Another serious reason why these conversations are futile

[Spock]

I really would be interested to see what response you have to this observation, more on-topic than any post has been for a while.

Christians and atheists are well-matched. The atheist because he is trained how to attack theism, and the Christian because he has loved God.

I don’t think that most atheists are “trained to attack” theism. Most of them do not even think about these matters. Just like most theists, who go to church on Sundays, but otherwise they lead their lives exactly as atheists do. (I call them Sunday Christians.) But there is an interesting point in what you say. When you say you love God, what exactly do you mean? Is that an emotion? After all “love” is used in so many aspects. I started a thread before about “love” and it fizzled out.

This is what I meant when I said atheists argue like robots — their arguments have all the seeming of philosophy, no soft squishy center. It was no insult, at least not one intended.

Of course it was not an insult, and it did not come through as one. You are right, when I (and I only speak for myself) think and talk about these matters, there is no “emotional” charge. Many times I have been accused of being “hostile”, or “being depressed”. I was asked how can I lead my life without an “ultimate goal”, how come that I do not feel “suicidal” in my “despair”. These questions show an incredible amount of misunderstanding, which I try to rectify - with modest success.

As my parting request, consider please responding to my questionnaire. I really do want to scope out the mind of individual atheists, those without a book contract.

I missed it before, but now I went and checked it out. Will give a response over there, but I can already see that it will be almost identical to that of AntiTheist.

 

[Spock]

More self-deception! Precisely which posts contain answers to my questions?

If you think that I have nothing better to do than browsing dozens and hundreds of pages to dig out some some posts, then you have another think coming.

That remains to be seen… Your track record indicates otherwise.

Really? You you made a list of all of my posts, a list of all the replies to them, made a cross reference of all the replies to decide which ones I consider worthy or not? You sure have a lot of time on your hands. For one more time, just ignore me.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

No, we do not “have to explain” it. Explanations cannot go into infinity, there is some point where the explanations stop.

There is a point where time begins. You say it is without a cause, this is qualitatively the same as saying that it came out absolutely nothing. Potentiality cannot be the cause of its self. It is a contradiction. Full-stop.

You cannot explain change with the fact of change. And so yes, it does need an explanation since it has a beginning. Your refusal to explain it merely highlights the fact that you are in denial because you know the theistic consequences of explaining it; it has nothing to do with you reasoning powers.

 

[Spock]

There is a point where time begins.

No, there is not. Time is not an independent variable, it is a property of STEM - space, time, energy and matter. The only thing we can say is that STEM - in its current form “started” at the Big Bang. The properties of the singularity are unknown at this point. Everything about the singularity is mere speculation.

You say it is without a cause, this is qualitatively the same as saying that it came out absolutely nothing. Potentiality cannot be the cause of its self. It is a contradiction. Full-stop.

No matter how many times you are going to repeat it, no one says that. First of all “nothing” is not an entity, it is merely a concept. Causation, just like space, time, etc… can only be defined within the Universe. It is just as incorrect to ask “what caused the Universe?” or “what happened before the Universe?” or “what exists outside the Universe?” as it is to ask “what exists to the north from the North Pole?”. (The direction of “north” is simply undefined at the North Pole.) These questions attempt to apply some something where it is not applicable. Usually this error is called the “fallacy of the stolen concept”.

There are some things which are called “brute facts”. Theists call their brute fact God, atheists call their brute fact the Universe.

You cannot explain change with the fact of change. And so yes, it does need an explanation since it has a beginning.

Change is just another inherent property of STEM. It needs no “explanation”. There is no “change” outside STEM.

Your refusal to explain it merely highlights the fact that you are in denial because you know the theistic consequences of explaining it; it has nothing to do with you reasoning powers.

Get real and stop phychoanalyzing me. The theistic “explanation” is nothing of the kind. It may be true (as I said before) that the known, physical universe is not “all there is”. But the explanation you propose does not explain anything. To say that an unknown and unknowable being used some unimaginable, “magical” powers does not give us any information about the event. On the very contrary, it stops all the possibilities of any explanation, now and forever.

Also, there are no “consequences” of what you say. Your faceless, skeletal, deistic god - even if exists, would have no relevance to us. And there is no logical way that would lead from this deity to the Christian God.

 

[Neil_Anthony]

Originally Posted by Neil_Anthony
Here’s an example of something I think is beyond science, but still is worthy of knowing: What lies beyond our universe. Are there other universes? Do you think this is a problem that science can solve? It seems to me more of a philosophical problem, yet some scientists seem to think its within their realm to speculate on what “must exist” outside our universe.

It is pure speculation. As a topic for a science-fiction story such a conjecture can be useful. But so can be the idea of time-travel. No, these questions do not belong to science, and will not be solved by science. There is nothing “outside” the universe, or “before” the universe.

I think physicist Stephen Hawking, cosmologist Max Tegmark and many scientific publications who have published papers on multiverses would disagree with you. Why do these scientists believe in multiple universes if they don’t belong in science? Why would they waste their time on such questions, if not to answer questions like “what lies beyond the universe” and “why are we here?”?

 

[Spock]

I think physicist Stephen Hawking, cosmologist Max Tegmark and many scientific publications who have published papers on multiverses would disagree with you. Why do these scientists believe in multiple universes if they don’t belong in science? Why would they waste their time on such questions, if not to answer questions like “what lies beyond the universe” and “why are we here?”?

I have no idea. But I seriously doubt that they care about things like: “why are we here”.

Now, it is possible that they are able to create a theory, which will allow us to posit questions and calculate the answers. It is the same with quantum theory. The mathematics is there, it can be “interpreted” in several ways (none of them satisfactory). But that does not matter. To visualize it would be an “icing on the cake”.

If the multiverse theory would be like quantum theory, if it would allow to make predictions, and verify the results, then it would become more than just speculation, it would become a useful tool. I am not familiar with the details, but I seriously doubt that the multiverse theory is akin to believe that there are multiple universes, like having multiple balloons floating in a room. More like imagining that the observable universe is just a 3-dimensional subset of a multi-dimensional universe. That cannot be observed, but as long the mathematics is usable, and would yield verifyable results, that would be an indirect verification of the theory. How one attempts to “visualize” the actual structure is of no relevance.

In mathematics we routinely deal with n-dimensional spaces (matrixes and vectors), which are mighty useful tools in several applications. We cannot visualize a 100-dimensional space, but we can use the mathematical tools to solve all sorts of problems, from quantum theory to operations research, to linear and non-linear programming, which are used in theoretical and applied economics.

As an old saying goes, in every science the “amount” of actual science is directly proportional to the mathematics it uses. As another old saying goes: “don’t speculate, calculate!”…

 

[davidv]

I have no idea. But I seriously doubt that they care about things like: “why are we here”.

Now, it is possible that they are able to create a theory, which will allow us to posit questions and calculate the answers. It is the same with quantum theory. The mathematics is there, it can be “interpreted” in several ways (none of them satisfactory). But that does not matter. To visualize it would be an “icing on the cake”.

If the multiverse theory would be like quantum theory, if it would allow to make predictions, and verify the results, then it would become more than just speculation, it would become a useful tool. I am not familiar with the details, but I seriously doubt that the multiverse theory is akin to believe that there are multiple universes, like having multiple balloons floating in a room. More like imagining that the observable universe is just a 3-dimensional subset of a multi-dimensional universe. That cannot be observed, but as long the mathematics is usable, and would yield verifyable results, that would be an indirect verification of the theory. How one attempts to “visualize” the actual structure is of no relevance.

In mathematics we routinely deal with n-dimensional spaces (matrixes and vectors), which are mighty useful tools in several applications. We cannot visualize a 100-dimensional space, but we can use the mathematical tools to solve all sorts of problems, from quantum theory to operations research, to linear and non-linear programming, which are used in theoretical and applied economics.

As an old saying goes, in every science the “amount” of actual science is directly proportional to the mathematics it uses. As another old saying goes: “don’t speculate, calculate!”…

What is the basis for your doubt?

 

[Spock]

What is the basis for your doubt?

Gut feeling, nothing more substantial.

 

[tonyrey]

If you think that I have nothing better to do than browsing dozens and hundreds of pages to dig out some some posts, then you have another think coming.

 

[davidv]

Gut feeling, nothing more substantial.

Which to me demonstrates that your own assertains and lack of substantial backing for them contribute to the futility that your OP complains about.

 

[tonyrey]

You cannot explain change with the fact of change. And so yes, it does need an explanation since it has a beginning. Your refusal to explain it merely highlights the fact that you are in denial because you know the theistic consequences of explaining it; it has nothing to do with you reasoning powers.

You have to remember that atheists deify the inanimate universe and endow it with the magical power to produce the power of reasoning - which then disposes of itself by attributing itself to the inanimate universe! Don’t you see how plausible their explanation it is?

 

[tonyrey]

Which to me demonstrates that your own assertions and lack of substantial backing for them contribute to the futility that your OP complains about.

Yet another nail in the coffin!

 

[Soldier_Of_God]

I’m late to the game but I thought I would comment on the OP concerns.

There is nothing to “interpret” in the command: “Kill all the men, women and male children, but keep the virgins for yourself”. There is nothing to “interpret” in: “I am a jealous God”. Also “I create good and evil”. Or “vengence is mine”… or innumerable other commands and actions. You should ask the Church to give an official, infallible interpretation of the Bible, verse by verse, chapter by chapter. And then you would at least have something to point to, instead of the vacuous and irrelevant “comeback” like the one above.

Biblical hermeneutics requires context and grammical-historical analysis, in other words an understanding author’s original intended meaning in the text. Parsing out text to suit an exegetical perspective is intellectually unacceptable. To address why God has commanded the death of defeated opponents, let’s examine Number 33:55, which occurs a couple of verses later:

“BUT IF YOU DON’T KILL the inhabitants of the land: they that remain, SHALL BE AS NAIL IN YOUR EYES, AND SPEARS IN YOUR SIDES, and they shall be your ENEMIES in the land of your habitation.”

A defeated people that is allowed to continue will return to become lethal rivals to the ancient Israelis, the people chosen to be stewards for the word of God.

As for God being “jealous”, “angry” or subject to other human emotions, God undergoes an anthropomorphism process in an attempt for finite minds to understand His motivations. Strict and literal interpretations in this regards is not appropriate for comprehension. For example, the “hand of God” is used in various biblical references. Do we really believe an actual hand became corporeal to perform tasks? It is simply a metaphor and the same is applicable when God acquires “human” characteristics, including emotion. Specially, the statement of God’s being “jealous” is to mean that He desires that all persons to worship him exclusively and for individuals not to be lured into and indoctrinated into false belief systems. Again, grammical-historical analysis is the key to understanding the bible.

 

[JDaniel]

Significant? Perhaps. But completely unnecessary. If god is what he is said to be (and I do believe in a supernatural creator, though I don’t buy what man-made religion is selling)

Seeker:

This is an interesting answer. Can you describe how you view this “supernatural creator?” What are his/her/its determinants or attributes?

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

Well, I am glad this thread is thriving. So many posts to reflect upon, and so little time. So, permit me to look at JD’s post about the recovery of the patient after the intercessory prayer. I do not doubt that it happened, just as you described. The question is, to what extent does such an event support the claim that intercessory prayer “works”? Sorry to say, it does not support it at all.

Well, Spockmeister, that is an uncategorical assertion. My uncategorical rebuttal is that it does. Neither of us can win this with naked assertions. I did not describe the events of those days to be a proof of the assertion that intercessory prayer works. It’s just strange that it coincided. I prefer to believe that the coincidence was not fortuitous.

You lament that Christians are lame who make such assertions, and yet, you don’t seem to have a problem doing the same.

It is very interesting that people bring up such anecdotal evidence to support a claim, and declare that indeed prayer brings positive results. On the other hand, when atheists offer a rigorous, double-blind test to examine such a claim, and it shows absolutely no correlation, then the believers will proclaim, that God cannot be “tested”, that in the case of a test God will “skew” the results, to stay hidden from prying eyes.

That’s not this Christian. I don’t know who you’re talking about.

This is precisely the attitude I am complaining about. When convenient, assert something, when inconvenient, deny it. That is why conversation is almost impossible. Either prayer “works” in a controlled environment, and then God can be tested, or God cannot be tested, and then such anecdotal evidence is meaningless. You cannot have it both ways.

If you were using me as an example, I will state for the record that your argument is nothing more than fairly close to ad hominem, monsieur!

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

Actually, I’d say no. The implication of the original story was that it was the intervention of the man of the cloth that saved her, not prayer in general. I have no doubt people were praying for my mother, I myself was despite the fact I don’t really believe god intervenes in such situations. And despite the positive results, I attribute her survival to her incredibly strong desire to attend my brothers wedding. Now that it’s past, I worry she may be ready to go.

On the other hand, eventually it’s going to happen, and if she’s ready, she’s ready.

Seeker:

I understand.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

Indeed he said: “Whatever you ask in my name will be fulfilled, because I will go to the Father”. That is a very strong promise. He also said: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can tell the mountain, go yonder, and it will go”. (Not verbatim quotations). Also an explicit promise. Did you try it? Did the mountain move?

To preempt the usual response, obviously Jesus did not mean “everything”, when he said “everything” (which is sloppy wording on his part). He must have meant: “if the prayer was what God otherwise intended”. “If it be thy will…” is the form most people use. So, why issue intercessory prayers at all? “If it be thy will, please perform this…”? If it is God’s will, he will do it anyhow. If it is against his will, he will not do it, even if you pray for it. Not to mention that God is immutable, he cannot be influenced by prayer.

I cannot resist to quote from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary:

To pray (verb): To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

Double blind tests are the only kind, which can separate the actual results from the placebo effects.

The patients are divided into two groups. In the first group there are the patients for whom prayer is uttered in a systematic fashion (Group A). The other group is the control group, for whom no systematic prayer is performed (Group B). The point is that neither the doctor, nor the patient is aware of who belongs to which group. At the end of the experiment it is eveluated if the patients in Group A show a significant benefit which does not occur in Group B. Significant beyond the statistical fluctuations. There were never any positive results.

My goodness, how sterile!!

God bless,
jd

 

[Elijah_Baley]

Spock, that’s much appreciated. I look forward to reading the back and forth some more.

Understanding God as love is as easy as understanding the love of a father for his children and his children for their father. Fr. Barron, who represents Catholicism better than some Catholics on this forum, explains some of the false understanding of God’s love beginning around 3:20. Late in the video, he concludes with the illustration I mentioned. Come to think of it, the beginning of the video might be interesting watching for you, too.

Peter Kreeft uses the following words in a quite different context but he may be adapted to our purposes:

Or rather, not dying to your desires but dying to the you in your desires. I think this sounds much more mystical than it is. It is simply giving God a blank check. It is simply islam, complete submission. Fiat. Mary’s thing. Look at what it did 2000 years ago when she did it; it brought God down from heaven and thus saved the world.

Selflessness directed towards another for a moral purpose is love. Love is not merely affection, and not a sexual reaction, but an absolute, altruistic charity.

And, in the defense of prayer, God sometimes responds as we hope to our prayer, but not every time. Most of the time we are simply conforming ourselves to His will. Fr. Barron explains.

