How does God exist?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Mind Over Matter, Jan 3, 2012.

  1. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,320
    Working [lab] scientists can't be expected to have a familiarity, background, or interest in the issues debated in philosophy of science; and accordingly a concern about the support for or inter-consistency of a particular view and argument if they did so rigorously hold such to begin with. That could even be the case with most theoretical physicists, though that degree of apathy may seem a stretch.

    Robert Crease once conducted a poll of physicists (in general) over at physicsweb.org, regarding their stances about realism. This was provoked by John Polkinghorne having claimed that scientists were overwhelmingly critical realists like himself. In many cases, after receiving their responses, Crease had to interpret what their positions were, since some lacked a formal understanding of or classification for what they held. Some had never even scrutinized before the territory they were being asked about:

    Robert Crease... "Still more significantly, a large fraction of respondents cannot be classified as critical realists because they recognized, while answering the poll, that their answers were philosophically indeterminate. Indeed, the most heart-warming letter I received said: 'At the end of [your original] article, you said that a low response will indicate either that you have no readership or that scientists don't care about the issues raised. After 48 hours of discussions we have to suggest a third category - those who would like to reply but in attempting to answer the questionnaire have found their *gut* philosophical position to be wholly inadequate and inconsistent.' Her poll, too, was blank - but it seemed a product of a sensitivity to the seriousness and significance of philosophical issues rather than a repudiation of them."

    After presenting a common quote of Einstein's about how the scientist appeared to be an "unscrupulous opportunist" to the philosopher, Crease elaborated further:

    "...Einstein implied that one need not have a consistent philosophical position to be a good scientist. Philosophers may suppose that scientists, being rigorous and conceptually savvy, must have fully worked out positions. Scientists, meanwhile, may assume that the views they hold about reality correspond to the positions that philosophers have found to be the most rational. But fully articulated positions are only for those being needlessly rigorous and consistent.

    "Furthermore, it would be difficult to translate everyday assumptions into such positions, just as it would be difficult to translate an average person's political and religious views directly into a systematic political programme or theology. Even philosophers may not commit themselves to worked-out positions, for philosophers are less holders of positions than examiners of them. Nevertheless, as in politics and theology, a position does not need unconditional subscribers for there to be value in formulating and examining it."
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

    Messages:
    4,634
    Political posturing is a better way to say it . It is prevalent in human thought on the individual level. That is where it starts and resonance in others beliefs that are in line with the political posturing which make the seed grow into real life human endeavors perceived good or bad. The out of alignment of many satalite agendas creats the chaos of total annihilation inevitable.

    Not until we understand what I just said and we see the flaw of the old world can we do anything in a positive way : meaning improving environmental conditions of our localized space
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,205
    Why do you think Heaven has an address? And, by "address", what do you mean?
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. hansda Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,424
    If Heaven is existing , it should have an address ; as every existence is having some address .


    The way mass , energy and space are having address , I want similar kind of address for all other existences .
     
  8. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,058
    So how do those scientists justify their authoritarian attitudes?

    Simple ego power (for which there is, eh, plenty of scientific evidence)?
     
  9. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,205
    In our existence, we are subject to mass, energy and space, and TIME. God is outside of time, and when we reside with God in heaven, we will not be subject to earth's mass, energy and space. That is why God is everywhere, and why Jesus, after His resurrection was able to appear and disappear instantly to the Apostles.

    God is not subject to just one location i.e.: an address. He is not subject to our limitations. You want to find God, then you open your heart through Jesus and invite Him in. Then, you will feel His presence.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  10. hansda Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,424
    This is OK . This is scientific .
    You mean to say GOD is not there inside of time . Is there any existence beyond time ?

    What is Heaven ? Where is Heaven ? Can we reside there physically ? Our body has mass , energy and space .

    Earlier you said GOD is outside time . Is it , everywhere outside time ?

    I think JESUS had some miraculous power .

    Do you mean to say , GOD lives in the heart .
     
  11. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,205
    Indeed, our bodies do. Lamentably, we do not get to keep them. But for Heaven, you will be fitted with a resurrectional body; pneumatikon soma.
     
  12. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,620
    Wow, that is a amazing and extraordinary truth claim. Very good indeed. Now do tell me, why should we believe that what you said is true?
     
  13. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,058
    Why do you want to believe?

    If you don't want to believe anyway, why engage in this conversation?
    Can't you think of a more direct way to oppose those whom you don't agree with?
     
  14. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,205
    If you have difficulty finding God just look for love!
     
  15. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,205
    The first part is self evident in human life (we cannot keep our natural bodies). The 2nd (pneumatikon soma) comes from the NT. And we can trust the NT, if and only if our LORD, who is at the core of that document, is true. I believe that HE is.
     
  16. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,620
    So the bible is the true, exactly, literal and inerrant word of the one and only supreme creator God?
     
  17. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,320
    Richard Lewontin: "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen." --Billions and Billions of Demons, NYT book review, 1997

    But another way to regard this is that scientists have their own personal views just like anyone else -- you have to keep that separate from their roles as working agents of methodological naturalism. Not truly being strict robots, the private "person side" will usually be a return to biased, passionate interests in the world (community, politics, environment, homespun philosophy, etc). Admittedly, a spectator audience might have difficulty disentangling the scientist from the citizen when this "dyad" entity tours the popular interview slash lecture circuit, and doesn't make clear which platform they're speaking from in any particular moment.

    But there are plenty not in the dark that it is the organization which a human provides which makes sense of or conforms what would otherwise be a jumble of empirical data into an understanding (background theory provides interpretation); and also extracts such data from Nature, with invented procedures [see Kant quote below for an earlier grasp of this]. The results may in turn feedback and modify the a priori or operating frameworks, since even that is supposedly revisable in natural science. Unless, of course, Lewontin above indeed represented an overwhelmingly dominate faction holding that some of the framework is immutably dogmatic. This would be similar to contending that since "unmarried males" IS the definition of "bachelor", altering that would actually be introducing an entirely different concept, simply sharing the same word, and mistakenly leading others to consider it a continuation of the original (sleight-of-hand trick).

    Immanuel Kant ... A new light flashed upon the mind of the first man (be he Thales or some other) who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle. The true method, so he found, was not to inspect what he discerned either in the figure ... but to bring out what was necessarily implied in the concepts that he had himself formed a priori, and had put into the figure in the construction by which he presented it to himself. ...Natural science was very much longer in entering upon the highway...

    When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made the air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite column of water; or in more recent times, when Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime back into metal, by withdrawing something and then restoring it, a light broke upon all students of nature.

    They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own... Reason ... must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated.

    Even physics, therefore, owes the beneficent revolution in its point of view ... that while reason must seek in nature, it must [also] adopt as its guide ... that which it has itself put into nature. It is thus that the study of nature has entered on the secure path of a science, after having for so many centuries been nothing but a process of merely random groping.
    --Preface, second edition of Critique of Pure Reason
     
  18. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,205
    Non sequitur!
     
  19. Enmos Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    43,184
    It's a question..
     
  20. hansda Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,424
    So , you mean to say in our lifetime ; it is not possible to visit heaven or meet GOD .
     
  21. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,058
    Often, when atheism is mentioned, someone brings up Stalin. And it is for good reason. Namely, Stalin's attitude was No man, no problem: if there was a problem, his system would simply get that person killed, and then the problem didn't exist anymore. No man, no problem.

    Scientists tend to have a similar attitude: while they don't exactly kill people, they do kill the personal about people, effectively turning them into robots. We don't matter. What matters is scientific materialism - and even if it kills us.
     
  22. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,620
    Scientific materialism is not what matters - scientific naturalism does. We MUST kill the personal about people [at least in matters of science and philosophy] if we are to have a accurate objective ontology. Science doesn't make us robots anymore than Newton's optics destroyed the beauty of the rainbow - it leaves massive room, with good understanding, for a enriched and fulfilling human experience of feelings, emotions, knowledge and sensations.
     
  23. Mind Over Matter Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,205
    A question can be a non sequitur!
     

Share This Page