As the rest of your questions seem geared only for you to affirm your bias for yourself, I’m going to ignore them. I disagree with teh basic assertion that physical processes are independent of God. This is the inherent crux of the argument that you seem to be missing. Just because science can explain something doesn’t mean it disproves God, or is even evidence that God does not exist. Any scientist worth his salt will say the same thing. What I would say is that science explains rationally HOW god works. It is not rational to say that physical processes dis/prove anything about God. I have been defining God for you the entire time, and you have been to obtuse to understand what I am saying, so now I will answer your questions.
Is god distinct from the universe? - No, the universe is God’s Corpus
Is god conscious? - Yes, God is Consciouness itself
Is God good? Is God all-good. - As the word Good is derived from the word God, and it refers to how in touch with God something is, then yes, God is Godlike or “good”, in that God is like God.
Can God change things in the universe? - God changes things in the universe constantly, the evidence is that things change.
Is god all powerful? - Again yes, by definition.
But please do me a favor don’t start asking the dumbass atheist questions like “If God is all powerful how come he can’t make 2+2=5?, ahyuck ahyuck ahyuck.”
Basically I am defining something for you, not discussing the mechanics of processes. You cannot “PROVE” that something means what it means. It is not rational to attempt to do so. Science only verifies the way things work, not whether a word means what it means. You are sitting here arguing with me about definition.
Physical processes are the processes of God. God creates the universe all the time, and evolution describes the process by which that creation unfolds. When you can finally wrap your head around the fact that I do not see it as this dualistic dichotomy that you do, you might be able to comprehend what I am saying. I think you are creating false-dichotomies. I don’t really care that much if you believe in God, I just would like for people to realize that arguing against God is not rational, it’s like arguing whether “red” is the color I think it is. You cannot make any rational arguments about it, yet you seem to continue to try, while trying to berate me into thinking I’m stupid, when all you are really doing is confirming my opinions about your mental faculties.
Simply, I expect someone to be rational, if they hold someone else to that standard. None of your arguments have BEEN rational. You seem to have decided that the atheist argument IS rational, and therefore you must be rational, this is hardly the case. I defined God many times for you in this thread, you’ve ignored it many times.
However, maybe you can latch on to this: the Universe is the Body, God is the Being. Us communicating right here is evidence of us being part of a larger whole. We are working out concepts between us, as part of a collective consciousness.
Are you answering your own question? “Physical processes are the processes of God.” has no reason to be believed in, save that you think that it should be. Not very “rational”
Sure it is, it has been proven to “me”. That’s rational. Just because I cannot repeat the experience for someone else doesn’t make it irrational. What would be irrational would be for you to start believing it because I told you to. However, this is what is being expected of me by the atheists in this thread. My only real goal in this thread is to hear one atheist be honest and admit that they have no rational explanation for why they don’t believe in God. Everyone here who does believe in God has said, “I don’t believe in those limited definitions of God you are putting for either.”
As I said in another thread, it’s basically a matter of a fundamental difference in how we define things. I define that everything is conscious, some people define that things are random. My question then is, if everything is random except for the brain processes of a human being, then how do you know that those processes are not random too? I simply believe that NOTHING AT ALL is random, that it is all decided upon by some form of consciousness or another.
"Rational” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Now, to continue your hijack, you keep on claiming that both atheists and theists use irrational arguments, and both rely on faith. Wrong. They keep on saying “God does not exist”, or such claims. They also say that the idea of god makes no sense to them. You hear such phrases, and figure that they are saying that logic does not lead to the belief in god. Well guess what? It doesn’t. All theist arguments I have been presented with rely on hopeful thinking, or faith. Now, if that feels insulting to you, to imply that your belief is not based on rationality, tough cookies.
Show me one non-strawman of why atheists are irrational in their beliefs, and I will show you one misunderstanding of what they are saying, or one claim they make without showing you the reasoning behind it.
We want you to produce some evidence, not assertions and word games. Atheism is rational, as there is no evidence for the supernateral; what evidence there is, is against it.
You don’t need consciousness to have order.
Word games prove nothing. The People’s Republic of China is not for the people, nor is it a republic.
Perhaps the problem is that I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body. I don’t see any interconnection with anything else that can’t be explained physically - by the exchange of information, etc. I grant that you feel this connection, but we feel lots of things that while personally true are not actually true.
The trouble is, which of us is correct can only be confirmed by methods which already assume that my methodology is correct, so I don’t expect spiritual people to buy into it. Do you get my point? Logical type people say show me the evidence, which is something spiritual type people reject, while spiritual people say that if you meditate (or fast or give yourself to Jesus) you will see the light, which logical people reject as being an indicator of truth. I can say that scientific/logical methods have improved our lives, but you might reject this as being spiritually unimportant.
Does this make sense to you?
I was raised Jewish, and never learned that we were better than anyone else. I read somewhere where “chosen” is like being chosen for a suicide mission. My rabbi never said that gentiles were going to hell, or were less loved by god than we were.
My objection to religion is when it is used as an excuse to bash or name call those who don’t believe, or to restrict the rights to do things that the religious claim are objected to by god. None of which I’ve ever noticed you doing! Standard variety Western religions, to me, fail the test of factuality - many statements of fact in the holy books are wrong. Spiritual religions, to me, fail the test of utility. What benefit is there from it being true? (Benefits from believing may be totally seperate from the validity of the belief.)
I’ll let others judge our relative obtuseness. However I do note that you seem to be ignoring things I’ve said several times. Your strawman view of atheism is clouding your reading ability.
You claim that physical processes are related to god. Fine, show it. What laws have gotten violated due to god’s will (or our’s, since we are all one big happy mind.) All you’ve been doing this thread is asserting stuff, and then claiming you have some special access to the truth.
God is related to good in English, but not in other languages. That’s not any evidence in any case. Your answers are not that different from cosmosdan’s, except that he has the humility to know that some of these are hard, and that he may not be 100% correct. Specifically, the assertion that god is consciousness is odd. If so, why are we all compartmentalized? Many people claim to be tied into god, but they all come up with different views of god. If god is consciousness, he has a real, real bad case of multiple personality disorder.
You say god changes the universe. How does he change it in a way that can be distinguished from the operation of purely physical laws?
Anyhow, the point of this exercise was to demonstrate that you could start to define god to us - and you did. I may disagree that this defines anything real, but it is a definition, or the beginning of one, so we are making progress.
Do you know why this is a meaningless thing to ask? (Lib don’t give him any hints. ) I do. The interesting contradiction is this. If god is both omnipotent and omniscient, he must both be able to change the future and know the future. But if today god knows I’m going to eat at McDonalds tomorrow, he can’t change things so I eat at Wendy’s. If he is unconstrained in changing things, he can’t know in advance what he will do. The argument against this I have usually heard is that he doesn’t want to, but that is pretty weak.
The third omni is omnibenevolence. This one could be in conflict with omnipotence, but the usual argument is just from evidence. There are many places where god could arrange things to be better without violating free will (the tsunami argument again.) The usual argument against this is by assertion - god knows best, so don’t argue. But it is hard to see how As for hell, why not let those who qualify into heaven, and extinguish the consciousness of those who don’t? There is always a better solution than eternal torment. changes to avoid suffering would actually wind up worse - it is not like the past 2,000 years have been so great. A secondary one is the one cosmosdan uses - suffering ain’t so bad. But then I don’t know what beneficence is.
Actually I was asking you for a definition, which you finally supplied.
I’ll compare IQs, degrees, education quality and professional recognition against yours anytime, bub.
Scott is right - you don’t understand what a rational argument is. How would you propose distinguishing your universe with god from a universe without god? How would this be relicatable by other people - after all you don’t claim a special relationship. (You’ve got that going for you, at least.)
A mathematical proof is the most rational thing I can think of. But mathematicians don’t prove things and claim a result without showing their work. They know that they can alway be wrong, and so publish the proof so it can be checked by others. You’re saying you know this stuff, and anyone who disagrees with your assertions is irrational. Not everything we do is rational, no sin in that, but we should be able to tell the difference. cosmosdan can, why not you?
You are aware that Einstein used god as a metaphor, right? And I wonder if you know enough science and calculus to have a clue as to what he is getting at here.
I haven’t seen this quote before, but I like it - especially as someone genetically averse to calculus. (Evidence - both me and my daughters. We all got through, but we didn’t like it.)
Feynman found calculus obvious and fun. :eek: Thanks for sharing it, anyway.
Thanks for the cite, Voyager, but your above post is in the wrong thread. Just because he is treating this as the same thread as the other one doesn’t mean ou have to, as well.
Gods laws cannot be violated. Examples of Gods Laws: Gravitation, Thermodynamics, etc…
Why do you have different cells?
You are asking me to prove something in opposition of the way that I have defined God. It cannot be distinguished from the operation of purely physical laws. Those purely physical laws ARE the operation. Remember I’ve been arguing that the opposition between science and God are a false dichotomy. How is it rational for you to cling to a definition where one must distinguish God from the universe, and ask me to supply evidence for you when I disagree with the basic premise you are asking me to prove?
I defined it as such when I first entered the thread. It’s not my fault you haven’t been reading what I’ve written.
The reason it is meaningless is that the universe was designed as it is. God wanted it the way that it is, and thus it is that way. You can play word games using the word omni all day long if you like. It doesn’t show a lack on Gods part, only on those having the argument.
I disagree that omnibenevolence is a necessary component. The reason that God knows best, is because God creates that which is known. We all are God, we decide what occurs in this world.
So validation of your peer group is evidence of rationality?
I used to color comic books. My boss had built the company we worked at into a company that was earning revenue of about $ 1m a year. He always talked about how smart he was, that he had a 180 IQ. Meanwhile, he was alienating everyone at the company that we were subcontracting with. Everyone at our company knew it because the two companies were intimately connected, and he was alienating people on our side too. He didn’t realize that he was driving his company into the ground until his company that employed more than twenty people was just him and his wife getting enough work coloring posters for another company: Marvel. He ended up moving out of New York City, up to Westchester to do illustration work. He went from running the coloring on 10+ titles for one company to doing spot illustration in the course of a few months. He thought he his big IQ was evidence of his intelligence and rationality as well.
For me all I know is that I’ve been told I was a genius all of my life. I tested for an IQ, and my parents wouldn’t tell me what it was because they didn’t want me to brag about it to other children. My step-mother who always tried to tell me she was smarter than me didn’t understand that telling a 7 year old that my IQ was so high she couldn’t tell me what it was made me brag anyway.
The moral of the story is that there are a lot of idiots with high IQs.
I do understand what a rational argument is, but you are laboring under a pretense that atheism is rational de facto, and that is irrational. It is irrational to tell someone else that their experience is incorrect. Having a lot of people who share your irrationality does not prove that you are rational. This message board just happens to be a place where atheists like yourself are well represented, and it’s easy to find people who will agree with you. That doesn’t make it rational. It’s like Der Trihs claiming that Mysticism is all bullshit, but he doesn’t even know what Mysticism is, because as he says he doesn’t have time to study bullshit, though he has plenty of time to debunk something he knows nothing about. That is irrational.
And no, I don’t claim a special relationship, I don’t know anything that is not knowable by you or anyone else.
I am not trying to debunk the work of mathematicians. And no, anyone who disagrees with me is not irrational. People who use junk science to disprove my experience are irrational. You are making a very fundamental mistake. You are thinking that my inability to COMMUNICATE it to YOU makes me irrational. This is not the case, and that is not a rational assumption. You can believe what you want to believe. In this particular argument I was trying to flip the script on the atheist argument. Someone can quite rationally come to a belief that there is no God. However, the arguments that are generally put forth trying to disprove God are irrational. Like word games about omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Or asking if God can make 2+2=5. Words are used to describe the universe, sometimes words are inadequate to describe that which is being discussed, and omnipotent is inadequate in this case. It doesn’t prove/disprove anything about God, it only proves/disproves that omnipotent is insufficient to describe God.
The point of mysticism is to transmit ideas that are beyond the limitations of words. Myths oftentimes have encoded into them ways of living or thinking that our ancestors tried to pass on to us. For instance, if you study Vedic scripts you might find methods of crop rotation hidden within. That is what mysticism is about, it is about trying to find a nugget of knowledge within an imprecise method of communication. If you were willing to drop your defenses, and your clinging to words, we might come to a common understanding, but you want to hold me to some rigid belief that I don’t actually hold. Sure some of the things others have said about God/Mysticism/Theology help me explain what I have seen and experienced, but holding me to their experience is only going to frustrate both of us and serves no purpose.
Now you’re claiming a superior understanding of what Einstein meant when he said the word “God”. Man you people will find any way to justify your bias won’t you?
Hey, if the same bigotted view of religion is being discussed here, I don’t see how it’s off topic. This thread was a shallow attempt at blaming religion for all the world’s problems. It is the same thread. It’s the Atheist circle jerk where everyone agrees that each other is rational, whether or not it’s true.
Anyway, you’re right, this is a stupid thread. I should be bowing out. Who cares if you think that religion is responsible for all the world’s problems? You’re right it is responsible for all the world’s problems, just like society is, just like God is, just like laws of physics are.
I apologize for being stupid enough to even give it the time of day.
Because we evolved from cooperating colonies of one celled animals, that’s why. And our cells don’t think individually.
Many theists say that God is outside the universe. If God created the universe, then he cannot be of it. If he is the universe, we must ask how did it get created? If you use the standard explanation of cosmology (as best we know it) we wonder how a consciousness emerged from the Big Bang directly.
If god is all powerful, as you claim, can he violate our accepted idea of physical laws, perhaps by moving a planet out of its orbit without applying force? If not, he is not all powerful, and is just another name for physical laws.
No, you said god was the universe, which is not much of a definition, and does not directly imply some of the answers you gave.
Wrongo. The reason it is meaningless is because 4 is defined through the axiomatic definition of artithmetic, which begins with the axiomatic definition of “1” and the successor function. You can define addition using these, and all the numbers. Here is a sketch of a proof, skipping the application of addition.
which is the definition of 4 (succ(succ(succ(1)))
in this system. QED. Five is succ(succ(succ(succ(1)))))
No one, not even atheists, expects god to do something which is logically impossible.
As for the tri-omni argument - you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?
Saying that omnibenevolence is not a property of god is perfectly okay. Ancient peoples, like the Greeks, certainly didn’t use it. It is more of a Christian ideal. I agree that we decide what occurs (absent the random earthquake) so how is god deciding this different from people doing so without a god? You’re just asserting that this has anything to do with a god.
Getting a PhD in a technical field is typically good evidence, yes. I only brought it up to test your claim that you were smarter than me. The claim does not appear to stand up.
Here’s a quote from me: “That Dennis Richie posts on comp.arch means you should never assume anything about the intelligence of an anonymous internet user.”
If you don’t know who Dennis Richie is, you can look him up.
Actually I don’t. However, isn’t it rational to have as the default condition that something does not exist, absent evidence, be it god, unicorns, planets, or invisible Pink Unicorns? To convince ourselves that something does exist we need some sort of evidence. Claims are evidence, not good evidence, though. If I claim that Shangri-La exists, and I’ve been there, but you determine that I’ve never been out of Cleveland, then I think you get to maintain your default belief that it does not exist.
That’s a common mistake. It is irrational, and incorrect, to tell someone they did not have an experience. It is perfectly rational to tell them it does not map to reality, given lack of evidence to support it. Case in point all the ufo abduction experiences. Sure those people had that experience, but I rather doubt they were being abducted. Now, it is a good idea to find an alternate explanation for the experience, which has been done in this case, but it is not strictly necessary.
I do hope you don’t believe that little gray men have done anal implants on tens of thousands of people.
Well, I never made the claim of truth through amount of support. When I was a teenager I read lots of books on mysticism and the supernatural. I even have one of Conan Doyle’s books in my collection. I’ve read some of Rhine’s original work. It is bullshit, and the lack of supporting evidence after well over a century of studies is plenty of evidence of that.
Are you familiar with Einstein’s famous letter about how many misinterpreted his belief in God? I can look it up if you wish, its been posted on the Dope dozens of times. At the most he believed in god as nature, as Erasmus. I’ve never seen any evidence that he believed this “god” to actually play an active role in anything. You can always substitute “nature” for “god” with no loss of meaning.
How do cells that don’t think individually cooperate then?
Well, asking how we were created is a never ending puzzle that we are trying to solve. What I find irrational is the claim that once we find out that a previous assumption about God suddenly disproves his existence. If I am talking to you this whole time and I think you have black hair, but you really have blonde hair, that doesn’t mean that you don’t exist, only that I was incorrect about one of your properties.
To discuss the idea of creation, we’d have to go into the idea of eternity, qabbalistically there are two. There is the idea of a linear eternity where things travel along a path in sequence. then there is the idea that all things that have ever happened, are happening, and ever will happen are happening at once.
This why I said that omnipotence is insufficient. We could say that God is all powerful in that he can create logic puzzles that are by necessity paradoxical. I think this is wanking, I think that God is omnilogical, as logic is a property of God, that in the case of the “three omnis” that it’s a paradox in the words you are using, not a paradox in the actuality of God. Force is a form power, asking God to be so powerful that he can move a planet out of orbit without using power is just silly. It doesn’t tell you anything about God, it only tells you that you are spinning your wheels on the subject.
Any deep study of mysticism will caution one against attempting to quantify and qualify God. In Qabbalah the word is “Ain Sof”, which means roughly “Without limit”. You are asking for God to be limited in a way that doesn’t suit the concept, the closest thing to a synonym I can provide is “The universe”, which is also a fairly amorphous concept. In my estimation “The Universe” is somewhat impersonal whereas “god” is more personal. The difference is that one describes “all that is” the thing and the other describes “all that is” the being.
How does that prove anything against what I said? Elaborating more deeply on what I said doesn’t prove that I am wrong.
How can atheists expect anything of God? God doesn’t exist.
Yes, I do, and I think and have always thought that it was a stupid argument.
It’s not different. The Earthquake is decided by the Earth and the solar system which are also beings of which we are a subset. Us understanding the Earth, Sun, God are all of those things of which we are a subset, understanding themselves, this is our function.
Sure, I respect PhDs, but that doesn’t mean that people with PhDs cannot be dumbasses. I have friends with PhDs who can be major dumbasses from time to time. That doesn’t make them stupid overall, but the PhD only accounts for them being extremely knowledgeable within their field.
The claim I am smarter than you was basically a devil’s advocate approach to the whole atheism debate. I wanted atheists to see how phenomenally irritating it is to have their intelligence impugned for a belief they hold dear. I said that there was a glass ceiling, I never said that I had passed that glass ceiling and was thus smarter than all atheists.
There is the idea that all knowledge exists in the cosmos and can be tapped. Of course this requires context, but if one can tap into that base of knowledge then they essentially know ‘everything’. A belief that this is not the case would be an impediment to understanding were it true, no? I believe it to be true, you do not have to. The wonderful thing about it is that it is essentially provable. If I could tap into it, then you could ask me any question, and I would be able to answer it.
This goes back to free will however, because your will not to believe in it can override my will to prove it to you, even if you pretend to give me permission to prove it.
I agree that this is sound advice.
No that is not rational at all. To assume something does not exist because it is out of your experience isn’t rational. For instance, I could know where a unicorn is and want to show it to you, and you can say “Bring it to me and I’ll believe you.”, but what if the unicorn is wild, and I can only prove it by bringing you to the Unicorn? It would take active participation on your part for me to prove that it exists. There is a difference between not believing something that hasn’t been proven to you and disbelieving something that hasn’t been proven to you. non-belief is passive, disbelief is active. It is rational to withhold judgement, it is irrational to say it is incorrect without evidence.
I don’t know if someone has been abducted by UFOs or not. I’m all for hearing their story though, and I’m not going to immediately call them an idiot, because my life will be enriched by hearing a crazy diatribe about their abduction. Personally I would like for UFOs to exist, it would make things more interesting.
Have you read the Sefer Yetzirah? I personally hate the word supernatural, because everything is natural. If someone is capable of telekinesis then it is natural. If Cthulu scrambles my psyche, it’s natural. The word supernatural depends upon a very narrow defintion of the word ‘natural’. I’ve never read Conan Doyle, though he’s always struck me as more of a dabbler than anything. A lot of what you consider math/science in antiquity was the venue of mystics such as Pythagoras. I feel like the mystic pursuit was split into two factions. At some point the “Natural Philosophers” took over as the arbiters of culture from the priests, and suddenly there was a split into what is “real” science and what is “junk” science. Oftentimes someone gets laughed out of a room only to be vindicated years later.
Here are some great quotes by Max Planck that are topical:
“The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.”
-- Max Planck
“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning.”
My rabbi never said that gentiles were going to hell, or were less loved by god than we were.