Belief in existence of God scientific. Denial - unscientific

[theStudent]

The length of the thread, in the link below, is largely due to repeated questions.on the contained information. The following is open for debate.
Belief in the existence of God is scientific. Denial - unscientific.

For those who disagree with the above, please state why, and/or provide evidence for the following:

• God does not exist.
• God exists only in the mind of the believer.
• Miracles do not happen.
• The Bible is a book of myths.

[Clownboat]

[Replying to Clownboat]

The card shuffler that deals the hands in the Casino

The action of waves and rocks on the beach

both can randomly produce those same results right?

Dealers can produce a royal flush.
Waves spelling 'help' is not something I have ever observed.

Please correct me if I have this wrong.
A card shuffler can produce a royal flush, therefore the gods are an explanation for creation?

Yet you deduce ID instead , even where it is actively guarded against, even where arrest and death are threatened.

Why?

Because I have observed humans spelling out words and you even claimed that there are guards on the island. Why would I deduce some magical explanation where one is not needed?

"If we apply your logic to the gods, we must believe that all of them are real. Please address this."

this was covered earlier with Bob the unicorn. But its about the power of explanation provided by ID, whether or not it is visible. Bob doesn't provide any particular explanation for anything

I don't believe it was sufficiently covered, either way, let's go with Bob the unicorn created the universe. Therefore Bob explains how the universe formed.

Why is Zeus not an explanation for whatever you are trying to credit the gods or a god for?
Why is Allah not an explanation, or Vishnu?

Did you develop this thought experiment with the end goal of arriving at a preconceived god concept? If so, that would explain why you ignore Allah, Zeus and Vishnu.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 311 by Clownboat]

It would probably be helpful., in this discussion, to review the classical proofs for the existence of God, and their contemporary reformulations, such as the ontological argument.

[Talishi]

[Replying to post 311 by Clownboat]It would probably be helpful., in this discussion, to review the classical proofs for the existence of God, and their contemporary reformulations, such as the ontological argument.

Ontological Argument - Fails, because existence is not an attribute. You have a thing ("God") or not, but you can't have your God as a line entry and then pencil in, "oh, he must exist too because that's a perfection". Hume says so.

First Cause, First Mover, etc. - Fails, because we have identified events that have no cause (vacuum fluctuations). The argument from no infinite regress requires that every event has a prior cause.

Fine tuning - Fails in the face of the Anthropic Principle. It the universe was not conducive to life, no living things would exist to wonder about how perfect it seems to be.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 313 by Talishi]

That isn't fully accurate. Kant argued existence isn't a perfection. Hume followed suit. However, I disagree. Kant argued that the ten gold pieces he could imagine had all the perfections of the real ones, even though they didn't exist. I don't buy that. The cake I imagine can never have the perfections of a real cake. The latter I can eat, the former I can't. Hnece, my revision the ontological argument goes like this: There is not one atheist who can emphatically say, right across the board, that there is no possibility of a God. However, small it may be, all rational atheists are probabilistic atheists. There probably isn't any God. Now, we can't let God stand as a mere probability, since it is more superior to be actual than to be merely potential, which is why we seek to actualize our potentials. Hence, granted God is a possibility, however, slight that may be, means that God does in fact exist.

I'll get back to you in a sec on the others.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 313 by Talishi]

OK, back to it.

The fine-tuning argument is essentially an argument that highly intricate order requires an ordering mind. Where there is a watch, there is a watchmaker. The us a highly intricate structure: therefore, there must be a Cosmic Designer, i.e., God. The fact that life probably does exist everywhere rules out the possibility of it being just fandom, as the likeliness of it occurring everywhere purely randomly is nil. The old idea that life came about randomly was based on the out-moded notion that life exists over very rarely in the universe.

Regarding the first-cause argument: Yes, self-creation is very real. However, self-creation always originates out of an environment, our of preexisting causes which shape the self-causation. No events are totally uncaused or unshaped by prior ones.

Now, self-causation is essentially the actualization of a potential. So prior, to the self-causation, a potential must be brought into play. So before there was a universe, there were already abstract possibilities for that universe. Now, potentials do nothing themselves, they are neutral as to their ingression or physical actualization. Hence, potentials do not exist on their own. They are always found in some actuality. If you think of the potentials for the universe as analogous to imaginative ideas, then there are no imaginative ideas, except in an imagination, a mind. And there wasn't just a bunch of potentials sitting there; there was some selectivity as to what will be presented for actualization; and that agency of comparison mans a mind. Hence, prior to the universe there was a transcendental imagination, and that imagination is God.

Self-creation, as is all creation, is always the birth of something novel. There is always choice or freedom involved. Now, freedom is possible only if the entity is given the potential to transcend the given, do something different, not just repeat the past. That requires a novel potential be brought into play; and that requires a transcendental source, something from outside the box, beyond the world, or the divine imagination of God.

[Talishi]

[Replying to post 313 by Talishi]
There is not one atheist who can emphatically say, right across the board, that there is no possibility of a God.

The God that is defined in the Bible cannot exist due to the law of non-contradiction. Elsewhere on this forum I have posted a couplet of verses that assert 1) God knows the end from the beginning and 2) God regrets making Saul King.

Other gods are defined with omniscience and omnipotence, another couplet that is self-stultifying, as well as omnipotence/omnibenevolence, or an omniscient God who tests Job and Abraham, or an omniscient God who doesn't know what time it is because he is also immutable.

[Talishi]

Regarding the first-cause argument: Yes, self-creation is very real. However, self-creation always originates out of an environment, our of preexisting causes which shape the self-causation. No events are totally uncaused or unshaped by prior ones.

You are speaking of the False Vacuum, which jitters on the Planck scale. Your implication is that the False Vacuum is not the eternal state of the universe, but it came out of a True Vacuum that didn't jitter, where an arbitrarily small region of space can have a precisely-defined field value of zero. But that is an assumption.

[Talishi]

Now, self-causation is essentially the actualization of a potential. So prior, to the self-causation, a potential must be brought into play. So before there was a universe, there were already abstract possibilities for that universe.

I do not accept that "before there was a universe" is a coherent statement. Time is an emergent phenomenon of stuff moving. Time began when the density of the universe moved off from the maximum allowed density, giving room for things to move and time to exist.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 316 by Talishi]

In a way, I agree. The Bible, as I said, is not a book of metaphysics, tells us very little about how God is built, so to speak. We get but snap shots which often conflict. It's up to us to put them together into a meaningful, unified whole.
Consequently, the early church borrowed heavily on Hellenic metaphysics and standards of perfection. Many believers and also nonbelievers naively assume that the traditional Christian definition or picture of God comes right out of Scripture. It most certainly did not. It came most directly out of Hellenic metaphysics.

Now, the traditional model of God is called classical theism. Accordingly, God is void of body, parts, passions, compassion, wholly immutable, wholly independent of the world, all-determining. Since the 40's, however, many theologians have challenged this model on biblical and empirical grounds. Neo-classical theists, such as myself, argue the model is unbiblical, as God, in Scripture, is attributed deep feeling, change, and knows the future only as possibilities, not certainties, etc. We have proposed a dipolar model of God, whereby contingency and change can be attributed to God. After all, if God cannot change, if nothing can make any difference in God, then saint or sinner, it's all the same to god, who remains blissfully indifferent to the world. But I know I and many others can put no faith in such an indifferent Deity. We accept that God is all-knowing. However, we stipulate carefully that this means God knows the future for what it is: the realm of as yet unactualized potentials, not as a matter of definite fact. I can go into more detail if you wish. I'm just trying to point out here that Scripture is not the basis for the classical Christian picture of God as he or she is in his or her own nature. I say "her," to draw attention to the passive, empathic, receptive dimensions of God, a theme lost to the classical model, which, on the basis of purely Hellenic standards of perfection, enshrined the immune and the immutable.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 317 by Talishi]

OK, well, I don't quite follow you here. One assumption I am going on is that nothing comes out of nowhere. Everything has a cause. I view the universe as a web, a matrix of sensitivity. All events are interconnected. Nothing exists in isolation. Every entity has a mind, hence some real degree of freedom and choice; but at the same time, every event is sensitive and receives input from all other events taking place in the universe. Hence, all things have causes.