Existence shouldn’t even need defending, since it is defined as “being alive, or reflecting objective reality”. When someone presents a concept of deity that can demonstrate either of those, theyll have provided something beyond subjective beliefs, or wishful thinking, and I’ll take a look.
So far they always have an empty bag.
Citation needed, is this a statistic? What’s the source for this? Argument by assertion
Why? It’s perfectly reasonable to explain affection with our need for reproduction
Again, citation needed: is this a statistic? Was polling actually done on a relevant sample of people? Once again argument by assertion
This conclusion is based on unsourced arguments by assertion and is therefore not valid.
Also, even if this proves the existence of a god, what tells me it proves the existence of your god? Even if your argument was correct (and it’s not) it could prove the existence of Ra, Odin or Apollo since we have the same amount of evidences (wich is zero)
I do agree that love is one of the most powerful and transformative experiences that a person can have . . . but to draw a line of causality from the existence of love to the God of Christianity is so flawed that I don’t even know where to begin.
People experienced love long before Christianity. Archeologists unearthed the remains of an elderly Neanderthal man in the Shanidar cave in Iraq which shows that he had a healed amputation of his arm, bad arthritis, and other disabilities which would have precluded him from hunting . . . yet he had been nurtured, cared-for, and fed. He is an example of human love that predates Christianity by maybe 40,000 years or so.
Animals love each other (and us) without Christianity. Dogs grieve when their owners die, and dogs will place themselves at considerable physical risk to protect their owners. Dogs will–for example–swim into rivers and lakes to keep people from drowning.
People assume that love is automatically good, and it seems to me that this assumption is often wrong. The German populace loved Hitler. MAGA people love Donald Trump. People who love Hitler and who love Trump are not evidence that love is a gift from a benevolent God.
How do we know that love isn’t a gift from another god such as Osiris, Ahmen-ra, Zeus, Thor, or Vishnu?
If love has a supernatural basis, then why are some people automatically incapable of it? Sociopaths don’t really manifest love, and people who develop brain leisons can become homicidal toward their loved ones and sleep like a baby after murdering their own children.
And so on.
Oh look, it’s the “naturalism cannot explain X” mantra so many intellectually indolent mythology fanboys love to trot out, to hide their failure to pay attention in class.
If you think that powerful hormonal motivators for various behaviours aren’t positively selectable by evolution, you need to re-take all your science classes from scratch. Because, wait for it, organisms that perform the requisite behaviours survived better than those that didn’t within their clade, and likewise, produced more offspring and influenced future generations.
Every species, no matter how simple or complex, all the way from nematode worms to humans, require the ability to maintain situational awareness. Because doing so means that you detect food more quickly, are more successful at eating, detect threats more quickly, are more successful at avoiding becoming lunch for something else, detect mating partners better, and are more likely to get laid, and thus bequeath a litter of crotch spawn to the world.
Powerfully motivating hormones, are simply one biological means of ensuring that certain parts of situational awareness are active. All the better to ensure that you don’t miss out on lunch, don’t become lunch for something else, and don’t miss out when that hot mating partner shows up.
Meanwhile, once again, the usual mix of biological ignorance and anthropocentric conceit is at work in the usual tiresome apologetics. Pair bonding and relationship building aren’t unique to humans by any stretch of the imagination. Even an elementary observer will see this at work right across the entire clade of mammals. Everything from the duck billed platypus, through various marsupials such as Koalas, via rodents and Artiodactyl mammals, all the way through to us, exhibit this behaviour, and it has a well-understood chemical basis, via a peptide hormone called Oxytocin.
But, and here’s the fun part, this isn’t even unique to mammals. Just ask anyone who has kept a tropical freshwater or marine aquarium, and watched various species therein breed, and they will tell you that there are entire taxonomic Families of fish that exhibit similar pair bonding and relationship forming, particularly with respect to reproduction.
The classic example is the Family Cichlidae, about which I posted previously here among other places. I listed several species in that post, but there’s a Genus therein (containing, unless taxonomic revision has changed this, three species) that not only exhibit the advanced pair bonding rituals and parental care of other Cichlids, but take this one step further - the parents produce special nutrient slime on the sides of their bodies when rearing offspring, that the fry feed upon until they’re ready to start looking for nice juicy protists to munch upon.
Now, of course, none of these organisms know anything about the weird and wacky mythologies humans have invented, or the cartoon magic entities asserted to exist therein. Instead, they simply conduct their lives in accordance with the imperatives that are delivered by those selectable hormones and other mechanisms of motivating behaviour.
Humans, of course, add to this mix a large cerebral cortex, which provides the data processing substrate enabling both curiosity and a desire for storytelling in a social setting. Indeed, the book accompanying David Attenborough’s Life on Earth TV series, ends with a chapter on humans, and the title of that chapter is, tellingly, The Compulsive Communicators.
As organisms driven by curiosity, a desire to make sense of our surroundings as opposed to merely existing therein, and a desire to share our ideas with others of our species, it’s not surprising that we’ve come up with some, let’s call them interesting ideas in the past. Our mythologies are littered with these, some of them more fantastic than others. But, one feature that our early, mythology based attempts to make sense of our surroundings all share in common, is the projection of our capacity for intent onto our surroundings.
For example, our ability to strike flints and initiate controlled fires, became a natural metaphor for thunderstorms to our early ancestors. Who came up with the idea that said thunderstorms were the product of a big, invisible version of ourselves striking invisible flints and making lightning. It doesn’t require a Ph.D to work this out, just basic human understanding.
But, that large, and sometimes overactive cerebral cortex, started devising all manner of fun stories for the campfire. Lo and behold, that’s how religion was born. Someone in the past concocted some fantastic stories for the campfire, persuaded enough fellow humans to treat those fantastic stories as fact, and the rest follows.
Indeed, our childhood trust in adults and our capacity for gullibility stem from relevant evolutionary imperatives. Children that obeyed their parents and stayed within safe watching distance, were more likely to survive than children that wandered off out of sight, and into the mouth of the nearest large predator. Those that believed their parents when said parents told them that the big striped kitty will eat them, were more likely to make it to adulthood, and pass on the same advice to their own offspring.
The flip side of this, of course, was the tendency to carry this childlike trust in ‘authority figures’ into adulthood with respect to those fantastic campfire stories. It’s taken our species a long time to understand that this is a double edged sword, and that the proper way forward is to exercise care and diligence when presented with assertions. Even now, not everyone recognises this fact, and the duplicitous play upon this.
But, those who did learn this important lesson, even despite their historically unavoidable failings and other human weaknesses, went on to deliver our most treasured gift - science. Which, along with pure mathematics, is a discipline that teaches its practitioners to think carefully about what assertions are likely, or unlikely, to be true.
Diligent work in the realm of science has taught us a great deal about the operation of ourselves and our surroundings, and we ignore that knowledge at our peril. If that knowledge happens to toss cherished mythological assertions into the bin, then tough, into the bin said assertions must go. Failure to follow that maxim, makes you a soft target for every charlatan and fraudster waiting in the wings. It’s not as if we lack evidence for the abundance of such malign figures in the world of mythology based beliefs.
At which point, it’s time to present some facts, facts that are unpleasant for the sort of people who cling to mythology based beliefs to confront.
First, none of the adherents of any of our pre-scientific or hypo-scientific mythologies, have ever once presented even an atom of genuine evidence for their favourite cartoon magic entities. That includes yours. All of you have FAILED DISMALLY to deliver over the past millennia.
Second, your mythologies aren’t “evidence” for your favourite cartoon magic entities. They are, instead, evidence for the propensity of the authors thereof to make shit up.
Taking as an example the Abrahamic mythology so beloved of many who come here, engaging in ideological stormtrooping on its behalf, this contains assertions that are not merely plain, flat, wrong, but farcical and absurd. Such as that nonsense about genetics being controlled by coloured sticks, an assertion that was totally destroyed by a 19th century monk, when he launched modern genetics as a properly constituted scientific discipline. If you experience butthurt when told this fact, then tough.
Third, ex recto apologetic fabrications, that an astute child would point and laugh at, also do not constitute “evidence” for your pet magic entities. They instead, are evidence for the desperation and duplicity of the pedlars thereof.
Fourth, when successful direct experimental tests of relevant postulates falsify the assertions of your favourite mythology, again, it’s tough. Your mythology goes in the bin. This has already happened, and you had better start learning about this.
Now, back to that tiresome and glib mantra that mythology fanboys love to chant or post online, the “naturalism cannot explain X” mantra. Again, you’re going to be reaching for the burn cream. Because scientists have alighted upon vast classes of entities and interactions, that the authors of mythologies were incapable of even fantasising about. Painting fake apologetic bulls’ eyes around scientific discoveries, fools no one who paid attention in class, and this practice is merely a symptom of ideological desperation.
Not only that, but those same scientists have provided testable and verifiable quantitative explanations for vast classes of observables, and performed successful direct experimental tests of those explanations. The gaps into which mythology fanboys can try in desperation to insert their pet magic entities, are becoming vanishingly small. Those gaps will disappear completely. Indeed, reality would have to throw us one colossal curve ball, to reverse the trend of the past 400 years, and there are no signs of that happening, regardless of any wishful thinking mythology fanboys might have on this matter.
“Magic Man did it” might have seemed reasonable to a barely literate 10th century peasant, but it isn’t reasonable to anyone in the 21st century who enjoyed a proper science education. And I am not in the least bit sorry for forcing the more snowflake parts of the mythology fanboy demographic to face that fact.
Meanwhile, about those fishes … see here for much more detail, including pages from the Innes book itself.
This line of “reasoning” might be described as “argument from inspiration”.
X feels so compelling and ennobling to me that it cannot just be explained naturalistically, therefore, God.
The irony is that often what people have top-of-mind when they spout about love, is what is properly / scientifically labeled “cathexis” and what is popularly referred to as “love goggles”. It is that transcendent feeling you get when a new love-object becomes available or at least potentially available, and you can think of nothing else, and believe that mutually possessing that person will make life not just endurable but positively and permanently joyful.
Why it is hard to understand that this ability would facilitate mating is beyond me.
Some Christer reading this might well object, no, we’re not talking about human lust, but this elevated love involving God. But it is no different. It is the same, nay, a more extreme version of the same obsessive preoccupation, lacking only a sexual element (usually, lol – although young girls in some parts of fundamentalism are encouraged to consider Jesus their love interest, the better to distract them from actual boyfriends).
The thing about such obsessions is that they invariably collapse in the face of the fact that the love object is special only like everyone else – it has flaws and annoying habits and so forth, and eventually fails you. And God certainly fails you when reality fails to live up to the fantasy. The healthy thing to do is to realize this, give back your projections, and let the love interest be who and what they are. In the case of God, that would be totally imaginary.
And today I learned a new word. Thanks Mordant!
Turns out there’s quite a literature on the subject …
The real question is, why does your imaginary friend need people like you to prove his existence for him? Shouldn’t an all powerful deity be able to do that without you going on an Atheist board and making a sad half ass argument?
The OP visited this site one day, spent seven minutes on it, started a debate and never returned.
Sigh….
I find that kind of words very hard to remember, as they don’t give me any clues towards their interpretation.
In this case I find the German equivalents - libidobesetzung or objektbesetzung - much more descriptive and easier to remember, with the Wikipedia suggestion of emotional investment somewhat less so.
But I had a Classical education, and as a consequence, words of Latin or Greek derivation make sense to me. 
The ones that prove to be a bit arcane to decipher, usually yield to 15 minutes or so spent perusing the relevant dictionaries. Which are now online, courtesy of the Perseus Project. Their section on Greek & Roman Materials points you to two dictionaries - Lewis & Short for Latin, Liddell & Scott for Greek.
Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary
Liddell & Scott Greek Dictionary
in the case of Liddell, the Greek scholar, his daughter Alice was the girl around whom Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
As for Charlton T. Lewis, he was an American scholar who also had a colourful career as a lawyer and insurance broker.
I move in interesting circles.
To me, “libido preoccupation” or “object preoccupation” are a little too narrow in scope to be accurate, as it is not just about, e.g., sexual desire. “Libido occupation” could as well denote things like addiction to porn or to sex. In this case it’s an obsession with the idea of being “in love” and what one thinks it will do for them (something akin to, solve all their problems and insecurities – to achieve a kind of transcendence of the human condition). It is not just the intimacy but the total and unconditional acceptance, the promise of ease in a relationship.
Part of the extensive literature mentioned by Calilasseia is the topic of “vital marriage”, the (apparently single digit percentage) set of marriages that at least appear to result in that brass ring everyone thinks cathexis will produce, which is, two people so endlessly enthralled with each other that they have no consequential disagreements or fights, and the relationship is for both of them by far their greatest joy and priority in life.
In my observation and experience, few people want to, much less can, take it to that level. I’ve heard it described as “being joined at the hip”; many find it stifling. With the right person, I don’t think it would have to actually feel like that. However I also suspect that these very elderly who claim (usually after their partner dies) that they “never fought” are just very repressed and devoted to fulfilling a social expectation. I also note that people who make such claims tend to be in a relationship where the one partner (typically the man) is very assertive and the woman is apparently not. If it “takes two to tango” and one is willing to stuff it, sure, there’s no conflict, at least for the one who is not stuffing it.
Interesting topic to me, as Western culture so elevates romantic love and freights it with so many expectations – and creates more problems than it solves by doing so, IMO. Combine that with the wildly unrealistic expectations produced in the brains of those who come from triumphalist cults like Christian fundamentalism, and hilarity generally ensues.
Hi! No the existence of god doesn’t represent unconditional love.
Nope, water, then food, but I can see how someone who had never struggled to find either would make such a facile error. Humans are also just one species of evolved ape, among countless species. The existence of such emotions can be explained by evolution, and the fact we evolved to live in societal groups, and that various emotions facilitated this, it of course requires no unevidenced deity or deities be added.
No it isn’t, and even were it impossible, to suggest the lack of an alternative explanation to an argument lends it credence is an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.
Yes, since premise B used a known common logical fallacy.
Special pleading fallacy, so again your argument is refuted logically, and that is vague facile reasoning as well.
I think you mean the likelihood principle, and that is a statistical inference that states that all the information in a sample relevant to the parameters of a statistical model is contained in the likelihood function, evaluated at the observed data. In simpler terms, it means that two datasets that produce the same likelihood function for a given model should lead to the same conclusions about that model. You have failed to offer any data, only facile subjective assertions, and a wildly subjective conclusion, and your argument is irrational as it uses at least two known fallacies in informal logic.
However it seems you haven’t the courage or integrity to honour your claim:
It is clear you were not looking for debate of any kind.
And with that, we can say that they lived up to their username. Now they can change it to, “Proven Wrong”. 
Don’t hold your breath 
Deniers will deny.
I talked about this once, and I was surprised I didn’t find this post before I posted my version about it. anyways here’s my answer when intangible concepts are used as evidence for a deity:
Intangible concepts like love, energy, or ideas to “prove” God is but a flawed attempt to redefine God using terms for things that already exist. Like saying God is love, or God is energy, or God is existence, or whatever intangible thing that is already defined.
The primary problem with defining God as being synonymous with things that are already proven to exist in reality (such as love, energy, nature, or the universe) is that we already have words for those things and don’t need to use God to describe them. The word God comes with extra baggage because most theists think of God as conscious, smart, and involved in the world, answering prayers and judging people. There is no evidence whatsoever that energy has consciousness or self-awareness. Ideas, faith, love, morality, and other societal constructs are related to the human brain. All of which arise from evolutionary strategies that enhance survival through teamwork, cooperation, and altruism.
But creation and existence are not connected to the brain, you say? But we already have words for them. Creation and existence in itself do not burn, punish, and persecute homosexuals and other “sinful enemies” of a faith. People do that in the name of their fantasy.
God is everything, God is you and me, God is all around us. Tell me, do they all pass judgement to others for not aligning with their agenda, or is it just you?
Ultimately, if the word “God” is used to mean anything to anyone (such as love, energy, or nature), then it essentially carries no meaning and undermines effective communication.
I think what they are trying to riff on is that we accept the reality of many things that are “intangible” or invisible, so why is it hard to accept an invisible, intangible, and at times ineffable God? Well … my answer is that an intangible like “love”, say, is a shared experience, an intersubjectively verifiable thing that everyone experiences. That it is hard to define or comes in many variations doesn’t change that. But to posit a God who is immutable and perfect when everyone’s subjective experience of him is different and leads to thousands of denominational variations, and for which there is zero actual evidence, is a horse of a different color.
Intangible perhaps, nothing as far as I am aware is invisible, at least in its most literal sense, but then this is precisely the weasel worded salad we have come to expect from those who want to defend an unevidenced magical deity.
The point for me is that like pain, though love is a subjective experience, its effect has objective markers, and can both be explained by the objective fact of species evolution. More importantly, lets assume for the sake of argument, that both exist only in the human imagination, then how does comparing them to a deity or deities, represent a a sound argument that any deity or deities exist outside the human imagination?
Nailed it….deities are no more objectively evidenced than mermaids or dragons.
That we have existing scientific explanations for all the entities and processes mythology fanboys trot out as purportedly “needing” their entirely superfluous and merely asserted cartoon magic man, destroys their cretinous apologetics at source.