The Existence of God

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Netherland Antilles Laurence Drake
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The Existence of God

Post by Laurence Drake »

People here seem to have the mistaken belief that God does not exist, and that there can be no rational basis for believing that He does.

I've come here to try and convince you otherwise. If I can't persuade you to believe that God exists, then at the very least I hope to show that theists may be rationally justified in holding that belief. I also hope that this will encourage you to harbour greater respect for their views, and to appreciate more strongly the practice of religion on the whole.

My main argument goes like this. First, there is a substance dualism between brain-events and mental-events, which are causally linked; and second, science cannot fully explain these links, whereas theism can. Since these claims are true, it follows that the existence of God provides the best explanation for why the universe appears to us in the way it does.

Let's begin by showing that there really is a dualism between two different types of substances. We can do this using an example.

Think of a blind person, who also happens to be very gifted in her knowledge of science. In fact, she is so gifted that she knows everything there is to know about electromagnetism. The facts and details of every wavelength of light, and in particular those wavelengths that correspond to the colour red, are completely understood by her. Her knowledge is so flawless that, given information about the initial conditions of a system of light, she will be able to predict with perfect accuracy how the system will evolve over time.

She knows what the colour red corresponds to in the physical world, but does she know the colour red itself? My belief is that she does not. Our subject could have access to all the facts of science, but still know nothing about the colour red due to her blindness. The mental experience of the colour red is inaccessible to her. And the fact that it remains unknown, in spite of her comprehensive knowledge of the material world, gives us reason to think that there are things whose existence cannot be explained in terms of the natural laws of science; things that exist separately from the physical world, and that cannot be understood through scientific knowledge alone. We can call these things immaterial substances.

So brain-events, which are of the material world, and mental-events, which are of the immaterial, are two different kinds of substances. Knowing everything there is to know about one tells us nothing about the other. Are the two causally linked? It seems to me that they are, since we are all aware from experience that certain states of affairs in the physical world invariably correspond with certain mental experiences. For example, eating chocolate will always evoke the taste of chocolate for me; unless I am hallucinating, but even in that case the material state of affairs is different, ensuring that the causal link between brain-events and mental-events is upheld.

Now we can move on to the second claim; that science cannot explain this link, while theism can.

We can see how difficult it us for science to provide us with insight into the link between the physical and mental world. This lies in the fact that mental properties cannot be measured according to a scale. Unlike the speed or mass of particles, the meaning of a thought is not twice or half as much the meaning of another. The fact that I am now tasting chocolate is not a multiple of the fact of tasting pineapple or coffee. The causal relations between mental and physical events cannot be generalized; there is nothing to be gained from trying to reduce our knowledge of physical-mental relations into more fundamental laws. As a result, there can be no physical-mental theory of science - only a collection of causal relations which provide us with no meaningful explanatory power in themselves.

Knowing about physical events does not mean we can explain the existence of the mental events that arise from them. If my brain is stimulated in a certain way, what reason do I have to expect that it would cause me to experience the sensation of chocolate? Why not something else? If this was a question of thermodynamics, then science would instantly supply us with a clear and accurate response. But here it has no answer.

The alternative is theism. Rather than having an enormous collection of relations that we are unable to explain further using the tools of science, we can simply say that God exists, and that he is responsible for maintaining the causal connection between mind and body. This provides us with the ultimate explanation we are looking for, and is a far more comprehensive, concise and elegant theory than anything science has to offer. It does this because it leads us to expect the existence of mental events from physical events. For it is only by means of the mental world that we have good and evil, and only by means of the physical world that good and evil have their objects.

Now that we have seen the reasons for believing in the existence of God, we are in a position to look at the consequences - namely, what this means for morality, and in particular how humans ought to behave within the constraints of their knowledge of the universe. But that discussion will be for another time. For now I hope to have given you at least one justification for the view that God exists.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by jacksonpollock »

This proves my point.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by evilcheadar »

Ok
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Kaiserklein »

Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by jacksonpollock »

Kaiserklein wrote:Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work


Dumb avatar dude.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Laurence Drake »

Kaiserklein wrote:Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work

You're just frustrated because my logic is so bullet-proof you'll never find ways to argue against it.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by gibson »

Typical theist argument. Find something we don't understand, add God, and presto said equation works out. The thing is just because you can find an answer to a question in no way implies that said answer is correct. There are literally infinite other answers to any question that have just as much of a possibility of being correct as God, as there is 0 empirical evidence of the phenomenon known as God.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by jacksonpollock »

gibson wrote:Typical theist argument. Find something we don't understand, add God, and presto said equation works out. The thing is just because you can find an answer to a question in no way implies that said answer is correct. There are literally infinite other answers to any question that have just as much of a possibility of being correct as God, as there is 0 empirical evidence of the phenomenon known as God.


