Which Christian texts would be acceptable to you? I’d hate to submit 4,000 failed predictions if only 700 would pass the test.
How about Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.--Mark 9:1 This seems to be a pretty big FAIL for Christianity.
Well, once you correctly translate the Greek from the Hebrew from the Aramaic you’ll find that what Jesus really meant was [fill in some bullshit from your favorite apologist].
The former.
A boulder rolling down a hill doesn’t “contain” the idea of a wheel. So whether the boulder exists or not has no bearing on the existence of the idea.
Not if a new thought is a *rearrangement *of the existing matter within in the brain.
You assume thoughts are things. But it would be more appropriate to say that that they’re patterns. I can take a set of alphabet blocks and rearrange them to spell something completely new without adding any matter to the alphabet blocks. Similarly I can rearrange my neurons to think a new idea without adding any new matter to my brain.
Stating that God limits his own omniscience in regards to his own actions is like saying that if I choose not to go out and and engage in a homicidal rampage that I don’t really have free will. It’s a self-imposed limitation.
How do you measure omniscience against itself unless you’re going to constrain omniscience to not knowing everything in totality, but knowing everything about a certain subject. I.e., omniscience in regards to math and science would be greater than omniscience in math. Omniscience in math, reading and science would be greater than omniscience in math and science. And so on and so forth. But that would require redefining what it means to be omniscient. At any rate, the greatest knowing would be knowing everything for not only all time, but before and after it as well. But that wouldn’t make sense here, since God is considered to be eternal (and the concept of time doesn’t even make sense when speaking of timelessness, anyway), and time itself would have no concept to him.
No one said he doesn’t know, but rather he chooses not to know. One implies his power being limited not necessarily because he wants them to be limited, whilst the other denote a personal choice God makes in reference to his own powers. There’s a difference between those two statements. Anyway, “God can do everything” is a meaningless statement. Generally speaking, when people say God can do everything, they mean he can do everything that can possibly be done as everything, by definition, includes contradictory notions.
Knowing the consequences of your actions doesn’t necessarily mean you know what your actions which led to you said consequence were. Presumably if I showed you a video of you in jail a year from now, you wouldn’t necessarily know what your actions were to lead you there unless I also told you what you were there for.
I’m not arguing anything, just pointing out that he doesn’t violate any law if he’s not held to it.
You’d be quite surprised just how few X will happen at Y predictions the major religions have made.
Right. I think therefore I am (T>A), not I am therefore I think (A>T). The first is an affirmation of existence, while the second an affirmation consciousness, which is what I said.
Ehhh, okay. The idea that consciousness implies existence isn’t necessarily true or, at least, it’s based on the assumption first that you exist. Consciousness implies existence, and you need to exist before you’re conscious. If you think you can be conscious before you exist, then let me know. As I noted before, Descartes statement isn’t so much an affirmation of one’s consciousness, but one’s existence, through which our conscious let’s us know we do.
A thought, or the memory of a thought, is simply the rewiring in a sense of what is already in the brain. No new matter is needed. Rewiring might be too strong, I believe it is adjustment of the threshold values at which the neurons fire.
Now a thought itself is probably an interaction of neurons - I’ll give an analogy with computers later.
The idea might be sitting there in a place hard to access, or it might be overwritten, but it at some point had a physical impact on the brain. You’re quite wrong in denying that.
Okay, computers. A computer program has a physical representation, perhaps as something written, or an ASCII file, or object code. It sits on a disk and parts will sit in the Instruction cache of a processor.
A computer process is the set of states and transitions the computer goes through while executing a program. It is more like a thought. If you smash a computer, the programs it was running might be safe and sound on a disk, but the process it was running is gone forever. There is clearly nothing supernatural about a process, and it is physical because it involves the interaction of physical things. Just like thought.
Perhaps a written idea is like a program. You might say not, because a process is an exact implementation of a program, but in fact it isn’t. Even assuming that the computer is working properly, the process may involve executing instructions in a different order from the way they were written in the program. Some may get dropped altogether. So a process, like a thought, has no existence until it is run, and no existence after it is finished - but it is still basically physical.
So physical object exist even if no one thinks they do, while immaterial objects, such as ideas, exist only when people believe they exist? And how do you know this?
It doesn’t contain the idea of the wheel in the sense that if you cracked open the boulder it would have schematics on how to build a wheel, but it does in the sense that it rolls down the hill much the same way any similar rounded object would.
Thoughts aren’t a rearrangement of the existing matter in the brain.
Number one, a pattern is a thing lol. Number two, the brain doesn’t work that way. While you tend to forget some older things as you learn new things, you don’t forget everything. The brain (as far as I know) isn’t capped to where you only have a certain amount of space and can only think “raw” or “war”, but not both, or where you have to toss out old information for new information because there isn’t enough room.
(If I’m wrong, feel free to correct me.)
And to that guy who posted before you, I’d honestly have to sit down and look for stuff on Mark 9 because, admittedly so, I ain’t a Biblical scholar.
No, because unlike your example mine violates the very definition of God. Say you define a Saint as someone who never commits a sin. (An incorrect definition, I know.) It is incorrect to say that I’d be a saint no matter what I did, even killing someone, and I don’t kill someone out of free will. The fact is, the moment I do kill someone I am no longer a Saint. The definition constrains my actions, and saying I choose to live under the constraints doesn’t make a difference. Now, if I extend the definition of Saint to be someone who commits no sin and can do everything, I have a contradiction, since a Saint cannot commit a sin and still be a saint. What he does is not important, what is is what he is able to do.
