God is disproven by science? Really?

[firedragon]

Many people mostly atheists believe that God has been disproven or has being shown to be non-existent.

It's true that some people who think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence when it comes to the God topic. Absence of evidence is an elimination method to eradicate the possibility of something. For example, you can take a geographical area like lets say a mountain. You can scour the whole mountain for fossil records of a dinosaur and you can eliminate the possibility of having fossil records in that mountain. Well. Some would claim that's evidence of absence.

The problem is, there are some atheists who claim that since there is no evidence for God, that is evidence that God does not exist. Thats a pretty lame treatment intellect. Today an atheist said that in this very forum.

BUT, there is a big but. Very rarely do some of the most educated atheist scientists, evolutionary biologists etc do that kind of fallacious reasoning. Even in this very forum most atheists don't make that argument. Most do not say that God has been proven to be non-existent. Some do. Not most. I think your "many" word up there could be mistakenly interpreted.

 

[firedragon]

Can... you prove to me through ID how it is Brahma the Creator exists?

That's interesting.

You know. How do you understand this "ID" thing works?

 

[The Hammer]

That's interesting.

You know. How do you understand this "ID" thing works?

Not sure? That's kind of why I asked.

I'm partial to the idea of entities having created the universe. But really the method and process of how, isn't necessary.

 

[firedragon]

So, those who don't agree with you are "non-intelligent" person's.

Lool. Viker. You have absolutely misunderstood everything. What this guy means by non-intelligence is not a persons non-intelligence. It's the the design of the universe. He is making a case with Intelligent Design in mind. Not human intelligence.

 

[firedragon]

Not sure? That's kind of why I asked.

I'm partial to the idea of entities having created the universe. But really the method and process of how, isn't necessary.

Okay.

 

[The Hammer]

He is making a case with Intelligent Design in mind. Not human intelligence.

They are the same thing. As we all contain the spark of the divine.

 

[Subduction Zone]

It's true that some people who think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence when it comes to the God topic. Absence of evidence is an elimination method to eradicate the possibility of something. For example, you can take a geographical area like lets say a mountain. You can scour the whole mountain for fossil records of a dinosaur and you can eliminate the possibility of having fossil records in that mountain. Well. Some would claim that's evidence of absence.

The problem is, there are some atheists who claim that since there is no evidence for God, that is evidence that God does not exist. Thats a pretty lame treatment intellect. Today an atheist said that in this very forum.

BUT, there is a big but. Very rarely do some of the most educated atheist scientists, evolutionary biologists etc do that kind of fallacious reasoning. Even in this very forum most atheists don't make that argument. Most do not say that God has been proven to be non-existent. Some do. Not most. I think your "many" word up there could be mistakenly interpreted.

There is a proper way to us the "absence of evidence" tactic, but I do not think it is proper in the claims of the nonexistence of a God. The one time I will use it is in various Flood of Noah claims because that event would have left clear evidence and there is none to be seen.

 

[Nakosis]

Many people mostly atheists believe that God has been disproven or has being shown to be non-existent. But if you knew the definition and explanation of intelligence, or its variants, or synonyms, you will never claim such illogical claim. Thus, intelligence protects the existence of God from those non-intelligent persons.

I hope that before those who claim that God does not exist, let them define "intelligence" first in the usage of God = Intelligent Creator or Intelligent Designer.

God would need to be a testable proposition before one could disprove it.

 

[Windwalker]

There is a proper way to us the "absence of evidence" tactic, but I do not think it is proper in the claims of the nonexistence of a God. The one time I will use it is in various Flood of Noah claims because that event would have left clear evidence and there is none to be seen.

That and claims of election fraud, where there no supporting evidence. In that case the absence of evidence, is evidence of the Big Lie, being in fact nothing but a big lie.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I figured out the age-old question. . . "Which came first, the chicken or the egg."

Every cell in a chicken's parent would have to have altered DNA to be something other than a chicken. But, an egg is just one cell, so it is easier to alter the DNA.

Thus, the egg was first, and the chicken grew as the egg divided through mitosis.

Theists believe that God made the egg out of mud. Doesn't that seem difficult to understand?

It's an easy question because eggs were around way before chickens.

 

[QuestioningMind]

Who is defining God as an entity? Are you starting with an idea of God, like some guy in the sky with an idea in its mind like a watchmaker and a watch?


The heck it doesn't. That process is what is responsible for countless forms of life taking shape, adapting, surviving, and thriving. What is it that is figuring out how to do that, if it's not an "intelligent" process? I think you are assuming intelligence to mean something akin to human cognitions. That's an anthropomorphic projection, that intelligence must be human.

Do you believe other animal life forms besides humans possess intelligence? I know a lot of people assume they don't, as they view humans as beyond nature in some fashion or other. Kind of like the earth being the center of the known universe.

What is wrong with viewing the process of evolution as intelligent? Aren't the cells of your own body intelligent? Don't they know what to do? Or are you cognizing their actions and processes in order for them them to know what to do? Do they have little human brains thinking their actions, like aliens commanding spacecraft? Intelligence doesn't need to look like conceptual thought, is my point here.


You assume evolution is about specific species surviving? Why? None of this negates what I'm saying.

The heck it doesn't. That process is what is responsible for countless forms of life taking shape, adapting, surviving, and thriving. What is it that is figuring out how to do that, if it's not an "intelligent" process?

You're just trying to redefine what intelligence and figuring something out means. Intelligence requires conscious awareness. In order to figure something out you must have intent and the ability to make choices. Thus some living entities possess intelligence and others do not. A single celled organism possesses no conscious awareness and is incapable of making choices.

In order for something to 'figure out' how to make a species adapt, survive, and thrive that something must have conscious intent and the ability to intervene in some manner in order to change a natural outcome. A natural process like evolution has neither conscious intent nor the ability to change natural outcomes.

That would be like claiming that a wind storm has intelligence and somehow figured out how to blow sticks and branches into a creek in just such a way that they eventually get caught among the rocks and create a dam. The storm didn't 'figure out' how to drop the sticks and leaves in such a way so they would intentionally result in the creek water getting blocked off. The storm doesn't even possess any conscious awareness that a dam has been formed. Calling such a formation the result of an 'intelligent process' completely negates what the meaning of an intelligent process is.

 

[Alien826]

By "real" I mean existing in the world external to the self, reality, nature, the place where things with objective existence are found.

I would be happy to see evidence of anything that exists outside the "world" you describe. That would be a good starting point for a scientific investigation of "god" I think.

On the other hand, I don't see why a god has to exist outside the natural world. The descriptions associated with gods in general, could be just as easily produced within the natural world. But we still need some evidence of course.

 

[firedragon]

They are the same thing. As we all contain the spark of the divine.

Not at all my brother. Forget about me agreeing with him or not. This guy is talking about intelligent design as a concept. Not about the intelligence about people who oppose it.

I don't know what else to say really.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

Not at all my brother. Forget about me agreeing with him or not. This guy is talking about intelligent design as a concept. Not about the intelligence about people who oppose it.

I don't know what else to say really.

In post # 28, the OP deflected to how creationists are insulted by non-theist scientists in a defense of his OP. He said his OP is "cute." Considering his attempt to justify himself, I would say that he meant to insult the intelligence of the people who oppose his belief.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Not at all my brother. Forget about me agreeing with him or not. This guy is talking about intelligent design as a concept. Not about the intelligence about people who oppose it.

I don't know what else to say really.

And ID has been shown to be nonsense when ever any scientists tries to defend it. They cannot even define what they mean by "intelligence". They have no tests that could possibly refute the concept. It is just an ad hoc explanation and since those change with every refutation and have n predictive power they are not valued at all in the sciences.

 

[Windwalker]

You're just trying to redefine what intelligence and figuring something out means. Intelligence requires conscious awareness.

