Sorry to make fun but by saying God is simply the separation of good and evil takes away the act of Creation and therefore It is not the master of the universe, then what is it? I don't understand what your concept is. The line between good and evil doesn't need to be supernatural.

That was good.  Yes, it does take away the act of creation, that what it's supposed to do.  Where does an atheist believe the world came from?  Even if you say God created the world, then where did God come from?  Unless there are an infinite amount of Gods creating Gods, then you have to stop somewhere with something that was never created.

Good and evil are not physical things to be created, like an apple is created by a tree.  That's my point.  They are not created.

Oh boy, now I have to read Max's super long post...  

Whew, Max!  That was a long read!  I'm exhausted... here we go...

Christianity inherently depends upon faith, not proof.

Well, I haven't tried to argue for or against Christianity.  That's quite another topic.  I'm just talking of the existence of God in general.

Everything ultimately requires faith.  Even atheism.  According to dictionary.com, proof is "the evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true."  Thus it requires faith in the evidence or argument, and, like faith, can be wrong.  This means that what is proof for one man may not be proof for another.  Now, can you prove everything you believe in?  For example, what proof do you have that a computer monitor is in front of you?  Well, you can see it.  What proof do you have that your eyes are working right?  You probably don't have any, but it's easy to trust your eyes, and thus it is ultimately based on faith.  But you don't need "proof" to get on with life.  Faith is innate and you are comfortable with it.

And the problem I have with the subject as is posited by most Christians is that I've already long since given the subject its due, but by extension, it is simultaneously impossible to acknowledge this as true as it tends to be defined by conventional Christian wisdom.

Um...  Earlier in this thread others have not understood what I have said, and now I find myself in a similar position.  Is there another way you can say this?  I am not sure what you mean.

And should anyone think to raise the point, allow me to save you the trouble -- I wouldn't claim that anyone else's faith is invalid simply because I've never had a similar experience, only that the difference between myself and such a person is the starting point where non-Christians begin to see contradiction where Christians simply deny that it exists.

Well... of course.  If you don't see something, if you don't believe in it, you deny that it exists.  What contradictions are you speaking of?

So, to conclude my point about SPH's remark, while I would agree that, in spite of being wholly subjective abstractions, moral right and wrong have an absolute definition, at best, the only way I could associate God with them even hypothetically is to acknowledge that they have been emphasized in addition to worshiping God. In other words, the moral definitions in question are not a quality dependent on the existence of God, indeed, they would continue to be moral even if God did not exist.

My argument is that God is morality.  I don't mean to say the "God" is just another word for "morality" ... I'm saying that the belief in an absolute and unchanging morality... is God.  Does that make sense?

And this is the crucial fallibility of any faith: it can be wrong.

Of course.  But as I stated in my previous post, everything is ultimately based on faith.

This doesn't mean that something that is right can be wrong...  Thus, if you have faith in something, or know something, you do not also believe you could be wrong...

I have said many times that science find its faith in the truth and religions find truth in their faith. The point is that if you believe strongly enough, for you it becomes true. Whether it is Peter Pan, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Great Pumpkin. If you believe in them, they exist. Until you grow to the point where the answers don't add up and you loose your faith.

Another point is asking someone to disprove God, is making them prove a negative. Prove there is something I don't believe exists. As Julie pointed out earlier, there is a $1,000,000 reward for anyone that can prove God's existence.

What?!  Believing in something doesn't make it true... 

As for the prize, do I get it even if those I have proved it to are dead? 

Religion is NOT the source of moral values nor is it required. Like I said before, humans will one day evolve beyond religion. Thanks again Max Bell.

Believing in moral values is in and of itself religious.  No, religion is not the source... as I have said, moral values are not things that are created.

Whew, Max!  That was a long read!  I'm exhausted...

No worries. There was a time when I'd say how long I'd been online and posting the exact same way and today is a new milestone; I don't remember how long I've been doing this anymore.

Well, I haven't tried to argue for or against Christianity...

And you've just encountered one of my worst habits; occasionally I will address someone's post, specifically, in order to cite it as an example, but the other 90% of the time I'm just ranting to the nebulous "you" that paranoids and street corner psychotics rave about. In this instance, I was addressing Christianity specifically, since this topic seems to have loosely been involved with it some way.

