Does God exist?

Pretty much what Tyro said, and I did say in the beginning that you can define God however you want, even a pencil. The God of pantheism however is meaningless. It borrows off the modern interpretation of what the God of theism is, but shelters itself from the barrage of criticism by saying God is the universe. No one can deny this. If you define God as existence, then God exists. But it is no different than saying existence exists, which has been known for quite some time, and is relatively unimportant.

Consciousness is a difficult topic, empirically we know it is somewhere in your brain, but we don't know how it manifests itself. Also, not all cells lend themselves to being conscious beings. Are dead cells dead conscious beings? Are the cells on my leg conscious? If you amputate my leg am I in a lessened state of consciousness?

Fair enough, so long as you are aware of the implication.

Not really. I am speculating on the ability for us to actualize our capacity. We do it everyday. Certain tests for example speculate on your ability to do well in medical school or law school. There are many gate-keeping tools in the education system that do this. We do this in job interviews. We do it in everyday life when we judge people. They all have the capacity to be nice, do well in the job, or do well in x field, but we speculate on their ability to actualize it.

Likewise, we have the capacity to know God's existence, and I'm just speculating that this won't happen.

 

So you won't respond to the example I gave?
Also, I believe God manifests himself as nature, not material things manufactured by humans.

is it? What do we really know about existence? We're here, we reproduce, and we come up with words to describe processes that have been here for 13+ billion years. But as you've said, we'll never be able to fully understand the meaning of it all, so where does that leave us?




If you woke up one day, and everyone and every thing you came across paid no attention to you, what would you do, assuming this went on for the remainder of your life?

well no, they're dead. Just like dead people are no longer conscious

You wouldn't be, but again, the cells in your amputated leg would eventually expire.

 

It depends how you define nature. If you define God as the metaphysical as opposed to the man-made, what I said as pantheism still holds. Also, as for your example, it doesn't defeat the fact that reality is objective.

That doesn't mean we don't already understand some of it, and have the capacity to understand all of it. Imagine a Billion page book. As a practical thing, you will never be able to memorize it simply because you do not have enough time in your life (unless you have an edeic memory), but as a potential, you can. Where does that leave us? That's not even a question, you've implied that just because we can't know all, that we know nothing.

I don't know, but this is not relevant.

While we do not call a dead person a dead conscious person, it's not semantically incorrect, just as if cells are conscious, calling it a dead conscious cell is not semantically incorrect.

So, my cells are conscious beings, yet when I remove them it does not affect my consciousness? It either does, or it doesn't which is it?

 

(excuse my language)
Honestly, up until 5 months ago I would've doubted God. I was in a complete shithole, smoking weed, drinking up, shards, carrying around a knife on me at all times. I was basically f*ed off my ass all day and put on an act of bravado even though I was scared shitless. I constantly engaged in punch ups knife fights etc. etc. I was beyond cocky, until he sent me a message. I got jumped one night by people who I met on the day. They seemed friendly enough, we talked we laughed, they beat the living crap out of me. My friend started taking me to a local Christian youth, at first i hated everyone there, hated the thought of God. Man my life was f*ked. One night I decided it was all or nothing, life or death. I accepted God into my life... 5 months later, I feel as if he's healing me, as if every day I get better. Sure I'm still not perfect, my old cockiness still kicks in time after time, I still get angry. But then I pray, tbh I feel a whole lot better after I do. Through him I'm slowly kicking my habits i guess.

I've seen him work miracles time after time to those who really accept him into my life, especially my mates who've been in worse positions than I. One of my mates quit smoking, quit drugs cold turkey, only because of God.

one of my good mates said
"Church isn't a museum of perfect people, it is a hospital for for broken, for the sick, for the underserving. Let's stop playing the righteous card and begin to realise we are just as broken as rest of the world."

So yeah this is my argument to why I believe that God really exists.

 

God need not exist for you to gain a boost from believing he is helping you kick a habit. Just thinking that you are getting help when you really aren't can go a long way.

