sophie

(1) From what always existed, which is the combination of all possibilities, GOD emerged.

(2) Our universe evolved through a combination of possibilities.

At the intersection of (1) and (2), we have the posibility that our combination of possibilities is NOT the combination of ALL possibilities.

If (1) were substantially true then GOD exists as an external to our universe. Even if (1) was substantially true in the sense that what emerged is assigned a lebel "GOD", then the possibility still exists that our universe is not the combination of all possibilities and some possibilities are external to our universe.


Of the possibilities which are external to our universe, I would suggest a good nap and some brillo to close the case. Then again it could be zero possibilities which exist outside our universe, and we are substantially alone.


This leaves us with the point of what always existed. Whatever it is it was either always the way it always was, or it kept shifting from one form to another. Which includes our universe.

haverbob

Nice point. I'm not sure that I can disagree with you, I just haven't figure out what new ground you have broken.

Sue Sponte

Again, although this concept seems so utterly simple to me, that I acknowledge something to be POSSIBLE is in no way an indication that it is so. Specifically applied to your query, it is possible, as an abstract, that elves exist in some fashion or dimension. There is no basis whatsoever, however, to believe that elves actually exist.

haverbob

You are correct, I hear you all the way. Your system works.

So, Sue, by the way, who taught you that system that works so well for you?? You may think you taught it to yourself, which would mean that you sat in a cave for years and figured this out yourself. Of course you didn't sit in a cave, but still all of your thoughts are your own, correct?? They are not. Not to assume you thought that they were, it's just a little kind of subliminal reminder, that's all. Your idea of evidence and truth were taught to you by someone else. That's where you got it from. So you believe in the one version that was taught to you, rather than the other version that was taught to you and the other people who decide to remain theists, that's all. No foul there. It's completely understandable (sincerely, not sarcastically). You just decided on "one unknown" (athiesm), over another unknown (God). I'm not going to tell you that I blame you, I'm just identifing the choice you made. You chose one unknown over another unknown, that's all. And you get the pride from saying "oh yeah, well at least that I can acknowledge that I don't know". "At least I gain the pride of saying that I am saying the "logical" thing while others are not". Good for you. That's about as far as I can go. Hope it makes you happy to be "accurate" or "correct" or "right". Enjoy your personal reward.

Alan N

I appreciate your thinking Haverbob (I'll grant that it is your thinking ). Given your reasoning, can we really know anything , or all we all just part of the 'collective' of knowledge, shifting it from here to there, but never adding or removing from it? Are you a pantheist?

You've hinted at your theology in other threads, but please, do share...

haverbob

It's funny. I make statements and people like to add to those statements so that they can disagree with what they have added. Kind of like "so what you really mean is..." and then they add what they would like to think that I really mean so that they can disagree.

About pantheist. Which definition do you mean?
1) A doctrine identifying the Deity with the universe and its phenomena.

2) Belief in and worship of all gods.

Also, based on these definitions, I can't see where either of these departs from theism

Alan N

Haverbob, I did not add anything to your statement, I simply reflected the tone (that I understood) of your comment to Sue. I really do appreciate your viewpoint, so you can disregard my parenthetical.

I'm trying to understand where you are coming from with the line of reasoning that no thoughts are truly our own. I don't believe that thoughts are taught. I believe that methods and symbol are introduced and explained, but how an individual processes that and produces working knowledge is not simply a product of the teaching. Please clarify your thoughts on this.

It's similar to the thread you and I conversed in where we discussed symbol and it's deficiency in expressing reality. A bird isn't really a 'bird', anymore than the meal that you eat at the restaurant is really 'steak and potatoes'. How much more are you not "Haverbob that ascribes to point x and y and maintains a theology of z"?

These threads are excruciatingly frustrating, at least for me, because the richness of an abstraction is lost to pixels on a screen.

Regarding Pantheist:
is the one I had in mind. Likewise, I don't think a pantheist departs from theism...I was simply trying to understand your posts a little more.

