This is going to be my last relatively long argument post on this thread, since I am also starting to become bound by time constraints these days and I would have finished my campaign by now if I had not spent so much time in this topic, so this is about it for me, at least for the time being.
Also, regarding the nature of my becoming a Christian, you assume more than you justifiably can. I have said that both I and my family are Christians, but I did not say that I was raised as one, nor that I became one without thought or reason. You do not know the details of my coming to accept Christianity, not why I did so. I would also point out that the process by which I personally came to accept these beliefs has no bearing on whether they are true. That is dependent upon the claims posited by the religion, and it would be specious to attempt an argument against their truth based upon the process by which an individual came to accept them.
So you are saying that you came into contact with the ideas later in your life, which is essentially equivalent to what I was saying earlier, because humans can be convinced of just about anything with a little bit of effort. (how do you think that Hitler and bin Laden for example, gained so many followers so easily?) And you do indeed need to take into account the method in which the knowledge is assimilated if you are attempting to judge them as an individual, because as I said earlier, the taking in of ideas influences the method in which you judge them. The best way to circumvent this difficulty is to have multiple individuals who have all accepted an idea through different procedures judge it. This doesn't say anything about whether the idea is actually true or not, but that is irrelevant here, as the "truth" of an idea can only be established by direct sense perception, but we are talking about what is the best approach to discovering something on which there is little agreement within the world. Reading the Bible and being convinced of its soundness or having someone else recite the ideas into you (church worker, friend, whatever) is almost as bad as being brought up with them initially. If you came into contact with any religion with the rationality and logical reasoning that you claim to have used, you would have discovered everything independently so as to not be influenced by foreign ideas that are currently indeterminate, and the probability of you coming up with almost exactly the same stuff as what is in the Bible is vanishingly small and does not really need to be taken into account here.
The personal god of any sort who has feelings/objectives/etc. is completely out of the question here due to the glaring contractions that come up in almost every facet of reasoning while explaining our world, and the concept of morals goes along with it, because without the god, as you said earlier, morals are meaningless. Some religions claim to have a universal, impersonal god who is just a being, but anything that is considered "alive" and "conscious" must have motives, so either they come to the personal god conclusion or go to science. We are left to consider whether science has any meaning or this nihilism is the correct route, and a long set of reasoning finds some "inherent flaws" (more on this in a bit) in nihilism as well.
"Christians" who do not believe that Jesus was resurrected are left to consider the whole religion as nothing more than a very large metaphor telling us that we ought to be nice to each other.
Tell me how it, or any other religion for that matter, is anything more than that, even with this stupid "resurrection" in there.
Those that are growing are those that still actually believe that this stuff is real, because they actually have something to offer to people.
This is why people accept these religions so readily as far as the second purpose goes. If there was a religion where anyone who believed in it could become the god themselves, I bet everyone would instantly flock towards it.
There is something further to be said regarding choice. If choice is to be possible at all, there must be options between which to choose. The imperative "Choose!" makes no sense until one sets it in a context of choosing between, say, 31 flavours of ice cream. Even if I were to give you that imperative without a specified context, the only way you could comply would be to invent a set of options for yourself, and then choose between them. Try it. Choice entails the presence of options. Thus, if an ICV is to be permitted to choose good, there must of necessity be an alternative option. If we do not set up this alternative, there is no possibility for the choice. Therefore, if God wants us to be able to choose good, we need to be able to choose evil as well, and if he wants us to be able to chose to love and follow him, we must be able to chose to hate and rebel against him, and it seems that he does want to put this choice before us.
You are missing the point again.
He made the whole concept of our choices and free wills. The only way that he could not be held responsible for our choices would be if our "free wills" somehow already existed in the universe and were not a product of his "creation" and he put them into us, but you are saying that he made everything, and so he alone is responsible for everything.
One thing I don't understand about most religions is why they need their supreme being to also be a "good" being; if a real supreme being was there that fit in with science, he would go by complete indifference to everything and couldn't have cared less about what happens in the universe.
1) I didn't say logically explicable. I said logically possibly explicable, as in it is a logical possibility that your existence be explained. 2) Granted, I assume you are human as I am, and thus find your existence logically possibly explicable (i.e. by your parents). 3) If we eliminate all external assumptions, then this theory becomes meaningless. Without the idea of explanation, "God" is not an explanation of the existence of the world, the purple dragon is not an explanation of the existence of "God," and you are not an explanation of the existence of the purple dragon. 4) If you are in fact God, why are you arguing against your own existence?
