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Originally written by The Creator:

You argue he was hallucinating - after all, he was under a lot of stress. I prefer the more straightforward explanation.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

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Originally written by SkeleTony:
Your charge that I am "closed minded", typical as it is, is a groundless assertion you do not bother to substantiate.

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I thought it was obvious. The description in my post above is the most reasonable (and until fairly recently, most widely accepted) idea of a god, and it logically followed from a number of posts that had already been made, but you had ruled it out without discussion.

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The only way that you can deny the possibility of something without being closed-minded is to define exactly what that something is and then demonstrate why any version of it is completely impossible. You have not done that for divine beings yet.

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You seem to have drawn the wrong conclusion from this, though. Science is inherently agnostic, not atheistic: science can only disbelieve in something if there's evidence against it.

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Philosophy can disbelieve in something without evidence, but that's something else again.

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Occam's Razor does not tell us what is true in the absence of evidence; it merely tells us what our working assumptions ought to be in the absence of evidence.

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God is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Science neither believes nor disbelieves in such things.

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The concept you present above is too sketchy and ambiguous to be of any use to me in evaluating it for consistency and such.

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So are you saying that it's possible?

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That's a normal definition of a god, you know.

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That's the idea that you'd have to deal with if you wanted to say that there cannot possibly be gods of any kind, because that fits well within the definition.

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Sentience is a property emergent from brained entities.

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You can't possibly know that with certainty.

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That's a statement that I'm not willing to accept. The only sentience that we know of right now emerges from brain activity, but to say that this is the only possible sentience is the epitome of the mistake that you have been accused of earlier, thinking that what we know now is all that there is to know.

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Originally written by The Creator:

Perhaps I chose my words poorly. I suppose that we'd all agree that the most straightforward explanation is the most likely and simply disagree on which is the most straightforward.

*i, if that were the one and only such occurance, I'd probably agree with you. Thing is, there are a tremendous number of things that most Christians would accept as miracles that I know of. They could all be explained away in extreme ways, with hallucinations, lying, set ups and so forth.

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But the likelihood of that seems so small to me that it's much easier to believe that there's at least a fair bit of truth in them.

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I guess I'm just curious to see at what point people would accept that divine/spiritual intervention is more likely than not.

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See what I mean? Hand models adn runway models are both models but clearly the guy in the above analogy is fishing for a non-applicable example to rationalize a dissenting view.

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But I never defined "brain" as "thought". I defined mind as thought and emergent from the physical brain.

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I am not sure what you are getting at here. I have never had any direct experience with anyone's thoughts and I think such a thing is probably impossible.

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See this I disagree with completely. I know that the reason "Red" appears as it does to me is because of a particular configuration/organization of my physicological bits and pieces. It is the same as my knowledge that my car can make a lot of noise because my muffler is attached and working(or not) a certain way. If I come upon another car that has the same exact makeup with the same muffler attached in the same way, the reasonable inference is that it too(barring any "defects"/deviance in the construction) will make similar noise.

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There are no humans with non-human eyes/brains. If there were then I would think they might possibly be seeing what I see as "green" on a stop sign, instead of "red".

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What is an "intelligent" but "non-sentient" being?!? I submit that that is another impossible thing but I concede that a redefinition of "intelligence" will allow one a proverbial 'escape hatch' from that one.

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We could but if my suspicions are correct, you will simply define "experience" in such a way that we are stuck in the same dillemma anyway.
In other words "subjective experince" is no where near the same thing as an OBJECTIVE one. That is to say that my imagining what it is like to be hit by a car is not the same thing as being hit by a car while crossing the street. The former can only be recounted as anecdote while the latter can be observed concurrently by a whole bunch of people.

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See I don't think that "caused" is right the way you are using it above. There is not really a single "cause" of my perception but rather a few different components: The actual object I am percieving and my sensory organs and brain matter.

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Furthermore, you are once again implying things with a dependent existence are equivalent of things which independently exist.

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In essence saying that since the thought in my head is "caused" by my brain, thoughts are existent in the same way that trees, caused by climatological conditions, "exist".

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If this is what you are saying then I disagree wholeheartedly because trees do not reuire my thinking about them to exist adn if you are NOT thinking abouyt them, you can still run into one adn break your nose.

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What is unscientific is assuming that what he reporeted anecdotally(re: that he had a dream in which the structure of benzene came to him) happened just as he reported but that is another issue. YES it is unscientific to rely on dreams in such a way but so what? If I am inspired to invent a better sugar-free beverage than Diet Soda because of a daydream or hallucination I had then how I go about inventing said beverage will be where the scientific process occurs. The "inspiration" part is rather inconsequential(or maybe "incidental" would be a better word) to the whole matter of how science works.

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(None of the individual components of science require science as a whole in order to take place, anyway.)[/qb]

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What is THAT supposed to mean(not agreeing or disagreeing...I simply cannot make sense of what you said there)?

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Probably right here but hypotheses really don't even require SCIENCE!

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THat's not what I was arguing. Let's say that I came here boldly proclaiming, in all of my closed-minded furor, that girls who wanted to be working 'models' had to be of a certain height adn weight range in addition to having appealing facial features/bone structure by the general consensus of the modeling community and society in general.
Now along comes someone who says "Hey! My friend does hand modeling for those Palmoloive dish soap commercials adn she is overweight adn short!"

See what I mean? Hand models adn runway models are both models but clearly the guy in the above analogy is fishing for a non-applicable example to rationalize a dissenting view.

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See "model" example above. Calling economics "science" in this discussion is like invoking someone with an honorary doctorate(re:Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.) in a discussion about medical malpractice or something.

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(By the way, no theory is strictly falsifiable if you don't want it to be anyway; you can explain away any data you like.)

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???

Again, what is your point here? That if someone wanted to they could plug their fingers in therir ears and chant :"BLAH BLAH, I can't hear you because superstring theory works LA LA LA!"? WHat does that have to do with proving grounds for falsification?!?

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Talk to a quantum physicist some time. It's mostly in biology that you tend to meet the hardline reductionists these days.

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I have spoken with people who invoke QP/QM to support ridiculous positions but I am not sure I have ever actually discussed anything with a quantum physicist. Much of what they would have to say would go over my head anyway as I and math are old enemies.

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Just that. I say that thought is an emergent property of brains and does not exsit sans brains(has no independent existence) adn of this I am certain. I am also certain that logically inconsistent gods(and otehr entities) do not exist. I do not believe it is possible I am wrong on this but I also did not believe my fellow Americans would ever go back to "boy bands" after New Kids on the Block were finally eradicated by my local music scene.
In all seriousness though, your only recourse here is to show me a thought that exists without a brain, or a round square or a God. Until then, I cannot be called "closed minded"(as some have) for saying that which is impossible, is in fact impossible.

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But I don't think there are any such circumstances. Doesn't mean I am entrenched or something so that I could not see that I was wrong if I were in fact wrong. No human can see how a round square could exist. You can speculate that this is because we lack some capability or something but that argument supports any claim no matter how ridiculous or nonsensical(e.g. I can claim that I gave birth to my mother, rather than the reverse adn say that this makes sense if only we had the capacity to understand that "mother" meant "child of" rather than "parent of").

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If there were no minds, there'd be nobody to know that brains existed, and therefore it'd be meaningless to say that they existed.

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If there were no brains, there would be no minds and therefore no one to say that minds existed.

Your move.

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:Boggle: How did you go from the quasi-zen "What is meaning?" thing to...?! Nevermind. Let's get back on track here. "Meaning" is often, if not always subjective I think we both agree. So is your bone of contention with me over my definitions and this is all just semantic quibbling? Is it not so much that you think a round shaped square might exist but rather that you should be able to redefine "square" as being "round"?

Well, knock yourself out then. How do you expect to function in our world though?

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Whoa. I think that linking genetic inheritance with self-awareness is a very long bow to draw indeed; it almost seems like a kind of biological mysticism.

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You don't agree that genetics play a role in determining are personalities, intellect and such?

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As for experiences, if you're a strict materialist, surely you're committed to the idea that any knowledge or experiences must be stored in some physical form, and therefore be measurable and replicable in principle.

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Not sure what you are getting at there. If you are saying that "ideas" and such should have a phsyical existence themselves then no, materialists would disagree. If you are saying that ideas must, according to materialism, have a real-world reference, then I would tentatively agree because I am unaware of any idea in history which did not. Even gods and dragons are imagined from a human frame of reference.

