Answers from My Discussion With an Atheist: Logic Lad.

 



I have been have a bit of a discussion with this atheist blogger "logic lad" who goes on message boards and argues about God. Something I've been known to do form time tot time (like every waking moment of every day for the last decade and a half). LL is a nice guy he's putting with my crankiness pretty well so I appreciate that. I don't like the answers I gave him on his blog. So I'm making more answers here. Why did I give bad ones? Well not but not satisfying. It has it has to do with the hour of the morning, the level of cafine intake and so on.

Logic Lad:

All the great minds that have built this intricate theology also all started from the point of view that there is a god so we better explain how we know that, not the scientific approach of look for evidence and then formulate testable hypothesis, and test them. Also I find it more than slightly telling that as human understanding of the workings of the universe moves forward so the philosophy that hides god from being testable also moves forward, almost as if the more we lift the curtain the more we must be convinced that god is in the small bits still in shadow.

Meta:

 What may appear to be better ways to hide something are just really more dependable realizations about the certainty of it. The thing of which we are more certain is the nature of God that outstrips any sort of empirical nature. He spoke of an evolution of understanding in God talk. That's the appraoch I've taken in that discussion. It's basically like the appraoch I took in my blog piece of recent months on the evolution of God (part 1, part 2). So what evolves is not God but our understanding of God. Thus as our understanding evolves we gain a deeper sense of the magnificent of the God concept and it's transcendence of any human ability to pin it down or produce it through empirical data. What they are going to simply have to understand is that God is not a thing. God can't be controlled he's not going to subdued and conquered and understood as though he some kind of bit of nature that performs on demand for scientists. They can carp all they wish about not fulfilling their dreams of being charge but they are not and they are not going to be. God will say God. We can't expect the basis of reality to conform to being a small part of the whole. I think the wish to move beyond the limitations and get to the bottom of God is actually the sense of cognitive dissonance that one has when reality suddely doesn't match the paradigm that our ideology has led us to feel that it should.


LL:

If there was obvious and unambiguous evidence for god, we would not be having this conversation, the fact that may great people have believed is a simple argument from authority with a little argument from popularity thrown in, lots of very bright people believe unsubstantiated and unproved things that doesn’t prove that what they believe is true, or do you think homeopathy works based on noble winning scientists thinking they have proved it?

 Meta:
 "unsubstantiated" and "unprovable" doesn't equate to "stupid" or "not believable." Scientific theory of today has produced many aspects of thought that are unsubstantiated and unprovable:

Dark Matter

various opinions stated on that page but that's the point, it's not provable now and while one might "hope" or have "faith" that it will be, we don't know. 

String membranes
 Not even wrong is a blog ran by physicist Peter Woit who is not on the band wagon for string theory he's not the only one. He thinks it's unprovable. so do many others.
Multiverse
No emprical evidence for Multiverse and there may never be.

These ideas are science they are blessed by the priesthood of knowledge that says we may think of them and support them. Atheists mock and ridicule any idea that's not backed by empirical proof but they accept non empirically probable ideas when the priesthood of knowledge says they must. That's the demand for empirical proof on God rather laughable. They have to accept the fact that there's a different set of rules, not scinece but logic and its' part of knowledge too. It doesn't have to all the be scinece, there can be other methods for acquiring knowledge of truth. There can be logic and phenomenology. Physicists can't control that stuff so the reduce it out of the world of thought. It lends itself to supporting belief in God so atheists reduce it out of the world of thought. It's still there, it's still valid, and one simply has to learn it to be a real thinker.

Let’s ask this straight, do you believe in the Christian interventionist god? If so give me a good piece of actual evidence, not scripture, not philosophical musings, actual evidence that this being exists.

 The problem with that concept is that it's based upon the straw man atheist version of supernatural(SN) that was foisted in the enlightenment. I've written about that too in recent months. The counterfeit SN is God breaking into a closed system that doesn't allow him. The true concept originally was the notion of God raising the natural to a higher level. The SN is the power of God to draw us to a higher level of consciousness, and at times natural effects bend toward the higher law. God isnt breaking in nature is reaching up. You might try to charge that this is just a cleaver way of  spinning it but (well hopefully cleaver) but it's more than that. SN (which is the power of God) is the ground and end of nature. So nature is moving toward God's end for it anyway. If natural law is not perspective but description then descriptions are open to various witnesses. Some people do observe miracles and and amazing things that atheist refuse to accept. The atheist is in the dilemma not the believer. If natural law is prescriptive then the idea of mind as the basis of it is more important becuase it's more parsimonious than having a bunch of disembodied laws floating around with no reason for them to be. If it's descriptive, which is the bias of modern science, then it has to be open to different descriptions which do include miracles. Either way the former materialist closed realm of discourse has to open up. The empirical evdience that supports this is Lourdes. See my article on medical historians who find in the academic journal The History of Medicine and Allied Sciences* that Lourdes miracles are still inexplicable. See my miracle pages on rules of Lourdes and some of the results. There are also backing Protestant miracles.

LL:

I am not afraid to listen to actual thinkers, but the problem with philosophy is that at some point you need to test your thought experiments against reality, if your god exists and he can have an effect in the world then there should be evidence of it.

 The Lourdes stuff establishes that and the other protestant miracles. Even more accessible to pining down is the body of empirical work around mystical experience. The results of mystical experience in so far as they transform the lives of the experiences in a vital and postiive way are what we should expect form the divine. That fits exactly with the concept of God having a effect upon the world that can be empirically tested. Thanks to Ralph Hood's M scale these experiences are testable, predictable and can be documented as empirically valid. They are linked to the divine by both their content and their results.

 LL:

 If not then all the philosophy in the world does not make the imaginary real. If you have evidence let’s get on to that, you need to convince me that there is a god, specifically a Christian god (as that is your chosen faith) before I commit the time and energy to looking in to any deeper truths

Meta:
Of cousre that's just begging the question. These things can only be real if they fit the criteria that I set and that support my view. If the things that support my view are not used as the only criteria for truth then I reuse to accept it. That's basically what he's saying, and that is the standard line of atheist mentality these days. Nothing but begging the question, as he begins with the assumptino that it can't be real. "philosophy does not make the imaginary real." Why is it imaginary just becuase it doesn't fit the criteria that supports his view?

This is one of the great shams of the atheist movement. They want to take over truth by eliminating any other view rejecting other scientific views. Their libel and slander of the empirical studies on religious experience re nothing short of shameful. I've been getting that on atheist boards for years. Logic is not fantasy. We don't have to go looking for square circles, we know they don't exist. We can prove that logically without every having to look for them. They not the kind of thing that requires empirical proof, that sort of purely logical issue is beyond the empirical. It may be easy to prove God that pure logic alone but the point is there are aspects of reality that are open to different methods, everything doesn't necessarily revolve around the same kind of empiricism that supports the atheist view point. There are phenomenological answers that support belief, for example. There are kinds of empiricism such as the mystical experience concept that support belief. That is what they are doing by construing the fortress of facts strategy. They are touting a truth regime that replaces real thinking with the aspects of thought that put turth under their control.



 *
 Bernard Francis et al, “The Lourdes Medical Cures Re-visited,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (10.1093/jhmas/jrs041) 2012 pdf downloaded SMU page 1-28  all the page numbers given are from pdf

Bernard Francis is former professor Emeritus of medicine, Unversite Claude Bernard Lyon. Elisabeth Sternberg taught at National Institute of Mental Health and The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. Elisabeth Fee was at National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.