on discussing god and religion

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Maybe you would be interested in Dr. Craig’s recent Sunday morning lectures over the last month addressing arguments from atheists:

1. youtu.be/jHuKQRpatqw
2. youtu.be/piBmKiDK9mM
3. youtu.be/HA6kkBrlasM
4. youtu.be/fmL_S0NB9CA

I don’t agree 100% with everything Dr. Craig (or anyone else) says, but he’s usually pretty spot on.

[iambiguous]

Does God Exist?
William Lane Craig says there are good reasons for thinking that He does.

Eight Reasons in Support of God’s Existence

I believe that God’s existence best explains a wide range of the data of human experience. Let me briefly mention eight such cases.

(I) God is the best explanation why anything at all exists.

Okay, but if you are going to credit God with the existence of everything, that necessarily includes the existence of these:

…an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events…making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages…

Suppose you were hiking through the forest and came upon a ball lying on the ground. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. If your hiking buddy said to you, “Forget about it! It just exists!” you would think he was either joking or just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously the idea that the ball just exists without any explanation. Now notice than merely increasing the size of the ball until it becomes coextensive with the universe does nothing to either provide, or remove the need for, an explanation of its existence.

Or, suppose John is hiking through the forest with his kids, and a grizzly bear attacks them. The bear devours them. Or an avalanche buries them under feet of snow and ice.

The families ask, “why?!” The buddy says, “God knows.”

And, depending on what kind of ball it is, its existence can be explained in great detail. For example, suppose it was a baseball. The buddy can link you to this: youtu.be/usnZ_rdRo_M

As for this…

So what is the explanation of the existence of the universe (by ‘the universe’ I mean all of spacetime reality)? The explanation of the universe can lie only in a transcendent reality beyond it – beyond space and time – the existence of which transcendent reality is metaphysically necessary (otherwise its existence would also need explaining). Now there is only one way I can think of to get a contingent entity like the universe from a necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is an agent who can freely choose to create the contingent reality. It therefore follows that the best explanation of the existence of the contingent universe is a transcendent personal being – which is what everybody means by ‘God’.

Please. To note the existence of the universe and then to just assume there must be a “transcendent reality” behind it?

And then the purely speculative question in turn that revolves around any contingencies that must exist in order to explain the existence of God Himself. Did God create Himself? Did God create the universe as He did because it can only be in sync with the laws of matter or did God create the laws of matter too.

Anyone here able to demonstrate to us which one it actually was?

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Biggy’s just pissed God never gave him that Grand Unified Theory of Everything he wanted for Christmas since he was a kid & Santa was letting him down.

Maybe this year?

[iambiguous]

See how she follows me around from thread to thread?

She and her pinhead ilk have all but taken over ILP, and she still has the gall to harass one of the last members here who actually treats ILP as a philosophy forum!

May she burn in Hell! [-o<

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Philosophy is not repeating the same “question” over and over and giggling rather than engaging with those who dismantle your commitment to nihilism.

[iambiguous]

I know, I know: define “pinhead”.

Let’s go to the dictionary:

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Knock knock.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@Ichthus77

Philosophy is not repeating the same “question” over and over and giggling rather than engaging with those who dismantle your commitment to nihilism.

Exhibit A: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p … 5#p2871375

[iambiguous]

Since 1] she insists on following me around from thread to thread here and 2] from my frame of mind, her posts are not worth my time reading, I repeat myself:

@iambiguous

Note to others:

Just for the record, as with the Kids and the pinheads and the yak yak yakkers here, I don’t read her posts anymore.

I only clicked on it because [sigh] I am the “subject” of the thread.

On the other hand, sure, my own reaction to her is just another hopelessly subjective manifestation of dasein. Others may have actual respect for her religious views and react otherwise. And that works for me.

Anyway, if you do come across a point she raises that you consider interesting or intriguing enough to warrant my attention, by all means, point it out to me.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

If they are all just clones of you that’s not likely to happen. OR if they’re all just clones of me.

[iambiguous]

No, seriously.

[iambiguous]

From PN:

Does God Exist?
William Lane Craig says there are good reasons for thinking that He does.

(II) God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe.

We have pretty strong evidence that the universe has not existed eternally into the past, but had a beginning a finite time ago.

Really?

And how might one square that evidence with the gap between what they think the evidence reveals and all of the evidence that would be needed to know for certain that Existence itself “had a beginning a finite time ago”?

And then back to the final conjecture from Rumsfeld:

“But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Dark matter, dark energy, anyone?

In 2003, the mathematician Arvind Borde, and physicists Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past, but must have a past spacetime boundary (i.e., a beginning). What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds so long as time and causality hold, regardless of the physical description of the very early universe.

Right, and how can “the Gap” and Rummy’s Rule possibly be relevant to their own “here and now” intertwining of an educated calculation and a wild-ass guess?

And then – presto! – the existence of a God, the God, your God?

As though a hundred, a thousand years from now astrophysicists will look at Borde, Guth and Vilenkin and think, “by golly, they were absolutely right about everything!”

And, what, IC’s descendants will be there with them to exclaim, “see, Immanuel Can was right, it is the Christian God that resides in Heaven!!”

Because we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, we can’t yet provide a physical description of the first split-second of the universe; but the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of one’s theory of gravitation. For instance, their theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state which may have characterized the early universe cannot have existed eternally into the past, but must itself have had a beginning. Even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called ‘multiverse’, composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse itself must have had a beginning.

Okay, any astrophysicists here – Astro Cat? – able to connect the dots between this “theorem” and, say, these facts:

“…an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events…making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages”…

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Yo, Mr. R, you’re up!

[iambiguous]

Did John Calvin Believe in Free Will?
MATTHEW BARRETT at the TGC website

]Two Calvinists strike up a conversation, and I just happen to be nearby. As they express their love for the doctrines of grace, I then hear them describe the difference between, say, Calvin and Arminius: the former rejected free will and the latter heralded free will. Though they don’t know it yet, pitching the long-standing debate this way leaves them open to the all-too-common objection that we are just a bunch of robots. Maybe it is time for the eavesdropper to speak up.

No, really, what is the existential relationship between Calvinism and the fate of your very own eternal soul?

“Are you familiar with Calvinist doctrine? At its heart is the concept of predestination. Calvinists believe that, at the beginning of time, God selected a limited number of souls to grant salvation and there’s nothing any individual person can do during their mortal life to alter their eternal fate.”

Okay, the concept of Calvinism. But what about the nitty-gritty existential reality of your very own soul either nestled blissfully for all of eternity in Salvation or writhing in agony the very embodiment of Damnation?

Is it really possible that the God of Abraham has in fact already selected a handful of us to reside in Heaven with Him forever and ever while the rest – including the most fervent defenders of Christianity here – are already doomed to Hell? Period. Judgment Day for each of us only as it has always ever been fated/destined to be?

What to make of this, right?

Now you know Arminius was not a contemporary of Calvin. But hold on a minute, Calvin did have plenty of nemeses, and one of them would take up Calvin on issues that would, later on, put Arminius in hot water with his Reformed counterparts. The man’s name was Albertus Pighius, a Dutch Roman Catholic scholar.

You may be aware of Martin Luther’s famous work The Bondage of the Will, a must read for every Christian. But many forget that Calvin wrote a book with a similar title: The Bondage and Liberation of the Will (though it is his subtitle that gets down to the nitty-gritty: A Defense of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice Against Pighius).

Now here of course we get into the historical accounts of Christianity. Jesus Christ [man or myth] arrives on Earth, is crucified, dies for our sins.

Then [historically] all those flesh and blood human beings putting together this while rejecting that in constructing one or another rendition of the Christian Bible.

Calvin then becoming just one of those to put his own rooted existentially in dasein stamp on it all.

God, the determinist.

While there is much we could say about the Calvin-Pighius boxing match, I want to ask a question that may seem, well, obvious: Did Calvin believe in free will? By looking at Calvin’s Institutes, as well as his debate with Pighius, we discover that this question is not so easily answered as one might have assumed.

Seriously, how could someone convince himself that whether he lived his life, say, embracing Hitler or doing everything in his power to defeat him, it was all entirely moot. His fate was decided by God right from the start.

Or is Calvinism just one more frame of mind such that it doesn’t matter what your fate is as long as you are able to convince yourself it was all “beyond my control…so don’t blame me.”

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Read Chosen but Free by Norm Geisler.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Whenever morons gather, they gather in his name…Abraam’s one-god.
There be no other definition of the term ‘god’ other than Abraham’s.
Judaized Europeans.

‘God,’ imbeciles, is a word. A word refers to a mental concept.
A mental concept either refers to something external or something internal.
The degree of this determining the degree of the concept’s idealism.

Now what kind of ‘god’ are you morons discussing?
I’m guessing it is always Abraam’s version, 'cause your minds are trapped in this linguistic indoctrination.

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

Not really, discuss sacrifice, the new and the old versions , are they comparable in some ways, or are they incomparable?

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Go on, mind of allegories and typos.
Tell me more.
I’m listening.

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

@Lorikeet

Go on, mind of allegories and typos.
Tell me more.
I’m listening.

Don’t take it wrong, having lunch will get back

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

I never, take anything "wrong’.
Have a beer on me.
I’m feeling generous.