Aethiests what is your perspective of god?

I have no problem with your analysis of faith. I’m not here to defend blind faith. I’m just pointing out that making claims that God doesn’t exist based on science (“I do know that there has never been a scientific discovery that has supported a theistic explanation of anything”) is the wrong way to go about it because the question is out of science’s domain.

If you have no problems with my analysis of faith then what would be a proper domain within which to question god’s existence? If science is too specific we can look at reasoning alone, which would land us, roughly, in the realm of philosophy. I don’t know of any good reasons to believe in god(s), as all the ones I’ve ever seen can be refuted, however. If we discredit faith and have no good reasons for belief in god then it follows that we should not have belief in god, although we can say that god may exist and we will, of course, believe if good reasons or evidence turn up in the future.

The long and storied history of philosophy is full of great thinkers who were theists. I would suggest starting with Plato and moving forward from there.

Yes, but my point is that philosophers don’t base their theism on faith because faith has no place in philosophy. I’m not going to go through every single theistic philosopher’s arguments for the existence of god, starting with Plato. I don’t have the time. If you can think of the best rational arguments you know, excluding the classical ontological/teleological/cosmological ones then I would appreciate it tremendously. If we’re getting too off topic we can do a different thread or you could e-mail me in private, as well.

Take the time.

It’s worth it.

I’ll take the time to fulfill your request if you take the time to fulfill mine; I think that’s a fair deal. I want a list of the top 5 or 10 rational arguments for the existence of god(s), whichever works for you. If you can provide me with something I can’t refute then I will take the time. If you can’t then there’s no sense in wasting my time, for indeed it seems to me that life is short and there is no afterlife to prolong it.

Sorry. All I’ll be able to provide are my interpretations of the arguments. And I’m a poor interpreter. You’ll end up just refuting me and my incomplete and incompetent interpretations, and not the arguments. That’s not gonna solve much. Sorry I can’t be more help, other than to submit to you that the arguments are out there. Your utilization of your time is completely your own business. Just seems like an important question to me is all.

Alot of the more solid arguments for God revolve around Jesus obviously… because he at least claimed to have trancended the metaphysical barrier. So with that being said… let’s consider the following theory which, by the way isn’t mine.

Let’s pretend for a moment Jesus was telling the truth (this isn’t faith… just inductive reasoning) and that he actually did do all the things he said, ie: walk on water, water to wine etc. Now pretend for a moment that this christian God wants to test our ‘faith’ in such a way that he would not show his face at all since the time of Jesus, thus making us doubt if all the Jesus hoopla actually transpired… to make us doubt God with the advent of science and technology.

If you think about it, this argument is actually very clever… because it works on the inductive premise of theory + test to confirm. They test the theory of causality by rolling a pool ball into another over and over to see if we will get the same effect right? and the fact that the ball is bumped forward a little bit by the first pool ball over and over… instead of say, disapearing completely… gives strength to this theory. Well similarily, this theory is tested over and over… the test could be as simple as saying outloud “God are you there?” and the fact that he does NOT answer actually gives credit to his ‘being there’. This is of course hinged on the argument that God is testing us… but causality is also based on an argument that also cannot prove without using tests which incorporate the original theory.

So that’s at least one argument you can rip apart Orniter. See it’s interesting because what you’re actually arguing is agnosticism… the fact that there is no evidence for the existence of God doesn’t point to athiesm… true athiesm would actually be very very very hard to actually prove if you think about it. But I say this because to not have faith in anything… you must first have a world in which nothing can be completely proven, which is basically what agnosticism states 'there is no evidence to say one way or another… (yet). You’ve just sorta got a fancier way of saying it… or Ivan Turgenev does at least.

Glad to see you made it, Orniter.
Welcome to ILP.
On that note, I shall exist stage left…I am staying outta this one.

