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(By the way, this should read: Let D = the infinite set of increasingly larger divisors tending toward infinity of function f. I see that I wrote it out and then pasted the symbolic expression redundantly, but you probably figured that out. But just in case it caused confusion.)
That's great. But when you do it, think about the biblical ideas about God's attributes, beginning with the universally apparent attributes, which some are claiming are not in the Bible too just so, as if Saint Paul, for example, were just pulling on our legs when he wrote:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man. . . .
Some folks have mistakenly taken this passage to be a cosmological argument when in fact it's essentially the same transcendental argument asserted in the Book of Job by Moses, whom tradition holds to be the author. Paul clearly has that argument from Job in mind because he begins it and ends on the very notes as Moses did in Job.
We can readily perceive contradiction via the organic principle of identity. We "hold the truth in unrighteous". The essence of sin is embracing contradiction and acting on it.
We can't know the more intimate truths about God from reason alone. We need direct revelation to know those kinds of things. But we can know from contemplating the problem of origin that He must be. We are compelled to account for our existence, and the idea of God jumps up!
Also, the attributes of God at the conceivably highest degree of being are objectively and universally apprehensible. It's not necessary to go into a tediously detailed definition of divine perfection as philosophical theists tend to do. What is the very highest order of origin? Sentience. What is the very highest degree of perfection in any one of the categories of attribution? Eternal, infinite, indivisible and immutable. Why must this be? It's very simple really. Because God by definition is the unsurpassedly supreme being. It's not rocket science. And what is the other pertinent factor that we may safely assert? The organic principle of identity by which we ascertain these things must universally apply to all of existence as grounded in God.
Now does this mean that God couldn't by His own volition "compartmentally" reduce the capacity of any given aspect of His being in order to accomplish some purpose or another? I don't see why not, but then I don't see why He would have to do that either. In any event, how in the world would I know anything about that without further revelation? The objectively apparent imperatives regarding the issue of origin only tell us so much, and no more. And I've had to strike some things I imagined I saw listed among the generally revealed knowledge in our minds that I unwittingly inserted from deeper revelation in the past. Oops.
God designed it that way. Eventually one must take the leap of faith to get past the barrier between reason and the arms of God. At least that seems right to me, though some philosophers and theologians have claimed that the proofs are absolute in the ultimate sense. Hmm. I don't see how that's right. The only argument that gets close to something like that in my opinion is the transcendental argument. It just seems to me that God does two things. He gives us all the evidence we need and then some, both rational and empirical, but it is by faith that we please Him. I know that both of these ideas are biblically supported. As for the idea that reason absolutely bridges the gap, I don't see where that's biblically supported and I don't think that's what Paul is saying. He's after something more intimate where the gap is concerned.
The problem with purely philosophical theists is that they invariably take these divine attributes of absolute perfection and think to imposed them in some sense on the essences of material things, which are of a lower order of being, or think to denigrate them without justification to make them work anthropomorphically in some sense relative to humanity's dimensional sense of reality, albeit, in violation of the very same principle of identity from which they delineated the various attributes and established the necessary degree of supremacy. Neither of these things necessarily follow. So you end up with subjective mush, mere speculation.
From there consider things like divine love, justice, mercy, grace . . . as defined by the Bible! That may seem weird, but it's okay. Just don't go alone. Take God's hand and go along with Him in pray. In other words, If He permits, go with the Holy Sprit and take the Word with you.
_________________________________
P.S. Yes. You never actually divide by infinity as such, because, while infinity is defined in this case as "every existent or potential existent simultaneously" or as "every number that exists simultaneously," any number divided by infinity is undefined. We mathematically intuit what happens as we approach infinity or zero respectively. I'll give one thing that God gave me. The infinity end gives you God and all other existents. The zero end gives you the Triune God who stands and stays "before" and apart from all other existents.
Oh, by the way, in the above, I didn't mean to imply that the Son did not empty Himself of full divinity in His humanity. He did of course, but He was never disconnected from the Father. Remember Christ still knew all things immediately pertinent via that connection . . . well, except in that horrible moment when He took our sins upon Himself. Imagine His anguish. You know I don't think it was the prospect of the physical torture He knew He would have to endure for our sake, though no doubt that was part of his anguish in the Garden. Rather it was the knowledge that He would be separated from His Father in that instance on the cross in order to complete His mission. Whoa!
