File 13282971086.jpg - (248.78KB , 1600x963 , 1326825960772.jpg )

File 132829714344.jpg - (242.29KB , 1280x1024 , 1325908140714.jpg )

File 132829716511.jpg - (292.46KB , 1280x960 , 1327705554904.jpg )

>This thread is for discussion of the validity of religion(s) and arguments for and against the existence of god/gods.

There is no arguments against the existence of gods. There are counterargument.

Do you have an argument to prouve that there is no santa?

>>5953
If there was a sect of people whose firm belief in Santa was begging to have a negative impact on my world, I'd come up with one.

You are in the strictest sense correct, but this is petty semantics and bickering over it isn't going to get us anywhere.

File 132839348538.jpg - (66.09KB , 453x604 , shrodingers cat.jpg )

If God is all powerful... Surely he could trick us into thinking our logic is valid, when it is actually totally incorrect. Thus, we can't know anything for certain. Thus, AGNOSTIC!
Break that circular logic.
Pic unrelated, just liked it.

theology played itself out for the most part in the middle ages. It managed to hang around thanks in part to the Great Awakening and poor education, but very few new insights have been gained since the Enlightenment happened. IMO, C.S. Lewis is perhaps the only modern theologian worth reading and even he is just a rehash of Augustine and Aquinas

The reason I believe in God is because this universe is so vast and mysterious, and our world has been crafted so perfectly, right down to a T. Even our bodies are practically machines, designed exactly right in order to sustain life and homeostasis. Physics follows a strict set of rules that, as far as we know, are never broken. Doesn't that seem like the work of a god? The work of a being with an epic, overarching plan, who is crafting things to fit his own needs, with his own designs? I think it is.

The reason I believe in God is because this universe is so vast and mysterious, and our world has been crafted so perfectly, right down to a T. Even our bodies are practically machines, designed exactly right in order to sustain life and homeostasis. Physics follows a strict set of rules that, as far as we know, are never broken. Doesn't that seem like the work of a god? The work of a being with an epic, overarching plan, who is crafting things to fit his own needs, with his own designs? I think it is.

"our world has been crafted so perfectly, right down to a T. Even our bodies are practically machines, designed exactly right"

Goodness child, who ever told you those things? The universe is not perfect and seamless as it first appears. Tell a cosmologist, planetary physicist, geologist or ecologist you think the world is perfect... brace yourself. ...and the "design" of our bodies and every other living body, even the mechanics of how bodies are designed, is a process that has nothing to do with perfection. 1st year bio students could make substantial improvements. There is no such thing in reality as perfect. If there were a creator god or more likely gods, they did a ramshackle hodgepodge job of shoehorning the processes that exist together into all this.

>>5999
Ha ha wow. Go study cell biology for a few years and then tell me the cell isn't a fucking hackjob. It's just layers and layers of "well, I guess this'll work for now" that has been accumulating for billions of years. If the cell was designed by an intelligent being, he is a piss poor designer.

>>6007

>It's just layers and layers of "well, I guess this'll work for now" that has been accumulating for billions of years. If the cell was designed by an intelligent being, he is a piss poor designer.

I'm an Atheist, but even I think this is a piss poor argument against the validity of religion. They can always point out the cells actually work despite being like that, or even that the designer knew imperfections would be necessary and must change over time. Being imperfect means it actually has to change, leading to evolution, etc. Being static on a genetic and cellular level pretty much equals death. Unless you're a roach.

>>5939
What is this religion and how do I join it?

>>5999
We know almost the exact instant that our universe jolted into existence. It's a goddamn long time. Which is a goddamn long time for a culmination of completely random events to occur to create something as complex as life. Nothing needs be designed, there was just so long for something to happen that it was bound to and it did.

>>6010
I suspect you are not a cell biologist.

>>6010
I suspect you have not really studied cell biology. It is bitingly obvious how the system was not designed.

>>6010
No. When he says it's a piss poor design, he means it's reeeeeeally a piss poor design.

For instance, on the macroscopic level, the recurrent laryngeal nerve descends down the neck and upper thorax, loops around the aorta, and then travels back up the neck to the larynx.

At the microscopic level, the internal molecule that binds to cannabinoid receptors is a fatty acid derived molecule called anandamine. The thing about fatty acids is that they tend to stick together rather than float freely in an aqueous solution, such as cells. Now, you see the problem here is, cannabinoid receptors are placed in a terrible spot. You see, they are what are known as cell membrane receptors. The cell membrane is made up of what is known as bi-lipid layer, which is just another way of saying, a shit ton of fatty acids and fatty acid derived molecules. The anandamine is much much more likely to move into the membrane than it is to bind to the receptors. The body wastes energy making the stuff.

These are only two examples out of many.
And this is not the behavior of a being that is both omnipotent and omniscient. Hell, human engineers dont even fuck up this badly.

Is our world created by a personal God? We don't have prove for either side of the argument, which leads me to an attempt of an answer.

If there was no God, the statement "there is a God", wold not be disprovable, since you cannot show that something does not exist.
If there was a God, the statement "there is no God", would be disprovable, since you just had to "show" that God.
We also have the position that there is a God who is not personal but everything good or the inherent order of the universe. This position, however, is not valid, since there is no reason why we should name "Good" or "Order" as God. If I talk about God, I talk about a supernatural being who created the universe. I assume that such a God does not exist because I was not yet proven wrong.

If I look at the complexity of the universe, I could of course assume this was created for a certain purpose but it also could work much easier and attain the same goal. So why did "God" bother to create multiple Galaxies in which every Atom ist so incredible complex? It does not make sense.

So either God is a brilliant artist who just had shown his work, or the Universe just is there without a reason.

The things we can read in all those holy books assume that humans have a speacial role in Gods plan, but this seems unlikely since there is so much going on without any real impact on humans.

Omniscient. Omnipotent. Mutually exclusive.

Ok theists, since you're picking and choosing which currently familiar human attributes you like to see reflected in your idea of a god, go ahead and choose which of these supernatural attributes you prefer over the other.

Would you rather have a god that knows everything there is to know forward and backward in time, or one who is all-powerful to change it?

>>6072
God is both. He does not conform to human logic.

Well, that was easy. So he is powerful and powerless, and is able to know everything and isn't. That's not a limit of human logic, that's a limit of the logic of logic, sewed into the nature of this universe, which it's claimed he both created and operates in. ...making it his logic. Claiming he doesn't conform to any logic (and how do you claim know this?) is an excuse, and a poor one.

And if there's only one of them, it's clearly not a "he", as there would be no sexes of gods to choose from. Oh well, when you take your mythology directly from warring bronze-age barbarian hordes traceable all the way back to Akhenaten, you get the bad with the good.

File 132939166194.png - (191.25KB , 498x435 , SBVZN.png )

>>6084
Then if such a being does not conform to logic, why does he need to exist?

I could say the universe came into being because bananas are feathers. God doesn't exist because he exists. And so on...

Hell, I could even say God loves everyone so he sends them to Hell to be tortured, because 'hey, anything God does doesn't have to be rational, reasonable, nor logical.'

Secondly, I must ask you, How do you know this?

I would rethink over what you said, before you make a terrible mistake in judgement young man.

It seems Americans are a lot more interested in discussing religion than West-Europeans. As a Norwegian, I only know one guy who actively bothers bringing up the subject, and I don't think I've ever had a discussion about God/religion with any of my fellow philosophy students. While I understand that religion carries a whole lot more weight in American politics, it'd be interesting to see a first person account. The only reason I'd debate a religious person on the incredibly boring topic of the existence of supernatural entities would be to point out fallacies in their arguments, just I like to do in every discussion.

Not to be totally off topic:
>>5987
You must not have followed theology very closely. Aside from the Catholic church re-evaluating important parts of their metaphysics (the existence of purgatory etc), there have been quite a few interesting things going on in the field of Christian ethics. And last but not least, Don Cupitt has made some real headway with his non-realism account of God, which is pretty damned interesting. If you're interested, he's been interviewed twice for the Philosophy Bites podcast, short and sweet introduction to his thinking.

File 132943147932.jpg - (61.97KB , 504x360 , ignostic.jpg )

An ignostic was asked whether he believed in God, and said, "If you mean a big man in a cloud, as children conceive of God, then I am an atheist, for we have satellites now which would have surely seen such a creature if he existed. If you mean an all-encompassing God who is synonymous with the entire universe, then I am a theist... though I see no reason for having two words for the same thing. If you mean a vaguely-defined supernatural being whose existence cannot be tested, then I am a theological noncognitivist; it doesn't matter whether a meaningless thing is true or not, and I won't worry about it any more than I will about invisible pink unicorns."

>>6130

That I gnostic was not aware that an all-encompassing god that is synonymous with the universe is not a theology. If he believes in a theology, he is a theist. If he does not, or admits to not knowing, or comes up with a non-theological god concept, or doesn't care at all, then he is a-theistic. There are many names for each of these variations of a-theism, but all are a-theistic.

>>6144
Well, see, you're using the terms "theology" and "theism" under the etymological pretense that the Greek root "θεός" means "God (as per your definition". "θεός" may as well be synonymous with "universe". Regardless, it's still a meaningless term.

"God is nothing but a construct, created by man, to inspire fear and promote order" <-- best anti god quote I've ever heard

>>6128
To add to this fellows point, the Euthyphro dilemma.

Does God like certain things because they are morally good, or does he like certain things because he commands them?

If he liked them because they were morally good, then God did not set the standard. If he liked them because he commanded them, it would be too arbitrary. If God decided he liked murder one day, then murder would somehow become moral. Besides, if this was true, saying "God is good" would only mean that he obeys his own commands, and that there is nothing "good" about him.

>>6192
Well so are human rights.

>>6258
Why yes. Yes they are.

Buddhism. No gods necessary. No soul necessary. If you choose to pursue personal enlightenment so you may be at peace with the world, here are some philosophies that while pondering, you may benefit from.

Only remotely realistic religion I've seen thus far.

We know God doesn't follow the rules of logic, because if did, he couldn't exist. We do however know that everything in the universe follows the rules of logic, therefor it stands to reason that God can't exist in the universe. From that we can deduce that God exists outside of our universe, because if he didn't, he couldn't exist!
And since only an all-powerful, all-knowing being can exist outside of the universe, that being must be God, and then therefor God exists!

Checkmate gaytheists!

>>6339
no u.
I know all powerful myself does not exist in this universe so I am as an all powerful being must be existing outside of the universe so I'm God!
You must be a troll, or you definitely need to think more before you get yourself all snobbed up.

Believing in God is highly irresponsible and lazy. We are the new stewards of the planet, and of each other. By believing in God, you are giving up responsibility.

>>6409
This is actually a pretty good argument considering the negative effects almost all religions have.

Although I don't believe in god(s), I can't argue against the idea because there are only so many layers of reality that have been exposed by science. Until we can look at the core of existence, understand it's unfolding, and then state that it could happen on it's own, there will always be greasy little edifices for magical thinking to cling to.

>>6466
>>6409

Religion, in and of itself, is no more dangerous than other common human vices. One can enjoy alcohol without being an alcoholic, and one can have religion without becoming a complete twat.

>>6475
What you consider a vice is nonsense grounded in puritanical values you didn't invent, and that you probably haven't really thought about. The conversation is not about vices, and definitely not about what makes you a "twat".

When you accept the existence of a force greater than humanity you absolve yourself of responsibility. It's no surprise that religion supposedly makes people feel so "good", it alleviates the burden of suffering. I don't care if the person is on vaguely spiritual, or deeply and conservatively Christian. The phrase, "everything has a purpose" is the line of thinking that will keep humanity from overcoming suffering.

>>6477
I agree with Imhotep here, and would like to add that religion isn't really a vice. Drinking -as noted- doesn't always bring about alcoholism. Religion on the other hand, always brings about irrationality. It requires one to make beliefs that are grounded in faith, and almost always makes blind faith a virtue. If it didn't, it wouldn't be religion.
Yes, it's fine to get drunk on the weekends, just as it's fine for people to believe whatever they like. My beef is not the beliefs, but the means by which they are made and fostered.

>>6477
>>6481
This is an interesting line of thought. I've often considered weaker iterations of faith to be harmless, but this paints theists as having a dangerous moral relativity (ie: "I'm right, you're wrong") that absolves them of the very things they define as sins - they just have to say the right words and/or perform the right ritual, like a child apologizing so they can get their toys back.
I'm forced to wonder if moral derelicts can ever be benign. It seems by relinquishing the right to auto-define one's morals, a person gives themself away.

I just want to add a quote that seems relevant:

"[] Philosophy is merely the widest science of all. Its reasoning method is the same as that of any particular science and of all particular sciences. And by that same method of reasoning, the inductive method, philosophy fuses all particular sciences into one great science. As Spencer says, the data of any particular science are partially unified knowledge. Philosophy unifies the knowledge that is contributed by all the sciences. Philosophy is the science of science, the master science, if you please. []"

"There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians, [] judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods? They have added to the gayety of mankind, I grant; but what tangible good have they wrought for mankind? They philosophized, if you will pardon my misuse of the word, about the heart as the seat of the emotions, while the scientists were formulating the circulation of the blood. They declaimed about famine and pestilence as being scourges of God, while the scientists were building granaries and draining cities. They builded gods in their own shapes and out of their own desires, while the scientists were building roads and bridges. They were describing the earth as the centre of the universe, while the scientists were discovering America and probing space for the stars and the laws of the stars. In short, the metaphysicians have done nothing, absolutely nothing, for mankind. Step by step, before the advance of science, they have been driven back. As fast as the ascertained facts of science have overthrown their subjective explanations of things, they have made new subjective explanations of things, including explanations of the latest ascertained facts. And this, I doubt not, they will go on doing to the end of time. Gentlemen, a metaphysician is a medicine man. The difference between you and the Eskimo who makes a fur-clad blubber-eating god is merely a difference of several thousand years of ascertained facts. That is all."

- Jack London's character Ernest Everhard in The Iron Heel

I find this to be an encompassing argument against metaphysics in general, which paints religion, at best, as a colorful waste of time.

>>6489

London is an idiot.

According to him anything that's non-tangible and doesn't produce immediate benefits is completely worthless.

>>6512
So he was a positivist I take it.

>>6512
Well that might be the worst reduction I've ever read. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the quote.

File 133263495373.jpg - (467.95KB , 1440x900 , 1318148306350.jpg )

(Pic obliquely related)

God exists if you believe he does.
Pragmatigally, what good does a belief in God do.
There are plenty of examples of someone being full and satisfied in their belief in God while they have used that belief to visit evil upon the world about them....and some have actually visited good on the world about them.
Ergo, a belief in god is a pragmatically neutral proposition.
What should be God is something you can believe in that will lead ONLY to good....What could that possibly be ?

>>6586
This is moronic and vapid blabber from someone trying to sound philosophical. Everything you said is diarrhea. I hope to the God who exists because I am believing in him that you are no older than 15. Please never post on this forum again.

>>6643
Calm down Imhotep. It's only 7chan /phi/. It's not like this is Stanford Philosophy department.
Sure it may be better, than say, Notre Dame. But even 50 monkeys at 50 typewriters is better than what comes out of the philosophy department of Notre Dame.

>>6659
Tell me that was not the stupidest thing you've read all month.

>>6671
Well, seeing as it's the beginning of the month... actually, no. It still isn't. Though, it is up there. Maybe he's a very good troll, perhaps?

>>6643
well he has brought some personal though to the topic while you have only spitted out a negative reaction to his input.
Your reaction defines you more than it defines him.

I appreciate his train of thought, moreover.

> What should be God is something you can believe in that will lead ONLY to good....What could that possibly be ?

Very nice. A shot a principles. Indeed "god" has to be overarchingly good.

>>6795
Gods don't have to be good. There's no reason to suppose that's a requirement.

sage'ing a sticky.

>>6799
Abrahamic god, and especially god of the bible rest on being omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent.

File 133525608760.png - (9.38KB , 400x400 , you arent agnostic.png )

>>5959
Agnostic is not a position. If I were to say whether English was your first language or not, "I don't know" Is not an answer I'm going to take.

>>6807

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

>>6814
"Do you believe X exists?" "I don't know"

It implies you don't know what you believe. It's not the same thing, like when someone asks, "Do you think it's going to rain on Friday?"

The question should be rephrased to "Do you live your life with the assumption that God(s) exists?"
The answer that could be given is yes or no. "I don't know," is a meaningless answer.

>>6816
Hmm. The question phrased that way is still incomplete, as more than one condition could result in a "no". One could simply not live one's life with the assumption that God exists, or one could live one's life with the assumption that God does not exist. One is absence of assumption concerning God, the other is active negative assumption.

>>6853
Yes, and these things concern belief, not knowledge.

Saying "I'm without knowledge" on a question concerning belief, shows a lack of understanding on the other person's part.

>>6814
Its not a choice. Quit calling it a 'choice', because its not. This idea that because there are binary conclusions, that its a choice is stupid. Its like when "certain people" equate the faith debate to 'The Theory of Evolution' to 'Christianity'. Its so vastly different than what's correct. Believing that something is true is compulsory.

>>6856
I wasn't referring to knowledge. I was pointing out that simply not believing in God and actively believing there is no God are two different states.

>>6866
Yes, but not deciding is not a choice.

If someone never hears about Judo-Christian philosophy, then talking about choices is an incoherent statement.

>>6867

So if someone ever hears about Judaeo-Christian theology, they must either actively believe it or actively disbelieve it? That sounds dangerously to the Christian position that one you learn of Jesus the only two possibilities are that you believe in Jesus or you go to hell, which in turn sounds an awful lot like The Game.

>>6870
What?

http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/p20.htm

Here's an discussion between Father Fredrick C. Copleston and Doctor Bertrand Russell. It's quite interesting (also fun to listen to). There's an audio file if you're a lazy fuck (like me).

We don't discuss the existence of God; God exist, period. Beyond that we cannot say nothing more about Its nature, that's a field for faith, maybe theology. So, discuss religion but not God's existence.

>>6981
what the hell is this hogwash? If someone makes a claim that something exists I'm going to investigate it. IF no evidence turns up in favor, but that someone still claims it exists (I'm looking at you Big Foot hunters) then I will laugh at him.
I laugh at you and your blind faith in divine existence.

>>6991
Please dont feed the trolls.

sage'ing a sticky

>>6993

Oh, you.

>>6129

Scandinavian countries are good at getting rid of Gods. The native religion was supplanted by Christianity in, what, a few decades? It's no surprise that Christianity is falling to the wayside so easily.

The United States are different. The US worships a lot of different things that form some kind of capitalistic Godhead in which a god exists: money, power, and liberty.

It's not just important to our politics - it's entirely engrained into our society. We have God on our money, on our walls, in our state buildings (Constitution? What's that? Lulz), and all over our presidents. It'll be a long fight to get the US to where the Scandinavian Countries are at.

Also, why the fuck do Europeans call us Americans? Canadians and Mexicans are Americans to - as is every person in the whole of South America.

>>6991

No evidence? Just look around... God is everywhere, and in you also; call it the Logos, Monad, whatever, He's real and out there. It's a shame that peolple confound God with religion; religion is a human construction around the inate and perceivable idea of God, nothing more, or you choose to believe it or not, move on. Don't turn your anger to religious institutions against God; release yourself from preconceived notions about God and accept Him as the fundamental origin of existence, not an supernatural being but the whole of creation.

But perhaps you are seeking another kind of evidence, mathematical maybe? If that's the case let me remind me you of a little fundamental theorem by Godel: the incompletude one: there are truths not provable in math, that is, there's no axiomatic system from which they can be derived, and if you believe Chattin, this truths not only exist but are the vast majority in the universe of all possible mathematical truths. Yes, God is just a number, but not a computable one, you dig?

>>7027
*loud wet fart sound*

>>7027
I'll oblige. How do you know that god is everywhere?

>>5999
i just want to point out that there is only a very small percentage of terrain on the planet that we can actually survive on. The reason we've grown to all these different places is really because we've managed to create shelter to shield us from the elements. Not to mention that the sun, our primary source of life and energy, gives us cancer.

Our bodies are very flawed. We breathe and eat through the same tube. We go to the bathroom through our reproductive organs, raising the risk of infection. Our bodies are fragile and we get sick/die very easily.

>>5999
i just want to point out that there is only a very small percentage of terrain on the planet that we can actually survive on. The reason we've grown to all these different places is really because we've managed to create shelter to shield us from the elements. Not to mention that the sun, our primary source of life and energy, gives us cancer.

Our bodies are very flawed. We breathe and eat through the same tube. We go to the bathroom through our reproductive organs, raising the risk of infection. Our bodies are fragile and we get sick/die very easily.

>>7038
actually the laws of physics are broken all the time, by beetles, bumble bees, and electrons at least.

>>7040
lol no

Even those things follow the laws of nature.

>>7037

I'm not talking about omnipresence, but of the quality that pervades the universe and links all the things in it. Look no further than the big bang: all things in the universe arise from a space-time singularity, an infinitesimal point that expanded to stars, planets, flowers, humans, the cosmic background radiation, and so forth, so whatever give rise to the big bang - let's call it God - is everywhere as we are single instances of His creation. The same analogy can be applied to humans; if we look into our dna we see the roots of our ancestors until 50 000 years ago to the first migrations of the modern men out of Africa, so that the so called 'mitochondrial eve' - the root of mankind - is also everywhere and will continue to be so in every coming generations

>>7050
A thing's source does not permeate through and become the thing's "essence." Steel is not iron ore. Polyester is not oil. To say that a supposed god is "in everything" because he allegedly initiated creation is just as absurd as saying rubber trees are in tires.
Furthermore, you have already contradicted yourself.
"let's call this god" you said of the source of the big bang. This is a supposition; a "suppose for the sake of argument" argument, but earlier you claimed quite definitively that "God exists, period."
You can't make such an existential claim from a supposition in the way you did.
Finally, your analogy of historical DNA as being something like god's operation is ludicrous. Causal connections are not proof of a god's existence, they are causal connections and nothing more. When you say "this is everywhere" i assume you mean that there are clues to this history in all human's DNA ("everywhere" that certainly is not), but this is again as meaningless as saying chickens are everywhere in a cake because they supplied the eggs.

