Yes, but now we have science, logic and reason.
How things were 500 years ago is irrelevant. Or does your doctor still prescribe leeches to deal with imbalances of the humours and never washes his hands?
Proof there is a God
- Thread starter JBrentonK
- Start date
How things were 500 years ago is irrelevant. Or does your doctor still prescribe leeches to deal with imbalances of the humours and never washes his hands?
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
The mainstream of today IS religion, not physicalist nihilism. Don't believe me? Take a poll. That says to me the majority view isn't necessarily the truth.
Check and mate. You know exactly what you are talking about MR.
Of course you do. Why wouldn't you? One of the most common phrases in the English language is, "Did you see that?" We know, either instinctively or by "common sense" that we can't trust our own individual senses.
Very little. I have no direct experience with France or opium or slavery or mammoths or a million other things.
Agreed about announcing extraordinary experiences to others. Next step is to find a scientific basis for explanation.
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Maybe you can't but I can. I trust my own senses all the time without asking people to confirm them. Besides, what good is someone else's opinion on whether I saw something or not. Were they there? Why should their opinion matter at all?
Wow..So all day long you go around calling up people to confirm the existence of things you see firsthand for you? That must be very tiring..
No, the NEXT step is to provide extraordinary evidence to back up that extraordinary claim.
Well, to be fair, one could formulate a scientific hypothesis before collecting the necessary evidence.
But the hypothesis would undoubtedly be such that in order to be accepted the evidence would indeed be considered extraordinary.
It would be interesting, in the absence of such evidence at the outset, to at least see what scientific hypothesis is arrived at to possibly explain things.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
One might argue that the fabric of spacetime irself allows for certain information sharing. But I cannot imagine that spacetime is sentient in the popular interpretation. Moreover this sentience would have to have existed "before" Creation, which would inveldate the argument of an emergent universal sentience and thus rendering the argument false.
OTOH, presuming that Creation was a spontaneous event in a timeless permittive condition and the fabric of spacetime was formed by certain very simple cosmological constants, then a universal language of information exchange could exist, albeit not sentient in and af itself. That language can be understood and written as Mathematics. I believe, so far 31 universal constants have been discovered and codified as fundamental aspects (functions) of our current universe.
IMO, all other imaginings of a pre-existing being, which intentionally created the universe, brings with them so much presumptive baggage, that a coherent answer cannot ever be found and will always remain beyond our "knowledge" in the realm of Faith (desire in the direction of greater satisfaction).
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Yazata
Valued Senior Member
If he's trying to convince people what something [God and/or panpsychism which he seems to confuse with pantheism] has objective existence as opposed to being a hallucination or a product of his own imagination, then the thing that he's proclaiming will have to exist publicly for other people and not just subjectively in his own head.
I don't use the word 'reality' the same way that you seem to. I don't think of my own subjectivity as my own personal 'reality'. I'm not God and I don't possess a 'reality' of my own. I think that there's a single reality in which all of us are embedded.
If I was trying to convince them that whatever it is exists in the reality we all share and isn't just a feature of my own imagination, I wouldn't have much choice.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
So do I. But that's not the issue here.
Nobody is questioning whether Spellbound believes in God. Nobody is questioning whether he's convinced himself that he's somehow experienced God. The question is whether the object of his experience exists in objective reality and isn't just a product of his own imagination.
This is one of the epistemological problems with religious experience. It's inherently private. While it can be totally convincing to the person having the experience, it has very little evidenciary force for anyone else.
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
If it was just inquiry for confirmation, that would be acceptable as an attempt to acquire knowledge.
But human hubris fails to recognize the limited view we have of the universe and never inquires, but state their experince as undisputable fact. Their "witnessing" of divine workings. But of course these are always argument of both "ignorance' and "authority"
The OT is full of it and claims that it is truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and better be accepted as such or terrible things will happen to the "unbeliever", least of which is an eternity in hell.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
But does that not negate the argument of creation of reality and then become embedded as part of this reality after the fact of Creation?
I have no fundamental problem with intra universal communication of a kind, but how would that work before the universe was even created., other than through Mathematics.
Consider (assuming) that god must have been sentient. motivated, and all powerful, let's follow the history of Creation.
a) "let there be light" is a command, but a command to what and by whom? OK, god.
So there was light, then god created the heavens and as his crowning achievement he created the earth and everything on it (paradise). But god needed someone who could truly appreciate his wonderful work and he created man and woman and this worked just fine for awhile.
Then god had a quarrel with one of his angels and as punishment god looked around for a suitable place to shield the rest of the universe from this disobedient angel. Where to put him? In a supernova? Maybe a Black Hole would be a good prison?
But no, god sent the devil (evil) to his one true masterpiece, paradise, to tempt mankind (made in his image). The plan worked perfectly and after the devil tempted innocent mankind (god's crowning achievement), turning the earth into the hell-hole we are witnessing today.
Does any of this make sense as an attribute of a loving god who created the miracke of earth and mankind and then purposefully broke it, as punishment for one of his own kind? That sounds not only unfair to me, but reminds me of an "abusive father".
And I am to believe ANY of that, without question?
From the psychological viewpoint of the intent of scripture, clearly describing "god's will", which might be called "aversion therapy", if man was innocent before being tempted by the devil (who somehow was able to disobey god's will), why punish mankind by dumping the devil on earth?
At best this would be unjust, reasonably this would be "indifference, at worst an intentional act of introducing evil into what once was paradise. Then after god's devil corrupted mankind, makind itself was banned from paradise?
What was god's motive in all these chinanigans? Just for fun?
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
There was a brief time when Einstein's famous equation existed only in HIS head without existing publically for other people. Does that mean that equation was only a subjective hallucination? One cannot underestimate the impact of self-evident firsthand experience in determining objective entities, especially in the case of experiencing mathematics and scientific descriptions. With every fundamental truth or manifestation of Being there's always going to be a first time it occurs to anyone. But the fact that noone else shares it shouldn't mean it is invalid or just a delusion.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
I can see Aqueous Idiot throwing babies into a fire and shouting "Hail Satan!"
As for me, I love God.
And what is it that makes you love God?
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Einstein also said:
"if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins383803.html#UpBZwDVldIy2JmBf.99
Psalm 137:9I can see Aqueous Idiot throwing babies into a fire and shouting "Hail Satan!"
As for me, I love God.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
For those not familiar wit this psalm:
137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.htm
An act of love? Seems to me more an act by a seriously disturbed mind. Is this what the bible teaches?
There was a time when the bible was required as part of an educational curriculum. perhaps it is time to introduce this book into school curricula.
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.htm
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Except Einstein proved his imaginings first through the maths, then by prediction, then by factual proof.
Prove your imagining of God by any means. I bet you cannot even come up with a test.
In 2000 years you have not been able to provide a single proof of the existence of a God (by any other name).
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
But he intuitively KNEW the truth of his proposition before anyone else shared it with him. I'm sure other humans have similar experiences with the self-evident and a priori truths of their being. They certainly don't need to call peers to find out if they're true or not.