 

Yeah I've considered that, but looking at me and my mates 1 year back to now. I'd like to say that we've all changed for the better, because of God. Like I'm not making things up, my mate, one night when he was fried off his ass, God spoke to him. Sure if it was once or twice, you could say he was just "hallucinating" or "hearing voices" but It happened for 3 months, every night he'd be fried off his ass, God would speak to him. He wrote down everything the voice told him. He comes from a non religious background, a broken family, never been to Church once. But when he finally did go to Church, he showed them the notes, and they related to a lot of what was said in the bible.

 

Hearing voices when you are fried makes perfect sense and you can make the Bible say whatever you want. And since Christianity is everywhere in our culture, you would have to be extremely and purposely sheltered from it to know nothing about it.

 

25 pages of notes to be exact, all related to God and Christianity.

What I'm taking from what you're saying is that what happened to my mates and I happened by pure coincidence, by chance. I highly doubt it. I've seen too many examples of people, violent people, drug addicts, even myself that have accepted God into their lives and it changing for the better.

Christianity isn't something that can be forced, it has to be accepted with an open heart.

I dug myself a hole so deep I basically had two options, embrace God or be dead, stabbed in the streets, left to die.

 

God Does Exists and if you think so too Please click in my signature Pray for the Logan's! It's a story that needs our prayers.

 

I believe so I've had expirences and stoof how could to something be created from nothing

 

Aside from your experiences, not understanding how something can be created from nothing does not constitute a god. To jump to a conclusion when you have already said that you don't understand it is IGNORANT.

 

There is no evidence or reason to believe in a "god". The majority of people believe in a "god" only because of indoctrination starting from birth (muslims, christians).

 

Law of Thermodynamics states matter/energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Which means matter/energy can not be created from nothingness. Say we take god out of the picture, then the 1st law of Thermodynamics IS saying it was created from nothingness. Therefore science is contradicting itself or science itself says there must be a God.

 

Nope. It is perfectly possible that the universe and the matter within it has always existed. It is also possible that science is wrong and matter can actually be created from apparent nothingness. There could also be an infinite amount of universes that have always existed and the interactions between them caused to big bang that made our universe begin expanding. There are many possibilities that explain the creation of the universe and many make much more sense than a god who would have to have always existed and decided to create our universe? Why? Because he felt like it? That's a very shitty answer.

 

Who says the god had to have always existed? A god is a supreme entity, doesn't mean it has to have existed the entire time.

And believe me it's as much of a possibility as what you mentioned, you really can't deny that, and there is no reason why a supreme entity can't exist within the boundary of science.
Unless of course you have proof?

 

To offer a simpler answer: There's no such thing as "the law of thermodynamics." The conservation of mass, the principle you're thinking of, is not violated by any current genesis theories of which I'm aware.

You're trying to make a logical argument against logic.

 

If god has not always existed, something would have had to create him which means something is more powerful or equally powerful to god and thus all monotheistic religions are proved false. I also never said it was not a possibility. I was proving to the guy that he could not say that he knew there was a god because of what he said because there are other possibilities. In life there are always an infinite number of possibilities to explain a situation and we must choose the one that seems most correct. The simplest is normally the correct one and because of this and the fact that a god existing brings about all sorts of philosophical issues it makes sense to simply not believe in one, especially since there is no evidence for it.

 

That's fine, but if god was created through nature that's also fine too.

I agree, but that wasn't what I was responding to.

There is no evidence for the creation of all of existence period, except that we're here.

There is no simple answer to this that can be put forth because we are working off of nothing. (And no, I don't consider the Big Bang proof of the beginning of existence, just the current state of the universe.)
But sure it is unlikely, and there probably are better ideas, but until we can get evidence we can't dismiss ideas such as a supreme/more powerful being.

You should leave before you hurt yourself. I wasn't arguing for religion, I don't subscribe to that.

I'm just saying that a powerful being or a "god" is simply a possibility, we don't have nearly a good enough understanding of our universe to claim definitively one way or the other.
You're just as bad as a theist if you think you can.


Edit: This thread should be closed, there is no real legitimate arguments to be made due to lack of evidence on both sides and is dropped down to mere opinions.

 

We can dismiss the idea of god and any other theory because of a lack of evidence. Saying I don't know is a perfectly fine answer. In addition to this a supremely powerful being raises all sorts of questions and contradictions and problems that it doesn't even make sense to exist.

Then you are an agnostic and yes there is legitimate arguments. If you do not understand that you can kindly leave.