wesmorris said:
It is impossible to prove or disprove god by way of reason. The only means of acceptance is circular.
No. It's not circular, even though many will claim so.
We must be, and we can be more exact.
I say we can prove God by a two-way inductive process. A two-way inductive process is when you come up with an explanation or theory that enables you to see the very evidence on which this explanation or theory is based.
Many scientific breakthroughs are results of two-way inductive reasoning. In science, this is often called working on a "hunch" or "intuition", which leads the scientist to reconceptualize certain basic knowledges, set up a hypothesis and see if it holds (which includes acting as if it is true), which then offers to see new evidence to support or contradicts the hypothesis. The whole thing is then tested again, and then called a theory.
We can do the same with the belief in God. It is just that the evidence we use is of a different nature than science is used to, but this still doesn't mean that the application of the method is invalid.
Just to entertain the thought: How about the basis that the concept itself confines it to imagination. Taking just the word "omnipresent" as a typical characteristic of the definition, it seems to me that it is necessarily imaginary because it cannot be empirically concluded.
But just because something is currently "imaginary" does not mean that it does not exist, or that it has no effect on us.
The concept of "omnipresent" necessarily keeps it from being knowable in that to demonstrate something satisfying the definition of omnipresent, one would have to distinguish it from something else. Since however it's omnipresent, it must be everywhere and thus one space-time coordinate cannot be shown to be part of the whole in any part more than just however you define the whole; e.g "the universe". So something omnipresent is thus "the universe". It's dance around the identity "the universe = the universe": The joy of circular reasoning.
This is still thinking of god in terms of empirical reasoning. But how are we to think of god in terms of empirical reasoning, if we have determined before that god is imaginary?
Are we to measure imaginary entitites with empirical methods?!
Now, that would be madness, sheer madness!
Where is the compelling evidence that says that God is imaginary?
That god cannot be demonstrated as "real" to the satisfaction of all rational
observers of the test.
By that same token, your love for your wife and children is also not real.
One can only utilize the essence of baye's theorum: What's the probability of this if that happens? You can really only talk rationally about something given something. The basis of any information system is circular, as definitions must be.
There are no conclusions without conventions.
You do realize the immense implications of this?
Then those who don't believe in God do so due to a convention.
I dare you to go to those atheists and tell them their unbelief is based on a convention! They'll maul you.
This is also true if the conclusion that god can only be shown to be imaginary as a repucussion of the definition. It's not that god is or isn't, it's that it can't be demonstrated to be either to the satisfaction of all rational observers.
This has the statistic trap in it: "to the satisfaction of
all rational observers". All? What if it is 90%, or 51% of them? Or does that mean that those 10% or 49% of rational observers weren't rational?
Really that's the crux of the matter I suppose. I don't think the concept of god can be defined in a way that's rational.
Neither can values or preferences be defined in a way that is rational.
We have to treat them as a given, axiomatically.
God is purposefully intended to exactly explain that which is unexplainable. That observation directly requires that God cannot be rationally demonstrated. If it could be, then the whole point is crushed.
In the Gödel thread in human science, we've touched on that too. It's the problem of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and how in the system of religion, God is such an axiom that fixes the otherwise necessary inconsistency of a system.
Circularity is the basis for communication.
Hm?
I don't see how you get to this.
The basis of communication is definitely the assumption that communicators understand eachother. If all communicators would not enter communication on this assumption, they would never even open their mouths.
That we act on this assumption shows only when misunderstandings come up, but otherwise, we act as if we understand eachother.
Ultimately however, people rationalize their conceptual inter-relationships on the fly. Current short term memory queues onto the relationships which were established by previous stimulous, thus filtering the concepts that were formed by that former stimulus into the action centers (nervous system controls), perpetuating this circle by leading to new stimulous, back to concepts, back to action, repeat. Circular argument arise when folks burn the value of belief into their conceptual inter-relationships in a way that supercedes the value of consistent reason.
Please note that I do think the percieved survival function (including their capacity for reason) of the individual and their circumstance very often combine to render circular logic a preferable choice. The rational choice for logical consistency is often at odds with convenience (convenience being value's real time profit function). Value is maximized by the mind. You seek what you like based on what you've become (what you are).
Complete consistency is impossible in living beings; due to being limited and exposed to a changing environment, living beings learn, change, adapt, and this interferes with the consistency of their cognitive systems, and makes them inconsistent. To compensate for those inconsistencies, some fixations and circularities may appear.
