I can prove the existance of God. Right now.

I'd do God.

 

103 pages of posts and no proof for God yet? hmmm, I guess I'll just wait, maybe page 104 will do the trick.

 

Evidently, God doesn't have an opinion on this issue, or he would be posting here himself.

 

So people are expecting a "proof" of God to be posted on the Atheist/Agnostic forum--by God, Himself, no less? I'm a believer, but I don't think God can be "proven", in the way I you imply. Many people, like me, have posted their reasons for believing in God, here and elsewhere. I think reason and evidence are useful in ruling out some really unlikely alternatives, but my own belief is ultimately based on faith, defined as intuitive risk-taking. I've bet my life on God as I understand Him/Her/It. Other people can bet on other possibilities, on the basis of different life experiences, assessment of evidence, hunches, etc. Those bets may be as well-founded as my own, and might indeed be right. What can I say? All I can go on is what seems to me to be most reasonable on the basis of my own perceptions, life experiences, and the evidence available to me, while keeping an open mind to other possibilities.

Right now, I'm reading an interesting book by a fellow Oklahoman who I've recently met, philosophy professor Eric Reitan, whose Progressive Christian views about God and reality come closer to mine than anybody else I know. Reitan's book, Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion's Cultured Despisers, addresses Dawkins' The God Delusion, in particular, and the "New Atheism" (Harris, Dennett, Hutchins, Stenger, and company) in general. One of his main points is that they all engage in equivocation, setting up a straw man, as you have done, and feeling proud of themselves when they easily demolish it. (Admittedly, the straw man is worshipped as God by fundamentalist Christians, Jews, and Muslims around the world even today.) Your post is a few steps above the other hundred or so on this thread that strike me as not serious ruminations by folks who are partaking of too much herbal sacrament. Nevertheless, do you or others really think that it's much of an argument against the existence of God that (S)he doesn't jump through hoops so that the atheists and agnostics on Hip Forums will know that (S)he exists? This presupposes that: (1) (S)he gives a rats ass and (2) that (S)he is the kind of anthropromorphic entity for which that expectation would make any sense at all. Reitan defends the religious tradition of Schliermacher and Progressive Christians who regard the "Primitivistic Orthodoxy" of Evangelical fundamentalists as not true religion at all.

Progressive Christians have their vulnerabilities, too. We come close to a "Yes, Virginia.There is a God" position that saves God and religion by redefining them in light of science and modern realities. Reitan and I think that's okay. God "evolves". Like Schliermacher, Reitan thinks that authentic religion has always been devoted to a transcendent benevolence that is antithetical to the God portrayed in "inerrant" scripture. By that view, a lot of the religious movements that have caused so much damage throughout history have been "inauthentic". Even I can see how tautological that is. Reitan seems to be convinced that God is an outside source of support for humans. I'm not convinced that God is necessarily more than a concept I've developed as a source of ultimate meaning, but there are various considerations that make me think (S)he is more than that. (Elsewhere I've identified a half dozen of these, which I'll spare you from repeating, unless you really want me to.) Like Reitan, I agree with Simone Weil that "one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth." Anyhow, one of the things I like about Reitan is that he's willing to concede that atheism and agnosticism can be valid, rational approaches to making sense of our reality, and that we have no basis for saying that they are wrong or for trying to convert them to our way of thinking. Why can't the New Atheists do the same?

 

I think I've stated this already on this or another thread, but, again:

I could have gone my entire lifetime of more than 62 years without giving one thought to the concept of god if it wasn't for pushy, rude, insulting, in your face Christians who just can't shut up and leave others alone. It started when I was very young and they tried to indoctrinate me in the public school system, has lasted my entire life and is continuing with my children.

Atheists are only defending their freedom against religious tyranny, and that includes Dawkins, et al.

By your own admission atheists didn't "set up the straw man," organized religion did. If the rest of Reitan's book is this contradictory, it must be fun reading.

 

ps

This is a forum for agnostics and atheists. If someone comes here and tries to prove that god exists, it is not an attack by atheists on theists, it is an attack on atheists. Furthermore, Dawkins is not required reading, as the Bible used to be in public schools.

 

Right on!

(see name of thread)

 

If you check out the Christian site--even the so-called Sanctuary--you'll find that lots of atheists have come onto those to attack Christianity. The whole point of the Sanctuary is to provide some insulation against that, for "mutual" protection. Christians aren't allowed to "proselytize" on either Christian site, but atheists are allowed to attack Christianity on the general Christianity forum.

Interesting you should mention Dawkins not being required reading. Reitan thinks he should be!

I agree that nobody on this thread has proven the existence of God. I don't think it can be done. Reitan takes Dawkins to task for dismissing too cavalierly some of the proofs, including Aquinas' cosmological argument. He suggests that Dawkins "mangled" Aquinas, and suggests that to have an accurate understanding Dawkins would have to wade through at least the first part of the Summa Theologica, with its 119 questions and numerous articles. This may be a clever ploy to take Dawkins out of circulation for a good long while, and possibly destroy his mind in the process! Reitan admits, when all is said and done, that he doesn't accept Aquinas' proof either, and he explains for good measure why the argument from design (which I happen to put some stock in) "fails".

