God doesnt exist

Great Debates
141

[QUOTE=lekatt]
Let me give a quick answer and stop.

The evidence: I was healed from my heart problem, and I was a totally changed person. There were many other things also. I am sorry if it offends you or others but there just is no doubt in my mind what happened. Suggest you read about others, there you will find the same attitude.

Gotta go.
[/QUOTE]
That you recovered from your heart problem is interesting; one can wonder precisely how that occurred. That your life was changed is perhaps less convincing; I mean, no offense, but some people’s lives are changed by Oprah. So perhaps you changed your own life based on a personal reaction to your percieved experience. Hard to say, really, especially from the other side of the internet. (“Many other things”, of course, is something I cannot assess.)

As for being offended, I’ve actually noticed that you in recent weeks have seemed a lot less offensive, with a marked reduction in blanket attacks on science, scientists, and other things. (Or maybe I’ve been reading the wrong threads.) Regardless, I don’t argue with you because you offend me, I argue with you when I disagree with the position you posit (for example, that God exists, or that a personal religious experience is ironclad evidence of anything). If you’re not interested in debating such things, then don’t.

142

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Actually, that is a good policy. All of us tend to fool ourselves. When writing a scientific paper, you try to write to convince the reviewer, not yourself. I learned to go over the first draft and remove all words that imply a level of certainty that isn’t warranted.
[/quote]
Understood, but not everything in life is, or should be, like the process of writing a scientific paper.

Misses the point - which was not about the evidence, but about the certainty, and the way the certainty naturally shapes the way you talk about the topic. Granted, in this particular case, you could say your certainty is rational and evidence-supported, and therefore different from the kind of certainty that religious folks or lekatt might possess, but it’s certainty all the same - and when you’re certain something happened, you just talk about it happening, not that you believe or think it happened. You can be wrong about it, of course.

143

It’s amusing to me that the same argument seems to have come up anew between Voyager and Mangetout that came up early in the thread between Revenant Threshold and me (both now, it appears, not actively participating in this thread), apparently rather independently.

144

[QUOTE=drszusz@yahoo.com]
God, G O D Does exist. If it didn’t, you would be reading something else. Its ‘just’ a word.
It’s what it conitates in those who find it nessisary to put all kinds of weird meanings to the ‘word’ that causes all the brew ha ha.
Brew ha ha, funny words
[/QUOTE]
That’s about right on, drsz, at least AFAIST. I still maintain that the best definition of God (capital G) is “X”. I believe God is just a big variable. Everybody means something different when they say it or think about it so God becomes a meaningless word unless you think of it as a variable.

Many times the God/No God debates on the SDMB and elsewhere come down to a definition of God. I haven’t seen anybody succeed at giving a definition that is acceptable to anyone other than him/herself. That is–if the definition goes on long enough, deep enough, and into enough detail, the notion of “God” becomes unique to oneself.

I still maintain that there is no God. I freely admit however, that the God I don’t believe exists is a certain sort of God which I can only roughly define. It is hard for me to do this even roughly, and it takes a lot of words, so I just say “God” in these discussions. The God I am talking about is the patriarchal, all-knowing, all-seeing entity that knowingly created the Universe, and then also created mankind on Earth. He also is concerned with, and can affect the outcome of, day-to-day events. Sometimes it is tempting to just say “The God of Abraham” but I am talking about more God-notions that just that one when I express my disbelief.

I think the idea of God=X is useful in explaining why debates over God/No God get so heated. I think that often when someone like I opines that there is no God it comes across as a pretty kooky to someone who sees god as the Tao or the Cosmos–someone who is perhaps a pantheist. After all–who can deny the existence of the Cosmos?

But if I deny the existence of God as understood by someone to be a drunk Elf or an Invisible Pink Unicorn then I think 99% of the population would agree with me.

To me, the commonly understood concept of God, at least the impression I have of that concept among mainstream Christians, Jews and Muslims in the USA, is a LOT closer to the idea of an Elf or an IPU lording over the Universe than it is to pantheism. That’s what leads me to the conclusion that “there is no God” even though I am not fully defining God each and every time I make that statement.

God is best understood as “X”. Unless the variable is defined, it is difficult–maybe impossible-- and almost always contentious, to discuss whether X exists or not.

145

[QUOTE=lekatt]
I am rarely offended by anything, but this video is very offensive, not so much to me, but to the billions of people who take their beliefs seriously. Would you like to be belittled and slammed because you are an American?
[/quote]
Neither I nor the guys in that sketch are American.

I chuckle when I try. You’re so confident about matters spiritual that when you’re wrong about stuff on the Earthly plane (and it’s not like my location field is cryptic), it cracks me up.

146

Nothing special about “God”, though. Every word is a variable in the same way. But we can still extract, if only fuzzily, a conventional meaning for a term through analysis of its ordinary employment in the relevant speech community. It’s true that “God” is perhaps a little more fuzzy a term than some others, it may even be fair to say that there are multiple similar but not identical meanings of the term, but it’s hardly diluted of any standard shared sense at all. If someone were to go around claiming that God was the Great Wall of China, and therefore rather clearly existent, we might say “Oh, ok, you have your own definition. That’s nice”, but we wouldn’t really leave it at that. We’d also say “But insofar as your definition fails to contain the appropriate resemblances to how the term is generally employed by the rest of us speakers, we’re going to have to consider your definition wrong” (I know; how can a definition be wrong? Well, for some definition of “wrong”, it’s not hard. :)). “If you’re going to try to engage us in a debate on the nature and existence of God, you’ll need to use the term in a way that at least has some stronger resemblance to the way it is conventionally used (or demonstrate more forcefully that your definition does have suitable resemblances)”.

When people start saying “God is the universe”, I feel as though they’ve slipped into something like this. (It’s even worse than with the Great Wall of China, because these sort of proposed definitions generally veer rather closer to making “God exists” an empty tautology). I feel perfectly justified in responding “No, God isn’t the universe, no more than he’s a fishbowl, and if you want to go around injecting yourself into discussions of God’s existence by making claims on the basis of your ‘God is the universe/the Tao/the laws of physics/the number 4’ conception, the burden is on you to demonstrate that this has any resemblance to how we all normally speak.” (Not necessarily an insurmountable burden, but attention must be paid to it nonetheless)

The danger always exists of falling prey to some sleight-of-hand in this way; demonstrating God’s existence on the understanding that the term denotes merely “the universe” or whatever, but then acting as though this has some relevance to more conventional understandings of the term. I’d have a hard time believing that anyone who says “God is the universe, nothing more” actually truly manages to avoid any conflation with more standard interpretations.

At any rate, my own observation of how the term is generally used makes me wary of any definition of God that doesn’t posit him as an intelligent being, a sentience of some sort, with a huge amount of influence over the universe.

147

And yet some solidly established namebrand religions do in fact hold that, in at least some important senses of the word, God is indeed the universe.

Not as a synonym for the word “universe”, perhaps, but nevertheless that rather than a discrete “Entity” with edges or skin or other surface marking off where God starts and ends.

As for sentience, can we define, understand, or speak of sentience without limiting the sentient to an experience of the passage of time? You know, where one gains more information on Monday, has specific thoughts about it, reaches conclusions or formulates opinions, some of which might be subsequently affected by further info or experiences on Tuesday afternoon? I put it to you that the alternative to “sentient” isn’t necessary “less than sentient”.

148

[QUOTE=Mangetout]

Misses the point - which was not about the evidence, but about the certainty, and the way the certainty naturally shapes the way you talk about the topic. Granted, in this particular case, you could say your certainty is rational and evidence-supported, and therefore different from the kind of certainty that religious folks or lekatt might possess, but it’s certainty all the same - and when you’re certain something happened, you just talk about it happening, not that you believe or think it happened. You can be wrong about it, of course.
[/QUOTE]

Sure. There is a loose probability we assign to things, and we each have a threshold beyond which we talk about the thing actually happening. The probability is never 1. The trick is in assigning the probability. Some people are more gullible than others - when that email from the Nigerian prince comes in, they are sure it is for real.

149

Indeed - the appearance of that probability doesn’t always look the same from the POV of the subject and that of an unaffected observer. The 419 scam victim doesn’t say “I believe Mr Abacha is going to give me the money”, he/she just says “Mr Abacha is going to give me the money” - and is of course dreadfully wrong, in terms of factual veracity, but has still expressed his/her viewpoint in the most honest and straightforward way possible.

None of what I’ve said in this thread should be taken as endorsing any particular viewpoint - I have only ever been trying to address the reason why people don’t cast their assertions in doubtful terms when they feel no doubt.

