Post Any Evidence For God Here

[Ray Rider]

Classic Neo insolence from back when I tried to be nice and debate normally.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29531&p=884495

Good stuff from Guiscard and Suggs too.

I miss those guys.

My original posting of the pic.

That's an interesting read! Thanks for posting the link, I haven't seen that thread for ages.

[MeDeFe]

john, your reply tells me that you haven't understood a word I wrote.

[vodean]

so basically there is no evidence for god that cannot be easily countered. except israel, but unless the us is god, then thats out too. the us COULD be god...

[Neoteny]

You totally misunderstood man.

That's a picture of God..

..and he's hungry.

I make no claims as to god's sex. But if he turns out to be the child, he is a she.

[PLAYER57832]

so basically there is no evidence for god that cannot be easily countered. except israel, but unless the us is god, then thats out too. the us COULD be god...

Basically, there is no evidence for God if one has no desire to believe.

And if you believe... it is evidence enough.

[john9blue]

john, your reply tells me that you haven't understood a word I wrote.

^ lol, too good...

[GabonX]

You totally misunderstood man.

That's a picture of God..

..and he's hungry.

I make no claims as to god's sex. But if he turns out to be the child, he is a she.

Well they both look pretty hungry..

Do you know if the bird is a she?

(In all seriousness that is a really sad photo. If memory serves me correctly, the person that took it went into a deep depression and wound up committing suicide..)

[2dimes]

Wait, which one is God?

This picture proves nothing in my opinion. Because there is suffering on the earth does not disprove God. The bible (where we get the christian god from) says that there will be suffering and death because of evil choices by humans so all that picture does is prove God was right???

This is after all the point of having a heaven is it not. The Idea of a better place. And where does that Idea come from? Where does the Idea of "better" come from from. "Better" than what?

I guess some very young innocent children deserve to be eaten alive.

God was the fourth one present, he gave that photographer and possibly his companions the choices, to help out another human, or just take pictures to document as the child dies to become food for the buzzard. Like me and possibly some of you, God hopes the right decision is made and the child is given an opportunity it did not happen to be born into. He can intervene but put the photographer in position to decide if he's going to help or just pass through and take a picture on his way to lunch at the hotel.

This may have been done to give the photographer the choice "Do the right thing and help or just spend his days providing proof that God's not helping." Is God to blame for the photographer's choice if it's not to help the child? That seems to be the opinion here.

People put restrictions on how God can fix things all the time. It reminds me of the joke about the Christian trapped in a flood.

He's on his steps and a person comes by in a 4x4 that can drive in the water and offers to give him a ride to safety. "No thanks, God will save me."
Later the water is much higher, he has gone to the second story of his house on a balcony and a boat comes by offering him a ride to safety, "No thanks, the Lord will save me."
Finally the water is so high he has climbed to the roof and is getting wet. A helicopter comes and they tell him he needs to come with them or he'll be killed for sure. "No thanks, God will save me. I have faith and was praying all day."
The man is over come by the waters and treads for as long as he can finally drowning.
He enters heaven and is quite dissapointed in what happened. He asks, "God, why didn't you save me from drowning?"
God replies, "I'm not sure what you wanted. I sent a truck, a boat and finally a helicopter."

[PLAYER57832]

There were more choices than that.

If the photographer did not take the photo, then we would not have the same knowledge of the tragedy. Seeing has undoubtedly moved people who might not otherwise act, to act. I don't know the outcome. I do know that even with direct and immediate intervention from that photographer, from even the best of medical care, the likelihood is that child would die. However, I also know that this photo has spurred many people to act differently. That one photo, that one child is likely to have saved many others.

Is it a balance? Not to those involved.

But, the real answer comes with choices and evil. We either have choices or we don't. If we have choices, we may choose wrong, even terribly wrong, and many, many consequences result. Consequences happen no matter what we choose.

As a Christian, I believe that God knows all, knows the end. He gave us one path through the law, another through Jesus (part of the same, but anyway). Some say (within Christianity) he gave other paths, some limit it to those two. As a Christian I believe that no matter the pain, no matter the horror, the end is good. In the meantime, we are each obligated to so what we can to relieve suffering.

But also remember the story of the "imperfect angel" (and its many variations). Sometimes bad things are allowed to exist so that we might prove that we can do better.

[Neoteny]

You totally misunderstood man.

That's a picture of God..

..and he's hungry.

I make no claims as to god's sex. But if he turns out to be the child, he is a she.

Well they both look pretty hungry..

Do you know if the bird is a she?

(In all seriousness that is a really sad photo. If memory serves me correctly, the person that took it went into a deep depression and wound up committing suicide..)

I can't tell. Birds are weird anyhow.

He was a war photographer according to wikipedia, so I'm sure this is only the tip of what he saw, but he did commit suicide and he mentioned a good bit in his note. There appears to be some discussion about the actual circumstances of the photo, but regardless of how it occurred, it's a very depressing shot, and speaks for itself very well. It won a Pulitzer for a reason.

[MeDeFe]

john, your reply tells me that you haven't understood a word I wrote.

^ lol, too good...

I'm glad you can laugh at your own failures, you must be a very cheerful person.

Look, I'll make you an offer, you re-read my reply to your essay and reply to it with one coherent text rather than with one-sentence snippets and paragraphs in the margin. Partly because it will help you get your arguments (if you indeed have any) in order, and partly because I can't be arsed to edit that abomination of quotes and colours you spawned.

[AAFitz]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - the bravest people in the world are atheists. If they are right, they're just dead. If they are wrong, they're in bad shape.

Perhaps, but I think any Believer in a true God of Good, would probably realize no such God would concern himself with petty things such as origin of birth, or faith taught since birth, including exclusion of any faith. Clearly, as any parent, a Good God would only reward/punish on an infinitely fair scale, and only actions towards His children would be relevant. No doubt if there is no god, and an atheist chooses to live a life of evil, there is now doubt, that reward will be unlikely, however, the same is true of a believer, and while saying thanks, and saying I love you every day is nice...I think its fair to say any higher power will not be fooled.

Without a doubt an atheist is brave, but no more so than anyone of any other religion, for since there are many, all with different ideas and rules, many of which involve not worshiping the wrong God...They may be said to be taking more of a chance.

For living an honest life and working to build a better world, is probably better than choosing one group of rules to follow, religiously, and wasting time on thanks praise, for an entity, who by definition would be immune to such actions.

In fact, since the atheist wastes no time, on things that may not exist, and lives his/her life, which may be the only minutes we get in the universe of time, it could be said the Believer, who gives up such a precious and unique asset of time, which very well could be finite, is very, very brave in choosing one of the many supposed Gods, and hoping he exists, and hoping they get something from their time, when logically its possible, that a small mistake in belief, could give them the exact opposite.

[john9blue]

It's 306 words, without the first and the last line that are obviously not part of the main text. The quantity is there, but the quality is so lacking that I hardly know where to begin.

I'll make a list of the main points and then go into the details as necessary.

Firstly, you do not understand the meaning of "possible", particularly "logically possible". A concept is logically possible if it contains no internal contradictions. Just for the sake of completeness: The other important category is "naturally possible", a concept is naturally possible if it does not contradict the natural laws of our world.

Ok, but anything naturally possible is also logically possible, right? IDK where you're going here but I'll wait...

Secondly, you claim that natural selection is a process with a direction, that it will lead to a particular goal. This is bullshit of the highest degree, with one ounce of this dung you could fertilize enough land to bring an end to starvation all over the world.

So you're saying natural selection is random? It's not. It tends to select for the fittest. Otherwise it would be pointless. There is a direction.

Thirdly, you fail to understand that even if it is in any way possible to apply natural selection to things like religion, you cannot deduce that religion must be good for society in order to perpetuate itself.

Yeah I can't. I'm not trying to deduce though, it's inductive. If a religion shows itself to be good for many societies in the past, it will likely (not certainly) be good for society in the future.

