Why do you believe in God, MGT?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:14, archived)

because the Universe is an idea,
and only a mind can formulate an idea.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:17, archived)

The universe is an accident, not an idea.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:18, archived)

accident is an idea.
I think you will have some difficulty thinking of anything that isn't an idea.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:19, archived)

What do you mean the universe is an idea?
In what sense? Could it not just be a coincidence?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:22, archived)

what would it coincide with in that case?

( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:23, archived)

A million other universes that aren't being experienced, purely by virtue of the fact nothing is alive within them to experience it.
I doesn't really solve the problem of deciding how the universe/s came about but I like to think of it as almost an infinite evolution of universes exploding into being and wilting out of existence until eventually one came along that produced life, or this is one instance of one that produced life.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:29, archived)

how can they be meaningfully be said to exist if no-one experiences them?
tree falling down in woods etc. But see Berkeley on this point.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:34, archived)

I've always found the whole 'if it can't be experienced then it doesn't exist' thing to be incredibly arrogant.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:37, archived)

Yet that one statement completely undermines MGT's argument for God.

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:40, archived)

God experiences God.
He is "always about in the quad," of course.

It's this faith in the independent existence of physical matter that baffles me, when all we really have is sense impressions, which are a sort of thought.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:47, archived)

So you don't believe in evolution?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:48, archived)

I don't know how that follows.
At least, no more so than that I don't believe in gravitational force, or electrons. The history of reality is what it is. The question is what reality is.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:52, archived)

'independent existence of physical matter '

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:54, archived)

Wait...you don't believe in gravity?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:54, archived)

Physical matter is an artifact,
it is our own human interpretation of sense data. So is gravity. The sense data is consistent in certain ways, is all we can say. We label where it comes from as "physical matter" but that is just a metaphysical brick wall.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:01, archived)

Is this not sort of turning into the question of 'what is consciousness' rather than a discussion about religion?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:03, archived)

"What is consciousness" is a vital question in religion.
But "self reference" is a central concept. Or to put the problem concisely, "how does reality bootstrap?"
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:09, archived)

Can we come back to the initial question of whether or not you believe in evolution?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:18, archived)

Believe is too strong a word.
I don't doubt it. But it doesn't have a great deal of impact on my theology. Although I've lately started to come round to the idea that evolution is theologically significant in a positive way.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:23, archived)

So you don't believe God created man in his own image and all that?
How old do you believe the Earth to be?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:25, archived)

We are created in God's image,
this gets complex. I fear it may be beyond the remit of the side of the page.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:32, archived)

That's why I put the links up the top.
If we are created in God's image, why do we have so many imperfections? Surely God is perfect and therefore so must we be?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:37, archived)

And in what image is every other animal created in?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:39, archived)

I wonder,
at this point, whether by "image" you are thinking "physical appearance". This is not the case. It is the mental image I speak of, such faculties as powers of reason and creativity, which beasts may possess in some small measure but reached increasing fulfillment as evolution progressed.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:43, archived)

In that case, why would God have given me the means to reject the idea of him?
That doesn't sound like something an intelligent designer would do.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:46, archived)

An existence doesn't have to be meaningful for it to be an existence.
That doesn't sound like a very religious sentiment.

Also, is God watching over the whole universe or just one planet in it?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:39, archived)

Existence is meaningful,
that is a religious sentiment.

It exists precisely because God "watches over it".
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:51, archived)

Yet there is no proof for this and quite a lot of proof to the contrary.

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:52, archived)

absolutely to the contrary,
the Enlightenment with all its self-declared "rationalism" stated that space and time were absolute, that the laws of nature were entirely deterministic, that phenomena were all explainable in terms of this substance called "matter". All of this science has shown to be wrong. Space and time are relative, matter and energy are equivalent, particles are waves and vice-versa, and that with no medium to propagate them. It took decades for them to finally get over the results of the Michelson-Morley experiments, Atomism was finally proven and destroyed the idea of the continuity of matter, Kurt Godel brought logical positivism to a sorry end. Quantum Mechanics requires that the outcome of quantum events are not decided until someone observes them - and cosmology has declared that the universe is the result of a quantum event. Science can only comment on the utility of all this in terms of the predictability of phenomena. Metaphysically we are left with an enormous mystery, greater than the one that the Enlightenment originally set out to dispel.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:58, archived)

Ergo, God exists?
Science is humble about what it knows and doesn't know. It disproves itself often, that is its point. Do you not think it's a bit of a cop-out to just attribute everything we are yet to discover to a divine creator?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:01, archived)

Except post-normal science, which is a more polite term than "self-serving propaganda".

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:06, archived)

I hope science is humble now,
it certainly doesn't seem to have been to some people in the 18th century.

