Proof of God

Post Reply New Topic

Does the world cease to exist when I close my eyes?

oh dear ...

Well,if most people recognize this then at least most people have got Something right!

Sorry folks, was in emerg with my Dad much of today (yesterday) and will be busy all day Sunday, so I’ll get to more, hopefully, as soon as I get a chance.

Let’s have em? I’d like to determine that for myself.


Without justifying your basis for logic though, you can have no absolute logical objection.

To imply that no revelations are valid, because some are apparently contradictory, is fallacious.



Right, but I have a worldview which makes sense out of universal, abstract, invariants, whereas you do not. How does it make sense in your worldview that one can know a universal truth? How does it make sense in your worldview, that there are such things as abstract concepts? How does it make sense in your worldview that some things change, whereas others do not? On what basis do you proceed with the assumption that some things (such as the laws of logic) WILL continue to hold?



Can there be such a thing as an invalid law of logic? What if such a law were presupposed, how would you know which was valid, and which was invalid?


On what basis do you assume that the laws of logic you are working with, and your reasoning about them, are valid?



You said: “Well, ok, and obviously the counter-argument is that Christianity does not provide the nature of reality as well as another system.” I’m just waiting to hear what ‘other system’ you are talking about? Yours? What is it?


What is the reason that it has stayed the same in the past, and what is the reason for expecting it to remain the same in the future?



Past patterns are only helpful if one FIRST assumes that nature IS (not has been)uniform. What is the basis for this assumption?



In order to know anything, one must know everything, or have revelation from someone who does, else you end in an infinite regress of “And how do you know THAT?” So, tell me, how is it possible for you to know anything according to your worldview?



I know, and I want to know if you are a skeptic or a nihilist so I can demonstrate what ‘living consistently with that claim’ means.




Try doing that and you’ll see. (Better yet, if you drive, don’t do it in your car).



The argument about presuppositons is not a chronological one. Both God, and logic are necessary presuppositions, no matter the order (although, I would argue that our knowledge of God is innate). The argument is that one cannot make sense of one presupposition (logic) without the other (God). One cannot autonomously use logic to come to a conclusion that logic is not autonomous.



So then you DO see why you must assume that they must hold. You see, if the laws of logic are not assumed to necessarily hold, then you should have no problem when I contradict you like that, cause you have no basis for claiming that the law of non-contradiction NECESSARILY applies to my response.



Again no, but I have answered this above.



But soing so, does not comport with your worldview, and cannot be justified in your worldview.



No, IF, and that’s a big IF, survival was the proper goal of creatures, all one could hope to posit is “This has helped me to survive,” not “truth.” Truth does not even enter into the equation.



Again, all you could hope to posit, if I granted that you could account for the reliability of your senses and reasoning, which I do not, is that certain traits apply ‘as far as you know’ in your extremely limited realm of experience and knowledge, not universally. Naturally, you may disagree, but please demonstrate how any evolutionary model leads to any universal truth, and I will show you your error.

I hope your Dad's OK. My prayers are with you both.

Look, the issue is still that you haven't put forward any argument as to why God is the only thing that could produce universal, abstract absolutes. Perhaps they are simply a property of existence. Perhaps they are put in place by a demiurge. Perhaps they are put in place by Allah, or by Brahma. If the basis of an argument for God is going to rest solely on the grounds you've given it, then even accepting your argument does not lead to the Christian God unless you have somehow demonstrated that Deist, Pantheist, Islamic, Hindu, and Zoroastrian conceptions of God are flawed and the Christian one is not.

The revelations? Sure. This deist God's attributes are plainly perceived by all creatures. In fact, Christianity borrows from our system, but perverts it by inserting nonsensical doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and various mythological claims.


Well, without stating your revelations, I cannot state specific objections. However, I can state general strategies, one of which being the use of Humean skepticism.


To imply that the very mechanism of revelation is questionable because some are apparently contradictory on the other hand is not fallacious. Y'see, I don't have to prove that all revelations are fallacious, all I have to do is prove that the best examples seen of revelations are fallacious, given that you are my opponent, this means your revelations. I see no reason to accept them as having a single bit of legitimacy.


But you are just shifting the question. I was attacking YOUR view as inconsistent by it's OWN metrics. I don't have to claim ANYTHING about my system in order to do that. To say that I do, well, that's just a dodge. In any case, I think we are already discussing the possibility in another argument somewhere down the line. As I stated though, universal truths can be known because they are beneficial to surviving beings though, which makes sense by evolutionary logic. Abstract concepts are just mind-concepts, because minds work through extrapolating from specifics to generalities because that strategy has been beneficial in the past. It makes sense in my view that some things change while others do not because some things change while others do not, it is just a brute fact about the workings of the world, and the difference between the changing and the constant is in the observation of the changing of certain things and the relative constancy of other things. I proceed with the assumption that some things will hold because they have held, and because assuming constancy in something that has tended to remain constant does not seem invalid. After all, if I did not assume constancy, what change would I assume? No answer, thus assuming the outcome I can see makes most sense.


Doesn't matter. I am criticizing YOUR view. And given that you are giving an account for the laws of logic, if your view has questionable assumptions, given logic, then this view could be discarded for a view that might even be very similar, but that lacks these questionable assumptions.


Doesn't matter. I am still criticizing your system, criticizing the internal coherence of your system does not demand ANYTHING from my system at all. Thus your attacks are just meaningless. There is logic, there is your God which you proclaim to provide logic, but there is an inconsistency between the idea that your God is the provider of this logic.


It could be any system. There are infinite possible systems. All I care to claim in this case, is that it is not Christianity, not that I have a monopoly on what system it is. To do this, all I claim is that there are these same agreed upon transcendental necessities, but that Christianity does not account for these necessities. After all, you are arguing from the given concept of logic, to argue that your God is the best way to understand the existence of this given concept.


Well, I don't have to know that, all I have to know is that the past has tended to be the same, and that the assumption that the past stays the same has been fruitful.


Past patterns are helpful if they are noticed. After all, if the basis of action is trial and error, then any assumption works, and working assumptions are kept until they do not work.


Well, how do you know that the revelation is valid? I mean, God does not solve any epistemic problems because he does not give you all knowledge. You merely guess that he is trustworthy. Why can't I guess that my senses or reason are trustworthy and stick with it, just as you stick with the assumption of God's trustworthiness?


I don't see much reason to differentiate between the 2 beliefs, as they usually have similar meta-ethical underpinnings. So, out with it. You can even describe both if it makes you feel better.


People do it all of the time. You think that people are amazing "rational men"?


Well, the order does matter though. If you presuppose logic before knowing about a Christian deity, then it would seem that logic is not contingent upon the Christian God. In any case, there seems little reason to suppose that the Christian deity is universally known other than the claims of some Christians. I don't see how your later thing is anything but a random statement. One can autonomously use logic to come to ANY conclusion, much less the conclusion that logic is not autonomous. People use logic to come to all sorts of boneheaded conclusions.


No. I really do not. For one, a lack of the law of non-contradiction does not mean that all must contradict, or that anything does contradict, it only means that contradictions are not an impossibility. I do have a basis to say that I use the law of non-contradiction is useful for my life, and that I seem to have no reason to reject it. I mean, sure, you can argue that the law of non-contradiction does not apply to your response, but then I could reply that our conversation no longer has any expected utility to me, due to my inability to process anything you would say from then on. My mind's ability to process things is a matter of psychology and brain physiology though.


Again, yes.


Experience cannot be justified in my worldview? You mean a creature cannot benefit from having a background of memories so as to learn from based upon the fact that the world already appears to follow certain rules?