Further, the Big Bang wouldn't have been the big bang as it were, had a being been required to initiate it, nor had there there existed a being to initiate it.

Nature is not a chariot, and neither requires nor allows for a god to pull it around.

Monotheism is rebranded sun-worship. Get over it.

>>7054

Again, i'm not talking about omnipresence - the quality of being in more than one place simultaneously. All your objections are flawed by the fact they are refuting something that's not claimed in my assertions. What i'm talking about is the 'feeling' of the presence of God in all things as manifestations of His creation and rooted in the same origin that connects everything; i'm not saying the big bang is everywhere, what i say is that trough cosmological evolution we can extrapolate the existence of a big bang and from it we can infer the existence of God, because matter/energy doesn't arise spontaneously (causal connection did you say?), so God is that something that fills the picture, the entity that breaks the 'absurd' of existence: the primordial being. So God's everywhere is not a physical claim but the awareness of God's work in all things

Also, i haven't contradict myself; God is just a name and thus subject to multiple meanings and interpretations - philosophical, religious, logical, etc. I might as well have said 'let's call it string theory', wich by the way is the best candidate we have now to a pre-big bang explanation, but then how string theory came to be? and we could go on and on, until we get to the point that God is inescapable: the singularity of the multiverse

>>7058
This reasoning is ancient. What you are talking about is the idea that there must be a Prime Mover, an uncaused initial cause that sets the sequence of causality.

However even if we assume this is true, it does not follow that said initial cause must be an entity with intent and agency.

>>7055

Who said that God is pulling the universe? As far as i'm concerned i believe in a self-sustained universe governed by the laws of physics, and if that was all there is to say about it we probably didn't need to pull God to the picture, but in a universe of cause and effect the big bang couldn't had operate on itself to trigger himself, so if the big bang was the effect we can recursively track the cause to something outter to the space-time universe we are in, and God, in that view and according to the implicit defenition i give, is the only candidate around

>>7059

Yes, you nailed it, but nowhere i said otherwise, what i claim is the inevocal existence of God, but make no further assertions about It's nature (including a personal or sentient God), that's the realm of faith, and as i said: or you have it or you don't

>>7059

Yes, you nailed it, but nowhere i said otherwise, what i claim is the inequivocal existence of God, but make no further assertions about It's nature (including a personal or sentient God), that's the realm of faith, and as i said: or you have it or you don't

>>7058
>What i'm talking about is the 'feeling' of the presence of God in all things as manifestations of His creation and rooted in the same origin that connects everything;
This gave me the "feeling" of constipation. I don't see how this is any different from what I refuted, that an originator does not continue through the creation. A "feeling' that something exists is not evidence that something exists. I feel strongly that aliens exist, but that alone doesn't mean they do. You may not be talking about omnipresence, but you seem to be talking about something very close to it. To say that "everything is god" because you think god caused them to come into being makes the same fallacy i mocked above... there is no iron ore in steel and the blood, sweat, and tears from the workers is not actually in the steel (i hope)

>>7061
So if we are positing that an impersonal first cause can exist without itself being caused, what makes it more logical to assume that an unknown event caused the earliest known event than it is to assume the earliest known event is itself that first cause?

>>7064
I'll simplify this.

If we assume that God can exist without a cause, then why not save a step and assume the the universe can exist without a cause?

>>7063

Are you trying to deliberately miss the point? Did you notice the quotes in the 'feeling' sentence? When i say 'i feel' i didn't mean literally as in 'i believe', for a believe is an act of faith and to me God is above that; a believe is something that requires faith, a kind of hope in something, so we may apply them interchangably as in i hope/believe Obama win/loose the election, also i might say i believe Christ is the son of God and that's an faith-based utterance, but i don't say 'i believe in God', God exist, it's an axiom (axiom 0 to be more precise, let axiom 1 be a theory of everything or something) of the universe, is given, not proved or demonstrated.

Consider the micro-world of euclidian geometry: it has beautiful theorems about plain geometry derived from a set of postulates/axioms; so in this micro-universe the axioms are God, the same way supose i randomly setup a set of rules and initial conditions in Conway's game of life that strangely would evolve to a state where life and conscience emerged, should my craft be dependent of what cells 3C or B2 in the grid choose to believe as to their origin? I guess not, even considering i was very able to conceal the autorship to the game agents - in fact, they would be able only to see their 2D grid world and infer the laws of physics (the rules) trough inspection of their world behaviour, but not aware of a runing microship or a programmer.

Likewise the preposition that 'God is everywhere' is metaphor, because we can only speak of God trough metaphor and analogy (unless those who claim they are prophets); it's kind of sad we know nothing and therefore can say nothing about the only thing for sure in the universe

>>7061

because the first known event of the universe is itself part of the universe and therefore subject to the laws of physics that postulate that everything has a cause, so whatever caused the first known event of this universe must be an event form an outer universe or dimension, and we don't know if the same laws apply there at all (maybe the laws we see here are a subset or a special case of those); Einstein uniformity principle applies only to the space-time universe we inhabit

>>7064

because the first known event of the universe is itself part of the universe and therefore subject to the laws of physics that postulate that everything has a cause, so whatever caused the first known event of this universe must be an event form an outer universe or dimension, and we don't know if the same laws apply there at all (maybe the laws we see here are a subset or a special case of those); Einstein uniformity principle applies only to the space-time universe we inhabit

>>7074

if we assume the universe exist without a cause, than the universe is God, a pantheist philosophical and metaphysical view

>>7080
Except the laws of physics as we know them formed during that event, and were in flux as it occurred.

>>7082

Exactly. That's why i refer earlier to a theory of everything as a kind of axiom 1 of the universe, because some believe that in the primordial plasma soup of the big bang existed only one fundamental force that would eventually break up in the four we perceive today

>>7081
If the universe is God, then why not get rid of the term "God" and just save us the trouble?

But theists wont because such a God is not the God of the Bible that makes all their wishes about their existence come true.

I like how, no matter how far people go with their shaggy god theories, all the way to the timeless beginning of the universe, they still, fashionably, limit themselves to the modern concept of a single, never plural, god entity, as if that somehow makes more sense.

You're not trying to prove a god or twenty gods, or a whole civilization of supernatural beings. You're trying to validate a badly outdated series of myths that are already well understood by anyone who looks into their history, to be several ignorant and violent early bronze-age civilizations attempts at understanding the world and forcing an ethical code amongst their awful people.

If God is the universe, then why not get rid of the term "the universe" and save all the trouble of conflicting with theists about it's existence.

It even sits nicely with both monotheists and polytheists when arguing over the existence of the existence of a single/many gods.

>>7085

Well, does it really matter, i mean what's in a name? For me, a crow perhaps denotes a black thing with feathers and wings that fly, for a scientist it might be for instance something belonging to the corvus brachyrhynchos species of the corvus genus belonging to the corvidae family, but in spite of what me or the biologist say the little bird don't give a damn and get on with is business.

The names of God are indeed a very scholary subject probably as old as the scriptures themselfs, with all sorts of designations and titles ascribed to it in the Tanakh. The scholars don't even agree as to the correct pronuntiation of the tetragrammaton (YHVH in english) hebrew representation of the name of God, being Yahweh the most common.

Perhaps the best definition of God is the one gived by the Lord to Moses: 'I Am what I Am'; right so, things are just what they are, the definition is the thing itself. But the danger is that we must comunicate and wrap this ideas/definitions in human languages with their inner subjectivity and redundancy - Wittgenstein was probably right when he said that all philosophical problems are language problems; mathematics or natural language might not be tailored for such a task but are the best we have

>>7084
So you're trying to apply the laws of causality to the event which itself established those laws. If the event which caused causality needs a cause, then the event which caused it also needs a cause, repeat. This is the paradox of infinite regression, which the concept of the prime mover was formulated to solve.

>>7090

Indeed. So for the sake of sanity let's consider moment 1 when we have a full universe pack with planck scales, quantas of energy, and all of that. The big bang itself - the begining of expansion (or super-inflation if you prefer) - implicitly requires a previous event to trigger it and transform all that kinetic energy; recently Stephen Hawking advocated the search for clues in the cosmic background radiation of clashs with other universes in the past, that might be such an event, in accordance with M-theory which prescribes it in the form of membranes clash

>>7086

That 'awful people' are your ancestors dude, show some respect. Who knows how future generations will judge us, 'awful people', and how much of our 'shaggy' theories about nature will be classified as myths, that's called evolution; science is not the art of being right but mostly of being wrong; Bohr said once that a specialist is someone who had made all possible mistakes in a given field, in the same vein Einstein once said that someone who had never been wrong have never attempted something new. That's the main advantage of science against religion and its ethernal dogmas, because the world is movement, the worls is chage, science might even exclude religion but never excludes God - God is the supreme constant of the universe, the one that precede all others

>>7095
You're trolling right?

Or is this honestly your opinion?

>>7096
I'm an atheist, but he sort of has a point. I don't personally think it goes far at all in proving the existence of 'God', and it doesn't go anywhere in proving the mythology of, say, the Bible, but I wouldn't say he's trolling.

Nope, not my ancestors, but even if they were, respect is earned. I'd give them the amount of respect they deserve, right along with the tens billions of other nameless dead people I've never bothered to imagine from the thousands of civilizations most of you have never even heard of, that lived and built and fought and died for their missing gods too, who stumbled around obsessed with tribal warfare like savages over the milllenia and conquered and merged their cults and cultures and left nothing but some very impressive stonework (+10 respect points) and that unstable blend of dogmatic anti-history that came with the sacrifice of all the worlds knowledge acquired over tens of thousands of years (-several million respect points).

A people for whom the abrahamic faiths are an ethical improvement, are a bloody-minded people who barely think. Then and now.

>>7093
If an event established all that, then at the beginning of "moment one" defined by the duration of that event there was NOT a full universe with all that.

>>7097

No. I'm asking him honestly. Because it's very hard to understand his thinking.

>>7101

Your difficulty probably arises because of preconceived and prejudice notions about God, the idea that God and religion are the same, but they are not; of course religion deals with God but the broadly idea and notion of God excedes the religious perspective, religion is just one of the possible viewpoints about God. Release yourself from what you think to know about God, make tabula rasa of those views and start from scratch to see what can you possibly achieve about the ontology of God. I did it, and my conclusion was that i can't make any grounded assumptions about God, except His existence. Like Descartes said 'nothing comes from nothing', therefore all things are rooted in God as the primary source of existence, whatever the essence of God might be

>>7099

If you don't somehow isolate the notion of the universe as an autonomous entity you cannot take a systemic aproach to deal and analize it. Of course there aren't fully isolated systems as such, the notion of a system itself includes interfaces with the surrounding environment and for our universe any previous events that has given rise to it may be considered as part of that interface; if not, we couldn't even be destinguished from our parents as individuals

>>7122
We were talking about the first event. Talking about events previous to a first event is nonsensical.

>>6010
however I understand the reasoning because the comment was directed at everything was perfect. Nothing is perfect as some search their whole lives to attain said perfection.

>>6475
although one happens more often to then the other. Any talk of not being religious or not believing in a god is met with hands over their ear, saying,"la la la I can't hear you." meaning they become twats in my eyes while a
Majority of people who drink aren't necessarily alcholics. Well depending on your definition of alcoholism.

>>6512
he didn't say that. Because scientists use a process to get info and if it doesn't make results then they take the hypothesis and start again. It's not about immediate results, tangent of
Course because we're talking about the existence of god and whether religion is notable.

>>7124

I'm talking of the first event of a space-time universe (u) which is incorporated in an outer Universe (U), so we can consider the system U(u). This way the first time event of u is preceded by events in U (unless causality is not a necessity in U, in which way U may not even exist yet...), some (at least one) of which give rise to u, or originated the first time event of u.

Let's consider U our universe and u a black-hole, for instance; so the first event of u was in fact preceded by an event in U, the colapse of a super massive star.

If you consider the space-time universe u as the only system around, or if U is the 'all-inclusive' system, than we are lefted with the paradox of the first event of u/U, and the only escape from that paradox is God, the prime mover, in aristotelic tradition

Saying there must be something "outside" the universe to make a system of U(u) means there must be something outside THAT system to make ù(U(u)). And then this reasoning requires us to hypothesize û(ù(U(u))), and ü(û(ù(U(u)))), ad infinitum. So we'll ignore this problem of infinite regress because it's irrelevant to the point. We'll instead lump all of this into a new set and call it Everything There Is.

So here's the logic you're presenting so far.

First, we must assume that Everything There Is cannot be self-causing, because things must have a cause.

So then we must assume that there is a thing that caused Everything There Is.

A necessary quality of this thing is that it is self-causing.

But now that this line of reasoning has admitted that some things are self-causing, the initial assumption no longer holds. That specific assumption, when followed to its logical end, is self-defeating.

>>7132

Your objections are covered in the last paragraph of my previous post. I've never said that God has a cause; who knows? Maybe God is some kind of reverse-entropy (like Maxwell's demon) Deus ex machina who created matter and order out of chaos. But if that was true, is not Chaos God? God is itself a paradox, but the one that settles all others

>>7146
Firstly, the objection certainly not covered. The objection is that existence is a thing and things cannot be self-causing, so to solve this we must hypothesize a self-causing thing.

If a Prime Mover can be self-causing, why then can't the universe itself be self-causing, since the premise has established that self-causing things exist?

Secondly, God as an idea does not in any way "solve all other" paradoxes. It simply displaces them. Saying "a bunch of things don't make sense so we'll blame them all on something that doesn't NEED to make sense" is hardly logical.

Properties of potential universes that compliment other properties of potential universes can allow potential universes to be extant universes. Others can't. Ours is one of the former. The prime movers are the universal constants allowing our universe to exist. And so it does.

No gods necessary. ...no matter how many times people loosen their definition of gods to give them room in the universe to escape into.

>>7147

Your very reasoning is an absolute demonstration at the very least of the plausability of the existence of God; you say: 'why can´t the universe be self-causing?' the simple admission of the possibility of self-causality is a recognition of God because self-causing entities evaluate as God, whatever you choose to call it, if you are not confortable with the term call it NoGod or something, i couldn´t care less, but the thing you choose to call NoGod is nevertheless mapped into God in my own dictionary.

So why the universe can´t be self-causing? Because of the sacred laws of thermodynamics which don't allow it. But does that mean the universe can't actually be self-caused? Not necessarily; it only means that the current laws of physics as we understand them must be extended if not completly overruled to allow it. Perhaps a theory of everything is a good candidate for God. In the presence of a perfect model of the universe maybe one could say: 'I´ve seen God'. I can't understand people who say scientific knowledge throw them awy from God, for me is quite the opposite, whenever i see advances in the knowledge of the inner-workings of the universe i feel as we we progress a tiny little bit further into the mind of God. Whoever thinks in the former way must misjudge the Bible as a scientific corpus. It is not however. The likes of Darwin, Leibniz or Einstein, those are the true prophets, the ones who decode God's magnum opus.

Why must God be some white hair and beard wizard archetype with a thunder voice? God is a state of knowledge, the state of full, perfect knowledge, a kind of epystemological nirvana with information-theretic entropy of 0. Which knowledge, what it consists of? I don't know, nor anyone else does. If you are seeking a precise defenition of God not i nor anyone else could give you one, whoever possess that knowledge can perhaps create and start his own universe. To 'see' God you must read between the lines of the great book of the universe. Some people say 'God is this' and 'God is that', i only say God IS, the rest is beyond our current understanding, we can make philosophical, ethical, metaphysical, or hypothetical claims about it but they remain subjective considerations based on personal beliefs or feelings, a faith. That's why the principle of maxium entropy in a statistical terms follow a conservative approach by stating that in the presence of insuficient data we should stick with the max entropy model, meaning we should consider what we don´t know rather than what we think we know. Given that, God is an utopia, a dream of complete and absolute knowledge, an information singularity, perhaps bounded by the Bekenstein limit (links the amount of information that can be stored in a given area to the entropy of a black hole with the same area), but with a physical expression, after all the Wheeler correspondence states the physical world can be seen as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals (like the matrix?) - maybe quantum decoherence is the illusion after all, is this not a consequence of the new PBR theorem? How far, if ever, we are in this quest or path to God is irrelevant, after all in spite of what ants may know about it quantum mechanics is there anyway (so we think).

To say that a paradox excludes something is an implicit acceptance of the impossibility of existence, when in reality it only means the possibility of higher logics perhaps with greater-than platonic truths; i can only see two ways in the current state of affairs to escape the paradox of existence: 1)self-causality and 2)ethernity or infinity. Any of them (i doubt both, and yet...), if true, belong to the domain of God. Is there a third ooption? If there is, it's also in God. This is consistent with what i've said before because any of them would be fundamental ingredients in the state of full or perfect knowledge of creation. Put this way, God is not only possible but irrefutable, and if you believe in Godel's ontologycal proof, if something is possible in some universe then that something necessarily exist in that universe. This is connected with the many-worlds interpretation of the wave function collapse and with one of the views i expressed elsewhere about God existing in some universe U that would give rise to our own universe u - U can be a Turing machine programed by God to output u.

A paradox is not something inherently bad though, it can derive from a logical impossibility or else represent insuficient knowledge about something. Ancient elders made that mistake when they lacked full knowledge of the tools to discern about some thought experiments. A classical example is Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise; some implied that this would mean the impossibility of movement and dynamics, but the development of the propper analytical devices (series and successions, specifically the notion that infinit series can have a finit limit, so that Achilles would not take an infinit amount of time to pass the turtle) allowed to find what could be seen and perceived but not formaly demonstrated. Comon sense prevailed. So there i refute the accusation that God doesn´t need to make sense, because, after all, God is just the application of common sense (some prefer intuition) to reality, no mysticism just plain old common sense.

So how can we predict God's existence if we can´t make any more predictions about it, of what properties and attributes it has, or what is it made of? By its consequences. How do we know black-holes exist? no one have ever seen one. By its consequences in nearby gravitational fields. If dark matter and dark energy exist how does someone predicted it before it has been observed? Because of the universe expansion. Same thing to the higgs boson relative to the break of electroweak symmetry and particle's mass. What is the consequence of the existence of God? Well, life, the universe, and everything else.

>>7180
> If you are seeking a precise defenition of God not i nor anyone else could give you one

Then the word is meaningless and cannot be discussed here.

>God is just the application of common sense

The same common sense that tells one that the Earth is flat and the sun, stars, and planets move around it.

>>7149

Universal constants are an epyphenomenon of some other process, in our case, the creation of the universe, they just don´t arise by themselfs; constants, by definition, are immutable so they can´t allow an universe to come into being, they are data, for an universe you need an algorithm to transform that potential in action. In this context, the binomial algorithm/data of the primer universe is God

>>7200

"the binomial algorithm/data of the primer universe is God"

How do you know this? Show your work.

>>7201

By definition. If i consider God to be the primordial entity/substance that excede our current understanding of the laws of physics, that breaks the chicken-egg dilema (so that it won't has a cause or it is itself the cause, or something in between), responsible for the initial 'set in motion' of all universes, then an algorithm and initial conditions with those characteristics in the first universe are God.

>>7204
I thought you said no one could define God.

File 133787305961.jpg - (23.53KB , 504x641 , grim-zombie-jesus.jpg )

>>7205
It seems he's trying to define God into existence.

Maybe he would like meet my waifu who I defined into existence. I would show her off, if however, SHE WASN'T A FICTIONAL CHARACTER JUST LIKE GOD.

Here, have a picture of Zombie Jesus for your troubles.

>>7205

True, but only a barely minimal justification of the existence of God without speculate on His qualities or properties. I've never said God isn't definable, every esisting things get one of this for free; even an empty set has a definition - the absence of mathematical objects in some domain -, because, you see, it doesn't make sense to define non-existing things, so ordinarily non-existence is defined in terms of existing things, like for instance saying a room is empty is implicit the reference to furniture, people, etc., all existing things, but saying for example that Sherlock Holmes or the Bigfoot are not in the room is nonsense

"Even our bodies are practically machines, designed exactly right in order to sustain life and homeostasis"

That has very little to do with design, and everything to do with evolution. The first species were far from "perfect" (which humans still aren't anyways), and it has been through billions of years of evolution that we are "perfect" (as you say).

It has been proven that all religions and god's are almost exactly the same, you only have to prove one wrong to prove them all wrong. examples? I will put greek myth and the christian bible together.

Rains nine days and nine nights- Prometheus (the creator of man) saves mankind and other animals by putting two of everything in a box.
Rains 40 days and 40 nights (small difference) and the creator of man makes 2 of everything go on a boat.

Man is created from clay by Prometheus and is given women to entertain
man is created from earth (clay is found on earth) and women created from rib to entertain him.

Apollo is born to save mankind. he is the god of truth. born december 25th
Jesus is born december 25th made out to be son of god savior of man.

