Who can give the best account of why there is a God?

The SB states that God is the witness or observer, existing before the material world existed, before there was any cause or effect. What is illogical about that?

 

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...that you would believe it without questioning it.

 

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lg,

Well exactly. If you can’t use science, which you claim you can’t, then you are pretty much screwed on the proof part aren’t you? Not my problem, it’s your claim, you figure out how to prove it.

You are constructing strawmen again I see. Go back and re-read what I said.

Covered that already. Those sources cannot be accepted as authoritative until their claims can be substantiated, which you are unable to do. In the meantime their words are merely curious but have no credence.

Pay attention. Read above.

It has nothing to do with what I assume but how established scientific methods operate. And to date I do not see that anyone has been able to establish facts outside of that discipline. If you have something then demonstrate it as I have requested numerous times here already.

Still trying to incorporate invalid analogies again, give it a rest please. But I’m surprised at you; surely you realize that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that here numerous times.

Only if you class normal people as ignorant morons. I think you’ll find that even most children from fairly early ages understand these facts.

Come on don’t play dumb here – we are talking natural versus supernatural, and you know that.

I’m beginning to enjoy the way you twist and distort anything you don’t like and try to blame me for things I didn’t say. You’d make a great politician. Again if you can’t demonstrate something is true then there is no reason to believe it?

I’ll answer the rest of your post later – I’m out playing golf for the rest of today.

 

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it is not that I believe it to be true without questioning it, it is that there is nothing illogical about it, so I consider that it may be true. In fact with the advent of Quantum Mechanics, I see that is really may be true.

However atheists, know that it is not true, they must possess knowledge of all.

 

Vitalone,

That you can see how something might be true desn't require you to then assert that it is true, you can simply remain open minded until further evidence/proof becomes available.

 

So, the SB concocts a story of something existing without providing a shred of evidence in regards to the creation of the story and not being able to provide any evidence whatsoever to back up the story, is somehow logical?

The knowledge of atheists is the lack of theists knowledge.

 

This is quite an amazingly illogical thing to say. According to you, the first cause is a concious being capable of intelligently planning the creation of this universe...

Don't you see why this is funamentally illogical? It's sort of like saying a human being has always existed fully formed and never evolved from simpler beginnings over a long period of time.

 

Again, you having knowledge all know that SB has no divine origin. I do not profess to have evidence to back it up, science has already done that for me. QM has yet to determine who or what an observer really is. Thereby you assuming it is 100% false is really a bold assumption, requiring lots of faith.

 

I have no idea what you said here, other than your admittance to not having any evidence to back up the claims.

 

Cris

Once again - the strength of your convictions is determined by the degree that you reject the basis for scripture and saintly persons - much like the strength of the convictions of a high school drop out regarding th enon-belief in electrons lies in the disregard of professors and science text books.

 

The evidence gathered for electrons far outweights that of a man who was killed then came back to life 3 days later to bodily ascend to heaven. The fact you would compare the two displays you're own ignorance and delusion.

 

Cris

You missed my q - I was asking what are the general principles you advocate to determine whether someone has perceived something or not - if you want to claim that science determines this then you cannot declare that you perceive your own mind because reductionist models do not allow for such things.

“

and that the scriptures reflected reality other than fantasy based on the ignorance of the times in which they were written.


"Because the people who wrote scriptures are wrong the scriptures are wrong"
... round and round we go .....
if you want to get off the roundabout you will have to divulge how they were actually wrong
“

How do you propose to substantiate the claims of the existence of an electron to a high school drop who rejects the two channels of scientific authority (professors and science text books)?

If you want to do something more than state your opinions to the world its required that you form a coherant argument

The analogy doesn’t apply. No claims in religion regarding supernatural phenomena have ever been substantiated, (ie saintly people are wrong) which means the ancients and the scriptures you reference have no credibility, and hence no reason to recognize them as authoritative.(Therefore scriptures are wrong)

You haven't moved an inch from the platform "Scriptures are wrong because saintly persons are wrong" - you haven't indicated why they should be accepted as wrong

It has to do with how you assume scientific models operate

because you assume that reductionist models are capable of determining the noumenan of everything that is phenomenal - which is obviously false

If you are asking how to make spiritual noumenan manifest in the reductionist paradigm it is impossible - if the mind cannot be detected by reductionist methods, what to speak of spirit

Absence of evidence indicates just that - absence of evidence - Until you garner some evidence it is very difficult to hold you claims (that religion is all fantastic and god does not exist) as credible because they don't even take the form of a coherant argument
“

They understand through faith - not direct perception or self evidenced experimentation - how many people per 100 000 do you think have carried out the necessary experiments to directly perceive the symptoms of an electron to determine their reality (even how many people per 100 000 scientists wouldn't draw up such large numbers - because people accept science text books and professors as authoratative they get the benefit of the knowledge by faith)

the problem is that the parameters of what you deem "natural" doesn't accommodate everything that is phenomenal in this world

Which is the exact premise that the high school drop out holds to maintain the notion that electrons do not exist - how do you propose that it be demonstrated to him that electrons are true?

May the force be with you

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not sure what you mean by the word "out weighs"
I could say the evidence gathered by football fans outweighs the evidence gathered by scientists gleaning knowledge about the electron.
Does that mak ethe football fans more true or the scientists less true?

 

In case you haven't noticed, science operates on the same principle - how many scientific truths have you personally verified (archeology, geology, astronomy, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, psychology etc etc)

 

It's simple really. There is no evidence for the resurrection, and every reason to believe it is myth, as is typical of religious texts - hearsay. Electrons however, are very real and based on first hand observation.

 

Fire

what you require for eye witness accounts to an event about 2000 years ago?

How many football fans in a packed stadium do you think have this first hand observation?

