What would you do if it were proven...?

[Candide_West]

Now thats cold reality for ya. Personally, I think i would go crazy. Life would turn in to a hilarious comedy in which people strive for a meaning and a value which doesn’t really exist. My emotional and moral experiences would be telling me there is a God while at the same time my rational experiences would be telling me there is no God. Every now and then i would feel a sense of hope and pray, only to realize that i had forgotten the harsh truth. There is no God. Such a reality is utterly ridiculous and pointless to me.

What a nightmare.

As I’ve said before I’m glad you’ve found a way to live through religion that satisfies you. Surely though you must realise that your position is not shared by all others and is not the only tenable one. I mention this because the rest of you post kinda implies to me that you do not.*

Luckily such a reality only exists in the minds of those who have something to lose by admitting or believing in Gods existence. I mean, if one doesn’t have anything to lose by having hope, then who in their right minds would promote the belief that there is no objective purpose meaning or moral value in our lives.

Seems like and odd statement in a few ways.

1. It seems to imply that people choose their beliefs. As if I could tomorrow morning get up and say “you know what I’m gonna be a Christian” or you could change your mind tomorrow and be a Buddhist. You could probably try, you could certainly pretend, but I’m sure you would really continue to believe in the Christian God.*

The reason for this is that religious beliefs are a conclusion. Not an action.

1. It also appears to suggest that atheists have a vested interest in being atheists. Which from a personal perspective I can tell you is not true. I do however have an interest in maintaining my personal integrity by being honest about my view of the world and not lying to myself that I believe in something I don’t. See point 1 about lying to oneself.
2. You have said about lack of moral values. Yet we’ve previously discussed how you can form morals from axiomatic principles without reference to any Gods. Which plenty of people do.*

No one in their right mind would say to them selves everyday that their life is worthless and has no more true value than cow dung covered with flies eggs, especially if they have no rational proof to believe so.

Er, that’s true I guess. But rather off the point since I don’t imagine anyone out there does this, certainly not me or any of the other atheists I know. It would truly be a weird thing to do. Do you know someone who does the above?

And no one, that has ever been emotionally wounded, can cast themselves in a positive light without having faith and hope in the fact that their lives have true existential value.*

I’m afraid you’re wrong here. I have been emotionally wounded and have indeed recovered from it. So has everyone else I know.*

I can’t help but be curious why you think these odd things about atheists.*

Everybody knows that there is such a thing as “rational emotions”; this is to say that there is a right way to feel about something and a wrong way to feel about something. We don’t call people crazy simply to categorize a distinct set of behaviors, but rather the word exists because we recognizes in someones objective existence something which ought not be the case, something which goes against our true nature. We recognize an absence of emotional sanity.*

Generally true although of course “objective” in this case is not truly objective but rather the “practicably objective” we have discussed previously. Ie objective enough for humans.

Obviously this has little to do with religious beliefs.*

Something is truly wrong, not just in our subjective opinion but rather in the objective nature of some person. There is an objective standard of what an emotionally rational person ought to be, and most of us know that we should strive to live up to that standard; that we should all love each-other; but we are held back by our selfish passions. We all know that it is truly evil to rape a child. We all know deep down that there is a moral law, that we ought to follow.

Again agreed, this comes from practicably objective morality. Axioms such as “suffering is bad”.

Again this has little to do with religious beliefs.

Atheism would be understandable and justified if their was absolute proof that there is no meaning purpose of moral value. But if there is no proof, why would you want to remain agnostic or atheist on the subject rather than have hope and faith in the existential fulfillment of ones being?*

Odd statement. It appears to suggest that being religious is a ground state which you should revert to unless it is proven false. In fact it like any proposition it is reasonable to reject the religious proposition by ockhams razor if it is not supported.*

Unless your one of those people who would rather be the God of their own lives; i see no good reason to not have faith in something so important. Unless your crazy. In fact i think that a conscious atheism which is grounded in desire rather than knowledge is a form of insanity.

Firstly I don’t think being an atheist is based on a desire. Certainly it isn’t for the majority of atheists I know.*

Nor do I think that atheists seek to be their own God. It’s a bit of an odd idea that really, trying to be something we don’t believe exists. I suppose perhaps you are referring to atheists being responsible for their own actions in which case I’d agree (but it seems like an odd way to put it).

 

[Candide_West]

O.P., if it were satisfactorily proved that God not only lacks existence, but that it is impossible for God to exist, the first thing I’d do is go find a quiet spot and indulge in the male urge as quickly as possible. You can’t just hold this volatile stuff in if there’s no God, and thus no sin! I suppose the next thing I’d do is weep for all my wasted time, and then go home and listen to some Baroque music really loud before killing myself.

GlouriousOrder, A few questions about the above if you would indulge me.

Firstly, why would it make a difference whether it was proven to you that God doesn’t exist or that it is impossible for God to exist. Surely the situation is the same either way?

Secondly, there seems to be a bit of a contradiction in your reaction to the news. Firstly you would weep for all your wasted time, then you would waste all your remaining time by killing yourself.

To be clear I say this is a contradiction because weeping over having wasted time suggests that even in the absence of any Gods you still consider your time to have value. But in the latter you throw a whole load more time away for no reason, suggesting it has no value.

Please enlighten me if I’m missing something.

Thanks

 

[Candide_West]

Actually, I’d say in the UK, when the results of the latest census come out, there will be a dramatic shift towards atheism. This is not because atheism is a more rational belief, or more ethically sound - but because it has been promoted excessively in the media over here recently, and theism demonised even more so. The fact that atheism often gains popularity particularly in cultures where we are so esconced in exclusivistically human-constructed environments, however, and where media proliferation is absolutely pervasive, strike me as interesting factors.

Which post is this referring to anyway? Must admit, can’t quite remember…

Interesting. I would actually have said the opposite, that atheism is under attack in the media. However, I would grant that Christianity has rather lost the favourable bias of the media. It’s now quite now more evenly shared by the different major religions (ie Islam springs to mind) but atheism remains excluded.

It seems to me that you are in British society required to respect any religious viewpoint other than atheism.

As for what this was regarding. I believe it came from you challenging my statement about individuals having changed their religious beliefs.

 

[Candide_West]

Hi Betterave, apologies, I’ve just realised I’ve failed to respond to a few of your posts on this thread. I’ll go back over and try to respond as soon as I can.*

I think we do have pretty good methods of making maps of what real religious arguments look like in the real world, that’s very much an empirical enterprise, and it seems to me, with due respect, that what you present here as your “True Map” of how religions assess their own relative accuracy with respect to “the real world” is pretty much phony.*

Not quite sure what you’re aiming at with the above to be honest. I wasn’t trying to present a true map of anything myself. I was just pointing out that different*religions have different and often contradictory views on particular issues. And the adherents of each religion consider that the supporting arguments for their own religion are stronger than those for the others (which is probably inevitable really, you aren’t likely to find many people saying “I think Islam is most likely to be the correct religion, but I’m staying catholic” or vice verse).

As for empirical comparison, I don’t know of any commonly accepted standards by which to compare religious beliefs (please inform me if there are some, i’d be interested). By this I mean that they have been agreed across all the different religions, or even the most major religions for that matter. Simple matters like rules about clothes and food are harshly contradicted across even the top few most populous religions. And I’ve never encountered an agreed set of rules to compare them.*

Instead I observe that Muslim can make a justification of their rules based on their religion, a Sikh theirs, a Hindu theirs, a Christian theirs etc. To Muslims the Muslim justification is strongest, to Christians the Christian one is strongest etc.*

So the question is: where did you come up with this, as you apparently believe, True Map of the general nature and success of religious apologetics in “the real world” (which, again, to me looks more like a True Caricature)? Your True Map looks to me like the product of and productive of closed-mindedness towards the real-world reality of intelligent religious reasoning.

