I’ve shared proof that God categorically cannot exist several times over the years since I thought it up, most recently here (second half of the post):
The question’s closed.
Doesn’t matter what illusions you can experience as you’re about to die and your body is shutting down, along with its ability to experience reality.
This reminds me of Anselmo’s ontological argument but backwards:
Just throwing this out there:
Consciousness is not limited to the human or animal body. Consciousness is an ordered energy that exists beyond corporeal forms, ask Ecmandu.
Yeah it’s a play on all the various Ontological Arguments.
It’s a necessary consequence of them that all the authors seem to have overlooked.
I jokingly call my argument the “Epistemological Argument”, because its crux is more a matter of Epistemology than Ontology.
Not sure what you’re trying to imply with your substitutions of God with World.
Are you trying to say that the form of the argument can be used to prove the world doesn’t exist?
When I’m being thorough I clarify how this specifically applies to internally contradictory (supposed) “beings”, and not things that could potentially be verified to exist somewhere. Some things, given that they aren’t internally contradictory, could exist. God, being internally contradictory in accordance with my argument, cannot exist anywhere.
If you’re referring to the world in the “noumenal” sense, as in beyond the phenomenalogical, then sure - by definition, being beyond any ability to directly affirm it, it can’t be said to exist. But the world, insofar as it can be verified in some way, can be said to exist - and the form of my disproof of God wouldn’t apply to that.
You got the gist of what I was trying to say.
Putting noumenon/phenomenon aside, what makes God impossible for man to comprehend?
Is it our unfamiliarity with God?
Is it God’s vastness?
Is it God’s complexity?
Thing is, all these three qualities, unfamiliarity, vastness and complexity applies to everything in degrees.
God by definition may be (one of) the most unfamiliar, vast or complex things, but all things are more unfamiliar, vast and complex than we can comprehend, but does that mean we cannot know them at all or sufficiently?
A pencil isn’t just a solid, cylindrical object you can write with, it is a world unto itself.
There’s more going on inside of it and its relationships with the cosmos than you could ever comprehend in a million life times.
Since you can’t even begin to comprehend a pencil in its entirety, does that mean you cannot know it at all or sufficiently?
What you can comprehend about a pencil alone, could not be used to design a pencil, I mean design it molecule by molecule, does that mean the pencil is essentially unknowable to you, and so beyond your ability to affirm its existence?
It seems to me the above coupled with…
means you are concluding that you have proven that nothing beyond your conception exists. In the specific case, God, but in general, if this argument works, then it ought to work for anything beyond your conception. I don’t think that holds.
I also think that proofs are the wrong way to go, for both sides, or any side.
Can one infer that there is something beyond our conception or that has facets beyond our conception. I think so. In fact I think this is common and that we all do. I think there are facets of my wife and even myself, let alone the universe, that are beyond my conception, but at the same time I have good reasons for inferring are present. The clues I find are, yes, within my conception and from them I infer that there are things beyond my conception. The whole problem of other minds I think falls within a reasonable inference that there are other minds. I can’t prove it, even to myself, but I think it is a reasonable conclusion. An inference to best explanation. Here we are talking about entities that are quite immanent with what for us are transcendent qualities, and God, at least in the (I think horrific) monotheisms, is mainly transcendent. Of course there are other conceptions of a deity, but it is trickier than my belief that aspects of people I know are beyond my conception.
Let’s jump to a thought experiment: I get emails from someone who seems able to read my mind, make predictions about the stockmarket, read the minds of people around me, predict events. I think it is reasonable for me to conclude that this is an intelligence entity, one that I have not experienced elsewhere as far as I know. I might wonder if it is a deity, a psychic, an alien, an AI in some Chinese lab. I have the aspects I am in contact with: the emails and their amazing qualities. I experience these facets of the entity. But much I do not. Neverthe less I conclude that I am dealing with an entity that has facets beyond my comprehension (pretty much as i do with experts in many fields). I think in such a situation it is reasonable to infer that I am encountering a portion of an entity with facets that are beyond my comprehension. I may make guesses about what this entity is, but all my guesses, some listed above, are words that don’t really show comprehension, just vague labels. I don’t comprehend an alien that can do this shit. I don’t comprehend the AI that does this. I mean, it’s a machine of some kind, though so different from other machines the words don’t really mean anything in terms of my comprehension and I certain do not comprehend it’s abilities how it does this, what it is like to do this, how it is experienced by the AI or alien or deity. Just as I really don’t comprehend what it is like for physicists who understand things and reach conclusions about things way beyond my abilities. I can use words like deductive processes or intuitive genius coupled with mathematical processes (none of which I understand) but I don’t comprehend even these earthly more or less mundane creatures. In part they are beyond my comprehension. Though
it is rational, I think, to conclude, via inference to best explanation, that these uncomprehensible processes and facets of these mundane creatures exist. So also could I be convinced of someone I don’t get to touch except via incursive thoughts, images and experiences in my head, should these consistantly lead me to things I could not have arrived at otherwise. I can’t prove it to others, I can’t even prove it to myself. But then proofs are really just the domain of symbolic logic and math, and I have never understood the theist and atheist attraction to proofs for such things. It seems like a category error to me.
Shit, we could use logic to proof things like quantum physics type stuff we know is true now COULD NOT be true using deduction. But then our deduction had hidden paradigmatic assumptions we didn’t realize before.
The guy who cannot conceive of relativity theory or spooky action at a distance cannot use his inability to conceive of something as proof it does not exist.
One can of course attack the proofs of theists along the lines you’ve run here.
But demonstrating problems in the proofs of others is not proof the opposite is true.
We all use abduction, even to believe in ‘the past’ ‘the coming future’, to have some trust in our memory and evaluation of our own arguments. We all infer to best solutions about things we cannot conceive in full. That there is something beyond our conception. And in any case it would be foolhardy I think to think we have proved that if we cannot conceive of it it does not exist and also that no one else could be rational for believing in it. We should be able to find examples where others do not believe in things because they cannot conceive of it and we know better.
To have a rational belief does not entail it can be proved or even demonstrated to others. We all have beliefs we cannot demonstrate are true to others. In many cases these are specific contingent events - like something happened in private we cannot prove to others but they do accept the existence of such events - iow the ontology is not controversial, like say Jimmy raped me might be impossible to prove or even give much evidence at all of, but the ontological category of rape is not the issue. But we should be able to go beyond this and see how earlier people would not have been able to conceive of categories of events and processes, but we now consider them real.
And some people are vastly better than others at specific forms of abduction/inference and in general at this. Professional poker players, the best mathematicians, and so on. Take a walk in the woods with an indigenous shaman and you may not come to believe in animism, but you will realize that entities he refers to that you consider real, he can notice and understand better than you and also know, himself, that part of them is beyond his comprehension, just as even your best friend is. He can tell you who was recently here, what they were doing, what their state is (nervous, heading for sleep, rutting…) and you will not, in many cases, be able to see the clues at all, let alone the animals involved who are elsewhere. And all mammals, for example, have facets that are beyond our comprehension. There is stuff going on in there minds we do not know about. What it’s like to be a bat and all that. But then also things we can infer, with different degrees of confidence. The indigenous shaman, if he is skilled, with greater confidence. Our axioms are set in place not via proof but via abduction. Our axioms about memory, the past, the futures, our perceptions and how they relate to the past, reality, the future. Yes, we can test these, but then the whole damn thing could be a dream with built in confirmation biases and saturated with illusions. Yet, we ground our understanding on these unprovable but useful (it seems) axioms we arrived via abduction. And then when others use abduction or inference, we get all ontologically and epistemologically puritanical.
Inference, interactions with entities that ALL have facets beyond our comprehension that we can be rational inferring, not proofs.
I have that within me that passeth show.
-Shakespeare
I think I can safely say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics.
-Richard Feynman
I think it is fairly rational to think there is something just prior to the earliest point in time in the Big Bang we think we know something about. That stuff existed. I think that’s a reasonal assumption. But I can’t prove it and whatever it was is beyond my comprehension.
God doesn’t exist. God is existence itself. In other words God is not a being God is being itself.
God doesn’t not exist because you say he doesn’t.
“God is existence itself” is a meaningless statement. Why say God then, and not existence? What you are using “God” for is not what “God” refers to.
God as being itself is the ground of being, and the ultimate of source of everything. Therefore God is the meaning of meanings.
If God is everything, God is nothing.
It is a meaningless statement. What distinguishes God from anything else that makes the distinction, the name, meaningful?
God was already a term before you wanted to use it for “everything.” You are using the word wrong.
Maybe you mean “everything” or “existence” or “the universe,” I don’t know.
If you are everything, you are not the source of everything. You are simply everything.
Can you possibly see the difference?
The thing about pencils is that it’s potentially possible to comprehend everything about one, even if it takes more than a million life times, because there is nothing internally contradictory about what a pencil has to be in order to be a pencil (its necessary essence).
Pencils don’t have to be more than is humanly conceivable, in order to be pencils to us. That which is “pencil” to humans is sufficient to humans such “that which humans can conceive as pencils” indeed constitute pencils.
The same goes for all mundane things, that we have no issue in defining to ourselves, insofar as our conceptions allow, that they are to us what we conceive them to be.
I’ll give you that it’s possible that more than a million life times might reveal something about pencils that is necessarily beyond human conception - and indeed that element of pencils could not be said to exist to us. But that aspect would have to be the necessary essence of a pencil in order to for us to conclude that pencils cannot exist. We already have no issue in recognising various aspects of pencils that together, in whatever combination, is sufficient to us to identify as “pencil” - and that would have to change and be completely overwritten in order for us to distil “pencilness” all down to this new internally contradictory essence that now means pencils cannot exist. Until that happens, I’ll be happy to remain okay with pencils and anything else mundane existing without issue. Unfortunately for God, He’s still not off the hook.
As for unfamiliarity, vastness and complexity, we can indeed affirm that these things occur in degrees, and that extrapolations from such things exist. But the existence of degrees of these qualities/quantities, and the existence of extrapolations, can at best suggest a tendency towards that which would presumably qualify as Godliness, without actually proving the result, or “end point” of such extrapolations. Extrapolations suggest a direction to explore and affirm, but they don’t necessarily guarantee the possibility of what the extrapolations seem to suggest. Ultimately, given sufficient parameters that would define what we’d be looking for as definitely “God”, for our findings to be conclusive they’d need to completely present to us within our human conceptions. Since, by definition of “God” this is never going to be the case, we’d be subjecting ourselves to a necessarily futile search. That’s why it’s fortunate that we can rule out “God” logically before needing to conduct any such a search, and it’s also why we can continue to explore the world within a pencil to our heart’s content.
I didn’t say God was everything. Things are beings. God is not a being. God is being itself. Everything that is participates in being. Anything that doesn’t participate in being doesn’t exist.
Verily, we add nothing to nature by calling it ‘god’, whatever that might mean.
Is this not “begging the question”?
Writing “God” into necessary existence as a premise such that He is necessarily the conclusion?
I actually cover this in my own argument.
To humans (within the limits of our human conception), God necessarily presents to us as entirely mundane - and even given that God is “existence itself”, existence too presents itself to us as entirely mundane. Either way, with no divinity nor anything beyond human conception as seems to be the necessary condition of “Godliness”. In necessarily presenting to humans as entirely mundane, he therefore does not present as “God” (who is at least in part beyond our human conception).
So given that He presents to us as entirely within our human conception (as necessarily must be the case for humans) thus presenting as not God, If He was able to present Himself as God, he’d either be diminishing Himself to that which doesn’t qualify as God, or he’d be elevating human conception such that He’d no longer be “at least in part beyond human conception”, and therefore He’d not be Godly to us.
Thus it’s a logical impossibility for God to be God, even if you try and make out that “God” is just another word for “existence”. But I ask you: why the redundancy in vocabulary? Just call existence “existence”. No need to bring “God” into it, as if to legitimise all the other inevitable associations with God from all the various different beliefs that humans have by proxy. Quite clearly there is more that people will end up dragging into the frame when it comes to “God” in comparison to what people think of when they simply think of “existence”. We could do without that excuse to import religious nonsense, so even the utility (as well as the logical validity) of equating God with existence is at fault. And even without religious nonsense, there’s not even any faith element to “existence” - it’s tautologically true as the most fundamentally necessarily true thing that anyone can say: that “existence is”. Equating God to existence in the first place is just wrong in every sense.
Well I didn’t invent the idea that God is being itself. Philosophically it goes back to the pre-socratics and it’s been held and is held by Jewish and Christian and Muslim philosophers and theologians. So you need that idea to understand what those guys are talking about, if you care. On the other hand, if you’re talking about God as a concept, which of course your argument depends on, I agree with you. God is mainly defined in terms of what God is not, not what God is. So for example the proposition that God is infinite is merely saying that God is not finite. The mind can’t comprehend infinity. So God is incomprehensible. God encompasses everything. Nothing encompasses God. Being defies conception. Yet concepts are no good without it.
And then, for some, when those like me note, “we’ll need a context”, they are missing the point.
But here my point is that given what I construe to be the “for all practical purpose” reason for God and religion – morality here and now, immortality there and then – why not take a stab at connecting the dots between God and religion as intellectual contraptions and the manner in which the conclusions you come to here pertain to the behaviors you choose from day to day.
In particular, as they are understood by you to be pertinent in turn to one or another rendition of Judgment Day.
I need to emphasise the distinction between the “necessary” and the “contingent” when it comes to human conception.
There is a difference between something necessarily being beyond human conception (due to the definition of its essence as necessarily being beyond human conception), and something only being beyond human conception circumstantially.
For example with your shaman, it’s just another human conceiving within human conception, that just happens to be different to someone else’s human conception. It’s not beyond human conception for the mathematician or poker player to conceive in their particular human ways beyond how the shaman conceives any more than vice versa. It’s just contingent on the particular human, rather than necessarily beyond any human.
With your alien example, again it’s contingent on humans happening to be currently lower in intelligence than the alien - or lacking in whatever traits are necessary to be able to understand how the alien is doing what they’re doing. It’s not logically impossible for humans to be able to gain in intelligence such that they’d be able to catch up to these alien standards, just circumstantial to current conditions. However it is impossible for all shaman, mathematician, poker player and alien to conceive that which is by definition beyond their conception. That is the “necessarily beyond conception” element that God has to have in order to qualify as God, without which they’d just be another aspect of mundane existence - with sufficiently full knowledge of the full essence of their existence just contingent on whichever species is trying to conceive of them at the time.
If God is just waiting for us to get good enough at conceiving, in order for us to conceive of Him in his entirety - to be equal to God - then it’s just a matter of time to realise that God was never divine at all, only seeming that way due to our relative inferiority that we happened to have compared to Him at every prior point to us finally being able to be Gods ourselves.
In my opinion, the certainty that deductive argument allows has an appeal. Abductive reasoning is the normal human version of reasoning, sure, but it doesn’t offer that black and white certainty of deduction. That’s why you have to “learn” and refine deduction and induction almost artificially, and why it’s considered an improvement to mere abduction.