As I said, wrong thread. That "show" was in the other thread. A lot of people there were whining in the same manner as you are now. So Bowser started this thread, the "show-me-what-you-want-to-stop-you-whining thread". So in that context, your contribution at the moment is "Gee, I dunno." (Spoken in a whiny voice, perhaps)
You have just simply made claims, like the following, which are unproven ..... . As long as you are "just sayin' ..." without the expectation that your words reflect anything related to what has been previously floated in regards to evidence, meaning and/or truth, I guess that's fine. . Drugs are kind of special in that they empower fabrication on a wide range of subjects.
If you imagine a Universe, where it is a fact that there is no God, how would it be any difference from the Universe that we experience?
This is obviously not the place to go in to detail, but there are examples within scripture of great personalties exhibiting "godlike" powers who were adverse to God. IOW what to speak of being God, there is no guarentee that displaying "superhuman" powers even makes one saintly.
Well I guess the real detail here we would have to examine is what you are imagining God and/or the universe to be. Given that detractors of God display an illustrated bias towards a souped up universe and a dumbed down God, the answer is obviously "nothing". If we want to move in to the realm of "imagining facts" a lot of things will start to look really groovy.
Then quite a few claims about what the universe can exclude by dint of natural laws go out the door, for a start ...
James why do you lie so much. Having a discussion with a person that blatantly tells lies, is a pointless pursuit. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Jan.
What are you prepared to accept about God now, in order to take a guess? For example, would we be humans? Jan.
That's fair enough if believe God does not exist anyway. If yes. What is the point of the question? jan.
It was in response to the question about "what would it take for you to acknowledge that God exists" or whatever the question was.
It's kind of instructive to think about what satisfactory evidence of God might be. Good thread topic. 'Empirical' can mean 'experience' in a broad sense, or 'sensory experience' in a narrower sense. I suppose that interpreting the word the first way would leave open the possibility of extra-sensory religious experiences of some mystical sort. I don't want to close the door on the possibility of these. The possibility might conceivably exist that some religious experiences are self-confirming (at least for the individual having the experience). The problem there is that the person who has the experience might sound a bit crazy to others. But if we stick to sensory experience, I'm just like Baldeee (in post #24 as I recall). I can't think of anything that would convince me that I'd experienced something divine, a god, or even Jan's 'the God'. I can imagine inexplicable events and I can imagine astounding light shows in the sky. I can imagine space-aliens as far beyond human cognition as humans are beyond dogs. So incomprehensibility and seeming omniscience and omnipotence couldn't be the criterion. I call this the Independence Day Problem, from that 1990's alien invasion movie. The problem is that no matter how amazing the light-show, the powers responsible still might not be suitable objects of religious worship. There seems to be an additional ingredient necessary in a proper god, something that the Christian tradition calls 'Holiness'. In order to be a suitable object of worship, something can't just be a super-space-alien. It has to be truly Holy. So, how do human beings recognize that?? How do we recognize holiness? I don't think that it's anything that we see, hear, touch or smell. Our senses aren't how we detect it (assuming that we do, which is questionable). It's more of an emotional feeling, a reaction that we have to things. So, does that suggest that our determination of divinity is purely subjective and there isn't any objective way to distinguish divinity at all? Is labeling something 'divine' or 'holy' as much about us and our feelings as it is about the 'something' receiving the title? At this point, I'm inclined to say 'yes'. That places the 'divine' alongside the 'good' and the 'beautiful' with regard to perhaps being more subjective than objective. I don't think that they know either. Maybe they mean something like: 'If you want me to believe, then you will have to convince me!' Leaving open what the convincing might be and how it might occur. Whatever it is, they will know it when they experience it, assuming it convinces them.
Is there any argument that can be made in support of the existence of God that cannot equally validly be made in support of the existence of the Cosmic Unicorn? If I were to say "all the stuff I see around me was put there by the CU", is that sufficient for theists for accept it as objectively true for other people beyond myself? If not, what's the difference?
You mean aside from the fact you would be mirroring the exact same arguments by persons who make no reference to unicorns, cosmic or otherwise? By the same token, I could do the exact same thing with science by replacing key terms with the names of Disney characters. I am not sure how doing so would signify anything greater than my powers of semantic mix n matching.
Right. My point is simply that, without appealing to extant evidence (that third parties can analyze for themselves to verify its validity), any claim is as valid as another. Or invalid. The claim of God's existence is no more valid than the claim of the CU's existence - if one dispenses with the notion of independent validation of evidence. Precisely my point. Arguing God without producing independently verifiable evidence is tantamount to semantic mix n matching - leaving God no more valid an assertion than the CU.
But you are appealing to extant evidence. You are simply swapping nouns for promoting ideas that are already present. Granted you are of the opinion that such a body of work, in its original form, doesn't constitute extant evidence, but you don't lend weight to your challenge any more than labelling energy, mass and the speed of light as Huey, Dewey and Louie changes anything specific in Einstein's work.
