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

Buddha said:
Please clarify what article you are talking about.
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"this" one

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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Here, you have presented no article so far. Just some unarticulated and incomplete ruminations with lots of useless hype and far from the point -if even real- self-references.
 
Buddha said:
I could reproduce that proof in another thread.
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And then the mods can merge it with this one, like they did last time. This is where we're talking about it, post it here.

Buddha said:
I wish I could understand your line of reasoning. But I didn't play paper, rock, scissors in my childhood.
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Okay I'm calling shenanigans on this. Really, we're supposed to believe he has no clue what Rock Paper Scissors is? This is him trolling at worst, and a sort of "I don't even OWN a television" at best.

Buddha said:
1. The Universe is of infinite age.
There must be an observer or observers to verify that. But their evidence, whatever it might be, cannot be viewed in its entirety, so it cannot be accepted.
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The observer observes their own evidence. Or there are two of them, and they observe each other. Solved.

Buddha said:
2. The universe came to be by itself, so to speak, as a result of some empirical process.
However, there was no observer to verify that, so this claim is baseless.
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So you agree that there's no actual firsthand account or video tape, you just require the *possibility* of one. And you know that even if there was we couldn't actually review and validate every second of it so you're essentially saying as long as it's not infinite it's okay. So what if the universe came into existence by itself and a hypothetical observer came into existence alongside it? Then it could observe the whole thing for us and #2 could be true. Solved.

Buddha said:
3. Someone created the universe.
In this case that someone is the Creator (or Creators) and the Observer at the time, so this hypothesis can be confirmed.
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Sure, by your strange custom-made logic that's designed specifically to prove this point you've proven this point. But as I've just showed the other two are valid also.

And also your whole "proof" is a mess.

Buddha said:
Without the observer, how can anyone tell which one of them is correct?
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Yeah! On a related note, why do we have forensics and science and stuff? It's not like anyone can learn anything without the testimony of a firsthand observer, so what's the point?
 
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Buddha said:
I can easily modify my proof be getting rid of the tape. Here it is:

1. The Universe is of infinite age.
There must be an observer or observers to verify that. But their evidence, whatever it might be, cannot be viewed in its entirety, so it cannot be accepted.
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Here you postulate a hypothetical observer but dismiss the statement because the observer cannot view all the evidence.
2. The universe came to be by itself, so to speak, as a result of some empirical process.
However, there was no observer to verify that, so this claim is baseless.
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Why did you throw your hypothetical observer under the bus?

3. Someone created the universe.
In this case that someone is the Creator (or Creators) and the Observer at the time, so this hypothesis can be confirmed.
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Everything we "observe" happened in some "past time". Scientists have looked back in time quite a darned ways now. Not hypothetical observations.

End of proof.
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It's the end of something. I would not call it a proof of anything.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Okay since this is apparently a difficult concept.

Here's how it should go: You look at all the evidence and form a conclusion.

Here's how it shouldn't go: You decided what conclusion you want, and go back to find evidence that you can twist to support it.
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Here's how it also shouldn't go (which is what Buddha is actually doing): You decided what conclusion you want, come up with an obscure and convoluted re-statement of that conclusion, call it an axiom, and reason to the conclusion from it.

Dave
 
Buddha said:
This might surprise you but I used similar example in one of my debates that you use here -- I wrote that it is impossible to tell the sex and the color of a pre-historic animal based on its skeleton.
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That doesn't surprise me at all, as you had already talked here in a similar way about things you know shinola while you repeat once and again the same dialectical tricks you deemed successful.

You use the "Lernaean Hydra technique" of "replying" to any piece of criticism by departing from it and generating a bunch of unrelated arguments with the same lack of quality.
 
Buddha said:
There must be an observer or observers to verify that. But their evidence, whatever it might be, cannot be viewed in its entirety, so it cannot be accepted.

...

However, there was no observer to verify that, so this claim is baseless.
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Just because a claim cannot be verified, does not mean that claim is false. This has been explained to you in several different ways. Please stop being wrong on purpose.
 
Buddha said:
I can easily modify my proof be getting rid of the tape. Here it is:

1. The Universe is of infinite age.
There must be an observer or observers to verify that. But their evidence, whatever it might be, cannot be viewed in its entirety, so it cannot be accepted.

2. The universe came to be by itself, so to speak, as a result of some empirical process.
However, there was no observer to verify that, so this claim is baseless.

3. Someone created the universe.
In this case that someone is the Creator (or Creators) and the Observer at the time, so this hypothesis can be confirmed.
End of proof.

There are several theories regarding creation of the universe that do not involve God (or Gods), the theory of quantum fluctuation is one them, that contradict each other. Without the observer, how can anyone tell which one of them is correct?
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1. Recall that the logical positivists regarded universally quantified empirical propositions of the form "For all x, f(x)" as being unverifiable. But that doesn't imply that such statements, which includes all hypothesised physical laws, are meaningless under logical positivism, but rather that they are not propositions. Physical Laws rather, are hypotheses, where a hypothesis can be thought of as a policy adopted by scientists for generating and testing a series of related propositions whose quantifiers are finitely bounded.

