Irrelevant to the point.
The distance to the sun was unknown in the year 1. Within the time limit of that year was it knowable or unknowable?
Something can be both unknown, and unknowable given certain time line parameters.
Many things that were beyond human experience and understanding in year 1, did not remain so.
Something unknown is
and until those things occur it it correct to call it currently
which is the definition for what?
Yes definitely, if one defines God’s love as inscrutable, then it’s existence is not provable and not an assertion in the logical sense. Another poster said that you couldn’t prove anybody’s love but this isn’t true in the way that they are implying it - that love is somehow inherently beyond scientific and rational understanding. The real truth is just that the word “love” refers to many different phenomena, and so in any particular context the meaning is too vague when used without further clarification. This doesn’t say anything about the nature of love, all it says is that the speaker isn’t using precise language.
The same can be said of God’s love - it’s not just that it’s not an assertion because it has no negation (although this is a natural and important consequence to have an insight about) - but more importantly it’s meaningless because it has never been properly defined.
That said, no one who is Christian and uses it’s conclusions to support it’s premises rather than the other way around is really interested in the objective/implicit order nature of God. They are interested in the subjective/explicit order (experiential) nature of God, that is to say - what they directly experience. And in a similar fashion to the way certain placebos are as effective as medications, whether the underlying mechanism for experiencing God’s love is active loving by God or training the brain to create the illusion of such - the subjective experience is the same. And since the subjective experience is what has value for them, the objective mechanism becomes irrelevant.
Good post.
Thanks! Recognition at last 
You know, I had always assumed that too until a recent thread in which I (unconvincingly) argued the very point. The upshot of the conversation seemed to be that there are some things that God is simply incapable of explaining. Naturally, this state of affairs doesn’t necessarily call into question God’s adequacy as a teacher so much as underscore how dumb His creation actually is. Live and learn, right?
** my bolding
I’m not sure you’re referring to our conversation in the other thread but I’d like to point out that in the scenario I presented it wasn’t that God wasn’t capable of explaining or even a question of whether God could suddenly place certain knowledge within us. It’s a question of purpose.
Assuming God can explain or just zap the knowledge into us why doesn’t he? If the experience of free will and effort in order to gain that knowledge and understanding and awareness is the purpose or at least a major part of it then just zapping it into us would defeat that very purpose wouldn’t it? In other words
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
Most guesses are. 
Then I must be obtuse, since all the ones I’ve seen seem to boil down to who knows what God considers to be love. Could you restate an answer to make it clear it is different from one of my (now 5) choices?
Thanks.
Well, God can’t do logically impossible things.
cosmosdan, that’s a really, really weak free will argument. Inspiring people to write the facts in the Bible is somehow more conducive to free will than directly downloading the information into our brain? If I could get a college course downloaded, instead of sitting through it for months, would that decrease my free will?
It may be the journey, but downloading a reliable roadmap only decreases our free will to get lost.
It’s not an argument about free will at all, it’s about purpose. You may be of the opinion that truly loving God would have made it easier but that’s an opinion not a logical argument.
This was discussed, and derailed by the same type of parsing, here: If there were a God, don't you think he would've made him or her self known by now? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
As cosmosdan said, in the theology it’s a question of design and purpose.
When free will comes into it, to make a very long story shorter, I pointed out that under one definition of god he decided to construct the universe in that manner.
Why? Who knows.
To say god chose to do things the way he did in order to have man learn and grow is all well and good but it doesn’t address why god constructed the universe and man in such a way that learning and growing in that manner is how things operate in the first place; unless you just believe he was constrained to do so by reality. Then again, he created reality. Depends on the working definition of god. Which can then be parsed into meaninglessness.
Anyway, why god constructed the universe in that manner – if that’s what you believe is the case – is unknown if you’re any kind of xian, not unknowable.
ROFL
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Amen. LOL
It’s true, the issue of being ‘respectful’ will always come up; people generally, in my experience, can’t or won’t distinguish between a vicious attack on their argument and a vicious attack on their person and then conflate the two by starting to call you names instead of calling your argument names.