I suspect this emerges from a misunderstanding of what was under discussion regarding the true maps. In fact my original point seems to now have been agreed by PRmerger, which was that two groups with conflicting beliefs restating their opinions indefinitely will never resolve the conflict. Unfortunately I find this to be a relatively common occurrence around the world, and the conflicts are indeed continuing.
*

P.S.: For some reason, along with all the snarky garbage, our moderator has seen fit to expunge my reply to your post #697, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t snarky and was on topic. Please let me know if you’d like me to take another shot at responding to it.

Ah that’s unfortunate, yes I’d still be interested if you have the time. Perhaps it would be possible to ask the moderator to reinstate that post?*

 

[Candide_West]

Candide

I also wouldn’t agree that at the point knowledge ends faith must take over. Although I acknowledge that a lot of people do follow this. Personally I think that when knowledge ceases you say “I don’t know” and look for the answers. Not fill the gaps with faith in Gods or magic etc.

You have a strong desire for certainty of the “show me” type.

Your reply seems to have nothing to do with what you appear to be replying to. If there is a link I’d be interested in what it is?

In any case, to respond, as I’ve said before, I don’t believe in things unless I have some reason to do so. It doesn’t necessarily have to be direct evidence but I do need to have some adequate reason.*

At the moment I have got no adequate reason to believe in any Gods, let alone the Christian one specifically.

If there is a God, you would require that He show himself to you in order to prove his existence.*

As above, not necessarily show himself directly. But I’d need some reason to believe in him. Currently, if he exists he appears to be doing a perfect impression of not existing.*

But precisely because He does exist, He will not show Himself to you until you have earned the right.

Odd statement, it appears to be implying that the lack of any evidence for Gods existence is evidence for his existence. It makes rather more sense to say “But precisely because he doesn’t exist, he will not show himself…”

Apparently you have decided He is not worth the effort to get to know unless it is on your terms, not His.

Again, odd statement, I have looked for God and found nothing. If he exists he could choose to give me something to believe in, any time he likes. But doesn’t.*

It’s not like I can choose to believe in your God any more than I can choose to believe in The Cargo. The only conclusion I can come to is that either your God doesn’t exist or if he does exist then he doesn’t want me to be Christian.*

 

[Candide_West]

You’d think so, but nope. I mean, Islam is laughably is off the table. The only true contender to Christianity is Judaism.

Er, I’m afraid I think you’re wrong here. How can you consider Islam to be “laughably off the table” when there are hundreds of millions of people who believe it to be correct?

 

[Candide_West]

“…a lot of easy answers”? To what questions?

The reason I’m here, issues of morality, why the world is the way it is etc.

Presumably no one fully consciously lies to him/her-self, no one actually tries to lie to him/her-self… do they?*

I’m not so sure on that front, I’ve known plenty of people who have a particular opinion or belief which they can’t justify but continue to hold. These people have actively avoided information which conflicted with the view they held. Some of them seemed aware that they were doing this but continued to do so anyway.*

Sometimes an event has occurred which forcibly made continuing in that position totally untenable and the individual has said something to the tune of “I was lying to myself because…”

So yes, I’d say that people do lie to themselves, perhaps it’s debatable whether they are fully aware of it or are really trying to do it. But nonetheless people do it.

The ‘evidence’ that supposedly supports a given conclusion, however, is often subject to interpretation, and the question is whether you’re being honest about that. It seems to me that your allegedly exhaustive dichotomy between “accepting what I see” and “trying to lie to myself” smacks of either naivety or dishonesty: either a too-simplistic understanding of your epistemic situation, or a voluntary and motivated refusal to understand,

True that evidence is often open to interpretation. However, are we really free to interpret as we please or is that in built into our nature and our prior information / assumptions? Can I honestly read the same piece of information and interpret it in two different ways, and pick either of them to be the true interpretation? I’m dubious although open to discussion on this one.*

Also in the case in point the problem is in fact that I lack anything I would call evidence of the existence of God to interpret. I have the same amount of evidence for the existence of God as for Brahmin, Allah and fairies.*

