Because you cant prove a negative.
We had a poster on this board who was rabidly anti god,now I would like there to be a god but 'I cant see any evidence for one,so I see no need to rant and rave either way ,I have no agenda .
But this slightly strange type HAD to tell us there was no sandy claws suggests something to me,I’ve seen the face of death many times,aren’t Ilucky but never felt the need to ram it down peoples necks.Aren’t Ilucky.
Maybe this muddied the waters, I forgot a NOT. Why can’t I edit my post here?
It should have said “I am NOT this famous philosopher”.
Let me make it perfectly clear:
A dear friend of mine once gave me a book of poetry by a Quentin Smith. The author of that book of poetry is the same Quentin Smith seen here: http://www.qsmithwmu.com
I am not that Quentin Smith. My name in real life is not Quentin Smith OR Quentin S. Smith. I am not trying to give the impression that I really am the Quentin Smith seen at this webpage: http://www.qsmithwmu.com
I choose that name because I liked his poetry. I am not that familiar with his other work and would need to familiarize myself with his work before I debate it. I added the middle “S” because that’s my middle initial and it’s part of a running joke in my family (me always including my middle initial).
I hope that the confusion is gone now.
I wouldn’t call myself anti-god, but I think that in the interest of “fighting ignorance” (the board’s motto) it’s important to point out that there is no evidence of a god and that therefore the rational choice is not to believe in a supernatural being.
I went into a fair amount of detail in the three threads linked to the post above (well, on page 4). It might be more descriptive than definitive (I don’t purport to fully understand the process myself) but it should give us a starting point.
Then you can’t prove what you’re saying.
I read through some of the stuff you posted in the other threads, and I still don’t really understand what you think prayer is.
You’re against organized group prayer, because it acts to prevent ‘real’ prayer, which is supposed to separate us from unified collective thinking? You’re communicating with something outside the ‘social mindset’ to something that is supposed to give you ‘confirmation’ and ‘reality checking second opinions’?
So god provides you with messages and visions which when shared with the rest of the group act as a reality check, and are only incorporated into the social mindset if they genuinely ring true?
Well, for what I understand of it, I don’t any real fundmental difference between your kind of prayer and personal prayer. You’re communicating with something outside of humanity/this world to get something more than we/it can give you. you don’t regard that something as an anthropomorphized god, so you dont consider ‘talking’ to be a good way to think about it, but it’s still just some kind of communication.
This suffers from the same problem I see regular prayer suffering. You’re having some kind of interaction with something that you claim isn’t, er, not really sure actually, ‘of this world’ doesn’t seem to fit, so I guess ‘of humanity’ will have to do. You are getting something out of this interaction, visions, messages, whatever, that you claim come from this outside thing. Do you have any evidence that this outside thing exists? Do you have any evidence that the visions and messages are in fact coming from the outside thing, and not your own mind? Personal experience cannot be considered evidence, especially in this case, because there is no non-personal event happening that others can see attributed to the outside thing, it’s all happening in your mind, so to speak.
What do you understand of the process?
To answer the OP:
Because belief in God (depending on the definition) is as solidly argued here as disbelief in God. So much so that to the extent that my disbelief in the existence of God has been strengthened through my following and engaging in discussions here, my respect for those who take the converse position, particularly certain posters here like Liberal, Polycarp, etc has also grown.
I have said that it’s the entirety of everything, the all-encompassing. Yes, I have sufficient evidence to convince me that there’s a universe beyond “humanity”, beyond AHunter3, etc. Do you doubt it?
I would assume that in some sense of the word every thought, impression, comprehension, idea, & notion that crosses by brain “comes from my own mind”, but it does so in a state of interaction with the world outside my skull. In some cases there are direct and immediate correlations with direct sensory input, in other cases my mind is musing in an abstract way about different concepts and how they relate to each other… in some sense, if you follow things back far enough, w/regard to those latter types of mental activity you’d find bits and threads of it that tie in to sensory input, too — but nowhere near as directly.
Reciprocal question: Do you have any evidence that the thoughts and ideas represented in your post stem from the outside world, or did they just emerge spontaneously in your mind?
In other words, the distinction makes less sense than you probably believed it did when you asked it. Prayer involves my mind, but it involves my mind in a state of interaction with the world, some of which interaction is immediately of-the-moment and some of which may be incidents in the past and/or ongoing situations experienced over time, etc etc.
My dear child, I can’t prove that anything at all is happening or has ever happened anywhere other than in my mind. (You can reject solipsism but you can’t prove it to be wrong). I find that the overall world-view I get when I “believe” that there’s really a “you” out there reading this, rather than me imagining it all, fits better, “click” better, more succinctly models my experiences in an emotionally compelling manner, than the alternative.
You do that, too, even if you’re not aware that you do. Empirical evidence can confirm or invalidate a hypothesis, it can bolster or cast doubt upon a theory, but it can’t generate the hypotheses and the theories, and without them it has no meaning, no pattern, no order, no explanatory model of what structure it is that the data-points are representative of. Theorization is an art, not a science. It’s intuitive, not deductive. Ultimately the world that is “real” to you is chosen by your mind as the best model to fit the facts based on how it feels.
Meanwhile: the question was not whether I can prove that prayer does work; rather, the claim was made that it could be proven that it does not.
You’re not one of the two who made that assertion, so it’s an onus upon you to render that proof, but neither is it mine to prove the alternative case, as I never claimed to be able to prove anything of the sort.
