The first valid evidence that god does NOT exist

[Will Bouwman]

Wilbur’s stance does not allow him to conceive of a divine instigator, that much is clear.

You too, eh Gus? The issue is this:

Your god is too small; made so by the arbitrary restrictions you put on him. To return to the teacup in the Pacific analogy; you have designed and built that teacup, and foolishly trapped yourself inside it.

I am perfectly able to conceive of a divine instigator. What I want to see is how Mr Can justifies shrivelling an almighty being, if such exists, into the petty, vindictive teacup in the ocean he has created. The most probable answer is two and a half thousand years old:

But mortals suppose gods are born,
Wear their own clothes and have a voice and body.
The Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each of their own kind.

Xenophanes

[Skepdick]

Descartes failed to prove anything other than that there is thought.

How did he prove that there is a thought?

It may be, as idealists believe, that is all there is, which has an elegant parsimony, and is irrefutable, which, to be clear, doesn't make it true.

There is no such burden of proof. Scepticism is not an assertion that some proposition is false, it is that the burden of proof hasn't been met by whoever asserts that proposition is true.

So did Descartes meet the burden of proof for thought? What met it? What put an end to his skepticism?

Whatever methodology convinced Descartes of the cogito (presumably: immediate experience/awareness) should also convince him that his hands exist. There's no principled reason to be skeptical of some awareness and not others.

[Belinda]

So you don't even get what we do here.

::: hearty laughs! :::

There is not much to get, son. How might I sum it up? Wilbur’s stance does not allow him to conceive of a divine instigator, that much is clear. But overall the theistic turn, and the conversion you pretend to seek through your apologetics, is useless to him — a post-modern man with philosophy degrees. He tells you: It is all concoction! Pick a story that expresses your aesthetics. Put your heart and soul into it. Put it on billboards, the silver screen, in a leather-bound set of philosophical articles …

It’s just “story-telling”.

You are really very very simple to define. The root of it is sheer conformity to a specific belief-trope. Your mind operates through mathematical and “logical” pictures and patterns, and when you received “the Lord” you simultaneously adapted your mental structure to the established doctrines in the most literal manner possible for a modern man, which indeed you are.

You did not, so to speak, go “back in time” in the sense of abandoning the modern means of reasoning. You bent reason to the need to believe at all costs. You forced reasoning to take on, to accept, to “believe in” a pre-digested absolutist, bible-literal story. The Genesis story is literal history. The revealing key here is your marrying of 2 incompatible epistemes. Adam & Eve are “the original mating pair”!

You represent something incredible, in fact extraordinary. You are a ‘wonder’ to behold. I marvel that you do it, that you can uphold it without cracking.

You and Wilbur are “emblems” of a much larger conflict where two structures of thought and projected perception and belief lock horns in eternal, unresolvable battle. As I understand it these are conflicts that were dealt on in detail in the 17th century.

I transcended both poles of this conflict ages ago. Mostly these days I float around the planet in the Hyperborean currents and look down contemplatingly on human affairs, just scratching my chin, much like Lucretius in the first part of Book Two.

Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds Roll up its waste of waters, from the land To watch another's labouring anguish far, Not that we joyously delight that man Should thus be smitten, but because 'tis sweet To mark what evils we ourselves be spared; ‘Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife Of armies embattled yonder o'er the plains, Ourselves no sharers in the peril; but naught There is more goodly than to hold the high Serene plateaus, well fortressed by the wise, Whence thou may'st look below on other men And see them ev'rywhere wand'ring, all dispersed In their lone seeking for the road of life…

I agree with your explanation of Immanuel's world view.

It's interesting that you call Immanuel Can a "modern man".I wonder if you mean 'modern ' in the sense of the year 2025, or if you mean 'modern' in the historian's sense of post-Renaissance. Both interpretations fit Immanuel Can.

[Will Bouwman]

Descartes failed to prove anything other than that there is thought.

How did he prove that there is a thought?

By having one.

[Age]

Existence as a whole is not infinite because that is not possible.

Maybe it's possible. Maybe it's not. Anything you can't exhaust is effectively infinite.

You can't be sure it's finite until you get to the end of it.

Energy, a part of Existence, is finite.

How do you know that? Have you exhausted all energy?

If you don't like the word "infinite" - use the word "unbounded"; or "limitless".

You can prove the negative by proving that it is impossible that it to exist.

Proofs of impossibility only work within some specified theoretical contexts. That doesn't lead to universal truths of any kind - it only proves impossibility within that specific logical framework.

