God

Tillerman88 wrote: ^hell yeah absolutely nothing

Nothing and everything..

Being and non being..

He is many He is One

He is many He is None

I know, the concept of a Nameless Absolute is unfathomable by our human intellect.  However, God can be perceived by the little mind as a triune nature consisting of:

Consciousness

Existence

Bliss (Love perfected)

YESESIS wrote: I definitely believe in God and have even been shown His existence(not that I think anyone on here will believe that).

Some of us might, but slightly more detail would be required, perhaps?

Man With Hat wrote: you rang?

condor wrote: What does the word god mean to you??

I don't have a grudge against religion but I don't understand how the concept of 'God' even came about, I have as far as I have noticed no spirituality in me and I really don't see why it wouldn't just make sense that we came from natural chaos and only look for meaning because that's a useful way of thinking for our survival, and that doesn't mean it has any use on a metaphysical level. The too-much-of-a-coincidence argument bothers me because of that, it's reverse logic; if you look at every possible reality, and it doesn't even have to be a real multiverse, just a hypothetical one, most would be pretty empty, to our 'meaning' at least, and the rare ones where conscious thought does take form will all have the conscious thinkers realize how much of a coincidence it is that they exist, while all being created at random.

^ Good point about nothingness and every possible reality, tweeel, I was going to touch on the same.

YESESIS wrote: Logan wrote: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That watchmaker analogy (known as a teleological argument or argument from design) offers a very poor analogy and I don't think many logical people would be swayed by it unless they were looking to be and prepared to be swayed by it. Especially if the aliens they had had had some sort of parallel technology (rather than, say bio-tech, which I'll leave the possible implications out for now), then the aliens would very easily recognise the watch to be a mechanism/ artifact with a designer rather than of natural causes. The brain's development, on the other hand, being organic/ biological can be explained by natural evolution (technology vs. biology). If the brain is a trillion times more complex than a watch, and you think that because the watch required a more complex designer than itself (which it did), then wouldn't the designer of the human brain also be more complex than the human, and so by following the argument, wouldn't the designer being much more complex than the human require another designer and so on (ad finitum -- infinite regress)? Linked is the first cause argument, which is a Philosophy 101 thing. if the comsos required a designer, what was required to create God?   The counterargument from theists often being God always is and always was, or one could say that God exists outside of time and space and outside this universe across the multiverse and other planes of existence do not need to operate according to the laws of our universe. Perhaps we are bio-technology designed by aliens, who knows? Or computer simulations? Anyway, I don't want to negate your experience, but I do believe that it says far more about your own psychology, biases and persuadability than the existence of God. I once heard a voice seemingly not my own in my head which I equated with God which said, "You must die before you live". A Christian friend was excited when I told her and said that was a true sign from God that I should become born again. I say it was a neurological event. Don't know if you've seen this, but this banana one is amusing: In your video Kirk Cameron talks about the human eye.. Which happens to be a great example of the awesome power of our brains. https://www.livescience.com/3919-human-eye-works.html - The last sentence under the section "The retina"  But of course no intelligent design went into this, it.. it developed by random chance. Yeah that's the ticket, that has to be it. Actually, why does ANYTHING exist at all? Shouldn't there just be absolute nothingness... forever!? Wouldn't that make the most sense? Oh well, maybe the 'Row Your Boat' song had it right all along.

I'm agnostic on the matter, but I don't think that intelligent design is a necessary assumption to explain us or the cosmos. If our complexity requires an intelligent designer, might not that intelligent designer also have needed another intelligent designer to become into being and so and so on in an infinite regression?

I don't know of evolutionary biologists think that it is just random chance (incidentally, in a sense being a determinist I believe in less chance than most, although that mainly come up in free will arguments). Natural selection supports the survival of mutations that provide an advantage -- mutations may be chance in a sense, especially if one considers chaos theory, but mutations that are not advantageous are less likely to be passed on (for reasons that should be quite obvious).   So it's not just some accident that the eye developed how it has. Theories of evolution, by the way, have "evolved" a lot since Darwin made that statement. As for the banana analogy, bananas were not always shaped that way -- the modern banana is a hybrid developed through cultivation by man.

If one accepts the mutliverse, then yes there can be universes without matter or energy, but to say to absolutely nothing implies even a lack of space (no an emety void that goe on forever, but not even a void, total non-existence). There's an interesting hypothesis, by the way, that before our universe came into being (cosmic inflation) there was literally nothing (no universe where ours exists), not even space, and that early on our universe was spatially minute. By the way, if only nothingness existed nothing would make sense becaue nothing could make sene of anything.

Which reminds me of an old "mutton is better than heaven" joke my dad told me (quite irrelevant, but has nostalgic value for me):

Mutton is better than Heaven because nothing is better than Heaven and a leg of mutton is better than nothing.

On another note: I'd think it less presumptuous to believe in some vague Spinoza-like conception of god than a belief in a personal God that answers prayer, which requires yet more assumptions. I wonder if you are also an atheist when it comes to other conceptions of God? Do you believe in Zeus, for instance? Not all atheists deny the possibility of God and one could even be a deistic atheist because theism commonly implies a personal god. Many religious people buy into a whole lot of mythology (mythology that conflicts with other mythologies and conceptions of God or gods). In the video Cameron says it takes more faith to be an atheist (atheist simply mean without theism), and that is a bogus claim. Agnosticism is a form of atheism, and not all atheists are hard atheists that claim that there can be no God, it simply says a lack of belief in God. The atheist sees a lack of evidence to assume that God exists, the theist commonly claims that the atheist is blind to the evidence. Knowing something that can not be proved requires more faith than not knowing. Furthermore, it requires more faith to believe in a specific God and follow a particular faith than believe in vaguer conceptions of god. Religious people commonly not only believe in God, but they think that they know what God wants of us and follow texts that claim to know God's will. Theism requires more assumptions than atheism, and hard atheism is more of a belief system than soft atheism (agnostic atheism) as it entails a belief in the non-existence of God. I used to call myself an agnostic but that implies that we cannot know and never can know if God exists. I doubt that there is a God, but I don't know (there may be out there in the multiverse, if the multiverse exists, and we might have been created by some superior intelligence, our universe could be some cosmic experiment).

Edited by Logan - October 28 2017 at 10:31

Edited by YESESIS - October 28 2017 at 19:57