Why Believe in a God when It is Impossible to Prove?

[Belindi]

I wrote no such thing, Felix.

Gee whiz, folks are getting a bit testy around here... I was just riffing on your "struggle for existence" comment, Belindi.

I try to be concise which means sometimes I omit what I'd have been better to include.

By 'struggle for existence' I mean the struggle to get fed, raise offspring, get shelter from the storms, drive off competitors and so forth.Those individuals who manage to survive until they reproduce are the ones whose genes will survive until they themselves produce offspring, all else being equal e.g. no massive earthquakes , meteors , etc. If I remember rightly this is what Darwin himself meant by 'struggle for existence'.

I did mention vast time scales , 'geological' time scales,so that minute genetic variations will or will not increase exponentially.

BTW does "riffing" mean you were joking ? If so I'm either too old or too foreign or both to know the expression apart from what people do when playing popular guitar music.

[Belindi]

GaryLouisSmith :

I think you are saying that there are certain roles which we MUST MUST MUST play and there is no way out. Is that because of our bad karma? How did we get trapped in this world? But maybe you are in love with this trap. Who wrote the laws that govern this place? Surely they are from a lower band of Archons. "Behold, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves, you must be as cunning as serpents and as simple as doves."

it may possibly annoy you Maslow implies non-compliance among the upper layers of his hierarchy of needs.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

Your quotation is so apt to politics today and to heroes like Greta Thunberg it gives me gooseflesh to read it

[Felix]

Belindi said: BTW does "riffing" mean you were joking? ... what people do when playing popular guitar music.

You were close, it's a musicians slang term which means to improvise on a theme.

Belindi: I did mention vast time scales, 'geological' time scales, so that minute genetic variations will or will not increase exponentially.

Yes, but it is inconsistent in that the fossil record does not indicate any sort of steady change over time but rather "punctuated equilibrium," i.e., fits and starts, and it not clear what's going on there - so Darwinian theory also involves a bit of "riffing."

[dawwg]

You have to remember that I am the guy who thinks the mind and the body are two, not one...There is no such thing as pleasures solely of the mind. A mind, just as a mind, without a body, is able to know and feel real sex. Or taste real flavors. Or listen to real sounds. That's what minds do. They go to the thing itself. I as a mind might spy up ahead a material person or a god. There would be no problem going up to that and being intimate with it.

OK, you can disengage your mind from your body and have intimacies with people at a distance, I'll not argue against that, you are gifted.

And you don't think imaginative flights of fancy are pleasures solely of the mind.

[Sculptor1]

You have to remember that I am the guy who thinks the mind and the body are two, not one...There is no such thing as pleasures solely of the mind. A mind, just as a mind, without a body, is able to know and feel real sex. Or taste real flavors. Or listen to real sounds. That's what minds do. They go to the thing itself. I as a mind might spy up ahead a material person or a god. There would be no problem going up to that and being intimate with it.

OK, you can disengage your mind from your body and have intimacies with people at a distance, I'll not argue against that, you are gifted.

And you don't think imaginative flights of fancy are pleasures solely of the mind.

No. You can't "give him that"!!!LOL. This is a complete fantasy.

[Sy Borg]

Greta: Belinda is right, the first blob didn't need a will to live, only the capacity to persist.

What I was saying is I don't see such persistence leading to a progressive evolution unless the potential for that is inherent in Life itself. I don't buy the idea of it being a haphazard process driven by random chance, it's just too farfetched.

I don't find it far-fetched. The idea of mind existing within a primal, early universe seems more in need of an explanatory path. I didn't notice such a mind at the start of my own path. We have no mind or will as an embryo. Mind emerges gradually.

What I see are entities in reality with different types of persistence-enhancing systematisation. Some are called "living" and others "non living".

Yet the formation of objects, for instance, is simply a more primal version of natural selection. The proto-planetary disc evolved to become the planets and moons we see today. Survival of the persistent. How to persist? Be big. Be well located. What happened to the non-persistent? They are not around any more :)

So larger rocks aggregated, destroyed or evicted the small. Sometimes they clashed and destroyed each other, or one would emerge from the battle, scarred and victorious. It's a familiar story.

So I'm interested in looking beyond the easy division of of "life" and "non life" because there's many entities whose sophistication lies between that division. Viruses, prions, stars, planets, crystals, organic molecules. Each clearly has a clearly dynamic means of persisting, unlike an asteroid or pebble, yet none of these would would seem to possess "will". Microbes too, at least the simplest of them, would seem more configured by evolution than displaying will.

Will emerges from these situations naturally, because it's one more attribute that helps an entity to persist. Means of persisting have become ever more developed and complex over time. The process continues with humans working to create sentient entities that will either absorb or outlast them.

[steveb1]

<snipped>

To date there is no convincing proof for the existence of a God.

There's a difference between proving the existence of God and experiencing God as an object of "gnostic" immediacy.

"Proving" God is a matter of entering into public discourse to "win an argument" that putatively establishes God's reality on some external, public, or "peer-review" level.

Acquiring God-evidence, on the other hand, is the opposite of "proving" God, because the evidence is experience via subjective endeavor and is obtained only through private personal experience, not public discourse and material quantification.

If you find a rose blossom to be beautiful, that is your private and personal experience - evidence that speaks for itself.
But if you try to prove:

1. That the rose flower is indeed beautiful;

- and -

2. That your experience and interpretation of the rose is true and real

- then -

3. You've failed, because 1. and 2. above cannot be done, because the rose experience is wholly subjective and cannot be pulled out of the private psyche into the external observation for confirmation or denial. Even if you show the rose to others for them to see, handle, and smell, still your experience is unique, ineffable and non-duplicable.

Ditto for all claimed God-experiences: due to their non-material, subjective and "qualia-toned" reference, they can't be pulled out of the individual subject and put on display for dissection.

That, in my view, is why theists who have experience of God are not obligated to turn that internally received evidence into public proof. Unless, that is, they are foolish enough to proselytize about their private experience and insist that it can be proved as if it were identical to physical claims about the material universe. Best to keep the experience of the rose blossom to oneself, unless interested parties inquire about it. The same holds true, or ought to hold true, for claims of God-experience.

[Consul]

There's a difference between proving the existence of God and experiencing God as an object of "gnostic" immediacy.

"Experiencing God" means "perceiving God". How can you perceive a god who is a spatially unextended and spatially unlocated immaterial soul/spirit?

[GaryLouisSmith]

OK, you can disengage your mind from your body and have intimacies with people at a distance, I'll not argue against that, you are gifted.

And you don't think imaginative flights of fancy are pleasures solely of the mind.

What you have to do is disengage your thinking from popular culture and do some rigorous logical analysis. Become a real, radical empiricist and examine the phenomena that directly appear to you mind. Don’t go off on one of your flights into the Matrix.

What does it mean to be “of the mind”? What does it mean to say the mind is engaged with or disengaged from the body? What exactly is a thought? What is an imagined object? I think you have no idea what any of that really means and you just got your words from the air that all “knowledgeable” hip people today breathe.

Learn analysis. Learn how to take things apart into their constituent ontological, phenomenological pieces. Learn intellectual violence.

[Consul]

"Experiencing God" means "perceiving God". How can you perceive a god who is a spatially unextended and spatially unlocated immaterial soul/spirit?

For example, even a spatially located immaterial soul is invisible in principle, since it is a zero-dimensional object (like a mathematical point) lacking a surface that could reflect light.

[Consul]

"Experiencing God" means "perceiving God". How can you perceive a god who is a spatially unextended and spatially unlocated immaterial soul/spirit?

By means of "mystical perception" perhaps? I don't think so, because this alleged source of knowledge is a supernaturalistic/theistic fiction.

"In the wide sense, let us say that a ‘mystical experience,’ is:

A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual experience granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection."

Mysticism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/

[GaryLouisSmith]

<snipped>

To date there is no convincing proof for the existence of a God.

There's a difference between proving the existence of God and experiencing God as an object of "gnostic" immediacy.

"Proving" God is a matter of entering into public discourse to "win an argument" that putatively establishes God's reality on some external, public, or "peer-review" level.

Acquiring God-evidence, on the other hand, is the opposite of "proving" God, because the evidence is experience via subjective endeavor and is obtained only through private personal experience, not public discourse and material quantification.

I basically agree with you, but I disagree with you about your use of the word "subjective". Yes, God, as I see the matter. is something that one directly experiences. God is not something to be proved. But if you want to try to prove God's existence, I will listen because I enjoy such debates. I love the Ontological Argument.

There is no subjective-objective divide. Everything that appears to our mind is objective. If I see the beauty of X, then I see the beauty of X. it is a real thing. Maybe I am the only one seeing it. So what? It is still there.

For me, the act of philosophical looking or "proof" if you want to call it that, is a matter of clearing away the underbrush so you can get a clearer view of the thing. Make a clearing where only that one thing exists and you can see it in all its nakedness. You might call that philosophical analysis. It's also like a surgeon moving back folds of skin and organs to get at the one thing he is interested it. I think the word for that is "sublate". God can be seen if you clear away the ruins of analysis blocking your view.

[steveb1]

Thanks for your perceptive comments.
You wrote,

"Everything that appears to our mind is objective."

If so, then what do we categorize as subjective?

And, re: God-talk - mystics claim to know God as a "Presence", but also as a "Person". Can a person, who is a human or a divine subject, be experience only as an object...?

[dawwg]

OK, you can disengage your mind from your body and have intimacies with people at a distance, I'll not argue against that, you are gifted.

No. You can't "give him that"!!!LOL. This is a complete fantasy.

It's impossible for me to prove it to you, but such events have occurred, I believe.

For the sake of argument let's say I cornered an unsuspecting 'advanced being', more by luck and his skepticism that the truth would be accepted than by deft maneuvers, what defensive strategy would they adopt? Deception and dissembly (sp?)

Ah yes, and you think this individual is alone? No I tell you, we are in a veritable coven of vampires!

[dawwg]

Learn intellectual violence.

How'd I do?