I do wonder about the conversion part though. I’ve actually done it.
That is, I’ve converted people out of their religious belief systems. Or, contributed to that happening. But this is how it worked.
I was relentless in attacking their logic (within their own belief systems, and within their own premises). This made them testy. And angry. And snippy.
And it made them say absurd things.
Which is what happens when you’re ideologically forced to never concede defeat.
(He’d say, “at our “temples” we’re allowed to question everything!”. Really? Does that include questioning whether or not your belief system is complete and total bullshit and a scam to make money for the organization? Of course not. The ‘open conversations’ are really all just premised on a basic agreement that the fundamentals are true. So it’s not really open.)
Anyway, human nature being what it is when he did finally give it up you know what the reason was? Something that really didn’t warrant giving up the belief. Specifically, the fact that some religious act didn’t result in the predicted outcome.
Which, ironically, wasn’t even a fair reason to dismiss the perspective. I pointed that out. Others have left when they felt the fellow believers weren’t being nice or supportive to them as people and I was. But that’s not really a reason to think their ideology is wrong though.
What seems to happen is that when a person leaves these beliefs, they do so based on something seemingly shallow or incidental.
I didn’t find that my arguments were ever going to make them leave in a million years in and of themselves. In fact, I suggested afterwards that my arguments probably unnaturally delayed his departure from those beliefs by reflexively causing him to hold his ground that he otherwise would’ve started to depart from.
The advantage that my arguments did have, however, and the contribution they made to the overall ‘conversion’ is that after they’d decided to leave based on what I’d say are dubious logical premises, all of our conversations came flooding back and they quickly had “ooooh, yea now I see…” moments that wouldn’t have been possible if all those objections hadn’t been stuck in their head earlier.
Suddenly, they felt that the whole thing was transparently ridiculous.
And once on the outside of those types of belief systems, you generally don’t go back to that particular thing in that version. I think it’s like deprogramming from a cult. They realize they’d hijacked their mind to justify the beliefs they felt they should hold.
And that’s not the same as the use of our minds to further beliefs that are critically assessed and re-assessed. There’s a difference. In the latter, the entire foundational premise is up for debate but not in the former.
Now, he’s fending off believers that are grasping at straws to get him back.
There’s a zero percent chance of that now though; he’s seen it for what it is.
Sort of the way education works over ignorance. To call the greater knowledge just another form or ignorance or point of view is where folks part ways.
By the way, cosmosdan made a good point upthread about the OP and I guess I’m a bit unclear as well: are we talking about love being proof of god’s existence? Or are we talking about whether not the god that’s believed to exist does in fact love us or not?
Because the examples given with parents/kids about love don’t compute when you consider that the parent’s **existence **is never at question with kids and is not used to prove that the parents do in fact exist in the world. That’s absurd.
Kids know their parents exist.
Now if the question is “does the god that we presume to exist and that we define in a certain way “love” us in a way that’s based upon our definition of “love” and how can we know that he does “love” us or not?” then I’d agree with the post about the hot dog. That’s pretty layered.
Obviously, any possible thing that happens can be defined as subjective evidence of love from god. I’m surprised such people would even be interested in logic; it seems half-hearted to me because I think continuing down that path would lead right out the front door of the church. I guess it feels good to think that your beliefs aren’t just of the heart, but also logically valid! It’s a wash with the non-believers! <sigh>
Opinions can be expressed with logical arguments.
**"No that’s just right. You might notice that this is exactly the kind of evidence a believer might give you and you would summarily dismiss as inadequate. This provides no clear objective proof of her true motives. You believe this is love because it serves your preferred belief system and I expect brings you comfort and joy to believe so. I sincerely hope you are exactly right. Love is much better than any alternative IMO.
I might point out that more than one man or woman has believed the same evidence you do only to discover they were wrong."**
It helps to know that the person in question exists.
Then it just becomes a question of whether or not this person that exists loves me or not.
It’s not a question in that case of whether not their love **proves **they exist, so it’s not the same thing.