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The most obvious example of a scientist with religious beliefs is Einstein, as you undoubtedly know, but I'm sure there are many others.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

I am giving you a third concept of a "god": a powerful, invisible being. That's a god in the traditional sense, the way the ancient Greeks, Romans, Hindus, and many others thought of a god.

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If you want further definition of what I mean, I refer you to those forms of religion for their definitions of gods.

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In order to completely discount divinity, you must provide some sort of reason why that kind of god cannot not exist.

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Done that. You just aren't getting what I am saying. A transcendent deity cannot exist because the very definition of "beyond our reality and therefore not constrained by the limitations inherent in our universe" excludes such a thing being part of our reality and universe.

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Otherwise you can only say that an all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing God doesn't seem logically possible, but gods could exist, and while they are not necessarily the most likely explanations of events — nor the most useful — they are possible.

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I disagree and I do not even bother much tackling traditional Abrahamic notions of the tri-omni God anymore. It is old hat and most theologians I encounter have conceded that battle by now.

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It is not up to me to define an unlimited number of possible existential claims that can be made and refute them. Define "God" adn tehn we will talk about it.

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I would've thought that the onus was on you, because you're trying to disprove a commonly held (or at least controversial).

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One of the main reasons I stayed away from strong atheism for years was because of the commonly held notion(which I accepted) that saying "God does not exist" is a positive assertion which entails the burden of proof. I no longer believe that is so. Even strong atheism is a negative response to a positive claim(that "God exists") adn when you factor in the law of non-contradiction argument, strong atheism is clearly NOT a positive assertion which demands prrof. It is still a negative and you cannot prove a negative. I am saying that not only do I lack gods, but the universe also lacks gods because the concept is counter-logical. If someone told you your house was on fire and not burning or your dog had been hit by a car was inside sleeping, you would dismiss the claims as nonsense.

But somehow "God" gets a hall pass to roam the corridors of absurdity.

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In order to do that, you would have to define your term and then refute it.

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YOU have said that God may exist. I asked you to define "God" because otherwise you might as well have said "The Snozzwoggler may exist." It is YOUR assertion, not mine. You define it otehrwise I have no idea what we are discussing.

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I claim that your definition of "God" above is terrible and does fit the normal usage of the word.

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My definition(such as it is) fits 99% of the Gods still around today. The reason why so many Gods are described as "transcendent" or "beyond time, space and the physical universe" is because, as usual, they do not see how big the whole is they are digging. They mean to dig an escape tunnel to evade the watchmen of reason but they do not stop digging until they hit magma and when they look up, there are those watchmen, shaking their heads in bemused resignation.

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A god can just be a powerful, invisible, intelligent being — the humanoid intelligence is what distinguishes it from any sort of natural phenomena.

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If it has human intelligence then it has a brain. If you claim that God can run really fast then this means it has physical legs, unless you are defining 'run' as something else like 'floating' or teleporting.

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[b]If science were necessarily atheistic, then why have the best scientists often been religious?

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Even though Stareye was all over this one I will add that not only was Einstein religious(he called it "Cosmic religious feeling" but he was also defniately an atheist. He identified as believing in a Spinozan God-concept in polite company. Baruch Spinoza was a sort of father of pantheism but whereas SPinoza's pantheism was sort of ambiguous about whether "God" was merely a synonym for "universe" or whether God was an independent entity, modern pantehism(which started with Einstein) was much less so.

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Originally written by Albert Einstein:
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events.

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- Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941

The above quote is one of MANY in which he denounces or dismisses the transcendent and supernatural. It is a clear endorsement of naturalism.

Einstein was a product of his times. Back then "atheist" was a dirty word that was commoinly thought to mean someone with sever character flaws, irrationally stubborn and hateful towards the religious or God. Given that characterization it is no wonder he did not come out and use the word, instead saying much the same thing with less economical and more eloquent prose. You have to read AROUND his dismissal of "personal gods" to see that he also dismissed every quality attributed to ANY transcendent god-concept. Too often, theists will dwell on the "Personal God" portion and conclude that this must mean he accepted some less personal god-concept.
Einstein was not "without religion" but he WAS "without gods". "God" was a metaphor for "nature" or "universe".

