About God

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Okay so I'm not any religious person or anything or savvy in religion.

I don't believe in god because if god existed he would have prevented many disasters that were NOT supposed to have happened (the bible heavily uses deed>reward mentality and I don't think the Armenian holocaust, Jewish Holocaust, American school shootings and mass murders in Russia/China by Stalin and Mao Tse Tung were committed because those people had it coming)

However, I remember talking to a religious man once, he was very knowledgeable about religion and an academic as well. He mentioned that (quoting the essence of his words) "there have been attempts to prove that god exists not by proving that he actually exists, but by proving that there is no way he couldn't exist" (proof through negation). It got me interested, but since it was years back I'm no longer in contact with that person and can't trace the source of these claims.

If you guys can direct me to the relevant read that he was referring to, I'd be much obliged.

Sounds like the argument from necessity. In academic philosophy (and modal logic specifically) saying that a proposition is necessarily true is equivalent to saying that there is no possible world in which it is not true.

The argument from necessity is the old <define god into existence> trick which does not do much to convince non-believers.

https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/necessity.shtml
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/



Can a god be born through technological evolution? If a super advanced AI - the technological singularity - explodes into existence, would you call it God?

A few great books on the subject of God and religion that I have enjoyed are:

- Religion for Atheists by Alain de Button (the author is an atheist who has a generally positive view of religion)
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Happiness is a Serious Problem by Dennis Prager
- Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
- The Great Divorce by CS Lewis
- The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis

I threw CS Lewis in because he was an atheist before he became a Christian so he argues everything from that perspective which I find very relatable.

Personally, I am emotionally inclined toward atheism but rationally inclined towards thinking that there is a God so I am the opposite of most people I have met. I think it is very important to be rational and get both sides. I assumed that you were mostly curious about Christian religion and not Tenrikyo, Baha'i, Rodnovery, Manichaeism, Candomblé, or something else so I did not include those. If you want to look into them though, the Ofudesaki and Kitab-al-Aqdas are the main holy books of Tenrikyo and the Baha'i faith respectively.

You might have fun on Youtube with Waking Cosmos (metaRising) and 0thouartthat0. They try to sort of surf the edge between science, standard philosophy, and other strains like panpsychism and mysticism without jumping what most people tend to consider the credibility line. Matt tends to be a proponent of what he calls 'Process theology' (no relation to The Process - might be a bad choice of name) which is sort of in line with A N Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin's concepts of a webbing and enriching of conscious data in the universe where a God could be in formation.

As far as strange cosmological arguments I've heard it suggested that if time and space are eternal and existence has always been (if not in this pocket at least others) that pretty much anything and everything has popped up out of that fabric. Not sure if it might be fanciful but it's at least a logically consistent question - sort of like a Fermi paradox for deities.

I think I'm simply agnostic. Part of me wants to believe but I will always have my doubts. Also who's to say that all religions don't have some truth to them? Even the ancient religions that nobody practices anymore?

Maybe they're like different peices of a giant jigsaw puzzle that has several other peices missing.

Also I don't hate atheism but the way atheists act arrogantly surperior and look down on anyone as being "stupid" for being religous really bugs me. Like for example Brian from Family Guy who's always complaining about the stupid and horrible things religous people do and yet like Quagmire pointed out Brian is a horrible person himself who makes no effort to try and actually help the world that he is always complaining about. Sounds like a lot of atheists I myself know. Just saying.

I personally believe that everybody should have the right to their beliefs and nobody should have the right to take that away from them.

Can this God even be described? How tall is God? Is this being male or female or even relatable as some kind of 'humanoid'? Or a disembodied radiant intelligent spirit energy? Or really a collection of programmers overseeing the 'simulation'?

It's interesting to speculate and discuss the existence of something that seems abstract to me. I'm not even sure what Heaven is supposed to be like in detail, but we're all interested in it if it means some continued form of existence.

Thanks for read, you're right, it didn't got me convinced...

About the AI thing. If this strong AI (Steven Hawking was so terrified of) is going to have millions of worshipers and will be able to perform miracles: heal people, cure world hunger using technology - than by definition isn't he a god? (not the biblical one, but still?)

You are applying your own finite set of rules to the infinite God. You are also presuming to know what motivates God and why He does the things He does. Fnilally, you have begun your thesis with the assumption that God does not exist, and then followed up with cherry-picked "evidence" to back up your conclusion.

^This is not at all scientific.

I'm not trying to be scientific because religion is not exact science like math (and even that's debatable). Also, obviously I'm not a university professor for religious studies so no need to be a wise guy. If Math and religion would have been scrutinized by the same approach, I'd say religion is the smartest invention in human history, the universe is gazillion years old and wasn't made in 6 days. But let's just explore further.
Your first argument is actually a strong one and I've heard it from religious figures. While I can relate to that being true, the problem for me is that even religious interpreters and high ranking people within the religion itself (that is Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions who believe in a singular god) have to apply their rules at least to guess what is god's will and thus dictate how people behave. How can one tell? read the bible (or the Quran & Hadith) as sets of rules were dictated by god there and deduce how he would want us to behave. However since the Bible and the Quran many human beings have been trying to decipher god's will and have made laws based on those old sources - which is still inherent in human society to various extents.

So you're just stating an opinion. That's cool. Everybody has opinions, and every (un)substantiated opinion is just as (in)valid as any other.

Of course I can't prove whether god does or does not exist. I believe you have to prove its existence before I need to disprove it doesn't exist. Saying something exists out there in the ether is like saying someone is guilty until proven innocent. Which is btw also another "non scientific" notion (that is actually based on the bible funnily enough - where according to biblical era law you can only convict someone based on 2 witnesses.). Why would we not just throw everyone in jail based on others' opinions unless proven false? this is a philosophical discussion because religion is philosophy and not science therefore should be treated as such.

Edit: Btw, that's why religion is "faith" - you BELIEVE something exist, you don't KNOW it. That's the basis of religion.

Google the "First Cause Argument".

That would be an example of the sorta thing that you're looking for.

This assumes God cares, though. Our happiness doesn't have to be our creator's purpose.

I'm not saying I believe in God 100% but I kind of think of the relationship between the creator and his creations as that between a struggling parent and their ungrateful children. A parent can't make all of their children happy all of the time (and apparently "God" has a LOT of children) and whenever some of their children don't get exactly what they want or need out of life they get angry at the parent and blame their misery and unhappiness on them which isn't really fair because the parent did the best they could.

I'd worship an elephant. Why not? They're great animals!