If you want to prove that it's impossible for a needle to exist any given haystack - you actually have to search it. All of it.

For example, Existence is eternal.

How do you know that? If existence is eternal why is the universe only 14 billion years old? How can something "eternal" have a finite age?

Existence as a whole is not infinite because that is not possible.

Existence is eternal.

If existence is eternal then it's infinite in age. But you said existence is not infinite.

Contradiction.

Energy can't be created or destroyed. That means that there is a constant amount of Energy. That means that it is not infinite.

What do you mean by, 'energy is not infinite', exactly?

Energy = matter which is another proof that is not infinite because that is not possible.

But, 'energy' is energy, while 'matter' is matter. One is not the other. So, what do you mean by, 'energy equals matter', exactly?

Yes, I agree with you about the specific logical framework. In this case, it is Existence. It was never created, which means that nobody created it, which means that god as creator does not exist.

God is not 'somebody'. So, if 'nobody' created Existence, Itself, this does not mean that God, as Creator, does not exist at all.

There is no need to search for god to prove that he does not exist. He does not exist because he can't exist.

Only an absolute imbecile would call the Creator of everything a "he". So, why do you keep doing this?

Is it because, obviously, if one calls the Creator of everything a "he", then 'that thing' could not exist.

Are you just defining 'a thing' in 'a way' that would be impossible to exist so then you can just say and claim, 'that thing does not exist', and say you have evidence, just so that you can feel like you have 'won' some thing, and/or so that you can feel better about "yourself"?

Imagine coming into a philosophy forum, defining 'a thing' in 'a way' that could never even exist, and then say and claim, 'The first valid evidence that 'that thing' does NOT exist.'

Existence was not created, which means that it is eternal. "The universe" you talk about is, in fact, just a cosmos, one of many in Existence.

Talk about presenting another prime example of one who will just 'look for' any words, and present them in 'a way' in the hope that they will somehow back up and support one's already obtained and hel onto well-maintained beliefs.

In our cosmos, there are many sub-cosmoses or dimensions. When the scientists say that the "universe" is 14 billion years old, they in fact talk about the age of just one of the many sub-cosmoses.

Will you define the words, 'Universe' and 'cosmos' in the exact way that you are using them?

If no, then why not?

Existence has many parts in it. Some are small and some are big. The age of these parts is measured by their presence in Existence.

Their presence in relation what, exactly?

Is the Universe, for example, in your own little personal view and belief, here, big, or, small?

While the whole Existence is in the eternal Now, its parts have different ages or lengths. 14 billion years is a measure that describes how long the timeline of our sub-cosmos is.

Who and/or what is this 'our' word, here, referring to, exactly?

So, the parts of Existence are eternal and at the same time, temporarily limited. Their position in Existence is eternal, but their range is only 14 billion years in time/space.

Again, 'this one' is 'grasping' at words, in the hope that they will somehow work for them and their already obtained belief, here.

Existence is in the eternal Now. It was never created and has no beginning or end in time. In Existence, Everything has already happened.

So, 'tomorrow' has, already, happened, right?

Existence has two parts: Pure Awareness, a nonmaterial superstate which is infinite, and Energy = matter, which is material and finite.

If energy and material is finite then they have a beginning, and an end, and thus were created, somehow.

I suggest your revise 'your beliefs', and, your attempts at 'trying to' to justify 'thise already obtained beliefs'

That is the reason that Existence is not infinite as a whole, because one part of it is finite.

you are just making things worse, for "yourself", here, now.

[Skepdick]

Descartes failed to prove anything other than that there is thought.

How did he prove that there is a thought?

By having one.

Like having hands?

[Age]

Nobody knows exactly that. But we do know it had to have a specific beginning point.

It's just like we know that a mathematical sequence of prerequisites has to have a starting point, or it never starts at all.

Yes okay that’s fair enough. I guess we’ll never know the exact time the beginning began, just that it did begin. Shall we leave it at that not knowing when then? Something sprang into action, that’s for sure, we can be certain about that for now at least, yeah?

Right. But we can narrow that, using some basic reasoning.

Whatever "sprang into action," it had to be uncaused and always-existing. That much is established by the impossibility of an infinite regress of causes. However, we also know that it had to be very powerful, obviously, if it can create universes. And it had to be capable of injecting into the universe the kind of complexity and intricacy from which, as we observe scientifically, that complexity subsequently began to decline entropically. That gives us a lot that we know for sure.

