Prove God Exists - Act Three

[Saga of Gemini]

i didnt say that it disproves anything i was just pointing out the fact they havent used scienfic fact to disprove any arguement i have made

You havent made any scientific or ´pointed to any scientific fact for us ti actually disprove you silly.

 

[Inter4]

Colonel: we are by no means fanatics. We are just clear about what the bible says.

 

[Perfection]

i didnt say that it disproves anything i was just pointing out the fact they havent used scienfic fact to disprove any arguement i have made

I did, Virtual particles come from nothing.

 

[Colonel]

how do they come from nothing whats the science based on, explain

 

[Saga of Gemini]

Yeah perfection ( this is not for fueling the debate Im honestly curius about them)

 

[Erik Mesoy]

I'm just gonna repeat the system used in Deverry and Krondor, as people worship a God, or rather a Platonic Idea, it gains power but also the limitations and feelings human minds impose upon it. Mankind creates the gods, then makes the gods powerful enough to create mankind.


*Hangs up a large DO NOT FEED THE TROLL sign*
Colonel? GoAT!

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLwhose name is Colonel.


-Erik Mesoy,
Now bashing trolls for amusement.

 

[Colonel]

why do u insist on makeing fun of me did i make fun of you, no i didnt so shut up if you dont want to add something

perfection explain the quatum mechanics thing

 

[Saga of Gemini]

he is not conected at the moment wait till tomorrow.

 

[Perfection]

Okay, first of Colonel be patient. I was working on an awesome Sim City 2000 city and so wasn't here. My life doesn't revolve around responding to your lame comments in my threads.

Virtual particles are predicted (and expiramentally confirmed to exist) they are random particles that are generated from nothing hang out for awhile go back to nothing. There is no cause to thier existance they just pop in and out. At the level of quantum physics there are a multitude of instances where causality is violated showing that at least at some level the macroscopic view of it is an illusion.

 

[Colonel]

well simple to explain away they come from some other plain of exsistance and come inot ours and go back and they are created there,
OR
they are complete opposite of us on the phase spectum for us and therefore don not appear in our phase but come in and out but they are created in there normal phase
OR
they exsist in an aalternate reality and come to ours


in any case your use of this to argue against my orginal arguement doesnt work as i have just explained way and shown that they could have been created elsewhere and we arent aware

 

[Perfection]

You have absolutly no evidence too back up those claims, nor does physics. In fact all ideas I've heard about them (I read a fair amount on the stuff) say the pop in and out.

There may be underlying mechanisms that would allow causality but you have no evidence to back it up, therefore you cannot use the assertion of causality as the basis of your claim because quantum mechanics in this and other ways (quantum entanglement for instance) do not support it. Your assertion that science supports causality is false.

 

[Plotinus]

Colonel, it would be very helpful if you could provide a quote from a scientific source - or even a link to one - that supports your assertion that science proves that everything must have a cause. It would be even more helpful if that source were later than the eighteenth century, which is where your notion of what science says appears to have ground to a halt. I've given links to quantum mechanics pages and Perfection has explained some of their ideas elegantly. As Perfection pointed out, you haven't "proven" that quantum particles are caused, you have (as you yourself put it) "explained away" their apparent uncausedness. That's not proof. Until you provide some you can't simply keep repeating unverified assertions.

You say that your interloqutors here have not used scientific fact to disprove any of your arguments. Well, I think your argument about the necessity of causation has been pretty thoroughly disproved, partly by me pointing out to you how science works and what it covers, and partly by Perfection and the others introducing you to quantum mechanics.

This is starting to remind me of that bit in Zork that happens if you go down into the cellar and head north. Keep it together, Plotinus, stick with it...

 

[Mrogreturns]

Hey Perfection! If / when you post a fourth enstalment of this saga, could you change it from "Prove God exists" to something along the lines of "Produce open, empircal and replicable evidence of phenonomona that can only be explained by the existance of God". Or, at least use the word "evidence" rather than "proove". That might reduce some of the Tom Foolery seen here and in the previous two threads. Ahh who am I kiddn"...

 

[Phydeaux]

By the way, Phydeaux, it seems a little odd to suggest that God is made of "stuff" of any kind, spiritual or otherwise... Christianity, at least, has generally taught that God is not a "thing" at all, not a physical thing or a spiritual thing - he is what makes "thingness" possible in the first place. Aquinas said that God's essence is his existence, and Tillich said that God simply is existence itself. They were trying to get across the idea that God is not a thing, but the prerequisite for existence. I've not explained it very well - have a look at some of the earlier chapters at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1.htm

I was just trying to explain that God doesn't have to come from some where or some thing. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to say that it was spiritual.

Well if He is, He is some thing. If you mean that He is not a thing as in some thing He created then I would say you are right.

 

[Iggy]

Placing a deity in the holes of our understanding, making it a true God of the Gaps, is neither intelligent nor rewarding in any way.

That is the first time I have heard that expression.

 

[Plotinus]

"God of the gaps" is quite a common term - it refers to the tendency of early modern scientists to appeal to God whenever they couldn't explain something by other means. For example, Newton's theories apparently entailed that the solar system would sometimes run down, so he suggested that God intervenes every so often to wind it up again. As the science got better, the gaps got smaller, and there was less room for God. Hence Laplace's (apocryphal) comment to Napoleon, when asked what role he assigned to God - "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis."

In his "Letters and Papers from Prison", Dietrich Bonhoeffer meditated very interestingly on the problems caused by the approach to God that created the "God of the gaps". He argued that this use of God - as a last-ditch scientific hypothesis - was not only bad science but disastrous for religion. Not only because it means that there's less and less role for God as the science gets better, but also because it doesn't do justice to God -

"If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realise his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved."

So Bonhoeffer suggested instead -

"It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weakness but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness."

How do we do that? Well, we might have a better idea if the Nazis hadn't executed Bonhoeffer shortly afterwards.

 

[Phydeaux]

@Plotinus,
It looks like you have been trying to say that, you can take what we have been saying, take out God, and put in science. Sure you can say that there is way that the universe could come from nothing with out God and we just haven't found it yet, and I can not disprove this (why do you want to get rid of God so badly any way?). But it doesn't prove your side ether.

I do not believe that science can make some thing out of nothing. The idea that some thing can come out of nothing with out God has the same problems that you suggested God would have, because every thing had to have a cause, with out some thing doing some thing nothing gets done.

I think that God is different, because He is out side of science, the same laws are not pushed on Him. He created those laws of science, and because He was here, before He was not applied. So He can be here with out a cause. God is the one thing that can explain how the universe came to be.

 

[Plotinus]

Phydeaux - I wasn't trying to argue for either side, I was just pointing out the flaws in the basic premise of both sides, that (1) the universe or (2) God needs an explanation outside itself/himself.

Remember - the universe as a whole is outside science, just as much as God is. As I argued above, science looks at patterns. It needs to look at a number of objects to derive what those patterns are. But there is only one universe - or at least, we only know about one. Therefore, the universe - as a single object - is not within the realm of science. Only the objects within it are. Therefore, nobody can appeal to science when saying that the universe must be caused or must not. It's just not a scientific matter, any more than God is.

I don't want to get rid of God at all. I just want to get rid of bad arguments and poor reasoning - whether for God or against him. I agree with you that God can be here without a cause, and I have absolutely no problem with that idea. In fact it puzzles me that so many people do seem to have such a problem with it. But I disagree that God is the one thing that can explain how the universe came to be. We don't know whether that fact requires an explanation at all, let alone what kind of explanation would be appropriate.

 

[Iggy]

God is the one thing that can explain how the universe came to be.

That is why man invented him. Its simple really when you think about it. In early society civalisation religion was used not just as a control tool, but also to provide the great face saving explanation. If the leader or wise man of the tribe was asked for his opinion he could always rely on the deity card to explain any situation to his advantage.

 

[Phydeaux]

Phydeaux - I wasn't trying to argue for either side, I was just pointing out the flaws in the basic premise of both sides, that (1) the universe or (2) God needs an explanation outside itself/himself.

Remember - the universe as a whole is outside science, just as much as God is. As I argued above, science looks at patterns. It needs to look at a number of objects to derive what those patterns are. But there is only one universe - or at least, we only know about one. Therefore, the universe - as a single object - is not within the realm of science. Only the objects within it are. Therefore, nobody can appeal to science when saying that the universe must be caused or must not. It's just not a scientific matter, any more than God is.

I don't want to get rid of God at all. I just want to get rid of bad arguments and poor reasoning - whether for God or against him. I agree with you that God can be here without a cause, and I have absolutely no problem with that idea. In fact it puzzles me that so many people do seem to have such a problem with it. But I disagree that God is the one thing that can explain how the universe came to be. We don't know whether that fact requires an explanation at all, let alone what kind of explanation would be appropriate.

I suppose your right. But I would say that the claim of believers, that they have had experiences with God gives a little edge to the idea of a God, true or not.