New Proof of the Existence of God

Is there a God? If so, what is She like?

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Science Fan
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Science Fan »

Necro: For some reason I did not see this original post, which is why I wrote another one below.
Last edited by Science Fan on Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Science Fan »

Necro: You are mentioning debunked claims. Take your claims about near-death experiences. We now know that when the brain is deprived of oxygen that it produces an hallucinogenic drug. So, this is what causes near-death experiences --- they are the product of the brain's own production of an hallucinogenic drug. Same with out-of-body experiences. They are hallucinations. We've had people claiming to see their own body from looking above, yet, they could not see the two dead bodies lying right next to their own body? We have some hospitals rigged with electronic messages that can only be seen from the ceiling, and yet, not a single person who claims to have floated out of their body has ever accurately reported seeing any such messages.

The more science advances, the less room there is for supernatural claims.
wisdomlover
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by wisdomlover »

It's hard for me to get my head around the idea that the probability of there being a god is 0 because if god existed it would be able to do an infinite number of things, making the probability denominator infinite.

Why does the number of things a being can do affect the probability of their existence?
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Greta
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Greta »

wisdomlover wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:06 pmPremise #1: Life was created from a completely random process.
Premise #2: No finite being can create anything that is completely random.
Therefore: Life was created by an infinite being.
Point #1 is false. Life was not created by completely random processes. As with everything else in reality, life was created by the interplay of chaos and order. Chaos is not randomness, but apparent randomness. Much that appears to be random to us is ruled by fractal geometry.

Nor is even the quantum realm necessarily random. Who is to say that there's not much smaller Planck scale physics driving what we perceive as random fluctuations in subatomic particles? The fact is that we simply do not know; the best we can do is report what appears to be the case based on current technology and methods, aware that there's much experimentation to be done before any kind of certainty in this can be achieved.

Point #2 seems rather odd to me - when you talk about "finite" and infinite", let's make clear that the difference is academic. If all the possibilities of a "bubble" universe are limited, it's only barely the case. For all intents and purposes, the universe might as well be unlimited.

Point #3 assumes that life was created. However, much work has been done in observing chemical self-assembly, making clear that a creator as such is not needed (unless the creator has created the system of chemical self-assembly - and that is also a far from solid supposition).
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by wisdomlover »

Greta wrote: Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:52 pm
Point #1 is false. Life was not created by completely random processes. As with everything else in reality, life was created by the interplay of chaos and order. Chaos is not randomness, but apparent randomness. Much that appears to be random to us is ruled by fractal geometry.

Nor is even the quantum realm necessarily random. Who is to say that there's not much smaller Planck scale physics driving what we perceive as random fluctuations in subatomic particles? The fact is that we simply do not know; the best we can do is report what appears to be the case based on current technology and methods, aware that there's much experimentation to be done before any kind of certainty in this can be achieved.

Point #2 seems rather odd to me - when you talk about "finite" and infinite", let's make clear that the difference is academic. If all the possibilities of a "bubble" universe are limited, it's only barely the case. For all intents and purposes, the universe might as well be unlimited.

Point #3 assumes that life was created. However, much work has been done in observing chemical self-assembly, making clear that a creator as such is not needed (unless the creator has created the system of chemical self-assembly - and that is also a far from solid supposition).
I upgraded my 3/15 argument with a new one on 3/19 in response to feedback.

Nevertheless, you are correct that life was not created by a completely/truly random process. There may well also be other problems with my argument, but I put that mistake there on purpose (I am an atheist, and provided clues like making fun of him sitting on his throne & being bad at logic) because it is often used by theists who try to argue against a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life. It's good for us to be clear that the option is not god vs. randomness.

Great job, I thought nobody would catch this.
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Science Fan »

Wisdom: My argument was that our existence is far more likely due to natural processes than to an all-powerful God, not that an all-powerful God does not exist. I don't believe that's true, but that was not my argument. Typically theists claim that the chances of our existing is so small that a God must be involved. Such claims overlook how basic probabilities are calculated, and that the probability of our existence depending on an all-powerful God would have to be zero, since the probability would be 1 over infinity, representing an all-powerful God's infinite number of options for doing something else besides creating us. So, a theist cannot base his argument on the so-called low probability for our existence through natural causes, because their alternative is even less likely.
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by wisdomlover »

Science Fan wrote: Thu Mar 22, 2018 4:46 pm ... the probability of our existence depending on an all-powerful God would have to be zero, since the probability would be 1 over infinity, representing an all-powerful God's infinite number of options for doing something else besides creating us. So, a theist cannot base his argument on the so-called low probability for our existence through natural causes, because their alternative is even less likely.
Don't natural process also have an infinite number of options for things that could have been produced that way besides us?
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Greta
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Greta »

wisdomlover wrote: Thu Mar 22, 2018 3:05 pm... I put that mistake there on purpose (I am an atheist, and provided clues like making fun of him sitting on his throne & being bad at logic) ...
Heh, you sly dog :)

I've long had an issue with the notion of "randomness" because chains of events leading to everything are too complex to grasp. Lorenz's chaos did at least as much as Einstein's relativity to disprove Newton's "clockwork universe" and the hope that the future of humanity would be able to be predicted with confidence. Alas, there are too many variables so, unless AI meets the challenge, the medium and long term futures will always be as hard to predict with certainty as the location of electrons.

So, rather than a clockwork universe given to occasional random events attributed to the hand of God, we have a living universe that was seemingly generated by, is infused with and regenerated by chaos existing within even the most orderly systems.
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Necromancer »

Science Fan wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:38 pm Necro: You are mentioning debunked claims. Take your claims about near-death experiences. We now know that when the brain is deprived of oxygen that it produces an hallucinogenic drug. So, this is what causes near-death experiences --- they are the product of the brain's own production of an hallucinogenic drug. Same with out-of-body experiences. They are hallucinations. We've had people claiming to see their own body from looking above, yet, they could not see the two dead bodies lying right next to their own body? We have some hospitals rigged with electronic messages that can only be seen from the ceiling, and yet, not a single person who claims to have floated out of their body has ever accurately reported seeing any such messages.

The more science advances, the less room there is for supernatural claims.
No, absolutely not! You are being selective toward a set of studies you choose to respect and throw the rest aside. I say some studies may describe something to the matter at hand, but they fail to catch the big points like others do, that the souls exist.

It concerns way more than the status of the mind too. There are proofs of great regenerative abilities with "some" people which can not be explained by any other than great control of the soul to simply take such action, to regenerate, even an arm or more if need be. Then there are the reincarnation issues that you "have no belief in", that "some" people are able to reincarnate their bodies "out of thin air", or by milk or blood or whatever.

Then, we have the "mere" survival cases of people being outside of their own bodies, being able to look down on themselves, I guess because their own bodies are of great priority to them, instinctly paying close attention to what is so basic in life, the body to live and breathe. So too, with the rest of the cases where the body is more or less intact.

Outside of this, you may want to remove "dubious" claims of phantom feelings too yet I happen to think they are there for the potential to regenerate what is hurting.

Science Fan, you're data-set is too narrow. It is I who are being real about nature. I suspect you deselect studies according to your Worldview.
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by HexHammer »

wisdomlover wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:06 pm All the classic proofs of the existence of god are old and worn out -- the first cause argument, the argument from design, the ontological argument, etc. They have been refuted so many times, it's like beating a dead horse to think about them.

Sitting there on his throne, dismayed that fewer and fewer people believe I him, god thinks it's time for people to ponder a fresh new proof. Why he chose to reveal it to me, I don't know. He works in mysterious ways. Here it is:

Premise #1: Life was created from a completely random process.
Premise #2: No finite being can create anything that is completely random.
Therefore: Life was created by an infinite being.


Both premises call for some discussion, but rather than anticipate what people might need more information about, I'll just leave it simple for now and see if there's a response.
You sure are a false prophet, making up nonsense and babble grabbed out of thin air, the Tooth Fairy seems to be your consultant!
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Dontaskme »

HexHammer wrote: Wed Mar 28, 2018 4:40 pm making up nonsense and babble grabbed out of thin air

The thin air that made the brain is now fat air.

Lots of thin air clumped together maketh the thin fat.

Or thick air, or what ever you want to call clumps of thin air these days.

.
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Serendipper »

Greta wrote: Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:52 pm
wisdomlover wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:06 pmPremise #1: Life was created from a completely random process.
Premise #2: No finite being can create anything that is completely random.
Therefore: Life was created by an infinite being.
Point #1 is false. Life was not created by completely random processes. As with everything else in reality, life was created by the interplay of chaos and order. Chaos is not randomness, but apparent randomness.
If chaos is not random, but determined, then what is the difference between chaos and order?
Nor is even the quantum realm necessarily random.

It took a while, but hidden variable theory was eventually disproved by John Bell, who showed that there are lots of experiments that cannot have unmeasured results. Thus the results cannot be determined ahead of time, so there are no hidden variables, and the results are truly random. That is, if it is physically and mathematically impossible to predict the results, then the results are truly, fundamentally random. http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/1 ... andomness/
Who is to say that there's not much smaller Planck scale physics driving what we perceive as random fluctuations in subatomic particles? The fact is that we simply do not know; the best we can do is report what appears to be the case based on current technology and methods, aware that there's much experimentation to be done before any kind of certainty in this can be achieved.
It's not that we do not know, but we cannot know.
Point #2 seems rather odd to me - when you talk about "finite" and infinite", let's make clear that the difference is academic. If all the possibilities of a "bubble" universe are limited, it's only barely the case. For all intents and purposes, the universe might as well be unlimited.

The universe is finite, but the nothingness outside it is unlimited. The finite universe could expand forever inside of the nothingness, but the universe will never be infinite until the day that forever arrives. Even claiming the universe is unbounded in size could be and probably is false, since there will come a time that the distances between particles is too great.
Point #3 assumes that life was created. However, much work has been done in observing chemical self-assembly, making clear that a creator as such is not needed (unless the creator has created the system of chemical self-assembly - and that is also a far from solid supposition).
Unless the chemicals are themselves primitive forms of life. Nonlife cannot create life; either life is not life or nonlife is not nonlife. Either way is fine for me, whether I'm alive or a machine, but there can be no differentiation between the two.

Consciousness is not a complicated form of mineral, but mineral is a simple form of consciousness.
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Greta »

Serendipper wrote: Sun Apr 01, 2018 9:51 pm
Greta wrote: Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:52 pm
wisdomlover wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:06 pmPremise #1: Life was created from a completely random process.
Premise #2: No finite being can create anything that is completely random.
Therefore: Life was created by an infinite being.
Point #1 is false. Life was not created by completely random processes. As with everything else in reality, life was created by the interplay of chaos and order. Chaos is not randomness, but apparent randomness.
If chaos is not random, but determined, then what is the difference between chaos and order?
Time. Over time orderly systems - areas of concentration - emerge in chaotic systems through probability.
Serendipper wrote:
Nor is even the quantum realm necessarily random.

It took a while, but hidden variable theory was eventually disproved by John Bell, who showed that there are lots of experiments that cannot have unmeasured results. Thus the results cannot be determined ahead of time, so there are no hidden variables, and the results are truly random. That is, if it is physically and mathematically impossible to predict the results, then the results are truly, fundamentally random. http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/1 ... andomness/
If results seem impossible to predict, then why assume that that will always be the case? Maybe predictive methods are not strong enough or less effective in the realm of the very small. Given that Planck scale entities are posited to perhaps be impacting on the quantum scale, and given that our knowledge of Planck scale entities is minimal and theoretical, then Bell has only provided practical guide, not an ultimate ontological position. Either that or he's presenting an educated guess as fact.

So many "certainties" and "proofs" have fallen by the wayside in life that I take anything proclaimed as certain as provisional if it does not make sense. True randomness - the breakdown of cause and effect - makes no sense because that implies an extra actor in reality - God - which may be so, and also may not. The positing of God as certain and true is a game, generally one to reassure oneself that one's posthumous prospects don't seem so bleak.

It's perfectly possible that what we conceive of as randomness is actually chaos, with traceable causes and effects all the way down with sufficient technological means.

Consider other ideas that make no sense, such as "there was no before" before the big bang. It's magic thinking - positing the miracle of creation out of absolute nothing, without allowing questions as to what came before just looks like an updated creation myth with non anthropomorphic actors acceptable to modern minds. Logically, the big bang was more likely a state change than a beginning, a birth rather than an ultimate origin. There must have been time before the BB, but there were no clocks to measure the seething activity in the "quantum foam" - no stellar or planetary orbits or rotations, no great cosmic cycles - rather countless cycles at the smallest of scale, each perturbation in the fabric of reality appearing an disappearing in its own infinitesimal time. Completely subjective time (albeit without observers, only peers).
Serendipper wrote:
Who is to say that there's not much smaller Planck scale physics driving what we perceive as random fluctuations in subatomic particles? The fact is that we simply do not know; the best we can do is report what appears to be the case based on current technology and methods, aware that there's much experimentation to be done before any kind of certainty in this can be achieved.
It's not that we do not know, but we cannot know.
Yes, "we cannot know" - yet. We need a means other than atom smashers to investigate the smallest realms. We've taken that method of piercing the shells of subatomic entities about as far as practicality and budget can stretch.
Serendipper wrote:
Point #2 seems rather odd to me - when you talk about "finite" and infinite", let's make clear that the difference is academic. If all the possibilities of a "bubble" universe are limited, it's only barely the case. For all intents and purposes, the universe might as well be unlimited.

The universe is finite, but the nothingness outside it is unlimited. The finite universe could expand forever inside of the nothingness, but the universe will never be infinite until the day that forever arrives. Even claiming the universe is unbounded in size could be and probably is false, since there will come a time that the distances between particles is too great.
Seemingly so.
Serendipper wrote:
Point #3 assumes that life was created. However, much work has been done in observing chemical self-assembly, making clear that a creator as such is not needed (unless the creator has created the system of chemical self-assembly - and that is also a far from solid supposition).
Unless the chemicals are themselves primitive forms of life. Nonlife cannot create life; either life is not life or nonlife is not nonlife. Either way is fine for me, whether I'm alive or a machine, but there can be no differentiation between the two.

Consciousness is not a complicated form of mineral, but mineral is a simple form of consciousness.
I quite like the poetry of that last sentence. It nicely captures both the connections and emergence that appears to be taking place.

It's clear to me that biological life is not the only living state. By our current definitions, living systems like stars and planets are "dead", nonliving objects. So I'm a panvitalist these days, taking into account that all living systems need "space" to survive - to be surrounded by less animate things (otherwise they would be consumed by competition), but that's not to say these other things are "dead" as such. So, unlike almost everyone. I don't see rocks as "dead", rather dormant entities within living systems (like minerals in one's body).
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Serendipper »

Greta wrote: Mon Apr 02, 2018 1:40 am
Serendipper wrote: Sun Apr 01, 2018 9:51 pm
Greta wrote: Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:52 pm
Point #1 is false. Life was not created by completely random processes. As with everything else in reality, life was created by the interplay of chaos and order. Chaos is not randomness, but apparent randomness.
If chaos is not random, but determined, then what is the difference between chaos and order?
Time. Over time orderly systems - areas of concentration - emerge in chaotic systems through probability.
But a chaotic system is an orderly system, right? A chaotic system is a deterministic system that is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. What is the difference between order and disorder? Are clouds ordered? The difference seems subjective. Mom used to think my room was disordered, but it looked ok to me :D
Serendipper wrote:
Nor is even the quantum realm necessarily random.

It took a while, but hidden variable theory was eventually disproved by John Bell, who showed that there are lots of experiments that cannot have unmeasured results. Thus the results cannot be determined ahead of time, so there are no hidden variables, and the results are truly random. That is, if it is physically and mathematically impossible to predict the results, then the results are truly, fundamentally random. http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/1 ... andomness/
If results seem impossible to predict, then why assume that that will always be the case? Maybe predictive methods are not strong enough or less effective in the realm of the very small. Given that Planck scale entities are posited to perhaps be impacting on the quantum scale, and given that our knowledge of Planck scale entities is minimal and theoretical, then Bell has only provided practical guide, not an ultimate ontological position. Either that or he's presenting an educated guess as fact.
Well, there will be doubters for a while I suppose:

Some people continue to believe that agreement with Bell's inequalities might yet be saved. They argue that in the future much more precise experiments could reveal that one of the known loopholes, for example the so-called "fair sampling loophole", had been biasing the interpretations. Most mainstream physicists are highly skeptical about all these "loopholes", admitting their existence but continuing to believe that Bell's inequalities must fail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stew ... ntal_tests

What does Bell's inequality mean, in layman's terms? https://www.quora.com/What-does-Bells-i ... mans-terms

Until someone provides reasonable objection, I suppose we're successfully working under the assumption that randomness exists.
So many "certainties" and "proofs" have fallen by the wayside in life that I take anything proclaimed as certain as provisional if it does not make sense.
That's a good point. Bell actually disproved his own conviction, along with Einstein's. Nobody wants to believe in randomness.
True randomness - the breakdown of cause and effect - makes no sense because that implies an extra actor in reality - God - which may be so, and also may not. The positing of God as certain and true is a game, generally one to reassure oneself that one's posthumous prospects don't seem so bleak.
My theory is that randomness is not uncaused, but caused by things we cannot know and that's most likely because we are continuous with the universe and therefore cannot make an observation without affecting what we're observing. Due to infinite regression, we cannot make a prediction.
It's perfectly possible that what we conceive of as randomness is actually chaos, with traceable causes and effects all the way down with sufficient technological means.
True, but again, if it's impossible to predict due to inability to take precise-enough measurements, then it may as well be random.
Consider other ideas that make no sense, such as "there was no before" before the big bang.
Time is an artifact of space in this universe and a speed limit on information from our perspective. Outside the universe (ie before inflation), there is no such time as time or space. Light observes no time or space now and from that point of view, the last 13 billion years was instant. I can't imagine an eternity of no-time; I have nothing for my mind to grab onto.
It's magic thinking - positing the miracle of creation out of absolute nothing, without allowing questions as to what came before just looks like an updated creation myth with non anthropomorphic actors acceptable to modern minds. Logically, the big bang was more likely a state change than a beginning, a birth rather than an ultimate origin. There must have been time before the BB, but there were no clocks to measure the seething activity in the "quantum foam" - no stellar or planetary orbits or rotations, no great cosmic cycles - rather countless cycles at the smallest of scale, each perturbation in the fabric of reality appearing an disappearing in its own infinitesimal time. Completely subjective time (albeit without observers, only peers).
There was probably a time before quantum foam too. Everything had to come from something, except consciousness which couldn't have come from anything; either it doesn't exist or it has always existed.
Serendipper wrote:
Point #3 assumes that life was created. However, much work has been done in observing chemical self-assembly, making clear that a creator as such is not needed (unless the creator has created the system of chemical self-assembly - and that is also a far from solid supposition).
Unless the chemicals are themselves primitive forms of life. Nonlife cannot create life; either life is not life or nonlife is not nonlife. Either way is fine for me, whether I'm alive or a machine, but there can be no differentiation between the two.

Consciousness is not a complicated form of mineral, but mineral is a simple form of consciousness.
I quite like the poetry of that last sentence. It nicely captures both the connections and emergence that appears to be taking place.

It's clear to me that biological life is not the only living state. By our current definitions, living systems like stars and planets are "dead", nonliving objects. So I'm a panvitalist these days, taking into account that all living systems need "space" to survive - to be surrounded by less animate things (otherwise they would be consumed by competition), but that's not to say these other things are "dead" as such. So, unlike almost everyone. I don't see rocks as "dead", rather dormant entities within living systems (like minerals in one's body).
Panvitalist, I like that :)

It occurred to me one day that plants eat rocks, or we could say that plants come from rocks and plants are the missing link connecting rocks to animals in the chain of life. Rocks come from stars as a waste product, or we could say that rocks eat stars because rocks increase in number as the star-fuel dwindles. Matter itself eats space: they say a blackhole sucks in space faster than the speed of light, which is why light cannot escape. So that might explain gravity: no mysterious force tugging on matter, but matter riding on the space being draw inward. So, stars eat space, rocks eat stars, plants eat rocks, animals eat plants.

You might like this video. Start at 27:00 and watch for a couple minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVW9CBI52nU

Where there are rocks, watch out! Because the rocks could come alive :mrgreen:
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Re: New Proof of the Existence of God

Post by Melchior »

wisdomlover wrote: Thu Mar 15, 2018 10:06 pm All the classic proofs of the existence of god are old and worn out -- the first cause argument, the argument from design, the ontological argument, etc. They have been refuted so many times, it's like beating a dead horse to think about them.

Sitting there on his throne, dismayed that fewer and fewer people believe I him, god thinks it's time for people to ponder a fresh new proof. Why he chose to reveal it to me, I don't know. He works in mysterious ways. Here it is:

Premise #1: Life was created from a completely random process.
Premise #2: No finite being can create anything that is completely random.
Therefore: Life was created by an infinite being.


Both premises call for some discussion, but rather than anticipate what people might need more information about, I'll just leave it simple for now and see if there's a response.

Fallacious.
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