When crafting definitions so, then of course there's no logical/scientific dis/proof.

It's not that hard to craft a definitional proposition so that both the proposition and its negation are compatible with all evidence. Like a difference that makes no difference (except Bateson used that phrase differently).

With the garage dragon, Sagan alluded to a simple procedure by which claims can be counter/evidence-immunized, converging on such propositions. With the invisible gardener, John Wisdom expressed something similar. Say, when the Olympians were nowhere to be found once people started looking (and could), the deities became "relocated" to some "otherworldly" realm.
The immunization procedure.
Thus, Tillich, Eagleton, and Whalon learned from the best, and now declare "God does not exist", yet in the same breath also declare "I believe God is". :D If we take existence to include reality, fictions/imaginations (fictions exist too, they're just not real), thinking (might occur when reading the forums), whatever, then their strange verbiage leads to "God" as "something" of which nothing much can be said. Neither here nor there, a ghost of bewitching language.

I guess you could show something, and then identify that as "God", which hence exists, or come up with a definition and determine that it refers to something real, just what you were looking for, "God". Just have to keep in mind that definitions are ours — there are no running elephants in dictionaries/encyclopedias, though we might find evidence of a stampede out there.

The notion of 'God' has already flunked out due to the impossibility of a composite being First and Fundamental. Not even the tiny proton could be Fundamental because its parts would have to be more so.

The God notion flunks for other reasons too. The universe is full of unintelligent design; a big rock caused the Permian extinction that made the opening for mammals to evolve. There were other extinctions too, and perhaps another is coming.

What, then is Fundamental instead of 'God'?

The 'Existence Principle' that says that something has to be, with no option not to be, is applicable to what is the least, not to the greatest, as to what ever is as partless and continuous as the one Permanent thing made only of itself.

Why does it spawn temporaries such as the universe, us, and 'particles' rather than not, it just sitting there not doing anything?

Philosophically and scientifically, we note that it doesn't sit still; therefore it can't remain still, and so it is energetic.

How does it form the temporaries, given that it can only be itself and not change into anything different than itself?

It thus can only rearrange itself, as it must, being energetic, into the temporaries that come and go, some of them lasting for quite a while, as events, not things.

Many proposed Fundamentals have fallen by the wayside, such as Newton's Absolute Time and Space and the idea of Absolute elementary 'particles' as themselves producing fields. What is left are quantum fields that produce the elementaries at stable rungs of energy quanta at those specific levels of excitations.

We note this happening along with the upward progression of the universe from the simple unto the more complex doing what was supposed as God's job, naturally only, this necessarily taking almost 14 billion years up to now, with no magic therein, even at causality's great speed that is the speed of light, and still the continuing existence of humans is precarious.

RIP Notion of 'God'; It was never going to wash that the lesser had to be created by the greater, and so forth, ad infinitum…

The notion of 'God' has already flunked out due to the impossibility of a composite being First and Fundamental. Not even the tiny proton could be Fundamental because its parts would have to be more so. — PoeticUniverse

Hey! There you are again! What happened to the poems you posted in a thread about philosophical poems? Why did you delete it? :sad:

Why has that notion of God flunked out. Can't there be an eternal first and Fundamental divine world? Why not? All properties of our observable (and non-observable) universe can be projected on them. You might ask, then what's the sense in creating a similar universe?

Hey! There you are again! What happened to the poems you posted in a thread about philosophical poems? Why did you delete it? :sad: — GraveItty

It's not deleted; they moved the thread to the lounge area.

The lounge area?

The lounge area? — GraveItty

It's under categories to the left of this screen. Lounge stuff doesn't show up here.

You might ask, then what's the sense in creating a similar universe? — GraveItty

Life going on in our universe is the Soap Opera Channel for the Divine Guys.

Yes but your incoherent notion is only one description of such an entity. — Benj96

AN incoherent notion is perhaps not a description of anything. Of course one can change one's idea of god to fit whatever one likes; but in the end that's one of the problems with the very notion of god - no one is quite sure what it is, so it can be anything.

My preference is Sol invictus.

I would argue that both science and logic can and do ‘prove’ gods existence. — Robbie84

Then you should have no trouble first showing us what god is and then providing said proof.

