I mean "discovered". It's a plain English word. Here, I mean also indirect as well as direct evidence. So no, not just the senses.

Well yeah, the way you frame it. What I'm hearing from you is that materialistic naturalism is the belief that human beings know everything and nothing simultaneously. Of course that's ridiculous.

Yeah, I heard they did really well making computers in the middle ages with the blueprints found in scripture. Oh, wait ...

If you say so. Your version of naturalism seems pretty silly, I'll give you that.

You know this because you read it in a single book, and you don't need to confirm it at all, apparently. While that's good enough for you, it doesn't quite do it for me.

Here's the problem: I can say he does bow to me, and we both have equally dubious sources. He also wears green pants on weekends.

A simple "yes" would have sufficed.

So none of this seems strangely convenient to you? You really want to believe in a fictional character, so you figure he's the one exceptional case? Why? Just because?

By "proof", I guess you mean evidence. Life certainly does mutate and follow a process of selection -- that much is certain. So we'll have to make sure that the people who don't accept that get a better education.

No kidding. We know nothing about things outside of nature, but let's make up something that could exist outside of that, and then just run with it.

Oh, and it's "real."

So the only evidence you'll accept for God is physical evidence, even though God is a non-physical entity and that if he was physical, then he couldn't be what he is defined to be?

Yeah.  That's being partial.  LOL

See the link I've provided with many different proofs, none of which are "god of the gaps" or "ad hoc arguments".

The immediate effects on consciousness, cognition, self-identity, personality, memory, etc, any aspect of individual mental, even 'spiritual' identity and nature you can think of, which so often follow significant damage, disruption, disease, major physical stimulation of the brain, or the effects of chemicals such as psycho-active drugs. Not all aspects of consciousness in all cases, of course, but there is truly massive evidence of this sort.

fMRI (brain scanner) experiments, where patterns of activity are correlated with the responses of the subject to a conversation with the researcher.

Experiments which correlate verbal reports from a subjects asked to perform various actions while subject to various sensory inputs (visual, aural, touch), with direct measurements of neural activity in parts of the brain already identified as involved in initiating muscle movement and responding to various sensory inputs. Including observations which appear to show neural activity directly related to moving an arm or hand occurring a short but significant time before the subject reports the intention to move the limb.

Just for starters.

Why can you not grasp, despite my repeated explanation, that when I say we do not have or need 100% certainty for useful knowledge, that does not mean I am applying that to all propositions, or asserting that there are no essential 'assumptions' or principles for coherent thought.

Deductive, definitional statements such as the "Laws of thought" (Identity, Non-contradiction, Excluded middle) are 100% certain and need to be formally recognized as part of constructing and elaborating more complex logical principles and arguments.

Even without explicitly being aware of such principles, coherent thought is still possible, so long as the violations are not too severe, the logic not too 'fuzzy'.

The "law of excluded middle" is a poor choice. It is 100% certain, because it is an absolute requirement for a system of binary logic, but not for other forms of logic, as I have already explained.

"Law of Non-contradiction" is more fundamental. And yes, it is an essential principle behind any discourse, since it (along with the Law of Identity) expresses the fact that there are distinguishable parts of reality, which allow us to refer to some sub-set which constitutes A, and the rest of reality, which is (not A). Any 'reality which has any form of structure, ie is not a perfectly uniform field or substance pervading all, immediately implies these two principles. Since we do not and could not exist as separate entities in such a Universe, they are obviously valid as codifications of this basic minimal requirement for a universe such as ours.

I repeat that the LEM is not so much a Law, as part of the definition of the elements of binary logic, ie every well-formed statement in basic logic is either True or False. One has to exclude statements such as "This sentence is false", which are neither True nor False, but Undecideable.

I am comfortable to fully accept such principles, but my position is that we should always seek to keep our essential foundational assumptions to a minimum. 

There endeth your lesson in principles of logical thought for today.

Since our universe does have distinguishable objects, including ourselves, as I explained above, the Law of Non-Contradiction is simply a codification of the most fundamental 'observations', such as that we exist. It, and the LoI, is not really in quite the same category as other axioms.

Your example is not a good or clear one. A rock can simultaneously be in several distinct over-lapping categories. Quantum Uncertainty actually does allow the possibility, by some interpretations, that an object may actually be in a superposition of states, which could conceivably include the state of non-existence, or 'a non-rock'.

It would be better put as: an entity cannot simultaneously be one defined part (A) of reality, and all of reality that is not included in that definition, ie (not A).

Here endeth part 2 of your lesson in logic for today.

I have no real problem with those statements.

Of course - as I have repeatedly said, we do have 100% certainty of many things, especially such broad principles, but that is not required for practical and useful observation and choice of response. And we do not have, or require, in such a scenario as I described, anything like 100% certainty of many important specifics of the situation.

I skimmed thru your list. Pretty much the sort of thing I expected. No actual proofs, of course. All riddled with unjustified assumptions and leaps of logic.

EDIT: Those are all arguments for God, not proofs.

It seems as though some of the arguments (like the fine tuning argument) aren't really for God, per se, but for a "something". Some of them present the possibility of a god-like thing, and some happily introduce God as a priori knowledge, then barrel through to the conclusion that God is the thing they were talking about originally.

Really convincing stuff, is what I'm saying. For added entertainment, just replace the word "God" with "God's sister", and you can have an excellent time arguing the existence of God's sister.

I haven't given God's sister a name yet, but she deserves one, considering how ignored she is.

Yeah, I was definitely being excessively kind to describe them as "arguments for God", most of them would have difficulty qualifying for even that description. Most seemed to arguments for there being gaps in our understanding or knowledge, with the implicit or explicit naked assumption that only a 'God' could possibly fill the gap. Or else just naked appeal to personal prejudice or preference, or arguments from ignorance. Etc, etc.

You didn't read the argument.  I deal with this response in the argument. Look:

Counter Argument: "To support your claim, one must introduce an additional supposition -- namely, that the physical universe (nature) is all that exists. This supposition is unproven and unsubstantiated."

Response: No such supposition is required. Materialism does not rule out your view a priori - your own definition rules out providing any  ontology for your terms!. You are claiming that there is something beyond materialism, something transcendent, etc. Seeing as your definition rules out any possible positive terms, the burden is therefore on you to present 'another way', contra materialism, to render your definitions coherent. If you want to hold that the term 'immateriality' or 'supernatural' make any sense, you must provide either an ontology or a universe of discourse. If you cannot do this, if all you have is a negative definition, without any universe of discourse, then you must concede that your terms are stripped of any actual meaning... you must concede that your terms can only point to 'nothing'. This is a problem of your own making: ergo your attempt to blame your opponent is just a sign of the weakness of your position.

AND, the related argument/response:

Related Counter Argument: "Materialism begs the question that all there is, is matter."

My Response: You've got it backwards: you're begging the question that there IS something beyond materialism in order to make this very charge. Those who build their case for immateriality by arguing that materialism rules out their claim a priori implicitly concede that there is no way to build a positive case for your claim.

I even predict that most respondents to the argument will reply with arguments that I specifically refute in the argument.

Look:

Review:

I only get two types of responses.

1) Reassertions of the very points already refuted here.

2) Personal attacks

Looks like we have a Daily Double.

My favourite pattern in those is still the arguments that start something like:

God exists a priori. Now, on to show that God exists.

Gold.

That doesn't prove that mental states are immaterial.  It only proves that states which we may conceive to be immaterial entities are affected by the states of other physical things, which could mean nothing more than that these mental states are either equivalent to the physical entities that get affected or they are physical entities in their own right which have a perceived causal relationship to certain parts of the physical brain.

And that proves the immateriality of mental states, how?

Lapses in time do not prove the existence of immaterial entities.  It may be that the neural activity associated with the moving of a body part acts uses up less time than the time it takes for the initiation of muscle movements in our face and the vibration of our vocal folds to produce sound, which is the physical activity involved in the subject's reporting by speaking.

So no, the existence of immaterial entities has never been proved using the methodologies which you are already biased toward.

But you did say that 100% certainty is not required for knowledge in the practical sphere and you are just wrong.

I do understand what you are saying.  My point is, the empiricism that you so explicitly endorse requires an a priori set of assumptions which do not derive from experience.  Otherwise, empirical observation is NOT POSSIBLE.  Therefore, yes, 100% certainty IS required.

I am NOT saying that empirical knowledge is useless.  I'm just saying that even coherent judgments of probabilities require some degree of 100% certainty and that is something that materialistic naturalism cannot account for because if it is true that everything is physical (which, as I've demonstrated, is a necessary assumption of materialistic naturalism), then even those a priori propositions which we ascribe to prior to any empirical observation would be physical.  Yet it would follow they would be subject to physical laws, which themselves are understood inductively and thus we have no certainty. 

So yes, natural science is useful in its own sphere, but it is a slave to philosophy and I have just demonstrated that to be the case.

Then you are doing nothing more than making the LNC an inductive principle based on empirical observation, while at the same time affirming that it is a necessary property of empirical reality.  But then it comes back to why you get to cherry pick which properties of reality are "fundamental".

I could invent a language where "rock" is defined as something other than what we normally define to be a rock and then declare that a rock is both a rock and a non-rock.  Truth in reality has nothing to do with formal systems. 

Not that you have anything to offer in that area. 

Or do you know everything about everything?

I'll hold you to that.

Simply because you are not persuaded by the arguments does not mean that they do not prove the existence of God.

It just means that you are stubborn.

LOL

You are either a little kid or an adult living at home with his mommy and daddy.

I wouldn't rule out either, since the latter actually applies to the owner of this website.

In other words... You have no way of refuting his refutation so you go after the writer. 

It is irrelevant to the discussion that he/she is either a little kid or an adult.  If it would make you feel better I could copy and paste the arguments presented (with permission of the poster) so you don't have to feel like you were refuted by a child.

Not at all.

I just find humor in these weekend atheist evangelicals who turn out to be little kiddies living off their parents.  You would think that these would be people who really are passionate about the issue of religious oppression (or at least the religious oppression that exists in their imagination), yet one can observe that these are little twits who do not even have to worry about paying their tax dollars to support anti-gay laws or provisions to outlaw abortion.  They have more important things to worry about-- such as junior prom or losing virginity to some gal whose name they will forget in 4 years time.

But I digress.

I've pointed out in one of my other posts that anybody can come up with some "Mickey Mouse" rebuttal to any argument that gets presented, just like creationists will come up with any counter against some point that an evolutionist makes. 

For me to respond to every single thing he wrote would require me to go back and re-read the arguments and write numerous paragraphs explaining the exact point that the atheist misunderstood.  That would be too tedious and since I do not live my parents and actually work for a living, I'm not going to put in that kind of time. 

Note that I do not necessarily endorse every single argument listed on the page.  Viewing this in context, I was making the point that there are lots of arguments for the existence of God and atheists will have the unbridled tendency to disavow them automatically, not because they are unsound, but because they do not comport with the only kind of evidence that the atheist will allow, which excludes God by necessity.  Thus, it becomes quite clear that atheists (such as His Willness and BobSpence) will disregard the arguments without even reading them.  Even BobSpence admitted that he just "skimmed" through it.  His Willness claimed that he had seen all of the arguments before, even though many of them were formalized by Metacrock himself.  So unless His Willness somehow knew about Metacrock before I brought up the site, I find it really hard to believe that he already read these arguments.  That's my point:  The evidence will be denied automatically.  Even if you stump the atheist, s/he will still not accept the fundamental conclusion that God exists.

Except that's not the case, which is what I already said, and you said that you never said that. Which is why it's frustrating to talk to you.

Of course! I study Classics.

See on theologyweb where there's a user named SaintWill? Now look at my signature. Have we made the connection? I've already met Metacrock, I've already read the arguments, and they're still weak and filled with spelling mistakes.