Does it? Who is defining it that way? The basic definition of Intelligence is, "the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations". That sure sounds like evolution. That sure sounds like all our autonomic systems. They are all intelligent, without having "cognitive thoughts" per se. Now are they "aware"? Yes, of course they are. How else would they be able to respond to their environment?

Now let's look at intelligence from a philosophical point of view.

Intelligence

Unlike belief and knowledge, intelligence is not information: it is a process, or an innate capacity to use information in order to respond to ever-changing requirements. It is a capacity to acquire, adapt, modify, extend and use information in order to solve problems. Therefore, intelligence is the ability to cope with unpredictable circumstances. But intelligence is not merely analytical: to survive and flourish in society, we must also have social and emotional intelligence. (However, I do not here assume an equating of intelligence with consciousness.)

Information, Knowledge & Intelligence | Issue 98 | Philosophy Now
​

So, you were saying?

Again, what you appear to be doing is projecting how intelligence manifests in human cognition, and assume that since these other things, and I'll assume you believe no other animal species as well, does not have intelligence based upon this anthropocentric bias. But that is not the case. Human intelligence is a manifestation of the innate intelligence in the entire system of life itself. We've just evolved how it looks to include cognitive thought, but intelligence is inherent in the system itself we evolved from. We evolved because of that inherent intelligence. But none of that means it "thinks", if that's what you assume intelligence is.

In order to figure something out you must have intent and the ability to make choices. Thus some living entities possess intelligence and others do not. A single celled organism possesses no conscious awareness and is incapable of making choices.

It's aware of its environment and responds in certain ways to it. You can call those "choices" at a proto level of course. "yes", "no", and so forth. To lift this from a search I just did, "they can react to light, dark, gravity, heat, can repair stress and trauma damage, and can replicate themselves".

All of this is true. So that is clearly awareness. It's not just a passive existence without interactions with its environment. Therefore, that is intelligence.

In order for something to 'figure out' how to make a species adapt, survive, and thrive that something must have conscious intent and the ability to intervene in some manner in order to change a natural outcome.

You don't think there is a conscious intent for survival inherent in all life? Why do you think there is any survival at all? Isn't that, to borrow for Jurassic Park here, as he perfectly says just this:

"Life finds a way". Why, I ask? It intends to survive. That is intention inherent in evolution. That is intelligence in figuring out how to do that.

A natural process like evolution has neither conscious intent nor the ability to change natural outcomes.

Clearly you're wrong here. "Life finds a way".

That would be like claiming that a wind storm has intelligence and somehow figured out how to blow sticks and branches into a creek in just such a way that they eventually get caught among the rocks and create a dam. The storm didn't 'figure out' how to drop the sticks and leaves in such a way so they would intentionally result in the creek water getting blocked off. The storm doesn't even possess any conscious awareness that a dam has been formed. Calling such a formation the result of an 'intelligent process' completely negates what the meaning of an intelligent process is.

Evolution intends for life to survive through adaptation. Sticks sliding into a heap is not the same thing as the sticks themselves changing their own configurations in order to make a dam. If you wish to use the storm as an analogy, it would be more a destructive force and the dam was created by the death of life forms. Evolution on the other hand, would be to adapt life to work with the destruction from the storm.

Oh, and by the way....

Evolution may be more intelligent than we thought, according to researchers. In a new article, the authors make the case that evolution is able to learn from previous experience, which could provide a better explanation of how evolution by natural selection produces such apparently intelligent designs.

Is evolution more intelligent than we thought?.
​

Oh, and this as well:

Intelligent design without a creator? Why evolution may be smarter than we thought

"I don’t think invoking a supernatural creator can ever be a scientifically useful explanation. But what about intelligence that isn’t supernatural? Our new results, based on computer modelling, link evolutionary processes to the principles of learning and intelligent problem solving – without involving any higher powers. This suggests that, although evolution may have started off blind, with a couple of billion years of experience it has got smarter."
​

The full article is quite interesting. But all this goes to show, seeing evolution as intelligent, is nothing new, nor does seeing it as such invoke some image of an external creator god, planning to create you and me from our mommies in the 20th century. We could have just as well be fish in the ocean.

