Sorry, you don’t count for my survey since unless I’m reading you very wrong, you believe in a personal god, and not a spirit of the type I’m asking about.
I try to capitalize the Judeo-Christian god and not capitalize the generic brand of god - so Zeus is not God but he is god.
It is also clear from the Torah and Tanakh that the God here originally was not the one true God but the strongest god. The Ten Commandments say that you shall have no other gods before me, not that there is no god but God. The Shma says “The Lord is your God, the Lord is One” - which is both monotheism for the tribe and saying which god counts for us. The early books of the Bible do not deny the existence of other gods at all.
Wrong. There’s not only no evidence that it exists; there’s no evidence that it CAN exist. Claiming the immaterial exists is a claim of the impossible, according to all we know. A baseless claim of the impossible.
You don’t need “scientific proof” to deny the existence of something which science has no room for and for which there is no evidence. That, again is the default. It’s not the job of science to go around trying to prove a negative to people who insist that their baseless fantasies be taken seriously. It’s the job of the people making such claims to come up with evidence that their claims aren’t fantasy. To at least come up with evidence that their claims are possible. Which they never will.
He’s “a god” not “God” or “god”.
Irrelevant; what people virtually always mean NOW when they say “God” is the modern Judeo-Christian monotheist God.
Excellent! [/Burns]
So we are on the same page here. You use the construct “Diogenes the Cynic” (as do I, of course; I was pretending otherwise for purposes of illustration), not to refer to a separate THING that you are asserting cannot be reduced to and fully described as subatomic particles, but rather because it is both easier and useful to deal with that reality on that level and convey the concept of the entirety-as-unit.
And that is how I use the word God. Nor am I alone. (Hence this thread). I can dispense with theological nomenclature. I often do, especially insofar as so many people do make “babytalk” assumptions about what those terms refer to that using them doesn’t facilitate communication. But there are times when doing so would be as cumbersome as carrying on a conversation about DtC while persisting in rendering all references to that individual in terms of the behavior of the subatomic particles and their behaviors.
Except that using the term “God” amounts to a claim of the supernatural; in something that doesn’t exist. It has a huge amount of baggage. If you are claiming that some sort of supernatural being exists, then your analogy with Diogenes fails, because he unlike God is not fictional. If you don’t believe in the supernatural and are using it as a synonym for “the universe” or something like that, then using the word “God” all by itself hinders communication; it doesn’t help it. It poisons the intellectual well even if you don’t intend it to.
Actually you do not perceive the material world, nor does a material world exist in quite the sense that you seem to imply that it does.
Your perceptions work like this: you have an impressive yet finite range of sensory impressions; they do not convey meaning, they only impart sensation and emotion; and the latter is not imparted by those senses, even, but by the interaction between you and the perceived, as apprehended by that perception. I want to drag in an imaginary third party to this discussion, a hypothetical university professor who would say that YOU, the observer, assign all of the meaning to the object that you perceive. I have dragged this professor in so that I can point and say that the professor is wrong: it does not come from you, the observer. But neither does it come from the object. It’s all in the interaction between you and the object. It’s relational. Over time you notice patterns, re-experiencing experiences that you correlate with the previous similar experience, and from pattern-recognition you built up a “world” inside your mind, a model or theory, if you will, and this enables you to make sense of all of your observations. Just like science. Just like scientific theories. But you never perceive that world directly. Before you can know that you have seen a tree, you have to experience it and interpret the experience.
And the objects? I lied when I said DtC was “just a bunch of subatomic particles”. Those are not the fundamental building blocks. Let’s review the history of the search for fundamental building blocks. Discarding the ancient and medieval notions of humours and the 4 classic elements etc, we found things composed at a granular level with predictable properties: molecules. Those “molecules” (while still a useful concept themselves) were then known to be the behaviors of atoms, interacting with each other. The atoms were the true building blocks. Except that we later determined that the “atoms” were a behavioral manifestion of protons, neutrons, and electrons (and a handful of less common supportive players) although once again “atoms” continue to be a useful concept. In the more modern era, folks such as my own Dad shed light on the components of neutrons and whatnot and once again we came to understand protons and neutrons et al as the behavior of quarks. So the chase down the sizes has revealed that at every stage the “fundamental building blocks” are interactions, they are verbs, not nouns. Interactions of yet smaller particles. Because we have been materialists, we expected to find that at the smallest level would eventually be truly indivisible particles, the true building blocks of the universe. But something funny happened at the smallest levels we got to in the late 20th century: it started to look like the universe at its most granular is composed of interactions. Not interactions OF yet smaller particles, just…interactions. Things that have a “tendency to exist” whose behavior interacts with the tendencies of other things to exist and so on. Well, why NOT? We’ve been studying interactions composed of particles which are interactions of particles which are interactions… why COULDN’T interactivity itself, rather than THINGS, be the fundamental bottom of the chain? And so it is. The whole bloody mess is a verb, not a noun. Materialism is wrong. (Still a useful concept, mind you. Just not the bottom line or the ultimate description of the truly real!)
