God doesn't seem to exist!

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This adage is fairly well-known as Hitchen's Razor. I'm hardly stupid enough to think I could present it as my own, nor do I think you're stupid enough to believe me if I did. If you prefer, I could quote the latin proverb of which it is a translation, but that would just look pretentious. Or I could quote Richard Dawkin's version: "The onus is on you to say why; the onus is not on the rest of us to say why not." They're all in essence the same; the greater claim has the burden of proof. Or is that what you're dismissing? What is that bible verse about logs and splinters...?




So the mere pointing out that people have worshipped gods that aren't yours is instantly straw-man, now? And do tell my why you exempting your particular god from all identifiable attributes, as well as exempting it from having to have a cause, is not a massive case of special pleading. And I'm sure that if I concede that you have made your god unfalsifiable, that you will have no qualms tacking attributes onto it.

I'm glad that this argument is progressing reasonably with no small thanks to the contributions of Lintar and Alexander the Solitary.

My purpose was, and still is, to demonstrate that an uncaused first cause, i.e. a transcendent God, is a scientific (philosophical, logical) necessity. All claims to the contrary assume, via many convoluted imaginary pathways, consisting of no more than gratuitous assertions pretentiously described as "science", that things that did not exist cause themselves to exist... which is contrary to commonsense logic and all observed natural laws.

There are many ways that the existence of such a being can be known with moral certainty; an infinite variety of mixtures of completely affective and completely rational (scientific, coldly logical) perceptions. The necessary attributes, or qualities, of such a being can also be deduced, or otherwise known by various mixtures of a hard head and a soft heart.

The proponents of nonscience, as above, continue to promote their ideology with specious assertions disconnected from observable reality pretentiously marketed as "science". If a food product was so seriously misrepresented it would result in a court case and prosecution.

Simply an ideological assertion. That morals and ethics are not universally adhered to does not mean that they don't exist or that they change "over time".

A mere speculation based entirely on the wishes of your ideology. I understand quite well how entropy works and the physics involved. Must I present the explanation and the criticism of your contrived version yet again?

Don't you know what a straw man is?

Most of your diversionary attempt has been dealt with above.

Falsifiability is not limited to physical experiment... it is essentially a logical process. Any absurdity is ipso facto falsified.

The claim you make that 'God is a cultural construct' is one that is here made without a shred of evidence to back it up. Why should I believe this? Someone here quoted the C. Hitchens maxim that 'claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence', so should I just simply dismiss this claim of yours out of hand? Have you considered the possibility that the reason why so many people throughout history have believed in something they have chosen to label 'God' is due to the fact that they have a direct, intuitive and immediate understanding that without God not only is their life hopelessly incomplete, but that it doesn't even make any sense either?

As for God not being a scientific hypothesis - yes, you are right, it isn't one, and I never said it was. God is for philosophers and theologians, not scientists, in spite of what Paul Davies and Stephen Hawking may say about this.

This is your 'evidence'??? Sad. You must be very frightened of death to cling so fearfully to this fairy tale. You can fashion all the words you want to try and confuse the issue. However, that changes nothing. Science is incomplete. That doesn't create fear in scientists. They simply look for the details to further increase scientific knowledge. Fear not. When you die, there is nothing to fear. It's simply lights out for eternity...

I was going to link a cross section of diverse creation stories as evidence but your next sentence provides good evidence too....


Of course I've considered it. It's probably true. That right there is your evidence that God is a cultural construct. Humans thought it up out of deep emotional need. But just because something makes people feel more at peace in the world is not evidence that it is true. Rather it's evidence-and motivation- to create it. God is something people created for emotional reasons, not something discovered.

I don't think anyone here is denying the fact that in the past, and even now, people did (and still do) worship gods that most of us would now reject due to, among other things, their rather obvious anthropomorphic qualities (ex. Zeus living on Mt. Olympus, casting down lightning bolts), but philosophy, theology and the concept of God itself has - surprise, surprise - moved on since then. Progress, and I know that this will be hard for many with a scientistic persuasion to accept, has actually been made in our understanding of concepts that, due to their very nature, cannot be adequately explained by science. Science is, by definition, a method we use to help us understand the purely physical aspects of our existence for which a physical explanation is perfectly adequate (ex. the elliptical orbits of planets that are accounted for via Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion and Newtonian gravity).

