: Do you want to talk about lies... oh my sweet sweet brother and sisters...
: lies come in many forms my friends and they usually begin with ourselves. Right. Time for a flat-out challenge of the fuzzy-thinking. I've levelled this argument twice at Stuart and he has yet to provide me with an answer of any sort.
I'm not looking for some vague and patronising flim-flammery; just some pure reason, if you can encompass it.
I'm not saying that a God doesn't exist; merely that you can never prove the existence of God by any physical or logical means. This should present no problems to the enlightened Christians like Lark; but I'd be interested to see how Robert or Kristin or Stuart react to it.
Any belief in an omnipotent God is alogical - as an omnipotent God is beyond logic. You either believe or you don't. If you truly believe that God exists, no amount of physical proof will do anything, since it cannot encompass the nonphysical. You cannot give any compelling evidence for the (non)existence of God that is not physical, since we all experience life through physical filters.
If we were able to cleanse the doors of perception, we might well be able to see things as they truly are, but that itself relies on the belief in a soul that is somehow seperate from the body; Cartesian dualism; which is also an act of faith, since no-one has ever given compelling physical evidence towards this.
Among other things, this means that you cannot cite physical phenomena as proof of the existence of God if you believe that such systems cannot ultimately determine God's existence. Any physical thing, whether it be the Earth, the Bible or the Universe cannot be used to provide "proof", because "proof" is a logical concept; and God is alogical; things like the Bible only provide compelling "proof" of God's existence if you accept the Bible as truth to begin with; which is a basic logical flaw.
Fundamentally, you either believe or you don't. If you believe, then no physical evidence (or lack of) can sway you; if you don't, then no physical evidence (or lack of) can sway you. You cannot say that an experiment makes it 33% more likely that God exists; it would be absurd.
This is a major difference between faith and science; science can be disproved; God can never be disproved, since God is beyond proof; it's the point of Popper's falsifiability posit. And it's why evolution is a scientific theory where creationism isn't.
You cannot prove that the Creation didn't happen; as such, it is not falsifiable and thus not scientific; it is a matter of belief. Evolution, however, is a) an ongoing process and b) limited *entirely* to describing the physical (and thus measurable) world. You can therefore design an experiment that would prove that evolution *isn't* happening; this makes it a scientific theory, as it is falsifiable.
To recap, it all comes down to belief. Since God is beyond logic, you can only use logic to prove God exists if you start by using the axiom that God exists; which is circular reasoning. You can't obtain alogical results from a purely logical calculation any more than you can make 1+1=3.[1]
The ultimate question is; "do you believe?". If you do, then logic is irrelevant. If you don't, then logic is irrelevant.
Gideon.
[1] This also means that many of the "logical proofs of God" like the watchmaker argument are just so much hot air...
