How does God exist?

Hansda: IMO . . . NEITHER is your question (scientific) . . . to QUOTE: "What is the address of GOD ? !!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Every existence has an address .

We all also having some addresses .

If GOD is existing , HE also should have some address .

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Not unless he is nomadic.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Spirit, or an immaterial power, is supposed to be non-spatial. Not yet another extended substance/object residing in a "place" or existing as a dimensional realm. Such intelligible entities are more like the general nature of a concept than a concrete particular. No experience in either live perception or imagination is applicable to them... that's the whole point, they are non-physical or non-phenomenal, though language or abstract description can apparently refer to them in an empty-of-content manner.

This is especially applicable to "god", if it is supposed to be the ultimate spirit or order -- the overarching instructional will, form, or scheme that its spatial/material creation and the particulars of such are following / obeying. The so-called "existence" of such an ultimate intelligible entity would just be the condition of a universe conforming to such overarching lawfulness... That a world just is noted to be adhering to this organization and inter-consistency. Proposing that "god" -- a master "spirit" or master principle -- is just more spatial stuff or even a non-general object residing in either its own creation or some other dimensional place, just recedes into another question of how that supposed "stuff", realm, concrete particular, etc., is going to itself be explained (i.e., you would eventually have to stop that receding nonsense by positing an intelligible, non-spatial regulator, anyway).

If instead you need a "personal god" for some practical reason, then just bite Kant's bullet. And discard all this fish-flopping from various individuals of trying to squeeze a personal god into science or the phenomenal world. A typical Catholic intellectual's depiction of Kant as the devil of all devils isn't going to alter that the "territory" his Critique cleared, and his elaboration on practical reason, as being about the only option "traditional" Christians or other Abrahamic religions have. Postmodernism, neopragmatism, and obscurantism of one variety or another aren't exactly what many Marxist-phobic theists consider friendly "rival options".

 

A personal god hits to the heart of where you will find God. Personal means god will be accessed in a way that is unique to each individual The human brain is the generator/transmitter for the manifestation.

Christ said this evil and adulterous generation looks for a sign (external data or special effect), but none will be given. There was transition going on in the human mind connected to the decay of outer man and the formation of the inner man. Inside the human soul is where god dwells; in human hearts.

Let me give an analogous example of this. We have all had at least one dream, we can remember. If I ask you to prove there are dreams, you will not look outside in the yard, under the tree, in the lab, or anywhere else outside for it. Then after looking all those places, conclude, with confidence, dreams do not exist. This shows lack of common sense. You look inside. I can't look inside your mind but you can look inside your own mind.

Since God is a very expansive concept you also need to go very deep inside to places of the mind brain that can support such data density.

The human mind, from the inside, is a new frontier. You can't look at the good stuff from the outside since technology is lacking. You need to approach it from the inside. There are many eastern philosophies which have developed systems for entering the unconscious mind.

Ironically, atheists say religion is all in the mind and all in the imagination, and then look for God outside the mind, and then say it is not there. Where is common sense in atheism?

 

Common sense is not so common anymore.

 

the common sense of atheism is found in the foundation of Humanity First and Foremost above any other being

this attitude towards Humanity is the only way for us , Humanity to survive

god is too whimsical

 

Well, I lost faith in humanity long time ago, I have some very bad experience with people, this is why I have social fobia as well as I'm scared of people in the first place (the only way I can communicate with other people is through forums). I do not believe in god, I never will, since I always wanted freedom. And this is why I'm an atheist. I really don't believe in anything, I stopped believing in humanity long time ago-because everybody cares about themselves, they are only super-egoistical bastards, because I had to become one of them-just to survive and adapt.
The only thing you can believe in is what is actually real-the nature for example.

 

Theists are the ones who are saying that God exists outside of the imagination. If the claim was merely that God existed within it, all atheists would agree (in the same sense in which they would agree that invisible pink unicorns exist within the imagination).

I'm sure what your ill-conceived example was meant to convey is that the correct 'route' to God exists within us (rather than outside of us), but what common sense (along with a little wisdom and experience) actually tells us is that the realm of inner experience (when it is disconnected from empiricism) is the most notoriously unreliable indicator of the actual existence of anything.

Try again.

 

Where and how do you draw the line between "internal" and "external"?


And secondly, where does empiricism take place? "Inside", or "outside"?

 

It all starts with the basic foundational premise that there is indeed an external world that exists independently of one's own thoughts. If one accepts that, then the answer is obvious: that which is external is that which exists independently of one's own thoughts.

Exactly at the point at which knowledge of this independently existing external world is gained via sensory experience. So it's necessarily both.

 

Barring the idea of direct or unmediated perception, or cognition/consciousness extending beyond the body, or philosophies that posit a ubiquitous phenomenal experience as being more fundamental than either the "islands" of individuation (selves) and the material substrates inferred in it by the seeming thought events of the former illusory islands, then...

Internal and external presentations, as well as interpretations and conclusions about them, usually wind-up being attributed to the perceiving / thinking agent or system (i.e., both introspection and extrospection are actually a dichotomy of its inner processes). But in most of these schemes (including even Berkeley's immaterialism) the "outer sense" half is fed by reception of influences from beyond the conscious agent. Whether they be from God or equivalent powers; a circumstance transcending classification and intuition that was left unknown; or the familiar world of outer sense being metaphysically reified (everyday tendency); or the latter being converted to an atomistic (micro-bodies) world or whatever other abstract / theoretical manner of worlds.

