Does God exist?
- Thread starter Kreskin
- Start date
Sure God exists ... in they who choose to believe. No matter what name you choose , it's the spirit that keeps us searching for answers.
:smile: I'm most definitely back.... got home last night at 10PM Alberta time, looked in here to make sure there'd been no explosions or chaos, and promptly passed out.
GOD does indeed exist. proof of "GOD" is only needed by those of you who have no "faith", Jesus said "no proof will be given except that of Johna" so debate away in your vain attempts to show how utterly idiotic you are, in thinking that talking about it will change any of your thoughts about why, or if. You will all go away thinking exactly the way you did before you entered this forum good luck
I think that's WHY they call it "FAITH"............"ye of little faith" i seem to remember someone quite prolific saying once or maybe twice....."it is your FAITH" that sets you free also i recall...:?::idea:
I think that's WHY they call it "FAITH"............"ye of little faith" i seem to remember someone quite prolific saying once or maybe twice....."it is your FAITH" that sets you free also i recall...:?::idea:
I presume you mean the god of the current monotheist traditions. Not that it matters much, he's no different from any of the others, they're all creations of the human imagination, rooted in fear, uncertainty, and incomprehension. There is no evidence or argument that can be advanced in support of the existence of any of them that doesn't apply equally well to all of them, or isn't badly flawed logically, and there is no event attributed to them that doesn't have more prosaic explanations. No, he does not exist. None of them do.
Postulating his existence creates more issues than it explains, and at least two of them have no possible solution. First there's the problem of who or what created god, which logically produces an infinite regress of creators creating other creators, and the stopping point is completely arbitrary. To stop it at the first step, as most people do, isn't a solution, it's just an assumption that begs the question. If you're going to do that, you might as well just postulate that the cosmos has always existed and be done with it.
Second, there's the problem of the characteristics usually attributed to god and the nature of evil. If he's willing to prevent it but isn't able to, he's not omnipotent. If he's able to prevent it but unwilling to, he's not benevolent. And if he's both willing and able to prevent it, why doesn't he? The only answer ever produced for that involves some claim about his inscrutable purposes and his unknowable nature, usually tarted up in fancy philosophical circumlocutions, which is just a retreat into mysticism and to me renders the whole concept of god incoherent. It explains nothing, its simply a refusal to attempt an explanation. It's even worse than that: if it's true that god is unknowable, how can anyone claim to know anything at all about him? We can't even know if he's good or evil himself. Postulating god's existence requires postulating many more things in order to explain the way things are, and following the principle of Occam's Razor, it's far simpler just to reject the initial postulate.
That's what I do. It's my considered opinion that if people truly understood why they don't believe in Zeus or Mithras or Osiris or the thousands of other deities humans have invented, they would also cease believing in Adonai or Jehovah or Yahweh or Allah or whatever name the culture applies to him. There's no reason to think he's any more real than they were, and they had followers in their day no less devoted than today's fundamentalists.
Postulating his existence creates more issues than it explains, and at least two of them have no possible solution. First there's the problem of who or what created god, which logically produces an infinite regress of creators creating other creators, and the stopping point is completely arbitrary. To stop it at the first step, as most people do, isn't a solution, it's just an assumption that begs the question. If you're going to do that, you might as well just postulate that the cosmos has always existed and be done with it.
Second, there's the problem of the characteristics usually attributed to god and the nature of evil. If he's willing to prevent it but isn't able to, he's not omnipotent. If he's able to prevent it but unwilling to, he's not benevolent. And if he's both willing and able to prevent it, why doesn't he? The only answer ever produced for that involves some claim about his inscrutable purposes and his unknowable nature, usually tarted up in fancy philosophical circumlocutions, which is just a retreat into mysticism and to me renders the whole concept of god incoherent. It explains nothing, its simply a refusal to attempt an explanation. It's even worse than that: if it's true that god is unknowable, how can anyone claim to know anything at all about him? We can't even know if he's good or evil himself. Postulating god's existence requires postulating many more things in order to explain the way things are, and following the principle of Occam's Razor, it's far simpler just to reject the initial postulate.
