Are there good reasons to believe that a god exists?

[Jashwell]

"Are there good reasons to believe that a god exists?"

Doesn't seem like much preamble is needed, but expect this largely to be filled (if at all) with arguments in favour of the existence of a God and counter-arguments. (Because the question is not "Are there good reasons to believe that a god does not exist?"). Though if you do think you have a good argument that shows it is reasonable to believe God does not exist, that is also valid.

This question comes up a lot in other threads where various classical arguments (e.g. ontological, axiological, cosmological) have been given in those threads.

If possible, try not to shotgun debate by raising lots of arguments at once. One sound argument should be sufficient.

[David the apologist]

Uh, this used to be a second copy of the above post. But I don't know how to delete posts. And I don't think that anyone would want to read that monster twice. So... yeah. Any resources on how to delete posts in the future would be greatly appreciated.

[Freddy_Scissorhands]

If the argument succeeds, it brings us to the conclusion that there exists a single self-existent cause of the universe that is itself perfectly simple, transcendent, immaterial, eternal, omnipresent, infinitely good, infinitely wise, and infinitely powerful. In the immortal words of the Angelic Doctor, "et hoc dicimus Deum."
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I don't think you've supported any of these attributes properly in your argument, to be honest.
They are all just asserted. No evidence or solid argumentation for any of it.
It also smuggles in some very, very, very loaded language.

"Perfectly simple" f.e..
What does that mean? I guess you want to argue that your god also has a will, that it is something that is aware.
Sorry, but awareness isn't something simple. Therefore a perfectly simple thing wouldn't be aware or wouldn't be thinking, which are kind of essential things.
Of course you can now make an argument that, when you talk about a GODLY "Perfect simpleness", or a "godly way of awareness"... in which case you've devoided the words completly from their usual meaning and made up completly new concepts, just to fit your narrative.

"Infinitly good"
...
In regards to WHAT?
What does that even mean? And how on earth did you conclude that it had to be that?
I can grant you everything else in your argument, and we could still absolutly arrive at a god who is a competly evil being, who has mainly created this universe to have some suffering he can indulge himself in (which seems to fit our universe much better, to be honest. The universe is a cruel and unfair place, and it takes us human beings and a lot of efford to only attempt to make it a bit less cruel and more fair).

"infinitly wise".
Absolutly no argument to support that.
Heck, "wise" is such a vague and undifined term, that you could have thrown in anything there.

These kinds of argument also really depend on the people hearing it not really thinking about that stuff, but rather just take some premisses as intuitivly true, even though there is no evidence for it.

For example does it apply the notion of causality beyond the bounderies of this universe. And there simply is no justification given for that.
Sure, it is INTUITIVLY true... which means, without really thinking about it and just going by gut-feeling it is valide. But we know for a fact that reality doesn't care for our intuitions. And if you think you can just appeal to an intuitive notion, such as causality, when you talk about the least intuitive subject in the world (the origin of existence, or the universe), then I think you've already lost.

I personally don't think that there is any good reason to believe in a god.
Todays god, as all gods before, are just space-fillers, to insert into the gaps of our knowledge.
"Hey, we don't know how the universe started. We can't even say anything about the origin of the universe, truely. That means that god can fill this niche!"
The cosmological arguments might dress up in a different way, but essentially it's nothing more than an appeal to a mystery where we are honest enough to accept that we don't know enough yet to make a judgment on what it is, and then claim that despide that, a god MUST be the answer.

[Jashwell]

[Replying to post 679 by David the apologist]

These are all claims that would require entire threads of their own for me to do them justice. If you want more detail, I would be glad to provide it. But be warned: I'm quite verbose

This'll suffice, though I'd rather you replied one at a time - i.e. you take one argument and run with it. it's time consuming, misleading and confusing to shotgun debate like this.
But if you do want my immediate responses:

Everything that exists has its existence either through its own nature or from some external cause.

"Through it's own nature" here is indistinguishable from "doesn't have a cause"
"Everything that exists either has a cause or doesn't"

Something can be internal or external (given that something both internal and external can be broken up into those two things in some form or another), but not neither.
The alternative to or logical negative of external cause is no external cause.
As in no cause - xor an internal (self) cause.

The use of the word nature is, intentional or not, a rhetoric trick used to hide language of meaningless tautology ("it has a cause or doesn't") and special pleading ("this one thing doesn't have a cause/has an internal cause/self cause/etc").

Not everything can have its existence from an external cause. For nothing can give what it does not have, but a cause that must itself be caused has nothing to give but the metaphysical equivalent of an IOU.

I don't understand what you're saying.
(Not to mention that an infinite chain of IOUs would still be valid)

Therefore, something exists that has its existence through its own nature.

This doesn't follow.

Now, whatever a thing has through its own nature either is the nature itself or else it comes from the nature. But if a thing's existence were to come from its own nature, the thing would be its own cause, which is absurd.

Meaningless, not absurd. The better term would be "without a cause".

