Acid Haze posted:

There is a movie called Heaven Is For Real and it's based on a true story. Pretty sure that means God is for real too, man.

redstormpopcorn posted:

My (incredibly limited) understanding of the theories surrounding the Big Bang, and "time" being relative to distance and motion have indicated to me: the concepts of "before" and "first" may not really exist as typically considered when discussing an incalculably dense singularity containing (OR WAS IT?) the entire mass of the Universe.

VitalSigns posted:

There must be a God who is testing me with these homosexual urges, because if there's not then that would mean I'm gay and I can't be gay.

Zeitgueist posted:

Can I suggest The God Delusion by Dick Dorkins?

Zeitgueist posted:

Dorkins is so militant he hasn't published anything that wasn't a pop-atheism book for decades.

I used to like the guy back when I was young and dumb, also I liked libertarians. Much like libertarianism, the easiest way to ruin it for you is to learn more about him.

Kyrie eleison posted:

Also, leftism. Seems kinda nice at first, but then you get a little more exposed to it, and yeeesh!

Kyrie eleison posted:

Maybe people are less prone to rebellion because they are happier

QuoProQuid posted:

My understanding of the science and theories surrounding the Big Bang is a little vague, so I'm not sure I can respond to redstorm's point or correct his presentation. The fact that the main developers of the Big Bang Theory were Catholic priests suggests to me that there is an explanation that at least fits within the Catholic understanding of God. I could be wrong though. Does anyone know how Lemaître might have responded?

Berk Berkly posted:

And Inflation Theory sort of makes the idea of a unmoving mover even more redundant, or at least gives no special status or purpose to our Universe. We aren't the only possible outcome and likely not the only outcome as there could be actually infinite, different Universes popping into and sometimes out of existence with no intrinsic purpose or motivation. It is just how reality works.

Trying to proscribe some whim or intention upon it is just us projecting our egos and wishful thoughts.

Kyrie eleison posted:

Fact: when most of you are elderly, you will believe in God.

SedanChair posted:

Yes it's called fear, do you love to be governed by it?

QuoProQuid posted:

His beliefs had no bearing on his observations but his observations would have had a an effect on his beliefs. I don't pretend to completely understand Big Bang Theory, but Lemaître remaining a Catholic priest after developing the theory with Hibble and Slipher and the Catholic Church being one of the main groups to popularize the theory suggests either that the Big Bang Theory can't be used to discredit theism or that both would be able to explain away any apparent inconsistency. I was asking if anyone knew what those explanations would be because I'm genuinely not sure.

Kyrie eleison posted:

If the universe "just exists" without a creator, that sure would be strange! Why did the Big Bang occur out of nothing? "It just did?" And soon the universe will be ruined by the heat death, and its entire inhabitable existence will be an incidental blip from the context of eternity? How strange.

VitalSigns posted:

It'd be weird if stuff just existed with no explanation, so obviously it was all spun out of nothing by something that just exists with no explanation.

WMain00 posted:

I'm also agnostic, but I believe that God is the Universe. The manifestation of life is the Universe attempting to understand itself.

Kopijeger posted:

Why would a inanimate object or a collection of such have any need or desire to understand itself?

SHISHKABOB posted:

go land on the moon and tell me the universe is awesome for life

SHISHKABOB posted:

There's a lot more than a few stepping stones out there that are barren of life!

Not to mention most space is filled with uh hydrogen atoms haha, ain't no life there either.

SHISHKABOB posted:

"oh but we don't care about EMPTY SPACE" oh well then maybe you shouldn't say "the universe is good for life- wow!" because MOST OF IT IS NOT GOOD FOR LIFE.

SHISHKABOB posted:

Oh so you're saying that there's possible life floating around in the endless tracts of interstellar and intergalactic space?

SHISHKABOB posted:

Whoah WHOAH whoah where are you going. I'm just saying that most of the universe is inhospitable. I made no claims about "is there life???????"

Sure the earth is awesometastic to live on, but go a hundred kilometers away from it and you're dead!

SHISHKABOB posted:

lol why would you think that, that's loving retarded. I think you're making some unfounded assumptions about my thoughts and what I'm trying to get across.

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

Bro, I hate to break it to you, but God can just sit back and wait because he's already succeeded in trying to kill everybody by making them mortal. He's just murdering you through the slow process of cellular oxidation.

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

I stand by the Catch 22 ethos that everything and everyone is out to kill you at all times. Even your own body is trying to kill you.

JawKnee posted:

vestigial organic structures in humans

boom, god as perfect designer disproven.

Space Whale posted:

In HElium we have eternal life huh?

Ernest Hemingway posted:

The logic is actually quite sound - you can't really reject the argument on the ground of its axioms (I didn't invent modal logic). And no, this argument can't be used to prove the existence of magical penis unicorns. Necessary existence is a trait that can only be possessed by God.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

And so far I'm submitting that we CAN prove God. Which means that if you don't prove me wrong by Sunday you all have to go to church.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Well, if the argument holds, I fail to see how the sort of argument it is (metaphysical, or otherwise) affects the strength of its conclusion.

Are you asking for an argument based on empirical evidence? I'm afraid I don't have one (no one does).

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Now, when we're talking about necessary/contingent existence the picture becomes difference. There is no possible world where 1+1 does not equal 2 and no possible world with a married bachelor in it. Likewise with God.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

You're thinking in terms of existence/non-existence and not in terms of necessary existence/contingent existence - your conception of the perfect cookie might include it's existence - but as Kant established, existence is not something that can be predicated onto something- i.e. regardless of what qualities A consists of, it either exists or it doesn't (You can have a real or imaginary A with qualities C,B,D - but you can't have an imaginary A that also exists ) this is why "The perfect (X) argument fails to address a more refined understanding of the ontological argument. When you imagine the perfect cookie existing, you don't imagine it necessarily existing - and you couldn't because cookies can't necessarily exist (i.e. there is at least one possible world where the cookie is not on the table).

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Far from it, actually. The watchmaker argument speaks to the notion of causality and depends on the notion of necessary causality. My argument is not about causality and when I use the word necessary, I'm using it in a different sense - i.e. it is logically contradictory to deny a necessary something.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Well, now you're characterizing God as a contingent entity as per a psychological approach (yes, we dreamnt God up and anthropomorphized him at some point), but you're not really addressing the issue of God as a necessary being so much as just asserting the opposite without argument. (To be fair I haven't provided an argument for God as a necessary being, it's just something I've stated).... if it helps, I'm trying to characterize the concept of God as a strictly logical concept which possesses 'necessary existence' as an essential property.

Dzhay posted:

Actually B was specified, it was "Having property A and necessarily existing". (A&N in your terminology, I guess)

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Oh, then it's simple - property A, unless it is a property that is an essential property of a necessary being, couldn't be attributed to a necessary being. So property A can't be just anything as "Having property A and necessarily existing" contradicts itself if property A is something that could possibly be otherwise (like an orange on your desk).

Ernest Hemingway posted:

You're right, I haven't (and I'm not going to!). The argument, in most cases, would have to proceed from here.

The non-controversial claim I am making is that if God were proven to be a necessary being, then the fundamental characteristic of that proof would be showing that it is logically contradictory to deny God's existence.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

I think you've misunderstood me here. God, like any other concept, can be represented symbolically in logic formulations. I meant that that was how I was characterizing God in my arguments - to lead it into more of a logical analysis direction than a space-monkey-in-the-sky one.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

I'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious but I really do need you to explain how I'm doing this.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Again, I think we've misunderstood one another. I never purported to offer logical proof of God's existence (which I think is almost surely impossible), but merely to characterize a more modern take on a very inventive and compelling argument - specifically, how S5 in modal logic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S5_%28modal_logic%29) establishes that if you can convincingly characterize God as necessary being in any possible world, you have proven God's existence. I thought it was a good topic to bring into the finding out if God exists thread.


I did. I did drop the necessity claim, because I agree that it's not evidently true or something that is easy (or even possible) to prove. Which is why I'm content to remain an atheist.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

Again, I think we've misunderstood one another. I never purported to offer logical proof of God's existence (which I think is almost surely impossible), but merely to characterize a more modern take on a very inventive and compelling argument - specifically, how S5 in modal logic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S5_%28modal_logic%29) establishes that if you can convincingly characterize God as necessary being in any possible world, you have proven God's existence. I thought it was a good topic to bring into the finding out if God exists thread.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

How so? Have I mischaracterized S5? (This is a very real possibility since I'm by no means an expert in modal logic.)
...or do you reject S5 altogether?

quote:

The fallacies of the argument are issues which a clever theologian could fix with some rewording and addition of some other premises. However, the argument can be completely broken and made laughable by simply changing "God" to "The Most Perfect Island" (or something similar). The argument remains structurally valid (that is, nothing in the symbolic formulation of the argument is incorrect), however, we come to the laughable conclusion that "The Most Perfect Island" must exist. You could also replace "God" with "Unicorns" and define "Unicorns" as "that than which no greater horse can be conceived". We now have an argument for the existence of unicorns, another mythological creature.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

I've already spoken to this. The 'that which no greater can be conceived' issue speaks to older formulations (specifically, Anselm's), and while it is by no means a trivial response, it is a basic and obvious one that has been well addressed and which loses relevance once you get into more modern formulations such as the modal approach that I've done my best to describe in this thread. It's why you're more likely to encounter 'the perfect island' response to Anselm in high school or introductory undergraduate courses than in actual philosophy discourse.

