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

A logical debate..you are joking....I admire you audacity but thats all...does belief and logic ever go to bed together ? for the very last time please answer our requests or the consensus of opinions will be obvious...

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.

[..] we believe in things we like, and we like them [...] 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 is my justification of faith and my understanding of proof.

You have yet to explain to me why it is sufficent proof.

I am using over two millenia old methods of reasoning here

before we can prove God exists we must define proof

I made the fact that I would require certain things before I would answer very clear in my post, I would apprecitate it if you didn't act like I was being intentionally obstructive simply because I require rigourous defenitions of what you mean by proof.

Fields like mathematics or logic are the only fields in which you can actually _prove_ anything, because they are based on conventions like TRUE == TRUE and 1 == 1 which are two statements held to be correct, by agreement.

This does not apply to "real world science" like physics or chemistry, for example, in which you _can not prove_ anything the same way you can prove 1+1=2. You can instead formulate theories to explain why or how things happen and support or falsify them with natural, experimental evidence. Nature will never care about standards or conventions you set up, it will do its thing regardless of what you think, regardless of your belief system.

Arguing that if any "belief-scince[sic]" system holds 1 == 1 to be true, by convention, it also allows any other statements equal merits to be true, by convention, isn't sound arguing.

So if I believe I can't lift 500 pounds on Earth but I can on the Moon, I base this belief on how I feel at the moment ?

We believe in things we like ? So I base my belief on gravity's effect on Earth and Moon on personal preference ? What ?

So if my "emotional preferance[sic]" is that one equals one then god is "prooven[sic]" to exist. Oh I love it.

IF (1 == 1) THEN (god == TRUE) :a-ok:

:whoa-dude:

Why is it sufficient? It's sufficient proof for me to put food in my mouth knowing it's not going to kill me. In other words, EVERYTHING we know and do in life comes about because of a certain amount of trust in the world we perceive through our senses. I don't have that kind of trust in something that's ONLY logical or ONLY rational. Remember the battle of the minds from The Princess Bride? One of the two wine glasses are poisoned and he has to guess which? And he goes through these mental contortions to logically figure it out, then dies anyway because they were both poisoned. That's what happens when you THINK you can predict the real world through logic alone.

So would I be if I decided to bloodlet all of my patients who have fevers, but we've learned in those two millenia that perhaps there are better approaches.

But you're only going to accept your own definition of proof, so what's the point in soliciting ours? And because you have an individualistic, nonliteral interpretation of religious teachings, what prevents you from contorting a proof all around to fit your own conception rather than a mutually agreeable standard?

That's a fallacy unto itself. Proof cannot be rigorously defined. The way I prove to you Pythagorean's theorem is different than how I prove to you that water's boiling point is lower at high altitude.

If all beliefs can only be proven by themselves-then the value of all proof between different systems is equal.

Av: I get what you're saying and I understand why you would think that. I also understand why everyone seems to be fighting you on this so hard. It's hard to step away from ourselves.

Let me try to explain it in another way.

Science, as a tool, is a series of definitions which have been granted by mankind to help describe the world around us. We use Science to prove Scientific things.

God is not a scientific thing. God is something beyond the realm of science so using science to explain it would be like using a telescope to explain an atom. It's not the right tool for the job. What Av is saying is that we do not have the necessary tools to explain God and so his proof of God is not necessarily a proof in God but a proof of our inability to prove God with our current understanding of the Universe.

We are not ready as some may say.

Now I get it ! Different systems ! Reality is one, what's the other ?

La-la land ?


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Fields like mathematics or logic are the only fields in which you can actually _prove_ anything, because they are based on conventions like TRUE == TRUE and 1 == 1 which are two statements held to be correct, by agreement.

This does not apply to "real world science" like physics or chemistry, for example, in which you _can not prove_ anything the same way you can prove 1+1=2. You can instead formulate theories to explain why or how things happen and support or falsify them with natural, experimental evidence. Nature will never care about standards or conventions you set up, it will do its thing regardless of what you think, regardless of your belief system.

So you admit I am right?

I am saying that reason leads us to the conclusion that everything is the proof of itself. I am not talking about a scientific idea of proof, as that would be to apply scientific precepts to a non-scientifc system. I am saying that the meaning of proof changes when applied outside one belief system and becomes as I described: total/nonexistant.
Faith is the basis for all beliefs, and everything we 'know' is a belief, or orgignates from a belief.

Indeed a different conundrum. Maybe the Christian god and the Great Spirit and Shiva and Odin all exist. Or maybe only one of them exists, but pure logic will not be able to tell you which one it is.

Who's to say that they are different?

I know this sounds strange because it is so easy to differentiate between various deities and pantheons, but are these differences the result of our subjective experiences explaining the same thing (or phenomenon or what have you)?

Hey, while we're at it, why not consider Abeguwo too !

If that is the case, though, are we not still justifed in maintainin that certain beliefs are better-founded, and more valuable, than others? Because the scientific method, for example, has without question "worked" well for centuries, advanced our knowledge of the universe, and has been the foundation for developments in technology and medicine which have benefited humanity, can't we reasonably assert that if a "belief" underlies the scientific method, it is a very well-established belief? I would say yes. I do not know how we could say the same, however, regarding the "belief" which is the foundation for the claim that God exists.

I would like to make it clear that I was not backing you up, I was merely explaining in a different way. I can't say I even remotely agree with you for several reasons.

In essence, you are saying that we can prove anything we can think up. Well I think I can fly but that doesn't allow me to prove it. The fact that it "is" does not really prove that it "is". Proof requires more evidence than "it is". There needs to be some way of showing, beyond doubt that something is which means you are going to need more than one bit of evidence. You are going to need a complete list of rational, reasonable, repeatable facts that show something exists. You cannot do this with God because God is not something you can experience. The only "experience" we have of God comes from death or something inside of us which can easily be explained as a self enduced euphoria. I have died a few times and have not seen God. I have not seen anything. This leads me to believe that the only form of proof we CAN have about God is one that I have experienced to be false.