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That draws attention to a major threshold problem that I've never seen addressed ─ what real entity is the word "God" intended to denote?
Funny.
"Real" compared to what? And what is an "entity" as opposed to a non-entity in this case?
Well, unless God is the origin of "nature", and therefor precedes/transcends it.
You're being mighty cavalier about what you claim to be "real", here.
A lot like quantum physics in that way. Where all we have are effects, and we must imaging the causes because the causes are invisible to us.
I agree. And I've never understood the weird insistence that God must be physically extant or not at all. Lots of things are not physically extant and yet are as "real" to us as anything that is.
This is irrelevant nonsense, of course, meant to discredit and insult, not illuminate.
The philosophy of science restricts science to external data collection, that can be confirmed by others, through the shared five senses. But there is also a large source of internal data that is not as easy to confirm from the outside, that still eludes science due to its data limiting philosophy.
Ow? For example?
It absolutely isn't.
As you've presented it, it's an unevidenced claim. You'll need to add a sound, evidenced argument to convince here.
Nonexistent. And we can assign criteria to define the two. Real and actual refer to the collection of objects and processes existing in space and time that can affect one another. This is nature. Ideas may be real (exist in heads in spacetime and manifest as actions), but their referents need not be, in which case we call the referent imaginary or unreal, since it can be found nowhere and causes nothing. This definition includes all of existence including any reality outside of the bubble of spacetime we call our universe yet causally connected to it.
That's an incoherent thought in the framework I've offered. If a god exists, it's part of nature as well and subject to laws of nature that pertain to that higher order meta-spacetime. What keeps this deity intact? Why doesn't all of its knowledge become corrupted? Why doesn't it dissipate away like a cloud? Something prevents that.
See above. If you consider that framework flawed, demonstrate the error if you can or just accept that you simply don't like it for reasons you can't state.
Disagree. And there you go with those quotes. If your metaphysics is tethered to nothing but your imagination, and if your definitions are so fuzzy that real becomes "real" for you, you have no foundation for a self-consistent view of reality. It's possible the framework I presented needs tweaking, but not until observations arise that contradict it. As long as it serves as an adequate scaffolding for understanding experience, it's a valid perspective.
He wrote, "In that context the unicorn is light years ahead ─ at least we know what we're looking for and if we found an equine with a single horn on its forehead and probably white hair, and if we had a virgin female handy, then we'd know."
But that's a meaningless term, though, isn't it. It represents the antithetical to existence, but we don't know what existence is beyond "If I can experience it, it exists". "If I can't experience it it still might exist, or it might not." But we know that existence surpasses what we can experience, though by what degree and what factors we have no idea.
That and $5 will maybe get you a cup of coffee these days.
So saith whom, now? Oh, that's right, the materialists saith it. That and $5 will get them kicked our of the philosophy coffee shop. Outa mine, anyway. For being WAY to vague and imprecise, as defined above.
So "nature" and existence are the same thing, according to you. Everything that you decide "exists", exists as part of "nature". And anything "unnatural", then, simply doesn't exist. That's quite the logic circle you've got there.
The ideas DEFINE the referents. Without the ideas, the referents are just a mass of indistinct, incoherent phenomena. Perception is conception. "Existence" is a concept. "Reality" is a concept. "Objects" are concepts. All of them "existing" in our minds. All of them existing because we labelled them, and related and aligned them, and we evaluated them. Right there beside God, and the "afterlife", and "infinity", and perfection, and morality and a whole bunch of other stuff we created in our minds.
Science has a standard for what constitutes "proof." So does the legal profession. Presenting proof that lies outside those standards results in a rejection or dismissal of the proof.
"Self-originate" means what it implies: the thing brought itself into existence.
No one made a claim about it. I'm suggesting that the examination of the idea in a logical process yields a reasonable conclusion supporting the existence of a god.
Understood.
Please tell us eithe4 the scientific study or logical argument that proves the existence of God.
I already offered it, though I didn't include much context. I'll offer some here to make it clearer.
And, in that case, NOBODY is claiming that a self-replicator came about in that way.
And I would strongly disagree. It seems that a logical, skeptical, and cautious process leads to the reasonable conclusion that no conscious being was the cause of the universe as a whole.No one made a claim about it. I'm suggesting that the examination of the idea in a logical process yields a reasonable conclusion supporting the existence of a god.
Understood.
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Actually, even in that case, the conclusion does not follow. Even if *someone* wrote the code (which is unlikely), that does NOT prove that there is a God. All is shows is that some intelligence wrote the genetic code of things on Earth. That could be an extra-terrestrial species, for example.
So we have at least two big logical flaws. Can we address those first?
I think that is going *way* beyond the evidence and into 'hopeful thinking'.
No one here has; correct.
I understand. I was not including skepticism or caution in the approach, as those weren't asked for. Just flawless logic. And there is no flaw in the logic that code comes from a coder (whether the coder is unconscious, or not, of its coding, the coder yet remains "god." Questions of identity require a different logical exercise to address.
As I pointed out, there are flaws in that logic. A code (like the DNA code) does not require a 'coder' and that coder does NOT have to be supernatural. In the case of DNA, it is simply chemistry.
Well, if code can't write itself, then something must have written it. Else we're into self-origination, which I thought you (maybe it was someone else) had argued against. The logic I'm following here ignores entirely the identification and characteristics of the coder; it merely addresses the question, "Was there a coder?" (who can be given the label "god").
It would prove there is a coder. Who would be "god," whatever that is.
Sure. If you'll note, I have not attempted once to identify "god." I have only addressed the question of god's existence from a purely logical standpoint, using a specific logical chain to produce a binary outcome.
For sure. I'm doing just that.
I have no idea how you're concluding that, based on what I've offered. Nowhere in the logic I've offered is there any room for "hope" of any kind. Either code writes itself or it doesn't. Etc. We can blast away at the logic to see if it continues to hold water, but each blast will also be scrutinized as to its relevance to the logic. Else we ruin the experiment.
I think I've addressed why this is perpendicular to the logic being examined.
While the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, the same cannot be said of abiogenesis. Science does not yet really have an answer for how life came from non-life.
No, science has a clear standard for what constitutes evidence. It is an error to conflate that with 'proof". Evidence can only support or oppose a scientific theory or hypothesis. But if one wants to judge what is real then one should rely upon reliable evidence, such as scientific evidence. It is best to keep an open but cautious mind. In other words one will not claim that "Gravity is absolutely proven". But at the same time one should realize that it is unwise to step off of a cliff just because gravity has not been proven yet.
Your conclusion is noted. Thanks for taking the time to post.