Edit, too late to use the edit button:
should of course be:
so it’s not an onus upon you to render that proof
Here is where we reach an impasse. (I speak only for myself here.) You have no evidence of God. You presume that all choices in life should be rational choices. You then assume that everyone else must accept that all choices must be made on the basis of your defined rationality. This gets shorthanded into " . . . there is no evidence of god." And then you argument moves forward from that assertion as if it were an axiom.
I have evidence of God. My evidence is not rational. I have no proof. (And even in pure materialistic logic, evidence and proof are different things.) I find rational examination, and logical thinking to be excellent tools in some aspects of life. I do not find them to be the sole foundation upon which an entire human existence (mine, that is) must be built.
There are times when one has a choice, and logic, and reason clearly favor one decision. If one is to live by logic and reason alone, that decision is no decision at all. But there are other criteria than logic, other examinations than rationality. To live according to the belief system presented as the desires of a great being, dedicated to love, to compassion, and to faithfulness of actions and beliefs is such a choice. The materialist logical refutation of the existence of the being is irrelevant to faith.
On the same path, in the other direction, was I to convince you, with logic that God loved you, you might believe it, but you would know only the truth. You might gain knowledge; you might even gain insight, or even wisdom. I cannot give you God’s love. Evangelism by argument is a grave error of faith, in my view. Only by my actions can I give you the word of God. And at every step I must be wary of my own frailty. As I love you, so you will know that God loves you. It is a burden to be taken up with joy, but with trepidation as well. For as I fail, so will you make your judgment, not of me, but of Christ Himself. You will see in Him, my faults, rather than seeing in me, His strengths. So you see, arguing about God is more dangerous for me than for you.
So, if you don’t mind, I could really use that pass you mentioned giving to believers in God. I promise not to try to apply it to UFO’s.
Tris
It has NEVER been a valid answer in the first place.
Belief in various gods has a basis in witness testimony. There are people who claim to have seen miracles performed, or heard some god speaking to them. Nobody at all claims to have seen a FSM.
It’s a valid argument to ask a Christian why he doesn’t believe in the Hindu gods, or vice versa. It’s stupid to ask a Christian, or a Hindu why he doesn’t believe in the FSM.
As a sceptic I object to this type of phony argument. It convinces nobody, makes you look stupid, and discredits the rest of us by association.
Give me a dozen children for an hour a week in the appropriate setting. I could change that.
It’s still a false argument, and Dawkins is still a dick for making it.
By this rationalization, someone who is color blind could say that there is no actual difference between red and green.
But in the face of evidence showing why he believes red and green to be the same color, and how it can be shown that the simplest explanation for why everyone else can consistently give the same answer when shown a random painted board, it seems to become a bit silly to try and maintain that you aren’t simply color blind. The only difference being that in this case, the grand majority of everyone is color blind.
A majority voterbase of color blind people still doesn’t mean that red and green aren’t two different, distinguishable colors. It just means that, as the OP notes, they’re being let off easy.
People make up all sort of messed up stuff for many reasons. In the end, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is more benign.
I took his reasoning to be that empirical rules of evidence do not apply to metaphysical things. If red and green can be empirically measured, then they are not metaphysical. He does not use the tool of prayer to determine whether something is red or green, and he does not use the tool of science to determine whether God exists. If you find that unreasonable, then you ascribe mystical powers to science that are, frankly, indiscernable from religion.
But you can throw a spectometer against red and green and show numbers indicating they have different physics.
This is more like your partner trying to convince you that there is a significant difference in two nearly identical colors of nail polish - she cares, you don’t, and you don’t see any difference between Sonora Sunset and Chicago Champagne Toast - and don’t understand why she bemoans the loss of Wyatt Erple Purple - which as far as you can tell, was nearly identical to the other two. And will never get why this is in the least bit important.
(I miss Wyatt Erple Purple - Chicago Champagne Toast is a little too dark and Sonora Sunset is a little too nude).
A universe beyond youself? That’s what you believe is god? Sorry, but that’s rather weak. You’re going to have to expand that definition further, because by your words you think everything and everyone except you encompasses god.
I can show that at least some of what I posted was influenced by the outside world. I posted an attempted summary of your ideas on prayer, and that did not arise spontaneously in my own mind. I do not assume that the things I took in from the world outside my own mind came from ‘god’, because I have no evidence for it. Of course, if you’re going to define ‘god’ as ‘everything that isn’t me’ then you really have no choice do you? If you wish to claim that some piece of information came from ‘god’, then you’re going to have to provide evidence that this is so.
I didn’t ask for proof, I asked for evidence. All that stuff that makes you think something fits better, clicks, or more succinctly models your experiences is called evidence. From what evidence did you draw the conclusion that there is an outside thing communicating with your mind?
The problem here is that you have taken a word, ‘prayer’, and redefined it to mean something no other person would assume it means. You’ve changed the goal, and not told the other players in the game. Even though your version of prayer is similar to the more common version, you’ve arbitrarily redefined it to exclude a lot of the real world interaction, as yours takes place entirely in your mind.
Then it is not evidence.
You make a huge leap here. Why is logic irrelevant to faith? Can you give a reason other than ‘because I say so’?
In order to do this, you would need to convince a person that there was a god, wouldn’t you?
You haven’t shown why we should give your belief a pass. Why should it be exempt from the reason?
How exactly is he wrong? Can you bring to him a true experience of the joy of the subtle interplay of colors?
Would you call him stupid for failing to consider your optical instruments to be significant?
Even though the hypothetical you propose is not really relevant, I will follow it this far. I don’t claim that there is no difference between red and green. I simply state that I do not perceive the difference between them. Do you have a counter argument that will change that?
Tris