Atheists: What would be evidence of God’s existence?

[Tiberius]

The only reason you wear the red shirt is because you chose to wear the red shirt, NOT because God knew you would wear the red shirt.

God knew you would wear the red shirt because God knew you would choose to wear the red shirt.

Answer the question please, yes or no.

Is there anyway that I could choose to wear the blue shirt after God has told you that I am absolutely guaranteed to wear the red shirt?

I will keep asking until you answer yes or no.

 

[Trailblazer]

You can't quit posting. What would I do with myself? Get a life or something? And I'm on page 152, one more to go.

Okay, I am going to add that to my list for the counselor

1. What is the continued value of the forums to you?

CG said he needed me to keep posting.

If you want to see the rest of my list I can post it later.

 

[Tiberius]

There is objective evidence for Baha'u'llah and as far as what that adds up to, we have to do the math ourselves...

And as I have stated many times already, I am not disputing that.

I do claim that the Baha'i Faith is based upon facts as stated it here to Adrian, another Baha'i, about six months ago.

By that logic, Star Trek is based on facts as well.

I am sorry, but no religion has any objective evidence for religious/supernatural beliefs such as "God exists. If we did we would win the Nobel prize for religion!

You want what there can never be. the ONLY way there could ever be objective evidence for God is if God showed up on earth, but Baha'u'llah explained what would happen in that case and it ain't pretty.

What I want doesn't matter.

What I have been saying is that without such facts, there is no rational reason to believe in any supernatural claims at all.

 

[Trailblazer]

I know everyone believes them and has the same conclusion about them, and I know why. Because they can be checked and verified.

That was NOT my point.

My point was that if the evidence for religion was real and valid, we would see that everyone reaches the same conclusion about religion!

You can't say that real and valid evidence leads to everyone coming to the same conclusion in one case but leads to people reaching lots of different conclusions in another case. THAT would be illogical.

I certainly can say that because it so obvious why! All people think and process the SAME evidence differently. It is completely illogical to expect people to come to the SAME conclusions about a religion just because they would come to the same conclusions about a scientific fact. That is so illogical I can barely breathe!

Likewise, if someone said they checked and determined that it WAS true, then their OPINION is just that - an opinion.

And since that is what you have done - said you have checked and determined that it WAS true - you have an OPINION, and since it's a subjective opinion, it can not have been verified.

It is a subjective opinion that I have verified to be true.

verify
make sure or demonstrate that (something) is true, accurate, or justified.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=verify+meaning

And I know that the Baha'i faith is NOT true.

Sounds to me like we just have two opinions butting heads. And opinions are not verified.

That is fine with me if is the conclusion you came to after doing your research.

How on earth do you thing everyone would ever come to the same conclusion about a religion? That is logically impossible!
Well, I should not say it is impossible, but it is impossible the way people are at this time. In the future I think everyone will know that the Baha'i Faith is true, based upon what Baha'u'llah wrote:

“Warn and acquaint the people, O Servant, with the things We have sent down unto Thee, and let the fear of no one dismay Thee, and be Thou not of them that waver. The day is approaching when God will have exalted His Cause and magnified His testimony in the eyes of all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth.”Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 248

I have proven it false to the same degree that you have proven it true.

You have only proven it is false to yourself just as I have proven it is true to myself.

Likewise, if you claim that you have conclusively proven that the Baha'i Faith is TRUE, that would also be an argument from ignorance.

But I never claimed that the Baha'i Faith is true, I only ever said that I believe it is true.... big difference.

Yes, we all know what it is. You've said before that you wouldn't do that, and yet here you are, doing it again...

Not everyone knows what it is so I am going to post it for other people to read.

So someone makes a claim, and if they share your faith and say that it proves your faith is correct, then you just accept it?

I thought you said we should verify things. You don't seem to have done that here.

That is not what I said. I said: "Sorry, history is not my strong suit. You'd have to ask someone like @Truthseeker9."
@Truthseeker9 never said that the banks of the Rhine Tablet proves our faith is correct.
What I accept is his interpretation of the Tablet because he knows more than I do about the Baha'i Writings.

Does that include scientology?

No, it does not include Scientology because that is not a revealed religion since Hubbard was not a Messenger of God.

True.