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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Hawk_Girl »

Kaiserklein wrote:Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work


So true. God of the gaps is what he is referring to.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by NekoBerk »

Maybe there is a God... a psychotic person who likes watch how we kill us between ourselves, a pervert person who likes watch us in intimate moments, a person who don't give a fuck if the religions try to have power over the world and ignorant's brains, a person who don't make anything for stop wars or make something for childrens that don't have nothing for eat today in christmas, we are living in the hell then... God doesn't exist for me, because... the people always need to answer their own questions about a lot of thing that they didn't know in the past, and thanks to science we know a lot of answers of the old questions that the people made before, like "Why the sky is blue?" or "why it thunders" ?... for that the greeks invented Zeus... god of thunders and the sky, then the explanation about why it thunders is because Zeus is angry lauching thunders, then they invented a lot of gods for anything and explain things that they didn't know.

I hope you understand to what point i want to reach, sorry if my english bad :P.
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Re: The Existence of God

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gibson wrote:Typical theist argument. Find something we don't understand, add God, and presto said equation works out. The thing is just because you can find an answer to a question in no way implies that said answer is correct. There are literally infinite other answers to any question that have just as much of a possibility of being correct as God, as there is 0 empirical evidence of the phenomenon known as God.

There is plenty of empirical evidence for God. It's not reasonable to say otherwise. I shouldn't even have to explain myself here since the same argument has been made hundreds of times by people much smarter than I am, and you should be familiar enough with them to know that there is at least some empirical basis for believing in God.

It's true that there might be other explanations for substance dualism. What makes theism the best explanation is its simplicity. Again, trying to apply science to the apparent distinction between mind and body just gives us a list of causal connections, leaving us no better off than when we begun. Theism reduces everything to a single, original cause, which makes it infinitely better than the countless other explanations which all rely on garbled complexity to sound convincing, and which have no better empirical foundation than theism.

The fact is, given the evidence available to us, there is no reason for us to prefer any other theory over theism. Unless you really do think its a good idea to have a more complex, inelegant theory for its own sake.
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Re: The Existence of God

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NekoBerk wrote:Maybe there is a God... a psychotic person who likes watch how we kill us between ourselves, a pervert person who likes watch us in intimate moments, a person who don't give a fuck if the religions try to have power over the world and ignorant's brains, a person who don't make anything for stop wars or make something for childrens that don't have nothing for eat today in christmas, we are living in the hell then... God doesn't exist for me, because... the people always need to answer their own questions about a lot of thing that they didn't know in the past, and thanks to science we know a lot of answers of the old questions that the people made before, like "Why the sky is blue?" or "why it thunders" ?... for that the greeks invented Zeus... god of thunders and the sky, then the explanation about why it thunders is because Zeus is angry lauching thunders, then they invented a lot of gods for anything and explain things that they didn't know.

I hope you understand to what point i want to reach, sorry if my english bad :P.

I understand your point. And the fact is, it was reasonable for ancient civilizations to attribute natural events like thunder to God. This is because it was the simplest explanation available to them, and they had no evidence which provided them with a better theory. The Ancient Greeks had no rational basis to explain thunder in terms of the behaviour of electrons, because firstly this theory was more complex than the alternatives, and secondly they had no reason to believe it was true.
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Re: The Existence of God

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Laurence Drake wrote:
Kaiserklein wrote:Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work

You're just frustrated because my logic is so bullet-proof you'll never find ways to argue against it.

No, your logic is just shit. There's no more reason to believe in the "God of the gaps" than there is to believe in "Allah of the gaps" or "Unicorn of the gaps". And it's not even a proper gap. You are saying that since the difference in taste cannot be measured quantitatively, science cannot explain the relationship between a physical event (eating a bar of chocolate) and a mental event (feeling a chocolate taste) [1]. Science can explain this very well, have you ever heard of taste receptors and how they are triggered by different molecules?

What a load of shit


[1]
"We can see how difficult it us for science to provide us with insight into the link between the physical and mental world. This lies in the fact that mental properties cannot be measured according to a scale. Unlike the speed or mass of particles, the meaning of a thought is not twice or half as much the meaning of another. The fact that I am now tasting chocolate is not a multiple of the fact of tasting pineapple or coffee. The causal relations between mental and physical events cannot be generalized"
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Re: The Existence of God

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Laurence Drake wrote:
gibson wrote:Typical theist argument. Find something we don't understand, add God, and presto said equation works out. The thing is just because you can find an answer to a question in no way implies that said answer is correct. There are literally infinite other answers to any question that have just as much of a possibility of being correct as God, as there is 0 empirical evidence of the phenomenon known as God.

There is plenty of empirical evidence for God. It's not reasonable to say otherwise. I shouldn't even have to explain myself here since the same argument has been made hundreds of times by people much smarter than I am, and you should be familiar enough with them to know that there is at least some empirical basis for believing in God.

It's true that there might be other explanations for substance dualism. What makes theism the best explanation is its simplicity. Again, trying to apply science to the apparent distinction between mind and body just gives us a list of causal connections, leaving us no better off than when we begun. Theism reduces everything to a single, original cause, which makes it infinitely better than the countless other explanations which all rely on garbled complexity to sound convincing, and which have no better empirical foundation than theism.

The fact is, given the evidence available to us, there is no reason for us to prefer any other theory over theism. Unless you really do think its a good idea to have a more complex, inelegant theory for its own sake.

So essentially you're saying that theism is correct because it's the simplest explanation. Surely you don't actually believe that the simplest explanation is always the correct one do you?
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Re: The Existence of God

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gibson wrote:
Laurence Drake wrote:
gibson wrote:Typical theist argument. Find something we don't understand, add God, and presto said equation works out. The thing is just because you can find an answer to a question in no way implies that said answer is correct. There are literally infinite other answers to any question that have just as much of a possibility of being correct as God, as there is 0 empirical evidence of the phenomenon known as God.

There is plenty of empirical evidence for God. It's not reasonable to say otherwise. I shouldn't even have to explain myself here since the same argument has been made hundreds of times by people much smarter than I am, and you should be familiar enough with them to know that there is at least some empirical basis for believing in God.

It's true that there might be other explanations for substance dualism. What makes theism the best explanation is its simplicity. Again, trying to apply science to the apparent distinction between mind and body just gives us a list of causal connections, leaving us no better off than when we begun. Theism reduces everything to a single, original cause, which makes it infinitely better than the countless other explanations which all rely on garbled complexity to sound convincing, and which have no better empirical foundation than theism.

The fact is, given the evidence available to us, there is no reason for us to prefer any other theory over theism. Unless you really do think its a good idea to have a more complex, inelegant theory for its own sake.

So essentially you're saying that theism is correct because it's the simplest explanation. Surely you don't actually believe that the simplest explanation is always the correct one do you?


He is probably misusing Occam's razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor), mistaking the "simplest" explanation with the one with least assumptions. And theism just requires so many more assumptions in any case. Yeah this is just a God of the gaps argument which is totally retarded, and this is not ever a proper gap since science can explain well what he claims is unexplained.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Laurence Drake »

gibson wrote:
Laurence Drake wrote:
gibson wrote:Typical theist argument. Find something we don't understand, add God, and presto said equation works out. The thing is just because you can find an answer to a question in no way implies that said answer is correct. There are literally infinite other answers to any question that have just as much of a possibility of being correct as God, as there is 0 empirical evidence of the phenomenon known as God.

There is plenty of empirical evidence for God. It's not reasonable to say otherwise. I shouldn't even have to explain myself here since the same argument has been made hundreds of times by people much smarter than I am, and you should be familiar enough with them to know that there is at least some empirical basis for believing in God.

It's true that there might be other explanations for substance dualism. What makes theism the best explanation is its simplicity. Again, trying to apply science to the apparent distinction between mind and body just gives us a list of causal connections, leaving us no better off than when we begun. Theism reduces everything to a single, original cause, which makes it infinitely better than the countless other explanations which all rely on garbled complexity to sound convincing, and which have no better empirical foundation than theism.

The fact is, given the evidence available to us, there is no reason for us to prefer any other theory over theism. Unless you really do think its a good idea to have a more complex, inelegant theory for its own sake.

So essentially you're saying that theism is correct because it's the simplest explanation. Surely you don't actually believe that the simplest explanation is always the correct one do you?


