Where did God come from?

But all logic and math are is systematized language. Logical systems say that in order for conclusions to be valid in a given system, statements must be formed according to the set of rules X, and that conclusions follow from previous statements according to the set of rules Y.Science, similarly, is systematized observation, and proceeds analagously to the above.The rules themselves are as much inventions of human minds as the rules of Monopoly and Scrabble. You have demonstrated no such thing. All you've offered are assertions. I could just as easily assert that I've demonstrated the existence of an ice cream factory on a planet orbiting Alpha-Centauri using your own statements. That doesn't mean that I have. See? This statement of yours ASSUMES the existence of an ice cream factory on a planet orbiting Alpha-Centauri.Aren't we glad I demonstrated that? The existence of the ice cream factory on the planet orbiting alpha-centauri is clearly evidenced.The point is, grace, that you can call a dog a duck, but that don't make the dog a duck. Maybe to you, but not to me. Seems to be a problem of incredulity on your part. More incredulity. Not even close.

Yes you could. This is simple and obvious. But suppose we said is it true that you stunkflit your flibble home from work yesterday? The ultimate truth value of this statement is absolute. If you say yes and you really did, then it is a true statement in the absolute sense. If you say yes and you did not, then it is absolutely false. Of course, you could suppose a world where this kind of thinking was allowed. That is, it would be both true and false that you drove your car home from work. This is the world void of absolute truths that I mention (and even considered) and please explain to me how in a world like this, science, math and rational thought or inteligable communication would be possible as it is today? Then are you suggesting that there is no way my statements are true? Since they are false by your own conclusion? By mind, I simply mean our ability to reason and understand. This is finite since our abilitiy to reason and understand is limited by time. Furthermore, the existance of various paradoxs suggest that our mind has limits. That is, there are things which can be understood, yet our mind reaches limits. Furthermore, the inability of a mind to find the largest konwn prime number is an extremely simple example. Yes we can program a computer to do this demonstrating it exists, however our mind reaches it's limits in trying to determine this.I am limited on time and perhaps have skipped some comments you specificaly wanted me to addres, if so let me know.

Is it? How about this from the Old Testament, Genesis 22:1-2: Now, Abraham never carried out this command, but he was fully prepared to, as we read in Genesis 22:9-11: Abraham was fully prepared to carry out God's command, and only because he had faith that commands from God could only be righteous. It was the strength of this faith that God was testing in Abraham. Abraham believed that killing his own son was morally right, and so we see that murdering your child as a moral wrong is not an absolute truth when under the command of God.One can imagine other circumstances, of course. You're commanded by desperate criminals to torture a son to death, otherwise they'll kill all your other children and him, too.There's a movie named Sophie's Choice starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. It takes place in WWII Europe where when entering a concentration camp Sophie is forced to make a choice between her son and daughter - if she makes no choice she loses both. Which is the morally right course, and is there really an absolute truth involved?--Percy

No it is not. It is only true where "stunkflit" = "drive" and "flibble" = "car." Where "stunkflit" = "fly" and "flibble" = "magic carpet" the statement is false.BTW - what, exactly, is the difference between "ultimate truth" and just regular old run-of-the-mill truth? Simple: we agree upon definitions and apply them as consistently as possible. Our definitions need not be absolutely true in order to be useful. The word "colon" means both "a punctuation mark" and "a part of the human anatomy." In other words, it is both true and false that the word "colon" means "a punctuation mark." It is also true and false that "colon" means "part of the human anatomy." According to your reasoning, speaking about these objects should be impossible, yet proctologists don't seem to confuse punctuation marks with parts of the human body. Gee, why would that be? They are false to anyone who supposes the common definitions and syntactical rules of the English language. You may not suppose these, but then that is your problem. First of all, that our ability to reason may be bounded by our birth and death does not imply that our reasoning is finite. It seems that reasoning is a continuous process, and as such it may still be infinite.Secondly, am I to take your statements to mean that you believe there is no reasoning after death? Is there no reason in Heaven? Paradoxes are places where our definitions simply bump into eachother. I'd say that's rather evidential of the fact that logic isn't absolute if we can express logical notions that are undecideable. Does a barber who shaves every man who doesn't shave his own face shave himself or not? Does the set that contains every set that does not contain itself contain itself or not? Well, according to our definitions of the natural numbers, "prime," "+," "*," and "=," there is no largest prime number -- and we didn't even have to try to count them all to find that out. I'd like you to address the distinction I made between the possibility of meaningless communication and your assertion that it necessarily follows when absolute truth doesn't exist. I don't deny that it's possible, however you've yet to show how it's necessary.

Percy,
I do apprecaite this post and was fully expecting someone to bring this counter example up. Let me first say that if I can provide one example of an absolute moral truth, then an absolute moral truth does exist, and therefore absolute truth exists. Is this a fair claim? Assuming we agree it is...The original example I gave was not the one you mention. My original claim is this: In this example, God has NOT commanded me to do this, in fact the example I give is completely different from the one you have presented, in fact I would have to agree with you that there are cases when it is morally ok to kill your child. Perhaps I could qualify my exmaple by saying I would be doing this out of pleasure and the pure enjoyment of watching someone die. Is it wrong to do? As you and I have both pointed out there are really an infinite number of scenarios that could be presented for both sides. The difference is that if I can provide one, then absolute truth exists, your counter examples merely show cases where that are not moral absolutes. I am suggesting that it is relatively easy to provide ONE, in fact the example I give I still mainain to be sufficient for our discussion.The example from Genesis, as you have mentioned, is a lesson in trust and obedience, not in moral absolutes. Of course just as Abraham said, elohim ultimately would provide the sacrifice and He did just that, that is God showed not only His holiness(requiring a sacrifice) but His grace and mercy(providing the righteous requirements Himself).Regards

I will be gone for a couple days, I'll get to this when I return.

Your post reminds me of the no-win situation that the God of the Bible puts us in. 'Believe in ME or else'. I don't care to know where that god came from.

Sure. The way this works is that you state your moral absolute, and then we place it in different contexts to see if it remains unchanged no matter what the situation. If it never changes under any circumstances, then we *perhaps* have a moral absolute. We can't be certain because there are an infinite number of contexts, and we can't consider all of them. Just as theory is tentative for the same reason, so must be any claim to absolute truth.Though we didn't start this way, let me describe the way we *could* have started. You could have taken the statement, "Killing another human being is morally wrong," and claimed it to be an absolute truth. So we place this truth in other contexts, and we find a large number of exceptions, like self-defense, war, euthenasia, etc.So you move to claiming the statement, "Killing your child is morally wrong," is an absolute truth, and we place this in a variety of contexts and find that it, too, has exceptions, such as commandments from God, threats from desperados, moral quandries in concentration camps, and so forth.So you move on to yet another statement, making the murder even more heinous and unjustifiable, and we would undertake the same exercise and place the statement in a variety of contexts to see if we could find any where the it didn't hold up. Maybe we could find some, maybe we couldn't. But even if we can think of no situations where the statement doesn't hold true, we can still, as I earlier explained, only make a tentative claim to absolute truth, because it isn't possible in finite time to consider an infinite variety of situations.And this ties in nicely with the philosophical point that I think Rhain and others have made, where the certainty you think exists is simply an illusion. It is certainly appropriate to a universe where the position of any particle is never absolute but only a probability wave in space/time.--Percy

Percy,
I must say that the approach you have taken in examining this problem is quite good and I do appreciate the fresh insights. I agree with some of your comments but do have a couple comments in response. So in the example I provided, concerning the torture of my child, we could as you suggest start with murder, continue to children, and then continue to torture since that appears to be a good starting block. As you pointed out there is another situation where it would be moraly acceptable since the suffering my child goes through could save 2 other children. So I added the motive of the killing which would be for pure enjoyment or my own pleasure. By absolute, I mean universal and invariant, that is applicable everywhere and unchanging. I am sure you would agree that it is morally wrong to commit this crime today, given the motives and situation I provided.So if you agree it is moraly wrong today then do you think it is likely to change tomorrow? Or perhaps yesterday or the day before it was not wrong? Is there not sufficient evidence to say that this act is wrong today, was wrong yesterday(recursively) and will be wrong tomorrow(for all time)? Is this not the more rational choice? If you disagree, do you think it would change? If so why?Or..Do you say that this act is not immoral? This is fine as well, however I would argue that this position is much harder to defend and will address it if this is your answer.So concerning absolute truths, I perceive the evidence to be overwhelmingly in favor of this line of thought and therefore I maintain that it is an accurate reflection of reality. You could argue otherwise but in doing this, I would contend that you are denying the simple realities of the world in favor of a more complicated and error prone system, that is you are either denying that it is moraly wrong to commit said crime, or you are saying it is wrong today but possible it will not be tomorrow. I do apologize if I have misunderstood you.Out of curiosity do think there is ever a case where a claim is NOT tentative?Thanks...

grace2uWhat is the arguement you would give for the universe being infinite?What would you declare to be the evidence?

Man! Keeping up with the likes of you guys is a challenge to a simpleton theist such as myself! While in my sinful, prideful nature it is tempting to skim past many of your replies,(since, after all, only what I am talking about has any importance,right?) I have been reading your replies and at the same time trying to keep a focus on the overall topic. Allow me to attempt to make sense to myself as I attempt to add to the collective response:
It seems that we all must agree somewhat on the definitions of words, because only by agreement can we be sure that we are talking about the same thing,right? For example, if the topic were apples and my definition of an apple was a circular red edible fruit and your definition of apple were an edible object which when consumed somehow illuminated my mind towards an entire new paradigm where I was co-aware of the reality of nature in a context labeled as "good and evil", we would be hard pressed towards agreement of the purpose of the fable/inerrent truth...
Philosophically, all of us are free to discuss meaning and to assign any value to our search that we wish. Lets agree on the meaning of the terms which we use, however.
Does Absolute Truth mean that Truth exists as a set value outside of our search? To one person, absolute truth may mean that God is real for them. It is circular reasoning on their part, because God is absolutely true for them and Truth equals an unchanging reality. For others, truth is an evolving and changing concept. Even looking at the Bible, God is said to be the same yesterday, today, and forever, yet God shows us quite different personality quirks in the Old Testament vs the New Testament. Stephen brought up a good point as saying that regardless of whether one believes in Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, gravity is still observed the same way. It is understood perhaps in new ways, however. The same argument could be said of God. While the exact words of the Bible can be mocked for their inconsistencies and errors, the philosophical meaning of imperfect humans reacting to events by talking to their deity (whom either exists regardless of what is believed, or...exists only because people allow the thought) is the real meaning of the book. Many, many words and stories have been written by humans over time. Words have been organized into coherant theories, understanding has increased, and we are civilized, although still imperfect.
The "Fable" of original sin basically only shows that at some point, humans had an awareness of their own potential and that this somehow was the alternative to blind faith. Or am I wrong?

I think you do btring up some good points, namely a definition of terms used iwould proabbly be beneficial.. My participation in this forum began by questioning(faulting) Rrhain for his own use of circular reasoning which I still would alledge he used(using reason to justify reasoning or logic to justify logic). This discussion then quickly became one of absolute truths and whether or not they exist. My claim is that absolute truth must exist since this universe does not make sense assuming the contrary. The furhter claim is made that ultimately denying absolute truths leads to a breakdown in communication, leaving all arguements with this notion of "we really don't know anything-such as do others even exist?" This type of thinking I claim is a disservice to science and rational thought. That is, drawing this concept of NO absolute truth to its logical conclusion, would lead all rational thinking to a deadend. Evidence I use to support absolute truth has been among other things, comments made from those that would deny absolute truth. In their sloppiest moments, they find themselves making asertions which assume absolute truth, thus demonstrating even those who do not claim absolute truths exist, beleive absolute truth exist.So, by absolute truth I simply mean a set of "truths" that exist External to our understanding of what truth is. These truths are ultimately universal and invariant. Many refer to morality as one set of absolute truths. I would agree and also add logic/reason/wisdom (not man made such as fuzzy, aristolean,etc but instead a set of laws of logic that these logics describe). There are other absolute truths as well, together they ultimately reflect the nature, glory and beauty of Christ.The nature of disagreeing with this concept is ultimately intersting to me. In fact, I don't fully understand why people deny the existance of an absolute truth. At times, I think it is merely because they like to disagree with theist-Christian theists in particular. THis is just one more item that can be used in an attempt to do that. I do agree with some of your other posts that suggest overall a large portion of atheists are open to discussion on these matters and will consider the points, examine them and adjust their positions. I would add however that their views are goverend by a set of overlying presuppositions(as are everyones) that will force them to draw different conclusions. Having said that(I broke my cardinal rule of never saying "having said that"), with this concept in particular, I don't see any evidence to suggest the contrary, therefore I am confused as to why an UNBIASED atheist or anyone for that matter would deny the existance of such a thing. Most of the arguments against become extremely silly and irrational-ultimately questioning our own existance. I do agree that ulitmately we truly do not know much since our understanding is finite and that which is to be understood is infinite, but that claim in itself could be looked at as an absolute truth. Irregardless of the fact that we are potentialy in a cave or tricked by our senses, rational discourse demands an absolute truth be in existance, even if we will trully never be able to demonstrate what it is in it's entirety. This is important for a theist, since it demonstrates that yes there is something more powerful that ourselves which is soverieign over the cosmos.Theists can demonstrate to others the evidence supporting absolute truths but ultimately the question comes down to a decision. One can:
1) claim we will never know anything and therefore never have passion for any belief(since ultimately we are in a cave),
2) one could agree that absolute truths exist(and seek to undrstand what this truth is)
3) one could take the position denying the existance of absolute truths and consitantly communicate in this manner(very few truly do live up to this standard of communication since ultimately it would appear to be mad/insane)
4) or lastly, one can deny that absolute truths exist, yet assume that it does in the way that they communicate(this is simply irrational at best).IMHO, the best choice is the acceptance of this concept, in fact ultimately, I would maintain that the evidence in favor of absolute truth, vastly outweighs that against it and therefore not taking a position is just as irrational as taking one of disagreeance. Of course, being a Christian, I have had an experience that science and logic can not fully explain. This experience, coupled with the evidence supporting absolute truths, nature of revealed theology, and all the other arguements for Christianity leave me with a set of extremely convincing evidences such that while I would never be able to demonstrate a full blown proof for Christianity to someone else, I have ample evidence to believe in this Christ. If I were to ask an atheist why they are just that, the answer is simply, there is not enough evidence, the burden of proof is on the Christian. I agree that the burden of proof is on the one making the claim, however I would also add that ultimately and sadly, no amount of evidence would be sufficient for many people.Take care.
"Christe eleison"

Hi Grace!In the methodology I described it is inherent that you do not go from 25% of an absolute truth and through successive refinements to 50% to 75% and finally to 100%. Rather you go from 90% to 99% to 99.9% to 99.99% to 99.999% and so on. Removing all the tentativity from the assertion is not possible. An infinity of contexts makes no other conclusion possible. If the claim is being made by imperfect creatures such as ourselves, no. And I state that absolutely tentatively! --Percy

My position would be that the cosmos is infitite. Cosmos being all that makes up everything both physical and metaphysical. My reasoning would follow that if I can dmeonstrate some thing within the cosmos that is infinite and if the cosmos is the set of all things both phyisical and meta, then the cosmos is infitine since it contains an infinite entity. The simplest open set entity I would present would be numbers.So in short, the existance of numbers is proof that the cosmos is infinite.

The universe would have to be infinite if it contained something physical that was infinite. Numbers are not such a thing.They are a concept. There is no "highest" number but that doesn't mean that an infinite number of them have actually been enumerated and laid out to look at. I probably should leave this for other to make clearer but it seems obvious to me that your example is a bad one.

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Common sense isn't