It is a matter of perspective, either you are a stranger on an alien world or you came from this world and it is your home.
If God is real, how would you know?
- Thread starter Jan Ardena
- Start date
foghorn
Valued Senior Member
I'm a product of Nature (the whole shebang of me).
You replace the word God with the word Nature. She has many names.
Well, right. But that's like a criminal deciding to replace the word "steal" with "borrow." He can do that if he wants, but it doesn't change what he does.
foghorn
Valued Senior Member
I stick with Nature and Occam's razor. Your way is silly. You end up with...
If it takes an intelligence to ''make'' an intelligence, then who made the first intelligence and so on, getting where exactly?
So, there's consciousness and intelligence in rocks, lead, iron, carbon monoxide? Doesn't it make more sense that intelligence and consciousness are simply parts of the brain?
Well, there is evidence for God in China’s Ancient History. The very same God talked about in the Bible.
Why would you ask that?
Highest expression is an abstraction. Is expression definitively bound to purpose? No, it's not.
Among Bowser's lazy troll lines over the years, that one is actually kind of funny, though that assessment is an introspection starting after the fact. If his low-effort troll occasionally produces results that aren't utterly dismal, it can easily be coincidence.
The general advice is to not pretend confusion about easy and easily communicable ideas; in this case, a resulting question considers whence comes the inquiry about whether Nature has a purpose. Consider a not-entirely unrelated potential; I'm midway through some decisions about how much time and effort to waste on someone else, and part of the problem is his loathing of religion might preclude him from discerning certain differences. Would he be following a Poe rabbit, as such, because, why not, and it's an opportunity to whine about the people he loathes; or would he be chasing down the rabbit hole because he did not recognize it was trollbait?
Bowser, meanwhile, is his own sort of example. His retort about whether God has a purpose is as lazy as it is predictable, but he does make an affirmative assertion↗ of the belief that, "the whole point is Life itself". I'm not unfamiliar with the expression, and where I would suggest he's wrong reflects my recent criticism↗ of the not-unrelated pantheistic proposition↗ defining God, "as being all things". And if God being all things is too limited a definition without recognizing what does not exist as a thing, so also is the "whole point" being "life itself" symptomatic of something Yazata↗ considered recently, "that God needs to be Divine, God needs to be Holy". And as I subsequently considered↗, this is a problem of the gods humans invent, that reality simply is, and while people need reality to mean something that has to do with them because that need to be needed or significant or affecting, not utterly powerless and ignored and insignificant, drives the focus on what "God" has to do with oneself.
This isn't obscure stuff. We might consider another example. If, once upon a time, you knew an atheist who converted to religious belief, yet every time he turned up to evangelize he sounded pretty much indistinguishable, these years later, from the sort of clueless atheistic mockery that was sport even in his ostensibly disbelieving days, how surprised should anyone be? Still, the haunting Poe question involves the appearance that one who disputes with this evangelism cannot discern the difference between genuine but ignorant advocacy, to the one, and clueless provocateurism, to the other. Furthermore, there also remains a question of whether someone actually cares about the difference, or if it's all just an excuse to keep complaining.
Look at how Bowser's replies are structured. Everything is always fragmentary and noncommittal, not quite on track, and there are always anxious retorts willing to be led around by the nose, like that, under a pretense that engaging a patchwork, low-effort, targeted deviation somehow addresses religion or theists or some such. Look at his pantheistic proposition; needling so directly as he did after proposing to define God as being all things is hardly unfamiliar behavior. And if you follow down that page, you'll see he's just stringing people along because they let him.
So also is his current run↑ in this thread, counterinquiring atop a tacit presupposition; and your line↑, Foghorn, is well-placed, timed, and pointed, but you're dueling with a sincerity historically most given to insincerity. And the thing about his retort↑, thereunto, is that it's just a cheap and easy joke. The setup is the first sentence, which again plays the tacit presupposition; the punch, in this case, is the question.
You seem to have passed on the tacit presupposition, which is vulnerable to logic; to the other, Bowser isn't seriously committed to any particular argument. But confusion over the phrase, highest expression, compared to your own tacit presupposition° regarding nature and purpose, answers his question rather quite succinctly; no, of course you're not°°.
See Billvon (#278↑) for a simple address of Bowser's bait. Watch and see°°° whether the differences implied by each of their phrasings ever are ever accounted directly°°°°, but there is an important difference; he is not purporting some sort of strange confusion as a digression point.
Thus, I would remind that Nature has no particular purpose in mind, as such, in phenotypic expression of alleles. Expression of natural outcomes is not some extraordinary use of the word. We can argue, all we want, about whether or not, "You are proof that the Universe", [itself], "is conscious and intelligent". But the question whether you are "the highest expression" of that outcome is not confusing, and has an obvious answer.