I suppose you could argue that I could re-interpret the things I see to be evidence of God. But if I am free to do that then surely I’m equally free to re-interpret it as evidence of Brahmin.*

because in many ways you wouldn’t still like to be a Christian, and you also wouldn’t like to admit that your reasons for not still being a Christian cannot in fact be what you have been telling yourself they are.*

? Not sure I understand what you’re aiming at here. My ceasing to be a Christian was as I’ve said before a realisation that I no longer believed in any of it. Not a choice, or a decision or even a desire.*

As for not wanting to be a Christian, well actually I do think it would be nice, very comforting, especially about death etc. And really it wouldn’t change my morals hardly at all, and not at all in the things I actually do in my life. So I don’t really think I’ve got much by way of reasons not to be Christian.*

So in response to your claim above, I would say that it seems to me that as an atheist you’ve settled for “a lot of easy answers,” so depending on what you mean by that, maybe not so much has changed since when you were a Christian?

Not sure what easy answers you think atheists have? Could you elaborate?*

 

[davidv]

The reason I’m here, issues of morality, why the world is the way it is etc.

I’m not so sure on that front, I’ve known plenty of people who have a particular opinion or belief which they can’t justify but continue to hold. These people have actively avoided information which conflicted with the view they held. Some of them seemed aware that they were doing this but continued to do so anyway.*

Sometimes an event has occurred which forcibly made continuing in that position totally untenable and the individual has said something to the tune of “I was lying to myself because…”

So yes, I’d say that people do lie to themselves, perhaps it’s debatable whether they are fully aware of it or are really trying to do it. But nonetheless people do it.

True that evidence is often open to interpretation. However, are we really free to interpret as we please or is that in built into our nature and our prior information / assumptions? Can I honestly read the same piece of information and interpret it in two different ways, and pick either of them to be the true interpretation? I’m dubious although open to discussion on this one.*

Also in the case in point the problem is in fact that I lack anything I would call evidence of the existence of God to interpret. I have the same amount of evidence for the existence of God as for Brahmin, Allah and fairies.*

I suppose you could argue that I could re-interpret the things I see to be evidence of God. But if I am free to do that then surely I’m equally free to re-interpret it as evidence of Brahmin.*

? Not sure I understand what you’re aiming at here. My ceasing to be a Christian was as I’ve said before a realisation that I no longer believed in any of it. Not a choice, or a decision or even a desire.*

As for not wanting to be a Christian, well actually I do think it would be nice, very comforting, especially about death etc. And really it wouldn’t change my morals hardly at all, and not at all in the things I actually do in my life. So I don’t really think I’ve got much by way of reasons not to be Christian.*

Not sure what easy answers you think atheists have? Could you elaborate?*

First off - Congrats on persisting on this topic.

I offer a few things that came to mind as I read the last dozen or so posts in the thread:

Pope Benedict in his book, Introduction to Christianity, offers that there are three legitimate responses to the basic questions of life, “Who are we?” and “Why are we here?”. These three responses are monotheism, polytheism and atheism. He then use the rest of the book to explain why Christian monotheis is the correct response.

It is very confusing to me why you claim their is as much evidence for fairies as for God? Do you have some unique definition for the word evidence in making this statement? (note: Allah is the arabic translation of God, so it is not a fair contrast.)

Also, how do you define belief? For me, belief is my intellectual assent to the truths proposed to me by my parents and reinforced by instructions provided to me in religious education and my own self study. In this context, it seems absurd to claim one doesn’t chose what to believe. Are the reality denyers (those that lie to themselves) not chosing to do so? It sure seems like a choice to me. Just like it was a choice to believe my parents and religious educators and the various authors I read.

 

[Betterave]

True that evidence is often open to interpretation. However, are we really free to interpret as we please or is that in built into our nature and our prior information / assumptions? Can I honestly read the same piece of information and interpret it in two different ways, and pick either of them to be the true interpretation? I’m dubious although open to discussion on this one.*

Just a quick note on this comment for now: I never said what you are suggesting I said here - hopefully you can see that? Certainly I do not think that we are free to interpret as we please, that we can consciously just ‘pick’ (by some kind of pure act of volition?) which of two interpretations is true. If you think I said anything that would suggest that I believed otherwise, I’d like to know what that is.

On the other hand, we can and often do choose to believe claim A over claim B without any intersubjectively tangible grounds for doing so, but this choice is always grounded at least in a minimalist justification such as “claim A just seems more plausible,” never by a claim like “I just *picked *claim A, I was free to and I did [full stop].”

 

[Betterave]

The reason I’m here, issues of morality, why the world is the way it is etc.

Okay. And how does “being a Christian” provide “a lot of easy answers” to these questions??

I’m not so sure on that front, I’ve known plenty of people who have a particular opinion or belief which they can’t justify but continue to hold. [Just *plenty

? ] These people have actively avoided information which conflicted with the view they held. [Could you be doing that right now (in this thread)? How would you know?] Some of them seemed aware that they were doing this but continued to do so anyway.* seemed…?]

Sometimes an event has occurred which forcibly made continuing in that position totally untenable and the individual has said something to the tune of “I was lying to myself because…” [Sure - but what does that actually mean? In what sense is it actually true in a given case? Not questions that we can answer a priori, I think.]

So yes, I’d say that people do lie to themselves, perhaps it’s debatable whether they are fully aware of it or are really trying to do it. But nonetheless people do it.

Of course, I never disputed that people actually do it. I just wanted to qualify the meaning of what it is that they actually do.

Also in the case in point the problem is in fact that I lack anything I would call evidence of the existence of God to interpret. I have the same amount of evidence for the existence of God as for Brahmin, Allah and fairies.*

I suppose you could argue that I could re-interpret the things I see to be evidence of God. But if I am free to do that then surely I’m equally free to re-interpret it as evidence of Brahmin.*

Really? With regard to *which *things could you do this? (I don’t think this kind of abstract gesturing towards unspecified hypotheticals is likely to be very helpful in actually confronting the issue here.)

? Not sure I understand what you’re aiming at here. My ceasing to be a Christian was as I’ve said before a realisation that I no longer believed in any of it. Not a choice, or a decision or even a desire.*

Fair enough. But that seems irrelevant to what I said: “The ‘evidence’ that supposedly supports a given conclusion, however, is often subject to interpretation, and the question is whether you’re being honest about that. It seems to me that your allegedly exhaustive dichotomy between “accepting what I see” and “trying to lie to myself” smacks of either naivety or dishonesty: either a too-simplistic understanding of your epistemic situation, or a voluntary and motivated refusal to understand, because in many ways you wouldn’t still like to be a Christian, and you also wouldn’t like to admit that your reasons for not still being a Christian cannot in fact be what you have been telling yourself they are.”

As for not wanting to be a Christian, well actually I do think it would be nice, very comforting, especially about death etc. And really it wouldn’t change my morals hardly at all, and not at all in the things I actually do in my life. So I don’t really think I’ve got much by way of reasons not to be Christian.*

Again, fair enough: in that case, in terms of my analysis, you are left with the “either” rather than the “or” - or else you are lying to yourself but it has not become clear to you yet that you are doing so (unless you have a proposal for ruling out this latter possibility?).

Not sure what easy answers you think atheists have? Could you elaborate?*

In the immediate context here, I am referring to the easy answers that I responded to and analyzed, whereby you pose a false dichotomy in order to justify your beliefs:

No, actually I don’t think that your religious beliefs are a choice at all. I think they’re simply a conclusion. I remember being christian, it made life easier for me by providing a lot of easy answers. In many ways I’d still like to be a christian but I can’t make the evidence support the conclusion. So my choice is actually between accepting what I see and trying to lie to myself.

 

[Betterave]

Not quite sure what you’re aiming at with the above to be honest. I wasn’t trying to present a true map of anything myself. I was just pointing out that different*religions have different and often contradictory views on particular issues. And the adherents of each religion consider that the supporting arguments for their own religion are stronger than those for the others (which is probably inevitable really, you aren’t likely to find many people saying “I think Islam is most likely to be the correct religion, but I’m staying catholic” or vice verse).

I’m afraid your claims above about what you were “just pointing out” are simply false. Here is what you actually said:
The accuracy of each True Map is actually dependent on the accuracy against the real world (which none of the religions have found a effective way to measure but instead just keep saying “we know ours is right because out God said so”).
Now if this positive assertion that you made is not an attempt to present a true map of anything, what is it??

As for empirical comparison, I don’t know of any commonly accepted standards by which to compare religious beliefs (please inform me if there are some, i’d be interested). By this I mean that they have been agreed across all the different religions, or even the most major religions for that matter. Simple matters like rules about clothes and food are harshly contradicted across even the top few most populous religions. And I’ve never encountered an agreed set of rules to compare them.*

I’m afraid this really doesn’t make any sense: first you imply that an empirical comparison of religions is impossible; then you go on to make empirically-based comparative claims about different religions. So which is it in your view: possible or impossible??

Instead I observe that Muslim can make a justification of their rules based on their religion, a Sikh theirs, a Hindu theirs, a Christian theirs etc. To Muslims the Muslim justification is strongest, to Christians the Christian one is strongest etc.*

So how does such a justification, “based on their religion,” work? Can you give me an example?

I suspect this emerges from a misunderstanding of what was under discussion regarding the true maps. In fact my original point seems to now have been agreed by PRmerger, which was that two groups with conflicting beliefs restating their opinions indefinitely will never resolve the conflict. Unfortunately I find this to be a relatively common occurrence around the world, and the conflicts are indeed continuing.
*

No, I don’t think this is based on my misunderstanding. My comment was based on the obvious falsity of the positive claim you made about religious epistemologies/ apologetics (the one I quoted above). To which I replied:

So the question is: where did you come up with this, as you apparently believe, True Map of the general nature and success of religious apologetics in “the real world” [wherein “we know ours is right because our God said so” provides the paradigm for understanding the grounds that religious people offer for their distinctive beliefs] (which, again, to me looks more like a True Caricature)? Your True Map looks to me like the product of and productive of closed-mindedness towards the real-world reality of intelligent religious reasoning.
It seems to me likely that it is the product of closed-mindedness because it is so obviously false, a caricature, which just happens to serve you well from the point of view of ‘justifying’ your current beliefs - I think a more open-minded person would have noticed this. It is productive of closed-mindedness because you have probably convinced yourself that it is true, and so you have given yourself a ‘justification’ for not looking at real religious arguments more carefully.

 

[Mystic_Banana]

Interesting. I would actually have said the opposite, that atheism is under attack in the media. However, I would grant that Christianity has rather lost the favourable bias of the media. It’s now quite now more evenly shared by the different major religions (ie Islam springs to mind) but atheism remains excluded.

It seems to me that you are in British society required to respect any religious viewpoint other than atheism.

As for what this was regarding. I believe it came from you challenging my statement about individuals having changed their religious beliefs.

Hmmm. Maybe things are very different in the US. But in the UK, I seriously think atheism has by far the most favourable bias in the media… and think it has done for quite a long time, although never as blatantly as in recent years. The closest after that is probably Buddhism, followed by Paganism, followed by Christianity in a poor fourth, regardless of the fact that in the last census 70% of citizens self-identified as Christian…

Hmmm… nope, still can’t remember. Can you remember which post it was?

 

[razredge]

If God does not exist I’d start saving up for cryogenic preservation

 

[Candide_West]

First off - Congrats on persisting on this topic.

No worries, I just think it’s polite really, when someones taken the time to write to me.*
*

Pope Benedict in his book, Introduction to Christianity, offers that there are three legitimate responses to the basic questions of life, “Who are we?” and “Why are we here?”. These three responses are monotheism, polytheism and atheism. He then use the rest of the book to explain why Christian monotheis is the correct response.*

Interesting, I wonder why he excluded spiritualism etc.*

Not sure what you mean by the three responses though. If you have time could you outline briefly the responses he presents from each point of view to the question “why are we here” for an example please. I’m sure it’d make an interesting read.*
*

It is very confusing to me why you claim their is as much evidence for fairies as for God? Do you have some unique definition for the word evidence in making this statement? (note: Allah is the arabic translation of God, so it is not a fair contrast.)

My reason for saying this is simply that I don’t have anything I would call evidence for the existence of God (either the Christian one or any of the others) or fairies. No special definitions required.*

Incidentally the reason I mention Allah is because he seems to be a very different god to the Christian God. Even though the two words mean the same thing.*
*

Also, how do you define belief? For me, belief is my intellectual assent to the truths proposed to me by my parents and reinforced by instructions provided to me in religious education and my own self study. In this context, it seems absurd to claim one doesn’t chose what to believe. Are the reality denyers (those that lie to themselves) not chosing to do so? It sure seems like a choice to me. Just like it was a choice to believe my parents and religious educators and the various authors I read.

I remain unconvinced about religious beliefs being a choice. You certainly choose what actions you take, but could you truly change your beliefs by an act of choice? Could you for example get up tomorrow and decide to be a hindu for a few weeks and honestly be one? I doubt it. In the same way I can’t simply choose to believe that a god exists.*

 

[Candide_West]

So if I understand you correctly, you are denying my claim that “we don’t develop concepts except on the basis of experience,” and you support this denial by claiming that we can invent and understand concepts by means of “abstract reasoning.” That argument only works, however, if you believe that “abstract reasoning” is possible without some basis in experience. IOW, your claim must be that no basis of experience is required in order for us human beings to carry out “abstract reasoning.” Now before going any further my question is: Do you really believe that?

To be clear my opinion here is that you do not need to have direct experience of a concept in order to understand that concept.*

Let’s take infinity as an example. I’m sure we both understand the term and the concept but neither of us has ever encountered anything of which there is an infinite quantity.*

 

[davidv]

No worries, I just think it’s polite really, when someones taken the time to write to me.*
*

Interesting, I wonder why he excluded spiritualism etc.*

Not sure what you mean by the three responses though. If you have time could you outline briefly the responses he presents from each point of view to the question “why are we here” for an example please. I’m sure it’d make an interesting read.*
*

My understanding of what the Pope meant is that all human world veiws that we define for ourselves can be put in one of the three catagories. As to “spiritualism”, depending on its nature, it could be a form of any of them.

My reason for saying this is simply that I don’t have anything I would call evidence for the existence of God (either the Christian one or any of the others) or fairies. No special definitions required.*

So, on what basis do you claim that the stories and information about God that were presented to me in my youth are not evidence? Seems to me you may be commited the absence of evidence is evidence of absence fallacy.

Incidentally the reason I mention Allah is because he seems to be a very different god to the Christian God. Even though the two words mean the same thing.*
*

If there is only one God, as Judaism, Islam and Christianity claim, then in matters not how He is described. He is still the only one and the same God.

I remain unconvinced about religious beliefs being a choice. You certainly choose what actions you take, but could you truly change your beliefs by an act of choice? Could you for example get up tomorrow and decide to be a hindu for a few weeks and honestly be one? I doubt it. In the same way I can’t simply choose to believe that a god exists.*

So far your claim that it is not a choice is contrary to the evidence.

 

[Candide_West]

So, you are telling me that you don’t know what people mean by nothing.*

Not at all, I know well what most people mean by nothing. Which is entirely different a real nothing (by which I mean the absence of anything). I assume though that what we are talking about is a genuine nothing. Ie, no time, no dimensions, no mass, no laws of physics, no observer etc.

If you don’t know what is meant by the word nothing, then how is it that you can determine what i can know and what i cannot know about it?*

I do know what the word nothing refers to. As for what you know about it, well if you know something about it then it’s not nothing that you are referring to.*

You just told me you don’t know the nature of nothing, so how can you possibly determine with out science that a thing would not exist in nothing? And yet at the same time you seem to have a problem with the certain fact that only nothing can come from nothing.

Odd, you seem to argue that a thing could be within a nothing (which would make it not nothing).

