Don't you love Jesus?

[Umfriend]

OK, I need to go to bed and it'll be a while before I can return. Just this:

Jamm: I'll read the post and re-read the previous one. One question may cut it short: What is the central argument or position of your logical discourse? Is it that Belief in god can be or is based on logic?

Schmo: Yes. Still I would venture that the chinese were more succesfull (as measured by number of population) than the jews at any time. The point is, it is not at all clear that the laws on food and stuff etc. have neccessarily been beneficial to a people.

Gurm: So we don;t actually know that the law on pigs was established during nomadic years. It may have been established during the Egypt period (they'd been nomads prior to that period as well) and put into writing during the Great Escape.

Gotta go. Wife is waiting and, truly, she is nicer company than you all together

[Jammrock]

Jamm: I'll read the post and re-read the previous one. One question may cut it short: What is the central argument or position of your logical discourse? Is it that Belief in god can be or is based on logic?

That the existence of a god can be based on logic. Remember, not all logic has to be scientific or linear Hell, some science is barely logical ... but that's not my point. I await your reply.

Schmo: Yes. Still I would venture that the chinese were more succesfull (as measured by number of population) than the jews at any time. The point is, it is not at all clear that the laws on food and stuff etc. have neccessarily been beneficial to a people.

The problem with this logic is that the Chinese were not always the Chinese. China is a mix of a large number of groups. Over the course of time the smaller regions were conquered and turned into China. It wasn't until the Manchus took over in 1644 that China became as big as it is now.

http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/toc.html

Jammrock

[Gurm]

Gotta go. Wife is waiting and, truly, she is nicer company than you all together

Yes, I confess that your wife is much better company than most MURCers. (EVIL GRIN)

[Gurm]

That the existence of a god can be based on logic. Remember, not all logic has to be scientific or linear Hell, some science is barely logical ... but that's not my point. I await your reply.


The problem with this logic is that the Chinese were not always the Chinese. China is a mix of a large number of groups. Over the course of time the smaller regions were conquered and turned into China. It wasn't until the Manchus took over in 1644 that China became as big as it is now.

http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/toc.html

Jammrock

If the Jews had in fact gone on to conquer the entire middle east instead of settling down into a period of stability before the fall of the old kingdom... who knows how much of the world might now be "Israel"?

But the official party line is that God was pissed off that the Jews were ignoring him, and decided to scatter them. Oops!

[schmosef]

Schmo: Yes. Still I would venture that the chinese were more succesfull (as measured by number of population) than the jews at any time. The point is, it is not at all clear that the laws on food and stuff etc. have neccessarily been beneficial to a people.

Hmm... I don't know if total pop is the appropriate way to measure success in this case... You have to admit that food supply is just one factor in determining total pop. To isolate the impact of the quality of the food supply and the general rules of hygiene you'd have to look at things like how common it is for disease to be food/hygiene related, how quickly disease spreads in the communities, how common various diseases are. The fact that new flu strains are thought to come from China should say something... I've not heard of a virus or illness that originated in Jewish regions.

[KvHagedorn]

OK< I don;t care either way about anything. I just want to note here that the only logic I have found for believing here is in an argument that goes like: "I do not understand how this all could have come about without a creator, hence I believe it all came about because of a creator which, by the way, I do not understand".

The factual questions raised about the universe here are worhty of any new-age magazine. The most striking thing is that the questions, even if they are relevant/valid, can only go as far as to show that scientific theory can;t explain everything we see. It's actually a fallacy in discourse as it merely seeks to invalidate a standpoint by making it suspect (as in, you can't explain it thus you are wrong) to further another standpoint (which says "I can explain it by proposing an unexplainable thing").

Let me just say that I respect anyone's belief in God, just not the position that such belief is supported by logic.

The idea of God may not be logical, but neither is love. Neither is trust. Neither are many things we think of as that which makes us human (not to be a specieist.. human as being opposed to what we must do as corporate cogs or what computers would think based upon some pure nonrandom "logic.")

[KvHagedorn]

Well, your first post is handled in the placeholder. Yes, the life of us atheists is hard...

I find the consideration to believe because it is "better than to be completely and utterly alone" very understandable, perhaps even logical.

Define logic. Define logical. There is no logic, because all logic is based upon assumption somewhere along the line, which makes it illogical and flawed.

[KRSESQ]

Definitely one of the better threads I've read in these parts in a long time. Part of the problem in arguing the existance of God logically is that there is no common agreement on what God really is. An old philosophy teacher of mine tried to use reductionism to come to a common definition. His conclusion? God was "Maximum Potentiality" (whatever the hell that means). Small wonder I got a C.

Please, continue.

Kevin

[Jammrock]

Definitely one of the better threads I've read in these parts in a long time. Part of the problem in arguing the existance of God logically is that there is no common agreement on what God really is. An old philosophy teacher of mine tried to use reductionism to come to a common definition. His conclusion? God was "Maximum Potentiality" (whatever the hell that means). Small wonder I got a C.

Please, continue.

Kevin

I like that term. I'm actually quite impressed it's stayed civil this long

[schmosef]

I like that term. I'm actually quite impressed it's stayed civil this long

It almost went wrong very early on, but thanks to our ever vigilant admin, things stayed above board.

[Umfriend]

OK, it will be a while before I get to Jamm's logical discourse. Work, study and, I have to admit, the need for some English books will take time.

On the other strain, I'd like to say this, sort of hoping to end it:
I issued a sort of challenge: Show me something Man did not know [about the Universe] until God told him. Put otherwise, what has God told us about the universe that we did not know before he told us and that we COULD have known had we known what we know without god having told us.

An example: The earth is not flat. 5000 bc, we could not have know ourselves. It had been nice had the Torah had as, say, Lev 11:13 "And hark on to me, the earth is not flat". Or the sun is a star or there are zillions of planets or light behaves like matter in some circumstances, ya know, that sort of things.

Currently, we're discussing the Kosher laws and (not sure it's a part of it) the cirucmcision. The problem with this is that it's rather humanity-related. I counter with two args why this does not meet the challenge. First, and this one is to the point, is this understanding or knowledge? Second: should we be gratefull for it? Proponents might argue that it avoids a lot of diseases or at the least has done so in the past.
1. The subject is laws, not understanding or knowledge or fact. What we have learned aftwerards that confimed the sensibility of these laws (as Schmo and Gurm have helpfully supplied above) and some of them are bogus as well.
2. The downside may well have been that leading a Kosher life was expensive in various ways. Perhaps they avoided diseases but lost easy access to protein. If it was so well a knowledge/understanidng, why has the jewish people not conquered the world? Or at least ben more succesfull than they have. I used the chinese, not even close to kosher but vast in numbers as an example.
3. (OK, I cheat), there is the possibility of the doctrine having evolved from obeservation. The fact that the jews have been nomads, settlers, nomads again and settled again may well explain how they had a lot more observation-opportunity that formed their laws.

Hmm... I don't know if total pop is the appropriate way to measure success in this case... [...]If these Kosher laws were so easy to figure out, why were the Jews the only ones observing them?

About the statistic to measure succes. I agree. The point is, neither needs to be the absence of the plague in this matter. Moreover, I never said the laws were easy to figure out. A present day Atheist with all the knowledge/understanding we have today would not have come up with them!
The point is, they may have been able to have been found out and they may also have been to expensive to adhere to for many people(s).

OK, this is where we stand on this strand AFAIK. AFAICS the challenge stands and I could have issued it more clearly but I should think it it clearer now what we are actually looking for, no?

Some loose ends:

The problem with this logic is that the Chinese were not always the Chinese. China is a mix of a large number of groups. Over the course of time the smaller regions were conquered and turned into China. It wasn't until the Manchus took over in 1644 that China became as big as it is now.

Irrelevant in this discussion. The chinese have been chinese far longer than 1644: it's not about nation-state ideas but about way of life (adapted to local circumstances), language, identity etc. There were a lot of chinese prior to 1644 even if they did not live in "china".

The idea of God may not be logical, but neither is love. Neither is trust. Neither are many things we think of as that which makes us human (not to be a specieist.. human as being opposed to what we must do as corporate cogs or what computers would think based upon some pure nonrandom "logic.")

Thank you for bringing in your view on corporate culture into this, just what we needed. In any case, up to the first "human" I agree. Completely. I never said otherwise.

Define logic. Define logical. There is no logic, because all logic is based upon assumption somewhere along the line, which makes it illogical and flawed.

Sorry, but this is "illogical". Logic is not flawed, the conclusions based on assumptions may be, That's a property related to the assumptions then, not logic. I'm not going into this any further as I don;t really see it contributing to this thread.

Ok, work work work but I'll finish a reply to Jammrock before Yom Kippur!

[Umfriend]

That the existence of a god can be based on logic.

OK, I am still not clear on what this is supposed to mean. I'll try and clarify why I am confused.

This all started one fine day when Gurm stated that he leans towards judaism based on logic. What I have tried to argue is not neccesarily that his motivation to believe has nothing to do with logic, that is, that his premises do not lead to the conclusion that [a] god [must] exist.

I have, explicitaly, not argued that logic can not be used to prove, or disprove, that good [needs to] exist. I will say that I have never seen such a proof or refutation. What I have seen is (a) a set of axioms I will accept as such combined with a claim that it leads to the "logical" conclusion that god [must] exist and (b) sets of axioms I do not accept with a claim that it logically leads to the conclusion that god [must] exist.

Gurm is an example of (a) in the sense that I agree the universe is hard to understand. I do not understand it. My point is that logic does not dictate that therefor [a] god[s] [must] exist.

(b) I have not seen here, so as an example of this: lets presume, for instance, that nothing can exist without a conscious creator, then, given that I accept that I exist, logic does dictate that something exists which we can call god. The issue here is that even though it is logical, the basic assumption is not accepted. It's logical, but it is rejected based on the rejection (non-acceptance) of the basic assumption.

Now comes the confusion. I do not know whether your argument is more like (a), (b) or is actually just trying to argue that (c) there may be a set of axioms that may be true/acceptable based on which logic would lead us to conclude that [a] god[s] [must] exist[s]. Note that (c) is neither (a) or (b). (a) and (b) both argue that god exists. (c) just argues that maybe [one day] we will be able to prove the existence of god using logic. It does not actually try to do it. It does not try to improve/replace Thomas de A's proofs but rather tries to argue that one day an acceptable proof may be found.

I get the notion that your discourse is much like (c), or is it?

[Nowhere]

...

Anyway, the three omni's build the classic definition of "God." All powerful, all knowing, all present (omni obviously means "all" or universal). As such you could, according to this logic, call godhood the ultimate end to science, i.e. a being that has achieved the ultimate goal of science.

Thus saying that "there is no possibility of a god," which is true atheism, is to say the science is futile and ultimately cannot achive the knowledge that it so desperately seeks, beyond increasing basic comfort of the human race ... or to accelerate the destruction of the human race if you're more inclined to be a pessimist. Or to say that no being/person has yet attained said status in all of time and space. This is why some people say there is no such thing as an atheist, only people who are agnostic and don't know it

Anyway ... the believer, following this line of logic, would say that at least one being/person has achieved this goal or status and uses it for their own purposes, like the creation of planets and populations.

This of course begs the question, where did God come from. To which nobody knows ... which isn't a bad thing, as we really don't know a lot in the grandest scheme of things (it's hard to know about the universe when we still can't send people to our closest planet, let alone closets galaxy).

Anyway ... if you are speaking of logic, science, and god a more accurate statement, IMHO, would be, "I believe in the possibility of a god," more than, "I believe in God."

My $0.02.

Jammrock

It's interesting, because it basically, IMHO, puts God on par with us. And that would be also the answer "from where he came from". However, it does not rule out the possibilities that our universe is the "first" in chain of events. Or that "godlike" beeings existed and creted us, but, for example, ceased to exist. Of course it's still a good argument for possibility of Gods existence...

Still, believer doesn't fallow only logic by stating God is there - logic doesn't deal with probability when determining whether something exists.

[Nowhere]

I would say that I've had a very difficult life. It's been a real battle getting to where I am. And I've had a lot of obstacles. I've never thought of myself as blessed in the sense that things came easy to me. But I've always had this feeling of Ruah HaQodesh that's simply been too strong to deny. I have to admit that it's given me comfort.

It's the absense of that feeling in some/most of my friends that saddens me. I'm not saying that most of my friend are atheists, but most don't feel their faith the way I do. And all would agree that there's somthing different about me. That feeling gives me a perspective on things that they don't have. I'm not as caught up in the "now" as most people.

One could argue that I've manufactured it, but it feels real to me.

So, do I have the right impression that this Ruah HaQodesh basically, at most simple level, made you feel no matter the circumstances that you're not alone?

Well, that's the comfort some people don't have...

[schmosef]

So, do I have the right impression that this Ruah HaQodesh basically, at most simple level, made you feel no matter the circumstances that you're not alone?

yep

Well, that's the comfort some people don't have...

And that makes me sad.