I know I said I’d back out, but there came a real reason to post I could not in good conscience ignore:

If you **could **refute my statements you wouldn’t hesitate — without making feeble excuses. Is it really so difficult? …]

I know it is irksome to have the weaknesses of your arguments exposed but on a forum you shouldn’t expect to have a comfortable ride… **You **can ignore my references to your posts but that won’t stop others reading them.

Shame on you. You do not defend the faith by attacking the integrity of those who do not claim the faith as their own. Use truth. It is on our side. As it stands, you actively weaken our witness to Christ.

 

[JDaniel]

Yet, none of these elevate the status of such a belief system beyond pure, irrational speculation.

That’s nothing more than a naked assertion.

I doubt it. But this is not the point at all. There are some people, who willingly and joyfully engage in such practices, where there is no “pressure” to participate in them. They know what they are doing, and want to do it. Yet, according to the Church such behavior is “disordered”, and not permissible. That is what I am talking about. Whether the participants are of the same sex, or not, they have several things in common: they are willing, they are eager, they are filled with love for their partner.

God commanded us to procreate. He did not command us to participate in pure hedonistic pleasure for the sake of hedonistic pleasure. You know very well that married couples engage in foreplay. You know very well that all acts of love-making do not end in fornication. Many times it’s purely natural.

What is there to test? Some people like big families, some like small ones. Some are happy alone.

But, and this may sound silly, how would they know?

Nope, I did not invent it. Take a father who beats up his child, and later offers a lollipop as a reward. The reward is unconnected to the previous deed. The reward will not make the prior injustice “justified”. Why do we have to go and talk about such obvious things?

Your point evades me.

So? The principle that someone’s free execution of his his “will” is somehow “sacrosanct” is nonsense. If we can justifiably prevent a deed, so can God.

Conclusions by Spock?

Nonsense. The crevasse is not “good”, nor “bad”. I described an accident, and there is nothing “evil” in that. In the absence of a mind, which can see the event and has the ability to prevent, rectify it, there is nothing “evil” about it.

You were misunderstood, then.

The problem is that you describe God as all-knowing and all-powerful, so you paint yourself into a corner, when you say that such a being is somehow “exempt” from doing what needs to be done, and yet you wish to describe that being as “loving” and “caring”. That is the contradiction.

Not a contradiction: people live and people die. That such things take place has nothing whatsoever to do with God’s Love for his people.

No. No sane atheist considers “matter” as some kind of a “god”. That is just your misconception. I do not blame “God” for anything, and have said it many times. I blame the believers for maintaining a contradiction when they speak of the God, they believe in. Doublethink, anyone?

Really? Earlier in this forum you mentioned something about matter as a sufficient replacement for God. My misconception was instantiated by you.

God bless,
jd

 

[Betterave]

Christians who love God don’t bother with training in defending him, which is the real reason why atheists seem to knock Christians dead in informal debates like these. Most Christians today are not trained in logic because most people aren’t trained in logic these days. Apologetics is no substitute, either, because apologetics by definition includes a personal dimension that the cold logic of philosophy does not, and often emphasizes that personal dimension — see “aesthetic argument for God,” et al.

This is what I meant when I said atheists argue like robots — their arguments have all the seeming of philosophy, no soft squishy center. It was no insult, at least not one intended.

I found this to be a very curious set of comments. I’d have thought that atheists’ arguments are all soft and squishy, usually throughout, and that the center of theistic arguments is anything but soft and squishy - and that’s why atheists don’t like such arguments. I also haven’t noticed any atheists seeming to knock Christians dead in informal debates like these. Spock’s logic is anything but “cold logic” (unless by ‘cold’ you mean lifeless and uncomprehending). He’s expressed a personal conviction on more than one occasion that he fully expects these conversations to be fruitless. And they usually are because he is constantly attacking straw men and begging questions and tailing off into irrelevant ad hominems.