So now we have a list of characteristics of whatever it was that created the universe. What candidates fit that description?

people like 'this one' just can not see where they are Wrong, no matter how many times they are told where they are Wrong, and this is just because they believe, absolutely, that they are not. And, they believe this, even when their claims, premises, and conclusions have been shown to be Wrong.

[Will Bouwman]

How did he prove that there is a thought?

By having one.

Like having hands?

That'll do.

[Age]

If one attends to Descartes, one comes to believe one does not even know one's own body exists...

Correct. If that troubles you, prove you have a body.

Well, Descartes' Meditations is a big subject, but I have him here, on my desk, if you want to go into it.

Descartes is making an heuristic argument, not a literal one. He's saying, "Let's use absolute skepticism to remove any knowledge that is less than absolute, and see what we're left with." But what he's actually saying is not that we have NO knowledge, but that there is no knowledge that is free from some possibility of doubt, except (he says) my own knowledge of my own existence. (That, too, has been criticized, but we need not go into that now.)

However, as I've said, that need not trouble us much. All human empirical knowing is probabilistic. But probabilities of a high sort are much better than probabilities of a low sort. So let's stick with high probability knowledge.

LOL you keep claiming God has a penis, and you do this not from a low or high probability perspective, but rather from an absolute, perspective. Which is all the more funnier considering the Fact that 'that claim' is not even a possibility, at all, let alone any probability.

Still, the question will come up: what makes one kind of knowledge high-probability, and another low? And the answer will be, "It depends on the attached evidence."

And, considering that you have absolutely zero evidence for your claim, here, then this shows just how out of touch with Reality you really are being, here.

So what evidence is attached to the Atheists' claim that there is no God, or the dogmatic agnostic's claim that nobody else can know?

What evidence do you have that a thing with a penis created absolutely every thing?

And, just be honest, here, "immanuel can". Not that you will be, because of you know where, exactly, you will end up if you were.

[Age]

No, it does not...

Sorry...it does. And a little thought will show you it does.

If something is decaying from a higher-complexity state to a lower-complexity state, you can use it as a kind of "clock," which while not precise, makes it absolutely certain there's a rate involved. And that rate can be "wound back," and gives you a sense of the origin point.

Simple illustration: if I look at you, I can judge your age by way of your decrepitude. That is, depending on the distance between your physical decline and the ideal peak of your powers, I can say, "This man's in his '30s, or '40s, or '50s, or whatever. And I know for sure that you are a time-dependent being, too: because if you had infinite time before you, your decrepitude would already be 100%. You'd be dead.

But the universe is the same. Because it's entropic, we can "wind back" the calendar, so to speak, and judge that at some point it had to be infused with immense original complexity, from which it has been steadily declining by way of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. So it's beyond doubt, really.

...cosmos is one of many cosmoses in the Universe.

I asked you what you meant by "cosmos." You didn't answer. Here, you reveal you think it doesn't mean "universe." You say it's just "one of many" parts of that "universe." Okay. So what is included in what you're calling "the cosmos?" Do you mean, "our solar system"? Or do you mean "our Local Group" of solar systems? Or do you mean something else?

It seems that you don't want to understand a simple fact and are stubbornly mixing two different things.

I understand that you don't like the truth about eternal Existence because it cancels out your god as Creator.

The funniest part about watching you two fighting and bickering, here, is the irrefutable Fact that the Universe is infinite and eternal, and that this Fact actually proves that a Creator exists.

The things that you two are 'trying to' claim, here, actually refute and prove 'your own conclusions and beliefs' False, Wrong, Inaccurate, and Incorrect.

Liking or disliking does not affect the truth. Your fight against reality, reason, and facts just shows your desperate attempt to deny reality and keep religious delusion.

Yet, LOL you are doing the exact same thing, here, "senad dizdarevic". you are both being as blind and as stupid as each other, here.

Energy can not be created or destroyed. Existence - All that is, as a closed system, was never created and will never be destroyed. You can deny it but that does not change the fact that that is true.

But, this in no way means that the Creator does not exist.

[Immanuel Can]

No, we don't exist in causality, as there is no causality in Eternity.

Well, then, you don't believe in science (because it requires causality), and you don't believe in logic (because maths proves infinite regress impossible), and you don't believe in entropy (because it's a 'clock' on energy redistribution)...and you believe in impossible things instead. You believe in an eternal universe, though everything around you proves it's temporal.

I can't say I know how to overcome an aversion to evidence, when it operates at such a total level.

We do not come into existence; we come into consciousness of our existence.

Oh. Mysticism. The old "we are God" thing. How dull. How implausible.

