Good luck TJ, I hope you can crack his thick skull. Cap is I am sure a nice guy, but his delusion really has a firm grip on him. I still have hope for him though. I think there are some real doubts in his head that keep him here that he is unaware of or ignoring.

I've done my best to keep repeating the glaring elephant in the room he is ignoring. Maybe you can give him that extra push he needs to face reality.

 

Brian37 wrote:

Good luck TJ, I hope you can crack his thick skull. Cap is I am sure a nice guy, but his delusion really has a firm grip on him. I still have hope for him though. I think there are some real doubts in his head that keep him here that he is unaware of or ignoring.

I've done my best to keep repeating the glaring elephant in the room he is ignoring. Maybe you can give him that extra push he needs to face reality.

 

no one told Brian that his 'glaring elephant' in the room is a pocket sized figurine.... made of straw.

c'mon, if it's so obvious, then stop with the excuses and show me.  Seriously.

TGBaker wrote:

I set up a discussion post for us in Atheists vs Theists. I hope to pull an elephant out of my hat though there is not much room for him. How do you eat a whole elephant. You can. But only a little at a time.

 

yea, that statement was more for Brian who has been taking the ignorant theist approach with me in hopes that I would just accept his belief out of redundancy and not reasoning.  I'm looking forward to our discussions

Brian37 wrote:

You have as much evidence for your pet god as there is for Thor or pink unicorns.

yea... OH... except for the millions of eye witness accounts of God through the years...

Brian37 wrote:

Ignorance is claiming an invisible friend without a lick of evidence for such. I will keep repeating that because it frustrates you to have that mirror in your face.

that's basically what you're doing... I think you're repeating because you don't have a lick of reasoning and it frustrates you.

Brian37 wrote:

NO ONE, not you, not any human by any label in human history, since the first deity was invented, has had, nor will ever have any lick of evidence for their non-material entities.

At least not the evidences you're looking for...e .g. God DNA and Godsperm.... which never in history was ever claimed to have existed and would not logicaly exist physically like you would like it to.

Brian37 wrote:

You start with a naked assertion, based on popular myth, written in by a scientifically uneducated society, and you are damned right I am going to keep pointing that out.

that's great, but what's your excuse for those scientifically educated people who claim to have discovered God through their studies?  Wait, they're still uneducated right?

Brian37 wrote:

Don't get upset with me because you cant prove the existence of your magical sky daddy.

i'm not upset at all.  I just think it's funny that you're using the same excuses and approach as the "scientifically uneducated society" and yet think you're smarter than them

Brian37 wrote:

Mimic our arguments all you want, you still have NOTHING.

NOTHING!  that you want to discuss anyway.

Brian37 wrote:

You, "My invisible friend is real"

Me, "So you claim, so has every other deity believer in human history by every label, so what".

and that has been your argument from day 1

Brian37 wrote:

You have as much evidence for your pet god as there is for Thor or pink unicorns.

yea... OH... except for the millions of eye witness accounts of God through the years... Oh and Jesus who is known to have existed historically... though i guess you could argue whether he was just a radical or actually God's son.  Not to mention personal accounts of the work at hand and the statistical reasoning... and Qantum Physics...and archeology... the complexity of the physical makeup of living beings... should I go on?

Wait... this is all apparently over your head.. you're not able to discuss these topics... too complicated for a discussion you know you're right in huh.

Brian37 wrote:

You merely like the idea of having a super hero. You merely don't want to face that that is really all there is to ANY deity belief.

Right, just like Sapient, the creator only "likes the idea" that god does not exist.  and he just "doesn't want to face that God is reality" right?  or could it be that we both are looking for the same thing for different sides?  I've said it many times to you... maybe bringing his name in might click with you because I am asking of you the same thing he's asking... reasoning really, not so much the evidence, just reasoning behind your conclusion

Brian37 wrote:

If anyone had any evidence, other than a history of tradition or myth, for any alleged being claimed in human history, science would have confirmed it by now.

not necessarily.  Evidences for many theories aren't confirmed... that's why they're theories.  Science confirms only what we can tangebly test and retest using physical and observable means.  The problem with testing God is what would the constant be?  It'd be like testing my ability to answer 100 math problems... if I choose to refuse the test, can you confirm my abilities?

Brian37 wrote:

What humans have proven, like you here now, are that they are capable of believing bullshit because the idea sounds really appealing to them.

you have been a great example of that

Brian37 wrote:

Your claims are not special, your pet god fiction you falsely believe to be fact, is not special.

Same with yours... now we agree that we are both average people.  I feel better now

Brian37 wrote:

WHEN, and I won't hold my breath waiting,.......when you can pony up with universal independently falsifiable evidence like you can for DNA, for your pet god, then you will have something. I will give you the Nobel Prize myself in front of the United Nations. You know you are wasting your time, otherwise you'd be in a lab, instead of making excuses here for why you delude yourself into believing in non-material magical invisible super brains.

WHEN, and I won't hold my breath waiting.... when you can pony up with reasoning and rational conclusions with reference to study for your conclusions for your claim that God does not exist then you will have something.   I will then concede to the fact that I was wrong and will spread the word to all those who are still believers in my realm.  If your conclusions are indeed reasonable and rational, this will spread like wildfire.  

Brian37 wrote:

If I didn't have hope for you I wouldn't be wasting my time repeating myself. You don't want to see that the person you are really fighting is yourself, not us.

I'm not fighting.  I'm just trying to make you see that your "repetitive approach" is the same approach religious sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholics among others use to brainwash their followers.  Why should I consider you any different than them?  So far all you've proven to me is that you want me to buy into your ideals just as any other sect would.

Brian37 wrote:

I KNOW you think your god is real, but what is really going on is that you want this god to be real so badly you look for reasons to justify it, that is not evidence, that is apology. That is what Muslims do and Jews do and Hindus do. They look for excuses to believe, not testable evidence.

and yet it's evidences I looked for in order to believe in the first place... so how is it possible that I believe now if when I was looking for evidences there was none?  

 

 

 

 

I just saw Thor. Does that count as evidence ?

(Pretty good movie. The guy who plays Loki nails it. And I totally didn't mind a black Heimdall )

Cap, I think you and Brian are hung up on the God DNA thing.

Let's start smaller - you claim that a being that is outside nature (that you and others call God) interacts with the natural world. Things that affect the natural world leave some sort of trace in that world. The being you call God seems to be an exception to this because there is no evidence of any interaction you claim he has made.

I'm asking why (Brian is also - he's just a little more direct). Up to this point, the only answer you've come up with is "You just don't understand metaphysics".

Non sequiturs are responses to question. they're not answers.

This is the real problem that goes back to Decartes and his dualism.   How can one interact with another.  As a medium you would need a third substance and for those two more ad infinitum.  That is why monism is the norm. If you posit a monism then you perhaps can work with a property dualism where a property of one substance interacts with that of another within the monism. This really moves away from dualism to pantheism or panentheism.  Typically Being is equated with potentiality or the source that set the boundary condition of existence which is simply the actualization of the Being as potentiality. Secondly to personify this Being. It is equated with Consciousness and nothingness. The eguating of Being and Nothingness allows for it to be boundless or limitless. The positing it as absolute consciousness allows it to actualize existence by self reference or Logos.

I'm not "hung up" on anything. DNA is provable testable and falsifiable. I didn't invent DNA so there is nothing for me to be "hung up" on.

CAP is the one "hung up" on a pet deity

just like an other human in history claiming their pet deity.

He doesn't want to face that humans invent gods and he is merely one human in a history of humans that like having fictional super heros who falsely believe them to be real.

I am persistent, yes. "Hung up"? No. I am the one telling Cap that the earth is a glob, he is the one still insisting that it is flat.

I only hope for his sake he wakes up before he wastes his entire life on a superstition.

 

Cap, if you're going to assume that eyewitness accounts are perfectly reliable, then what about the other religions of the world. The Hindu faith is far older than the myths that make up the Abrahamic religions, and I imagine that they have just as many if not more accounts of seeing their deities or the servants thereof. Or to make this a non-theistic thing, what about alien abductions or some of the stuff in cryptozoology? I mean there are a lot of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens or think that they saw some kind of alien spacecraft, and not just the stereotypical drunken redneck either, there are professional pilots and others who have said they saw UFOs. Now, sure, they might just have seen military aircraft that they couldn't identify and some stuff might just be their imaginations amplifying something but many of the accounts seem consistent.