When it comes to the ontological argument, the conversation really has moved past that point.

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Unless I'm missing something he's conflating necessary existence (i.e., anything that necessarily exists) with God, which still begs the question (even if you're only predicating God in this one way).

Ernest Hemingway posted:

If the aim of the ontological argument is to 'define things into existence', or predicate existence onto a contingent subject, then it surely fails... and so much has been established through Gaunilo and Kant.

The response has to be that it aims to do something else - and in the modal case it is trying to establish the possibility of a necessary being. And this being is usually characterized as something like a being "of maximum greatness", which includes an argument for why only this being could be considered a necessary being. To avoid the risk of sounding like a lunatic again, I won't elaborate, and will leave it to you to figure out why this approach wouldn't apply to Dracula or anything else that would be substituted into the 'lost island' rebuttal.

I hate to nitpick, but the argument doesn't depend on the initial assumption of God existing - it depends entirely on establishing that it is possible for God to exist. It is by no means successful in doing this. But it is important to account for this turn if one wishes to respond to it effectively - (i.e. not with the drat island argument).

Ytlaya posted:

To start with, I feel kind of bad for you because a lot of people were completely misunderstanding your argument. It was pretty clear from early on that 1. you were using "necessary" in a different way than many of the posters replying to you were and 2. that you never claimed that God was, in fact necessary (and that your logic was contigent upon that).

One thing I have to ask, though; wouldn't that logic also mean that, if God is necessary, there isn't necessarily just one God? After all, something being necessary doesn't mean that there must only be one of that something (i.e. there can be two greatest things that are of equal greatness).

quote:

Necessity is a property of statements not of objects. It doesn't make sense to claim that an existent thing is logically necessary. Existent things just are, that's all. We have no examples of necessary existence; we just have examples of necessary inferences or judgments. There can be no empirical necessities.

As Kant notes, existence is not a real predicate or property; existence is not a characteristic which can be added to the concept of the subject. Thus, the concept of necessary existence is not meaningful. (Q.v., the notes Existence Is Not a Predicate)
The idea of necessary being is unintelligible. As Hume point out, any statement concerning existence can be denied. Hume writes, "The words, therefore "necessary existence," have no meaning, or which is the same thing, none of which is consistent." Whatever we can conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent.

Nevertheless, Charles Hartshorne claims that the predicate "necessary existence" does add something the concept of God and so is a real predicate or property. E. g., "necessary existence" is distinguished from contingent existence in that necessary existence cannot not exist.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

In posting in a God thread on the internet I had to be prepared for some unclear semantics... and while for brevity's sake I didn't qualify each statement (i.e. God 'qua necessary being') every step of the way, my phrasing was a little sloppy and muddled at times.

And you're right, I don't see why the logic would exclude the possibility of more than one necessary being - but the monotheist would probably respond with something like "A unified perfection is greater than a shared perfection".


Agreed. And while the linked example doesn't quite explicitly to S5 (which I believe is the trick that makes this argument a little more fun), it does employ modal qualifiers to hide the arguments critical assumption. With:

PN(G)->N(G)
PN(G)
————
N(G)

PN(G) cannot really be assumed and it's up to the person presenting the argument to convince us otherwise before we accept N(G).
However, including PN(G)->N(G) as the first premise is, I think, a delightfully clever move.

Perry Mason Jar posted:

This is so wrong it hurts.

Ernest Hemingway posted:

No. While a magical being would be capable of performing deeds we would consider scientifically impossible, her actions would still be confined to the realm of logical possibility (as I've established above) - this means that she could not destabilize proofs. Furthermore, the examples you've provided do not violate the laws that you allege they do, i.e. Christ's never ending bread basket makes no scientific sense, but is still perfectly logical. Him having one loaf in one moment, then two in the next moment, then five in the next, etc. is fundamentally different from proving that 1+1=5.

Proofs are always safe, that 's why they're proofs. Scientific laws are never safe, and that's why they're not actually laws. These statements obtain in a world with or without God.