I’ve observed that to be true in many contexts. This is, however, the Straight Dope. I expect more of people here. I expect you to be able to entertain more complex concepts. In using “God”, I am referring to some understandings that may not be sufficiently imparted by “universe” as it is conventionally used. But I give you my word that no supernatural presence is going to be dragged into any such discussion.
“Interactivity itself” can’t be anything, because it has to be interaction between something. And regardless of what you seem to think, there is nothing contradicting materialism in the very small. Fluctuations in spacetime are still examples of materialism.
Then you should use a less loaded word. That’s like trying to hold a conversation about relationships using the word “kill” in place of “love” and not expecting to be misunderstood.
I’m not sure how much of the “woo woo” stuff I ever believed. Maybe back when I believed in Santa Claus. For most of my life pre-personal revelation, I held those notions in a sort of suspended “maybe but I don’t GET it” zone. How can you believe something you can’t even make coherent sense of yet? On the other hand I’ll readily admit a lot of physics is sufficiently above my head that I don’t really understand what the theories are asserting there, either, and they, too, are in a “maybe but I don’t GET it” zone in my head. So I probably expected to end up believing them if and when I ever developed the comprehension if that makes sense.
The anlogy to me isn’t working at all. Whatever I am, I still am something. What’s being discussed as “me” is verifiable phenomenon. I post therefore I am. God never posts. We can’t even prove that he lurks.
We can perceive our perception, there’s no evidence for anything else.
Oh look. An epiphenomenon of the aggregate cloud of subatomic particles! It is exhibiting posting behavior!
OK, I accept your thesis that you post, therefore you exist. Shoulda pulled it on Der Trihs himself, instead. He can’t make that assertion!
Since HE hasn’t posted for nine years, may we assume that GOD is dead?
True, since they were polytheists. But he counts, since there is as much evidence for his existence as for God’s existence.
Since the people I was addressing this thread to no longer believe in the traditional western God, this is irrelevant.
You’re not getting the spirit thing. Since we are all a part of god, every post is by god. God also argues with himself, flames himself, and bans himself. God is one confused dude.
My point is simple.
If God exists (and I’m making no claim he does) than he is something as well. The fact that he is not a “verifiable phenomenon” doesn’t render him “nothing” or, rather, non-existent; but simply “unverified.”
IOW, If there is a creator, it is silly to ascribe the limitations of the creation (“Us” being the creation, and limited by the tools we have to use in the temporal world) to the Creator.
If such a supernatural God exists, why must he be observable in the natural world?
Oh, the irony!
Not true; there’s every reason to think that what we perceive has an underlying reality. The fact that we can’t prove the reality of the world like a mathematical proof isn’t the same as “no evidence”.
A singular God IS a traditional Western conception, as is referring to such an entity as “God”. And there’s no reason to assume that if there’s such a thing as gods in the first place that there’s only one…except for the “traditional western” belief in monotheism.
If it isn’t, then there’s no point in talking about it since for all practical purposes such a god might as well not exist. And such a god by definition has no evidence for its existence, and believing in it is irrational. In practical terms, you are putting out a theological argument for atheism.
I figured it fit in perfectly with Deism. Dude did his thing and then wandered off. 
Generally the argument is that, if something interacts with the material world, we should be able to recognise that, even if all we see is the result of the interaction. A supernatural god, which does not exist in any form nor interact with the natural world, may quite certainly exist, but logically, being natural beings ourselves, would be unable to recognise it (and of course it would be unable to recognise us, rendering quite a few of the oft-granted godly abilities somewhat nulled).
As for your question earlier as to whether the existence of a god makes belief in that god more valid - actually, I would argue that it doesn’t (nor would non-existence make belief less valid). What matters is the existence of evidence for that belief, not the actual existence itself, and whether it is that evidence that the belief is based upon. If I believe in, say, a generic Christian God, because ducks have beaks, my belief is is not very valid whether or not it actually exists.
There’s a difference between not recognising something and not being able to recognise something. You don’t know what colour my hair is; that doesn’t mean that you cannot know what colour my hair is, or that my hair is not physical. That we, as of yet, cannot fully understand how the physical processes of the brain result in “I”, if they do, does not mean that they do not and that there must be something nonphysical there. You do not know that the reductionist view is incorrect - not full, I would agree, but you can’t describe my hair in full, either.
Even if there is something nonphysical of humans, then it’s certainly still illogical to posit an entirely nonphysical being. For one thing, we humans certainly seem to require our physical aspect. Remove some of the brain, and we remove some of our selves. We can even make particular changes by removing or affecting particular parts of the brain. Logically speaking, if we accepted the idea that humans must have some nonphysical aspect, then it is only logical to conclude that other beings would require physical and nonphysical interaction at the most. And I call nonsense on your claim that people’s “essential nature” is more noticeable at different levels of development (or that those are “higher” and “lower” - it’s an entirely illogical claim. If we recognise “lowly” people, then we can recognise non-lowly people because they are not lowly. It’s like saying we have sheep and cows, but sheep are more recognisable because they bleat. If we only have two categories, then cows are just as recognisable because they do not bleat. Your argument is entirely nonsensical.