No Evidence For God, Why Still Believe?

And you have no idea of what I was referring to. So who is really ignoring the referents?

James, you know that this post does not negate the problem that I pointed to, and you know just as well that I don’t need to know what angle of what argument you were making for my point to stand. Don’t even try this.

Quantities and functions of objects and relations between them doesn’t prove anything about anything outside the system in which they’re being considered. Godel knew this and so do you.

Let’s get on a clean thread if that is the debate you want to take on. Start one. We can at least show someone what an actual debate should look like.

I never start threads man. I finish them.

Prismatic…when you say there’s no evidence…how do you rule out firsthand evidence contained in private mental states?

Prism isn’t going to be able to justify his arguments to you.

And why are you afraid to start threads?

Afraid? I started the greatest thread of all time. My work is done.

I’m seeing a lot of talking, no walking.

Let’s talk about symbols and referents on your side, and evidence contained in private mental states on his side. I mean, I technically think that you’re both wrong.

I’m not sure what you are trying to put forth, but still, get it onto a clean thread so we can make sense of it.

I am sure that you’re trying to get me to put something fourth, so that I can be at a rhetorical disadvantage as the one who’s forced to induct. You’re no Socrates James. I know these tricks.

Just tell me how you get from an abstract system to a concrete fact about the world without violating the distinction between symbols and referents.

Oh, that is just a BS trick of your own. Afraid to commit to anything?

I still need for you to clarify that. Maybe an example or two?

You can draw all the diagrams that you want, and you can write out all the formulas in the world, and you can quantify everything under the sun and at the end of the day the proof as to whether there is or isn’t a god just simply doesn’t rest on those things.

Well, that would be BS, but is that the error that you were talking about?

How about just quote whatever it was that you felt was whatever kind of error you are talking about.

I’ll take your “BS” remark as your concession. It’s 5am. Have something better for when I wake up. I don’t have to quote you, I know how you think and my statement stands on its own.

That’s what I thought. You never actually engage in debate, do you. Hit n Run.

I can’t go to sleep at 5am? I’m not engaging you unless I start a new thread?

James, be real. Respond to the post and stop making it about me. You’re better than this.

Your constant blame-shifting efforts don’t work with me. You made a claim that I was wrong about something. I merely asked you to explain what you were referring to. And since then you have been backpedaling, shuffling your feet, and making excuses.

You are the one who needs to stop stalling, dodging, and blame-shifting and “get real”. Or are you Not better than this?

Sigh…

Let’s bring this down to…earth?

Playing the stock market.

There’s the part where the folks who have the right answers invest in particular corporations and as a result make money. Right and wrong here are easily measured. By bank accounts for example.

But then the right/wrong dichotomy shifts from playing the stock market, to justifying it as a virtuous pursuit. Investment, in other words, in sync with capitalism, said to be in sync with the most or the only rational human interactions in the economic sphere.

But some argue that, on the contrary, capitalism is the immoral pursuit of selfish gain and exploitation. A mode of production [rooted historically] that is heavily invested in the “alienation of labor” and in “commodity fetishism”.

Now, I do not argue that there is “never a right answer”. I make the distinction between answers that are embedded objectively in the either/or world and answers that are embedded subjectively/subjunctively in the is/ought world.

And, per the OP, there are facts [right and wrong answers] regarding God and religion that either are as well in sync with the either/or world, or are instead embodied existentially in dasein and in conflicting goods.

Thus I am not only willing to acknowledge the existence of any number of “indeterminant” things, I point out time and again how my being entangled in this…

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

…is entirely predicated on “the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty”.

Then it becomes a matter of folks like James and Mr. Reasonable noting the extent to which they are not in turn entangled in it. Relating precisely to those human interactions deeply embedded in contingency, chance and change.

Let’s see if James and Mr. Reasonable are willing to pursue this out in the world of actual human interactions that do come into conflict over things like God and religion and value judgments. And political prejudices.

How about starting a new thread, Smears?

And, if I’m not mistaken, he means this one: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179879

Note how he introduces it:

I’m sitting on my couch, watching a video of the alabama/lsu game while smoking a bong and waiting for chinese food to be delivered. I was thinking of getting someone over here to clean the place. This is usually what I’m doing, I’ve seen this game about 130-140 times now.
Or I’m in the bathroom someplace, bored and using my phone to post on message boards while I poop.

And, indeed, if ILP were but one more component of social media, I believe it may well be the greatest thread here.

He noted in jest. :wink:

There is no evidence for anything involving the senses either. Can’t trust the senses, can’t trust that traffic light, color blind to our own color blindness, but we stop and go just the same. :-"