Non-scientific evidence

--Sorry to butt in to your ongoing discussion, you can keep it going if you wish --Hello Everybody,First of all, thank you Woodsy for making this thread.This thread is largely a result of me claiming that the scientific method is invalid as a means to study supernaturalism. I had proposed < in another thread (Straightforward questions) but unfortunately, the topic degenerated into a long dialogue between Dr Adequate and I which ultimately landed nowhere. Anyway, I still hold on to said view. The reason being: Since by definition, God is not subject to physical observation, empiricism, and testing--a method that is founded upon said concepts is not viable as a means to study the supernatural existence of God. Like Woodsy said in his OP, I have claimed that there are reliable and relevant ways to prove the existence of God. Proof is a tricky word. What is proof to one person might not be proof to another person. For example, as a theist I consider nature to be a proof of God’s existence; but an atheist will not be satisfied with such an argument I’m not here to force, push, or convince anybody. I also would like to apologize (in advance) if the arguments I present are not as appealing or satisfactory as you would like. I am aware that this forum contains a lot of scientists and expertswhich is wonderful but it also adds a little more pressure on the theist’ shoulders since he knows they will expect arguments of high value, reliability, and of course reasonable logic. I would like to clarify before I begin the discussion that my aim is not to convert anybody. As I have claimed, I would like to present you with certain arguments that I have gathered from a number of sourcesright from Bible classes in College to personal research--, and as a theist, accept as proofs for the existence of the highest authority ever conceivedwhom we call, God. None of what I present is of my origin. I’m here only to present already existing arguments and debate them with you.To start off I would like to give a brief overview of what I hope to do. I’m going to begin by asking a few questions (and you guys are welcome to answer/or not answer thembut I would really appreciate it if some of you do answer). The intent of the questions is to get us thinking about why we even need to think about God i.e what things in nature call our attention to study supernaturalism. Next, I’m going to offer a few philosophical arguments for the existence of God. After we have debated enoughand if you all think that you would like to hear arguments for why the Biblical God is, in fact, God I will present those arguments. So* Philosophical questions* Arguments for the existence of God* Arguments for the deity of the Bible GodHere are a few questions to get us started1. Why am I here/ Why is the world here?2. Where did I come from/ Where did this world come from?3. Is there an unseen world out there? Can we know anything about it? If yes4. How can we know anything about an unseen world?5. Who is the greatest authority? If we term HimGod, then is He real?6. How do we define God?7. Do we need God? If yes/no, why/why not?8. Are there ways to test the existence of God i.e are there reasons for His existence to be true? Are these reliable, logical, reasons that are supported by physical observation of the seen world around us?9. How much can empiricism tell us about God?The only questions I compulsorily ask you an answer for, is nos. 6 and 7.I hope to learn something from your answersand this debate. I put forth these questions only to create a starting pointquestions such as why do we even need God are, I think, pre-requisites for any debate about God’s existence.I don't know what definitions of "non-scientific" and "reliable" we all have in our minds, but the ones I have in my mind are:1. non-scientific: Anything that cannot be tested by experimentation i.e philosophical ideas, historical data...etc. Anything a priori, basically. As Galen Strawson put it, "[An a priori argument is one that] you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don't have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don't have to do any science."2. Reliable: Worthy to put complete trust in. Ex: I rely on my eyes to see, therefore my eyes are reliable to help me see.So, once we establish certain initial answers to questions about God, I will present the first argument. Over to you.

Isn't that convenient. I could make up anything I wanted and attach the same description to it but I guarantee you would not accept it as being true.I have an invisible dragon living in my garage, but it is undetectable by scientific means. Do you believe that there is an invisible dragon in my garage? Probably not, right? Then it isn't proof. What we appreciate the most is honesty and effort. You seem to be doing fine so far. Just remember that we argue the argument, not the person. It's nice having a different voice and hope you stick around. If there is an unseen (i.e. undetectable) world out there then no, we can't know anything about it. We can have beliefs about it, but not knowledge. Is there a greatest authority? I think you need to start there first. As an unevidenced entity that people believe in nontheless. What we need or don't need has nothing to do with what does exist or doesn't exist. If I needed unicorns to be real they don't suddenly poof into being.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

I never asked you to believe that God exists, based on the said statement. IOW, science is the only way to gain knowledge.^ This is quite unreasonable. For example, if you told me that Paris is the capital of France, the only reasonable way for me to believe that is to go to Paris, France myself and verify it? Let's assume i don't have the money to do so, will I forever stay in ignorance?

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5. Who is the greatest authority? If we term HimGod, then is He real?

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On Taq's suggestion, let's make ^ question no.5. I agree with you, Taq.

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6. How do we define God?

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I was expecting a descriptive definition. Or atleast, a prescriptive one. If we don't have a mental picture i.e set of qualifiers for God, then how are we going to argue His existence or non-existence?

