Showing Mangetout that God doesn't exist in 'another thread'.

Great Debates
1

God doesn’t exist. Just kidding )

Ok, I will demonstrate for you Mangetout that:

a.) God does not exist
b.) In the event that God does exist, God cannot do anything at all, and is simply a vegetable.
c.) In the event that God does exist and can percieve awareness, God cannot be anymore meaningful to your existence than you or I.
d.) I will try, when I can to actually attribute negative meaning to your God - using your own axioms and internal logic.

God can take on many, many, many, many, many, many, many… properties and a few many more to boot !

The first necessity in exploring God, is to explore your specific God.
*Does your God create anything? Did your God create humans, or life or the universe?
*Does your God think on any level about anything, is your God aware of anything at all, on any level?
*Can your God communicate with their own intention being conveyed, or can your God only communicate without their intention being conveyed? Or one half of one or the other? (i.e. A rock can ‘communicate’ with me, but is what I draw from that communication, anything near resembling what a rock might actually try to convey to me, if indeed it is ‘trying’ to convey something to me?)
Does your God live? Is your God everliving? Did your God create itself? Did something create your God? Has your God just always been? Does your God know all things or only some things? Does your God operate in a heirachical system, or does your God encompass a unillateral system? Does your God have an opinion, a philosophy, a feeling? Can your God express anything we can express, nothing we express, only some things that we can express? Does your God have a desire, a ‘body’, a ‘residence’?
Does your God offer (assuming it is heirachical) any rewards that one would consider beneficial to the adherence of that heirachical system; and the desire to move through it to become closer to your God? Does your God tell jokes? Does your God offer a reason for being? Does your God do everything it can do, or does your God reserve behavior, thought and speech? Is your God everything all at once? Is your God nothing? Is your God ‘nothing and everything’? Does your God have rules to abide, or offer rules for you to abide by? Is your God perfect? Is your god moral? Is your God hope? Is your God love?

Please don’t answer all of these questions (you can if you want shrug) … it is only a short list anyways. To even begin this discussion, I need at least one property associated with your God, to show you why that God is non-existent or irrelevant. You can add additional properties or subtract properties and recombine them however you like in future posts… I will be the chess player from accross the table so to speak, waiting for you to defeat me. Without some sort of property, I cannot begin this process wihtout writing one of the books I always planned on writing but was always to lazy to ) Addressing every variable for every combination of possibility for the interpretation of God should flow more smoothly and keep me engaged in the process (I have a ‘slight’ motivation problem), if we are communicating back and forth like this with input from others to either speed up your process or my own.

-Justhink

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My advice: find a really good editor.

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Can I try? It seems a shame to leave such a long OP without something to play with.

How about “God cannot be understood by Man”?

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“”"""""""""“My advice: find a really good editor.”""""""""""""""""""

That advice resonates with me quite well =) I understand that I have a handicap with writing comprehesibly.

-Justhink

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I believe so.

**

He/it would appear to be thoughtful and aware, based on my experience of him/it, but I think it’s possibly unhelpful to equate these terms with their exact human equivalent.

Yes, although not in an organic sense.

**Ummm, I believe that God has been around for at least as long as the universe, since physicists seem to be telling me that the concept of ‘before the universe’ is meaningless, I clearly cannot frame a coherent statement about what sort of existence, if any, God enjoys/enjoyed outside of space/time.

**Possibly, possibly, possibly, but maybe not - I really don’t know.

**‘All’ is still ‘some’ - I believe that the knowledge, power, presence of God are to practical human purposes, infinite (square circles excepted)

**I don’t understand the thrust of these questions sufficiently to answer them.

**These questions seem (to me) to be putting the cart before the horse somewhat; Although (IMO) God and man share certain similarities, direct comparisons are probably dangerously inaedquate.

**I believe that the popular concept of reward and punishment from God is flawed; actions have natural consequences as a result of the fundamental properties of the universe in which we live; this may apply to more than just the ‘physical realm’.

**I don’t know; I don’t see why he shouldn’t; sometimes I have experienced what appears to be humourous enlightenment, but it was pretty subjective.

**Lame as it sounds, I don’t think I can fully understand the motvies of God; little glimmers of them maybe; and it’s hard to put into words; like if I tried to offer you the reason for being married (which is perhaps not a bad analogy, although I am a little wary of using analogies at the moment).

