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

And again this is what apologetics has turned into in the modern age; all arguments for God have to define "God" so vaguely at best, self contradictory at worse, that you are arguing for nothing and everything and what few characteristics that are placed on God are circularly self defined.
 
Dr.Sid said:
Isn't 'creator of the universe' even oxymoron ? IMHO universe means 'everything'. For any x, x is part of universe. With such definition you can't have anything outside. You can't have anything before, or after. You can't have creator, you can't have multiverse. You can have beginning and end, but that's about it.
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Oh, that's mere semantics. No better than most if the arguments for a creator.
 
phiwum said:
To be fair, creator of the universe would be close to omnipotent, assuming he wanted to create it and it wasn't mere accident.

Which, you know, that's a possibility.
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The Mad Scientist Fallacy: the assumption that the ability to create something implies the ability to control (or at least understand and/or predict) the thing created. Mad scientists are always yelling things like, "Stop! I command you! I am your creator!" at their creations, usually just prior to being shoved aside, eaten, or murdered. Complex systems theory tells us that sane scientists can't necessarily do any better.
 
Myriad said:
The Mad Scientist Fallacy: the assumption that the ability to create something implies the ability to control (or at least understand and/or predict) the thing created. Mad scientists are always yelling things like, "Stop! I command you! I am your creator!" at their creations, usually just prior to being shoved aside, eaten, or murdered. Complex systems theory tells us that sane scientists can't necessarily do any better.
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That's why I like my "Pan-Dimensional Assembly Line Worker" story.:D
 
JayUtah said:
Well, in various philosophical traditions the observer can be hypothetical so that he can observe things that otherwise wouldn't be directly observable, such as an Einsteinian "observer" that can right light waves. What they mean in most cases is that there just has to be something to observe.
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I was using the definition Buddha was using.

You're right, though, that the term "observer" doesn't imply consciousness, as he implies. This is why Shroedinger's Cat doesn't really work as a demonstration/critique of quantum superposition - there would be billions of observers in the box with the cat, in the shape of air molecules. It's also why anybody who uses the word "quantum" in order to blather on about consciousness is really only demonstrating that they don't know what the word "observer" means.

But you're onto something. Buddha's scenarios are carefully contrived to have the exact mix of hypothetical allowances and practical limitations to make his proof seem like it works. Hypothetically speaking, the evidence showing the origin of the universe is set to be analogous to a videotape, limited in other words to sequential playback and subject speed but magically capacious enough to hold all the evidence. Then the punchline of his proof is that such a volume of evidence would be too much for the human observer to review in a lifetime. Now all of a sudden the human observer's limitations become important. The modeling and encapsulation of the evidence can be as hypothetical as it needs to be, but the observer modeled to be able to digest it in the contrived form suddenly has limitations, and those limitations -- i.e., properties of the model, not of the thing being modeled -- are what his proof hangs on. So yes, he's begging the question in a sense, because he's built his thought experiment to have exactly the properties it needs in order to make his proof come out the way he wants.
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You're right, but that's not all of it.

It's an axiom of his argument that the only condition that can validate a theory is the existence of a conscious observer at the beginning of the universe, and he's defining "conscious observer who was present at the beginning of the universe" as "the creator". One of the axioms of his "proof" of the existence of God is that God exists.

You could take away all the nonsense with video tapes, etc., and re-write it much more simply:

If God exists, then the theory which includes the existence of God is the correct one.

1) The universe has existed forever without God
2) The universe had a beginning without God
3) The universe was created by God.

Since 1 and 2 do not contain God, 3 must be correct.
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phiwum said:
Oh, that's mere semantics. No better than most if the arguments for a creator.
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Is it ? I really don't understand how idea of creator solves problem of 'how things started to exists' .. as it doesn't explain how the creator started to exist.
Or if the idea 'the universe was always there' is unthinkable for theists, but idea 'the god was always here' is perfectly fine.
 
Dr.Sid said:
I really don't understand how idea of creator solves problem of 'how things started to exists' .. as it doesn't explain how the creator started to exist.
Or if the idea 'the universe was always there' is unthinkable for theists, but idea 'the god was always here' is perfectly fine.
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The first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument is that "whatever begins to exist has a cause". God is eternal, so has always existed. He never "began" to exist. The universe (supposedly) began to exist, thus has a cause. Possible arguments against that idea are in the link above, but philosophically the idea "God has always existed and so doesn't need a cause" is fine.
 
GDon said:
... philosophically the idea "God has always existed and so doesn't need a cause" is fine.
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as long as "the cosmos has always existed and so doesn't need a cause" is fine too. Cosmos being the hypothetical container that houses this and other universes in the multiverse. :p
 
Myriad said:
The Mad Scientist Fallacy: the assumption that the ability to create something implies the ability to control (or at least understand and/or predict) the thing created. Mad scientists are always yelling things like, "Stop! I command you! I am your creator!" at their creations, usually just prior to being shoved aside, eaten, or murdered. Complex systems theory tells us that sane scientists can't necessarily do any better.
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Fair point. Unless He's omniscient in a strong sense, including prescience, then things would not necessarily go as desired.

