Catholics and William Lane Craig

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MindOverMatter2 said:
…but the God of Abraham, as defined by his attributes, can be proven to exist through human reason alone. This is a doctrine of the Catholic faith.
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More than just a doctrine, it is a dogma. See here: theworkofgod.org/dogmas.htm Of course it is nothing, but an empty assertion, which is binding on the Catholics and only on Catholics. For everyone else it is just another “ho-hum” moment. 🙂 If the church (or its theologians) could prove its veracity, it would be a major breakthrough in converting all those nasty atheists. So, as the old commercial went: “Where is the beef?”.
 
Spock said:
More than just a doctrine, it is a dogma. See here: theworkofgod.org/dogmas.htm Of course it is nothing, but an empty assertion, which is binding on the Catholics and only on Catholics. For everyone else it is just another “ho-hum” moment. 🙂 If the church (or its theologians) could prove its veracity, it would be a major breakthrough in converting all those nasty atheists. So, as the old commercial went: “Where is the beef?”.
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The statement on that page that you have your undies all in a bunch about merely says “God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural light of reason from created things.” It doesn’t mean that we need deductive arguments “proving” there is a God. It’s normally considered to mean that our reason tells us that God exist in the same type of way that our reason tells us that the entire outside world we see with our eyes exist independently of us and is not just an image created by our minds.
 
Spock

So, as the old commercial went: “Where is the beef?”

Genesis, 1000 B.C. : “Let there be light.”

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

:D;)
 
ronnie_bonigli said:
It hardly needs to be said that arguments for the existence of God do not show that “Christianity is true”. They merely “prove” (to the extent that they “prove” anything since they are all arguably flawed and open to debate) that there is some sort of “god”, be it the God of Islam or New Agers or deism or the god of Spinozza. Again, IMHO these intellectual exercises are overrated
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It’s one thing to say that you can know God apart from evidence for him. Craig actually does defend the idea that one can know God apart from evidence, but it’s shortsighted to deny that evidence and reason have any value, and it strikes me as overly fearful to say that we shouldn’t come up with reasons for our beliefs because of the fear they might be shown to be bad ones. Reason can be a helper to faith and as I said in a previous post, the Bible commands us to be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us.

Similar it’s short-sighted to say that the Teleological argument is worthless because it only proves a designer. The arguments can work together, a cosmological argument can offer evidence for a creator, the teleological arg. for a designer, the moral argument that He is good, the evidence for the Resurrection can offer evidence for Christianity. And the ontological arg. can help support the others. And at any rate a person convinced by the fine-tuning arg. might be a person who would be more open to accepting Jesus, his claims, or the evidence for the resurrection than he would be without that argument.

Finally, this talk about “proof” is misleading since proof in most people’s minds means some sort of mathematical certainty proof, and if such certainty cannot be established, people consider the argument a failure. This is hardly reasonable. It would be better to talk about “Evidence” for belief instead of proof. That way you don’t get caught up in the search for the perfect argument and reject any non-perfect arg as worthless.
 
ronnie_bonigli said:
The statement on that page that you have your undies all in a bunch about merely says “God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural light of reason from created things.” It doesn’t mean that we need deductive arguments “proving” there is a God.
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Yes, you do. See below. (Btw. that is what all those attempted and unsuccessful “proofs” are supposed to establish).
ronnie_bonigli said:
It’s normally considered to mean that our reason tells us that God exist in the same type of way that our reason tells us that the entire outside world we see with our eyes exist independently of us and is not just an image created by our minds.
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There is a world of difference. We directly experience the external reality, via our senses. God cannot be experienced in any manner. Lacking the possibility of direct experience, all you could hope for is to establish God’s existence deductively.
 
ronnie_bonigli said:
Which argument for the existence of God “proves” specifically “the God of Abraham” but not the generic god of deism?

The cosmological argument? The ontological? The design argument?
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What is the generic God of deism?
 
What is the generic God of deism?

“This most beautiful system [the universe] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Isaac Newton
 
ronnie_bonigli said:
The statement on that page that you have your undies all in a bunch about merely says “God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural light of reason from created things.” It doesn’t mean that we need deductive arguments “proving” there is a God. It’s normally considered to mean that our reason tells us that God exist in the same type of way that our reason tells us that the entire outside world we see with our eyes exist independently of us and is not just an image created by our minds.
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Certainty, meaning metaphysical certainty; as in there is no space for rational doubt nor possibility of it being wrong.
 
Spock said:
There is a world of difference. We directly experience the external reality, via our senses. God cannot be experienced in any manner. Lacking the possibility of direct experience, all you could hope for is to establish God’s existence deductively.
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Spoken like a true atheist
 
MindOverMatter2 said:
I prefer it if you take the time to type it out for us. Then I might take you seriously.
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It’s not my fault you don’t know what deism is, you don’t have to get snotty with me, I’m not here to teach you stuff you should already know
 
A general, if not absolute, tendency of deists is not to believe in a personal God or any of the traditional religions. Thus the God of Spinoza is adopted by Einstein as his own, by Einstein’s own admission. Einstein was no more an atheist than a theist, though you will find atheists who try to use him against theism, never willing to acknowledge that he repudiated atheism as well.

Isaac Newton is classified as a deist by some, because he found in the natural world sufficient indications of the existence of a powerful and intelligent Creator. Yet Newton also subscribed to the view that the Creator had inspired the authors of sacred texts with a code by which prophecies could be calculated once the code was broken. In his own notebooks, Newton used a code that resulted in predicting the restoration of Israel sometime in the late 1940s. This happened, of course. Using a code he also predicted the end of the world in the 21st Century. These aspects of Newton’s thought and writings were not discovered until well into the last century when dust covered boxes of documents were rediscovered to be the work of Newton, who apparently was obsessed with biblical prophecy.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
A general, if not absolute, tendency of deists is not to believe in a personal God or any of the traditional religions. Thus the God of Spinoza is adopted by Einstein as his own, by Einstein’s own admission. Einstein was no more an atheist than a theist, though you will find atheists who try to use him against theism, never willing to acknowledge that he repudiated atheism as well.

Isaac Newton is classified as a deist by some, because he found in the natural world sufficient indications of the existence of a powerful and intelligent Creator. Yet Newton also subscribed to the view that the Creator had inspired the authors of sacred texts with a code by which prophecies could be calculated once the code was broken. In his own notebooks, Newton used a code that resulted in predicting the restoration of Israel sometime in the late 1940s. This happened, of course. Using a code he also predicted the end of the world in the 21st Century. These aspects of Newton’s thought and writings were not discovered until well into the last century when dust covered boxes of documents were rediscovered to be the work of Newton, who apparently was obsessed with biblical prophecy.
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deism is a pretty milquetoast religion, in my opinion that is. But all those arguments for the existence of God could just be referring to a boring deistic god
 
btw, back to post #63, I had said;
ronnie_bonigli said:
The statement on that page that you have your undies all in a bunch about merely says “God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural light of reason from created things.” It doesn’t mean that we need deductive arguments “proving” there is a God. It’s normally considered to mean that our reason tells us that God exist in the same type of way that our reason tells us that the entire outside world we see with our eyes exist independently of us and is not just an image created by our minds.
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and you responded;
Spock said:
There is a world of difference. We directly experience the external reality, via our senses. God cannot be experienced in any manner. Lacking the possibility of direct experience, all you could hope for is to establish God’s existence deductively.
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do you not see a problem here with your reasoning?

If the world we see is just an image created by our minds, what good is it that “We directly experience the external reality, via our senses”? I had just said it could be all an image created by our minds, which would obviously include those very sense perceptions that we “see” and “hear” with. We don’t need a deep philosophical argument to convince us that the world we see and feel with out senses is real independently of our mind, we believe it as a basic fact about reality. For billions of people who’ve lived over the millennias, the believe in God is a basic fact of reality.
 
ronnie_bonigli said:
For billions of people who’ve lived over the millennias, the believe in God is a basic fact of reality.
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Very few people, if at all, have experienced God in the direct same fashion that we experience everyday life. Many People, however, may have experienced effects that they rationalise as being proportionate in nature to the power of a divine non-physical cause they call God.
 
ronnie_bonigli said:
We don’t need a deep philosophical argument to convince us that the world we see and feel with out senses is real independently of our mind, we believe it as a basic fact about reality. For billions of people who’ve lived over the millennias, the believe in God is a basic fact of reality.
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Argumentum ad numeram.
 
MindOverMatter2 said:
Very few people, if at all, have experienced God in the direct same fashion that we experience everyday life. Many People, however, may have experienced effects that they rationalise as being proportionate in nature to the power of a divine non-physical cause they call God.
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The key word is highlighted above.
 
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