Sue Sponte

Your point is taken, Haverbob, but only to a degree. Yes, we are all products of our environment, which influence the way we think and believe.

With that said, my belief system is my own. I've learned many things from many people (i.e. language, interpretation, logic, etc.), but the APPLICATION of those techniques is my own. In my case, I can honestly say that I do not know a single person who shares my religious views. I live on an island in that regard, and have most certainly not simply adopted the belief system of another.

As noted above, I do not believe this is the case. To the contrary, my family and friends taught me that Christianity is the proper belief system, which I rejected once I became capable of understanding the issues and reasoning behind them.

I'm not sure how the react to this. It isn't about pride nor deriving "happiness" from my views. I believe them because I believe it is the correct way to view the information before me, not to derive pleasure from the process or result. To the contrary, it is often a cognitively painful result, alienating myself from those close to me on an issue from which they perceive me in a negative light or feel "sorry" for me. Believe me, from my experience, reaching the beliefs I have was most certainly NOT the easiest or happiest.

I also hope that your last statement wasn't a veiled criticism that my belief system can create only "personal reward", a selfish system comparative to Christian beliefs.

haverbob

Here's what I thought you added. "Given your reasoning, can we really know anything , or all we all just part of the 'collective' of knowledge, shifting it from here to there, but never adding or removing from it?,"

This is what I thought you added. Notice the word 'collective' with a parentesis around it in your question above. This suggested that I was speaking of some sort of robotic, or brainwashed or "borg like" concept. Is that kind of what you meant to say? If so, that is the addition. If not, whoops, my bad.
I'll try to clarify. When you decide to go to the store, that is not someone else's thought, that is your own of course. I was more talking about the root of our thoughts, basic theories, motivations... Since far more (or maybe even all) of the root comes from society and what you are taught, the more specific thoughts we have are merely an extension of that root (which we can extend in our own way). The part's the we choose, and it is the eqivalent of getting to choose the last level (128th) of 128 levels. The other 127 have been told to us. Doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong, but they do not belong to the individual. That's what I meant by the cave example, because to choose 88 instead of one out of 128 levels, you need to not listen to almost everybody or go live in a cave.

That was not meant to be a negative against Sue, it was just a direct statement (except for maybe that last sentence in that post, that didn't serve any purpose). It meant, that, believe it or not, even though atheism is supposed to represent freedom from having other people tell you what is what, it merely replaces God with logical philosophy and science (I have no real fault with philosophy or science). So logical philosophers and scientist are now in a sense telling you what is what. But YOU are not really telling YOU what is what as much as you may think you are. So an atheist is still not free, they now are beholden to the concept of "evidence" rather than the concept of God. I'm not going to fault, the concept of evidence, I'm just saying that the human mind made that concept up and then we use it to prove or disprove God (I might be willing to back away from that last sentence if you can provide me a good reason). So in order for a being that is outside of our ability to reason (timeless) to be able to exist, it must adhere to a concept that our reason created. And that's one of the reasons for atheism.

I'll try to answer you legitimate question about my point of view. I'll lay the cards on the table as best I can.

I get my ideas from that book I told you about, but there might be other good books as well. None of those books really matter, it's what they point to that matters, which is usually the same concept, just in different words. They only point, because they could never explain, much the same way as love is never really described or measured, it is only alluded to by certain actions or behaviors or examples.

So I may have mentioned before, but I was brought up a Catholic. But I have a fairly rational, critical, educated mind, so upon further study of religion, I became an atheist (or maybe agnostoc, I just basically said "I don't know anymore"). Then, almost by chance or accident, I read that book (and I wouldn't have read it had it not been for the fact that I had a six hour flight). It challenged everything that I simply assumed was the truth, and although I didn't like it, I was honest enough to admit that I couldn't really refute it either. That changed the way I look at alot of things The God-noGod argument didn't become important at that point, to me, God just seemed to be a default kind of thing at that point, but it wouldn't upset me in the least if the default was "no God". Doesn't really matter. What mattered was myself. Before one asks about God-noGod, one needs to understand the person who's asking the question first (themselves). Then the rest takes care of itself. People always think they know themselves, but I'll bet you I can usually show them otherwise, because they are busy with the outside world and spend little time observing their actions, because they believe that's where the solution to their problems lie, in the outside world. The problem is almost always never them, its the outside world according to their mind. I can try to give you examples later upon request if you would like

