Returning to this after a long and thoughtful hiatus, I've been thinking about these things:

I think that there is a non sequitur in your line of reasoning that goes from "the universe must have been created" to "therefore the theistic god created the universe." I think that if you want to jump from "the universe exists therefore it had to have been created" to something, you have to jump to "there is some sort of outside actor whose nature is undefined." He could be a cosmic computer programmer and we are his simulation. He could be a god child playing dolls. I don't see how you can jump to the theistic god, nor do I see how you can claim that all of this business (logic, the universe, reality, etc) "flows" from his essence.

You talk about prophets messing up with certain aspects; what about when Jesus tells his disciples that he will come into his kingdom before the end of that generation?

I understand that we can't know certain things, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. We can't simultaneously know a particles momentum and position, but it still has a momentum and position.

And then with the antimatter imbalance, at the LHC when they smash together particles, they get a vast majority of matter and only a tiny tiny bit of antimatter, similar to the big bang. Is god there in every single experiment scooping out the antimatter? If you hold that god designed the universe to have a matter/antimatter imbalance, it could also be argued by the nontheistic camp that it's just one of those things about the universe that just is such as the various universal constants.

I'll come back and post some more when it's not midnight.

Interesting points.

In my opinion, everyone is free to think whether God exists or not, and I'll respect that view. Imo, God exists. Why? I'm just believing that. Can't you argue that? No, I can't. Can you argue why you like your favourite snack bar? The only argument you can think of is 'they sell delicious french fries'. Maybe I don't like their fries.

Dixit.
(I have said)

elfprince13, I know you're a really smart guy, which is why it really made me cringe as I read this, since this is the same argument made by the uneducated flock of any theistic religions. No offense.

The thing is, you can't just argue and argue and then out of nowhere pull the God-is-outside-the-Universe/physical-laws-and-therefore-he-isn't-bound-by-them-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you! because A.) there's no way that you possibly know that and therefore it's stupid to assume so, and B.) it's just taking one mystery and trying to solve it by creating another mystery--nothing is being gained.

I'm not arguing against theism here so much as I am trying to debunk ugly logical fallacies.

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Also, while I'm here, and since it seems this thread is fair game for stirring up argument, lemme just say something about answering legitimate questions with scripture, which I'm pretty tired of people doing (from an intellectual standpoint).

In general, you can answer a question like "Where in the Bible does it say...?" with "The Bible says...", but when you're given a question like "How do you know God exists?", when you answer with "Because the Bible says so," you're not doing yourself any intellectual favors. When you have to bust out the Bible and quote it to support your arguments, you're making the assumption that the person you're arguing with believes it is a 100% dependable and accurate source, which is almost never the case. If I started a religion based on Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and I claimed that Sauron was an existent demonic being, I can't start quoting LotR and say "Because Tolkien's book says so. See? Right here..." because you believe it is a work of fiction. It's a horrible case of circular reasoning, "The Bible says the Bible is accurate," or "The Bible says God exists, and God says the Bible is accurate." It's not a sustainable position.
</rant>

If a religion can be disproved by logic or science, that's a pretty lame religion *cough* no offense latter day saints *cough* (they can be very nice people, but I think their whole religion is whack)

I personally am a devout Roman Catholic, and even I question whether there is truly a god or not, and it's all a fake. Everyone, I bet even the Pope at one time did. It's human nature. But, that's where faith comes in. You can't prove there is a god -- however, deep down inside you know there is one. When you have no faith, you have no power to determine if there really is a god. How can you ever feel enlightened by a force you openly reject?

The one thing is though, is that any argument that there is NOT a god is easily debunked. Try to disprove it. Logic can't disprove it and neither can science. It can't be applied the other way though, to tell the truth.

Or lame are the minds that think they have a great enough understanding that they can disprove something so much greater than them. No?

Of course there's a God! I see him playing skee-ball every year at the arcade on the Boardwalk...

