I do this all the time - it’s the first step in a proof by contradiction.
Axiom 1: assume that God exists.
Axiom 2: assume that if God existed, 90% of people would believe in him.
Step 3: from 1 and 2, it is the case that 90% of people believe in God.
Step 4: note that no single religion controls more than about a third of humanity, and that’s taking very big-tent views of religion.
Step 5: from 4, it is not the case that 90% of people believe in God.
Step 6: 3 and 5 contradict - therefore at least one of our premises is wrong.
Step 7: since Axiom 2 is incontrovertable (heh), we have just proven that it is not the case that God exists.
Obviously in real life nobody believes that 90% crap, but this is the argument form of a proof by contradiction, and arguments of this type like the POE do indeed disprove the existence of God. (For some definitions of God, anyway - the Flying Sphagetti Monster remains undisprovable, and is in fact the most plausible god ever imagined.)
I’m really not following. It doesn’t “come from” anywhere. it’s constructed on the canvas. Before it’s constructed, it doesn’t exist.
Actually, the only thing that really makes it exist is if we decide to label it as an art piece.
They’re your words, not mine.
It wouldn’t be “me succeeding,” just me parakeeting the current state of neurological sciemce. It will have to wait, though. I won’t have time to research and post until probably tomorrow afternoon. You can just Google “Brain memory,” though.
I didn’t define it out of existence. I defined it as a linguistic tool, which is not to be confused with the thing which it references.
Not for me it doesn’t. Mostly it makes me wonder if our reality is in fact a computer game. Leading to the question “How should I live my life if this is a computer game?”.
I think this is the first serious thing I’ve ever seen you post. Is it the first serious thing you’ve ever posted?
God exists for me because I have experience God. Experience is knowledge, and knowledge is what many people have of God, the rest have faith. There are tons of individual personal evidence of God. Because you may not have experienced God yet does not mean He doesn’t exist.
Can I say that it’s impossible to fly by flapping your arms, is that dogmatic? Can I say that anything at all is physically impossible without being dogmatic? I see no reason to be namby-pamby. If someone says they’ve invented a perpetual motion machine, I know they’re either mistaken or full of it. There is no chance that they’re right. We know that some things are reasonable possibilities and some things aren’t. Ghosts are not. Why pussyfoot around about it?
Believing in God is exactly like believing in Thor or Zeus. You have your god that you believe in due to having been taught to and seeing things that you think God did, and they have their gods they believe in due to having been taught to and seeing things that they thought Thor and Zeus did. There is literally no difference between the two of you, except that your god makes less sense than theirs.
Seriously, a person could at least describe Thor and Zeus, and their stories at least made plausible fiction, especially since they didn’t know the cause of lightning anyway. Believers in God are so unable to make sense of their diety that they have started taking pride in its ineffability.
It’s not. You may go home and mind your own business without trying to convince anybody of anything, if you like. But if you want us to stop thinking that you believe in fairy tales then yes, the onus is on you to convince us, because why should we just take your unsupported word about something so ridiculous?
Same question I asked before:
What would we have to show you to prove the nonexistence of your deity?
If the answer is that nothing could convince you, than your participation in this thread is based on deception, because you have pre-rejected what you ask us to do.
My Q for DtC is by what authority are you to judge the experiences of others?? and what method are you using to prove or disprove the supernatural? By using science you are using the study of the natural to define the supernatural, it just doesn’t work, nor does it make any logical sense. Science after all is just a story that is created to define reality that is allowed to change when evidence is presented contrary to the story, can you imagine accepting a story from a person, then presenting evidence to the contrary and he changes his story to match the new evidence and you accept his new story over and over as truth. Science is by it’s very definition is logically a fib, a made up story that will change again.
What I am using here is simple logic. Science says materialism is the only dimension. But Science doesn’t know everything. Therefore science doesn’t know whether materialism is the only dimension or not. Science is contradicted by faulty logic.
I could do the same with any organization that believes its way is the only way.
Learn to question everything, and every authoriety. Believe in nothing that you haven’t personally experienced, perferable more than once. At the same time don’t dismiss anything, keep the mind open so learning can take place.
You don’t actually think they’re asking to have their minds changed, do you?
Dio threw down a gauntlet. While some people have honestly come here looking for alternatives, and thus presented situations that actually seemed to defy explanations, that’s not what the hardline theists with their “people had visions” stories are doing here. They are facing down a hostile challenge expecting to win.
How does one judge the experiences of others, when one doesn’t have a clue as to what those experiences are? Unless, of course, you are God. I think your logic is more than faulty, its irrational.