Title is pretty self-explanatory. Go.
The Cosmological argument fails.
The kalam fails.
The ontological argument fails.
The modal ontological argument only proves the possibility of god, by virtue of modal logic and axiom S5.
The teleological argument fails.
The transcendental argument fails.
...
ARE THERE ANY? For the past three thousand years, the smartest minds have been unable to provide a single syllogism that conclusively demonstrates god's existence.
Yet, all of these supremely arrogant theists run their mouth against atheism, as if they have an epistemological leg to stand on, when they don't.
Any day now! We are waiting for your argument, and until then, atheism is justified.
First it must be determined what you mean by "existence" here. If you mean a physical existence, then there is no evidence that God physically exists. Now, what other types of "existence" do you acknowledge? If you can't acknowledge spiritual existence, then there is no way to show you evidence of God.
The syllogistic argument for God is simple. Time, space and a physical universe exist. Something had to create the physical. It's illogical that it created itself. Something had to create it because the universe has entropy, it is not perpetual. So until you can provide a syllogistic argument for how "physical" came to exist, we have to assume something beyond "physical" must have created it.
Now... Atheism is still justified. Atheism is a faith-based belief that God does not exist. The simple fact that God does not physically exist is enough to justify Atheism. This doesn't validate Atheism, but it is justified.
I disagree. Atheism is not justifiable in the formal sense at all because the assumption of it is contradictory to the fact that the possibility of God's existence cannot be logically denied. Atheism is purely faith-based without a justifiable argument to back it at all. We have existence. That's it. How is it that we have existence? Something must have always existed because how do you get something from nothing? So either some material thing has always existed or some immaterial thing has always existed, and the immaterial thing can be intelligent. To say that anyone of these things is impossible is to say that you know something that you can't possibly known is true. Atheism is not logical whether it's true or not. You can say that God is or must be though without such a contradiction.
I understand what you are saying and I agree, Atheism is not valid for the reasons you mentioned. Still, it doesn't have to be valid to be justifiable. If an Atheist is unable to realize spiritual existence and all they are aware of is physical existence, then to not believe in God's existence is simply to not believe in God's physical existence. I believe that is justified because God is metaphysical and doesn't physically exist.
Atheists are spiritually illiterate. They have no concept or understanding of spiritual nature at all. Any talk of "existence" can only mean in a physical state of existing, they have no knowledge of any other kind of existence. Therefore, their sentiments are justified, given their illiteracy of spiritual nature.
If you want to know what is most likely just ask an agnostic atheist who is also a scientist. You'll get the most logical/rational/probable answer.
Agnostic atheists do not exist, how is anyone supposed to ask them anything?
Are you asking a human if they know for sure there is a god? 100% sure? No human could honestly answer you yes.
Agnostic means not sure. Agnostic Atheism means, at least to me, that we can't say for sure 100% there is not god. That's the agnostic part of us. But we see zero evidence so don't believe there is a god. That's our atheist part.
I'm at 1% there is a god and 99% there isn't one.
No human could honestly answer "yes"? Where do you get these ideas?
Why did god ever talk to you?
I only went by what it appeared you were saying. Sometimes you have to ask in some way or guess something in some way to elicit from the other person what he means. That's all. I really wish I'd seen this post before posting to Foxfyre, so please look at that post because it's important to this (1294). I strongly disagree. One of the first bible studies I did after becoming a Christian was on God's attributes. This was my own study using a concordance. The ideas about these things in the philosophy I've read are different from the Bible. Then I compared my notes to a couple of books on biblical doctrine and theology. I was seeing the same thngs. In my opinion, the only thing that can be taken from Aristotle, for example, is the idea that God is indivisible and unchangeable in His being. The rest of his stuff doesn't work very well with the Bible. The Bible overwhelming talks about God's attributes in the most perfect or complete sense there is. I have no idea what verses you could be talking about that contradict this. I know that Descartes, Plato and Kant talk about God in the most perfect sense but the problem with those guys is that you end up with a philosophy of pure subjective introspection with ideas of perfection about everything else. Why should that be I ask myself? Once you get past the objective things that can be seen in the highest sense about God's attributes from thinking about the idea of God from the problem of origin, these guys need to stop and get over themselves. Lots of the other stuff they go on about past the objective things that can be known about God from reflection is not in the Bible about God or other things.
You should use Nave's Topical Bible to study topics, it helps a lot.
I have a reading schedule that takes me through the entire Bible 4 times a year, and have read every translation I could find. I even learned Greek so that I could read the Septuagint and the New Testament in Greek. Over many years my view of God changed from what I first learned, but I also learned that New Christians are the most dogmatic about their beliefs. I can tell you that, if you continue to just read the Bible, and study things that you discover in that process, you will eventually learn that most of the stuff you now see as unquestionable is entirely questionable. God will reveal Himself to you on a personal level in a way that I cannot explian, and you will realize that you cannot explain Him to anyone else anymore than you can explain your best friend, you simply do not have the time.
I said all of that to explain why I am not willing to go into everything on this forum. It would take months just to build a foundation for you to understand the many shortcomings you have in your understanding of God. Being a Disciple is a lifelong journey, it took me years to get to where I am, and I have barely scratched the surface.
I don't see how my concept limits God in any way. I base my perceptions on what God has revealed of himself to me personally, however limited that may be. That I do not require God to be this or that is not coercive of God nor does it restrict him to any particular character or state of being, but it is simply what I believe he has revealed to humankind. To insist that God MUST be this or that seems to me to be much more coercive.
To insist or to know from what God Himself has revealed? Once again, it is not I or Justin, as far as I can tell, who is putting God in chains around here. Though, admittedly, I haven't been able to read all of his posts.
I'm sharing with you what's self-evident to all from the general revelation (the cosmological order beginning with our own reflections upon the problem of existence and origin) should they take the blinders off and open up their minds. These are the very same things asserted about God in the Bible, and the Bible tells us they are self-evident from reflection on the contents of our minds relative to the principle of identity too. There in the Bible! The Bible tells us they may be seen without scripture, but scripture backs what I'm telling you.
I have nothing to do with what is being revealed. I have nothing to do with stamping the Image God on your mind. I'm sharing with you the universally apparent attributes of God in terms of their entire upper range without limitations of any kind whatsoever, save one: God will not and cannot violate the principle of Identity, as He is the ultimate Principle of Identity: God = NOT-God for obvious reasons cannot be.
That's coercive? That's requiring Him to be something He's not or must be? I don't know what your imaging, but that's the only limit I'm talking about. There is no other limitation on Him or full, unrestrained expression of His attributes whatsoever.
For example, Foxfyre, there is no reason to believe that absolute omniscience and free will cannot coexist. The Bible utterly rejects that contention! That restraint. That length of chain. God does not have to limit His knowledge in any sense whatsoever for free will to thrive.
The principle of identity does not tell us that's impossible and neither does the Bible. Illusion. That's not a movie in the can--your chain on Him. Illusion. QW is wrong. I just falsified his notion that existents cannot be two or more things simultaneously according to the principle of identity. False. The principle of identity readily and coherently apprehends such things with no problem at all.
Perhaps if you were to take a look at that fact, you'd realize that it's you who are believing something that originated, by the way, from secular philosophers making baby talk, trying to put God into their models of being.
I have looked at that fact and still draw my own conclusions with the reason and logic that God gave me. You obviously have been very well educated in theology and I do not question your motives or intentions here. But methinks you are sometimes too quick to judge others and reject their arguments, and not always charitably or without insult, and sometimes I think that weakens your own arguments. Is it possible that you have adopted one particular theory of theology and have closed your own mind to other possibilities? One thing I have learned about God is that anytime we think we have God all figured out, we are most likely to have it wrong.
From where I'm standing I'm seeing a lot of claims being made that can't be objectively backed by rational experience of by the Bible. I'm a young Christian, new to the faith but I'm not new to the Bible. I was raised in a Baptist church that my mother attended with us kids. I just went along but I do know the Bible as I had to do all those Bible studies for years. Of course reading the Bible with the help of the Holy Spirit is a whole other level of understanding from just the intellectual level. The idea that the basic attributes of God are known from the act of thinking about the possible ultimate source of existence being intelligent and spiritual rather than being material, that humans can perceive what that would mean in the highest sense is biblical. David, Moses, the prophets and the apostles talk about that and why God did that to our minds constantly. Some of the best affirmations of this are found in the Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, Daniel, Job, the epistles and the gospels. The very things that can be known about God by thinking about the issue of origin are specifically named by the inspired writers also. I have no problemfollowing what M.D.R. is saying. What he calls the "imperatives of the problem of origin" that come to our minds when we think about the idea of God without the Bible are in the Bible. The Bible teaches that these things can be seen without the Bible and what they are. I don't get what arguments you think he's rejecting out of hand. I still don't really know what you're saying about free will. All I can get out of what you said is that you believe free will happens. M.D.R. believes free will happens. I believe free will happens. I believe the same way he does that total omniscience and free will can be at the same time. You seem to be saying that these two things can't happen at the same time but you don't really say why that can't be, except that for some reason you think that means everything is mapped out.
If you were given limited omniscience that allowed you to see every second/minute/hour of what you would be doing, thinking, speaking, believing, hoping during the next 24 hours, is not that 24 hours already determined? There is nothing you can do to change it. It is fixed already in time in that the past/present/future already exists. How then do you have free will within that concept? For what purpose is this existence if your present has no ability to alter or change your future?
I understand the reasoning of the supposed philosophical paradox. What I don't understand is why Christians think it's a problem since organic rules of logic from God and the Bible tells us God is the deity of infinite simultaneousness. What I learned from my awful encounter with that atheist is that you can't defend the cosmological argument or explain anything else if you abandon complete divine omniscience. What you get is a multitude of contradictions, paradoxes much bigger than what is really not a problem at all. Everything unravels and I mean everything. That's the first thing he asked me, if I believed I had free will like the Bible says. The he asked me how I could have free will if God knows everything like the Bible says. Easy I said. God can do anything, which was the right answer but I didn't have the understanding to explain how in this case. Then he asks me if God contradicts Himself. All I'm telling you is that there's no good reason to limit God. The understanding that God lives in the eternal now and the understanding of God's logic which we have and by which we can see that an infinite number of states of existence can exist simultaneously is all we need to know to see that the paradox of secular philosophers if a false dilemma and the Bible backs all of this.
No human could honestly answer "yes"? Where do you get these ideas?
the yes to what is the question not it's existence.
.
I have no idea what that means.
How can you ever accept something as "proof" if you don't believe in what it supposedly proves? I don't understand what the hangup is with this, it's not that complicated. Anything you can think of... If I do not accept or believe that it can or does exist, then nothing you will ever be able to show me is going to be viewed as evidence that proves it's existence. Sorry, just how things are.
Are you serious? Many atheists clearly admit the possibility that God might exist but a belief in a possibility is not proof. If you presented any verifiable evidence at all that would support such a possibility they would believe in God as surely as they believe in gravity. What you do is present evidence that is not evidence and then expect people to believe in what has not been proven and then say they don't believe the evidence which is not evidence, because they don't believe in God which is bullshit.
For instance your previous assertions that a spiritual reality exists because the evidence shows that people have always worshiped God is a non sequitur based on an unfounded assumption that is simply untrue because many people have always worshiped things that we now know beyond any doubt are not God. People used to worship trees, or the star and moon, or animals, or made up mythological creatures which are not gods and have no existence or basis in reality and the historical worship of that which does not exist does not prove the existence of anything and is not evidence of the existence of spiritual reality or God..
You also never addressed the fact that by and large most people who ever lived were only pretending to believe in what ever god was being worshiped at the time out of fear and self preservation because if they didn't act like they believed they were shunned, made anathema, banned from the synagogue, beaten, persecuted, imprisoned or killed.
Believe whatever you want to believe, but don't act so bewildered when you encounter other people who just don't have what it takes to be so gullible.
No human could honestly answer "yes"? Where do you get these ideas?
the yes to what is the question not it's existence.
.
