Does God exist? (13 Viewers)

[Snaykew]

God exists! Just look around you! He made EVERYTHING.

 

[KFunk]

Idk for the most part I'd look to use the other persons notions... and I truly don't see how someone could claim something could not be necessary if it happened and there was nothing before it.

And it is at this kind of impasse that I invoke the problem of imprecise/incoherent concepts. You say 'I simply cannot see how X could be the case', and I say 'I can indeed see how X might be the case'. We are both rational individuals taking a critical approach and yet we hit this brick wall.

It's hard to diagnose what the exact issue is, but I certainly think there is a high risk of conceptual breakdown. A more exciting idea is that we may have hit an area of true contradiction.

 

[Slidey]

It's hard to diagnose what the exact issue is, but I certainly think there is a high risk of conceptual breakdown. A more exciting idea is that we may have hit an area of true contradiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems

When you get to this point in metaphysics, the difference between the universe and a methamatical model of the universe becomes arbitrary. It's exciting to consider the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems at such a point.

 

[Lentern]

Who said I'm an atheist at this scale? I'm providing you with logical discourse and you're trying to shrug it off with "Well somebody else believes otherwise and you're an atheist, so you must be wrong."

If you can't find logical fault with what I say then you can hardly go around claiming a need for a supernatural being, no?

Well I'm just reluctant to embrace the notion that the big bang had a catalyst as it will result in my recieving a blastingfrom another one of you people. Cheap shots aside if you embrace the big bang had a cause than we get back to the first cause dillemma anyway or in your case, the first, last and middle cause as you claim to be a cyclist, which arises in your later quote so I will comment on it there.

You should probably research what I say instead of trying to push your agenda. Probabilistic non-determinism, not non-determinism without a pattern.

I was paraphrasing for confirmation, no need to be touchy. I will have to seek confirmation though on my prior question, do you believe it falls withnin the laws of science for something to happen with absolutely no catalyst?

Why is it not accurate? Do you agree that if
A causes B
B causes C
C causes A
then you'll get an infinite cycle which preserves causality and has no first cause? This is exactly what you are looking for, so I fail to see the 'folly'. I certainly see the folly with this, though:

The basis of your entire argument is "I need a first cause to comprehend the world, therefore it was some supernatural being that started everything, even though I don't know what caused the supernatural being to exist, and even though I comprehend him even less than science."

Exactly what is wrong with that theory? The laws of science do not permit the commencing of existance, therefore as existance indeed has commenced or else we'd not be here something not bound by those laws must have played a role. If the something is not bound by those laws than it is supernatural.

It allows for the possibility of a deity no more than before. I was simply pointing out that your preconceived notions of intuition about the world are wrong, and was thus hoping you'd realise that trying to apply a 'logical' requirement to the multiverse which isn't even true for the universe is somewhat irrational.

I agree and yet science will persist in trying to decode rather than except the presence of a force beyond their comprehension.

 

[KFunk]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems

When you get to this point in metaphysics, the difference between the universe and a methamatical model of the universe becomes arbitrary. It's exciting to consider the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems at such a point.

Aye, Godel's theorem is tres cool. It's worth considering the possibilities afforded by admitting the existence of contradiction. Naturally, classical logic has to be thrown out the window in this case (because a contradiction implies all wff's and so the logic breaks down), but this is why you use a paraconsistent logic instead. Interestingly, Godel's theorem can be true within a formal theory / system of arithmetic based on paraconsistent logic without generating the issues that Godel's theorem normally creates for axiomatic systems (since such a logic is not 'explosive' in the way classical / intuitionistic / other logics often are - that is, in that from a contradiction you can derive all wff's in these systems).

 

[Slidey]

Well I'm just reluctant to embrace the notion that the big bang had a catalyst as it will result in my recieving a blastingfrom another one of you people.

Sorry, I thought this was a sincere debate about philosophy, not a matter of saving face.

If you agree, say so. If you disagree, say so. Don't pretend to disagree because it's easier to defend your stance.

Cheap shots aside if you embrace the big bang had a cause than we get back to the first cause dillemma anyway or in your case, the first, last and middle cause as you claim to be a cyclist, which arises in your later quote so I will comment on it there.

I'm doing this asynchronously, but you didn't actually 'comment on it there'. I'm happy to provide you with some possible cyclic models of the universe, though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model#The_Steinhardt-Turok_model

I was paraphrasing for confirmation, no need to be touchy. I will have to seek confirmation though on my prior question, do you believe it falls withnin the laws of science for something to happen with absolutely no catalyst?

Yeah, certainly: radioactive decay.

On the other hand, probabilistic non-determinism really still requires some guiding mathematical function, which is why I never put it forward as an explanation for an uncaused universe.

Exactly what is wrong with that theory? The laws of science do not permit the commencing of existance, therefore as existance indeed has commenced or else we'd not be here something not bound by those laws must have played a role. If the something is not bound by those laws than it is supernatural.

What is wrong with it? You can't see what is wrong with it?

1) "I need a first cause to comprehend the world"

What you need and what is true are not the same.

2) "therefore it was some supernatural being that started everything"

Nevermind that science can also produce models that fit both reality and an causality.

3) "even though I don't know what caused the supernatural being to exist"

Then you are no better off at all. In fact now you're 'worse' off because you're pretending to have an answer to something which you still have no answer for.

4) "and even though I comprehend him even less than science."

But I thought this all originated from a desire to comprehend? See point 1. You've solved nothing, found no understanding here.

What special property do supernatural beings have that places them above the laws of logic? I'm not talking about the laws of science here, which we don't fully and absolutely understand yet (and which are empirical), but the laws of logic, which we DO fully and absolutely understand, to the point we have things like Godel's theorems, and which are absolute, ideal, and infallible.

You are requiring your supernatural being to violate the laws of logic in a way you refuse to let science do. In light of this, how can you expect to be taken seriously?

I agree and yet science will persist in trying to decode rather than except the presence of a force beyond their comprehension.

Yeah, well lucky for you kiddo. If we all thought like you, we'd have never moved out of the stone age, no?

 

[KFunk]

Fatality.

 

[Slidey]

Aye, Godel's theorem is tres cool. It's worth considering the possibilities afforded by admitting the existence of contradiction. Naturally, classical logic has to be thrown out the window in this case (because a contradiction implies all wff's and so the logic breaks down), but this is why you use a paraconsistent logic instead. Interestingly, Godel's theorem can be true within a formal theory / system of arithmetic based on paraconsistent logic without generating the issues that Godel's theorem normally creates for axiomatic systems (since such a logic is not 'explosive' in the way classical / intuitionistic / other logics often are - that is, in that from a contradiction you can derive all wff's in these systems).

Yeah, I think it's a promising topic. Of course, paraconsistent logic requires the dismissal of very intuitive logical axioms (such as transitivity or negation), so people like Lentern are no better off.

Alas, alack.

 

[Slidey]

I don't even want to think about how the Everett interpretation fits in with a cyclic model of the universe!

Fatality.

 

[Enteebee]

tbqh I don't have any favoured view of how we have something instead of nothing or how the universe came into being or if it's even meaningful to say it came into being, of prime importance in this discussion (for me at least) is merely to show that all of the god hypotheses are highly improbable against the others which are born of science.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591024811

God: The Failed Hypothesis / The Comprehensible Cosmos

Damien Broderick | March 10, 2007

God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
By Victor J. Stenger

DO we live in an age of resurgent belief, as the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the US and of Islam elsewhere suggests? Or is the "faith of our fathers" getting corroded, as many believers suspect with dismay, by an unholy blend of sceptical science and consumerist self-indulgence? The popularity of The Da Vinci Code and Philip Pullman's death-of-God trilogy for young readers, His Dark Materials, is certainly striking. Film stars enthusiastically endorse a cult claiming that a galactic overlord named Xenu stranded us here 75million years ago.

Meanwhile, defiantly atheistic books have been bestsellers: evolutionist Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, philosopher Dan Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Sam Harris's brilliantly incisive little tract, Letter to a Christian Nation.

Then there are the claims by filmmaker James Cameron that the tomb of Jesus has been found. What in heaven's name is going on?

I have a sneaking suspicion that doubts about faiths are fuelled less by the shock of Darwinian insight, say, than by a deep, unconscious revulsion after 19 ardent true believers murdered nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001.

Detesting militant Islam required no great intellectual courage on the part of Westerners, but a side effect has been a dawning sense that if one leading faith could propel such brutality -- could constitute, indeed, the new post-communist threat -- then perhaps religious conviction in general might be questionable.

Traditionally, brand-name religion is instilled from infancy, often with ferocious warnings against heretics and infidels, making it hard to doubt the precepts with which one has grown up.

When I was a child in a parochial school, I parroted a catechism that explained vacuously "We cannot see God because he is a Spirit, and cannot be seen by us in this life". Later, I learned classic proofs for God's existence such as the argument from design (the world is complex and so must have a watchmaker), which the proven process of evolution had long ago dispelled.

Other arguments seemed, eventually, equally frail. The First Mover gambit was amusingly parodied by a friend's phrase: "If there's no God, who pulls up the next Kleenex?" One last-resort argument for the necessity of the divine was a real puzzler, though: Why is there Something, rather than Nothing? Who put the bang in the big bang? Veteran particle physicist Victor Stenger offers an answer to that deep question in his two new books, arguing a materialist, God-free account of the cosmos, equally antagonistic to superstition, the paranormal and religions archetypal and newfangled alike. He refuses to accept the polite accommodation urged by agnostic Stephen Jay Gould that science and religion can never be in conflict as they are non-overlapping "magisteria". Faith, for Gould, dealt with morals, science with testable fact.

This bid for mutual tolerance gained little traction in either camp. Evolutionary psychology pressed hard against the territorial prerogatives of religion, showing how traditional ethical codes had developed on the basis of templates selected -- for good and ill -- by a million years of human prehistory. But aren't the central dogmas of Christian civilisation, indeed of all the Abrahamic societies including Judaism and Islam, derived from the infallible word of God delivered in Scripture? Stenger offers a familiar corrective: the moral guidance of the Bible is confused and often reprehensible, supporting slavery and other atrocities. We interpret its words according to today's superior moral insight and sensitivity, so the interpretations given by Christians "must depend on ideals that they have already developed from some other source". Unlike some critics of faith, Stenger takes the tough line that deity is not just an unnecessary hypothesis or one where an honest thinker can choose to accept or reject it. No, it is "the failed hypothesis".

This is a bold claim indeed and certain to meet scornful rejection from prelates and pious alike. Undaunted, Stenger trots briskly through all the obvious claims and his objections to them, concluding in each case that the evidence for the traditional God is too weak to accept or can be dismissed as mistaken.

For example, while human life is well-suited to this planet (inevitably, since we evolved here), the universe as a whole is an uncongenial place, vast, empty and hostile. Far from being carefully designed and calibrated for humankind, the cosmos looks precisely the sort of place one would expect had it emerged unplanned from the void. That assertion still seems to most non-scientists merely a conjuring trick. How can something burst into existence from nothing? Philosophers debated this for centuries but the question assumes that "nothing" has a clear meaning. Actually, we never see nothing, only the change of one thing into another, the slow dispersal of energy into exhaustion.

As Stenger points out in his remarkable book The Comprehensible Cosmos, all the matter and energy in the universe, including the newly discovered dark matter and dark energy that comprise most of the cosmos, balances out to zero. "Nothing," as physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek put it, "is unstable". The void cannot be conceived as ultimately empty.

The astonishing random event that led to an explosion of matter and energy and expanding space time -- to the creation of a local universe -- seems finally within our mental grasp.

Stenger does not stint in his treatment of these remarkable ideas. The first half of his book sets out for any reader with a basic scientific training the way in which symmetry gives rise to the laws of nature: conservation of energy and momentum, the quantum rules that rewrote physics in the 20th century, special and general relativity. His lucid if demanding treatment offers a somewhat contentious account of the way in which everything we see about us takes the form it does because of one simple demand: that no standpoint is privileged over another.