Currently some 60% of all NAS scientists are atheist. That is including scientists from ALL fields imaginable. When you narrow it down to the "hard sciences" of Astrophysics, biology, geology etc., the number grows dramatically and if you count ONLY the biologists, less than 5% of those are theists of any sort and of those who are, most are deists, fideists and theistic pantheists.

The more you know about how the universe works, the less apt you are to have god-beliefs.

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Let me draw an analogy. One person looks at a flower and says, "It's beautiful." Another person looks at it and says, "No, it's not." Does science have any interest in this situation or ability to render judgment on which one is right?

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False analogy. Neither of them CAN BE "right". It is impossible to assign an objective "TRUE"/"FALSE" condition to such a subjective evaluation.

"God exists"("existence" being employed in teh same usage as one says "Trees exist") is a whole different animal. When you say "God exists" you are making a fundemental claim about the nature of reality and THAT is the domain of science!

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Obviously not. But why? The critical point here is that no experiments can be done that would demonstrate the truth or falsity of either claim.

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Nope. THe default status of an existential claim which does not follow from rules of inference is "FALSE" until you show otherwise. If you say "God exists", the scientist asks "What is "God" and where does it exist?". Eventually you must provide mechanisms and such adn tell what God is made of and therefore how you are able to discern/infer his existence. IF you say "He is made of 'spirit'" then the onus is upon you to cough up some "spirit" so that scientists can get to developing a "Spiritometer" to track down God. If you cannot give us some "spirit" then your claim is either false or not worth considering for it's truth-status.

If God is an unfalsifiable hypothesis then that ends the debate right there. It's not "Brilling in the Slithey Toaves.". It is not even a 40% chance of "brilling". Brilling, slithey and toaves are not words. It is complete nonsense.(the above borrowed from Charles Fiterman's B-Net defenses of materialism and science).

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Does science then indicate that the flower is not beautiful? No, science doesn't suggest an answer one way or another, because no data can be gathered.

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If NO DATA CAN BE GATHERED for something with an alleged independent existence, then what does that tell us about the claim? There is no possibility of an elephant being in my trunk because if an elephant were in my trunk and I had reason to say this was so, then there would be measurable effects that indicate this. It is not that my 'Trunk elephant detector' is on the fritz if I can find no warping or damage to my trunk. It is because the elephant in question does not exist.

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Similarly, no data can be gathered on "gods" at this point. Does science then render the judgment that gods can't exist?

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No but again, this is a strawman adn I am not sure how I got haranged into playing Devil's advocate on this one. Science is atheistic in that it lacks gods in the same way that a couch is atheistic. Doesn't mean that the person sitting on the couch or doing science must be an atheist and especially not a "strong atheist".

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[b]I know what your objection is going to be: the description of the flower is a qualitative one, whereas the existence of a being is a quantitative one (a binary, where 0 is non-existence and 1 is existence). I would suggest, though, that this difference is not the crucial point; rather, the similar lack of ability to test is important.

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I could not disagree more! You are employing and advocating the old "bat-and-switch" scam with words. it does not logically follow that if I can find a Matisse painting attractive, God must be possible to exist in the same sense that the tree outside my window does.

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[/qb]The same "definition" as in the previous sentence: the definition (by standard usage) of the word "god."[/qb]

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That's a statement that I'm not willing to accept. The only sentience that we know of right now emerges from brain activity, but to say that this is the only possible sentience is the epitome of the mistake that you have been accused of earlier, thinking that what we know now is all that there is to know.

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I never said(or thought) such a thing. AGAIN, this is a strawman.

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That is exactly what you said. You said, "T[h]e only grounds I would bother contesting your hypothetical god is if you are saying it is 'wise' but has no physical brain. Sentience is a property emergent from brained entities. Something cannot have brain functions and lack a brain."

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If "Sentience is a property emergent from brained entities" doesn't obviously indicate "The only possible sentience emerges from brain activity," then what on earth does it mean?

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Let me summarize my objections so that we don't get bogged down in details. You have claimed, from a number of different branches of thought, that no gods exist. (If this is not your claim, you may wish to state explicitly what you're arguing before you scream "STRAWMAN!!11" hysterically.)

