Merged A Proof of the Existence of God / Did Someone Create the Universe?

[abaddon]

I don know if the world smiley stockpile is sufficient.





But just in case the message hasn't got across.


Buddha, post your proof or withdraw your claim.

8 pages in, not a hint of an argument let alone a proof of anything.

 

[halleyscomet]

While this list alone is enough to condemn evolution to the dustbin of history, he left out some more evidence:

• No-one has ever seen a giraffe giving birth to a monkey.
• Were you there?
• Where are the half-chihuahua, half-elephant intermediaries?
• The platypus
• The Piltdown man hoax
• The banana

As the primary ghost writer for a short anti-evolution book some years back, I am disappointed to see Buddha relying on such shoddy, pathetic efforts.

 

[smartcooky]

Evolution incorrectly groups living things together on the basis of resemblance in appearance.

Does it? I thought evolution groups living things together on the basis of phylogeny

No other science uses the concept of descent. The periodic table of chemistry looks like a chart of descent, but it isn't.

What about genetics & DNA forensics.

It is not possible to make any inferences using evolutionary theory.

Really? Well, here are a few inferences drawn directly from evolution

1. Survival of the fittest - the struggle for existence among individuals due to limited resources.

2. Natural selection - reproduction depends in part on the genetic/hereditary constitution of surviving individuals.

3. Favourable characteristics - these accumulate over successive generations through natural selection.

4. Its is not progressive - evolution does not produce the best quality products, only ones that work.

5. Its not an argument for the status quo - evolution does not dictate why things are the way they are now.

6. It provides constraints - what has gone before sets physical limits on what we can do now.

7. It provides complexity from simplicity - species in predator - prey relationships often enter into 'arms races'.

Darwin falsified his data, committing scientific fraud.

Evidence?

Some of his ideas might have been wrong, but being wrong is not fraud. However, maintaining you are right even after you have been shown to be wrong (which is what creationists do) IS fraud.

Scientists have only observed microevolution, never macroevolution.

macroevolution extrapolates directly from microevolution. To think otherwise is pure ignorance. As Jerry Coyne wrote in the August 2001 issue of "Nature"...

When, after a Christmas visit, we watch grandma leave on the train to Miami, we assume that the rest of her journey will be an extrapolation of that first quarter-mile. A creationist unwilling to extrapolate from micro- to macroevolution is as irrational as an observer who assumes that, after grandma’s train disappears around the bend, it is seized by divine forces and instantly transported to Florida.

Our ancestors could not have domesticated wolves into dogs. If that were possible they would have domesticated bears instead.

Really? Let me give you just a few reasons why domesticating dogs is a much better idea than domesticating bears.

1. Dogs are far more intelligent, and far easier to train.

2. Dogs are small and require far less resources to be looked after.

3. Dogs in the wild rely entirely on hunting for survival, bears eat mostly berries, vegetation and fish. Bears rarely hunt.

4. Dogs are fast and agile and will hunt prey much larger than themselves. By comparison, bears are slow and cumbersome, and will only hunt small mammals.

5. Bears tend to hibernate or slow down in the winter. While its true that bears in captivity do this to a lesser degree, they are still essentially useless in the winter.

6. Dogs hunt in packs, ideal for tracking and killing large prey. This makes them ideal hunting partners for humans. When bears hunt, they do so individually.

Evolution leads to ridiculous conclusions, such as predators and prey evolving to run faster and faster, to supersonic speeds and beyond.

This is a ridiculous statement on its face. Evolution is not a race to a finish line, its a race with no finish line.

Evolution states that the strongest survive, ignoring other desirable characteristics such as endurance.

Really? Where does it say that?

a. Cheetah tries to catch a gazelle, and succeeds - speed gives the cheetah the edge.

b. Cheetah tries to catch a gazelle and fails - endurance gives the gazelle the edge.

So much for endurance not being an evolutionary trait

Only one random mutation can occur at a time because if more than one happened it would not be random.

Err, what? Of course its possible for more than one mutation to occur at a time. The only reason they do not appear to do so is rarity

 

[Zivan]

I agree with you 100%

After getting so excited at the prospect of finally finding out, I'm utterly devastated that apparently no proof is forthcoming.

Ohhhh, it may still be forthcoming from Buddha............

 

[jrhowell]

While this list alone is enough to condemn evolution to the dustbin of history, he left out some more evidence:

...

• The banana

I think that he may be saving that one as part of the proof of God.

Also, I would like to make it clear the the list I presented previously was my distillation of arguments in the book down from several paragraphs each to a sentence or two that I thought captured the essence. The list was based on the free sample which covers only about the first 10% of the book.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Really? Let me give you just a few reasons why domesticating dogs is a much better idea than domesticating bears.

1. Dogs are far more intelligent, and far easier to train.

2. Dogs are small and require far less resources to be looked after.

3. Dogs in the wild rely entirely on hunting for survival, bears eat mostly berries, vegetation and fish. Bears rarely hunt.

4. Dogs are fast and agile and will hunt prey much larger than themselves. By comparison, bears are slow and cumbersome, and will only hunt small mammals.

5. Bears tend to hibernate or slow down in the winter. While its true that bears in captivity do this to a lesser degree, they are still essentially useless in the winter.

6. Dogs hunt in packs, ideal for tracking and killing large prey. This makes them ideal hunting partners for humans. When bears hunt, they do so individually.

//Slight hijack//

Which animals are worth domesticating, especially for a stone age society, is an oddly fascinating subject.

Zebras Vs Horses: Why we domesticated one and not the other
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo&t=300s

Prior to the modern area humankind domesticated:

The Dog (from various populations of Grey Wolves), the Goat (from the wild Ibex), the Pig (from various populations of wild boars), the Sheep (probably from wild mouflon, although there's some debate), cows (from the now extinct Auroch), the Zebu (from another subspecies of Auroch), the Cat (from the African Wildcat), the Chicken (from the Red Junglefowl), the Guinea Pig (from the wild errr... Guinea Pig), the Donkey (from the Wild Ass), the Domestic Duck (from the Mallard), the Water Buffalo (from the Wild Water Buffalo), the Honey Bee (from the Wild Honey Bee), the Dromedary Camel (from the now extinct Thomas Camel), the Horse (various populations of wild horses), the Silkworm, the Yak, the Bactrian Camel, the Llama, the Alpaca, and a handful of others.

Almost all of those are herbivores and most are grazing animals.

Ideally a domesticated animal should be a herbivore, and not just any herbivore but a specific type of herbivore specifically a herbivore that eats something we can't eat. That's why grazing animals like horses and cattle and sheep fit the bill so good. Essentially horses and cows and sheep turn grass (something we can't eat) into either food, usable work, clothing or all three.

Omnivores tend to be really, really not picky (the pig) and carnivores like the Dog have to be super worth it.

Domesticating pure carnivores for food is obviously not worth because of pure thermodynamics, you'd have to feed the tiger so many cows you'd be better off eating the cows. And the whole "High odds they are going to kill you before you figure out how to domesticate them."

And a lot of animals simply aren't approachable. They are either too dangerous or too skiddish.

And it has to be something that we can keep track of its breeding cycle. An animal that takes literal decades to breed and grow up or only breed under amazingly specific circumstances again just aren't practical. As the CGP Grey Video I linked to puts it "We need animals so in the mood to breed they get it wrong sometimes (Picture of dog and pillow.)"

But finally almost all domesticated animals have some sort of family structure. Horses run in herds, wolves live in packs, chickens in pecking orders, etc. By assuming control of the lead animal the rest follow.

There's some exceptions in pre-modern times; the silkworm and honeybee and the cat (although there's a fair amount of evidence that cats domesticated themselves and weren't domesticated in the traditional sense)

 

[aleCcowaN]

That's it!!


The banana, therefore God.

 

[halleyscomet]

A Proof of the Existence of God

By the way, we can make predictions using Evolution. The excessively well documented evolution of the whale is one example.

Years ago the LACK of fossils showing whale evolution was a major crowing point for Creationists. Scientists decided to use what was known about evolution and geology to predict where transitional whale fossils might be found and started digging. Their predictions proved fruitful. As a result of what they found whale evolution is now very well documented indeed.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_05.html

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/evograms_03

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-whales-evolve-73276956/

 

[theprestige]

I think cats didn't so much domesticate themselves as entitle themselves.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I think cats didn't so much domesticate themselves as entitle themselves.