Fourthly, you seem to think that natural selection is a philosophical or moral position, in this regard you're simply wrong. Natural selection is a concept that originated in biology strictly to explain biological phenomena through a natural process, while it may be possible to describe phenomena outside of biology with this process, it has no moral, ethical or philosophical contents whatsoever.

Yeah, I'm not trying to discover ultimate truth/morality using natural selection, just explaining how our current system of morals came to be. Societies with morals that didn't work died, ones with working morals survived, and passed on their system of morality. That's why natural selection applies, and how it helps determine the morals that are best for society as a whole.

1. Possibility
"A world better than the one in which we live." I see no contradictions in such a sentence but, admittedly, it lacks contents and the question "Better how?" is reasonable to ask, so let's say "a world in which noone starves". Arguably starvation is a bad thing and a world in which noone starves would be better than the current world in which some people starve. I can easily imagine a world in which noone starves that is otherwise identical to ours in all relevant aspects. I see no contradictions in the term "a world with no starvation". Unless you can show me how the term itself if meaningless we must conclude that such a world is logically possible.
If a better world is logically possible, Leibniz and Pangloss can suck my dick.

Ultimately it is very hard to tell whether starvation is good or bad. What if I told you that the smarter someone is, the less likely they will starve, so starvation tends to kill off less intelligent people, making our species smarter, and leading to more progress and prosperity for thousands of generations into the future? It's how the rest of the animals on Earth work. That's why I bring up natural selection so much, because it accounts for this, and helps explain why some suffering might ultimately be good.

2. The non-directedness of natural selection
Natural selection posits that the fittest individuals of a given population are more likely to pass on their traits to a larger number of offspring than the average. "Fittest" can be defined as "best adapted to the given environment". This means, however, that "fitness" is not something absolute but relative to an overall situation, if the environment changes, the traits that used to be contributive to fitness may turn out to be a disadvantage.
Traits that are advantageous may be linked to other traits that are disadvantageous and will appear together in a significant amount of individuals, thus leading to no overall increase in fitness. E.g. Vipera berus, the dark individual tend to be somewhat larger and stronger and they need less time to get warm in the sun, however, predators that prey on them also have an easier time spotting them.

Nowhere in the definition is there any such thing as a "direction" of natural selection, it is a mindless process that will work in any way depending on any number of details.

See above, natural selection will sometimes work for the worse, but those bad traits will be "deselected" in time. I'm not talking about individual cases or species, I'm talking over long, long periods of time. NS will always do exactly what it needs to do to ensure that species (or anything) survive by becoming better. To go back to the Catholic Church example, if they still required masses in Latin and persecuted all nonbelievers or anyone who broke a single commandment, you can bet they wouldn't be where they are today. They adapted to the times and are doing fine.

NS is a mindless process, but so is gravity, and that is very predictable and definitely has a direction. They are both facts of nature.

3. Natural selection, memes and benefit to other entities
Applying the same reasoning as you did, virtually all viruses ought to be beneficial for us since those that somehow make us (their carriers) better should have an edge over those that make us sick. I think empirical evidence will disagree with this. Likewise, if you want to apply natural selection to cultural memes like religion, you need to ask yourself "How do tubgirl and meatspin benefit society?", or maybe lolcats if you want a more innocent example. Yes, from the standpoint of natural selection there's no difference between religions and pictures of cats with captions.

I'm not sure what you mean with the viruses, and what empirical evidence you're talking about, but I'll take your word for it. TG/MS/LC are hilarious/shocking and provide entertainment, and if they didn't then they would hardly be known. Who says they don't benefit society when people are entertained by them?

This is because your basic understanding of natural selection is flawed, you argue that religion (especially Christianity) must be beneficial to society because it has been around and dominant for so long. But then you're putting the cart before the horse because what you're really doing is applying natural selection to societies and concluding that their religions play a role in their dominance

I don't say it MUST be beneficial, I say it probably is beneficial, because if it wasn't, then how do you explain its predominance in many of the world's most developed countries for hundreds/thousands of years?

