Post: #26

Yeah - I can understand the history/political side of this. But it always confuses me that semmingly intelligent people just can't handle the idea of two gods. Or three gods. Or 14 gods.

Fundamentally it is the same thing and doesn't change anything.

Post: #27

(06-02-2013 06:53 AM)cardguy Wrote:  Yeah - I can understand the history/political side of this. But it always confuses me that semmingly intelligent people just can't handle the idea of two gods. Or three gods. Or 14 gods.

Fundamentally it is the same thing and doesn't change anything.

Would one have existed prior to the others, or were they all created at the same time? What created them?

Post: #28

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

Post: #29

(06-02-2013 12:37 PM)caps Wrote:  

(06-02-2013 06:53 AM)cardguy Wrote:  Yeah - I can understand the history/political side of this. But it always confuses me that semmingly intelligent people just can't handle the idea of two gods. Or three gods. Or 14 gods.

Fundamentally it is the same thing and doesn't change anything.

Would one have existed prior to the others, or were they all created at the same time? What created them?

All created at the same time. Creating fourteen in one go is no more impossible than creating just one.

Post: #30

(06-02-2013 03:32 PM)TheBlackNarwhal Wrote:  Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

These types of questions don't even grab me anymore, and I can no longer even see why I once found grappling with them interesting.

The questions don't mean anything - it's just pitting different thoughts up against each other, and noticing how they don't form a coherent picture. OK, that means they don't form a coherent picture, and in this case it seems obvious to me why. The concept of God itself is flawed. So why spend time thinking about a flawed concept? Of what use is it? Can you water your lawn with that concept? Sweeten your tea with it? Use it in your remote control when the batteries go dead? It's just a useless concept that goes nowhere and does nothing and is broken.

Post: #31

(06-02-2013 03:38 PM)xsplat Wrote:  

(06-02-2013 03:32 PM)TheBlackNarwhal Wrote:  Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

These types of questions don't even grab me anymore, and I can no longer even see why I once found grappling with them interesting.

The questions don't mean anything - it's just pitting different thoughts up against each other, and noticing how they don't form a coherent picture. OK, that means they don't form a coherent picture, and in this case it seems obvious to me why. The concept of God itself is flawed. So why spend time thinking about a flawed concept? Of what use is it? Can you water your lawn with that concept? Sweeten your tea with it? Use it in your remote control when the batteries go dead? It's just a useless concept that goes nowhere and does nothing and is broken.

Spending time thinking about anything above ourselves is never wasted time. Why spend time thinking about a flawed concept? I'd rather think I spend that time thinking about why other people choose to believe in said flawed concept. Looking at God from a skeptical and philosophical standpoint is a good mental exercise, as it was for Epicurius, it's when people take these concepts and make them part of their core beliefs is where the flaws surface. I'm as pragmatic as the next guy but to totally refuse thinking about somethings on the scale of God and the Universe would be the flawed concept. Reality is more boring then we realize, which is why we occupy ourselves with these questions.

Post: #32

(06-02-2013 03:46 PM)TheBlackNarwhal Wrote:  

(06-02-2013 03:38 PM)xsplat Wrote:  

(06-02-2013 03:32 PM)TheBlackNarwhal Wrote:  Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

These types of questions don't even grab me anymore, and I can no longer even see why I once found grappling with them interesting.

The questions don't mean anything - it's just pitting different thoughts up against each other, and noticing how they don't form a coherent picture. OK, that means they don't form a coherent picture, and in this case it seems obvious to me why. The concept of God itself is flawed. So why spend time thinking about a flawed concept? Of what use is it? Can you water your lawn with that concept? Sweeten your tea with it? Use it in your remote control when the batteries go dead? It's just a useless concept that goes nowhere and does nothing and is broken.

Spending time thinking about anything above ourselves is never wasted time. Why spend time thinking about a flawed concept? I'd rather think I spend that time thinking about why other people choose to believe in said flawed concept. Looking at God from a skeptical and philosophical standpoint is a good mental exercise, as it was for Epicurius, it's when people take these concepts and make them part of their core beliefs is where the flaws surface. I'm as pragmatic as the next guy but to totally refuse thinking about somethings on the scale of God and the Universe would be the flawed concept. Reality is more boring then we realize, which is why we occupy ourselves with these questions.

Thinking is utilitarian, I agree. The above thinking example is not a koan - it quickly resolves into an actual answer. There is no god. End of story. Good thinking job.

Why keep at a question after you've already answered it?

Post: #33

Thinking about god ("Does a god exist? What is its nature?") becomes mundane after a while. You'll have all the arguments figured out and know how the many debates will develop.

Thinking about religion ("Why do so many people belief in a delusion?") is the next step. You'll be looking at it from a social science perspective.

Philosophizing about what would be case if god would be real, is useless. If the assumptions are wrong, the rest will be wrong.

I like debating the existence of god though, but for amusement. Never get invested in it, because remember:

"You can't reason someone out of a position, they didn't reason themselves into."

(The similarities between religious people and feminists are unlimited.)

Post: #34

(06-01-2013 08:13 PM)SexualHarrasmentPanda Wrote:  Assume there is no god and work from there. If you find evidence to the contrary then and only then should you believe there is a god. The burden of proof lies on the side that is affirming existence.

I mean yeah, i am an atheist through and through. just trying to answer OPs question.

Post: #35

The common counterargument to this is:

What Difference Does It Make.

Whether we are in the matrix or not, we still play the same way.

Post: #36

Just came across this:

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered.

Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

Post: #37

There is only one God - the God of Biomechanics. Respect him and you reap the rewards - if you accept and do your role of a man (ie. alpha), you get lays and become happy with yourself. Don't respect him and you incur his wrath - be a spineless beta and you get married to a fattie, become a sexless beta, get cheated on and divorced; if you're a beta with a spine you can succeed in a monogamous country (ie. not America). This also applies to women - ride the cock carousel and/or compete with men in a male-oriented career and you become a cat lady in your 30's - 40's without a man or you marry a beta who will make you unhappy and leave you longing for an alpha, which makes you cheat on him and finally divorce him.

Post: #38

THIS WHOLE THREAD

Post: #39

We live in 2013 and are having serious discussions involving the existence of god???

Post: #40

The problem with this thought experiment is that logic and God are both human constructs. The universe is so vast so infinite that logic is incapable of grasping at it's function or it's existence. Outside of logic there is no right or wrong only phenomena.

To give you an example here's a quote from an article on PBS about how big is the universe:

"While we can never directly "see" the whole of the universe or glimpse its farthest horizons, we can discover how it is behaving"

Tha fact and this is an improtant fact; there is no "farthest horizons" in the universe it is infinite, we are no where in particular relative to the universe. But logically we like to put boundaries around something to better understand it and it simply doesn't work. You could say that beyond a certain point there are black impenetrable walls around our universe and call those walls "The End of the Universe" but then you have to wonder, what goes on beyond those walls, maybe more walls? Maybe gelatin? One thing you can be 100% certain of is that it never ends, will logic follow? Nope. The fact that it is infinite makes it illogical. Such is the universe.

Post: #41

If it doesn't make sense to have one God, then does it make any sense to have one truth? Was science patterned after Christianity's search for the truth of one reality. After all, Isaac Newton was devoutly religious. If we can have more than one God, we can also have more then one truth. Are atheists monotheists?

Post: #42

(06-01-2013 10:48 PM)cardguy Wrote:  Why is there something instead of nothing?

It's been a while since I've delved into this topic, but something is a more natural state than nothing for a system with energy. Nothingness is actually a very unstable state of nature.

I did a quick google and found this:

Quote:We can't truly define No-Thing but we may give it a non-defintion as a zero-radius with nothing around it. Once a quantum event occurs, and it will according to this view, the generation of some-thing would expand slightly causing a pressure ratio of an inside pressure to the outside pressure of the 0 radius. It would be an infinite pressure as any number divided by 0 is infinity. This infinite pressure would result in the Big Bang.

Basically, "nothing" is just a concept. The best we can do is assume a radius of zero - not necessarily meaning that there is no energy in the system.

A zero radius could potentially be anything smaller than the Planck length -

Quote:In some forms of quantum gravity, the Planck length is the length scale at which the structure of spacetime becomes dominated by quantum effects, and it would become impossible to determine the difference between two locations less than one Planck length apart.

What's more interesting is the implications of this, as it begs the question of what there was before something. Some of the theories are quite interesting. One off my favourites involves black holes.

Quote:Because a black hole has only a few internal parameters, most of the information about the matter that went into forming the black hole is lost. Regardless of the type of matter which goes into a black hole, it appears that only information concerning the total mass, charge, and angular momentum are conserved.

We could potentially consider that, since we can't actually observe the existence of "something" within the hole, it contains what we might call "nothing". Perhaps it can be said that within the black hole is a 0 radius (or what is essentially a collection of "nothing"). We also know that a black hole has energy, and an ever increasing entropy.

Now, let's see.. Large amounts of energy at 0 radius, positively growing entropy, with the possibility for energy fluctuations? That sounds familiar... Much like the conditions the aforementioned theory required for the big bang that lead to our universe. This means that within every black hole, there is potentially a universe inside- implying that we could be a universe inside a black hole in another larger universe.

Now we have all kinds of weird, interesting, and downright mindblowing implications to think about.

And people say physics is boring..

Post: #43

Good stuff!

Also - check out the work of Lee Smolin. He combines Natural Selection with Black Holes creating new universes:

http://www.space.com/21335-black-holes-t...ation.html