Thus, there is a thing in which nature and existence are the same. In short, there exists a thing that is perfectly simple (ie, doesn't have any component parts, physical or metaphysical).

You can't treat existence as a property or a nature.
Existence is a necessary condition to have properties or follow one's nature.

Further, while existence considered as an abstraction covering all of reality is empty as a concept, existence considered as a constitutive principle of any particular thing exhausts the positive content of the thing itself. The natures of things in our experience are not and cannot be anything positive added to existence, making it more positive or in some way completing it, for the only thing outside of existence is non-existence. It follows, then, that when a thing's nature is distinct from its act of existence, the nature is a restrictive principle, a limiting principle.

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

But for a perfectly simple being, there is no distinct nature to serve as a limiting principle.

Nature (in this context) is a word used to refer to the class to which an instance belongs, analogous to classes in an object orientated programming language - i.e. describing 'properties', 'functions', etc.
Nature cannot be limiting. Nature is not prescriptive.
If you do not subscribe to a nature, that is not your nature. The use of the word subscribe (which is prescriptive) is purely metaphorical. The more literal way of saying this is to say the nature does not apply to you.

As such, this first cause must be absolute and transcendent. Any attribute that doesn't entail limitation and the lack of which would be a limitation may truly be predicated of this thing in some sense or other.

What counts as a limitation? It sounds awfully a lot like you're trying to say that it's perfect and that anything that isn't perfect can't be it. But perfection is subjective.

Thus, since time, space, and energy are limiting principles

In what sense?

this first cause immaterial, eternal, and omnipresent.

This doesn't follow.
Space isn't a property of an object, and while you could consider being spatial (i.e. existing in space) to be a property - to lack this property (this "limitation") would be to be not present NOT omnipresent. Same with time. To be omnipresent is to be ultimately spatial, the very antithesis of what you are claiming to achieve.

However, since evil, ignorance, and weakness all entail limitation, this being must be good, wise, and powerful to an infinite degree.

How do any of these entail limitations?
Not only are you trying to make perfection an objective matter, but you are stretching the word limitation to mean its very antithesis.

The whole idea of good is that it is limiting. To be good is to be limited, to have restricted actions. It is better to live your live without murdering randomly than with. This is a limitation. A restriction.

This in turn entails that there can only be one such being. For there to be more than one such being, there would have to be some real difference between them. But both are already infinite, so there's "no room" for anything else to be added to either of them. Nor can there be anything that either of them lack, because that would contradict the established fact of their transcendence.

Except that this isn't valid... or sound.
Not only does perfection not need to be unique, not only does having an "infinite" property still allow you to be distinguished from others... but infinities can be compared... and are regularly in set theory.

If the argument succeeds, it brings us to the conclusion that there exists a single self-existent cause of the universe that is itself perfectly simple, transcendent, immaterial, eternal, omnipresent, infinitely good, infinitely wise, and infinitely powerful. In the immortal words of the Angelic Doctor, "et hoc dicimus Deum."

That's an awful lot of complicated properties and natures for a simple being without any nature.

Moreover, causation isn't the only thing that has prompted theists to produce arguments for the existence of God.

Notice "prompted theists to produce arguments for [theism]".
Not "arguments for [theism] prompted people to produce theists".
This is generally a bad thing. Of course that doesn't show theism is wrong... just that at least the initial theists were unreasonable (by definition) according to this sentence.

The implications of modern cosmology with respect to the beginning of existence of the universe

1) The Universe began
2) The Universe didn't

Now I'm not going to lie and say this is a clear 50/50 choice. Religions are spread by word of mouth, and through people, and myths are spread as stories.
"the Universe continued to exist" not quite as riveting, seemingly eye opening or allegorical as "the Universe began to exist".

Oh, and the implications of modern cosmology: "the Universe began to exist"
Notice the absence of "... because God"?

the uncanny way that abstractions (such as mathematics) seem to control the universe

Because they're descriptive not prescriptive. We based mathematics and logic off of the Universe, not the other way around.

the co-ordination of the natures of things such that they produce an intelligible and elegant universe

If it were unintelligible we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Elegant? In what sense?

the existence of consciousness

has nothing to do with theism

the veridicality of human reason

some of the time (and only after the advent of reason, only a few hundred thousand years after humans emerged)

the existence of an objective moral law

is indeterminable by any number of humans unless you discover a logical objective morality thus invalidating the need for a God.

the innate desire man has for "something more" than what the world has to offer

Said in a vague way so that it can be switched between "> world" to "want god".
Once again, nothing to do with God.

Now, admittedly there are counterarguments, and counterarguments to those counterarguments, and so on ad infinitum.

And fortunately a single clear flaw in a logical argument makes it invalid or unreasonable and thus the entire argument must be discarded.
And there are many clear problems with some arguments.

the argument for God as a principle of unification in the world of experience becomes overwhelming.

Unification? How so?

Now, it is true that the argument from evil would appear to provide a contrary datum.

