logically we could reach the conclusion that all humans should commit suicide. Reason is very relative.
What would be proof of god(s)?
- Thread starter StrangerInAStrangeLand
- Start date
Nasor,
This could be out of loyalty, to some cause or belief.
What makes you know that it is love?
jan.
This could be out of loyalty, to some cause or belief.
What makes you know that it is love?
jan.
It's not iron-clad proof of love, but it would be strong empirical evidence for love that could be shown to someone who was skeptical that love existed.
And in any case, love is a subjective internal experience. If you want to say that god is merely a subjective internal experience, I might be inclined to agree with you.
Nasor,
I like the switch. In one breath you say of there is evidence of love, proceed to give examples. Then when love is used as a metaphor for God, all of a sudden it is purely a subjective internal experience.
An atheist technique?
jan.
I like the switch. In one breath you say of there is evidence of love, proceed to give examples. Then when love is used as a metaphor for God, all of a sudden it is purely a subjective internal experience.
An atheist technique?
jan.
Love is and always has been a subjective internal experience. There is nothing "all of a sudden" about that. There is, however, empirical evidence that people do in fact have this particular experience. Subjective internal experiences are hard to gather empirical evidence for, because your possible evidence is limited to the person's own account of their experience and any behavior that the person might display that would be consistent with the experience that is being described.
Never the less, it is indeed possible to gather empirical evidence that love is a real phenomenon, and so your claim that there is no evidence for love is bullshit.
Edit: Suppose a random strange approached you on the street and told you he loved you. Would you just take his word for it? Of course not. You would wait until you had some evidence that he loved you.
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Nasor,
Your switch was sudden though.
Unless you can show otherwise, no one has ever seen love, no one knows what it actually is, but most people understand what it is due to experience.
There doesn't need to be any explanation, scientific or otherwise, for anyone to understand what love is. This sounds like experience with God.
How is it evidence when it comes to love, but not evidence when it comes to God?
But you are prepared to accept evidence based on the purely subjective nature of love. Why not God?
You keep spouting, I keep hearing, but you've yet to back up this claim.#
Please present love to us, here and now.
For obvious reasons, especially if I have some experience of serious relationships. But that does not explain what love actually is.
jan.
Your switch was sudden though.
Unless you can show otherwise, no one has ever seen love, no one knows what it actually is, but most people understand what it is due to experience.
There doesn't need to be any explanation, scientific or otherwise, for anyone to understand what love is. This sounds like experience with God.
How is it evidence when it comes to love, but not evidence when it comes to God?
But you are prepared to accept evidence based on the purely subjective nature of love. Why not God?
You keep spouting, I keep hearing, but you've yet to back up this claim.#
Please present love to us, here and now.
For obvious reasons, especially if I have some experience of serious relationships. But that does not explain what love actually is.
jan.
I did not "switch" anything. My point has not changed. I was merely pointing out how sad it is that in your attempt to come up with another example of something that people believe in even though it can't be supported with evidence you had to resort to a subjective internal experience. I find this sad because we're supposed to be discussing the omnipotent master of the universe, which I would not expect to be as nebulous and subjective as an emotional experience.
In your initial post you argued that one couldn't provide evidence that love exists to someone who had never experienced it. I was pointing out that this wasn't true; if you described the experience of love to someone who was skeptical that such an experience really occurred, you could easily provide evidence that some people did indeed have such an experience.
Because I would expect the omniscient, omnipotent master of the universe to be capable of more interaction than causing people to have subjective internal experiences. I would expect him to be able to do things like cause people to regrow lost limbs when they pray for it. I would not, on the other hand, expect people's internal experiences to cause lost limbs to grow back.
What, you want a definition of love? Okay, I can give you a definition off the top of my head. "Love" is a phenomenon that causes the experiencer's happiness to become tied to the welfare and happiness of another person, even at the voluntary expense of the experiencer's own welfare and happiness. It also causes the experiencer to want to spend time around the subject of their love so that they can interact with them. Typically someone in love wants for the subject of their love to experience reciprocal feelings toward them.
If I gave that loose definition of love to someone who had never experienced it and they were skeptical that people really had such experiences, I could show him evidence in the form of documented human behavior to support my assertion that some people do indeed have such experiences.
Nasor,
Would you not expect such a being to create a whole scenario such as the universe. Wouldn't his action be absolute, complete, and instantaneous, from his own perspective.
The same can be said of God, which is probably why millions of people believe in him.
Have you thought from his perspective (based on scriptoral definitions)?
Maybe there is no point to such impromtu appearances, outside of his scheduled appearances (scriptoral based), and the appearances of his close devotees to spread understanding in each millenium, according to time, place and circumstance?
Read the gospels, there are plenty of miracles to suit your curiosity. If you don't believe they existed, that is your choice. There were non believers who witnessed those events, I imagine not all of them believed it was divine by its nature. So what makes you think you will believe such events, and not seek a naturalistic explanation.
