An Ontological Proof that God Does Not Exist

[firedragon]

Real author: Douglas Gasking

Gaskin's argument is the silliest joke you will find. No honest scholar has praised his stupid joke. I mean seriously. It's not a proper argument. It's a joke. When someone presents the fallacy to this OP, the creator of the OP cannot even respond with proper counters because almost every single atheist apologist who have been engaging with this thread or this argument has never understood it.

It's unbelievable.

 

[F1fan]

I'm sorry that you're feeling insulted, but it's true. Have you ever seen an atheist object to a God of his own understanding? I never have.

What God are understandable? None. All we have is literature that depicts gods of various types. You try to make it seem as if atheists are somehow deficient in being able to understand our sons, or some actual person. That is a ploy that always gets caught. You have little respect for atheists.

Have you ever objected to a God of your own understanding? How can they when atheists has no understanding of God of their own. They've never developed one. And what a colossal waste of time and energy it is objecting to everyone else's!

We don't have our own Santa Claus or tooth Fairy either. But there is nothing to understand about fictional characters except what is in lore. Same with gods thus far. Theists offer no evidence that their gods exist outside of this imaginations.

Sure, in much the same way as people tend to adopt the social habit of driving automobiles. Because doing so works for them in a ways that they appreciate. And since everyone in every religion views their God a little differently, as you atheists are constantly pointing out, it's pretty clear that they are all developing their own version of God, for themselves. And are not simply accepting whatever they're told unconsidered.
Which is why you don't really understand any of them. There's no greater impediment to learning that being certain that there's nothing to learn.

There are no gods known to exist. If you disagree, provide evidence. Those who believe in some sort of god do so because they adopted one view or another.

However atheists know the Old Testament God is vastly different than the New Testament God. I wonder what happened. I guess God got therapy. Do you understand what happened to this God based on the Bible? It's not explained.

Again ... There's no greater impediment to learning that being certain that there's nothing to learn.

We can learn what people believe. We don't have to agree with it. Atheists know about many gods. None are known to exist. Philosophy doesn't help. It can only blur actual knowledge if it has an agenda, like selling the idea that rocks have agency.

No, I used it in the context of philosophy and I said I was using it in the context of philosophy. But you don't recognize philosophy as a legitimate intellectual pursuit, because you don't think it has anything in it worth your learning.

I recognize when philosophy is fraud. You trying to distort a word used in psychology to describe human thought and trying to apply it to inanimate things is unacceptable and flawed. You can't get away with that.

After all, it's not material fact based, and that's all that exists in to your version of reality. As evidenced by the following remark ...

I follow facts and science. You don't. So when your claims and beliefs are contrary to fact and science, then you are called out. Of course you don't like it. Religious belief is fragile.

You're not going to be able to grasp the ideas that this conversation requires to be anything other than a waste of time.

Grasp what? Your misinformation and flawed beliefs? When you distort words, meaning, facts, and science, you will not be comprehensible to rational minds. Get things right, then present your claims and arguments.

 

[PearlSeeker]

Gaskin's argument is the silliest joke you will find. No honest scholar has praised his stupid joke. I mean seriously. It's not a proper argument. It's a joke. When someone presents the fallacy to this OP, the creator of the OP cannot even respond with proper counters because almost every single atheist apologist who have been engaging with this thread or this argument has never understood it.

It's unbelievable.

Yes, it's a parody.

 

[Brickjectivity]

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 not saying we can observe the far off past, only that we are in the past just like everyone else who has died. What we see in our immediate vicinity is not a present moment but a capture of the immediate past relative to ourselves.

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.)

Moments suggest reversibility. One thing about time is it is irreversible. Using the smallest measure (perhaps a planck second?), it cannot take away the irreversibility of time. Using a small measure does not make 'Now' something more than the events between two others.

A universal moment in time also suggests a wavefront, as if there were a surge of change through spacetime that we could call the present, but relativity if true suggests that spacetime is not changing uniformly. Someone is traveling near light speed relative to you and they experience the smallest measure of time, but their smallest measure of time may not match yours. Yours will seem longer to them I think, unless for some reason there is an invariant smallest measure of time consistent across different frames of reference. In that case what happens?

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.

I conclude that the present, not change, is an illusion. I conclude we are all both as alive and as dead as Cleopatra.

 

[Brickjectivity]

Interesting that apologists never seem to raise this problem when they use ontological arguments in an attempt to prove god.

Proving that God exists is pointless to me. Technically it is idolatry to me, too, or related to idolatry. "Let the baal defend itself if it be a god." I have not read Kant, but Kant is the one famous for claiming to prove God exists by imagining the greatest necessary being. It doesn't sound like something I'm interested in reading. Perhaps he does define 'Being' or not. I'm not sure. I don't think I'd take his word for it.

