in order to convince others to accept your assumption.

I've rejected a number of things that my heart was tied up with since I was young - notably free will and objective morality. I made the choice to critically examine my beliefs. For a moment of rhetoric --> Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." (Apology 38a)

The thing is (my sneaking suspiscion) that she doesn't really believe with the resolve she claims here.

ITT: Dogmatic elitist fundamentalist atheists attack anyone who disagrees with their unfounded conclusions.

Hows bout you step up to the plate and present your arguments then? You can't, your occasional trip to this thread to take a little jibe without ever actually presenting your own thoughts or defending them under some criticism makes it just sound like you're frustrated other people have different beliefs to you.

 

[darkliight]

ITT: Dogmatic elitist fundamentalist atheists attack anyone who disagrees with their unfounded conclusions.

Shh.

 

[TacoTerrorist]

^ It's not like everyone follows an exact set of thinking processes and deduces that atheism is the right path. Stop insinuating that people have a mental deficiency because they don't think the same way you do.

 

[Ubik]

ITT: Dogmatic elitist fundamentalist atheists attack anyone who disagrees with their unfounded conclusions.

Feel free to elaborate on your complex beliefs anytime.

 

[darkliight]

^ It's not like everyone follows an exact set of thinking processes and deduces that atheism is the right path. Stop insinuating that people have a mental deficiency because they don't think the same way you do.

I think the argument is they have a mental efficiency - they're too quick to attribute to a god

Shh.

 

[Enteebee]

^ It's not like everyone follows an exact set of thinking processes and deduces that atheism is the right path. Stop insinuating that people have a mental deficiency because they don't think the same way you do.

I don't think they really believe it anyway so I couldn't think they have a mental deficiency for believing. If they somehow really do then their only deficiency is that they're wrong, I've made many mistakes so it's no biggie.

 

[KFunk]

KFunk, but what if the claim was "you have 70 billion eyelashes"? Most people don't stop at God exists or God does not exist. They're fairly specific.

Sure, if the entity is defined precisely then you might be lucky enough to get the following condition:


If god exists (G) THEN some event X will necessarily occur ............. (G --> X)

but using classical logic we know that,

If X does not occur THEN it is not the case that god exists (~X --> ~G)


and so you could feasibly generate an empirical case against the existence of god. However, some issues emerge. Firstly, the conditional implication (G --> X) has to be an airtight, logical one, such that X will necessarily occur if god exists. Secondly, X has to be such that (a) we can observe it and (b) we are highly unlikely to miss it.

Unfortunately, as I discussed a few pages back, religion has an unfortunate tendency to shield itself from such arguments by positing, say, that god requires faith rather than empirically justified belief, or that god works in mysterious ways and thus we can conclude little about god on the basis of empirical observations. This latter 'mysterious god' claim is something of a cure-all because it suggests that god is so beyond human understanding that we could never adequately determine the truth of a conditional of the form G --> X. Bullshit? Yes, in empircal terms, but that's what we're working with.

 

[TacoTerrorist]

Okay, my main anti-atheist arguments are:

The universe is an incredibly complex, living breathing machine. This points to a diety of some description.

Science does not attempt to assert whether God does or does not exist. It is the way in which we attempt to understand things about our universe, not a tool to promote atheistic dogma.

There is no reason to throw the idea of a god out the window. Science does not provide any reasoning as to why a god couldn't exist. To conclude that a god certainly does not exist is as irrational as saying that a god certainly does exist.

Feel free to attack them with all your blind idiocy.

 

[Enteebee]

The universe is an incredibly complex, living breathing machine. This points to a diety of some description.

Prove that it points to a deity? As an argument it's incredibly weak. It's like if I said "people die, this points to no god". We have a great many naturalistic explanations for the existence of our universe as it is, but even if we didn't that doesn't make assertion that a god must have done it any more logical.

Science does not attempt to assert whether God does or does not exist. It is the way in which we attempt to understand things about our universe, not a tool to promote atheistic dogma.

Science doesn't attempt to prove anything, it is a method... It can be a tool to promote whatever anyone wants.

There is no reason to throw the idea of a god out the window. Science does not provide any reasoning as to why a god couldn't exist. To conclude that a god certainly does not exist is as irrational as saying that a god certainly does exist.

By that logic to say the tooth fairy certainly doesn't exist is as irrational as saying the tooth fairy does exist. Science does provide reasons as to why a personal god couldn't exist within our natural laws as far as we understand them.
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This latter 'mysterious god' claim is something of a cure-all because it suggests that god is so beyond human understanding that we could never adequately determine the truth of a conditional of the form G --> X. Bullshit? Yes, in empircal terms, but that's what we're working with.

I think it's good to try to get people to elaborate rather wholisticly on their heuristic for deciding whether something does or does not exist / don't know. Obviously they can after exploring this say god carves out a special niche, but I find inconsistent logic to be quite the drill on the human brain i.e. When I realise two of my beliefs are inconsistent it forces a bit of an overhaul, it doesn't "feel right" to consciously disagree with yourself. Obviously humans carry with them lots of contradictory beliefs all the time with no problem, but I think raising these to a conscious awareness, where your rational mind is probably most active, forces you to work to correct the inconsistency.