Thread: tsixE doG seoD

Originally posted by Belisarius
Ok this is a thread where you have to argue the oppossite of what you really believe, don't try to come off as sarcastic, try to make convincing arguements for the oppossing side of the debate and stick to them. The topic:

Does God Exist?

I don't think there's an opposite view to "I don't know," other than "I know," and I don't.

Damn me and my agnostic ways.

Is there any sicentific proof god exists?

Let's rather take a step back and lets decide if science is the right way to determine if God exists. And why/why not.

Ooo, I like this idea! Okay, here we go.

God does not exist. I don't just mean in the traditional, personified, dude-in-a-cloud way; that, I could almost buy. But the idea that some spirit hangs over the entire universe, has His hand in the workings of all manner of things, and existed before existence is absolutely absurd.

I hear people say that you can see evidence of His presence everywhere you look. You know what I see? Logic. Order. Rules that have always been and will always be consistently adhered to. It seems to me that evidence of a willful act of a being that exists outside this framework of natural law would manifest as a disturbance in the predictable outcome of events. Every anomaly can be described; all one must do is understand what actually caused it. That the Sun rose in the east and set in the west was attributed to gods, once. The Sun is not a charriot of fire, kids. The Earth flies around the Sun, and rotates in such a way that our field of vision oscilates from solar exposure to terrestial obstruction: day and night. No kidding. Every day, God is proven false. And don't try that quantum chaos crap. It's not that quarks and leptons don't obey rules, we just haven't defined those rules yet. From the Big Bang to the human brain, there is just no room for a deity there. Period.

(Jeez, that was hard!)

Clever idea, Beli.

Erm...OK then, I say, that it is impossible for such a being with the qualities to be called "God" to exist.

Now, I'm no bradybaker, so I don't exactly have the kind of knowledge to write a personal essay in this direction, but this site sort of gets at what I'm saying. If we are to say that "God", in being "perfect", is a composite of all of these certain attributes, then since the physical plausibility quotient of even a powerful being having all of said attributes is very minimal (0.2, according to the site), then it is highly unlikely that this "God" exists.

I'm not trying to cheat, but here is the "metaphysical engineers' report" from said site, having entered God as potentially having all of the aforementioned attributes which would make him the commonly imagined entity:

"The problem of suffering

Your God is omnipotent (all-powerful, able to do anything), omnibenevolent (all-loving) and omniscient (all-knowing).

The metaphysical engineers have found it hard to model this God in a universe like our own. The problem is this: our universe contains vast amounts of suffering, much of which seems either entirely unnecessary or unnecessarily severe. Although some of this is the result of human action, and thus may be seen as an inevitable consequence of human free will, much is not. Plagues, floods and famines are not all the result of human action. Even the idea that human free will explains the existence of much suffering is hard to accept, since God, if all-powerful, could surely limit our capacity to harm others or suffer at their hands (after all, there are many other limits on what we are able to do).

So why is there all this suffering? If God cannot prevent it, it would seem she is not all-powerful. If God doesn't want to stop it, it would seem she is not all-loving. If God doesn't know about it, she can't be all-knowing.

The metaphysical engineers are continuing to study theodicies, which are attempts to resolve this difficulty, known as the problem of evil.

*******************

The problem of loving too much

Your God is omnipotent (all-powerful, able to do anything), omnibenevolent (all-loving) and a perfectly free agent.

The metaphysical engineers have confronted a difficulty modelling this God. If perfectly free, then God could choose whatever she wants. Nothing could stop this because God is omnipotent. But this God is also all-loving. It seems to the engineers that such a God could never choose to do something which is unloving. It is not that God just chooses not to do such things, rather that God's nature as omnibenevolent constrains what she can do. In other words, God does not have the freedom and/or the power to do something unloving.

One possible response is that God isn't necessarily omnibenevolent, but, as a matter of fact, since she never chooses to do something which is unloving, is omnibenevolent. However, if this is true, then the metaphysical engineers can't see how omnibenevolence can be a necessary characteristic of a God.