So even if it is just people aspiring to the divine, I think you have to give the idea of God some credence. — Pantagruel

That looks reasonable at first blush. But folk twist the aspiration into religion.

With the garage dragon, Sagan alluded to a simple procedure by which claims can be counter/evidence-immunized, converging on such propositions. With the invisible gardener, John Wisdom expressed something similar. Say, when the Olympians were nowhere to be found once people started looking (and could), the deities became "relocated" to some "otherworldly" realm.

The immunization procedure.

Thus, Tillich, Eagleton, and Whalon learned from the best, and now declare "God does not exist", yet in the same breath also declare "I believe God is". If we take existence to include reality, fictions/imaginations (fictions exist too, they're just not real), thinking (might occur when reading the forums), whatever, then their strange verbiage leads to "God" as "something" of which nothing much can be said. Neither here nor there, a ghost of bewitching language. — jorndoe

Apophatisism and negative theology are not 'an immunisation procedure'. It's not as if it is a rhetorical dodge designed to win arguments against unbelievers or defend against atheists. For many believers, these ideas are atheist, and many times in history their exponents have been tried as heretics. Nobody burns heretics nowadys, but Tillich was accused of atheism on more than one occasion.

What the 'negative insight' depends on is a realisation of there being degrees of reality. But that, for us, is an impossible thing to concieve of, because, for us, only things are real, and the only things that exist are phenomenal things, 'out there somewhere', those things detectable by sense, including the augmentation provided by scientific instruments.

This is why I return again and again to the reality of intelligible objects. By this I mean something like, but not only, platonic ideas and forms. But the scope of the intelligible world comprehends many other elements, like natural numbers, geometric forms, principles and laws, and so on. At least some of all these possible forms are real - but in what sense? Where do they exist? They are not 'out there somewhere' but are discernable only by reason. Their reality is implicit, implied, they do not exist in the sense that teapots and rocks exist, but they are nevertheless real. In fact they represent the structural level of reality, the formal tissue of reality itself. They comprise the 'formal realm' which science depends on but does not see sees only indirectly.

So the ontological status of laws, principles, numbers, and the like, are a clue to the reality of the non-physical. Nobody can dispute the laws of physics, when it comes to their deployment, but there are plenty of disputes, as to for example whether it is really accurate to call them 'laws'. Whereas I understand the contemplation of first principles to be the original intent of metaphysics proper:

if happiness consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect [nous], or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already that this activity is the activity of contemplation. — Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics

So the error of modernity is to assign reality to only what exists on the horizontal plane discoverable by sense experience, through extroversion and objectification. This leads to the erroneous conception that 'proof' of the reality of God can be obtained through empirical disclosure. But seeing through that itself requires a kind of conversion, a metanoia, change of outlook or understanding. That is the direction in which the 'negative theology' of Tillich et al needs to be sought, but it is a very difficult thing to fathom, as it goes against the current of modern thinking.

Some refs

Russell's Leaky Teapot, Re-visited, Bill Vallicella
Hegel's God, Robert M. Wallace
Augustine on Intelligible Objects
God as Ground of Being

RIP Notion of 'God'; It was never going to wash that the lesser had to be created by the greater, and so forth, ad infinitum… — PoeticUniverse

The Golden Template employed above had to be thrown out through the stain-glass window after its one and only attempted usage for showing 'God'.



The Permanent’s the one and only thing,
As the ‘vacuum’, whose zero-point energy
Isn’t zero, its point values tugging
On each other and thus being quantum fields.

We decompose it into harmonic
Oscillators though a Fourier-transform,
Each as a quantum harmonic oscillator
Whose energy comes in quantized units.

The lowest energy state is not zero.
When we sum for all possible values
We get an infinite result.

When a theory is renormalizable,
There’s a mathematically sensible process
To discard the unwanted infinities
But still account for finite differences,

Which are responsible for observables;
We may sum energies to some finite cutoff value,
And use it to compute observable values;
In the limit of the cutoff going back to infinity,
The physical prediction doesn’t change.

Interesting thoughts. Does anyone here believe the bible does indeed have divine authority?

Does anyone here believe the bible does indeed have divine authority? — Robbie84

That depends on whether one believes in God or not.

Consider 2 persons, one believes in God, the other does not.
One which believes in God is struggling with "what if there is no God?"
Other one which doesn't believe in God is struggling with "what if there is God?"

Doubt is inevitable regardless of whether one believes in God or not, therefore it takes prudence to make your decision, so it's all about risk as follows:
1. If I don't believe in God then what risk do I run to start believing in God if there is no God?
2. If I do believe in God then what risk do I run to stop believing in God if there is God?

.

1. If I don't believe in God then what risk do I run to start believing in God if there is no God?
2. If I do believe in God then what risk do I run to stop believing in God if there is God?
6m — SpaceDweller

What risks you refer to? I can't see what kind of risk one runs if he make a change in belief. You say the are no risks. But what risks there could be? Not having arrived at the truth?

Neither science or logic can disprove [insert imaginary being here].

The question isn't exactly a logical one.

Why imagine God as oppose to ancient people, civilization before the universe?(What I'm suggesting here is that imagination could be more logic-attuned).

How did God attain such power? Is there a logical lock that prevents power reaching the wrong hands?(A logic question based on an imaginary scenario).

What I'm suggesting here is that imagination could be more logic-attuned
How did God attain such power? Is there a logical lock that prevents power reaching the wrong hands?(A logic question based on an imaginary scenario). — Varde

In same or similar way one could question the question of any of the great questions.

But does that actually make sense?
Just because there is no answer to great questions that doesn't mean the question is invalid or that it should be undermined.

What risks you refer to? I can't see what kind of risk one runs if he make a change in belief — DecheleSchilder

I'm suggesting to use reason rather than faith(or lack of it) to weight risks of 2 choices where each choice has equal chance of probability.
Agnosticism is not an option.

I'm suggesting to use reason rather than faith(or lack of it) to weight risks of 2 choices where each choice has equal chance of probability. — SpaceDweller

The positions don't seem to be equiprobable. 'God' is not even close to having been established; Genesis in being wrong shows divine inspiration to be lacking; a composite, such as Mind or a proton cannot be First and fundamental, for its parts would have to be more so; the universe is full of unintelligent design and its progression is seen to be purely physical, from the simple to the more complex.

the universe may not be what meets the eye, planets may be simulated there and as off, stars may be lights in the sky(given that if we reach them something is simulated).

Why is it that neither science nor logic can disprove God? — Shawn

"God", undefined and vague, is not even an idea, just a cipher (i.e. mental crutch) outside the remits of both science and logic.

What's the bedrock belief here that overrides one's reasons or lack thereof, of or for believing in God in face of no empirical evidence to attest to his existence.

Childhood indoctrination. Mostly. In general, IME, people acquire habits of believing long before they habitualize thinking and even longer before, if they ever do, unlearn bad habits which block or impair thinking well for themselves.

Is it really the argument from nothing, that something was created that backs everything God related up?

I don't understand this question.

I don't understand this question. — 180 Proof

When reading sparingly Hawking, the idea of a creator is embodied with the first cause. In other words from nothing, something came to be. Therefore, God must have been the cause of everything that had proceeded from his choice for genesis of the universe.

Yeah, but why bother call the symmetry-breaking vacuum fluctuation "God" or "creator"? Why confuse the fundamentally physical with the wholly imaginary?

Yes, if you care @jorndoe elaborated on this if that's what you care to discuss.

If you've read Stephen Hawking, then that's all the elaboration that's needed for this thread topic.

I'm closer to the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

I'm closer to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. — Shawn

What do you mean?

What do you mean? — 180 Proof

Its just a principle that has ramifications for either proving or disproving the existence of God.

Funny that it manifests in exploring (N)ature when trying to investigate God's workings.

Quantum uncertainty (e.g. acausal (random!) vacuum fluctations —> spontaneous symmetry-breaking) proves the Insufficiency of "Sufficient Reason", no? And therefore "God" (i.e. creator, uncaused caused, unmoved mover, "fiat lux", etc) is an unneeded hypothesis (P. Laplace).

That's the gist of it. We don't entirely know what caused a non-zero-sum in antimatter and matter result; but, it's interesting to think that an observation was made during the annihilation. Was it God or an alien?

That's the gist of it. — Shawn

Non sequitur. Ad hoc clutching at straws. Woo-of the gaps. :roll: