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Old 03-24-2014, 01:03 AM
 
Location: OKC
5,421 posts, read 6,486,982 times
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If something is real, than it is within our reality. That's what reality means - everything that is real. If something is not within our reality, it only exists as a hypothetical. It can not be real and can not really exist.

God can not exist outside of our reality, because by definition, "existing" would make him part of our reality.

For the God of the Christian bible to be real, everything we know about physics would have to be false. And really, a lot of what we know about the other sciences, too.

That's a pretty good reason to believe the God of the Christian bible isn't real. It's the same evidence I use to support the claim that unicorns and leprechaun's aren't real. (Which I suppose also makes me an A-unicorn and A-leprechaun as well as an A-theist, (for the purposes of this debate.))
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Old 03-25-2014, 10:33 AM
 
4,096 posts, read 6,186,736 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Boxcar Overkill View Post
God can not exist outside of our reality, because by definition, "existing" would make him part of our reality.

For the God of the Christian bible to be real, everything we know about physics would have to be false. And really, a lot of what we know about the other sciences, too.
I don't see that line of logic at all. The very nature and definition of being supernatural is beyond our physical realm, both in seeing and understanding. You are demanding that a supernatural God behave in a manner of your understanding. That's very limiting and very juvenile. That's like a child saying that PI doesn't exist because he can't understand.

So instead you can claim that a god who is behaving in the very limited scientific knowledge we understand doesn't exist. In that ok, you could be right. But so what. Who want's a god that is limited to our understanding and scientific laws.

We as finite beings may never be able to understand a infinite being. To sum up Pascal, faith is a choice and not reason, ie. science:

“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline?

Reason can decide nothing here.

There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up... Which will you choose then?

If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."
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Old 03-25-2014, 01:43 PM
 
Location: OKC
5,421 posts, read 6,486,982 times
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Originally Posted by Kayekaye View Post
I don't see that line of logic at all. The very nature and definition of being supernatural is beyond our physical realm, both in seeing and understanding. You are demanding that a supernatural God behave in a manner of your understanding. That's very limiting and very juvenile. That's like a child saying that PI doesn't exist because he can't understand.

So instead you can claim that a god who is behaving in the very limited scientific knowledge we understand doesn't exist. In that ok, you could be right. But so what. Who want's a god that is limited to our understanding and scientific laws.

We as finite beings may never be able to understand a infinite being. To sum up Pascal, faith is a choice and not reason, ie. science:

“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline?

Reason can decide nothing here.

There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up... Which will you choose then?

If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."
What I am denying is that the word "supernatural" is a logical concept. Certainly there are many things that are real yet we can't see them. That doesn't make them supernatural. Many physicist theorize that reality contains multiple universes. That doesn't make them supernatural, at least not any more.

There is only that which is real, and that which is not real. There is no longer a distinction between natural and supernatural.

While as a matter of logic it is possible for a real being to defy the known laws of physics, that doesn't mean it is likely. For example, would you believe a claim that I have an invisible pink elephant that can move forward and backward through time? You would rightfully doubt that claim, based primarily on the fact that such a claim would deny the known laws of physics. The same is true of a claim that leprechauns exist. In our routine daily lives we are functionally certain that a claim that denies most or all known laws of physics is an unreal claim.

I am simply applying that broader principle to a claim that a Christian God exists.

As for pascal wager, can you explain to me why that wouldn't also apply to Islam or Hinduism, for example? And if it does, you'll understand that you are not a Hindu for the same reason I am not a Christian.
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Old 03-25-2014, 02:14 PM
 
4,096 posts, read 6,186,736 times
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We only know what we know today and it's not absolute. If I had told you that the world was round two thousand years ago you wouldn't have believed me because science didn't support that.

We do not and can not know every truth. That is what is impossible.

Faith is not based on what we can quantify. The choice whichever god is yours.
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Old 03-31-2014, 12:30 PM
 
Location: Haiku
7,132 posts, read 4,739,376 times
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Two concepts are tossed around in this discussion as if they are axiomatic truths but I think that actually the dilemma here is that there are not axiomatic at all. Those concepts are "exits" and "reality".

The question of whether there is an objective reality outside of human consciousness is a very real one that dates back thousands of years and I do not believe any practicing philosopher will say that it has been settled. Closely tied to that is the question of existence - you can say that something in the physical world "exists", such as a giraffe, but can you also say that there is concept of "giraffe" that also exists independent of the object? If so, where does that reside? Plato believed that to be the case and called these abstract notions Forms.

So from a pure metaphysical standpoint, "god" can exist as a Form independent of anything tied to the real world. In that sense, that answer to the original riddle posed here is, yes, a supernatural god can exist. However, that does not say that the "god" Form can actually do anything useful. To now say that the "god" Form has a corresponding presence in the natural world is not possible because it is a simple contradiction of the original hypothesis of a "supernatural god".

To return briefly to the metaphysical question of reality - I personally have the viewpoint that it is impossible for humans to truly know (in an epistemological sense) objective reality. We are limited by our brain capacity and our thoughts are shaped by our human experiences. For example, take the "laws" of physics, for instance, Newton's law of gravity. Does that law "exist" outside of human experience or is that law just an approximation for objective reality? Most (if not all) physicists would say it is an approximation, that in point of fact we are creating a human interpretation of objective reality using the crude tools that we have at our disposal. Newton's law is a good example of how we might fool ourselves into thinking that physical laws are objective laws, but actually are not - Newton's law has of course been discovered to be an approximation to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. And the latter will probably be replaced someday by another theory.

As another example take the notion of "life". We like to think we know when something is a alive or dead. But what is the definition of "life" in an objective reality? Here on earth, our subjective view of "life" is tied to carbon-based biology and to DNA. But that is a limitation imposed by us because that is all we know. We cannot discount the possibility of something that is "alive" but is not carbon based. But that begs the question of what is "alive". NASA has struggled with this for years in their programs that are designed to detect other life-forms (like the SETI project).

You get my drift here - we cannot know what objective reality is, and therefore we cannot really say what is "real" and what is not. At best all we can say is whether something is real within the limited context of our subjective reality.

I believe the use of the terms "natural" and "supernatural" are necessarily defined within our human context, which is our subjective reality. The danger here is our subjective reality is plastic - it changes constantly as we learn new things. It is thus difficult to make absolute statements and use absolute terms such as "exists" in this subjective world.
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Old 04-03-2014, 06:33 AM
 
Location: Nanaimo, Canada
1,807 posts, read 1,885,953 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kayekaye View Post
We only know what we know today and it's not absolute. If I had told you that the world was round two thousand years ago you wouldn't have believed me because science didn't support that.

We do not and can not know every truth. That is what is impossible.

Faith is not based on what we can quantify. The choice whichever god is yours.
I don't intend to be pedantic, but the Earth was known (or at least theorized) to be round a looooong time ago. Eratosthenes made some fairly accurate calulations to support his discoveries.

Eratosthenes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Old 04-03-2014, 05:41 PM
 
Location: Subconscious Syncope, USA (Northeastern US)
2,365 posts, read 2,137,246 times
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Originally Posted by FredNotBob View Post
(This follows from a previous thread about the nature of matter...I was going to include this there, but I realized I was going off on a tangent...)

Are supernatural beings physically possible?

Probably not, according to the laws of physics.

Merriam-Webster defines 'supernatural' as:




With the above definition, we can draw the logical conclusion that 'supernatural' beings exist outside of our universe. What does that mean for the ghost hiding up in your grandmother's attic, then?

Well...to be blunt, it means that it probably doesn't exist.

Here's the thing: anything that exists in this universe is subject to its physical laws. Everything, from ants to zebras, operates on a specific set of principles that are fundimental to the nature of our reality.

A 'supernatural' being, then, would not be able to maintain even the simplest atomic structure in our universe. It would cease to exist the instant it appeared. And here's an even more mind-bending concept...

...it might not even have sensory systems capable of comprehending a three-dimensional universe. All of our perceptive capability depends on the three-dimensional nature of our universe; a supernatural being, that is not subject to our laws of physics, would probably not be able to make sense of what it sees, if it sees anything at all.

Anyhow....food for thought....my head, as usual, is hurting from trying to understand what I just typed.... :P
Um, no - your conclusion is flawed. The Legend of Jumping Mouse, is a Native American fable about how a mouse only knew the world he could see. He believed that the world under the grass that surrounded him was all there was. Of course, he died when an eagle spotted him jumping beyond the confines of the grass that blocked his view - but he died happy, because he now understood that there was so much more than merely what he had been able to previously see.

An eagle can certainly physically exist in the grass, cant it? Maybe not forever - but none the less it can land and rest there.

Last edited by ConeyGirl52; 04-03-2014 at 05:50 PM..
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Old 04-04-2014, 04:11 AM
 
Location: Subconscious Syncope, USA (Northeastern US)
2,365 posts, read 2,137,246 times
Reputation: 3814
Quote:
Originally Posted by Boxcar Overkill View Post
If something is real, than it is within our reality. That's what reality means - everything that is real. If something is not within our reality, it only exists as a hypothetical. It can not be real and can not really exist.

God can not exist outside of our reality, because by definition, "existing" would make him part of our reality.

For the God of the Christian bible to be real, everything we know about physics would have to be false. And really, a lot of what we know about the other sciences, too.

That's a pretty good reason to believe the God of the Christian bible isn't real. It's the same evidence I use to support the claim that unicorns and leprechaun's aren't real. (Which I suppose also makes me an A-unicorn and A-leprechaun as well as an A-theist, (for the purposes of this debate.))
Everything you know about physics, eh?

Einstein - E=mc squared. There is no energy lost.

How do we know the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible isnt real? The science of Genetics has proven the Biblical "Eve" was real.
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Old 04-16-2014, 10:13 PM
 
Location: State of Grace
1,608 posts, read 1,477,890 times
Reputation: 2692
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kayekaye View Post
We only know what we know today and it's not absolute. If I had told you that the world was round two thousand years ago you wouldn't have believed me because science didn't support that.

We do not and can not know every truth. That is what is impossible.

Faith is not based on what we can quantify. The choice whichever god is yours.

Oddly enough, in the Bible - penned over 2,000 years ago - we read "The earth is round and hangs upon nothing in the sky." Pretty smart for supposedly uneducated human beings, no?

In reading this thread, I can't help but notice that most people refer to the laws of physics as fact, not even considering that it is merely their understanding of the laws of physics that they are accepting as fact. This strikes me as more than a tad arrogant. Clearly there is absolute truth, but my own observations thus far show that no human possesses the knowledge (from the Latin word scientia, from which we derive the word science) to understand such an absolute - at the present time.

Mahrie.
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Old 04-17-2014, 01:04 PM
 
Location: Sinking in the Great Salt Lake
13,139 posts, read 22,738,779 times
Reputation: 14116
Quote:
Originally Posted by Boxcar Overkill View Post
If something is real, than it is within our reality. That's what reality means - everything that is real. If something is not within our reality, it only exists as a hypothetical. It can not be real and can not really exist.

God can not exist outside of our reality, because by definition, "existing" would make him part of our reality.

For the God of the Christian bible to be real, everything we know about physics would have to be false. And really, a lot of what we know about the other sciences, too.

That's a pretty good reason to believe the God of the Christian bible isn't real. It's the same evidence I use to support the claim that unicorns and leprechaun's aren't real. (Which I suppose also makes me an A-unicorn and A-leprechaun as well as an A-theist, (for the purposes of this debate.))
Not arguing with you per-se... I think the god of the Christian bible can be easily disproven too.

But objective reality is a bit messier than that. None of us have ever experienced objective reality because of physiology; all we can ever experience is a "virtual reality" model assembled by our brain from electrical impulse codes sent to the brain by our sensory organs and compared with past sensory code. The code itself was written (and continues to be so) by the experiences of the brain through trial and error. If it usually proves true, our mind treats it as the benchmark to compare new code with later on.

If something is true 99.999999% of the time, our brains will accept it as reality. It may be true so often that it only happens differently once every million years (meaning an occurance is completely out of human experience)...


...But if even .0000001% of say... Bigfoot stories are true, that means a very large hairy hominid is (or until very recently was) living in the mountains somewhere in Western North America. And if it happens every once in a million years (whatever the "it" may be), that means it's happened 4500+ times in the Earth's history... just about as many years as it's been since the pyramids of Egypt were built!

Our human perspective is really tiny. We may be able to peek out of the fishbowl from time to time but we could never imagine the ocean.
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