Post Any Evidence For God Here

[BigBallinStalin]

I got it.

Neotony created Lionz. What we are witnessing is a man masturbating to a mirror.

Lionz does the sweet-talking, and Neotony bashes it down. Lionz asks the gentle questions to guide where this is going, and Neotony gladly obliges himself.

This isn't a battle of the wits v the witless, but the journey of one man inevitably headed to the climax of this story.

[Lionz]

Here's an aerial shot showing some or all of Marble Canyon perhaps. One main canyon that was cut as a result of a natural dam being breached? And also a sunken path type canyon that was cut by the Colorado River into wet sediment? Wet sediment that turned to sedimentary rock centuries after the flood?

Note: Marble Canyon refers to a smaller of two and more sunken path type canyon Maybe. Maybe I used Marble Canyon to refer to a larger of two and have said stuff wrong.

[BoganGod]

Evolution is the proof of the existance of God. Only a being/soul/consciousness would be lazy enough to use such a long drawn out process to get results.

[V.I.]

I probably don't need to mention this, but notice the dichotomy between Heaven (represented by Christ's limp body nailed into affixed wooden beams) and Hell (the skull replete with evil eyes and gnashing teeth.) I'd think you'd have to have your head shoved far up your ass to miss this obviously divine message.

[natty dread]

I probably don't need to mention this, but notice the dichotomy between Heaven (represented by Christ's limp body nailed into affixed wooden beams) and Hell (the skull replete with evil eyes and gnashing teeth.) I'd think you'd have to have your head shoved far up your ass to miss this obviously divine message.

Skull? Crusifix? where?

[pimpdave]

As is often said, "God helps those that help themselves", and I'm pretty sure that female (or dude pretending to be female) helped herself (or himself) to some augmentation.

Sorry guys, but if all you see is a rack, how do you know it's a girl? *shudder*

[natty dread]

how do you know it's a girl?

Bone structure?

[2dimes]

how do you know it's a girl?

Bone structure?

Nipples.

[Juan_Bottom]

Are all of we Heathens supposed to be posting, or are we stepping back and letting Neo do this, or do we just not care about one lone nutter anymore, or wha? I'm just not sure of our/my role here.

[jonesthecurl]

I got bored with the lone nutter, though he did manage to make me respond once or twice more.
I think he's a troll, I don't think his suggestions would be accepted even by the most ardent creationists.

[bbqpenguin]

Descartes, in a hundred words or less

I think, therefore I am. I am a thinking thing.

Everything comes from something.

Nothing can come from something less than itself.
(EX: you can get a rock from itself, or break it off a boulder (which would be greater), but you can't get a rock from a pebble, which is "less"

Since everything must come from something greater than itself, you should be able to trace the source of all things up a chain of creation to a perfect source of infinite.

This source is God.



Anyways, that's the way I understand the argument. Descartes doesn't argue for the Abrahamic God, or any specific God in particular, just that there must be some point of infinite creation. I don't know that I'm necessarily convinced by it, but it makes sense, at least on a basic level. There are some arguments against him, chiefly that he uses circular reasoning. Later, he manages to clarify his argument, a least a little, to get around this.

Personally, I find the probability of existence from a statistical point of view far too small to have occured by chance.

[Snorri1234]

Descartes, in a hundred words or less

I think, therefore I am. I am a thinking thing.

Everything comes from something.

Nothing can come from something less than itself.
(EX: you can get a rock from itself, or break it off a boulder (which would be greater), but you can't get a rock from a pebble, which is "less"

Since everything must come from something greater than itself, you should be able to trace the source of all things up a chain of creation to a perfect source of infinite.

This source is God.



Anyways, that's the way I understand the argument. Descartes doesn't argue for the Abrahamic God, or any specific God in particular, just that there must be some point of infinite creation. I don't know that I'm necessarily convinced by it, but it makes sense, at least on a basic level. There are some arguments against him, chiefly that he uses circular reasoning. Later, he manages to clarify his argument, a least a little, to get around this.

Well that's not exactly the argument, but close enough. Anyway, the main problem (aside from the circular reasoning which he never really got rid of) is that "God" in this way is not meaningfull. There are no attributes you can derive from this for God, aside from "infinite" which isn't particularly usefull.

