Solved it all.

What do you imagine their goal is?

As I see it, there are two approaches to incorporating the universe into one's self: knowledge and belief. I try to understand how they work.



And this isn't my scenario: God is postulated as being all-knowing, all-powerful and much more stuff. I'm just trying to explore the nature of such an entity. (I find the medieval method of digging up as many Bible-quotes supporting your case as possible a little bit... lazy.)

If you really want to know that, you might start with a more open scenario instead of drawing out a rather complex one in which you don't even believe.

Making assumptions about what others believe is highly unlikely to really help you understand who and what they believe in.

But, honestly, I don't think that's your goal, so proceed.

It doesn't matter in the least what I do or don't believe in. This is a hypothetical scenario with a generic god. Any all-knowing and all-powerful entity can be placed here, no matter what the rest of the belief surrounding this entity actually is.

Why would I need a more open scenario? If I want to check a thesis, all I need is one counter-example. Finding examples in support of a thesis is futile, unless you can prove that all possible examples are in support of the thesis. It's way more practical to look for examples that oppose a thesis, because you only need one.
"Alright, alright, he's an all-powerful and all-knowing God... except when it comes to baking cookies. He can't bake cookies. But apart from that he can do anything and knows everything."




Is there a mistake in my reasoning or not?

reasoning doesn't even enter into the picture, let alone a hypothesis.

But if you enjoy this kind of exercise in which you shoot down every possible POV held by someone who might actually believe in a god, and can find others to play, go for it.

Just don't fool yourself into thinking that you have "won".

Everyone always says there is no evidence for or against God.

But all the evidence in the world. All the actual scientific data points to a natural world existing based on the observable rules of science.

Religion is repeatedly being shown to have a negative impact on the world. And on the minds of it followers.

based on the observable rules of science is not evidence of there not being a god.

In other word, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Religion has also been repeatedly shown to have a positive impact on the world and the minds of it's followers.

You may have your personal POV on god and religion, but it is not evidence.

see, Universal Ether, N-Rays, Proton decay, etc...

Unless one postulates a deity that does not and has never interacted with the physical Universe.
Absence of evidence AND evidence that no such deity is included in the explanation of anything is evidence of absence.

You'll keep saying this, and I'll keep disputing it.

It is arrogant to say that it has, and that if no evidence of a god was discovered to this point, then there is no such thing.

We may have reached the point in quantum mechanics at which further understanding is beyond our abilities as humans to fathom. But mysteries do remain.

With the upcoming flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft, due to the timing and trajectory, there will be a significant portion of the surface we won't get to see. Does that mean we can't rule out whether purple elephants live on Pluto?

It can be surmised, from all that we know about Pluto.

But are there other life forms that exist that do not require moderate temperatures and liquid water? We don't know everything there is to know.

Perhaps they live underground in a secret private galactic zoo. We don't know, do we?

The problem with your reasoning here is that it leads to analytical paralysis. We can't say anything about anything unless we have 100% certainty, which can never be established.

For example, we don't *know* that homosexuality is 100% genetic all the time, so your position gives cover to the bigots who think it's a choice. We don't know everything there is to know, after all.

but nothing we do know indicates anything but natural explanations and runs counter to any supernatural explanation.

Haven't heard this one in a while. Problem is, this argum my has been around for centuries, the gaps keep getting smaller. Your God of the gaps? Is massively smaller than the God of the gaps just 20 years ago, and 40 years ago, and so on and so on.

Really dumb argument.

All I know is I am not in an 'argument'. I shared my thoughts on the matter and don't really care if you want to disagree rather than discuss.

Definition 2:

But the God of the gaps argument.

We don't know everything, so God fills in the gaps in our knowledge.

Is a fallacy. I don't care to discuss fallacies with people who don't know a fallacy when they see them.

I don't even believe in a god!

But it's ridiculous to say that humans know all there is to know about everything. I'd love to see the scientist who claims we do.

But the point is, everything we do know. Knowledge, being empirical, verifiable, and falsifiable, is the way knowledge works.