No. The simplest explanation is the best explanation when all other factors are equal, because it posits the existence of the fewest components. That doesn't mean the simplest explanation is guaranteed to be true; it only means that it's the one we should accept when we can do no better within the limits of our observations. Our basic intuitions about probability tell us that a statement is more likely to be true if it's component statements are fewer, and it is therefore simpler.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Laurence Drake »

ovi12 wrote:
Laurence Drake wrote:
Kaiserklein wrote:Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work

You're just frustrated because my logic is so bullet-proof you'll never find ways to argue against it.

No, your logic is just shit. There's no more reason to believe in the "God of the gaps" than there is to believe in "Allah of the gaps" or "Unicorn of the gaps". And it's not even a proper gap. You are saying that since the difference in taste cannot be measured quantitatively, science cannot explain the relationship between a physical event (eating a bar of chocolate) and a mental event (feeling a chocolate taste) [1]. Science can explain this very well, have you ever heard of taste receptors and how they are triggered by different molecules?

What a load of shit


[1]
"We can see how difficult it us for science to provide us with insight into the link between the physical and mental world. This lies in the fact that mental properties cannot be measured according to a scale. Unlike the speed or mass of particles, the meaning of a thought is not twice or half as much the meaning of another. The fact that I am now tasting chocolate is not a multiple of the fact of tasting pineapple or coffee. The causal relations between mental and physical events cannot be generalized"
Believing in God is not the same as believing in some fantasy. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and infinitely good; he has both reasons and the ability to uphold the causal link between brain-events and mental-events. Unicorns do not. There is every motivation to consider that God in particular might exist as opposed to some arbitrary fantasy.

Molecules hitting taste receptors do not provide us with an explanation, because they do not tell us what to expect in new cases in which new kinds of molecules are producing new kinds of taste. We could come up with a list of all the different types of molecules that we already know, and all the different types of taste they evoke. But this only tells us that we taste chocolate when there are chocolate-molecules on our tongue, and pineapple when there are pineapple-molecules, which is trivial. The problem here is that science has no predictive power over other explanations - except for the exact cases of which we have experience, we can say nothing about what mental-events will take place following certain brain-events. We would have no reason to expect mental-events to exist at all if we only knew about brain-events. This would not be the case of we believed in the existence of God.

This is an contrast to how science has succeeded elsewhere. I gave the example of thermodynamics earlier, and I'll use it again. If you gave a scientist the temperature of a gas, he would be able to tell you it's pressure. He would be able to do this for all temperatures and pressures, including those that no living person has ever experienced, or ever will experience. Thermodynamics has predictive power; it leads us to expect outcomes in cases where we do not already know them. A physical-mental theory would have no such power. It could not tell us why a particular mental event takes place instead of some other one. It could not tell us that carbon has a certain taste, unless we have already tasted carbon before. It could not tell us why mental events exist at all, given the existence of the physical world.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Kaiserklein »

jacksonpollock wrote:
Kaiserklein wrote:Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work


Dumb avatar dude.


Wow arguing about avatars... That's some high level conversation. Btw if you don't know where this avatar comes from, you should educate yourself.

Laurence Drake wrote:
Kaiserklein wrote:Don't even have the faith to argue with this pile of shit. Anyway trying to convince other people that your belief is true is pointless and will never work

You're just frustrated because my logic is so bullet-proof you'll never find ways to argue against it.


Yeah one's logic is always bullet proof when you add a bit of esoterism and faith. There is no proof that a god exist, and people believing there's one will always find arguments related to their faith to justify it, but that will never be pure logic and will never convince someone neutral
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Laurence Drake »

Kaiserklein wrote:Yeah one's logic is always bullet proof when you add a bit of esoterism and faith. There is no proof that a god exist, and people believing there's one will always find arguments related to their faith to justify it, but that will never be pure logic and will never convince someone neutral

No, there is no proof that God exists, and I never said I was going to give you one. You don't need solid proofs in order to find things convincing. Rejecting arguments because they're based on faith is just stubborn. All beliefs have some degree of faith in them. Preferring the faith of humanism and science to the faith of theism is irrational unless there are reasons to justify your views.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by deleted_user0 »

Lol dr. Legend you have a competitor in the Total troll category
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by Laurence Drake »

umeu wrote:Lol dr. Legend you have a competitor in the Total troll category

If someone disagrees with you that does not make them a troll.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by deleted_user0 »

Nope, but being a troll Makes you one. And i am really wellversed in the art of trollspotting.
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Re: The Existence of God

Post by momuuu »

Does he show some top tier faulty but hard to dispute arguments? Becayse that might make it a fun read.
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Re: The Existence of God

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I'd like to see how an argument can be both faulty and hard to dispute.
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