My main point was that no matter what we think and believe, we cannot, in actuality, know God or God’s mind - since we are only human.
I don’t know whether or not you actually believe in God but if you do or did, you would “see” a designing God wouldn’t you?
Your statement makes me realize just how much is paradoxical when it comes to speaking about God and probably will remain so.
Perhaps within the mind of God there is no contradiction between the absolutely random and the algorithm. But then I’m not a physicist so my statement may be absurd here.
I actually got mad at phyllo and Uccisore for using argument of ignorance to prove God.
I like your tone better, so I’m not really angry at you.
I don’t like argument from ignorance, because in a lack of FULL knowledge, people use argument of ignorance to say things like “you don’t REALLY know if you exist” etc… (Define exist etc…)
I tend to see statistics as ways that we come to absolutes …
An analogy that I love to use is my coffee analogy …
I ask for “walking room” (so it doesn’t spill) which is about 3/4ths full…
I’ve never had the same pour, but all of my pours statistically, have been perfect !!
I think there is certainly perfection, I just think it’s a margin of error
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.
The way I look at it, there is NO contrary evidence.
We can’t know enough to assume that we ourselves are right or wrong when it comes to God unless someone else’s notion about God is too absurd to argue the point.
It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proved false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is that: there may have been an insufficient investigation, and therefore there is insufficient information to prove the proposition be either true or false.
As a skeptic, I don’t assert that something is true simply because it has not been proven false.
I take the high scientific road these days though there was a time when I was fine with simply believing something.
There can always be insufficient data and we all have our blind spots and biases, deliberately ignoring information.
Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four,
True
false
unknown between true or false
being unknowable (among the first three).[1]
This is true, especially when it comes to God. How can we be absolutist in our vision of God?
How knowable can God actually be ~~ I mean the “actuality” of God. Our minds of fallible and in that we are not always capable of thinking in terms of a paradox. Many people hate the paradox. They like their truths pure and clear cut.
In debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used in an attempt to shift the burden of proof.
But this is just the thing. I know this pertains to all kinds of subjects and debates but when it comes to God, I’m not shifting the burden of proof because the way I look at it, there could only be so much so-called proof according to appearances and how far can that take us since it depends on our senses. God is a transcendent subject.
The universe appears to be quite structured and organized and evolving as a process but does that actually mean that God had a specific design for it? Reason makes us say yes but can we say that absolutely?
The major problem with argument from ignorance is that it facilitates no discussion whatsoever, the sense you’re using it in, makes it abundantly clear…
You can neither prove nor disprove theism, atheism or agnosticism…
They were trolling with this argument, and I got angry
Oh, I was mostly thinking about the latter. When you said ‘coercions of the flesh’, I’m thinking- well, we all have to eat, drink, and come in out of the cold, and throughout history people have been driven to evil deeds again and again simply because of those things.
In scriptures, although a little misleading today, the term “flesh” refers to your normal animal instincts; wants, desires, lusts, addictions, the seven sins, or whatever. One can become free from such urges so that decisions become the result of a more balanced assessment of ones needs, more disciplined.
When one is addicted to anything, one’s “will” is not free. When addicted, even if you decide to stop drinking alcohol, you will keep drinking it anyway. If you don’t believe that, just try it and you will quickly learn … and be cursed, requiring outside assistance. A respect for God can be deeply felt enough to “set you free”, especially along with the organized assistance of a true, forgiving (aka “Jesus”) church. Today, you are supposed to hate “organized religion” so that there will be far less outside assistance and the reign of desires, lusts, and addictions can resume in making specific people extremely rich and powerful.
If you are trying to avoid discipline, you are suckering into Satanism (being lost in lusts). And it all happens for very exact psychological, physiological, and neurological reasons. It isn’t superstition.
The real game is wealth translation, everyone here except myself it seems, derives pleasure from wealth encryption, which is enjoying the you won and others lost.
No, what I mean, is say, you become celibate or chaste, you’re hurting good people who want to experience the bond of sexuality with you. If you’re sexual, you’re hurting all the good people who can’t have sex with you because of imposed limitations.
If you become president, you hurt everyone else who wanted to be president, if you don’t become president, you hurt all the people who wanted you to be president.
If you are homeless, you hurt everyone who this makes uncomfortable, if you have a home, you hurt everyone who wants that home.
Basically, the more you see life clearly, with sharp resolution, you become keenly aware, that no matter what you do here, you’re hurting someone …
This doesn’t excuse hurting those people either …
The goal , the real game in life, not the distractions, is to solve this problem once and for all, and not just lolly gag through life, living a meaningless life.
Yes, you could argue this; but my point above involves taking these generally abstract, scholastic assessments of the relationship between an omniscient God and mere mortals, and situating it out in the world of actual human interactions.
Omniscient: having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding; perceiving all things.
To argue then that an all-knowing God does not know whether Jane will abort or not about her unborn baby, or that Jack will or will not report her to the authorities, seems to ascribe the meaning of the word “omniscient” to God as but one more manifestation of His “mysterious ways”. And, of course, the faithful can always fall back on that to rationalize anything with respect to Him.
Similarly if a bat could only be as God intended it to be how could this omniscient God not know what it is like to be a bat? It is as though this all-powerful entity set life itself into motion such that it would evolve on its own into minds [ours] able to probe these questions self-consciously.
In other words, whatever that means.
And [thus] we are still back to square one: connecting all of these endless “intellectual” and “theoretical” speculations to an actual extant God.
A God, the God, your God.
And not theirs.
Or, sure, maybe it’s just me. My inability to reconcile the idea of an omniscient God able to be the “perfect predictor” with mere mortals able to choose behaviors that would be both “free” and wholly [necessarily] in sync with God’s prediction of what it will be.
And what then is the limit to that which mortals are able to think, feel and behave autonomously?
Are they able to prove the existence of God if God does not want His existence able to be proven? Are they able to teach themselves to behave in such a manner that God is not aware of it? Can they discover how to trick God? To defy God with impunity?
As long as there is a gap between what mere mortals think, feel and do and God’s awareness of this, it would seem to make this relationship considerably more problematic.
For example, am I “free” to not believe in God? Or, as some Christians [among others] insists, “free” or not, will my refusal [inability] to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior result [necessarily] in eternal damnation?
And [of course] always this: with so much at stake how/why is it that God makes answering these crucial questions so seemingly elusive?
Since this is important to me, I don’t want my earlier reply to not get read iambiguous… We posted about the same time.
I want to add for James other examples,
People who are non idolatrists roil in pain when the see crosses, churches, weddings, baptisms…
Most people who think they are good are evil as fuck, not only do people actually do these things … But even those that don’t do not speak out against such evil. That’s called being the asshole through omission … The magnitude of evil in this planet is astonishing…
