''Faith'' basically means believing in something despite lack of concrete evidence.
So God is deliberately avoiding to show concrete evidence (and only shows up in your mind instead).
However, God certainly wants people to know that he exists, right?
Then why doesn't God just directly show himself? In other words, why is he hiding?
The Bible is not enough evidence, because all ''false religions'' have their own holy books too. God needs to provide the kind of evidence that false religions don't have (I dunno, like--enabling believers to glow in the dark or having Bible texts imprinted on DNA strands or somethin').
So is God a troll? He could've shown more evidence but chooses not to, and instead regards this kind of blind faith as the only requirement for salvation.
Just a thought: maybe Satan's been stopping God from showing himself, and wipes out all the evidence. But if so, why doesn't God change the requirements for salvation (like good deeds, hopefully)?
Feel free to point out any misunderstandings.
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"maybe Satan's been stopping God from showing himself, and wipes out all the evidence."
are you fucking kidding me? he's god..!!!! if he created something from magic, surely he can show his self by his magic just a snap of his fingers.
and by the way god created satan, so how can satan be more powerful than his creator?
so much for the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient god that can be fooled or tricked by his creation.
if his real (which is not), he's the dumbest and the worst god ever. most likely all of the gods.
The greatest trick god ever pulled was convincing the world he exists.
@Rushing or Dragging: "Feel free to point out my misunderstandings."
1. God is evident to all those who truly seek him with their heart. (Obviously you are using the wrong organ.)
2. Concrete evidence is all around you but you have hardened your heart to God's miracles. All you have to do is look at the trees.
3. Satan is not more powerful, He is a fallen angel who will get his just deserves along with the rest of the heathen on Judgment day.
4. God does directly show himself through his word, THE BIBLE.
5. Yes, false religions have their own holy books. Why would you believe a false religion. Christianity is the only true religion. God did provide evidence that other religions don't have, his word written in the bible. Wow! You just don't have a clue do you? Even more important than this is the fact that God's message is written on your heart. You know there is a God and are only in denial.
]
6. Blind faith has nothing to do with salvation. Salvation is obtained by inviting Jesus into your heart and begging him to forgive you for the sinful being that you are. You must be reborn in Christ to obtain salvation. Faith is never blind, it is guided by God.
7. Satan is doing all those things plus more. He is planting dinosaur bones to convince the ignorant that evolution is real. He confounds all those without faith and belief to keep them away from God's one true message and the Salvation of Jesus.
Hi Cognostic,
In reply,
1. Yep. All Gods are. All non-Gods are too. Pretty much everything is. Search for that feeling that feels good about something. Culture it within yourself. Give it a name. Hay presto - its what you want. The only special thing here is that theologians have mixed up a perfectly normal human experience with their theology in an attempt to find a way to uphold it. Its not uncommon for theologians to look for ways to do this though. They've pretty much tried it with everything they think their audience will let them get away with.
2. Cool. So write a paper on it and publish it in a proper peer reviewed journal where your idea can be honestly assessed and you can be honest with the feedback. This is the best way to prove that something is evidence for something else. Otherwise, there just might be the smallest chance that what you're interpreting as evidence for something might actually be evidence of something else.
3. You said it so it must be true.
4. James Bond is a character in a book. That is a 100% true claim. However, it doesn't allow me to claim that James Bond is a real person just because he has lots of books written about him. Same goes for Zeus or Osiris, and yes, Yaweh. Its a problem of categories. Before you can claim something in a book is proof of something else's existence you need to prove that the book is correct. That is why no science book is itself proof of anything. What makes a science book true is not that some words a written in it. It is the evidence, argument, methodology and ultimately peer review that it is based on. We accept books only to the degree that you or I, or anyone, can get off our backsides and go and fact check them. What we know about the Bible is that like a James Bond book its got some Cities in it and people's names that are true, but on the actual substance - that hasn't been verified outside of it yet and so we don't know it is true and therefore it cannot be used itself as evidence of anything external to itself other than those things verified externally, like place names, some history etc. Thats the same for all books.
5. You've said it so it must be true.
6. You've said it so it must be true.
7. You've said it so it must be true.
Look, if I say that Mount Everest is the largest mountain in the world I am not actually giving you any real information about Mount Everest. What I am actually revealing is the state of my brain wiring with regard to Mount Everest - if there is such a thing. My words might accord with a real world object we can agree to call Mount Everest, we'd have to go there and check, measure the damn thing. Obviously we don't all do this, but we could. We build up a trust about the world by at least measuing the small things and fact checking them - often by relying on the same people that are claiming things, such as when we turn on a TV we rely on engineers and phycisists to have understood some mechanics and electronics etc. Now that is what proof all around us looks like.
