Back to basics: Give me an argument as to why a god exists

[FaerieStories]

Hi, I'm new here and I see a lot of active topics on specific concepts where users are already heavily engaged in debate, making it a little hard for me to join in. So to test the waters a little (and to help me decide whether or not to stick around here), let's go back to basics and have a debate about the most fundamental question at hand here: does a god exist?

As a non-believer, I have yet to discover any convincing reason as to why I should believe in a god. So, if a Theist would like to get the ball rolling by giving me a reason why god exists, that would be great.

(PS: unrelated question: what is the general breakdown of belief/non-belief on these forums? Is it an even mix of believers and non-believers, or is there- as tends to happen on the internet- a larger proportion of atheists to Theists?).

[scourge99]

If you do not understand why a method must be shown as reliable before we should trust it results then I am afraid we have nothing more to discuss on that matter. This reminds me of a debate I had where my opponent made a claim that i disagreed with. I explained that his claim was not necessarily true because he was committing a logical fallacy. He conceded that he was committing a logical fallacy but nonetheless insisted that the logical fallacy proved his point. There was nothing more to do at the point in the debate.

That, of course, is entirely up to you. I refuse to climb into the box you have placed yourself in, and I have never claimed to have proven anything to anyone.

I don't even know what it means to discuss "another realm of knowledge". Its word-salad to me much like square-circles and a place north of the north pole. I don't know what those things even mean or are so I can't comment.

Well, it does require the ability for abstract thought.

I find it bizarre in the extreme that you would question the need for a reliable method. A reliable method by definition can be trusted because its result are dependable/accurate. If you use a method which is not dependable/accurate (reliable) then the results are undependable/inaccurate (unreliable) by defintion. In other words, unreliable methods have a high probability of returning FALSE results. Methods with unknown reliability have an unknown probability of returning false and true results.

I feel like its insulting to have to explain this.

I'm not in the least offended. It is your own choice to limit your perception of reality to only that which is subject to "reliable" methodology. It does require a certain degree of courage to accept what is merely pointed to without the need for certainty.

Scourge:

Many non-theists accomplish all that without such beliefs. That you require faux beliefs to accomplish those things you listed is a personal failing on your part alone. Similarly, some Christians claim that without a belief in god then they would be hedonistic, rapists, and criminals. It appears you suffer from a similar defect but in different aspect.

Kayky:

Another claim you keep making. I see very little evidence of this in the world.

Scourge:

I have no idea what you are referring to and I'm not going to guess. Try to be a bit more specific. Use complete sentences.

You keep claiming that nontheists can achieve the same degree of personal transformation without God. But I see no evidence to accept such a claim on face value.

A well-placed sentence fragment is an effective rhetorical device. But I suppose you're as rigid with your syntax as you are with your view of reality as a whole.

You are under no obligation. But at this point it seems you are merely being intransigent. After all its pretty damn bold to claim that non-theistic beliefs:

1. Can't provide one emotional healing, sometimes instantaneously.

2. Can't make one a more loving and hence more moral human being.

3. Can't provide a sense of groundedness and peace and make one more comfortable in their own skin.

One example that comes to mind is McCullouch. Talk with him if you think these things are impossible or rare for non-theists.

I actually agree with you. I'm just giving you a taste of your own medicine. Bitter, isn't it?

I don't recall ever calling or even implying you are a liar. I find your beliefs irrational. Which I think you'll accept as a fair assessment if allow me to explain. As you have stated before, your priority seems to be more about obtaining personal comfort and happiness even at the expense of truth and knowledge.

I am just as interested in truth and knowledge as you are. If my conclusions happen to lead to happiness, well, I suppose that's just a bonus.

Your description perfectly characterizes the difference in thought between many atheists and theists. [some] Theists are concerned with finding satisfying beliefs that ring true. [some] Atheists are concerned with having true beliefs regardless of how unsettling, uncomfortable, or unsatisfying they may or may not be.

I find this an ironic comment. I see you as the one unable to deal with the discomfort of uncertainty.

By what means or method did you arrive at this knowledge? If your method cannot be shown as reliable then how do you know the "knowledge" you gained from it is reliable? In what sense is it "knowledge" if its can't be shown as reliable or true oir probable?

A close encounter of the third kind. As I have said before, I don't require a fool-proof test. I know what I have experienced, and I know what it has meant in my life. That's enough for me.

It tells me you are entirely oblivious that your criticism of others applies equally as well to you. ( I think there's a word for that but it escapes me. I was thinking hypocrite but that is for someone who knowingly does what they criticize others for.)