150

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Indeed - the appearance of that probability doesn’t always look the same from the POV of the subject and that of an unaffected observer. The 419 scam victim doesn’t say “I believe Mr Abacha is going to give me the money”, he/she just says “Mr Abacha is going to give me the money” - and is of course dreadfully wrong, in terms of factual veracity, but has still expressed his/her viewpoint in the most honest and straightforward way possible.
[/QUOTE]
I tend to disagree. Straightforward, certainly, that’s a fine way to put it just in a conversation even if it doesn’t tell the whole story. But honest? I don’t think a statement like that can be honest or dishonest. “Mr Abacha is going to give me the money” - that person has no way of knowing for certain whether that’s true. It hasn’t happened yet. He doesn’t know the full circumstances around the situation. “I believe he’ll give me the money” - honest. “He’s going to give it to me” - unless this is somehow a factual claim, I don’t really think you can call it honest or dishonest.

Edit: Thinking about it further, I would say it could be considered dishonest, depending on how they think about it. If for example they have some doubt, then claiming certainty as they appear to do would be dishonest. OTOH if they have no doubt whatsoever then I wouldn’t consider that dishonest (but not honest, either, since then it’s dependent on reality and not their opinion).

151

It’s quite possible to be honest and completely wrong, or honest, and ignorant, and wrong etc. In fact I bet it’s quite common.

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
…(but not honest, either, since then it’s dependent on reality and not their opinion).
[/QUOTE]
I understand the terms ‘reality’ and ‘opinion’ completely, however, I think it’s very often the case that we talk about ‘reality’ and actually mean ‘my opinion of reality’. I don’t think we’re often quite as in touch with the hard facts of reality as our brains like to tell us we are.

152

[QUOTE=begbert2]
That you recovered from your heart problem is interesting; one can wonder precisely how that occurred. That your life was changed is perhaps less convincing; I mean, no offense, but some people’s lives are changed by Oprah. So perhaps you changed your own life based on a personal reaction to your percieved experience. Hard to say, really, especially from the other side of the internet. (“Many other things”, of course, is something I cannot assess.)

As for being offended, I’ve actually noticed that you in recent weeks have seemed a lot less offensive, with a marked reduction in blanket attacks on science, scientists, and other things. (Or maybe I’ve been reading the wrong threads.) Regardless, I don’t argue with you because you offend me, I argue with you when I disagree with the position you posit (for example, that God exists, or that a personal religious experience is ironclad evidence of anything). If you’re not interested in debating such things, then don’t.
[/QUOTE]

Just some information for you: what causes a near death experience is clinical death in most cases, these people have been in accidents of all kinds as well as physical problems. In most cases they recover fully or at least to the point of living a satisfactory life. In many of the cases the doctors are surprised at their rapid recovery. This is just another trait of NDEs. As for the changed life, it is really a changed perception of what life is about, and most researchers agree that this is one of the things that make them believe NDEs are real. Now I give this for information only and I know you will want proof. I can’t give you the kind of proof you demand. But if you wish to really study the material you will find what you are looking for. Thanks for the kind words, I am trying very hard to walk the path, and I am getting better.

153

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Of course, but for some believers (example: lekatt) expressing doubt would be a false representation of the experience he completely believes he’s had. That’s my problem here - that there seems to be some expectation that people will tailor their expression to accommodate the doubt of their audience, not their own.

How about considering it from the other angle? - I (I assume you too) completely believe men walked on the moon; when talking about it to a moon landing conspiracy theorist, we’d say “men walked on the moon”, not “we believe men walked on the moon” - for most things, we express our belief simply and baldly - to prefix it with “I think…” or “I believe…” lends it a tone of false doubt that is not actually present in our thinking - because we’re trying to describe what happened, not what we think about it.

Of course if there is uncertainty, then it’s only right and proper to express it, but lekatt doesn’t seem to possess any such uncertainty - so it’s entirely appropriate for him to baldly state ‘I met God’ (and everyone else to react to that however they like).
[/QUOTE]

Thanks for your understanding, you got it exactly right.

154

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Of course, but for some believers (example: lekatt) expressing doubt would be a false representation of the experience he completely believes he’s had. That’s my problem here - that there seems to be some expectation that people will tailor their expression to accommodate the doubt of their audience, not their own.

