Um, on a second read, I’m not sure “In lieu of this thread” means what I thought it meant. I meant, in “light” of the direction of the discussion of this thread (i.e., I dealt with the situation of evidence of a god existing, evidence that god is an important moral consideration, but I didn’t address the situation in which I might feel that a God was interacting with me personally, internally, concluding that in such a case, existing/not existing seems almost moot, and the real question is deciding, not concluding)
And yet again we come to the part of the conversation where Lib dismisses my part of the conversation as some sort of cheap trick that he won’t stoop to participate in.
Yes, we’ve had this conversation before, and we will have it again whenever you try to pretend astonishment whenever someone is confused by your dropping metaphors into a non-metaphorical conversation. If I say that a Mr. Jones visited me and talked to me, no one on this message board will assume that the spirit of Mr. Jones came over me and that I recieved any sort of enlightenment. No mysteries, no metaphors and no using secondary definitions. Yet you would drop into the conversation an example of God visiting you and talking to you, know full well that, because you are reusing the same words but using very different definitions, your example has no bearing whatsoever on the original scenario.
Maybe it is conversations like this that drive some people further away from religion. When a person who is trying to use direct questioning to find out what a religious experience is like is answered by a religious person who uses the same language as the questioner, but uses religious and metaphorical definitions when there are perfectly good words in the language that mean what the religious person actually means to say, then eventually the questioner is going to assume that the religious person either doesn’t have the answer or is purposefully avoiding giving the answer.
I am utterly amazed at my own naivete. I wasted a considerable amount of my time answering your questions as forthrightly as I could. You can take your “second chance”, turn it on its blunt end, and sit on it. That’s a metaphor, and I bet you understand it.
That “Christian” answer is more suited for the BBQ Pit, Lib, imho.
Non-metaphorically, could you please describe to me some evidence that might convince a non-Christian to at least look into Christianity? Would this evidence rule out the possibility of other religions being valid?
Czar wrote:
Interesting opinion. Naturally, you found the tu quoque accusation of “obvious weaselling[sic]” to be appropriate for Great Debates.
No. I am convinced that I could not describe to you any sufficient evidence, non-metaphorically or otherwise.
More pretense. It is widely known that I consider no epistemology to be valid above any another, and I consider all religion to be nothing more than a body politic that frets endlessly over piddly shit.
Hence your lack of concern over concepts like “accuracy”, “truth”, and “meaning”. Those are just the details that obscure the grand picture, right?
Go ahead anyway, Lib, and give it a shot. Try to describe to me non-metaphorically the evidence of a diety. If I then fail to understand what you are trying to say it will be on my head, not yours. I think I’m intelligent enough to figure it out if you use small words and avoid compound sentences.
I do find it interesting, though, that you find the Norse, Roman, Greek, Christian and Egyptian mythologies to be equally valid.
Or did you mean something else when you said,"…I consider no epistemology to be valid over any other…"?
Czar wrote:
Fair enough.
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines the Deity as the “Supreme Being”, and “the collection of attributes that make up his nature”. The nature of existence belongs to the field of philosophy called ontology. Higher orders of intensional Kripke logic deal with the alethic attributes of modality: necessity and possibility. The strongest possible modality is necessity, which is existence in every possible world. To be is a synonym for to exist. Therefore, a Supreme Being may be defined as Necessary Existence. I will offer ontological evidence developed as a model tableau that the Supreme Being exists in actuality.
- G -> G (If God exists, then He must exist necessarily — Induction that perfection cannot exist contingently)
- <>G (It is possible that God exists)
- ~~G (It is not necessary that God does not exist — Restatement of 2 by Modal Reflexion)
- G -> G (If God exists necessarily, then He exists in actuality — the Modal Axiom)
- G v ~G (Either God exists necessarily, or He doesn’t — Excluded Middle)
- ~G -> ~G (If God doesn not exist necessarily, then it is necessary that He does not exist necessarily — Becker’s Postulate)
- G v ~G (Either God exists necessarily, or He necessarily does not exist necessarily — Sustitution from 5 and 6)
- ~G -> ~G (If God necessarily does not exist necessarily, then it is necessary that God does not exist — Modus Tollens from 1)
- G v ~G (Either God exists necessarily or it is necessary that He does not exist — Substitution from 8 and 9)
- G (God exists necessarily — Disjunctive syllogism from 8 and 2)
- G (God exists in actuality — Modus Ponens of 10 and 4)
QED
Peter Suber, an atheist, and a professor of philosophy at Earlham College has said that the above proof is valid.
I have no illusions that this response will be acceptable to you. And I fully anticipate that you will call it evasive — not because I think you have any case for saying that, but simply because you always do say that. Nevertheless, I have directly addressed non-metaphorically and with technical precision evidence that God exists.
If you actually do as you promised, and take upon your own head the responsibility of understanding it, then I will consider it a miracle, and even further evidence that He exists.
Erratum: Inference 10 is a disjunctive syllogism from 9 and 4, not from 8 and 2.
When you deliberately (and, IMO, snobbishly) talk over people’s heads by using specialist jargon which we cannot be expected to know, and cannot look up in a dictionary, then you’re not making a good-faith effort to make yourself understood. Like they say, if you know your ideas are good, you make an effort to help people understand them. But if you hide your ideas behind a veil of obfuscation…
That is, incidentally, aside from your other dishonesties in that post. And, for that matter, aside from the fact that it’s hard to understand how you can construe what I said as tu quo que.
Does anyone here think he gave appropriate answers to my questions? Like I said, I thought it was too obvious to bear explanation, but if I’m wrong, I’ll go into more detail.