Anyway, there's a little chunk of how I think as you asked. If you need a label for me (agnostic, atheist, catholic....) then I'll choose the label "mystic", although I don't really like that word, it's just the only one I can find that might be appropriate. I don't like it because it almost suggests wearing a robe and sandals. But that's not what it really means. Jesus, Buddha, Confucious, Thomas Aquinas, maybe Gandhi and the Dalai Lama and believe it or not, maybe even Einstein. These are all mystics. The one thing in common that they all have, is that they saw through the little joke that we all play on each other because of the societies that we all create. Then the world became an entirely different place for them without having to change one single thing in the world.

I didn't offer you a "logical" reason for my belief in God, I just basically said that by default it just fealt that way. But if you want a logical explanation, I'll give you one, but that's not my real explanation. The real one is the one that I've already said. Here goes. I happen to be a tremendous fan of Jesus. I thought his words suggested that he was the best and wisest mystic of all (my opinion). So my respect for his wisdom tells me to believe him when he says there is a God. That's all.

mattdamore

i) The SETI example was not to show how the universe was designed (that's an entirely different argument) but that the originators of an engineered signal need not be known or ontologically understood to know that the signal they sent was in fact engineered. If this is the case, then it is false that we would need to know detail-for-detail about the ontology of God on this basis alone. So you raised some other good points . . .

(ii) Causal theorists typically understand that time is no longer a necessary ingredient for causality. It may be sufficient to account for causality by its temporal order but it is not a requirement of the causal matrix itself. And since the kalam argument does not address (nor is precluded by) the existence of time or timelessness, there is no harm done to its conclusion.

(iii) Regarding the timelessness of God (where much ink has been spilled), one could adopt belief that the entirety of God's knowledge is embraced all-at-once in a single vision and that the B-Theory of time is a true account. God's knowledge would also include temporally-dependent truths as a result so that "It is now 11:30" becomes "At 11:30 on July 28 it is 11:30" and God could know that in advance as a sort of tautological truth. A-Theorists can take the Newtonian approach and argue that there is a metaphysical time beyond physical time so that, even though the creation of the universe marks the origin of physical time, God himself still resides in a metaphysical time where one thought succeeds another thought and so on. I take issue with these interpretations of time, but suffice it to say that if these interpretations are possible solutions then God cannot be precluded by such arguments.

(iv) Let me just note that to say that something is intuitively obvious is not to say that it is a sort of religious faith if one means "blind faith" or "faith contradicted by evidence" (it can successfully be argued that anything is ultimately based on some faith as the Rationalists and Empiricists demonstrated). By intuitively obvious I mean that something can be warranted or rational to believe in wholly apart from evidence. I gave one example of this in the previous post about one such warranted belief that both you and I hold: the universe was not created 2 minutes ago with false memories built-in. But you cannot produce one piece of evidence to show why this conclusion is false. Yet, you are rational to not accept it because you have a warranted belief to the contrary. Moreoever, you cannot establish any new beliefs, facts, or laws because everything would be based on an infinite regress of evidences that could never be mustered in anyone's lifetime. Just try to prove a new hypothesis. Evidence for that hypothesis would be dependent on other evidences and those would be dependent on other evidences where those would also be dependent on other evidences, etc ad infinitum. But all of this is academic anyway. What you are doing is arguing for evidentialism and not for the falseness of premise 1 in the kalam argument. If you are right about your critique of kalam's premise 1, then that only means that one must present evidence for it, not that it's wrong or not warranted. You would have to provide counter-evidence to premise 1 to say that it is not correct. But because of the seemingly obvious truth of premise 1, I think the burden of proof would then fall on those who negate it.