When we pin down theologians they cannot do anything on the level of scientists or engineers. It is hard to actually pin down anything productive from theology at all, outside of secular or material theology such as textual translation etc. The equivalent of saying that James Bond exists in a text or we've just found a new earlier text of him and this is what it says. Theologians haven't done much in hundreds of years towards actually proving anything and have been left far far behind by the products of the natural sciences.
And today's Poe Award goes to Cog. A truly outstanding effort, there.
*applauds*
@Cog
Preach it, Brother Cog! Preach it!..... *waving hand in the air, with head down and eyes closed tight*.... Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, brothers and sisters!!!.... *dancing around in small circles*....
This has always seemed incredibly weak to me. Its surely a non argument.
1. Assume God exists.
2. Notice that there isn't very much evidence.
3. Give up and hide under 'its for a reason'. Then go back to 1.
It isn't just God trying to hide. It unicorns and fairies and aliens and everything else.
A lack of impact in the world can only be given as evidence of absence because that is what it is. It doesn't necessarily mean that there is no God. God could have made the universe and then gone on a golfing holiday or just be sitting around reading all the other books in another universe. Those are compatible with the absence of God in this universe, but, most importantly, so is the idea of 'No God'.
Given that the idea of God has been constructed by humans, no matter which one you look at (they must all ultimately admit that someone wrote them down or spoke them etc), and that the reasons given in support of them by theologians are so terrible (the world is really big and complex and we don't know everything and stuff obviously started, and if we define a start as needing God, then we need God, and after we've accepted that there is a God because stuff exists, the only one thats real is my one) - the idea that there isn't a God is just a better fit to the data.
Howdy, UK! Great having you with us. Hey, since you seem to be new here, I think it is only fair you should know that Senor Cognostic is quite a master of sarcasm. *chuckle* I say that only because you seem to be taking his post to mean he actually believes the stuff he is writing. In actuality, however, he is only sarcastically spouting things most theists would say as "arguments" for their beliefs. Please, rest assured, Cog is very much the atheist. Might want to try reading his posts with that mindset. They are so much funnier that way. LOL
Edit to add: On a side note, I must say you had some very impressive come-backs to his statements, at least. LOL
Lol. If there's a part of my brain that suffers it's the bit that's supposed to spot parody (alongside the bit that's expected to perform any maths in my head just so I look cleverer than being perfectly capable of doing it on a calculator). Ah the internet, combined with my own guilty seriousness thats always likely to have left me the last one sitting at the table downing beer after beer getting pleasure out of debating any point that moves.
I blame Twitter. It's primed me to fail to understand anything longer than two sentences.
Thanks very much!!!!
@UK
No problemo, amigo. Once you have a chance to get familiar with all the regular players around here, I do believe you will fit in nicely. See you around.
UK_Geologist,
Looks like you got some pretty good stuff! Hope to see more of you on this forum from time to time.
Hey UK_Geologist. Are you a fellow geologist like me? Specifically I am a volcanologist.
Well come to the boards.
rmfr
Rushing or Dragging,
The biblical God creature was simply the series of men who ruled the dominant ancient Middle Eastern empires at a given time. The God character bit the dust with the death of the Babylonian emperor and the collapse of the Babylonian Empire around 530 B.C. He's not coming back.
Sometimes the God character was the Egyptian Pharaoh, the Assyrian, Persian, Babylonian, Hittite rulers or even an Israelite/Hebrew chief priest. That's one of the reasons the God character is so nutty. He was a multitude of different people at different times.
A Girl asked me once if I believed in God, I said I don't know but when I look at you I know angels exist.
I high fives myself in my mind thinking dang bro you good thinking that one up on the spot and waited for her to melt into me.....she straight up burst out laughing her ass off.
Works in the movies.
Good effort though. I remember a very pretty girl back in college (long time ago) holding a door open for me to walk through. In my head flashed 'thanks' and 'cheer's and out came 'chanks'. Good times.
I just spilled my tea, and it was only partially due to my hangover and the shakes.
'chanks"
fucking brilliant fair play...I'm am going to plagiarise that joke big time.
@TermDog
Yeah. I can think of a few things that only work in the movies, TDog. Don't try this one.
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What ya mean it does not work like it does in the movies?!?!
Hollywood LIED TO ME!
;)
In all seriousness it took me far too long to figure out movies are a terrible thing to emulate.
I actually watched dirty dancing a few times figuring it was a sure fire way to impress the girls. All it did was was make the date laugh quite a bit.
I suppose it kind of worked, I did get a second date, but only after promising I would not try to emulate Patrick Swayze anymore, especially since sadly, I cannot dance like him.
TermDog: "A Girl asked me once if I believed in God, I said I don't know but when I look at you I know angels exist."