Let me see if I got this right Old_Gobbo

P1 - debatable
P2 - how do we assess the probability of such a statement?
P3 - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the Bible provides no such thing given that many of its claims, including the one that Gallileo was persecuted for contradicting (that the Earth is stationary and all planets & the sun revolve around it)
C1 - inductively improbable. Obviously if you “pretend” (as you are so fond of having me do) that all your premises are true then your conclusion will be as well. The problem is that you keep wanting the reader to suppose these things (or “pretend” they’re true) without giving them any reason to and without even assessing their probability! Take a look at a similar argument: Pretend there are there are magical elves (1), pretend elves have been hunted to near extinction (2), and pretend some elves can turn invisible and that all the ones that couldn’t died off (3). Now, obviously, it’s inductively probable that magical invisible elves exist! They could even be standing right next to you! Moving onwards…

P4 - How do we know this? Should we just pretend here as well?
P5 - I agree with you here; this is nearly self evident
P6 - Again, how do you know this and, further, what do we make of all of the “confirmed” miracles recognized by the Catholic Church? What of the stigmata and virgin mary grilled cheese sandwiches? What of peoples’ prayers being answered and of countless millions thinking they’ve witnessed sure signs? If P6 is true then you implicitly acknowledge that all of the supposed evidence since the time of Jesus is just 2000 years of self delusion and fanciful imagination, and if this is the case then how can you be sure that your argument is any different? Further, if your God is really trying to test our faith then why are you trying to make a definitive argument that such a God even exists? Wouldn’t a successful argument counter itself precisely by virtue of its efficacy? Are you a heretic trying to subvert God’s Plan?
C2 - Not only are your premises dubious at best, but you’ve also failed to consider alternative explanations. You state that when we ask God if he’s there we recieve no answer as a test of our faith, but it could also be that there is no answer because there is no God and Occam’s Razor would be in overwhelming favor of such an alternative explanation as it requires none of your specious assumptions. Given the leap of faith that we make by magically “pretending” that all of your premises are true I find it appalling that you can even begin to think that we can reason our way to God through the use of this argument. You ask me to assume all your premises and then marvel at the strength of your conclusion! I would like to meet this intellectual giant, this bastion of hope and rationality, from whom you took this argument for I can’t help but marvel at the genius of this fellow! Perhaps he could even explain why we need this test of faith in the first place - and that would be true genius - for it seems to me that your test of faith is merely thinking of the worst caliber and that anyone that couldn’t see through it would possess the credulity of a toddler and, therefore, need no test of faith at all!

Yes, we can test causality in this way. The difference between causality and God, the really critical one that you left out, is that causality requires none of the assumptions that you’ve made and we can observe it directly. Ball A hits Ball B. It’s there, right in front of us, in plain sight with no ambiguities and we can do it over and over again, day and night, until the inductive probability that Ball B will react to Ball A hitting it is overwhelming even to the most jaded of pool ball causality skeptics (I fall into this group and was convinced after 47 days of continuous trials I performed without sleep). The simplest explanation is that A causes B, whereas the simplest explanation for no response is that God doesn’t exist.

My pleasure.

What I’m actually arguing is atheism. Agnosticism is implicit atheism, if you actually want to be technical, actually. I am not proving “true” atheism. I don’t feel we can prove anything outside of a priori knowledge of mathematics and logic. What I’m saying is that when there is no evidence for something there is no reason to believe in it, plain and simple. You don’t believe in elves do you? Can you prove to me that they don’t exist? How do you know there aren’t some deep in the forests of Siberia in an underground cavern that nobody knows about? You can’t! We can propose an infinite amount of such unprovable things and, as soon as we realize this, it becames patently clear that proving a negative is, generally, impossible. However, we can assess the probability of a given proposition. I find that of our Siberian elves to be no higher than your God, as neither has been shown or reasoned, in any way, to exist. If you don’t like that line of reasoning then you must concede that the evidential grounds for your God are the same as Siberian Elves, Australian Unicorns, and green elephants on Mars. Why can’t we find any of these things? Oh well… I like to “pretend” they’re just testing our faith for some wholly incomprehensible reason or another :slight_smile:

-Prove- to me that the speed of light in a vacuum will be the exact same tomorrow as it will be today. You can’t… my point was that they are both based on inductive reasoning. Say you were to say to a psychic “You suck… you’re never right”. None of her past predictions may have come true… but that doesn’t mean that in the future that will be the same. See what I’m getting at?