The metaphysical engineers suggest that this whole issue may hinge on a problem with their understanding of "a perfectly free agent". It cannot mean what it seems to mean, namely, that God can choose to do literally anything.

*******************

God the sustainer?

Your God is the sustainer of all that is. This means that if God ceased to exist so would everything else.

The metaphysical engineers are finding it hard to model this God in our universe. The laws of physics do not seem to require that the universe has anything outside of itself to continue to exist. Therefore, they can't quite see what kind of evidence it would be possible to point to in order to come to the belief that God is required for the universe to continue.

When they have previously confronted this problem, it has been suggested that a law-giver or law-enforcer is required in order to sustain the laws of physics. But this response seems to rest on a misunderstanding of the nature of physical laws. Laws in the legal sense do require law-givers and law-enforcers. But physical laws are simply descriptions of the nature of reality. So the idea that a law-giver is needed to sustain the rules of physics seems to confuse the legal and scientific senses of laws.

*******************

Not so personal after all?

The metaphysical engineers are finding it hard to understand how, on your conception of God, one can have a personal relationship with her.

Personal relationships appear to depend on a number of things. Sufficient similarity between the persons in the relationship is one. Another is that both are persons, or are, at least, person-like, as some higher primates, for example, appear to be. The problem is that in our universe there seem to be no genuine personal relationships between things of great difference. And God, as you have described her, is vastly different from human beings.

People can have feelings for things which are similar to those they have towards people. Affection or love for places or objects, for example, is common. But this is not the same as having a personal relationship with them. In a similar way, people have relationships with animals, maybe a cat. But this does not seem to be the same as a personal relationship, because of the great difference in the way the person relates to the animal and the way the animal relates to the person. Perhaps this is the kind of relationship which you envisaged?

*******************

Can God do the illogical?

The metaphysical engineers request clarification of what you mean when you say God is able to do anything.

In the model, God was asked to make 2 + 2 = 5 (where all the terms hold their common meanings). She could not do so and the model broke down. It seems that no being can ever do what is logically impossible. It is not just beyond the wit of humanity to make 2 + 2 = 5, such a thing is a contradiction in terms.

So the metaphysical engineers seek your permission to understand by all-powerful that God can do anything which is logically possible. Before accepting this, however, you should understand that by accepting the limits of logical possibility on God, you are leaving open the possibility that, if some characteristics you attribute to God turn out to entail logical contradictions, you must give these up. It means, in effect, accepting that rationality is a constraint on God (though it is a moot point exactly what the word constraint means in this regard).

*******************

Why this universe?

Your God is omnipotent (all-powerful, able to do anything), omnibenevolent (all-loving), omniscient (all-knowing) and the creator of all that exists.

The metaphysical engineers have run up against a problem. When your God created the universe, being all-knowing, she must have known about all the suffering there would be in this world. Yet God still created it, as it is. She did not create a more benign version of the universe, or simply choose not to create the universe. Why is this?

It could be that God did not know about all the suffering which would occur. But that would make God not all-knowing. It could be that God doesn't mind all the suffering, but that would make her less than all-loving. It could be that God could not have created a more benign world than this one. But that would seem to make God less than all-powerful. The only way we can resolve this problem is to conclude that God can only do what is possible and that this really is the best of all possible worlds. The metaphysical engineers find it hard to model this resolution as they think they can make a better world quite easily. For example, they are able to make human brains more hardy and thus reduce the incidence of psychopathology, resulting in an immediate decline, in their model, of crimes of sadistic murder. Are they mistaken in some way?

*******************

For eternity?

The metaphysical engineers request clarification of what you mean when you say God exists eternally.

You may mean that God exists through all space and time. But according to our best physics, space and time exist only within the confines of a universe. This would seem to constrain God's existence to within a universe.

You could mean that God exists "outside" space and time. But the metaphysical engineers find it hard to understand what you mean by "eternally", if that's the case. Doesn't the concept "eternally" require some notion of time to make sense? The metaphysical engineers are still puzzling over these issues.

*******************"
Just as an interesting observation, argument aside, if you only enter God as "Omniscient", "The Creator", and "Perfectly Free", the plausibility quotient is 1.0...

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy