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Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
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Author | Topic: God and the human mind | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
I would like to ask of those people who profess to believe in God a few simple questions. What event or state of mind convinced you of the existence of God and if you questioned this event/state of mind what eventually convinced you of the validity of the experience?
Did you in anyway investigate into the possibilty of self-deception and other means of fooling yourself such as confirmation bias,wishful thinking,selective thinking,post hoc reasoning etc..? If you did investigate perhaps you could share with us what you did to eliminate any of these or if you did not why not?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
prophex
Actually I have not stopped doing this, a man of wee faith I guess, I have not found anything particularly "wrong" with what I believe in to date, I have come to the conclusion that I will never... Ok so could you give us some idea as to how you determined that errors such as confirmation bias,wishful thinking,etc..were addressed by you that you might rule them out?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
jar
Thanks for the reply but I am more interested ,not in the belief,but, on how well you may have investigated the possibilty of errors in your thinking that could trip you up into giving creedence to something that is possibly just a construct of your mind?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
prophex
By the support of others, especially my brother, messenjah. And please explain how they/he answered issues concerning confirmation bias,wishful thinking,etc.. This message has been edited by sidelined, 09-03-2004 12:14 AM
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
prophex
My point,my point...Oh yes I need you to tell me if you applied critical thinking to the belief system you accepted. For instance The law of Truly Large Numbers.Confirmation bias.Begging the question.Selective thinking. I do not believe this part of my query has been addressed. This message has been edited by sidelined, 09-04-2004 12:46 PM
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Prophex
And what would that critical thinking amount to entailing prophex?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Phatboy
To use these once I knew that God was/is with me were as innappropriate as using them on you, sidelined I do not see how using critical thinking as applies to me would be a problem. It may be a little overboard to apply citical thinking to surmise my existence but being as I do exist the application of critical thinking would only buttress the fact rather than destroy it.I am sorry to disagree with you and,of course,you are entitled to your beliefs but it is not your god that is subject to investigation by critical thinking it is your own mind and its capability to distinguish between phenomena that have some level of likelihood and those that are unlikely. This does not mean that god does not exist but if god is incapable of withstanding investigation by critical thinking of human beings perhaps we may wonder why?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Hangdawg13
Since God is not bound by time, no. I would like to question the basis for this statement.Is there evidence for such a statement or is this simply a belief on your part to support your faith in god?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Darth Mal
This is way off topic but I had to ask if in your signature it is supposed to read we are the bog? Do you not mean borg? I also wanted to recommend a new picture of the month from a magazine called free inquiry.There is an excellent cartoon on al-qaeda terrorists on page 16 that I find hilarious.Perhaps you may consider it?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
jar
If there is a GOD, one capable of creating the universe, of thinking into existence all the beautiful and aesthetic rules we are discovering, who understands intuitively the relationship between gravity and the other forces, would he care what you or I believed about him? Do you worry if microbes believe in you, or if dirt believes in you? I enjoy this paragraph but I think in order for it to be a proper theistic endevour it is definitly limited by our language.We cannot be seriously using thinking in the same way we would for humans since this requires a material existence in order for us to think.
Something with so little self confidence that it could become upset if I didn't believe in it is not something that could have created the Universe. That is a highly well thought out statement and I agree 110%.POTM time for you jar.Bravo and well said!
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Darth Mal
I thought I did understand. The famous phrase by the borg is We are the borg! Resistence is futile! And I also know about the relationship of R=V/I.As for the link unfortunately the website for free inquiry does not include the comic. If I can get a copy of it somehow scanned I will see what I can do.Thanks.
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Hawgdawg13
Not only does this make sense to me logically, but it is supported by scripture. Well, leaving aside the validity of the logic you say it is supported by scripture,yet the scriptures were put together by men,thus it seems you accept a lot of things third hand at best.I will get back to this later today or tomorrow but could you show me the scriptures that state that God is beyond time and space and could you explain to me the concepts of time and space that those writers had in that day and age?Good day.
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Hangdawg13
2Pe 3:5 "They are deliberately ignoring one fact: Because of God's word, heaven and earth existed a long time ago." 2Pe 3:8 "But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (Psalm 90:4) Psalm 8:3 "When I look upon Your heavens, the work of Your fingers: the moon and the stars which You have fixed;" John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being." Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Job 38:33 "He stretches out the heavens by himself and walks on the waves of the sea. He made the constellations Ursa Major, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the clusters of stars in the south. He does great things that are unsearchable and miracles that cannot be numbered." There are others that I can't think of right now that point to his immanence and transcendence. This makes for an interesting reply but immanence as I am aware of it means structured within reality and transcendence means beyond any knowledge or experience. Now to be structured within reality, to me means, to be accesible to investigation. Transcendent is by definition beyond our knowledge or experience so one needs ask how these people became aware of something that they cannot. But irregardless these vserses do not deal with transcendence of time and space.In order of example
2Pe 3:5 "They are deliberately ignoring one fact: Because of God's word, heaven and earth existed a long time ago." This is a statement that is not supported.Who is the person who originated the claim that because of God's word, Heaven and Earth existed a long time ago?
2Pe 3:8 "But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." Here we are given a statement from someone to a beloved that again is a fine statement to make but again we have no support for the origin of the statement and the means by which this was determined.Who has had a day with the lord in which one thousand years has passed who then recorded the event. How well did he adapt to being in a world a millenium after spending a day with God? And how does time relate to a description of something that is not of time? Psalm 8:3 "When I look upon Your heavens, the work of Your fingers: the moon and the stars which You have fixed;" Ok we are to seriously consider that God manipulated the heavens in our space-time while remaining beyond space-time. And the logic that ties this together? The satrs are not fixed but constantly in motion.
John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being." More of the same insistence of a position without a qualification for why we should accept this.One also wonders how the writer knew of this.Can we clarify what is meant by "the Word"?
Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Again a guess that requires a postulating a God to explain existence.There is no meat to the proposition of what is the event of all events the birth of our universe..This is a statement that holds no information to support itself.
Job 38:33 "He stretches out the heavens by himself and walks on the waves of the sea. He made the constellations Ursa Major, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the clusters of stars in the south. He does great things that are unsearchable and miracles that cannot be numbered." Again we have something that is supposedly beyond space-time and doing activities within space time.The mention of the constellations of Ursa Major and Orion as though they were meaningful on a cosmic scale reflects the lack of understanding of the appaently related stars within these constellations.For example Orion is recognised by these stars
BETELGEUSE (Alpha Ori) RIGEL (Beta Ori) BELLATRIX (Gamma Ori) MINTAKA (Delta Ori) ALNILAM (Epsilon Ori) ALNITAK (Zeta Ori) SAIPH Betelguese is 1400 light years away. Rigel is also 1400 light years Bellatrix is 240 light years Mintaka is 920 light years Alnilam is 1340 light years Alnitak is 820 light years Saiph is 820 light years These stars are not even close in proximity to one another just as measured form Earth.The distances between each of them is also great.So in a related note you can wonder just what God meant by asking Job if he could loose the bands of Orion.You would think a God would be aware that the constellation is not bound since He is said to create it. What are the great things that are unseachable? The miracles that cannot be numbered? To not question is to allow no way to ascertain the veracity of the statements. If those statements are devoid of content that allows us to examine them then one may question why such is the case?
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
Hangdawg13
Ok I have obviously made the error of thinking that you were using the bible as support for your notion of a god who is transcendent.I apologize,and will start over. Here is your original arguement;
My basis for this statement lies in the fact that time is a property of this physical universe. God, the supreme being who created the universe, cannot be bound by what he has instantiated. If this were the case, God was created when the universe was created, and God could not have been the creator because there would be no capability for God to choose until afterwards. God transcends time and space. It is incorrect to think of God as an old man with a lot of time on his hands, and it is also incorrect to think of God as mundanely rushing through all reality in an instant. He is fully experiencing and fully transcending everything because everything exists in his mind so to speak. If you really want to make an attempt to understand God, I think one of the first things you have to wrap your mind around is a being that transcends all dimensions. Not only does this make sense to me logically, but it is supported by scripture. As far as physical evidence? Well that would be equivalent to proving God exists, which can only be done by God when he so chooses. Space-time,mass-energy,all of it is part of a physical universe.You are starting with the premise that {A}God created the universe.You then state he is{B} not bound by the universe he created.What is not apparent is how A was able to do so while have the property of B. Where and when did He exist if Space-time did not exist till he created them? If mass-energy di not exist until he created them what did his existence entail? This is where the logic falls apart, because unless you are claiming special dispensation from logic this does not make sense. Of course, we have the statement that god transcends space-time. What we do not have is evidence to support the notion. This does not mean it is not the case it means that we cannot know either way in which case it is valueless in a discussion.
He is fully experiencing and fully transcending everything because everything exists in his mind so to speak. Now here we have a clever use of logic.He is fully experiencing? In what sense does he experience? How do you arrive at this assumption?He is fully transcendent which means beyond knowledge or experience which begs the question how can we know or experience that which is not of knowledge or experience? To experience is to have had some awareness of a sequence of events occuring in a physical world.How,sir,does something beyond the physical take part in the physical? As for mind our own minds are physical in nature and when the brain that it exists in is damaged as in a coma there is no mind to speak of in the sense of experiencing.Now you state that we and the universe are somehow extant within the mind of god.Does God have a brain? He thinks thoughts? You must substantiate the human characteristics that you are asserting he has and how they can themselves exist without material form and also how you arrive at this conclusion. 'Bye for now' This message has been edited by sidelined, 09-11-2004 11:42 AM
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sidelined Member (Idle past 5939 days) Posts: 3435 From: Edmonton Alberta Canada Joined: |
sad2kno
you have to wrap your mind around the concept of a being that is operating on all dimensions Really? So explain to us uninformed masses, since you have wrapped your mind around the concept,just what you mean by a being that is operating on all dimensions.Or do you mean to say you imagine you have your mind wrapped around the concept? Can you even tell us what you mean by all dimensions? How many would that be?What are they like?Where do we find them? Isaiah 55:8-9 (his thoughts are far above ours} So the author of Isaiah states.How could he know what the thoughts are like in a god which you claim is transcendent of physical form and as such has no brain in which to have thoughts.Do you never question the obvious contradiction apparent in these statements?
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