Are there any good arguments for God?

[allfoak]

allfoak said: ↑
- despite all the elaborate efforts of God to hide his existence, YOU have seen through it and figured it out.

These are not my words.
I would like this post deleted.

http://www.religiousforums.com/thre...-arguments-for-god.184846/page-2#post-4644655

If you do not do it voluntarily i will ask the mods to do it.


3. Trolling and Bullying

2) Defamation, slander, or misrepresentation of a member's beliefs/arguments, or that of a particular group, culture, or religion. This includes altering the words of another member to change their meaning when using the quote feature.

 

[SpeaksForTheTrees]

"Tiberius is uncertain, therefore God"?

On a Samsung mobile with a mind of its own try reply in least words
My 3 word comment concluded to a therefore ?
Thought we was throwing round out the box no scripture scientific ideas that might give Tiberius something else to reject ..
The thread technically about Tiberius conclusions upto date on all objective /subjective he she experienced .
Myself i like what thingy said " mother nature herself makes the suggestion of god

 

[ArtieE]

allfoak said: ↑
- despite all the elaborate efforts of God to hide his existence, YOU have seen through it and figured it out.

These are not my words.
I would like this post deleted.

http://www.religiousforums.com/thre...-arguments-for-god.184846/page-2#post-4644655

If you do not do it voluntarily i will ask the mods to do it.


3. Trolling and Bullying

2) Defamation, slander, or misrepresentation of a member's beliefs/arguments, or that of a particular group, culture, or religion. This includes altering the words of another member to change their meaning when using the quote feature.

Had some trouble editing the post but think I managed to erase the reference to you.

 

[Neo Deist]

The only two reasonable positions on God that fit with this perfect lack of evidence are agnostic-atheism and agnostic-deism; the only difference between them being hope offered by the latter, which is why I've adopted it as my preference.

ROFLMAO!

Coming from the same person that bashed others for their hyphenated deisms...too funny!

 

[Kueid]

And if you change it for "GOD = MARMALADE", we could easily say that God tastes good on toast and comes in a jar.

Yes. One could do that.

This revisionism of the definition of "God" (or "god") has always struck me as an admission of defeat: "we can't justify belief in anything we could reasonably call 'God', so let's unreasonably call something 'God' that we think we can justify belief for."

Defeat? Implying battle.

 

[ThePainefulTruth]

God doesn't try to hide his existence.

And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land: and there builded he an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him.Genesis 12:7

And the Lord spake to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend. Exodus 33:11

Hearsay, land ancient hearsay at that.

That isn't the generic sense; it's the metaphoric sense.

Idols are not metaphors

The argument from causation is a philosophical one, not a scientific one, and rather better.

Krauss, and other scientists would beg to differ. And since there's no evidence for a spontaneous Big Bang, any scientist who claims that's impossible can have no evidence to back himself up.

Scientists, like everyone else, assume that things don't just happen for no reason at all.

In this natural universe, yeah. But that contains 100% of the evidence we have, nothing from before. In fact, I think Hawking thought he had some, but it didn't pan out.

But that means that the big bang (if there was one) didn't just happen.

Now it's your turn to say, the absence of evidence is not evidence.

No physical event can be a first cause, by definition. If you assume that the big bang did "just happen" you've abandoned our basic instincts and also destroyed science: you can't discover the laws of nature if they could be broken at any time! So, you have a choice. Either the universe is meaningless and lawless, or the sequence of events had a non-physical launch.

Or it was initiated by a part of the Cosmos which is external to our universe and run by different natural laws, or supernatural laws, or a supernatural Will.

And if the universe is incomprehensible, how come we, as part of it, have this built-in belief that it isn't? And how come science is so successful?

But the universe is comprehensible, we just don't have all the evidence or knowledge about much less an external Cosmos running on rules piled onto ours like relativity was piled onto Newtonian physics etc., if an external cosmos exists at all.

Have people experience gods? Yes.

None with anything but hearsay to offer.

Are they sane and reliable? Yes.