I explained what cosmos is.

Try again.

The universe is a whole, and a cosmos is a part of it.

Wait: so "universe," to you, means all the material stuff that exists? And when you say "cosmos," you only mean a "part" of it?

...one cosmos in Existence (the universe).

Wait. Now you say that "cosmos" means "universe"? So it's no longer just a "part" of the universe?

You can see why your explanation is problematic to me. You just said two different things were "cosmos."

...as there are many dimensions in it stacked like pancakes. Every dimension has its own sky or "cosmos" or "universe" - for the inhabitants, that is their World...

Wait. So now, "dimension" does not mean "universe," and "universe" no longer means "all that exists," but "cosmos" now means the same as "universe"?

...inhabitants of other planets know the truth about one Existence or the Universe, many cosmoses, and many dimensions inside them.

So...now you're wanting to tell me about what "inhabitants of other planets" know? And now the "dimensions" are "inside" the "universe," which has "many cosmoses"? Could you just provide a concise definition for each of these terms, and use them consistently? In your above message, you've mixed them up to the point that it's impossible to judge what you're saying.

If you want to learn the truth about life on other planets, read my article on lucid dreaming...

Well, there's certainly some "dreaming" going on, but I'm not finding it at all "lucid."

In your desperation, you constantly ad hominem misquote me, misrepresenting my position, and even turning me into a religious believer.

I don't "turn you" into anything. You turn yourself into a believer in such esoteric things as "lucid dreaming" and "other cosmoses" and "many dimensional" things, or "inhabitants of other planets." Does it not even occur to you how extraordinary claims to these things are?

Existence is eternal, and it will stay eternal no matter what you say or do.

Mathematics is decisive. There is no eternal-past history for the Earth or the universe. It's an entropic system, so we know that empirically, as well.

You can ignore that, deny that, but as you say, reality will not change. (At least we agree on that last principle.)

I understand the limitations of Earth science, and I know that it will evolve beyond causality.

See, that's the kind of crackers prophecy that gets you labelled "religious." How have you been enabled to predict such a thing, especially since the idea is actually absurd?

Energy can not be created or destroyed, which means that it is Eternal. That is the reason that infinite regress is impossible, and at the same time, that the universe was never created and has no beginning.

Again, you've just contradicted yourself twice in a single sentence. If, as you say, infinite regress (of causes, presumably) is impossible, then the universe cannot be past-eternal. So it had to have a beginning. That's inescapable. "Energy" may always exist, but order in this universe is entropic: it tends toward a future state called "heat death," in which all energy is equally distributed, and then nothing happens forever. So unless something miraculously intervenes to arrest this process and to inject order into the universe, this universe is doomed.

The fact that the infinite regress is impossible does not mean that the universe was created and has a beginning.

Yes, it does.

Quite contrary, it means that it was never created, and it is eternal.

Then it could not be causal, and entropy could not be operating in it.

We do not come into existence; we come into consciousness of our existence.

Gnosticism.

Is this your definition of cosmos?

The universe has many cosmoses. Cosmos is a space in which there are galaxies, solar systems, and planets.

In our Cosmos, there are many dimensions or sub-cosmoses.

Wait: "sub-cosmoses"? So "cosmos" doesn't mean the solar system and planets, it means something "sub" that? And these "dimensions"...please tell me how you got access to those.

[Immanuel Can]

Cogito ergo sum.

That means, "I think, therefore I am." I'm not sure how you think that raises an issue. You'll have to spell it out.

Descartes failed to prove anything other than that there is thought.

Not quite. What he proved is only that we can't know with absolute certainty (that is, under the heuristic demand that we only believe that which is beyond even the most extreme possibilities of doubt) that there is anything other than a thought. But absolute certainty isn't available for anything empirical, so that's not a very troubling realization. It just gives us a humbler recognition of our human limitations; it doesn't imply we can't know things.

Which I believe, but prove it.

I just did. It's much more probable than not, since I'm writing to you, among all the other things I mentioned. And you believe it.

What are your grounds for asserting that whatever you believe is more probable than idealism?

So now it's on the skeptic to prove there's reason to disbelieve what seems obviously true. Burden of proof.

There is no such burden of proof.

Yes, there certainly is.

If you like AI, AI says this:

The burden of proof in philosophy lies with the person who makes a claim, especially one that contradicts a generally accepted position or challenges the status quo. This is because they are the one actively trying to convince others, and it is their responsibility to provide the justification, evidence, or argument for their position.

There are multitudinous websites at which you can find the same sort of information, if you wish to check. https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/log ... n-of-Proof, for example.

Thus, as soon as one sets out to deny that common sense reality is real, the burden of proof falls on the one asserting that what seems true to the vast majority or articulates the status quo is false.

It's obvious that we have bodies. I believe I do. You believe I do. My friends all believe I do, as does my government and anybody I have ever met. Billions of others also find it commonsensical to think they do. So now, the burden is entirely on the skeptic to show why he disbelieves.

[Alexis Jacobi]

It's interesting that you call Immanuel Can a "modern man".I wonder if you mean 'modern ' in the sense of the year 2025, or if you mean 'modern' in the historian's sense of post-Renaissance. Both interpretations fit Immanuel Can.

When historical Christianity is examined, it is really a conglomeration of worldviews and metaphysical concepts and superstitions of a region of the Mediterranean world: a ‘confusion of peoples’ of the 1st century. Real Christianity is Catholicism, and genuine Catholicism is rooted in Medieval metaphysics and The Great Chain of Being. The stars are angelical; the Earth is a middle-territory, and at the center of our “world”, which is the cesspool of the cosmos, there is an actual “hell-realm”. This picture, this metaphysical diagram, still ‘lurks’ in man’s psyche (think Jungian symbolism, think man’s unconsciousness and what percolates out of it).

Immanuel is certainly a modern man, as we all are moderns. Yes, post-Medieval and also modern in the sense that modernity is acutely chaotic and topsy-turvy. The incredible things that men still believe, that haunt their minds, and that are projected onto a world they do not understand but which is felt to be their enemy, produces paranoid visions. Maleficent demons, aliens, reptile people, fantastic fantasies that are part of structures of interpretation (of a world that has power over the individual).

Curiously, what Immanuel has done, and it is a uniquely Protestant manoeuvre and strategy, is to have jumped over 1,500 of the intellectual, metaphysical and spiritual history, and landed as a modern man back on the landscape of biblical Judea. One one hand he side-steps an entire realm of superstitious belief (1,500 years of Christendom) and yet he takes up intellectual residence within a fabulous, impossible to believe, Biblical-Gospel picture “as if it is real”. In that “world” God parts oceans and sends plagues to Egypt — utterly fantastic tales which are literally unbelievable — but which this Modern (Protestant Evangelical) forces himself to believe because, logically, an omnipotent God who created everything must have that sort if miraculous power. It is logically consistent with the Story that this is so, but completely untenable in “genuine modern” terms.

The individual is trapped in a fantastic ‘land’ where man’s will upholds — forces — him to believe the unbelievable or his belief-system collapses.

The issue of coming under the influence of Hebraic mega-assertiveness is quite peculiar. One renders oneself a victim to a fantastic lie and here, obviously, I refer to the fantastic notion of Hebrew “chosenness” which as a deeply ingrained trope infuses not only the Talmudic and ultra-Orthodox Jew, but is carried over to the radical Christian Zionist and in general to the arrogance of believing “My God is real, your god or gods are unreal”.

Immanuel’s entire stance is grounded, from the top to the bottom, in this profoundly psychologically manipulative use of Story.

Really if we bother to think about these things the “real issue” is not with one particular Evangelical Christian believer, but far more that there are millions and billions of people who exist in a ghostly fantasy-enriched landscape where ancient patterns of perception exist side-by-side with perceptual stances that must necessarily exclude the former.

[promethean75]

Please review section 3.b @ http://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/Rest_o ... etaphysics

Explain how in the confines of the first egyptian mesopotamian pre-socratic dark age Augustinean Hermetic private cartesian skulls super-empirical concepts generated by the distortion of language and not the least bit of empirical investigation because they were lazy ass class conscious theorists with chronic jargonitis who sat on padded burgandy chair cushions didn't wanna get real jobs were imposed on reality laying the foundation for the western philosophy and politics of the ruling class of property owners that run the world today in twenty words or less, please.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Explain how in the confines of the first egyptian mesopotamian pre-socratic dark age Augustinean Hermetic private cartesian skulls super-empirical concepts generated by the distortion of language and not the least bit of empirical investigation because they were lazy ass class conscious theorists with chronic jargonitis who sat on padded burgandy chair cushions didn't wanna get real jobs were imposed on reality laying the foundation for the western philosophy and politics of the ruling class of property owners that run the world today in twenty words or less, please.

Hmmmmm. Presently I am more interested in dominating the 5 French mother-sauces. I have an opening next week though.