Just saw this one. Hate to say it, but that one was pathetic when I was a kid half a century ago. And it was pathetically "OLD" back then also... ;-)
rmfr
@R&D
Re: " Does God deliberately seem non-existent?"
You mean is he hiding like this?
Matt 12:38-39 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
Jonah was the guy who spent three days in the belly of a whale...sorry...fish...it was a great fish. Shark, maybe. Fucking great great white. Huuge.
I think it's about time we all finally admit that we just plain SUCK at Hide-n-Seek. Obviously, God is the supreme hiding champion. Maybe we should just throw our hands up in defeat and all yell together, "Olly olly oxen free!!!" At the very least, he may come out to get his trophy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4upY8UWrsU
I tried that, did not work, apparently god likes hiding more than trophies. Perhaps he knew in all his hiding I got a lot of very critical difficult questions for him to answer.
Perhaps god is hiding because like a child he does not want to own up to his/her/it's bullshit?
@Logic
No, no, no... You got it all wrong. OF COURSE he isn't going to come out if only YOU make the call, because he knows you could simply be trying to trick him. You know how kids are. Plus, there is still everybody else on the planet who could tag him when he steps out of his hiding place. So what has to happen is that we get every single person on the planet coordinated to yell "Olly olly oxen free" all at the same time, so that he knows nobody will be left around to tag him when he comes out. C'mon, man! You gotta learn to play by the rules. Get with the program already. You can't fool God. He's omniscient, remember?
Again, why would God want you to know he exists? If he's trying to see what kind of person you are it makes more sense to be undetected doesn't it? If you know he's there then you'll act like you have a god watching you, which wouldn't be you, it would be how you think god wants you to act.
The Bible is an evil book because it aims to make you behave a certain way, if there is a god, he'd want you to behave like you, wouldn't he?
It's an interesting argument. I still say that an absence of something can only be used as evidence of its absence, not as evidence of its motives. To infer its motives you would need some sort of information about it, which is the whole point.
So, maybe its the type of non-interference that an anthropologist might exhibit when studying ancient tribes, but it could just as easily be that God has withdrawn to create an armada of alien races with which to wage war against us just to see who's best.
The only way to tell between the two hypothesis would be to have some information that could pick between the two, which is what the point is about; we don't have it because all we've got is evidence of absence, not evidence of motivation.
So, to counter your argument, since the above is really just a 'you're making it up' point (i.e. you're hypothesis generating, not doing anything to pick between hypothesis) I offer this:
There is a difference between an anthropologist discovering a society of primitive people's and an omnipotent and omniscient being creating one in terms of their relationships to it as it develops. It's more akin to an engineer or programmer than an anthropologist. The problem with your hypothesis comes from God being omnipotent and omniscient (as it often does). It is whether the idea of God creating us and then sitting back to watch because God respects rules of anthropology - whether that is really a very credible idea - as an anthropologist didn't create the primitive people's knowing exactly what they'd do at every step along the way.
So we'd be comparing that hypothesis against the alternative; that the absence of evidence is simply just because the thing is absent.
The latter seems a better fit to me. Else we're contorting ourselves to try and make things fit without any real information to do so; i.e. without any real information that makes us honestly go in that direction (we'd only be going in that direction just to please ourselves, not because that's where any evidence lies).
I could also argue that if God is perfectly good then the ultimate outcome of the universe will maximise goodness (the same argument, rephrased, that is usually given for why there is evil in the world, why a child can be murdered or someone raped etc, and God still be perfectly/maximally good. In the end it will sort itself out; the problem is our vantage point for we cannot tell how it will, it just will).
Putting aside that that argument is crap; that it leaves us in a position of not being able to tell is child rape is a bad thing, it implies that God has accepted that maximum goodness is to be achieved by God hiding - that God's OVERT active presence in the universe is NOT the way to maximise goodness, and what?, having child rape in the universe is.
That argument actually makes me shudder, yet its there and present in theology and its spoken in an indirect way (i.e. don't point it out to the congregation) in pretty much every Church 'lecture' presented.
P.S. I really hope that comment wasn't a parody too!!!! :)
@UK Geologist
Your posting reminds me of a point I bring up on occasion when debating apologists:
The god concept suffers badly from the "superhero problem." An easy example of this would be superman. He can go so fast that he can travel back in time. If he could travel back in time, then he could easily solve any problem as they come up. Kryptonite? Go back in time and prevent the krypton planet fragments from reaching earth. Missed something important because you can not be everywhere at once? Go back in time! The superman comic logically, would not be an interesting story if superman simply used the powers available to him logically.