This does not mean, as he takes pains to stress, that anything goes in the postmodern vein. Readers prepared to follow his argument into elementary calculus and quantum theory will find it spelled out in detail in the second half of the book. The tragedy of the 21st century is that so few people have been equipped by the education system to take that journey into hard-won insight. Which is probably one reason, when the pain and confusion of life become too great to bear, so many of us turn to Xenu or God and abandon the struggle to understand.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21334644-5003900,00.html

 

[Heyu8myrice]

theres got to be a God out there... how can all this be created by accident?

 

[KFunk]

Yeah, I think it's a promising topic. Of course, paraconsistent logic requires the dismissal of very intuitive logical axioms (such as transitivity or negation), so people like Lentern are no better off.

Alas, alack.

Aye, paraconsistency certainly challenges our intuitions. But keep in mind that our intuitions also have a habit of generating contradiction (think naive set theory - which, funnily enough, could be resurrected in some form through use of a paraconsistent logic). If we continually find that we hit contradiction at the limits of thought then paraconsistency may be the best means we have to navigate such waters. On the other hand, we could always straight out deny the contradictions and accept something akin to incompleteness of knowledge in those areas.

I don't even want to think about how the Everett interpretation fits in with a cyclic model of the universe!

The possibilities are fairly beautiful: for example, that all possible universes exist perpetually. David Lewis would be smiling from all of his counterfactual graves (to have pinned down the universe through a priori theorising is no mean feat!).

 

[katie tully]

theres got to be a God out there... how can all this be created by accident?

I just..
You know...
Anger wells up inside of me.

 

[Lentern]

I'm doing this asynchronously, but you didn't actually 'comment on it there'. I'm happy to provide you with some possible cyclic models of the universe, though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model#The_Steinhardt-Turok_model

I love the word possible, covers all manners of sin doesn't it. These models whilst wonderfully planned and summoning almost every resource we have, are for the most part guessing. There is quite alot of sound logic amongst them I won't deny but the great gaps are patched up with guesswork. They might be right, but as far as them being scientific they are still incredibly dominated by guesswork. Almost like a hybrid between science and religion really, shall we call it scientology?

Yeah, certainly: radioactive decay.

On the other hand, probabilistic non-determinism really still requires some guiding mathematical function, which is why I never put it forward as an explanation for an uncaused universe.

Sounds alot like "yes and no" to me. I'm not really sure how something can have no cause yet "a mathematical guiding" but to your credit you really relied upon it so it's a moot point.

What is wrong with it? You can't see what is wrong with it?

1) "I need a first cause to comprehend the world"

What you need and what is true are not the same.

You can manipulate the phrasing but it does not speak nicely to your ability to construct a cogent arguement if that is what you rely upon. It is my opinion and one you cannot refute with any certainty that for the world to exist something must be repsonsible for it's existance.


2) "therefore it was some supernatural being that started everything"

Nevermind that science can also produce models that fit both reality and an causality.
They are not scientific models they are religious models relying enormously on speculation and guesswork. They are barely more scientific that Allah or Jesus.

3) "even though I don't know what caused the supernatural being to exist"

Then you are no better off at all. In fact now you're 'worse' off because you're pretending to have an answer to something which you still have no answer for.
I hardly think it is better to act under the pretence of being able to understand the inconcievable, from my point of you it is much more sensible to accept that it is beyond comprehension.

4) "and even though I comprehend him even less than science."

But I thought this all originated from a desire to comprehend? See point 1. You've solved nothing, found no understanding here.
I've solved plenty, i now appreciate that it is too much for mortal minds to comprehend, something you will continue to battle with in futility.

What special property do supernatural beings have that places them above the laws of logic? I'm not talking about the laws of science here, which we don't fully and absolutely understand yet (and which are empirical), but the laws of logic, which we DO fully and absolutely understand, to the point we have things like Godel's theorems, and which are absolute, ideal, and infallible.

You are requiring your supernatural being to violate the laws of logic in a way you refuse to let science do. In light of this, how can you be expect to be taken seriously?

I think the answer to your question lies in the definition of the word supernatural. I mean ofcourse something can't be decoded if it's supernatural, it wouldn't be supernatural if it was. What a ridiculous question. You can't decode everything mate, and just as your pursuit of a scientific answer to the impossible will yield but further questions so will your attempts to get a theologian to logically define the supernatural.

Yeah, well lucky for you kiddo. If we all thought like you, we'd have never moved out of the stone age, no?

Oh rubbish. I don't object science, i'm perfectly happy for science and religion to coexist. I have time and time again said that I have no qualms with people not following a religious faith and have never discouraged people anyone to try and learn more about the world around us. I have only questioned this close minded, intollerant notion that science holds the answers to everything which you have brandished about the place in no more reasonable manner than the christian fundamentalists like the reverend Fred Nile. It is this militancy which fosters the antipathy between the church and sciences and which drives moderates to the side and hand authority to the extremists.

 

[Shoubadoo]

theres got to be a God out there... how can all this be created by accident?

Ok. But how could a spirit, that is, a non-tangible thing, create tangible things?


What is god, or the gods? Are we all gods, in our higher sense of thought & being?
We will never come to agreement on one thing because to believe, we need proof.
And the belief in god is based on faith.

I have seen people being healed by others through god. I have seen miracles.
But that is still not proof it really is 'through god'.
And on a Christian basis, if God loves us and so gives us free will, why would he sentence those who do not believe Jesus is 'the way, the truth, and the light' to an eternity of hell, i.e. life without God?
Why bother creating something you 'love', if you can bare to see it burn in hell for all eternity?

As I said, nothing can be proven, unless you count faith as truth.

 

[Kwayera]

theres got to be a God out there... how can all this be created by accident?

It wasn't.

 

[Kwayera]

I have seen people being healed by others through god. I have seen miracles.
But that is still not proof it really is 'through god'.
And on a Christian basis, if God loves us and so gives us free will, why would he sentence those who do not believe Jesus is 'the way, the truth, and the light' to an eternity of hell, i.e. life without God?
Why bother creating something you 'love', if you can bare to see it burn in hell for all eternity?

As I said, nothing can be proven, unless you count faith as truth.

Healed? Miracles? 'splain.

 

[Slidey]

Well, I'll leave you at that, Lentern. I can tell this isn't about intellectual honesty for you, but a desire to resolve the uncertainty you currently feel about your world. Repeating "but there must be a supernatural being!" over and over might help you bring consistency to your world for a time, but subconsciously you'll remain deeply uncertain and that's something no amount of self-delusion can entirely suppress.

I'm all for philosophical discourse, but I'm not here to get you through your existential crisis.

 

[Lentern]

Well, I'll leave you at that, Lentern. I can tell this isn't about intellectual honesty for you, but a desire to resolve the uncertainty you currently feel about your world. Repeating "but there must be a supernatural being!" over and over might help you bring consistency to your world for a time, but subconsciously you'll remain deeply uncertain and that's something no amount of self-delusion can entirely suppress.

I'm all for philosophical discourse, but I'm not here to get you through your existential crisis.

My self delusion. My good man I do not pretend to be able to explain it all. It is you whom think that a theory which involves basing it on a scintilla more facts, and in reality that's what it is. Considering the incredible complexity involved in the formula the added scientific calculations which you use make up a scintilla of what is neccessary to understand it all. The difference is whilst you delude yourself into thinking your religion rational and sensible, I accept that there are elements the human mind just can't get it's head around. But ofcourse I'm the one in lala land not you.

 

[Garygaz]

Science is fucked. So many laws and theorems and so many exceptions here and there. I've lurked around wikipedia and what not to find out as much as I can about the big bang (although most of it was in complex scientific theorem talk) and have found the following. (correct me if I'm wrong)

Energy (which has always existed) went through some complex process to create original matter which then expanded and what not to explode and create the universe and everything in it, which is still expanding to this day. The big bang was the beginning of time.

I know I've said it to Slidey before, but, damn, the idea of energy ALWAYS being existent is pretty mind boggling. Every single thing in the universe has a predecessor except energy, a singularity exempt from the other rules of science. Ahhhh that's why I'm not doing science.