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You have used logic and science to try to back up your claim. I argue that science has nothing to say on the matter either way, and logic doesn't disprove the existence of gods by the normal definition, despite pointing out some contradictions in the specific case of one popular kind of god, the second kind of god in your examples above.

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Originally written by PoD person:

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See what I mean? Hand models adn runway models are both models but clearly the guy in the above analogy is fishing for a non-applicable example to rationalize a dissenting view.

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Enter Wile E. Coyote and the Smurfs . . .

Only kidding; however, if someone continually compares an important, gravely serious cornerstone of your belief system to cartoon characters, basically just for effect, it can grow irksome in the extreme.

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God is a common name often given to gods just as Dog is a common name often given to dogs. It is not a special case. You cannot define God anymore than you can define Fred.

There is a vague common notion of what the word means in this forum. If you have some special meaning such as "The Floogle predefining all Bugles under but not including kumquats." your meaning is something else enterely and your version of God may well exist or not exist or be nonsense. Most gods are small statues and exist. The common meaning is something close to the Christian God.

God must exist in some sense or we couldn't be discussing him. I think the sense in which he exists is as a persistant made up thing, a relative of Superman and Wile E. Coyote. If so I don't have to prove what he isn't because it's so very plain what he is.

He is a member of a large class of highly similar beings who systematically violate physical law in steriotyped ways. As the name implies and every Bible admits God is a god. This is a very large problem. Anything that violates physical law is very likely a myth. If I have to choose between some god and ordinary physical reality, the real world is going to win.

And God claims exclusivity. If God exists; Zeus, Quetzalchoatal, etc. do not and vice versa. Any argument for God must have an addendum demonstrating why it isn't an argument for Huitzelpolchitli instead.

In the case of Pascal's wager it must demonstrate why it isn't an argument for worshiping Kim Jong Il who seems a far better target for an argument based on bribes and terror. In the case of moral arguments nature worship must be eliminated and it seems a far better target for an argument based on benefiting the world.

Like Superman, God has a history, descriptions of him change over time. Like Superman he is the product of known processes operating for known reasons at known times.

Like Superman God has a copyright. Wherever you see Superman you see the claim that DC comics or some such corporate entity owns him. If he was real they wouldn't dare. Superman would leave them stranded on the dark side of the moon.

God is far greater than Superman but every religion claims a copyrite. There is no god but God and the nasty little man with pointed teeth is his prophet. God let his only son die under torture to avenge his own anger against a man and woman four thousand years dead.

Like Wile E. Coyote God's motives are mysterious if you think him real but easy and obvious if you consider what he really is. Why does Wile E. buy a heat seeking missile and not food? Because it's funny and the point of Wile E. Coyote is to be funny. Why does God demand belief, because belief supports a priest class and the point of gods is to support priests. Why does God allow a tsunami to kill so many harmless people, dogs, goats and even beetles. Because God is a made up thing and made up things have no power over earthquakes.

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On the other hand, I believe that your "disproof" of a Transcendent God is seriously flawed. By the same logic you use, string theory and its eleven dimensions are impossible.

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Also, it relies on the assumption that God has not intervened in the realm which we can perceive, and the Creator and I would obviously dispute that.

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You also insist on considering the concept physically, as opposed to metaphysically.
Science and Logic can, with time, provide an infinite amount of answers concerning the laws of the universe, but when asked "Why?" the laws are a certain way, it can point only to other laws.

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e.g. Atoms act a certain way because their particles act a certain way, and their particles act that way because they are composed of quarks and gluons, which in turn act a certain way. Somewhere along this chain of reasoning, however, we run into a wall. Science can define the reasons for phenomena with ever-increasing accuracy, but where it fails is defining the reason(s) for that/those reason(s).

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When one traipses along through such meta-science (although the word science does not apply at all here, sans the existence of any sort of Scientific Method), one finds that Occam's Razor, which you feel compelled to invoke to disprove instances of supernatural intervention, is actually on one's side. The simplest reason for all the various reasons defined by science is the existence of a God. I believe in God because "That's just the way things are," is simply not adequate explanation for me.

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