If you apply natural selection to memes, the memes need only be beneficial to themselves in order to be perpetuated, they may be beneficial to society, but they may equally be detrimental, there is no way to tell since society is the environment in which they thrive or perish.

But if they were detrimental to society, the society would tend to die off, taking the meme with it.

On the other hand, if you apply natural selection to societies religion becomes merely one factor among thousands, under those circumstances it is simply foolish to conclude that religion must be the one contributing factor to a society's dominance.

Yeah I'm not giving religion ALL the credit. But you can't deny that it's a huge social force and has a large impact on how a society operates. You could say the same about systems of government for that matter- the bad ones will die off. Those two definitely deserve a lot of the credit for determining how well a society does.

4. The lack of moral, ethical and philosophical contents in the process of natural selection
Let's go back to my earlier definition of natural selection. "Natural selection posits that the fittest individuals of a given population are more likely to pass on their traits to a larger number of offspring than the average. "Fittest" can be defined as "best adapted to the given environment"."

Yeah. Sometimes I'll stretch the principle beyond biology because I think it's a universal principle, but w/e.

Please demonstrate where in this definition there is anything regarding morality, because I don't see it. I don't even see why you could possibly think there is. While you're at it, please explain where you got the harebrained idea that killing people is beneficial towards spreading ones genes around.

Well like I was saying, I think it applies to things other than biology as well.

Actually I looked up the exact definition of survival of the fittest and found out about this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer

who as you can see extended the concept to societies and culture as a whole (I knew I couldn't have been the first lol). Check this out:

Spencer's interest in psychology derived from a more fundamental concern which was to establish the universality of natural law. In common with others of his generation, including the members of Chapman's salon, he was possessed with the idea of demonstrating that it was possible to show that everything in the universe—including human culture, language, and morality—could be explained by laws of universal validity. This was in contrast to the views of many theologians of the time who insisted that some parts of creation, in particular the human soul, were beyond the realm of scientific investigation. Comte's Systeme de Philosophie Positive had been written with the ambition of demonstrating the universality of natural law, and Spencer was to follow Comte in the scale of his ambition. However, Spencer differed from Comte in believing it was possible to discover a single law of universal application which he identified with progressive development and was to call the principle of evolution.

In 1858 Spencer produced an outline of what was to become the System of Synthetic Philosophy. This immense undertaking, which has few parallels in the English language, aimed to demonstrate that the principle of evolution applied in biology, psychology, sociology (Spencer appropriated Comte's term for the new discipline) and morality. Spencer envisaged that this work of ten volumes would take twenty years to complete; in the end it took him twice as long and consumed almost all the rest of his long life.

So anyway, the morals that are better for society will tend to last longer than those that don't. Simple enough. That's how we developed our international sort of moral code in recent years (e.g. just war theory, diplomacy, Geneva Convention, etc.), because it promotes our survival, and we aren't dumb enough to blow each other to smithereens.

There you go, if you won't respond to that then I can't say I'd be surprised...

[AAFitz]

Secondly, you claim that natural selection is a process with a direction, that it will lead to a particular goal. This is bullshit of the highest degree, with one ounce of this dung you could fertilize enough land to bring an end to starvation all over the world.

So you're saying natural selection is random? It's not. It tends to select for the fittest. Otherwise it would be pointless. There is a direction.

You are still missing the point. It is random. it only selects the fittest for a given situation, not overall fittest. On islands, animals tend to grow smaller, even people do, to survive less resources. This does not make them more fit per-se, only more fit for the island. If they move off the island, and stumble into their bigger counterparts, they will be torn to shred, because they evolved smaller and weaker.

Without a doubt changes happen in order to deal with specific situations, and if that attribute tends to make it less survivable, then it will be more likely to be passed on.

Birds evolution is a great example. Some male birds have evolved absolutely ridiculous feathers simply to attract female birds. There is no doubt that some of these do not make them more fit, but arguably make them far less fit, however, they get passed on, simply because they get to reproduce them.