Everything else is useless to the community. Because it can be interpreted anyway, anyone wants.

If you like some bit of nonsense. Great.

Keep it to yourself.

Why are you posting in the Religion forum if you don't want to discuss such things?

Let me guess. You just like attacking people with religious beliefs. Classy.

I will say what I want. Please feel free to put me on ignore.

There is a difference between "crazy Christians" and normal ones.

Don't think I lump you all together. But I do wish the moderates would speak up more.

I live 25 miles from the Phelps, the WBC, you have to forgive my anger at the "crazy" side.

We haven't discovered a single thing that requires a god to explain it. This is all evidence against there being gods.

In other word, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Actually, often it is. Particularly when a hypothesis (like gods) contains assertions that SHOULD be observable. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Absence_of_evidence

Otherwise you trap yourself into the game of Russell's Teapot. Feel free to play that, but don't you dare think you "won."

I'll take my absence of evidence, and the fact that revealed scripture is both horrible, and clearly man made.

Ok,

So 2200 years ago, there were a lot of faiths in the Middle East.

Judaism, animism, roman and Greek pantheism, and a bunch of wild preachers mixing them all together in a stew of oral tradition. Even Zoroastrianism was a foot. (No Ba'hai yet)

Ok, so 99.5 percent of the world was illiterate. So these religious traditions were stories. And you know how stories change as they are repeated, made new, and repeated again.

Then they get all scrollified. Turned into scrolls of parchment. Despite them being copied, oral traditions, they still change after being written down. We don't have any first editions of these texts, but from the ones we have, we know these scrolls have more changes, additions and typos between them than there are words in the gospels.

Then the nicene council happens in 325 AD and we finally get the book. Cutting out the apocrypha, the books, the men deciding the nature of the bible, rejected. (Especially if they gave power to women).

Then another few thousand years of copying and translating, and we get to Shakespeare's time and the King James Bible. Another translation. And finally the RSV and the good news, and marvel's graphic novel bible featuring the avengers.(just kidding)

If this is the basis of your world view. If you think this is the key to knowledge about the universe, while rejecting science. Seriously. You've got to quit admitting you think this way in public. It's so embarrassing for you. Christianity has jumped the shark, it's only inertia now. Fading inertia.

I personally do not believe in a god, as such (disclaimer), but have full respect for those who do. (I used to, as a young girl, then went through a long atheist period, and in recent years have explored a Pagan 'path').

I agree that, while scientific evidence of a deity seems impossible to attain, that doesn't mean that a god doesn't exist.

There are some well-designed studies that show prayer can have a positive impact. That doesn't prove there is a god who is intervening upon request, but it suggests that people who concentrate upon certain intentions (such as healing thoughts for a friend) may affect the outcome, by unknown means.

The only significant one showing any kind of statistical outcome I've heard of was the one that showed people who knew they were being prayed for actually did worse.

A quick search shows mostly studies of the effect of religious beliefs on outcomes.

I did find this:
http://courses.ttu.edu/jkoch/Honors%20Seminar/Prayer%20In%20Vitro.pdf

And a couple of others that required a subscription to read.

Maybe if someone else has more time than I do today, they can dig up a couple of others.

The group that combined all the "prayer healing" studies found prayer did nothing.

Also, prayer studies are always about "invisible" conditions. Infections, heart failure, etc. let's see the prayer study to grow back soldier's amputations. Let's see that study.

I would think it would be by comforting the target in some way, allowing for a little less stress and consequent stress response, rather than actually changing a physiological or mechanical condition.

One study I stumbled upon earlier said something about it not changing the rate of death from a particular disease, but those who were targeted by prayer had shorter average hospital stays. I didn't link to it, because the conclusions indicated the results were not statistically significant due to a smallish sample size.

I never believe anything that is not supported by science, but I enjoy conjecture about things that could possibly be supported by science someday. For example, we don't understand how there could be what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," predicted by quantum theory and demonstrated in experiments leading to Bell's Theorum. But I like to wonder if this could be the mechanism by which people's thoughts and intentions (or prayers) could influence another person's well-being.

This is more of a study about how people fare if they know someone else is praying for them. That puts a lot of other factors into play.

If I were a patient, I might have some anxiety that people were taking time out of their day to pray for me and feel that I wouldn't want to disappoint them, or feel self-conscious about it. That could increase stress, and therefore affect outcome in some small way.

It would be more interesting to look at studies in which the targets don't know about it - at all.

versus your earlier statement of:

"There are some well-designed studies that show prayer can have a positive impact."

Basically here you are outright admitting your earlier statement was completely made up based on what you hoped was true. Thanks for clearing that up. Now perhaps you should go back and edit out your false claim. That would be the honest thing to do.

You specifically speculated about possible comforting/stress reducing benefits of the target of the prayer.

How, exactly, would being prayed for without knowing it be comforting or stress reducing?

As I said, I don't really have time for a search. I have lots of company coming for the weekend and I should NOT be on the computer.

I'm not trying to prove anything or disprove anything. I thought it would be fun to discuss. It's surprising how contentious people are in this group.

However a "discussion" is not someone throwing out a completely fictitious claim, and then when being shown to be wrong, accusing others of being "contentious."

Which you do not seem to be, are mobilizing for a last ditch effort, because they have lost the culture war.

I can give no ground to religious ignorance.

Say it with me people.

I can give no ground to religious ignorance.

I'm gonna buy a billboard that says those last three lines.

We only hear about the crazy ones, the Christian Right.

It's not bad to have a belief system; it's bad to impose it on others - in any way. I wish we could get every speck of religion out of our government, off our currency and out of the pledge of allegiance that I have to say every morning, as part of my job.

There are a number of churches who welcome LGTB, for example. Unitarian Universalist, Episcopalian, Congregational, and probably others. Even the pope has tried to mellow the Catholic Church'es position on gays.

Again, the problem is when people try to dictate what OTHERS do and believe. We don't like it when Christians do it; Atheists should not be doing it either.

I don't care if people believe there are purple elephants on Pluto, as long as they don't tell me I have to believe it!

(in this country and the West) I know you don't think challenging beliefs is the same as telling someone what to believe.

The door is wide open, as far as I am concerned, though I am highly skeptical about the existence of any kind of god that humans have previously described.

But I also have full respect for those that believe, as long as their beliefs do not infringe on the rights of others. I have double respect for those that use those beliefs to pursue paths of civil rights, social justice, economic equality and taking care of the least among us.

Positive thinking and attitude can lead to favorable outcomes, so it is not surprising that when prayer is used in a positive way, it might have a positive result.

Though I don't believe in prayer per se, it means something to me when people tell me they are praying for me.

Hope you are doing well. It's nice to see you around these parts.

Given that people simply claim God exists without evidence, showing that no god is required kicks a major stool leg out from under their claim.

Normally claims that X God exists is predicated on the assumption that SOME god like entity MUST exist to explain existence.

of unicorns, too, because--you know, no evidence.

She trots out the same old argument pretty regularly, if you haven't already noticed.

"not believing in the fairies at the bottom of the garden is as legitimate as believing in the fairies."

There is centuries of people disproving what was once held as evidence. Everything from evolution to plate tectonics to lightening rods. The god hypothesis never holds up when tested, so they rewrote history to suit their agenda.

Wait, do you mean that two people cannot talk about the same god if one of them believes in this god and the other one does not believe in this god? That even though both talk about an entity with identical attributes, being believed in changes the object of their discussion?

Why does it matter whether I treat the objects of my speculation as real or not? The objects stay the same and that means the logic stays the same.
"A car with 1000 wheels would be very long."
"Whoa, you don't even believe that a car with 1000 wheels exists! You cannot possibly know whether it would be long or not!"





Can you find a mistake in my reasoning or not?
If Yes: What is the mistake?
If No: Thank you for participating.

So what are you going on about? These are two of the three standard omni* attributes of the abrahamic gods. The problems with omni* are also classic and generally irrefutable. Apologists are left with "its a mystery".

Feel free to skip it.

Perfect.

Critical thinking skills.

Very good.

Maybe God lets people choose their own destinies, via their actions. People tend to think he is right there, micromanaging their lives, rooting for them in football and in wars, deciding who lives and dies - and when.

But really, it makes more sense that sets up the conditions for life to exist, and then he just lets it all go, thus avoiding the dilemma you describe.

But if God has never preordained events and will never micromanage (and will never change this decision because he's timeless), does he still count as all-powerful? If he could, but not actually does, is he still all-powerful?

And does he even have a choice to stay out of micromanaging his creation? (As I showed above, his very infiniteness is the problem as it leads to crippling paradoxes.) If he has no choice but to stay out of micromanaging, is he still all-powerful?

The best managers step back and let workers do their jobs (for example). That doesn't mean they don't have power.

Everything is simutaneous

We do have time. Proof? You didn't know that I would write that.

But it is by no means proven to be true.

Quantum physics has major problems handling scenarios mathematically where time doesn't behave normal. That's why it's so tricky to amend quantum physics and the common theory of relativity: We haven't yet found a mathematical way to express them in the same way.


Time does exist, though no absolute time. It's malleable and flexible.

It's almost as if someone(s) made it all up without thinking it through...

You can get around the whole "but if God knows everything he can't change his mind" thing by just saying if he was going to change his mind he would have already known that when he formed is initial opinion... so he never would change his mind.


They are however incompatible with the concept of free will (If it's not possible for you to do anything except what God knows you will do then the course of your life has been predetermined and you don't have free will... which pretty much destroys the entire concept of sin which makes Christianity meaningless).


It's also incompatible with the description of God in like half the bible where he's constantly changing his mind.

Un-think that thought, man!

I don't want to be inside the event horizon. I'd miss the new season of Ray Donovan.

Then He is not omnipotent.

He is able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?"

- Epicurus, 341 BCE - 270 BCE

Rumsfeld (audible hiss) liked talking about the "known', the known unknown, and the unknown unknown." To discuss your post, he might add the 'known unknowable' (a.k.a. God) and the 'unknown unknowable' (probably also God). But, since this is gobbledeegook that a mind like Rumsfeld's might extrude, let's just throw all that out. Chucked -- sh#t canned -- kaput.

Let's also throw out all the power attributions to God made by ancestors who thought night was a giant pin-pricked drapery. Let's discount equally lame efforts to take known authoritative entities -- like daddy or king -- multiplying them by infinity and calling that God. Out, out, out.

Let's not throw out physical science completely, since it has proven extremely adept at describing where God isn't. And believe me, scientists have looked! At both the vanishingly small and at the boundaries of the universe, they have looked, with no signs whatsoever. So, unless God created and engaged a galaxy-sized cloaking device, he/she/it is not physical -- not out there, at least, on either a galactic or quantum scale.

That leaves us with the 'Chariots of the Gods' scenario -- which is essentially science fiction, due to the distances involved, relativity, yada and/or yada. There is also the atheistic scenario -- which seems comfortably plausible until one sees animated simulations of cellular structures just a few molecules across, moving like inchworms, replicating DNA -- devastating to the atheistic viewpoint, IMO. There's also the 'God is within us' angle, which has merit, if explored, but all too often is just a poorly examined fall-back position into which the die-hard religious entrench themselves. And last, but not least, my favorite -- the Gaia model.

Gaia postulates that all life is connected -- that life itself is God, and that all life forms on Earth contain it. So, to this way of thinking, although incredibly ancient, God just found out what a planet is, what stars are -- about light, cells, asteroids, organisms and so forth. It just found out because only comparatively recently did a constituent creature capable of investigating those things evolve. God is just now finding out what It is... because of us.

I love that.

Well, that's my dollar-minus-98. Hope you like it.

What God knows and is capable of doing is a question forvthe ages.

Personal I just accept his ways are higher than my ways.