Thought experiment. What if it was one day proven 200% there’s no God?

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joeybaggz said:
Don’t you have better things to do with your time.
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Discussing and learning seem like worthwhile ventures. Why else would you be on an Internet forum, unless you are just looking for confirmation bias.
 
Hi,

whatever errors humans may have about God should be admitted, definitely.

But one thing most cultures, religions, and individual believers get RIGHT about God is that he is the one necessarily-exisiting reality that is the ultimate cause of all else that participates in existence (i.e., “Creator”).

That’s all we need to really work with: For a dragon is not separate from creation. A dragon is part of creation. God is entirely other, entirely outside.

People throughout history may confuse God with creation (giving him a white beard, etc.). To be sure, that is an error, but it’s not relevant to the point. God is not within the Universe: He is its Cause.

Empirical science works within the bounds of creation (or, if you prefer, the material or physical or space-time world). So if there is a dragon, science may well discover it one day.

But empirical science cannot, in the same way, disprove or discover God.
 
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laylow said:
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Wesrock:
Have I done that? God’s existence, omnipotence, supreme goodness, omniscience, Intellect can all be presented through logical, rational arguments
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Well claiming these attributes leaves a huge challenge with the problem of evil, there cannot be a logical resolution if you hold to those attributes plus omnipotence.
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I disagree, and objections based on the POE are emotional, not logical, especially if you understand what God is not. Anyway, Sophia and I are having a discussion on the Problem of Evil in this topic: Conversation with a knowledgable apologist - #51 by Sophia

I link it because I’d rather not be discussing the same thing in multiple topics at once.
 
Wesrock said:
God’s existence, omnipotence, supreme goodness, omniscience, Intellect can all be presented through logical, rational arguments.
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Would you care to have a discussion about these concepts? Not necessarily now (we have a lot on our plates), but sometime in the future. And besides, the World Cup starts tomorrow!! Actually, I would like to have a conversation about these attributes themselves. Just “what” is omnipotence, omniscience. supreme goodness (we already seemed to run into an impasse about this.) 🙂 I find this a very interesting subject. As you said, purely on logical, rational grounds - no theology, no revelation. I would suggest a starting point that God created the universe… nothing else.
 
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Hypothetically, yes, I’d love such a discussion at some point. It would just have to be a very thorough and involved discussion with a serious commitment, and I have plenty of real life one’s already. Just being honest, not trying to duck out of anything. Maybe if I take things one at a time…
 
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Wesrock said:
Hypothetically, yes, I’d love such a discussion at some point. It would just have to be a very thorough and involved discussion with a serious commitment, and I have plenty of real life one’s already. Just being honest, not trying to duck out of anything. Maybe if I take things one at a time…
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Absolutely. This is supposed to be fun, not an obligation. Just one attribute at a time. When you want to start, just send me a PM, and we can continue from there.
 
catholic1seeks said:
Empirical science works within the bounds of creation (or, if you prefer, the material or physical or space-time world). So if there is a dragon, science may well discover it one day.

But empirical science cannot, in the same way, disprove or discover God.
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I agree. However, God did apparently think it was important show something empirically around 2000 to 5000 thousand years ago. He even became a man and called himself his son and preached to people…

…unless of course this is all just human contrived legend.
 
Part of the whole Catholic understanding of creation is that it is a love-act whereby God calls all creation to participate in his Goodness (since, after all, God is Goodness itself), and he calls rational creatures like us humans to a fulfillment that can only be found in Him.

Part of this love-act requires that his rational creatures are not forced into communion with Him. I suppose there are many reasons why God does not want to physically appear to each individual person (and convince with utter 100% empirical certainty). But one reason is surely this: That love is not forced, but a dialogue.

[Now, before a straw man is made, realize that according to traditional Christianity – including Catholicism – that knowledge of God’s existence is not equivalent to salvation and fulfillment with Him. So it’s not as if human fulfillment and salvation is being diverted by not having a 100% empirical proof forced in the face of every person.]

Perhaps slightly off topic, also note that in the traditional Christian/Catholic view, every reach of the atheist towards goodness, towards truth, towards beauty is a reach for God. You may not accept this, of course, but at least realize that for Catholics, all people are truly interacting with God, and God is always calling us towards him. Will there be (intellectual**) atheists in Heaven? Probably. For merely not having an explicit mental understanding of God does not mean you haven’t accepted God.
 
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“Well, if I propose a God with no limitations as the Prime Mover”
Oh, don’t stop with “propose,”
Believe it!
 
A “legend” which all those with intimate, first hand experience of Jesus Christ willingly died for…
I wouldn’t die for something I even suspected, let alone knew with a certainty, was a legend. Would you?
 
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I strongly disagree. We know was much about God as we do about dragons. You claim without proof God is outside space and time and is therefore conveniently unfalsifiable. I can say the same thing about Santa Claus. The only difference would be that no one made a religion out of Santa Claus, which gives the illusion that God is real and Santa is not, but truth is not democratic.
 
The First and Ultimate Cause of everything cannot be equivalent to or within the Universe, for these things require explanation outside of themselves.

Or what, you have reason to believe some item in the Universe – or the entire Universe itself – is necessarily-existing? What reason do you have for this?
 
Curious11 said:
I strongly disagree. We know was much about God as we do about dragons. You claim without proof God is outside space and time and is therefore conveniently unfalsifiable. I can say the same thing about Santa Claus. The only difference would be that no one made a religion out of Santa Claus, which gives the illusion that God is real and Santa is not, but truth is not democratic.
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Rather, you seem very unfamiliar with traditional arguments for God’s existence, or do not grasp them. From the very same principles we believe reality is intelligible to the scientific method, theists argue that the existence of God is necessary and can be known. Consider evolutionary theory. We cannot conduct tests on evolution, but we see the effects littered throughout the Earth and in our genome. We reason from the effects we see to the cause. Likewise, if you see a balloon rising the air without any string pulling it and in the opposite direction predictable by gravity, you can reason that what fills it must be less dense than the surrounding medium. Likewise arguments for God are not based on tests we can run here and now, but by the effects around us and our knowledge of them and reality, the principles that underlie the scientific method and belief that empricism works. There may be trust that our senses and perceptions (and that includes technological methods) relay real (if not complete) information about the world, but any reliance on science or empricism holds that to be true, too.
 
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You have no proof there even is a “First and Ultimate cause”, and if there is one that it is God, and that if it is God it is YOUR version of God.
 
I have often thought that one piece of evidence for the existence of God is the existence of the need to actively convince others he does not exist. If there is no God, why do we have atheist evangelism? This is one, like the existence of beauty, you get or you don’t get.
 
@Curious11, Do you believe that in all of reality, everything is contingent?
 
Wesrock said:
We cannot conduct tests on evolution
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False, absolutely false. We have been doing so since the day antibiotics were first invented, antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolved through natural selection, and before you say “that’s just micro evolution”, it uses the same natural selection mechanism as macro evolution
 
Wesrock said:
Likewise arguments for God are not based on tests we can run here and now, but by the effects around us and our knowledge of them and reality
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We find scientific explanations for those phenomena. It usually goes something like this: there’s a storm, a religious person says God is the cause and therefore prayer would help it stop. A scientist comes along with a meteorological model based on data, math and proof from obersvational methodology. Then the Religious person says “yeah but God is behind that”, but offers no proof, yet tries to elevate it to the level of scientific certainty
 
Er, I believe in the evolution of species. Even so, it was only an illustration, and people reasoned from the effects they found even before such scientific tests were technologically possible. Or would you not be a believer in evolution if we simply had the geological record and fossils?
 
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