What would it take to prove / disprove the existence of God?

[Jon Miller]

I thought we were talking about God in general.

The God I beleive in I beleive will be disproovable (and hence proovable), in the future (and also is if time machines are possible).

JM

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


Oh, you don't believe that Jesus really existed?

I do, I beleive He existed.

There is no proof.

I have faith.

JM

[Ben Kenobi]

but why is it more probable that that particular god is more true than any other god ?

Ah, comparative religion. I don't know if Whaleboy wants to take on that argument in this thread.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


Okay, suppose you are debating the existence of God. The only way to prove that God exists is to show evidence of his intervention. If you believe that anything that cannot be explained through natural means did not happen, then it is impossible to show that God exists. You are arguing in a circle.

Well, that is quite fine if you can give exaples of such things.

Mars, perhaps, if you can find enough water or atmospheric pressure, and even then, it will be a stretch.

Venus, it's an interesting question as to what will kill you first. Asphyxiation, battery acid rain, atmospheric pressure or the temperature hotter then an oven. The Russians couldn't even get probes down long enough to survive more then a few minutes on the surface.

Didn't say that neither mars nor venus was "paradise", though both planets have/had the possiblity to develop life - it just didn't happen that way.

It is unlikely, that all the conditions required for the existence of life as we know it on Earth would arise through a chance combination. That is the argument why it seems more plausible that God would exist. It's not just the distance, but as Whaleboy shows, a whole constellation of effects coming together.

How can you say that ? It actually happend here. Just because there was a random coincidence here how does that prove the existance of any kind of god ?

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


Ah, comparative religion. I don't know if Whaleboy wants to take on that argument in this thread.

I guess that Whaleboy is flexible - after all he didn't asked for proofs for a specific god.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
The laws of physics have changed. Ergo, it is entirely possible for events to have occured contrary to the laws of physics as we know them to be today, even though they remain valid under some greater law which we do not fully understand.

The laws of physics have not changed - instead, they have been amended. Indeed, the foundations of physics remain intact, e.g. The Principle of the Conservation of Energy. As I result, I proposed a demostration that violates this.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
because God is supernatural (be definition)

all science deals with is the natural world..

God is not within the realm of science

I don't think we are attempting to falsify god. I think we have been trying to demonstrate the existence of such an entity, which should be entirely probable.

Although some posters are attempting to shift the burden of proof to the critics, i.e. "disproving god," or proving an infinite negative.

Quite disingeuous, that.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


I don't think we are attempting to falsify god. I think we have been trying to demonstrate the existence of such an entity, which should be entirely probable.

Although some posters are attempting to shift the burden of proof to the critics, i.e. "disproving god," or proving an infinite negative.

Quite disingeuous, that.

Umm, how would you demonstrate the existence of God? I know of no way in physics, and no attempt in physics.

Please explain.

JM

[Jon Miller]

Really UR, I am interested.

Give me one sceintific attempt to prove God's existence.

JM

[Blake]

I was thinking more about the proof of god thing - if god wanted to prove he existed - what could he do?

Meddling with the fundamental constants of the universe would be a good start, like change the strength of gravity, just for a little while, then set it back. Now, THAT, and other similar meddling (which could be done at the subatomic level too, detectable by scientists) would be irrefutable proof of either god or of beings so powerful that they exist outside of what we understand as the universe itself.

I mean imagine some beings are so powerful that they can create and manipulate universes in a lab. They are rightfully gods to the inhabitants of the universes that they create.

I don’t believe any distinction can be made between god and a being powerful enough to create the universe.*

* Well other than the "God is everywhere one", the powerful being actually wouldn't have full knowledge of every single facet of the universe; only what they choose to examine, while God should have that knowledge. Atleast I think he should as per religious dogma, altough I'm not sure how the infinite attention span thing would work.

[Elok]

Where to begin....I do not claim that atheists have no values. They plainly do. Those values just appear to make no consistent sense. The conclusions do not follow the premises. We all have a moral inclination or conscience of some type, and we follow it, but we're damned if we know why. Secular explanations of morality appear to be rationalizations of that impulse which fall apart under close examination. I try not to speculate too much on what atheists might be drawing their values from, for fear of strawmen, but rationalization is the best explanation I've found that works.

I'm inclined to suspect that, for morality to have a purpose--for it to be more than just a variant on sexual appetite that we follow intermittently to silence an urge--it must point to something beyond the knowable conditions of life. I haven't done intensive studies or anything, but all of the expansive secular ideologies I've seen (that have a true moral component) have a stand-in for God, as in Plato's "the good." I think Marx used the flow of history instead or something, operating on the assumption that the natural direction of history was inherently desirable as well as inevitable.

If this comes easier from an atheist, I read a meager selection of Sartre for my ethics class which approximates my argument. I think it was from an essay called "Existentialism and Humanism," or something like that. He rejected the idea of appealing to justice, and mercy, and generosity, as "the right thing to do," after banishing the concept of deity. He said (paraphrased) that those who do so are attempting to have it both ways, to throw off the authority of a God without accepting the consequences. A vague idea of undefined goodness is used as a stand-in for the missing God and not allowed to be questioned. He called that dishonest, bad faith.

Where I differ from Sartre (aside from, obviously, not being an atheist) is that he did not believe in a preexisting human nature, which I think is more or less undeniable. The existence of the conscience seems clear, and it fights social norms too often to be explained away as a social construct itself. There is no "radical freedom" from my point of view. Sartre's language itself implies certain assumptions which cannot be made in a truly valueless universe, and making your own values seems not only pointless but impossible if the values are to be anything but arbitrary whims, like rooting for a sports team because it comes from your city.

[Elok]

Whaleboy: I'm not sure, but I think you might have misread me. I'm saying that, without working in an element of the supernatural, something beyond the empirically verifiable (not necessarily a God, Buddhism doesn't use one), you can't explain ethics in a way that works. You can explain a practical system of protecting your own hide via prudence, which superficially resembles morality. You can invent terminology devoid of actual meaning and stick it in the place of the supernatural; the result will "work," after a fashion, provided you don't look too closely. Or you can distort the word morality to mean something that the conscience strongly resists but which can be justified with material evidence (typically pure egotism). Or a combination of the above. A real system of ethics that works with the here-and-now? I haven't seen it. You can live ethically and naturalistically, but you'll have to bite the bullet and admit the whole game appears arbitrary and sentimental (Kuci did, assuming I understood him correctly, in my controversial thread a few months ago, and that was the end of my argument with him).

GE Moore's system...it's been a while since I encountered it (briefly) in ethics, but I believe that was the guy that kept playing bait-and-switch with the dictionary (using non sequitur analogies concerning horses and the color yellow) for pages and pages, with the air that his explanations were totally relevant and self-explanatory. I think the general term for such behavior in pop culture is "the Chewbacca Defense." It worked in that he was evidently satisfied with it, but it answered nothing and proved nothing, assuming I deciphered it correctly. His answer, in the text I read, was that Good was ultimately indefinable, wasn't it? If that one was indeed Moore, he basically substituted Goodness mystery for Divine mystery, and now he has a God sans personality he can use as a sock puppet with his shoddy wordplay. That was essentially the second option I listed above.

[BlackCat]

@elok : Have you ever heard about the Puckle gun ? What about human sacrifices wich several religions have both advocated and practiced ?

How can such behaviour be documentation for a higher morale and ethic in a theistic than a nontheistic practise ?

[Elok]

I have no clue what a Puckle gun is, but I never claimed that the conscience cannot be perverted by systematic self-persuasion. If the conscience were infallible, there would be no need for any formal system of ethics at all, or indeed any purpose in discussing the topic, as the conscience would invincibly beat down any attempt to act wrongly. The conscience can be suppressed, and even temporarily eliminated; people in the WWII concentration camps often turned inhumanly callous and brutal. But it sprang back very quickly once they escaped the camps.

I don't know much about human sacrifice in history, but consider the Aztecs. Their version was motivated by an apparently sincere conviction that, if the gods were not regularly fed human blood to sustain their strength, they would be unable to withstand the powers of darkness and the world would end. Where the devil they got that idea from is beyond me, but there can be little question that they really believed it, considering that they wasted tremendous time and energy waging "flower wars" against subjugated peoples to earn a steady supply of captives. It would appear that human sacrifice was, according to their sincere conviction, arguably the lesser of two evils. The stupid idea that it was necessary at all probably didn't come from anything like the conscience, given how absolutely bonkers it sounds to the rest of us. It certainly struck the Spaniards and all the neighboring tribes as revolting, albeit the latter were biased by their status as victims.

One might argue that, in the absence of objective values, a utilitarian case could be made for their human sacrifice as contributing to a stable population and providing animal protein as a potential food source in an area where it was otherwise relatively rare. Supposing there were obvious benefits to society from it somehow, and the victims were chosen by lottery so as not to favor anyone and lead to corruption et cetera, can you (without prior values) justify the revulsion you and all the rest of us feel at the prospect? A few people die unwillingly, the rest of society benefits.

Wait a minute. Reading your entry again (it wasn't super-clear)...I hope you're not pulling that lame "these religious people in the past were crazy, ergo you must answer for them" argument again. I might as well ask you "how can atheism ever have morals if it was practiced by monsters like Stalin and Pol Pot?" If you've given up that bizarre method, then just ignore this last paragraph. If not, we're going to have to abandon the argument entirely on the grounds of a complete failure to communicate.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Elok
I have no clue what a Puckle gun is, but I never claimed that the conscience cannot be perverted by systematic self-persuasion. If the conscience were infallible, there would be no need for any formal system of ethics at all, or indeed any purpose in discussing the topic, as the conscience would invincibly beat down any attempt to act wrongly. The conscience can be suppressed, and even temporarily eliminated; people in the WWII concentration camps often turned inhumanly callous and brutal. But it sprang back very quickly once they escaped the camps.

A Puckle gun is a 1700 invention where the inventor found it suitable to use round bullets when used agaist christians and square bullets when used agaist heatens. Of course the squeare bullets inflicted much worse injuries. Wikipedia has a good (short)description, but there are other sources if you don't trust wiki

I don't know much about human sacrifice in history, but consider the Aztecs. Their version was motivated by an apparently sincere conviction that, if the gods were not regularly fed human blood to sustain their strength, they would be unable to withstand the powers of darkness and the world would end. Where the devil they got that idea from is beyond me, but there can be little question that they really believed it, considering that they wasted tremendous time and energy waging "flower wars" against subjugated peoples to earn a steady supply of captives. It would appear that human sacrifice was, according to their sincere conviction, arguably the lesser of two evils. The stupid idea that it was necessary at all probably didn't come from anything like the conscience, given how absolutely bonkers it sounds to the rest of us. It certainly struck the Spaniards and all the neighboring tribes as revolting, albeit the latter were biased by their status as victims.

One might argue that, in the absence of objective values, a utilitarian case could be made for their human sacrifice as contributing to a stable population and providing animal protein as a potential food source in an area where it was otherwise relatively rare. Supposing there were obvious benefits to society from it somehow, and the victims were chosen by lottery so as not to favor anyone and lead to corruption et cetera, can you (without prior values) justify the revulsion you and all the rest of us feel at the prospect? A few people die unwillingly, the rest of society benefits.

Wether or not the aztecs "wasted" a lot of time and energy on the issue of capturing victims doesn't really matter - they had ethical and moral valuse build upon a god belief.

Wait a minute. Reading your entry again (it wasn't super-clear)...I hope you're not pulling that lame "these religious people in the past were crazy, ergo you must answer for them" argument again. I might as well ask you "how can atheism ever have morals if it was practiced by monsters like Stalin and Pol Pot?" If you've given up that bizarre method, then just ignore this last paragraph. If not, we're going to have to abandon the argument entirely on the grounds of a complete failure to communicate.

I don't think that religious people in the past was more crazy than todays. There is no reason to think that a religion started today wouldn't include human sacrifices. That would simply be a matter of the "story" behind the religion. I guess that you will argue that it could never happen today because laws would prevent it, but if those laws was changed by this religion it could certainly happen.

Funny that you should mention Stalin and Pol Pot. I don't see them as rational nontheistic people. I see them more like headfigures in some kind of religious organisations - their actions for certain looks like that - their supporters don't ask questions and they do whatever they are told and belive that they are doing the right thing because they have been told it is.

The reason why I mention those points is that you claim that a theist ethic and morale must be better because it's based upon a religion. Unless you reduce that to a specific religion, then you have to account for all kinds of religions.

PS. Isn't there something about human sacrifices in christianity ? I can't remember if it was a goat or a sheep that was so unlucky to be sacrified instead.