Okay ATHEISTS <rolls sleaves>

BTW It is impossible for humans to make up an entirely original idea. Prove me wrong. Create something and show me a picture of it. Not using ANYTHING that you've seen or heard of before.

 

you advocate the existance of GOD (big G) and from ur sig im guessin r christian, as a christian u are asking us aethieists and agnostics to try and validate ur system of beliefs by attacking ours, if u dont want us to argue back, why did u start the thread?

u accuse us of being evasive but you refuse to answer any critisism exept in the form of childish insults and mockery. i'd apreciate it if you would try to clarify your argument even close to the point of coherencey

 

This is NOT the Christianity forum. You should post Christian arguments there. Hence the name of the forum. I'd appreciate if you could keep on topic.

 

fair enuff

so hows about that coherent argument then?

 

Lol Point Man Point Make A Valid Point Lol

 

lol all im tryin to do is find out what your first point meant man.

you said no nothin without POR-therefore there is god

i just wanna know why, is that so unreasonable?

 

Check this out. Try to create something not using anything you've seen or heard of before. Please send me a picture of this thing.

 

Portalguy:

And in return, you will reply with a picture of your god...?

Or a picture of empathy, for that matter. Or a picture of one of the many, many, many other human constructs which are purely conceptual - with no formulative point of reference? I shouldn't need to list these concepts. Any one of us (including yourself) could come up with dozens of examples with only a few moments of thought.

It seems that you're (rather effectively) arguing against god's existence from an empirical position. The fact that you don't realize it makes this, for many, a frustrating thread, but for others (myself included) it's very pleasantly entertaining.

Peacelove,
Aldousage

 

Oi vey. I haven't read the whole thread, but just to chip in: proving that atheists can't do something does NOT prove the existence of any specific deity. It doesn't even particularly imply the existence of a creator.

For those who totally agree with the OP, please, carry on. I'm not an anti-religious zealot, and I'd rather you people continue to think you're winning on the offchance that you eventually just take your victory, rather than just continue to rant at folk.

For those who aren't sure: check out some Lacan, some Kristeva, Safir-Whorf... basically the tons of people who believe that humans develop their concept of the universe through language.

 

It's impossible (to within a certain tolerance of possibility), but not because there is a god. Our culture is so media-saturated, we're bombarded with music and images constantly; most of us would be incapable of creating something without having seen or heard something similar before, purely because of the sheer amount of things that have existed before that we've seen and heard.

Can you explain how you get from point A to point B though? You're making a valid point, but I don't see how you're linking it to the other one.

 

Thanks again for responding.

Your point about science being unable to explain many basic phenomena related to the human condition is a restatement of the argument from ignorance, and it is a well-known logical fallacy. It does not logically follow from humankind's ignorance about physical phenomena that the only rational explanation for them is then a supernatural deity or Creator. It speaks only to the state of human knowledge, or perhaps the limits of it, or even perhaps to the limits of knowledge we can obtain due to physical constraints. For instance, in black hole physics there is a concept derived from mathematical formulas called the event horizon. Anything on our side of the event horizon is information which we could theoretically learn, given the necessary perspective or technology. Anything beyond the event horizon, however, is information we could never learn, even in principle. It is beyond our grasp even theoretically due to the implications of the cosmic speed limit of c.

The apparent fine tunedness of the universe for the right conditions for life is a favorite piece of supposed evidence of proponents of Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is merely creationism in fancy clothes, and as such is an intellectually dishonest attempt to pass creationism off as science. The greatest blow to any version of ID is the anthropic principle, and it is fatal. At its core, the anthropic principle states that any universe in which we might find ourselves, and in which we could possibly ponder its existence must by definition be one which allows for the conditions for life to develop and evolve. Obviously, without such conditions, life cannot develop and no one could exist to ponder the question in the first place.

Another way to look at it is with probability theory and the law of large numbers. Suppose you were a Creator, capable of bringing into existence from scratch any possible universe. One could just as easily posit a cosmic foam or substrate from which our universe sprung in place of the Creator, as it is the same idea. Now, start creating universes. Universe 1 is chaotic, without order, which is to say without any physical laws. It will necessarily be short-lived and will end in self-destruction. Universe 2 is slightly different, but also without order. It, too, dies a quick death shortly after its birth due to its lack of order. This process of creation and destruction goes on and on. With enough trials, eventually one universe will be created not just with order and fundamental laws of physics and matter/energy, but the precise universe in which we live will be created at some point in the large number of trials. It's simply due to the nature of large numbers and probability. Thus, our universe was inevitable, with or without a designer we might call God. Add to this law of large numbers the idea of selection pressure and the accumulation of successful trials, and you can get our universe much quicker than by chance alone. A large number of trials combined with selection pressure or bias is the best explanation for the existence of our particular universe, and no Creator is necessary.

Your statement about prevailing scientific explanations seeming to be extremely improbable is not correct. Again, due to the anthropic principle, not only is the existence of the universe with these particular conditions which are capable of supporting life probable, but it is absolutely necessary in order for us to exist and ponder the issue. It is trivial to imagine a universe that does not allow for carbon-based lifeforms to exist and which consists of nothing but stars and planets and various gaseous bodies. Such a universe would never have philosophers or scientists or students to ponder or study it, however.