Also, there are no scriptures where the character God tries to prove his existence. If he exists then it doesn't whether we believe he exists or not, in order to validate his existence. It simply just is. To come to that realisation to full effect must be the greatest miracle of all.
I understand what you mean, and I agree with you, but it doesn't explain what love actually is. Someone who has never recieved love, only the opposite, would still be in the dark about what love actually is. Untill they experience it for themself. They would interpret your explanation by their own experience, and would probably see it as an opportunity to exploit you, or the person who was showing them love.
jan.
Would you not expect such a being to create a whole scenario such as the universe. Wouldn't his action be absolute, complete, and instantaneous, from his own perspective.
The same can be said of God, which is probably why millions of people believe in him.
Have you thought from his perspective (based on scriptoral definitions)?
Maybe there is no point to such impromtu appearances, outside of his scheduled appearances (scriptoral based), and the appearances of his close devotees to spread understanding in each millenium, according to time, place and circumstance?
Read the gospels, there are plenty of miracles to suit your curiosity. If you don't believe they existed, that is your choice. There were non believers who witnessed those events, I imagine not all of them believed it was divine by its nature. So what makes you think you will believe such events, and not seek a naturalistic explanation.
Also, there are no scriptures where the character God tries to prove his existence. If he exists then it doesn't whether we believe he exists or not, in order to validate his existence. It simply just is. To come to that realisation to full effect must be the greatest miracle of all.
I understand what you mean, and I agree with you, but it doesn't explain what love actually is. Someone who has never recieved love, only the opposite, would still be in the dark about what love actually is. Untill they experience it for themself. They would interpret your explanation by their own experience, and would probably see it as an opportunity to exploit you, or the person who was showing them love.
jan.
If you want to argue that there is evidence for god, fine - since you apparently believe in god I would expect you to. I was just getting annoyed because you seemed to be taking a "some things can't be supported by evidence, maybe god is one of them" approach.
Well, convincing 4 billion out of 6.6 billion people in the world who aren't christians that christianity is correct would be the point. Whether or not god cares about that enough to make his presence unambiguously apparent to everyone is of course up to god, but I had the impression that he wanted people to worship him and believe in him.
I doubt that the miraculous events described in the bible ever occurred, just like I doubt the magical stories in all 2000+ year old texts. If I ever actually witnessed anything as miraculous as what's described in the bible I would probably become a christian immediately.
If god really doesn't care if we believe in him or not, like I said that's up to him.
I disagree. I contend that the set of experiences and feelings I described is love. When people talk about "love" they are talking about the set of feelings that I described.
So what? This would not convince the person that love is possible for them.
In effect, that person would still be in a state of unbelief about the existence of love, despite all the evidence.
That is because if something is purported to be relevant to one, then one will be skeptical about its existence unless one experiences it oneself, no matter how much evidence from other people they are provided.
If belief in God would be as relevant to oneself as the existence of, say, polar bears or electrons, one would not have much trouble accepting the existence of God as true, just like one does not have much trouble accepting the existence of polar bears or electrons as true. For things that aren't all that relevant to us personally, even hearsay can suffice for us to believe it exists.
For things that aren't all that relevant to us personally, we question very little how the evidence for them was gathered.
But with things that are relevant to us personally, we have much higher standards of what qualifies as evidence. When we seek medical treatment, we like to get a second opinion, we discuss things with our doctor, we don't just accept what we're told. When someone claims to love us, we don't just believe it, no, we want some evidence, and we are willing to reevaluate our position should evidence to the contrary come in.
This is one of the reasons some people don't believe in God: they have no personal experience of God. And all the evidence in the world that other people can provide is nothing against that lack of firsthand, personal experience.
And this can be extremely frustrating.
On an interesting side note, I have asked theists several times in threads like this one what it would take to convince them that their religion was wrong, and they almost always say that there is no evidence that could ever possibly convince them, no matter what. I've even asked Christians what they would think if followers of some other religion were able to miraculously heal the sick etc, and they usually respond that they would assume it was a trick of the devil
Good point! I've experienced that many times in life but hadn't yet thought to ask it in this forum.
No. It's not.
Nasor,
You asociated the terms, omnipotent, and omniscient, with God, yet I don't think you fully apreciate what those terms signify.
That is your perogative.
Where is the unconditional love in that?
You want God on your own terms. If you wanted your husband or wife, on your own terms, the relationship most probably wouldn't last. And if it did, it would be miserable.
As you don't believe Jesus was the person portrayed in the text, the actual love of God, by Jesus, probably went straight over your head.
But in all scriptures, unconditional love is the catalyst.
Nobody said God doesn't care. As far as God is concerned, every human on the planet has the opportunity to become his devotee. As some level of religion is available to everyone, and the free will to choose or not.