But Occam's razor would tell us that if we don't need a religion, then we shouldn't believe it. And if we DO need a religion, then that need would prove that it is true.

But logic would tell us that if we do need religion, then we should try to determine which if any religions are true.
We do need religion cannot be proven true unless there was never any religion.

I don't care about metaphor. I care about facts.

So you care if the story of Adam and Eve is factually true and if not you do not care what it means?

 

[Trailblazer]

So the other shirt is not available. No other shirt is available.

So tell me, do I have a choice if there is only one option available?

I did not say that there was only one option available for you to choose from.

 

[Trailblazer]

Once again I will point out that this means that my choices can apparently retroactively rewrite history.

No, your choices would not retroactively rewrite history because they would have already been written on the Tablet of Fate.

 

[Truthseeker]

So the Germans were lamenting the gore along the banks of the Rhine, and this is a reference to the Franco-Prussian war?

The war that the Germans WON?

Please, tell me about the actual event where the banks opf the Rhine were covered in gore. Which side did the dead belong to? Were they dead French or dead Germans?

No, please don't distort this. The Germens were lamenting the oppressive treaty at Versailles.

Both French and Germans died. That's the nature of war, though Germany won. Any death in war is lamentable.

 

[Trailblazer]

And if I can't do anything different, then it's not a choice, is it?

I did not say you could not have done anything different.

And since everything must happen in the way God knows it will happen, then we can not choose to do it any differently, can we?

That is not true. We can choose to do whatever we want to do.
What God knows will happen is determined by God's foreknowledge of what we will choose to do.
Everything will happen in the way God knows it will happen because God knows how it will happen.

Also, I most certainly do NOT believe in predeterminism. I am using a hypothetical situation. IF God exists and IF God knows the future, then we have no free will.

I was hopeful for a while but now my hopes have been dashed. There is no hope for you to ever understand this
I should have known when to quit. One more try... Read this passage and explain why what God knows is the CAUSE of anything.

“Every act ye meditate is as clear to Him as is that act when already accomplished. There is none other God besides Him. His is all creation and its empire. All stands revealed before Him; all is recorded in His holy and hidden Tablets. This fore-knowledge of God, however, should not be regarded as having caused the actions of men, just as your own previous knowledge that a certain event is to occur, or your desire that it should happen, is not and can never be the reason for its occurrence.”
Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 150

If an astronomer knows the exact time an ellipse is going to occur in the future does that CAUSE the eclipse to occur? Why would be it any different if God knew something was going to happen in the future? How would that CAUSE it to happen?

AGAIN, we will do what God knows we will do but only because God knows what we will do, but what God knows is not the cause of what we do. We CAUSE things to happen because we choose to do things since we have free will to act.

The fact that God knows what we will do is enough to remove any choice we have, even if he was not the one who determined it.

Explain why God's knowledge prevents us from making choices.

What is the defendant going to tell the judge? "Judge, God knew I was going to murder my wife so I had no choice except to murder my wife! Therefore I am not guilty."

You gotta be kidding. What you believe amounts to absolute predestination and no free will, thus humans coud never be held accountable for anything they do wrong. It is patently absurd.

“Everyone wants to hold criminals responsible for their actions. This “responsibility” has its foundation in the belief that we all have the free will to choose right from wrong. What if free will is just an illusion, how would that impact the criminal justice system? Free will creates the moral structure that provides the foundation for our criminal justice system. Without it, most punishments in place today must be eliminated completely. Its no secret that I’m a firm believer in free will, but I’m also a firm believer in arguing against it when it helps my clients. That’s what we lawyers do (call me a hypocrite if you like, I can take it). Now, let’s delve into the issues and practical effects of eliminating free will.

We only punish those who are morally responsible for their action. If a driver accidentally runs over a pedestrian–there will be no criminal charges in the death of the pedestrian. This is what we call an “accident”. However, if a husband runs over his wife after an argument, that same pedestrian death now constitutes murder. It was the driver’s “intent” that made one pedestrian death a crime, and the other not. But, what if we examine the husband’s brain, and an MRI discovers a frontal lobe defect that could explain his deviant behavior? Is he still guilty of murder? If such a defect “caused” the husband’s actions, our criminal justice system has laws in place that would label the husband “Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity”......

