Detecting God

Objectivity isn't about ultimate proof or perfect answers. It's about looking at the object itself and trying to make observations that aren't clouded by your own subjective assumptions. Comparing your observations with other people's observations tends to cancel out the subjectivity. It comes down to:

• "Did you see that?"
• "Yup."
• "Okay then."

or

• "Did you see that?"
• "Nope."
• "Hmmm...."

The guy who thinks he's Napoleon might be right but chances are that isn't going to help him function in what the rest of us think is the real world. For what it's worth, I think "seeking God" means seeking Him in the real world, seeking ways to improve the real world and improve your interaction with the real world. I think of seeking His Almighty Spookiness in the woo-woo world as escapism.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can\'t find it.

No, that's objectivity. Nobody guaranteed that objectivity would give you the right answer. You still have to work at it to understand how that subway car disappeared. It wasn't objective because there was no object. You can only be objective when there's something tangible to be objective about.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can\'t find it.

I'd say "observe" rather than "measure". Meaurement implies comparing quantity A to quantity B. Observation just acknowledges that A and/or B actually exist. We can see a cloud even if we can't figure out how to measure it. In this conversation, we're still trying to decide whether we see God at all. A physical chill can be measured with a thermometer. A chill in the sense of "a chill went down my spine" is a psychological phenomenon that's likely to be accompanied by physical reactions that would show up on a polygraph. There would probably be a detectable change in brain waves too.A "feeling of love" is readily observable in a person's behaviour.It's possible that belief in God could produce similar observable reactions in a person but how do you connect the evidence with a real "god"? The same reactions would be produced by a fear of ghosts or a love of ice cream.Edited by Ringo, : Fixed spellling: "tiVeRraT" --> "riVeRraT".

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Of course it matters. The topic is about detecting God, not detecting "something". Nobody's disputing that reactions to something can be detected in you. The question is: Can you detect a god which is causing those reactions?

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

You're making my point. We detected "something" - a perturbation in the orbit of Uranus, I think. The next step was to try to figure out what caused that perturbation. In the case of Pluto, we found a planetoid - which can also be detected by other means. e.g. telescopes. And in the case of your feelings, we found physical evidence that those same feelings can be caused by various measureable physical and/or psychological phenomena.Long story short, we can confirm the existence of Pluto by more than one method. We can't confirm the existence of God at all.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

I'm not interested in metaphysical claims. The OP says:

quote:

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By 'detect' I mean "to discover or determine the existence, presence, or fact of".

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As an example, I cannot 'see' gravity but I can 'detect' it by dropping a ball and watching it hit the ground.

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Yes, I am making the assumption and the OP seems to be making the assumption that we can make observations. As far as I'm concerned, detection by physical observation is a given in this topic.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

We're not talking about the possibility that something might be there that we can't detect. Nobody is saying that God can't exist because we haven't detected Him yet.The topic is about detecting God.We knew long before we detected Pluto that it was possible to detect something like Pluto. We had the technology to detect something like Pluto. We've known for a long time that we'll eventually detect other planets in the universe because we have the technology to detect planets.We do not have the technology to detect gods.The real question here, for those who believe in gods, is: How do we go about developing that technology? How would a God Detector work? What kind of God Waves would we look for?

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

That logic may or may not be implied in the OP. It's not the logic that I've been using. If you're going to reply to me, reply to what I say, not a strawman. That's all I asked you.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Nonsense. The scientific method deliberately weeds out subjectivity by way of repeatability and peer review. The "spiritual realm" is entirely subjective. Otherwise, why would there be so many mutually exclusive interpretations of the same spiritual realm?

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

That still puts it miles ahead of any investigation into the "spiritual realm", for which we have no toys at all and no objective knowledge.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

The point of the thread is to show a method of detecting God that's as good as the methods we have for detecting gravity and the sun.As the OP suggests, we can detect gravity by dropping a ball and watching it hit the ground. Anybody can do that, whether he's a Sikh or a Mormon or an agnostic, and make the same observation. That's the level of detection that we're asking from you. Please devise an experiment to detect God to that same level.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Does it occur to you that the misanthropic interpretations might be the ones that are wrong? Who's supposed to benefit from the "Word of God" after all? God or man?

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

That's my point. A theocentric universe makes little sense. (Some might argue that God isn't "in" the universe at all, much less at its center.) Why would God bother to create a universe at all if He was so self-centered? More to the point of the thread, why would He create it and then hide from it?

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.