proving God exists

Discussion in 'Religion, Beliefs and Spirituality' started by wasteoid, Jul 24, 2007.

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  1. most of the arguments about God i encounter are based on the belief that sufficient physical evidence will prove the existence of God. i find this belief to be flawed.

    an infinitely powerful Creator is infinitely more intelligent than His creations. God created the universe, space, time, you, me - everything. as a created being, it is unreasonable for me to believe that i would understand everything about the God who created me.

    similarly, my dog will never understand that i leave every day to go to work, so i can pay bills and provide food for him. i can spend every day for the rest of his life trying to explain this to my dog, but it is futile and pointless. my dog will never have the understanding of my job or bills, but i still have to go to work and pay debts.

    a person\'s understanding or belief in something is completely independent of its existence. history is full of examples of this: gravity, round earth, bacteria, radiation, etc. we may one day discover something that proves God exists, or we may not. i do not base my spiritual beliefs on what mankind can prove physically.

    i believe God made things very simple for us. seek Him and you will find Him. knock, and the door will be opened. ask, and you will receive. this isn\'t physical world stuff, it\'s spiritual, so no, it\'s not about money, jobs, girlfriends or whatever. it\'s about your soul and the afterlife. anyone who is truly wanting to know about God should seek Him. however, a person asking for proof of God\'s existence is probably (not always) looking for a fiery debate, rather than seeking God.

    so to answer anyone\'s challenge to prove God exists, the answer is no, i will never be able to prove to you that God exists.
     
  2. Nice concept, it\'s sound to me. Yet atheists will rip it apart out of sheer frustration with that being the answer to you.

    God has been trying to prove He exists to Himself forever- only half of Him can know at one time though so their is a distinction between the two; and for another very important reason- if everyone knows, or everyone doesn\'t know there is nothing left to prove and nothing left to search for. Boredom sets in. Everything\'s the same, nothing\'s changing.
     
  3. boredom doesn\'t seem to be the last step though. boredom generally leads a person to do something that relieves boredom, rather than stay in the bored state. what is boredom anyway? at any point in time, we can choose to do a variety of activities. boredom is really when a person can think of no available activity they would enjoy doing. i would contend this is more a result from lacking imagination or creativity than a lack of something interesting to do.

    reason i went off on that is because i have a friend who routinely complains of being bored, and it is such a downer to hear that frequently, especially when i could come up with a long list of activities that would be fun/interesting. obviously, either he doesn\'t have that list or doesn\'t agree that my list would satisfy his craving for entertainment.

    regarding the duality inherent in many religious systems (ying-yang, etc), i do believe in the end we will see a god-mother figure emerge as a pseudo-duality for the true God. as you may have guessed, i don\'t believe it will be real but merely the devil in disguise as mary.
     
  4. The boredom results from the mystery being non-existent (no belief) or over (all belief) I\'m talking about proving God exists as a game He plays with Himself.

    Sure it doesn\'t matter if we all agree one day on belief, we can still go out and have a good time. But God is all-knowing... If there is no mystery for Him... Wouldn\'t that drive Him nuts? Nothing is changing, nothing is happening. I ALREADY KNOW. :eek:

    That\'s what I\'m talking about.

    Perhaps he got rid of His all-knowing nature though with all-power and all-knowledge as the way and means. That would make things a lot easier to understand considering we are children of God and can\'t prove He exists. He\'s just keeping a secret from Himself for His own enjoyment. That way, he wouldn\'t know what was about to happen or all that had ever happened or will happen either- he could experience life as chance and feel mortal and in the company of others. -if this was the goal (the creation of the universe having boundaries, chance happenings, and others) than I\'d say mission accomplished.
     
  5. I\'m an agnostic. What you\'re saying is one of the reason\'s I\'m an agnostic. Not a full fledged believer because of other reasons, not a full fledged atheist either. Howvere, some of the points you\'ve made raised some questions.



    So, what then, if anything, are prophets? Or the laws the Church dictates? If it is unreasonable for us to believe that we would understand everything about the God who created us, are these creating an untrue understanding of an all powerful being?

    similarly, my dog will never understand that i leave every day to go to work, so i can pay bills and provide food for him. i can spend every day for the rest of his life trying to explain this to my dog, but it is futile and pointless. my dog will never have the understanding of my job or bills, but i still have to go to work and pay debts.

    I agree more or less with this statement.
     
  6. You\'re analogy between a dog and an owner may prove that a less inteligent being will never truly understand a superior being, but when I look around i see humans as the most intelligent beings alive. IE the dog can at least acknowledge us through his physical senses but may lack the ability to understand the way we act, but I can\'t acknowledge any Gods through my senses. I can\'t see one, hear one, smell one ect. I agree that we will never understand a superior being but as far as we know none exist.
     
  7. Asking if god exists is pointless, you\'ll never know. At least not in any of our lifetimes. I just sit back and appreciate the fact I exist in such a placid sea of infinite nothingness. That shit\'s a miracle, regardless if it was a random explosion of elements or if it was a result of some magical super-being. Being fervently for or against either position is going to hold you back, leaving you thirsty for something.
     
