Originally posted by whodeyNo offense, but who cares what you think?
No offense, but who cares what you think? The fact is, if you are a finite mortal human being and some if not all your views will be skewed simply because of your finite limitations. Therefore, if one were to have the "big picture" it would have to come from a source outside the realm of finite human thought. Such a holy book, if it exists, would then inevitably come into conflict with some of your ideas or preconceived notions.
Well, that is just my opinion, Im simply making use of my freedom of speech.
Originally posted by whodeypreconceived notions? wow, the inherent contradiction in your "thought" pattern is breathtaking -- quite admirable, really. I've not seen such a purely stated case of self delusion in a long time, at least not since the glory days of Soviet Newspeak.
No offense, but who cares what you think? The fact is, if you are a finite mortal human being and some if not all your views will be skewed simply because of your finite limitations. Therefore, if one were to have the "big picture" it would have to come from a source outside the realm of finite human thought. Such a holy book, if it exists, would then inevitably come into conflict with some of your ideas or preconceived notions.
You put Stalin in the shade, old man. You are positively Orwellian. Congratulations.
You offer us the Teleological Argument? Oh, please, explain it to us, do.
hint: basic sources on the history of philosophy will tell you:
"Some phenomena within nature exhibit such exquisiteness of structure, function or interconnectedness that many people have found it natural - if not inescapable - to see a deliberative and directive mind behind those phenomena. The mind in question, being prior to nature itself, is typically taken to be supernatural. Philosophically inclined thinkers have both historically and at present labored to shape the relevant intuition into a more formal, logically rigorous inference. The resultant theistic arguments, in their various logical forms, share a focus on plan, purpose, intention and design, and are thus classified as teleological arguments (or, frequently, as arguments from or to design).
"Although enjoying some prominent defenders over the centuries, such arguments have also attracted serious criticisms from a number of major historical and contemporary thinkers. Both critics and advocates are found not only among philosophers, but come from scientific and other disciplines as well."
see
# Dictionary of the History of Ideas - The Design Argument, by Frederick Ferré, maintained by The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library.
# Design Arguments for the Existence of God, by Kenneth Einar Himma (Seattle Pacific University), hosted by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
# The Teleological Argument and the Anthropic Principle, by William Lane Craig (Talbot School of Theology), hosted by Leadership U.
# Anthropic-Principle.com, maintained by Nick Bostrom (Oxford University).
# Robin Collins's Fine-Tuning Website, maintained by Robin Collins (Messiah College).
# The Universe, Design, and Fine Tuning, by Michael Sudduth, lecturer, San Francisco State University.
Or, are you offering us an ontological argument for the existence of God?
Are you attempting the method of a priori proof, which uses intuition and reason alone?
Again, Philosophy 101:
"In the context of the Abrahamic religions, ontological arguments were first proposed by the Medieval philosophers, Avicenna (in The Book of Healing) and Anselm of Canterbury (in his Proslogion). Important variations were developed by later philosophers like Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne, and Alvin Plantinga. A modal-logic version of the argument was devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel.
"The ontological argument has been a controversial topic in philosophy. Many philosophers, including Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Gottlob Frege, have openly criticized it. Among Islamic philosophers, Al-Ghazali, Averroes and Mulla Sadra criticised Avicenna's argument in varied ways, and Mulla Sadra put forward a substitute argument.
"The argument examines the concept of God and argues that if we can conceive of God he must exist. The argument is often criticized as committing a bare assertion fallacy, as it offers no supportive premise other than qualities inherent to the unproven statement. This is also called a circular argument, because the premise relies on the conclusion, which in turn relies on the premise.
"The differences among the argument's principal versions arise mainly from using different concepts of God as the starting point. Anselm, for example, starts with the notion of God as a being than which no greater can be conceived, while Descartes starts with the notion of God as being maximally perfect, or having all perfections."
The problem from which I cannot escape is the question of the supernatural.
Again, Philosophy 101:
"One problem posed by the question of the existence of a god is that traditional beliefs usually ascribe to God various supernatural powers. Supernatural beings may be able to conceal and reveal themselves for their own purposes, as for example in the tale of Baucis and Philemon. In addition, according to concepts of God, God is not part of the natural order, but the ultimate creator of nature and of the scientific laws.
"Religious apologists offer the supernatural nature of God as one explanation of the inability of empirical methods to decide the question of God's existence. In Karl Popper's philosophy of science, the assertion of the existence of a supernatural God would be a non-falsifiable hypothesis, not in the domain of scientific investigation. The Non-overlapping Magisteria view proposed by Stephen Jay Gould also holds that the existence (or otherwise) of God is beyond the domain of science.
"Proponents of intelligent design (I.D.) believe there is empirical evidence for Irreducible complexity pointing to the existence of an intelligent creator, though their claims are challenged by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. Some scientifically literate theists appear to have been impressed by the observation that certain natural laws and universal constants seem "fine-tuned" to favor the development of life (see Anthropic principle). However, reliance on phenomena which have not yet been resolved by natural explanations may be equated to the pejorative God of the gaps.
"Logical positivists, such as Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer viewed any talk of gods as literal nonsense. For the logical positivists and adherents of similar schools of thought, statements about religious or other transcendent experiences could not have a truth value, and were deemed to be without meaning."
Sometimes I'm with Ayer. Most of the time, I don't care. If folks want to fool themselves, let them; they probably do more good than harm in their belief.
So long as they keep out of my civil rights and those of others, who cares what they choose to comfort themselves in an otherwise rather difficult, cold, uncaring, and seemingly senseless universe?
I don't begrudge them their comfy little thoughts -- as individuals, I think religious people are just fine folk.
It is when they get together and organize; when they begin to clot, that's when I begin to have a problem with them.
So, class, to review: here are the essential historically recognized arguments for the existence of God. This is why I constantly ask folks in these threads what they mean when they use the word "God."
Choose one and support it or criticize it:
# The cosmological argument argues that there was a "first cause", or "prime mover" who is identified as God. It starts with a claim about the world, like its containing entities that are caused to exist by other entities.
# The teleological argument argues that the universe's order and complexity are best explained by reference to a creator god. It starts with a rather more complicated claim about the world, i.e. that it exhibits order and design.
# The ontological argument is based on arguments about a "being greater than which cannot be conceived". It starts simply with a concept of God. Anselm of Canterbury and Alvin Plantinga formulate this argument to show that if it is logically possible for God (a necessary being) to exist, then God exists.
# The mind-body problem argument suggests that the relation of consciousness to materiality is best understood in terms of the existence of God.
# Arguments that a non-physical quality observed in the universe is of fundamental importance and not an epiphenomenon, such as justice, beauty, love or religious experience are arguments for theism as against materialism.
# The anthropic argument suggests that basic facts, such as our existence, are best explained by the existence of God.
# The moral argument argues that the existence of objective morality depends on the existence of God.
# The transcendental argument suggests that logic, science, ethics, and other things we take seriously do not make sense in the absence of God, and that atheistic arguments must ultimately refute themselves if pressed with rigorous consistency.
# The will to believe doctrine was pragmatist philosopher William James' attempt to prove God by showing that the adoption of theism as a hypothesis "works" in a believer's life. This doctrine depended heavily on James' pragmatic theory of truth where beliefs are proven by how they work when adopted rather than by proofs before they are believed (a form of the hypothetico-deductive method).
# The Argument from Reason holds that if, as thoroughgoing naturalism entails, all of our thoughts are the effect of a physical cause, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if naturalism were true, there would be no way of knowing it—or anything else not the direct result of a physical cause—and we could not even suppose it, except by a fluke.
This last one gives me the willies. As the son of a confirmed scientific rationalist, who was the senior VP in charge of all organic chemical research for a major international chemical conglomerate, so no slouch at science, this last argument is the most interesting.
Finally, here are some of the major faiths' arguments -- happy Passover everybody:
* Judaism asserts that God intervened in key specific moments in history, especially at the Exodus and the giving of the Ten Commandments, thus demonstrating his existence.
* The argument from the Resurrection of Jesus. This asserts that there is sufficient historical evidence for Jesus's resurrection to support his claim to be the son of God and indicates, a fortiori, God's existence.[18]
* Islam asserts that the revelation of the miraculous Quran vindicates its divine authorship, and thus the existence of a God.
* The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormonism, similarly asserts that the miraculous appearance of God, Jesus Christ and angels to Joseph Smith and others and subsequent finding and translation of the Book of Mormon establishes the existence of God.
How about the arguments against the existence of God?
Empirical arguments depend on empirical data in order to prove their conclusions.
* The argument from inconsistent revelations contests the existence of the deity called God as described in scriptures — such as the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qur'an — by identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures, within a single scripture, or between scripture and known facts. To be effective this argument requires the other side to hold that its scriptural record is inerrant, or to conflate the record itself with the God it describes.
* The problem of evil contests the existence of a god who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by arguing that such a god should not permit the existence of evil or suffering. The theist responses are called theodicies.
* The argument from poor design contests the idea that God created life on the basis that life-forms, including humans, seem to exhibit poor design.
* The argument from nonbelief contests the existence of an omnipotent God who wants humans to believe in him by arguing that such a god would do a better job of gathering believers.
* The argument from parsimony contends that since natural (non-supernatural) theories adequately explain the development of religion and belief in gods, the actual existence of such supernatural agents is superfluous and may be dismissed unless otherwise proven to be required to explain the phenomenon.
* It is argued that belief in God does not help make accurate predictions of future events in the real world, so Occam's Razor may be applied to eliminate this unnecessary hypothesis.
* The analogy of Russell's teapot argues that the burden of proof for the existence of God lies with the theist rather than the atheist.
I rather like the teapot, myself, though I'm not an atheist.
Deductive arguments to prove the non-existence of God attempt to prove their conclusions by deductive reasoning from true premises.
* The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit is a counter-argument to the argument from design. The argument from design claims that a complex or ordered structure must be designed. However, a god that is responsible for the creation of a universe would be at least as complicated as the universe that it creates. Therefore, it too must require a designer. And its designer would require a designer also, ad infinitum. The argument for the existence of god is a logical fallacy without the use of special pleading. The Ultimate 747 gambit points out that God does not provide an origin of complexity, it simply assumes that complexity always existed. It also states that design fails to account for complexity, which natural selection can explain.
* The omnipotence paradox suggests that the concept of an omnipotent entity is logically contradictory, from considering a question like: "Can God create a rock so big that he cannot lift it?" or "If God is all powerful, could God create a being more powerful than itself?".
* Another argument suggests that there is a contradiction between God being omniscient and omnipotent, basically asking "how can an all-knowing being change its mind?"
* The argument from free will contests the existence of an omniscient god who has free will - or has allotted the same freedom to his creations - by arguing that the two properties are contradictory. According to the argument, if God already knows the future, then humanity is destined to corroborate with his knowledge of the future and not have true free will to deviate from it. Therefore our free will contradicts an omniscient god. Another argument attacks the existence of an omniscient god who has free will directly in arguing that the will of God himself would be bound to follow whatever God foreknows himself doing in eternity future.
* The Transcendental argument for the non-existence of God contests the existence of an intelligent creator by suggesting that such a being would make logic and morality contingent, which is incompatible with the presuppositionalist assertion that they are necessary, and contradicts the efficacy of science. A more general line of argument based on this argument seeks to generalize this argument to all necessary features of the universe and all god-concepts.
* The counter-argument against the Cosmological argument ("chicken or the egg"😉 takes its assumption that things cannot exist without creators and applies it to God, setting up an infinite regress. This attacks the premise that the universe is the second cause (after God, who is claimed to be the first cause).
* Theological noncognitivism, as used in literature, usually seeks to disprove the god-concept by showing that it is unverifiable by scientific tests.
I tend toward the last one, but I remain open to new evidence.
Inductive arguments against the existence of God argue their conclusions through inductive reasoning.
* The atheist-existentialist argument for the non-existence of a perfect sentient being states that if existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. It is touched upon by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi [a being-for-itself; a consciousness] who is also an en-soi [a being-in-itself; a thing]: which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead."
* The "no reason" argument tries to show that an omnipotent and omniscient being would not have any reason to act in any way, specifically by creating the universe, because it would have no needs, wants, or desires since these very concepts are subjectively human. As the universe exists, there is a contradiction, and therefore, an omnipotent god cannot exist. This argument is espoused by Scott Adams in the book God's Debris.
* The "historical induction" argument concludes that since most theistic religions throughout history (e.g. ancient Egyptian religion, ancient Greek religion) and their gods ultimately come to be regarded as untrue or incorrect, all theistic religions, including contemporary ones, are therefore most likely untrue/incorrect by induction. It is implied as part of Stephen F. Roberts' popular quotation:
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
I studied Sartre's Being and Nothingness, for all the good it did me. I even sat myself down at the sidewalk cafe in Paris where he wrote the book. Strangely, just as I sat down, I saw a friend from Washington, DC, a congressional staffer with whom I was conspiring to defeat the Defense Dept's attempt to escape from its legal obligations to cleanup up the messes it has made. Quite an existential moment, and it happened just before the 2000 election that G.W. Bush stole, too.
If there is a God, he has one strange sense of humor, I'll give him that.
Originally posted by generalissimoim baptiist - auto in dude
What if all religions were wrong, and failed to understand what God is really about?
Maybe we didn't get what Jesus' message was all about.
If we had, our world would have been much better.
Of course, this is just a question, it may not be true, but anyway let's think out of the box just this time.