Atheism/Existence of God Debates (Please Read OP)

Turtwig

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Ah yes I remember now the brights and the supers. The latter being a very accurate description.

I hate both terms.:mad:

Morbert

ISAW wrote: »

Religion is about reason but has faith as well.

Mathematics is about constructing suppositions, and exploring their implications. Sometimes these systems of suppositions are complete and consistent. Sometimes they aren't. But my point is, just as theists can have faith in a particular subset of all religious belief, mathematicians can assume a subset of all possible suppositions are true, without being accused of "cherry picking"

Zombrex

Malty_T wrote: »

I hate both terms.:mad:

Me too, but more cause of the unfortunately inevitable way people take it as demonstrated by PDN's post, rather than because of the original meaning that was intended.

Morbert

I will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever refer to myself as a "bright".

Turtwig

Morbert wrote: »

I will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever refer to myself as a "bright".

Good, now we know how much it irks you, we'll call you one then.

Hey Mr Bright.:pac:

Zombrex

Malty_T wrote: »

Good, now we know how much it irks you, we'll call you one then.

Hey Mr Bright.:pac:

Mr Brighty McBright. Why don't you go marry a light bulb you obviously love them so much

beglopty

Just spent ages reading through this thread. A lot of arguments and disagreements. I did notice one statement with which nobody seemed to have a problem though;

Wicknight wrote: »

I was just about to go of and start a revolutionary movement to execute all people in Cork. :rolleyes:
/QUOTE]


Let's focus on our common goals people.

Morbert

gvn wrote: »

To bring the argument down a different route.

What are peoples' thoughts on revelation and prophesy in relation to free will? If you manage to define a consistent system of God, omniscience and free will (which Morbert appears to have done) then how do the aforementioned factor into it?

Are revelation and prophesy violations of the free will God has supposedly given?

I myself can't seem to reconcile either with free will.

If an individual foretells an event that is to happen in the future, how can the interim between the prophesy and the event occuring not be defined (or predestined, whatever word you'd like to use)?

Likewise, wouldn't a direct communication between God and a human be inconsistent in the system that has been defined over the past few pages?

Prophecies are something I would be less willing to defend. I haven't thought about them enough to form an opinion.

lmaopml

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Offensive to say the least.

Sorry, Cerebral I was in giddy form just having a laugh and being light hearted. I didn't mean to offend you at all...words on a screen sometimes don't convey things in the proper context

I hate Star Trek!

Sin! How? Does not compute.....

CerebralCortex

lmaopml wrote: »

Sorry, Cerebral I was in giddy form just having a laugh and being light hearted. I didn't mean to offend you at all...words on a screen sometimes don't convey things in the proper context

Well I took it that all you had left was the option to laugh.

lmaopml wrote: »

Sin! How? Does not compute.....

Well the Borg is one of many things I hate about Star Trek. A future where they still haven't figured out a cure for aging yet have an artificial intelligence in the form of Data, who at the same time wants to be human. Absolute nonsense!

lmaopml

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Well I took it that all you had left was the option to laugh.

Yes. You took it right

Well the Borg is one of many things I hate about Star Trek. A future where they still haven't figured out a cure for aging yet have an artificial intelligence in the form of Data, who at the same time wants to be human. Absolute nonsense!

Ageing is one of the best things about being human in my opinion. Old people - I hope to be among them at some stage in the medium to far off future, who wants to live forever?....preferably able to look after myself and be independant, and have a good family, plenty of love, and a laptop with fingers that can type at the speed of light = Happy.

Old people are beginning to use mobile phones these days - Viva the revolution!! The future will look different for us when we are old.....hopefully.

Anyways, freewill.....Atheism/Existence of God...this will probably be a mega mega thread....:)

CerebralCortex

lmaopml wrote: »

Yes. You took it right





Ageing is one of the best things about being human in my opinion. Old people - I hope to be among them at some stage in the medium to far off future, who wants to live forever?....preferably able to look after myself and be independant, and have a good family, plenty of love, and a laptop with fingers that can type at the speed of light = Happy.

Old people are beginning to use mobile phones these days - Viva the revolution!! The future will look different for us when we are old.....hopefully.

Anyways, freewill.....Atheism/Existence of God...this will probably be a mega mega thread....:)

You're insane!

lmaopml

Did you have to 'exclaim' it? That is shockingly inconsiderate of you..:)

Why am I deficient now?

ISAW

Morbert wrote: »

Mathematics is about constructing suppositions, and exploring their implications. Sometimes these systems of suppositions are complete and consistent. Sometimes they aren't. But my point is, just as theists can have faith in a particular subset of all religious belief, mathematicians can assume a subset of all possible suppositions are true, without being accused of "cherry picking"

In fact is it not true to say mathematics can prove there are a subset of propositions which are true but when mathematics can not prove true? For example, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable.

so you are saying maths physics science etc. takes some things as a given i.e. we believe it to be true.

The "cherry picking" comment was related to a claim that "most philosophers are atheist"
A survey was produced and of all the hundreds of ways of matching groups up the group with the highest percentage of atheism of all the respondent groups was picked out. I'd call that "cherry picking" wouldn't you?

By the way i already produced counter evidence as to whether this survey represents what people actually think. And I used the most representative sample possible i.e. the entire population of the world. I am then ironically accused of "argument ad populum" Go figure!

CerebralCortex

lmaopml wrote: »

Did you have to 'exclaim' it? That is shockingly inconsiderate of you..:)

Why am I deficient now?

I exclaimed it because you just declared that the process of progressive degeneration of the human body was the best thing about being human. That's insanity! You do realise that aging is what kills most people right?

ISAW

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Just think of your mind as a computer.

There are philosophical problems with this in the theory of artificial intelligence as well though. I am thinking about the Turing Test and the Chinese room in particular.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/

also the model of the human on computers e.g. long term memory short term memory processing input/output and vice versa may have some benefits and helpful analogies but isn't necessarily a one to one relationship. things may exist in the human domain without an analogue in the computer co domain and vice versa.

ISAW

CerebralCortex wrote: »

I exclaimed it because you just declared that the process of progressive degeneration of the human body was the best thing about being human. That's insanity! You do realise that aging is what kills most people right?

So? Everything dies. The universe will one day end. All life will one day end. How is it insane to consider that natural?

CerebralCortex

ISAW wrote: »

There are philosophical problems with this in the theory of artificial intelligence as well though. I am thinking about the Turing Test and the Chinese room in particular.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/

also the model of the human on computers e.g. long term memory short term memory processing input/output and vice versa may have some benefits and helpful analogies but isn't necessarily a one to one relationship. things may exist in the human domain without an analogue in the computer co domain and vice versa.

You've lost me. Care to explain to me how the Turing Test and the the Chinese room would indicate that my brain isn't a computer?

CerebralCortex

Here we go.

ISAW wrote: »

So? Everything dies.

That doesn't say we can't do anything about aging which causes suffering, we know causes disease and is something that can be tackled. Certainly an interstellar race would have made inroads into nanotechnology, actually to suggest that they didn't have nanotech before space travel on the scale of Star Trek is absurd. Keeping things relevant, it's another reason I think Star Trek is sh!t.

ISAW wrote: »

The universe will one day end. All life will one day end.

There's a bit of straw manning going on here. I never made any comments about the end of the universe, or the destiny of life. I said that to consider something like aging which damages and inevitably kills the person as being the best part of being human was insane.

ISAW wrote: »

How is it insane to consider that natural?

Natural does not equal good I hope you realise? Tooth ache is natural, you hardly enjoy for that reason do you? Ever hear of this?

Morbert

ISAW wrote: »

In fact is it not true to say mathematics can prove there are a subset of propositions which are true but when mathematics can not prove true? For example, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable.

In a sense yes. For a given set of axioms capable of simulating the natural number system, there will be statements which can be formulated, but cannot be proven by the set. It is possible, however, to prove such statements by appending axioms to the set, but this will result in new unprovable statements. You can get around this by adding an infinite number of new axioms with some systematic process, but this process, in turn will result in new unprovable statements.

so you are saying maths physics science etc. takes some things as a given i.e. we believe it to be true.

Science is entirely different to mathematics as it is a process of induction as opposed to deduction. The incompleteness theorem doesn't apply. But yes, a theory is effectively a set of assumptions about some general physical process or relationship.

The "cherry picking" comment was related to a claim that "most philosophers are atheist"
A survey was produced and of all the hundreds of ways of matching groups up the group with the highest percentage of atheism of all the respondent groups was picked out. I'd call that "cherry picking" wouldn't you?

By the way i already produced counter evidence as to whether this survey represents what people actually think. And I used the most representative sample possible i.e. the entire population of the world. I am then ironically accused of "argument ad populum" Go figure!

I was referring to your cherry picking comment in post #581.

There are philosophical problems with this in the theory of artificial intelligence as well though. I am thinking about the Turing Test and the Chinese room in particular.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/

also the model of the human on computers e.g. long term memory short term memory processing input/output and vice versa may have some benefits and helpful analogies but isn't necessarily a one to one relationship. things may exist in the human domain without an analogue in the computer co domain and vice versa.

The thought experiment is good for highlighting problems with the behaviouristic notion of intelligence (if it acts intelligent, it is intelligent), but it's scope isn't wide enough to tackle the issue of whether or not the mind is computational. This is because semantics and "understanding" only makes sense in the context of a learning algorithm, and such an algorithm is never postulated in this thought experiment. In other words, if we consider response c, the "brain simulator response", a materialist like myself would claim that a sufficiently elaborate system of water pipes, capable of having neural plasticity and efficacy (and hence learning), would indeed be capable of understanding.

The larger philosophical issue related to the disconnect between the language of brains and minds is known as the p-zombie problem. While it poses interesting questions for materialists, it also poses interesting questions for theists, due to syndromes like alien hand syndrom, where a will exists without a mind.

CerebralCortex

And for anyone interested in the p-zombies here is a good article on why I don't think it's a problem for materialists.

ISAW

Morbert wrote: »

I was referring to your cherry picking comment in post #581.

Any formal system capable of expressing the basis rules of logic such as Mathematics is either inconsistent or incomplete. This may not be true of parts of mathematics but so what? Gödel's theorems are usually studied in the context of classical logic and in this discussion the logical proof/ disproof of God is what brought me in.

Morbert

ISAW wrote: »

Any formal system capable of expressing the basis rules of logic such as Mathematics is either inconsistent or incomplete. This may not be true of parts of mathematics but so what? Gödel's theorems are usually studied in the context of classical logic and in this discussion the logical proof/ disproof of God is what brought me in.

Are you deliberately ignoring what I am saying? Mathematics is not a formal system. This is an incredinly simple point.

ISAW

Morbert wrote: »

Science is entirely different to mathematics as it is a process of induction as opposed to deduction. The incompleteness theorem doesn't apply. But yes, a theory is effectively a set of assumptions about some general physical process or relationship.

...

I was referring to your cherry picking comment in post #581.

Wher you don't actually refer to the message from which you quote me?

But which refers to me previously saying

The context was I think the use of logic (by Cerebral) to disprove God etc. and the idea that science is sufficient for society and everything can be broken down by science and explained away

I was accusing him of cherrying picking elements a survey but I applied the same to you for cherry picking part of mathematics and saying parts are consistent/complete when i claimed maths as a whole was not. I also claimed science was not sufficient and the comment about "I have already shown" was I believe in relation to maths/logic as a special case of not being consistent/complete by its own definition where I applied the "sufficiency" criterion to science.

I think the point is quite clear.

Sorry I have to stop this answering now

ISAW

Morbert wrote: »

Are you deliberately ignoring what I am saying? Mathematics is not a formal system. This is an incredinly simple point.

Are you aware of what I wrote. someone cited what they claimed were several logical disproofs of God. I pointed out that logical reasoning itself or any formal system is inconsistent or incomplete and that is formally proved. As regards the non formal or consistent parts of mathematics - what have they to do with supporting claims about logical arguments showing God can't exist?
Cherry picking out other sub fields which may be internally consistent do not show most philosophers are atheist or do not show that God does not exist.

Morbert

ISAW wrote: »

Are you aware of what I wrote. someone cited what they claimed were several logical disproofs of God. I pointed out that logical reasoning itself or any formal system is inconsistent or incomplete and that is formally proved. As regards the non formal or consistent parts of mathematics - what have they to do with supporting claims about logical arguments showing God can't exist?
Cherry picking out other sub fields which may be internally consistent do not show most philosophers are atheist or do not show that God does not exist.

Nobody has contradicted the sentence in bold. I am not claiming "non-euclidean geometry is complete, and can prove its own consistency, therefore disproofs of God are valid." Logical disproofs of God are attempts to demonstrate that the idea of God is an incoherent one (I do not believe they are successful in doing so). Incompleteness theorems are actually irrelevant to the issue. I was simply correcting a simple mistake in one of your posts. You cannot say Mathematics is inconsistent any more than you can say religion is belief in Thor. There exists a set of religious beliefs involving Thor, and there exists abstract mathematical systems that are incomplete or inconsistent.

pts

It has been a month since the last post in this thread so hopefully I will be permitted to change the angle slightly without being accused of derailing the vibrant discussion

I propose that we don't discuss/debate an abstract, I'll defined creator but instead narrow our discussion to a God which has falsifiable attributes and actions.

I'd like to start with the post I started in the "i am looking for honest views on this" thread before I was informed that it was a resurrected thread.

The Youtube user Evid3nc3 has a great series of videos detailing his loss of faith in Christianity and subsequent move towards atheism. All his videos are very well produced and thoughtful, but I'd like to look at one in particular. In 3.3.3 Atheism: A History of God (Part 1) he discusses the evolution of the Bible, based on the book "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlnnWbkMlbg

I think that if most claims made in that book are true, then it would be a devastating revelation to Christians. I would be very interested in hearing peoples opinions the areas touched upon in this video and Karen Armstrong's book.

PDN

pts wrote: »

It has been a month since the last post in this thread so hopefully I will be permitted to change the angle slightly without being accused of derailing the vibrant discussion

I propose that we don't discuss/debate an abstract, I'll defined creator but instead narrow our discussion to a God which has falsifiable attributes and actions.

I'd like to start with the post I started in the "i am looking for honest views on this" thread before I was informed that it was a resurrected thread.

The Youtube user Evid3nc3 has a great series of videos detailing his loss of faith in Christianity and subsequent move towards atheism. All his videos are very well produced and thoughtful, but I'd like to look at one in particular. In 3.3.3 Atheism: A History of God (Part 1) he discusses the evolution of the Bible, based on the book "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlnnWbkMlbg

I think that if most claims made in that book are true, then it would be a devastating revelation to Christians. I would be very interested in hearing peoples opinions the areas touched upon in this video and Karen Armstrong's book.

Any chance you could summarise the claims rather than me having to watch a 15 minute video?

Twin-go

You often here religious people say they prayed to God and he cured their illness. He is credited with curing every thing from the common cold through to thermal cancer. They feel their faith and prayers have been answered and that's great. What did God do to cure these people? Did he reward them for being faithful? did he simply answer their prayers?

But take somebody equally faithful. Somebody that prays every day for Gods help. They too need his help but he does not answer their prays. He does not "cure" them.

Why doesn't God cure amputees?

ISAW

Twin-go wrote: »

You often here religious people say they prayed to God and he cured their illness. He is credited with curing every thing from the common cold through to thermal cancer. They feel their faith and prayers have been answered and that's great. What did God do to cure these people? Did he reward them for being faithful? did he simply answer their prayers?

But take somebody equally faithful. Somebody that prays every day for Gods help. They too need his help but he does not answer their prays. He does not "cure" them.

Why doesn't God cure amputees?

Aha! Given your "how do we know he does" beginning...How do you know he doesn't?

Anyway, this issue is a form of the "only True Scotsman" fallacy. Take Lourdes for example. Atheists might say "where is the evidence of a miracle cure" and they are shown one and they say "but that isn't a true miracle a true miracle would be..." then when they are shown that another example is added. Teh operative question is this suppose an amputee did got cured and it could not be explained by science. Would they accept that this is a miracle or say "but what about a double amputee" or some other "whatabout" only true Scotsman?

In the end they will believe or they wont and no amount of amputees growing limbs will convince them if they don't believe.

By the way Lourdes is not a conditional obligatory belief for Catholics or Christians.