Not really. Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism hasn't been that well received. Not only that, but based upon what we have seen, what we think to be truth and what we think to support survival are not incredibly different. Not only that, but also, from what we can see, there are contradictions in the thinking mechanisms of human beings, as some notions are well-supported by one part of the brain, like free-will for instance, but are harder to support with other parts, such as our rational understanding as libertarian free-will tends to have problems in understanding the mechanism as purposive and in the context of mechanistic cell behavior. In any case, if our survival mechanisms told us that what helped us to survive was true, and there was no way to question the mechanism, then why question the mechanism?? I mean, truth would be categorically excluded from us by a lack of mechanism.


The idea is pretty simple. If truth helps beings survive, and truth includes universal truths, then an evolutionary model can reach a universal truth. This does not mean that it does, but it certainly can. If there was a false positive though, then you are right, there would be no way to know, but there would also be little reason to be concerned as there is no way to question something you have no way to perfectly attain. In any case, you still have to prove the universal negative that no other religion, even a slightly different one, can account for the same facts that you claim that the Christian religion accounts for. This means that you have to prove that every part of your religion is necessary, that every part of creation is necessary, that this world is the best of all possible worlds, that your interpretations of scripture are the most valid rather than ad hoc, etc. This seems questionable, as after all, it does not seem as if Calvinism is the traditional view of God(the name is a bit of a give-away), nor does it seem as if presuppositional apologetics is the traditional Christian argument given that it was developed by the more modern theologian Cornelius Van Til. If neither of these 2 beliefs are tradition, then I would argue that they are not a natural part of the Christian framework, but rather unnatural additions to it.

Well, actually, you have to argue that a specific notion of the Christian God is perfect, and that every other theological conception is flawed. After all, there is always the possibility of supposing an off-brand Jesus (Jesús, the hispanic savior?) which would be Christian-like, but not actually Christian and still must be a failed position. Thus, the issue is that they have to prove that just about all things Christian are non-arbitrary or problematic. This is a pretty difficult task, as this entails arguing everything is better in Christianity. Then again, the presuppositionalist is basically asking for this by proclaiming that his position is perfect, and trying to get the opponent to create their position from the bones up while not doing so themselves, and instead just hoping to get by through saying "God did it".

twoshots:
Logic and sentience are Not the same thing; you need to understand and acknowledge that. There is a nematode who's fairly simple nervous system performs calculus computations: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 132219.htm . There are MANY other examples of logic circuits in the nervous systems of non-human animals.
So just exactly HOW can you justify your claim that since logic is irreducible(cannot be proven/disproven with itself)that it is a construct of the mind?

BTW, FYI, your sophistry is starting get Old.......

I'm not being a sophist, this is a widely held belief. I have even touched upon the fact that other animals seem to perform logic and math in this very thread. The point is that the fact that a number of beings find a particular system useful wouldn't make it "real" any more than the fact that humans find educational establishments useful would imply there is some kind of true educational establishment "out there".

Logic and math are not observed; they are assumed. The fact that other animals use them is only sensible given the fact that we are also animals.

The example I gave was a creature which shows NO indication, intuitive or objective, of being sentient and having ANY ability to "find a particular system useful". It Evolved the capability to do this W/Out having any ability to think. That is the point, we consciously ASSUME logic and mathematics yet we OBSERVE it in self-organizing systems that display no ability to make such assumptions! And Yes, humans ARE animals and like all animals we evolved from even simpler organisms. Unless of course you believe that life has a supernatural origins.........

It may have evolved, but any number of systems evolved which we wouldn't call anything other than a convenient contrivance. The point is that epistemologically it would still count as constructed because our knowledge of it does not depend on observation of the external world.

Than in the case of nonsentient creatures with a CNS capable of mathematical computations...Who or What constructed it??? Hmm? This is one of the reasons I strongly favor science, which is based on REAL-world observations and ratiocination than the intellectual wankery that philosophy has become.

This whole thread has become intellectual wankery.

Has anyone attempted to use this 'Proof ofGod' scenario to prove the existence of the flying spaghetti monster?

No.

I wonder why?

On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheeZoMG topic

I would be sad if there were no FSM. , then I would not be touched by His Noodly Appendage.

****Delete****

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 16 Feb 2009, 4:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.