The definition of GOD

A common emoticon used at TheologyWeb is that of an almost comatose smiley drooling all over himself.Maybe we need such a thing here.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

No, I'm simply stating a fact. For centuries we have known that the pure application of logic is not a means to acquire knowledge about the real world. This seems odd to some people, but that is because some people are still stuck in a Medieval style of thinking. This is why the scientific method was developed -- it is a much more reliable way of obtaining knowledge about the real world.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

Okay. You don't know how to falsify your theory. You probably don't even know what "falsification" means in a scientific context. And it appears you don't really want to learn anything because you think you're already so super smart.We can't help you until you admit you have a problem.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

Logic is simply a set of rules that humans have developed to help us keep our thought processes orderly. The universe doesn't need to be anything, and in fact the universe often confounds our logical deductions. That is why the pure application of logic does not lead to new knowledge, and that we must always resort to observation.- I'm not playing any games. It is a fact that you don't really understand what you are talking about and that you are out of your depth here.- Yet you don't listen to what anyone is trying to tell you.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

You sure contend a lot. It's nice that you are willing to describe your beliefs, but simply asserting what you believe isn't science.- The perturbations of Uranus' orbit in the 19th century, the Michaelson-Morley experiment, the photoelectric effect, the fact that the ultraviolet catastrophe doesn't happen, and the discovery of high temperature superconducting ceramics are few things in the universe that confounded peoples' logical deductions.People had to redo their basic definitions and reformulate their premises in order to get their logic to match how the universe really is.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

Actually, no. The perturbations were due to the existence of the previously unknown planet Neptune and its gravitational effects. Based on what was known before the discovery of Neptune, the seven known (at that time) planets, Newton's Laws of Motion, and the Law of Gravity, scientists logically concluded that Uranus had to follow a particular orbit. It didn't. That is because their premises were wrong: there weren't only seven planets, there was an eighth as well.And this is my main point. Logic cannot lead us to specific knowledge about the world, because logic depends on the premises and we can never be certain that our premises are correct. The conclusions must always be checked against reality; the scientists of the 19th century knew this. That's why they did experiments and made observations. If they simply trusted their logical conclusions, then they would have just said, "This is what the orbit of Uranus looks like," and they wouldn't have bothered to check it. But they did check it because they realized that their logical results might be limited by their incomplete understanding of their premises, and it's a good thing that they did.This is why I don't trust logical "proofs" of the existence of God. I don't trust the premises. I don't trust any set of premises or theoretical framework until its conclusions can be checked by observations in the real world.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

Well, we can continue to dispute that later, but right now I want to focus on the main point.You have presented what you claim to be a proof of God's existence. (At least that's what I think you're claiming.) But in science, or even in the real world, logical proofs mean nothing until they are verified by experiments or observations of phenomena in the real world.So your efforts are kind of quaint (especially since I don't really think you proved anything at all, as the other correspondents are trying to tell you), but I still see no real reason to take the idea of a god seriously. If you want to demonstrate God's existence, then you're going to have to present physical, solid, verifiable evidence.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

Actually, the problem is that you haven't provided any real reason to take the idea of a god seriously.- The other problem is that you want to discuss what you think are my psychological issues rather than admit that your reasoning is flawed.- Okay, I've owned pets, and I have done this very thing. What was I supposed to have observed, and how do these observations support your thesis?

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

Since we are past the 300 post mark, I will post my summary. I will make no new points here (not that I ever did -- I was essentially making the same points over and over), nor will I directly respond to anyone else's post.My post is very simple. rulerofthisuniverse attempted to construct a purely logical argument for the existence of God. I'll leave it to others to explain how he failed in this attempt. The point I have been trying to make is that purely logical arguments give us no new knowledge about the real world. That is because the conclusions of the argument depend on the truth of the premises, and we can never be certain that the set of premises that we are using are a completely accurate description of the world. Anyone can construct an argument that can demonstrate any conclusion that one desires. All that is needed is to select the right set of premises that will lead to that conclusion. Someone who is sufficiently clever (or who has been hoodwinked by someone who is sufficiently clever) can choose a set of premises that are false but not obviously so.So the premises must be checked against reality. But this is not the way that science tests our knowledge. If one is to try to demonstrate that God exists (or does not exist), then the statement "God exists" or "God does not exist" must be taken as one of the premises. It is not a conclusion, it is accepted a priori as part of the initial theoretical framework. Then the conclusion is produced, and it is this conclusion that is tested against empirical observation. If the conclusion is not observed, then one or more of the premises must be false, which might be "God exists" (or "God does not exist") if the other premises appear too reasonable to discard. If the conclusion is observed, then the theoretical framework, the premises, including "God exists" is tentatively confirmed pending further testing. This is a scientific test of whether or not God exists.To conclude that God exists (in an allegedly "scientific" study") is to imply that one can, and will, test the existence of God directly, and the existence or non-existence of God (as empirically determined) will then be used to judge the validity of the rest of the theoretical framework from which this conclusion came.But I suspect that if the, um, "logician" felt that the existence and non-existence of God could be determined empirically, then there would have been no need for such an argument from logic to begin with. The "logician" wants to prove that God exists, an endeavor that could be successful (in the logical meaning of proof), but that will still not necessarily tell us anything about whether God exists in fact in the real world.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies