Does God Exist? [Arguments & Proofs]

[ducati916]

Not really. Whether people are more pious or not is irrelevant to the question at hand.

According to Anslem's proposition, God has to be greater than the entirety of the known universe. Our knowledge of the universe is far greater today than 1000 years ago, so it stands to reason that any god conceived of today which would satisfy Anslem's proposition would have to be far greater far greater than any conceived of by people 1000 years ago, and similarly, a conception of god from 1000 years in the future would be greater than today's conception. My argument still stands.

Alternatively, as human knowledge, through the sciences, has progressed, the attribution to God has diminished.

You are arguing a progression in knowledge, without a concomitant change in the actual physical world. Thus, the world, the resources, are unchanged. What has changed, is human knowledge in how to best utilise these resouces to satisfy human wants. Your argument contains a fallacy.

jog on
duc

 

[ducati916]

disarray

there is nothing that transcends time and space, it is part of the system or it is nothing at all. once again the argument seems to be "it's too big for us to comprehend and outside our scope" which i disagree with.

if it is not measurable, quantifiable, perceptible or able to be conceptualised then it is cannot be a "reality" and so cannot be inhabited by "god".

Notice that God is not defined as a being, rather, as a reality. The reason is that a being connotes a something existing in spatiotemporal understanding, alongside other spatiotemporal somethings. Philosophers who have believed that God exists, and that his existence could be proved, have not intended to assert the existence of a being occupying some particular region of time-space. They have meant to assert, rather, the existence of a reality that is not subject to these categories. Hence, God is not a being, but a reality.


The concept being promulgated above is something that exists independently of ideas concerning it. I have alluded to the poverty in intellectualism, with the ascendancy of the physical sciences. Reason is the final principal of reality.

Language, and it's useage, is both a sign and symptom of the underlying disease underlying reason. Evidence of which is all around us. I will return to this point.

yes they do, because they are the sum of quantifiable processes. memory, imagination, conceptualisation are all ordered by-products of a physical, measurable, systemic stimulus / response procedure (that we are in the process of working out)

You are mixing quantitative in with qualitative. Yes our knowledge of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology are improving. This I agree is quantitative. However, imagination, is a qualitative variable, as is memory. If you take the physical CNS of two individuals, anatomically, they will be the same. The same neurophysiological biochemistry will be present. The output however can [and is] significantly different. This is a qualitative variable.

aren't you making a leap of faith to state that our mind is something transcendent when it is quite clearly just a lump of highly organised, wonderfully engineered, electrically charged, biochemically managed meat? there aren't any ghosts in the machine (and if you think there are the onus is on you to prove it)

Making a leap-of-faith? No. The range of human accomplishment, based on the same anatomy, is testimony to the fact.

but cognition, emotion, taste etc. are, once again, all measurable and quantifiable processes. i think our disconnect and what you and i won't be able to resolve is this simple fact -

Quite the opposite. They are all qualitative, they vary in an individual from moment-to-moment, they are the very antithesis of quantitative.

i see everything as a measurable, quantifiable, systemic procedure. every single thing in the universe can (eventually) be unravelled and reduced to a sum / a system / a procedure. these concepts will all be testable under the scientific method and this "reality of which none greater can be conceived" is something we as a species will be able to understand.

That is becoming quite obvious. Going slightly off-topic, economics, is an example of qualitative action, that has been usurped into econometrics via the Chicago School, look at the mess they made, simply because they didn't [and don't] understand this basic problem - that human action, is not quantitative, that mathematics in economics, is a fatal flaw. Mathematics, is of course, a vital underpinning to physics, and as such, has been held in high esteem.

you (or st. aslem) seem to see something ethereal outside of natural processes, transcending the universe, which can never be tested, proven or disproven. this belief can only be maintained by faith, the absence of data from those who disagree and arguing states of existence that do not, and cannot by definition, exist.

We are arguing that data, empirical knowledge, a posteriori and knowledge apprehended a priori can co-exist. That reason, a priori knowledge, is valid and relevant. That the question of God, falls into a priori reasoning, not, a posteriori.

there is nothing outside spatiotemporal constraints so the very concept itself is meaningless. there's quite a few papers on this floating around, google "god outside spacetime" or something like where people smarter than me argue against this very point st. anslem makes.

Ok, I'll have to come back to you on this issue.

why define this ultimate reality as god rather than an process? do you accept that "god" can be a process? like an ultimate sum or a grand unified theory or something? in which case we're down to questions of definition.

My first impression is yes. I can accept that [although I reserve the right to modify this initial position after having time to ponder the implications] I agree, at this point, we are simply arguing a definition. The further arguments however proceed on this definition being accepted.

says who? saying we will never understand the nature of the universe is merely an opinion and you are still required to prove that our conception will remain limited (by physical, technological, intellectual factors or what have you)

Simply my opinion. I'm not enslaved to this however, and accept that I will qite possibly be totally wrong. My intuition is, that to apprehend God, will require advances in our abilities in other directions, directions that are currently in retrogression.

this is irrelevant to the topic and also an opinion as this "retrogression" may very well be just part of the systemic cycle we are part of. BYO crystal ball of course

Yes, and no. The very idea that the physical sciences, physics in particular, represent mans highest achievements are particularly pervasive, and may well account for many of today's ills. But, I'm sure this topic will re-emerge under good/evil later on at some point as ethics enters into the discussion.

jog on
duc

 

[Sidamo]

You are arguing a progression in knowledge, without a concomitant change in the actual physical world. Thus, the world, the resources, are unchanged. What has changed, is human knowledge in how to best utilise these resouces to satisfy human wants.

Yes, but we're also being asked to imagine/conceive of something, an idea as such, than which nothing greater can be conceived. Therefore the limits to our imagination are very relevant. What science has done is change our ability to conceive greater things. Our imagination has expanded in leaps and bounds and therefore so has our conception of "God".

 

[explod]

Yes, and no. The very idea that the physical sciences, physics in particular, represent mans highest achievements are particularly pervasive, and may well account for many of today's ills. But, I'm sure this topic will re-emerge under good/evil later on at some point as ethics enters into the discussion.

jog on
duc

You are now running with my tendency to generalise here duc, ..."may well account for many of todays ills"... Is that so?

 

[Sidamo]

Wouldn't a God who has done all the things attributed to him without actually existing, be greater than a God who had to actually exist to accomplish the same feats?

 

[ducati916]

Yes, but we're also being asked to imagine/conceive of something, an idea as such, than which nothing greater can be conceived. Therefore the limits to our imagination are very relevant. What science has done is change our ability to conceive greater things. Our imagination has expanded in leaps and bounds and therefore so has our conception of "God".

I actually like this argument. Definitely on the right track as far as providing argument that challenges the specific proposition under discussion. My response is as follows.

Yes science has taken our knowledge further. Therefore I accept that [potentially] our imaginations have also changed, relative to previous era's, thus a change in our ability to conceive.

There is one important difference however: science has moved us forward in the area of the material but not the immaterial. The original definition states: A reality transcending time and space. Thus this reality, likely lacks the material that science studies. As such, the dichotomy of your argument is exposed, and can be rejected as valid.

Most of the arguments, objections, concern themselves with this concept of immateriality. I also noted that the previous thread, had numerous references to this lack of physical evidence, that seemingly made any proofs impossible.

This area of objection needs to be addressed.

jog on
duc

 

[ducati916]

Wouldn't a God who has done all the things attributed to him without actually existing, be greater than a God who had to actually exist to accomplish the same feats?

This objection, is similar to the objection that was posited by Gauanilo, to proposition 3. You are jumping ahead - or, do you accept proposition 1 now?

jog on
duc

 

[ducati916]

You are now running with my tendency to generalise here duc, ..."may well account for many of todays ills"... Is that so?

Indeed I am generalising here, as, I am offering only my opinion. The opinion however has no direct connection to the proposition, thus, is not particularly important one way or another.

jog on
duc

 

[ducati916]

et al

Just to expand further on my previous assertion:

However our minds as distinct from our anatomical brain & CNS, do not [have to] conform to our physical laws.

disarry replied:

yes they do, because they are the sum of quantifiable processes. memory, imagination, conceptualisation are all ordered by-products of a physical, measurable, systemic stimulus / response procedure (that we are in the process of working out)

aren't you making a leap of faith to state that our mind is something transcendent when it is quite clearly just a lump of highly organised, wonderfully engineered, electrically charged, biochemically managed meat? there aren't any ghosts in the machine (and if you think there are the onus is on you to prove it)

To move the argument forward: Searle in 1990 formulated the following arguments:

(A1) "Programs are formal (syntactic)."
A program uses syntax to manipulate symbols and pays no attention the semantics of the symbols. It knows where to put the symbols and how to move them around, but it doesn't know what they stand for or what they mean. For the program, the symbols are just physical objects like any others.


(A2) "Minds have mental contents (semantics)."
Unlike the symbols used by a program, our thoughts have meaning: they represent things and we know what it is they represent.