 

[blü 2]

No, not a fourth option. In my earlier post, I described what would amount to a different perception of your third option.

Your third option, IMO, sets up a false dichotomy: (1) It passes an objective test or (2) It can't be distinguished from the imagined.

If you can't distinguish it from the imaginary, on what grounds should it get its own category?

You are omitting the logically possible existence of everything that we currently can't test for. For example, it's logically possible that if the left brain is damaged and goes offline, we might experience an 'oceanic' feeling of love and oneness. That happened to one stroke-damaged brain of a woman who happened to be a brain scientist. But we can't test it for it by deliberately damaging the left brains of people and sending them offline.

We can observe the damage to the brain to a certain extent, by x-rays and EEG. We can also accumulate data from many cases and refine our mapping of the brain and its functions. Studies of that kind go back to the 18th century, but since new tools became available in the 1990s we've made enormous progress; we still have a great deal to learn about how the brain actually works, but we're actively working on it.

Nevertheless, it's one of many possibilities that can't pass an objective test. Yet it can be distinguished from the imagined.

It's clearly a reaction to a misfunction. There's nothing mysterious about it as such ─ the mystery is in the details.

Nor do I think regarding God as brain damage is helpful to your cause.

A far more persuasive notion is one that accounts for the huge variety of supernatural beings that we find across history and across all cultures ─ that humans create gods because the human brain has evolved to create instant narratives to account for everything it perceives that it doesn't understand ─ weather, drought, famine, lightning, plague, the sun and moon and eclipses, luck in love and hunting and fishing and war, fertility, birth, the season of spring and the 'story' of the year's seasons. This is the space which gods and other supernatural beings are devised to fill. And we're gregarious primates and we've evolved with an instinctive need for identity and belonging, which means we bond with our fellow-tribesfolk with language, customs, stories of heroes, just-so stories, and supernatural beings and explanations.

For instance, Yahweh doesn't exist until around 1500 BCE, when he appears as a tribal god in southern Canaan, with a consort, Asherah; and as you know from reading the Tanakh, in the early part [he]'s just one of the many Canaanite gods until after the Babylonian captivity; only then does he become the only god. In the first century CE he splits into the god of the Jews and that god's enemy the god of the Christians. And in the fourth century CE the Christian god becomes "triune" ─ despite that notion being flatly contradicted in the NT ─ yet another very clear example of theology as very human politics.

And around 600 the Jewish god splits again, into the Jewish god and that god's further enemy the god of Islam.

The Christian god, apart from major new identities with the Mormons and the Rastafarians, now has (the net tells me) something like 7000 different denominations of followers. Which just underlines the tribal role of gods.

 

[MrIntelligentDesign]

Does it? Who is defining it that way? The basic definition of Intelligence is, "the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations". That sure sounds like evolution. That sure sounds like all our autonomic systems. They are all intelligent, without having "cognitive thoughts" per se. Now are they "aware"? Yes, of course they are. How else would they be able to respond to their environment?

Now let's look at intelligence from a philosophical point of view.

Intelligence

Unlike belief and knowledge, intelligence is not information: it is a process, or an innate capacity to use information in order to respond to ever-changing requirements. It is a capacity to acquire, adapt, modify, extend and use information in order to solve problems. Therefore, intelligence is the ability to cope with unpredictable circumstances. But intelligence is not merely analytical: to survive and flourish in society, we must also have social and emotional intelligence. (However, I do not here assume an equating of intelligence with consciousness.)

Information, Knowledge & Intelligence | Issue 98 | Philosophy Now
​

So, you were saying?

Again, what you appear to be doing is projecting how intelligence manifests in human cognition, and assume that since these other things, and I'll assume you believe no other animal species as well, does not have intelligence based upon this anthropocentric bias. But that is not the case. Human intelligence is a manifestation of the innate intelligence in the entire system of life itself. We've just evolved how it looks to include cognitive thought, but intelligence is inherent in the system itself we evolved from. We evolved because of that inherent intelligence. But none of that means it "thinks", if that's what you assume intelligence is.


It's aware of its environment and responds in certain ways to it. You can call those "choices" at a proto level of course. "yes", "no", and so forth. To lift this from a search I just did, "they can react to light, dark, gravity, heat, can repair stress and trauma damage, and can replicate themselves".

All of this is true. So that is clearly awareness. It's not just a passive existence without interactions with its environment. Therefore, that is intelligence.


You don't think there is a conscious intent for survival inherent in all life? Why do you think there is any survival at all? Isn't that, to borrow for Jurassic Park here, as he perfectly says just this:

"Life finds a way". Why, I ask? It intends to survive. That is intention inherent in evolution. That is intelligence in figuring out how to do that.


Clearly you're wrong here. "Life finds a way".


Evolution intends for life to survive through adaptation. Sticks sliding into a heap is not the same thing as the sticks themselves changing their own configurations in order to make a dam. If you wish to use the storm as an analogy, it would be more a destructive force and the dam was created by the death of life forms. Evolution on the other hand, would be to adapt life to work with the destruction from the storm.

Oh, and by the way....

Evolution may be more intelligent than we thought, according to researchers. In a new article, the authors make the case that evolution is able to learn from previous experience, which could provide a better explanation of how evolution by natural selection produces such apparently intelligent designs.

Is evolution more intelligent than we thought?.
​

Oh, and this as well:

Intelligent design without a creator? Why evolution may be smarter than we thought

"I don’t think invoking a supernatural creator can ever be a scientifically useful explanation. But what about intelligence that isn’t supernatural? Our new results, based on computer modelling, link evolutionary processes to the principles of learning and intelligent problem solving – without involving any higher powers. This suggests that, although evolution may have started off blind, with a couple of billion years of experience it has got smarter."
​

The full article is quite interesting. But all this goes to show, seeing evolution as intelligent, is nothing new, nor does seeing it as such invoke some image of an external creator god, planning to create you and me from our mommies in the 20th century. We could have just as well be fish in the ocean.

Since you had the wrong, useless definition of intelligence and even its variants, then, your post is wrong.

 

[MrIntelligentDesign]

There is no Intelligent Design. There are only indications of Incompetent Design.

You must differentiate or categorize the two and give universal numerical limits. If not, then, you are not doing any science at all.

 

[MrIntelligentDesign]

I didn't ask you for that.

I asked you for a description of a real god, (non-imaginary, found in nature, having objective existence) such that if we find a real suspect we can determine whether it's God (or a god) or not.

If you're not talking about a real God, simply a conceptual one, please just say so.

If you're talking about a real God, I need that description to know what you're talking about. So, I suggest, do you.

It is like forensic, you do not need to see first the criminal or not, you must first make a system to check. I post this in another thread. I hope it will help you.

The debate will be: which is God or who is God?

The second debate will be: If God designed/created the universe, life and species, or living organisms, did He use Evolution, for biology only, in this example, non-intelligently guided change of frequency alleles or not? If not, then, Evolution is wrong and the change that we see in biological world must be Biological Interrelation, BiTs, from the new Intelligent Design <id>.

But before we could conclude about intelligently guided or not intelligently guided change, we needed first to debate, the third debate, of what is intelligence? The new <id>, from me, I discovered the definition and explanation of intelligence, and solved it.

Thus, the debate is OVER. Evolution is wrong since intelligence was discovered. The fourth debate will be: can you accept that Evolution is wrong or you will rediscover the topic of intelligence (probably, intelligence = non-intelligence) and fight the new <id>. Then, do it and win against the new <id>.