**Ummm, square circles again perhaps?, or maybe an evil God sitting idle while millions die in earthquakes? - I’d like to come back to these questions later, if I may, when I have had a chance to chew over exactly how to frame my thoughts.

**In the sense that physics offers me rules as to why running with scissors might result in undesirable outcomes? - yes.
In the sense of why my marriage vows offer me rules as to why, if I threw rocks at my wife, she might feel inclined to leave me alone? - yes.
In the sense of “Look kid, this isn’t good for you (or others) and you wouldn’t understand why” - yes.
But in the sense of “if you do that, I’ll whack you with this big stick simply because I don’t like you doing that” - no.

**As far as I am able to tell from where I am sitting, yes.

**I’m not sure how to answer that one; is there such a thing as universal objective morality? Can we percieve it?

**In my opinion, the concept of Love is an excellent, but ultimately inadequate (limited by our experience and understanding) metaphor. But “God is Love” need not necessarily mean “Love is God” or even “God is entirely composed of Love”

I’m sorry if I have not addressed any of your questions properly, and please bear in mind that I may have omitted important details. I have also, on occasion, been known to be completely wrong.

To sum up; I can experience that which is beyond my understanding.

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Gaaah, I did mean to preview, honestly.

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“God cannot be understood by Man”

I was just thinking that I should have included this and its variants on the list when walking to the store! I was kicking myself for forgetting them =)

That clearly means that women have the option =P

In all seriousness, let’s break this down.

A term that people have:

God

can be understood by those people, yet only certain properties.

We can demonstrate our ability to understand the word: God.
These are typically registered (for the average human being) through the senses of sound and sight.
a.) Hearing the word: God
b.) Reading the word: God

So clearly, words cannot be God, as they can be understood (presumably by someone).
A bit of a thread ender =)
So much delight that your axiom negates any attempt to convey a meaning of, and or about God. I happen to feel it pretty much describes God myself ) If only others could be so ‘enlightened’, we might just forget the whole thing ever even existed.

God = Inability of man to understand, comprehend or argue ?

It sounds a bit like a schizophrenic, but not quite )

I understand this to be the collective knowledge of human beings…?
I cannot understand one word of Chinese, but I would not equate all Chinese or the language of Chinese being God under your definition, correct? Hmmm… wait a minute, this just got interesting. What we can understand, cannot be God =)
Then we must determine what constitutes understanding, and if there is anything within the context of our understanding which God would be meaningless without. Becuase the axiom does not include the fact that we can determine what cannot be understood about God. One way to rephrase it is:

Man can undertand the ‘cannots’ of God.

Understand – seems to imply a rational string of thought that validates an observation consistently with all data found within a system. talking to myself here, sorry

This means that God cannot understand man. This God cannot be meaningful to us.

-Justhink

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Of course, all you have to say is:
“Man cannot understand the cans and cannots of God”

In which case all religion and talk of God becomes a null set, and of necessity hypocritical. It also serves the function of destroying hope in terms of being human and understanding God. If you want to understand God, it appears that genetic manipulation or suicide are the only options available… unless you want to wait for a natural death (which of course would be boring, if all you care about is union and understanding of God).

-Justhink

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Heck, I can’t even understand you. What does that imply? :smiley:

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Justhink - I think your line of thought seems to flip the statement “God cannot be understood by man” (or woman! ;)) into “That which cannot be understood must be God”.

The statements are not the same, though; if they were, then I’d be a God when I had a few pints.

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Justhink - I think your line of thought seems to flip the statement “God cannot be understood by man” (or woman! ) into “That which cannot be understood must be God”.
I jumped like a madman here…:::::

If God cannot be understood by man,
Then anything man understands, cannot be God.
Everything man understands cannot be God.

– following me here?

Man can only understand the ‘cannots’ of God.

All things God 'cannot ’ (be, do, understand etc…) are the only things that man can understand.

This creates an absolute language barrier between the two that does not reconcile any meaning for an infinite span of time; between the two entities. When you pray to God for a washer and dryer, God might give you a Pepsi ! Or a dead cat!

-Justhink

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“”"""""""“Gaaah, I did mean to preview, honestly.”""""""""""""

Just hope that the bandwidth God doesn’t punish us! =)

One thing that is certainly implied by those questions is that they may as well be littered with LOTS of: ‘these’. I didn’t expect straight forward answers to questions like, “Is God alive” etc…

It should have been: Does your God ‘live’ ?
Understand? I’m not trying to put you in a box here, but your God does need some concrete property to be analyzed. Otherwise, your God may as well be a scoop of vanilla bean ice-cream! Think about that when you compose the properties of your God… what distinguishes my God from anything and / or everything? Be crafty, be honest, be decietful if you like … but I need a property or properties to go on, Mangetout.