Zues creates Pandora and her box. Pandora is made curios and is told not to open box. guarded by Hephaestos, she slips by him and opens box which in turn makes man know all havoc and evil on earth
Eve being curious and easily deceived is tricked by a serpent to bite into an apple which in turn makes her know all things wrong.

It has been proven that all religions and god's are almost exactly the same, you only have to prove one wrong to prove them all wrong. examples? I will put greek myth and the christian bible together.

Rains nine days and nine nights- Prometheus (the creator of man) saves mankind and other animals by putting two of everything in a box.
Rains 40 days and 40 nights (small difference) and the creator of man makes 2 of everything go on a boat.

Man is created from clay by Prometheus and is given women to entertain
man is created from earth (clay is found on earth) and women created from rib to entertain him.

Apollo is born to save mankind. he is the god of truth. born december 25th
Jesus is born december 25th made out to be son of god savior of man.

Zues creates Pandora and her box. Pandora is made curios and is told not to open box. guarded by Hephaestos, she slips by him and opens box which in turn makes man know all havoc and evil on earth
Eve being curious and easily deceived is tricked by a serpent to bite into an apple which in turn makes her know all things wrong.

>>7201
he's referring to PHI or 1.618. if you divide certain natural happenings it's supposed to come out as 1.618. like the ratio between male and female bees in a hive

>>7288
>>7261

We can describe specific qualities that Sherlock Holmes and Bigfoot would have if they existed, why not God?

>>7301

First, both Sherlock Holmes and the Bigfoot are not entirely non-existing beings, they possess a kind of virtual existence, something in the middle between existence and non-existence, because they are derived or inspired in very real entities; in the case of Sherlock Holmes he is the fictional alter ego of Dr Joseph Bell, who was the main inspiration from Conan Doyle to create the great detective, besides others lesser known, including Conan Doyle himself, as i believe there are traces of every author in their characters. It's always the same, every non-existing things are defined by their existing counterparts, so they don't possess a definition by themselfs; even if i imagine an universe composed of anti-matter, it's still a dual or mirror oposition to our universe, but God is The thing, the mirror or clone of itself, perfect symmetry - although i don't know in what dimension or topological space -, the same with an anti-matter avatar of the self, whether if i say XYZ doesn't exist, your answer would be like: 'what is XYZ?' - it's redundant -, again the mind searching for non-existence from an existence standpoint. If we define non-existence as infinity minus every things that exist, then, at most, we can say that XYZ is somewhere in the infinit space of all things that are not - pretty damn vague, for sure.

Second, and most importantly, the existence of either Sherlock Holmes or the Bigfoot are not indispensable for the existence of the universe, the same way individual water molecules are not indispensable for the existence of an ocean, only the character and emergent properties of the ocean itself are. Remember God is the original entity or the initial state of the universe, so the universe doesn't sustain without God; in short, the conservation laws prove the laws of physics are impossible from a thermodinamic point-of-view, so God is an extension of those to 'normalize' existence, whatever God might be - we don't know

>>7336
Holmes may not be indispensable to the existence of YOUR universe, but don't imagine that this holds true for everyone. Also, the theory that "the conservation laws prove the laws of physics are impossible from a thermodinamic point-of-view" (sic) was founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of the laws of conservation.

>>7337
>Holmes may not be indispensable to the existence of YOUR universe, but don't imagine that this holds true for everyone.

Can you go into more detail by what you mean by that, ffaf27

>>7341
It's as simple as this: I can't imagine a world in which he did not exist. Comforting me with his constant presence at my side. Assuring me that Baskervillains will get their just deserts in due time. Punishing the wicked and bettering the lives of the g8dly.

>>7342
You are a silly one, ffaf27.

>>7336

So they halfway exist, and the question remains. We can arrive at qualities these entities must have to be the specific entities they are, why not God?

>>7336
cris, do you understand what circular logic is?

>>7337

As it happens i'm a sherlockian fanatic; you choose the wrong guy to mess with in Baker Street matters my friend. So i'll give you the famous quote from the master detective for you to thinker with: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth...” - So if our current model of the universe deem it impossible, whatever remains (GOD) must be the truth. Elementary Watson

>>7409
But science has better explanations. Unless you're saying that those explanations are impossible...

>>7353

Must have? For someone who claims God doesn't exist what qualities should this be? Non-existing things don't have qualities, as for myself i attribute none (with the exception of the creation of the universe, which may not be exactly a property but a consequence of God's other meta-qualities) to God since i don't know the nature of those qualities and properties, and nobody does, besides theological and philosofical traditions which are systems of believes founded in personal faith, even logic when dealing directly with the God concept arrives at all sort of paradoxes, since logic seems insuficient to produce any definite definition of God (with established qualities/properties) - Godel's incompletude theorem states exactly that.

Therefore we arrive at the notion of God indirectly by inference and association, and derived directly by accepting the full consequences of the laws of physics which establish the necessity of causality and the conservation of energy as fundamental constituents of the inner fabric of the universe; so we may conclude that or the laws of physics are wrong, and they provide a very close model of our universe but not quite the same, or else they are still incomplete. In this view God is the missing link, the bridge between our understanding of the world and the reality of existence, a kind of hidden variable of the cosmos; Einstein himself when confronted with the possibility of spooky action at distance proclaimed the possibility of hidden variables in quantum mechanics, just by induction, not by experimentation or by knowing which were the properties of those supposed variables, if he knew it they wouldn't be hidden wouldn't it? in the same way if someone knew the properties of God It wouldn't be a mystery. We can made up fictional characters and their properties/characteristics based on our experiences and acquaintances, but not with God, God is one-of-a-kind, there's no mold for God, so if there's not a comparinson term for God how can we define it? We (should) know He exist but nothing else for granted

>>7355

Yes, it's saying the universe is because it is, duh

>>7412
Your logic is basically:
>1. God exists because he is the ground of all existence
>2. Things exist.
>3. Therefor God exists.

>Yada yada. Transcendental argument of God.

Oddly enough, there are physicists who make the claim that the universe did in fact, come from nothing. They have good evidence to back that claim up too.
You see, if you add up all the energy in the universe, both positive (regular energy) and negative (which is gravity), it comes out to about 0.

Wrap your head around that.

>>7411
There are specific qualities that we can infer God to have. For example, to fulfill a role as a prime mover He must be self-instantiating, self-creating.

Interestingly enough, there are certain qualities that a prime mover would not necessarily have to have. It would not have to be everlasting, once causality is set in motion there is absolutely nothing that requires its continued existence. It would not have to have agency or intent. It would not have to be a particularly strong force, as it only needs to set in motion a chain reaction.

In short, a prime mover is not required to have any qualities that are connotated by the word God, and you cannot argue that the word does not carry certain specific and immediate connotations.

So what exactly is the value in automatically connecting this word to the concept of a prime mover when the discipline of philosophy requires precision of speech?

>>7417
that depends on if thats what your specific god entails.
This is also the point of no return, where deism and general religion schism.

>>7425
Even the phrase 'your specific god' uses the non-capitalized 'god' which has inherent implications, most specifically that it refers to an entity with intent and agency.

If I picked up a rock and said that it was a god because it shares a quality or two with the concept we indicate by the term, I would be grossly misusing the word.

>>7413

I simplify and reformulate the logic as follows:

things exist
things need cause
first cause is God

There's a gross misunderstanding of what negative energy is all about, i'm afraid; an antiparticle is the reverse charged correspondent of another particle, so by your argument a battery with reverse charged poles come out of nothing... but even if that was true, where did the null sum come from? as far as i know the standard model of particle physics predict a rougly 25% of antimatter to 5% of regular matter (with the remaining 70% being dark energy). And how on earth do you come up with the notion that gravity has negative energy; if gravity manifestated as you claim only trough negative energy, bodies like the sun or the earth, made of regular particles, didn't have any gravitational field! Also, if that argument holded, than we could also say that an particle/antiparticle annihilation would evaporate to nothing which contradict the conservation of energy law, energy transforms but don't disappear. I advise you to go research and revise your arguments before making silly assertions

>>7417

Your problem with the word God is not mine. As to the connotations of the word, by that argument, for instance if you are an united states american, i could say you care only for money, if you are from Texas you like guns, and so and so. Can connotations frame 400 million people?

You say God doesn't need to be a special strong force because it only needs to set in motion a chain reaction - bold claim from whom doesn't have (nor anybody else) the cluest idea as how the primer universe come to be. Agency and intent, as you say, are not necessary conditions, but if not then, as life itself on earth, the first universe must have evolved from random interactions, but evolution, whatever it be, needs an environment, and that leads to the question as to where that environment come from in the first place. This inevitably leads to all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, so the only exit is to consider God as in a state of information superposition (it can be anything) - is the moon there when we are not looking? we can´t be sure, but if i´m looking to the ocean i can perceive its influence trough the tide. The same with God, i just don´t know if the uncertainty principle of science will ever allow us to reach there, the full knowing of God.

You are strugling to disaprove God as a consequence of a dislike of certain religious traditions and beliefs. Claiming God does not exist is a religion as anyother else, because it entails judgement based faith, no less. As oposed to agosticism, which disaprove those traditions without disaproving the notion of God, which by the way can not be disaproved nor proved, it's the most abstract notion of all, so powerful and at the same time so weak, it has 'is' but not 'what', so WHAT IS God? Your bet is as good as mine, God may not play dice, but we can throw our odds, and so i respect all faiths and creeds although may not agree with many

>>7482
cris, do you believe in a life after death? Or that god interacts with the world? If so, how or what does it do?

>>7482
You assume that, because I am arguing with your reasoning, I must be trying to disprove God. I am doing nothing more than pointing out that your reasoning is not sound.

Let me ask you this one question, and please answer only this question.

Things exist.
Things that exist require cause.
There exists an entity or force that is the first cause.

Why does this entity or force not require a cause if it exists?

>>7489

Don't know. Insuficient data. Impossible to compute

>>7496

Is not sound because, once again, you want a definition of God in a tray, like someone could come up and say: "hey you this is God, God this is him"; If all we can see was all that it could be talked about all philosophy would be thrown in the trash. Philosophy is perhaps the art of interpret what we see to uncover what we can't; the senses are not all there is to learn the world, you got to see God with the eyes of the mind. Because information is resource intensive the senses gives us just the barely to survive, we don't need infrared vision or ultrasonic apparatus, it's a very frugal system devised trough million years of evolution, we only see shadows of reality.

You ask how does God don't need a cause, which is the same as saying why the first cause don´t need a cause, by definition; but who says it doesn't? It could be our insuficient understanding of the laws of cause and effect or something derived from it, or it could be the subjective nature of natural language that set traps in the form of paradoxes to very real problems, but somehow nature found a way out. You force me to do something i try to avoid which is speculate on the nature of God. It could be that God is a recursive entity in which the cause is itself (God -> God ..., this view also implies infinity which provides another escape for the first cause dilema). This exists somewhat in nature in the form of fractals, for instance. Does this mean God is a fractal? How do i know? We must humbly accept our current insuficient knowledge about the genesis of creation, and this is not accomplished by taking form God the credit for setting this all up, however He (or should i sat It, but once again if agency and intent was not present at the moment of creation then the emergence of a stable universe maybe would require infinite luck, a kind of creationist view of existence) managed to pull that out

>>7516
Then how can you say there is a God in that lack of data?
Intuition? Because you say so?

>>7517
> Philosophy is perhaps the art of interpret what we see to uncover what we can't; the senses are not all there is to learn the world, you got to see God with the eyes of the mind.

Philosophy is the art of exercising reason and logic. If you're going to try to support the existence of God with logic and reason you have to be willing to define what God would have to be as a result of the role you identify Him as having. You can't just begin a line of reasoning and then at some point say, "okay, I'm comfortable here so I'll just stop examining."

If you say there is a prime mover and that a thing called X is it you must be willing to define X with the properties it would logically have as a prime mover. If you assert that an unknown thing called X is the prime mover and a known event called Y is not, you must be prepared to identify a specific quality that X has that qualifies it as a prime mover, that Y lacks. Something other than "X does not need to have specific qualities, therefore it must be the prime mover.

>>7519

No, because of the consequences of the laws of physics that demand a first event and which the same laws prescribe as impossible. So the paradox reveals insuficient data and information not the absence of God

>>7531

God is an abstract losely defined entity associated with creation, therefore we don't know the specific quelities it has other than that it created the universe, we know it exists by the consequences of the physics laws but the qualities it possesses to made that happen are unknown to us; i can't speak for alien civilizations but it's poossible that God alone 'knows' that for the time being. It doesn't mean we should be confortable with it and stop examiniation at all, it's just a measure of the current state of knowledge, science will progress step by step in the decoding of the universe and as that happens God will be closer to us; in that perspective God can be viewed as a limit of knowledge or the limit of knowing - will future human species get there? Maybe, but that leads to other interesting questions: does God evolve? if so (reminds of the gnostic tradition of sophie or wisdom in such that God may not be the limit of knowable but the limit of what is known at a specific time t in the universe, like natural and real numbers are both infinit but one is 'more infinit', or uncountable infinitable, than the other), it can be more difficult because that limit expands, but does it expand forever? This seems like the computational halting problem that leaded to the development of modern computers, which is not solvable or (algorithmical) computable.

Your reasoning about thnig X and Y is meaningless, is the same as asking: 'why the first cause is the primal mover?', this are just names to identify a concept, you may choose to apply whatever suits you best, provided it is consistent; because God is such an abstract concept we can't know for sure what of X or Y are the best candidates for God, or better put, both X and Y can be God, only when someone 'knows' God can such a distinction be made in terms of specific qualities of X and Y. By definition i mean the full spectrum of the term, not only a verb of action (the bible does that: 'in the begining there was the verb, or logos') like saying that the first cause is the initial state of progression or cosmic evolution, but rather the properties and qualities needed for that to happen, and that we simply don´t know yet

>>7580

It is far from meaningless.

We have an event. The first event in this universe.

This event has a duration.

During this event, the laws of causality are solidified.

At the beginning of this event, the laws of causality do not yet exist.

Considering this, the only reason you have to say "It must have been caused" is "because I say so".

That's not how things work here.

>>7581

Wow! you are full of certains, and know more about God than i do, for instance you seem to be certain about the arisen of causality in this universe, i only know it's granted; you speak of several first events: the first event of the universe, the first event of causality, but there's a paradox there (as always), the first event of causality as defined by you, after the 'solidification' of the laws of causality, are the output, or caused, by a previous event, namely the first event during which the laws of causality solidified, therefore it has a cause, and so it cannot be the first event of causality, but no panic, as i've said before, the arisen of paradoxes does not imply necessarily the falsehod of the premises. You are the one who seem to be stoping examination, because you say: 'causality somehow arised'. stop. no need for God. Well, to me, the process that somehow arised causality can be a good instance for God, but we shouldn't stop there. Let me give an example.

Supose you come to a place where lives some people deprived of all contact with civilization, and the most advanced technology they possess is that they know how to lighting fire. Now supose also that you place some food heated in a microwave, and that one of them finds it. He toutches it and feels it warm so first he gess that someone has made a fire and heated it, but finds no traces of a fire around, so he concludes that somehow the food must have been heated, because he knows the food is warm and by a spetacular themodynamical intuition he knows also that food doesn't sustain heat or doesn't get heated by itself, when he joins his people he transmits what he has found and propose they worship that mysterious source of heat. But as time goes by his inquisitive mind doesn't get rested by that perliminar conclusion, because he knows that even a fire must be lighten, don't arise spontaneously, so in the lack of further evidence, he name's the mysterious source of heat (again, by spetacular intuition) as 'microwave' even though no one of his people knows the properties of so defined microwave - you can call him the first philosopher of his kind. Some generations after, one of his descendants discoveres electricity in lighthnings, they call him (warning! more intuition coming) B. Franklin

>>7588
>the arisen of paradoxes does not imply necessarily the falsehod of the premises

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_contradiction

>>7588

Why is it less reasonable to say "Causality somehow arose during event X, therefore event X could possibly be self-causing" than it is to say "Causality somehow arose, therefore God"?

>>7589

Thanks, but i said 'necessarily' which means that as a general rule the definition applies but not always (it can have exceptions). Two common sources of paradoxes are the notions of self and infinity, and all known formal logic systems and languages have problems dealing with them, that's how, for instance, Godel constructed his incompletude theorem, or Russel found a paradox in Cantor's set theory, but sometimes this paradoxes can be avoided by carefully constructed axiomatic systems as in the case of the canonical Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. Another instance of a famous self-related paradox is the paradox of the liar which says: 'All that i say is lie'. God is a special case in which it is subject to both forms of paradoxes, and the reason why we always find ourselfs leading to paradoxes whrn dealing with God in human-constructed languages; God is subject to the self paradox in instances of self-causality, and God is also subject to it in cases of no established cause event, or infinity. That's why former sages knowing of the impossibility to fully define God in a pure human language, ascribed divine qualities to a pre-babel language of which some judaic traditions assert it as the percurssor of hebrew, and that's also linked with some judaic practices in the utterance of the sacred name of God and protocols for dealing with texts where the name of God appears - they have burial places for such texts, it can´t be simply thrown in the trash

>>7590

That's not exactly what you've said before, but that's ok. If event X is self-causing then event X is a (very) strong contendor for God

>>7452
no it doesn't. God is a noun, and if it isn't proper, its definition is inherently nebulous. It can mean any number of things to any number of different people, which is why its so hard to disprove god, because he keeps fucking changing definition, within the thread even. If I call a rock god, because my "belief system" reveres rocks, I don't see the problem with calling a rock god. I hope you aren't trying to twist my words, so I'm going to just assume you aren't trying to strongarm the argument into the definition of 'god' as an entity. If you have a different interpretation, then explicitly explain what your 'god' entailes.
Basicly, what is your point?

>>7598

God   [god]
noun
1.the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.
2.the Supreme Being considered with reference to a particular attribute: the God of Islam.
3.( lowercase ) one of several deities, especially a male deity, presiding over some portion of worldly affairs.
4.( often lowercase ) a supreme being according to some particular conception: the god of mercy.
5.Christian Science . the Supreme Being, understood as Life, Truth, love, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Principle.

This is the word we're dealing with in this thread.

There are animistic religions that hold rocks to be imbued with a spirit, but not one of these would identify a specific rock as a complete embodied instance of a creator deity.

>>7595

So if the Big Bang is likely self-causing, you would say that the Big Bang is probably God?

>>7594
>Thanks, but i said 'necessarily' which means that as a general rule the definition applies but not always (it can have exceptions).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic

You're bad at this.
Also, a paradox is used to show a that there is a flaw in a the premises of an argument.

But given the way you talk, it's clear you regard "God" as a being, but avoid talking about it as such. And that you believe it must exist, because you can't see how the universe can arise causelessly.

I feel I should point out, that in empty space, particles do come into existence without a previous cause, and they will always come out of nothingness, so long as they return to it. This is not speculation on the nature of quantum particles, but was shown to be true by the mathematics, and then more importantly, shown to be true through experimentation.

When people say that the universe is a causeless cause, they really mean it popped into existence for no reason. Your God is not only unneeded to explain the origin of the Universe, but given the amount of contradictions and impossibilities that it's pretty much a requirement that such a thing doesn't exist.

Your arguments have all boiled down to a "God of the gaps" arguments, which shows a) your ignorance of matters, and your need for cognitive closure, and b) your need for a God to exist.

>>7603
>you believe it must exist, because you can't see how the universe can arise causelessly.

If you can't "see how the universe can arise causelessly" does that mean that you believe god must exist?

>>7644
No. But every cosmological argument for god demands that the universe have a prior cause, then they go on to assume that prior cause is a causeless cause, and that it it possibly God. Ignoring the fact that going from the first premise to the second is highly fallacious, if you show the initial premise is a false assumption, the argument falls apart. Basically it shows they have no case.

For those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe

>>7600

Precisely

>>7603

The nature of the uncertainty principle allows for perturbation theories to momentarily create virtual particles as intermediate states but the final outcome is always conserved. Also, they rely on the specific time-energy uncertainty which is not an universal characteristic since they are not Fourier transforms of one another. The uncertainty principle applies to all systems that behave like a wave, so in this wave-view properties loose their precise values in favour of probability distributions, but since some of them are 'interlinked' the act of measuring for instance the position ('colapsing' the probability distribution to an observable) it would interfere with the probability distribution of the momentum operator, hence the uncertainty. But where does all that leaves us? The implications and philosophical interpretations of the uncertainty principle are still an non-consensual open matter. Are they just a mathematical device to express a degree of uncertainty? What about their physical implications? So we are left with the proper interpretation of the wave-function and quantum mechanics in general, and since those allow for a superposition of states until a concrete measurement is made, we can imagine kcking a ball in oposite directions simultaneously so that both distances cancel each other (average of 0) - does that mean the ball didn´t move afterall?. Even if real, those physical implications, in the form or virtual particles, have short range and don't propagate as their conventional counterparts, so maybe we can view them as ingredients or sub-products in other processes but not as individual systems of their own; this way, if this events (virtual particle creation) need a 'wrapper' process then they don't arise out of nothing as it's proposed by some - even experiments that purpose to create photons from virtual particles need mirrors and other experimentation devices. No way. So even creation out of nothing needs something. Nothing comes from nothingness. This is perfectly coherent with my own views since if the first event of the universe arised out of nothing it needed some other process, in this case God. So does that mean God or the universe is some kind of virtual particle? Not likely, because virtual particles don´t sustain. Virtual particles are intermediate snapshots of other events. Consider the case of a human jumping; if we take a picture of him suspended in the air does that mean humans can fly? If we define fly as the inner capacity to sustain in the air, then only for short moments. Gravity wins, and for virtual particles conservation laws win too. But even if we consider the universe a virtual particle, then it's only so as part of another 'outer' Universe process

>>7646

zero-energy levels are not allowed by the uncertainty principle, so the universe doesn't have zero energy. that's the problem of confounding states with averages and fluctuations with standard deviations

>>7650
That's not what the uncertainty principle states at at!
Not to mention your assertion goes against confirmed scientific data. It's well established that virtual particles come into existence from nothing all the time. In fact, the calculations for the energy levels of atoms comes out wrong if you don't account for virtual particles acting on them! Not to mention a myriad of other calculations in quantum physics that would disagree with experimental data.