But yes, I do disagree with your statement that “nothing comes from nothing” is a “certain fact”.*

Its supported by logic. If there is truly absolutely nothing, then it is irrational to claim that the antithesis of nothing could from it. To claim so would be to say that nothing and something is qualitatively and essentially the same in their power and effect, being only superficially or apparently different. But this cannot be so, since there is no real power or effect in absolutely nothing, because it would not truly be absolutely nothing if there was.*

Not quite sure what you’re aiming at here. You seem to be saying that if something could come from nothing then nothing and something are the same thing. Obviously this isn’t correct so I assume I’m misunderstanding you somewhere here.

Incidentally I guess you’re aware that there is a hypothesis that the sum total of all the energy and mass in the universe is zero hence what we see in existence is a separation of positive and negative from each other? This is at the moment at least totally unsupported by evidence, but conceivable at least.*

Reality and nothing is absolutely distinct and thus it is a contradiction to think that absolutely nothing can possibly produce anything that can be truly said of reality. To do so would be to make reality and nothing synonymous in nature. This is not possible since nothing is and can only be the antithesis of production and reality.*

Again this appears to be saying that if reality came from nothing they would be the same which makes no sense so I’ll wait on a follow up on that one.*

It is precisely because reality and nothing is absolutely distinct that we cannot meaningfully apply any ontological truth to nothing, that is, any truth that can be rationally applied to reality. Therefore the word nothing (in so far as the word describes the absence of the ontological truth of being) can only function meaningfully as a negation of potential reality.**

No, nothing is the absence of anything. Not the negation of potential reality. The negation of a potential reality would be something thus not nothing.*

And yes you are correct that we cannot predict what nothing would do or look like. We cannot by definition ever encounter nothing.*

For example you cannot say that the natural powers of a rabbit has the same natural powers of a rubber ball, and that is because they are distinct in nature while having those particular forms and thus evidently cannot be said to have the same potentiality. This is the same with reality and nothing, accept this time nothing and reality do not share any nature at all, whereas the rabbit and the rubber ball both share a material nature. Thus to say that nothing can produce something would be the same as treating nothing as having a being or nature; which is illogical. Nothing by definition is the absence of being and nature, thus it is meaningless to speak of the possibility or potentiality of beings coming from it. *

But it is you who is saying what the nature of nothing is, not me. I am saying in fact that we can’t know anything about nothing. You are the one claiming to be able to predict it’s behaviour.

You entertained the irrational possibility of something coming from nothing, and several times you spoke of nothing as if it had an ontology.

It is what it is.

No, I said that your assertion that nothing comes from nothing is an bald assertion. I also pointed out that if your second point in that post was correct then that made the first point both unsupportable and irrelevant. I note that you haven’t replied to the remainder of the points I made as yet. Do you have any further thoughts on the subject?*

 

[Betterave]

So, on what basis do you claim that the stories and information about God that were presented to me in my youth are not evidence? Seems to me you may be commited the absence of evidence is evidence of absence fallacy.

“Seems to me you may be commited the absence of evidence is evidence of absence fallacy” - why would you say this?

If there is only one God, as Judaism, Islam and Christianity claim, then in matters not how He is described. He is still the only one and the same God.

It matters not how He is described? I’m sure you can’t mean that? You would be right to point out there are not three logically independent possible Gods described by the three religious traditions (a point which Candide seems to be ignoring), but the differences still matter a great deal, don’t they?

So far your claim that it is not a choice is contrary to the evidence.

Which evidence?

 

[Windfish]

It’s been proven. Let us move on! :tiphat:

 

[Betterave]

But it is you who is saying what the nature of nothing is, not me. I am saying in fact that we can’t know anything about nothing. You are the one claiming to be able to predict it’s behaviour.

LOL! I’m not sure if you’re joking here, but I’m sure that’s not what MOM was saying. On the contrary, by definition of nothing, there is no ‘it’ and there is no ‘behaviour’ (none whatsoever); therefore, necessarily, there is no ‘its behaviour’ to predict – so MOM was certainly not claiming to be able to ‘predict its behaviour.’