Why are you an Atheist? - Catholic Answers Live - 12Nov2018

[Damian]

No idea, but your deity should know how to do this and let the religious followers know how to do this. Imagine if Hagrid showed up to Harry and told him that magic was real. But didn’t demonstrate it at all and told Harry about how a wizard killed his parents. Pretty sure Harry would put a nickle in Hagrid’s hand and help him to a psychiatric clinic. What would it take for you, for example, to believe that level of paradigm shift about the truth of reality as you understand it. To go from a life of the 21st century suburbia to believing that Hogwarts is real, but without ever demonstrating magic at all?

 

[Wesrock]

But how does this address my point that you can not demonstrate this being to exist at all yet. It’s still just the hypothesis that no one can test to determine either way if it is true or not. I care that reality actually demonstrates itself to match my internal model of reality. That is justified belief, not an untestable internally logically consistent position. Fantasy novels are also untestable internally logically consistent position to hold as well. If that is justified belief for theists to hold about reality, then their logical process can not distinguish between fantasy and reality.

It is demonstrable from empirical reality and synthesized judgments about reality. It is not testable or falsifiable, though it is open to logical disproof. We do have good reason from our observations of reality (God’s effects) that he exists, and so have good reasons to believe in God. I do not have good reason to believe that The Lord of the Rings is history or that the magic described in The Wheel of Time is real.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

Nothing is the state of not being at all. How can nothing become anything else? How does it have potentiality?

You need to make an effort to understand wholly that which we are saying. Without it, there’s no point in being here at all.

 

[Wesrock]

Ex: If I tell you what a shoe is by saying it’s not a glove, have I told you any positive qualities about it?

It is Subsistent Being (term admittedly does need further groundwork, which could be covered). It is the conserving cause, creator, and first principle of all reality besides itself. We can demonstrate that it is not multiple, not composite, not changing, not lacking in perfections (this can be expanded with some additional groundwork), among other things. This prevents plenty of errors.

You can have a changing first cause. This is demonstrated by the idea that the entity changed by making a decision to start reality. How it started reality is a different question. The pixies had to self destruct to create reality.
However, there’s an internally broken logic here. How can something make a decision to do something when it had an infinite amount of time before that to come up with the idea? It would never come to make the decision then since it had an infinite amount of time to think it up.

No, it did not have infinite time to think it up, or rather, there are no successive moments or thinking or a change from not making to making. That God never had a beginning does not mean that there’s been infinite time. There is no time for God, no passing moments, no change.

 

[Wesrock]

Wesrock:

There is no time for God, no passing moments, no change.

Which means that God is in a frozen status, cannot act, cannot do anything. Poor God… an icicle, or a statue. Cannot even “know” something, since the reality is constantly changing and “knowledge” is information about something.

And, of course he was not a creator of anything. the act of creation is an action, and every action needs a change - otherwise there would be no difference between action and inaction; and finally if there is a change, then there is a “before” and an “after”, which leads to a “time”.

Not simply irrational, totally illogical, too.

The problem is you take these snippets out of context, but don’t go further. You just assume that’s all there is to it. Classic “then why are there still monkeys?” objection to evolution.

God is not a rock sitting still, unchanging, as time moves around him. The rock is still there in time, having successive moments, even if it’s not changing physically itself (simplified, I know rocks erode). I don’t just mean the same through successive moments.

There is no before or after for God. Everything that is (at the moment it is) is present in God’s knowledge at once, all in what for God is one eternal moment. Likewise his one, eternal act applies to all moments, unchanging.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

If a healthy tree produces a seed, and that seed becomes a new tree, did the first tree change states of being during the process?

Hint: The answer is no

 

[Wesrock]

If a healthy tree produces a seed, and that seed becomes a new tree, did the first tree change states of being during the process?

Hint: The answer is no

This analogy is too loose for me, and while I felt comfortable ignoring erosion in my rock scenario, I think this is too big an ask, even in an idealized world, that the tree has not undergone any change.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

Well, I should’ve said to assume the tree is still healthy. Still, all it means is that creation doesn’t change a being.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

Is the tree not a healthy tree now?

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

But the thing itself didn’t change. Thus is God: He created, but creation did not change His nature.

 

[Roseeurekacross]

Faith and belief are not the same thing, for example you have no faith but you have a lot of belief there is no God.

Its part of your journey home.

But why are you now posting on here, The phone call has been and gone,

Whats your point in a nutshell

 

[Roseeurekacross]

I’ve ran this experiment before and got zero results.

Is God just an experiment to you? No phone call or text from God in your experiment = God does not exist. . I say you are not serious about letting God into your life, or even desiring God in your life.

Running a couple of experiments is absolutely meaningless and certainly not scientific. We don’t determine God with science. But I will say, if you are running experiments to test if God is out there, you are not so much an atheist as a doubter. Keep experimenting, keep praying for God to reveal Himself to you.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

Alright, I’m going to make these responses brief, I don’t have much time to engage today.

So you’ve just defined a deity to be unable to be detected in reality in any way. That is one of the requirements to have justified belief about something when your belief is in reference to the model of reality. Reality has to demonstrate its existence some way to us.

Reality does demonstrate the existence of God, in its order, in t’s very existence. You just also have to accept philosophy as a valid avenue for the discernment of evidence. You do not, so you will never be able to understand this. You have willfully blinded yourself.

Same way Einstein observed reality, created a logical mathematical conclusion about gravity waves. We looked for them, but were not justified in believing they actually exist until we found them in 2015.

I’m sorry, but I find this to be objectively false. The math supported Einstein’s notion, so it was completely valid to believe it to be true even before one had been observed. Most scientists believed in them, otherwise they wouldn’t have been searching for them. This is the same as black holes. They were theorized, and the math supported the theory, which was widely believed prior to actual observation. You are placing an unrealistic requirement on belief that is not shared by scientists.

So you’ve just defined your deity out of justified belief of its existence since you can not ever demonstrate that it exists at all.

Once again, physicality is not the only avenue for the discernment of truth and reality. That belief that you can only come to know thing through physical evidence, is itself a philosophical position that cannot be proven through physical evidence. It is a self-refuting premise.

The philosophical evidence for God’s existence is strong, and is supported by the coherent and organized construction of the universe which indicates underlying design. Until you are willing to do away with your faulty notion that physical evidence is the only evidence, you can never actually know anything, because, as I stated, the idea that you can only accept physical evidence is a philosophical position which cannot be proven through the application of physical evidence. It is irrational.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

No argument here, you’re just repeating what I stated: an unjustified belief

Once again. A lack of physical evidence does not make a belief unjustified. There is no physical evidence for the conception of beauty, but that doesn’t mean beauty doesn’t exist. (To be clear, so you don’t misrepresent my argument, the qualities which generally illicit a sensation of beauty in certain people can be quantified. However, the subjective experience of beauty cannot.)

You have trapped yourself in an irrational worldview, where you demand physical evidence based on a concept which lacks physical evidence. You are no different form someone who claims that there’s no such thing as objective truth, completely ignoring the fact that that is a statement of objective fact which refutes itself.

I don’t expect you to accept this, but that is because you have willfully blinded yourself to the nature of your own beliefs.

I won’t be able to continue this discussion today, I’m far too busy at work. Like I said before, shoot me a pm and I’d be happy to really get in depth on these issues.

 

[goout]

Roguish:

because you do not know that cognitive mode in which it Faith is natural and spontaneous, and therefore your only sane choice.

No idea what you mean here. What do you mean by Faith?
Here’s how I understand the difference between Belief, Hope, and Faith.
Belief is the understanding of all possible outcomes of a problem. Such as, “I believe a 1-6 will result from a 1d6 dice roll.”
Hope is the understanding that out of all possible outcomes, the one you want to be will be the result, regardless of how rare the possible result would be. Such as, “I hope a 5 will result from the 1d6 dice roll since I placed a bet on the number 5 to appear.”
Faith is the excuse people use for wanting a result that has not been demonstrated to be even possible. Such as, “I have faith that a 7 will result from a 1d6 dice roll.”
You can literally hold any claim you want based on that use of the word “faith”, even if it is contradictory to what reality demonstrates and even to other claims you hold to be true as well. “Faith” in this instance is not a way to have justified belief/model of reality or in fantasy worlds as well.

The Christian context for all of this is relationship. Dry definitions only go so far.
So faith for instance, is not merely an intellectual exercise defined by evidence. It is a participation. Faith is a response in relationship, not a thing. A car is a thing. Faith is not like a car.
If you want to understand what you are searching for here, you must start in this relationship context, or nothing else follows. Good faith discussion always leads a person to seriously consider things that are inimical to your own point of view. This is hard, and it is risky, because we become attached to our own beliefs.

So I would ask you, or challenge you, to ponder these items first in the context of relationship. And if that is difficult, think about those people you have trust in, those people you love, and how these terms work in this context. You might discover realities that are not reducible to the evidence you require of Christianity.
But, it’s hard to accomplish anything when we are speaking two entirely different languages.

 

[crenfro]

Hello.

Your post reminded me of a story about St. Mother Theresa. She was giving a talk and started getting heckled by an atheist in one of the back rows. She answered his questions. She told him something along the lines of “perhaps you’ve never had a spiritual experience of God’s great love for you.”

Praying that you will have such an experience soon and will continue to sincerely look for the truth.

Many blessings.

 

[Damian]

It is not testable or falsifiable, though it is open to logical disproof.

So every hypothesis that is directly referencing reality as its grounding for justification is not to tested against what reality actually demonstrates to be the case. This is the problem with that type of thinking. From first observing reality, we come up with logic language to describe the predictability of reality and then infer that our logical predictions can define something into existence since we assume that our logic isn’t wrong. Well you can be logically correct and still factually wrong based on our proven track record of all our logically correct hypothesis in the past that turned out to not be correct when tested against reality. Reality is the arbiter for logical truth claims made in reference to reality. Your defining a deity into existence here. Sorry but that’s also how you create comic book characters too. Comic book super heroes are also built in a logically consistent reality that can not be tested against reality to see if Thanos actually exists. So how can your method tell the difference between fantasy and reality. It can’t apparently.

 

[Damian]

Here’s the problem with having me define what your god is. It will always be the wrong description of what you think a deity is. “That’s not my god” response. So it’s your deity, its your belief, you tell me what it is.

 

[Damian]

Nothing is the noun in that sentence. Any noun can be describe as unchanging. You can still be an unchanging state of not being.

 

[Damian]

Not this, not that, not a glove. Okay, well what is it then? Universe making pixies can be a first principle as well. It is changing because deciding to make a universe is a change.
Perfection is a subjective description.

there are no successive moments or thinking or a change from not making to making.

Thinking is necessarily linear, as reality indicates since you are also using reality to reference the grounding foundation of logic. You can’t use experienced reality to justify your logic and then imagine time to not act as reality demonstrate time to operate when it becomes a logical problem for your deity idea. That’s called special pleading fallacy. So since thought is necessarily linear with an infinite amount of time for this deity to exist, it could never come to the point to make the decision to create. You can not have thoughts or actions in t=0 or t<0.