Not really the topic of this thread (there is a "justify the belief that gods do not exist" thread), but I don't really use it anyway.
"Objective morality" is far too malleable.

ultimately inconclusive (like all the other arguments)

No... it'd be a clear logical contradiction.
The existence of evil, and the existence of a God capable of and intending to remove that evil are incompatible.
The two objections theists have are 1) evil doesn't exist and 2) God doesn't intend to remove all evil (for instance, this is the best possible world - he values something else more, like free will or whatever)

2) parasitic on either objective moral values or on the existence of consciousness, depending on how it is phrased.

Fortunately an appeal to absurdity or logical contradiction doesn't require the premises to be sound.

Similarly to say that a specific floating island would defy gravity doesn't mean to say that floating islands exist.

Thus, even the existence of evil (as typically urged by the atheist) presupposes chunks of the evidence for theism.

Except it doesn't, or rather there's no reason to think it does.

[Willum]

Dave the Apologist:

Let me start out that your post was very well reasoned and written, and due to it's length, I can not adequately give it the recognition it deserves. Let me honor it then by asking the forum to re-read it.

I have selected parts of it to refute, of course, that is the nature of the forum. I did find some of what you wrote infuriating, and I am pretty sure that wasn't intended, but my own reply had to be changed to moderate this. I ask pardon in advance if I didn't edit it all out.
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Physics/Chemistry: There are no properties by which any definition of god can be discovered.
Expecting physics and chemistry to ascertain God's properties is like studying tomatoes with a magnifying glass in order to determine the temperament of their farmer.

I disagree, as a creator of many mundane things, I am frequently surprised by how other people accomplished the same achievement, and how prominently my own style and character shows through on a collection of plumbing, an approach to a problem, a letter, or even a beaker of chemicals. It doesn't tell anyone how I look, but it does give parameters anyone reading or employing my works many things about myself, most times things I never think about of myself.
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Physics/Chemistry: There are no properties by which any definition of god can be discovered.
Expecting physics and chemistry to ascertain God's properties is like studying tomatoes with a magnifying glass in order to determine the temperament of their farmer.

Ah, but can't we? Can't we see that the farmer did or did not care for his crop? Remove pests, provide it nutrients or not? Won't this tell us perhaps even a great deal about the farmer? Certainly it will tell us something about how the farmer relates to his crops, and therefore how god relates to ourselves.
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Why? Surely, we wouldn't expect to be able to put a transcendent being on a scale and weigh it, or detect it in a calorimeter?

This is a little underhanded, you're putting god on a pedestal and saying he is above being measured by our pathetic little devices. We can weigh the Pope, we can weigh the President. In terms of respect these men ARE above these pathetic devices, but they still have weight. Further, we can weigh the Sun, Jupiter, other Suns, even Galaxies, just not on a scale. If you say god exists based on some properties, then, he should be perceived by these properties, or, at least, shadows of them. If you say god can douse the Sun, then characteristics of something that can douse the Sun, must exist.
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... I would contend that asking for the mechanism by which God interacts with the world is similar to asking for the mechanism by which an electron absorbs or emits a photon. It's a category error, some interactions are ontologically immediate and fundamental.

Absolutely, so how can this interaction take place invisibly or otherwise undetectably? Their is no mechanism, real, conjectural or cartoon-imaginary, even able to parameterize how god is somehow above the rules of matter and energy such that god is excluded from the necessity of interaction. There is no reconciliation for this.
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Saying he is above these laws is pointless.


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If a transcendent being exists, then what could it be other than "above the laws"?

I hope that, upon reflection you can see how spurious an argument this is, this would have to interact, and through those properties of interaction you have parameterizations. You could claim Unicorns exist, but there magical horns allow them to only be seen by virgins, with the same validity. It either goes nowhere, or is a simple rationalization.
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What more should we expect to see than caused things everywhere, a temporally finite universe, a universe ruled by mathematics and other abstractions, an elegant universe, conscious beings, beings capable of discovery, an objective moral law, a desire for something beyond the world, and what appear to be religious experiences amongst those who dare to seek Him out?

Absolutely, but we should reasonably be able to find him by the characteristics he claims he has, if you can't then it doesn't exist. For example, we're in the Sahara and someone describes snow; saying only that it is solid water. We scoff and say water can't be solid, what a monkey jabberer you are to say so. Then time passes and we can explore these properties, we find solid water can indeed exist.


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Why can't chemicals take on self-replicating patterns, given time. No reason, and once they do, they just get better.
But isn't that sort of situation marvelous in its own right? Aren't chemical and ecological processes that effectively force the development of complex life even more remarkably teleological than any particular biological organ could ever be?
Err, yes, but that's why, I myself am a scientist, not a Religious-ist, the beauty is there, I don't need another entity to make it more beautiful. The world is wonderous without the need for god, or some other father figure to justify it for me.
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I freely admit that there are more subjective factors involved in the assessment of purpose in these processes than there are in the assessment of purpose in biological organs. But, in the final analysis, the organs could have been made by aliens of a simpler construction than earth life, whereas only a supernatural being could shape the laws of chemistry and ecology themselves, rendering the former sort of argument (and, by extension, all teleological arguments based on the arrangement of particular material things as opposed to their very natures) useless for the purposes of natural theology.

