Are you actually confused about that?
I believe the consensus among thread participants would be no, Triskadecamus is not pursuing a romantic encounter with Czarcasm.
You’re welcome.
Ok.
I was not trying to make an argument about God.
I was not trying to make an argument about faith in God.
I was not trying to make an argument about the absence of faith in God, or the absence of God.
I was trying to examine the phenomenon of the epistemology of love in a particular person, chosen because he has so frequently rejected an non logic based acceptance of anything as being real or actual. It turned out that that examination implied, to me at least, an implicit denigration of the object of investigation. That seemed to be an inherently evil thing to do. So I stopped.
The existence of love may be inextricably associated with the existence of God, and I am one of the people who think it is. But I am not one of the people who believe that you can prove that, or the existence of either element of it. I don’t do proof of God. I oppose the entire practice of proof of God. It seems to be irreverent, not to mention futile. (imageine for a moment that the following phrase is bolded, and in a very large size typeface) This was never intended to be a thread about God.
This was intended to be a thread about the personal epistemology of those elements of human experience which might possibly not be related to intellectually rigorous examination by strictly defined logical rules. I decided that was not going to happen. Subsequent revisiting of the stealth witness meme seems to support the accuracy of my decision.
Tris
Yes, but good luck proving it.
:smack: 
If some atheist challenged a theist to prove his or her faith, they’d be stupid also. And for exactly the same reasons. One can easily collect evidence supporting a person’s faith. In certain cases you can find counterexamples, also (for instance, if a person claiming a certain faith never attended church and did things banned by the religion.)
The problem is, I’ve never seen anyone dispute the existence of faith. Now, if someone contended that it is impossible to have faith in a nonexistent object, that could be interesting, though I think that contention is easy to falsify also.
But my reaction comes from seeing the supposed lack of proof of love being used to justify the lack of proof (or evidence) of God. Without that context, (even if it is denied) I fail to see the faintest glimmering of a reason to bring this up. We might as well debate a proof of the existence of hunger.
And so you said, and thanks for explaining what you actually are trying to do below.
Are you under the impression that logic and rigorous examination can only be applied to material things? If we say that love is the state of a physical object, the brain, and a process, it is as physical in a sense as a rock. To get away from loaded examples, a factory is a physical thing, but a manufacturing process (the flow of material through the factory) can and is studied just as the physical factory can be. You can’t do much studying of it on Christmas day when the factory is shut down - the process must be actively running to be studied.
For faith and love, the emotion exists, the brain in which the emotion resides exists, but the object of the emotion may or may not exist. (See Pygmallion - the original, not the Shaw version.)
Do you have any arguments (not proofs) that love and god are connected? Is there anything not explained by a purely physical and evolutionary view of love? What about types of love - love for a spouse versus love for a child?
The way I have usually seen this brought up - which you didn’t do - is to conflate the lack of physical evidence for god with the supposed lack of physical evidence for love. That’s the bull moose stupid part. I’m curious as to why you brought this topic up, that not being your reason.
Are you limiting love to the love of two actual people? if a spouse dies, then is the love no longer provable? Have you never loved from afar?
I don’t think there is anything particularly odd about a person saying that he loves god. Now God loving him back is another matter. I’d want to at least see a signed Valentines card.
This is the definition of(and the evidence of) love, and while I hope that I am never put into this situation, I hope even harder that that I can live up to this dear woman’s example.
No. However, I think that ascribing inherent falseness to non logical apprehension is, in fact a non rigorous conclusion. Quite aside from that, it seems to me that for some things, (valid elements of human existence) rigorous, and methodological examination has a potential to affect the object of examination.
Yet faith, or love might possibly reside in some other location, some other aspect of existence. I am unwilling to automatically reject undefined possibilities. I do not automatically accept them either.
I have life experiences which do prove to me that God is, and God loves me. They do not even approach the phenomenon of logical evidence, and using them as arguments has even more of those effects I alluded to. Hence my adamant refusal to try to convince someone of God’s existence. I find that to be spiritually perilous for everyone involved.
When discussions occur on this board having easily defined physical parameters, and subject to long term academic scientific examination, I find myself often on the same “side” as Carcasm, and I find my views to be at least intelligible to him. The possibility that something might fall outside of that realm, and yet still be real, actual, and true seems so completely obvious to me that is very frustrating to hear yet another iteration of the nature of evidence, and argument, when the point is that evidence and argument are inappropriate for some types of understanding. The very frequent use of such phrases as Bull Moose Stupid, and delusional, and Sky Pixie, and . . . well, deliberately denigrating word choices makes it even more frustrating.
Love is experienced by people who have unmeasurable intelligence, and minimal cognitive function. That love exists without understanding. I chose love because it was a thing that I know from prior reading that Czarcasm did believe exists. It seemed to me that I could examine the illogical aspects of love, which I feel do exist, and use them to open the door to the possibility that the illogical might not be untrue.
Unfortunately, there were other aspects of the exchange I had not consciously considered, most especially my own desire to win an argument. That argument would destroy the thing I wished to convey. So, I have withdrawn the attempt to win. In fact, by the accepted standards of Great Debates, my point of view is entirely unsupportable. The fact that I don’t find that sufficient reason to change my mind doesn’t make me right.
Tris
Faith is the belief in something not based on proof. Now, our senses may not be 100% accurate but are you going to tell me that we have not empirically established certain laws of nature? Such as a degree of certainty about electromagnetics, for instance,which is evidenced by technology all around us. That technology is based on empirical proofs.
A line has to be drawn somewhere as to what is real and what is not. So long as we agree that the world and people around us exist and have consequences on our lives, we have a baseline that starts there. No theory will likely ever be 100% complete but so long as we can continue to make accurate predictions about what we will see as a theory progresses, we have proof of empiricism.
If a person exists who claims they love you, you may need to take that on faith. Though if it is true, you will likely see some empirical evidence, that others can agree on, that will constitute selfless acts of love towards you.
Anyway, I reject that empiricism is based on faith. That is a false argument unless nothing is real and we are all in a consensual illusion, in which case everything is a moot point
So, if someone draws the line, you promise to believe what you are told?
Tris
Convince me that the world and everyone in it does not exist, please. Convince me that my computer, and the science behind it is not real.
I certainly would not want to assume that non logical apprehension is false. Our intuition, creativity and imagination is non-logical, but often produces truth more effectively than attempting a proof. But neither is it true. The way it should work is that you produce a hypothesis by whatever means, and then you test it. We know that we apprehend all sorts of false things, through optical illusions or mirages.
That’s good, but we have plenty of very good evidence for the proposition that emotions are based within the brain.
This view seems to lead to several inherent contradictions. One possibility is to say that everyone’s view of god is equally correct, even contradictory ones, which seems to imply that everyone’s view is objectively wrong if subjectively correct. Or, you can say that your view is right and a lot of other people’s views are wrong, but that would require some mechanism to check, which you reject. Or, you might say that your views are factually correct for you, which requires making some predictions. You might say your views make you feel better, which is no doubt true, but doesn’t imply any outside entity. You might say that god loves you and will protect you - which no doubt gets tested all the time. Most people who have this view seem to retreat to the unfalsifiable position that whatever happens is for the best. We’ve covered that already in discussions of natural evil.
The point here is that you can use logic to examine non-logical things.
Love certainly does exist without understanding. Not everything we do is logical, nor should it be. Sometimes the end result of love is just love. But don’t you agree that not everything we think about the person we love is true? That goes for people as well as gods.
Winning an argument? When is the last time that happened around here? There are no judges, no cash prizes, and no medals in GD. The benefit of a place like this is honing your views. The very best result for me is when I discover that an opinion I have is not logically supportable. That is how you grow and learn. A second benefit is being able to look at something in a different way. I’m an atheist, but discussing things with other atheists is boring. I’d much rather discuss stuff with intelligent theists, so that I can understand their arguments. Time and time again the most intelligent ones say that they believe because they have some internal experience that convinces them that god exists and loves them. You fall into this category.
Maybe this is like the difference between the artistic and scientific temperment. Both artists and scientists think imaginatively. Artists get to put their imagination right out there, while scientists have to test theirs. An artist who tests his imagination against the real world hardly produces anything (or is a hard sf writer) while a scientist without imagination never does anything interesting.
Certain aspects of “love” are concrete and measurable and, indeed, constitute advantages in terms of evolutionary survival. The same is true for religious belief.
The question is really what you hope to demonstrate with this exercise. Rationalists and atheists do not dispute the existence of religious belief.
It’s based on empirical EVIDENCE, not empirical PROOF.
After all, it’s POSSIBLE that every time a scientist conducts an experiment an invisible demon twiddles with the results. You can’t PROVE something like that isn’t happening, even though all evidence and common sense SUGGESTS that it’s not.
I agree. I’m actually on your side here. I was just pointing out a common theistic attack on empiricism.
Strictly speaking, we have strong evidence for the validity of empiricism. Not proof.
My point exactly.
While I agree your points about proof vs empirical evidence, an unknown would calculated as a null hypothesis. We don’t start with some probability of gods or demons. We start, seeing no evidence at the start, from a zero probability. It is only after some evidence is seen that we might consider demons tweeking or gods loving. Until some significant evidence is found science assumes that neither play a part in either.
Thus we have no reason to believe that things are not as they seem.
And if they were not…it would be a Flying Spaghetti Monster twiddling with scientific results, not a demon. I have proof as it’s written in a book somewhere. 
I realise I’m late to this party but here’s an excellent paper.
The question here is what is the explanandum?
In the case of love, there clearly is something to be explained. Ditto for belief in the supernatural. But skeptics ask not for evidence of belief. They ask for evidence of the supernatural.