*cricket*

I'm sorry, did you just say the bible ... historical ... flying ... ? Sorry, blacked out with disbelief, there. You know the Israeli archeologists who went out to find the path of the Exodus? Nothing. Nada. Plenty of other settlements and interesting finds, but it turns out the whole Exodus thing was pure fantasy. So there's one less flying colour.

Hundreds, not thousands. And the "manuscripts" you're talking about are fragments.

Uh ...

Neither of those links makes any reference to Exodus, which is what I'm saying is pure fantasy. See "Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence" Frerichs and Lesko, for a full exploration of the topic.

You're just going to crazy town now. Knowledge is either a priori or a posteriori, and you've given me "I just know", which doesn't actually fit into either of those. You "know" that people are "spiritual entities", and I'm begging the question? You must be joking.

Let's step back a second. Can we at least agree that nature exists? I mean, can I say that without it being a problem for you? So ... we can know that. That's a priori, that there is existence.

Bit of a problem with that. If we can both agree that nature exists, then it's actually up to you to demonstrate that a super-nature exists. I'm not begging the question by asking you to show that it exists, because we both just agreed that we know that nature exists. it's up to you to give me something outside of that.

No, there isn't. There can't be. First, we would have to have a God to apply evidence to. As it is, we have a moving target, such that any and all things can be ascribed to God. That means we can't form a hypothesis, and we can't apply evidence to something without a hypothesis. Thus, no hypothesis.

I don't mind you saying "there is my personal warm feeling for God", because that's at least accurate. But don't pretend that floundering arguments are somehow ontological "proof".

Then why are you talking to me? 

It is the case, which I've demonstrated.  You said that I was equating those assumptions definitionally into "naturalism" and I'm clarifying that I was not.

I don't post on theologyweb.

Whatever, I can't prove that you are lying.  I'll just admit that it is my assumption and it will stay that way. 

Source?  Link?

Umm, no.  Thousands.  Check the link.

Do you have a source or a link to back up your claim(s)?

I'll read it later. 

You are begging the question.  You've just assumed that the only thing that we know is the material and I'm telling you that your assertion is not proven.  Even if you do not agree that God is real or that people are immaterial souls, I've presented them as possibilities (and linked you to 40 different arguments to boot).  So now you have to prove to me that nature is all that there is.  This is a claim that you are making.

Actually, any claim about nature that we can make is a posteriori.  All propositions about nature require reference to sense experience.  

But yes, I agree that it exists.  But I do not agree that it is all that exists. 

I can demonstrate that naturalism is an untenable position that cannot account for knowledge.  I can also make further arguments regarding its failure to account for logic, morality, and the qualitative characteristics (qualia) of our experiences.  Thus, by way of impossibility to the contrary, I can show that naturalism is not an option.

Then there are numerous proofs that I can give you for the supernatural, 40 of which you've already rejected without reading (this is only my opinion).

Only given your definition of "evidence" and your arbitrary methodology.

I have no idea what you are even talking about. 

Here's the problem:  Just because you say that arguments are insufficient does not mean that they are.  It could just mean that you are an idiot.  Have you ever entertained that possibility?

Because I honestly can't fathom how you believe the things you're writing.

Sure, let me just pick up any book I have on Tacitus, who wrote in the first to second century. Then, the earliest manuscripts (Medicean) are from the 10th or 11th centuries. So ... math says hundreds of years later, and you say thousands of years. I wasn't making a slam-dunk correction, I was assuming you made a typo, and you'd be aware of that.

This has to be the longest piece of miscommunication ever. I'm saying "nature" is all that exists definitionally. As in, if there were a God, it would be part of nature, because definitionally, nature is all that exists. Not "there are certain things I'm specifying that do not exist", not "I know everything in nature", but definitionally, nature is the set of all things that exist. Again, if God existed, clearly God would be in that set.

Again, I do not have exhaustive knowledge of nature, or the dynamics thereof. So while I may object to spirits and gods and whatnot logically, I'm not ruling them out based on exhaustive knowledge of the dynamics of nature.

Phenomenology, then. No problem.  Are you furthermore saying that any a priori knowledge is only definitional? Like, "Fathers have children" and "all bachelors are unmarried"?

I was asking about super-nature. If we've determined that naturalism is corrupt and without basis, how do we deal with super-nature? How can we learn about it or test to see if we're right?

What, the one where I need a hypothesis to apply evidence to? How is that arbitrary?

I'll start again. If I want evidence for something, I have to know what something I'm talking about before I can apply evidence to it. Otherwise, I might be attributing evidence to the wrong thing. With God, the definition is so fuzzy and vague that we could say God is responsible for all sorts of things. Hurricanes, flooding, flowers, the vastness of space,  we could say those are "evidence" because we don't have a specific enough hypothesis about God. If we did, we could say something like, "if God exists, then X should happen", and it should be to the exclusion of any other explanation. As it is, we don't have that.

Even the best tries don't skim the surface. "If God exists, then we should be moral". There are actually many other explanations for moral behaviour, so there's no exclusivity there.

Oh sure, all the time. No, the arguments are insufficient for the same reasons that Zaq pointed out. I'm amazed he got through them all. Usually when I hit a false premise, I stop reading, but Zaq really went for it, and gives a fair critique of all the arguments, and why they're weak and full of holes.

As harsh as that sounds, I'd have to endorse it (though with softer wording). I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe that people who can rationalize can also reason their way through bald assertions. If the thinking gets clear enough, then the conclusion can be clear as well.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Welcome to the forums!

So, is it fair to say your argument for the existence of deity is based on thought problems?  I think the typical atheist response would be that actual evidence is required at some point, rather than a logic diagram (atheists can make those too).

Or is that unfair?  I'm just trying to get a handle on all the different arguments.

Edit: I guess to elaborate, even the most complex theories in science like Big Bang, Quantum Theory, String Theory, Dark Matter, make some sort of quantifiable statement about reality, and so in theory I should care, even if only a little.  I'm not super familiar with theist cosmological arguments, but they all seem to boil down to the fact that a deity exists outside of nature, and cannot be understood fully by man, ever.  So...I just don't get it.  "God cannot be fathomed, he cannot be tested, he cannot be falsified, and he has no rules governing his existence."  Oh good, thanks for that!

The part that frustrates me the most, as an atheist, is even in recent history that was not the general claim!  A few thousand years ago, a deity supposedly had direct contact with humanity.  A couple thousand years ago god sent a proxy, and invoked supernatural events.  A few hundred years ago, god was still directly responsible for physical acts in nature.  Now god just exists, but he never actually does anything because of one excuse or another, or at least he never does anything in public (unless you are Catholic I guess).

How can I argue with any of that when the bar keeps moving?  What am I supposed to say?  How can we make a convincing a rational argument when nothing physical means anything to a theist?

"2 + 2 = 4" follows directly from the definitions of "2", "+", "=" and "4", and logic. It is true because it is consistent with the definitions of the elementary terms;

So it is still valid  to say that mathematical truths are 'definitional', in that all valid ('true') expressions are logically consistent with the definitions. They are inevitable consequences of the definitions.

Where did the description of God come from? Are statements such as "God is a simple entity" a priori, or follow by some argument from a set of axioms or assumptions?

How does one calculate what is 'sufficient reason' for the existence of something?

I honestly find both "necessary being" and "sufficient reason" as obsolete concepts, in the light of modern science-based understanding of reality, but I am curious to hear your personal understanding of these concepts. IOW don't just point me to some link, I have read more that enough articles involving that sort of language, and find such concepts contribute absolutely nothing to my understanding of anything, in sharp contrast with discussions and speculations on ultimate things based on insights from science.

If I say that my three favorite philosphers are David Hume, Bertrand Russell, and Daniel Dennett, you may understand where I'm coming from, if you hadn't figured it out already. I consider most philosophy pretty much a waste of words. 

Nevertheless, I am interested to get some understanding of the way people with a very different view on these things come to those positions.

From my position, there are certainly fundamental mysteries still to wonder at, but "God" seems a non-solution to a what are not really valid or meaningful questions in the modern context.

Yet, you put a list of arguments up expecting that everyone here would read them.  Now that someone has responded to them you don't have the time to counter?  Genius.  If you're going to use something in a debate at least make sure you can defend it.

Although I might steal your tactic in future debates.  Screw arguing the finer points of evolution.  I'm just going to list every chemical and biological law I can think of - starting with the forces of attraction - and list them as a defense.  If a creationist ever takes the time to go through them all and come up with a response I'll call him a loser and say I don't have the time to defend my position.  So full of win.

Also revealing that he sees our reactions as "hate".

I'm kind of upset that my original response to this didn't go through, for some reason. Ah well. The internet giveth and the internet taketh away.

We might be getting closer to your conception of reality, then. Nature it divided into two subsets -- are these subsets mutually exclusive? That is, does God participate in the physical world?

The idea that math has a certain special place aside from a priori and a posteriori knowledge bolsters scientific induction quite a lot, wouldn't you say?

My guess is that it's the second "realm" you suggest: the one with the eternity and God.

Oh neoplatonism. Sigh.

"Spiritual being" is vague, seeing as we don't even know how to deal with the concept of spirit, much less spirit as it relates to being. "Eternal" would mean you're positing that a being could be eternal, "infinite" is equally unhelpful, as is "perfection". Intelligence is far too difficult to define to make it even relevant to the discussion, much less discovering how something we know absolutely nothing about could be said to be intelligent with a straight face. The necessary being bit according with the principle of sufficient reason is simply circular. "Let there be a being that satisfies this condition" is a philosophical exercise, not a description of something real (whatever you believe real is). Indivisible is another leap of conjecture.

You don't see what's vague about the concept of perfection?

A being that both exists and does not exist -- would that be logically impossible? God exists in roughly the same way that centaurs exist: they were written about in several books, and have a fairly well-known set of traits. So they exist, in the sense that ideas of things exist, but not in the sense that anybody has seen one, or has any actual evidence of one ever living.

Of course not. However, it seems as though "necessary" is a matter of opinion.

And since we see no evidence of moral absolutes across cultures, what does that tell us?

I don't blame you, and I probably wouldn't have relied as much on game theory as he has, but he gave very solid criticism. Some of the arguments listed were too childish to even address (the arguments from emotion or "religious feeling" would be the least compelling). Others make no attempt at a chain of logic. Some are other people's arguments, and there were a couple of those that were interesting, but didn't show that God existed, merely that it could not be proven that any random set of attributes could not be said to be clustered together in a being.

I acknowledge presuppositions that are taken up in the pursuit of science, absolutely. Ceteris paribus ("all things being equal" ) is the most obvious. Others are that the natural world is what we can test, and that what we observe can be affected by our biases. These are assumptions that allow the scientist to get the job done. The philosopher might take issue, but the scientist would be remiss in his or her duty to spend too much time on them.

To apply that idea to all of atheist thought would be a mistake. There are tons of irrational atheists, and there are atheists who are sometimes irrational, and other times rational. In terms of theism as opposed to atheism, however, you must concede that one engages only the rational mind, and the other relies on a belief that demands neither evidence nor reason.

Theist/apologist/theological thought requires assumptions that go beyond what is testable -- beyond reason -- to engage a feeling rather than a rational argument. The feeling of faith doesn't require any reasoning, it just requires one to sustain the feeling. Without detracting from the value of feelings, they're irrational.

It's true, it is. I'm waiting for the answer on this one. Maybe the supernatural in this context is just God and heaven. Who knows? That's the convenience of having a supernatural, you can put anything in it!

Haha -- that would do it. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed playing with game theory in second year economics. But the reason I wouldn't use it has nothing to do with its applicability, I just don't think you need that amount of firepower to shoot down those arguments. As I said before, I gave up reading them as soon as I found an obvious contradiction or assumption. As a result, I didn't make it to the end of a lot of them.

Your refutation list was honestly hilarious. I started doing a point-by-point refutation myself, but then abandoned it after doing so many "see above" comments that the whole project seemed redundant.

I guess personal attacks are to be expected on the internet. But you would really have to value someone's opinion before you could take a personal attack seriously.