Let me put it to you exactly how incorrect you are.
Not only are you very wrong in that assertion, you wouldn't be able to post your ideas here unless computer and chemical engineers were given a correct understanding of electrodynamics, which especially includes characterizing quantized states of electron orbitals used to explain band gaps in silicon, which is required to make semiconductors like processors, RAM, and solid-state drives. If the effects of virtual particles were ignored, the calculations would be off, and the idea of home computer would be a far-fetched dream!

>>7648

And does calling the Big Bang "God" help us understand it any better?

>>7651

>That's not what the uncertainty principle states at at!

From http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Zero-point_energy:

In a quantum mechanical system such as the particle in a box or the quantum harmonic oscillator, the lowest possible energy is called the zero-point energy. According to classical physics, the kinetic energy of a particle in a box or the kinetic energy of the harmonic oscillator could be zero - namely if the velocity were zero. But quantum mechanics with its uncertainty principle implies that because the uncertainty of the exactly vanishing velocity is zero, the uncertainty of the position must be infinite. This either violates the condition that the particle remains in the box, or it brings a new potential energy in the case of the harmonic oscillator. The minimal velocity allowed by quantum mechanics is therefore not strictly zero, and therefore the minimal energy is not zero either.

You can see the calculation at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/hosc4.html

They state:

This is a very significant physical result because it tells us that the energy of a system described by a harmonic oscillator potential cannot have zero energy.

Zero-point energy is not the same as zero energy, rather it's the ground state for every quantum systems as predicted by quantum field theory and according to the uncertainty principle. All that verbose for the evidence for virtual particles for nothing, no one here is disputing the existence of them, only certain dubious interpretations about it. You talk about negating evidence, but yourself disregard well established principles and laws of thermodynamics (Wikipedia article about virtual particles states: virtual particles exhibit some of the phenomena that real particles do, such as obedience to the conservation laws) just because they don't suit your particular views

>>7652

Names again. Like calling God the big bang doesn't help either. I think that in a pure scientific perpspective God doesn´t matter, science can progress without knowing of God, but the more science progress the more we feel God lays somewhere ahead, confirming the philosophical intuition of God; i only say that we can't deny God, and science provides us with alternative paths to It, as we can now apply scientific reasoning to make a glimpse of the God concept, whereas the ancients only had their feelings in the form of wonder and reverence to nature at their disposal with all the associated inherent subjectivity

>>7664

"The Big Bang" is a purely descriptive term associated with the actual behavior of the event. All matter and energy expanding instantaneously from an infinitesimal point. The term "Big Bang" describes what happened.

What does the term "God" describe that makes it more of a fitting descriptor for this event?

>>7663
Oh really now? The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that if particles arise from a zero-energy state, then they must last forever (which our universe will). The point is doubly moot, because quantum tunnelling events can bypass such barriers anyway. You don't need Gods or external forces to explain the creation of everything.

But seeing as you wont listen to me, let's get some far more qualified minds to beat it into your head.

>There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty [five] zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. (Hawking 1988: A Brief History of Time p.129)

>There is a still more remarkable possibility, which is the creation of matter from a state of zero energy. This possibility arises because energy can be both positive and negative. The energy of motion or the energy of mass is always positive, but the energy of attraction, such as that due to certain types of gravitational or electromagnetic field, is negative. Circumstances can arise in which the positive energy that goes to make up the mass of newly-created particles of matter is exactly offset by the negative energy of gravity of electromagnetism. For example, in the vicinity of an atomic nucleus the electric field is intense. If a nucleus containing 200 protons could be made (possible but difficult), then the system becomes unstable against the spontaneous production of electron-positron pairs, without any energy input at all. The reason is that the negative electric energy can exactly offset the energy of their masses. In the gravitational case the situation is still more bizarre, for the gravitational field is only a spacewarp - curved space. The energy locked up in a spacewarp can be converted into particles of matter and antimatter. This occurs, for example, near a black hole, and was probably also the most important source of particles in the big bang. Thus, matter appears spontaneously out of empty space. The question then arises, did the primeval bang possess energy, or is the entire universe a state of zero energy, with the energy of all the material offset by negative energy of gravitational attraction? It is possible to settle the issue by a simple calculation. Astronomers can measure the masses of galaxies, their average separation, and their speeds of recession. Putting these numbers into a formula yields a quantity which some physicists have interpreted as the total energy of the universe. The answer does indeed come out to be zero within the observational accuracy. The reason for this distinctive result has long been a source of puzzlement to cosmologists. Some have suggested that there is a deep cosmic principle at work which requires the universe to have exactly zero energy. If that is so the cosmos can follow the path of least resistance, coming into existence without requiring any input of matter or energy at all. (Davies 1983)

But wait, there's more!
Here's a paper by Alex Vilenkin [ http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org/pdf/awarded/1983/vilenkin.pdf ] that shows not only is all this possible, that it's also possible for universes to come into existence even from a state of absolute nothingness. No space, no time. Nothing.

>>7664
So you openly admit you're skewing the results of science to try to make God exist.

What is this really about cris? Why does the idea that God's non-existence bother you? Why are you willing to go to such lengths to prove it's existence? You talk about science feeling ahead to prove God, yet most scientists are atheist. You say we can't deny God. We can't, or you can't? It would seem you can't live without God.

>>7665

Acknowledge that i refer to the correspondence between God and the big bang in the hypothesis raised by you that the big bang created the universe out of nothing, so in that case the term God describes that event as the foundational ('driving force')creation agent or entity of the universe

>>7669

>Oh really now? The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that if particles arise from a zero-energy state, then they must last forever (which our universe will).

So if they last forever they possess an infinit past which means they are former than the universe they live in... great, problem solved(!); but if they last forever, they are infinit, and if they are infinit they wouldn't arise from neither zero-energy or no state whatsoever becayse they just happen to always been there. Also, this contradicts evidence, since virtual particles, by that view, shouldn't exhibit short range, they only do that precisely because they don't 'come out of nothing'.

>The point is doubly moot, because quantum tunnelling events can bypass such barriers anyway.

Quantum tunneling can only bypass ground states of minimal energy levels, not supposedly states of zero energy. If there.'s something that the uncertainty principle states is that it's not possible to remove all energy from a system, there always remain a residual level in the form of quantum fluctuations; there's no equivalent of absolute zero in quantum states of energy.

The argument as proposed by some is akin to a stadium with half suporters of team A and the other half of team B, so that in the perspective of support for team A we have +50% (for A) and -50% (against A), because the net support (or fluctuation) for either teams is zero, one can say, applying the same reasoning, that it's like the stadium is empty with the pseudo justification that both team supporters cancel each other out, and that way the logical conclusion is that the noise from the stands come from nothing. The full transposition of the analogy is that, the same way quantum processes can't have zero energy states, even if the crowd was all 'silent' in the stadium the players in the field would nevertheless listen to some murmur noise (people moving in their seats, coughing, mobile phones ringing, etc), the players wouldn't be able to precisely track the origin of the noises but would undoubtly feel it anyway; so you see, we might say that a kind of uncertainty principle with the same properties of the physical term applies also in social events with similar predictions. That was the base and inspiration of John Cage's famous 'silent piece' (4'33''), it purpoted to demonstrate that absolute silence is impossible in a concert, so that if the musicians are silent the 'music' come from the crowd.

But to follow the fully consequnces of their reasoning, ex nihilo supporters must accept also other pseudo derivatives like free energy and perpetual motion both of which are in accordance with 'out of nothing' sources, but why stop there because if a full universe could come out of nothing many other events also can, maybe the Egypcian pyramides or the Niagara falls could just have spontaneously arised, why not...

Another point relates to the persistence of considering gravity as negative energy because it seems evident to me that matter and nearby gravitational fields are bound states so that an increase in kinetic energy corresponds to a decrease in energy 'stored' in the gravitational field; as the universe is composed of matter obviously the spacetime distortion gravitational effect is proportional to increase/decrease in energy matter so that the net effect is null and thus the sum of all energy in the universe, provided the universe is flat, aproach zero.

The Davies quote completly eludes me. He says: "In the gravitational case the situation is still more bizarre, for the gravitational field is only a spacewarp - curved space. The energy locked up in a spacewarp can be converted into particles of matter and antimatter... ...Thus, matter appears spontaneously out of empty space." Empty space? As far as i know the gravitational field is a spacetime geometry distortion caused by matter/energy, and of course wherever matter and energy arise they can be converted in emission of particle/anti-particle pairs. Einstein once said: "People before me believed that if all the matter in the universe were removed, only space and time would exist. My theory proves that space and time would disappear along with matter." So, no matter, no spacewarp.

Let's enphasize this point: nothing is a state of absolute 'nothingness', not a degree of precision derived form wave-like behaviour, or uncertainty, or doubt, because even a statistical distribution refers to concrete and real events, although they express the state of knowledge about those events in a [0-1] interval. Nothingness contains nothing at all, the absoslute void, not even the quantum void which has fluctuations and spacetime in it. In that vein, singularities don't qualify also as nothing, although they can be viewed geometrically as zero volume points, but with infinite pressure and density, and that's why Hawking advocates that quantum effects prevent the formation of singularities, at least general relativity speaking. So in that context all this roundabouts about creation ex nihilo seems more like a misplace of terms than anything else. To validate what i've just said let me call upon the words of Vilenkin himself:

>T]he state of “nothing” cannot be identified with absolute nothingness. The tunneling is described by the laws of quantum mechanics, and thus “nothing” should be subject to these laws. The laws of physics must have existed, even though there was no universe. - Alexander Vilenkin in Many Worlds in One, p.181

>So you openly admit you're skewing the results of science to try to make God exist.

You are good at distorting words. The question really is why are you afraid of God? God doesn't bite nor Is the bogeyman. That moral superiority attitude towards the 'poor souls' that need a God or paternal figure doesn't suit and it's a signal of mediocrity. I don´t talk of a personal God or a biblical God but instead of the God that is the origin of creation, the problems you have with the former ones are up to you. Regarding ex nihilo theories, my position is that of salutar cepticism, i do not refute, i raise (strong) objections (stranger things have already happened in science). Oddly enough is that the ones who don't aknowledge God rush so fast to this proposals; in their ansiety to refute It they push science to the vicinity of God, since God might actualy have created the universe out of nothing afterall, but to explain that you have to provide the mechanism and to do this you need to invoke God; God is right in front of your noses and you can't see it. God exist in spite of what you or anyone else may think of it, the same way that anyone's opinion relative to the speed of light is irrelevant

>>7707

That describes something about you. I presume that you weren't there, so what does it describe about the nature of the event that a purely descriptive term doesn't?

>>7709

I'm not sure to quite follow what you mean. If by "describes something about you" you mean a personal believe in God that's not correct, God from the point-of-view of creatiion is not a belive but a fact, a believe is an adherence to a particular emanescence of God beyond a first cause of the universe. It's a necessary clause of the universe since without God the universe by itself isn't self-suficient as determined by the laws of physics.

Language is only useful to communicate ideas, and the more universal are its symbols the better it serves that purpose. So to the general population if i say God is the origin of the Universe most of them will immediatly get a grasp of the concept, whereas if i say the big bang is the origin of the Universe many would go '?!?'. Besides i find calling the big bang God abusive since i don't believe the big bang arised by itself. Anyone with minimal knowledge in comparative religion knows that in every one of them God is prescribed as the origin of the universe, so it inequivocaly represents that event, whereas big bang can mean many things to different people, from the beginning of the universe to a canon ball blast, it's very descriptive of both and yet this are very different things. The same way to first cause (the 'first cause' is the first cause of the Universe seems redundant) or primal mover, logos, etc. Semiotically God provides a good model to abstract that concept, but of course there are caveats (no free lunch and no silver bullet here) and we must deprive God of the religious semantic load it entails which is of no value in this context. However i don´t think religion should have the exclusive of God, so it's perfectly natural to use that ubiquitus reference in other contexts other then philosophy or religion, such as physics, provided we make the necessary adjustments as i mentioned. One thing we can grant, whatever the origin of the universe it must be something out of the ordinary, not a mystical or supernatural being but a trully spectacular and marvelous event, and in that sense science and religion are not so far apart in respect to wonder and reverence to nature, religion trough God, science trough uncovering those wonders. In this quest, God is superfluos to science; science isn't, and it shouldn't, the search for God, science must assume nothing including God; God isn't the graal of science, rather it's the end of the maze - when science get (and if) the full picture of how the universe came about then God can be (or not) a simple formula in a t-shirt.

So if we agree all existece has a time 0, a begining, we may call it A, no problem, but when we identify it concatenating characters 'G', 'o', and 'd', there's trouble. Can you spot the absurdity of this? it's easier than finding waldo

>>7708

>The argument as proposed by some is akin to a stadium with half suporters of team A and the other half of team B, so that in the perspective of support for team A we have +50% (for A) and -50% (against A), because the net support (or fluctuation) for either teams is zero, one can say, applying the same reasoning, that it's like the stadium is empty with the pseudo justification that both team supporters cancel each other out, and that way the logical conclusion is that the noise from the stands come from nothing.

Ugh. That's not how wave mechanics works at all! Bad analogy is bad.

>But to follow the fully consequnces of their reasoning, ex nihilo supporters must accept also other pseudo derivatives like free energy and perpetual motion both of which are in accordance with 'out of nothing' sources, but why stop there because if a full universe could come out of nothing many other events also can

You're really good at creating strawmen, aren't you?

>Einstein once said: "People before me believed that if all the matter in the universe were removed, only space and time would exist. My theory proves that space and time would disappear along with matter." So, no matter, no spacewarp.

Exactly! See, now you're getting it.

>In that vein, singularities don't qualify also as nothing, although they can be viewed geometrically as zero volume points, but with infinite pressure and density, and that's why Hawking advocates that quantum effects prevent the formation of singularities, at least general relativity speaking.

Yes. Precisely. Now take that to it's logical conclusion. What does that imply?

>[T]he state of “nothing” cannot be identified with absolute nothingness. The tunneling is described by the laws of quantum mechanics, and thus “nothing” should be subject to these laws. The laws of physics must have existed, even though there was no universe. - Alexander Vilenkin

The laws of nature are not a "thing" no more than numbers are a "thing". That is, they are only descriptions of the world. Or is this some sort of weird platonic thinking where numbers and math are actual metaphysical entities?

Let's break it down.
1. There was a beginning to the universe (A time 0)
2. When matter is not present, time and space also do not exist. (Due to General Relativity)
3. Due to infinities creeping up, singularities (point filled with matter) cannot exist. (Due to General Relativity)
4. Due to quantum effects, there's a limit to how much energy-matter can exist within a plank volume.
5. Given 2, to talk about time before the Big Bang is nonsensical.
6. Given 2, to talk about space outside of the universe is nonsensical.
7. Given 3 and 4, energy-matter had to have been created (The total energy-matter in a plank volume can't explain all the matter and energy we have now)
8. Given 2 and 3, both quantum mechanics and general relativity are needed to explain the Big Bang
9. Given 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7, the universe had to have come from a state of no space-time, where no energy or matter is present.
10. Given 8 and 9, the universe came from a state of no space-time or energy-matter, due to both general relativity and quantum effects.
11. Given 10, the universe must be flat in geometry (testable observation. WMAP show the universe to be flat with a error value of less than 1%)

That is what what various papers show. The universe is the uncaused cause. There's no room for deities. If you're wanting to be a pantheist, fine. Whatever. But calling shit like the universe "god" just makes you sound like a massive tool.

>You are good at distorting words.

No, these are you're own words:
>I think that in a pure scientific perpspective God doesn´t matter, science can progress without knowing of God, but the more science progress the more we feel God lays somewhere ahead, confirming the philosophical intuition of God; i only say that we can't deny God, and science provides us with alternative paths to It, as we can now apply scientific reasoning to make a glimpse of the God concept, whereas the ancients only had their feelings in the form of wonder and reverence to nature at their disposal with all the associated inherent subjectivity

It's called confirmation bias when you look for shit to prove your beliefs instead of letting the evidence show you what is or isn't true. in b4 "but datz wut ur doining not SEEING god rite in front of u!!!1!"

>The question really is why are you afraid of God? God doesn't bite nor Is the bogeyman.
Oh you. Here you go, creating strawmen again. How can I be afraid of something I don't even think exists. If you have verifiable non-subjective, non-speculative evidence that's of it's existence that can be corroborated by peoples of all backgrounds, I'm all ears.

>>7716
>So to the general population if i say God is the origin of the Universe most of them will immediatly get a grasp of the concept, whereas if i say the big bang is the origin of the Universe many would go '?!?'.

This is a false statement. People may or may not disagree with you if you assert to them that the Big Bang was the origin event, but they certainly would not be confused as to your meaning.

If you presented to the general population the concept of an entity with will, intent, and agency that has a role as creator of the universe, and then said that this concept is identified by the word "God", most people would agree with you.

However, if you presented them with the concept of an impersonal self-causing event in which effectively all matter and energy now extant expanded rapidly from an infinitesimal point, and then said that this concept is signified by the word "God", most people would disagree with you.


>Language is only useful to communicate ideas, and the more universal are its symbols the better it serves that purpose.

Only if we are speaking about a more general concept. When referring to specific concept, one must use specific language.

>without God the universe by itself isn't self-suficient as determined by the laws of physics

Your insistence on this point confuses me, as it has been repeatedly shown in this thread that this is not at all the case in any way.

It has been shown that during the generative event, the properties of spacetime described by the laws of physics were in flux. Holding that event to specific laws of causality that did not exist at its inception is an error that you insist firmly on making.

Further, even if we permit you to apply to the generative event the specific assumption that "a thing cannot spontaneously arise without cause", this assumption has been shown to be FALSE. Particles DO arise from nothingness without cause. This is a repeatedly observed and corroborated fact.

So to go over the logic you have presented:

things exist
things need cause

We can stop right here, because it has been observed that certain things do not need cause. End of story.

Does this "disprove" God? Of course not. It simply requires one to find another support for the existence of God, because the universe does not require God in order to exist.

Allow me to repeat that, the universe does not require God in order to exist.

Kids, even if there is a God, responsible for creation, is it not reasonable that God has created life elsewhere in the universe? To Christians, Muslims, Jews, whothefuckever.

God doesn't give one single solitary shit about your existence. Now stop killing each other over who's right and do something productive with your lives.

>>7717

As i've said before, saying God doesn't exist is a religion like any other else with its dogmas and beliefs sustained only by a great deal of faith, but alas that's not science, that's mysticism, voodoo science for harry potter in wonderland. Religion has miracles, atheism has magic in the form of nowhere emanation of particles (virtual 'ghost' particles) from nothing where the cause is uncaused, heck even Christ needed some bread and fish to multiply by, if only Hawking had been there... You need energy? Puff, here it is, more? Puff, there it goes - no, no, big no can do jedediah. But at least religion names their beliefs. Of course there are still unknowns in science, like for instance knowing how does the energy density held in a universe in expansion, but the easy way out is postulating something like 'who cares? for all i care it came from nothing', that sounds like before the discover of the source of the Nile the river had no cause; but there's a little inconvenient there which is to ditch centuries of established practice and well fundamented laws, but, again, who cares? But if the cause is uncaused you have a strong case for God there because that fits like a glove in the canonical definition of God, i doubt that's the way but keep it going.

Notes (1-11):

(7) incomplete. One way or another all matter have been created.
(9) why bother? Of course if the big bang is the moment 0 of spacetime, before that there was no spacetime. Let's not forget Aristotle maxim that we shouldn't demonstrate obvious things with others less obvious, like in Occam's razor.
(10) we all know that, that's why we need God to provide the mechanism of creation. Got it? It is not sufficient to say 'well, first there was nothing, then it came the big bang'; in between 'first... then' is where all the neat action happens.

Talking of confirmation bias, your conclusion from these evidence is way way off. Here's another example:

>The laws of nature are not a "thing" no more than numbers are a "thing".
That is, they are only descriptions of the world. Or is this some sort
of weird platonic thinking where numbers and math are actual
metaphysical entities?

So the laws of physics are not a thing per se, but they describe and are about something; bad comparison with numbers, because numbers can mean or deal with anything, they are abstract notions with no correspondence as that, whereas numbers in the form of a physics formula acquire meaning and substance, they loose that ethereal base to gain firm ground in reality; the wave function is what it is, a description of the probabilty amplitude of particles quantum state; without a universe the wave function is neither true or false, it describes nothing, it's just mambo jambo with numbers, like 1+1, but 1+1 what? So maybe (and i say maybe - who knows?) the laws of algebra don't need an universe, but that not seems the case for the laws of physics

>>7720

>However, if you presented them with the concept of an impersonal
self-causing event in which effectively all matter and energy now extant
expanded rapidly from an infinitesimal point, and then said that this
concept is signified by the word "God", most people would disagree with
you.