That's what I do. It's my considered opinion that if people truly understood why they don't believe in Zeus or Mithras or Osiris or the thousands of other deities humans have invented, they would also cease believing in Adonai or Jehovah or Yahweh or Allah or whatever name the culture applies to him. There's no reason to think he's any more real than they were, and they had followers in their day no less devoted than today's fundamentalists.
I'm feeling lucky today Dexter. I'v been reading about the origins of the gods, seems they have a very real and natural origin and thier power is only matched by thier complete apathy toward mankind. Nevertheless celestial objects of predictability were and should still be held in rapturous reverance and we should listen and observe with close attention for the portents alerting us to the right time to duck. Asteroids comets fire and ice plague pestulance war disease chaos and enormity of death all those are the work of the old gods and then we got the rational thinking of the priestly class which set to work exterminating the true word of god
untill now we have the solemn words of thieves and liars holding sway over observable proveable empiracle evidence of the visitations and works of the gods. Many of those old gods still exist in reality solid fast powerful full of unspent wrath, fire and brimestone aplenty to scourge the earth of sinners and saints alike I rekon. This planet is littered with recent impact shrines erected naturally in thier honour commemorating thier visits.:lol:
You will go away unchanged and therefore unsaved, your above pronouncement prooves it.
No one stays who will not bend to the council and advice of others and accept the offered hand accross the ditch of disagreement. When you cannot grow you die eh.
I still don't understand why skeptics who see the same thing cropping up repeatedly throughout history (and truly, many of the differing details matter little when the whole is considered) would think that Occam's Razor would define it as not being for a reason. Common sense would dictate to me that something so ever present in cultures separated by time, by geography, by bloodlines, is coming up time and time and time again for a reason.
'God' exists. It's the nature of that existence that's the uncertainty.
It's called celestial mechanics. Gods a mechanic. Pass the ball pean hammer please, no the big one, thankyou.:lol:
unsaved thats a strange choice of words
growing in my ignorance of the proof of GOD no thanks, i would rather not know what others think, i am quite happy believing in God ,you may or may not believe ,it makes little difference to me ,and no I'm not going to say you will burn in hell, or any such foolishness, as for one i don't believe there is such a thing as hell ,or if there is such a thing it is here and now ,as this is about as far from god as you can get, i see no reason to try to discuss my belief in something, to those of you who are unwilling to WANT, to believe in such as god ,also many archaeological digs have found truths for biblical events, past ,and the proof of the flood is one due to erosion and such like, but i cannot show any proofs of god too you, so really debating with those of you who would rather believe that there is no such thing, and me saying there is seems to me to be pointless, and a waste of electricity, this said your welcome to your opinion..:lol:
But I can point to proof of god with ease Quandry. Haven't you got any birds or flowers where you live, how about bees or love or sunshine?
What if God is the strength to get out of bed on one of those mornings when pain would prefer you stayed laying down? ...or the patience to sit out feeding mosquitoes in a weedy bay because you just know the perfect bass is being tempted by your spoon? ...or the dedication to endlessly scan thousands of identical microbes on a slide for that one that might be the cure for cancer? ...or the vigilance to remain bent over an eyepiece for endless hours peering into the deepness of space for a changed light pattern that might be a new star? Would God exist?
Right on Wolf it seems there's proof of god all over the place, oh pity those so blind they cannot see the wings of god on the dung fly.:lol:
Exactly it is the fact that this world is soo diverse from the tiniest amoeba to the largest whale..such a diversity of living things is proof i feel .but people here want quantifiable evidence something that hits them in the head like a rock don't they i cant give them that so i wont bother i can only say what i believe to be true and that is there is A GOD ...:-?
That's not what Occam's Razor does. The essence of it is to avoid multiplying hypotheses unnecessarily, that simpler explanations are more likely to be correct. I'd immediately agree that religious beliefs arise repeatedly and consistently in all human cultures for a reason. The pervasiveness of religious belief clearly speaks to something that's universally true about human nature, but it doesn't justify the conclusion that god exists.
And that's all I can say about god as well, any further explination is the conciet of man a sin we learned in some garden on some planet, I think it was this one but I'm an ignorant savage and a sinner of the worst kind and I can't discuss it any further. Of course there's many many tons of service manuals and instructional tomes that take the discussion to it's inevitable corrupt conclusion.