But I made the concept of explanation as well! I am not god, but I made the purple dragon and the purple dragon made god, so I indirectly made god. It holds together even better than the Christian theory.
Ah, but if, as I maintain, we have an independent free will, then at least one of those universal conditions is that of my choice, and that is not mathematically pre-determined. So sure, if all the conditions are the same I will respond in the same way, but the question is whether the all-important condition of my choice is the same or not.
I said if
all other conditions are the same, including those of the particles in your brain that make up your "free will."
Why as a person and not a force? As I said before, probably to make the revelation more meaningful to us human persons. Beyond that, I suggest you ask him. All I know is that he did. As for his not seeming impressive to you, and the fallacy of assuming that a similarity in one respect means similarity in all respects, see above.
You are trying to dodge the question. It would have been equally "meaningful" to us if he showed himself in the form of a force. For example, why did he not manifest himself as, let's say, a talking tornado or a ghost with psychic powers? It would have meant just as much to us as a person, and we would have been much more impressed. This point of "free will" is the critical similarity that can determine every other property because, as you yourself said, the condition of this choice is the all-important one. What differentiates "intelligent" living beings from nonliving objects is this concept of "free will," which gives life a number of benefits as well as a number of deficiencies. If he has such a "free will," which you claim he does, he will have very similar capabilities as far as his thought processes go, seeing as this will determines all our actions.
Well, no you couldn't give more, since for every P there is a P*, and for every Q there is a Q*. But on to the real meat of this paragraph: there is a fundamental error in your logic here (this is an extremely common error, evidenced in numerous other posts in this thread as well). Monotheism, atheism, polytheism, pantheism, animism, and any other like belief that one cares to think of posit claims regarding metaphysical reality. Scientific enquiry has as its field of investigation the physical realm of matter and energy, and as such provides no information regarding the metaphysical. The logic that runs "Science provides me with no information regarding the truth of any metaphysical claim, therefore the metaphysical claim that there is no God is true," is grossly faulty. So long as our view of knowledge is confined to the sphere of science, the only logical positions available are "hard" and "soft" agnosticism, respectively the beliefs that we cannot know what metaphysical reality is like, or that we simply do not know. Thus, like all metaphysical claims, atheism is not a viable conclusion to be reached from pure scientific enquiry. One may certainly hold to it and to scientific knowledge, but one cannot argue that one's metaphysical position is based upon science.
Since you are using science here, I think I should point out that one of the fundamental axioms of science is to "disbelieve everything without proof." I can see the problem in the wording of that though, so I'm not going to argue too much there. But then tell me, why does the purple dragon, a shivan, or anything else you can think of not exist? And no, you cannot have a P* for every P. Here is an example: if you can give me a logically consistent counterstatement (an opposite '*' statement) for the following statement, I will concede that you are the greatest thinker in the world.
This is a true sentence.
This is where the elimination procedure comes in handy. Any statement can proved to be correct if all counterstatements that exist in the same system are contradictory. We use the same principle when thinking about the god thing. If a god made everything, he would have also made the concepts of logic and mathematics (or any equivalent) that were used to make the things, but by the very definition of "making," he cannot escape the logic, especially since he thinks just like a human (as you have already said). If he did not make the logic, the logic precedes him and is thus the god itself. So much for that. We now look at what science says: it asserts that some sort of order (logic) is an inherent property of matter, because if it was an entirely human invention, humans would have needed to use logic to arrive at the result of logic (and this is when they do not have logic), which is contradictory. This property of logic was created by whatever events came before, which by the way were no "better" than anything else as this god is supposed to be, and the sequence goes back into infinity.
Also, regarding the P and P* statement, we as humans think in a certain way (rules of problem-solving) in that one of the two is closer to what we actually perceive, so we are back to the simplicity argument. Unless this god shows up and lets everyone know he is around (and he must be quite a coward if he exists and still has not done so), the statement "god does not exist" will make our equation simpler than "god exists." Your "grossly faulty" statement makes complete sense going by the problem-solving rules, because it boils down to this: nobody can perceive god, god does not fit in at all with the currently accepted science which we can and have used to predict the future, there is no great contradiction in science yet that can only be explained by god, and the original purposes of god have long since been fulfilled. For example, by your reasoning, the equations x+y=1 and x+y+z+sin(xy/z)=1 are of equal "complexity" for the purposes of solving, which is similar to what a god would do to both science and our perception.
I said before that I am an agnostic as far as my core ideas go, but I am not going to needlessly take the existence of the god into calculations unless there is more definite proof, so in theory I am a "hard agnostic," but in practical affairs I am an atheist. Also, I would advise you not to use arguments that can be used just as easily against you: if you think that atheism is not a solution, theism is no more of a solution either.
But if nothing matters, why don't you live your life by the outcome of a coin toss? (seriously
)
Also, I would like to point out a glaring inconsistency in your philosophy here, CP5670. As an atheist, you deny the existence of God. This of course means that all of these things which you have just declared meaningless have arisen as a sort of evolutionary hiccup, and cannot be said to have any objective or absolute grounding. This means that values are nothing, silly and illogical lies we tell ourselves. But at the same time, you insist that we should try to usurp God's throne, and that stagnation of society's pursuit of knowledge is bad, that we ought to overcome our emotional nature to obtain the better state of purely rational existence, and that independent critical thought is good, and that ambition ought to be kept because it pushes us forward to new heights of achievement, which is the most important thing for us to do. You do, in fact, hold to certain values and ideas of good and bad and of should and ought. Of course you do; you are, after all, human.
I know, I am just a silly human, and have thus been ingrained with these human values throughout the course of my life as well. However, these "values" cannot really be said to amount to objectives as anything more than a motivation for completing them. The objectives I have given were discovered through an elimination procedure; in other words, they were found because all other systems led either to contradictions or to the eventual demise of humanity. Now whether we want the latter or not is a matter of debate (although even
it can be shown to be inconsistent), but taking it as an assumption for the moment, the scientific path is the only system that at least is free of contradictions, even if it might be difficult in other ways. I fail to see how that says anything about values in the humanistic sense, which are the ones I am condemning. (I never said values are useless, only that these human ones are, and even that only holds in future eras)
Jesus Christ was not merely a prophet of God. He was God himself become a man like us in order to redeem us from destruction through his death and resurrection (how that works is a whole other topic, and doesn't really contribute to this argument, so let's just leave it for now that this is the Christian theological position with which we have to work). Neither Moses, nor Mohammed, nor Hitler, nor Einstein, nor bin Laden, nor Mike from Kanmore were/are what Jesus is, and thus did not do what he did.
Wait, so Christ was all of god concentrated into a finite thing? (human) So much for the infinite god.
But in any case, he was god in the form of a human, which is pretty much what all the other religions claim for their prophets. In other words, at the most he is the equal to any of those other men you mentioned. Also, why did he want to redeem us when he created all the faults in us? Did he intend to correct some mistake he had made earlier when making us? And how the heck does becoming a man, dying and coming back alive "redeem" anyone or do
anything constructive for that matter? That makes about as much sense as I defragging my hard drive in order to "redeem" humanity from their "sins."
Well, space certainly seems to be an infinite thing. One can multiply or divide finite amounts of space, but attempts to do so with all of space as a whole yield meaningless results. And all that is contained within the natural realm certainly interacts with space, indeed in space.
You can certainly use some calculus techniques though to compare both transfinite and infinite parts of space directly, though. For example, it is easy to compare the ratio of the volumes of a sphere with an infinite radius and that of a cube with infinite edges.
After all, concepts such as finite, infinite, transfinite and the like are all really terms that relate to the natural realm, and so perhaps it is to be expected that they would not serve well as descriptions of supernature. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent (whence the inference to infinite comes), but he is also quite able to interact with his creation. Thus I think I shall find that the term infinite, as described by you, is insufficient to properly describe God, and I shall have to refine my terms and say that God is not bound or subject to any natural limitations.
So now you are going against the mathematics. It turned out just as I said earlier; you are ready to accept the science as long as it does not contradict with the religion, but if it does, the religion takes precedence.
And how do you define a limitation anyway? A limitation can be a strength depending on what you are taking it with respect to.
As for wanting to usurp the throne, I can only say that I find your position at once nearly incomprehensible and deeply saddening.
Incidentally, that's precisely what the average German thought of Hitler during the early years of the Nazi regime; he was their true friend, and it was thus deeply saddening to see people plotting against him or even questioning his practices and authority.
No, the logic here is impeccable, actually. The first time I encountered this argument I had to reread it a couple times very carefully to get exactly what it was saying. 3 and 4 do not say the same thing at all. To put 3 into a slightly different form with fewer relative clauses to clog up the reader's understanding, For any existential proposition (E), (E) must either be a member of the set (LPE) or of the set (not-LPE). 4 says something quite different, namely that The truth of the members of the set (LPE) as a whole can only be explained by the truth of a member of the set (not-LPE). The two are quite different, as you can now hopefully better see.
I looked over it again more closely, and yes, I can see the difference this time. Nevertheless, your argument does indeed fall apart when one starts to move into the transfinite and infinite realms, which is what we are dealing with here. Let us suppose that we have a statement, and we find some explanation that shows it to be true. We then find another explanation that proves the validity of that explanation. A third explanation is then conceived of that proves the second explanation. We can theoretically continue this explanation process into infinity as long as we have a method of determining an explanation from the statement it explains, and this works just like an infinite series does. Now you are saying that because an infinite sum is infinite, it cannot be solved, which is true as long as we try to add up all the parts manually. But this is exactly why we have inductive reasoning and the fourth rule of problem-solving. We determine patterns in the chains of existing principles and use those to find the limiting principle at the end rather than going by a step-by-step route; this is the goal of all science.
Calling everything that we don't understand "god" is the fool's answer to things; for the fourth time, I point you to what I said earlier about planetary motion. The people are too stupid to try to break the planetary motion principles down into mathematical laws, and so it is all "god." According to you, just because we cannot explain something at the moment, not only is it impossible to explain it, but it is also the work of a magical man and no further explanation is needed or can be given.
You may continue in this inconsistency if you wish, of course. You may continue to hide behind the idea that "I have to have my axioms to think" and pretend that that somehow settles the matter of whether the axioms are valid. You will always have to deal with that nagging doubt that persists in asking you why these axioms are any good, why you hold to these values when there is no value, and indeed why you even trust your brain to be able to find truth, but of course you can just ignore those questions if you wish. You can even try to pin your hopes on the future, as if a complete account of the functioning of the universe might somehow give value to it or prove that this knowledge of it is itself legitimate. But you'll forgive me, though, if I try to follow a system that actually gives me answers to those questions. You see, I don't mind admitting that God is God.
Heh, that is what I think of the religious crowd. Of course I have to deal with these doubts, especially the last part, seeing as the human brain is quite limited in certain ways, but once again, we use the elimination procedure. If I assume the other case, that my brain is incapable of anything, I reach a dead-end; I cannot go anywhere from there at all, and therefore there is no choice but to go by the other explanation. (once again, elimination procedure) Then you bring up the case of "values" again, which in the context you are using could be interpreted to mean just about anything. I am only talking about the common "humanistic" values, as in the ones you mentioned, being useless because of their inherent contradictions and unsuitability for changing conditions. Everything has values and has no values as far as the universe as a whole is concerned here. I am talking about objectives, of which these "moral values" are simply a subset that have both good and bad effects on humans. (what matters here is not so much that they are "good" or "bad," but rather that they are inconsistent) This ties intimately into the system of ideas; they can be thought as waves, since they have the potential to change the properties of matter, but they cannot actually be said to exist alone and are merely disturbances in other matter. The only reason I like ambition is because it the main force in holding a society together. And yes, a complete account of the universe without contradictions in accordance with what we perceive will indeed prove its legitimacy; that is what science is all about.
But you are saying that your system (Christianity) gives a shortcut answer to all this. What is that answer? Why must a god exist? What would happen if a god did not exist and the Bible was a farce? If removing the "resurrection" also removes all these "answers," that says something about the credibility of the whole thing. One method here cannot be any more correct than the other as far as we know if we go by theory alone, and thus we must fall onto our perception to shift the probabilities. I said this earlier: if no information is available on a proposition, it is better to leave it indeterminate instead of reaching an answer based on insufficient data. However, this only applies to statements on which the probability is exactly equal to that of any other explanation, which is not really the case here although you seem to be claiming it, because we have our perception leaning in the other direction. (again, show me this god)
The biggest problem is not any of that though, but this:
If the god exists, why does the purple dragon, the Shivan, and anything else you can think of not exist as well? And you should mind admitting it, seeing as calling something "god" in the way you are talking of it here is to basically to not only accept your own stupidity without knowing of its truth or falsehood, but also the dominance of someone over you (assuming this person exists); if everyone had thought like this throughout history, there would be no such thing as revolution and we would still be living as monarchist societies.
So then the choices are either to accept the only available explanation of the event (i.e. that God healed my brother) or to insist that some other explanation must be the truth, despite there being no other explanation available.
Here's a better explanation: god had
absolutely nothing to do with it, but
page 863 in my math book was responsible for the healing of your brother. Now prove to me that it is or is not so.