It is an interesting notion, however – that one of the points of god would be to see to it that his existence wasn’t clear and obvious because part of the journey is to use your free will to explore whether or not he exists. I thought theological free will’s point was to use it to choose between good and evil, not to use it to decide whether or not to believe in god’s existence. But I guess if that’s fun…
I wonder what this theoretical god would do with people that used their free will and their journey to conclude that he’s not worth knowing if he’s going to go about things that way. I think there’s a Star Trek episode vaguely similar to that.
If there is any benefit to belief, then a truly loving god wouldn’t exclude those who couldn’t figure it out. If there is no benefit to belief, then who cares. Calling a god who obfuscates his existence is really stretching any definition of truly loving I can think of. I can think of thousands of ways in which true knowledge of a god who cares about us would make the life of most of the people on earth better. A god who hides that knowledge in an obscure puzzle is one who deserves a punch in the snoot, not love.
I sorry I was a little dense about what you were asking. The light went on last night but I was too tired to formulate my answer.
so to refresh myself talking about this.
I posted
I’d also mention that if physical death is not the end, and the real us is eternal soul then the idea of God killing us physically isn’t what you present in your statement here. That’s what I mean about perspective and the whole human suffering argument. You start with the premise If God is" assuming certain qualities about God and us too I think, and then step back into the physical human mode when looking at suffering. IMO for the argument to be logical we have to try and imagine God’s perspective or even our own eternal soul perspective. We can try and we can discuss but at some point we can’t really argue logically from that perspective.
That’s the simple point I have been trying to make. Sorry I’ve been so clumsy in making it.
Yes they can. The reason I rejected certain beliefs is because they didn’t seem reasonable to me. Still, we must be careful on this subject because we’re doing so much guessing and supposing.There are a lot of unknown and shifting values as well as emotional arguments.
We can think of obvious examples such as creationism where people believe something in the face of serious evidence against that belief. IMO they obviously have a strong emotional attachment to that belief that overrides reason and logic.
In other arguments like these last couple of threads the logic and the emotions behind the argument aren’t quite as obvious. I’m just pointing out that atheists shouldn’t assume their logic is obviously superior and uncluttered with emotion and in this particular case The argument presented as clearly logical IMO is not.
One of the main reasons I rejected a more traditional Christianity is because I didn’t see them as reconcilable with a loving God. I don’t see a literal personification of God as a separate all powerful deity as all that useful either. The personification IMO should serve as a tool for learning and growing. Useful to some and not to others. It’s unfortunate when people worship the tool and lose sight of the goal. Or, as my Bahai friends put it. We are drawn to the light and make the mistake of worshiping the lamp.
I don’t think God hides his existence from us any more than the sun hid itself from the prisoners in the cave. I’m not interested in any extended analogies but I know that my kids clearly knew I existed , believed I loved them, believed my warnings and advice were born from this love, and still had to find their own way and make mistakes. I think no matter how perfect my love and advice might have been it was their nature to find out for themselves. Sometimes my love for them meant I had let them have the experience and learn for themselves. Interfering with that experience, even to prevent suffering, isn’t necessarily an act of love.
I think the path to making a better world is open too us but love demands more courage and commitment than we can muster at times. Knowledge isn’t useful without the willingness to act in a committed manner. IOW, if we can’t find the will to act, can’t believe our actions can really make a difference, can’t believe that love, truth and compassion as ideals are worth pursuing, then I don’t see why sudden god belief would clearly make things better. Most people claim to believe now and yet the world is as it is. Belief alone is not enough.
Anywho, as always thanks for your input and your patience in sorting through my rambling.
I missed this.
I agree with Sam Harris that religious beliefs that affect our lives need to be challenged. They shouldn’t have any special protected status. If you’re going to campaign to pass a law that affects me and mine then come prepared to defend yourself.
I think with any friends and family if you plan on continuing a relationship you can’t constantly bring up the things you disagree on. Respect people’s rights to choose their own path when it doesn’t harm you or yours.
I try to point out to believers that our commitment to the truth should be more important than denominational doctrine or dogma and that means embracing science as one path to the truth. The commitment to truth requires that we are willing to question and explore. It’s not a lack of faith to question a tradition or what some other person taught you.