The Old Testament suggests they went rather badly. Suggesting that either he isn't prescient or that he doesn't have a conventional view of moral justice.
 
Dr.Sid said:
Is it ? I really don't understand how idea of creator solves problem of 'how things started to exists' .. as it doesn't explain how the creator started to exist.
Or if the idea 'the universe was always there' is unthinkable for theists, but idea 'the god was always here' is perfectly fine.
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To requote Sagan.

"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?” "

"Save a step" in this case is a metaphor for "apply Occam's Razor". He's saying that in both cases, omitting God makes for the easiest solution, the one requiring the least assumptions.
 
The concept of God is not allowed to answer it's own question, especially when the concept of God is being specifically invoked in a self defining way to answer the same very question.
 
It appears the website server was down on Saturday, I could not respond to the post. This time I have an article. I want to see if the server works.
 
Buddha said:
It appears the website server was down on Saturday, I could not respond to the post. This time I have an article. I want to see if the server works.
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Young man we do not take well to stalling excuses around these parts.
 
Buddha said:
It appears the website server was down on Saturday, I could not respond to the post.
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Is that comma a non-sequitur? Because the thousand messages posted on Saturday in these fora, from every corner of the planet, are evidence this "website server" was doing fine (that's the way evidence works)

Buddha said:
This time I have an article. I want to see if the server works.
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Then just drop the link to reach it.
 
Buddha said:
It appears the website server was down on Saturday, I could not respond to the post. This time I have an article. I want to see if the server works.
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An article? You said you would be proving the existence of a god. Do you have any intention of doing that? If so, would you please just do it already. So far, all you've gotten to is that the universe was created by something. I'm sure it was. If that weak, disappearing god (who sets physical laws in motion and then doesn't interfere) is all you intend to prove, mission accomplished. If there's more, please present it.
 
Buddha said:
It appears the website server was down on Saturday, I could not respond to the post.
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It was down briefly on Saturday. Other people were able to post, as you can see. We're not interested in your latest excuse for not responding to your critics. Or any excuse, for that matter. Your critics have brought up good points that you refuse to address.

This time I have an article. I want to see if the server works.
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Does the article answer your critics here and fix the errors they've found in your proof? If not, then it's not what the other people in this thread are expecting. This is not a pulpit, and you've expressly said you've come here to get feedback on your proof and hopefully refine it accordingly. Was that an honest expression?
 
JayUtah said:
It was down briefly on Saturday. Other people were able to post, as you can see. ...
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Agreed. I couldn't hit it for about 20 minutes, then it was back up.

I'm going out on a limb here and say it will be at least 500 posts before the 'actual proof' is presented.
 
I would like to make few remarks. The discussion was very good, at least from my point of view. This is not sarcasm, I met several very intelligent opponents, I give them a credit for that. Now I know what I would have to do to improve my presentation. First of all I would have to explain to an audience why I chose the videotape (CD) thing. I would also have to elaborate on the method of induction in general.

One thing came as a total surprise -- I expected that my opponents base their critiques on scientific realism, which is trending very high these days, but instead they chose the obscure Popper doctrine he called "deductivism"

Deductivism became a dominant philosophy and replaced positivism in several scientific fields including elementary particle physics, astrophysics, biology, sociology and several others in 1950s. Positivism remained dominant in solid state physics, plasma physics, chemistry, etc.

The media pay inordinate attention to elementary particle physics and astrophysics because they deal with the topics of the universe creation and evolution. It would be fair to say that there were times where deductivism was the predominant philosophical system.

Deductivism went into sharp decline in early 1980s and was almost completely replaced with scientific realism (not to be confused with realism) due to the advent of the superstring theories. I would say that one bad doctrine was replaced by another, equally bad doctrine.

The superstring theories did tremendous damage to modern physics. Before you rush to defense of these theories you should read the book, Not Even Wrong, by P. Woit. The author is one of few remaining scientists who subscribe to the Popper doctrine. In his book he wrote that the superstring theories are incompatible with deductivism because they cannot be falsified and, therefore, are wrong. He also describes the debacle that elementary particle physics and cosmology face these days.

In the future I plan to participate in the conferences dedicated to the superstring theories and whenever possible criticize them. I can use the ideas that I presented here, in modified form, to attack scientific realism and its application to the superstrings. In particular I am planning to criticize the anthropic principle.

No, I am not a physicist. I have MS in Mechanical Engineering with concentration in Control Systems Theory. After obtaining my degree I returned to my alma mater, Polytechnic Institute of NY, as a special student. The word "special" applies to the students who take courses not geared towards a degree.

I took four graduate courses in quantum mechanics and one course in Lie groups theory. My education backgrounds enabled me to read original articles on the Standard Model and superstrings theories. I fully accept the Standard Model, but disagree with the superstrings crap.

I heard about Popper, of course, but before reading his famous book, THe Logic of Scientific Discovery, 5 months ago I had no knowledge of his method of proof and the falsifiability. To me his deductive logic is based on a flimsy foundation.

If anyone wants to debate Popper's book and his articles with me, I'll happily do so at another thread in the Science section. Frankly, I am more interested in debates involving scientific realism.

Sorry, I am running out of time now, I have to return to my work. I'll be back tomorrow.
 
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