What do you consider proof of God, if anything?

[liquidpele]

Yeah, well… much as I might hate to admit it, Plato wasn’t wrong about everything.

And that right there sums up a major reason why I don’t like religion… sigh.

 

[masterjedi747]

That’s fine, but why not simply accept God as an indemonstrable first principle instead of pretending to do philosophy?

Two reasons.
First, because even though He is a first principle, His existence is not wholly indemonstrable. We can still show that He exists, even if we cannot know why He exists.
Second, because His existence is not as obvious or self-evident to us as other first principles (such as the fact that we sense things, or that the world outside of us really exists in some way).

And that right there sums up a major reason why I don’t like religion… sigh.

Well… sorry. I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but it is kind of hard for a reasonably-intelligent person to get everything in their philosophy wrong, though. Even when they’re wrong, there’s often something like the truth in what they’re getting at.

 

[severntofall]

I think faith isn’t quite the same thing as proof. I had faith long before I had proof, and my proof is just God loving me and interacting in my life in powerful (to me) and distinct experiences.

I heard his voice once–well, heard/felt a voice within me. It’s very difficult to describe except that it was audible, and made me jump and look around for a second even though it was coming from within. It was during a time of heartfelt prayer that God asked me a question.

There have been other ways that God has made himself known to me, through answered prayers. They are personal moments that mean a lot to me, but others may not see the significance, especially one who doesn’t believe.

Hope that helps!

Peace,
Teri

The subconscious is a wonderful thing isn’t it.

 

[severntofall]

If you wait for proof, you may never experience the joys that Faith brings and the elation that comes from feeling your sins are forgiven by Our Lord Jesus Christ.
For me it was existential despair or Faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
Simple really.
I don’t feel that I need an “explanation” for those that might harass me for my decision to believe. If it be God’s Will, they will be inspired by my actions, not my intellectual debating skills.

…or, if you wait for proof you may never experience the joys Faith brings and the elation that comes from feeling your sins are forgiven by Our Lord Allah (or Osiris, or Vishnu, or Zeus, or Dionysus or etc.). Faith is the willingness to believe what you are told to believe. Essentially faith is this: dying a member of the same religion that your parents raised you in. Sure there are exceptions, but the sizable majority of Christians had Christian parents, Muslims had Muslim parents, Hindus had Hindu parents. Here’s a fact: if shortly after your birth, you had been kidnapped and taken to Saudi Arabia and raised by Muslims parents then today you would be a devote Muslim (probably more dedicated to Islam than you are currently dedicated to Christianity). Faith is nothing more that the innate human tendency to believe what you are told and to conform to societal pressures. People say that faith has nothing to do with reason, but that’s incorrect: faith is a reason to burn a heretic; it’s a reason fly a jet into the side of a building; it’s a reason to drown a witch; it’s a reason to hack off a child’s clitoris with a sharpened stone. Faith is a reason to abandon critical thought and take the easy road rather than using one’s brain.

 

[liquidpele]

Two reasons.
First, because even though He is a first principle, His existence is not wholly indemonstrable. We can still show that He exists, even if we cannot know why He exists.

Well… sorry. I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but it is kind of hard for a reasonably-intelligent person to get everything in their philosophy wrong, though. Even when they’re wrong, there’s often something like the truth in what they’re getting at.

Your first paragraph there claims you can show he exists… this forum is basically asking that exact question… so how do you show that? What proof do you see that convinces you?

You are confused by my response to your comment of “Yeah, well… much as I might hate to admit it, Plato wasn’t wrong about everything.” My point was that it saddens me that anyone would hate to admit that new information was true. Why should it matter that it’s true, your personal opinion on how things “should be” is irrelevant. Discovering new information and truths is one of the great things about life, and yet too often religious people actively try to avoid such things. That is what I was implying towards when I said it demonstrated what I don’t like about religion.

 

[DavidHume]

You are confused by my response to your comment of “Yeah, well… much as I might hate to admit it, Plato wasn’t wrong about everything.” My point was that it saddens me that anyone would hate to admit that new information was true.

I don’t know if I’d call Plato “new information.” Church scholars know all about Plato and Aristotle – they just didn’t bother to keep up with much philosophy after them. And then they wonder why philosophers roll their eyes after hearing Aquinas repeated by rote, yet again.

 

[MindOverMatter]

My purpose is not to try and explain anything away, I’m actually just genuinely curious about other’s experiences and logic on this subject.

Well first and foremost, allot of people doubt God because they are led to believe that the physical processes of reality can explain everything.

I have reason to believe that naturalism, in so far as it claims to be an absolute and sufficient explanation for all things, is necessarily false. In other words, the “inert” and that which “changes” cannot explain the reality of being.

But I don’t want to tell you why.
I feel like being selfish. Not really. I just don’t want to waste my time as proving God usually includes teaching people how to think. But I will give you a few hints.

Knowledge As A Basis For Proof.

Before you even begin to prove the Existence of God, you must first come to realize and come to terms with the fact that most if not all knowledge is based ultimately on faith; including “scientific knowledge”. It might strike you as sacrilege when I tell you that scientific truth does not equal true “epistemological knowledge” of truth. But it is true. We cannot truly know that which exists outside our heads simply by observing and interacting or even experimenting with what appears to you and me to be objective. You can say to your self that the objective realm is “probably” real, because human **intuition **draws us or rather tempts us to this conclusion; but it could all just be some weird fantasy in your head, or you could just be a brain in a vat being fed deceptive knowledge by a couple of old Grandpa’s who have nothing better to do with their time. (I mean No disrespect to any old people on this thread!!).

The only true knowledge you have is the knowledge of “being”, and you have this knowledge only in so far as you have knowledge of “self”, your mind (true knowledge); rather then knowledge of physical things (false knowledge). This is self evident knowledge that is common to all who have minds; the true epistemological root. Hence common-sense. Please note that when I say “true knowledge”, mean that which is the most certain knowledge attainable. I do not necessarily mean this in the Scientific empirical sense.

We also have logical principles that we acquire through the intellect which seems to coincide with the objective nature of being. Its truth in fact follows necessarily from the existence of being. This is =There cannot be being and non-being at the same time. In other-words, being “is”. To put it more simply; that which doesn’t exist cannot be given the attributes of being or those things which have the reality of truth in respect of being, including potentiality. Hence, logic seems to be rooted in reality, at least in so far as we are talking about “ultimate being”, as in, that which is “being” in itself.

Thus we come to the second realization, that being is ultimately a nature and is most real, since there can be no such thing as “Nothing”. This is because nothing is a negation of being; not an “actuality” of being. Thus there is necessarily a being that is by nature “being” and is most real, as in, it is “reality itself”, since there can be no such thing as non-reality in regards to the ultimate. And again, we then come to another knowledge in regards to that truth = that any being which begins to exist, is ultimately caused by that which is most real, since there can be no reality without that which is most real. Thus there is a necessary eternal link between objective being and the principle efficient causality.

That being the case, causality is not a tautological truth, but a necessary truth that exists necessarily in regards to the nature that is being, and those entities which begin to exist, and one is justified in invoking the principle of causality in so far as we keep in mind “Ultimate Being” and the first knowledge that is “being”. Of course, in so far as physical reality is concerned, we have no reason to think that causality does not take on different qualities, such as with quantum physics, but such beings are not “being in itself”, since they begin or change, and thus in so far as they participate in being they are caused by Ultimate Being even though they are indeterminate in regards to physical causes.

A quick note. When I say that Physics is not being in itself, I do not mean to say that they don’t exist. I merely mean that they are not Existence by nature of being, but rather they are that which participates in Existence, not as attributes, but as creation. I don’t believe that sharing in the nature of existing is the same as being Existence by nature. It would not be wrong for the pantheist to say that physical things share in existence, but it is my position that it would be wrong to say that they are in fact “existence” by their very nature, existing by their nature. Thus i believe all forms of Pantheism is flawed, as I will show you in the following paragraphs.

To be Continued…

 

[MindOverMatter]

The Necessary Difference Between Entities That Change & The Reality Of Ultimate being.

There are things that apply to participatory beings (the less real) that cannot be applied to ultimate being (the most real). This brings us to another truth. Being is absolute, as in, it does not change. It exists outside of change, and as a result transcends, in nature, that which changes. If being changes, then being has a beginning and has in its-self “beginnings”. But “being”, as an ultimate nature, simply is, it never began and has no parts or qualities that begin in so far as it is Existence by nature. If something has the nature of ultimate being, keeping in mind that there is no such thing as an objective nothing, then such a being is eternally being; such a being is Existence. This means that being, in so far as it is a nature, cannot contradict its nature or be anything else other then being. Thus any change or beginning in absolute being would be a contradiction in terms, since it would suggest that being exists in something greater then itself in which it changes. It would mean that being must realize some end in order to be absolute or complete. This is logically meaningless and impossible.

I will try to explain this in a simpler way.

You cannot identify existence as an absolute nature of being with that which is in a state of becoming. Ultimate being by its nature of being “absolute” and “ultimate” does not proceed to greater or lesser quantity or quality; it simply “is”.
Those beings which change and begin to be are less then ultimate and absolute, since they do not exist by there own nature of being, but by that which “is”. They come in to being, and thus they are finite and limited. There can be no meaningful quantitative limits on Ultimate being, because such things exist only in relation to something else or something greater and so Ultimate-Being is transcendent of height width change potentiality and imperfection or incompleteness.

Existence has no potentiality in its being in respect of change, since potentiality must ultimately rest in Existence. This means that Existence is pure actuality. In other words being is timeless expression. There is never a time when it is different or not expressing its Being. A being that changes has the potentiality to change because it exists in Existence, thus potentiality cannot infinitely regress without an ultimate being that lies outside of change. It’s important to note that when we talk of potentiality, we are not speaking of an actual being in itself, but rather, one is describing the ability of one entity to change, realise or actualize another quality of being. If existence is merely a collection of changing beings, then potentiality regresses infinitely, which means that Potentiality infinitely transcends that which changes. In other words; potentiality infinitely transcends Existence.

Not only is this not logical, it is also meaningless; especially in regards to the “first knowledge”.

I conclude therefore that ultimate being transcends that which changes and that which has limits or dimensions.

Thus Existence transcends and causes Physical reality.

Thank you for reading.

 

[JDaniel]

I’m curious what people consider as proof that there is a God, or if you even think proof is possible. Has anyone had what they would consider a miracle happen, seen an angel, seen a person healed by prayer, etc? I don’t believe because I have never seen any proof, so I am curious what others have seen or what they would even consider proof. My purpose is not to try and explain anything away, I’m actually just genuinely curious about other’s experiences and logic on this subject.

To me, adequate proof for the existence of God consists of two primary parts. The first part can be called the apprehension of God from cosmological and teleological considerations. It consists of knowing that the Divine must be absolute (not relative), un-divided (not composed or composite being), necessary (not contingent or dependent), first cause (uncaused and not merely some exigency in the middle of an infinite causal chain), first mover (unmoved and not merely some exigency in the middle of an infinitely moving/changing chain), final cause (the ultimate end, or purpose, of all being and beings), formal cause (the ultimate designer of being and beings and that which maintains the relational matrix of natural things). I induce and deduce that physically existent things possess none of these determinates that are necessary to and for the existence of natural things and the physical universe. The universe (or multiverse, or whatever) exists as a physical phenomenon and did not bring itself into existence.

Further, there exist in nature some incontestably primary contraries. The first of these is undifferentiated matter, or, primary matter, then privation, or, potency, then actuality, or act. This is the conclusion from the primary dialectical induction from our experiences of, and with, (substantial) change. This is not merely some primitive, or infantile, manner of conceiving of change and causality; it is the simplest and most underived manner of apprehending it. All subsequent science presuppose them.

Then, there are the contraries involving the essences, or, nature, of God. On the one hand, God is Omnipotent – powerful beyond all bounds. On the other hand, He is All Good. If God were simply All Powerful, or, to some degree more powerful than Good, any relative certainty of our continuation would be non-existent. There would exist no reason(s) to form relationships; no reason(s) to begin projects; no reason(s) to make plans; no reason(s) to strive to attain the Final Cause or End, and so on. If He was All Good, or, somewhat more Good than Powerful, we may as well be automatons. Thus, a symbiotic relationship inures that is the result of Divine Love that, ultimately, is no more and no less than Truth. Apprehended in any other way Truth is always insufficiently defined, or described.

The second part can be called the apprehension of God from (His) revelation. As far back in history as we may want to travel, we discover that “foot prints” of God were left in the sands of the earliest things and the earliest sentient beings, or, at least those that were able to leave any pictorial, written, or oral legacies. What he was, to primitive man, was always confused. Thus, he was the God of: “x”. This does not mean that he was defined as “x”, but, that he was the reason for “x”, or, the cause of “x”. He was the God of: “fire”, or “thunder”, or “lightening”, as examples. But, he was always He.

As man’s life became more leisurely, he began to think about what God was, or is, from what he had experienced and what he could not directly experience. One can say that earliest man saw unexplainable phenomena and attributed a divinity to explain them. Or, one can say that early man “apprehended” the “effects” of He whom he could not see and attributed Him (in whatever form of intelligibility) as their cause. I prefer the latter, although, the precise way is really not all that important. What is more important is that the idea of a divinity has permeated men’s thoughts from the very beginning, as we can glean from early artifacts, writings, pictures and oral tradition.

From oral tradition and early manuscripts, we have discovered that several hundred men, distant and distinct from one another due to time and space, have consistently described, in prose or prophetic form, the history of men, the advent, life and death of Christ and many of those around Him, including times and places, the attributes of God, the Rule of God, the fulfillment of promises, descriptions of direct communications, or experiences, with God, and the interweave of thousands of years of historical events and hundreds upon hundreds of people that were (and still are) affected by the precision of the interweave and the precision of the underlying sentiments of the events and narrative.

Christ’s ability to make everything he says and everything he does project into the metaphysical is uncanny and He is well beyond any equal, or potential equal, among finite men or women; His ability to foretell the future with precision, or, relate the (distant) past with precision; His perfect inflection. He is perfection in His pauses. He is perfection in His moments of anger. He is perfection in His moments of anguish. He is perfection in His moments of praise and prayer. He is perfection in His times of communication with His Father and His Mother. He is perfection as a teacher. He is perfection in His apprehension of the pain He will endure through His Passion. He is perfection in His human form.

The perfection of the interweave of all of the forgoing and all of the prophets, the writers, the events, and the culmination of it all, leaves no other possibility but God. Upon these dialectical considerations I champion my Faith.

jd

 

[PaulAndrew83]

I hate having to bow out of a discussion due to time

To Mr Hume I would like to continue the discussion on causality but I probably will not get time till Monday.

On topic

The only way one can attack the proof of God’s existence is to attack the validity of causality. Once one accepts causality it is simple reasoning to show that God exists. Any other attack on the proof can be shown quite easily to be wrong and perhaps show the person who disagrees to believe in magic.

On causality

I don’t think we got from you[David Hume] an admission that your following propositions were incorrect.
David Hume:

You’ve missed the second portion, which is that you cannot show that cause-and-effect is true even with observation and experience – **because any use of observation and experience to justify cause-and-effect must already presuppose that cause-and-effect is true. **

And
David Hume:

Experience can’t show him that cause and effect is true, because induction (the method we use to draw inferences about reality from our experience and sense perceptions) already assumes cause and effect to be true.

I believe we need to clear up these propositions of yours before we go any further.

Paul

 

[PaulAndrew83]

I don’t know if I’d call Plato “new information.” Church scholars know all about Plato and Aristotle – they just didn’t bother to keep up with much philosophy after them. And then they wonder why philosophers roll their eyes after hearing Aquinas repeated by rote, yet again.

I roll my eyes hearing someone deny casuality. What I find funny is that everyone behaves as if Aquinas’ philosophy is true because to do otherwise would turn you into a zombie. Edit; see you monday

Paul

 

[JDaniel]

Either you or Maritain must be confusing David Hume with Immanuel Kant. It is plausible to do so, because Kant writes highly of Hume’s work before setting off in a different direction. That would also be a valid critique of Bishop Berkeley, but he’s not Hume either.

This is indeed the entire basis of Hume’s philosophy. All of his work rests on this. E.g. I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience. That’s exactly what you said, and it is in exact opposition to the Thomist cosmological argument, which takes a general principle of material cause and effect as unchanging and a priori.

I guess you have a problem with actually reading Aquinas, don’t you. What you have just written is completely false and/or mumbled.

In most schools of empiricism, idealism vs. realism becomes a pseudoproblem. It’s only people like Kant and Aquinas that have to tangle with the outcomes of their metaphysical machinations.

This tells me that you have no conception of what is a priori.

jd

 

[JDaniel]

Those are all good observations and do not contradict what Hume says (aside from “certain knowledge of the existence of the cause”, perhaps) but I think you may have missed his larger point within his sea of protracted examples.

The key points are:

• We only know of the principle of cause-and-effect through induction about events that we actually experience
• Therefore there is no a priori justification for supposing any cause-and-effect relation for events that we do not actually experience (what Hume says is actually stronger – we don’t have any a priori justification for cause-and-effect period – but certainly not for events that are only known through hypothesis like in the Thomist argument)
• “In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.”

Aquinas’s cosmological argument takes as a priori that causality uniformly applies throughout the entire universe and throughout all of time.

A Humean objection would be that there is no justification a priori for this idea of causality and no way to establish it via observation, and therefore one must either take uniform causality on sheer faith (in which case, why not just take the existence of God on sheer faith and drop pretense of philosophy?), or one must reject the cosmological argument as sufficient justification for belief in God, since it relies on an unjustified premise.

Kant and the German-style idealism that followed him can all be viewed as attempts to rescue causality from Hume’s critique.

Ah. Now I see your dilemma. Hume (and you) never understood, or read anything regarding First Principles as derived from the most primitive dialectical observations of mobile being. Such First Principles are abstractions from the most general and most preliminary science of nature known to man, and expose to the beginner: substance and two contraries. First Principles are underived (presuppositionless) and non-dependent on anything else. Principles, whether First Principles or not, underly all cause-and-effect. Thus, all cause-and-effect is presupposed by something that is the conclusion of the most primary dialectical induction ever made by sentient man.

All causes are principles, but, not all principles are causes. This is the Thomistic sense of causality, not what you are inferring. Hume, unfortunately, started his “science” someplace in the middle of its march towards certainty. Rather, he should have started at the beginning.

jd

 

[JDaniel]

This thread seems to have strayed a bit off topic. And the last thing we need is another long boring incomprehensible my philosopher can beat up your philosopher discussion. So perhaps we can just summarize each philosopher and be done with it.

Perfect!:clapping:

jd

 

[JDaniel]

There is no way to show that anything has a cause, because there is no way to show that the cause-and-effect relation exists. So even if we were to grant (for the sake of argument alone) “all things that have causes cannot be explained without appealing to something that does not have a cause”, there is no way to show that the set “all things that have causes” is not empty.

There is no argument from logic alone that can prove it, and one cannot use observation and experience because induction from observation and experience already assumes cause-and-effect.

Other philosophers might disagree, but this is likely the single most influential idea in philosophy since the 18th century. Kant made a special epistemological category, called “synthetic a priori”, to contain things like the principle of cause and effect. He explains his analysis in Critique of Pure Reason.

Most philosophers with ontological and epistemological theories since then have felt the need to pre-emptively address Hume’s radical empiricism, since it is one of the most coherent expressions of the arguments from skepticism since the ancient Greeks.

If I were you, I wouldn’t be so cock-sure of my assertions. You haven’t yet asked me for an explanation. But, I’ll wait. You might discover it on your own and save me countless hours of repetition of that which I have already stated herein on multiple occasions.

jd

 

[JDaniel]

You’ve missed the second portion, which is that you cannot show that cause-and-effect is true even with observation and experience – because any use of observation and experience to justify cause-and-effect must already presuppose that cause-and-effect is true.

Again: not so.

jd

 

[JDaniel]

And we can’t possibly know which situation that will be until we observe it, so there is no necessarily relation of cause (the current situation) to effect (the situation in the future).

While, indeed, we may have witnessed the correlation of the effect with its cause a posteriori to the actual action, that does not mean, that when properly understood, the effect could not have been predicted a priori to the action.

Instead of billiard balls on a table, consider that which we perceive first, either as infants, or as beginners to a science. What is the first thing, or things, we perceive?

jd

 

[JDaniel]

No, any use of observation and experience to justify cause-and-effect must already presuppose that observation and experience is true… seeing as how those are the means by which we come to our understanding of cause and effect.

And yes, I’ve read Hume (who’s quite wrong), as well as his predecessors Berkeley (completely nuts) and Locke (not so bad, but not quite right). I’m curious as to whether you’ve read Kant, by the way? Critique of Pure Reason? Not that he’s right, in the end, but he’s at least better than Hume in many respects. One of the first things that he does, by the way, is point out the fact that Hume contradicts himself by denying the possibility of any a priori concepts but somehow still granting the validity of mathematics apart from our experience of reality. But you should really just stick with Aristotle, honestly… he might not be all up-to-date on his knowledge of the natural world, but at least he’s got solid principles and his head screwed on straight, especially with regard to the Prior and Posterior Analytics (most relevant to this conversation).

Here, here!

jd

 

[JDaniel]

Yeah, well… much as I might hate to admit it, Plato wasn’t wrong about everything.

Seriously, though, do you simply deny the existence of universals? I suppose you don’t recognize a difference between the concepts signified by “triangle” and “this triangle”, or between “man” and “this man”?

But we see things cause other things; we see causes produce effects. So once I’ve seen the same cause produce the same effect a sufficient number of times, why can’t I simply conclude that one is the cause of the other?

And to ask a parallel question: Why is common sense being done away with? Why not simply admit that we can make such a conclusion, and go to work on determining how we can (since we obviously think that we can)?

Well, perhaps no deductive or inductive argument can possibly be given. Perhaps it’s simply an indemonstrable first principle that you just have to accept as a patently obvious and self-evident fact.

And… this is exactly where I think Hume is quite wrong. Just because we don’t understand why one object is the cause of another, it doesn’t mean we can’t still know that one object is the cause of the other. I don’t have to know “the secret power” of fire in order to know that it will always burn dry wood under the proper conditions.

And I don’t just mean “I’m pretty sure fire will burn dry wood, because that’s what I always see it do; although maybe it won’t this time”… I mean “I know that fire will always burn dry wood under the proper conditions, because that’s what fire does; and if it doesn’t, then something else is preventing it from happening”.

And maybe the medieval view of philosophy is the correct one…

…and what is that supposed to mean, and what exactly does the difference amount to? Is it ever possible for there to be one philosophy that reaches the truth, or is it just a continual evolution of ideas with no certain end?

Often so, but I don’t see why they particularly have to… other than the fact that they often do intend to build upon or tear down certain teachings of their teachers.

Perhaps a better measure of a good philosopher is how long and to what extent their teachings survive among the most intelligent circles of thinkers after they are gone.

You bet! Persistence is the measure of a “good” philosopher and “good” philosophizing.

jd

 

[JDaniel]

Your first paragraph there claims you can show he exists… this forum is basically asking that exact question… so how do you show that? What proof do you see that convinces you?

You are confused by my response to your comment of “Yeah, well… much as I might hate to admit it, Plato wasn’t wrong about everything.” My point was that it saddens me that anyone would hate to admit that new information was true. Why should it matter that it’s true, your personal opinion on how things “should be” is irrelevant. Discovering new information and truths is one of the great things about life, and yet too often religious people actively try to avoid such things. That is what I was implying towards when I said it demonstrated what I don’t like about religion.

Pele:

I’m not sure you will find many of the “Discovering new information and truths is one of the great things about life, and yet too often religious people actively try to avoid such things.” type of people in these forums. What you will find, is people who will not roll over to accept that which is false purely because someone has called it “new information”.

Anyway, you are asking good questions - keep it up. We’ll do our best to give you good answers.

jd