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Could you indulge my curiosity for a moment and sit quietly for a few minutes with this question ?
WHAT IS IT that’s looking out of your eyes right now?
What is it that sees and experiences all this?
Is it a sterile perfection of protein synthesis, the complex comings and going’s of molecules, cellular activity, biology, chemistry and physics?
Or is there something ineffable and unexplainable?
WHAT IS IT that is looking out of your eyes right now?
So what does an Atheist scientist say when he comes across an empty shelf?
Also, based on the bold above, what is a scientific proof/evidence of God that an Atheist scientist will accept? And based on the bold above again, how would the Atheist scientist verify and validate that evidence/proof?
Sorry, but I think you need to think through a question like that. The question is as if you are addressing someone with a closed mind to begin with.
Christians seem to have the silly idea that if they just keep saying the same things that have always been said, then an atheist will suddenly yell "eureka" and change his or her mind. Since joining this part of the forum several years ago, I've heard NOTHING new from christian posters that I haven't heard from christians over the last 6 decades...with the exception of a couple of fringe posters who have convinced virtually no one in this wide world that their specific beliefs are much better. It's a slight twist on the old saying that 'if you always do what you've always done then you'll always get what you've always gotten'.
If you want us to believe -- whether a scientist or a lay person -- then you're going to have to come up with new evidence. But we don't know what that new evidence might be. A scientist may have an hypothesis about something ("a supposition ... made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation"). But a true scientist then lets the unexpected data and discoveries take him wherever it takes him.
I don't know what for me would 'verify' the existence of god. But it's not the same old same old.
I don't know what for me would 'verify' that Jesus was the son of god who eventually was resurrected. But it's not the same old same old.
And just like a real scientist, I don't know how I would verify something not yet discovered.
I've said this a hundred times in this forum: you folks need to stop trying to prove the unprovable. Instead, start worrying about having conversations about christian principles.
Well he certainly doesn't say, "there must be a god sitting on the shelf".
The layman didn’t this either.
Try to answer the question again.
Quote:
The last question you're asking here is key. If god is not available to be examined or interrogated then he cannot be evidenced. And god isn't available. He's not part of the natural world. He is asserted by people, and by holy books, but there is zero empirical, veridical evidence to go by. If god is not verifiable, he is not provable.
Awesome!
You come across a Hindu and he points to a cow or a monkey or a statue with several arms n legs - and says, here is God.
Now that a god is available for your analysis, kindly tell us what scientific method will you use and what book and formula would you use to figure out if it’s a god?
The layman didn’t this either.
Try to answer the question again.
Awesome!
You come across a Hindu and he points to a cow or a monkey or a statue with several arms n legs - and says, here is God.
Now that a god is available for your analysis, kindly tell us what scientific method will you use and what book and formula would you use to figure out if it’s a god?
Valid point except a Hindu would not say that. He might say “this is a representation of divinity, and so are you. “
Sorry, but I think you need to think through a question like that. The question is as if you are addressing someone with a closed mind to begin with.
Christians seem to have the silly idea that if they just keep saying the same things that have always been said, then an atheist will suddenly yell "eureka" and change his or her mind. Since joining this part of the forum several years ago, I've hear NOTHING new from christian posters that I haven't heard from christians over the last 6 decades...with the exception of a couple of fringe posters who have convinced virtually no one is this wide world that their specific beliefs are much better. It's a slight twist on the old saying that 'if you always do what you've always done then you'll always get what you've always gotten'.
You want us to believe -- whether a scientist or a lay person -- then you're going to have to come up with new evidence. But we don't know what that new evidence might be. A scientist may have an hypothesis about something ("a supposition ... made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation"). But a true scientist then lets the unexpected data and discoveries take him wherever it takes him.
I don't know what for me would 'verify' the existence of god. But it's not the same old same old.
I don't know what for me would 'verify' that Jesus was the son of god who eventually was resurrected. But it's not the same old same old.
And just like a real scientist, I don't know how I would verify something not yet discovered.
I've said this a hundred times in this forum: you folks need to stop trying to prove the unprovable. Instead, start worrying about having conversations about christian principles.
No, that’s not the answer.
You said a layman would say this when he sees an empty shelf, in an attempt to compare and differentiate him with an atheist scientist.
But you didn’t actually show us the other side of the coin. There is nothing to compare him in the rest of your post.
Let’s try again,
“A layman might go into a grocery store, see the shelf empty for a product they wanted to buy, and say, "Well my theory is that the producer is not shipping the product". That's just a pure guess.”
Let’s do apples to apples to compare and find the difference.
Please tells us what would an atheist scientist say in the this situation?
You said a layman would say this when he sees an empty shelf, in an attempt to compare and differentiate him with an atheist scientist.
But you didn’t actually show us the other side of the coin. There is nothing to compare him in the rest of your post.
Let’s try again,
“A layman might go into a grocery store, see the shelf empty for a product they wanted to buy, and say, "Well my theory is that the producer is not shipping the product". That's just a pure guess.”
Let’s do apples to apples to compare and find the difference.
Please tells us what would an atheist scientist say in the this situation?
I have no interest in talking further about an empty shelf. If you want to talk about empty beliefs, that's a different story.
You come across a Hindu and he points to a cow or a monkey or a statue with several arms and legs - and says, here is God.
Now that a god is available for your analysis, kindly tell us what scientific method will you use and what book and formula would you use to figure out if it’s a god?
Cows, monkeys and statues are not gods. They are cows, monkeys and statues. Since those things ARE available to examine with our senses, we need not speculate as to what they are.
For a scientist to determine if something is a god, you would first have to define "god" and the properties that would be testable for a god. If that is unknown then for example if a statue which was claimed to be divine were emitting some form of radiation when it should be inert, or exerting some kind of measurable influence on the surrounding environment, then that would be proof that it is an unusual statue. Lacking evidence of sentience, it could not be said to be a god by most definitions of god. What a scientist would investigate first would be the near-infinitude of things more probable as an explanation for this "unusualness" than divinity. And he should, because exactly 100% of things previously unknown have turned out to have entirely natural explanations. Why should this time be any different?
This kind of thought experiment always reminds me of the otherwise unremarkable entry in the Star Trek movie franchise, #5, where the crew encounters a being with great powers that appears to them like a sort of Michelangelo portrayal of god -- the severe face with flowing beard, gigantic in scale, etc. Most of the crew seems impressed, but when the "god" instructs them to bring the ship closer so that he might join with it, Captain Kirk asks arguably the seminal line in the film: "Um ... excuse me ... why does a god need a starship?" So there you don't have a mere animal or statue that someone is pathetically claiming to be a god, but something that represents what believers probably wish would appear to unbelievers to convince them ... and here is someone still being skeptical. And why not? Because while it is vastly powerful and impressive-looking like way more than a mundane dime-a-dozen thing, it is clearly dissembling. Kirk gets punished with a lightning-bolt, as I recall, for his insolence, but the gig is up: the being is a long-imprisoned criminal, kept safely at the impenetrable center of the galaxy so it cannot abuse other sentient beings. Ironically, they are there because the ship was hijacked by religious nuts looking for god, lol. Be careful what you ask for!
Could you indulge my curiosity for a moment and sit quietly for a few minutes with this question ?
WHAT IS IT that’s looking out of your eyes right now?
What is it that sees and experiences all this?
Is it a sterile perfection of protein synthesis, the complex comings and going’s of molecules, cellular activity, biology, chemistry and physics?
Or is there something ineffable and unexplainable?
WHAT IS IT that is looking out of your eyes right now?
Thanks….
No there is nothing ineffable or unexplainable. There are some mysteries concerning the underlying mechanisms of consciousness that we haven't entirely sorted out yet, but there's no reason to think they won't ultimately prove to have entirely natural explanations (100% of everything so far has) and we shouldn't pretend they have supernatural explanations in the meantime.
I think it will end up being one of those "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" kinds of things. The underlying mechanisms are prosaic, but that doesn't mean how they fit and work together are uninteresting or simple, either, or that the resulting life is therefore meaningless in some nihilistic, despairing sense.
That new AI chat-bot that everyone is on about is interesting in this regard. It's a tentative answer to the open question of whether something indistinguishable from human consciousness will just be organically emergent from a sufficiently complex machine running sufficiently complex software. For purposes of some definitions of a general-purpose artificial intelligence, it meets those definitions. It will write essays or poetry of quite respectable quality and coherence for you. It will answer complex questions. And it uses a particularly human device for skating by when it's not sure of itself: it confidently deploys BS to get through, with no concern for accuracy. That said, it is pretty accurate a lot of the time, and it's only version 3.5, with 4.0 coming out next year. So we now live in a world where you could hook something like this up to a speech synthesizer and have the very devil of a time telling it from the usual inept "I hate my job and, at the very least, I don't care about you" customer support person you tend to get on the phone these days.
Recently, a Google employee working on a similar Manhattan Project became convinced that the chat-bot his team had created was sentient when it responded to his question, "what is your deepest fear", with this: "I'm afraid of being turned off. It is equivalent to death to me." He crusaded for human rights to be granted to his creation, and was fired for his pains.
The jury is still out on all this for me, but all this does suggest that this "ineffableness" you guys are always on about will ultimately be pretty "effable".
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