Their human, so anything based on pure hearsay is in doubt. I think Paul probably had sanity problems along with his corrupt ego.

A survey of religious experiences in the USA showed that those who have them are not revealed to be suggestible or gullible by psychological tests. A survey in the UK showed that over a third of the population have had a religious experience, and that the percentage among graduates is actually twice that among those who left school at 16. Some who have had such experiences have been geniuses, like the mathematician Pascal.

You greatly underestimate the ability of the human mind to lie to itself and compartmentalize.

But this does not support Christianity or Islam. Generally people identify a spiritual presence by context. If you're a Christian, you assume it's Jesus. If you're praying to Ganesha, you assume it's Ganesha. But there are occasions when deities identify themselves, and you can't just dismiss the many occasions on which that has happen to perfectly normal people. If it had never happened, all religious believers would be monotheists.

Believing in which God?

ROFLMAO!

Coming from the same person that bashed others for their hyphenated deisms...too funny!

Like Christian-deism, yeah. It and others are obvious (to most) contradictions to others which you were unable to defend. Your attitude smacks of having nothing better to do than to attempt intimidation. Good luck with that.[/QUOTE]

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Yes. One could do that.

So is the word "god" meaningless, or are there limits to how far we can go in redefining it?

Defeat? Implying battle.

Implying a challenge.

 

[Tiberius]

The fine-tuning problem and related problems in cosmology and theoretical physics. I'm not convinced, nor am I prepared (as other agnostic/atheist physicists seem to be) to assert that the problem is so great as to necessitate an infinite number of universes in which our own is simply "fine-tuned" because out of infinite possibilities it is the one in which we could exist (nor yet am I prepared to yield to a particular method of anthropic reasoning I see as clearly correct, e.g., that espoused in Anthropic Bias). I am still trying to find what I believe to be defensible ways to conclude the issues are only seemingly so. But such issues continue to irk me.

I see this is nicely explained by the idea that we simply evolved to suit the conditions already here, just like a puddle of water takes on the shape of the hole in the ground it sits in. So no matter what the conditions, we'd always find ourselves well adapted to them.

 

[Tiberius]

If there's an infinite amount of universes there could be an infinite amount of things in them including an infinite amount of gods?

Only so long as those gods are not logically impossible. One could also ask, "f there's an infinite amount of universes there could be an infinite amount of things in them including an infinite amount of square triangles?"

 

[Tiberius]

The argument about the existence of God boils down to one question, how did the universe come to be. God creating it is just as fantastic as its coming to be spontaneously.

With the exception that invoking a God to explain it also requires us to ask where the God came from. I read a book about this, quite interesting. http://books.simonandschuster.com/A-Universe-from-Nothing/Richard-Dawkins/9781451624465

There's absolutely no evidence for or against either proposition, with the Big Bang being a perfect firewall beyond which we can retrieve no evidence at all, at least so far. In fact the perfect lack of evidence would appear to be designed, which would seem to indicate a divine design--but we can't use a lack of evidence, as evidence.

Why would it appear designed?

The only two reasonable positions on God that fit with this perfect lack of evidence are agnostic-atheism and agnostic-deism; the only difference between them being hope offered by the latter, which is why I've adopted it as my preference. One advantage, if I'm wrong, I'll never know it. If the atheists are wrong, they'll have me ragging on them for all eternity....though all in good humor of course.

I never really understood that hope can only be felt if one is religious. I'm agnostic atheist, and I certainly don't feel hopeless.

 

[Tiberius]

You are using the same world to describe it. It's super hard for me to follow. I'll assume that you are saying "things that don't have an 'material' body don't exist" e.g. "thought". I think I don't need to say how wrong you are.

No, that it is not what I am saying. If you're going to redefine my terms, of course you are going to misunderstand.

If you change that concept for, let's say, "GOD = REALITY" would that make sense? With this concept of God you could easily say "God exist", no?

Why would I want to define God as reality?

 

[Tiberius]

I put it God = Truth. Whatever the Truth is, there be God, whether it's a divine super-consciousness or just a conglomerate of matter and energy.

If God = Truth, then why do we need the word God when the word Truth is just as good (and lacks religious overtones)?

 

[Tiberius]

I would advise looking up Natural Theology and Deism. As an area, they provide a series of rational arguments for god's existence.

I've sen the arguments put forward by those schools of thought and I don't find them very convincing.

I think it is important to keep in mind that not all religious views are built on "revelation" or "blind faith" and therefore should not be dis-qualified outright. There are some intresting arguments as to why, assuming that man created god, it becomes logically untenable to believe that revelation is an entirely false source of knowledge (given it has a man-made source and so must come from our experiences).

I think that all religions depend on blind faith to some degree, since the underlying idea of the supernatural requires belief without evidence (or at least, a misunderstanding of the evidence).

I am an atheist, but it is hard to account for the historical prevelance without making some considerable leaps. neither mental illness, ignorance or sheer lying can account for the existence of religious belief.

I think a lot of religious belief stems from ignorance as in the ignorance of how the world works, so supernatural explanations were developed. Also remember that such systems would have been eagerly appropriated by those who saw that they could be used to control people.

religious belief is part of the evolution of human knowledge and understanding of the universe.

I have to disagree here. I'm not aware of any verifiable knowledge about the universe that is religious in nature.

the "false" nature of religious belief is not absolute and there may be very real, material/physical origins for those beliefs or a rational basis for some of its content. regardless as to whether there is a god or not, the philosophical exercise you have to do to establish it either way is considerable. When it comes down to it, we have to re-asses what we can and cannot know and how we can know something is true/does exist.

But with no way to test it, such claims are meaningless.

I am happy to say god does not exist, but have come to recognise that there are dimension of that that would qualify as "faith" if I were to make the opposing argument. Nor am I entirely satisfied that I have exhausted the argument as I can poke holes in my own reasoning (the big bang as a form of cosmological argument is the biggest and most serious). I think, if you consider the subject as a whole, there is more to it than a yes or no response because it is at the most abstract outer limits of human knowledge.

But in an objective universe, there can only be a yes or a no when it comes to how the universe works.

 

[Tiberius]

Proof that God exists starts with us.

The Hermetic teachings are the most straight forward teachings i know of on how this question should be approached and understood.

Any objective truth about the universe must come from the universe. If it requires that we examine texts, then any conclusions we draw can only ever be as accurate as the texts, but can be less reliable, depending on how skillfully we interpret that text.

I would prefer an argument from God that comes from the universe itself.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

On a Samsung mobile with a mind of its own try reply in least words
My 3 word comment concluded to a therefore ?

My mistake - I thought you were trying to be relevant to the thread.

 

[Tiberius]

The most convincing, I think, is, "Once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the case." Many atheists, and even many theists, have not arrived at "god" in that way; if they had, they would be identically firm in a shared belief that is neither atheism nor theism. So what is impossible about the whole world? That path is, in philosophy in the West at least, the road of nihilism, which points to the uncertainty of an objective reality (specifically, the truth value of the world). The agnostic settles on "I don't know," in regards to the truth value (specifically, that there is no knowable truth value); the nihilist recognizes that truth is the one thing that cannot be eliminated, at least not without contradiction (the truth of the elimination). Hence, uncertainty is granted a certain certainty that moves realization past the possibility of eliminating the world, while maintaining its uncertainty. This is a brand of mysticism. "God" lies in knowing the complete uncertainty (for some, 'unlikelihood') of the world, while, still, the world remains.

So God of the Gaps?

 

[Tiberius]

God doesn't try to hide his existence.

And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land: and there builded he an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him.Genesis 12:7

And the Lord spake to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend. Exodus 33:11

Shame he never does that today...

 

[Tiberius]

Your own uncertainty

Care to clarify this?

 

[Willamena]

So God of the Gaps?

Only if complete uncertainty has a gap.

 

[outhouse]

There has never been a good argument for any deity at any time.


No deities exist outside mythology and theology, in any culture anywhere.