 

[blü 2]

If you don't know, you've proved my syllogism!

If you can't tell me, you've made the point I was making.

 

[blü 2]

I'm not saying we can observe the far off past, only that we are in the past just like everyone else who has died. What we see in our immediate vicinity is not a present moment but a capture of the immediate past relative to ourselves.

But our instant of awareness is in the present ─ you could say, IS the present.

Moments suggest reversibility.

That experiment I linked was a demonstration of reversability ─ within an exquisitely narrow time band, but reversability nonetheless, implying that 'NOW' has duration, is not absolutely instantaneous.

 

[Sheldon]

Have you ever seen an atheist object to a God of his own understanding?

Oh dear.

 

[Sheldon]

And since everyone in every religion views their God a little differently, as you atheists are constantly pointing out, it's pretty clear that they are all developing their own version of God, for themselves. And are not simply accepting whatever they're told unconsidered.

No it isn't pretty clear at all, you may want to try and rethink that, and see if you can spot the error in your reasoning, or not of course. Either way it's there, looming large...

 

[Sheldon]

There's no greater impediment to learning that being certain that there's nothing to learn.

Are you certain about that?

 

[Brickjectivity]

But our instant of awareness is in the present ─ you could say, IS the present.

I don't know but this interpretation seems to intimate that our awareness is more than biological. I think of people as biological and our intelligence as an effect of our biology. As a practical matter milking the goat and making the butter we have to think of time as if there is an instant between past and future -- so we can agree to do things at particular times, but when we're talking about spacetime I think we don't have to agree that there is any separation between any two nearest times. We don't need it biologically, either, for our minds to pass from one stage to the next in time. I still think there is no difference between our position in time and that of someone from the far past, but you have given me a lot to think about with this conversation.

That experiment I linked was a demonstration of reversability ─ within an exquisitely narrow time band, but reversability nonetheless, implying that 'NOW' has duration, is not absolutely instantaneous.

Yes, although it was a simulation of an electron rather than an actual electron. Honestly I was not able to follow precisely how they were able to simulate the electron and whether it really had implications for reality besides error correction for computing. They were looking for error correcting measures for qbit machines, and it seems they believed that they had achieved time reversal within the simulation. They also said, though, that this would have been impossible in the real world. They said "In nature, restoring this particle back to its original state -- in essence, putting the broken teacup back together -- is impossible." but they also said "At this moment, it's very hard to imagine all the implications this can have," For me it seems inconclusive with regard to what we have been talking about.

 

[firedragon]

Yes, it's a parody.

Some parodies in this topic are meant to be sarcastic, but have good logical form and outcome. This was not a documented parody. It's hearsay. But there is a chance it's a genuine parody by gasking. Apparently Robinson who narrated this sat for lunch with Gasking and while at lunch Gasking said this as a joke.

 

[Tiberius]

I don't follow your logic on that conclusion.

You said God was not bound by logic. So he can be both real and non-existent. Sure, it's LOGICALLY impossible, but as you said back in post 19, God is not bound by logic. So why can't he do things that are logically impossible?

 

[Tiberius]

1. I am here. (self-evidential agency)

Okay.

2. You are here. ('other'-evidential agency)

Okay.

3. Here is here. (the medium of our mutual recognition)

Okay.

"God" refers to the agency responsible for "here", as you and I are not.

Unsupported claim.

At best this is some weak version of pantheism.

 

[Tiberius]

Yes but because I wouldn't know how they are doing it

Whether or not you know is irrelevant. You could be fully aware of their method and still recognise that it takes a lot of skill.

 

[Tiberius]

That's a contradiction. Not only your conclusion, your premises are contradictory. They are formally invalid in argumentation.

I love this. You make the claim, but utterly fail to JUSTIFY your claim. You just say, "Nah, you're wrong," asserting it without evidence.

And since you assert it without evidence, I will reject it for having no evidence.

 

[Tiberius]

1: God does not exist

2: Scoffers spend insane amounts of time on forums proving a non-existent being does not exist

3: Scoffers may be insane

I agree with you that God doesn't exist. I think you missed the point of my post.

 

[Tiberius]

But isn't that just your subjective opinion?

Perhaps.

But if this is just someone's subjective opinion, then wouldn't the ontological argument that God DOES exist similarly be just someone's subjective opinion, and thus invalid?

 

[Tiberius]

Non-existence, by definition, doesn't exist. Something that doesn't exist can't be a handicap.

If it doesn't exist, then why do we the concept of it.

I am an only child. My sister does not exist. If my sister's non-existence does not exist, doesn't that mean she MUST exist?

 

[Tiberius]

Real author: Douglas Gasking

Thanks, I couldn't remember where I had heard it before!