coach - If someone you knew believed that Jesus will protect him or her if they jumped from the 8th floor – would you let them try?

For the rest of you butt out of that one - I know it's tempting to come up with a list of those you would let try but coach has come up with a valid question which I would like him to answer in relation to his own faith.

I'm guessing that he ducks the core issue and comes up with a reason why the person should not jump other than his Gods ability (or otherwise) to protect the feet of those who plummit from mid sized buildings.

R0bert

coach,

You said "You cannot seriously believe that two or more ‘faiths’ can all equally be true. If one is found to be true the others by definition or deductibility must be 'not true' = false."

Who says any of them are true? The basis on which you believe that your "faith" is true, is exactly the same basis on which others believe their "faith" is true. That basis is "faith", the definition of which is "strong or unshakeable belief in something, especially without proof or evidence" (Collins English Dictionary).

And you said “Same with religions – they all believe that they worship a god or gods that will protect and bless them. That’s called superstition not faith. They must be guided to reason.”

Another definition of “faith” is “a conviction of the truth of certain doctrines of religion, especially when this is NOT BASED ON REASON”. (Collins English Dictionary).

You seem to need to justify your belief and faith with words like “proof” and “evidence” and “reason”.

Please stop kidding yourself. Your faith in your version of the supernatural is exactly the same as others’ faith in their version of the supernatural, none of which is based on evidence or reason

Message for R0bert

Due to constraints on second posts, am unable to complete my response to you on the "Censoring debate" thread until tomorrow.

Keep up good work.

Cheers

Dear W,

You stated that arguments assume that logical thought is possible, and that an argument is valid if it stands up to logical testing. I agree, with respect. My point is simply that the possibility of logical thought requires the belief that all of our thoughts are not totally determined by circumstances. Atheism denies that possibility, so far as it requires that our thoughts are totally determined by the biological, chemical, physical, social, economic and other forces acting upon us when we think. I don't see how it allows for the possibility that we, when thinking, are not totally controlled by our circumstances. Instead it seems to suggest that even our thoughts are totally determined by our circumstances.

Kind regards,

Tomess

"If there is a creation there must be a creator. Cause and effect. Something cannot exist from nothingness." says Coach with some certainty.

Earlier i posed a question (.... to Coach too) about "nothingness" expressing the thought that neither empty space nor solid matter can exist because they represent human idealisations and not material "constituents" of a material universe. John's excellent article draws attention to the problems associated with adopting a purely anthropocentric mindset. The rote learning in wrong order and parroting Coach makes an excellent example here, where if we truely insist then let's have a teddy (..... a god bod) created vacuum planted in our heads. LOL

This anthropocentric mindset also gives us this reverse notion of mind or intelligence first. i.e. an extraordinary intelligence existed unsustained before any material constituents of the universe. The idea is then put forward to "disprove" the idea that there pre-existed such a supernatural reality. Silly isn't it? This is not hard to do when we examine our evolution as an ever-expanding living process from stardust to us developing some sort of contemplative intelligence. We see that intelligence cannot exist without causality.

Because the state of existence is a logical one, intelligence of any type cannot develop without information. You cannot have intelligence without information and you cannot have information without logic because they are aspects of the same thing and existing simultaneously. For a supernatural intelligence or teddy to have existed when there was nothingness, (if you even believe nothingness could exist lol ) is impossible and absurd to have then supposedly created the universe.

There is no reason why information and logic cannot exist without a teddy but on the other hand it is impossible for a teddy to exist in the absence of logic and information.

Coach: My reference to belief in fairies was not meant to be smart-alec. I think you found it distasteful because the parallels between belief in any supernatural beings and fairies is confronting for you just as w has pointed out. In the past many people have taken belief in fairies very seriously, Arthur Conan Doyle for instance. We don’t believe in fairies now because the concept is useless in explaining things that happen in our daily lives. By the same token, neither you nor I can prove that God or angels do not exist but many of us, including you, do not use the idea of these supernatural beings to explain the mechanisms of earthly events. I have tried to make the point elsewhere that scientific investigations, whether by Newton or any other scientist who believes in the supernatural, never ever include a factor for a supernatural being or force in their calculations or explanations. That does not prove the non-existence of the supernatural but it does confirm its irrelevance.

I personally believe that God and fairies exist in people’s brains and, to that extent, influence those people’s behaviour but they are not external forces. Sparating what is inside one’s brain from what is outside it is one of the great philosophical problems of the ages and the basis for the distinction between idealism and materialism.