Why must i impose my views on them? When i talk of God i know i'm understood in the basic permise of the creator of the universe, anyone personal beliefs on top of that are up to them; if they choose to believe in an entity with will, intent, and agency is their business; this is about interchange and mutual understanding of concepts and ideas, not brainwash. Besides, is hard to escape the notion of intent and agency in every process of creation, because a law denotes a specific purpose and direction, a filter in an otherwise random sea of events, nevertheless that's not garanteed so i avoid making those claims - after all the anthropic principle makes a fine tunned universe seem more obvious -, here i refer only to the secure starting point we should consider (God), the rest is not my department

>Only if we are speaking about a more general concept. When referring to specific concept, one must use specific language.

But i'm really talking about a general concept; it should have been obvious by now. If i set a barebones definition of God linked with the genesis event of creation and strip it down from the remain folklore and tradition, is this not an abstract notion? The manner in which people fill the gaps of this definition with their own system of beliefs confirms God as an universal and broadly concept with many ramifications

>It has been shown that during the generative event, the properties of spacetime described by the laws of physics were in flux

Can you show me how you pass from 'nothing at all' to 'something', even if this something is not yet a complete universe? without resort to an external process (which i call God). It seems to me that or you enter an infinit regression without ever reaching the nothingness state, or you have to stop somewhere and assume 'something' as a starting point, maybe a singularity, but singularities are not states of nothingness

Your very own words disagree with your assumptions; you say things arise from nothing and we only have cause-effect events after the laws of physics were consolidated, but the thing is that allegedly out-of-nothing events depend on the uncertainty principle which only has meaning in the context of those laws which were not yet consolidated when they were in need for that to happen

>>7751
>Why must i impose my views on them?

We're not talking about imposing anything. You brought up the issue of what the general public holds these words to mean, and that is what the general public holds these words to mean.

>Can you show me how you pass from 'nothing at all' to 'something'

It has been observed to happen. The 'how' is irrelevant, it is an observed and corroborated phenomenon. You can say 'things don't come from nothing' all you like, but when it is pointed out that things are actually coming from nothing all the time the statement becomes nonsensical.

>>7750
So basically you're just calling stupid shit "God" even though it has nothing to do with the actual concept used in a religious context, but only because you like the term...

That's basically as bad as when Christians say, "God is love."
Either way, you're now off topic.

>>7752

>It has been observed to happen. The 'how' is irrelevant, it is an observed and corroborated phenomenon

The unknow provenance of something doesn't exclude a source - and we have strong clues; it´s probably just that the nature of spacetime is not so innocuous as we supposed to be and manifest wave-like behaviour where the uncertainty principle rules, like a void field; avoid easy answers in favour of rational and sensical hypothesis (apply Carl Sagan's skeptical statement that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'), and let's not confound 'nothing' metaphors with states of nothingness; also keep in mind that string theory predicts seven aditional hidden space dimensions, as there can be n plausible explanations without resorting to bogus physics. The how makes all the difference

>>7757

The exact mechanism through which gravity operates is unknown. Would you then assert that gravity is not an observed and corroborated phenomenon?

>>

Precisely, the exact mechanism is unknown, we don't extrapolate from there that gravity arises spontaneously but rather from a perturbation of spacetime induced by matter, and even before general relativity nobody claimed such

>>7765

Yet the behavior of gravity has been observed and quantified. Regardless of the mechanism, it is a factual phenomenon.

The phenomenon of spontaneously manifesting particles also has been observed and quantified. These are not "hidden" particles falling out of some folded dimension. These are particles that did not previously exist coming into existence. Regardless of the mechanism, it is a factual phenomenon.

To imply that these might be pre-existing particles coming from somewhere unknown shows that you misunderstand the phenomenon, much like one who thinks that the heavier of two metal spheres will fall faster and hit the ground first misunderstands the phenomenon of gravity.

>>7767

>These are particles that did not previously exist coming into existence. Regardless of the mechanism, it is a factual phenomenon

Very bold assumption; that's like pulling particles from the magical hat (maybe the bunnies don't exist either before the magician grabs their ears). What we can say based on the known laws of physics is that virtual particles that existed in a previous unknown state (maybe in a spacetime void field) transitioned momentarily to that state before transitioning again to another unknown state. This is factual, the rest are fantasies and suppositions, although science is also made of those that's not the basis for a rigorous scientific method

>>7772

>Very bold assumption

It is no more so an assumption than when Copernicus did the math and found that the data fit a heliocentric model.

Do you suppose that when the cosmic background radiation was detected, it was just assumed that "this is leftover from the Big Bang"?

Do you suppose that when the equations describing the behaviors of relativity were formulated, in some cases years before the technology even existed to measure those behaviors, that it was an assumption, and that they just happened by coincidence to be correct over and over again as technology became able to measure them in different ways?

>What we can say based on the known laws of physics is that virtual particles that existed in a previous unknown state (maybe in a spacetime void field) transitioned momentarily to that state before transitioning again to another unknown state.

Show your sources, please.

As recent discoveries in physics have shown, nothing will always produce something if left long enough. If you say there's no god, that means there is nothing, from which something would be produced. So is nothing what we would consider God?

>>7773

Again, mora speculations based on litle evidence (or better yet, on dubious interpretation of the available evidence); you supose that we are in the presence of history-making physics, but we don´t know that. In science history the ratio theories/fallacies is 1:n, n>1, for every correct result we got plenty more wrong assumptions and hypothesis, but of course, given that the former are the ones that enter history the others tend to be quickly forgotten, and so we assume that science is the history of champions, likewise in sport the second place get no posterity honors, but that's far from truth, and it's supposed to be this way because most of the time we only know the correctness of something after evaluating wrong alternatives, and even this it's not granted, because the power of science lays in having no place for dogmas or ethernal truths, a theory is just valid until a better one gives better explanation of the available data; Einstein once said: 'someone who never failed never tried something new'. So, closely considered, science is more the history of failures than of successes. It surprises me someone like you that talked earlier of the rigour of philosophy to jump so fast in that wagons.

>>7773/7774

Wolfgang Pauli said once about a paper submitted to his apreciation that 'it's not even wrong', i dare think that ex nihilo interpretations are not even math because mathematically the closest thing we have for 'arising from nothing' is something like f(_)=x, but this is very different from ()=x; if we were to try to define f() it could be something like f -> {... return x}, so this is akin to saying that some process given some unknown or no input at all gives back x; this is consistent with what Vilenkin said, specifically that nothingness is subject to the laws of physics (being f some postulate of those laws), and as i said before it's strongly my conviction that we cannot consider those laws without a universe

>>7779

Obviously, if f gets no input, x is considered to be part or embeded in f

>>7779
> you supose

The only supposition here is yours. You are supposing that when multiple physicists observe a phenomenon, find that the data fits the current model of particle physics, and also find that the formulae of said current model predict certain behaviors of these spontaneously manifesting particles correctly including the amount of time these particles exist, that they are deluded and what they have found to be so is not so.

You are asserting that the consensus of the worldwide community of particle physicists is wrong when it has concluded that the data indicates spontaneous manifestation of these particles.

It is at this point, then, where I ask to see your work. Because at this point there are two possibilities. Either you have data that will change the present conception of the way the universe works and should receive a Nobel, or you are fundamentally misunderstanding the phenomena in question.

>>7782

I've said nothing of the kind. I contest the interpretation, not the results, the same way that it's possible to contest the Copenhagen interpretation (and there are a few others) without putting into question the phenomenon of quantum entaglement

>>7785

Again, show your work. If you were going to contest, say, the heliocentric model, you would have to have data. You would have to demonstrate your model to fit the data more accurately than the previous one.

Until you do that, I contest your contesting, and it remains demonstrated that this specific line of reasoning for the existence of God is not valid.

So at this point in the conversation, the question becomes "Now that argument from first cause has been demonstrated to be invalid, is there another proof to examine?" If you are able to discuss this question, please do so. If you are not, then you should not post, for it would be a hindrance to the discussion.

>>7786

That 'show your work or shut up' attitude doesn't serve any usefull purpose on this issue and doesn't add anything valid to the discussion, my views are my own and subjected only to my personal worldview, feel free to ignore them as suits you best

The acritical behaviour towards certain interpretations of some known observations is very unscientific, because if an observation, valid and necessary as it is, contradicts every scientific postulate possible and imaginable, it's not to great a leap of thought to speculate on some unkown evidence that may provide a valid explanation of the fact without breaking previous assumptions tested against the judgment of time. Science has still so many unknowns that rushing to precipitate conclusions is not good policy. Of course, for something dealing with the consequencies of the existence of virtual particles as predicted by the standard model is irrelevant to whether they spontaneously arised or not, but to broader issues like the ultimate origin of the universe that's all a different matter, and the mere aknowledgement of some consequence don't exclude a more deep understanding of the matter, and saying 'it come from nowhere' seems to me a premature epistemological give up, so i rather prefer the term 'apparently it come from nowhere' that more closely resembles our degree of doubt. Further, if the uncertainty principle is a manifest behaviour or property inherent to wave-descriptive systems, in a pure, devoted from everything, void where does this wave behaviour comes from, is it a property of spacetime itself? But, if so, spacetime doesn't qualify as nothing, Einstein himself asserted this when he talked of a matter dependent spacetime, let's not even talk about the cosmological constant and dark energy. At the very least, we need the laws of physics to conceive something of the kind, but if the laws of physics are emergent descriptions of reallity that does not solve our chicken-egg dilema, so, in any way, an external process or source etymologically associated with God always arise, and even in the hypothesis that virtual particles come from nowhere, their short range bound to their inherent uncertainty, fails to provide a robust explanation for the universe.

Let me conclude with a historical perspective about beta decay. As earler as 1914 experiences with magnetic spectrometers by Chadwick seemed to violate the conservation of energy, but inquisitive minds like Pauli, and later, Fermi, postulated in the 30s the emission and existence of neutrinos to overcome this dificulty, but only in the 50s was possible to experimentally detect such elusive particles, and only in the 60s was possible to formulate a more secure description of the interactions involved. This man could have easily resorted to out-of-nothing explanations but their skeptical temper propelled them to search for more 'rational' explanations, in light of the known physics, before directing their efforts in other directions; like sherlock said: 'eliminating the impossible, what remains, however unlikely, must be the truth'. In a time where we still lack a proper account for a quantum description of gravity we should be wary of such conclusions, because, if nothing else, it's too close to call

>>7789
>my views are my own and subjected only to my personal worldview

Then take them to /x/, because that is where claims supported by opinion belong. Here we support claims with logic.

First claim, the universe exists. This is valid.

Second claim, anything that exists must have a cause. Since it has been shown that there are things that exist that cannot be said WITH CERTAINTY by any interpretation to have been caused, this claim is unsound and cannot be used to support an argument.

If you can assist the discussion in finding another argument to analyze, you would help it progress. Until then, every post you make is an active hindrance.

Anyone has ever thought about the cyclic model of Universe? It explains (or not) lots of shit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model

>>7929

The problem with the cyclical model is that by the current data, the expansion of the universe is accelerating faster than the force of gravity acting among all the matter in the universe can counteract.

>>5920
Hrm, apparently I have not been to this board in quite some time. Well the postulation is interesting about it I guess. I used to be rather religious but got pretty disappointed in it eventually and actually grew disdain about it.

I have always believed in my adult life that there is "something" out there, perhaps what could be called a god or gods. I know that the Universe is orderly in an intentional way. That's about all I have right now. With I felt better with my spiritual life but I'm sort of starting at square one over here.

>>7969
>I know that the Universe is orderly in an intentional way.

Oh? And how do you know that? Or are you confusing knowledge and belief?

>>7973
I have knowledge that it's orderly by the observation of mathematics and predictable movement of celestial objects and it is my BELIEF that this is intentional/by design.

Take your Ritalin, Garth...

>>7974

If you honestly think the universe is orderly, then I'm going to have to laugh.

By the way, before you posit a designer, you should probably prove there is design. I bet you can't do it.

>>7976
I think any astute atheist would admit the Universe and life in general is orderly and adheres to certain "laws."

Let's think mathematics, celestial alignment, physical laws of gravity and such, survival of the fittest, etc. I mean there must be 1,000 examples that even a "non-believer" could say that life and existence is highly measurable and predictable by many standards.

>>7978
Wait. You actually believe those "laws" are really things. brb, lol'ing

Those are descriptions of things in nature, but not things themselves. And for the most part, nature isn't orderly. Nature is chaotic.
Evolution is a good example of such chaotic elements giving raise to the appearance of design, but upon inspection show that it cannot have been. Of course you're free to take the creationist view if you so choose. I mean, you are after all free to your own stupidity.

>>7981
So you don't keep track of time with a 24-hour time system? And you don't keep track of the days and months with the calendar system? You don't take part in a leap-year every four years since we know that years are actually 365 1/4 days long? The ocean tides, as caused by the very predictable phases of the moon don't affect you either, I suppose. And the effect of the moon phases on birth rates, crime, and ER visits don't effect you at all. You are also assumedly unaffected by seasons of the Earth as it rotates around the sun so you don't dress warmly in winter or wear shorts in summer. The absorption and redistribution of water throughout the planet is not something you count on either, because you don't drink water. Nor plant synthesis of CO2 into oxygen. There sure are a lot of things that don't affect you. I guess you're right. There is no order, no functions which support existence and life.

>>7987
So basically you argument is, because the hole fits the puddle perfectly, that the pothole must have been made for the puddle. Do I need to point out circular logic is an incorrect form of argument?

I asked for proof of design, and you have yet to give me any.

Though, if you wanna pretend you're Bill O'Reilly, go the fuck ahead ahead.

I could use the entertainment.

>>7987

Order and disorder are abstract concepts. The phenomena they describe are found in equal parts in the universe, and said phenomena are essentially no different from each other except in PERCEIVED efficiency.

When we describe something as orderly, we can mean no more and no less than precisely this: "we perceive this thing as being efficient or promoting efficiency".

When you point out the "order" in the universe and say then that the universe is orderly, it is a meaningless statement. You could equally as successfully point out all the "disorder" in the universe such as entropy, radioactive decay, and destructive cosmic events, and argue that the universe is disorderly, and that all this disorder must happen by design.

Both positions are meaningless, as "order" and "disorder" are not things or qualities inherent in the universe or objects/phenomena in it. They are subjective descriptors like "hot" and "cold" that are dependent solely on the observer's reaction to the object.

File 134289099994.jpg - (10.38KB , 260x269 , olhp_logo.jpg )

I have decided to thoroughly and completely dedicate my life to the Left Hand Path. I believe there is something real about the Christian god, whether it is an actual entity, or just a set of ideas, but one thing I am sure of is that it is pure evil and emanates, IMO, the true qualities of an malevolent demonic force.

My life was great before and for whatever reason, I decided maybe I needed some "churching up" and new some guys from work who played in a Christian rock band. It was at this exact, EXACT moment that my life went terribly wrong. I allowed the demon-Christ into my life and it was most pleased to have someone to attack, torture, and attempt to kill.

I am not an adult with many years of observation and experience under my belt. I am going on the "Left Hand Path" forever now because it is the way to a natural, harmonious life in nature and a way to attempt to get away from the terrible and evil curse that Christianity has bestowed upon me.

>>8013
I realize I made some typos in that and actually am quite proficient in English so please ignore them.

I personally believe in Universal Consciousness and obviously dualism. Essentially, your body is the physical world and your consciousness is the energy/"spiritual world". Both your body and consciousness are made of transferring energy as is everything in the universe. Since energy cannot be destroyed, my belief is that when you die your consciousness/"soul" is transferred back into universal consciousness, the source of all energy and you either choose to stay in this energy/spiritual form ( can be considered " heaven" however, you do not retain your humanistic attributes that make you, "you".) or your energy/consciousness can be re-used to be put back into the physical world. Hopefully when we fully understand the Higgs Boson, it may lead to the some answers on the origins of energy and my belief.


However I also respect the basic teachings of many religions though I despise instituted spirituality which seems to teach hate more than faith. That said, Jesus direct teachings and King Solomon's wise words can lead you to great life epiphanies. As well as Buddha and Gandhi. They all taught us harmonious living with all things as opposed to now which is consume Earth resources until we destroy the thing that supports our ability to survive as a species.

Finally realized that the gods/God do not care what religion or belief you subscribe to. But they do care if you make some effort to better your life or show respect.

I used to go to AA and I thought it did me some good but then I decided it was religious hogwash and stopped going, and also stopped reaping any benefit. Maybe some of it IS hogwash, and maybe the gods even agree, but what helped me was just showing my family and the gods that I was TRYING to do something good with my life.

I plan to go back either tomorrow or the next day.

a-theos

without-divinity

without god, whether that means you don't believe in god, or believe that there is no god

skeptics and anti-theists are both atheist groups


religion is the advocacy of mnemonic anecdotes combined with attribution to a cosmic father or mother figure along the lines of an intuitive yet hard to discern pattern recognition grouping process within the brain


this is why they are always claiming prophecies are coming true, or cyclical this and that, it's because loosely similar events are occurring, while the patterns within the events that occur throughout time and space often take on different forms

this is why the brain allows for this because it has to have aspects that can recognize roughly similar patterns in the same way that mathematics occurs, specifically in an algebraic manner


the arguments against small gods is more or less clear

if it is omnipotent but not omniscient it is the universe itself

if it is omniscient but not omnipotent then it is impossible to find

if it is neither omnipotent nor
omniscient then it is the g'aoul and we will have to steal alien technology and make pew pew on them (or you know just another alien species that's pretty advanced technologically and so on)

if it is omniscient and omnipotent then it's useless to care what it thinks particularly because you will never be able to, whether you pretend that you hear it talking to you (your own psyche doing this most likely) or if you try to science it up, because you will never understand everything, so you will never know what it's thinking in the slightest, as anything less than infinity, when compared to infinity, is nothing

there are two ways to approach the omniscient and omnipotent variety though

one, it's the universe itself (again) and we are it's consciousness or something else is or lots of things are, and two, said entity is apart from the universe

that last one is unlikely, omni means all, potent means powerful, if a separate entity had all the power, current existence would have no power, at all

since merely existing requires some amount of power, such as gravitational or nuclear or whatever, one can rule out the conscious separate entity hypothesis I believe

>>8181

I'm not sure I completely understand what you mean by:

>>since merely existing requires some amount of power, such as gravitational or nuclear or whatever, one can rule out the conscious separate entity hypothesis I believe.

Do you mean that something cannot exist without the laws of physics present? Or do you mean that the amount of 'power' in the universe is finite?

Can you rephrase what you mean?

Second law of thermodynamics
Universe is expanding
Radiation from big bang
Great galaxy seed
Einsteins theory of relativity
I highly recommend you all look into the SURGE conflict. Also, I don't believe life is subjective... Thats just silly, what if I told you there is no absolute truth, and that's absolutely true; would you follow along with the belief? No, it's simply contradictory.

Id like to think of the creation of the universe is gods ideas coming together to form it in the "Big Bang" or another way i think of it is the creation of god or the intelligible universe.

I submit for the consideration of the board at large that an atheist and a creationist essentially believe the same thing at a fundamental level.

The creationist believes that a God, which exists in everything, created the sum total of everything that exists.

The concept in the atheist's experience that matches the concept of an omnipresent God is in fact the sum total of everything that exists. The atheist believes, in essence, that this sum total created and was created by itself.

These two formulations are essentially equivalent.

>>8510
This is a tired old line of thought, trotted out by those trying too hard to see a greater unity to things. Sometimes things are just different. Your argument boils down to ignoring the specifics of both positions. You siphon off the most vague possible interpretation of each, compare them, and say they are equivalent. It's just silly.

Let's see. In what way are the ideas of intentionality similar? In what ways do Atheists prescribe a human element (motivation) to the creation of the universe? In what ways does the Creationist claim of knowing something they can't know (by what means the universe was made), compare with the Atheistic idea of knowing only what they can determine? And how does the Creationist idea of the age of the earth compare with the Atheists? How about their belief in the method of geological formation? Or the formation of living things?

Even cursory look at that idea shows it to be absolute buffoonery.

>>8514

You're becoming personally offended by an idea. You should analyze your investment in this.

You are looking at specifics when the premise is equivalency in the simplest, most basic foundation. The premise means what it says and implies nothing more. You argue against a greater equivalency that the premise does not assert.

I think you are instinctively trying to nip an imagined slippery slope in the bud.

>>8519
Ah shut up ya gas bag. Your argument is a pile of shit. And instead of just pointing that out like I usually would, I went the extra mile and told you why. Pretend that I'm offended or whatever, fine, but at least respond to the critique.

Here's equivalency at its simplest: your brain and a bowl of diarrhea.

>>8545

I simply pointed out that, in a Venn diagram between the two concepts, if you describe the fundamental formula of each concept, those formula are equivalent and fall into an overlapping zone of the diagram.

You then proceeded to contest that by instead pointing to other areas of the diagram that don't overlap, arbitrarily discounting the area that does. When I calmly point this out, and based on your slowly increasing use of vehement colloquialisms diagnose a reason for your misdirection, you have no response but an ad-hominem party with more vehement colloquialisms.

Before, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and allowed that this misdirection might have been unintentional, but you are challenging that.

>>8555
You clearly stated that the essence of the two ideas are fundamentally equivalent.

>These two formulations are essentially equivalent

Quit trying to backtrack upon your own foolish statement. You can try and redefine what you said, but even if I was stupid enough to buy that, you still have to explain why you made such a vapid statement.

Now you're saying that there are mere similarities, in some ways, between the two. So what? Why is that worth posting? Especially tarted up as some profound philosophical truth. There are similarities between all beliefs, in that they are all beliefs. I could attack you on every single point until you're reduced to claiming this as the sole similarity. But what's the point.

You say you're giving me the benefit of the doubt. No. I gave you the benefit of the doubt when you came here, because you made a decent contribution to my thread. But then, after one compliment, you exploded into the most pompous and vapid douche. Everything you've said since has reeked of emptiness and philosophical bankruptcy. You don't know what you're talking about, and worse yet, you don't know that you don't know what you're talking about.

>>8561

>backtracking

I don't think that word means what you think it means. I have always been referring specifically to the scope of the basic formulation of two fundamental premises as clearly outlined in the very sentence you quoted. The operating word in that sentence you seem to have overlooked is "these". It has a function and meaning in the sentence.

>But what's the point. (sic)

The point is that the Venn diagram overlaps where the fundamental premises are stated in basic terms. Nothing more, nothing less.

>I could attack you on every single point

That would not be difficult, as there is one single point stated above. But you have yet to discuss this point, choosing instead to dodge it, and resorting to ad hominem when it is noted that you are doing so. Why would you have such a reaction if you weren't personally invested in the subject? Perhaps you should step away from the conversation and return when you are able to achieve more rational objectivity.

>>8561
On a note completely separate from the actual discussion and thus in a separate post, I have not "become" anything. It is far from my fault that you erroneously believed I was a person that would agree with you unfailingly. That you read my posts as "intelligent" when agreeing with you and "unintelligent" when they do not agree with you does not reflect any actual change in the coherency of the content therein.

>>5999
i think that the rules of physic never being broken is a sign that every thing wasnt created by a god, if i were god, id put some loopholes in or miss something when making them

"First claim, the universe exists. This is valid." #c1bebf #cris

I'd like to disagree with this.

If we consider conciousness for a moment, we can only be 100% sure that our own conciousness exists. We rely on assumption that other people also posses conciousness and are not "philosophical zombies" we are again relying on this assumption that the universe itself exists. We could be a brain in a vat connected to a computer living in a "simulated universe"

No we do not even know if the universe exists.

>>8653

If the universe is simulated, that simulation is a thing that exists.

If the universe is a shared delusion, that delusion is a concept that exists somewhere in some form.

What you assert is not an inability to say that it exists. It is an inability to make concrete statements about the nature of that existence.

In other words, there is something exhibiting a behavior to an observer. Whether that something is internal or external to said observer is irrelevant. It is a thing that exists, even if that existence is merely in the form of data.

this article changed the way that I used to see god http://www.fullmoon.nu/articles/art.php?id=tal
very good reading !

>>6409

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati

What about these lazy intellectuals, and I mean the historical group. Not the conspiracy taking over the world crap. How they came to be associated with these theories is beyond me.

There's not a one religion which is valid; neither it is based on concept of god or not; it just smells your brain to areas which are non-experiencable. Even sciences aren't valid. Everything is based on concepts, nothing is solid - everything we can think of or we can expierience,is just probability in ocean of chaos.

Eventually, all organized religions that manage to strive and expand become a form of Authoritarianism that excludes and indoctrinates. Not only do they reject what its leading elite consider heresy, they will persecute and weed out whatever threatens the dogmatic paradigms that sustain its power structure. Basically, it will all end up in a shit load of people tortured and murdered in the name of an almighty, loving god.


Faith in itself isn't bad, it tends to be a solution for a lot of people's problems. It's the whole "church" aspect that manipulates faith through fear and blackmail and turns a peaceful man who finds comfort in a prayer into a militant agent of the gospel.

>>9139
This is a flaw not specifically of religious organizations, but of organizations in general. Be it labor unions, government bureaus, police departments, et cetera. The behavior of its members and the codification of its tenets only ever partially address the goals the organization was formed to address. From the outset, a portion of its resources and the behaviors of its members are spent in solidifying the perpetual existence of the organization and its status quo, and this portion will only ever be increased, never decreased.

I was thinking the other day. If you look at it, humans are capable of everything the various gods are said to be able to do. We can:

Create new types of life (admittedly, not life from scratch)
Create new worlds
Perform most all the miracles described in the bible
Destroy the world
Pretty much anything we want

I beleive that humans are the closest things to gods there are. The various religious texts were written hundreds or thousands of years ago. You take the writer of one of those books to an average first-world home and he would be amazed.

File 135851426355.jpg - (21.22KB , 295x300 , 1288177368437.jpg )

>>9348
>>9348
i like too believe humans are slowly becoming what we would call god. True oneness and infinity, just an infinitely Repeating fractal of evolution in knowledge and consciousness.

>>9348
>(admittedly, not life from scratch)

Not quite yet, but we keep getting closer.

I don't know if a god exists and sometimes I hope he doesnt exist especially if he is in the image of Catholicism, a cruel, harsh, evil. And It would be extraordinary if there was no god, that we are self made conduits of life.

>ctrl+f
>"pasc"
>0 out of 0

First post on 7chan, religion arguments thread with 200+ posts and no Pascal's Wager. I'm out.

(Choa~)

One of the key motifs I've picked up on is the implicit attack/defense of the Judeo-Christian God Jehovah, known to the Muslims as Allah. Because this seems to be the main topic at hand, I will try to answer it as fittingly as I am able to.

The necessity for new-age "revealed" religions, such as Christianity, becomes apparent when one takes the time to notice what the regular "church-goer" IS. He often manifests himself in a variety of manners each holding at least 2, or more, of these qualities

-Lost
-Weakened
-Attention Seeking
-Abused [physically/mentally]

When a man wonders aimlessly, he will eventually find himself drawn to the area where most gather for similar reasons. When I was part of the 2010 Canterbury Earthquakes, the aftermath of such a devastating natural disaster on Christchurch turned it from the serene Winter-beauty that it normally was, into something that would look similar to an apocalyptic nightmare. Wrenching myself from the ruin of the mall I was in, suffering from a mixture of delirium, amnesia and temporal blindness, I began to walk. I didn't know where I was anymore, I just had a strange urge to walk forward. Eventually, I could make out a clearing of trees (must have been the remains of a park) and decided to head there. As I arrived, I was surprised to see that not only myself had reached this park but THOUSANDS of others as well. We weren't the expected giddy lot discussing our own tragic stories, but were all in a "trance" like state and stood there in a group for hours until the first sign of a rescue convoy came, in eerie silence.

What I have noticed amongst the average human psyche is that the weak will always attempt to align themselves with either a stronger man [as noticed in the rituals for alphaness seen everywhere in the animal kingdom], or out of a wish to be amongst a vast number [as seen in sheep, fish or other herbivore species]. In a religious context, these examples can manifest themselves in either;

a - The respect and acknowledgement of superior power as seen in the devotion of the "" archetype

or b - The feeling of acceptance in performing the actions of the multitude [being from New Zealand, I can attest to the fact that we have a high concentration per capita of religious people]

Both of these reasons would incite a sense of hope among the individual as to follow one who is venerated with such conviction, as Jesus the Nazerene is, would surely raise the spirits of any who would believe his miracles. Performing similar actions to your bretheren would also serve to raise ones moral as he would feel as if he were doing something that was approved by others.

If it is true that human being have an innate desire to be recognised and acknowledged by peers, then becoming a devout, overtly-convicted and aspiring Christian leader would serve as the perfect medium in which to acquire the attention of the surrounding. A baby cries to gain the attention of its parents in order to serve a function [food, warmth, illness, etc.], similarly, an attention seeker will ensure that they are always in the "eyes of the audience" so that he may have attention, whether it is considered good or bad.

Those who bear witness to some traumatic event, such as molestation, rape, murder, injury, addiction, depression, will find themselves without the basic human trust that ensures that they can operate efficiently within society, Many such "victims" are quick to trust those powers they cannot see, having a great distaste for what they can see based on their past interactions.

I know full well that four point leading towards my answer may not satisfy the likes of those who would seek always for more and more. However, it is both late and I have already written a virtual essay.

TL;DR - If it was not always the case, humanity has become dependent on institutions like Christianity because it is fucked up

pascal's wager is interesting, I'm bringing it up now

but I think it's more interesting to address the underlying mechanisms and foundation for the "particular wager in question"

WUT R U GONNA DO ABOUT IT BAGUETTE?
WAN-TI BET?

ALSO WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, I AM THE DISEMBODIED GHOSTLINESS OF HIS HOLINESS YOUR LORD, AND I SAY I DON'T EXIST

how much stock do you put into that, are you a believer? do you doubt the word of your lord?

if you do, why? is it because you believe that god cannot speak through individuals? or that there are certain requirements for this? what are they?

if you believe that god does not speak through people but through creation, then is religion itself totally unnecessary, and therefore irrelevant and useless, since if you go by the phrase "god is unknowable" then by definition there's no point to it

this is of course unless you're referring to god as life the universe and everything, or the god of the gaps

next up, is the possibility that you believe god used to herpderp through people's skulls and tongues, but doesn't anymore

when did god decide to stop this, how do you think you know? did he tell you? did you read up in a book or listen to someone else say he did? - why are you accepting that someone else in the here and now is claiming to know/speak god's will right here right now, if you don't believe that's legitimate?

if you want to argue that they're just relaying the historical record accurately, how does this deal with the possibility that the message was a lie or manipulation from the original message?

what if the origin of the message is that someone took a valid assessment of something and inserted agency into it where it doesn't belong, and then proceeded to recognize only the times when treating inanimate objects or for all intents and purposes, seemingly agentless situations - as if they were agents, and it worked

what then?

and I have a checklist to go by, under the assumption god exists

if god is all powerful, and all knowing, then there's no point in trying to understand it

if god is all powerful, but not all knowing, then it must be the universe itself

if god is all knowing, but not all powerful, then how did they create the universe? (this isn't limitation of power, this is lack thereof) furthermore, why should I care? they know what I'm going to do already, and I'm all but a puppet at this point for all intents and purposes if god is at all powerful, and if not, then god has no place in the universe other than as something like what you'd find in long division, a remainder - and the creation of the universe is pretty much a moot point, we're all fucked anyways, because god "knows" everything, I feel dirty

if god is not all knowing, and not all powerful, then I'm killing his ass and taking his floating pyramid spaceship, or I'm phasering his rock golem

What is God?

"God" to me is not a person or being.
if such a "God" exists he would be so supreme our minds would explode as soon as ever even peeking at a hair folicile on his gigantic supreme butthole.

God does not exist within this universe

The best way to explain Is how we create video games


We do not exist in the video game Universe But we can interact with it.

just like God

God exists, just Not in this universe otherwise how would he create it, if there was nothing in the beginning to start with?
example How would the Dovahkin create the world of skyrim?
I think it's an eternal Loop

But that begs to question was there ever a beginning? somewhere down the line in the universe before "Gods" universe and so on and so on


I think God looks at us but he sees us as a whole

like atoms in a structure

he/it may not even be aware of our existence

But the fact that we also think about this is proof that this "god" has at some point considered there are little people living down here

....

mind boggling stuff

>>10024
>when did god decide to stop this, how do you think you know? did he tell you? did you read up in a book or listen to someone else say he did?


I think if God did at one time herpderp through peoples skulls and tongues, that he stopped as soon as he realised the amount of fuckery he was causing because free will also exists here, so as soon as he introduced himself to the world people were free to fabricate the idea that god is here

Can't make people believe something if you yourself had no idea to begin with

or maybe He stopped interacting so that it would cause a whole big fuckery...
God= the master troll?

>>10038

The modern, non-traditional concept of gods (as supernatural non-human entities) adds little of value (beyond bad example) to the enterprise of understanding of the universe, and only clutters the already complicated task of doing so with yet more noise and smoke, which has to be removed later.

Gods have as much to do with philosophical discussion as jelly donuts. Anyone who brings either into the discussion's has their priorities showing.

"meaning of existence can't be supplied by religion or ideology" - wise old sage. Seek meaning, not easy prepackaged and more often than not, incorrect, concrete answers.

Existence of gods:
I don't want to say it's simply a fairytale but there is no evidence for gods. It really seems like the dumbest thing ever to argue about and all you faggots are wasting your fucking time.

Validity of religions:
Religions can be valid as a collection of >man-made< scriptures detailing codes of morality and knowledge and philosophical questions. There are parts of the Bible that forbid soil tilling - one of the practices that caused the dust bowl which makes sense in arid conditions. I think these religions have been vital in the formation of civilisation but it does not necessarily mean they are vital for the future. Equally centralised religions would probably have been pointless in a pre-agricultural society. So appreciate these expressions of culture without the GOD part.

otherwise I can't even find a reference to Nietzsche or many other philosophers in this thread which really means you're a pathetic and pointless group of shameless teenagers.
God is dead, now go kill yourself.

God is the strongest and most powerful idea human have ever generated. i don't know what will be the next biggest idea, but can guess something very awful.

God has to exist you fag it's illogical for got to not exist and without logic you wouldn't be able to comprehend anything due to the non existence of reasoning. Also God is not an "idea" he something that can't fully be perceived therefore or an idea, technically everything is an idea, that idea was an idea so was the idea about the idea BEING an idea. God has to exist for parallel levels of bunking o exist or else nothing would be relative.

All in All
If god didn't e it's nothing would make any sense what so ever
Just look at the world and even look at yourself
It's so perfectly made how everything fits together ( if the earth's temperature was off by 1 degree or our human genome altered by even a decimal of a percentage point we wouldn't be able to exist ) Something has to have put all these things in place via intelligent design. Seriously give up already and admit god exists It will be the best thing u ever do. Go to your local church and talk a pastor he will help you see things differently believe me.0

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

>>10084
Ok, I want to believe in gods. Now, obviously we have multiple god entities, because you ascribe a sex to your god, male, and for ere to be a male god means there is also at least female god for male god to differentiate itself from. As well, one single god doesn't really work, because where would one god come from? Without time or space, or a god realm with other gods in it, there's no reason for a god to exist at all. There's nothing to define any god, or differentiate itself from nothing to say its a god. For it to be lonely and create humanity to keep it company, it would have to know what lonely is first, which it couldn't do had it not experienced other beings to miss at some point. Obviously, if there is a god, then its far more likely that there are gods and a realm for them to be gods in. Hence why the oldest, longest, most successful and accepted religions in human history acknowledge this.

The fact that you refer to one god, and one god as male, indicates you're just being an obedient, uncritical follower of authoritarian rule from an empire that failed over a thousand years ago. It's Akenhatens crazy monotheism cult, fractured as it was driven out of Egypt, reunified in Rome, simplified by the Council of Naecea, and spread by the sword upon penalty of death for a thousand years. ...and it still hasn't improved as a moral code since the Bronze Age. Though if you ever visited the Vatican, you'd realize just how ridiculous it is that the Western Hemisphere takes the mythology so literally. They certainly don't.

>>10084
I don't think the world is perfect, neither do I think humans are perfect. I would suggest that only because of chance are things the way they are. If the universe is in fact unending there would be an unending amount of possiblities, we only know one of them.

>>10086
where do you come from to criticise the authoritarian nature of monotheism? :P

I think you do have a point though. Rather than discussing whether gods could possibly be real, I would suggest that these figures reflect the people who hold them to be true (scincerely or not). Monistic gods seem to reflect a father figure and authority which could tell us alot more about the people who first spoke of them.

>>10094


>where do you come from to criticise the authoritarian nature of monotheism? :P

>authoritarian nature
>one god-ism

I concur, that is not authoritarian, that is totalitarian

>>10236
>concur,
>totalitarian
>not authoritarian,

don't 'concur' with me, asshole.

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

File 13737120499.jpg - (678.65KB , 1331x1600 , inu cover.jpg )

Do Neanderthals go to heaven or hell? Thread (and God) over.

>>10425
Nope, like all other animals they returned to the earth as dust. Only humans go to heaven or hell.

>>10435

Your ancestors interbred and produced viable offspring with Neandertalers. Therefore they were, by definition, animals. Therefore you are an animal and will not reach heaven or hell, but be returned to the earth as dust.

Unless, of course, you are the blackest of blacks living deep in Africa and have no Neandertal, Florisien, or Denisovan ancestry, in which case enjoy your afterlife, human.

>>10442

Don't be an idiot. If you go far enough back, everyone's ancestors were fish, so nobody is going to heaven.

>>10444

True, but I thought I'd be generous and excuse ancestors from before the advent of "humanity".

File 137460779574.png - (851.05KB , 800x1200 , fantasy3.png )

the number one argument against the existence of a so called god is that there are no good arguments for its existence.

for some reason some people don't seem to be growing out of religion. I mean, praying to an imaginary friend when you're in your midlife crisis is like being 40 and still believing in Santa Claus: It's weird, creepy and you should kill yourself for it.

I would like to say i am an atheist.
I just became one yesterday after watching some of Aron Ra's speeches on youtube,i already believe in evolution and science as the only truth because it is but on to my topic.

ALL religious people have no real way of d fending faith they usually speak a passage from the bible and its usually irrational.
When i see a man of faith try to argue the truth of the bible i always see he never REALLY listens to the other person defying his faith,he just waits for an opportunity to make a counter argument.
They ALL ignore but when someone actually listens and changes from christianity/religion to atheism or just becoming a non believer they look back and see they couldn't even believe they believed in the bible.As you can see today there are a lot of ignorant illogical faith believers walking around who don't care to listen to truth except the one they believe in.

I would end with a link to Aron Ra's videos of his speeches and when you watch them PLEASE i am begging you LISTEN, don't argue with fact that cannot be disproved by religion.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AronRa/videos

Here's a question; why can we not celebrate life without believing in the supernatural?

Let me explain, I am an Atheist, but I was a Wiccan/pagan. One of the things that drew me to paganism was it's celebration of nature, something I could touch and see without resorting to the supernatural. I now no longer subscribe to paganism, but this year (april to be exact) I went to the beltaine festival in my city, mainly to watch the rather wonderfully choreographed ceremony.

Then something it me, can't we just celebrate the passing of the seasons without resorting to the supernatural. Life is a wonderful thing, and would an excuse to party and celebrate no be good for morale?

>>10465 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/15/creationist-darek-isaacs-dragons-biblical-times_n_3762395.html

I don't know if I should be upset that humans can be this broken or just laugh my ass off.

>>5959
This.
Agnostic atheism is the only position of logic.
It's a superposition of both religious and non religious until you observe it.

The human being can not perceive the complexity of things because he's physiologically limited. The brain, for reasons of economy of time and energy only generates highly simplified interpretations of the material world.
Imagine a being endowed with the ability to perceive this kind of complexity. It would for example be able to feel, to see things at a subatomic scale, at even quantum scale.
But does the existence of such a being make the possibility of life and entropy... impossible? A world where there is such a being could collapse as soon as this being perceives it, since he sees everything and understands everything immediately. Therefore, knowledge could be summed up in a singularity where life is impossible. It would be somehow a black hole of knowledge: knowing everything instantly means that we can compress the knowledge in this singularity. Philosophically speaking, that means that there is no point in finding a comprehensive knowledge. Our knowledge is incomplete by nature. There's something wrong, mostly nonsensical with the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent being. It must be possible to argue about the collapse of knowledge and perception assuming the existence of such a being, which implies metaphysics has no relevance, except for thought experiments like this.

>>10620

THIS is so close

no being within the universe could perceive all its elements and their attributes

perhaps even, the whole concept of elements having attributes is a convenient shorthand for what other fine elements are configured with the elements

as in, there are no attributes

only an intelligence outside the universe could comprehend it from a much larger universe..


anynow, the state of the universe wouldn't collapse, it would be perturbed, no big deal.

Regardless, the notion that our minds present us with travesties of reality in order to be comprehended by, or because it is presented by finite state machines with finite memory within a finite period of time to be useful within our finite lives...well, we're just never gonna see things as they really are unless they are just a little more complex than we think they are (Standard Model).

You hit it on the head there

>>10620

THIS is so close

no being within the universe could perceive all its elements and their attributes

perhaps even, the whole concept of elements having attributes is a convenient shorthand for what other fine elements are configured with the elements

as in, there are no attributes

only an intelligence outside the universe could comprehend it from a much larger universe..


anynow, the state of the universe wouldn't collapse, it would be perturbed, no big deal.

Regardless, the notion that our minds present us with travesties of reality in order to be comprehended by, or because it is presented by finite state machines with finite memory within a finite period of time to be useful within our finite lives...well, we're just never gonna see things as they really are unless they are just a little more complex than we think they are (Standard Model).

You hit it on the head there

File 138273604493.png - (49.16KB , 608x202 , i_am.png )

>>5999
>our bodies are like machines
Yes, but there are numerous imperfections in them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design#Examples
>ectopic pregnancy
>hernias
>pharynx being both for ingestion and respiration
>the breathing reflex being stimulated not by lack of oxygen but by presence of carbon dioxide.

>>7027
>trolling
We can discuss G-d and/or religion, independently or at the same time. However, we do not have to jump to your assumption that G-d exists.

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

I think the primary problem with arguments concerning the existence of a deity are that they are inevitably framed in the human perception of what a god should be. I think a god, by sheer nature, would not be comprehensible to a human, it is, after all, a god, something that exists outside our normal realm of understanding. I would describe myself as an agnostic deist, mainly as a convenient answer to the question "Why is there something instead of nothing?" The Big Bang occurred, as we all know, yet the materials for the Big Bang must have come from somewhere, assuming that matter cannot be created or destroyed. Even the idea that the matter of the Big Bang was created by the vast amounts of energy present at the time necessitates some source for that energy. Now, if you were to ask "If a god created that energy, who created god?" then odds are we're not really talking about a god. Most likely every religion is wrong in its specifics, but dismissing the idea of a god entirely is just idiotic.