I'm not trying to make an argument for alien abductions, just trying to point out that eyewitness accounts can be wrong, and in the days before we had mass communication essentially we have to deal with the problem of the telephone game where a story can get garbled, twisted, amplified and end up drastically different than what it originated as. Let's assume that each person who claimed to see a miraculous sign was entirely honest and truly believed what they were saying and weren't lying to curry favor, gain power, or anything like that. Equally we will assume that none of these eyewitnesses were manipulated or created out of whole cloth by scribes or 'messengers' claiming to be relaying a story. Even if I give them all of that there are still ways that they could be wrong, some of them might be schizophrenic or otherwise delusional, some of them might have been hallucinating due to starvation or heat exhaustion, or high on some substance that they thought would aid them in communing with a higher power. There are also people who believe that they've seen ghosts, taken rides on Haleys comet, or had past lives.

There are also problems where eyewitness accounts don't match up with what history tells us, the plagues of Egypt for example. Now, if we say for the sake of argument that there is no eyewitness testimony opposing what your books say, and the eyewitness testimony seems to be fairly consistent with other events and what archeology shows and such for the past, then it becomes far more compelling and far more probable.

TGBaker wrote:

This is the real problem that goes back to Decartes and his dualism.   How can one interact with another.  As a medium you would need a third substance and for those two more ad infinitum.  That is why monism is the norm. If you posit a monism then you perhaps can work with a property dualism where a property of one substance interacts with that of another within the monism. This really moves away from dualism to pantheism or panentheism.  Typically Being is equated with potentiality or the source that set the boundary condition of existence which is simply the actualization of the Being as potentiality. Secondly to personify this Being. It is equated with Consciousness and nothingness. The eguating of Being and Nothingness allows for it to be boundless or limitless. The positing it as absolute consciousness allows it to actualize existence by self reference or Logos.

Well said my friend.  

I would only add in my perspective that limits are experiential and limitless is perspective based.  it is possible that this boundless being isn't boundless by literal standards, but as far as our existence and knowledge is concerned, He is.

Joker wrote:

Cap, if you're going to assume that eyewitness accounts are perfectly reliable, then what about the other religions of the world. The Hindu faith is far older than the myths that make up the Abrahamic religions, and I imagine that they have just as many if not more accounts of seeing their deities or the servants thereof. Or to make this a non-theistic thing, what about alien abductions or some of the stuff in cryptozoology? I mean there are a lot of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens or think that they saw some kind of alien spacecraft, and not just the stereotypical drunken redneck either, there are professional pilots and others who have said they saw UFOs. Now, sure, they might just have seen military aircraft that they couldn't identify and some stuff might just be their imaginations amplifying something but many of the accounts seem consistent.

I'm not trying to make an argument for alien abductions, just trying to point out that eyewitness accounts can be wrong, and in the days before we had mass communication essentially we have to deal with the problem of the telephone game where a story can get garbled, twisted, amplified and end up drastically different than what it originated as. Let's assume that each person who claimed to see a miraculous sign was entirely honest and truly believed what they were saying and weren't lying to curry favor, gain power, or anything like that. Equally we will assume that none of these eyewitnesses were manipulated or created out of whole cloth by scribes or 'messengers' claiming to be relaying a story. Even if I give them all of that there are still ways that they could be wrong, some of them might be schizophrenic or otherwise delusional, some of them might have been hallucinating due to starvation or heat exhaustion, or high on some substance that they thought would aid them in communing with a higher power. There are also people who believe that they've seen ghosts, taken rides on Haleys comet, or had past lives.

There are also problems where eyewitness accounts don't match up with what history tells us, the plagues of Egypt for example. Now, if we say for the sake of argument that there is no eyewitness testimony opposing what your books say, and the eyewitness testimony seems to be fairly consistent with other events and what archeology shows and such for the past, then it becomes far more compelling and far more probable.

