Logic: There is no God

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Your character assassination aside, I'm glad you produced a dictionary definition of pride, so that we may deal directly with it. Does the definition mention the state of someone knowing a fact? Does it? No. And that is all I have claimed, before being accused by you of pride. The telling of something you know is not pride. And by the way, though I, like all here, am sometimes guilty of pride, I regularly shun it as much as I can, because God said to flee vanity and pride. I will now exit this thread so you may bring it back on topic, as you requested.

after i read your response, i knew i should have deleted my own because yours is more carefully worded. so of course raggy would ignore it and just go after mine. mine allowed too easy of a dodge for that prideful jerk.

I'm sorry, I've been reading this thread on a Blackberry, and I missed NobelCynic's response. NobelCynic is absolutely correct. If I claimed I understood the whole Bible, I would be lying, and I would be lying in pride. You have presented me logic, and I yield to it.

you're wrong. not necessarily that there is a god....but rather you have not offered sufficient proof....mainly because there is no such thing as sufficient proof against the possibility of a deity. afterall, the point of a deity is that it is supernatural so therefore the laws set up by it can be broken...think of it like a programmer...the programmer writes the code. the code exists and is its own entity and is finite but the programmer exists outside and affects what is inside.


this is not me defending the christian, jewish, muslim, or hindu gods (or whatever other gods) but rather simply saying that your logic isn't because it makes faulty assumptions. actually, i'm fairly certain that the first four are fake and just man made. but that's not to say there wasn't possibly some being that set everything into movement. this might not be the first build either...maybe this is a late-stage beta and it just hasn't crashed yet? well whatever...point is you can't prove for certain one way or another. and going one way and popping out the other side sounds like pacman to me.

I think you are going just a little too far. The first three supposably all worship the same God though they have serious (sometimes violent) differences of opinion about the nature of that God. This fact, however, does not prove that their God does not exist and is simply an invention of man; the other possibility is that he does exist yet none of them have perceived him accurately, and those who think they have are a little too confident in their opinions.

I know you used the phrase "fairly certain" and did not claim to have proof. I am not attacking your position, I am just giving you another possibility to consider. In order to prove that something does not exist, one would first have to define that something. If your position is that God as defined by religion does not exist, I think we agree.

How so? God as defined by the Bible is both infinite and "unsearchable".

i would say the closest to proof is that many of the jewish stories and even jesus' stories are taken from older persian and babylonian myths but just adopted to be centered around a jewish main character. which is something that's proven through archeology and historic studies.


maybe there was a hebrew god but the writers didn't trust him so they just stole stories from other myths at the time...but i'm pretty sure the simplest answer is just "they made it up".

but even that, skafather, would be just a proof against one set of stories of god doing avatar work and wonders in our world, not god itself. but you know that. (and if it all was that easy, the matter would have been off the table millenia ago)
that reminds me of someone on a forum who claimed he had actually disproven god. his argument was like the following: christian god derived from jewish god, who derived from egypt gods. egypt gods, however, were pharaohs - mere humans. so there can be no god if all that was worshipped at the ground of it all were humans. (i think i stared in disbelief for ten minutes... and then i started counting errors and woridng a nice reply)

the fault almost everyone makes is applying rules for proving or asserting things that work for our everyday life to an area way beyond everyday life.

as for knwoing of god and truth:
at a common logical ground between ragtime and sopho, the census looks like each of them has a subjective moment of evidence - we tend to assert "truth" for these moments of evidence, but when we are honest, its a subjective moment of evidence. something appears as evident and clear to me. what is evident obviously differs for both, and by the very subjectivity their evidence moments are, neither can claim objective/absolute truth for him/herself.
deal?

If you are not going to bother to carefully read my posts before asking me questions about them, I am not going to bother to answer them.


I am not sure I am following you here. If the writers of biblical stories drew upon older stories to make a point, would that invalidate the point? There is also the possibility that these stories did actually happen even if fictitious versions of them have been told before. Yes, your explaination is the simplest one, but Occam's Razor does not allways apply.

Perhaps what is evident obviously differs for both, while it unobviously is the same. The Bible speaks of an inner suppression of the truth. "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident within them" (Romans 1:18-19). It goes on to say we are "without excuse" for not believing in God, because of the beauty and wonder of nature.

So, certainly beneath person-to-person evidensibility, this personal, inner knowledge of God may well be true for all mankind -- after all, about 95% of the world is religious. The idea of diety is overwhelmingly believed in, and fervently pursued, even in the cases when such diety is believed to be strict, angry, or forboding to approach and deal with. History shows that man hungers for God.

Last edited by Ragtime on 03 Jun 2007, 12:17 pm, edited 6 times in total.

I had read your entire post. You underlined "Bible" in my reply. Why? Isn't the Bible part of "religion", the term you used?

You answered your own question, the Bible is part of your religion.

I realize that I may be the only one here obessed with semantics; nevertheless, I am obsessed with it. I choose my terms very carefully. Do not change them.

Okay.

Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Enuma Elish (Babylonian Creation epic, from the opening words meaning "when on high") are actually not that close, though other passages of the Old Testament speaking of Leviathan and Rahab (not the Jericho prostitute who collaborated with the Israelite spies, but like Leviathan some sort of primaeval beast like Tiamat and Kingu) are suggestive of similar ideas. That Tiamat and Hebrew Tahom "the Deep" are cognate does not say all that much, as both Akkadian (of which Babylonian was a dialect) belong to the Semitic languages.

And accounts of a great deluge or flood are fairly widespread, and both sides of the argument may wish to draw their own conclusions from this - either they represent orally preserved and subsequently written memories of an actual cataclysm, a good story spread like wildfire - as they do, language barriers not withstanding - or collective consiousness, itself capable of being conscripted to serve either point of view.

With regard to the original logical argument which commenced this thread "disproving" God, this seems no more conclusive than various rhetorical proofs (like those of Anselm, Thomas Aquinas or René Descartes) of God. However, naturally it would be incumbent upon me to return to it and respond to or rebut the separate propositions, though it might be prudent to wait until I can afford more time off from essay writing for university.

There has been some good argument on both sides (sorry if that sounds insufferably patronising, as this was not my intention). Some of these arguments between atheists and Christians (with representatives of other faiths sometimes also present) are an invaluable contribution to the intellectual life of Wrong Planet. Then again, sometimes this sort of thing can degenerate into vitriolic rants, so congratulations to you all on your maturity in avoiding this peril.