I will prove god's existence if....

The big bang has no before by the evidence..you cant just say we dont know

Now what about the considerable amazing relationship of distance and sizes of the sun the earth and moon..How the moon came to be exactly positioned the correct weight correct size by the smallest margin...how by chance we had the correct position relative to the sun and the moon...All these are amazing coincidences or have they been magnificently engineered..circumstantial...Without this fine tuning life would be impossible..

Sure we can. Do you want to make a list of things we don't know, and things we don't have evidence for? That doesn't make them untrue. The difficulty with the Big Bang is that time itself is defined by its beginning; but that doesn't mean there is no before in physcial terms.

Remember that evidence has to do with what we can find right now. Lack of evidence does not exclude the possibility of there being a before -- it just means we can't observe it.

There is nothing at all remarkable about these relationships. Things fall into a certain orbit based on mass.

Xris: it looks like there has been a mix up in the multiple conversations that seem to be going on. Ariciunervos hasn't mis-quoted you as I can see but regardless, we should probably bring this back to one conversation or start another thread on the essence of proof (though I think that is rediculous).

Ari: As much as I can appreciate your frustration, it is not going to help the situation if we don't give it a shot with an open mind. By open mind, I simply mean that you should accept ANY possibility as just that, possible. Evaluate it only within the limits of your own understanding of course but do not knock it. You may be wrong and should ALWAYS be willing to accept that.

Ava: Please stop attacking things such as proof and evidence themselves. This is a defense which will only hold out so long as we accept existentialism. We are all reading this thread for proof of God. Attack proof does not prove god. I will refer you to one of my favorite Aphorisms from Nietzsche:

"Those who are deep strive for clarity, those who wish to appear deep to the crowd strive for obscurity. The crowd is too timid to cross waters in which it cannot see the bottom." Attacking the essence of understanding is doing nothing more that obscuring the subject. Please try to stay with a rational conversation related to your claim of proof.


EDIT: If your claim of proof is merely questioning proof itself then please state that clearly.

So when something cant be found it does not mean it does not exist??

So the moon appearing billions of years after the earth formed and exactly the right size is of no significance? the earth being the correct size in relationship to the sun is of no consequence?

Ava: Please stop attacking things such as proof and evidence themselves. This is a defense which will only hold out so long as we accept existentialism. We are all reading this thread for proof of God. Attack proof does not prove god. I will refer you to one of my favorite Aphorisms from Nietzsche:

"Those who are deep strive for clarity, those who wish to appear deep to the crowd strive for obscurity. The crowd is too timid to cross waters in which it cannot see the bottom." Attacking the essence of understanding is doing nothing more that obscuring the subject. Please try to stay with a rational conversation related to your claim of proof.


EDIT: If your claim of proof is merely questioning proof itself then please state that clearly.

Again, you have avoided the request for truth and have, instead, attacked the idea.

*sigh* I see where this is going and I grow tired of it. Games are only fun so long as everyone gets to play but you seem to get frustrated when others join and try to modify the rules to suit your desires. I have no more to add to this conversation as it has nothing to do with God any longer.

Ava: Please stop attacking things such as proof and evidence themselves. This is a defense which will only hold out so long as we accept existentialism.

Well it is not going to be as elegant as I would have wished and I will have to deconstruct your belief systems after the event as opposed to before it but since you are going to be bores I will come out with it.

If you apply logic to any belief-scince, religion, even logic itself, and ask the question why? enough times you will eventually come to the conclusion that people believe in it because it is what it is. So for instance a scientist who believes in a logical empirical materialistic system, believes in it because it is a logical empirical materialistic system, and the nature of this belief is emotional. At root we believe in things we like, and we like them at root because they are and we cannot justify this belief except by defining what the belief is. If all beliefs are based on simple emotional preferance, then all beliefs are on an equal basis- all beliefs are equally proven. Thus everything is prooven or nothing is proven.

This being so we must judge belief systems on what they are not if they make sense in comparison to our pet belief system. For instance scince is a system for discovering things about the physical universe- it has acheived a great deal of things and so seems to work, thusly we can say it is an excellent and reliable system for explaining the physical world in purely material terms. However it can make not statements about morality, politics or anything nonphysical. It is simply not within it's scope. So it cannot be used to make statements about these things. Fundamentalist christianity is in disputation with scince on many issues- it claims that the universe is younger, and created differently, than what scince would lead us to believe. Fundamentalist christianity seems to have some value as a moral guide, though many criticism could be made there, but when making statements about the physical that are in direct contradiction to what a system of judging the physical says. It makes more sense to trust the former system- scince- on a material view of the physical- that of age- than that of a system that has no basis for understanding the workings of the physical at a material level. However a less literal belief- that the the universe was at source created by God, does not impinge upon the realm os the other system. However this same belief might claim that miracles occur- however they are not at odds on somthing observed- the age of the universe- but rather claims about somthing that cannot be systematically proven and observed , and cannot be proven or disproven by science. Where two functioning systems do not meet at odds, neither need be in conflict with the other and both can be believed.

Each system is it's own proof, and one need not seek to proove or disprove the other based on it's own criteria, except where the two conflict. Consequantly, empiracal, rational or any other kind of proof need only be demanded if the two systems are at odds.

This is my justification of faith and my understanding of proof.

It just means we don't know. Lack of knowledge doesn't give license to mythologize.

What "correct size" are you talking about? It is what it is. There are several planets with several different sizes, and many moons of very different sizes. Are they all the wrong size?

Also, we can't say with your degree of assuredness when the moon "appeared". We know the age and composition of its rocks, and therefore an inference about its origin. That said, there is a lot of inference that can be drawn:

Moon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediawell within the error of these estimates. In other words, the moon and the earth are the same age and likely part of the same physical process!


Again, this is all a matter of bending, twisting, and distorting science into transparent lies in order to justify a preconception.

All right. I hear your argument. I dispute the idea that things in nature can be called "just coincidences", because everything arises as the result of natural processes. And right now, to our knowledge, 1 of every 9 planets can support life. Yes, it's with a sample of 9. But if we actually had the technical capability of going out and looking, we might find that with suns like ours, life is not only abundant but actually quite probable.

We don't know. But I think it's intellectually inconsistent to accept natural processes and scientific principles for the most part, yet when something is not known you assume the answer is something supernatural. My assumption is that our knowledge is very limited and it's most likely that the things we don't know still correspond to natural processes, no different than the things we do know.

PLANETS with life on them..this is news to me

We have not got the slightest idea about the creation of life

Was life in the plan for the universe as soon as the BB occured?

was it all accidental to the nature of things?

It must be considerd or we are burying our heads in the athiests sand of sarcastic giggles..

Again, with a sample size of 9, the probability of intelligent life arising is 1 in 9. Right? And how many planets have we landed on -- 2. With a sample size of 2, the probability of life is 50%.

I know, the statistics are meaningless with samples like this.

But how can you possibly surmise that life -- even intelligent life -- is unique to earth? If you're just playing a numbers game, it is highly likely that many thousands or millions of planets have conditions like ours. And every single time we've observed a planet with such conditions, there has been life, i.e. 1/1.

Funny... that word "creation" again. It assumes too much. It assumes conscious agency in our existence, which is something for which we have no evidence or observations.

Why does your mind need things to have plans?

Why not? For all you know it was highly probable. The word "accident" does not mean unlikely or rare. I mean car accidents are predictable and common if you consider the circumstance of drunk teenagers driving at night with friends in the car. And the "accident" of life may be predictable and common given certain natural conditions.

How can I not giggle when you are reaching to explain nature via a conscious deity that nature provides no reason to believe in? Honestly, if you're going to come up with a proposition about natural, observable phenomena that invokes gods and purpose and meaning, then you open the door to a million counterexamples that are similarly nonverifiable. Maybe the world arose from a lotus flower and hatched from the cosmic egg.

Hey, guys, I'm back. Sorry for the delay, I got pulled away on assignment, and the "golden rule" is always in effect, "no go until go", and also minimal access to internet.

I've been reading some of the posts that have occurred in my absence, and still have many more to catch up on. Some pretty good stuff, I'm happy to see the discussion move along lines more of logic than theology. On that note, I think that before we can prove the existence of "God", we need to establish a definition of "God" that we can all agree on.

For the purpose of this proof, I will not subscribe to the concept of a singular, all knowing, all powerful being. Such an existence, although very aesthetically pleasing, is not "logical" and could never be proven by any logical or verifiable means. To this extent, why would we be so presumptuous to believe that, if an all powerful being did in fact exist, that it was for the existence of "Good". If such a being existed, maybe he created this world as some sort of sadistic and demented joke!

So, in my proof of a "God" I will apply the definition of "God" as such:
An intelligence that permeates the entire universe