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7. Do we need God? If yes/no, why/why not?

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Whether or not we believe that we need God makes a huge difference in our lines of thought--is what I personally think. For example, I, as a theist, see the need for God because I believe abiogenesis does not reasonably explain the origin of life--and < affects my view about evolution, big bang etc.

The point being that you can go to France and verify it yourself. It is an objective fact.If you think knowledge can be gained without any facts then please, show us how. How do faith based beliefs turn into knowledge? If I really, really believe that there is an invisible dragon living in my garage who is undetectable by any means does that turn into knowledge just because I really, really believe it? If you don't have any evidence the argument is already over. But what you personally think has nothing to do with what actually exists. You are allowed your own set of personal beliefs but you aren't allowed your own set of personal facts. Reality does not care what you think is or is not reasonable. At one time many believed that the Earth orbitting the Sun was unreasonable, but it was still true. Basing arguments on personal incredulity is a logical fallacy, the very opposite of reasoned discourse.

I don't think you got my question.If I tell you I have a "gisrugnienfilaubflvfaaziafcn" in my room and I do not describe or qualify it in anyway way, are you ever going to be able prove or disprove its existence if you don't even know what it looks like or what it is? See bolded. Edited by Dr. Sing, : No reason given.

Hello Dr. Sing,I've been watching your discussion in the other thread and I find your insistence on unscientific PROOF of God's existence quite interesting. Not because I'm quite sure what you're getting at here, but because I'm curious as to what you think constitutes evidence of God's existence, whilst completely avoiding scientific methods. You never quite explained what you were referring to in that thread, so I'm glad that you are making that effort here.First off, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm very skeptical of your claims of "unscientific proof". Mostly because I'm not sure we're using the same definition of either "scientific methods" or "proof". I consider anything that can be studied empirically within a framework of rigorous analysis and critique to be something to which scientific methods can be applied. I consider proof to be something that objectively demonstrates a given statement to be true. Mind you, absolute proof is difficult to come by in the "real world", although the term can be applied in mathematics.Finally, to preface our discussion I'll give a bit of background on my own views. I'm a theist, raised as a Christian, although over the past year or so I've begun to question many of the beliefs I once took for granted. As such, it may be more accurate to consider me an agnostic with a (understandable) bias toward theism. Perhaps you will provide me with some solid argument to restrengthen my beliefs. Perhaps not. In any case I will, for the sake of discussion, take the devil's advocate position in this debate. Because that's the way it is? Does there have to be a reason beyond the natural forces that are demonstrably capable of producing planets such as ours? From the same accretion disc that produced the sun. I don't know. And I'm not sure if anyone knows. Can it be studied/observed by any means at all? If not, how does it differ from the fantasy world full of talking animals that I made up when I was three? Is there a greatest authority? Isn't the existence of God something you're supposed to be proving to me? How does asking the exact same thing that you're trying to prove help you advance your argument? Differently. I would like God to be real. But my opinion or need does not constitute evidence of His existence. I used to think that the structured universe and the amazing fact that I exist was bona fide evidence of God's existence. But the more I learned about how the world works the less obvious was the need for a God to make things like people and planets. It became clear to me that God is often used to explain the yet unexplained, pushed back once we've learned to explain phenomena by other means. For example, Newton invoked God to explain the stability of the solar system, his conviction being that a system that complicated could only be kept stable by continuous intervention. As our knowledge grew we no longer had any need of that hypothesis.Of course, if God intervened in the physical world causing an observable effect, He could be studied scientifically. Something like a world-wide flood perhaps, or mana from heaven. If either of these things happened today, in an age of scientific methodology, at least the effects of God's existence could be studied empirically. That depends entirely upon whether there are any observable indications of God's existence. How much can non-empiricism tell us about anything?Hopefully my answers will be of relevance to this discussion and I look forward to seeing what arguments you bring to the table.Respectfully,-Meldinoor

Until there is a concept to even consider the only rational conclusion is Ignosticism.ignostic (plural ignostics)1. one who holds to ignosticism.
2. one who requires a definition of the term God or Gods as without sensible definition they find theism incoherent and thus non-cognitive.So until you tell us what a "gisrugnienfilaubflvfaaziafcn" is I am afraid that I can only conclude that you are talking gibberish.

Here is the crux of the matter, if by unseen you mean physically undetectable rather than just not accessible to human senses.I do not see how any knowledge of anything real can be gained without reliance on observations of some kind.There are fields of study that look as if that is possible, such as mathematics and logic, but my impression is that those boil down to something like tautologies, which is why they do not depend on observations. (Mathematicians here are welcome to correct this, or provide a better way of expressing it, if I am astray.)By the way, the study of history is indeed empirical. Evidence can be collected by observation as well as by experimentation.(Please excuse my sparse posting at present. I am preoccupied with an equipment failure at work just now. Thanks to all for carrying on so well.)Edited by Woodsy, : excuses added

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The metaphysicist has no laboratory. Robert Wood

Traditionally, as a being having certain attributes. These would include omnipotence and omniscience, plus perfection of all the psychological traits we think of as desirable, such as love, wisdom, mercy, justice, and so forth. Need is rather a strong word --- we do not quite need a god in the same way that we need oxygen. Nonetheless, it seems like the existence of such a being would be a good idea. If anyone is currently running the Universe, they are doing a rather poor job of it, and obviously God would do a perfect job of it. But clearly this does not apply to historical data. It is not a priori and we can only acquire it by examining the world.As for experimentation, you're wrong. Science is founded on observation. An experiment is just when you set up an artificial situation so you can observe what happens under those circumstances. But it is not by experimentation that we know such facts as that elephants exist or that Saturn has rings or that the White Cliffs of Dover are composed of coccoliths. Yet these are scientific facts. That seems to be going a little too far. If I say, for example, that my car is reliable, do I mean that I think that it will never break down? No, I do not. And if I did think so, that would not imply that it was worthy of such a degree of trust --- I might just be wrong. Indeed, according to your definition of "reliable", I don't see how we could ever know anything to be reliable, since it might always let us down at some point in the future. Have you ever seen an optical illusion?

Sure, but I hardly see how that helps your case. The entirety of the FSM claim, along with your gisrugnienfilaubflvfaaziafcn and God, none of them are either verifiable or falsifiable. We already know this, so what exactly is the point you are making?

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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." — Blaise Pascal

Of course not. I think that science's conclusion are pretty much The Truth^TM. They're probably nearly 99.9% likely to be correct.The point is that this is not something derived from science itself. Of course its superior, it can be shown to be accurate and reliable. We got nothing for the gnomes. But the science, itself, does not show itself to be more accurately reflecting reality than some unfalsifyable concept like the gnomes. Hell, the gnomes could be the ones bending the spacetime and then the scientific conclusion wouldn't even be contradicting the gnome one. If all we've seen is white swans then we can inductively conclude that all swans are white and use that as an explanatory framework to predict that no black swans will be found. But this is not saying that black swans do not exist nor can we conclude from that how accurately our explanation of all swans being white reflects reality, nor can we us it to come up with a liklihood of the existence of a black swan.Finding another white swan does not indicate how accurate the framework of 'no black swans exist' reflects reality. We would be finding the prediction accurate and the framework would be shown to be reliable. Sure, you could consider it that if you want. You could consider it to be 99.864% more likely to be correctly reflecting reality if you want to. But this is not something that follows from the science. By simply looking at the evidence we do have. We have evidence that shows the curved spacetime theory is accurate in its predictions and is reliable. We don't have anything for evidence towards the gnomes and they are an unfalsifyable concept, so considering the competing theories, the gnomes loose. But we haven't determined anything about whether or not those gnomes actually exist or not.

Ugh. Damnit, I knew that's what someone was going to say.I just used "seeing a ghost" to be a short consice description of what was going on (as I figured people would pretty much know what I was talking about). I specifcally said What it actually was is unknown to say that they had not concluded that is really was a ghost. The point was to explore where the evidence would fit as far as being "observed" and if there could be any reliability to it and how much they could use it to form some kind of educated guess on what they were seeing maybe with some if/then scenarios on top of it or something. Yes, that's all fine and dandy for scientific evidence. And it takes a lot of controlling the varibles to figure out. That's not always possible.I thought we'd be talking about non-scientific evidence and how reliable it can be.If a few guys all saw something then we can figure it was objective, but its not scientific. How reliable can it be and how do we determine that? That kind of stuff.But now Dr. Sing has jumped in and the route he's taking this thread is completely different from what I thought was going to go on. So we can just drop this if you want or don't care or whatever.

No, I got it. If you can't see gisrugnienfilaubflvfaaziafcn how would you be able to define it? What you are asking for is a made up definition for something that you will protect from disproof. It's a foolish errand that I don't feel like participating in. Either provide the evidence or admit you have none. See my previous post. The existence of Paris is a verifiable objective fact not to be confused with unverifiable deities for which there is no evidence.

So we all agree that curved space-time is more likely than magic gnomes to be the underlying cause of gravity but this is not a scientific conclusion. That is your position? Yes based on it's predictive power curved space-time is considered a reliable model of reality. More reliable and thus more likely to be correct (in terms of approximating reality) than your gnomes causing gravitational effects. So what?We have scientifically established that curved space-time is far more likely to be the underlying cause of gravity than magic gnomes. No?

No, we have not scientifically established that. No. How have we shown that the gnomes aren't causing it?