 

Okiefreak I'm not sure if I am one of the people you meant to address with your earlier post but I just want to clarify some things.

I was joking when I said "103 pages and no proof...". I mostly meant it to refer to the original post that started this thread, because I think the original post is quite funny for a number of reasons. And lastly if a god did exist I would not expect that god to "jump through hoops" to demonstrate to me that it exists.

However if this alleged god wanted me to do anything in particular or live in any particular way then I would expect some evidence to let me know that this god exists and wants me to do things, and I've never been presented with any such evidence yet. Of course that leaves the possibility that there is a god but he doesn't care what I do. But I reject that too.

 

I've always felt on this matter from a functional perspective. Every word that we use, has at its inception an embodied nature. The term God represents an embodied human sensibility. We are devotional by nature, from the instinct for self preservation as its simplest expression, to gratitude at its highest. The word good may be substituted for the word god in any linguistic formula describing the object of our endeavors. God or no, we are hard wired to find the good.

 

In Germany in 1939, Hitler was good.

"Good" has no objective meaning beyond Survival of the Species.

 

Actually I described it as being the instinct for self preservation. All life works to maintain its own integrity. In that this is a universally observable quality of living things, it is then objective.

 

Well, I'd have to argue that the instinct to protect the species is "gooder" than the instinct to protect the self.

 

Why would you want to do that. The self I'm talking about is the gene.

 

Because survival of a subset is not possible without survival of the set.

 

I agree with you on this. And I think my own interest in challenging the fundamentalist position and working through my own thoughts on why I intuitively felt the "tyranny" of the Religious Right was wrong to begin with was a reaction against the Moral Majority. A product of its own sense of being put upon by secular forces, religious conservatives have been feeling their oats and growing in power as a result of their alliance with the Republican Party. Reitan apparently agrees with us on this. His book originally had the working title Why the Religious Right is Wrong. The metamorphosis was a response to his sense that the New Atheists were going too far in a broadside attack on all religion, when fundamentalism would make a more appropriate target.

On that topic, it is. Quite a lot of the book is an attack on organized religion. As he explains: "...amidst all their equivocation, Dawkins and Harris get something right: organized "religions" have not typically been what Schleiermacher and other religious progressives have lifted up. Schleiermacher himself admits that every real religion is corrupt in one or many ways. After all, religous communities are human ones, subject ot all the failings to which humanity is susceptible. And there may be things about these communities that make them distinctively vulnerable to certain kinds of corruption." Reitan goes on to explain why he drives 70 miles every Sunday to go to church in Tulsa, when his own home town is full of churches and he passes signs for others all along the interstate on his way.

As I said, I'm new to this book and haven't even given it a complete first reading. Reitan, and Schleiermacher before him, emphasize the positive aspects of Jesus' teachings and think that peace, love and understanding is what it's all about. They dismiss the negative aspects that the ateists attack as being not Christian, even though the negative factors are obviously at work, and at times even dominant, in the real world. I, myself, am impressed by the beauty and humanity of various expressions of religion throughout history, but I don't know of a time when religion was free of superstition and corruption. There have been eras when it seemed to be working itself free of these things, and I have hope that the core ethic of love will win out as people experience the ugliness and venality of false religion. Reitan makes the point that we need to accept a concept of God that includes goodness as its very essence, so that we have a basis of pointing out the "bitter fruit" of religions that accept a tyrannical God.

 

And you won't find my name anywhere in that forum. You also won't find me attacking theists for their beliefs, just for their intolerance.

As for Dawkins, I have one of his books, but didn't get past a few pages. I'm just not that interested in arguments either way these days. All I've ever wanted was to be left alone, but mainstream Christianity, particularly fundamentalists, just won't do that. Bill Mahr said it best..."Christians are like Communists, they are not happy until everyone is one of them"

When you have people who substitute prayer for medical science all the way to the grave, there's no sense arguing the point. What we can argue, though, is actions and the right to "free choice."

 

Isn't the gene the set from which all subsets are produced?

 

I lived through that time. It was not an assault, it was a gradual movement to take charge of our own lives. Like banning mandatory prayer from public schools. The "Moral Majority" of Falwell only saw this as an assault because it took away their superior position in society and put everybody on equal footing. Madeline Murray only wanted for her son to not be indoctrinated. She was demonized and eventually murdered for her beliefs.

It wasn't the fundamentalists who sought out the Republican party, it was the Republicans who courted the Fundamentalists in order to gain a majority in Congress. It was a political tactic, not a religious movement, that turned into a symbiotic relationship.

 

No. The species is the set, the individual a subset, the gene a subset of the individual.
A subset of a subset of a set is a subset of the set.

The gene cannot survive without the species. It can live for awhile, but that's all.

However, the species may or may not be able to survive without a particular gene.