I have no idea what that means.
there is a biblical bias to responses by biblicists this thread by its OP has already excluded as a possible answer the biblicists have not demonstrate as being otherwise while debating as though they have provided the sought after proof. -
proof since the publication of that document that has never been verified, ergo the reason for this Thread.
are christians not able to conduct a sectarian discussion for the existence of God ?
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Funny thing, using logic I can prove anything I want,
Exactly. It's merely semantic gamesmanship.
""The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil"-Bertrand Russell.
No. I'm referring to the all grown up fact that the principle of identity is not contradicted by the existence of any given A that is simultaneously two or more things. The organic laws of logic readily and coherently allow for that and even anticipate the possibility that such things exist in the material realm of being. Conceptually, the Majorana particle is not as you claimed A and ~A; rather, its A = A (X and Y simultaneously). That goes to thought. Understanding the properties and the behavior of sub atomic particles goes to scientific inference and the processes of falsification . . . as directed by the laws of thought, which, of course, can be applied mathematically in other forms of logic, in both alternate-world forms and amplificatory forms.
No. That does not follow. Neither you nor anyone else in history has ever shown that the way we think is not transcendentally synchronized with how the universe works. In other words, the universe doesn't work the way it does because of the way we apprehend it. Rather, the way we apprehend things and the way the universe works and are lined up by God because He is the Principle of Identity, the ground of existence and has primacy over the cosmological order. You're saying that's not possible? Based on what? You're misconstrued notion of the principle of identity and your false predication of the Majorana particle?
The Bible declares that God is the Principle of Identity. It is in Him that the cosmological order, respectively, lives and moves and has its being.
That's not what I said. My opinions don't have primacy over the principle of identity or over the ground of existence. You seem to think your opinions do without a shred of evidence.
What I'm saying is that we exist. The atheist accepts that the universe exists. Then he says God doesn't exist. Who doesn't exist? God doesn't exist. So he has an idea of God in his mind because he realizes that the origin of his existence could be God. Since that's true. It's not logical to say that something that is obviously possible can't be. His claim that God does not exist is not rational. It's contradictory. The knowledge that God could be is justifiable knowledge. The claim that God cannot be after the atheist necessarily admits that He could be is not logically justifiable. It's not justifiable knowledge either. This has already been covered on this thread.
Actually, more accurately, they both used sensory data and math, but there's a twist here, which I really didn't want to get into, but since you seem to think I'm doing extracurricular philosophizing, which I'm not, or defending such. . . .
First of all, I don't know why you keep saying Aristotle didn't use sensory data. That's false. That's mostly what he did use. Aristotle was not the Idealist. Plato was. Aristotle was the classical inspiration for the empiricists of the Enlightenment era: Locke, Hume, Berkeley and others. . . . Aristotle's blank slate is Locke's tabula rasa, which, by the way, has been mostly falsified too.
What led Aristotle astray was his extracurricular philosophizing in violation of the recommendations of the principle of identity. Ironically, as you alluded earlier, he got it into his head that the perfections of the Logos (God)—which, according to him and the latter empiricists, are inferred by our minds upon experiential reflection rather than from innate ideas directly—that those "heavenly movements" that didn't line up with the perfection of geometric circularity must be miscalculations. He had the information he needed to get it right all along!
(Now of course the latter empiricists didn't make the same astronomical mistake; one had nothing to do with the other. Besides, Copernicus' model, improved by Brahe and Kepler and affirmed by Galileo, was well-established, and Newton was in the mix by then.)
In other words, the classical empiricist Aristotle wasn't entirely free of his teacher's influence; however, the bulk of the mathematical calculi based on the sensory data of the unaided eye from an earthly perspective worked. He simply decided to disregard those aspects of the sensory data on the peripheral of his "ideal model" in spite the fact that the principle of identity was telling him there was a problem.
Copernicus, on the other hand, refused to "square that circle." He paid attention to the recommendations of the principle of identity and took Averoes' criticisms of the Ptolemaic model seriously. He intuited a heliocentric model and found that its mathematics squared all the data.
I'll say this again. Philosophy is not bullshit. It's indispensable to science, and it precedes science. It deals with the what. What is it metaphysically and, thus, what is it definitively? We can't do conceptualization or language without it either. The problem arises when people abuse philosophy, or science for that matter!
