I certainly hope that I don’t make a friend into an enemy, but that simply is incorrect.
Speaking for myself, I personally have one-hundred percent absolute proof, far more compelling than the proof I have that you exist, but beyond that, it is a critical mistake — as the good people at Infidels.Org, a leading online source for skeptics (among whom I include myself) — to argue the following: A -> B, Not A, therefore Not B. It is a Denial of the Antecedant Fallacy, an incorrectly formed modus tolens. Correct is A -> B, Not B, therefore Not A.
The example they use of the fallacy is this:
Because I know you to have a keen intellect, and because I count you as a friend, I feel that you would want me to bring this matter to your attention.
There is much evidence, and there are many logical proofs, for the existence of God as Supreme Being. You might or might not accept any of it. But you may not consider your denials to constitute a lack of evidence or a lack of proof.
Nothing can be proved to a closed mind. And although no one argument stands alone as irrefutably sound, the entire set of valid arguments make a case sufficiently compelling that a bizarre intellectual denial is required to summarily dismiss them — particurlarly if they are dismissed with a haughty attitude of superiority for holding the opposing view.[ul][li]Testimonies of billions of people who, though differing in details of subjective perception, believe in the existence of an objective God[/li][li]The nature of logical tautology itself suggests that everything proves the existence of God, when God is described as analytic knowledge[/li][li]God as a First Cause has never been refuted successfully since there is nothing natural to account for a mechanism whereby something may arise from nothing (nothingness implies the lack of any mechanism by which something may arise)[/li][li]Most arguments against God’s existence are weak, and typically are denials of the antecedant or else rejections of axioms that are at least as self-evident as Peano’s Induction Axiom[/li][li]Arguments for an eternal universe have not accounted for any natural means by which entropy might have reversed during various hypothetical cyclical schemes[/li][li]Materialism as a philosophy resorts routinely to calling upon mystical phenomena (e.g., Branes, etc.) much in the same manner that Creationism calls upon secondary and tertiary agencies to underpin weak arguments[/li][li]When God is defined as Supreme Being, proof of His existence is almost trivially easy[/li][li]Like many other things in life (e.g., there exists seafood that tastes good), God’s existence has been subjectively proved to the satisfaction of a statistically significant portion of the population, whereas atheism is statistically insignificant[/li][li]Ethics arguments for the existence of God are compelling, when God is defined as the supreme agency for goodness[/li][li]Expressions of faith in the form of philanthropy and art have been an integral part of man’s culture for as long as we have written records, indicating the influence of God on man without temporal boundaries[/li][li]Most arguments against God’s existence that are not denials of antecedants are denials of positive ontological propositions, and therefore are equivocal[/li][/ul]These are a few off the top of my head. It has been my experience that when people demand proof of God’s existence, what they are unwittingly demanding is scientific proof, but that is foolish. Appealing to science to provide either proof or disproof of God’s existence is as ignorant and foolish as appealing to science to provide either proof or disproof that science is a valid epistemic philosophy — you can’t falsify falsifiability.
Don’t believe in God if you wish. But your lack of belief constitutes nothing whatsoever in the way of disproof.
As I have said many times, you can believe whatever you wish to believe as long as it makes you happy, but when believers i.e., fundies, start to wield their faith as a weapon, I’m going to go after them.
Appeal to popularity is no way to win an argument. Lots of people believe things that are demonstrably not so. Billions of people believe in astrology, but that doesn’t make it true.
“Analytic knowledge” is not a Person that that thinks and creates, and tautologies are not arguments.
And the argument from ignorance is also invalid. Merely because we do not know the ontological ground from which the universe arose is no reason to say that the First Cause is God, let alone the God of the Bible.
And this doesn’t even make sense.
“If p then q.
Not-p.
Therefore, not-q” may be useful to eliminate invalid conclusions in formal argument, but it’s a darn fine lab tool to test hypotheses.
Um, this seems to be a real non sequitur. What has this to do with the existence of God? Hypothetical cyclical schemes need, y’know, evidence to back them up. As far as astronomy now knows, the universe seems not only to have been constantly expanding since its origin, but the expansion is accelerating, not that that has anything to do with arguemtns for God.
You may want to start reading the the news.
Theoretical constructs are not mystical phenomena (Hint: One is backed up by math, the other isn’t), although
I admit the difference can sometimes be razor thin. Don’t ask me to defend quantum field theory because that’s waaaay out of my league. I’ll leave that to Orbifold or Ultrafilter to discuss.
How?
You already used the argument from popularity, and you used a poor analogy. The taste of seafood is highly subjective, differing from everyone. That billions of people might love raw salmon does not affect my distaste for it in the slightest. God’s existence must not a subjective impression but an objective fact that would be true for all people everywhere.
Nonsense. Again, ethics is a highly subjective business unable to prove the objective existence of deity.
And yet another form of the argument from popularity.
Asking you to back up your with easily grasped, objective evidence is not equvocal. You seem to view this discussion as some form of the Monty Python Argument Clinic–
“God exists.”
“No, He doesn’t.”
I like to think that my objections to the God hypothesis are a little more substantial.
Well, I’m not asking you to give us His telephone number, but I’d like something more concrete than you have offered so far.
I agree that if you believe in an invisble, powerless god, that it’s pretty damn dificult to nail down His nonexistence, but one can say that a God that is undetectable may be ignored.
I never saids it did. But the claims that Jesus made in the Bible–that He would return while people listening to him were still alive, that his followers could do miracles, that they could handle serpents and drink poison without harm–are false, so we can reasonably conclude that Jesus’s claims to godhood, and therefore the existence of the Father He claims sent him, are without merit.
So far your arguments are extremely bad. It’s not enough to hide behind “well, you can’t disprove God, therefore He exists.” Show us positive evidence of God’s existence. Do a miracle, drink some strychnine and be unharmed, have God appear in the clouds a la Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Prove to me that you’re no fool
(walk across my swimming pool)
Do that for me and I’ll let you go free
C’mon, Lib if you choose.
And Lib, having just read your disgusting comment in Eve’s “Rhinestone Jesus” thread, I suggest that you pretty much stop talking about God until you can start acting as one of His disciples. Right now you are as sounding brass because you have no charity.
Lib,
I have to go to work so I don’t have much time but just a couple of quick points.
You’ll notice that I did not make a positive assertion that God does not exist, only that it has not been proven to exist. I did not extropolate that absence of proof indicates proof of absence.
As to the ontological argument, I would just say that it could be equally applied to the IPU since I can define the IPU exactly the same way you define God. If it’s my statement that “no” evidence exists for God that you object to, I would just say that rhetorically, any logical (or even experiential) evidence for a Christian God is equally applicable to the IPU.
More later, I have to go now.
and don’t worry, Lib, I have arguments with all my friends. I have a thick skin. I won’t take it personally if you disagree with me.
Okay, Gobear. I’ll stop and play with you if you want to play. Let’s you and I both ignore, as you did unilaterally, that I said “although no one argument stands alone as irrefutably sound…” since you went ahead and split them apart anyway. It’ll be fun taking a look.
But first, it’s clear that this was disingenuous: “Let’s see your inferential evidence, and please, show us something beyond ‘I get a yummy feeling in my tummy and that’s God.’” Proof ought to be found (or not) in an argument, but it isn’t; it is found (or not) in the mind of the person who hears it.
Now you claim that you would believe in God if you saw Him in the clouds. That too is disingenuous. The fact is that you would attribute what you saw to an optical illusion. Drink some poison? A cheap and easy magic trick. A miracle? You would spare no stone in turning over ideas to explain it away. David Blaine does miracles everyday. Do something you can’t explain? Actually, there is quite much that you can’t explain, but how much of it do you attribute to God?