If God is God, then everybody is provided for through nature, not some, but all.
Of course if you don't believe in God (your free will) then that means nothing to you. You will have different explanations for everything.
Then we'll have to agree to dis-agree. I believe that try to explain love to the loveless, is like trying to explain green to the blind.
jan.
You asociated the terms, omnipotent, and omniscient, with God, yet I don't think you fully apreciate what those terms signify.
That is your perogative.
Where is the unconditional love in that?
You want God on your own terms. If you wanted your husband or wife, on your own terms, the relationship most probably wouldn't last. And if it did, it would be miserable.
As you don't believe Jesus was the person portrayed in the text, the actual love of God, by Jesus, probably went straight over your head.
But in all scriptures, unconditional love is the catalyst.
Nobody said God doesn't care. As far as God is concerned, every human on the planet has the opportunity to become his devotee. As some level of religion is available to everyone, and the free will to choose or not.
If God is God, then everybody is provided for through nature, not some, but all.
Of course if you don't believe in God (your free will) then that means nothing to you. You will have different explanations for everything.
Then we'll have to agree to dis-agree. I believe that try to explain love to the loveless, is like trying to explain green to the blind.
jan.
Nasor has logicly supported claims of love. Claims of gods haven't been supported.
Regardless, some discussion of it may be good for comparision/contrast but now it's gone off topic.
Regardless, some discussion of it may be good for comparision/contrast but now it's gone off topic.
The question wasn't whether or not it would be possible to convince someone that love was possible for them, it was whether or not you could provide evidence that love existed at all.
Don't be stupid. As a male it is 100% certain that I will never be able to experience giving birth, but I have zero skepticism about whether or not some people give birth - and it's pretty damn relevant for me when I'm considering whether or not to wear a condom. It's ridiculous to say that someone can't believe something when presented with evidence of it just because they haven't experienced it personally.
Replace "relevant to us" with "implausible" or "fantastical". It would be of no relevance to me whatsoever if there was s teapot in orbit around Jupiter - but I still probably wouldn't believe it unless I had some pretty strong evidence, because such a thing seems so implausible to me.
We are willing to believe things based on little evidence if the claim in question fits in well with everything else we have observed about the world and if it generally makes sense and seems plausible to us.
Electrons, by the way, are fairly fantastical - which is why people didn't believe in them until so much evidence had been accumulated about them. Since I already have experience with large furry animals existing, it probably wouldn't take much to make me believe in polar bears (although I would probably wonder why I hadn't heard of them before).
This seems to assume that "all the evidence in the world" amounts to much more than an ancient book full of magic stories. Theists love to say "Oh well, those atheists will just ignore whatever evidence we show them" because it allows them to avoid having to confront the fact that they don't actually have any empirical evidence.
To a loveless person, the evidence would not matter.
You seem to think that evidence can stand on its own, objectively, separate from the people who are in the position to reflect on it, to accept it or reject it.
If you mean that there is a minimum standard of evidence that will cause me to believe in a god, then yes.
It's not even clear to me that you are able to follow this discussion any more, because this has no apparent logical connection to anything. I have minimum standards for what would cause me to believe in god, just like I have minimum standards for what would cause me to believe in anything. Everyone has minimum standards for belief. You appear to be confusing the fact that I need evidence before I believe things with relationships or something.
I would argue that I do understand the concept, I just don't believe it to be real.
So he cares, but not enough to actually provide convincing evidence that he exists. Got it.
I do not "choose" what to believe. My beliefs are forced on me by reason and evidence. I couldn't simply choose to start believing that there is a teapot in orbit around Jupiter, even if I liked the idea. Although I've noticed that the idea of being able to believe something simply because they have decided to believe it (rather than because they have evidence that it is correct) seems to be pretty common among theists.
Oh, right. Just like it's impossible for me to believe in giving birth, since I will never actually be able to do it myself. The fact that I've read about it in medical textbooks and seen hospital delivery wards where people allegedly give birth means nothing to me.
Face it, your premise that it's impossible to use evidence to convince someone of something that they haven't personally experienced is absurd.
I am proof that it is not. I am a loveless person. Nobody and nothing has so far convinced me that love exists, much less that love exists for me.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
For goodness sake, try to keep up with the conversation. The fact that some people can't be convinced of some things doesn't mean that it's always impossible to use evidence to convince people of things that they haven't experienced. You were trying to argue the absurd position that people will always be skeptical about things that are relevant to them unless they have experienced them first hand. It only takes a single counter-example to prove that wrong. You personally might operate that way, but most of us aren't so unreasonable.
Even if you have never experienced love, if you are a rational person who has paid any attention to human society and interaction then you will have observed a great deal of evidence that some people experience what I defined as love earlier in the thread, even if you do not.