Well, what about qualia, consciousness, truth, aesthetic appreciation and morality, to list just five? How can chemistry, molecules, the philosophical doctrine of determinism, and the laws of physics explain any of these? The simple answer is that they cannot, and the reason for this is that the scientific method, useful as it is for so many things, is restricted to providing a purely material explanation for everything that one can imagine. Life is so much more than just molecules. Is there anyone here who seriously thinks their son or daughter (or insert other close relative here) is nothing more than just a bag of chemicals, with no mind or free will to speak of? If you are a materialist who believes we have no free will, then this is what you must believe, and you should live your life - which has no meaning whatsoever, by the way - accordingly (i.e. like a psychopath).

This is quite a straw man.

That would be great. This time could you provide some evidence for your assertions, you know a maths paper, or a physics paper outlining how the accepted understanding of entropy driving complexity is wrong.

Cheers.

Speaking for myself, I don't have 'an emotional need' to believe in God (or the afterlife, or anything else for that matter). The reason I tend to think that the existence of God is more likely than its non-existence is due to the evidence, from both sides in this debate, that has thus far been presented. If it were found to be the case that God does not exist because, for example, the very idea itself as I understand it is incoherent or logically flawed, I would not be too upset.

Actually, I can now give you what I think is a good reason to not believe. I presented this question to William Lane Craig at his website http://www.reasonablefaith.org, but I have not received a reply.

It's a variation of the Euthyphro Dilemma, and it goes like this: Are mathematical facts true because they are inherently so, or are they true because God made them so? The theist would no doubt respond with something like, ‘No, both of these options are false, neither is the case. Mathematical truths are a part of His nature, what it means to be God’. This, however, inevitably leads one to then ask, ‘Does God have the ability to alter His nature (and therefore the mathematical truths based upon that nature), or is His nature immutable, and therefore beyond His ability to change?’ In either case, the theist comes up against a problem that simply cannot be satisfactorily resolved. If God does have the ability to alter His nature, then the mathematical truths that are based upon that nature are purely arbitrary, but if He does not then such truths are above and beyond Him, and one must look elsewhere to find one’s answers.

I first came across what is now called the Euthyphro Trilemma on YouTube, of all places, and it immediately came to me that this dilemma/trilemma could be modified to include other aspects of God and its nature, and not just the 'goodness' aspect of God and what the implications of Euthyphro are for this. W. L. Craig does not seem to be able to provide an answer to this, or maybe he is still trying to come up with a clever, and no doubt convoluted, response. I don't know. Maybe someone here can come up with a good answer that leaves the concept of God intact, but I have yet to find anyone who can.

Really? Why? I don't think it is, because in order to consistently and honestly live according to what materialists claim to believe is true, they would have to treat those they know and care for as mindless automatons 'programmed' by their history, DNA and brains to do whatever it is that they dictate. Why is this so hard to accept? It follows naturally and logically, doesn't it?

For once I have to agree with Dent. Entropy doesn't drive complexity, although there is a correlation between its overall increase within the universe and the appearance of concentrated 'oases' of complexity like the Earth due to the presence of concentrated sources of usable energy (i.e. the sun). The Earth and the life upon it couldn't have existed, say, 12 thousand million years ago due to, among other reasons, the requirement for the development of the elements that such complexity requires in the first place via supernovae (ex. carbon, oxygen), and this in turn requires the passage of a couple of generations of stars, and the corresponding reduction of usable energy overall by which we measure the unidirectional passage of time, first.

I don't believe in fairy tales either. What's your point? Are you making the assumption that I do? I'm not sure if this is a strawman or red herring fallacy; I sometimes get my fallacies mixed up. Actually, I think it's both.

I think I may have misunderstood the point that Dent was making to Olddavid about entropy. In any case, what I said about entropy driving complexity I stand by.

Okay, no need to get emotional about it. The Biblical verse? Something about not seeing the log in one's own eye but pointing out the splinter in someone else's. I don't get it. Why do you bring that up?