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

Buddha said:
It depends on the nature of a claim. Some claims cannot be verified right away, but it might be possible to verify them in a future. Some claims cannot be verified in principle. An example of unverifiable claims is the one put forward by some superstring theorists who suggested that when our universe was produced, an infinite number of other, unreachable universes, were also produced.
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So let's be absolutely clear about something. Look back at this quote from post #319
Buddha said:
Being unverifiable, this statement is false.
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That quoted section is false.
AGREE or DISAGREE?
 
Buddha said:
You have a morbid imagination that has nothing to do with science. Define what God's suicide means for starters.
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That hinges upon the nature of the deity you're talking about.

Greek, Hindu, and Norse gods for example are all capable of dying.

In Christianity, the life of Jesus is essentially a complicated, prolonged suicide.

The Mormon pyramid scheme deity structure borrows the Jesus suicide and makes it cyclical, a necessity on each planet, trapping each iteration of "god' in a repeating pattern from which they cannot escape. It's as if it were written by a collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka.
 
JayUtah said:
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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Your post is kind of outdated, it should have been written in 1950s when Popper's doctrine was in its zenith. Now it is being replaced by scientific realism. To see why, read the book The Emperor's New Cloths by Penrose for example. There are also articles on the Internet written by the proponents of scientific realism; all these people criticize positivism and the Popper doctrine as well.
He also criticizes empiricism and related philosophic al doctrines.
 
Buddha said:
If you know palaeontology as you claim, you should know that initially the scientists thought that the dinosaurs were grey, but now they think that these animals come in bright colors.
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Citation needed.



Upon what do you base your assertion that early paleontologists thought dinosaurs were gray?
 
Buddha said:
You have a morbid imagination that has nothing to do with science. Define what God's suicide means for starters.
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Don't try to cheat your way here. Any mythology is equally valid, including your demiurge (learn that word, lad).

If you like replace "committed suicide" by "put and end to its existence".

What about the other one? What about the ones provided by other people?

Any explanation is possible with your one-two-three jello! of a "reasoning" or sinellogism :D
 
Buddha said:
Your post is kind of outdated, it should have been written in 1950s
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Says the guy spouting plagiarized and mangled slices of apologetic that fell out of favor before Europeans started colonizing the New World.

Please, keep it up. You are hilarious.

 
Unfalsifiable = False

So if something can be shown to be unfalsifiable then it's not unfalsifiable because we've just proven it false, which means now it's not false anymore. This rapid oscillation between "false" and "undetermined" creates a quantum effect, sending inverted chronotons into the past to create god.
 
Buddha said:
Your post is kind of outdated...
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Irrelevant -- you are the one applying Popper's doctrine to the question of the existence of God, although at one point I seem to remember you dismissed him as "pseudo-science." As I said, your argument is a Frankenstein's creature of philosophical tidbits from different schools of thought given a semblance of coherence by vigorous gaslighting. You keep dropping the names of famous philosophers, but you don't seem to be able to cogently apply their thinking.

Both my post and the one to which I was responding are defensible summaries of Popper regardless of whether Popper expresses current thinking. You have misunderstood and misrepresented Popper on a number of occasions, and you seem to think this cannot be detected by your critics. In responding to our corrections, you've pivoted away from whether you understand Popper and his ilk to whether the doctrines we're talking about are the current thinking. And then you simply use that to drop further names and further insinuate that your critics are not as smart or well-read as you are.

This is mere posturing, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the proof for the existence of God that you're supposed to be presenting and defending. It seems all your precious time here at the forum is spent nit-picking at irrelevant items you perceive to be grave errors on your critics' part instead of staying on topic. Every time you think you've caught someone in an error, you accuse them of ignorance and/or declare victory. That behavior is not consistent with honest arguments in favor of your proof. It's more consistent with the personalized modus operandi you assure us you have eschewed since Digg.
 
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Buddha said:
If you know palaeontology as you claim, you should know that initially the scientists thought that the dinosaurs were grey, but now they think that these animals come in bright colors.
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It seems that you are implying that if they were wrong about something as fundamental as color then they are most likely wrong about everything else and therefore evolution is false.
 
SOdhner said:
...sending inverted chronotons into the past to create god.
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"...tonight, on Star Trek."

Yeah, it's increasingly apparent that the last thing Buddha wants is to be drawn into a debate of his actual proof and the actual philosophies and their authors that we might consider applicable. But he sure seems to want everyone to remember just how well-read he is and how error-prone and benighted his critics are. For one precious hour each weekday morning in the western hemisphere he dispenses his wisdom from on high -- "That's not what 'postulate' means, therefore I win." "Let's talk about what color the dinosaurs were, because that's an argument I think I can bluster my way through easier than this one." "Let's talk about other people's proofs for God to draw attention away from my failure."

And then, sadly, no more time in the day to devote to such things as resolving the circularity in his proof, proving the axiom that the deduced creator must the God of the Bible, resolving the equivocation of "observer" between his first two cases and the third. You know, those pesky details that can be safely swept under the carpet and overlooked.

But that's as may be. Let me get back on topic. It appears Buddha's belief that unfalsifiable is synonymous with false comes from equivocating or misunderstanding what Popper (and others similarly situated) mean when they say they "accept" a field of study. It means they accept it as capable of creating knowledge under the axioms they've established for what knowledge should consist of -- the demarcation principle. Metaphysical categorization has nothing to do with the truth value of hypotheses or predictions the field might offer, or even whether all the hypotheses that might arise in the field are individually verifiable. Buddha rewrites demarcation to mean, "accept as true." That further obfuscates what "as true" would mean in various contexts, but it's moot because Buddha added that language; it's not in his source. The correct interpretation of "accepts" here is "accepts as science."

The conflation of whether one can determine -- by whatever means -- the truth value of a hypothesis and what the actual truth value is or must be is fundamental error in all manner of inquiry, not just science. It doesn't suddenly become valid reasoning just because one starts thinking metaphysically. Buddha's ongoing error is illustrated in his swing-and-a-miss answer to Dave Roger's question about whether unobserved events in fact happened.
 
Buddha said:
Well, you do not have to require presence of an observer if you are a follower of scientific realism. Everything depends on person's philosophical views.
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Nope, observation in QM actually means 'interaction with a device'.
And all that does is 'collapse the wave form'.
That is not a requirement in any way of scientific realism or naturalism.
 
jrhowell said:
It seems that you are implying that if they were wrong about something as fundamental as color then they are most likely wrong about everything else and therefore evolution is false.
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The original claim -- which is very, very off-topic in a thread about proving the existence of God, I might add -- was that one can't tell the color of a dinosaur's "from its skeleton," which is true. It's also a misrepresentation of how paleontologists actually theorize about and study the possibilities for the color of dinosaur skin. They don't do it "from its skeleton." Zivan's followup correctly notes that Buddha, for all his bluster, has revealed his ignorance of paleontological method. If Buddha thinks the competing theories about dinosaur skin color are based principally on osteology, he's wrong. Consequently his book that would have needed to rest on such a foundation is poorly reviewed and obviously incorrect at first glance.

In a similar vein we have Buddha here, now, claiming to be an expert in the philosophy of science. We suspect that he is probably not as expert as he claimed, given the previous data point of professing expertise he cannot demonstrate by recounting correct specialized knowledge. We note that his proof for the existence of God contains obvious logical errors, and this would tend to falsify his claim to expertise. Philosophy experts do not generally commit elementary fallacies. We note that his interpretation of various specific philosophical principles and doctrines is clearly wrong. Again, this would tend to falsify his claim to expertise.

Why does his expertise matter? Because it seems to be the only reason he's willing to give for why his critics' rebuttals do not hold or should not be considered. He's the expert, having read a book or two. And his critics -- he presumes -- are just too far out of the picture ("ignorant" or "outdated") to appreciate that his proof works.
 
Buddha said:
I expected your response, so I am going to quote Popper' book , The Logic of Scientific Discovery (I call it LSD)

"But I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is available of being tasted by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the testability but the falsifiability of a system is to taken as a condition of demarcation"
Popper, LSD pg 40

"The theory of natural science , and especially what we call natural laws, have the form of strictly universal statements, thus they can be expressed of negations of strictly existential statements '''
For example, the laws of conservation of energy can be expressed in the form: 'There is no perpetual motion machines' or the hypothesis of the elementary charge in the form: 'There is no electrical charge other than multiple of the electrical elementary charge"
Popper, LSD pg 68-69

As I wrote before, the Popper doctrine fails when it is applied to the control systems that my colleagues and I have developed. This is why:

1. Popper would not accept them as true because they are based on an inductive method of taking few measurements and building more or less complete model of a technological process.

2. Popper demands that all scientific theories should be based on strictly universal statements while almost all control systems theories are based on strictly existential statements.

I am sure that you haven't read Popper's book, which is a sign of ignorance on your part.
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Correcting more false quoting from "Buddha"'s:


"The theory of natural science , and especially what we call natural laws, have the logical form of strictly universal statements; thus they can be expressed in the form of negations of strictly existential statements or, as we may say, in the form of non-existence statements. For example, the laws of conservation of energy can be expressed in the form: 'There is no perpetual motion machines' or the hypothesis of the electrical elementary charge in the form: 'There is no electrical charge other than a multiple of the electrical elementary charge'.
In this formulation we see that natural laws might be compared to 'proscriptions' or 'prohibitions'. They do not assert that something exists or in this case, they deny it. They insist in the non-existence of certain things or states of affairs, proscribing or prohibiting, as it where, those things or states of affairs: they rule them out. And it is precisely because they do this that they are falsifiable.

How unrelated is indeed all of this to what JayUtah's was criticising of your many blunders. And how ironic that you resource to this kind of quotations that you trimmed and twisted while you still change from false to falsifiable and back again according to your dialectical needs and without showing real grasp on the subject.


Finally, as usual, you end your gaslighting by a self-referential "criticism" Popper-related.
 
JayUtah said:
Why does his expertise matter? Because it seems to be the only reason he's willing to give for why his critics' rebuttals do not hold or should not be considered. He's the expert, having read a book or two. And his critics -- he presumes -- are just too far out of the picture ("ignorant" or "outdated") to appreciate that his proof works.
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Another piece of evidence that he lacks the expertise he professes is his inability to explain any of his hypotheses in a coherent manner. Philosophy is in many ways a study of conversation, of the interplay of ideas. Someone who is so fundamentally incapable of engaging in even remedial debate is not someone who has expertise in philosophy.
 
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