Leading Atheist Philosopher Concludes God's Real

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
That's nonsense, because you can't have a singularity outside of space-time. A singularity is defined in terms of the shape of space-time. At that point, space-time existed, it was just infinitely curved.

Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued.

Ergo, no "time before" the singularity, as the singularity was the boundary of time.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
Travelling through time hasn't been proven to violate any laws of physics. It's just practically impossible.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/time-travel.htm

[Agathon]

The state of the game is roughly thus:

Metaphysics in the traditional sense is largely dead, and has been since the scientific revolution.

Post Hume, and after the discrediting of Kantian transcendental idealism and its offshoots, the a priori has largely been reduced to conceptual matters, which do not make any substantive claims about anything other than language and its uses.

If we assume with Quine, that there is no a priori then we don't even have that (or we have some watered-down pragmatist version of it).

That leaves us with empirical arguments for God's existence, which have all failed. The Intelligent Design argument is simply the latest version of an argument that was debunked 300 years ago.

We are left with justification by faith, which is fine for some people, but removes the question of God's existence from the province of reason.

The history of both philosophy and science since the Enlightenment has pointed in one direction, and that is the removal of religion from rational discourse. Brave attempts have been made to rescue it, but they have all been cases of rowing against the current.

What form do religious statements make?

Are they empirical? Then they fail.

Are they a priori? Then they are at best tautologies that can yield no positive information about the world.

Are they neither? In which case they are either meaningless, or we are all pragmatists, which is not something that religious people should favour.

[Whaleboy]

Sum over histories

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Where'd you get that they sprung from the BB? The BB was a particular configuration of the universe, under which different laws might have applied (in general - classical theory breaks down at singularities, but it's wrong anyway), but that doesn't mean it changed the laws.

This makes no sense. In order for what you're saying here to be true, there would have to some immutable laws outside of the singularity. This isn't the case, according to theory, as everything--the universe--was contained by the singularity.

You seem to be arguing as if the singularity was floating in space. That's not what BB theory says--it says that space itself was a product of the BB.

[Whaleboy]

Agathon:

Of course again bringing Wittgenstein into it, science and religion, reason and faith are not oppositional, as long as you're not trying to do the same thing with both. As I've always said, faith is inversely proportional to reason in a given context.

[Agathon]

It depends on your understanding of Wittgenstein. For most religious people, statements asserting God's existence are understood as the same as statements asserting the existence of medium-sized physical objects.

Wittgenstein is often taken as a license to assert anything, by assigning it its own language game. I doubt that was Wittgenstein's intent, even though he was a very religious person.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Bones certainly count as evidence.

Thet don't count as experience with the creature the bone came from.

ACK!

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Tuberski
Thet don't count as experience with the creature the bone came from.

ACK!

Sure they do. You're just narrowing "experience" too much.

Fossils give us ample evidence, beyond the scope of doubt, that there were dinosaurs roaming the earth millions of years ago. They also tell us tons of information about what those creatures were like, what they ate, how they lived, etc.

That is indeed "experiencing" the creature, if vicariously. Regardless, the point was that we have evidence such creatures existed. We do not have such evidence for a deity.

[Berzerker]

Molly -

Such as?


Revelation doesn't require evidence or fact, just faith. The kind of evidence, standard of proofs and thinking that is required to establish, say continental drift as fact, isn't necessary or desirable when it comes to proving items of faith such as transsubstantiation or the existence of any god.

Ancient scriptures and artifacts. And that was my point, faith requires little or no evidence. But how many atheists have really looked for evidence rather than dismissing "God" out of a faith in the stupidity of our ancient ancestors?

UR -

Is the notion of god less silly than elves dancing on electrons, an invisible purple with pink polka dot unicorn, or an unseen, noncorporeal dog that follows you around?

Yes, more than 90% of the people who've lived believe in God. That tells me further investigation is required. What did ancient peoples say about "God" and can we detect knowledge from these ancient peoples they should not have had. That to me would be compelling evidence for a "God(s)" in contact with ancient peoples. After all, the belief that God was a source of knowledge for ancient peoples may be the clue to finding God. For example, and just an example, the Greek symbol for the god of medicine is the cadacus (?), 2 entwined serpents which bears a striking resemblance to the DNA strand.

[Lul Thyme]

Yes and the same people you talk about, thought that an object needed a constant force to keep a constant speed, that the planets were in tightly packed sphere around the Earth and that was the enlightened ones.

OF course they had direct contact with the Gods.
Everything was God.
Magnets?
Gods
Lightning?
Gods
Weather ?
Gods

I am by no mean saying that science has proven the non-existence of god by reducing these phenomens to these causes, but I firmly believe that many people who did believe in God historically, would not, if they lived in our time where we have much simpler explanations for many things then they did...

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme
. . .where we have much simpler explanations for many things. . .

There are no simple explanations for anything in this complicated universe.

[Whaleboy]

Ancient scriptures and artifacts. And that was my point, faith requires little or no evidence. But how many atheists have really looked for evidence rather than dismissing "God" out of a faith in the stupidity of our ancient ancestors?

Empirical evidence by definition is accounted for under the PSR, as for conceptual evidence, that's precisely what atheist philosophers have been doing for centuries . Again, faith and reason do different things, thus they are not absolutely oppositional, as long as religion isn't trying to explain things scientifically, science can't touch it, and likely faith in science, which is why you'll never catch me saying "I believe in evolution", because belief =| knowledge.

Yes, more than 90% of the people who've lived believe in God. That tells me further investigation is required. What did ancient peoples say about "God" and can we detect knowledge from these ancient peoples they should not have had. That to me would be compelling evidence for a "God(s)" in contact with ancient peoples

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46793-2004Nov12?language=printer

There is also the innate knowledge of God argument, which was dealt with nicely by Jill Paton Walsh's novel, "Knowledge of Angels" (one of my favourites). Needless to say, faith, anthropologically speaking is attributable to the relative youth of the human species, as well as our genome, and the reconciliation of our superior intelligence and an attempt to understand the world around us, so for most of our history religion was advanced science, now it is obsolete, though faith is something completely different to science and cannot be used to solve scientific problems.

2 entwined serpents which bears a striking resemblance to the DNA strand.

The double-helix is one of the most common Fibonacci forms in nature, for good structural reasons (i.e., lots of length in a small volume).

There are no simple explanations for anything in this complicated universe.

Actually there are, again read my argument on the PSR. Instead of taking the universe as a whole, break it down into it's constitutent parts, be they contexts, dimensions and their subsequent events, you'd see contingents and actuality, actuality indeed denying the contingent, in effect, the universe at that level really isn't that surprising, irrespective of the resultant complexity.

I am by no mean saying that science has proven the non-existence of god by reducing these phenomens to these causes, but I firmly believe that many people who did believe in God historically, would not, if they lived in our time where we have much simpler explanations for many things then they did...

Well said . Wherever there are holes in our knowledge/science, people will always use that to provide evidence for God's scientific existence which is of course fallacious. God does not empirically exist, accordingly you cannot find empirical evidence for his existence that I cannot rip to shreds, but that's ok because the place for faith is not the universe or the textbook, but the subjective heart and mind of the individual, it cannot be communicated.

[Dr Strangelove]

To sum it all up: God is a blast.

[RGBVideo]

I doubt VJ has met most atheists.

All which I've met in both RL and Internet fit the description somehow.

Indeed. VJ's comment was as asinine as someone asserting that most "Christians" are x, y, z.

Hey, I know it's a strawman. It's just that I've met quite a lot of atheists in my lifetime.

No belief in god != no ethics.

It actually seems that no morale ==> no belief in god.