Yes that is a cop-out but that is not where I'm coming from. It's not just what's left unsolved so much as what has been solved and what it points to. Quantum Mechanics et al makes so much more sense when the Universe is conceived in terms of a sort of fiction inside the divine mind than it does in terms of absolutist material substance, this latter assumption having led so many astray and continues to do so.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:07, archived)

It was probably due to the repercussions of not believing in God that Science wasn't so sure of itself back then.
Doesn't religion also lead many more people astray in making them ignorant to science? I can't defend people who come to inaccurate scientific conclusions more than to say at least they are trying to come to a rational conclusion rather than substitute their ignorance for belief in a higher power.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:15, archived)

Various religions are guilty of various things,
but on the whole the case stating religion deliberately tries to obstruct science is massively overstated. Some fringe fundamentalists do that, on the whole most people don't take much notice, although I'm disturbed by recent developments in the U.S. as well the recent Muslim uptake of creationism.

I'm going to call you on your narrow definition of "rational conclusion" though. It seems to you it is necessarily only a rational conclusion if God isn't in it. Or "begging the question," to use the phrase properly.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:20, archived)

I'm not saying it deliberately tries to obstruct science but it nevertheless obstructs science.
And, to me, religion and God are fairly irrational so any conclusion would never include God, unless someone proved the existence of God.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:24, archived)

It doesn't obstruct science in principle.
Sometimes it morally disapproves of some kinds of experiments, and rightly so in my opinion. That doesn't make it opposed to knowledge of the natural world. On the contrary, quite a lot of good science was done in the Islamic world in the middle ages because of a Qur'anic commandment to "observe nature and learn", they were well ahead of the West in the field of optics, these are the unacknowledged Giants upon whose shoulders Newton stood.

But if you're going to decide that God is irrational from the outset then how am I to proceed? I can only say that it isn't really very scientific, or like the way philosophers tend to carry on. But Godel published a proof of God if you want to look at that.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:31, archived)

I'm of the opinion you really can't believe in both science and religion completely.
Eventually, one will clash with the other. I also don't believe you should be able to pick and choose which parts of a religion you believe in. Either you're all in or all out. Disregarding one aspect cheapens a belief in another aspect.

I can only say 'fair play' to anyone religious who helped to observe and learn nature but I don't doubt those conclusions would have been reached at some point, maybe even sooner than that if people weren't immediately attributing the existence of things to a higher power.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:36, archived)

The universe appears to be the three-dimensional surface of a hypersphere (the four-dimensional analogue of a sphere.)
If this is true, it begs an important and probably unanswerable question: what's underneath, or above the surface?
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:24, archived)

More universes.

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:25, archived)

no, it raises it.

( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:27, archived)

Shut up, Robin.

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:28, archived)

So you don't so much believe in a Christian God, just a creator?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:19, archived)

well "Christian" is a difficult word for me,
I don't believe in a lot of things that are generally associated with christians, such as immortal souls, for instance, and Hell, and the Trinity. But as for how I understand the term "God", I think Abraham had the right idea, as well as many who took his lead.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:21, archived)

So you're a jew?

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:23, archived)

well sadly not, perhaps,
because to be a Jew you have to have Jewish parents. Well you can convert, if you really want to, but they don't like it much. To be Jewish is more than just to believe in that particular God, but to be under that particular covenant from that particular God. Or to dispel a certain common misunderstanding I seem to hear a lot, Jews don't believe that non-Jews go to Hell. It's perhaps a defining paradox of Judaism, that they believe in a Universal God but not a Universal religion.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:27, archived)

Jews don't believe in the afterlife, do they?
And I thought it was only orthodox jews that got uppity about conversion?
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:29, archived)

Jews believe in "the World to Come,"
that is one of the pillars of their faith. This isn't necessarily the same thing as having immortal souls, although they have also come to believe in this, it isn't original. It gets complex.

I don't know what the Liberal stance is on conversion but even from my own perspective it's unnecessary. It's their tradition and their culture, it would seem like butting in. It's only the theology and metaphysics that has truth value, not the customs.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:37, archived)

Why do you believe in a certain God but disregard all other God's that humanity has created?
Is your religion due to your initial exposure to the idea of a God, that is to say the first you were taught, or have you sort of whittled down your choices to arrive at your current belief?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:32, archived)

My parents weren't really religious, if that's what you mean.
They were married in a church and got me Christened but that's about the extent of their church-going, these were just the done things. My dad was more into theories about aliens, my mum didn't much care about anything that didn't help with the housework.

I've investigated a lot of things. There's a certain amount of truth all over the place, the Buddha said some sensible things but Buddhism is properly agnostic although it has absorbed a lot of Hindu metaphysics. There's a lot of interesting Hindu philosophy as well, in fact my own view of the Universe has something in common with the Hindu cosmology lately. But Hinduism is still at root naive polytheism that has developed more towards monism through intellectual speculation. Judaism is interesting almost for being the other way around.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:45, archived)

Sikhism is interesting in that it expresses a fundamental physical truth in spiritual terms.
Their higher power is not a named deity but an intangible, universal force of light, truth, order, etc. - and it has since been deduced that the very presence of stuctured matter from atoms to life itself resulted from the prevalence of order against entropy.
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:58, archived)

I don't know where you intend to go with this.
The Sikhs call God "Waheguru" but note that it is only one name amongst any number of possible names. They meditate upon the "naam" or "name".
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:04, archived)

So do you pray to anyone?
What is the extent of your religion, beyond believing someone created the universe?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:26, archived)

Yes,
and I'm very strongly moral. I don't believe myself to be the centre of the Universe. God's will, not mine, be done. I have come to despair of humanism, which seems to be mankind self-congratulating and self-exalting. The value of humanity is entirely contingent on the will of God.

I go to church because I believe I have a duty not to "go it alone", community is important, as is ritual, although ritual is to some degree arbitrary but serves as an exercise in mindfulness. If our lives are entirely secular, we can easily forget God completely. Ritual serves as a reminder and is habit-forming.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:33, archived)

So when God allows a tidal wave to kill thousands of people or a guilty man to go free, it is purely part of a grander plan?
I too believe a sense of community is important but the whole ritual thing with regards to religion seems a bit self-congratulatory on the part of God.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:37, archived)

Isaiah 45:7
Well that depends on the rituals. I'm currently developing my understanding of "the humility of God," it exists in Judaism already, another one of its many paradoxes.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:39, archived)

A religion is full of paradoxes and self-contradiction?
HEAVEN FORBID!
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:42, archived)

I said paradoxes,
I didn't say self-contradiction. Maths is full of paradoxes.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:48, archived)

Why is your God the right God?
I only believe in one God less than you do, how do you know you've picked the right one?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:47, archived)

This deserves attention,
but a /talk user can post more questions than a wise man can answer.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:10, archived)

Are you the 'wise man' in this discussion then, for believing something without a shred of proof?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:17, archived)

No I'm just being a little flippant,
apologies.

What do you regard as "proof" exactly? Given that empirical science only falsifies its theories, while proof in the absolute sense only exists in mathematics.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:25, archived)

Proof as in evidence beyond a simple belief.

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:27, archived)

What counts as evidence, then?
I take it you mean empirical evidence? But all empirical evidence of the senses has to be interpreted to draw any conclusions from it, by use of our powers of logical reasoning. In practice we also tend to employ a great many assumptions. What I am saying to you is that the existence of physical material substance as the basis for all phenomena is such an assumption that we owe to times far past but we still cling to even after science has rendered it untenable, because, as you say, modern atheists reject the alternative a-priori as "irrational" despite the fact that it is the only explanation that remains that makes any sense.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:40, archived)

The belief in the existence of an ultimate creator who we can't see, hear, touch or feel; who is everywhere and nowhere all at once; who knows what we're thinking and can judge us for it is an explanation that makes sense?
Would it not be more reasonable to just admit that we don't know some things and perhaps never will?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:44, archived)

all that's needed is a nice pub.
you have your community and your rituals, job done
( real i'm not happy 'til you're not happy, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:00, archived)

Fair enough, each to their own.
Personally, things are always a shit load more mundane than anything quite so magnificent as a God.

I always thought a belief in the almighty was a way of sticking ones head in the sand or shouting LALALALALALA to the possibility that this is all just a random existence, there is no point and your life is essentially completely futile and you might just as well climb back up a tree and groom a chimp.

Mind you, what the fuck would I know, I work in finance.
( mark morrisons prison shoes I love Willie, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:38, archived)

Not believing in God is not a synonym for seeing no purpose to life.
Keats argued that Newton had destroyed the beauty of a rainbow by explaining it's colours. I believe it just makes it that bit more wondrous. I suppose it comes down to which side of the fence you sit on with regards science and belief.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:45, archived)

I'm with Feynman on this,
but Newton was no atheist. He only explained phenomena in terms of more fundamental phenomena, but we still need a source for phenomena as such.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:49, archived)

Belief is pointless I'd say.
Things either exist or they don't. If you squeeze your eyes shut and tell yourself cars don't exist, won't stop you getting fucked up walking across a motorway. God as a concept or ideal I can accept to a degree but as a physical being? Not at all.

It does all boil down to belief at the end of the day, after the full 90 mins etc... but faith means dick really, it's just telling yourself something over and over again for the sake of it, regardless of it being true or not. There is as much evidence for the existence of Batman as there is for a God.

Mankind has looked at a deity for answers to tough questions many many thousands of years before the deity of Judaism/Christianity/Islam. I personally think we might just not need the crutch anymore.

Again, I live in Glasgow, what the fuck would I know.
( mark morrisons prison shoes I love Willie, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:57, archived)

You're the first one to mention "faith",
and you have defined it peculiarly, from my perspective.

I believe only what makes sense to me, knowing that we do not have direct experience of reality, but only have access to sense impressions from which the truth must be deduced as best we can.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:13, archived)

Faith is to believe in something despite a complete lack of evidence, or indeed evidence to the contrary.
Religion is built on faith. Essentially you either have it or you don't and I don't.

May father is a priest in the Scottish Episcopal church and this is essentially how he'd define it. You're with it or you're out, you accept all the stupid hocus pocus stuff and just ride with it or you don't.

Getting hooked up on "what is reality" is essentially self defeating.
( mark morrisons prison shoes I love Willie, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:27, archived)