As you can see from the appellate opinion above, our criminal laws are founded on the notion that if a person is not acting by his free will, the law cannot hold him “accountable for his choices”. There are plenty of other examples of Florida criminal laws that would benefit my clients, should everyone agree that free will is an illusion. For example, confessions cannot not be entered into evidence unless they are made of the defendant’s “own free will”. The term “free will” is contained right there in the definition of numerous legal concepts. Other criminal law concepts would lose their meaning as well, like “premeditation”. Is it realistic to speak of premeditation if freewill doesn’t exist? Is a robot on an assembly line in China premeditating the building of an iPhone? The mere fact that a robot takes several distinct steps to complete a task doesn’t render its actions ‘premeditated’. Such concepts should be purged from our criminal justice system if we’re all just biological robots.

Should science convince the world that free will is an illusion–we must move past notions of “punishment” and “sentencing”. This is not just intellectual musings; concepts of free will impact the criminal courts on a daily basis....... The bottom line here is best expressed by Professor Shaun Nichols in his lectures entitled Free Will and Determinism: “if science convinces us that free will is an illusion, we seem to face a moral conclusion that is difficult to accept: that all criminals should be excused for their crimes.”

Free WIll, Determinism, and the Criminal Justice System

 

[Trailblazer]

I do not believe in predestination.

I have been saying that if God knows what we will do, then it is predestination, even if God wasn't the one who did the predestinating.

You just contradicted yourself -- you do not believe in predestination yet if God knows what we will do, then it is predestination.

If not God, who would be doing the predestinating? You have tied yourself in a knot.

 

[Trailblazer]

No.

If God knows today that I will wear the red shirt, then wearing the red shirt is the one possible outcome there is.

You will wear the red shirt but the reason you will wear the red shirt is because you CHOSE to wear the red shirt, not because God KNEW you would wear the red shirt.

He doesn't need to have predestined it, he just needs to know. His knowledge of what I will do is enough to rob me of any choice, because God's knowledge can't be wrong.

Can you imagine telling this to a judge in a courtroom? "Judge, God's knowledge of what I would robbed me of any choice, because God's knowledge can't be wrong, and that is why I had to kill my wife."

How does God's knowledge prevent you from making another choice? If you had made a different choice that would be the choice that God knew you were going to make. This is just basic logic.

How can there be many possible outcomes if God knows what the one outcome will be?

There can only be one outcome and it will be:

-- The outcome you choose, and
-- The outcome God has always known you would choose

But before you made a choice there were other choices you could have made thus other outcomes.

 

[Trailblazer]

If God knows what the outcome is, then the outcome he knows is the only possible outcome.

It is the outcome that will be but God does not DETERMINE that outcome, God just KNOWS the outcome because God is all-knowing and has foreknowledge.

How does that work?

God knows today what I will wear tomorrow, but he can't know until I make my choice. The only way he can know today what my choice tomorrow will be is if the choice I make tomorrow somehow travels backwards in time, but you said this isn't the case.

What you are saying makes no sense at all, even granting things like time travel and omniscience.

Okay, I just spotted the problem. God does not have to wait until you make your choice in order to know what you will choose. God is all-knowing and has perfect foreknowledge so God has always known what you would choose, from the beginning of time.

There is no such thing as today and tomorrow for God since God does not exist in time. God simply knows everything, period.

 

[Trailblazer]

Answer the question please, yes or no.

Is there anyway that I could choose to wear the blue shirt after God has told you that I am absolutely guaranteed to wear the red shirt?

I will keep asking until you answer yes or no.

No.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You absolutely did not explain WHY. You said: if a deity exists and knows which choice I will make, then ipso facto there is only one choice that I can make, But you did not explain WHY there is only one choice you can make.

If the outcome is known in advance, no choice was made.

What is being described by those who claim that the past and future are all seen by a deity is a reality where no choices are made. It is completely deterministic.

Consider going to a ballgame, and somehow having seen how it will turn out in advance because you are just that omnipotent. The players have no more choice of what to do than they do in the replay highlights reel. And if I know what that reel looks like before the game is played, nobody has any choices. It may look like the batter has a choice to swing r take the pitch, but not if you know with certainty he will swing and miss.

