Proof that god doesn't exist.

[brimstoneSalad]

TL;DR

This kind of post is considered SPAM. It is not necessary to reply to a thread just to say that you didn't read it.
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[Jesus Christ is Hard]

TL;DR

This kind of post is considered SPAM. It is not necessary to reply to a thread just to say that you didn't read it.
Either engage in conversation and say something productive, or leave it alone.

If you do this kind of thing again, you will probably be banned, and your posts removed.

If you wish to remain active on this forum, read the post which you neglected to read, and respond to it properly.

Also: Stop using troll-speak. Forum members are complaining about it. No more abbreviations. Type out your words, and spell check, as if this were an essay for a class in University.

And no more CAPS, except for where grammatically necessary.
If you want to emphasize a particular point, you may underline it or format it in bold.

TL;DR

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

I'll play the game.

I will define God as the creative entity whose existence is the condition of possibility for the universe. It is a being that has the interlinked qualities of being loving, wise and intelligent, compassionate and understanding.

How is such a definition illogical? I have not provided evidence yet for the existence of such a being, but the definition in itself is not self-contradictory and therefor not illogical. I don't think the dictionary definition of the word God is illogical either, as the opening post claimed. But maybe you use a different meaning of the word illogical than 'self-contradictory'.

[bobo0100]

I will define God as the creative entity whose existence is the condition of possibility for the universe. It is a being that has the interlinked qualities of being loving, wise and intelligent, compassionate and understanding.

this is not contradictory, but as a from your writing on the topic I am sure you would know that many classical definitions are, that definition is what this topic in primarily addressing.

[brimstoneSalad]

I'll play the game.

Welcome Alexander! I hope this will be fun. Great to meet somebody who actually practices positive life changes from change in belief.

If I were to demonstrate how your particular concept of god is logically impossible, I hope you will just amend your concept as an internal spiritual force (or something slightly different from your current concept, removing the contradiction) rather than an external and exclusive universal creative being, and continue to be inspired by the collective universal force of love and morality (which is true) that we all participate in, rather than reverting to hopeless hedonism?

Please let me know. I'd be very uncomfortable arguing about this if I thought that, when I win, it would deprive you of something that you're making good use of to inspire you to become a better person. That wouldn't be a win for me.

this is not contradictory, but as a from your writing on the topic I am sure you would know that many classical definitions are, that definition is what this topic in primarily addressing.

Actually, it still is.

How is such a definition illogical? I have not provided evidence yet for the existence of such a being, but the definition in itself is not self-contradictory and therefor not illogical. I don't think the dictionary definition of the word God is illogical either, as the opening post claimed. But maybe you use a different meaning of the word illogical than 'self-contradictory'.

Nope, same definition of illogical. It is self-contradictory, actually, but the contradiction only becomes apparent when you explore the meanings of the words the claim is composed of, and the implications they have.

Like when we talk about an omnipotent being. That seems OK at face value, until we start asking questions about what "omnipotent" means.

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

Sure, go ahead and say why you think this definition is illogical, or logically impossible. Shoot. I agree that omnipotence is a troublesome philosophical concept, to firstly define properly, so that anything could even theoretically fit the concept. Potestas relates tangentially to notions of necessity and contingency, which are hard too. But firstly please go ahead with pointing out what you think is a logical contradiction in my definition.

[brimstoneSalad]

Sure, go ahead and say why you think this definition is illogical, or logically impossible. Shoot. I agree that omnipotence is a troublesome philosophical concept, to firstly define properly, so that anything could even theoretically fit the concept.

The reason is similar to the omnipotence issue.
That is, creating "the universe"; there's a wealth of implication there, with regard to what the universe is. Lots of contradictions come up, and need to be answered for.

The universe: is it all that exists? If it is, and this deity exists, then did it create itself? Contradiction. If not, then the deity does not really exist.
You could say the deity is outside of the universe, but, then you have to change the definition of "the universe" to not being all that exists... in which case it's not THE universe, but A universe, within another one.

Is this universe isolated and self-contained? Then the deity does not exist from within this universe. That is to say, it may exist in ANOTHER universe, but not in this one, so can not affect us as such and with regard to how you describe it, it wouldn't "really" exist for us.

If this universe is NOT isolated and self contained, it's not really even a universe proper, but a little bubble within a larger universe and existence. You could call it a 'universe' in the less rigorous sense, but there's nothing really uni or verse about it. If you're familiar with comic book universes (which often cross over with each other), that would be more of the notion.

And that would be fine. We make bubble 'universes' all of the time. We make them within our minds, and even on computers. They are 'universes' within universes, and not fully isolated, because we can affect them from outside (as you suggest this deity does).

If you wanted to say that god is like the programmer of the non-isolated universe that we see, which is part of a larger universe, which may itself be part of a larger universe, etc. that would be fine.

But, that doesn't get to the root of the issue: That this god is yet another creature within another universe. One it did not create.

So, the problem comes down to you saying THE universe, rather than A universe, and the way you're using these terms. And the notion of god, THE god, in this sense, doesn't answer any of the questions of where THE universe really came from, because in that case you're really implying everything (all demi-universes).

Is it an issue of infinite regress? If it is, then 'god' isn't even special. It's not THE god, it's just A god. We could all create our own little bubble universes and become gods equally valid to that one, over whom there would be other creator gods. Some may be good, some may be evil, some may be something in between, as far as I could say (or explain at the moment) about that postulate.

This notion is problematic, of course, due to the infinite regress. When you're dealing with time or causality that becomes a particularly hairy issue.
You might say god is outside of time and changeless, but that isn't really true; it DOES act. There are actions and effects, which is in contradiction with a timeless being. And if it's not timeless, and we're dealing with an infinite regress, there's no way for an infinity of time to have passed to arrive at this point. Ergo: We could never exist, because the infinite number of time-dependent prerequisite universes could never have all existed.

When you 'solve' the problem of infinite regress, you run into other logical issues. Each answer just generates more problems. Defining god as any kind of fundamental or ultimate being tends to create issues.

Now if you define it as a mortal alien being within the universe -- not fundamentally different from ourselves, but just much MORE powerful, MORE loving, etc. Then you have no issues beyond the empirical lack of evidence, because such a being is evidently not impossible (indeed, it may be of a class of beings humanity could become some day).

[Jebus]

Great post, Brimstonesalad.

[AlexanderVeganTheist]

Interesting philosophical reflections, BrimstoneSalad.

It's pretty hard for me to respond to, because I don't know what is the reality. Some things aren't understandable by the human intellect, or at least not when we're still in this 3D realm. Almost no human on earth today can imagine or understand 4D objects intuitively, yet their existence is clearly a reality from modern physics. So that words seem to fall short, or seem illogical, can just indicate that the way we talk about it and imagine it is limited, like we need maths to describe 4D objects, and words and imagination fall short.

The best answer I can give to the objections and reflections you make is that I do not know how and where God exists. I don't claim to know the (mathematical) truth about how a being could be outside of time, infinite, and create a universe that does have time, for example. I don't know what God's experience of time is. I don't have a book or pastor that tells me. My capacity to understand these things at any given time is limited. It can grow, but right now, I can only tell you my theories, really.

E.g. I could see God as a substrate to the universe, a "field" of love, that maintains the universe, and causes it to have laws that enable a loving existence. But I don't think it's just a field, but an entity that experiences things, like the feelings of love itself.

I've heard very often that God is supposed to be timeless, eternal, outside of time. I also find it hard to see how it can respond to me tugging at his heart, saying to this oversoul, hey I want a connection, if it's indeed timeless. Then omniscience and the apparent contradiction between omniscience and free will come into the picture. Time is a reasonably hard topic to even ponder within our physical universe. If we imagine a being that is itself outside of time, still being able to interact with a universe that does have time, it's mind blowing.
What AJ says about the topic of understanding God, is that as the substance of Gods love flows into our souls, we become more like God and our souls ability to understand God (and the universe) grows. Some things can only be understood intuitively, by the heart, maybe, and cannot really be put into words.

Sorry, this post must be rather unsatisfying, and may be rather poorly structured too. It's the best I can do at this point.

Johan

[brimstoneSalad]

Some things aren't understandable by the human intellect, or at least not when we're still in this 3D realm.

This claim is both insulting and arrogant, and here's why:

If you want to set limits to your own understanding, that's up to you -- but you should consider that when you say you can not understand something, you make that true by limiting yourself. It would be more prudent to assume you can understand everything, so that you won't give up.
This is comparable to the bad answer of "god did it" that typical "Christians" tend to give to scientific matters.
If we never had faith that we could find the real answers, we would never look for them.

You shouldn't make assertions like this about what other people can or can not understand.
It's even contradictory to do so, because in order to know somebody else can't understand something, you have to first understand it yourself.

Almost no human on earth today can imagine or understand 4D objects intuitively, yet their existence is clearly a reality from modern physics.

First off, everything is 4d, since time is a dimension. We can clearly understand the concept of three spatial dimensions and one of time.
Beyond that, modern physics does NOT clearly imply the existence of more dimensions. Anybody who told you so was either ignorant or lying.

"String theory" may be a useful model some day, but it is neither fact, nor even a real scientific theory (it's a mathematical framework), because it doesn't make any tested predictions. It's a very elaborate ad-hoc hypothesis, or more charitably: They're trying to build an axiomatic model that, when finished, may be testable (but probably not), but more importantly may be mathematically useful (although it would tell us nothing about the universe's nature).
Look up some of the criticism of string theory, and you may be surprised. It's only popular in the media because it seems to strange and sexy. It sells papers, basically. That's it. So far, it's an insult to science to call it a "theory" along with real theories that have made testable predictions, and most scientists can readily acknowledge that. It's an entirely different kind of thing.

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues ... even-wrong

See an interesting discussion here: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/s ... ce.325063/

My capacity to understand these things at any given time is limited. It can grow, but right now, I can only tell you my theories, really.

You don't understand these things because you can't. Not because they are "beyond" your understanding in some patronizing way that belittles the human imagination, but because they literally do not make sense. They are illogical. It does not -- can not -- compute. The only things we can't understand are those that aren't real because they contradict themselves.
If you step back, though, you can understand them in the sense that you know that these kinds of claims are incoherent, and hold no truth value.

Like this sentence: "This statement is a lie."

Can you understand this to be true? NO. It's self referential, it has no truth value. But we can understand that it's incoherent, and why it's incoherent, and we can know that (like the claims about god) it has no truth value in reality.

A god that relies on these kinds of claims not only doesn't exist (empirically), but can not exist (logically). There's no maybe to it; that's absolute knowledge of such a god's non-existence.

If you define it coherently, though, as I explained, then the answer to god's existence goes from "of course not" to "maybe" and becomes an empirical matter.

I've heard very often that God is supposed to be timeless, eternal, outside of time. I also find it hard to see how it can respond to me tugging at his heart, saying to this oversoul, hey I want a connection, if it's indeed timeless.

If you found it easy, you'd be a crazy person.

There are no timeless forces, in the proper sense. That's logically incoherent. Force, even the force you're talking about, is a thing that occurs in time.
Even gravity, as a force, is not timeless.

The ARE timeless properties of things, based on some internal logic, that GIVE RISE TO forces when things in reality interact.

For example, where there is matter, it will interact to yield the forces of gravity. Gravity wasn't sitting there waiting, but is emergent from the interaction of matter.
Likewise, we could say that if there are sentient beings, they will inevitably interact to yield the forces of love, hate, etc. Those emotions weren't sitting out there waiting in the ether, they are emergent, and formed by those interactions of sentient beings.

Gravity and Love are both emergent forces in our universe. But neither of them have any meaning without the interactions that produce them. Without that, they're just timeless principles or properties of logic that preexist by necessity making those forces possible WHEN and IF the conditions are right for them.

If "god is love", then god did not exist before there were sentient beings to manifest the force that is god's being, and it does not exist outside of that context; it is within us, and nowhere else. But it has the timeless potential to exist anywhere sentient beings are.

Time is a reasonably hard topic to even ponder within our physical universe. If we imagine a being that is itself outside of time, still being able to interact with a universe that does have time, it's mind blowing.

It actually isn't that difficult. And it's not mind-blowing, it's incoherent and has no truth value.
A god that necessitates that being true simply doesn't exist.

Concepts, potentiality, properties of logic -- these things are timeless. Forces are very much created by the things they act upon IN time.
You should really take some physics classes; it might open your mind to a lot of things you have had trouble with.

What AJ says about the topic of understanding God, is that as the substance of Gods love flows into our souls, we become more like God

This is perfectly fine, provided you're saying god is love, in a coherent way that understands its contextual nature. Love begets love. As we let ourselves love and feel love, we can become more loving and feel more love. We reinforce those pathways which we use.

and our souls ability to understand God (and the universe) grows.

That's absolutely false. Understanding does not come from application. And even understanding love does not help you understand the universe. Quite the other way around; understanding the universe helps you understand how these processes work -- like forces -- and can help you understand love too. When you're immersed in it, you're more likely to be unable to see the forest through the trees.

Some things can only be understood intuitively, by the heart, maybe, and cannot really be put into words.

If you believe that, then you'll give up on mentally understanding them or putting them into words. You become a self fulfilling prophecy.
I reject that notion absolutely, and by working hard I have both understood them cognitively and articulated how they function in this post (the post wasn't hard work, I mean the philosophizing and studying the universe that preceded the post over many years).