Lots of people/religions say god is all powerful and all knowing, if he/she/it knows everything why does he/she/it need to hide so we can have free will? He/she/it already knows what we will do. God already knew how adam and eve and the garden would end, seemingly he stocked the place with a talking snake. Why would even bother? He already knew the outcome. Disappear off to create other alien races? Sure, but he is all powerful he could just snap his fingers and have 100 alien races. Why did it take 6 days to create earth and the heavens? Why did he need a day of rest on the 7th? I thought he was supposed to be all powerful? There are thousands, perhaps millions of these kind of issues.
I could write a 20 page paper on all the logic flaws of the first page of the genesis. (Pretty much any version.) Many of them centered around what I call: "the superhero problem."
All of which ofcourse strongly points to the various god concepts being created by the imaginations of humans.
Kataclismic
Re: " If he's trying to see what kind of person you are it makes more sense to be undetected doesn't it?"
Yeah but nah. He's got that whole quad omni thing going on. He knows what kind of person you are.. Think Santa's impressive knowing if you've been bad or good? Pffft! Santa's got nothin on God! He knows what you're going to do, before you do it, before you're even born.
And that's why you can't trust video games.
https://youtu.be/CysFu1-sZdI
@Permalink UK_Geologist
You call yourself a Geologist HA! Explain the Shroud of Turin! Explain the Trees! Just look around you!
1. I tell you God is evident in all who seek with their heart and you turn around and start using your BRAIN. What did you not understand in the frigging post? You should drop to your knees and beg JESUS for forgiveness with ALL YOUR HEART! Or at least start listening.
2. The book is published. It has been peer reviewed a million times. It's called the BIBLE. Open your eyes and you won't sound so ignorant. Every academic in the world who is worth his salt, has read it and reviewed it. AND by the way, MOST ACCEPT IT.
3. I said it and it is true. Now if more people like you would follow my advice, which comes directly from God, Jesus, and the Bible, there would be a whole lot less screaming and gnashing of teeth in hell. "I said it and it is true."
4. James Bond is a character in a book. You are comparing James bond to Jesus, The All Mighty Creator of the Universe? Really? This is a Category Error of the most basic kind. A juvenile logical fallacy. Because James Bond is not real, Jesus was not real? How ignorant is that? Because Santa Claus is not real, you had no parents. That makes perfect logic using your version of the process. At least you understand that "No science book is proof of anything." Science is just a belief system. Just like religion. We accept books because we fact check them. So when are you going to do what I told you to do and stop intellectualizing all this garbage. Drop to your knees and beg JESUS for forgiveness right now. WITH ALL YOUR HEART. " "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction." Proverbs: 1:7 A fool's lips walk into a fight, and his mouth invites a beating. Proverbs: 18:6 Whoever trusts in his own mind (LOGIC AND REASON) is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom (WITH HIS HEART) will be delivered. Proverbs: 28:26
5. Refer to response number 3
6. Refer to response number 3
7. Refer to response number 3
8. Mount Everest is the largest mountain. You don't even know what planet you are living on. All you do is make false claims and pretend you know something. From base to summit Mauna Kea is the largest mountain in the world. I repeat - Geologist HA! "we'd have to go there and check, measure the damn thing." And if we did we would find that Mauna Kea is LARGER! Read a book!
"When we pin down theologians ." What are you a taxidermist now? When have you ever "pinned down" a theologian. Show me one and I will show you fifty that will disagree and fully and completely demonstrate the flaws in your attempts to be logical. Logic Comes from God. He wrote it on your heart. You are a thinking being because he made you that way,. You can have no rational for logic without GOD. In fact, You know God is real. You are just angry and denying it.
I am completely convinced that this post has something to do with my missing tooth and massive amounts of Thorazine.
Proverbs 14:7-9 ESV /
Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge. The wisdom of the prudent is to discern his way, but the folly of fools is deceiving. Fools mock at the guilt offering, but the upright enjoy acceptance.
So obviously I will never post again on this site! I will leave you all to your foolishness. I have prayer meetings to conduct and worship to do. Remember Jesus loves you and will forgive you for your transgressions. Act now with all your heart or burn in hell forever.
Hey UK_Geologist
Welcome to the site!!!
Cog's Alter Ego.
@Cog
Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit..... *quickly taking off necklace*....Cog! Cog! Snap out of it, man!....*removing tooth from necklace*.....*covering root of tooth with super glue*....Quick! Open your mouth wide!.....*shoves tooth into empty socket*.... Okay, now close your mouth and put pressure on that tooth for thirty seconds.....*looking at watch.......* ...5... 4....3...2...1... Good. Should be set now....Talk to me, big guy. How ya doin'? C'mon, give us a sign here....*snapping fingers in front of face*....COG!!!!...
Somebody grab some coffee and energy shots! STAT!!!
Breathe, Tin Man! Breathe!
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