[quote]ephrem wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
Because I skipped through most of it. You have to understand, I work and have a family, getting an hour to myself is rare, and usually I am not going to spend it watching someone’s argument to prove somebody Else’s point.
You may find it fascinating and all that jazz, but I received formal education in the matter, Philosophy was my minor and had I stuck out one more quarter, I could have gotten a double major.
What I am saying is I have heard just about every counter argument there is and all remain unconvincing as none of them refute causality. I don’t want to watch a long video to hear something I have already heard.
Skipping around, it seemed that they were leading to using string theory, with all it’s parallel universes and 11 dimensions of space-time to attempt to refute the existence of God because they discovered something new.
Everytime science discovers something they try to prove that God doesn’t exist with. Evolution fails to do it, General relativity fails to do it (Einstein was a theist, btw), quantum theory fails to do it, and string theory fails to do it. You’d think by now people would learn, that a new scientific discovery doesn’t automatically refute God’s existence.
My argument for the existence of God revolves around causality. You have to refute that, for me to even consider an argument as valid. As long as cause and effect relationships remain in effect, then so does the argument from the cosmological style, especially from the point of contingency.
Have you ever studied or gave any thought to epistemology? If you run through a very simple exercise, you realize that you cannot prove the existence of physical matter.
It may sound illogical at first and it doesn’t mean that physical matter does not exist, it simply means you cannot prove it does. Only things you can prove are the objects of metaphysics. Seen through the eyes of naked logic, metaphysical world is more real than the physical.
Don’t believe me? Test me. Give me an argument proving something, anything physical exists, I will show you exactly how you cannot know it a prori, to be true.
Senses are fallible and foolable. Logic is not.
BTW, if you really want me to watch videos make sure they are 5 minutes or less.[/quote]
…there are weird and wonderful things going on in the universe, and we’ve only scratched the surface. I know you don’t consider science to be the enemy of religion, and i realise that if you believe something to exist that can’t be proven [by definition] by science because it exists outside of time and space then any discussion we have on this subject is useless…
…that is why i accept your challenge. No, i haven’t studied epistemology, i had to look it up actually. It confused me. You say senses are fallible and foolable; i agree. Yet you go on to say that logic is not, but how can something that comes from the fallible senses not be equally fallible?
…now i’ve typed this bit of text on a Logitech Illuminated Keyboard. Lovely action and the backlight keyboard is perfect in the dark. It’s nice and flat, and it even sounds nice when you type on it! This keyboard exists in reality. I can see it, i can use it, i can hear it, i spend money on it. It works because you read these words i just typed on it. How can it not exist, or how can i not know it to exist?[/quote]
You should read what I wrote to BackInAction, because I did end up listening to most of the video. The scientific information was interesting, though I have heard most of it before. Prefer the information be presented with out the pretext that it argues against the existence of God. I found their arrogance and dismissiveness about religious people kind of sad. Because the sentence after he says quantum mechanics demands that something come from nothing, he then goes on to say that energy exists in an empty space. Where I back up and said wait a minute, energy is a something not a nothing.
He spent 30 minutes leading up to this crescendo only to invalidate it in the same breath. What’s worse is he had no clue he even did it.
Here’s the problem, you got these physicists and scientists with a long string of letters behind their names picking on Betty Sue farm girl attending the First Baptist Church. There are religious philosophers and theistic philosophers with an equally long string of letters past their names, that can fuck their shit up. Apparently they haven’t bothered to address those questions. But they are aware that they have to prove that nothingness (void, compete absence of anything at all) can necessarily beget somethingness with out being acted upon. Quantum physics can theorize that energy can beget something in a void, but energy is something and it came from something else.
Things being outside the realm of time and space are not a problem for me. Science can touch on some of it, but not all. Metaphysics is the branch of study that studies the non-physical. All branches of empirical science are designed to prove the objects of metaphysics. For instance, a scientific theory is not a physical thing, niether are laws, mathematical equations and so on. We represent a lot of these things with physical objects or symbols, but a theory or even a fact isn’t a physical thing. For instance, the theory of gravity, I can drop an apple to prove it. Gravity (for the sake of argument) is a physical thing the apple is a physical thing, the dropping of it is a physical action, but the theory of it, is not. Now nobody knows what gravity is, that’s the scientific holy grail.
Epistemology is simply the study of what can be known. As far as you illuminated keyboard, (pretty cool btw) how do you know its not an object of your mind and you are simply acting upon what your mind wants you to think is there, but you could be just typing in thin air…It could just all be a dream.
Sounds like something you did as a kid? Well there is an entire branch of study dedicated to just that.
