Liberal claims it does:
I’m certainly not getting it.
It’s a personal thing I suppose. Like poetry.
Liberal has spent some time on “proofs” about God. For someone to suggest it’s better to not have proof could be an interesting contrast to ponder. I find those type of things personal and a matter of timing. If you’re mentally ready and the right idea comes along it can be an AHA! moment. Sometimes it just rattles around in your head for a while. You get a sense it’s meaningful to you but it hasn’t quite come together.
That’s just my take on it.
It’s a contrast, for sure. But it’s also been a widely accepted take on religion since forever. Most people don’t have any interest in “knowing” the truth; they cling to faith and would cling to it even if presented with irrefutable proof that there is no god. Tris strikes me as one of those people, based on the paragraph Liberal quoted. Godthink is an addiction to most believers in the world.
So what? If that effect behaves in all ways as if it was showing real things, then there is no reason to think that it isn’t showing real things. Seeing light is one of the ways we interact with the universe, and so far we have no reason to believe that we are doing anything but seeing light. As long as things behave consistently , testably, and predictably the way they have been up until now, then there is no reason to think they aren’t real.
Yeah, I thought that was a metaphor, not just a cake. How about: we are the cake, the inside of the oven is the universe, and god is the oven. My argument still holds. If god has an effect on us, we can measure it as something independent of the universe.
I agree. Why would you not believe things that are real based on common understanding of how we measure our world, but you DO believe in something that meets none of those criteria? 
Lordy, that’s quite a mess. Let’s break it down:
I’m hoping that your accusation of sophistry is born of ignorance rather than malice. Perhaps you meant “solipsist” instead of “sophist”, but in either case it’s nothing to do with me or my philosophy. Maybe you intended to equivocate, and weave together the connotations of “sophism” in the grand tradition of Gorgias with “sophist” in the manner of today’s modern blowhard. But I’m sure that all of us would like to identify with certain sophist principles, such as those of Protagoras that extole the virtues of using words correctly. 
As to complicated ideas, I don’t know what could be more simple than God qua Love, where love is the facilitation of goodness, and goodness is that which edifies. If you have postulated that God is complicated, then that is not a burden upon me.
Finally, what we can conclude from scientific studies of the brain and its interaction with God is precisely nothing. As one noted neurologist and neurological researcher put it, “Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way ‘inferior’ to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence – the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion – to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God.” VS Ramachandran, MD, PhD, Phantoms in the Brain, pp 184-185
A mysterious calling, to be sure. I’ve no idea where you got the notion that I think that we are unable to “truly know the world”. After all, I’ve said plainly what the world truly is: it’s a probability distribution. A mathematical inequality. A wraith of possibilities, all of which are contingent on observation. Know that, and you know the world.
Again with the “sophistry”. I have no idea what you mean.
Perhaps it would be best if you were less metaphorical and more direct. With regard to physical things, surely there can be greater precision than parables about fish and odd references to rhetorical vice. I honest to goodness have no idea what idea you are trying to convey, and therefore do not know how to respond.
First of all, I did not use Plato as support (though I certainly would not be ashamed to do so.) Plato was merely the one who conceived essentia — that which a thing is to be. If I were to write a syllogism, you surely would not say that I’m calling upon Aristotle for support just because Aristotle conceived the logic necessary to formulate a deduction.
And second, if you don’t want someone calling upon Plato, surely you should not call upon MWI. At a 2005 QM workshop hosted by the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, the many worlds interpretation was decidedly unpopular.
If God is the Supreme Being, then He is metaphysically ubiquitous by the definitions of both “supreme” and “being”.
You’re leaving an awful lot of premises audiatur et altera pars. I have no idea why (1) being “demonstratable” distinguishes entropy from any other “physical phenomenon”, nor (2) what use to the discussion there is for the epistemic emptiness of the universe’s timeline, nor (3) why once we’ve excluded the universe, we’ve excluded “everything”. It seems to me that your argument goes in circles: the universe is all there is because the universe is all there is.
Stunning. That was a veritable tour-de-force of non sequiturs, almost like a spider crawling upside down and backwards. I’m still reeling from the notion that I “falsified” a definition.
I think both “supernatural” and “metaphysical” clearly imply that God is not a part of nature and is not a physical being.
Mine too. In fact, that’s an excellent description of exactly what happened. Even proof itself isn’t proof of anything because there are always unproven assertions underlying every proof. As Zeriel already pointed out, “At some level, a priori axioms rule the roost, even for the most hardcore of rationalists.”
No, I think I do mean it. With the exception of those unfortunates I mentioned above, I think proof, either way, that was based in what we see as understandable evidence that most reasonable folks can grasp (water is necessary for life, for example) would cause the vast majority to give up their argument and recognize the reality.
A positive in the god column would not guarantee worship, mind you, but would simply acknowledge an existence.
But of what use would that be to God? Suppose you were the host of a party, and someone was there who acknowledged your existence, but cared nothing about you otherwise — including your rules for your house. If the Judeo-Christian God were to prove His existence to you, would it change anything about the way you view God? Would you, if not worship Him, at least respect Him and do as He asks with His world? Either way, since He asks for worship, your knowledge would only condemn you. At least in not knowing, you are not held to account.
There isn’t much I like about the judeo-christian god. Worship would be unthinkable. I think knowledge of his existence would probably make me very angry. The “not knowing” might buy me a pass with him, but the secretive nature of his existence gets him in trouble with me. And since I’ve lived my life without him all these years, I wouldn’t see a need to change what I was doing.
I think that, from your point of view, that’s a fair assessment. So, what I don’t understand is why you would even desire, let alone demand, any sort of proof. Why not just be happy for those who are content in their faith while you continue to pursue your own happiness in your own way?
Aye, indeed I did. I was not accusing you of any sort of deception. That was a term I had picked up recently, and obviously wrongly. My apologies. I meant the belief that things that are percieved may not be real. Certainly you believe they aren’t, by your own admission.
Briefly then, why does your solipsist philosophy, as outlined in the above quote, apply to your conceptualization of the world around you but not to your conceptualization of God?
I never asserted anything about the accuracy of the MWI, only that the mathematics of it seemed to be in direct agreement with the proposition R -> Not R and that said mathematics could be used to describe the universe.
The sum total of useful information in the above paragraph is exactly zero.
u·biq·ui·tous - existing or being everywhere, esp. at the same time; omnipresent: ubiquitous fog; ubiquitous little ants.
met·a·phys·i·cal - 2. Philosophy.
a. concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth.
b. concerned with first principles and ultimate grounds, as being, time, or substance.
It seems to me that the term metaphysically ubiquitous is a contradiction. In that to be ubiquitous God must be everywhere at once, but to be metaphysical God should be an abstraction, which would exist as an idea and therefore be present in some kind of memory storage device (like a bundle of neurons or a harddrive.)
If no Liberal or universe existed you would never have tried to define “reality.” It is the existance of both of those very “real” things that prompted your definition of reality and their subsequent exclusion from it. I just found it a tad ironic.
Then why not answer directly instead of wriggling? I didn’t ask for you to convey the implications of previous statements. 
Because their happiness, and the religious right’s attempts to control the bodies and minds of non-believers, is making making my freedom to live without religion extremely difficult. I figure that if the basic premise of existence were proven, maybe they’d stop. Some of them, anyway.
Understood. But that’s a political problem. Leaders of the religious right are politicians just like those in government. It should be possible for you to direct your ire at Jerry Falwell, without directing it at Jane Faithful. I understand that you have a different perspective than I do, but from where I sit, Ms. Faithful would be less sympathetic with Jerry Falwell if you didn’t prove his case for him that you’re her enemy.
I honestly doubt that because, armed with both proof and free-will, it is hard to imagine the terror they would unleash.
Your apology and admission of error are very classy. Thanks. However, my worldview is not solipsistic because I believe that God is real and that God can be perceived. It is only the universe that is not real. (And I would add that its perception is intrinsically unimportant.)
As stated above, I’m not a solipsist. If you want to classify me, the most concise and accurate label would be Christian Libertarian Objectivist — a renegade with respect to the first and the last, and a purist with respect to the other one.
It is, of course, possible to construct any sort of logic system, including one that allows for contradiction. But if we are going to allow such a construct to be used as a basis for our discussion, then we might as well stop discussing. We’re both right and we’re both wrong, and there’s no point in saying anything.
I wouldn’t dismiss Ramachandran so readily. There is no greater neurological authority. Feel free to search on what his peers have to say.
It is your 2b (“being”) that is applicable in this instance. Metaphysical ubiquity means necessary existence; i.e., being in every possible world.
But I agree with you on that. As Liberal, the human animal, I’m just atoms observing atoms. Everything about the universe is trivial. Even whether God created it is immaterial; it serves Her purpose all the same. From Her perspective, it is an amoral mis-en-scene in which we can act out our moral decisions with freedom of moral will.
Because your question was plurium interrogationum. I believe you drew a false dichotomy by giving me choices A and B only. What I did was tell you in my own words how I would characterize my own thoughts. I don’t know what could be more direct than that.
Most of my ire IS directed at the zealots; however, as I said in another thread, the softer side of god belief doesn’t fight hard enough against the bad guys. I believe there is some sort of misplaced loyalty among the believers that makes the softies less likely to speak out against the hard-asses. If the softies would stand up and say belief belongs in the “personal stuff” column and not in the “public policy” column, our leaders wouldn’t be pressured to pander to the bad guys. I believe that the bad guys are the majority; otherwise, their voice wouldn’t be so influential.
That’s certainly a possibility, but I think there is strength in numbers, too. Maybe we could get them to blink.