He tried to say omnibenevolent and omnipotent could be derived too, but that was just really unconvincing.

Personally, I find the probability of existence from a statistical point of view far too small to have occured by chance.

Why doesn't this apply to God then?

[MeDeFe]

Descartes' Meditations is a wonderful work, but his proof for the existence of god is poppycock.

[john9blue]

I got it.

Neotony created Lionz. What we are witnessing is a man masturbating to a mirror.

Lionz does the sweet-talking, and Neotony bashes it down. Lionz asks the gentle questions to guide where this is going, and Neotony gladly obliges himself.

This isn't a battle of the wits v the witless, but the journey of one man inevitably headed to the climax of this story.

My God.

Of course.

[bbqpenguin]

Descartes, in a hundred words or less

I think, therefore I am. I am a thinking thing.

Everything comes from something.

Nothing can come from something less than itself.
(EX: you can get a rock from itself, or break it off a boulder (which would be greater), but you can't get a rock from a pebble, which is "less"

Since everything must come from something greater than itself, you should be able to trace the source of all things up a chain of creation to a perfect source of infinite.

This source is God.



Anyways, that's the way I understand the argument. Descartes doesn't argue for the Abrahamic God, or any specific God in particular, just that there must be some point of infinite creation. I don't know that I'm necessarily convinced by it, but it makes sense, at least on a basic level. There are some arguments against him, chiefly that he uses circular reasoning. Later, he manages to clarify his argument, a least a little, to get around this.

Well that's not exactly the argument, but close enough. Anyway, the main problem (aside from the circular reasoning which he never really got rid of) is that "God" in this way is not meaningfull. There are no attributes you can derive from this for God, aside from "infinite" which isn't particularly usefull.

He tried to say omnibenevolent and omnipotent could be derived too, but that was just really unconvincing.

Personally, I find the probability of existence from a statistical point of view far too small to have occured by chance.

Why doesn't this apply to God then?

I know that that's an oversimplified version, but I'm by no means a philosopher or theologian and I wanted a quick, basic version that no one would be too lazy to read.
I agree he never really justifies his conclusion that God is a conscious, benevolent actor. He says something about it being derived from his perfection, but then never really backs up the perfection thing. Unless you assume that infinite=perfection, which I'm not so sure of. I think I'm more convinced than you are of his explanation of his seeming circular logic, but your opinion is more qualified than mine.

For the last bit, consider

Possibilty 1: magical man in the sky intentionally created you, me, dirt, reality t.v., dinosaurs, sunsets, himself (?), love, will, chicken pox, the Big Mac, morality, doesn't like it when you do bad things, and is always watching you, even in the shower

Possibility 2: everything that ever happened was an accident. a couple of cosmic forces collided by happenstance and created the matter, energy, space. and a lot of other things I don't understand. these products happened to react in such a way that made what we recognize as the universe(s) today possible. somewhere down the line, earth got spun out by chance and happened to have the exactly perfect amount of chemicals, radiation, elements, water, light, gravity, etc. to create life, 4 billion years later, you're at a computer screen reading this.

now I have to make a quick disclaimer. I believe in evolution. I do think that the universe is 8 billion(ish) years old. when I get sick, I don't lay around waiting for my faith to fix me; I take medicine. I believe in free will, not predestination. I don't claim that I know for a fact that God exists, only that I've been presented with more evidence that he does than he doesn't.

however, of the two probabilities, the first seems, to me the more plausible. though they both appear extremely unlikely, the fact of the matter is that, well, here we are, and the cause was one of these unlikely events (wiser men than I will probably object that there are more than just these two possibilities, and I await to hear them). the first has only one unlikely event (that God exists), while everything else can be attributed to his deliberate will. the second, though, is dependent on a long series of increasingly unlikely events to get where we are today.



also, spoons!

[notyou2]

Personally, I find the probability of existence from a statistical point of view far too small to have occured by chance.

It appears that you are saying that you find the chance that life developed on its own on this planet without a god too small to have occurred by chance. Is that what you are stating?

[bbqpenguin]

Personally, I find the probability of existence from a statistical point of view far too small to have occured by chance.

It appears that you are saying that you find the chance that life developed on its own on this planet without a god too small to have occurred by chance. Is that what you are stating?

no I'm saying that the probability of the universe existing at all too small to have happened without a God. probably

1consider, assume at one there was nothing at all.
2then, the universe happened to pop up. a couple of atoms banged together and did it, i dunno really how the Big Bang is supposed to work, so I'm sure that's really wrong.
3matter and energy were created by the big bang, producing the universe. they happened to organize exactly in a way that allows time to flow, exist in three dimensions (at least), and just so happen to be able to, eventually, come together to form things like galaxies, planets, stars, and living things.
4 the milky way galaxy, out of all the infinite possibilities of galaxies that could have been created, was born
5 matter starts collecting to form our solar system. gravity happens to exist and work the way it does, so atoms join together and start spinning around each other.
6. the earth is created. it is just the right size, shape, and consistancy to be able to harbor life. it is just close enough to the sun to hold liquid water, yet far enough away not to be burned to a crisp. also convenient.
7.hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon start linking together in funky ways in primordial ooze.
8. somethings happens. voila, life!

anyways, even if one of those things was very likely to occur, together they're a very unlikely chain of events. i don't deny that, assuming the universe was already the way it was, that life could conceivably have popped up by itself. I would say that, on their own, those specific conditions required for life to be the way it is are very unlikely to happen by coincidence.

lets say that each of the 8 things above has a fairly high probability of happening, independently of the other and all things equal. for arguments' sake, we'll say each of them has a 9/10 chance of happening by happenstance. that means, though, that the probability of them all happening at once is (9/10)^8. i don't care to figure what that is, but i bet it's already pretty small. now consider that in reality, each of those occurrences has a much smaller chance of occuring randomly, and that there is actually an uncountable number of them, not just 8. the number you get will be very, very close to zero.



Thank you, though, for checking before making judgements and accusations. Not many people here do that. Also, Darwin FTW.

[Frigidus]

Descartes' Meditations is a wonderful work, but his proof for the existence of god is poppycock.

Yup. It was a classic case of finding the conclusion you were looking for. He should have stopped with the proof of personal existence.

[notyou2]

I believe the chances for life occurring in a multitude of places in the infinite amount of galaxies, solar systems and planets without the hand of a superior being is extremely high, so high, that it is a given. I expect our space faring ancestors will be finding life in many places in the universe, but they most likely won't find a being that created it all.

[bbqpenguin]

I believe the chances for life occurring in a multitude of places in the infinite amount of galaxies, solar systems and planets without the hand of a superior being is extremely high, so high, that it is a given. I expect our space faring ancestors will be finding life in many places in the universe, but they most likely won't find a being that created it all.

well I suppose that if you assume there's an infinite amount of planets, then life (and, i suppose, everything) an eventual certainty. I also think there's a strong possibility of life on other planets. however, there's simply not an infinite amount of galaxies; though the Universe is expanding, that doesn't mean there's a limitless amount of it. even if you take life as a given, though, the probability of reality being the way it is, life aside, is still tiny. I couldn't even begin to list the countless minuscule factors that add up to create universe as we know it.


on a side note, i'm not so sure about the ancestors thing. if you figure the earth has been around 4 billion years, and has only been inhabitable for a a couple of those (i'm guessing here, i forget the exact numbers). if we've been evolving for most of that, where is there time for a previous race of being to evolve to the point of sentience to achieve such a goal as intergalactic travel?

[Lionz]

BBQ,

What if Darwin had one or more right idea and yet stretched things too far? What if various kinds of creatures were created and they naturally bring forth variety after their kinds?

[pimpdave]

What if heart disease isn't the primary cause of death for people over the age of fifty and it's actually robots?

I don't even understand why the scientists make them!

[Frigidus]

pimpdave,

What if the heart isn't actually essential for pumping blood? What if people dying following heart attacks is just a long string of unlikely coincidences?

[Lionz]

What suggests to you that elephants and sunflowers share common ancestry?

[notyou2]

Are we back to the beginning of the circle?