Errr... huh? God IS an alien. Does this help you personally to put things in perspective? It's not on topic, exactly, but it does seem to resolve some questions you bring up... you couldn't possibly sympathize with the entity you claim god is...
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Psychologically-the belief in god fulfills many needs. The need to be loved, especially by a father figure.
Is the notion of hell wishful thinking too?
Absolutely, think of the time and effort it would take to keep the place going just to punish people.
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Of course, if you can provide evidence that this Mises is a real mythical figure, I will gladly admit to being wrong on this point. [/img]



Mises is from several mythos-Greek, Assyrian and more based on vagueries in history. But I can prove their identical very trivially; Phoenician did not have vowels: Thus Moses becomes Mss and Mises becomes Mss. This is a QED, like it or not.
I disagree, and find it a little offensive that referencing militant monotheists as evidence for Moses is somehow better than militant atheists: Your claim of a modern lie does not in anyway refute to me an ancient lie. I'll wager neither of us had the ability to read the original documents from Syria or Israel or Egypt. But, honestly, I have no reason to doubt or question it, I've been reading here and there for years, from what seemed credible, before the age of Internet. Contrarily, if you can provide evidence that this Moses is a real figure... No you can't use the Bible, its credibility is compromised.

[wiploc]

Uh, this used to be a second copy of the above post. But I don't know how to delete posts. And I don't think that anyone would want to read that monster twice. So... yeah. Any resources on how to delete posts in the future would be greatly appreciated.

You can't delete everything; that would cause an error. Your post must contain at least two characters. The smallest, least obtrusive, pair of characters is two periods: ".."

Thus, a common way of saying that a post is a duplicate post, or that for some other reason you have reconsidered posting it, is to make the post consist entirely of two periods.

[Tired of the Nonsense]

"Are there good reasons to believe that a god exists?"

Let's face it. Most people believe that a God or gods exist because it's what their mommy and daddy told them when they were little. The overwhelming majority of people in this world grow up to believe in whatever it was that they were programmed to believe in as a child. When my daughter was about eight one of her friends invited her to go to church with her family one Sunday and they proceeded to tell her all about Jesus. When she came home she asked me what religion "we" believed in. I told her that I didn't "believe in" any of them, but that she would make up her own mind when she grew up. That was about the extent of my personal involvement into her religious training. She's pushing forty now and, while she's not the militant atheist that her old man is, she has no religious or supernatural beliefs. She is very well educated, well read, and successful in her chosen profession. It would never occur to her to believe in an invisible Being or Beings. If it is fair to say that I programmed her at all, it was to think for herself.

[Zzyzx]

.

Let's face it. Most people believe that a God or gods exist because it's what their mommy and daddy told them when they were little. The overwhelming majority of people in this world grow up to believe in whatever it was that they were programmed to believe in as a child.

Agree 100%. A glance at the geographic distribution of religions verifies that societies tend to be fairly uniform in belief preferences " which seem to indicate "teaching" of younger generations to worship the "gods" popular in the society.

When my daughter was about eight one of her friends invited her to go to church with her family one Sunday and they proceeded to tell her all about Jesus. When she came home she asked me what religion "we" believed in. I told her that I didn't "believe in" any of them, but that she would make up her own mind when she grew up. That was about the extent of my personal involvement into her religious training. She's pushing forty now and, while she's not the militant atheist that her old man is, she has no religious or supernatural beliefs. She is very well educated, well read, and successful in her chosen profession. It would never occur to her to believe in an invisible Being or Beings.

I could probably say about the same thing (and my daughter is well into her fifties), also successful, well educated, and well read. Though we have little communication, and although she did go through a religious phase (thanks to extended family), I trust that she shuns belief in invisible, undetectable supernatural beings.

If it is fair to say that I programmed her at all, it was to think for herself.

EXCELLENT child rearing. My mother seventy years ago taught her sons to "THINK, then do what you decide best regardless what others think, say or do." Although she was a devout Catholic, she did NOT require or insist that her sons accept that (or any) religion. Remarkable woman. Well educated. STRONG mind. One of four sons may have adopted Catholicism (and may just appear to have done so for social approval and to keep peace in his family).

All people should be taught to think critically / analytically, to consider evidence and the quality / verifiability of evidence presented, and reach sound conclusions that stand the test of time.

Anything less than that is failure as a parent in my opinion. Teaching / indoctrination to believe supernatural tales without investigating veracity of sources and verification of information is abject failure in parenting " and tacit admission that the belief system cannot stand to be questioned or investigated fairly, honestly and openly.

Any system sold on the basis of "mystery" or "revelation" or unquestioning acceptance is a fraud in my opinion.

[David the apologist]

If the argument succeeds, it brings us to the conclusion that there exists a single self-existent cause of the universe that is itself perfectly simple, transcendent, immaterial, eternal, omnipresent, infinitely good, infinitely wise, and infinitely powerful. In the immortal words of the Angelic Doctor, "et hoc dicimus Deum."
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I don't think you've supported any of these attributes properly in your argument, to be honest.

Of course not. It would take hundreds of pages to do the cosmological argument as presented by Aquinas justice. In fact, that's precisely what Aquinas gave it. My goal here is only to give you an idea of the flavor such an argument would have.

They are all just asserted. No evidence or solid argumentation for any of it.

Well, it doesn't have the sort of evidence you're going to be looking for, I suspect. But that doesn't make the argumentation invalid. It does rely on metaphysical reasoning of a rather abstract sort.

It also smuggles in some very, very, very loaded language.

Much of what seems to you like "loaded language" is really more along the lines of a "technical vocabulary" for a metaphysician. For instance, I would be loath to characterize the list I used to characterize God as a list of "properties." "Properties" had originally a very specific meaning: those accidents (another technical term) of a thing that "flow from" its essence/nature in the way that I denied that existence could "flow from" God's essence/nature.

To give examples based on the logician's old favorite, Socrates, Socrates' essence/nature is his humanity, one of his accidents (something that he could have or fail to have without it making a difference to his being Socrates) would be his whiteness, and one of his "properties" would be his ability to speak.

So if I ever complain about you using the word "property" to denote any sort of predicate regardless of its relationship to the essence/nature of the subject, now you know why.

"Perfectly simple" f.e..
What does that mean? I guess you want to argue that your god also has a will, that it is something that is aware.

Not in the same way that we have wills and are aware, but something broadly analogous.

For example, being immaterial, this Being has no sense organs. Thus, His "awareness" is not going to involve the sorts of mental images that ours has. Moreover, He transcends time. As such, His "thoughts" will not occur in a sequential order. There is no "stream of consciousness" for God. Similarly, His act(s?) of will must occur timelessly. There is no passage from an undecided state to a decided state.

These (and countless other considerations) being the case, God's "will" and "awareness" are of a quite different sort than our own.

Sorry, but awareness isn't something simple. Therefore a perfectly simple thing wouldn't be aware or wouldn't be thinking, which are kind of essential things.
Of course you can now make an argument that, when you talk about a GODLY "Perfect simpleness", or a "godly way of awareness"... in which case you've devoided the words completly from their usual meaning and made up completly new concepts, just to fit your narrative.

The concepts are analogous. This doesn't mean that they're equivocal, however.

Allow me to explain myself. When we talk about an attribute (NOT a property ) like redness, we are using a univocal concept. The redness of a ladybug is pretty much the same as the redness of a fire engine or an apple. The attribute of "redness" doesn't need to be adapted to the natures of the disparate things in which it inheres.

When we deal with a concept like "perfection," however, we have an entirely different situation on our hands. When we say that a certain diamond is perfect, we mean to say that its crystal structure is precisely periodical with no (or at least very few) deviations from the ideal. When we say that a person is perfect, we mean to say that he is a man of great virtue and few vices, but we most certainly are not saying that he has a periodical crystal structure! But that doesn't render the term "perfect" meaningless. We still mean to say something significant about the particular being under consideration. But what exactly it is that we're saying must in each case be adapted to the nature of the thing that we're talking about. Such a concept is called an "analogous" concept.

Awareness, like perfection, is an analogous concept. A cnidarian is "aware" of prey that come up against its tentacles, a dog is "aware" of the Frisbee its owner just threw into the field, you are "aware" of a verbose and nit-picky debate partner on the other end of the computer screen, etc. In each case, the "awareness" is adapted to the nature of the being that is aware. It's a little bit different in each circumstance.

"Infinitly good"
...
In regards to WHAT?

It's hard to say exactly what without a knowledge of God's very nature (which we do not have). Like perfection and awareness, goodness is an analogous concept. In a general sense, it is something "desirable" or "seek-after-able."

However, we could draw some analogies between key human virtues and the attributes of God. Quoting the Summa Theologica (I-II:61:4):

Virtue consists in the following, or imitation, of God. Every virtue, like every other thing, has its type [exemplar] in God. Thus the Divine mind itself is the type of prudence; God using all things to minister to His glory is the type of temperance, by which man subjects his lower appetites to reason; justice is typified by God's application of the eternal law to all His works; Divine immutability is the type of fortitude.

What does that even mean? And how on earth did you conclude that it had to be that?

Evil is, by the very fact of being evil, deficient in the ontological order. Such a deficiency conflicts with the infinitude of a first cause.

I can grant you everything else in your argument, and we could still absolutly arrive at a god who is a competly evil being, who has mainly created this universe to have some suffering he can indulge himself in (which seems to fit our universe much better, to be honest. The universe is a cruel and unfair place, and it takes us human beings and a lot of efford to only attempt to make it a bit less cruel and more fair).