So the statement "the universe is infinitely old" understood to be a hypothesis rather than a proposition, should be perfectly acceptable to the logical positivist. For it is merely a policy proposal for generating finite and verifiable propositions p(x), x=1,2,..., where p(x) is the proposition that "the universe isn't younger than x years old". The fact that the policy isn't exhaustable isn't grounds for rejecting the policy. Only falsification of one of it's generated propositions can do that.

2. Idealists and presentists, including some positivists, who reject the subject-object distinction along with metaphysical realism about physical time might say that it is senseless to speak of the universe pre-existing observation, but this is a purely grammatical point and isn't the same thing as saying that it is empirically baseless to speak of the universe coming to be by itself. For scientists (whether they be realists or idealists) can define equivalent verification criteria in their respective grammars for defining and testing such a hypothesis.

3. Seems to assume that it is meaningful to hypothesise a non-physical creator. Suppose one invents a creator hypothesis with enough sophistication that it is publicly verifiable (or refutable) in principle. Then what would it mean to say that this creation hypothesis was not a physical hypothesis?
Isn't the very grammatical essence of what we mean by a "physical" hypothesis that of it adhering to public verification/refutation? If so, then any scientifically admissible creator hypothesis is necessary physical.

Which then raises the question as to how one can then justify a conceptual distinction between a physical "creator-god" versus a bog-standard physical process. It isn't clear (at least to Spinozeans, pan-psychists and objective idealists) why only a certain class of physical processes should be the metaphysically privileged benefactors of psychological predicates but not others. In physical language, such metaphysical distinctions reduce to the trivialities of thermodynamic definitions of life.
 
Buddha said:
Please name the other possibilities that I excluded. This is the promise that really impressed me.
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-The universe started when god committed suicide. It's not its creation but its cadaver.

-The universe was born when good and evil dissociated.

There are lots of mythologies that can be used to satisfy the "logical necessity" of a crappy explanation in your style.

You cherry-picked your three options and failed to made a valid argument of them. And that basically summarizes all your work in this thread so far, once one gets rid of all the self-referential and off-topical padding you pumped in.
 
I Am The Scum said:
Just because a claim cannot be verified, does not mean that claim is false. This has been explained to you in several different ways. Please stop being wrong on purpose.
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If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to witness it, there was no tree, it didn't fall and there was no forest anyway.
End of proof.
 
aleCcowaN said:
-The universe started when god committed suicide. It's not its creation but its cadaver.
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//Slight hijack// Dilbert creator and, well mostly full time idiot, Scott Adams wrote an entire short novel based on this concept, called "God's Debris" where a delivery man delivers a package to a strange old wise man who explains that since God is all power, all knowing, and all good he was left with nothing to do but commit suicide and all that was left, the very base elementary particles of the universe and probability, are what is left of him.

It's a fascinatingly stupid book that I sort of have to recommended as such pure, distilled nonsense that takes it self so seriously.
 
sylvan8798 said:
Why did you throw your hypothetical observer under the bus?
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The abbreviated proof commits the same error as the original: it equivocates "observer" to deduce the predetermined conclusion. The hypothetical observer in his third case is none other than his omnipotent god, who has the ability to exist outside the universe, unbound by its limits, and observe the creation from before it happened. Were the observer in case 3 bound by the same limitations as the observer in cases 1 and 2, there could be no observation.

I would not call it a proof of anything.
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You just don't understand his genius. :D
 
Buddha- Does it not give you pause that every other poster here finds your 'proof' entirely lacking in credibility?

Similarly your disproof of evolution as summarised earlier in the thread by a poster (a summary you have not attempted to disagree with) was dismissed immediately as based on misunderstandings and ignorance of basic knowledge about the subject?

Has it occurred to you that it might not be absolutely everyone else who is wrong?
 
8Sime8 said:
The fact that the policy isn't exhaustable isn't grounds for rejecting the policy. Only falsification of one of it's generated propositions can do that.
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And this is Karl Popper in a slightly different nutshell. It's the doctrine that moved science from inductivism toward deductivism and greater strength and value. Inductivism categorized scientific theory merely according to conjunctive or disjunctive post hoc prediction inferences, irrespective of causal mechanisms. This has limited explanatory power. Instead, today, we inform the putatively predictive hypothesis according to perceived or postulated mechanism. Then we deduce what must follow given such a hypothesis. That gives rise in turn to questions that may themselves be testable. And because deduction gives us a logical calculus to relate testable questions to larger questions that may themselves not be directly testable (e.g., the age of the universe), I believe that satisfies at least the liberal positivists. In any case, it makes the question falsifiable. If something must follow from a hypothesis, and that consequent is subject to empirical test, then falsifying that consequent falsifies the hypothesis.

As a pidgin example, we can say that it must follow from an ageless universe that such a universe must have observed metastability. Hubble showed evidence that this is not the case. The universe is not metastable, hence it cannot be ageless. I don't have to exhaust the empirical evidence in favor of agelessness to see this. Cosmologically you can find all sorts of problems with that proof, but it's meant only to illustrate the pattern of hypothetico-deductive reasoning.

Buddha's rebuttal to this lacks steam. He simply dismisses anything that smacks of actual empiricism as scientific realism and declares it not worth his time.
 
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