They both have strict limitations, and we may know what they are via the principle of identity.
Abuse or disregard the recommendations of the principle of identity and you will drive off the road into a ditch. The principle of identity is indispensable to theology, philosophy and science. It's the fundamental tool of apprehension and the assimilation of data. That's all it is. The principle of identity is reliable. It's the tool that tells us that only so much about the why and the how can be had relative to the data at hand, and philosophy is not the right medium for getting at the deeper truths of the why and the how.
I understand what the principle of identity is. I understand how it works. I don't disregard it or misconstrue it. That's why I don't do "philosophical bullshit."
That's why I don't imagine that things like the Majorana fermion violate it when they don't. That's why I don't harbor any illusions that the major premise of its logical proof can be refuted given the fact that the principle is necessarily asserted by the arguer in the very act of trying to refute it.
That's why I embrace the concepts of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence and the ramifications thereof as they come at us without bias. That's why I don't countenance the "philosophical bullshit" that would arbitrarily impose a limitation on the unadulterated perfection of the Eternal Now's ability to create an infinite number of dimensional states of being wherein free will would readily thrive without conflict. In other words, I don't pretend to know that I'm not in such a dimensional state that would be perfectly compatible with the principle of identity which allows for A = A (X, Y, Z simultaneously).
Overly technical?
Coercive?
Whaaaaaa?
I'm not the one suggesting God has to be something less than absolutely omniscient, i.e., must necessarily withhold Himself from knowing things absolutely in some way or another in order for free will to actually persist!
The interesting thing about this assertion from theistic philosophy is that it's actually predicated on the organic laws of logic, albeit, as misconstrued to preclude that any given A cannot be simultaneously X and Y. But that notion is false, and given the fact that professional philosophers know that (I'll get to Intuitionistic logic tomorrow.), one wonders why some of them don't simply allow that they are treading on ground that belongs to theology.
What you're saying makes sense, except the suggestion that I'm being dogmatic. My thinking is very much like M.D.R.'s, though now I'm not sure I totally get him because I don't agree with something he just said about God voluntarily limiting Himself. That doesn't work in my mind for reasons I learned the hard way. Also, it seems to me he's contradicting himself but maybe he means something else. I don't know now. What I don't get at all is the idea I'm keep getting from you and Foxfyre that there's something dogmatically closed minded about our view. Our view is totally open to any possibility for God to do whatever He pleases without any limits at all. The only people putting limits on him are you guys.
It's just that the conversation has shifted a little bit into the Bible because of the kind of question that's being addressed, free will. For me that's just not something you can understand from just the things that the thoughts of origin give you. All I'm saying is that there's never any reason to put alimit on what God can do or how God can make it logically possible for Him to know all and for there to be free will at the same time. I don't get the logic that tries to say that logic doesn't work while trying to use the very same logic, though wrongfully ignoring the perfectly logical concept of infiniteness, to say that logic doesn't let both fully exist. Huh? The only thing that logically works is that both fully exist without conflict, and that's what the Bible says. I don't get the attack on organic logic from Christians.
...they preferred to believe the laws of thought governed the universe...
Oh, I am very serious big boy. No, Atheists DO NOT believe it is possible that God exists, that's what makes them Atheist. There is tons of evidence God exists, but it is spiritual evidence and you refuse to accept spiritual evidence because you don't believe the spiritual exists.
...your previous assertions that a spiritual reality exists because the evidence shows that people have always worshiped God is a non sequitur...
I've never said that people always worshiped God or that this is evidence of spiritual reality. Again, you are taking my words and morphing them into what you want to hear, then popping off some smart ass retort. Humans have always been spiritually connected, it's our most defining attribute as a species. What this proves is, humans (almost universally) believe something spiritual exists, and they always have.
Everything has entropy, no? Maybe a rock doesn't but even a rock will eventually die when this world expires. So everything you see will be gone one day if it isn't already gone. NOTHING lives forever. Nothing we know about YET anyways.
Nothing physical. That's the point. You cannot argue physical things never required creation if physical things have entropy. So we know because of entropy, physical things must have started somewhere, they must have had a beginning, something must have created them.
