Proving the Existence of God

[Peter_Plato]

You’re still talking about your broad theological beliefs, while my issue is with the logic of one specific philosophical argument, and nothing else but the logic of one specific philosophical argument.

Yes, let’s strain at the gnat and swallow the camel, shall we?

The issue is how any kind of interactive personality (a living God) can by inferred, deduced, or is in any sense consistent with a complete absence of change, but no worries, I’ve already concluded that Thomists have trained themselves never to ask such questions, as that’s the only way to see the Emperor’s new clothes.

Here are the issues, as far as I can tell, with your perspective RE: Proving the existence of God:

1. You believe in the existence of an undefined “God,” in whom you are content to believe so long as he remains undefined and undefiled by human reason.
2. Such a God, because of his “undefined” status is amenable to whatever you choose to believe about him so long as it accords with your personal beliefs. When anyone else makes a “defining” statement about this God, you take it upon yourself to invoke the full brunt of skepticism and the Emperor’s lack of clothing to eagerly dispel such notions.
3. Since God is undefined, he is also unprovable which consorts well with your need to keep God amenable to whatever you want to believe about him. It also accords well with your “bashing” of any other attempt to understand or know God because of your need to keep him “unknowable.”
4. Since God is, to you, undefined and undefinable, you are free to randomly invoke from any authoritative source any word byte or quote that supports your particular view on a particular subject regardless of whether or not the author of the quote generally agrees with your position or not.
5. Science is esteemed in your view because its method is indisputable. This may be true regarding its ability to make conclusions about physical events. However, you often invoke the findings of science to support, by association to its authority, your views on metaphysical, religious, spiritual, moral or any other subject you have a mind to.
6. Carrying on a discussion with you is an exercise in chasing the wind precisely because you seem to have no position regarding who or what God is, whether he exists or not and what obligations are due him. That God, to you, is unknowable and unprovable means no alternative beyond what you want to hold can ever penetrate your systematic unbeliefs.
7. You are free to carry on as you have, but at least those with whom you engage in discussion ought to be clear about where you “are coming from” so as not to have any preconceived illusions about what “Baptist,” as your stated affiliation, entails. The terms atheist materialist, fideist, or moral relativist could just as aptly apply to you as theist or Baptist, since the indefinability of God is, in your view, compatible with any of those.

These being stated, I think it is incumbent on you to add a disclaimer to each of your posts that warns your would be interlocutors concerning the “open waters” they are headed into.

Don’t take this personally because I do enjoy reading your posts. They are typically crafted well as far as that goes, but because they merely are intended to debunk a particular view and not provide anything approaching a defined alternative, the exercise is more like running an endless gauntlet than actually “getting anywhere.”

 

[Peter_Plato]

What personalty has to do with changeless mind? God in their view is changeless because it has omniscience. How God could change its personality when it knows the fate of each being before creation? God in this picture however knows about emergence of evil and itself alone is responsible for evil creation. The main question is whether God is able to create a creation without evil? The answer apparently is no, when free will is involved in creation. What is free will?, we don’t know. How about God?, God does know free will, how possibly God could not know what free will is in the same time creating beings with free will? So God is cognitively open to free will, so God knows the reason why we act accordingly based on our free will on a situation. Now if you rewind the movie backward, **you will find that God should know the source of evil in First Cause. **In simple word:

1. God has omniscience
2. God is cognitively open to free will
3. God knows the action we perform as a result of situation we were/are/will be embedded into

---

Your post is fine to this point (except that the word "in” is incorrect (should be “as”) in the bolded red statement above)

and then goes wildly off the tracks here…

---

1. God knew the source evil in first hand, namely first cause
2. God created evil

 

[Judas_Thaddeus]

The most popular of these arguments is the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA), as defended by William Lane Craig.
He is absolutely certain the universe began to exist.

It should be noted though, that under Thomism, the universe cannot possibly have begun to exist because that would denote a changeless God beginning to do something, which is a contradictio in terminis.
It’s really simple: if the universe did begin, Thomas of Aquino was wrong and if the universe did not begin, asking why it began is meaningless.

Well, if I may *cautiously *draw from my Pagan past, I do
have an interesting passage, not biblical, but still good:Each manifest thing has a cause, and each cause
has a cause before it, but the First Cause has no
cause before [Him], and [He] is the Spirit.
Though it comes from a pagan-source, I find it nevertheless find it to be a good point.
(You’ll notice the brackets containing the masculine pronouns, well yeah, I masculin-
ized the verse in light of Christianity).

 

[polytropos]

The issue is how any kind of interactive personality (a living God) can by inferred, deduced, or is in any sense consistent with a complete absence of change, but no worries, I’ve already concluded that Thomists have trained themselves never to ask such questions, as that’s the only way to see the Emperor’s new clothes.

I’m trying to reconcile this assertion with the existence of the section “God, change, life, and action” in The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil by Brian Davies (a contemporary Thomist), in which Davies specifically clarifies what it means to call God living, how God’s changelessness is compatible with his activity, etc. but alas, I cannot. The reason, I suspect, is that inocente has “already concluded that Thomists have trained themselves never to ask such questions.” He need look no further. But if one cracks open a book written by a Thomist on the subject (or even a book written by Aquinas), one will find that Thomists in fact do ask and answer “such questions.”

Note that to combat the claim you’re making, I don’t even need to assert that the responses Thomists give are right (although I think they are). You made a sweeping generalization about Thomist scholarship that is empirically false.

Perhaps you intend a restricted scope of “Thomists” and don’t mean to include Thomist scholars, but that seems a bit ad hoc.

 

[Bahman]

What personalty has to do with changeless mind? God in their view is changeless because it has omniscience. How God could change its personality when it knows the fate of each being before creation? God in this picture however knows about emergence of evil and itself alone is responsible for evil creation. The main question is whether God is able to create a creation without evil? The answer apparently is no, when free will is involved in creation. What is free will?, we don’t know. How about God?, God does know free will, how possibly God could not know what free will is in the same time creating beings with free will? So God is cognitively open to free will, so God knows the reason why we act accordingly based on our free will on a situation. Now if you rewind the movie backward, you will find that God should know the source of evil in First Cause. In simple word:

1. God has omniscience
2. God is cognitively open to free will
3. God knows the action we perform as a result of situation we were/are/will be embedded into

---

Your post is fine to this point (except that the word "in” is incorrect (should be “as”) in the bolded red statement above)

and then goes wildly off the tracks here…

---

1. God knew the source evil in first hand, namely first cause
2. God created evil

How about this?

1. God has omniscience
2. God is cognitively open to free will (since otherwise couldn’t create a being with free will)
3. God knows the decision we perform in a situation as a result being cognitively open to free will and situation, in another word God is cognitively open to creation
4. Creation was performed by first cause and God was cognitively open to first cause
5. Evil exist and God was aware the source of evil in first cause since it was cognitively open to it
6. God created evil

 

[Peter_Plato]

How about this?

1. God has omniscience
2. God is cognitively open to free will (since otherwise couldn’t create a being with free will)
3. God knows the decision we perform in a situation as a result being cognitively open to free will and situation, in another word God is cognitively open to creation
4. Creation was performed by first cause and God was cognitively open to first cause
5. Evil exist and God was aware the source of evil in first cause since it was cognitively open to it
6. God created evil

The problem is that you are using Aristotelian language (first cause) in an ambiguous way. The first cause would have been the Uncaused Cause (aka God,) so God would not be “cognitively open” to the first cause, God would have BEEN the first cause itself.

The conclusion - God created evil - is not demonstrated since “cognitively open” is ambiguous and could mean merely “aware of and permitted” which is a far cry from “creating.” God may have created all the necessary and sufficient conditions for evil - beings with free will - that, then, brought about evil (degradation of their own capacity for free agency) without God actually creating evil itself.

 

[belorg]

Well, if I may *cautiously *draw from my Pagan past, I do
have an interesting passage, not biblical, but still good:Each manifest thing has a cause, and each cause
has a cause before it, but the First Cause has no
cause before [Him], and [He] is the Spirit.
Though it comes from a pagan-source, I find it nevertheless find it to be a good point.
(You’ll notice the brackets containing the masculine pronouns, well yeah, I masculin-
ized the verse in light of Christianity).

And the relevance of this quote to my claim is??

 

[inocente]

As I said if you are dealing at the philosophical level, you can infer that the First Cause is Intelligent and has a Will and that He loves the creatures He created. That fits Thomas’ definition of a Being that is a Person, and, being a Person, that means He has a Personality. That seems logical to me. Where am I wrong?

And if He is Unchanging and Unchangeable, is a Person, and has a Personality, He fits the minimal definition of Who God is. But for a complete understanding of Who this Being is one has to accept Revelation. Now I can see how someone committed, ideologically, to Sola Scriptura can reject this reasoning. If that is your position, there isn’t much point in this discussion, because you will never accept my position, no matter what, and I will never accept yours. I don’t mind that, but you should have made that known right up front.

This has now gone on for days and you are still talking about your general beliefs and what you think I should believe, which is nothing at all to do with the question I asked, which was about the logic of a specific philosophical argument.

I thought you said you did a college course on philosophy, how can you keep making such a basic mistake? I mean there are ten-year-old kids who wouldn’t make such a basic mistake, and surely wouldn’t keep making day after day.

 

[inocente]

What personalty has to do with changeless mind? God in their view is changeless because it has omniscience. How God could change its personality when it knows the fate of each being before creation? God in this picture however knows about emergence of evil and itself alone is responsible for evil creation. The main question is whether God is able to create a creation without evil? The answer apparently is no, when free will is involved in creation. What is free will?, we don’t know. How about God?, God does know free will, how possibly God could not know what free will is in the same time creating beings with free will? So God is cognitively open to free will, so God knows the reason why we act accordingly based on our free will on a situation. Now if you rewind the movie backward, you will find that God should know the source of evil in First Cause. In simple word:

1. God has omniscience
2. God is cognitively open to free will
3. God knows the action we perform as a result of situation we were/are/will be embedded into
4. God knew the source evil in first hand, namely first cause
5. God created evil

Thanks for the reply but I’m not sure what this has to do with my question or the thread topic.

 

[inocente]

Here are the issues, as far as I can tell, with your perspective RE: Proving the existence of God:

1. You believe in the existence of an undefined “God,” in whom you are content to believe so long as he remains undefined and undefiled by human reason.
2. Such a God, because of his “undefined” status is amenable to whatever you choose to believe about him so long as it accords with your personal beliefs. When anyone else makes a “defining” statement about this God, you take it upon yourself to invoke the full brunt of skepticism and the Emperor’s lack of clothing to eagerly dispel such notions.
3. Since God is undefined, he is also unprovable which consorts well with your need to keep God amenable to whatever you want to believe about him. It also accords well with your “bashing” of any other attempt to understand or know God because of your need to keep him “unknowable.”
4. Since God is, to you, undefined and undefinable, you are free to randomly invoke from any authoritative source any word byte or quote that supports your particular view on a particular subject regardless of whether or not the author of the quote generally agrees with your position or not.
5. Science is esteemed in your view because its method is indisputable. This may be true regarding its ability to make conclusions about physical events. However, you often invoke the findings of science to support, by association to its authority, your views on metaphysical, religious, spiritual, moral or any other subject you have a mind to.
6. Carrying on a discussion with you is an exercise in chasing the wind precisely because you seem to have no position regarding who or what God is, whether he exists or not and what obligations are due him. That God, to you, is unknowable and unprovable means no alternative beyond what you want to hold can ever penetrate your systematic unbeliefs.
7. You are free to carry on as you have, but at least those with whom you engage in discussion ought to be clear about where you “are coming from” so as not to have any preconceived illusions about what “Baptist,” as your stated affiliation, entails. The terms atheist materialist, fideist, or moral relativist could just as aptly apply to you as theist or Baptist, since the indefinability of God is, in your view, compatible with any of those.

These being stated, I think it is incumbent on you to add a disclaimer to each of your posts that warns your would be interlocutors concerning the “open waters” they are headed into.

Don’t take this personally because I do enjoy reading your posts. They are typically crafted well as far as that goes, but because they merely are intended to debunk a particular view and not provide anything approaching a defined alternative, the exercise is more like running an endless gauntlet than actually “getting anywhere.”

What in heaven’s name? This is pulp fiction. What’s the matter with you?

My understanding of God seems to be very close to what Pope Francis has talked about. You seem to be on another planet.

As you know, you were the only person on my ignore list due to your propensity for spinning nutty witch hunts about me. I took you off because I found out you were stalking me around threads and posting to me even knowing I wouldn’t answer.

Please tell me that in future you will post on the thread topic and stop these obsessive nonsensical fantasies about me. Otherwise I will report you now and keep on reporting you until the moderator gets fed up with one or with both of us. What do you say?

Stickies

 

[Bahman]

The problem is that you are using Aristotelian language (first cause) in an ambiguous way. The first cause would have been the Uncaused Cause (aka God,) so God would not be “cognitively open” to the first cause, God would have BEEN the first cause itself.

First, the act creation, first cause, and existence of God lies at the same point. Second, God should be cognitively open to all possible concepts at the time creation. Third, cognitively open means that God could comprehend all possible concepts through connecting them by a set of basic laws. In another word a concept A is true if is explicable in terms of a set of basic laws.

The conclusion - God created evil - is not demonstrated since “cognitively open” is ambiguous and could mean merely “aware of and permitted” which is a far cry from “creating.” God may have created all the necessary and sufficient conditions for evil - beings with free will - that, then, brought about evil (degradation of their own capacity for free agency) without God actually creating evil itself.

The main problem is that being cognitively open enforce a hard constraint on creation as it is defined above hence it is impossible to imagine free will concept as being true.

 

[Bahman]

Thanks for the reply but I’m not sure what this has to do with my question or the thread topic.

It is relevant since it question the point creation and good God whether they ever existed.

 

[inocente]

I’m trying to reconcile this assertion with the existence of the section “God, change, life, and action” in The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil by Brian Davies (a contemporary Thomist), in which Davies specifically clarifies what it means to call God living, how God’s changelessness is compatible with his activity, etc. but alas, I cannot. The reason, I suspect, is that inocente has “already concluded that Thomists have trained themselves never to ask such questions.” He need look no further. But if one cracks open a book written by a Thomist on the subject (or even a book written by Aquinas), one will find that Thomists in fact do ask and answer “such questions.”

Note that to combat the claim you’re making, I don’t even need to assert that the responses Thomists give are right (although I think they are). You made a sweeping generalization about Thomist scholarship that is empirically false.

Perhaps you intend a restricted scope of “Thomists” and don’t mean to include Thomist scholars, but that seems a bit ad hoc.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant one particular kind of Thomist.

I believe Thomas himself was aware that God is ultimately unknowable, that in the Pope’s words: “If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself”.

But I believe there are Thomists who think everything about God is cut and dried, clear and safe, who “long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security’” in the Pope’s words. In that interview the Pope also said “we must not confuse the genius of Thomas Aquinas with the age of decadent Thomist commentaries. Unfortunately, I studied philosophy from textbooks that came from decadent or largely bankrupt Thomism.”

The Thomists I refer to are those who think God and everything about God has been proven, and God is safely pinned down, that there is no debate, that anyone who disagrees with their exaggerated doctrinal security is not a True Christian™.

I once knew an Israeli who was on secondment for a year. He wasn’t exactly an orthodox Jew, yet he was repeatedly shocked by the Christians around him. As he saw it, they had killed off all reverence, compartmentalized G-d, put Him in their back pockets, turned Him into a little imaginary friend, a known entity, a set of properties.

Don’t know if that makes it any clearer. Anyhow, the Pope would understand, as he said: “When I insist on the frontier, I am referring in a particular way to the need for those who work in the world of culture to be inserted into the context in which they operate and on which they reflect. There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”

 

[inocente]

It is relevant since it question the point creation and good God whether they ever existed.

I still don’t understand your point. For me, one issue with the doctrine of omniscience is that if God knows everything then there’s no point praying, for instance, since God has no choice but to act according to His knowledge. Then if God is unchanging, His detailed knowledge that I am currently eating an apple must exist eternally. How is that remotely possible? Then if God has this stunningly detailed knowledge of everything in the cosmos, how is God in any sense simple?

But I’m being told that we must unquestioningly accept every doctrine thrown at us, or we are not really Christians. Lay Christians know this because they read it on the internet, so it must be true.

 

[tonyrey]

For me, one issue with the doctrine of omniscience is that if God knows everything then there’s no point praying, for instance, since God has no choice but to act according to His knowledge.

So you believe God must be ignorant in order to be free?

Why then did Jesus say the truth shall make us free?

 

[KyrieEleison17]

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant one particular kind of Thomist.

I believe Thomas himself was aware that God is ultimately unknowable, that in the Pope’s words: “If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself”.

You believe correctly.

Saint Thomas is very clear in his doctrine that our limited intellects cannot grasp the “what” of God or of the divine substance. In fact he is quite clear that it can be difficult for us to grasp the “what” of even the most mundane things.

In Thomism God remains ineffable mystery and what we know about him through reason is limited and aided only by His own self-revelation to us.

None of this, however, is a license to speak foolishly or impiously about God or to deny that we can’t know, however indirectly, certain things about God: that He is one for instance or that He is necessarily “simple” and the like.
Contra Gentiles:

Now, in considering the divine substance, we should especially make use of the method of remotion. For, by its immensity, the divine substance surpasses every form that our intellect reaches. Thus we are unable to apprehend it by knowing what it is. Yet we are able to have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I still don’t understand your point. For me, one issue with the doctrine of omniscience is that if God knows everything then there’s no point praying, for instance, since God has no choice but to act according to His knowledge. Then if God is unchanging, His detailed knowledge that I am currently eating an apple must exist eternally. How is that remotely possible? Then if God has this stunningly detailed knowledge of everything in the cosmos, how is God in any sense simple?

But I’m being told that we must unquestioningly accept every doctrine thrown at us, or we are not really Christians. Lay Christians know this because they read it on the internet, so it must be true.

This is, however, precisely the problem with your idea that God is completely ineffable and unknowable. Since, as humans, we cannot know anything at all about God, then revelation would, indeed, be our only source of knowledge about him, so we would have to rely completely on “every doctrine thrown at us.” Our thoughts about God would be utterly inconsequential and error-filled, so doctrine (aka revelation) would be the ONLY means by which God could make himself known.

You push Thomas’ position far beyond what he obviously intended because Thomas wrote a great deal about what can be known about God. We can “know,” as in “draw conclusions about” God from his creative activity. Our capacity to reason is a tool, when used properly, to correctly make conclusions about God. This is “knowledge” we can have. We can also draw conclusions about God from what is known about his activity in history - the Scriptures, Tradition, and through the authority of the Church.

We are not in some intellectual netherworld left floundering in the dark by God - that would certainly be a lost condition because we would have absolutely no means by which to make sense of the “revealed” stuff either. We would have no starting point, at all.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

This has now gone on for days and you are still talking about your general beliefs and what you think I should believe, which is nothing at all to do with the question I asked, which was about the logic of a specific philosophical argument.

I thought you said you did a college course on philosophy, how can you keep making such a basic mistake? I mean there are ten-year-old kids who wouldn’t make such a basic mistake, and surely wouldn’t keep making day after day.

Judging from the rest of your posts today you seem to be in one of your " moods. " I apologize for polluting the planet with my presence. But then, your presence creates a balance, of sorts.

Linus2nd

 

[MISTER_SASB]

I hate to be contrary, but I’m not sure that’s right (about it being impossible to prove/disprove God). True, that’s commonly believed, but I would have said that it IS possible to prove God’s existence.

Here’s my thinking:

There probably won’t be any accepted explanation for the Big Bang for some time. When this stuff does finally get figured out, maybe the trail will lead to a kind of self-aware being, In that case, the proof would be based on evidence and would truly be “scientific”.

Unless that Master Mechanic chose to hide his.her efforts.

A conscious creator could possibly erase all information about the creation but here’s the problem. If “God” chooses to interfere with our ability to tamper with our perceptions, how do we know where that stops? Is it limited to hiding the act of creation? Is there more to this tampering? Is the sky really blue? Is my wife really a giraffe? If we accept that God toys with our perception, than it is useless to have any kind of discussion at all about the beginnings of the universe, about nature, or even about God. Maybe we are just brains suspended in bottles and everything we believe about reality is fed to us.

To have a meaningful discussion,we have to assume that “the creator” hasn’t selectively hidden stuff. If that’s the case,the remnants of God’s creation could still be seen just as the remnants of the Big Bang are visible in the cosmic background radiation. God is, by definition, part of nature. He is its greatest force.

In principle it should be as easy to discover God’s interventions as it is to discover “Inflation”, quarks, or multiverses. There’s no reasons that “proving the existence of God” has to be impossible. And failing to find evidence for God could be significant too, right?

The saying that it is impossible to “prove” the existence of God seems to be based on a misunderstanding. Scientist don’t usually “prove” things in the way that logicians do. They look for evidence. Failing to find evidence for God, scientifically speaking, doesn’t prove there is no God. But if a properly constructed experiment can be devised to test the theory that God exists, and if the experiment fails to validate its hypothesis, If, over time, other properly experiments fail to find such evidence, the hypothesis that there is a mindful creator becomes harder to defend scientifically.

This wouldn’t deter believers and, frankly, I wouldn’t want it to. I believe belief is a lovely thing with great value .scienceaintsobad.com/2013… But I wouldn’t be quite so quick to dismiss the idea of proving (or disproving) the existence of God.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad scienceaintsobad.com

 

[inocente]

So you believe God must be ignorant in order to be free?

Why then did Jesus say the truth shall make us free?

It seems to have escaped your notice that there are a wide range of possibilities between God knowing everything and God knowing nothing. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Also, are you playing the CAF game of quote mining? Jesus could have meant truth as opposed to falsehood, or truth as opposed to ignorance. But in context, if we read the passage instead of just a couple of words, He means the truth of the gospel frees us from the slavery of sin.