>>7027
There is nothing, I can prove this on a etch-a-scetch!
We are responsible for our meaningful fulfilling existence.

>>10744
My personal favorite is that the retina is installed inside-out, so that the sensory layer needs a hole in it to run the optic nerve through, which causes a blind spot. If the human body was intentionally designed, one must consider the designer to be incompetent.

People can believe what they want to believe, as much or as little sense as it makes. Life for most people has a tendency to suck, and religion gives a sense of community and "reason" to a things that either don't have them or aren't fair. If it turns out they are right, then good for them. If it turns out they are wrong, well, then there really isn't any harm done in the first place.

Yes, it can be taken to unhealthy levels, but there are extremest on both sides.

Feuerbach - The Essence of Christianity

God is only part of man's infinite consciousness.

File 139167055779.jpg - (19.89KB , 400x285 , Thinker_Monkey_Banksy_Artwork_Art_Print.jpg )

Plato asks: Are moral actions right because god says certain actions are moral and right—or is god simply aware of what is moral and right and passes that information on to humans. Simply put is god the source of right actions or the messenger relaying information. In other words is it the “word of god” in and of itself, meaning “god’s command” that makes a particular action right or wrong; does his speaking it make it “right”, meaning a moral truth ought to followed– or does god know what right and wrong is, what moral truth is, is he aware of moral right and wrong, and passes simply passes that information on to us?

>>11022
>>11106
WHat does that mean?

God explanations: circular logic, if any at all, redefining 'god'...throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks.

Reasons that a God is not only unlikely, but ultimately not worth wasting time on: shitty engineering, insane vanity, no real point for existing, at any rate...and thousands of others...

>>5999
I like you.

>>11125
I like him too. His sentiment is poetic. Unfortunately, philosophy is the practice of analyzing thoughts, and his thought does not stand up to analysis. If we assume that a God created the universe, then only looking at this planet and deciding it is the purpose of the universe is like trying to figure out what a machine the size of a building is for looking only at some mites living in some dirt stuck in a screw in the doorknob of an access hatch somewhere on it.

If the entire universe was designed specifically for a race of people living on a speck somewhere in it, and the laws of said universe that prevent those people from literally ever seeing a great part of the vastness of it because the light from those parts will never reach them, then God is either indescribably incompetent and wasteful, or we are a random anomaly in the universe He created and not the purpose of it in any way.

I look at the universe and love it. I am awed by the beauty, splendor, and grandeur of it. But if it was designed, then it was very clearly not designed for us.

>>8653
I know you are referring to the problem of "the other mind" but even so, if you are a mind in a vat hooked up to a compute then the mind, the vat, and the computer must exist in something like a universe. SO that even if the universe conveyed to the mind from the computer is not real or even exists, some kind of universe must exist.

Faith

Stuff exists which implies that something made it exist, change your definition of god to whatever that something was, then devote some effort to figuring out what it is.
Personally I believe that consciousness is primary to matter/energy, consciousness existed and its will shaped energy around itself, we contain very tiny parts of that original consciousness, which is now spread among all all 'life'.

>>11467
In order to avoid the problem of infinite regress, we have to include a thing which made itself, or had no maker. And if we concede that, we must concede also that other things may make themselves, or have no maker.

In my young life, I lived in a Catholic family. However, later, I thought, '... Duh. When you die, your body stops. Done.'
That is how I became an atheist. Pick at this as much as possible, eh? But really, is it not true?

>>10744
I wouldn't put to much trust in a wiki page that still thanks the appendix is useless.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-function-of-t/

File 14076649892.gif - (9.59KB , 243x163 , simons_graphs_03.gif )

>>5920
I believe in god, I just don't believe in the church. Whatever incongruities are existent in religion are based on what people have decided the truth is about god. I mean come on? Condoms are a sin? That belief became a part of Catholicism at the same time the Crusades were going on and they needed more fighters, you do the math.

The biggest thing most people are caught up about is the whole "how can a god that created the whole universe and cares for us all allow children to get cancer and people in Africa to starve" And I have to be honest, when my friend was diagnosed with cancer it definitely changed the way I looked at the world and it made me look hard at what it was I believed.

I believe that there are 2 possible explanations to that:

1.) God "loves" people in the same way that we care for ourselves, but are otherwise unaware of what each individual cell in our body is doing, and it is fairly pointless to us if a cell dies because it will be pretty instantaneously replaced with another.

Or 2.) Think of god as a scientist. The universe itself is one massive experiment, and as he observes what is happening he must be careful not to interfere with the experiment in order to keep from skewing the results. That he does care about each person on the planet, and would like to make changes in how the world is, but helping a few people is not worth sacrificing the ultimate goal of the experiment. And if this is truly the case, and you were in that position, than a single planet in an entire universe of almost infinite size is not as important as the people living on it think. I believe that god created the universe for some experiment, and he watches as the universe expands infinitely out, carefully observing as life begins to form on certain planets, and watching as those being develop in order to see what they do, until eventually the universe stops expanding, and collapses back in on itself, and that he continues to watch as the next experiment begins. And while it seems contradictory to state that a being who knows everything would be conducting an experiment, I can only guess that the purpose would be to teach rather than to discover.

I know there are probably problems with this, just as any other theological belief, but this is what my answer is.

Any thoughts?

>>11685

If the universe is nothing but an experimental testbed to probe the potential and condition of life, then we had the incredible misfortune of being born in the universe that must have been developed to test Pain.

We could have been born in the universe to test Pleasure, or even the control universe where everything is just Content. But instead, here we are in a place where life is nothing but a constant struggle against suffering and death, and if you are lucky, you pop out a kid or two before biting the bullet.

File 141103103145.png - (434.18KB , 571x540 , 135438761212.png )

Envision the accomplishments and capabilities of humankind: space travel, technology, literature, art, politics, etc.

Now imagine the capabilities of our cousins: apes and monkeys. Significantly fewer, no doubt. Some can learn to sign, some can learn basic skills, but they lack our awareness, creativity, and vision.

Let's take it a step further. Small mammals. Dogs, cats, rodents. They comprehend even less of our universe.

Even further, reptiles.

Finally, insects. Insects are highly adaptable and reproductive, but they understand zilch of the universe.

What if we humans are insects in the grand scheme of the universe? Despite our powers of reason and logic, we might understand exactly NOTHING in terms of divinity and origin of the universe. I'm not saying theism is sane, but gnostic atheism is insane.

>>11799

This is nice. Very Lovecraftian at the core.

I was at work today, on break eating some lunch, and watching some ants. We have some pretty big ants here (about 1/2" long) and they don't form trails like those little black ants, they pretty much just scavenge around for food and then take it back to the nest individually. They were frightfully efficient at this. Any crumbs were found and picked up in about a minute or two. I followed one that was carrying an oat flake I dropped from my granola bar, back to their nest roughly 15 feet away. It was a hole in the ground next to some stones we're using to make a patio. The interesting thing was that the actual entrance to this nest seemed covered in leaves. Now, it's below a tree so there were leaves everywhere, but these appeared too clumped; it was a non-random pattern. So, in experimentation, I grabbed a small stick and flicked away most of the leaves. I walked away to get back to work.

When I returned, a few leaves were back in place, and I observed the ants working together to move more over the nest. Possibly, it was because the hole was exposed to the sun, and this kept the entrance cool; possibly the tunnel was kept wet with ant saliva and drying in the sun would cause he sand grains to shift and collapse. Either way, it was a fascinating display of collective emergent intelligence and active modification of an animal's environment. Not many animals do this.

However, even individual ants are very smart. They can navigate obstacles and rough terrain, avoid coming to harm, locate all manner of foodstuffs (I tested protein [ham], carbohydrates [oat flake], and fat [cheese] and they took it all) and take it back to their nest, over non-visual trails which, for them, is a distance of miles. Not all the human ingenuity put together could produce a robot capable of these things, and yet ants accomplish it with brains the size of a pinprick that aren't even so much brains as they are a swelling along the nerve stem.

But, in the end, they are just ants. With no effort, I tossed aside their roof of leaves like a tornado carrying the roof of a human house. They don't know that it was me, because as you said they cannot comprehend me. Just as we cannot comprehend tornadoes (well, not completely). Thinks that are commonplace to us, like a lawn mower, are on the scale of nuclear weapons to an ant. ACTUAL nuclear weapons, to an ant, must be like a supernova or gamma-ray burst.

What if what we perceive as galactic-scale disasters are just bombs being traded between cosmic beings outside our comprehension? What if a tornado is just one of them walking by flicking leaves with a stick...?


To be fair, I don't see this as having anything to do with "gods". As powerful as we are, compared to an ant, we are not gods. We are born, we bleed, and we die. We can be killed by as tiny a thing as a virus. If they existed, these beings that are to humans as humans are to ants, would be the same. They might be Roman/Greek style gods (very powerful, but not immortal), but not Abrahamic omniscient gods. The latter most likely cannot exist inside the laws of this universe.

>>11804
>This is nice. Very Lovecraftian at the core.
It's actually just a spin on one of the conversations from the movie Akira.

>>11805
While I've heard of it, I've never seen Akira.

I was going for Lovecraft.

>>11810
That's cool man.
But in Akira, they have a conversation and one of the things brought up is pretty much "What if you gave an amoeba the same capabilities as a human?"

So yeah, anime beat you to the punch on that one.

>>11816
>hurr anime expressed a timeless idea in different words
>durr beat you to the punch

ok, weeb

>user was banned for this post

>>11816

I disagree. Lovecraft came over 50 years before Akira.

>>11821
>>11827
No way guys. Akira did it the best because its conclusion was that you turn into a giant baby when a human becomes a God. In my mind, it beat everyone to the punch on that one.

>>5920
to the agnostic and atheists, i am agnostic and don't know much about science,but,if we go always further back in time we must get to something where matter came from right?many philosophers talked about that,but always put a prime matter,i once heard that matter can be made from energy,all these explainations don't seem satisfactory to me.where did the first thing(be it energy or matter)come from,according to what i know to be the laws of nature this doesn't make sense right?so the most viable way seems to be to think about a Being that trascends the laws of logic and nature that started it all.this is in no way supposed to be an argumentation in favour of god, as i said i am agnostic, just wanted to hear some counterargumentations(only thing i can think about is that we get to a point with science and physics where we understand how the first thing created itself

>>11878
The how is not as important as you think. Once we concede the point that a thing may create itself, we must concede that other things may create themselves too. Then all we need to do is observe something in the universe creating itself or spontaneously existing, and we have done that. Particles create themselves all the time. They manifest in pairs, a particle and an antiparticle, which almost always annihilate each other at the instant they appear. But at the edges of event horizons of black holes, sometimes tidal forces are enough to capture one of the pair while letting the other escape. This would mean we would detect a distinct radiation signature coming from black holes, and this radiation was mathematically calculated and predicted before actually being detected and verified. We don't really need to know exactly how something can come out of nothing to state empirically that it does happen.

>>11880
we have reports of matter creating itself?

>>11881
Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle

>>11882
>matter creating itself
>virtual particles

Maybe go watch a couple of Youtube videos on virtual particles and pertubation theory before attempting to sound smart.

>>11886

Virtual particles are identical to "real" particles in all ways other than duration. They are for all intents and purposes matter coming from nothing.

>>11821
no wonder this board is so slow

File 142080008827.png - (210.21KB , 415x531 , faggot45.png )

>not being religious ironically
>dub-fifteen

>user was banned for this post

Well, you have to keep in mind that, when dealing with virtual particles, there is another force that produces them, like in the electromagnetic repulsion between two forces htat produces them. Basically they need to have a cause, they behave different than normal particles, but they are a product of some other entity.

Well, you have to keep in mind that, when dealing with virtual particles, there is another force that produces them, like in the electromagnetic repulsion between two forces htat produces them. Basically they need to have a cause, they behave different than normal particles, but they are a product of some other entity.

Now another argument that I hold is: the fulfillment of the prophecies in the bible. Now, you can think I am pretty fucking stupid ( which is probably true) but I've found the evidence of secret societies that have existed for thousands of years, that advocate for the mysteries of Babylon and the mysteries of satanism. The following are the only webpages from where I can prove some point:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_Memphis-Misraim

http://www.ordeniluminati.net/english.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licio_Gelli

I mioght have gone crazy, but I truly think there is some truly bizarre shit going on

Mkay, innocent question:

If God or Gods cannot be seen or heard or perceived in general, how can you prove he /they exist? and how can you prove he/they do not exist?

Another question:

I've noticed that people that say god exist and their justification is always metaphysical (spiritual, if you may).

I've also noticed that people that say god doesnt exist justify this claim on empirical (scientific, if you may) terms.

Can you hold that god exists empirically (scientifically)? can you explain that god does not exist metaphisicaly (spiritualy)?

Also, the third naive question:

Say you consider absurd that some people believe in a god because it does not exist.

Is it not also absurd to believe (BELIEVE) that he doesn't exist?

Not advocating for agnosticism, just asking for justifications on why god exists or god does not exist is any better than the other or any better or worse than neutrality.

>If God or Gods cannot be seen or heard or perceived in general, how can you prove he /they exist? and how can you prove he/they do not exist?

You can't.

>Can you hold that god exists empirically (scientifically)?

Nope.

>can you explain that god does not exist metaphisicaly (spiritualy)?

If it amuses you to do so, yes.

>Is it not also absurd to believe (BELIEVE) that he doesn't exist?

Not really. Belief and knowledge are separate concepts. Expressing belief that God exists is not an absurdity. Expressing knowledge that God exists is.

does god have to be a god in the traditional sense; could he or her not be an advanced being that visited the earth long ago, or could god not e nature anthropomorphized? In Confession of the Last Lowly Warrior the so-called FALL is depicted as the descent from a natural tribal state to the artificial feudal state, so that the fractured society depicted in several creation myths is the formation of the elite ruling class and the common labor class. that would mean creation refers to the creation of the feudal world and a feudal humanity, and not the creation of the physical world and or our species. what do you think?

A God has no NEED or WANT. Need and want is a human condition, not that of a God. There is no NEED for religion, or followers by a God. Therefore ALL organized religion is a farce. If God were to want or need anything, God would simply WILL it and it would be done, or would have been done without a need for man. God doesn't WANT and NEED man, it is man that WANTS and NEEDS God to escape FEAR. So man created religion which is actually just that, FEAR. Because FEAR is control. Hence, FEAR is GOD. Islam just took it up a notch.

>It implies you don't know what you believe.

It can easily imply that you belief, that you do not know whether X exists.


>"Do you live your life with the assumption that God(s) exists?"

I live with the assumption that I do not know whether God(s) exists.


I understand that it's very unlikely that some main stream religion is completely right. But the concept of God is much wider used than just for that purpose. There might be some form of intelligence related to our origin, there might not be. I don't have any evidence, so I don't know.


Maybe people are so pressured to hear an agnostic say he thinks one way or another, is due to the underlying reasoning that this influence some type of black and white moral behavior. But it doesn't. You don't need to be so deterministic to decide what you think is right.

>>12103

An entity that we would describe as "God" would have no wants or needs as we know them. However, the concept of "God" very much has a "want" and a "need" for people to propagate it, because if they stop doing so the concept ceases to exist. A "God" would not care either way if people believe in it or not. The picture of God that lives in peoples' heads, however, fears being forgotten because that is death to it.

Think of "god" as a parent.
If you live under this imaginary beings rules, you end up falling back on this parental figure when you cannot solve a problem yourself.

While "god" may have been a nice thing back before we had to diagnose what the fuck we're doing to our planet, we've kind of made it so that we have complete control over the fate of our existence, and therefore, the responsibility to take care of ourselves, instead of laying our faith in something which cannot be proven to even exist at any capacity.

>>6487
Even though most religions and most religious people don't agree with these lines of thought, I will respond.
You say that religious people have dangerously relative morality, but religion is the only logical system that can provide absolute morality. No other philosophy has ever came up with an absolute right and wrong, or at least none that I think you could accept as the one and only right and wrong.
A religion can conclude absolute morality out of the existence of a god, and a god is the only source of absolute morality.
Even a Leviathon can't replace such a god, as anybody who considers himself outside of the authority of the leviathon, even anybody born after the first agreements were made, has no part of this morality, making a leviathon a source for relative morality.
So: Yes, religion can cause relative morality in humans in some cases, but it is the only thing that can cause logically valid absolute morality.
OT: Out of the 30 students in my philosophy class, only one student other than me believed that absolute morality exists, and we were two out of four religious students.

>>5999
What about all the things that aren't perfect about human bodies? Birth defects, using the same tube for eating and breathing, visual blind spots, wisdom teeth, the appendix, etc.

>>12397
If you didnt notice, you are replying to a statement made 4 years ago.
Not about the thread.... My question is that even if there is a God, does it matter. Maybe we are an abandoned failed experiment just festering on this petri dish of a mudball. Might explain why we can't find other lifeforms, or why we are more evolved by lightyears than any other lifeforms on earth.

>>12411
There's no such thing as being 'more evolved.' Evolution is not a linear progression, new bits of dna show up and old bits sometimes go away, it's almost purely random.

>>5920
I hope this is suffice.
8ch.net/christian/catalog.html
textuploader.com/5bg6i

I've never denied the possible existence of a deity, but I've never understood the thinking of those who believe in one (especially when it comes to Christians).

"God can't control free will." Then how is it that he causes miracles? Let's say a drunkard chooses to drive his way home after he wobbles out of the local bar. He causes a head-on collision with a teenager.

In the situation which the teen survives the crash, people assume there must have been some sort of divine intervention. Of course, there is NO WAY it could have been because of the intelligent engineers who created a vehicle which was capable of saving lives. No, it was God who saved the teen. Anyways, the religious will attribute the life of the teen to the mercy of God. But the collision was a direct result of the drunkard's free will. Granted God isn't directly effecting free will, God is negating the whole point of free will. Why have free will if God is going to fix the results of said free will?

This assuming the validity of man-written scripts that were supposedly written from God's words, the belief God follows the rules he created, the belief God is omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful, but at the same unable to help everyone on the planet, the belief that Earth is the only planet/life residing on said planet God watches over (or the fact God only cares for the humans based on the lack of description of any other kinds of life he created), etc. I could go on and on and on about the non-validates and holes in the beliefs I have a thorough understanding of.

Now let's say the teen dies during the collision. In the situation which it is plausible to assume God can heal and protect, it is also plausible to assume he can hurt and destroy. How do we know he doesn't cause the evil in this world along with the good (assuming good and evil is an existent entity and not a notion made up by the moralities of man). How can one assume a God who is willing to send the ones he loves to eternal torture (even when their lack of faith is perfectly plausible) is one who wouldn't cause harm? He could even be just a sadist, causing death and pain for his sick twisted desired.

If I were to believe in a god with certainty, it wouldn't be with any existing religion (especially any branch of Christianity).

That does bring up an interesting point how do we know God does not control our free will what if the voice in our head is not us but some one else who controls any thing and every thing

>>6195
Thnx, it is beautiful

philosophical zombie

A concept of belief in religious context stands in contradiction to rationale. Have you given a rationale, you have failed the concept of belief. God is ungraspable and indefinable to the human mind. Hence any movement that defines god, has already failed the concept of god. Hence pasacals wager is bullshit.

Retort: This exemplifies the structure of alleged self-refutation of kantian transcendental idealism as posed by Bolzano, especially to be found in neuer anti-kant. More concretely that the proposition "No positive nor negative judgement about the thing in itself can be given" is itself a judgement about the thing in itself.
Bolzano in the wissenschaftslehere (1837) goes on to accept that he is not entirely opposed to the thing in itself, but then demands that the thing and exactly how it cannot be known, should be specified.

This is setting up an almost too obvious trap for the kantian since it forces him, in any response to presuppose more than he can know.

Bolzano further has, himself, a somewhat pragmatic view of religion, though he often speaks otherwise. In short, he does not feel convinced that Christianity bears any genuine truth, but rather that it is a genuine truth that religion bears the potential for keeping shitheads in line, which i personally find somewhat persuasive, was it not because of the disgusting immigrants and psycho Americans.

Furthermore, agnosticisme is the only rational position. However it is not a sustainable position. Hence rationality must go over irrationality, in order to preserve rationality. Ie. By accepting religion or metaphysical terminology by pragmatic notions, in the face of necessary non-knowledge. Perhaps something interesting could be said about this in relation to Carnaps 1956 writing empiricism, semantics, and ontology. So there is being. Goldmans casual relativist theory of epistemic frameworks supervenes heavily on it.

Idealism is interesting, aber es ist Schwärmerei. In the sense of fanaticism.

Best argument for god is either pragmatic og irrational, which will not count as real philosophy on the opposite side of the discussion. Which is why we still have jobs, aside from writing about shitty, stinking, boring environmental fucking ethics. Keep disagreeing faggy gentlemen

File 149249916541.png - (925.06KB , 996x3150 , 765bbd4d90467ee5a115fcc235c1047e80d26ce225a32226a4.png )

https://www.youtube.com/user/AominOrg/videos?&ytbChannel=Alpha%20%26%20Omega%20Ministries

>>12875
circular logic much?

I think it is ironic that if we CAN understand something, then it cannot be God doing it. If we cannot understand something then we must apply the Scientific Method to it to prove it is real. If you must get to something outside of what science can prove, then it cannot exist.

I don't understand how random rays of light cause chemical reactions in my brain such that I can see a beautiful sunset. Yet, I believe I see beauty in sunsets.

I cannot prove a "beautiful" sunset exists since science cannot prove beauty... Therefore it must not be real.

At times, I feel like something beautiful points me to something outside myself, something higher, that must have set the standard...
Dare I say appreciation of beauty is designed into us?
Dare i say by a designer?...
Dare I say by God?...

Or...It must be random chemicals firing again in that randomly created thing inside my head. Surly random chance accounts for everything right?

The point is that if you're going to say there IS something, them you have the provide evidence for it.

We have evidence people can and do make up gods all the time, yet we have zero evidence for a god when we look for axiomatic evidence.

>>13114
We who believe in a god have seen the evidence and accepted it. You who have chosen atheism have seen the same evidence and named it something else. Every atheist I've ever spoken to has believed in the same god as me, but has ascribed it a different name. There is nothing to prove.

>>13103
Those who walk the spiritual path and choose to connect with what some call God usually learn that there is no such thing as "coincidence," or any random happening. It all happens by design, sometimes by a telepathic, hivemind design, transcending the control of any one individual.

I know there will be some present who know what I am speaking of.

>>13264
>>13265
There is no proof of a divine will behind the existence of anything. Stories from two thousand years ago and more don't count as evidence. That said, I'm no atheist myself, and consider existence itself to be evident of purpose in it, but fuck you and your "proof" of divinity.

>>12012
>If God or Gods cannot be seen or heard or perceived in general, how can you prove he /they exist? and how can you prove he/they do not exist?

>I've noticed that people that say god exist and their justification is always metaphysical (spiritual, if you may).

>I've also noticed that people that say god doesnt exist justify this claim on empirical (scientific, if you may) terms.

>Can you hold that god exists empirically (scientifically)? can you explain that god does not exist metaphisicaly (spiritualy)?

Through science, we are beginning to find that there is a bond between particles that supercedes spacial relations, probably temporal relations as well (as exceeding time and space has been my own firsthand psychic experience, but for now, that is beside the point). This is Quantum Physics.
The observation phenomenon (probably not the official name for it, but they have begun to find that matter acts differently depending on whether it is being observed.) is clear evidence towards the fact that consciousness creates matter, not the other way around.
We are given free will by a mass of electrons (electricity) flowing through our brains at all moments. The nuclei of atoms seem to be matter, whereas the electrons are energy. Consciousness seems to lie somewhere between these.
Likewise, consciousness does not end at the physical limitations of the body. It extends as far as energy can flow. I know this, because I have held long-distance telepathic conversations with several loved ones. I can probably not prove this, but I would like you to know it. It is from my own first-hand experience I draw conclusions.
Consciousness is everywhere, even lying dormant in abiotic things in the form of some kind of energy. This consciousness, from which we all stem, is the thing that religious people call God.
I hope that explains.

That being said, knowing we create our own realities, I choose to acknowledge that the power of God lies within the self, and I invoke this power frequently to perform what some might call "magic," and others might call "energy work." (We all believe in the same shit and argue over what to call it)

>>13266
I never quoted the bible and I don't read it bro. Judging by your response, you didn't follow my original comment, and should not be responding to it. No offense intended. Just letting you know. I'm not even religious.

I also ended one of my messages by saying "there is nothing to prove." So by saying "fuck my proof," you are just proving you don't know how to read. Please pay more attention in the future. Best of wishes, not trying to be a dick.

>>13269
Yeah, I didn't bother reading any other part of the thread; still haven't. I'm literate, but not masochistic.

I took your "nothing to prove" statement as arrogance, the kind one usually hears from Abrahamic cultists who are so confident in their dogma that they genuinely believe they have concluded it to be true.

>>13270
I understand how you could do that

So I always believed that the Bible was true but I always thought it was metaphorical, not a historical account. I started thinking I was wrong and tried to look at it literally. It's amazing but despite how old it is, everything is still scientifically sound and correct. It really is entirely true not just a metaphorical account meant to spread belief.

If you are having doubts I suggest you commit to looking at it openly and being as good as you can. Do what you can to please God and ask him to return the favor.

I was going through a lot of trouble and asked God to send me an angel and he did. I think it was the Virgin Mary but I only know for a fact it was indeed an angel and did answer my prayers. It was a beaut

Puk-P-u-u-u-k_Pppppp-UUUU-K

>>6477
>When you accept the existence of a force greater than humanity you absolve yourself of responsibility
>not believing in determinism
>not realizing pretty much everything is beyond our control
Congratulations, you're just as stupid as the people you're decrying.

>>13423
>not believing our thoughts form the universe
On a long enough timeline, nothing is beyond our control--unless we annihilate ourselves or allow ourselves to be annihilated.

File 153407812198.jpg - (30.12KB , 700x449 , 006A8E2D-DB33-40D5-B82B-2AF2E10FB5C3.jpg )

Recently in Argentina has been getting bigger the campaign for having once for all a lay state.
What do you guys think about non-lay state countries?

>>13595
I'm bored. Someone please explain to me aurally how I need to accept this toupeed cheetoh as my president. I'm waiting three, zero, zero, (no wait), four, one, nine, (wait still) zero, two, seven, five seconds. People always act high and might online but as soon as a voice is involved they lose their courage.

>>13618
You don't have to accept him because he simply is your president, granted that you live in the US.

He simply is...

I believe the we humans are mere unintellegent beings. that dont have the technology or knowledge to accuratly predict the meaning or cause/origin of life. and that we are wasting out time and energy on something that can only hurt our society. I mean think about this, what if we proved there's no meaning of life , then everyone could be a nihilist, and one of two possible outcomes would occur, no one would work to get anything done on earth and just let humanity rot away into nothingness, or mass chaos and panic would strike and earth would no longer be safe for any humans, or even plants and animals. But what do i know anyway Im just a 13 year old boy.

File 154106153818.jpg - (42.41KB , 457x535 , lb.jpg )

>>5920

You should read W (or the law of inevitables)

cool

>>13664
Yeah, your conclusion is pretty stupid, but you're probably right when you say we will never discover the ultimate cause of the universe as we cannot observe or test phenomenon outside of it. That said, there are plenty of nihilists/existentialists who get on just fine and are contributing members of society. Life may be meaningless, but people will still want to be comfortable.

File 155840227641.jpg - (91.59KB , 679x770 , Gantz God.jpg )

>>5920
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RfUj09pWfM

Reminder that all religion is cosmic cope and cuckoldry

File 157141415429.jpg - (101.63KB , 540x840 , 9200000000415911.jpg )

>>14160
Actually this thread is imaginary. All religion is Masochism; a personality structure based on submission and dependence.
Reading list:
The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
by Ernest Becker
Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.

Key Concepts:
Ego psychology
Human
Human evolution
Meaning of life
Primate
Psychoanalysis
Psychology
Sigmund Freud
Social position
Sociology
~enjoy :^)

>>12372
Absolute morality is an excellent justification for bigotry and malfeasance to other humans. A moral system that cannot change can declare the poor and negros to be sub-human, fit for nothing but slavery doing labor for the rich and kings, and no amount of science or progress of civilization can change it.

Religion is nothing more than another system of control. Serve your King for your entire life; give your blood and tears until you die of exhaustion; then you're be rewarded for eternity. Literally nobody in the ruling class is actually religious; in their private circles they laugh at the idiocy of the common publick to eat this nonsense. They only pay lip-service to the Church to keep up appearances.


Humanity does not need absolutism in any form, PARTICULARLY morality.

File 15749161261.png - (287.30KB , 1280x720 , Screenshot_2019-11-27 DarkMatter2525.png )

The best explanation I ever found for the insanity of religion was from this video:

https://youtu.be/-j8ZMMuu7MU

The premise is that their "God" is just an idealized version of themselves.
That is why they are so obsessed. Any criticism against their God is in a way an attack against them.

File 159103173740.png - (247.75KB , 553x613 , 20190915_160447-2.png )

>>5920
somebody refute the following theory for god's existence. I am not a believer, but this argument is damning.

>>14512
It's too wordy for me. I only got to #7. Why am I such a retard?

>>14513
It's just the infinite regress paradox/prime mover argument. Nothing in that chain of logic proves that the "first cause" or "actual actualizer" or whatever you care to call it must necessarily be an entity with will and specific intent.

>>14514
Do you believe in this theory? If so, what do you think the actual actualizer is?

>>14512
Doesn't look too damning to me. Just a wordy way of saying god must have made things because things exist, which is a nonsense argument.

We all live in this world.... think bout it...where is our beginning point...we don't know at all...we don't know who we r...we don't know what is full extent of human....and we cannot question about our creator... Maybe we r just a simulation...maybe we r created by humans like us...maybe we r in a game like a virtual diving system...maybe we r just souls created ....

>>14565 philosophy is a hell of a drug

there is no argument against god as a concept, but there is against more specific interpretation, like the christian god

>>11685
Idea number 2 has is much more viable in an argument and I feel as though idea one should be used as a supplement for idea 2.

The problem with these theories is they imply there is some knowledge beyond God, which is not the case. I believe in God and He is omnipotent in more than any mind could possibly imagine. He created all matter, the ability to see and feel it, heat, the cycle of planets and species. Trying to go into exactly why God isn't helping you mostly boils down to one thing; impatience. God is not at your beck and call, if you truly need help you will receive it. Earn it. Pray you don't have to die to get your recompense and always remember what you are truly asking for.

As terrible as loneliness can be, asking God to help you sin might not work out in the end. Try and keep in mind the bigger goal, not falling tempted to this evil planet

>>14646
This is basically just another version of American individualist delusion. If you don't succeed in life, it's because you did something wrong, because you're a bad person. Now it's not even "you're not praying to God", it's "you're not praying CORRECTLY", but the message is the same:

If you fail, it's your fault. As if children got to choose whether to be born to a family of billionaires in the USA or a family of paupers in Syria. Clearly, if the second child is getting his legs blown off by a mortar attack, he just needs to "be patient".

What a bunch of shit. How convenient it is that any claims of equality due to some magical cosmic karma is demonstrably false in reality, so you instead claim it will happen in some invisible, unknowable "afterlife". Yes, sir, I know you've opened a billion boxes and all of them contained a punch to the face, but in THIS LAST BOX, you'll get a prize. Just trust me!

>>6409
ok Sartre

>>14669
He's not wrong.

>>14662
>If you fail, it's your fault. As if children got to choose whether to be born to a family of billionaires in the USA or a family of paupers in Syria. Clearly, if the second child is getting his legs blown off by a mortar attack, he just needs to "be patient".
Well now you're talking about being born into sin, only it's not the sin of our father but rather your father (and mother). That 2nd child never chose to be born, it's his parents fault he was born in a war-zone and now he's living with no legs and in constant agony because of that decision. At least religion gives him that false hope that maybe his suffering isn't for nothing, that maybe he'll find some peace in the end, but no, here you are snatching away that glimmer of hope "you've got a shit life because you were born in a shit-hole country and you're going to suffer until you die and it's all your parents fault, there's no afterlife, you were born to suffer till the end of your days." Do you feel happy snuffing out any pretense of parental love and leaving him with a cold withered heart like that shard of flint you call your own?

>>14672
Sin has nothing to do with racial parentage or geographic location. That's racism in disguise: "The reason why shit sucks in those countries (where we totally didn't plunder and start wars in) is because they're Godless Heathens."

>Religion offers a glimmer of hope where there is none
That is basically the same delusional idiocy that leads Americans to stockpile guns. They're paranoid of being robbed so being surrounded by weapons makes them feel safe; but in reality they're more likely to just have one of their own children accidentally kill themself. Religion does far more bad than it does good. Just because some people use it as a forlorn hope doesn't justify it existing.


If you're going to lean on anti-natalism, perhaps embrace it rather than retreating back into Magical Sky Fairy delusion. Yes, it's the parents fault and they should not have reproduced. You know why they probably did? Because "God" told them to!

>>14673
>Sin has nothing to do with racial parentage or geographic location. That's racism in disguise: "The reason why shit sucks in those countries (where we totally didn't plunder and start wars in) is because they're Godless Heathens."
Whoah! I never brought race or geography into this. I was saying how a child born in to a life where it suffers is the parents sin. Syria was your projection.


>Just because some people use it as a forlorn hope doesn't justify it existing.
All hope is an act of faith, are you saying humanity should abandon all hope for the future? Without hope we'd regress as a species.

>>14674
>We'd regress as a species
Ironically, this is literally the only possible future for humanity. Regression to a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with a total species population of less than 500 million. As things stand, human extinction from climate change and biosphere collapse is virtually guaranteed by the end of the century.

One can only HOPE that things don't just keep going as they are, because then there will be nothing left.

If atheists believe God doesn't exist, Then they must believe life has no higher meaning, If life has no higher meaning then a human life is worthless according to an atheists point of view, In such case since an Atheists life has no value. killing an atheist is logical because why save something that's meaningless.

>>14723
>If atheists believe God doesn't exist, Then they must believe life has no higher meaning
If there is a "higher" meaning, there must be other meaning that it is higher than.
>If life has no higher meaning then a human life is worthless according to an atheists point of view,
It does not follow. If life has no "higher" meaning, it may still have the "lower" meaning made necessary by the premise.
>In such case since an Atheists life has no value. killing an atheist is logical
It would by your assertion be a meaningless act, and it is not logical to pursue meaningless acts.

File 163691297730.jpg - (49.17KB , 715x715 , 64897400_313942659550545_4711879303271284736_n.jpg )

Aww yes, making theists comfortable time.

If a supposed god is omnipotent, that is to say, to have unlimited power that anything they set out to do, they never fail and always succeed.

But then, there's something such a god can't do: fail a task.

If a supposed god is omniscient, that is to say, to have unlimited knowledge. That is to say, to know every true thing that is possible.

But then, consider the statement, "god doesn't believe this statement is true."

Combining the two: "Is an all-knowing all-powerful god capable of predicting all their future actions, and then deciding not to follow through on any of them?"

If a supposed god is said to be a perfect being, that is to say, free of wants and needs, then why would a god create or do anything?

>>14842
The reason why the Abrahamic religions are especially so popular is because they're exclusively anthropocentric.
That's why Christians and Muslims justify ethnonationalism

File 163824324720.jpg - (352.33KB , 3120x4160 , 1606806772090.jpg )

>>14851
Here's the issue, laser weapons don't really do damage to white people, but actually do horrible unbelievable damage to black people literally because of the color of their skin
>>14842
Boredom. Same reason he whispers how to make energy weapons into my ears

>>14283
The first part of the video is a complete strawman, it assumes every interaction between an atheist and a theist will go through feelings of rejection i.e. a convienent tool to seque into "THIS is why theists say "reject God"!

The video builds on the same strawman again with the Gloria metaphor, assuming that the theist in this theoretical argument did not feel rejected initially the same metaphor would not be applicable. Bible-canonically it's God's job to judge, not man's.
If an atheist can feel close to God, why would he be an atheist?

The last segment is playing on emotions(cherrypicked facebook screencaps from the last decade) and saying it's not the time for disagreements yadayada and
>desirability is not a requisite for the truth
This is exactly what a Christian could say in response to an atheist. Thing is, they have a different truth than atheists.

I have to say, I've been on the fence with agnosticism for almost 2 weeks now. I never had much experience with atheist material before and seeing insofar this is not convincing.

>>14842
>If a supposed god is said to be a perfect being, that is to say, free of wants and needs, then why would a god create or do anything?

You're thinking of Him in a distant metaphysical way. His goal is the exact opposite of that.

No, god doesn't want to be an unknowable mystic deity, he wants to be a friend to you, hence "Heavenly father" being one of his names. That's who Jesus is really. The physical incarnation of God, and since we can see Jesus we know exactly who God is.

Why does a father want to have children? You tell me. also
>that pic
Your definition of God is wrong

>>14675

>One can only HOPE that things don't just keep going as they are, because then there will be nothing left.

From 1914 to 1945, over a hundred million people were slaughtered in cold blood. What did we do after? Right back to killing. Nearly five million people died in Korea. More than half of these–about ten percent of Korea's prewar population–were civilians. This rate of civilian casualties was higher than World War II's and the Vietnam War's. So, yeah, I think it stands to reason we're pretty much fucked. Sorry, class of 2100!

Is the modern stereotype of safe plodding predictable conversation a religion? It's been a slow creeping methodically repetitive thing.

File 166325223047.jpg - (42.22KB , 641x478 , images-2020-10-20T121130_344.jpg )

There's no way to actually prove that God dose/dose not exist . So i guess wether God is real or not is more of a subjective question then a real question .

>>15148
We could ask, what would the existence of God imply to us, sensorially?
Then we could try to verify that in our senses.

File 166495650361.png - (21.65KB , 522x522 , 2.png )

i have read a bit of the bibble; there are a lot of contradictions. maybe i should touch up on the quaran. how extrem (or not) is it compared to the bible?

>>5920
Viewing religion as a single entity is why you won't find God, btw.

>>6870
"Judeo-Christian" is an oxymoron.

I'm just going to stop here with replying to specific posts, I don't believe anyone in this thread is actually open to the truth, but I'm going to go ahead and rant anyway.

And yeah, I personally know God and even if I described my experiences that prove to me that I know Jesus of Nazareth is the promised messiah and that the Father who is in heaven (there are multiple heavens, one is atmosphere, one is space, one is God's dwellingplace; "heaven" is also used to describe the new earth and new heavens to come as mentioned by the prophet Isaiah, but that's not strictly accurate terminology according to scripture -- also, hell isn't eternal life, it's death [Ezekiel 18:4, 20; Romans 6:23; Matthew 10:28] -- the "eternal life in pain" lie is used to keep people from coming to God because they think he's cruel, but he's more merciful and forgiving than any man, but he won't just forgive people who refuse to stop hurting others or creation, you have to forsake your evil ways and want to turn to God for Him to forgive you [like you can't forgive someone who won't stop punching you in the face even if they say "sorry" while they punch you in the face]).

I could also go over all the real world evidence that supports the scripture, or how the evidence actually invalidates the big bang, millions of years, abiogenesis, and evolutionism. But nobody is ever willing to listen to that because they're convinced they're right because "government schools would never lie to me" then they never studied this subject beyond that for the most part and literally all I ever get in response is some 1/10 troll throwing a tantrum, so you either do your own homework or remain ignorant, it's literally not my problem.

I studied it for years, I didn't just blindly accept government/media narratives in "history" and "science" which now teach little boys they can become women and now our whole society is FUCKED. I've searched for the truth for years. And I found God and you know how I felt when I found God? Angry. Angry that nobody in my entire life told me about any of this knowledge, I was robbed of my birthright thanks to apostate worldly churches that conform to the world and won't name sin and counterfeit cults like catholicism which is full of homosexuals, sodomites, and child rapists and also because of my parents who did not raise me right (i.e. with the knowledge of God); and it took decades just to find it. I literally cannot think of even one person who told me of any of this. There's only one person I can think might've mentioned it, but I was really young then and don't remember any of our conversations.

The only experience most people today really have with "religion" is going to church on the weekend for one hour because their mother made them, then going home to play video games and watch cartoons, not even keeping the false roman catholic babylonian whore's day of rest on the "venerable day of the sun"-- and right here, none of you guys even know what I'm on about with rome (I'll give you a hint, Daniel 7:25 and Malachi 3:6).

You'll either search for God or you won't. The steps to finding God are all laid out, plainly and easily understood, in scripture [1]. If you want to remain ignorant, if you're scared to read the bible or if you just want to search for excuses to disregard it, then that's your choice. I'm not sticking around to debate. I've ranted and said my piece and that's all I'll say.

Well, I'll leave one last thing, I absolutely hate and detest and curse hypocrites and I am still angry over the jewish pedophile mods that took over 4chan after spamming it with CP years ago and made it into a total shit hole of antiwhite spam and botspam. That's why they closed down /qa/ really, it wasn't some false flag raid by a spinoff MOSSAD website; the 4chan fed mods were getting trolled too hard by the /qa/ posters so one of the fed mods was raging so hard he started doxing anons.

Mods, just delete that last paragraph if it's too off topic, I just needed to vent. Or the whole post, I don't really care, I'm probably not coming back here (it's not like a born again, bible-believer is accepted in any of these imageboards, I have several perma bans and range bans on 4chan all for speaking the truth and triggered their hypocrite mods for pointing out their hypocrisy); most philosophy is just entirely vain and pointless. Funnily enough, that was the original view from the West on Buddhism, that it was just mindless stuff and nonsense.

Thank you for reading my blog post.

[1] https://www.openbible.info/topics/seeking_god

>>15177
There are no contradictions in the Bible

If you need some understanding just ask

>>5920
There are lots of religions and worldly influencers but none of them can give you eternal life on Earth, they promise it is somewhere else because they can not give it but I can give eternal life to all my followers, the only thing is they must accept to obey the ten commandments plus the extra two that Christ gave to become my follower. I don't have a church nor will I build one but I would prefer my followers be with me where I am so they can benefit from the other gifts I have for them.

Let's think this through: If there was any real Gods we'd see their people create a stable and successful country. But as we can see none of the people who claim they have a "God" behind them have a long lasting success.
For all practical purposes "money" itself is a better God than any other invisible God claims.

>>15332
You're going to see money fail, and never God nigger

ok

Why does it feel like almost everyone hates God nowadays, God has blessed us with plentee of food and space and forgiveness, and please remember this. confession is only between you and God for no man has the strength to fully and truly forgive sin. All of men who think they can forgive by themselves should be hu mbled

Why bother discussing religions since there's really nothing you can do about them at all.

/Thread.

>>10910
Perhaps the blind spot serves a function, in fact it exists at the dead center of our vision. Whatever we draw attention to the most, we are blind to it. We are beings of peripheries and contexts. Perhaps, we ought to not see the very things before us without looking at them a little bit askance.