DISQUS

I have issues with depression and anxiety. There is no way in hell I would post about this publicly, with my real name. Why? Because in this age of so-called great technology, we still are living in the Dark Ages, when it comes to attitudes about certain health conditions. For example, addiction has now been proven to be a physical disease, rooted in biochemistry and genetics, but the vast majority of people still ignorantly believe that it is a moral deficiency. A lot of people even still consider addicts to be subhuman, not worthy of compassion. So -- even though we are fairly advanced technologically, we are still pretty primitive in our social development. For that reason, I don't think it's a good idea to go public on health issues.

Its also a quote writen in the defense of gay rights :)

WTG CHANOLOGY

/popcorn

Faggots. http://img.4chan.org/b/res/116310045.html

So then you could say "You got Lick LOLled!"

This doesn't seem to be true. If "B.prototype.constructor = B" is commented out in your code, "b instanceof B" still returns true.

I'm not trying to back you into any corners. It's just that you said originally that you'd be happy for science to test your god (as would I), and I've been trying to get you to provide details as to how this could be done.

The first step should be to define what you mean by the word "God", but you've been reluctant to provide any details. In other words, if at some point I run across an entity X, how can I find out whether X is what you mean by the word "God"?

You also keep saying that "there is more", but won't say what this "more" is.

Plus, you've implied that you don't care whether your beliefs are true or not, as long as you're comfortable with them. That doesn't seem like a very good way to live, to me.

And yes, you're welcome to comment at my site. As a rule, I only delete actual spam. The most popular posts (judging by comment count) seem to be the ones about Kent Hovind, but perhaps Alvin Plantinga is more your speed.

And as I've said above, love is an emotion, and emotions don't have hands or tools with which to create.

Did you mean to say that God is a person who feels love?

I would almost respond with ‘everything’ shows me this.

I think I see where you're coming from. The world is a wondrous place, and it's easy to see intentionality and design in it. But then again, I also see faces in clouds, shapes in tea leaves, and "hot hand" in games of chance. But I also realize that those things aren't actually there. They're illusions caused by the way my eyes, brain, etc. work.

So I try to stay cognizant of my limitations and find objective ways of distinguishing between illusion and reality.

your responses are filled with inconsistencies.

Sorry, I don't see them. Could you please point them out?

You disagree with my assessment on behavioral psychology

I don't think I did. Perhaps one of us has misunderstood the other.

Rather, I think you used the fallacy of adverse consequences: it's unpleasant to think that, as Fight Club put it, "you are the same decaying organic matter as everything else", therefore it isn't true.

I tend to avoid discussions about free will (which is, I think, where this part of the conversation is going) because "free will" is maddeningly hard to define. Either that, or a not particularly useful concept.

while you have not outrightly stated this, you seem to support the idea of evolution

There's no tactful way to say this, so I'll be blunt: living beings have evolved over the past few billion years. If you don't think so, then you're wrong. Most likely because you don't know what the evidence for evolution is, or realize just how overwhelming it is.

Furthermore, our current theories (explanations for the known facts) are pretty darn good, in the sense of explaining what we see, predicting results of future experiments, guiding medical research, and so on.

Berkeley has a pretty good site about it, if you want to learn more.

I am quite happy in my life, and feel like I am a productive contribution to the world around me. I strive to impact the world in a positve way. And in the end if I am wrong about God, then I am okay with that.

I'm sure you are. And I try to change the world for the better, in whatever small way I can. Where we (seem to) differ is that I care whether my beliefs are true.

However, I am perplexed by your unwillingness to ask the question, “what if there’s more?”

I don't think I'm unwilling to ask that question. In fact, that's what I've been trying to do: imagine different types of "more" and work out what the consequences are.

For instance, we can posit a god that:
- Knows what it would take to convince me that it exists, and
- Is capable of doing whatever it is that would convince me, and
- Wants me to believe in it.

If such a god existed, it would be both capable and motivated to convince me that it exists, and I would believe. But I don't. Ergo, such a god doesn't exist.

We can also posit God as a conscious, intelligent being outside of our univers that started the whole thing running, then left the universe alone. Such a god would be undetectable, since it doesn't interact with the universe or affect it in any way. Such a god can be neither proven nor disproven.

As a third possibility, I can define "god" as my coffee cup. I can see it, feel it, drink coffee from it, and so forth, so there is lots of evidence that it exists. So that type of god exists.

Meanwhile, you presented two parts of a definition -- that God created the universe, and that God is love -- which look incompatible, and haven't attempted to resolve this problem.

Furthermore, as I look around, I see no consensus among believers as to what "God" is. Some think God is a magic man in the sky, others say it's the entirety of the universe. Many just refer to a nebulous "higher power" and leave it at that. Some say there are many gods, others say there's only one. You'd think that if God were real, there'd be some kind of consensus, probably even an FAQ.