  8. consider the following concepts:
    -infinity
    -perfection

    as humans, we cannot experience either of these concepts

    yet we kno such a thing DOES exist...



    and some superior being must experience these concepts

    this superior being is god or some god like figure



    [did anyone else ever notice that you think more clearly and logically when your smokin?] :p
     
  9. It\'s nice to be back from vacation. So here we go again.

    That\'s an interesting outlook.

    I like to think that every scientific experiment is really putting the God hypothesis to the test though.

    But see, thats where the evasion of evidence lies. the physicist Victor Stenger has an interesting take on it. He disagrees with Gould\'s assertion that science and religion and fundamentally independent.

    He says basically that any omnipotent being (such as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God) although supernatural in many respects, his divine intervention would be observable within the natural world and therefore under purview of the naturalistic sciences.

    Ergo, although science cannot directly test the existence of a supreme deity, it can make inferences about a deity based on the observable behavior of the universe.

    If scientists ever obtained consistence data that could not be explained by any known natural processes, this would lend support to the hypothesis that God does exist. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

    That was a rough paraphrase of Stenger\'s book \"God: The Failed Hypothesis\", reviewed by David Ludden in Skeptic magazine.


    Well, I hate to burst your bubble but that is a logical fallacy to begin with; an obvious straw man, and is therefore not a valid argument.

    Yes, thanks to dogma and illogical convictions. I think if the burden of evidence was the same than the average person wouldn\'t have that outlook.

    Yes, except gravity, planetary structure and radiation are all based on evidence. Spiritual beliefs are not.

    That\'s quite an assumption. I give you Micheal Shermer, the reformed evangelical as anecdotal proof of this. He looked for god for many, many years and found logic and critical thought to give much more reasonable answers to the nature of the universe.

    So then the belief in God will always be restricted to an appeal to emotion, and an appeal to authority?
     
  10. \"Wise is the man who came up with the idea of God!\" Euripedes.

    See my brothers we created God, we built him just like we did the internet, out of our own intellectual need and artistic curiosoty, he needs us to thrive, and we need him as a banner for the meaning of life, He is our own imagination Oasis, Just a myth we humans needed to peace together the word all mortals ask - \'meaning\'. its called the dillusion of reprieve my brothers and we all need a God of somekind, whatsoever it may be.
     


  11. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
    -Richard Dawkins

    You\'ll love this website.
    http://www.wam.umd.edu/~autis/arguments.html

    The Creation Argument

    Statement:
    everything that exists must have been created, therefore somebody created everything, and therefore God exists.
    Problem: this argument leads to a contradiction
    Premise 1: everything that exists was created
    Premise 2: God exists
    Conclusion: God was created
    Clearly, God couldn\'t be the creator and the creation at the same time.

    :D
     
  12. I dig your take on this.
     
  13. If we could prove god....
    it would be like spoiling the ending of your own book.
     
  14. although God does exhibit some human-like characteristics, we can\'t apply all human behaviors to God, such as boredom.

    do you have to know everything about quantum physics to believe in gravity? the law and the prophets teach us about God, although our knowledge has limits - we can\'t understand everything.

    you see the creation as evidence there is no God; i see creation as evidence of God.

    a straw man argument is an attempt to misrepresent the opponent\'s position. by stating my argument is a straw man argument, are you saying that your position is that all beings have the capability to understand all things? if not, what is your position on this?

    my position is that a being with lesser intelligence can\'t possibly understand things of a being of higher intelligence. change the being of higher intelligence to be an infinitely powerful God, and the difference is immeasurable.

    can you measure the spiritual? how do you explain spiritual things, such as angels, demons, etc? just figments of imagination, shared hallucinations? to deny the existence of the spiritual realm is to deny significant amounts of observable evidence.

    that\'s why i put the (not always) disclaimer.

    no one is making you believe in God. you\'re free to believe in whatever you want. believers aren\'t required to convince anyone about God. i think that\'s one of the most annoying and counter-productive behaviors of many believers, thinking they are required to argue someone into believing in God. that\'s not what Jesus did. if you don\'t believe it, fine. if you\'re seriously curious and want to know more, i\'ll tell you what i\'ve learned. if you just want to argue and mock my beliefs, i\'ll eventually ignore you. i\'m not trying to be mean, just a waste of my time and energy.

    i am also be against any religion that teaches that. believing in God doesn\'t preclude science; science is evidence of God. learning more about the universe will also yield more information about God.
     
  15. If you say knock and the door will open, ask and you will recieve, how do you explain all the atheists and especially the atheists who were christians for the majority of their lives (myself)? I think if there was a god I would have felt his presence sometime in those years, I never once doubted god and thru ignorance, I thought when my life was going bad and then suddeenly it got better, it was because of god. Now that I have truely opened my eyes and left behind the fear of the consequences denying god, I have realized that life goes on, still the same ups and downs...

    http://youtube.com/watch?v=bxF12cpLyhM

    Anyone who can think for themselves, check that video out and if you think it was honest and helpd you, go ahead and check out the other 5, I loved all of them.

    I think there are two kinds of people in this world, those who are weak and must rely on an immaginary friend to get them through the day, and those who accept reality and responsibility and take control of their own lives.
     

  16. Yeah, that\'s the same realization I came too...it\'s a very logical conclusion.

    That\'s not to say god does not exist...merely his perceived presence or lack thereof has no bearing on outcomes in your daily life. Yep, I could prove that.
     

  17. I couldn\'t agree more with you : )
     
  18. Well, firstly, you are innately biased in your approach to this (which is not surprising) because you view the universe as a creation.

    That aside. I would like to go back to Stenger\'s book.

    You\'re arguing that the mere existence of a universe is evidence for a creator, because without a creator there would b e nothing. Right?

    Well that argument is flawed from the beginning, because the study of physics tells us that something, rather than nothing is the normal state of affairs. nothingness is unstable and will very quickly \"undergo a spontaneous phase shift\" to a state of somethingness.

    No invocation of supreme deity is needed and it directly contradicts ockham\'s razor if attempted.

    Therefore the existence of a universe is no evidence for the existence of a creator.

    Science -- I love the stuff! :hello:



    No that is no what I am saying. I am saying your argument is invalid and I therefore have no response to it. It\'s null.

    No, see you\'re just creating a cop-out. Methodological analysis and science allows us to make inferences and reasonable accurate predictions about things we cannot directly perceive, such as black holes and quarks.

    By making the statement that we will never be able to even comprehend God in any capacity also makes theologists and all organized religion look like a bunch of frauds. It\'s a double-edges sword you\'re wielding. If you want to stick to your guns on that one, then I have some very interesting repercussions of that outlook.

    Not to mention that if this is true, than any sort of faith-based spirituality is ludacris, because it is evidently based on absolutely nothing that a deep-seeded need to believe. Nothing more. It is reduced to a dogmatic conviction that is just as irrelevant to the universe and the realm of this supposed supernatural being as if a non-theistic outlook is correct.

    It\'s the logical fallacy of the moving goalposts. The margins that god lives in seems to be shrinking.


    That\'s hardly even a sentence, what is \"the spiritual\"?

    Are you referring to the group of people who believe in spiritual mythology? Then yes, I could measure them given a bathroom scale and enough time. I don\'t see what it would yield though other than a lot of weight.

    More or less, yes. Throw some mythology and cultural superstition and allegory in there and you have my response.

    Really? It is?

    Where is this \"observable evidence\"? because hell, if you can prove it to me, then I suggest you take it to James Randi, cause he\'ll give you one million dollars USD if you can show him this proof!

    Somehow, this evidence you speak of, has somehow escaped the purview of the entire scientific community.
    Oh... so God just hates Me, Micheal Shermer, and all the other non-theists in the world? We\'re just the jerks he decided he didn\'t want to reveal himself to? :rolleyes:

    I don\'t think you understand.

    the appeal to authority is a very commonly used logical fallacy. When an argument is reduced, it can be shown to have logical premises, based on evidence or proof. When theistic arguments are reduced, they ultimately come down to several logical fallacies.

    It is based on the assumed truth of the assertion made by an authority figure. In religion this can be from several things, including scripture, mythology or church figures. It is assumed to be true, therefore the asserted conclusion is true.

    It\'s not about having somebody force you to believe in anything, it is simple a fallacious bit of logic, based around flawed reasoning and unreliable assertions.

    Basic example:

     
  19. That argument isn\'t valid in regards to what you yourself said:
    an infinitely powerful Creator is infinitely more intelligent than His creations. God created the universe, space, time, you, me - everything. as a created being, it is unreasonable for me to believe that i would understand everything about the God who created me.

    Prophets claim to know the word of God, as such it is an \"understanding.\" The law of physics in regards to gravity do not connect to a prophet and a divine being as a proper comparison, and as such is non sequitur. Don\'t the prophets understand everything God desires of man?

    Just, please reaccess your argument as it relates to your original statements.
     
  20. i dont know why im sharing this with you guys; maybe i just want to show PROOF of God in action.

    well, im currently recovering from a year-long depression that left me practically incapacitated, both mentally and physically. during that time i questioned my faith and wondered why such a loving, caring God, capable of such unfathomable grace, could let someone (christian, for that matter) suffer to that extent. i saw a psycholigist (talk-therapist) and a psychiatrist, but it only seemed to make it worse. for all i knew, i was already in hell.

    ...then i began to put my faith in God and started to pour myself to Him. from then on things have been getting much better, not necessarily from a societal standpoint, but from a holy and righteous one. my psychiatrist insists that my medication helped me out of the depression, and that i should keep taking it because it is my \"assurance plan\" that i wont fall back into another depression bout. he wasnt informed that i had stopped taking my medication for over a month now. i think its no coincidence that once i chose to put my faith in God that i began to feel better. if only i could convince my doctor that i have a new assurance plan, and that is God.

    i guess what im trying to say is that our definitions of proof are not necessarily God\'s definition of proof. if im not \"proof\" that God exists in all of his awesome capacity, then i dont know what is.

    :)
     
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