Poll: what if proof of no God?

[Audie]

Is that knowledge, or faith?

People are not good judges of reality. Relativity seems absurd, quantum mechanics seems absurd. We're not wired to perceive reality. We're wired to survive.
We like to extrapolate our everyday experience of sources, intentional design, causes and purpose to metaphysical reality.

We need no counter. The burden's on you, the claimant.

It's not a fair discussion. One side gets
to make things up.
Like definitions, or about the integrity
of anyone who does not agree

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Becomes? Faith is belief. So is knowledge. Anything held to be true is belief.

Do you understand what a burden of proof is? You made an assertion that there is a god, therefore it's your job to support your assertion. It's not my job to disprove it.

The end problem is this. How do you know that you? Can you answer that?

 

[F1fan]

Or the "same" god with widely different attributes.

Kinda like blonde, blue-eyed, caucasian Jesus versus a version that right wing white Christians would be offended by? Always makes me chuckle.

It amazes me how often a believer's God always agrees with them on everything, which is why other believers are wrong.

 

[F1fan]

Like I said, few people seem to grasp the differences. Especially when not doing so fuels their bias.

What bias? Not making religious assumptions?

As I defined it, God is self-evident.

You are forcing a conclusion by defining it this way. Santa is self-evident. How? When you find a present under the tree marked From: Santa. Or the Tooth Fairy when you leave a tooth under your pillow and you find money in the morning. So you can make the claim of "self-evident" if you make certain assumptions and don't seek answers beyond the assumption. Seekers of truth want actual answers.

But you ignored the definition in a rush to defend your biased 'belief' that no gods exist.

What gods do exist that make the "belief that no gods exist" false? We humans know all gods can't be true as defined, described, and claimed, so why fault any thinker for being skeptical of ANY claim of ANY god existing? And you blame thinkers for not assuming any god exists, and falsely call it bias.

And as to "burden of proof", that doesn't mean what you think it means. As with many things, it's been poorly labeled to support a bias.

No, it's pretty clear. You want to make it fuzzy because you are making an unwarranted religious assumption and trying to cover your *** doing it. Theists often try to murky the waters of understanding so you can hide from any criticisms.

No one is required to prove anything to anyone else because that is clearly not possible when the someone else refuses to be convinced. Which is very often the case. All that is required of one making any assertion of truth is that they present their reasoning. That's it. What anyone else does with that reasoning is their own responsibility.

There's a certain obligation to honor the rules of discourse in forums. Sure, you can believe anything you want in your private life and aren't obigated to anyone. But if you enegage with otehrs about your ideas you can't make unverifiable claims, and accuse people falsely for not agreeing, and be honorable. You accuse critical thinkers of bias when they don't make your kind of religious assumptions. You miss the irony in that.

 

[F1fan]

Just as you keep claiming science does.

Science does what it does: follows facts and reports conclusions from an objective methodology. Do you have a problem with that?

That's how we humans are. We each think our own internal paradigm for determining truth and reality determines truth and reality for all.

No we don't. Many religious people keep their belief and rituals within their own life or congregation. Those who try to impose their religion on others have some personal issues. I suspect you agree with this in your political comments that are critical of the right's actions to limit freedoms for many categories of citizens. These theists have serious boundary issues.

WE are part of that existence. We are designed and sustained by it. So our "self-created mystery" is as valid as anything else that exists.

We humans existing does not mean we have to exist with religious confusion. Only religious people have that sort of confusion. Critical thinkers have resolved the stress of religious ideas and the intellectual problems these ideas create for the mind. Taking control over these social traditions of belief is very liberating. I can't imaginat why many people think they have no choice but to adopt the social traditions of belief like religion, and then struggle to make sense of these ideas in their own minds. It's like being sentenced to a prison that has an open door, but the citizen is afraid to leave. I don't get it. I walked out long ago.

I think people are doing what they have been designed and programmed to do with their lives by the nature of existence, itself. How could it be otherwise?

Designed by evolution and programmed by society, sure. Citizens become what their societies make them. How many citizens understand they can manage their own minds with their own agency, and make decisions that defy what their social learning created? We are obedient robots, how many can break from the robotic thinking?

You say god is self-evident when it is. That suggests you being complicit with your social learning against yourself so you become an obedient ghost, and fear thinking for yourself.

 

[PureX]

What bias? Not making religious assumptions?

Scientism. The ever-popular bias around here.

You are forcing a conclusion by defining it this way. Santa is self-evident. How? When you find a present under the tree marked From: Santa. Or the Tooth Fairy when you leave a tooth under your pillow and you find money in the morning. So you can make the claim of "self-evident" if you make certain assumptions and don't seek answers beyond the assumption. Seekers of truth want actual answers.

The desire to give those we care about presents to show them that appreciate them is self-evident. Humans everywhere feel it, understand it, and engage in the practice. And always have. Christmas and Santa are just a current concept and image that we use to represent that self-evident spirit within us, and to ritualize the practice. And your complaining that the Santa representation isn't "real" is completely irrelevant. First, it is a real representation, just as are the words you are now reading. And second, the fact that it's not the ideal that it represents is of no consequence, as it is not supposed to be.

What gods do exist that make the "belief that no gods exist" false? We humans know all gods can't be true as defined, described, and claimed, so why fault any thinker for being skeptical of ANY claim of ANY god existing? And you blame thinkers for not assuming any god exists, and falsely call it bias.

You don't seem to have any idea what the term "existence" actually means. You seem to think it only refers to matter.

No, it's pretty clear. You want to make it fuzzy because you are making an unwarranted religious assumption and trying to cover your *** doing it. Theists often try to murky the waters of understanding so you can hide from any criticisms.

There's a certain obligation to honor the rules of discourse in forums. Sure, you can believe anything you want in your private life and aren't obigated to anyone. But if you enegage with otehrs about your ideas you can't make unverifiable claims, and accuse people falsely for not agreeing, and be honorable. You accuse critical thinkers of bias when they don't make your kind of religious assumptions. You miss the irony in that.

The rules of discource don't mean you get to stand in judgment of every truth claim you encounter as if you are the sole arbiter of all truth and reason. I'm sure it feels quite fun to imagine that you are, by your own rules of reasoned engagement. But there isn't anything reasonable about them. They are all about the ego, not reason or truthfulness.

 

[John D. Brey]

I have a thought experiment:

Imagine you are somehow secretly in control of the whole world

Then imagine that it comes to your attention that some highly intelligent person has come up with conclusive proof that God does not exist

Any Theist who reads it will be compelled to become an Atheist and stop believing in God, it is that compelling

You have four options:

1. Surpress it - nobody will ever know
2. Allow it to spread on its own - it will eventually become known to all people (do nothing)
3. Loudly publicise it - everyone will know by the following day's evening
4. Initiate a controlled campaign of soft disclosure - it will be released very gradually

Which do you do and why?

The question and concept are actually untenable since even as a concept, "God," is a thing that's invisible and unknowable in His immense-ness. Therefore, any concept that supposed to prove God or disprove God is broken out the gate by being circumscribed within the conceptual idea that God is just another something whose, or which's, existence and being could be circumscribed within a scientific or logical examination:

What disqualifies the attempts of theoretical atheism is found not in the weakness of their arguments, but in the senseless ambition that arguments, whatever their form, might grasp what is at issue when the issue is God. Theoretical atheism believes, with a rather irrational belief, that we could have done with the hypothesis of God through concepts, when in fact through such concepts we are by definition unable even to get that far. If God is the issue, the issue is never one of demonstrating his existence (and still less his non-existence), because his (possible) essence remains, and must remain, inaccessible to us. If one believes he understands God, it isn’t God: this rule remains inviolable.​

​

Marion, Jean-Luc. Givenness and Revelation (p. 116). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.​

We owe it to the genius of Jewish monotheism to understand that God is not a thing that can be bounded as can an empirical observation, idea, concept, or experimental revelation. Jewish monotheism sets forth the first requirement for establishing a genuine relationship with God: don't try to understand Him or his revelation the way you try to understand things other than God. God is not reducible to human thought, conceptualism, rationalism, empiricism . . . such that only faith ----in the Barthian sense ---provides any kind of genuine access to God.

A subset of the foregoing (so to say) is that the possibility of a mammal possessing the requisite ability ("faith") to intuit the reality of the Creator of all reality ---more than that, the ability to somehow know, in a personal way, that Creator ---is as incompatible with normal conceptualism, experiment, etc., as is the existence of God himself. In a sense, the person who doesn't understand these truisms is, assuming the truisms are factual, denying that he is anything more than a smart mammal (who doesn't possess some otherworldly "faith" mechanism) such that we who possess this faith-mechanism would do well to just accept the reality that there are people without it even as they suppose our possession of it is merely a profane self-ingratiating peccadillo of our subjective ego.




John

 

[PureX]

Science does what it does: follows facts and reports conclusions from an objective methodology. Do you have a problem with that?

No. Automobiles are useful, too, though. We can get in them and drive them around an go places. But automobiles don't provide us with any wisdom, or truth. They just help us get around. The same is true of science. It helps us control and manipulate the world around us, but it doesn't provide us with any truth or wisdom. Only functionality. Science couldn't even tell us that creating nuclear weapons was a bad idea.

No we don't. Many religious people keep their belief and rituals within their own life or congregation. Those who try to impose their religion on others have some personal issues. I suspect you agree with this in your political comments that are critical of the right's actions to limit freedoms for many categories of citizens. These theists have serious boundary issues.

You keep confusing individual religions with theism as a universal human ideal. So long as you keep insisting on doing that you will never understand either of them.

We humans existing does not mean we have to exist with religious confusion.

Please try posting a pertinent comment without using the term "religion". Religions are like languages, every group of humans throughout time and place have developed them and did so for all the same reasons. The fact that they sound and look different doesn't make language any less a universal human trait, or any less "real".

Designed by evolution and programmed by society, sure. Citizens become what their societies make them. How many citizens understand they can manage their own minds with their own agency, and make decisions that defy what their social learning created? We are obedient robots, how many can break from the robotic thinking?

Being human imposes possibilities and constraints that none of us can escape, because we are human. Theism is one of those possibilities.

You say god is self-evident when it is. That suggests you being complicit with your social learning against yourself so you become an obedient ghost, and fear thinking for yourself.

It's complicit with the fact that I am human. Every society in every time and place on Earth is theist. Even you are. You just conceptualize the great existential mystery differently than most and then complain about the fact there others are doing the same.

 

[Audie]

Kinda like blonde, blue-eyed, caucasian Jesus versus a version that right wing white Christians would be offended by? Always makes me chuckle.

It amazes me how often a believer's God always agrees with them on everything, which is why other believers are wrong.

The Bible is so vague and contradictory it will
be found to say whatever anyone wants.
And make it Righteous.

That's why it's proved popular.

 

[F1fan]

The Bible is so vague and contradictory it will
be found to say whatever anyone wants.
And make it Righteous.

That's why it's proved popular.

It’s awesome how it’s on both sides of many moral disputes. Torturing and executing people for witchcraft. Slavery. Lying. Corruption as ww see in evangelical churches. Abortion access. Democracy which MAGAs oppose but love Jesus.

 

[Yazata]

I have a thought experiment:

Imagine you are somehow secretly in control of the whole world

The rest of you are in BIG TROUBLE now! Bwa ha ha ha!

Then imagine that it comes to your attention that some highly intelligent person has come up with conclusive proof that God does not exist

Any Theist who reads it will be compelled to become an Atheist and stop believing in God, it is that compelling

I don't think that's possible. Certainly not for 'God' as (what I believe to be) rightly conceived.

You have four options:

1. Surpress it - nobody will ever know
2. Allow it to spread on its own - it will eventually become known to all people (do nothing)
3. Loudly publicise it - everyone will know by the following day's evening
4. Initiate a controlled campaign of soft disclosure - it will be released very gradually

Which do you do and why?

I vote for #2. For one, I'm a huge believer in freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

For another, since I believe that your hypothetical situation is impossible, that impossibility could never be argued unless the "proof" were known.