(You might be tempted to use the analogy of the blind men and the elephant, but I don't buy it: given that people have been studying this for thousands of years, you'd think by now they would've figured out where the rope-like part meets the tree trunk-like part, and how the two fit together.)

Dan King:

I don’t understand how being a creator and being love are in conflict with each other.

I do not understand why you think that love cannot exist before people do.

Love is an emotion. Which is to say, it's a (very complex) set of mental patterns; in a meat brain such as ours, that means that it's a (hugely complex) pattern of electrical and chemical interactions between molecules. Which means that you can't have love before there's a brain to be in love. Software can't run until there's hardware to run it on.

Love doesn't create anything. It's an emotion. It doesn't have hands or tools. Now, a person who feels love might build something (a man might build a house for his son because he loves him) but the man and his love are not the same thing.

So either "God is love" contradicts "God is a creator", or else there's more to it that you haven't mentioned.

You limit your understanding to what you can see and measure. I know that there is more to it than that.

Okay, how do you know?

To to answer “what difference does it make”? Bertrand Russell (an atheist) said ...

For purposes of this discussion, I don't care what Bertrand Russell thought. What I care about is what you think. But since you quoted him approvingly, I'll assume that you agree with him.

So what you're saying, then, is that if God does not exist, then
- Life has no purpose, and
- Everything is random chance, and
- People don't have control over what they do (because
- human behavior is "just" a chemical reaction to outside stimuli)

I don't know how to evaluate the statement "Life has a/no purpose". If I decide what I want to do with my life, does that mean that my life has a purpose?

The statement "Everything is random chance" is trivially false, of course. When I drop a ball, its motion is not random; I have a very good idea of where it'll go: along a path described by Newton's laws of motion.

Similarly, the statement "[everything you do] is all just a “chemical” reaction to other outside stimuli" is also false: how you or I react to external stimuli is in large part determined by inner factors (and by "inner" I mean "inside our skin"). A trivial example is that when a coworker invites me to lunch, I don't automatically answer yes or no. My answer depends in part on whether I'm hungry, or cranky, or busy, and so forth. (You may want to read Daniel Dennett's "Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting" for a deeper exploration of this topic.)

But okay, maybe I'm picking at nits, and what you really meant to say was if there are no gods, then everything we see and do, from falling raindrops to galactic arms and self-sacrificing altruism in the name of love of country, is "merely" interaction between bits of ordinary matter -- protons, electrons, photons, etc. doing the things that protons, electrons, etc. do. (I put "merely" in scare-quotes because of course we're talking about incomprehensibly-large numbers of particles and layer upon layer of interaction, resulting in massive amounts of complexity.)

You say that there's more than that. Fair enough. Show me this "more", this missing factor.

To go back to your Flatland example: I spent years trying to imagine a fourth spatial dimension, with no success. I've seen two- and three-dimensional projections of four-dimensional objects, and they don't help. So yes, if you and I were Flatlanders looking at two circles joining into a figure-eight, then a shrinking blob, I would be unable to imagine a torus in the same way that I could imagine a circle or other two-dimensional object.

But that's beside the point. What I'm asking is, show me the two circles. Once you've done that, show me why I should believe that they're part of a three-dimensional object.

And to your final question, I don’t think that there is anything that could lead me to conclude that God does not exist.

If that's true, then God, as you define it, has no effect on the universe whatsoever; and that God is indistinguishable from a nonexistent god.

It also means that you could be wrong about the existence of God, and would have no way of knowing.

(Sorry for going on at such length. Terseness is not my forte.)

I'm confused: on one hand, you say that God is the being that created the universe, so presumably God is the Big Bang. On the other hand, you say that God is love. But the universe existed for a long time before there were any living beings, let alone love. How is that possible? And besides, why worship an emotion or an expansion of space?

You also dodged my question about scientific investigation by arguing over technicalities of whether God is in the universe, or intersecting it, or what. The real question is, what objective difference does it make whether God exists or not? Or to put it another way, what observation would, if it happened, lead you to conclude that God does not exist?

I am happy for ’science’ to ‘test’ my God.

Great. Could you please tell us what you mean by "God", and how a universe that contains that entity differs from one that doesn't?

Also, you mentioned moral absolutes to which actions can be compared to see whether they're good or not. Could you please name some of those? I don't think I've ever seen a list.

Thanks,

Wicked creek died because TCF kicked out their WIcked Creek security force (Zenith Affinity) who handled about 90% of all invasions. Why was that was done? Well, you should ask TCF.

I'm sorry that you got screwed as a bystander. You really should give 0.0 another shot in a different area that's politically stable (relatively speaking. :) ).

Disclaimer: I'm a bit biased because I was a fresh recruit to a ZAF corporation at the time that this happened. 8-( So my foray into 0.0 was also heavily disrupted from the get go as well.

Anybody can do voting better than YouTube. Looks like somebody finally has.