An individual might not know how he'll choose until the last moment, but if somebody else does, and is reliably correct, then there was no choice, no matter how things felt to the "chooser." Determinism and free will are mutually exclusive.

The deity knows all things simultaneously and does not exist in time.

Nothing exists outside of time. What does existence mean? It means to occupy a series of sequential instants. It means to be real in a specified range of times and places. To be means to move from one moment to the next.

Here are two more things that can't be done outside of time: thinking and acting. Both require a former and a subsequent state.

What are you saying? ..that there is no such thing as free-will?

That will depend how the term free will is defined. If all one means is that we have the experience of discovering a desire and acting to fulfil it, then yes, we have that experience. But that could all be entirely deterministic, and shouldn't be called free will. Call that the illusion of free will if the will is determined by physical processes and delivered to consciousness to be executed. The organism is an automaton, but a happy one who feels free.

To say that the will is free ought to mean not predetermined by physical mechanisms that are potentially discoverable before the will is expressed. There is interesting experimental data to suggest that this is the case. This intriguing video is two minutes long and summarizes the experiment well:

You provide me with the observation of the beginning of humanity ?

Why? We know where humanity came from without having to have been there to watch it. Observation in science doesn't mean observation of the unobservable past. It means observation of what is here now, and deducing what that past must have been like. That's how forensic investigations go, for example. Criminologists look at fingerprints, DNA, fibers, surveillance video, etc.. They all exist now and are all looked at now to decide what happened in the unobservable past. If we find a print in the car now, it's owner was in the car in the past. If the surveillance video shows people walking through an alley as we watch it now, it tells us what happened before.

We have enough evidence to conclude that the theory of evolution is correct beyond a reasonable doubt.

Something so complex does not just evolve

It does. It did.

 

[Tiberius]

I certainly can say that because it so obvious why! All people think and process the SAME evidence differently. It is completely illogical to expect people to come to the SAME conclusions about a religion just because they would come to the same conclusions about a scientific fact. That is so illogical I can barely breathe!

Yes, it is illogical. It's the special pleading fallacy.

It is a subjective opinion that I have verified to be true.

If you have verified it as an objective fact, then it's no longer a subjective opinion.

If it's still a subjective opinion, then yoiu have not verified it.

That is fine with me if is the conclusion you came to after doing your research.

How on earth do you thing everyone would ever come to the same conclusion about a religion? That is logically impossible!
Well, I should not say it is impossible, but it is impossible the way people are at this time. In the future I think everyone will know that the Baha'i Faith is true, based upon what Baha'u'llah wrote:

“Warn and acquaint the people, O Servant, with the things We have sent down unto Thee, and let the fear of no one dismay Thee, and be Thou not of them that waver. The day is approaching when God will have exalted His Cause and magnified His testimony in the eyes of all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth.”Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 248

it makes no sense that objective facts always lead to people reaching the same conclusion EXCEPT in the case of religion.

You have only proven it is false to yourself just as I have proven it is true to myself.

If it is not objectively true, then it's just an opinion you are convinced of. It is not a fact and it is not verified.

But I never claimed that the Baha'i Faith is true, I only ever said that I believe it is true.... big difference.

Your attempts to hide behind wordplay are tiresome.

That is not what I said. I said: "Sorry, history is not my strong suit. You'd have to ask someone like @Truthseeker9."
@Truthseeker9 never said that the banks of the Rhine Tablet proves our faith is correct.
What I accept is his interpretation of the Tablet because he knows more than I do about the Baha'i Writings.

Do you still claim that the Proclamation of Mr B you posted counts as a prophecy about Kaiser Will, WW1 and/or WW2?

No, it does not include Scientology because that is not a revealed religion since Hubbard was not a Messenger of God.

How convenient that your religion gives you a standard by which you can tell if a religion is a true religion or not! I suppose that makes it very easy to discount any religion that disagrees with yours.

But logic would tell us that if we do need religion, then we should try to determine which if any religions are true.

Given that there are many non-religious people in the world, and given that there are several very secular countries in the world that have a very high standard of living, I'd say that the evidence is that we DON'T need religion.

We do need religion cannot be proven true unless there was never any religion.

Or if there are people living without it.