 

For knowledge of such an event you can not depend on eye witnesses as verification. Especially eye witnesses who happen to be extremely religious and delusional. But of course, there were no eye witnesses of this fictional event, as it was typical of a myth that was perpetuated over a certain number for years for an ulterior motive.

This seems to be your one of your most commonly used arguments in a debate about science - the fact that the majority of the public are ignorant about it's details, somehow emplying that this is paralleled with religion. Of course the very fact that religion meets no standards of critical investigation instantly destroys that comparison. I have not experienced an electron first hand, but from my experiences of science, it is not in the business of asserting somethings existence unless it is based on a certain amount of measurement, observation and experiment. And scientific journals on electrons will explain it's findings to anyone willing to learn. In no way is this a method of hearsay as it has survived the standards of science that demands we explain how we arrived at our conclusions.

 

Fire

This says nothing about whether such eye witness accounts are false - all you seem to be doing is conceeding that if such a thing happened it is beyond your power to verify (verify by reductionist models that i s- unless you want to propose "whether a tree falls in a forest if there is no reductionist model to verify it")

This is a classic case of begging the question - "the reason that religion is a fantasy is because the persons who establish it are deluded. This is because anyone who is religious is deluded"

and then on the basis of this circular argument you offer a tentative suggetsion

perhaps because it is one of the most commonly advocated false arguments realted to science, or the claim that reductionist models can explain anything and everything

In other words religon doesn't meet the standards of reductionism - I never expected or declared that it would

same is true of bonafide religion - its not like anyone can say anything about god and be on par with jesus, the pope etc (in otherwords even though you may disregard or not be aware of the methodologies utilized to determine real religious principles from apparent ones, doesn't mean they don't exist)

scriptures are also there for the faithful

What to speak of denying, religion shares these themata with science

In other words the difference is that science (ie molecular reductionism) cannot lay claim to the same synoptic domain of religion

 

LG,

I think “detection” is probably the best description. How detection occurs is not limited provided it can be demonstrated as real detection and not just a claim.

So I have been quite confused by your insistence throughout your posts with your apparent obsession with reductionism. Each time I refer to science or the scientific method you inevitably always respond with “if you mean reductionism then you are wrong” as if that always answers the question and you then simply don’t answer and avoid the question.

I have said before I am not a reductionist as you seem to perceive it; although among the various forms of reductionism there is some foundation. Even within the scientific community there appears significant disagreement on the issue. You seem to want to equate reductionism with science and that is quite false, as I have tried to explain in earlier posts, but you didn’t appear to want to hear that.

I tried to introduce to you the concept of systems and emergent properties but again you kept irritatingly trying to insist that reductionism doesn’t work. The principles of systems, complexity, and holism, are separate to reductionism and are perhaps even opposites. While we can see that structures are composed of smaller components the behaviors of such structures or systems can have their own distinct properties that cannot be easily predicted, if at all, by examining the component parts. The mind is one such system. That it exists is well understood by science even if your perception of reductionism doesn’t easily explain it. Although we could argue that hierarchical reductionism does.

I’m not quite sure to what this refers. But wouldn’t it logically follow that if someone is wrong then what they would write down would be equally wrong?

But in terms of the authors of ancient scriptures my point was that what they wrote wasn’t the act of observation but the imaginative myth-making based on older myths and attempts to explain what was not understood in terms of their imagination. Objective and accurate journalism has never been a strong point in history, not today and certainly not say 2 or 3 thousand years ago when verbal creative story-telling was in most cases the only form of entertainment.

Understanding how religions and superstitions originated does require an understanding of the cultures and customs of those times. The research of Q for example examined this issue quite closely, at least in regard to Christianity.

I wouldn’t. The issue here is not any alleged authority whether substantiated or not but the ability of the audience to comprehend what is being proposed. Similarly trying to explain physics to an ant would also be a waste of time. As I said before your analogy here doesn’t seem to work or seem relevant.

Not so. A fantasy about something does not imply it doesn’t exist but if the claim is incredible and there is no evidence for the object then it is accurate to describe the claim for the object as a fantasy. That is simply being factual.

For example, I hope one day that we can develop teleportation, and perhaps we will but for now the idea is merely a fantasy.

I think this is where you failed to understand the difference between inductive reasoning and the blind faith typical of religious beliefs.

If you prefer you could label inductive reasoning as evidential faith. In this case there is substantial evidence that such experiments reveal such truths, or that qualified scientists through their proven works are authorities in these specifics. Either way the student has reason to believe the statements as true based on said evidence.

Religions have no such recourse to any such authoritative evidence. The faith of religions is pure blind faith, the type that has no hard evidence or inductive precedent for support. Religionists (and you are a prime example) typically attempt to interchange the two definitions of faith as if they are equivalent by claiming that everyone uses faith to some extent so it is just as valid for religion. That claim demonstrates either dishonesty or ignorance of the two distinctive definitions.

Not quite sure what you mean here. What phenomenon that we know about cannot have a natural explanation?

 

Lg,

Continuing from Sunday…

No not at all. For example I don’t need the brilliance of Einstein to be able to comprehend the results of his discoveries. I do however need to comprehend the validity of his methods for verifying his findings and that usually only requires an understanding of the scientific method that can be understood by most people with appropriate normal intelligence.

No that is not true. Science requires verification by experiment and documented in such a way that anyone can repeat the experiments to verify the finings. I.e. the facts can be independently verified by anyone if they so choose. This is entirely different to religious claims that are always personal and not subject to independent verification of any type. Or if the experiment isn’t practical to perform by ordinary folk then all the data and procedures are openly documented for the public for inspection.

Nothing remotely similar can be said about religious claims.

For example?

That is just a tentative claim, or can you prove it?