(A3) "Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics."
This is what the Chinese room argument is intended to prove: the Chinese room has syntax (because there is a man in there moving symbols around). The Chinese room has no semantics (because, according to Searle, there is no one or nothing in the room that understands what the symbols mean). Therefore, having syntax is not enough to generate semantics.
Searle posits that these lead directly to this conclusion:

(C1) Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
This should follow without controversy from the first three: Programs don't have semantics. Programs have only syntax, and syntax is insufficient for semantics. Every mind has semantics. Therefore programs are not minds.

Essentially, the arguments refute the arguments that the brain, anatomy, the hardware, and the neorophysiology, the software are the causation of the mind. This, in turn, begs the question, what is the causation of mind?

jog on
duc

 

[ducati916]

et al

Again, an expansion upon an assertion made earlier:

i see everything as a measurable, quantifiable, systemic procedure. every single thing in the universe can (eventually) be unravelled and reduced to a sum / a system / a procedure. these concepts will all be testable under the scientific method and this "reality of which none greater can be conceived" is something we as a species will be able to understand.

The scientific method. From Kuhn,

Science undergoes periodic "paradigm shifts" instead of progressing in a linear and continuous way

These paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before

Scientists can never divorce their subjective perspective from their work; thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity" - we must account for subjective perspectives as well

Although they used different terminologies, both Kuhn and Michael Polanyi believed that scientists' subjective experiences made science a relativistic discipline. Polanyi lectured on this topic for decades before Kuhn published "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

jog on
duc

 

[ducati916]

et al

Si in summary, the arguments offered as refutation of the first proposition, viz. that the anatomy and physiology of the brain are sufficient explanations in-of-themselves to account for the property described as mind are wholly insufficient.

Second, that the notion of science, far from being progressive and objective, is in point of fact full of disconuities, subjectivity and bias. Thus, do not provide sufficient, nor logical argument, to refute the first proposition.

jog on
duc

 

[Sidamo]

There is one important difference however: science has moved us forward in the area of the material but not the immaterial. The original definition states: A reality transcending time and space. Thus this reality, likely lacks the material that science studies. As such, the dichotomy of your argument is exposed, and can be rejected as valid.

What is existence? Surely a minimal definition is 'presence in reality', and since the only reality that's relevant to us is one bounded by space & time, then 'existence', when used as an attribute by us, would necessarily refer to our reality. Either God has a material presence in our universe, in which case he can be said to 'exist', or he doesn't, in which case he doesn't 'exist', except as an idea or a concept, which is little more than being an imaginary friend.

 

[ducati916]

What is existence? Surely a minimal definition is 'presence in reality', and since the only reality that's relevant to us is one bounded by space & time, then 'existence', when used as an attribute by us, would necessarily refer to our reality. Either God has a material presence in our universe, in which case he can be said to 'exist', or he doesn't, in which case he doesn't 'exist', except as an idea or a concept, which is little more than being an imaginary friend.

Tricky concept, or idea, is existence. Let's take the stance of The Brain in a Vat:

In philosophy, the brain in a vat is an element used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, and meaning.

It is drawn from the idea, common to many science fiction stories, that a mad scientist might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives.

According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the person with the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences without these being related to objects or events in the real world.

So what really is existence? Do we really know? If we do know [as you seem to suggest] how, exactly do we know?

jog on
duc

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

My aunt Gertie in the High Country speaks to God every day.

She has made so many bad decisions in her long life, I doubt, just on her testimony alone, that he exists.

gg

 

[ducati916]

Tricky concept, or idea, is existence. Let's take the stance of The Brain in a Vat:



So what really is existence? Do we really know? If we do know [as you seem to suggest] how, exactly do we know?

jog on
duc

As there seems to be no argument forthcoming on this question, here are some arguments that argue for an existence that is different than the one many would expect.

[edit] Malebranche

Nicolas Malebranche, a student of the Cartesian School of Rationalism, disagreed that if the only things that we know for certain are the ideas within our mind, then the existence of the external world would be dubious and known only indirectly. He declared instead that the real external world is actually God. All activity only appears to occur in the external world. In actuality, it is the activity of God. For Malebranche, we directly know internally the ideas in our mind. Externally, we directly know God's operations. This kind of idealism led to the pantheism of Spinoza.

[edit] Collier

Arthur Collier published the same assertions that were made by Berkeley. However, there seemed to have been no influence between the two contemporary writers. Collier claimed that the represented image of an external object is the only knowable reality. Matter, as a cause of the representative image, is unthinkable and therefore nothing to us. An external world, as absolute matter, unrelated to an observer, does not exist for human perceivers. As an appearance in a mind, the universe cannot exist as it appears if there is no perceiving mind.

Collier was influenced by John Norris's (1701) An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. The idealist statements by Collier were generally dismissed by readers who were not able to reflect on the distinction between a mental idea or image and the object that it represents.

Kant

Immanuel Kant held that the mind shapes the world as we perceive it to take the form of space-and-time. It is said that Kant focused on the idea drawn from British empiricism (and its philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) that all we can know is the mental impressions, or phenomena, that an outside world, which may or may not exist independently, creates in our minds; our minds can never perceive that outside world directly. Kant made the distinction between things as they appear to an observer and things in themselves, "... that is, things considered without regard to whether and how they may be given to us ...

jog on
duc

 

[Sidamo]

So what really is existence? Do we really know? If we do know [as you seem to suggest] how, exactly do we know?

What I do know is that if we don't know what our own existence is, we sure as hell don't need to worry about defining the existence of a god.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the same God. Using Wikipedia as a source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations - feel free to provide another if you think WP is bogus), that accounts for about 50% of the global population. Now, I'd suggest that the vast majority of those people, if quizzed on their conception of God, would mention a personal God, who listens to their prayers, possibly intercedes in daily life on their behalf, etc. etc. That's the God in question.

The problem with the alleyway we're heading down is that we're now into all this rubbish about how you define existence, are we all hooked up to a Matrix-style computer feeding us inputs etc. etc. The end result of that, if indeed we ever get as far as accepting Anslem's proposition one, is that the resulting definition of a 'god' will be so loose, and subject to so many qualifications and codicils that it will bear no relation to anything that the man on the street would recognise as 'god'.

 

[ducati916]

What I do know is that if we don't know what our own existence is, we sure as hell don't need to worry about defining the existence of a god.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the same God. Using Wikipedia as a source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations - feel free to provide another if you think WP is bogus), that accounts for about 50% of the global population. Now, I'd suggest that the vast majority of those people, if quizzed on their conception of God, would mention a personal God, who listens to their prayers, possibly intercedes in daily life on their behalf, etc. etc. That's the God in question.

The problem with the alleyway we're heading down is that we're now into all this rubbish about how you define existence, are we all hooked up to a Matrix-style computer feeding us inputs etc. etc. The end result of that, if indeed we ever get as far as accepting Anslem's proposition one, is that the resulting definition of a 'god' will be so loose, and subject to so many qualifications and codicils that it will bear no relation to anything that the man on the street would recognise as 'god'.

But I think we can safely surmise from the previous thread, no-one is particularly interested in what the average man believes or doesn't believe. The Bible is just some fairy story as far as I am concerned.

What does interest me is whether those who have given serious thought to the matter, have been able to quell the arguments against the existence of God in a rational and logical way.

As the arguments against the first proposition are now petering out - it's time to vote.

jog on
duc

 

[bullsvsbears]

To ducati916

Bible a fairy tale????What do you base this assumption on???

Doesn't it mean anything to you that a book that was completed some two thousand years ago is still the most read book on the planet? This is a book that has not gone out of fashion because it was inspired by a higher power and not by flawed human intelligence.

Science has come a long way in many ways but you only have to look at the forever changing conclusions on simple things like when to introduce nuts/eggs to infants and you should come to the realisation that science/ human intelligence has no real hope in answering more complex questions like whether God exists.

God is no fairy tale, he is very real but in our human attempt to appear clever we have in fact become fools my friend.

 

[tech/a]

The human race is arrogant.
It believes it knows how and why we are in existence.
The human concept of a god.

With the age of the universe being 13.75 Billion Years
and the existence of mankind 6million years
we think we know that there has to be a god!!

Frankly we have not advanced enough to believe let alone conceive any other concept--- even if it is staring us right in our face---evolution.

If there had been NO meteor strike to wipe out dinosaurs then there would STILL be dinosaurs and humans would not be on this planet and no God.

Sadly we have invented our own explanation of existence through God in its infinite forms.
Less than 2000 years ago we only had Sun/Rain/Sea and Fire gods,as we became more "intelligent" we needed more sophisticated "gods" so we invented them through story telling---The bible is told through 12 disciples.
We'd look pretty stupid worshipping Sun gods today!!!

In the next 2000 years we are sure to find/discover/create/introduce a few "gods" to add to those already worshipped to fit with our Sophistication as those we worship now become less attractive to man's capacity to understand his place.

(Which is in my view is a fluke in nature).

 

[bullsvsbears]

So we have some great falling rock to thank for our existence?
Wow very sophisticated thinking....

As I said in my previous post... How can we deduct that God doesn't exist if we can't answer basic questions such as when to introduce a simple nut or an egg to an infant's diet???

After so called billions of years of evolution humanity really hasn't made great inroads.