The problem of evil is a deep one, but the fact remains that no matter how much evil and suffering He removed from the universe, we would still "notice" the remainder just as surely as we do now. It would still seem like a lot. The only way He could completely remove suffering is by constantly intervening every time suffering would occur in order to prevent it. Such inconsistent activity (giving a thing a nature and then preventing its nature from being expressed) is unbecoming of a God, and such a universe would be extremely inelegant.

"infinitly wise".
Absolutly no argument to support that.

If He were ignorant, He would lack something we have, which (once again) contradicts His infinity.

Heck, "wise" is such a vague and undifined term, that you could have thrown in anything there.

If you prefer the term "intelligent" or "knowledgeable," feel free to.

These kinds of argument also really depend on the people hearing it not really thinking about that stuff, but rather just take some premisses as intuitivly true, even though there is no evidence for it.

The sort of evidence that is relevant to a discussion of metaphysics has more to do with what we know from daily experience than it does to do with distant realms of the very small or very large (in short, the sort of scientific evidence you probably expect me to present). Moreover, we're working at a high enough level of abstraction that the primary mode of falsification is deconstruction of a premise to unintelligibility, not going out and looking for particular things that "break the rules."

For example does it apply the notion of causality beyond the bounderies of this universe.

It depends on how you define "universe." If by "universe," you mean "everything that exists," then no it doesn't. It just determines which causal structures are possible in the universe. If by "universe" you mean "space-time-matter-energy," however, then it does, but with qualifications. For one thing, when we first run into the self-existent being, we have no idea what sort of thing it is, whether it could be a part of the space-time universe or not, whether it's a mind or not, etc. We just know that it's what we need to account for the fact that anything exists at all. Everything starts there. For another, "pushing ideas beyond the boundaries of the universe" is only a problem for hardline empiricists, for whom the problem is more accurately stated as "pushing ideas beyond the boundaries of experience." Of course, theoretical physicists do that all the time, and the result is that we find the Higgs Boson thirty years after some dude did some armchair calculations in a University basement. Subatomic particles are just as far out of the boundaries of experience as God is, all we have to work with on our scale is the little conductive tracks (we think that) they leave behind them.

Indeed, I daresay that the only epistemologically significant difference between God and the god particle is that we can control the latter with sophisticated enough technology.

Sure, it is INTUITIVLY true... which means, without really thinking about it and just going by gut-feeling it is valide. But we know for a fact that reality doesn't care for our intuitions. And if you think you can just appeal to an intuitive notion, such as causality, when you talk about the least intuitive subject in the world (the origin of existence, or the universe), then I think you've already lost.

If you want to get technical, I'm not appealing to intuitions so much as I'm appealing to the natures of things. The nature of causality has to do with the dependence/derivation relationship of the existence or alteration of one thing (the effect) on the action of another (the cause).

I personally don't think that there is any good reason to believe in a god.
Todays god, as all gods before, are just space-fillers, to insert into the gaps of our knowledge.
"Hey, we don't know how the universe started. We can't even say anything about the origin of the universe, truely. That means that god can fill this niche!"
The cosmological arguments might dress up in a different way, but essentially it's nothing more than an appeal to a mystery where we are honest enough to accept that we don't know enough yet to make a judgment on what it is, and then claim that despide that, a god MUST be the answer.

I've always found it odd how agnostics/non-theists tend to assume that EVERY argument is REALLY somehow a/n (insert the agnostic's/non-theist's fallacy of choice here), regardless of the ACTUAL structure one finds in the argument itself.

[David the apologist]

Hold on Jashwell, I'm saving my most misleading and obscurantist post for last!
In the meantime...

Dave the Apologist:

Let me start out that your post was very well reasoned and written, and due to it's length, I can not adequately give it the recognition it deserves. Let me honor it then by asking the forum to re-read it

Thank you! I appreciate the compliment.

I have selected parts of it to refute, of course, that is the nature of the forum. I did find some of what you wrote infuriating, and I am pretty sure that wasn't intended, but my own reply had to be changed to moderate this. I ask pardon in advance if I didn't edit it all out.

These are subjects that make all of us get "riled up." I apologize if I have somehow offended you, or if I have simply played the "stock apologist" you've dealt with so many times in the past.

However, I often use "throwaway lines" that are particularly memorable in order to give someone the gist of an argument that I have attempted to work out in greater depth. I chose your post to respond to because many of the points you mention are precisely those I have tried to wrestle with, so what constitutes a mere sentence in my posts could represent (easily) an entire paragraph. So if I sounded dismissive at any point in my reply, it's not because I thought your arguments shallow so much as it is because I thought that my point could be better conveyed by a pithy "bare assertion" than by an imposing block of text. If I were "David the philosopher" instead of "David the apologist" (and my focus was more on establishing my own position than on convincing interlocutors and bystanders to abandon theirs), my posts would all be twice as long as they are already!

I disagree, as a creator of many mundane things, I am frequently surprised by how other people accomplished the same achievement, and how prominently my own style and character shows through on a collection of plumbing, an approach to a problem, a letter, or even a beaker of chemicals. It doesn't tell anyone how I look, but it does give parameters anyone reading or employing my works many things about myself, most times things I never think about of myself.