A conservative empiricist or epistemological phenomenalist that wanted to limit speculation or refrain from "transcendent" existence altogether (remaining on the side of knowledge, with the external half of experience as the foundational source for it), such as a John Stuart Mill or Ernst Mach might be an example of.... Would refer to the independence of the environment exhibited in outer sense as being just that. Behaving independently of the desires of one's personal will and occasionally even memory-based expectations, without a metaphysical add-on or explanation. To this faction, objects (generalized as matter) were merely regarded as reliable possibilities of sensation, minus offering a dogmatic certainty as to how the regularities of these presentations and inter-coordination between multiple observers was ultimately accomplished.

V. I. Lenin [in the course of attacking such "radical empiricists" around the turn of the 20th century]: That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature . . . . The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. --Materialism and Empirio-Criticism


John Stuart Mill: Matter, then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not. But I affirm with confidence, that this conception of Matter includes the whole meaning attached to it by the common world, apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological, theories. The reliance of mankind on the real existence of visible and tangible objects, means reliance on the reality and permanence of Possibilities of visual and tactile sensations, when no such sensations are actually experienced. --An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy

 

You know, Fred Wolf PhD has stated that God is the great spill of consciousness.

I'd be willing to agree with this. Yet Fred believes that Conciousness spilled from the Big Bang which I can to this day, prove to be incorrect. However, he maybe be right that the conscious universe, the thing we call God, might be ourselves.

 

At first glance, one would say - "Of course there is a world existing independently of my thoughts, how could my thoughts possibly affect the workings of the Universe? They can't."

The dichotomy is: it's all in my mind vs. there exists a world independently of my mind. And since "it's all in my mind" seems like such an obvious recipe for insanity, one is prone to accept the dichotomy as valid and agree with "there exists a world independently of my mind." But that doesn't necessarily make that position an accurate description of "how things really are."


It appears that consistent reflexive reasoning or extreme critical thinking brings us into the deadlock of extreme skepticism: that we, humans, cannot really make any pertinent assertions about the workings of our minds, or the Universe.

That thing we so much love to do - namely think about the hows and whys - seems to be inherently doomed. Unless, of course, we are equipped with sufficient egotism to stop at some point and declare "This is true, that is false; this is so, that is otherwise."

 

I don't know that much about Eastern philosophies, nor about the way ordinary Eastern people think.
But from what I understood, they traditionally appear to tend to think of the mind or thoughts as external things - the way we usually think of chairs, cars, mountains, buildings and other people as external to ourselves. They seem to see thoughts as circumstances - and that one can move from one thought to another similarly as one can walk from one room to the next.

This is a bit difficult to explain, as the immediate impression an ordinary Westerner has at this is that those Easterners must be psychotic or suffering from some other psychopathology. But looking at them, they seem to function just fine.

We tend to identify with our minds/thoughts to the point that even the notion "we tend to identify with our minds/thoughts" seems absurd.
But one of the things one likely learns early on in Buddhism or Hinduism is that the mind is not the self.
Many of the philosophical problems that Westerners have worked on for so long, the traditional Easterners would consider redundant, or incomprehensible.

 

Can you dumb this down for me please...?

Maybe it seems absurd because we can't identify with what we are.

 

Jesus started the Lord's Prayer. "Heavenly Father who art in Heaven..."
So God's address is "Heaven" Number ONE in Heaven.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

too bad really

not all people are bad etc..

you just have to get back out there and find the people that enjoy life and are good towards each other

try a hobby

 

There's no way for me to be absolutely certain that an external world exists independently of my own thoughts (although there are definitely certain mechanisms that exist independently). But like I said, it's a foundational premise and although I will concede that it's not an unquestionably correct one, since it's typically accepted by theists and atheists alike it generally doesn't factor into discussions about the existence of God in any significant way. If it did it would create just as many problems for theists as it would anyone else (namely that if nothing exists independently of one's own thoughts, then God would not exist unless one was imagining him, and even then would not actually exist independently of that imagining).

 

I suppose the basic problem of all preaching and expecting others to hold the same convictions about God as oneself is that such preaching and expecting is mutually exclusive with the content of preaching, thus making the exchange between the preacher and the listener into a mere powerplay:

Namely, the preacher claims that the listener has free will and that God has free will, and that the listener should make a free and informed choice.
But the preacher also says that if the listener fails to make the right choice, the listener will suffer eternal, irreversible adverse consequences.

Since the listener at this point has no knowledge of God (at least no knowledge that he would be certain of as such), he has to have complete faith in the preacher.
The preacher says the listener should have faith in God, not in the preacher, but this is an impossibility for the listener, as he doesn't have any first-hand knowledge of God.


In other words, preaching that expects the listener to convert is introducing a number of unresolved/unresolvable epistemological problems.
To follow the preacher's instructions, the listener would have to have epistemic autonomy; but if the listener would have epistemic autonomy, he'd already know whatever there is to know and would have no need for a preacher to tell him about God.