That it's all superficial politicking is what it is, but pretenses of such basic confusion are very poor representations of any ostensibly enlightened, rational, and just position.
Honestly, I've never understood why that part so puzzles people. It's not like it's just you, or anything. As it is, you happen to be of the moment, and it has, in various ways, been coming up, of late. Or, such as it is, been going on for a while.
And I would think his continuing performance, responding to you with easy, noncommittal one-liners that don't quite match up to anything you're saying, ought to make some sort of point.
Consider (Q)'s response at #286↑. The first sentence identifies one of Bowser's easy fallacies. The second, though, mistakenly presumes that what makes sense has anything to do with what Bowser said. What (Q) didn't do, however, just for instance, was pretend confusion about the phrase, "universal constant".
I think of excrement, and, sure, for various reasons in the moment. Cowflops, horseapples, and, honestly, I don't know what the term is, but it's not really sheep dip, is it?
Because somewhere in all that shite is a metaphor about the flock driven to market and slaughter, because then there are some who aren't part of all that, but will come out to shit all over the road, anyway, just because, well, sheep biscuits, or whatever. And it's one thing to sweep it aside like rabbit pellets, or maybe we need to break out the shovels, as such, for more elephantine plop, but I just don't see the use in asking them to keep shitting all over the place.
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Notes:
° And look at his reply↑ to you, which leads with superficial counterpoint directly appealing to you, similarly to how his sketch of a pantheistic proposition needled another so directly as to say, "including you".
°° To which, the obvious reply is to wonder, So, what? But that's just it. That dead end is the point.
°°° Or not, as such, and I wouldn't blame you for passing over such low odds; if it comes up, we can worry about it, then.
°°°° In neither case is the argument itself really the point.
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
If you are looking at me then please don't waste your time.
And if indeed me my loathing is not to religion but to stupidity and unchecked gullibility ... My respect for religion you could find has many levels ...well you will not find such because that is irrelevant to what is happening here.
Alex
foghorn
Valued Senior Member
Nature is blind. Nature just is. ''Highest'' ''lowest'' mean nothing to Nature.
If somewhere in the rest of your post you say that, then good for you. I am not going to read all that round the houses stuff to reach a point you may be trying to make.
° I envy your spelling and vocabulary, but it seems to get in the way of your communicating with forums members.
°° The cat sat on the mat.
°°° The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
°°°° I trying to pad out this post to make it seem important.
°°°°° Boy, am I ignorant.
°°°°°° Many a true word is spoken in jest... referring to °°°°°
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Well, that's just the thing. Why would you go out of your way to present yourself as such?
When your answer to cheap advocacy is to pretend ignorance↑, people might take that pretense at face value.
Right. But you can easily replace "ancient history" with "unreliable myths."
We are evidence God exists on multiple levels.
All anyone has to do is merely look at the design and observe the, off the charts, complexity of engineering clearly seen in creation. It is a plain and simple thing.
Done!
Cut! Print! Moving On!
All anyone has to do is merely look at the design and observe the, off the charts, complexity of engineering clearly seen in creation. It is a plain and simple thing.
Done!
Cut! Print! Moving On!
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
We are evidence god does not exist.
If a god exists the implication may be that all things are due to his creation..mmm an intelligent design...and clearly the design of a human is far from inteligent and so that proves there is no god.
Done!
Cut!Print! Moving on!
Alex
I see complexity of engineering in CERN's accelerator or Rolls Royce turbofan jet engine, but everything in nature looks like it was just tossed together with no rhyme or reason. You seem to have a very different idea of what is complexity in engineering.
That is nonsense. The order, the apparent design, the complexity, Abiogenesis, and Darwinism and the evolution of life, are all explained and in many examples observed, at least as far back as t+10-43 seconds, or on a time scale of around 13.83 billion years.
Show me one example of evidence for any god that is not, and cannot be explained by any other means.
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
Show me one god out of the thousands of gods available that is not a mere human invention...just one...
Alex
A great man once said, "Man invented God: God didn't invent man."
Oh, wait, that was me that said that!!
Xelasnave.1947
Valued Senior Member
When you think about it there is more of a chance that aliens visit the Earth or that big foot is real, ...and there is fat chance of either.
It is wishful thinking gone crazy...heck I wish for a genie in a bottle, you know the one I am particularly focused on..but wishing does not make it happen...maybe I did not construct a really decent definition.
Alex
It is wishful thinking gone crazy...heck I wish for a genie in a bottle, you know the one I am particularly focused on..but wishing does not make it happen...maybe I did not construct a really decent definition.
Alex
