fundamental suppositions of God that are absurd

[_ludwigm]

Yup. And my wife died of puerperal sepsis,

Chap, I am sincerely very sorry to learn of your great loss.

Ceeboo

Thanks for the sympathy - but it was an ironic reference to the situation found quite a long time ago by Dr Ignaz Semmelweis. I am very sorry to have given a wrong impression.

by the way

Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian --- and thousands of women can thank him for their life.

True, 100 years later some other Hungarians helped to develop the nuclear bombs in Los Alamos...

[_huckelberry]

Gadiaton, considering your turtle story I find it emphasizes well my view that religion is concerned with a different focus of questions than physics is. People who believe in God may still be curious about physics but they turn to science for that sort of discovery. Religion does not have any special information about physics which comes from any other source than scientists studying physics. When people go to church and invoke God they are not interested in details of causality in creation. They are interested in what it means to be human. When the folks told stories of earth supported by big turtles they are not perusing physics but considering the place people have in the world through the explanatory dimension of storytelling.

Consider the the Galileo matter. It was not religion that Galileo's discoveries challenged but the established science of the day. Ptolemy was the accepted science and so some social authorities thought science and society needed protection from what they thought was false science that Galileo was creating . Subsequent science proved those authorities wrong and Galileo correct. That is part of sciences proper or natural role

I am in favor of science continuing to do its job and exploring all of the questions of physics. There is no religious question I can think of that must hurry because science will get there first. I hope only that science understands more faster. The religious question of who we want to be, who we can be, as human beings and a human family is a different sort of question. That is the sort of question looked toward on Sunday morning in worship.

I should add that I believe there is no religious question which should be asked excluding input science can make.The understanding which science can provide about what we are as people must be considered in the process of seeing what we might become.

[_Gadianton]

Yes: but that necessary being can't be god, because god must pick the best possible world otherwise he isn't god. If creating the world results in more magnanimous grandeur than not creating it, then God can't "pick" to create it because it's in his nature to do so and therefore, all beings are necessary beings. If "god" did "pick" the world by his free will, and thus there is more magnanimous grandeur than there otherwise would have been, then he is not god. And that's because I can imagine a higher being whose nature would insist on bringing the result with more magnanimous grandeur.

[_Chap]

...

It's possible that science will never have the answers we want it to have. But from what I've read in the last couple of days, the crux of the cosmological argument rests on little more than science failing to have all answers. I mean gee, it takes billions of dollars and thousands of scientists to build something like the LHC to get just a little more information, but any [know]-nothing Christian can sit back and say -- "you better hurry, because until you figure it out, God is on the table."

And they do, they do, all the time. Even if they probably couldn't tell you what LHC stands for, let alone explain what a hadron is and why it matters.

But the origin of the cosmos? They could talk about that until the cows come home.

[_CaliforniaKid]

I believe no one ever changes their perspective in the heat of a discussion. But I think most intelligent people gain from an exchange in some way and evolve with it.

I've experienced both types of changes from message board conversations.

Granted, no message board conversation ever suddenly convinced me of the error of my ways on an issue as big as the existence of God. But I have let people persuade me on a number of lower-level issues, such as the validity of particular apologetic and critical arguments. (Not so much anymore, because by now I've pretty much heard it all. But when I first got started on the Mormon boards I found myself conceding quite a few of my naïve evangelical arguments.)

And of course, over the longer term I have experienced much more dramatic changes, in no small part because over the course of many discussions I had retreated from fundamental after fundamental and gradually lost confidence in the explanatory power of my worldview. Academic study and personal soul-searching had a lot to do with it too, so I don't want to make it sound like it was all the boards. But the boards played a significant causal role in my transition to atheism.

[_honorentheos]

I believe no one ever changes their perspective in the heat of a discussion. But I think most intelligent people gain from an exchange in some way and evolve with it.

I've experienced both types of changes from message board conversations.