-Justhink

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I’m with you 'til here.

This is where the problem is.

The problem is that by “the cannots of God” you really mean “The is nots of God”.

If we cannot understand what God is, then anything we do understand fully is not God (cannot be God) - I agree with you here. However, the next statement (we can only understand what God cannot be, do, understand, etc) does not follow on.

" All things God cannot ‘be’ "… tick (in the sense that we can only understand what God is not). This is just a re-phrasing of my original statement.

" All things God cannot ‘do’ "… No! Bad boy! Logically, there is nothing that God “cannot do”, so this statement is meaningless. Besides, not understanding what God is does not mean that man cannot understand what God does. It just means that man cannot understand everything God does.

As a result, an “absolute language barrier” does not follow. As a loose analogy: just cos I don’t understand a Chinese guy doesn’t mean that he doesn’t understand me.

14

Too much boolean logic here for my liking; We cannot fully understand God, but those aspects of God that he extends in our direction with the express intention of interaction with us, we can experience - this is not the same as understanding.

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This divergence is only a loophole of incompleteness from the original statement, as addressed later with adding both “can and cannot”… Just to articulate that.
As a result, an “absolute language barrier” does not follow. As a loose analogy: just cos I don’t understand a Chinese guy doesn’t mean that he doesn’t understand me.

But you can understand him if you try, or at least ‘man’ can understand him, or has the possibility of understanding him, primarily because he is a subset of ‘man’ and can understand himself if need be. This scenario is not constrained by absolutes, but by conditions necessary to achieve the communication.

Let’s add some implied terms then!

Humans cannot understand everything about God.

This is silly IMO, as humans cannot understand everything about anything.

“There is nothing, logically, that God ‘cannot do’.”

God cannot uphold promises of victory to two informed, opposing archetypes.

For example:
God promises someone that they can never be hit by a bullet.
God promises someone that they can never miss what they want to hit with a bullet.

This is not like asking God to create a 14 sided triangle, it is simply an ability issue. If God places conditions upon himself to not imbue these two people with these powers… then he can maintain the illusion of his ability to do all things. If he doesn’t inform these two seperate individuals about one another before the encounter, this ommision of information will still maintain the integrity of his ability to do anything.

God cannot uphold these two promises, without someone knowing that God is not all-powerful, unless he lies or conceals his actions. For God to make the promises, God must not be able to uphold them.

I’m actually a bit tired as of now (5AM)… I’ll address the innitial edits in the morning on out topic and why I believe it still stands.

Apologies in advance, until then…

-Justhink

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There’s not a lot of difference (IMO) between the example you give here and the immovable object/irresistable force quandary.

Of the set of things that are possible, there are no things that God cannot do; this is not the same as being to do ‘anything’ (like square circles or sky blue pink objects).

But of course considered individually, both of the (unlikely)promises that you outline above are techincally ‘possible’; what is impossible is the conjunction of the two; so the first one yields to the second (“but you said I’d never be hit by a bullet”, “ah, yes, but I have now promised this guy he would never miss”). If I try to make a sky blue object pink, then in so doing I remove it’s blueness.

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In any case, it’s worth noting that belief in God doesn’t generally seem to spring from a dry, analytical process of logic, but from some kind of experience.

Yes, God is non-logical! - that’s one of the things we’ve been trying to tell you the last two thousand years.

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(or more)

19

Can a banana fit in an eggcup? (yes or no)

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Justhink: Note that the Chinese man is not my God! He was just an analogy to show that just because I do not understand someone does not mean that he cannot understand me - hence you cannot conclude that an “absolute language barrier” must exist between God and man if man cannot understand God.

Onto your other point:

Your “God cannot do these two things” claim is flawed - if we accept the premise that there is an omnipotent God, then I imagine a simple paradox wouldn’t be too difficult to overcome. He could either cheat (e.g. in the gun example, let the gunman die before he decides to aim at the invincible guy), or he can just use his godly tricks (why not simply create another universe so both outcomes can be true?). Better still, he could just avoid making daft promises in the first place :p.

Finally - GO TO SLEEP MAN! 5 am is way past bed time! :slight_smile: