Is there finally an argument for the existence of God?

We’re getting a new shipment at the end of the month. Deep breath….

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You can borrow mine, but only as a paper weight, as it’s fucked. :rofl:

This was the end for it:

Lost for words, cradling the remnants of my irony meter.

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Damn it Sherlock I’m backlogged as it is on repair orders and now this. These meters aren’t cheap either!

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If everyone would pay their dues on time, we wouldn’t have these financial issues.

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Demonstrate just one true statement that has never been shown to be true. If there were no way to demonstrate it to be true, by what means have you measured it to be true? (I am assuming you are using the word proven incorrectly once again just to make your point.

More semantic bullshit… reminds me of … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLlv_aZjHXc

His bullshit is every bit as vacuous.

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Projection time again …

As opposed to your conflating “explanation” with “blind assertion that magic is needed”?

Fixed it for you.

Your blind assertions don’t deserve attention, other than demolition.

Bullshit. There is zero evidence for magic, or a cartoon magic man waving its magic todger about and poofing things into existence. Grow up.

Ta dah, and just like that the stupidity of his claim is exposed. He is again using a positive statement about an unknown to use an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.

The only rational answer here is I don’t know. This is an unfalsifiable premise, it is designed that way. @Sherlock-Holmes claim demonstrates not only that he still isn’t making rational assertions, but that after 7 months of explanation he still can’t (or won’t) understand this simpe fallacy.

“Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents “a lack of contrary evidence”), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true. This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to prove that the proposition is either true or false.”

Clearly something is considered true or false because it has been demonstrated so. He either can’t or won’t understand this.

Lets take an example from science, tectonic plate shift, prior to understanding this, science considered the notion that continents could move to be unevidenced, so the correct approach is to withhold belief, but keep an open mind and treat the idea as tentative in the light of new evidence.

The error @Sherlock-Holmes is making, and has done from the start, in equating disbelief with a claim something is untrue, that is why he doesn’t see the epistemological line he crossed with that statement.

If you cannot demonstrate whether something is true or false, then you don’t know whether it is true or false, and can make no assertions either way, this is called agnosticism. This is true of all unfalsifiable claims, now if you believe them all then this inevitably leads to believing contradictory ideas, and thus it violates a principle of logic and cannot be rational, if you believe some and not others, then that is demonstrably biased and by definition closed minded, if you withhold belief from them all, but keep an open mind, then this is the only rational position.

He keeps claiming his arguments are rational, but keeps making irrational claims. What’s more he keeps asserting atheists and atheism is irrational, but has anyone seen him demonstrate a principle of logic that lacking belief in any deities violates? If so please point it out to me, so that I can scrutinise it and learn from it, NB I don’t mean an irrational claim an individual atheist has made, but by all means point those out as this will help me avoid such errors in reasoning in the future.

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Actually, within consistent formal systems of a certain complexity, Gödel proved with his incompleteness theorems that there exist statements that are true, but that cannot be proven true, within that system. Which means that given the formal axiomatic system S, a certain statement X can be true, but you cannot use S to prove it. However, this does not prevent you from proving X using another system S2 that is based on a set of axioms that is not the same as the axioms of S.

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Thanks for that, what are the practical applications of the theorem if you don’t mind me asking, does it demonstrate a probability among a group of unknowns of how many might be true or untrue? Forgive my ignorance, but supposing (as I don’t know) that we can say that there are true or valid claims in a group of unknowns, then as @cognostic’s question implied, if one cannot present a single example of a true unknown, what are the practical applications of the theorem? I have encountered a few theists who tout this theorem as supporting their belief in a deity, and I am unclear why, though from experience they do seem to leap on unknowns as if withholding belief from them is irrational, but in fact only claims about a specific unknown seem irrational to me, and disbelieving a claim is not itself a claim that it is untrue, as with atheism for example.

I suppose what I asking /saying is that as individual concepts the truth of the claim remains unknown yes? So as before we withhold belief and keep an open mind, if or until we are able to demonstrate a claim is true or false?

Thanks in advance for your patience and help.

It explains how the universe came to be here, what are you talking about!

Not at all, it makes a subjective claim about a cause, it explains nothing. Watch, a wizard created the universe, that has the exact same explanatory powers your claim did - none.

You’d need to study Godel, here’s the gist of his first incompleteness theorem.

" The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system."

Thank you, I was hoping I wasn’t the only person here familiar with Godel.

So you want to tell me what - for you - constitutes an explanation? This is a term you throw around all the time yet have no idea what it means.

“Explain to me why my house has been flattened” >> “A large rock rolled down the hill and into your house”.

“Explain to me why you made a coffee cake” >> “I felt like it”

“Where did that fabulous lighting system come from” >> “Joe installed it last week”.

See, these are all explanations.

You are correct, as another poster has pointed out. However for context you were responding to this post:

Are you saying Godel’s theorem can demonstrate or prove logically that a soul has objective reality? Only I am very dubious, and I was clearly talking about individual claims when I said it is epistemologically unsound to make assertions about unknowns, that we can logically prove there are true or valid claims in a group of unknowns, doesn’t help us reveal which claims are true and which not, does it? So what relevance does are you asserting Godel’s theorem has for my withholding belief from the claim a soul exists?

What are you smoking? I cannot imagine what I wrote that you are now trying to interpret that way, I’ve not even written the word “soul” either, you are a sneaky one!

In this instance you are asserting that science not only has no explanation, but that it cannot have any explanation for the origins of the universe, given all you have offered as an alternative is the bare claim a deity did it, I think it is reasonable to point out that science already has in place a theory that explains vastly more than that, it is a bare claim, nothing more.

I don’t believe science cannot explain it further either, as you cannot demonstrate this, only infer it from our current limited knowledge, religions have had millennia and a deity did it is the best you can offer, what might science achieve in a comparable time, given it’s enormous successes in just a few hundred years.

False equivalence fallacy. That explanation is supported by objective evidence, the fact houses exists, the fact of gravity acts on rocks, etc. Explain how the supernatural works or is even possible, explain how deities exist or are even possible, and can use it, explain how universes are “created”, explain why it is not all the other thousands of deities that you don’t believe exist, as unlike my atheism which makes no claim, your disbelief in them is predicated on your belief only one deity exists, and thus involves a claim all the others do not.

You have offered just a bare claim that a deity did it.

READ - THE - POST!!! Here it is again, with your response, from @Cognostic’s post that was three posts in succession. You can’t cite Godel’s theorem in response to my post, then claim it has no relevance to what is in that post, only you know what relevance you thought the theorem has to my post. We are not mind readers.

Here is my post

Here is your response

Then @cognostic replied, then you cited Godel’s theorem to support your response to my original post above, about souls.

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A thing cannot serve as the explanation for itself, not a scientific explanation anyway.

Since the universe is the totality of all matter, energy, fields, spacetime, since it encompasses all of that then we cannot explain the presence of the universe in terms of the universe.

We must look outside the system we strive to explain, if we want to identify the reason the system exists.

For a universe to exist there must be some agency that’s not part of the universe, that can account for the universe being there.

How many more times must this obvious rudimentary reasoning be drummed into your head before you understand it?

Good then explain how a deity is possible, explain how it created the universe. As the claim a deity created the universe supernaturally cannot as you just admitted serve as an explanation for the claim, yet you have persistently described it as a more satisfactory EXPLANATION than a material or natural one, even ruling our scientific explanation completely, so offer an explanation, not just a claim.

NB I will not be responding directly to any ad hominem or uncivil assertions.