I am Roman Catholic and I live in Utah, swarmed with Mormons. And I have complete faith in God.

No human being can or ever will prove or disprove anything. None of us can even reason with his existence. My stance is just that he exists. So maybe it's also impossible to prove he does -- but like I said, Faith is what proves or disproves something to a comtemplator's soul, and if they have no faith they obviously can't believe in him.

What do you mean by "It can't be applied the other way though, to tell the truth."? Do you mean that any argument that there IS a god is NOT easily debunked? The thing you have to keep in mind is that the burden of proof (since you're talking about proving and disproving things here) is on the theist, definitely NOT the atheist. Atheism is a neutral position, that's what many people fail again and again to realize. To support that, figure this: theism is a thing, and atheism is a lack of said thing, just like color is a thing and colorlessness is a lack of such thing (what color is a colorless object? no color...) Therefore there doesn't need to be an argument that God does not exist. If an atheist tries to prove that, he's an ignorant gnostic atheist. The agnostic atheist is a rational atheist and the point he tries to posit is not that there isn't a god or gods, but that there is no reason to believe that there is a god or gods because there is no empirical evidence to support the claim that there is. Where the separation lies between the duties of theists and atheists is in the burden of proof.

I've always sucked at breaking things up into paragraphs, deal with it.

I love how atheists will try to disprove God at any cost -- I'll go back to my life, it's hard to argue with someone that openly rejects God

Ashbad, that's why I've stayed out of this conversation until that post

good point, I'll follow suit

If you ever see an atheist try to prove there is not a god, slap him for me. You're completely misunderstanding the idea most thinking atheists try to promote.

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Just a second.



Fix'd.

You are correct in that assessment, but up until now I have been concentrating my arguments o the existence of a creator rather than the nature of the creator.


Do you believe that our universe is consistent? If so, why?


Can you get me a citation so I can read the passage you'd like me to respond to? I would agree that if Jesus failed any of the tests of prophetic authority we certainly can't look to him as a prophet (let alone God-incarnate). This is in some ways related to C.S. Lewis's Lord/Liar/Lunatic trilemma.


Then we are in agreement that limitations of knowledge and reason aren't limitations to reality.


Can you really make a comparison to the expansion of a singularity to a particle-decay that begins with normal matter? I haven't studied particle physics that extensively, but my conservation-of-charge spidey sense is tingling.


If you reject Many Worlds interpretations of QM all those just are things that allow life become phenomenally unlikely. You could argue survivorship bias for some of them, but since matter/antimatter symmetry would have blown everything up as soon as it appeared I'm not sure that argument holds in this case.


That wasn't an argument, that was a definition upon which further arguments are made. Actually, to be really specific, "God created our spacetime" is the definition, and "God exists outside of our spacetime" is one of the first things to follow from that.


Context man. I feel like I'm reading a kneejerk reaction from someone who has met too many Young Earth Creationists, not like I'm reading a response to the contents of this thread. Arguing that I'm wrong because other people who say the same thing as me are wrong about a different set of things isn't a logically valid argument.


Let's play by your rules for a minute: Please tell me how you know the axioms of ZFC are true.

Hint: You can't. So tell me instead why it isn't stupid to assume them.


You appear to have an odd definition of both "mystery" and "gain". Everything in science, mathematics, and theology is about pushing back the boundaries of the unknown. And there are fundamental properties of logic that prevent us from pushing the boundaries back "all the way", but it would be idiotic to suggest that answering a question which leads to another question hasn't brought us anywhere new.


A noble goal and one of my favorite hobbies, but unfortunately you haven't done that so much as failed to distinguish between presuppositions and logical arguments drawing on those presuppositions (or axioms in logical/mathematical terminology). If you feel my presuppositions are unjustified than feel free to challenge them, but don't confuse them with my arguments.


This is an entirely fair criticism, and I get similarly peeved when dealing with people who can't justify their beliefs outside of scripture. I'm not sure if this part of your post was in response to this thread, but I hope you've noticed that every time I have quoted scripture in this thread it is been at the request of someone else wanting to see how my philosophy meshes with scripture or to argue against someone's claims about it.



You're correct in pointing out that atheism isn't logically tenable when it makes truth-claims denying God's existence. You're also completely misrepresenting the position that most atheists actually hold (versus the one they give lip-service too). If you actually believe that the existence of God is unknowable, you are an agnostic without any qualifiers. Terming yourself an "agnostic atheist" is one of two things:
a) Redundant ("I do not believe that God exists").
b) A dodge ("I believe that God does not exist, but I won't claim to know that").


This working definition of faith raises a lot of problems - specifically that is unhealthfully oriented towards blind faith to the exclusion of empirical/evidence based faith.

http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2016:28&version=NIV1984

As for the universal constants being highly unlikely to support life, I have some things to say (rather than links). One, is over the years we have found that various constants are tied to other constants in fundamental ways (similar to how the diameter of a circle is tied to the circumference. The universe is unimaginable without this fundamental relation that we know as pi). I have a creeping suspicion that given enough time we will discover that all of the universal constants are all related to each other and they are not really independent. Perhaps the universe can only exist in one way. But that is just philosophical mumblings.

But what I want to get at with the whole "things are improbable" argument is this. Take the months of the year's initials, JFMAMJJASOND. You can clearly see "JASON" somewhere in there. The probability that of this is 8/(26^5) which is 6.7*10^-7. A VERY slim probability. What is far more improbable though? The probability of the letters' not spelling a single word. So when talking about "Oh, well life is so improbable, god must have had a hand in it" we need to remember that our particular universe with life is improbable, but that's a very us-centric view of things. We can't think of things as how improbable it is that they happen, but how improbable it is that something doesn't happen.

I scanned through this entire response pretty quickly because I'm in a hurry, but this stopped me dead in my tracks.

According to Merriam-Webster, atheism is defined as "a disbelief in the existence of deity" while agnostic is defined as "a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable". I can assure you right now that you can have an agnostic atheist or a gnostic atheist as well as a agnostic theist and a gnostic theist. You see, gnosticism deals exclusively with knowledge (i.e. what you know) while theism deals exclusively with belief (in a god/gods; i.e. what you believe). They are two different concepts. An agnostic atheist doesn't believe there is a god, but doesn't purport to know there isn't since it's ignorant to believe that such a thing is knowable. It is not a redundancy and it is definitely not a dodge.

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Also, this is really a matter of semantics, but an atheist might casually say "there is no god," but he could mean he doesn't believe there is one, not he knows there isn't one. So, no, I don't think I'm misrepresenting the position of thinking atheists.

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I'm not going to pretend I know anything about set theory, so I'm going to assume that the axioms of ZFC are like any other mathematical axiom. An axiom is irreducably self-evident, but you can still only assume that it is true. Derived proofs might confirm the truth of the axiom.

It's stupid to assume that anything can be "outside of the Universe" or "not governed by its natural laws" because there is no way to confirm our suspicions since we've never witnessed the possibility of anything being "outside" the boundaries of our universe. Therefore we can only assume that there is no "outside of the Universe".

I don't quite understand fully how you're comparing mathematical axioms to this.

Just stating my opinion and no, I didn't read the whole topic.

I don't think such thing as a god exists. I think gods were created by humans to explain what they can't explain. I also think that believing in a god will make science move on slower, but I can't control other people's minds.

I think I'll just jump in for a second on an unrelated note --

What do you think causes miracles to happen? Like ones that you can't disprove happened, such as The miracle of the sun or healings at Lourdes in France. Just curious to see what you theorize without any of God's presence

Ashbad... did you even read the "Criticisms" section of the "miracle of the sun" article? It fully explains it. And as for the Lourdes water, simple confirmation bias.