But that would be going beyond a dissection of the tomato/plumbing/letter/beaker on the level of a botanist/plumber/literary critic/chemist. In order to get an idea of the character of the creator of a thing (eg, the physical universe [if it has a creator]), you can't use the same tools as you used to investigate the character of the thing itself. Something different is necessary. Hence, if there is a creator of the physiochemical universe, then the last place we'd expect to find an accurate characterization of Him would be in the nitty-gritty details of the physiochemical world. What is needed here is a more holistic approach - one that can grasp the broadest outlines of the whole in a grand synoptic vision - and that's precisely why one needs the tools of "metaphysics" or "first philosophy" in order to investigate the question of God, not the tools of chemistry and physics.

Ah, but can't we? Can't we see that the farmer did or did not care for his crop? Remove pests, provide it nutrients or not? Won't this tell us perhaps even a great deal about the farmer? Certainly it will tell us something about how the farmer relates to his crops, and therefore how god relates to ourselves.

Well, if you're using the tools of a botanist, and only those tools, you'd never get to the question of whether the farmer did a good job caring for his tomatoes because you'd never get to the farmer. Arguably, you'd never even get to a means of defining the term "farmer" in the first place (which is pretty close to the problem you were pointing out).

This is a little underhanded, you're putting god on a pedestal and saying he is above being measured by our pathetic little devices. We can weigh the Pope, we can weigh the President. In terms of respect these men ARE above these pathetic devices, but they still have weight. Further, we can weigh the Sun, Jupiter, other Suns, even Galaxies, just not on a scale. If you say god exists based on some properties, then, he should be perceived by these properties, or, at least, shadows of them. If you say god can douse the Sun, then characteristics of something that can douse the Sun, must exist.

The problem is that, among the properties of His that I say must be affirmed in order for Him to do what I claim He can do are those such as immateriality and transcendence. A transcendent being isn't something that any conceivable measuring instrument would be able to detect. His power, moreover, is (if He is the kind of thing that I think He is) already present in every created thing (read, "every physical system"), and there's no way to mathematically correct for such an all-pervasive influence as would be necessary for any type of measurement to occur.

Absolutely, so how can this interaction take place invisibly or otherwise undetectably? Their is no mechanism, real, conjectural or cartoon-imaginary, even able to parameterize how god is somehow above the rules of matter and energy such that god is excluded from the necessity of interaction. There is no reconciliation for this.

There is no mechanism for God's interaction with the world. But there also isn't a mechanism for an electron's emission of a photon. So I'm a bit confused as to what sort of "parameterization" you're looking for, as the lack of a mechanism isn't a problem for a really basic causal action.

If, however, you're looking for some particular case/class of cases where He interacts with something in a way other than we see all the time in the natural order, then I freely admit that I can provide no such example that you'd be willing to recognize as such prior to admitting the actual existence of God.

I hope that, upon reflection you can see how spurious an argument this is, this would have to interact, and through those properties of interaction you have parameterizations.

Say I wanted to prove that you exist to my roommate, and my roommate is one of those weird singularity dudes who think that the internet is about to become conscious (my roommate in real life is a very nice person, and I don't think that the believes in the singularity, so this example is entirely fictitious. Just in case my roomie ever stumbles across this post). I gesticulate at the posts you've made, and he proceeds to assert that they were produced by an exceptionally advanced version of Cleverbot. I ask him what sort of proof he wants that you're a real person, and he suggests that we hack into the internet and force you to take the Turing test. By making that suggestion, my roommate betrays that he's not really taking the idea of a real person on the other side of the computer screen seriously, that somewhere in the back of his mind is still the idea of something that's really bound by its programmer's code.

But it's obvious that, since you are a real person, you could very easily just laugh off the ridiculous request my roommate is making of you and go do something more constructive with your time. That's because you exist "outside of" the internet, and your activities are ultimately not "parameterized" by the internet's code. You can say what you want to say, do what you want to do, and no hacker can take control of your brain (unless you really are cleverbot, in which case you should pass on my congratulations to your programmers).

So, since it's obvious that a really transcendent being would be in no way subject to the laws of physics, the fact that we cannot produce God-effects on demand in a controlled environment is a non-issue. The only question remaining is whether or not such a transcendent being exists. (you can expect my magnum opus on THAT topic in my reply to Jashwell sometime in the Spring of 2024. XD)

You could claim Unicorns exist, but there magical horns allow them to only be seen by virgins, with the same validity. It either goes nowhere, or is a simple rationalization.

Unless of course either 1) A buttload of virgins who have gone into the forest and claim to have seen unicorns, or 2) there are giant holes in all of my garish lawn ornaments, accompanied by a layer of magical fairy dust, from which I infer the existence of a unicorn angry about declining property values. The former would be an analogue to the mystics of their various religious traditions, and the latter would be an analogue to natural theology.

Absolutely, but we should reasonably be able to find him by the characteristics he claims he has, if you can't then it doesn't exist. For example, we're in the Sahara and someone describes snow; saying only that it is solid water. We scoff and say water can't be solid, what a monkey jabberer you are to say so. Then time passes and we can explore these properties, we find solid water can indeed exist.

Things get less straightforward, however, when we come to deal with personal beings who can't be controlled in a laboratory environment (unless they choose to take part in a study). They become even less straightforward if we start dealing with immaterial beings. And they become nearly inscrutable to empirical analysis if we start dealing with a genuinely transcendent being. If we want to deal with God, we need something more refined than the scientific method.

Err, yes, but that's why, I myself am a scientist, not a Religious-ist, the beauty is there, I don't need another entity to make it more beautiful. The world is wonderous without the need for god, or some other father figure to justify it for me.

I guess what I'm getting at is the fact that any impressiveness about a biological organ that could make you conclude it was designed is amplified by its having coming about by an evolutionary process, as it "pushes back" the actual implementation of the design to whatever laws of nature govern the evolutionary process. If you want a clear-cut example of teleology in nature, this method is somewhat disappointing. If you want a clear-cut inference to a supernatural designer, however, this sort of method is far more satisfactory than even the best that Behe and his ilk have to offer.

Errr... huh? God IS an alien. Does this help you personally to put things in perspective? It's not on topic, exactly, but it does seem to resolve some questions you bring up... you couldn't possibly sympathize with the entity you claim god is...

Well, it depends on how you define "alien." If you mean "a personal being very much unlike ourselves," then yes, God is the most alien of all aliens, and when I get around to spelling out the details of how I consider Him to be alien, I'm going to be accused of incoherence (I happen to be a proponent of Divine Simplicity. For now, just trust me when I say that God is seriously weird). And it would, at the very least, be extraordinarily hard to "sympathize" with Him, because He doesn't have emotions of any kind we would be able to recognize.

However, in the sense that I meant the term alien in the quoted passage, I let it mean "a material person, like a human with regard to metaphysical constitution, but with a number of significant biological, physiological, psychological, and sociological differences." In this sense, God is not an alien, because He is transcendent.

quote:
Psychologically-the belief in god fulfills many needs. The need to be loved, especially by a father figure.
Is the notion of hell wishful thinking too?
Absolutely, think of the time and effort it would take to keep the place going just to punish people.

Well played, my friend! (It's supposed to be applause, I couldn't find one that took of its hat)

But seriously, though. In modern Western society, can the notion of Hell really be accounted for by the idea of wish-fulfillment? How many Christians in the modern west want there to be a hell?

Mises is from several mythos-Greek, Assyrian and more based on vagueries in history. But I can prove their identical very trivially; Phoenician did not have vowels: Thus Moses becomes Mss and Mises becomes Mss. This is a QED, like it or not. I disagree, and find it a little offensive that referencing militant monotheists as evidence for Moses is somehow better than militant atheists: Your claim of a modern lie does not in anyway refute to me an ancient lie. I'll wager neither of us had the ability to read the original documents from Syria or Israel or Egypt. But, honestly, I have no reason to doubt or question it, I've been reading here and there for years, from what seemed credible, before the age of Internet. Contrarily, if you can provide evidence that this Moses is a real figure... No you can't use the Bible, its credibility is compromised.

I have no issue at all with the thesis that Moses never existed and that the ancient Jews made him up by borrowing from other mythological figures. I don't believe that, but I also recognize that the basis on which I do believe that Moses was a historical figure is one which I cannot expect you to accept. I repeat: I do not expect you to buy a single word of the Exodus story, I cannot provide you with any reason to do so that you would consider epistemologically valid, and I am DEFINITELY not implicitly saying that Ken Ham is a better person than you are. I would like to apologize if I gave that impression.

My issue is with the use of this "Mises" character in order to support your claim about the mythological character of Moses. You say that Mises shows up in Greek, Assyrian, and Phoenician myth? Great. There should be some sort of document recording some fragments of a myth about Mises somewhere. There's only one problem: there appears to be no such document. In certain atheist sources, we find him to be Egyptian, Syrian, or Assyrian, we find no attempt to reconcile this obvious contradiction, and in the search for a reference to Mises, we get shuttled around a loop of fundamentalist atheist authors, none of whom seem to have enough academic credentials to be able to publish what they've written about Mises (which, in most cases, is no more than a single throwaway sentence) in a respected historical journal.

I believe that Noah was a historical figure as well (though I consider the flood to have been a local one), but since you used a real myth to cast doubt on his existence - namely Utnapishtim - I had (and have) no complaints, as you were using reliable data in a reasonable way.

Well, I guess the only way to close this post is to say thank you for slogging through another one of my big ol' walls o' text!

[Danmark]

....
I have no issue at all with the thesis that Moses never existed and that the ancient Jews made him up by borrowing from other mythological figures. I don't believe that, but I also recognize that the basis on which I do believe that Moses was a historical figure is one which I cannot expect you to accept.

Thus you agree there is no basis for the acceptance of this mythology. And you offer no reason to justify your own acceptance of it.