You're essentially correct. The prevailing theory right now is once humans started to settle into cities, they started to store excess food, this attracts rodents. Cats essentially domesticated themselves by losing their fear of humans in order to stay close to such an easy food source.

The argument that dogs might have partially self domesticated, following early bands of humans in order to scavenge scraps off their kills, has also been suggested.

I'm actually rather partial to the idea that most carnivores did in fact self domesticate and intentional domestication was only used on herd grazing animals.

 

[halleyscomet]

A Proof of the Existence of God

Dupe

 

[RoboTimbo]

[*] The banana

The pineapple.

Checkmate.

 

[David Mo]

That's why it's wise to avoid affirming, "There are no green aliens with trumpets in their heads." It would be wiser to hold it as a presumption that you concede could be overturned with evidence, or a conclusion incorporating an inductive leap that concedes incompleteness.

Yes, but you're still conflating the limited ability to prove something with logical responsibility to do so.

Of course. If you are looking for the absolute proof of the existence of something you will not find it. All human knowledge based on experience is fallible and all human knowledge not based on experience is tautological.

But if you concede that God's existence has the same probability as that of the little green Martians with trumpets in their heads, we are getting closer.

But I think that there is some advantage of the Martians over God and is not negligible. While the Martians have a method of verification that is factually impossible, repeated attempts to find a method to verify that God exists have failed one after the other. Either those failures indicate that God does not exist or God is an unverifiable one. Both positions have been held by believers. The second implies that the word God has no meaning. It is not that it is false to say "God exists", but that it does not really mean anything.

 

[David Mo]

The position that states "I do not believe that God exists, but I do not affirm that God does not exist" is useful to remove the boresome theists and their biased interpretation of the burden of proof. But it can't be held for long because when he gets tired of fighting the atheist, the theist will ask the agnostic why he doesn't believe that God exists. Then the agnostic will be forced to dismantle all the evidence that God exists. Then the atheist will ask him if that is not a proof that God does not exist. And the agnostic will not know what to say. Unless he pass over the atheist field.

Dedicated to my agnostic friends.

NOTE: In my vocabulary: agnostic: "I don't believe God exists". Atheist: "God doesn't exist". Some people vocabulary: My agnostic = atheist; my atheist = gnostic atheist.
I hope we wont launch an absurd War of Names.

 

[Cheetah]

It seems totally illogical to me to have to state "X probably does not exist" when there has never been a shred of evidence for X's existence, despite a lot of looking and X defying the laws of physics.
X could be an invisible dragon in your garage, ghosts, god, telepathy or astrology whatever.

How could the burden of proof possibly rest on me if I declare "X does not exist"?
In my mind there is absolutely no reason to even consider the existence of X, without some evidence.

 

[The Norseman]

And here is the core of our disagreement, or differing ways of approaching since I'm not sure if "disagreement" is the right term.

They are perfectly content to wallow in their beliefs... forever. "Until then" might as well have read "Until the heat death of the universe."

For the most part, I readily agree with you about how ridiculous it is that extent to which we all pander to magical thinking (religious beliefs) and I'm pretty disgusted right now about all the Supreme Court cases and so on which are pampering and protecting the poor long-suffering Christians against the eeevil hoards of ravaging non-Christians. I'm not gonna go into details and, at first blush, it may not seem related, but it is; in all aspects of life, we're expected to dance around not simply proclaiming the obvious truth that 'god' — and especially *your* god — doesn't exist.

I'm certain of this fact and I'm happy to say it just so. I feel now like symbolically burning a bra to represent being freed from the shackles of religious language/thought control!

Now... off to find a suitable bra-donor...

Evolution leads to ridiculous conclusions, such as predators and prey evolving to run faster and faster, to supersonic speeds and beyond.

Ahem. Well, to be fair he really has something here...

I'm not the person to ask, I wasn't expecting an acceptable or well formed proof, I don't believe there is one and if there is it isn't coming from Buddha, I was just hoping he might lay out all his cards so his argument could be demolished from bogus definitions to unwarranted conclusions. There's an arrogance in his claims I was looking forward to seeing punctured, I don't claim any moral high ground I was in it for the bloodsport, but I do think there's a greater good in trashing the claims of science deniers, which as an anti evolutionist he obviously is.

Alright, that's cool. I think a little bit later, I'll expand on this part a bit then.

It seems totally illogical to me to have to state "X probably does not exist" when there has never been a shred of evidence for X's existence, despite a lot of looking and X defying the laws of physics.
X could be an invisible dragon in your garage, ghosts, god, telepathy or astrology whatever.

How could the burden of proof possibly rest on me if I declare "X does not exist"?
In my mind there is absolutely no reason to even consider the existence of X, without some evidence.

But you already did. You had the burden and met it to various degrees mostly though induction. In some circumstances it is perfectly acceptable to say that absence of expected evidence in x,y,z circumstance(s) we can conclude that q does not exist.

 

[halleyscomet]

You're essentially correct. The prevailing theory right now is once humans started to settle into cities, they started to store excess food, this attracts rodents. Cats essentially domesticated themselves by losing their fear of humans in order to stay close to such an easy food source.

The argument that dogs might have partially self domesticated, following early bands of humans in order to scavenge scraps off their kills, has also been suggested.

I'm actually rather partial to the idea that most carnivores did in fact self domesticate and intentional domestication was only used on herd grazing animals.

Domesticating wolves is so easy, monkeys are doing it today!

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...lliance-with-wolves-looks-like-domestication/

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...ng_baboons_and_gelada_monkey_in_ethiopia.html

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=12365781

 

[halleyscomet]

I took a look at the free sample available for the book that Buddha claims to have written disproving evolution.

The book has one lone review on Amazon.

I wonder if the author of the book is as grossly incompetent at remedial logic and research in the other things he's published.

 

[Buddha]

Did Someone Create the Universe?

As I promised, I am going to present a proof that someone created the Universe. But before doing that I am going to state my philosophical position.

I am a positivist. Being one, I reject several philosophical systems including idealism, realism, scientific realism and the Popper doctrine (he called it "deductivism"). Non-positivists might reject my proof; for example, it is not acceptable to the scientific realists and to the followers of the Popper doctrine.

From the positivist's point of view a theory or a statement based on never-ending experiment is false (scientific realists hold the opposite point of view). For example, the statement "The laws of physics will always remain in their current form" is false.

Also, for the positivist a theory based on assumption that could not be proved or disproved is false. Scientific realists see thing differently -- for them such theory could be correct.

There is also another positivist assertion that not everyone accepts. Suppose you have three contradictory explanations of an event. If you can prove that the first two are false this automatically implies that the third one is true, you do not have to prove it. Not everyone accepts this rule -- Popper said that the third remaining statement must be falsifiable in order to be true. But the positivists reject Popper's idea of falsifiability (Popper rejected positivism in return).

Now, the proof itself. There are three contradictory statements:
1). The universe was not created, it always existed.
2).The universe came to be by itself, as a result of some process (quantum fluctuation, maybe)
3).Someone produced the universe.

I'll start with the first statement. Suppose you met someone who claims to be as old as the universe (obviously that person is not the Creator). He might be telling the truth or he might be a liar. However, his past is irrelevant to his claim. Naturally you would ask him what kind of evidence does he have to prove that the universe always existed. The best possible evidence would be a videotape showing all stages of the universe's development. Whether the tape is authentic or it is a fake is irrelevant -- it is of infinite length and it cannot be reviewed in its entirety. Being unverifiable, this statement is false.

Moving on to the second statement. Suppose you met an observer who came to be at the same time the universe was produced, as he claims. He also has a videotape showing the process of creation and further evolution of the universe. From the positivist's point of view this is an ideal scenario -- we have an Observer! But his account of events could be incomplete -- he might have been created after the universe had been produced, but he has no knowledge of this sequence of events. The authenticity of his videotape is irrelevant. His testimony neither proves nor disproves that the universe produced itself. For a positivist his claim is false. However, a person who subscribes to scientific realism might be willing to accept his testimony. Everything depends on the individual's personal views.

The only remaining possibility is that the universe was created by someone. Of course, a person who says that he is the Creator is, most likely, an impostor. But his sincerity or lack of it doesn't matter as far as my logical deduction goes.

It doesn't follow from my presentation that there is only one Creator; as someone noted, there might be billions of Creators. A separate proof is needed to show that the Creator is unique.

I have said nothing about the Creator's identity. He (they) could be god of the Bible, god Brahma, Adi-Buddha, Oden, etc.

 

[fagin]

No.