Everything ultimately requires faith.  Even atheism.  According to dictionary.com, proof is "the evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true."  Thus it requires faith in the evidence or argument, and, like faith, can be wrong.  This means that what is proof for one man may not be proof for another.

Well, whether you'd credit me or not, I'd still be comfortable saying that I depend on what can be demonstrated, supported with evidence or proven to be fact quite a bit of the time. There's the kind of faith that involves not sweating the small stuff and the kind of faith that assuming that there is an explanation behind the really big questions provided one doesn't mind not knowing what it is.

Nor am I much of a relativist; there are a great many things that are simply a matter of taste and a few abstractions that involve the perspective of the viewer, but things either are or they aren't. Proof simply involves demonstrating that the premises which support a conclusion do not contradict it nor each other, and in many cases, whether or not the premises in question are supported by similarly sound premises. Otherwise, the only other criterion involved is simply being able to demonstrate that the conclusion is one that can be reproduced and demonstrated as true a sufficient if arbitrary number of times. 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, 2 + 1 = 3 and 1 + 2 = 3. Someone could certainly disagree if they chose to, but it wouldn't change the sum of the numbers.

What trips people up is abstraction; ideas that can only be said to exist in a subjective sense, like love or justice or fairness. While it might take some thought to arrive at a consensus about the definition of fairness depending on the context it arises in, people also do it all the time and using the same mechanism of reasoning that is employed when they tie their shoes, pay their taxes, or step to one side on a sidewalk to avoid a falling piano.

On the other hand, the basis for faith can vary greatly and it's unreasonable to try to subject them to a false equivalence. For example, one might not need to stop and make certain that someone is preparing a vaccine against the flu for winter. Past experience has demonstrated that this occurs reliably every year, and is made available even when occasional shortages occur. Besides the fact that there's money to be made in producing the vaccine, there are countless other reasons why its rare to see anyone panic at the end of summer on the assumption that they're about to fall ill without any remedy. Now ratchet that up a notch; presently, there is no cure for cancer, and while one can cite dozens of factors that will create the impression that the odds of discovering one are more or less likely without actually developing any kind of certainty about whether or not it's possible or will eventually be done. The role of faith in one's personal opinion on the subject is likely to be much more predominant in scenarios like this, but then so is whether one is a pessimist or an optimist.

Ratchet that up a notch. This life is fleeting and transitory, and serves only as preparation to the afterlife; preoccupation with one's health or comfort is a worldly distraction which detracts attention from the spiritual plane.

Granted, its a somewhat artificial and exaggerated example, but it certainly comes up often enough.

Now, can you prove everything you believe in?

Not to be contrary, but why do you feel it would be necessary to do so? To define this explicitly, its not that I believe I can prove it or even that I think that it's necessary to do so. But neither do I bother with ideas that cannot be proven, since they aren't good for much but entertainment. If it were necessary to be omniscient or validate every thought empirically, it would be impossible to know anything, but we do.

While conundrums allow for self-contradictory examples, they're not useful in the sense that they can't be used to validate or invalidate any other idea.

Um...  Earlier in this thread others have not understood what I have said, and now I find myself in a similar position.  Is there another way you can say this?  I am not sure what you mean.

It was a painfully constructed sentence that escaped my proofreader, who had fallen asleep by the time I'd written it.

I was attempted to address the idea of trying to impose false equivalences on different categories of faith, since, like an opinion, there may or may not be a basis of support for it, and some are better than others. In many cases, though, any is better than none.

And should anyone think to raise the point, allow me to save you the trouble -- I wouldn't claim that anyone else's faith is invalid simply because I've never had a similar experience, only that the difference between myself and such a person is the starting point where non-Christians begin to see contradiction where Christians simply deny that it exists.

Well... of course.  If you don't see something, if you don't believe in it, you deny that it exists.  What contradictions are you speaking of?

My argument is that God is morality.  I don't mean to say the "God" is just another word for "morality" ... I'm saying that the belief in an absolute and unchanging morality... is God.  Does that make sense?

Yes and no. I wasn't aware that you had been making an allegory but I can see where you're trying to distinguish it from old testament assumptions about similar allegories, certainly. That said, I've never been much of a pantheist, I'm afraid.

But to conclude; this would be another instance where I find contradiction in supernatural explanations, however metaphorical. Its impossible to deify much of anything without getting hung up on the subject of dominion and while I'd be the last to impose some artificial definition of equality on anyone, thats just one place I won't go. Its entirely possible for me to own an entire house full of cats, but I'm neither allowed to let them overrun it or make a hobby of finding new ways to kill them, and with good reason.

More over, in practice, too often anyone who would have you acknowledge their deity of choice isn't interested in positing an ideal for the purpose of expanding their personal growth. Certainly, you've said nothing that would cause me to include you in this generalization, nor would I extend it to anyone else. But the practice has allowed individuals power over other people with little or no effort of their own, and quite frequently, for no better reason that the subject person will allow people power over them in recognition of a supernatural authority and, occasionally, as a gesture of faith towards it.

If there is any social construct more abused or bastardized beyond relation to it's original conception, I'm unaware of any that's been more misused than morality. Worse, no other meaningful social construct is possible without it (that doesn't involve blunt force trauma and a dirt nap).

That said, it's very important to broach the subject only when it can be discussed as an attainable ideal, and one intended to confer some benefit for the trouble of doing so.

But then I'm comfortable admitting that I'm not only capable of identifying and exercising an enlightened standard of behavior without being threatened by a higher power, but find no contradiction in saying that I do even if such practice has been imperfect. If I've learned nothing, its that too many people adopt a definition they're incapable of satisfying and, realizing that the are doomed to fail, simply make no effort or as little as possible. They end up hating themselves, hating other people, and never once stopped to consider that the standard by which they've made those judgments might not be at fault (frequently because the first thing it teaches them is that they are incapable of bettering it).

And, while I apologize for again carrying you along in my little rant, I'd conclude by offering that to merely revere or value the concept or practice of morality runs the risk of rendering the idea sacrosanct (as does removing pretty much any idea to the supernatural realm).

But that's enough blather for one day.

First of all, Max, I admire the professionalism in your posts.  It is rare to see such a thing online these days.  Offline too for that matter. 

I could respond to the faith and proof matter at the beginning of your post, but I'm afraid of going too far off the point of what I'm mainly actually trying to say... not that I wouldn't have more to say on the subject, but it complicates things when we branch out and end up having two, three, or four parallel discussions.

When I speak of God, I have trouble comprehending the nature of the abstraction I speak of.  In other words, to those who believe in God, He's rather undefinable.  He isn't really known, as one can know something physical like an apple, or a simple abstraction, like the number 2.

It seems that when an atheist says that they don't believe in God, they are not speaking of the same God I believe in.  They are speaking of some mystical Zeus-like creature that controls the world and wants everybody to worship him.  And maybe this is what religion is for some people, and I'm sure it has been for some people, but it's not what I'm talking about.

One thing that atheists do seem to agree upon is that there is an absolute truth and an absolute morality... a true difference between good and evil that man does not define.  Although these are abstractions, they are very real.  When I speak of God, it is these abstractions that are bound up in the notion of which I speak.  "Something greater than the natural world" I once heard it put.

I don't understand how one can say there can be morality without God.  Not the Zeus-like god that will strike you down with a thunderbolt.  But God is the essence of morality.  Morality is based on God.  The absolute.  The good.  The reason.  The truth.

So if you are truly atheists, it should follow that the world exists for no reason to be fulfilled, and that anything you do in your life will ultimately not matter.  If this is the case, morality does not truly exist.  Is there a flaw in this logic?  Is there something I'm missing?

 

That's basically my point...

I don't understand how one can say there can be morality without God.  Not the Zeus-like god that will strike you down with a thunderbolt.  But God is the essence of morality.  Morality is based on God.  The absolute.  The good.  The reason.  The truth.

So if you are truly atheists, it should follow that the world exists for no reason to be fulfilled, and that anything you do in your life will ultimately not matter.  If this is the case, morality does not truly exist.  Is there a flaw in this logic?  Is there something I'm missing?

 

I'm happy you finally got to your point. You seem to to be adhering to the same logic that spawned most superstitions. When something is not understood man makes shit up to cover. There is no empirical reason to suspect that good, evil, god, devil, came from anything other than mans own imagination.

Doesn't matter in what way? Mans actions do matter in the present and will matter in the future to others said action affects. Atheists do not acknowledge the possibility of an afterlife so any good or evil they do is for the here and now. A religious or spiritual person may ascribe a different meaning to an atheists actions but that does not change the facts or intent of the atheist.

[[[caveat:: I am agnostic having a spiritual experience]]]

self professed atheists...
not one of you can PROVE the non-existence of some sort of god...

Therefore... to make the claim that Life stems from 'survival of the fittest stems from mutation --> DNA --> protein chains --> the aggregation of smaller molecules --> complex atoms created in the furnace of stars --> small atoms created in the first second of the universe as it cooled --> bing bang --> cyclical expansion and contraction of the universe wherein space and time are (re)created over and over...

p.s. I believe ALL of that

but what's before that...?

Carl Sagan said it best "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, first you muct create the universe"


ADDITIONALLY...
this B.S. about "proof"... 1+1=2 etc...
what proof do you have that the LCD screen you are looking at works as described. Because you read some marketing material describing LCDs or perhaps some technical article about the 'science' behind the technology... maybe you even know the guy who invented it.

In none of those case is your "proof" stronger than "I think so" you are operating on Faith...

but apparently you are more 'comfy' having faith in marketing material, psuedo-scientific explanations... of course in this case you are actively encouraged to "believe" that you "understand" what is being explained which makes you feel "in control" etc etc etc

I'm happy you finally got to your point. You seem to to be adhering to the same logic that spawned most superstitions. When something is not understood man makes shit up to cover. There is no empirical reason to suspect that good, evil, god, devil, came from anything other than mans own imagination.

Doesn't matter in what way? Mans actions do matter in the present and will matter in the future to others said action affects. Atheists do not acknowledge the possibility of an afterlife so any good or evil they do is for the here and now. A religious or spiritual person may ascribe a different meaning to an atheists actions but that does not change the facts or intent of the atheist.

So you are agreeing with my argument that for a true atheist, ultimately nothing really matters, except for happiness in the present?  There is no absolute truth or morality?

So you are agreeing with my argument that for a true atheist, ultimately nothing really matters, except for happiness in the present?  There is no absolute truth or morality?

Happiness would be your word. An atheist does not believe in heaven or hell or any other afterlife so an atheists actions are for the world he lives in. Abosulute truth is elusive. Absolute morality is subjective.

Abosulute truth is elusive. Absolute morality is subjective.

And that is much more interesting than the other way around. Let the apes figure it out for themselves.
:-)

Happiness would be your word. An atheist does not believe in heaven or hell or any other afterlife so an atheists actions are for the world he lives in. Abosulute truth is elusive. Absolute morality is subjective.

If absolute morality is subjective, it's not really absolute is it? 

Is absolute truth elusive or non-existent?  It must exist to be elusive... 

Anyway, such would be the thoughts of a true atheist.  It seems some who call themselves 'atheists' would not agree with these conclusions.

Thanks for the discussion. 

SPH:

A belated thank you for the compliment, and for the record, I spent some time thinking about the relationship of brevity to comprehension as well.

Your post leaves me at an impasse, since you've only made a series of assertions without providing any support for them. Thus far, none of the points you've made can be evaluated in a literal sense. You've mentioned a series of abstractions which you consider impossible without God, but provide no idea why you think this is so.

So, in a literal sense, I can't show you the flaw in your reasoning because you haven't provided any indication of what that might be.

But neither do I believe you've tried to understand much of anything. From what you've already concluded, you've already settled on a fairly gross caricature of atheism that bears no relationship to me. Given that, theres no reason to believe you'd listen to anything else I said.

Thing of it is, objective truth about any concept, concrete or abstract, is determined by its identity. To consider what you said in a literal sense, you'd have to assume that identity is something that can be changed. Even to assume that they derive their identity by design, that identity would remain constant. If the nature of truth was something that could simply be changed, then there would be no way to identify it at all.

Otherwise, these things do have an objective existence, and God does not exist, their natures still do not change. This does not mean you are required to agree with me about what the identities of these concepts are, but that fact by itself will only have any meaning to you unless you can quantify what that difference is.

Which brings us full circle. It's probably worth pointing out that when you make assertions like this, it's necessary to demonstrate their validity, much like the burden of proof lies with the prosecutor, rather than the defendant. That someone is incapable of disproving an assertion made with no support does not prove the assertion.

But I'm sure you see the dilemma, by now.

Otherwise, these things do have an objective existence, and God does not exist, their natures still do not change.

What do you mean by "God"?  We may be talking about two different abstract concepts.  What is your definition of "God"?