Empirical Evidence of God
- Thread starter Bowser
- Start date
Inasmuch as a lack of critical thinking robs one of perceiving precisely that which they are bereft of, perhaps you are right.
///
You do not demonstrate critical thinking. You do not understand critical thinking.
You talking about critical thinking is like a baby talking about heart surgery.
Face up to it & maybe you can learn it rather than lying to yourself.
Then maybe you can figure out why it bothers you that some people cannot believe your fantasy.
<>
Last edited:
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Ok I'll accept that, but the enfolded order is at a more subtle level than as expressed in a form we can observe or experience.
I like the way David Bohm presented it;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order
Nope. That's not what atheism is, at it's core.
You do not believe in God.
That you disagree with theism is simply a reason, or part of a reason as to why you are atheist.
jan.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
and you are without unicorns...
I’m a big fan of Bohm myself. His conceptions of wholeness and underlying order have shaped my views on reality as well. We often ponder the existence of extraterrestrial sentient entities within our own frames of reference, but the potential of these unsensible aspects of reality makes you wonder if sentient entities might be enfolded in the very reality that expresses ourselves. And then if you get into macro levels of order, what kind of expressions result from those conditions? We’re potentially dealing with infinite levels of order up and down the scale.
After a certain brief point, everytime you are pressed for response to a critique, you respond with irrelevant accusations, ad homs etc. If you think this is the standard for critical thinking, you are mistaken.
Last edited:
More denial, and rejection.
You know we're not discussing ''unicorns''. So why bring ''unicorns'' up?
jan.
Just for clarity, please can you explain what you mean by "denial" and "rejection" in this context. Thanks.
Well, we are, but we're not just our bodies. Our bodies have brains, and the brain produces the mind. The mind produces the "I". Your self-concept is a product of your brain. What else could it be?
People refer to "my self" or "myself" all the time. Are you going to try to argue that your "self" is different from your "I"? or that "you" own a separate thing called a "self", that is conceptually distinct from the thing you call "I"?
Your tendency to get bogged down in hair-splitting over language, as if it proves something about the existence of your God, is almost always a time waster.
You mistakenly think you know all kinds of things instinctively, Jan. But you really don't. That faulty assumption goes a long way to explaining your belief system.
Instincts are not the same as knowledge. Your subjective beliefs are not automatically synonymous with objective reality. But I know that, no matter how often this is pointed out to you, the relevance of the distinction continues to elude you. I don't expect the outcome this time around to be any different.
I remark in passing that it's strange that you appear to have completely forgotten our discussion in another thread about the "I" and your talk about "my fingers" and "my mind" and the like. I leave you alone for a month or so, only to return to find that you're back to square one, arguing the same points over with somebody else, as if the whole thing is new to you.
What you're talking about there is usually denoted "self-awareness" or "consciousness". It is tautological as to "who has the sense of 'I'?" I do. The feeling (illusion, arguably) that there is an "I" is what being an "I" is all about in the first place.
Rather than trying to find answers in a hair-splitting definition or redefinition of words (whose meanings are so often not well defined in the first place), you'd be better off looking at the actual phenomenon you're trying to explain. You won't sort this thing out using your a priori assumptions. No dictionary definition will tell you where consciousness comes from. You'll need to get down and dirty with science if you want an explanation of the "I".
I appreciate, of course, that you think you just know that you have a soul that comes from God, etc. etc. With your magical knowledge, you have no use for that fiddly science stuff. But you need to accept that you have zero hope of ever persuading anybody reasonable that your opinions are correct if you actually have no evidence. You'll never be able to define yourself into correctness, no matter how long you spend reading your dictionary.
What does that even mean? Every conversation you ever have happens with your body involved. No conversation you have ever occurs without the involvement of your body. Even if you think you talk to God, your brain is still involved in that.
What else could you possibly "act as though" you are, other than your body? I mean, you could pretend to be a tree, I suppose, or maybe a whale. But your body would be involved and other people would tend to spot that a human body was doing the acting, sooner or later.
That would be sanstheist.
Like you, for example, are a sanspixieist. You are without awareness of pixies.
This is classic Jan.
Note that Jan's assertion here is that the existence or absence of evidence for X depends on what a person believes about X. It should be the other way around: what a person believes about X ought to be based on the existence or absence of evidence for X.
The problem is clear: Jan identifies his own subjective impressions with objective reality. That is, he perceives no distinction between what he believes and what is real.
Jan would have to agree that "There is evidence for God because I believe in and accept God, and as such cannot reject anything pertaining to God." This is the logical counterpoint to the quoted statement above. Evidence for God comes from Jan's belief; Jan's belief does not come from evidence.
That would be sanstheist.
Pixies aren't the topic of discussion.
Jan.
Goldtop
Registered Senior Member
I would think that observations play a very strong role in making those decisions.
If I say I can toss my car keys into the air and they will float there, how many times will it take for me to toss my car keys into the air and they fall to the ground. Observations would show the car keys would fall to the ground 100% of the time, consistently, no matter how many times I tried. I can therefore conclude it is irrational for me to state that my car keys will float in mid air.
Pixies and gods are the same thing. Unless you can demonstrate otherwise.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
What Jan means? Jan is just trolling, trying (very successfully) to keep all the board's idiot-atheists crazily barking.
'Denial' in the epistemological context means declaring an assertion to be untrue.
In the case of assertions that God, pixies or pink unicorns exist, denial would be the claim that they don't. And in the case of atheist assertions that they don't exist, denial would be the claim that they do. Either way, the denial may or may not be correct, provided that there are good reasons for taking a position on the reality of these things.
Logically, denial seems to simply be the application of the 'not' operator ~ to whatever proposition is being denied. That's all I read the Greek 'a-' prefix in 'atheist' as doing, expressing 'not-theist'. It needn't be read as 'without' and can just as correctly be read as 'not'.
More recently, the word 'denial' has taken on a new and more tendentious meaning derived from Freudian psychology, the idea of individuals insisting on the untruth of what should be obvious truths that they find threatening and don't want to face. So the word 'denial' has taken on a new perjorative and rather insulting meaning that it never used to have. That's the usage that we see today in phrases like "science denier".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial
In real life, it's often justified and entirely correct to deny particular propositions, provided that there are good reasons for doing so. If Jan wants to make a convincing argument that atheism is 'denial' in the tendentious Freudian sense, then he or she needs to make a convincing case that God's existence should be obvious to everyone.
And it should also be pointed out that Jan can just as easily be accused of 'denial' of the non-existence of God. Perhaps the truth of atheism (assuming it is true) is something obvious that Jan just can't face.