I know my example is full of holes… but so is your science, alot if not all scientific laws break down under the right circumstances, science is a patchwork… the laws for the different factions don’t equate across those borders.

Anyways… I’m just playing devils advocate, I’m fairly agnostic myself… I agree with most of what you’ve said. mostly because of the sheer success science we’ve been able to observe through science. It’s important to note though that technology does not imply absolute truth… the fact that we can see what we think is success proves nothing. Science will always struggle with the inductive connection it seems to share with religion.

Btw that theory was (as far as I know) Future Man’s… you should have a talk with him, heh…

I love that argument, it means that we actually don’t know anything for sure; ie., all our knowledge is based on previous experiences which may not hold tomorrow. It makes for a very abrupt end of discussion.

From where I’m sitting it appears that the discussion can now begin.

A

A am an agnostic and could be called an atheist as I am extremely skeptical about the Theistic Deity.

There is the fact that anything exists at all and also that this specific universe exists with cars, stars, and sentient beings in it. I suppose an intelligent creative force, though not provable as of this time, is a possible explanation. I’ll call that creative force God.

From this, I do not see where we get an all powerful, all knowing, all loving, all good deity. S/he/it could be a real mean, petty, sadistic brute who gives us life for the sol purpose of taking it away. God could very well be the sort of entity that feeds off of misery. Or, maybe God’s interest is in some aspect of the universe that seems to us to be utterly chaotic, completely insane or merely trivial. Perhaps all of humanity is trivial to God. We could very well be a by product of some other project that God is really interested in.

Proof of anything about God is impossible. If god is capable of creating the universe, then she could very well be capable of modifying it. Also, if there is one being that is so powerful, could there not be other beings slightly less powerful that could impersonate God? Perhaps one of these lessor gods was the one that tweaked the laws of physics and lit the fuse for the Big Bang.

So, my view on God is that anything is possible but nothing is really knowable. So, while speculating may be fun, be sure to keep a towel handy to wipe up afterwords.

[edit]Old_Gobbo - [/edit]

I agree, and I’ve never claimed that science is absolute truth. In previous posts I’ve even explicitly stated that absolute truths may be impossible to come by outside of a priori knowledge in math/logic. I included the following to reinforce this point.

Now since I’ve already agreed with you on this point - on science not being absolute truth - the important thing to ask is “what’s better than science and the scientific method for obtaining truth?” So long as we acknowledge the flaws of science I see no problem in giving it credit for the tremendous advances it’s made, especially when there seem to be no other methods capable of this type of success.

(Egregious offense #3)

ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewto … 6869d77464

Ert -

Precisely. The problem with god(s) is that if they are outside of comprehension then how can we ascribe any attributes to them at all without being sure that we’re falling prey to anthropomorphizing the unknown?

Agreed. I think the fact that there are 3,000 active religions on Earth right now that all have very different rituals, gods, conceptions of an afterlife, etc. is enough to show that faith is not a reliable epistemology because, if it were, then there could not be so many radically different conceptions of “truth”. Not a single one of these religions that uses faith as a premise is any better or worse than any other on evidential grounds because they are all mere speculation. In the same vein, the best summation of atheism I’ve ever seen goes something like…
“I contend that we’re both atheists. I just believe in one less god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss every other god but your own you’ll understand why I dismiss yours.”

Of course we can’t prove this beyond any doubts. Humanity doesn’t seem to be priveldged to divine truths that are permanently beyond doubt. There is a difference, however, between inductively weak and strong arguments. The speed of light in a vaccuum seems to change very little and, as all of our testing indicates that this is very nearly a constant, it would be foolish to assume it will change. Prove to me that the next time you drop a basketball it will fall down. You can’t do that either, but only a fool would declare that it has a reasonable chance of falling upwards. We base our decisions (if we’re rational) and our science on what we can most reasonably believe to be true. While the speed of light could change and basketballs could fall upwards we shouldn’t make decisions that depend on them to do so. The burden of proof is on the fool that says such things will break all previous trends.

I agree