At any rate, let’s visit the list that you thought you would divide and conquer:
I’m not appealing to popularity; I’m appealing to testimony. Just to remind you, what you asked for was evidence. And testimony is accepted as evidence in practically every court in the world.
Well, the “God of the Bible” is not what you asked for evidence of, but I’m not afraid, so let’s allow your equivocation to stand. It so happens that one of the primary descriptions of the God of the Bible is as Creator. The Creator would be definitively the First Cause. That aside, your equivocation has ignored the argument. To show a natural origin for the universe (I dealt with an eternal universe separately), you must posit a natural mechanism that functions within nothing, an unfortunately self-contradictory quagmire — nothing must, by definition, include no mechanism of any kind.
This one blew me away. You seem to be saying that should a lab test fly in the face of logic, reason must be discarded. That’s downright spooky, especially coming from a person who is demanding evidence. The famous fallacy that you call a “darn fine lab tool” could be downright dangerous: If you smoke you’ll get cancer, but I don’t smoke; therefore, I won’t get cancer.
Speaking of non sequiturs, that article (of which I was already aware) had nothing to do with what I said. It is a simple matter that has been discussed in philosophical circles for quite some time now: if the universe had no creator, then it must be eternal. And yet, if it is eternal, then entropy ought to be at one-hundred percent (meaning, for one thing, that the temperature of the universe ought to be near absolute zero). Cycle theories of expansion and contraction have been proposed that introduced the notion of decreasing entropy during contraction, but these have been discarded — even by staunch materialists like Hawking.
I haven’t mentioned quantum theory. And yet it is telling that you raised it. You believe in its veracity despite that you yourself cannot do and have not done the math. You don’t have to give me hints, Gobear, as though I am a child sitting in your lap while you explain the universe to me. If you know something, just spit it out. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “backed up by math” with respect to the Brane theories. Hiryiu’s famous Phi theory is also “backed up by math”. Every crackpot theory under the sun is “backed up by math”. (Incidentally, math is backed up by unproved assertions. Did you know that?)
Well, here is one (of many) version(s):
G -> G (from definition of necessary existence)
~~G (it is possible that God exists)
~G -> ~G (Becker’s Postulate)
G -> G (from the Modal Axiom)
G v ~G (Law of the Excluded Middle)
G v ~G (substitution 3 and 5)
~G -> ~G (modus tollens)
G v ~G (substitution 6 and 7)
G (disjunctive syllogism 7 and 2)
Therefore
G (modus ponens 9 and 4)
QED
Really? Why? What have you shown that precludes God from existing as an objective being while having myriad subjective manifestations? I have yet to see an analogy offered in an argument that wasn’t classified by the adversary as “poor”. And here, I’m not offering a syllogistic proof (as I did just above), but merely statistical evidence that sufficient numbers of people have perceived God as to be statistically significant. Your response did not deal with that fact.
Lordy. You can’t just go around dismissing arguments with these wave-of-the-hand dismissals, at least not effectively. Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, has a rich history of debate on the matter of good and evil and their relation to God. But at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you dismiss this as an argument from antiquity. Just so you know, it isn’t.
No. You really must stop reading at all if before you have read you have already decided that what is written is wrong. This has nothing to do with popularity, but with temporality, and the evidence of God’s manifestation through the works of man for centuries.
What are they, exactly? Later in this series, you protest being asked to offer them. Lots of people have grasped the evidence easily. You cannot offer the fact that this is difficult for you as counter-evidence. Otherwise, a lot of people would not believe in math.
Sorry, but I don’t believe you. I believe that you have already pre-dismissed whatever might be offered, just as you have done so far. Your defense is so simple: deny everything with minimal comment, and say that everything is unsound.
Who besides you has said that He is undetectable? This only goes to bolster the argument I made that what you are in fact demanding is scientific proof; i.e., detection by some instrument that you can see with your eyes (never mind optical illusions). This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it was you who wrote, “…the question of God’s existence by itself cannot be satisfactorily determined by the scientific method…”. Besides, I have detected Him.
Well, He did return while they were still alive: “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” — Acts 2:1-4 His followers did (and do) perform miracles, and lots of them handle serpents (at least, they did when I was a child in the mountains of Appalachia).
You have not shown this to be the case.
I haven’t done that. If you read more carefully, as though I deserved the respect of a careful reading, you would see that when I have addressed materialism, it is where materialism has asserted God’s nonexistence in a proactive manner.
Going back to what I said at the beginning: proof is too often found (or not) in the mind of the person hearing the proof. You already believe that I am a fool; therefore, every utterance I make, no matter what it might truly signify, will prove to you that I am a fool.
No problem, Diogenes. And thanks for the reassurances.
Incidentally, I have no problem with my calling God God and your calling Him IPU. So long as we both mean Supreme Being, we are talking about the same thing, just as with any other synonym. It’s a car; it’s an automobile. […shrug…]
Just for the sake of throwing myself into this mix, Lib, point of clarification if you don’t mind:
Do you hold (sorry if this seems like a leading/angry/assumptive question, but I can’t think of any other way to phrase it) that anyone who does not accept the evidence in existence for the proof of God’s existence as valid, and therefore the conclusion that God exists, is in “bizarre intellectual denial” or possessing of a “closed mind”?
Given:
I do not believe for a fact (I have some general idea that I think some Higher Thing/s exist(s), but nothing I’d put my life on the line for) that God, as He/She/It is conceived by Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians, etc. exists.
I have seen the evidence you posted (though the fact that it is an incomplete list of evidence is duly noted) and remain unconvinced by those arguments. If you want (though it would probably take a lot more time than you have), I’ll go into why I take issue with some of them, but fact remains that they do not convince me so much as they say “this is proof that it’s possible”. “It’s possible” is basically what my belief is right now.
I do not believe that I am either closed-minded about this nor that I am in denial.
Now be careful. First off, if you read, I credited you with having 2% of all knowledge in the universe. Are you trying to tell me you have more? I’d be willing to bet it’s a lot less, because, as I’ve already said, all the knowledge would include how many grains of sand are in the beaches of Hawaii, how many hairs are on everyone’s heads, who ever existed, how many fell out on my brush yesterday…there’s a lot of knowledge. But when you imply I’m making it up, then I have to assume you either didn’t read my post where I explained it, or have a weak argument. Either way, I really believe when people can’t argue issues, they’ll attack character. Please refrain.
Oh, thanks. So I guess the same can be said about atheists and the sale of Stephen King novels, because, by the same line of reasoning, everyone who buys a Stephen King book believes cars will come alive, and rabid dogs really do act like Cujo.
Actually, you said these threads were annoying you. But I’ll use your exact words:
Maybe you meant that you want to hear about it, but it didn’t sound too welcoming to me.
Wow, the Word of God hasn’t changed, yet people quote science that, according to this definition, isn’t accurate. But let me address the young earth that you quoted. There is no scientific evidence of the age of the earth. You can quote carbon dating, I can quote a carbon dating experiment that showed a monkey to be over a million (I believe, but I can get the exact facts if you like) years old, while he was still alive…but you will have nothing outside of faith to substantiate either claim.
So here are my questions:
Is a painting proof there was a painter?
Is a building proof there was a builder?
Is a law proof there was a law giver?
Is creation proof…well, I’ll just leave this, but I would like answers on the first three.
Demonstrate that there is a creation, as distinguished from existence.
I am dubious. I think an omnipotent creator would have done a better job of it than the collection of engineering hacks that is the human body. Like the eye. I mean, there’s even an extant whole other example of a better way of putting it together in the octopus, so this isn’t something that can be handwaved as a limitation of the inherently flawed material.
Just in case I didn’t answer this, it’s exactly the same standard, and I’ll apply it. Can gobear say with 100% accuracy that my son exists? What about my daughter? Can he say 100% that he doesn’t nor does she? Well, no he can’t. He doesn’t know. I can say with 100% accuracy that my son does exist, and I’m 100% sure my daughter doesn’t. The difference is he could say maybe I do have a son or daughter, but that’s it. So lack of meeting God doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. Since I have met both God and my son, I can say that they both exists, and not be applying any different standard. Hope that helps.
Not at all. What I hold is that anyone who declares that they have been presented no evidence when the fact is that they have been presented evidence that they simply reject is in bizarre intellectual denial and possesses a closed mind.
It’s okay to say that an argument is valid but in your opinion not sound. That is the proper response to someone who has presented a thoughtful argument. (An argument is valid if all its statements follow from its premises. An argument is sound if it is valid AND all its premises are accepted as true.) It is NOT okay to pretend that no evidence has been offered.
What difference does that make? What if rotting flesh is not what the whole thing is all about? The universe might be a red herring, and attaching undue significance to it a mistake.
The sun congealed out of a large gob of gas and various other material in a process that can be observed in essentially all of its stages all over the galaxy at this very moment. Any one of them might, in several billion years, be host to life that offers the same laughably specious argument.
Stars form all the time. Stars die all the time. This star is only special from a human perspective because it’s the one that’s here. It’s not particularly remarkable for a second-generation or later star; there are thousands essentially just like it. (And yeah, second-generation at least; the element distribution indicates that there has to have been a previous round of stellar fusion, so this particular star grew out of the remnants of already dead ones.)
Svt, you really should not make statements like this, because this is an outright lie (I don’t know you, so I don’t know if it’s an honest mistake on your part, or you are being purposely deceptive). There are many different types of dating techniques, only one of which is carbon dating, and would not be used to determine the age of the Earth anyway. As for your “monkey dating” reference, I have not heard that specific claim, but anytime I have heard claims of this nature, they are always fabrications or distortions of scientific publications.
Nope, the Word of God has not changed. But I sincerely hope that you are not about to try the bullshit that claims that the Bible, literally read (except where literalness is inconvenient, like the passage where Jesus took and broke bread and said “this is My Body” – which no fundamentalist I know of except Jamie Buckingham believes means what it literally says), equals “the Word of God.” Let me refer you to a passage you should be fairly familiar with:
Do you have a Bible which became flesh and dwelt among us? Do you have a Bible through which the world was created? Do you have a Bible which John baptized in the Jordan? Do you have a Bible which gave itself up to death in order to save us, and rose from the grave on the third day?
If not, by its own testimony, it is not “the Word of God.”
Typical fundy. porn. It cloaks a small truth in a big lie. There is no scientific test which has demonstrated what the actual age of the earth is, ture. There is quite a bit of evidence that shows it to be in excess of four billion years.
Distinguish between a Jackson Pollock and a dropcloth?
Yes.
What kind of law. Natural laws are identified by induction – the scientific method you so cavalierly dismissed up above.
Creation is, yes. But do take note that the Universe is not Creation without belief in a Creator.
Take a look at what Libertarian is maintaining up above. And take careful note that even if one allows a Supreme Being, a First Cause, a Grand Principle to Creation, it is till a healthy stretch from there to YHWH God of Israel, much less to the idea that He was a Trinity, one Person of Whom became human to save us.
You’re in the big leagues, now, friend. And they’ve got some trick pitches that are nigh onto impossible to hit. Don’t expect slow-pitch softball that you’re used to.
Now, supposing all that you’ve said to be true, that means that you and I are bound to fllow the commands of Jesus Christ. May I respectfully point out to you that you have addressed “one of the least of these” in some rather hostile and dismissive language – which, according to the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, Jesus will take as being addressed to Him? (And yeah, I’m as guilty as Svt of that – I do take seriously what my fellow Christians say to me.)
We’re told how to respond by Christ Himself. And while you have remained remarkably calm, Svt, have you indeed returned good for evil, peace for hostility? In all honesty, I get the impression that doctrine is more important to you than your brothers and sisters here – and that’s the reverse of what He said.