Granted, no message board conversation ever suddenly convinced me of the error of my ways on an issue as big as the existence of God. But I have let people persuade me on a number of lower-level issues, such as the validity of particular apologetic and critical arguments. (Not so much anymore, because by now I've pretty much heard it all. But when I first got started on the Mormon boards I found myself conceding quite a few of my naïve evangelical arguments.)

And of course, over the longer term I have experienced much more dramatic changes, in no small part because over the course of many discussions I had retreated from fundamental after fundamental and gradually lost confidence in the explanatory power of my worldview. Academic study and personal soul-searching had a lot to do with it too, so I don't want to make it sound like it was all the boards. But the boards played a significant causal role in my transition to atheism.

A good point, I shouldn't have been so definitive. Both on message boards and in real life discussions my experience has been most people become more entrenched as they debate a subject, but given some space and time I've been surprised to see some modify their position once things have cooled down. I've done (and do) so myself. The lesson I try to take from this being to look for when I'm becoming more entrenched rather than being open to the discussion and head it off. I can't claim great success, but it's a method I try to put into practice.

Either way, I think there is merit in discussing a subject with the intent of engaging the person who holds a contradictory view. The idea I would only debate with someone having no intention of actually engaging them and their position in an honest way, but instead using them as a foil to persuade unseen readers seems rather pretentious. At least it would show I felt a high level of disrespect for the person with whom I was discussing. Failing the ability to demonstrate respect, I see meaningful engagement impossible at which point the discussion seems to be nothing more than sport.

[_canpakes]

The idea that the Creator of the Universe would choose to communicate with his creations in matters of eternal importance to their supposed immortal souls by appearing in secret to one man, and telling this man he had been deputized to represent the Creator on Earth, is absurd.

Sethbag, why do you think it's so absurd?

KevinSim -

If God can do that with one man, then God can do that with any and every man, making reliance upon a single spokesperson both unreliable and illogical... and absurd.

[_Calculus Crusader]

We can define any object of explanation as having necessary existence.

No you can't.

We can define the universe qua the aggregate of all things that way...

EA has farted out this response before but claiming that the universe is necessary is a very strong claim that does not appear to fit the data, especially in light of the fact that it is composed of all sorts of contingent things. Oh, and just in case:

Russell correctly notes that arguments of the part-whole type can commit the Fallacy of Composition. For example, the argument that since all the bricks in the wall are small, the wall is small, is fallacious. Yet it is an informal fallacy of content, not a formal fallacy. Sometimes the totality has the same quality as the parts because of the nature of the parts invoked—the wall is brick because it is built of bricks. The universe's contingency, theists argue, resembles the second case. If all the contingent things in the universe, including matter and energy, ceased to exist simultaneously, the universe itself, as the totality of these things, would cease to exist. But if the universe can cease to exist, it is contingent and requires an explanation for its existence (Reichenbach, chap. 5).

...

In other words, if it's necessarily true that god exists with the nature he has, then it's also necessarily true that he created the universe as it is, and therefore necessarily true that the universe exists. All this gets us is that there are no contingent truths, which undermines the point of the argument.

I've brought this up to him before, and I don't recall ever seeing a reply.

People are not obliged to respond to bald assertions.

[_Calculus Crusader]

Huckleberry this is the cosmological argument:

1.Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The Universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the Universe had a cause.

Eg the cause is god.

This begs the question; what caused god? To which the reply is god is uncaused. Which begs the question; why does god get a pass on being caused?

In arguing for a God-being, a theist is free to "define" Him as uncaused.

If there must be something eternal and uncaused it can just as well be the universe as god.

Go ahead and argue from the known properties of the universe that it is eternal and uncaused.

[_Zadok]

All this debate about the origin of the universe is explained by the great cosmologist Isaac Asimov in his short story "The Last Question". Read this and you'll understand the beginning of the universe and the true nature of God. (LOL).