Most of the female birds match the camoflague of the woods perfectly, whereas the male is like a lighthouse on the beach. That is not more fit, he is basically painting a bullseye on his chest, just to get laid. Sure, it gets him to reproduce, but that hardly means he is more fit and more survivable.

Again, many changes to tend to happen, which help the animals survive, but similarly, many happen that later prove to be the species downfall, as history has shown on a magnitude that is barely comprehensible. Dinosaurs evolved bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and while temporarily successful, it was that evolution that did them in. Only the reasonable sized reptiles survived new situations.

It is simply naive to think there needs to be an underlying purpose simply because something happened. Again, no doubt, many factors contribute to make changes happen, but the combination of those factors cannot be called one force, even though they add up to a seemingly singular force en masse.

There are so many examples of natural selection, not producing an animal more fit its not funny, they just happen to be more fit for a given time or a given place, but many of those changes, often end up making them less fit, and prove to make the entire species extinct. Luck as much as anything will determine how an animal survives. All its evolution process can do is try to cope with the given environment as best it can, and naturally, those best suited will live, and those that arent will die. But reproducing is often the greater goal of a species, than its ultimate fitness. Some literally only are born to reproduce at all. They have evolved to mate for a day, that does not make them more fit, it just makes more of them.

While its clear you miss something so simple and basic, because it is so enormous and complex, is not surprising. Obviously its easier to just assume something is guiding it, but that does not make it so, and it certainly doesnt logically make it so.

[PLAYER57832]

Secondly, you claim that natural selection is a process with a direction, that it will lead to a particular goal. This is bullshit of the highest degree, with one ounce of this dung you could fertilize enough land to bring an end to starvation all over the world.

So you're saying natural selection is random? It's not. It tends to select for the fittest. Otherwise it would be pointless. There is a direction.

You are both wrong here.

Even in the most atheistic interpretation, natural selection is not "random". There are limits from the beginning. Each additional step limits further choices (opens up some, eliminates others). However, it is not "directed" ( atheistically speaking) toward a particular goal, either, which is what I believe MeDeFe was going toward. This is true becuase "pure chance" and random events impact occurances. The selection only occurs within given parameters. For example, a bird that can eat a thistle with thorns might out-compete other birds on an island with lots of those thistles, but if that trait appeared on an island where those thistles were only a few, it would not matter. If a disease later struck those thistles, killing them off, then that trait might even be a disadvantage.

Even within Christianity, where we take as a "given" that God has set forth a plan, there is a question of how much he intervenes. Did he merely set the forces in motion nad more or less stand back or does he intervene regularly and frequently dictating which micro-changes "set" , eventually become macro changes, and which do not. (he obviously intervenes sometimes, but when and how much is not certain)

IN either case, whether you ascribe it to God or to "other", the direction is not obvious to humans and is not necessarily something humans will like.

It's sort of like the old Chinese curse .. "may your every wish be fulfilled". What seems to us a great idea at first can, in fact, be the very worst thing for us.

I realize that seems pretty trite and petty facing a picture of a starving child, but I find the reverse... that all this is happening without reason or cause, to be even worse.

This is because your basic understanding of natural selection is flawed, you argue that religion (especially Christianity) must be beneficial to society because it has been around and dominant for so long. But then you're putting the cart before the horse because what you're really doing is applying natural selection to societies and concluding that their religions play a role in their dominance

I don't say it MUST be beneficial, I say it probably is beneficial, because if it wasn't, then how do you explain its predominance in many of the world's most developed countries for hundreds/thousands of years?

Cut short a lot of the comments (did read them, though).

The problem with saying its beneficial is that the converse is not true. In truth ALL societies, failures and successes, have religious beliefs.

In truth, it is likely there is something fundamental to humanity that need religion, just as we seem to need government.

Within religions, what you say is somewhat true.

If you apply natural selection to memes, the memes need only be beneficial to themselves in order to be perpetuated, they may be beneficial to society, but they may equally be detrimental, there is no way to tell since society is the environment in which they thrive or perish.