Should you follow your intuition about how you think the universe came into being? That's up to you, but we know that our intuition can be wrong about many things, and many things that are demonstrably true are counterintuitive. A trivial but favorite example of mine is a mathematical proof that .9999.... (I don't know how to make a repeating sign in html, but my .... is meant to represent an infinitely repeating decimal) = 1. It's not approximately equal to 1; it is precisely and exactly equal to 1. It is in fact 1 itself, only expressed in a non-standard notation. Anyway, that's a topic for another discussion.

You refer to "blind" natural processes. They're not blind. The four fundamental forces of physics are a fundamental feature of our universe as we understand it. They were created in the Big Bang along with all the matter/energy in the universe, and with space-time. They are deterministic in that regard, except for the effects of quantum mechanics. QM is still so bizarre and counterintuitive, and our models of it continue to be at odds with relativistic physics. We don't know yet how to reconcile them. That does not mean the scientific process is flawed, however, or that God is the solution to the problem.

You conclude with "maybe there's more to it than the scientists yet realize." Absolutely. I suspect there are very few professional scientists of much repute who would disagree. Scientists understand that everything they do and everything they learn is provisional and subject to revision or even complete refutation. The process of getting a scientific paper published is a rigorous one, for example. A paper must be submitted for peer review by many fellow experts in one's given field of study, and it gets critiqued mercilessly. If it survives such scrutiny and objection, and it is a significant finding, it might get published in an appropriate scientific journal. Five years later, it might be completely refuted by new findings or a better hypothesis. That's how science works. It is not dogmatic.

Once again, the ever-changing collective fount of scientific understanding at any given time, and that gaps exist within it, is not evidence for a deity. The gaps in our knowledge do not logically imply a god who exists to fill them in. They are evidence for our own limitations and imperfections and for the vast scope and complexity of our natural world.

 

i cant, its a practical imposibility because my brain only creates things based on past ideas and experiences.

what i mean is, how does this prove the existance of god?

 

yeah, exactly.

 

I don't even really understand what the point of this is anyway. Creating something with no point of reference isn't exactly wonderful. Most great inventions have developed on existing things. If they didn't, we'd have plenty of people suddenly thinking "yeah, awesome, internal combustion engines!" and then having to wait thousands of years for someone to invent the car to put it in. Same with language: if we just made up words, divorced from context, they'd be utterly meaningless; by developing on our language, we've created complex interrelated meanings full of nuance and subtleties.

Fact is, there's always a point of reference. Physics is a point of reference. Reality is a point of reference.

 

Al, if you think that me proving humans can't create things without a point of reference is empirical in the least you're mistaken about both the point I'm making and what the actual definition of empirical is. In no way have I brought up sensory perception. I'm talking about the brains inability of total original creation.

That fact that I used the picture to prove my point doesn't prove that I should in return have a snap shot of God. Nice try with the Jedi Mindtrick though.

Peacelove

 

It proves that their must be something innate in us that points back to a Higher Power. Am I speaking Spanish? LOL

 

No it doesn't.

Nah, sorry, you're not proving your point at all, and I'm pretty sure you're the only one who thinks you are. More to the point, you're trying to prove a negative, which is pointless, and I never used the word "empirical", so I don't know where you're even getting that from.

This conversation is reminding me, for some reason, of that exchange in I, Robot:

Jiggy: "Can a robot write a symphony?"
Robot: "Can you?"

Point I guess being: can God create anything without a point of reference? Have you asked him? Can you prove that God created the universe without a point of reference? That he didn't just nick the idea from something he saw on 4Chan or something?

 

First off I never said you said empirical. Someone else did. I'm battling a whole corner of the forum here. It ain't just you and me.

Second I'm not trying to prove a negative. Which is of course ALWAYS the atheist back up plan. LOL

Third The fact that you're trying to answer my question with of course more of your own questions proves that answering it for you is a problem.

 

Yes, all to familiar. Sounds like the Zeitgeist film, except it substitutes Mithra for Horus. Did Mithra followers rip of Horus or vice versa? Atheist myth factories spin off different versions of this stuff weekly on the internet. When you can provide respectable scholarly sources, get back to us. Shmuel Golding, founder of the Jersualem Institute of Biblical Polemics doesn't count. He's an anti-Christian Jewish polemicist--hence the title "polemics". By the way, some of the "parallels" may be a result of Mithraism copying from Christianity. The two religions were in competition in ancient Rome, and many alleged parallels refer to post-Christian modifications of Mithraism. So to prove your case, please also provide documentation of pre-Christian parallels in Mithraism.

 

You're trying to prove that humans can't create anything without a point of reference. If you're not, then it can only be because you've already made up your mind that you're right, in which case I don't know why you asked anyone to try.

There's plenty of positives you should be proving which you've been totally avoiding, like why we should accept your "explanation" of where ideas come from simply because we are not absolutely certain ourselves, or why humans being inspired by a culture that has evolved with them over millenia proves that there is a god.

Not really. Firstly I did answer, and secondly, I don't see how an answer is devalued simply because it leads me to ask you to answer further questions. Do you think it's a weakness of me to want your argument to be made clear during the discussion? Should I instead answer without the information I feel I need to do so? Fact is, I'm really not sure what I'm even supposed to be arguing against. There's a massive leap in your logic that you've not filled in yet, far as I and a lot of other users can see, and I doubt very strongly that we're all stupid.