Logic tells us that nothing physical is capable of creating itself. It may be able to reproduce itself or regenerate itself, but it cannot create what it isn't here to create to begin with.... following me? So if physical nature couldn't create physical nature, and physical nature must have been created because it has entropy, then what could have created physical nature? The only rational explanation is something not physical in nature, something metaphysical, or spiritual.
Something may have very well created everything you see. We could have come from another black hole. But I see what you are saying. What created the black hole or all the matter, planets and stars? Something can't come from nothing. I know what Hawkins says but he hasn't convinced me yet.
I like your point though and I do get it finally. Pretty deep. I know you've been trying to explain it to me for awhile and I finally get it. I'll have to think about it more and do some research on the idea that nothing physical is capable of creating itself.
Is something non physical capable of creating itself? I'm thinking about how clouds are made and how they create lightening.
I still don't think this creator gives a rats ass about you or me and there is no heaven unless frogs and goats get to go too. Just like when a star dies that's it, same for you and me. What happens to your spirit? Nothing. It dies with you, I believe.
Those last two words are very important... You believe.
I'm glad you get what I have been trying to explain. The OP asks for a syllogistic argument and that is it in a nutshell. There is no "proof" for God because God is outside the physical. Any evidence for God is spiritual evidence and subject to whether or not you accept spiritual evidence.
Is something non physical capable of creating itself?
I don't understand what you mean by the question. Do you mean, can something non-physical create itself in a physical manifestation? Because "create" is understood to mean, physically brought into a state of existence. Regardless of whether spiritual nature can do this or not, it doesn't have to and there is no reason for it to. However, one might argue that is precisely what "physical" is, the manifestation of spiritual nature in a physical dimension.
Atheists do not believe in God because they see no physical, spiritual, or any type of evidence at all that would support a belief in the supernatural especially as promoted by delusional and irrational people who make absurd assertions that contradict well known and long established facts about reality and have confused faith with obstinate stupidity. Present some evidence. Its not up to the skeptical to believe first before they can see. Its up to the one making the claim to provide convincing evidence that can be seen or even just perceived before belief is even possible.
You have failed miserably.
You make ridiculous claims that people have always worshiped something greater than themselves and even call it God and when I show that such is not the case, and in fact what they worshiped is not God, you act as if that was irrelevant, claim to never have said any such thing and meant something else, start all that you fucking idiot talk, and then go on to clarify your position by saying the exact same thing you said in the first place.
Does Alzheimer's run in your family?
I don't believe everything we see today came from nothing. And I think that the matter that now makes up all the planets, moons, stars, meteors & comits we see have always existed in one form or another. In other words, the physical stuff that you see all around you has always existed. No beginning, no end.
This planet may expire and blow up, but the pieces will float in space, maybe get sucked into a black hole or may all eventually condense together and create another big bang 1 million billion trillion years from now.
Exactly. It's merely semantic gamesmanship.
As I said from the beginning, all philosophy is bullshit, especially philosophy that attempts to ignore facts by claiming they are something else.
There is a reason the Law of Identity is part of the Law of Thought, and it is not because the universe is run by our thoughts.
No. That does not follow. Neither you nor anyone else in history has ever shown that the way we think is not transcendentally synchronized with how the universe works. In other words, the universe doesn't work the way it does because of the way we apprehend it. Rather, the way we apprehend things and the way the universe works and are lined up by God because He is the Principle of Identity, the ground of existence and has primacy over the cosmological order. You're saying that's not possible? Based on what? You're misconstrued notion of the principle of identity and your false predication of the Majorana particle?
Just because you cannot follow it does not mean the idea is invalid. As I already explained, the Law of contradiction is not an axiom in all forms of logic. That means that I don't actually have to prove what you say has not been proven, all I have to do is free me from the constraints of classical logic and admit that the it is possible for something to be its own opposite. Since I am using a logic that you refuse to acknowledge, and you are using a logic that is based on the assumption that people thousands of years ago knew more than we do now, guess which person wins this argument.
The Bible declares that God is the Principle of Identity. It is in Him that the cosmological order, respectively, lives and moves and has its being.
Show me the verse that says that and you have a point. Until then, all you have is the ravings of a philosophaster.
