Theism and Explanation

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You actually make a fine point there: "God" only seems real or tolerable if/when or for as long as He does as men presume He should.

If you would have given it a few hours, you would have been sober without being arrested for possession. If you have the will power to turn yourself in, you have the will power to flush your stash and booze. Though, if you're a heavy enough drinker, I would recommend a hospital visit for DT's.

Well, either he favors alcoholics, or AA's claim about a higher power healing alcoholics is false. After all, there is AA, NA, and all of that, but no CSA(cancer sufferers anonymous) with the same method and bold claims.

Sure, and I had done that many times ... and then later always eventually ended up back drinking again. Quitting is one thing, you see, but remaining abstinent is quite another.

Mere speculation on your part.

You're telling this to a smoker who has "quit" three times already.

Sure ... and Step One of the Twelve Steps includes an admission along this kind of line ...

"... the question is how to stop altogether. We are assuming, of course, that the reader desires to stop. Whether such a person can quit upon a nonspiritual basis depends upon the extent to which he has already lost the power to choose whether he will drink or not. Many of us felt that we had plenty of character. There was a tremendous urge to cease forever. Yet we found it impossible. This is the baffling feature of alcoholism as we know it - this utter inability to leave it alone, no matter how great the necessity or the wish." (page 34)

So in order to recover via having the problem removed, we must first quit trying to quit!

Which is why I think of myself as a smoker who has not lit up since 1962.

ruveyn

http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html
https://rational.org/index.php?id=94
http://www.cfiwest.org/sos/index.htm
http://www.smartrecovery.org/
Leejosepho, I'm glad that you got sober and understand the gratitude you feel to AA for helping you get there. I have friends and family members who feel the same way. However, don't ever feel like you'll fall of the wagon if you lose your faith; the two factors are separable, and you can have one, or the other, or both.

One of the things that continues to annoy me about these people is their attempt to dragoon science into the cause of atheism as if science entails atheism. Nothing could be further from the truth If none are trained in metaphysics then the most they can assert is that God can't be spotted by telescope.
Science is metaphysically neutral, always has been, always will be. Questions about the existence or non-existence of God are simply irrelevant to science. There is no science that could ever even raise such questions let alone solve them one way or the other. It's an illegitimate move on their behalf and only shows the weakness in their position.

Science may be metaphysically neutral, but many of Religions claims take place within our Universe, making them physical claims.

People who actually adhere to the Scientific method need evidence to back their claims, not a mere disability to disprove them. I can't disprove a million gods, but I am no polytheist.

People who evaluate truth in Scientific terms must come to the conclusion that there is (probably) no God.

Can you prove you exist yourself?

Not speculation of a mere sort though, but rather a very clear problem with this kind of explanation.

Well, there are basically two issues:
1) Most religions require claims that overlap science to be decided in their favor. At minimum that when a person is speaking to their God, what's going on to them isn't the same as what is going on in a person outside of that religion. Often things beyond that as well, including certain cosmologies, and certain theories about psychology.
2) The more that science can explain naturalistically, the less that is valid to explain using supernatural ideas. As scientific explanations improve, the only areas left for God to explain may really just be rather ad hoc areas, where the invocation of God as an explanation would seem less valid, and more like filling up a gap, and gap-fillers are not considered good explanations. As such, it starts pushing God into the realm of ad hoc, meaningless ga[-fillers

In any case, I have to disagree with you that it is an illegitimate move. Even further though, if this were a matter of the "weakness of the position" it wouldn't have to be the only move. This thread, in its basic point, isn't exactly about science, but it relates to science, but rather a lot of it was partly intended to talk about miracles and invocations of God to solve metaphysical problems.


Is that actually a question we currently have any dispute about? I mean, I can only see this being a question if ryan93's existence is defined in a less direct method, and by some definitions of his existence, he very well may not exist. By the straight-forward, intuitive, I use this everyday kind of reasoning, it is clear that ryan93 exists, and the very question of whether he exists would require that he does exist in most framings of it.

Cognito ergo Sum.

If you are looking for a priori type proof that I exist (I presume you mean as a conscious being), I can offer none. Science makes assumptions, the assumption that there are no Cartesian demons, the assumption that physical laws are uniform at every point in space/time based on a finite number of observations. People cannot, not now, not never, get a priori, Absolute knowledge about the universe. Science is just the best, most obvious methodology to obtaining knowledge.

Of course, if you make a demand of me to provide a certain type of evidence, then its only fair I can ask the same.

So tell me, what is your a priori proof for God?

Faith, it has this name for a reason.