By considering omniscience by itself, I mean without reference to omnipotence. The so-called proofs of God usually compare various levels of knowing against each other, just as you did, and there is no problem doing that. I also agree about God knowing before and after time. I don’t know what that means, but then again I’m not God.
In any case. it is clear that knowing everything is greater than knowing everything except the state of the universe for one nanosecond. Since God is the greatest that there is and can be, the entity not knowing about one nanosecond is not God.
By your definition you can run into the “Can God make a taco so big he can’t eat it” chestnut. The reason that this is not a good argument against God is that involves a logical impossibility, and saying that God is the greatest that there can exclude these quite nicely. Ditto for doing two contradictory things. He must be able to choose either, but not both.
Read it again, in context. The passage comes from Descartes examining what we know and what it is okay to doubt. He says we can reasonably doubt just about everything in the universe, because our senses can be deluded or we might have been trained as children to see things that are not true. But then we come to the final level of doubt, that of our very existence. And there he says we cannot doubt our existence, because the very act of doubting - thought - implies that we exist in order to have the thought. Doubt implies thought, thought implies consciousness, and consciousness implies existence.
Define thing. A pattern is an arrangement of things. It is not a thing in the sense that if you remove the things the pattern is on, it goes away also. How much mass does a pattern have?
You are wrong. If you write something on a disk, you are not adding matter. If you overwrite a location, you are not overwriting all locations. Ditto for memory. Writing something to a memory location involves forcing either a 1 or 0 to recirculate within.
If thought involved adding matter to the brain, we’d all be fatheads in short order. We think we forget by losing a link to the memory, which might be recovered.
Well, Jesus said the world would end within the generation of his own disciples. That’s really the only “prediction” that the New Testament can be said to make, and it was a whiff.
There are failed predictions in the Ole Testament, though, and there are gobs and gobs of factual errors and contradictions in both Testaments. You really want to go down this road?
As an incidental note, are black conservatives really all that unusual?
Yup. I wouldn’t even call an idea an idea an “immaterial object”. It’s simply a pattern of neurological activity.
Lots of things exist only as patterns. A square dance exists when the dancers are dancing it. When the dancers stop dancing it, the square dance doesn’t continue to exist as an “immaterial object” floating around in the ether. It just goes away.
Sure they are. When we learn new things we form new neural connections. Thinking about different things produces different patterns of neurological activity. The connections between our neurons and how they fire define our thoughts.
It’s not a physical object. It’s an arrangement of physical objects.
The facts that ideas are stored as arrangements of neurological connections and are experienced as patterns of neurological activity does not mean that the brain can only hold one idea at a time. Different arrangements of neurons store different ideas, and those ideas rise to the forefront of our consciousness in response to different chains of thought or stimulus.
But that doesn’t make ideas somehow unreal or immaterial. They’re still just patterns in the brain.
After reading most of this entire massive thread it seems pretty obvious that human reasoning is not based on evidence or logic, but evidence and logic only follow a person’s assumptions. The only way you can hope to persuade someone is to persuade them to entertain different assumptions, at least for the sake of the argument.
If you’ve got the wrong assumptions to deconstruct the situation you will fail to see a clear answer… even if it is staring you in the face.
This hypothesis does require, of course, that all parties are discussing the topic in good faith.
This thread was both massively interesting and massively frustrating to read.
But usually the first step in this process is demonstrating that their current assumptions are inconsistent with evidence or logic (or both).
However, if someone steadfastly refuses to even consider the possibility that their assumptions might be wrong, then there’s little you can do. The gods themselves contend in vain … .
Like it.
I only skimmed but I’d read more later. It immediately reminding me of some of the arguments I see repeated here.
I think reasoning can be , ought to be , based on logic and facts ,that’s only one aspect of how we operate. There’s also emotion which can get in the way of reason. Emotion can motivate people to reject certain facts as unreliable, even when they ought to be. It can move people to justify things they prefer to believe and accept bad logic. People respond with different levels of emotion and or reason, and so it goes.
When I was a Christian years ago I operated within a certain group of people that supported certain beliefs and never really challenged them. It’s a self sustaining belief system in that way.
it is instructive to read the natural philosophers from Greek and Roman times, or even those who came before Copernicus, Galileo, and the beginning of modern science. They are not emotional, and they are logical, but it is easy for us to see where their assumptions go wrong. Some of them are explicitly stated, and some are implicit in their knowledge base.
Modern scientists are hardly immune from making the same type of mistakes. The difference, and the reason we’ve made so much progress, is that when we do experiments we set up a situation where nature dope slaps us when we get it wrong.
I was reading through the thread until I saw this, when I immediatley stopped. I hope this post was a joke.
Read a bit further down for a better joke…
It’s the evidence that is ignoring the skeptic!
That last bit isn’t how Biblical prophecies work, is it? They don’t give a use by date.
A quick search for “Biblical prophecy fail” turned up this site, which has lots of examples. I think my favorite one is Matthew 12:5 where Jesus misquotes the Old Testament, but a clear failed prophecy is Isaiah 17:1:
Surely, that’s past its due date by now, and Damascus has never stopped being a city and has never been a ruinous heap.