So you care if the story of Adam and Eve is factually true and if not you do not care what it means?

Well, if it was true, then it would certainly dramatically change what we know of science.

But for the record, I do not believe it is true.

 

[Tiberius]

I did not say that there was only one option available for you to choose from.

So if God KNOWS FOR A FACT that I will wear the red shirt, what other option is there?

 

[Tiberius]

No, your choices would not retroactively rewrite history because they would have already been written on the Tablet of Fate.

And I can't choose to do anything other than what is written there, can I?

Hence, no choice.

 

[Tiberius]

No, please don't distort this. The Germens were lamenting the oppressive treaty at Versailles.

Both French and Germans died. That's the nature of war, though Germany won. Any death in war is lamentable.

Ah, so it's a METAPHOR. The gore it speaks of isn't literal gore, it's a figure of speech.

 

[Tiberius]

I did not say you could not have done anything different.

If God sees I will wear a shirt of a certain colour, how could I possibly do anything different?

That is not true. We can choose to do whatever we want to do.
What God knows will happen is determined by God's foreknowledge of what we will choose to do.
Everything will happen in the way God knows it will happen because God knows how it will happen.

And I can only do things in the way God knows I will do them, correct?

I was hopeful for a while but now my hopes have been dashed. There is no hope for you to ever understand this

I'll never understand it because it doesn't make sense.

I should have known when to quit. One more try... Read this passage and explain why what God knows is the CAUSE of anything.

“Every act ye meditate is as clear to Him as is that act when already accomplished. There is none other God besides Him. His is all creation and its empire. All stands revealed before Him; all is recorded in His holy and hidden Tablets. This fore-knowledge of God, however, should not be regarded as having caused the actions of men, just as your own previous knowledge that a certain event is to occur, or your desire that it should happen, is not and can never be the reason for its occurrence.”
Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 150

That's just an unsupported claim. It says that God's foreknowledge doesn't cause it, but it never explains how that works.

You have also failed to understand the analogy I used. If I watch Jurassic Park, I know the lawyer is going to run for the toilet. Is my knowledge that he will run the thing that makes him run? Of course not! Is there anything I did that made him run? Again, no! I am not the one who set it in stone that he would run, I did nothing to make him run, yet I know he will run each and every time. I know it for a fact, and thus it can't be changed.

If an astronomer knows the exact time an ellipse is going to occur in the future does that CAUSE the eclipse to occur? Why would be it any different if God knew something was going to happen in the future? How would that CAUSE it to happen?

This is the worst analogy you have ever used, and that's saying something, because I've seen you use some absolute stinkers.

This analogy fails because AN ECLIPSE ISN'T A CHOICE.

AGAIN, we will do what God knows we will do but only because God knows what we will do, but what God knows is not the cause of what we do. We CAUSE things to happen because we choose to do things since we have free will to act.

Explain why God's knowledge prevents us from making choices.

Because if God knows we will do one thing, but we choose to do another thing, then that means God's knowledge was wrong.

What is the defendant going to tell the judge? "Judge, God knew I was going to murder my wife so I had no choice except to murder my wife! Therefore I am not guilty."

You gotta be kidding. What you believe amounts to absolute predestination and no free will, thus humans coud never be held accountable for anything they do wrong. It is patently absurd.

Exactly!

Of course, since I do not believe in God and I do not believe in predestination, there's no problem for me.

However, if someone does believe in a God knowing the future (predestination, and no, that doesn't mean that God is the one setting things in stone) but does NOT believe in predestination, then they have a mighty big problem.

 

[Tiberius]

You just contradicted yourself -- you do not believe in predestination yet if God knows what we will do, then it is predestination.

If not God, who would be doing the predestinating? You have tied yourself in a knot.

Doesn't matter, since I don't believe in predestination.

I was using a little thing called a HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION.

IF there is a God who knows the future, then we can not have free will.

There's that very important IF there. Doesn't mean I believe in a God who knows the future (or any other kind of God), and it doesn't mean I believe in predestination.

 

[Tiberius]

You will wear the red shirt but the reason you will wear the red shirt is because you CHOSE to wear the red shirt, not because God KNEW you would wear the red shirt.

I can't make the choice tomorrow because God's knowledge of it today means it is set in stone today.