But if they were detrimental to society, the society would tend to die off, taking the meme with it.

[/quote]
This would only be certain if all other factors were held equal. They are not. In reality, there are many, many factors that vary, hence the tendency to refer to "random" selections or "random" events, even if we know they are not really and truly random.

This is important within the Christian debate, john, because it is used by the extreme to exploit and distort the truth. It is important in the Atheistic debate because if you insist upon removing any chance of direction, you also ignore the truth, MeDeFe. (science is, of course, nuetral about God, but its important not to slant the arguments either way).

[PLAYER57832]

Secondly, you claim that natural selection is a process with a direction, that it will lead to a particular goal. This is bullshit of the highest degree, with one ounce of this dung you could fertilize enough land to bring an end to starvation all over the world.

So you're saying natural selection is random? It's not. It tends to select for the fittest. Otherwise it would be pointless. There is a direction.

You are still missing the point. It is random.

No, and that is the biggest point.

Almost nothing in nature is truly random in the mathematical sense. I am not sure anything in science is truly random, but no doubt someone will find something somewhere that is.

"Random" in this context simply means "too many factors for humans to really analyze" . Or, "ways we cannot predict, any pattern is beyond our current ability to truly comprehend and analyze".

mathematical randomness is used in sampling, but even that is not TRUE randomness.

[Rocketry]

Rocket.

[Imaweasel]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - the bravest people in the world are atheists. If they are right, they're just dead. If they are wrong, they're in bad shape.

Perhaps, but I think any Believer in a true God of Good, would probably realize no such God would concern himself with petty things such as origin of birth, or faith taught since birth, including exclusion of any faith. Clearly, as any parent, a Good God would only reward/punish on an infinitely fair scale, and only actions towards His children would be relevant. No doubt if there is no god, and an atheist chooses to live a life of evil, there is now doubt, that reward will be unlikely, however, the same is true of a believer, and while saying thanks, and saying I love you every day is nice...I think its fair to say any higher power will not be fooled.

Without a doubt an atheist is brave, but no more so than anyone of any other religion, for since there are many, all with different ideas and rules, many of which involve not worshiping the wrong God...They may be said to be taking more of a chance.

For living an honest life and working to build a better world, is probably better than choosing one group of rules to follow, religiously, and wasting time on thanks praise, for an entity, who by definition would be immune to such actions.

In fact, since the atheist wastes no time, on things that may not exist, and lives his/her life, which may be the only minutes we get in the universe of time, it could be said the Believer, who gives up such a precious and unique asset of time, which very well could be finite, is very, very brave in choosing one of the many supposed Gods, and hoping he exists, and hoping they get something from their time, when logically its possible, that a small mistake in belief, could give them the exact opposite.

interesting.

[Rocketry]

God if you exist please print the image of jesus on a naan break and post it beneath this text:



See, no god...

Rocket.

EDIT: HOLLY FATHER OF CHRIST! HE DID!

[PLAYER57832]

lol

[john9blue]

lol Rocketry.

If by "random" he means that the actual gene mutations are random, then he's right. But as a process it has a "direction", not necessarily divinely guided, but a direction nonetheless: towards becoming more adapted to one's surroundings. Sorry for the confusion...

[notyou2]

God if you exist please print the image of jesus on a naan break and post it beneath this text:



See, no god...

Rocket.

EDIT: HOLLY FATHER OF CHRIST! HE DID!

That proves the Christ was not immaculately conceived...Holly is his mother.

[tzor]

The following is not evidence for God

But it sure is cool looking.

[NotAConservative]

I am Atheist. I base this assumption on the fact that everything must have a start and an end. If there was a God, this would be impossible; if God created everything, who created God?

I will be very surprised if anyone can come up with genuine evidence that a God exists other then their own convictions and the fact that no one will ever entirely disprove God...Until we die

[notyou2]

The following is not evidence for God

But it sure is cool looking.

This proves Sauron exists and he is still trying to get the ring back