Plenty of Evidence for God?
What we know:
I've been looking at the arguments for a while now and while there are many facets to the discourse, Ontological1, Teleological2, Cosmological3 etc4, nearly all arguments depict a similar being; all are logical deductions toward a single goal of a 'necessary god', which most often delivers a being with the properties of Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Beneficence, Immortality and Eternity.
However, do these properties constitute evidence for any god? Or are they ONLY a list of properties which any god MUST possess in order to be the creator of a/the universe(s)? Are they not merely a description of the only god there may be IF there were to be an actual creator god?
Don't ALL the logical conjectures, that the likes of Craig5, Naik6, Tzortzis7 and other misguided disciples of some great, but equally misguided, minds of the past offer in support of a creator god's existence amount no more than a list of properties by which we would recognise such a being, if such a being existed?
This is not valueless information, it's valid, and very human, to attempt to prepare for the unknown via deduction from the variables available, no matter what the subject. And, in this instance, the philosophical conclusions that theologians have so earnestly revealed, would seem to be a fairly complete theory for recognising a creator god; if such a creator god was ever discovered. They, the theologians and philosophers, have provided for humanity a perfectly logical set of parameters via which 'we' could identify such a creature as legitimate.
Now, that's a very handy thing, a boon document you might say and kudos to all the great thinkers who have deduced such specifics from such flimsy data but, is knowing the attributes a god must posses even close to having evidence that such an entity exists?
I think not.
And I think not partly because each entry in this list of properties that we have come to through conjecture is itself merely a conjectural ideal. These properties of god, no matter which religion you choose interrogate, are "The Impossible Six"
God:
A Being that is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Beneficent, Immortal and Eternal
Omnipotent:
Have you ever met anyone who was powerful enough to control everything in a house? Yeah? What about with their mind? Nor me. Ever met anyone who came close to this, or ever heard of anyone do more than bend a spoon or move object a few microns? I think we can reasonably concede that omnipotence is a good distance from factual and must be considered to be a conjecture about an ideal.
Omniscient:
While psychics and clairvoyants do a great impression of having a minuscule portion of omniscience their ability is, as we all know, just a carnival trick called cold reading. Further, I think we'd all agree that even the President of the most powerful country on Earth could not be considered "all-knowing", even in his own country, in his own office sometimes.
Just in those simple human terms, the claim of any being's omniscience is hard to defend but when we look at it through scientific eyes the omniscience claim becomes utterly implausible and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to justify...
We know, from physics, that it's impossible to fully measure both the velocity and vector of a subatomic particle. It's possible to learn how fast it's moving or it's direction of travel but cannot be sure of both at once and that this is not 'our' problem, we cannot lay the blame at "primitive measuring devices", but rather it's a property of the subatomic particle itself, which we've named the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle". It seems that the terms velocity and vector only apply in the macro universe, to atoms or larger, and that subatomic particles do not possess these properties but rather are described by the term "state function" which I've heard defined as a "mish-mash of possible positions and momenta".
We know that just one human consists of 146 Octillion(ish) subatomic particles.(That's a USA Octillion of 146 followed by 29 zeros)1
We know that the universe is "way bigger"(technical term) than a mere human. As an extremely rough guess, it's bigger by a factor of about a googolplex to the power of a googolplex.1
For any creature to be considered omniscient, it must be, provably, fully aware of the "state function" of each and every individual subatomic particle at once, before it can be said to know the velocity and vector of all atoms in the entire universe (and itself, should it consist of any) for each and every nanosecond of the universe's entire existence (and beyond, should the being continue on). We know that there may well be more than one universe.(Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory)
The chances of achieving the ability to know the state function of all subatomic particles in every universe in every nanosecond must be considered, at best, negligible and, most likely, impossible. As achieving this ability cannot be considered "likely", it must also similarly be considered "unlikely" that a single being with this capability could exist and, further, it must be considered to be extremely negligible, or as close to impossible as one could get, for a being with this capability to have existed "first", before even the simplest subatomic particle acquired mass.
Whichever way one thinks about it, 'all-knowing' is not a thing that we can say exists in a real sense and we may only be conclude, therefore, that it is a conjectural ideal.
1Check out Shaving God with Occam for an explanation of the numbers mentioned.
Omnipresent:
Have you ever met anyone who was even in all the places they themselves wanted or needed to be? Ever met anyone who came close to this, or ever heard of anyone knowing even one instance of this property? No? Then it's conjecture about an ideal.
Beneficent:
While there are amongst us those with seemingly limitless benevolence to our fellow human, even the best efforts of the best of us can not hope to equal the immensity of malevolence in the struggle for survival. It's a slaughterhouse out there people, everything eats everything else, it's all about struggling to survive. Beneficence is not in evidence on any grand scale and so this property must be seen the same way, as conjecture of an ideal.
Immortal:
Think of your oldest relative, not necessarily living but the longest lived, not very long, eh? Some turtles live a long time, Crocs and a few Jelly Fish are supposed to be a bit immortal or something like it. However, all of that is here on Earth, inside this kindly biosphere. Ever hear of anything living in space? Not on an asteroid but floating free? And not in Star Trek or anything? Nope? Nor me. Now, as the Earth will eventually be swallowed up in the death of our, by cosmological standards, minuscule sun, all living things here will succumb to mortality, no matter what their genes have to say about it, so immortality of any kind in the creatures of which we are aware, is ultimately not seen and we may only conclude this is conjecture of an ideal.
Eternal:
This is a bit of a non starter, eternal is tricky; too many variables and simultaneously not enough but I'll have a bash. Firstly, it stands to reason that the only way to determine whether someone/thing is Eternal, is if you are yourself Eternal and can observe its 'life' for the entirety of yours. However, you'd only know for sure that it was you who was eternal, if your were also omniscient, which, as I mused above, is just a conjectural ideal. So, we must assume that you could not know you were the last and only being in existence or always existing, unless you hung around on your own until you were the only thing left after universal heat death, in all the dimensions in existence.
Secondly, if it so comes to pass that you do end up 'the one and only, eternal, billy-no-mates' then there's no way to detect if 'it' all stops if you stop; you have the solipsism8 problem.
At that point, the 'eternal being' really IS the ONLY mind in existence, so can a single mind truly know it didn't just imagine it all? The answer is, it can't and would instantly be unable to confirm its own eternal nature, or even have any true sense of how much time has passed since it had its first thought, indeed if heat death has occurred everything has already stopped, so there are no 'events' between which one can measure an elapsed time, so no time. Eternity here may be described here as zero perception.
Thirdly, "How long is eternal?" is not really a question, no answer can there come, but "How much longer is eternity than the length of time the universe has existed?" is a valid question.
The universe it seems is not eternal but the Big Bang didn't just create the space, it created time along with it. So, before the universe there was no time and we may only concede what the religious promote; any creator of the universe was existing outside of time. With that, surely we may only say that prior to the matter of space-time there was "No time at all" and so it follows that the length of the 'eternity' prior to the big bang that any creator god 'spent' learning how to decide if women should be stoned or if gays should be persecuted is also "no time at all" and thereby perhaps conclude it to be of little moral value?
As 'Eternal' prior to the universe is exactly equal to zero, indeed even using the word 'prior' is meaningless, it means any creator god's existence was, at best, exceedingly short, as close to zero as negligible can get, and cannot be legitimately seen to imply 'older than the universe' because to do so would take the conjecture into a time of "no time" where the descriptors like 'older' cannot apply in any comprehensible sense.
The religious may say, "Forget about time, god just exists 'always'!" but any attempt to quantify the word 'always' without implying the qualities of some scale of time and some scale for space eludes me, it becomes another meaningless word, like 'prior' or 'older'. How does one define "always" without these concepts?
Have a go; if you crack it, let me know.
Seems to me, the actual parameters of eternal are unmeasurable and therefore indistinguishable from ideological conjecture.
So, there you go, as far as I can fathom, the theological/philosophical 'evidence' for a creator god is set of conjectures based firmly in a list of conjectural 'impossible' ideals or, as I prefer to call it, pretendsies.
And, can pretendsies be legitimately claimed as evidence for anything?
Other than pretending, I mean.
Apologies for the 'booobie' immaturity - couldn't resist :)
This is one of the Too Many Questions
What we know:
1. There is a universe(s).The religious seem to think and like to imply that the theological and philosophical 'evidence' proffered for a creator god is sufficient to conclude God "is". While I don't think anyone could legitimately suggest that these 'evidences' can be claimed as any more than logical conjecture, does the conjecture actually amount to evidence for a god's existence?
2. Life grew in the universe(s).
3. All else is conjecture.
I've been looking at the arguments for a while now and while there are many facets to the discourse, Ontological1, Teleological2, Cosmological3 etc4, nearly all arguments depict a similar being; all are logical deductions toward a single goal of a 'necessary god', which most often delivers a being with the properties of Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Beneficence, Immortality and Eternity.
However, do these properties constitute evidence for any god? Or are they ONLY a list of properties which any god MUST possess in order to be the creator of a/the universe(s)? Are they not merely a description of the only god there may be IF there were to be an actual creator god?
Don't ALL the logical conjectures, that the likes of Craig5, Naik6, Tzortzis7 and other misguided disciples of some great, but equally misguided, minds of the past offer in support of a creator god's existence amount no more than a list of properties by which we would recognise such a being, if such a being existed?
This is not valueless information, it's valid, and very human, to attempt to prepare for the unknown via deduction from the variables available, no matter what the subject. And, in this instance, the philosophical conclusions that theologians have so earnestly revealed, would seem to be a fairly complete theory for recognising a creator god; if such a creator god was ever discovered. They, the theologians and philosophers, have provided for humanity a perfectly logical set of parameters via which 'we' could identify such a creature as legitimate.
Now, that's a very handy thing, a boon document you might say and kudos to all the great thinkers who have deduced such specifics from such flimsy data but, is knowing the attributes a god must posses even close to having evidence that such an entity exists?
I think not.
And I think not partly because each entry in this list of properties that we have come to through conjecture is itself merely a conjectural ideal. These properties of god, no matter which religion you choose interrogate, are "The Impossible Six"
God:
I've called them the impossible six because, as far as I'm aware, not one human has ever actually encountered even one of these properties, and it's way more catchy than calling them the "So improbable it's negligible six"....
Omnipotent:
Have you ever met anyone who was powerful enough to control everything in a house? Yeah? What about with their mind? Nor me. Ever met anyone who came close to this, or ever heard of anyone do more than bend a spoon or move object a few microns? I think we can reasonably concede that omnipotence is a good distance from factual and must be considered to be a conjecture about an ideal.
Omniscient:
While psychics and clairvoyants do a great impression of having a minuscule portion of omniscience their ability is, as we all know, just a carnival trick called cold reading. Further, I think we'd all agree that even the President of the most powerful country on Earth could not be considered "all-knowing", even in his own country, in his own office sometimes.
Just in those simple human terms, the claim of any being's omniscience is hard to defend but when we look at it through scientific eyes the omniscience claim becomes utterly implausible and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to justify...
We know, from physics, that it's impossible to fully measure both the velocity and vector of a subatomic particle. It's possible to learn how fast it's moving or it's direction of travel but cannot be sure of both at once and that this is not 'our' problem, we cannot lay the blame at "primitive measuring devices", but rather it's a property of the subatomic particle itself, which we've named the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle". It seems that the terms velocity and vector only apply in the macro universe, to atoms or larger, and that subatomic particles do not possess these properties but rather are described by the term "state function" which I've heard defined as a "mish-mash of possible positions and momenta".
We know that just one human consists of 146 Octillion(ish) subatomic particles.(That's a USA Octillion of 146 followed by 29 zeros)1
We know that the universe is "way bigger"(technical term) than a mere human. As an extremely rough guess, it's bigger by a factor of about a googolplex to the power of a googolplex.1
For any creature to be considered omniscient, it must be, provably, fully aware of the "state function" of each and every individual subatomic particle at once, before it can be said to know the velocity and vector of all atoms in the entire universe (and itself, should it consist of any) for each and every nanosecond of the universe's entire existence (and beyond, should the being continue on). We know that there may well be more than one universe.(Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory)
The chances of achieving the ability to know the state function of all subatomic particles in every universe in every nanosecond must be considered, at best, negligible and, most likely, impossible. As achieving this ability cannot be considered "likely", it must also similarly be considered "unlikely" that a single being with this capability could exist and, further, it must be considered to be extremely negligible, or as close to impossible as one could get, for a being with this capability to have existed "first", before even the simplest subatomic particle acquired mass.
Whichever way one thinks about it, 'all-knowing' is not a thing that we can say exists in a real sense and we may only be conclude, therefore, that it is a conjectural ideal.
1Check out Shaving God with Occam for an explanation of the numbers mentioned.
Omnipresent:
Have you ever met anyone who was even in all the places they themselves wanted or needed to be? Ever met anyone who came close to this, or ever heard of anyone knowing even one instance of this property? No? Then it's conjecture about an ideal.
Beneficent:
While there are amongst us those with seemingly limitless benevolence to our fellow human, even the best efforts of the best of us can not hope to equal the immensity of malevolence in the struggle for survival. It's a slaughterhouse out there people, everything eats everything else, it's all about struggling to survive. Beneficence is not in evidence on any grand scale and so this property must be seen the same way, as conjecture of an ideal.
Immortal:
Think of your oldest relative, not necessarily living but the longest lived, not very long, eh? Some turtles live a long time, Crocs and a few Jelly Fish are supposed to be a bit immortal or something like it. However, all of that is here on Earth, inside this kindly biosphere. Ever hear of anything living in space? Not on an asteroid but floating free? And not in Star Trek or anything? Nope? Nor me. Now, as the Earth will eventually be swallowed up in the death of our, by cosmological standards, minuscule sun, all living things here will succumb to mortality, no matter what their genes have to say about it, so immortality of any kind in the creatures of which we are aware, is ultimately not seen and we may only conclude this is conjecture of an ideal.
Eternal:
This is a bit of a non starter, eternal is tricky; too many variables and simultaneously not enough but I'll have a bash. Firstly, it stands to reason that the only way to determine whether someone/thing is Eternal, is if you are yourself Eternal and can observe its 'life' for the entirety of yours. However, you'd only know for sure that it was you who was eternal, if your were also omniscient, which, as I mused above, is just a conjectural ideal. So, we must assume that you could not know you were the last and only being in existence or always existing, unless you hung around on your own until you were the only thing left after universal heat death, in all the dimensions in existence.
Secondly, if it so comes to pass that you do end up 'the one and only, eternal, billy-no-mates' then there's no way to detect if 'it' all stops if you stop; you have the solipsism8 problem.
At that point, the 'eternal being' really IS the ONLY mind in existence, so can a single mind truly know it didn't just imagine it all? The answer is, it can't and would instantly be unable to confirm its own eternal nature, or even have any true sense of how much time has passed since it had its first thought, indeed if heat death has occurred everything has already stopped, so there are no 'events' between which one can measure an elapsed time, so no time. Eternity here may be described here as zero perception.
Thirdly, "How long is eternal?" is not really a question, no answer can there come, but "How much longer is eternity than the length of time the universe has existed?" is a valid question.
The universe it seems is not eternal but the Big Bang didn't just create the space, it created time along with it. So, before the universe there was no time and we may only concede what the religious promote; any creator of the universe was existing outside of time. With that, surely we may only say that prior to the matter of space-time there was "No time at all" and so it follows that the length of the 'eternity' prior to the big bang that any creator god 'spent' learning how to decide if women should be stoned or if gays should be persecuted is also "no time at all" and thereby perhaps conclude it to be of little moral value?
As 'Eternal' prior to the universe is exactly equal to zero, indeed even using the word 'prior' is meaningless, it means any creator god's existence was, at best, exceedingly short, as close to zero as negligible can get, and cannot be legitimately seen to imply 'older than the universe' because to do so would take the conjecture into a time of "no time" where the descriptors like 'older' cannot apply in any comprehensible sense.
The religious may say, "Forget about time, god just exists 'always'!" but any attempt to quantify the word 'always' without implying the qualities of some scale of time and some scale for space eludes me, it becomes another meaningless word, like 'prior' or 'older'. How does one define "always" without these concepts?
Have a go; if you crack it, let me know.
Seems to me, the actual parameters of eternal are unmeasurable and therefore indistinguishable from ideological conjecture.
So, there you go, as far as I can fathom, the theological/philosophical 'evidence' for a creator god is set of conjectures based firmly in a list of conjectural 'impossible' ideals or, as I prefer to call it, pretendsies.
Other than pretending, I mean.
PEACE
Crispy
Crispy
Please leave a comment - Anything will do
The best communications are often,
THREE WORDS OR LESS
OR ONE OR MORE FINGERS!
The best communications are often,
THREE WORDS OR LESS
OR ONE OR MORE FINGERS!
- 1 Wikipedia - Ontological argument
- 2 Wikipedia - Teleological argument
- 3 Wikipedia - Cosmological argument
- 4 Wikipedia - Existence of God
- 5 William Lane Craig explains Ontological argument for god - Youtube
(BTW I think "God and the laws of Physics - All alone in the Multiverse?", I was going to say destroys, but let's go with casts great doubt on the Ontological argument)- 6 Dr Zakir Naik
- 7 Hamza Tzortzis
- 8 Wikipedia - Solipsism