Christians don't believe that other "deities" don't exist.  ti's likely they were a person or other metaphysical being trying to rule a people.

[ ti's likely they were a person or other metaphysical being trying to rule a people.

Joker wrote:

Cap, if you're going to assume that eyewitness accounts are perfectly reliable, then what about the other religions of the world. The Hindu faith is far older than the myths that make up the Abrahamic religions, and I imagine that they have just as many if not more accounts of seeing their deities or the servants thereof. Or to make this a non-theistic thing, what about alien abductions or some of the stuff in cryptozoology? I mean there are a lot of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens or think that they saw some kind of alien spacecraft, and not just the stereotypical drunken redneck either, there are professional pilots and others who have said they saw UFOs. Now, sure, they might just have seen military aircraft that they couldn't identify and some stuff might just be their imaginations amplifying something but many of the accounts seem consistent.

I'm not trying to make an argument for alien abductions, just trying to point out that eyewitness accounts can be wrong, and in the days before we had mass communication essentially we have to deal with the problem of the telephone game where a story can get garbled, twisted, amplified and end up drastically different than what it originated as. Let's assume that each person who claimed to see a miraculous sign was entirely honest and truly believed what they were saying and weren't lying to curry favor, gain power, or anything like that. Equally we will assume that none of these eyewitnesses were manipulated or created out of whole cloth by scribes or 'messengers' claiming to be relaying a story. Even if I give them all of that there are still ways that they could be wrong, some of them might be schizophrenic or otherwise delusional, some of them might have been hallucinating due to starvation or heat exhaustion, or high on some substance that they thought would aid them in communing with a higher power. There are also people who believe that they've seen ghosts, taken rides on Haleys comet, or had past lives.

There are also problems where eyewitness accounts don't match up with what history tells us, the plagues of Egypt for example. Now, if we say for the sake of argument that there is no eyewitness testimony opposing what your books say, and the eyewitness testimony seems to be fairly consistent with other events and what archeology shows and such for the past, then it becomes far more compelling and far more probable.

Christians don't believe that other "deities" don't exist.  ti's likely they were a person or other metaphysical being trying to rule a people.

Another way to put it is that the Logos as a singularity is the boundary condition or objectification of the boundless such that the boundless has location but remains boundless. The boundless is Being. Being is potentiality while existence is actualization of the potentiality and therefore actuality. Being is real and actuality exists.  Being carries as an epistemic " I am all there is is/Apart from me(the boundless) there is Nothing) The singularity has no internality and is non-durative so ceases as it began as an individuation. It is the dialectic of epistemic Apart from Being is Nothing. The singularity would be the big bang, an inifinite point of singularity that in relation to the boundless potentiality of Being inflates instantly into existence.  The self reference of the boundless or Being as the singularity is a dialectic  I am all there is/ apart from me there is nothing becomes something as Logos. All things are created through it. The objectification as singularity is such that its internality is actually the boundless external state since a singularity is itself vacuous. The relationship of the one( singularity) to the boundless is two and then an infinite regression as the logos expands as creation into the boundless.  So the boundless would only be bounded by its self reference which is Logos and the subsequent creation. The Being is Nothing qs potentiality and becomes something as logos. But that is only one theory.

"other metaphysical being" ?

There's more than one of those things ?

 

Do they breed ?

jcgadfly wrote:

Do you accept the existence of these other metaphysical beings as unquestioningly as you accept Yahweh? Or do you require evidence of their existence first?

The problem with answering your question is that I required evidence of Yahweh's existence first as well.   So... considering that i "require evidence of" Yahweh's Existence, I "require evidence of their existence" as well.  

Yahweh's been shorting you - there is no evidence of his existence. You see evidence of Yahweh's existence becaused you believe in Yahweh. You have your conclusion and you fit the evidence to it.

jcgadfly wrote:

Yahweh's been shorting you - there is no evidence of his existence. You see evidence of Yahweh's existence becaused you believe in Yahweh. You have your conclusion and you fit the evidence to it.

He's been shorting me huh.  What if I said there's no logical reasoning to suggest he doesn't exist... and that you see reasoning he doesn't exist because you don't believe in Yahweh.  you have your conclusion and you fit the evidence to it.

c'mon Jc, you can do better than that.  I know you're smarter than that too.  What's happened to you lately?  everything alright? You used to be one that made an effort in the conversation

TGBaker wrote:

I set up a discussion post for us in Atheists vs Theists. I hope to pull an elephant out of my hat though there is not much room for him. How do you eat a whole elephant. You can. But only a little at a time.

 

yea, that statement was more for Brian who has been taking the ignorant theist approach with me in hopes that I would just accept his belief out of redundancy and not reasoning.  I'm looking forward to our discussions

I can state my logical reasoning, cap. Where's yours? I do believe people have asked and you haven't given it (not even to TG who's been putting forth a yeoman's effort).

Cap, you're the second person who has asked me if I'm all right because I took a more direct tone and (most importantly) didn't agree with their views. The first I excuse because he has been a good friend for 35 years and he might actually be concerned for my welfare. You aren't even close so cut the crap.

Yet you are still here.

Still asking us what we would accept, and still dodging it damned well knowing you cannot meet our standards. Once again, not my problem.

You are not fighting us in reality, you are fighting yourself needlessly. WE are the ones trying to pull you out of your delusion and sky fairy claim.

Thoughts require a material process. PERIOD. You lose.

Magic invisible sky friends are works of fiction invented by humans and stupidly accepted by gullible people like you.  The sun was not a god, and your god is fictional too.

As soon as you face that you'll be a hell of a lot happier.

TGBaker wrote:

I think that there is no basis for a perfect homo sapien couple or sufficient couple that devolve or cause a worldwide much less  a universal corruption such as Paul presents.

again, i'm not sure what you'd be looking for in the way of that universal corruption.  What exactly would you expect to find if in fact such an event did happen.

On another note, there is geneological evidence that the human race started with a first homosapien couple that originated somewhere (I can't remember exactly where) in the east, northeast section of Africa.  In fact, there was a special on.... discovery??? nat. geo??? can't remember and they traced sample groups back to that same location and likely couple and mapped out the migration patterns of these people's ancestors to explain their heritage and how it came to be from one source.  Very informative.

TGBaker wrote:

 

I guess we can discuss how positing a god  as first cause would simplify.

Scientifically the unknowns and illogicals of The Big Bang theory (e.g. how some scientific laws would have to have been broken in order for it to happen as theorized) seem to get explained..  The complexity of DNA is more logical and the fact that there aren't more errors in its replication makes more sense if there was a creator behind it in my opinion.  The efficiency of the universe in the way that energy is neither created nor destroyed makes more sense.  it's a smart design.  The complexity of consciousness is comprehendable spiritually (your consciousness is spiritual)  doesn't explain it, but clarifies it's possibility.  Signalless communication makes no sense scientifically and only makes sense with the possibility of another means of communication e.g. metaphysical or spiritual.  

That's just the science part.  Beyond that, so many times people ask why.  I'm not saying all the answers will come, but many why's would be answered with the rule of a God behind it.  Unknown reasons, though not understood would be accepted as possible.  I could go on.

TGBaker wrote:

I look at it as we can not determine the state prior to existence ( that is Being) thus we have a dialectic of theism/ non-theism. Empirically we can sustain the hypothesis of non-theism with lots of evidence but not so with theism.

Be it that we are physical and have concentrated on studying the physical and non-theism requires nothing outside the physical that makes a lot of sense.

TGBaker wrote:

It takes the presuppostion of one looking for it and 2 a motivation derived either from believed revelation or inspiration. Your statement, "Likelihood and odds ultimately go way up for results that otherwise would be deemed impossible by science though they happened anyway..." really defends what Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions presents a shift from a paradigm in which science can not see a possibility to one that explains the non-fitting evidence that is discovered. A panentheism is even more plausible than a theism.  It would accomadate an absolute consciousness that is non-personal but is both the external potentiality of reality and the body of actualization in existence with existence subject to Being. We certainly can move this to our discussion area.

Which is I think why Einstein supported that perspective.  First things first though, we'd have to agree on the plausibility of a metaphysical existence before discussing the likelihood of either.  a panentheism can't exist if metaphysics is false.