How about considering it from the other angle? - I (I assume you too) completely believe men walked on the moon; when talking about it to a moon landing conspiracy theorist, we’d say “men walked on the moon”, not “we believe men walked on the moon” - for most things, we express our belief simply and baldly - to prefix it with “I think…” or “I believe…” lends it a tone of false doubt that is not actually present in our thinking - because we’re trying to describe what happened, not what we think about it.

Of course if there is uncertainty, then it’s only right and proper to express it, but lekatt doesn’t seem to possess any such uncertainty - so it’s entirely appropriate for him to baldly state ‘I met God’ (and everyone else to react to that however they like).
[/QUOTE]

Thanks for your understanding, you got it exactly right.

Karl Jansen wanted me to preview the part of his book in NDEs, and give my opinion. I am sure he didn’t like what I had to say. But he went on to say that he found a group of near death experiencers (6-8) and tried to “break them down” into admitting their experiences were not real, but just dreams and such. He had very little success, only one finally agreed it might have been an illusion. Most of them, as I, knew their experience was the real thing. Not really scientific but interesting.

155

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
It’s quite possible to be honest and completely wrong, or honest, and ignorant, and wrong etc. In fact I bet it’s quite common.
[/quote]
Yep, I get that. Honesty isn’t associated with what’s actually true, but whether the person in question thinks it’s true. In terms of this, it doesn’t matter whether gods exist or not, it’s whether someone thinks they do that matters when stating their beliefs.

Certainly. I mean, in the end, we can’t be sure of anything, let alone the apparently simple stuff.

I’ll try and put it better (even I confused me with that last go). If I say “Yes, God exists, although I can’t be sure” and I do in fact believe that, then i’m being honest. My statement compared to the subject of the statement (my feelings) match. If I say that and in fact I don’t believe it, likewise, they don’t match and i’m being dishonest. If however I say “God exists; I am 100% certain” I can certainly compare that to my beliefs. However, unlike previously, what I am expressing is not a belief, but a factual statement about the universe (in my opinion). Thus the subject of the statement isn’t my feelings, but whether God actually exists or not. And so I can’t be being honest, because I can’t know enough to be certain (note that this doesn’t necessarily mean i’m being dishonest, either). OTOH, I could be being dishonest, in that I might not actually hold those views.

156

I have been reading the arguments and wanted to add that it is perception that counts the most. Reality is a product of perception. While it is true that one make not perceive clearly, it is still the perception they believe.

Some people look around and see no God, therefor God doesn’t exist for them. While others look around and see God everywhere therefor God exists for them. Now has the reality of the world changed any, of course not.

This is true with everything we see, learn, or imagine. What is reality? It is what you perceive it to be. This is why we must learn to respect others beliefs, otherwise we will finally kill each other off and there will be no perceivers.

157

I’m afraid I don’t get your argument, lekatt. You’ve suggested that perception creates reality, but then backed it up with an argument saying two people with different perceptions have no influence on the actual reality of a situation.

I would say rather that there’s perception, a person’s perception of reality, and then reality itself. Certainly a person’s perception of reality is dependent on what they see, but reality itself won’t be changed or created because of it. It is what it is.

158

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
I’ll try and put it better (even I confused me with that last go). If I say “Yes, God exists, although I can’t be sure” and I do in fact believe that, then i’m being honest. My statement compared to the subject of the statement (my feelings) match. If I say that and in fact I don’t believe it, likewise, they don’t match and i’m being dishonest. If however I say “God exists; I am 100% certain” I can certainly compare that to my beliefs. However, unlike previously, what I am expressing is not a belief, but a factual statement about the universe (in my opinion). Thus the subject of the statement isn’t my feelings, but whether God actually exists or not. And so I can’t be being honest, because I can’t know enough to be certain (note that this doesn’t necessarily mean i’m being dishonest, either). OTOH, I could be being dishonest, in that I might not actually hold those views.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, although in most cases we wouldn’t say “X=Y, although I can’t be sure”, or “X=Y; I am 100% certain” - we just say “X=Y” - at first, at least.

159

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Yes, although in most cases we wouldn’t say “X=Y, although I can’t be sure”, or “X=Y; I am 100% certain” - we just say “X=Y” - at first, at least.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, i’d tend to go with “I believe God doesn’t exist”. Two whole extra words to type than “God doesn’t exist”, but very much simpler. :wink:

160

OK, but that’s a negative statement - a response, if you like, to an already-stated assertion that God does exist, so in that case, it would make perfect sense to explicitly frame it as an opinion or belief - a contrary one to that already stated.