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Your argument is bogus.
Have you posted 4 or 5 thousand (just on this site) posts to the interweb about your lack of belief in aliens from outerspace...debating, analyzing, and preaching your position relative to those that believe aliens exist?
And there is the goal post moving.
Has every atheist posted 4 or 5 thousand posts to the interweb?
I am pretty sure you can take it as a given that there is some element of "wind up" in Gldn's posts, Arq. But he also highlights the underlying hypocrisy and cowardice or lack of commitment in the current atheist stance.
And there is the non sequitur.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticPhD
This reveals the lack of understanding of the empirical method and probability. When you say that a lack of evidence means the claim is invalid you overstate it. It simply means there is no support for it yet.
Yet being the main word. If it never happened, there never will be evidence for it. Which is evidence when you have understanding of the empirical method and probability.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticPhD
When you say you ascribe a probability to claims, that requires either that you have a theoretical basis for developing the probabilities or you have empirical data from which to draw the probabilities. For most of your "probabilistic" assertions about God, you have neither. You claim a default position of No God, which is dogmatic because you have no idea whether or not our Reality is God. We simply do not know making ANY default moot.
Do other gods exist? Do intelligent beings just exist? Do we have evidence that things happen without input from any gods? These are all data points you claim we do not have that we use.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticPhD
You reject or ignore an existing Reality and claim it cannot support the existence of God until some other evidence is provided. On what basis do you assert such a demand.
If you have no evidence for a claim, it is probably wrong, logically and mathematically speaking.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticPhD
I can think of nothing more Godlike than being responsible for the existence of absolutely everything that exists.
Except that is not the god you are putting forward, is it? You are claiming a conscious reality as god. And we know what happened when you finally decided to put forward some evidence for this god.
False. That Reality (God) establishes the existence of everything, controls and maintains everything by immutable laws are de minimus data points for God until you show they are inadequate compared to your what????
Anything that exists will have behaviors and properties, regardless of where they came from. Even godless existence.
The Universe IS God.
We KNOW:
~~THE UNIVERSE and that which comprises it, has rearranged itself so as to produce everything that has ever existed in Reality...from the smallest particle to the biggest Galaxy.---SOURCE/CREATOR 100%
~~THE UNIVERSE and that which comprises it, possess knowledge of all that is known at any given time.---ALL KNOWING 100%
~~THE UNIVERSE and that which comprises it, occupies all places in Reality.---ALL PRESENT 100%
~~THE UNIVERSE and that which comprises it, accounts for all the energy and force that exists in, acts upon, and controls, Reality.---ALL POWERFUL 100%
~~THE UNIVERSE and that which comprises it, is capable of all the seeing that has ever occured. ---ALL SEEING 100%
I could go on...but these are the attributes known to be definitive, demonstrative, and indicative of a God Entity.
Religions use metaphorical and allegorical characters and stories to describe all of this.
THE UNIVERSE is as "Godly" as it gets...from ANY reasonable assessment.
We DO KNOW that the ENERGY/MATTER that DOES IN FACT EXIST...rearranges itself so as to create all Reality, and can do this through indigenous power, without assistance or accomplice from any other force...."controls" that which is created by and through "laws" and "processes", that we do IN FACT know to exist...and also maintains and sustains or eliminates that which has been created by it.
We also know that these are the attributes known to define a "God".
Regardless of what ever anyone wants to call the KNOWN, EXISTING ENERGY/MATTER...it is, by its KNOWN ATTRIBUTES, definitively a God.
It doesn't matter whether this creation, control, and maintaining/sustaining, and eliminating happened out of what some believe to be "chaos", and organized itself by "random chance"...it is an OBJECTIVE FACT that that has happened, and is still happening.
It also doesn't matter if this ENERGY/MATTER was never itself "sourced", has always existed, and was never itself created (or is a "multiverse")....it is an OBJECTIVE FACT that it DOES EXIST...AND...by its KNOWN ATTRIBUTES (as opposed to "assigned attributes")...is definitively a God...without it existing in any other state than just the way it is, and has been known to be.
THIS is the evidence that "God Exists" that everyone asks for.
But by refusing to acknowledge the merited title, and insisting that the only reference is by name only ("Nature", "The Universe", etc) to identify that which has been shown to be, by known attributes and definition, a "God" entity....some then turn around and deny the existence of GOD.
No matter..."GOD" by any name is still "GOD".
So the usual word games then. Lol at all knowing and all seeing.
Because the universe has a brain, you know. Somewhere. Apparently.
I have asked you on multiple occasions to address your god claim. Let me repeat.
If your god is exactly synonymous with the universe, why bother using the term god? Why not simply use the term universe, or perhaps reality.
On the other hand, if your god is in some way different from the universe, either greater or lesser, please define what that difference is, and provide some evidence supporting your claims.
In this post, you also claim that the universe must be maintained and controlled, yet once again you fail to recognize, or dishonestly ignore, the fact that these are unsupported claims.
We agree on existence. The difference is you claim things not in evidence beyond existence, but you provide no proof. I don’t claim anything beyond existence, so I don’t need to provide proof, much less this negative evidence concept you seem to have dreamt up over the weekend.
The universe is the "handiwork" of God.
You believe everything in the universe just "existed" in an intelligent form, with no origin. You need to provide proof of this absurd claim.
As I said, the "So what?" question has nothing to do with the validity of the existence question. But I will indulge you. Why would a multicellular consciousness comprised of all sentient consciousnesses need to be beyond the collective? The collective as a synergistic composite would automatically exceed any of its parts including the sum of its parts. What you are asking is a philosophical question. It is asking what is implied in being part of a God's existence. For one thing, we must be playing some role in that existence so it might behoove us to try to discern what that role is so we are positive not negative components. That would provide a basis for the concept of morality. Anything positively contributing to our role in God's existence would be moral and anything negatively detracting from our role would be immoral. Those are just SOME implications of the "So what?"
The existence question from you is just semantics, as we can see from your answer here . And you have in no way established that all our individual consciousnesses can and do combine to exceed the sum of its parts . Not even close .
So the answer to my question is , admitting to your semantics ploy means nothing, because it changes nothing except the term we use .
I am pretty sure you can take it as a given that there is some element of "wind up" in Gldn's posts, Arq. But he also highlights the underlying hypocrisy and cowardice or lack of commitment in the current atheist stance.
I missed this post, wherever it was. However, I cannot agree with your view. It is a monumentally biased antipathy on your part that you see our refusal to snaffle particular speculations out of the unknown and present them as reliable fact as 'cowardice'. And any implications of atheist hypocrisy are based on Goldie's misrepresentations, which he probably knows are wrong. He does not bamboozle us, but it seems that you are only too willing to be bamboozled. It is what you want to hear, so you accept it without question or thought.
You believe everything in the universe just "existed" in an intelligent form, with no origin. You need to provide proof of this absurd claim.
The video posted by Jonesey and thumbed by Mystic gives the answer. Information - not intelligence. Before matter a cosmos of 'information' or 'numerical value' or 'potential' Whichever term you like. An innate quality of the nothing that did not need a creator, never mind someone to Draft and Pass the laws of physics. They are innate in matter. . As soon as the 'information' starts to take up spacial relationships one with another, we get the effect or 'illusion' it could be said of matter. Nothing acting like something. This is at least a feasible hypothesis and mechanism backed up with scientific discoveries which -as I said - was presented in the video that tried to make this out to be 'God' but really supports 'something from nothing'.
Thus the talk of the universe in an 'intelligent form' is overdoing it. It had a potential for being matter and that is all it had. It is theism that postulates an intelligence and a very sophisticated and complex one, as wel, but with no origins. "It has always exited" they say, avoiding any need for explanation.
The something from Nothing hypothesis, at one time sounding really quite wonky, is now firming up and while not yet on the level with the mechanisms for abiogenesis, is in the same ballpark. Consciousness is some way behind, but I would expect that consciousness and indeed human intelligence will get its' explanation in time, and there will be no gaps left for "God" to hide in.
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