OK then, as long as you believe there can be beings far more advanced than us. And these beings could possibly create other species and perform other 'godlike' actions. I don't think they care what you call them..
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An Ontological Proof that God Does Not Exist
- Thread starter Tiberius
- Start date
The hidden assumption in that statement is that physical material is made of physical material. Can you demonstrate that it is? I don't think you can do more than assume so, and so this hidden assumption is not verifiable.
There is also at least one solution to your challenge. If the universe exists within God then there is no challenge, because creation need not be a process which God engages in nor need it be more real than God is.
It is creationists, not theologians, who are challenged by your question. Theologians need not explain the creation of the physical universe nor even assign God as the creator. At the same time theologians can posit that everything is in God and is only as real as that. Its an old point of view.
You're bringing up the subject of scam artists. I understand. I have pursued questions about that, and here is what I think:
There are scam artists, and there always have been. They preexisted theologians probably. They did not invent God nor discover God. They do try to claim that they can teach us how to prove that God exists, and this is a popular bait. They'll claim to be theologians or scientists or to be whatever is convenient. They'll seek control by offering assurances, so one of the defenses against scams is to know that there aren't supposed to be proofs of God. This can save you a lot of money and many tears.
Similarly don't believe it if you see a book whose title claims to prove that God doesn't exist. There is no point in making such a proof, since there is no proof that God exists in the first place.
God was not invented by theologians in order to sneak anything past people. Its true that the more attributes you presume God has the easier it is to disprove that version of God exists, but when discussing what God must be like one is pressed to eliminate rather than to add attributes. It is somewhat like the netti netti process. Theologians are not interested in hiding God so much as discovering what divinity is not.
Are you really suggesting that it's an assumption that material is material?
And are you asking me to prove that material is NOT made up of magic stuff that is God? If so, sorry, but it's theists who believe in magic, not atheists. And if they believe magic is real it's on them to prove this magic is something outside of their imagination. I don't like being drug into others people's imagination against my will.
The reason you assume that the material world is material seems to be that it is convenient for you to assume so. The assumption (that we exist) underlies the assumption that the world must be made of material. It could be confirmation bias. Maybe it actually comes from people around your or from something you heard on a video or read somewhere. Evidence seems not to support that it is made up of anything at the quantum level as far as we know currently. Instead at the quantum level there appears to be no material and patterns rather than material have been found upholding what appears to be our macroscopic world. The particles and materials we seek become intangible. One might even consider them to be nonexistent if we didn't have a previous bias about them.
Do ideas exist? Do numbers exist? Does God? These are similar questions without definitive answers.
Is there a way that unicorns exist unconnected from us and outside of our reality? Could be. They are not consistent with our reality, however. Therefore we will never, ever meet a unicorn. Is God inconsistent with our reality? It depends upon what attributes God has. The theologian eliminates all attributes of God that are inconsistent with the universe.
What real entity ─ one with objective existence, not wholly conceptual / imaginary ─ (if any) do you intend to denote when you say "God"?
Where do you say your parents exist? Where do your air, water. food, shelter, society come from? Is it your view that I'm the product of your imagination?
Oh, and what happened when you dropped that brick on your foot?
But not into a real hole. To be real, the thing or state of affairs must exist in the world external to the self.
Otherwise the thing or state of affairs exists only as a concept / thing imagined in your brain, and not in objective reality, no?
I think my parents and I both exist in the past and are long dead. The truth revealed by general relativity is that there is no present, no future. The illusion that we experience the present is fabulous. Everything is past. This brings into question our existence, since the idea of existence involves a moment of time or period of time. You exist at a particular moment or for a period of time. This goes away if all is past. There are no moments, no periods of time but only the illusion of such hence no existence.
That is one way of showing that existence is not all that it seems. Another is to consider the discoveries made in subatomics. There is nothing but energy patterns when scientists try to find particles that make up the components of atoms. Its as if there isn't anything there. The components appear to be energy that can appear and disappear. Our understanding of this may change, but at the moment it supports my idea of non existence.
A third is to consider the irony that in a universe driven by cause and effect we cannot find an original cause. Thermodynamically the universe makes no sense, except as a 'What if' postulate: "What if there were a universe with a certain amount of energy? What would it do?" Astrophysicists are dutifully trying to find out where energy comes from, but they have yet to reveal it. They may find it, but it may not have an origin. At the moment its just one more thing suggesting that the universe may not make sense.
Theists can't demonstrate any gods exist, but they ask atheists to prove the gods theists claim exist don't exist. That is a scam.
the advantage of being an atheist is not having to prove anything. We just listen to theists make claims about their gods and make assessments. We notice the lack of evidence for any gods existing, so we reject the claims. Atheists don't have to prove the nonexistence of gods since gods aren't known to exist.
It could be the people who invented gods were sincere. Today we assess the ideas and nothing we can detect correlates to these ideas, so they are likely fictions. Were ancient people more capable in some special way that they can detect a supernatural? Nothing suggests they were,
Right, theists in recent years have become more and more vague about what they mean when they refer to their God. That is a way to create a safe space for theists in open debate.
Non-existence, by definition, doesn't exist. Something that doesn't exist can't be a handicap.
The material world is consistently the material world. there is no evidence of any alternative to material. So what is there to assume? I don't assume I am male. I am male by definition and due to the natural properties that make up my physical being.
I suspect you are trying to create ambiguity to shoe horn a "God of the gaps".
So you are not certain you exist? How is that helpful? If you get audited by the IRS I'll bet you will feel all the very real stress that actual beings who are audited experience.
How can there be a YOU that has bias if you only assume you exist? You have to concede and acknowledge that you exist to have bias.
That's an elaborate guess. I think you are trying hard to escape Occam's Razor.
Yes ideas exist as abstractions in the mind. The mental processing involved in forming and thinking of ideas, and the material process of brains as they store the ideas as memories are all material functions.
Unicorns exist as abstractions, but also as pictures, stuffed animals, etc. But we understand these are fictional characters and that what we create are models of these abstractions. There is no cultural pressure to accept that unicorns exist as real things like humans do with gods. Children are conditioned to believe in Santa and the Toothfairy, and then at some point they are pressured to accept these are actually fictions. And we follow these cultural models. The same with gods. There is a reason religion is a geological and cultural phenomenon, and that's because the ideas vary, and there are no actual gods to compare beliefs to.
And that is up to fallible mortals to decide what perfect, infallible gods are.
List these so we can assess your claim. I'm not convinced. What is consistent with a supernatural in our universe?
74x12
Well-Known Member
A non-existent hole is a hole that isn't real. So an imaginary hole is about the only thing that fits the bill.
I wonder why they call the Einsteinian universe "spacetime" then? Could it have something to do with the way both time and space must be relative ─ you could almost say flexible ─ to handle the absolute limit imposed by c, do you think?
What is your evidence for your proposition that the evidence of reality that we receive through our senses is an "illusion"? If it's an illusion, then your parents must be illusory. If it's an illusion, why do you need air? Water? Food? Shelter? Society? Why can't you just continue without them?
Yes, our universe exists for each of us in the Now, and I think of the Now as like the foam on the breaking wave of time.
Both memory and anticipation, the known past and the expected future, exist only in the Now, but time is demonstrated by change, which is impossible without time. I say that change is not illusory, hence time is not illusory.
You just said energy is there. And implicitly, that energy operates in patterns. It's not as mysterious as you say.
Energy has been regarded as a constant. Whether the expansion of the universe brings energy into being as the interstellar spaces stretch, or whether the universe's energy is being attenuated instead or whether some other physics is required is (as I understand it) still a work in progress.
Once we get into quantum theory we have to accept that certain parts of physics don't operate by classical cause>effect, so have to be dealt with statistically. Examples are the emission of any particular particle in the course of radioactive decay; and the quantum phenomena that generate the Casimir effect.
I find no reason in any of that to cease believing that I exist and that a world exists external to me aka reality.
And the fact that you post here seems to demonstrate that you actually agree.
A hole is a state of affairs that includes and principally concerns a perforation, and a real hole is one which exists in the world external to the self.
An imaginary hole is thus not a real hole.
PureX
Veteran Member
Yeah, it's too bad those atheists can't think for themselves.
Not philosophically. But as you are a materialist, you can't grasp this philosophically. See the following example ...
Phenomena is an expression of agency. "I think therefor I am" is a philosophical truism based on the recognition of thought phenomena being an expression of agency. And "I am" is an expression of the phenomenon of being. To recognize that "we are here" is also the recognition of an expressed phenomenon of being, but this collective phenomenal being (we are here) is not of our own agency. It is therefor the expression of some other agency that is not you or me. "God" is just a word some people use to refer to that agency. And the "'beardy guy in the sky' is just a way some of those people choose to imagine the existence of that agency.
It's only word salad to you because your ideological materialism cannot grasp anything beyond itself.
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Time is relative to the observer. What you view as past may not be, depending.
The illusion is that there is a present moment. To each person we appear to exist in a present moment between past and future when we all are in the past relative to any extreme future. There is plenty of evidence for that if we accept general relativity.
The present is the illusion of change, because 'Now' is relative. Our lives are not really at a particular moment but are probably part of the bloom and death of a universe that probably never was physical, and in it we never existed probably except as patterns which we probably misconstrued as energy. So it seems to me that all of our lives, our breathing, our needs and wants are just part of that bloom and pattern; and all of our entire universe with its time is a pattern possibly without any physicality at all.
It is an ongoing curiosity. You can presume it to have a finished ending but cannot make it so. I challenge you to prove that time isn't relative.
"We have to accept that certain parts of physics don't operate by classical cause>effect," not classical no. Space and order are part of the effect, however. All leptons and bosons don't pile up and take the same space. Spaces form and more solid seeming patterns emerge. From this we got the classical cause effect direction of time which you and I seemingly discussed here in the past long before the destruction of the Earth.
74x12
Well-Known Member
We don't want a real hole. We want a non-existent hole.
As I understand it, there's no place in space from which you can see the future of any other place in space. You can only see what is for them the past. Each place has its past, all places have their past, none has a view of their own or anyone else's future.
I'm reminded of a quantum experiment which showed that NOW is (at least) one ten billionth of a second thick. (>This< report refers to it, though it doesn't specify the 'ten-billionth' part.)
Change is real enough. I don't know how you can conclude that it's an illusion. Energy moves from areas of higher to lower energy all the time, and this has endless kinds of consequences, expressed as physics, chemistry and biochemistry.
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A hole (when it's not a metaphor) is a state of affairs involving the holed thing (call it object A) and the perforation. An imaginary hole exists as a concept or as an imaginary state of affairs.
I suppose if X claimed object A was so perforated, but in fact it was not, you could say X had referred to a non-existent hole.
But without some object A there's no coherent concept of a hole at all (metaphor aside, as I said).