You criticize non-theists for having blind faith when they claim that science can figure out everything (which I agree with you on) but then you turn around and commit the same type of error you criticize them for by having blind faith that science cannot ever figure out some things. You are an extremist just like the non-theists you criticize but in the opposite end of the spectrum.

This would be amusing if it wasn't so desperate sounding. You are the most extreme atheist I have ever debated on this site. I realize that you may have been burned by religion (former Mormon?). I know what that feels like. You are just unable to comprehend, it seems, how someone could respond to it in a way different from yours.

WHy do you assume there is meaning? THat is, why do you assume that there is anymore meaning then we make for ourselves?

The universal human desire for meaning points to the possibility of meaning.

We are classified as apes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae

I don't even know what it means to ask if we are more than smart apes? More than WHAT in regards to smart apes? Your question is, once again, vague, probably meaningless. Probably another attempt at obfuscation while trying to sound profound.

If we are part of an intelligence much larger than the universe itself, that would be pretty profound.

Is there more to existence than meets the eye?

What does that even mean??? Do you speak English or do you just try to speak in riddles because you think it makes you sound profound?

Say what you mean. Stop obfuscating.

Stop feigning ignorance. Unless you were raised by wolves, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But I'll play along and try to put it in simpler language for you:

What if there is a profound intelligence behind the universe?

Or even simpler:

What if there is a God?

The only intelligence I am aware of are us and some other animals that exist on earth. I don't know if anything else in the universe is intelligent.

Furthermore, its highly controversial what it "intelligence" exactly means. Colloquially its a vague and imprecise term.

How are we communicating with each other right now? Your claim of "vagueness" and "attempted profundity" does not dismiss these concepts as beyond the realm of human understanding.

My criticism hasn't ever been that you need to shutup about your experiences or anything about decorum. That you think this tells me that you either aren't paying attention or are being hysterical.

My criticism of your beliefs has ALWAYS been about HOW you interpret your experiences and HOW you reach the conclusions you do.

I know exactly the nature of your criticism as I have addressed it more than once on this very post. I hope I have made it clearer to you my criticism of your limited view of reality.

Please explain in what way these other methods are "valid". Also please cite one of these methods AND explain this method in a little bit of detail. Also explain the scope of its "validity"--I.E., what are its limits of application.

Experience is only valid to the experiencer. It helps though to know how universal this experience is.

Most of your responses in your last post are personal attacks, insults and rhetoric that in no way attempt to actually address what I said in good faith. If you actually care about my thoughts on the matter then you'll fix the last post. If not then you won't be receiving a response other than this.

[JohnPaul]

Tex wrote:

So if you don't believe it is logical that God exist, then I say: you being here(site), is for no reason and just a waste of your time and space. Wouldn't you agree.
Unless you are not sure of your atheism.

To you, existing for no reason is logical, because you can't even fantom why you exist and for what purpose. You are here on earth to learn for nothing. You go through life for nothing....In the end your life has no purpose. Your life has no value. It is the same as the fly I just killed. This you see as logical....Interesting.

You killed a fly? Why did you kill the fly? Couldn't you just as easily have shooed it outside? It was only going about its business and not intending to harm you.

Surely, you know that in some beliefs, killing any living creature is a sin. What makes you think that the fly didn't have just as much right to live as you do, and just as much purpose for being here as you do?

[JoeyKnothead]

From Post 220:

So if you don't believe it is logical that God exist, then I say: you being here(site), is for no reason and just a waste of your time and space. Wouldn't you agree.
Unless you are not sure of your atheism.

Not hardly. My life has plenty of meaning without attributing it to a god, or without a theist declaring it can have no meaning until I worship the one god they're so proud of.

To you, existing for no reason is logical, because you can't even fantom why you exist and for what purpose.

Show me you know a god's "why" or "purpose" and ya might have an argument. Without that, you're just another theist who is so proud of their god concept they refuse to accept other points of view as relevant or valid.

You are here on earth to learn for nothing. You go through life for nothing....In the end your life has no purpose. Your life has no value. It is the same as the fly I just killed. This you see as logical....Interesting.

Show me your god values these things, and you'll have a compelling case.

Otherwise, you're just another preacher who is incapable of understanding why some folks don't hafta bow to their god concept in order to find fulfillment.

[dusk]

So if you don't believe it is logical that God exist, then I say: you being here(site), is for no reason and just a waste of your time and space. Wouldn't you agree.
Unless you are not sure of your atheism.

To you, existing for no reason is logical, because you can't even fantom why you exist and for what purpose. You are here on earth to learn for nothing. You go through life for nothing....In the end your life has no purpose. Your life has no value. It is the same as the fly I just killed. This you see as logical....Interesting.

What God means here is of vital importance as has been often stated elsewhere.
Is a god as in a personal, intentional deity that cares for humans an also is omnibenevolent and so on logical. That is what most Atheist would deny. No it is not.

Something that may also be called god by some as well that manifest values, purpose and meaning does not need to be such an illogical god. It may be no more than a spirit no being at all just a force, mana, ...

Where god is only the vehicle to project certain non material concepts it doesn't need to be that personal omni everything that seems to be so inconsistent with observations of reality.
Examples being. Suffering vs. omnibenevolent god, imperfect creations from a perfect creator, creations with no purpose like ticks. Revelations on one rock in the big universe for some narcissistic people and not even that, there are eastern, western religions and thousands of in between things.
It seems more logical that this monotheist god is no more than the ideals men imagines and projects to an ultimate father that can for convenience sake be addressed. The projections of non material concepts such as values onto that being is more for lack of putting them somewhere else than for the need to pinn them to a person.

The point is monotheistic god is by no means the most logical explanation. It brings along all kinds of unnecessary problems for which there really aren't any good answers. It is too complicated and not necessary. I am not too familiar with wicca's but those esotherical religions have just as much justifications for their claims yet much simpler and less problematic because less all encompassing explanations.

The theory of monotheism is like writing up some String theory equivalent that seems to break with half of the existing proven makro models and yet because some thing it is the only such theory to explain another bunch of unproven makro models like SS it should be adopted and the problems ignored.

[JohnPaul]

Hi, I'm new here and I see a lot of active topics on specific concepts where users are already heavily engaged in debate, making it a little hard for me to join in. So to test the waters a little (and to help me decide whether or not to stick around here), let's go back to basics and have a debate about the most fundamental question at hand here: does a god exist?

As a non-believer, I have yet to discover any convincing reason as to why I should believe in a god. So, if a Theist would like to get the ball rolling by giving me a reason why god exists, that would be great.

(PS: unrelated question: what is the general breakdown of belief/non-belief on these forums? Is it an even mix of believers and non-believers, or is there- as tends to happen on the internet- a larger proportion of atheists to Theists?).

Lets see how you respond to just one example of my personal evidence for God.

10 years ago my father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. During that time I had many dreams about a smile. The smile didn't belong to a face it just hung there in mid air in my dreams. I knew it was related to my father some how so I hated the smile, but I kept dreaming of it. In my sketch pad I drew pictures of it and wrote about it. I hated it.

The night my father died 2 of my sisters called me about midnight to tell me to come to the nursing home because my father was about to die. I told them to call me again when it was all over. About 3 am I recieved another call from my sister saying my father was dead.

I got to the nursing home were I was told about the beautiful smile my dad had on his face when toke his last breath. I told my sisters I had already seen the smile and showed them my sketch pad (which was at the nursing home because we all took turns staying with him). My sketch pad had the dates when I drew or wrote something in it.

How do you explain the dreams?

Dreams are interesting, but I certainly see nothing supernatural about them. They are simply activities of the subconscious mind which deserve much more study. Psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, starting with Freud, was big at one time but now seems to have faded away.
The subconscious mind has little or no ability with verbal expression, but uses visual images very skillfully to express often very complex and sophisticated ideas. In my own dreams, I almost never see visual images of people, although I am often strongly aware of the presence of other people in my dreams. How did you know that the smile represented your father? What was it that you "hated" about it? I suspect that you had seen a similar smile on your father's face in the past, so the smile represented your father to you. You hated the image because it reminded you that your father was dying. It did not "predict" his death. You already knew that, or at least feared it. The dream image simply expressed your subconscious mind's deep concern about it, without any ability to analyze it in a conscious way.

[kayky]

Scourge:

Most of your responses in your last post are personal attacks, insults and rhetoric that in no way attempt to actually address what I said in good faith. If you actually care about my thoughts on the matter then you'll fix the last post. If not then you won't be receiving a response other than this.

You can't be serious. I see no personal attack in that post. But if you think I've broken a rule, I suggest you take it up with the moderators. Or you can simply pout.

[FaerieStories]

Faeriestories: I disagree. We know that whatever the mind and consciousness actually is- it is a product of the brain. It is not an 'assumption' that rocks are not conscious because we know that rocks do not actually possess anything that we know to produce consciousness. Now yes, maybe we are wrong and somehow all clusters of atoms have consciousness. But with our current understanding it is so unlikely that we are sure enough that rocks are not conscious to say that we know that rocks are not conscious. We are not 100% sure, but we are not 100% sure about anything.

