If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature....

The doctors had my mother on a respirator for a while so I guess they were helping her assert her free will - or maybe they were just satanic bastards.

God is made of Ritalin.

Yeah, that's about it. God controls everything BUT we can (and do) reject his control.Bad things happen when your car rejects your control.

It may be a tautology but evidence is evident. You don't get to have your own set of evidence. If it ain't evident (to most people, on an objective basis) it ain't evidence. If it needs to be accepted a priori it ain't evidence.

You seem to be using the term "objective truth" in the sense of "absolute truth".There is no absolute truth. There is only what most people agree on. Once you point out my biases and I point out your biases, what we have left is as close to "the truth" as we can hope to get. When most people thought the sun revolved around the earth, it was "the truth". Old truths only become false when "most people" agree that they are false. I don't know of any atheists who have said that. Rather, they tend to say that since there is no evidence for God, we can not use God as an assumption in anything. I don't have a "conviction that there is a reality". I have perceptions and you have perceptions and we can discuss the overlap in our perceptions. You see, it all boils down to agreement.

I knew you were going to say that.If I had meant absolutely I would have said, "absolutely." The onus is on the one making the claim to provide evidence that the claim is true. If you claim there is "absolute truth" then you need to provide evidence of absolute truth. Until you do, I stand by my statement the same as I stand by the statement that there are no unicorns.

They are neither absolutely wrong nor absolutely right, just like they are neither absolutely wrong nor absolutely right about anything else.

Not at all. I am disputing the claim that there is absolute truth. Until there is evidence of absolute truth or unicorns, the default position is that they do not exist.I am also making a distinction between absolute truth and objective truth. The argument isn't that "we cannot know facts". It's that we don't have all the facts yet. Some day we might find new facts that overturn our current interpretation of the current facts. Some facts we may never discover - but I would never suggest that there are facts that we "cannot" discover. Dictionary definitions are useful for schoolchildren. For serious discussions among adults, words are seldom interchangeable. Most sticking points seem to be based on the distinctions between terms.

No. Ideas are electrochemical patterns in the brains of humans. (Better say "organisms" because I don't think we can draw a fine line between our brain processes and those of other animals.)Even if God the entity exists, God the idea would exist only in human minds. There may or may not be a "reality" that exists separately from our perception of reality. Many people believe there is. But all we really have is our perception, individual and collective, of what that reality is. For some of us, agreement with other people's perception strengthens our confidence in how "real" our perception is.

Let me make the distinction between absolute truth and objective truth more clear.Objective truth is what we have left when we remove all of the biases. It's what we can agree is "true". Yes, it is fairly arbitrary. What was considered true yesterday might not be considered true today. Objective truth is our best estimate of what "is".Absolute truth is a philosophical construct. If it does exist, we can never know what it is. The closest we can come is the best estimate.So "real reality" is in fact a perfectly good concept. It's what we "know" is "real" today, as opposed to the woo-woo "reality" that we can never know. Even if we could know it, we wouldn't know whether we really knew it or not. Tomorrow we might know something completely different.

No I am not.I told you before that if I meant absolutely I would have said absolutely. I did not say that absolute truth absolutely does not exist. I said that absolute truth does not exist until it has been shown to exist. Exactly. If we ever did find absolute truth, we couldn't possibly know that it was absolute truth. We couldn't be sure that it wouldn't be improved or overturned in the future. I said that objective truth is what you have left when you remove the biases. Subjective truth has the biases left in. Even a schoolchild can see the distinction. Yes, verifiable. We verify by observation. We compare observations. New observations may very well falsify tomorrow what was verified yesterday. We don't know that there is any reality independent of thought. We only think there is.Without an observer, we can not verify.

I wouldn't call it a theoretical possibility. That would require a mechanism for how that someone knows. It's a hypothetical possibility for which no test for verification/falsification has been proposed.

Maybe you should stop assuming and read what I actually write.One more time: I said, "There is no absulute truth." I did not say, "There is absolutely no absolute truth." I do leave the door open for the possibility of absolute truth. When you can demonstrate that you have absolute truth about anything, I'll be glad to retract the statement that there is no absolute truth.And I don't "believe" there is no absolute truth any more than I believe there are no unicorns. When you provide evidence of unicorns and/or absolute truth, I will be glad to accept them. You're treating "absolutely" and "correctly" as if they were synonymous. I consider myself "correct" if I give the best possible information that's available to me. (Of course that information would be subject to peer review.) That's the oldest and worst trick in the creationist toolbox.Ever see a footprint? Are you really foolish enough to suggest that it was not made by a foot just because you weren't there to see it made?"Verifying" does not mean you have to be there to watch it happen. It means using every reasonable means to draw an inference. Maybe you do but "we" don't. Delusions are thoughts that don't match objective reality (not absolute reality). If the consensus is that there is no elephant in the room but you see an elephant, then the consensus is that you are deluded. You're using your own definition of "verify". Since I do not accept that absolute truth exists, I don't expect anybody to verify anything absolutely. To verify means to reach a consensus on what the "truth" is.

Obviously not. The word "absolutely" makes a difference. If I say, "There is no absolute truth," maybe you can be forgiven for assuming that I mean absolutely none - but if I say explicitly that I don't mean absolutely, you have no excuse. If and only if unicorns are detected, I am willing to acknowledge that they exist. Until then, I will say, "There are no unicorns."The same applies to absolute truth.

Since you know what I meant to say, I suggest you stop worrying about what the words really, really really mean and just get on with it.