Is my memory faulty? Think back to the days before Lib discovered a page full of notation that few of us understand. When people tried to use logic to disprove the existence of God, didn’t Lib claim that logic was a truism and that it was the inappropriate epistemology to apply to God, and that only his personal experiences could be used as the touchstone?
BTW, Lib, how does all this prove that the Resurrection really happened? I’m still curious as to how you justify your belief in Christianity over deism.
Warning: Lib has posted this “proof” before, and it’s premises and the actual nature of it’s conclusion have been discussed before. There was a rather lengthy discussion of it, and I would recommend anyone simply look for that old thread rather than rehash it here.
Of course, my own objection is simple and I’ll share it briefly. There is no such thing as possibility, everything that actually does exist, exists necessarily. So for me, possible worlds are meaningless, and thus any assertion involving them is meaningless. If you deny possibile worlds, then the entire proof simply becomes “if god exists in the actual world, he exists necessarily”, which just leaves us again trying to prove whether he really exists in our world through observation and analysis.
And that an athiest has no problem with that argument, if true, pretty convincingly demonstrates that under at least one viable interpretation the argument doesn’t actually prove the existence of anything we’d call a god.
But again, you can get all you want of that discussion in the lengthy thread he started last year, if you can wade through it.
Hmmm…It looks like English…
Hey, that’s what I believe! 
Lib: I have a few issues with your proof. It had evidently been discussed before, so I won’t go into great detail. Suffice it to say that I could substitute ‘pixies’ and ‘alien conspiracies’ in for ‘God’ and have no change in the truth value. I won’t point out where I believe the obviously damaged logic comes from, because that was likely covered in the other thread.
I would like to answer the original question, the one asking what would make us (worship/believe in) a higher being (paraphased from original):
I think this depends on what you believe constitutes a ‘higher being’. If you believe that, say, a unified theory is an acceptable ‘God’ then many atheists will admit to believing in that. Also, if your definition of ‘higher being’ is quite classical, then ‘the universe’ could easily be construed as a higher being. Or even love, if you were… um… dedicated enough.
I know this stuff is all very basic philosophy, but I thought it should be mentioned. I believe that there is a unified theory. I often believe there is a universe. Those are my primary logic failings, I think, since I have no proof of either.
I’ve been an atheist most of my life, but there was a period in my life where I was agnostic, and then a semi-theist…I believed there may be some intelligent force controlling the universe and possibly communicating with me or at least aware of me, but it wasn’t really tied in to any religious belief.
Those years were probably sparked by my using LSD a handful of times back then…I started considering myself agnostic after having some very real feeling hallucinations that felt like they should make sense even though they really didn’t. I considered the possibility there was something to the supernatural, if not an actual god. That lasted from when I was about 20 to 25 or so. Then I went through a really depressed phase after a series of relationship fuck-ups and I went into my semi-theist phase, where I believed in something looking out for me and tried to keep in touch with that feeling, because of the comfort it provided me.
Then things got better for me after a few years, and I went back to being a firm atheist. Like SentientMeat, there is no evidence that could be provided to me that would seem more likely to be proof of the supernatural than some advanced and elaborate hoax. Despite my recent string of bad luck (loss of a parent, wife, and job) I haven’t backslid yet, maybe because as I am getting older I am settling into what I really believe deep down. It is obvious to me that my religious beliefs were always a self-deception and the deliberate interpretation of natural and unnatural phenomena of the brain.
** Paper Geek**
wrote:
Belief is a “logic failing” ?
There is no logical reason for me to believe in a unified theory or law. There is absolutely no proof one exists. If there is no logical reason for me to believe it, yet I do, then I am not using logic in regards to that concept. Therefore, I have failed logic, or had a logic failure/failing.
I don’t know the value of attempting to show or prove that a god exists via, words, thoughts, thinking, ideas, logic etc., but can it be done? I highly doubt it. I don’t think the knowing of the existence of a god or transcendent self is shareable, how could it be if consciousness isn’t shareable.?
Although one could pass on information about their own awareness of such a being.
But I do think that I could have knowledge that a high aspect of my self exists through something like a nondual experience where one‘s awareness becomes nonlocal; instead of being the observer of objects, events etc. you are them. There is no distance between “you” and the perceived “world”.
The “awareness” changes, or its perspective does.
If I know god I don’t know god the way I presently know a book or apple; god isn’t a thought or a percept. The way my awareness currently works is that it is separate from all that it is aware of, there’s a split between all phenomena and the observation of it. But I can’t know god at a distance, if I know, I know directly, by ”being”, by being embodied.
Yet that is the opposite of the way I presently experience my “self”. Consciousness or “awareness” is not embodied, and only has general location.
Krishnamurti used to say, “In the gap between the subject and the object lies the entire misery of humankind.”
See, the problem with that philosophy is that it means that it is completely impossible to prove God exists, since any given person’s confidence in the matter can be easily (and correctly) attributed to self-delusion.
Of course, self-delusion may be all we actually have… but given that this forum is for debate, we are therefore proceding on the theory that logic reigns king. Given your philosophy, God’s careful adherence to the Prime Directive (imageek), and our use of logic in the present thread we have no recourse but to assume that God does not functionally exist, except perhaps as embodied by a set of constant rules governing reality.
At least, until someone provides us with actual, measurable data on God interacting with the world.
** Paper Geek**
wrote:
In what way has your logic failed if you’re not using it?
Your logic has obviously been successful in persuading you to “believe” that you exist.