Belief... or lack thereof

[Randy_Carson]

I see. You must believe. Otherwise, (sotto voce) there will be consequences.

But what you have said doesn’t ring true. If Christianity has a lot going for it in teaching one how to live one’s life (and it does), then one could simply live one’s life on that basis. I could feel free to discount all the nonsense about macro evolution being impossible and the Virgin Mary on a taco and all the other incredible aspects of Christianity and live my life as Jesus would want me to.

Plato said (oops, correction here: Plato is reported to have said) a lot of sensible things that would help us live our lives better. If I follow a lot of what he taught then I think that I would be a better man. But…I don’t have to believe that he existed to do that. There’s no threat of ‘consequences’ if I don’t.

Reduce your speed. Otherwise, (sotto voce) fines double in work zones.

Sorry. Life is like that. It only makes sense to heed the warnings.

 

[pocaracas]

time only exists because this is a material universe, the motion of a planet takes time and its motion through time is measured by its change over time, or its change over time is what we measure as time.

And you know this… how?

Typically, time is a part of space-time… the thing that gets warped by fields responsible for acceleration, such as gravity.
The rate at which time goes by is also dependent on the speed of the observer… which is just weird. The faster the observer moves, the slower times goes by…

 

[pocaracas]

Logic, man. Pure logic.

If time has always existed, then we would never get to the point we are today.

But we are here at today.

Therefore time had a beginning.

It’s not the first time I hear someone saying that… but it was never satisfactorily explained to me.

I see that as comparable to saying, if space is infinite, then we would never get to where we are today… which, I guess, seems a bit less obvious.

Any point in space-time can be defined in any arbitrarily given frame of reference, which means we can define t=0 as any instant we want.

 

[Bradski]

Reduce your speed. Otherwise, (sotto voce) fines double in work zones.

Sorry. Life is like that. It only makes sense to heed the warnings.

You can get information on how to drive safely from many sources. I’m sure you have a few tips. I take the best from where I can find them. I think that approach works best. But I don’t react well being TOLD how to drive by someone who’s authority I don’t recognise.

Try this, Bradski.
Gee, that works well. Thanks a lot.
Do this Bradski!
Hey, go stick it…

 

[pocaracas]

Look around you, bro.

I do… every day.
It’s great to be able to use your neck!

There are four ways to die, and only one of them requires an intruder. Suicides, accidental, and natural deaths can occur without any evidence from outside the room. But murders typically involve suspects external to the crime scene. If there’s evidence of an outside intruder, homicide detectives have to prepare for a chase. Intruders turn death scenes into crime scenes.

Using his expertise as a cold-case detective with the Los Angeles police department, J. Warner Wallace examines eight critical pieces of evidence in the “crime scene” of the universe to determine if they point to a Divine Intruder. If you have ever wondered if something (or someone) outside the natural realm created the universe and everything in it, this is the book for you.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514vx2WHyiL.jpg

That book has a few one star reviews which go in depth into explaining why they give it one star… Why don’t I just go by those to judge that I’m unlikely to find the content of the book enlightening?
Faulty analogies galore, it seems… PRmerger knows I’m not one to enjoy analogies…

 

[Randy_Carson]

Maybe it’s because we can reason out traffic rules from "first principles"and a bit of human psychology. If everyone drives at the speed they desire, the chance of accident rises. The same goes for disrespecting traffic lights and stop signs, etc…

God is a bit lacking in first principles… for me.

And if everyone lives at the speed (or manner) they desire, the chance of accidents rises, also.

That’s probably why we look to a source outside ourselves for objective moral values.

 

[Randy_Carson]

If there’s a Divine Music, I can’t wait to hear it… My experience at Catholic Mass is far from musical…

Ah, well, you’re not alone there! :nope:

 

[MPat]

MPat;13444553:

I’m afraid that does not answer my question. Let’s repeat it: “Are you saying that you would prefer to reject Catholicism even if it’s true, unless it is true under ‘your’ conditions [the same evidence that was available to someone else being available to you and anyone else]?”

Yes.
What sort of God leaves these matters in the faulty say-so of lowly humans?!

Well, no wonder you’re an atheist, if you say you are not really interested in finding out the truth.

I guess there isn’t much we can do in such case (looks like even self-interest doesn’t force you to care about truth, instead leading to complaints abut “fear-mongering”). Since it also looks like it took a post made of little but repetition of my questions to get some answers, I guess there is little progress we could expect here…

Anyway, let’s look what else we have.

All this talk of act and potency relies on our perceived reality, our perceived laws of physics. I was merely pointing out that, when/where the laws of physics fail or break, this line of reasoning may also fail.
I can’t tell if it does fail or not, but this possibility must remain open, however strange or counter-intuitive it may sound.

Also, some astrophysicists are hypothesizing that, considering Dark Mater and Dark Energy (whatever these are) the total energy (E=mc^2, mass is energy, minus a constant) in the Universe adds up to a remarkable number: zero.
If all energy and mass in the Universe is zero, then… zero energy, at some point, became zero energy, but split up in positive and negative parts.
Nothing is still nothing, but locally, we perceive a part of it as something.
Strange and counter-intuitive enough for you?

I don’t know… what if “The Force” is real and accounts for all miracles?
What if miracles are mostly bogus and manufactured?
What if they’re not miracles at all, but misinterpretations?
One must take care with such analysis, no?
Also, even if they are performed by a god, they may not have been performed by the God of christianity… it may be another god… a joker god, or one who once in a while gives you something to play with… and then goes to the other beliefs and gives them also something to play with… miracle claims are not exclusive to Catholicism, nor even Christianity.

Isn’t it interesting how you refuse to accept that things that do not exist can’t do anything without reservation? And yet, this caution is not consistent. In this very post you have cited wildest speculations (which, by the way, do not support any exceptions). Also, let’s look at this:

A caring loving all powerful God would never need to resort to such human artifices, as the carrot and the stick.
So… either Catholicism is false in a few details (for the stick is never used, rendering its suggestion a bit dubious, while Heaven still exists), or it’s false altogether.

So, you need reservations about the basic principle that is a precondition of all science (no, nothing science can possibly discover can invalidate the fact that things that do not exist can do nothing - if it was so, science would just fail to work and wouldn’t discover anything), but make wild claims about God with no reservation?

Isn’t that an interesting pattern? Something that might lead to belief in God is rejected or accepted with great reservations, while wildest speculations leading you in the other direction are accepted uncritically… Did you ever consider, why?

The method would work, if the required evidence was presented.
Sadly, the available evidence for any religion is very similar.

Once again, a very strong claim. Was it a result of a thorough investigation? Let’s see:

Now seriously, I don’t know, I’ve never been in a society that wasn’t predominantly Christian.
I’m sure Hindus have their miracles, as well as all other groups. These guys possibly have tons of them, for each of the gods… wasn’t there some statue of one of their gods in Bangladesh (or close by) that produced milk? Or one that drank milk…
I can’t remember… you forbade me from using google for this.

So, no, the claim that evidence for all religions is very similar is not a result of a thorough investigation of evidence for other religions. Otherwise you would have been able to remember far more miracles of those religions.

As you can see, the pattern holds: the claim was leading you away from belief in God, thus it was accepted uncritically.

Hence the moniker agnostic atheist.
Knowing that the information is far from perfect, it’s better to withhold judgement.

Oh, but are you really withholding judgement?

Let’s see:

The intuitive likelihood that Catholicism is true, given the origin of the information that is held as true, is low.
The same applies for all other religions, for they all share the same sort of shady origins.

Doesn’t look like withholding judgement to me…

Wow, wow, wow… hold on, mate… obviously meant to be fictional?!
How easily you discount a claim… tss tss tss…

Just because some text is written as an apparent documentary, that makes it worthwhile?
How about a film? The Blair Witch Project is a nice example of a film that’s not obviously meant to be understood as fictional.

There are claims that are advanced (truthfully, mistakenly, lyingly), and there is fiction. There is a difference.

 

[Randy_Carson]

It’s not the first time I hear someone saying that… but it was never satisfactorily explained to me.

I see that as comparable to saying, if space is infinite, then we would never get to where we are today… which, I guess, seems a bit less obvious.

Any point in space-time can be defined in any arbitrarily given frame of reference, which means we can define t=0 as any instant we want.

J. Warner Wallace describes it this way:

Philosophical Evidence (from the Impossibility of Infinite Regress)

Imagine a linear race track with a start and finish line. Now imagine you’re a new police recruit and I’ve asked you to put on your track shoes and step into the starting blocks for a physical training (PT) test. The finish line is one hundred yards away. As you place your feet in the blocks and prepare to run, I raise the starting pistol. Just before I fire it, however, I stop and tell you to move the start line and blocks back six inches. You reluctantly do that. Again I raise the pistol to the sky—only to command you, once again, to move the line back six inches. You grudgingly comply. Imagine this continues. Question: Will you ever reach the finish line? No. Unless there is a beginning, you’ll never get to the finish. In a similar way, time also requires a beginning in order for any of us to reach a finish; unless time has a beginning, we cannot arrive at the finish line we call “today.”

coldcasechristianity.com/2015/why-we-know-our-universe-and-everything-in-it-had-a-beginning-free-bible-insert/

 

[pocaracas]

And if everyone lives at the speed (or manner) they desire, the chance of accidents rises, also.

That’s probably why we look to a source outside ourselves for objective moral values.

Or we understand that, in order to live in a society, certain rules are required.
They’re not difficult rules, for most of us… but a few feel them to be a bit more challenging, so it’s better to keep those rules in a centralized code, so we can easily identify those who disobey the rules and apply the appropriate correction…
Oh, the correction that’s implemented is far from corrective, but hey… it’s what we have.

I don’t think the rules come from some objective source… they’re just what we, humanity, have found, after successful trials, that works better to maintain the society running.
Perhaps there are some sets of rules that are better than others, we can’t tell exactly which… but we can see different sets of rules implemented in each country and most seem to work up to a point.

 

[You]

And you know this… how?

Typically, time is a part of space-time… the thing that gets warped by fields responsible for acceleration, such as gravity.
The rate at which time goes by is also dependent on the speed of the observer… which is just weird. The faster the observer moves, the slower times goes by…

I’ll remember to buy a jar of time next time I visit the store then…

 

[pocaracas]

Well, no wonder you’re an atheist, if you say you are not really interested in finding out the truth.

I guess there isn’t much we can do in such case (looks like even self-interest doesn’t force you to care about truth, instead leading to complaints abut “fear-mongering”). Since it also looks like it took a post made of little but repetition of my questions to get some answers, I guess there is little progress we could expect here…

Anyway, let’s look what else we have.

Oh, I’m interested in finding out the truth… but I’d like to avoid “false truths”.

Isn’t it interesting how you refuse to accept that things that do not exist can’t do anything without reservation? And yet, this caution is not consistent. In this very post you have cited wildest speculations (which, by the way, do not support any exceptions).

Those speculations have as much going for them as any actual religion…
That’s the point what I was trying to make.

So, you need reservations about the basic principle that is a precondition of all science (no, nothing science can possibly discover can invalidate the fact that things that do not exist can do nothing - if it was so, science would just fail to work and wouldn’t discover anything), but make wild claims about God with no reservation?

Isn’t that an interesting pattern? Something that might lead to belief in God is rejected or accepted with great reservations, while wildest speculations leading you in the other direction are accepted uncritically… Did you ever consider, why?

Things that lead to belief in God typically rely on something that’s very similar to self-delusion, so of course I’ll avoid them.

The opposite direction things are accepted uncritically? Perhaps my “would” “could”, “may”, “can”, etc. seem certainties to you, but they tend to be used with care.
No doubt, I may have written something a bit more strongly than I really feel it is, but… oh well… I’m only human.

Once again, a very strong claim. Was it a result of a thorough investigation? Let’s see:

So, no, the claim that evidence for all religions is very similar is not a result of a thorough investigation of evidence for other religions. Otherwise you would have been able to remember far more miracles of those religions.

As you can see, the pattern holds: the claim was leading you away from belief in God, thus it was accepted uncritically.

You’re comparing my knowledge of particular religions miraculous claims with the general methodology employed to convince people that they must believe in those religions?..

Oh, but are you really withholding judgement?

Let’s see:

The intuitive likelihood that Catholicism is true, given the origin of the information that is held as true, is low.
The same applies for all other religions, for they all share the same sort of shady origins.

So, where does the information come from?

Ilia: Kirk unit. Why do you not disclose the information?

There are claims that are advanced (truthfully, mistakenly, lyingly), and there is fiction. There is a difference.

There is indeed…
What do we do if someone mistakes fiction for a claim?
e.g. The Atlantis claim by Plato

 

[pocaracas]

J. Warner Wallace describes it this way:

Philosophical Evidence (from the Impossibility of Infinite Regress)

Imagine a linear race track with a start and finish line. Now imagine you’re a new police recruit and I’ve asked you to put on your track shoes and step into the starting blocks for a physical training (PT) test. The finish line is one hundred yards away. As you place your feet in the blocks and prepare to run, I raise the starting pistol. Just before I fire it, however, I stop and tell you to move the start line and blocks back six inches. You reluctantly do that. Again I raise the pistol to the sky—only to command you, once again, to move the line back six inches. You grudgingly comply. Imagine this continues. Question: Will you ever reach the finish line? No. Unless there is a beginning, you’ll never get to the finish. In a similar way, time also requires a beginning in order for any of us to reach a finish; unless time has a beginning, we cannot arrive at the finish line we call “today.”

coldcasechristianity.com/2015/why-we-know-our-universe-and-everything-in-it-had-a-beginning-free-bible-insert/

So… Warner Wallace is also saying that space must have a start point, an origin, or else we’d never get here, to where we are now… right?

 

[pocaracas]

I’ll remember to buy a jar of time next time I visit the store then…

Aww, don’t be like that.

Time is a difficult concept.
Just look at the size of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry about Time: plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/

And they don’t come to any definite answer.

 

[PRmerger]

It’s not the first time I hear someone saying that… but it was never satisfactorily explained to me.

Oh, it was indeed satisfactorily explained to you.

And I know that you weren’t able to refute it.

How do I know this?

Because you deflected to a nonanswer:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=13362350&postcount=407

with a sudden and convenient inability to understand analogies.

 

[PRmerger]

You didn’t ask why God should have certain characteristics. And if you insist that He is the greatest thing you can conceive, then He is bound to have those you describe above.

I am confused about your objection to the insistence of defining God as that which nothing greater can be conceived.

That doesn’t make sense to you?

I mean, if there’s something that exists that is powerful…but then there’s something greater than this powerful entity, that first entity can’t be God.

That’s just common sense.

I don’t know what else to tell you.

 

[PRmerger]

I think you should read the contents of the link, not just the link itself…
The wonders of synchronized waving of the violin bow…and how their strength of thrust is usually a few seconds behind the maestro’s baton…
They can still not hear it, not get the music.

LOL!

No one has proposed that the deaf can hear music.

 

[Bradski]

I am confused about your objection to the insistence of defining God as that which nothing greater can be conceived.

I’m not objecting to you having that as one of God’s characteristics. I’ve no problem with it. But describing God as such doesn’t mean that He was responsible for the creation of the universe. That’s obviously not Anselm’s argument, but you have interpreted it thus. If I may paraphrase:

‘God is the greatest thing that can be imagined.
Whatever created the universe is the greatest thing that can be imagined.
Therefore it must have been God’.

Even allowing for the first statement, the second is not true.

I don’t know what else to tell you.

Well, as I asked:

Now we can start again by explaining why God has to have the three characteristics on which you insist.

If you say: ‘then obviously He wouldn’t be God’, then we agree and can move on to suggest (purely hypothetically) that your God doesn’t exist but whatever else could have created the universe does. You said that it had to be, amongst other things, eternal, omnipotent and omniscient. So I asked why:

Why does it have to be eternal? It could have ceased to exist at the moment the universe was formed.
Why does it have to be omnipotent? It could have no control over how things have evolved.
Why does it have to be omniscient? It doesn’t have to live in the eternal now and therefore be able to see everything. It could exist within the fabric of the universe and not outside it and be as unaware at how events unfold as we are.

And I went on to say:

Eternal? Why? I can easily imagine E creating the universe and then simply ceasing to exist. It may actually be a requirement. Maybe E ‘became’ the universe and does not exist in it’s previous form.

Immaterial? I don’t see that it matters. E might be (might have been) an energy force. Is that immaterial? Not sure and I’m really not bothered.

Omnipotent? Well, just because E created the universe doesn’t not mean that it is omnipotent. Maybe once it was created E was then powerless to change how it evolved. Maybe all it could do was light the blue touch paper and then watch it unfold, curious to see how it all turns out.

And omniscient? Who said he created all the knowledge? Maybe knowledge is a naturally occurring facet of the universe. One that E didn’t plan. Maybe E is pleasantly surprised it turned out that way. And who can say that E knows everything?

I hope that’s clear.

 

[You]

Aww, don’t be like that.

Time is a difficult concept.
Just look at the size of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry about Time: plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/

And they don’t come to any definite answer.

i guess that means i’m not wrong then…

 

[PRmerger]

I’m not objecting to you having that as one of God’s characteristics. I’ve no problem with it. But describing God as such doesn’t mean that He was responsible for the creation of the universe. That’s obviously not Anselm’s argument, but you have interpreted it thus. If I may paraphrase:

‘God is the greatest thing that can be imagined.
Whatever created the universe is the greatest thing that can be imagined.
Therefore it must have been God’.

I see what you’re saying.

We seem to be having 2 separate threads floating around.

What is God? Who is God?
And then there’s a discussion about the definitions of God.
We all need to agree that God, if he exists, is NOT just like a superhero, only more awesome.
God, if he exists, is that which no greater can be conceived.

And then there’s the discussion: how did the universe come about? Did it appear from nothing, like MAGIC, or did a creator cause its existence?

Which one do you want to address right now?