There is no scientific consensus on the relationship between the "brain" and the "mind." Your reductionist bias that the human mind is merely the firing of neurons in the brain cannot be justified with any current evidence.

Wrong. We know very well that what we describe as the mind is a process of the brain. In fact- we can do better than that- we can even tell you which parts of the mind are found in which parts of the brain- spatial memory, for example, in the hippocampus.

[Rkrause]

Hi, I'm new here and I see a lot of active topics on specific concepts where users are already heavily engaged in debate, making it a little hard for me to join in. So to test the waters a little (and to help me decide whether or not to stick around here), let's go back to basics and have a debate about the most fundamental question at hand here: does a god exist?

As a non-believer, I have yet to discover any convincing reason as to why I should believe in a god. So, if a Theist would like to get the ball rolling by giving me a reason why god exists, that would be great.

(PS: unrelated question: what is the general breakdown of belief/non-belief on these forums? Is it an even mix of believers and non-believers, or is there- as tends to happen on the internet- a larger proportion of atheists to Theists?).

Lets see how you respond to just one example of my personal evidence for God.

10 years ago my father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. During that time I had many dreams about a smile. The smile didn't belong to a face it just hung there in mid air in my dreams. I knew it was related to my father some how so I hated the smile, but I kept dreaming of it. In my sketch pad I drew pictures of it and wrote about it. I hated it.

The night my father died 2 of my sisters called me about midnight to tell me to come to the nursing home because my father was about to die. I told them to call me again when it was all over. About 3 am I recieved another call from my sister saying my father was dead.

I got to the nursing home were I was told about the beautiful smile my dad had on his face when toke his last breath. I told my sisters I had already seen the smile and showed them my sketch pad (which was at the nursing home because we all took turns staying with him). My sketch pad had the dates when I drew or wrote something in it.

How do you explain the dreams?

Dreams are interesting, but I certainly see nothing supernatural about them. They are simply activities of the subconscious mind which deserve much more study. Psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, starting with Freud, was big at one time but now seems to have faded away.
The subconscious mind has little or no ability with verbal expression, but uses visual images very skillfully to express often very complex and sophisticated ideas. In my own dreams, I almost never see visual images of people, although I am often strongly aware of the presence of other people in my dreams. How did you know that the smile represented your father? What was it that you "hated" about it? I suspect that you had seen a similar smile on your father's face in the past, so the smile represented your father to you. You hated the image because it reminded you that your father was dying. It did not "predict" his death. You already knew that, or at least feared it. The dream image simply expressed your subconscious mind's deep concern about it, without any ability to analyze it in a conscious way.

Good discussion and thanks.
Some how the smile brought up the same feelings I had for my dad. For me different people create different feelings (or none if I don't know them). Ie I feel differently towards my wife than my children and so one. The smile always occured at the point of sleep when a person normally jerks themselves awake. Not really sleeping not really awake. The smile itself was more like Alice in wonderland smile (if I remember my story right with the cat), no body or face just there. The dream went away after my father died. So I really don't know. I admit the mind is amazing and will never be figured out.

[FaerieStories]

So if you don't believe it is logical that God exist, then I say: you being here(site), is for no reason and just a waste of your time and space. Wouldn't you agree.
Unless you are not sure of your atheism.

To you, existing for no reason is logical, because you can't even fantom why you exist and for what purpose. You are here on earth to learn for nothing. You go through life for nothing....In the end your life has no purpose. Your life has no value. It is the same as the fly I just killed. This you see as logical....Interesting.

I, uh, I don't think I'm even going to dignify that with a response. What absolute nonsense. I thought the users of this forum were better than this.

Are you being serious?

[kayky]

Wrong. We know very well that what we describe as the mind is a process of the brain. In fact- we can do better than that- we can even tell you which parts of the mind are found in which parts of the brain- spatial memory, for example, in the hippocampus.

The following is a list of scientists who took part in a debate on this subject on a website called "Closer to the Truth.". Notice the difference of opinion among the participants.


Dr. Barry Beyerstein, a brain scientist, is a professor of neuropsychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Barry is a skeptic who does not believe in anything nonphysical.

Dr. David Chalmers is co-director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Dave believes that correlations between brain states and mental events do not prove that brain causes mind.

Dr. Marilyn Schlitz is an anthropologist and parapsychologist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Marilyn asserts that we can have experiences outside the brain.

Dr. John Searle, the author of many books about the mind such as Minds, Brains and Science, is the Mills Professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. John focuses on the problem of how the brain causes experiences.

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, a theoretical physicist, is the author of The Dreaming Universe: A Mind-Expanding Journey into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet. Fred speculates that reality is more spiritual dream than physical manifestation.