To act on nothing is to do something?

Shimokita said:

I haven’t attempted to prove the existence of God in this thread, but someone might need to disprove the possibility you suggest, depending on whatever argument he used.

I am not particularly concerned with trying to convince you that God exists, by the way. I think you already know that God exists, but are just playing a game and pretending that he does not as a way of rejecting his authority. I think the fact that you have employed such illogical arguments and gone to such great length to try to get people to agree with you, on a Christian forum, is evidence of this. If you truly believed that God did not exist you would be getting on with your life instead of spending half the weekend on the Internet arguing otherwise.

Click to expand...

I argue on here for fun, and it's good exercise for my brain. There's lots of reasons to hang out here, arguing about the existence of God, other than a hatred for a being that we don't believe exists.

Tone said:

In the beginning

Click to expand...

Everybody always jumps to the ex nihilo (is this even in Scripture?)...and skips the above ^..."The Beginning"...in other words, He created in time>>>>>>>>>dimension, space, energy, matter...

*Is time a thing?

If time is no thing, then, yes, He created out of (ex) time (nihilo)...

Nihilist Virus said:

In this thread I've allowed the theists to help themselves to the assumption that God exists. In this alternate approach that you're preferring, I'm giving the theist no freebies. But more or less the same topic with the same points, yes.

Click to expand...

I like it. I'm going to shamelessly steal it in future arguments with apologists too.

Nihilist Virus said:

Couldn't agree more. There can be more than one dimension of time, sort of an orthogonal time. Or how would clocks tick in a universe where light doesn't have a constant speed, but rather a constant acceleration? And also not to mention things we cannot even conceive of.

Click to expand...

So we were just arguing for arguing's sake, huh? I thought we were arguing with each other because we hate God... Atheist Brother.

Nihilist Virus said:

Here's another thing you can steal... a joke adapted from another one I told here a while ago.

An atheist, an agnostic, and an apologist walk into a bar. The atheist gives a long, logical explanation for why his favorite drink is the best, and then orders it. The bar tender pours him the drink, then turns to the agnostic. The agnostic can't decide, so he just goes with the house special. Then the bar tender asks the apologist what he'd like, and the apologist dodged the question.

Click to expand...

LOL That's awesome. Here's my favorite joke about atheists and Christians:

An atheist fellow lives next door to a little old lady that he hears praying all the time really loudly in her house. One day he hears her praying for money for groceries, so he decides to play a prank on her. He goes to the store and buys a ton of groceries. Bag upon bag of bread, milk, eggs, all the essentials, but even some niceties like ice cream. He takes them all and places them on her porch, rings the door bell and then runs and hides in the bushes. When the little old lady opens the door and sees all the groceries she drops to her knees and screams "Praise Jesus! Ask and Ye shall deliver!". So the atheist jumps out of the bushes and shouts, "Ha! Jesus didn't buy those groceries for you, I did! There's no magical explanation for how they got there, I drove to the store and bought them with my own money!". To which the little old lady runs screaming down the street in ecstasy, "Praise Jesus! I knew you'd get me my groceries, I never dreamed you'd get the Devil to pay for them!".

That joke is perfect because atheists will tell that in their inner-circles and laugh about Christians and confirmation bias. But Christians will tell that joke in their inner-circles and laugh about how surprising God's mysterious ways can be!

Nihilist Virus said:

Christians agree that God is omnipotent, but disagree on what that means. Some believe that God can do anything, including logically impossible tasks, while others believe that God can do "anything that is logically possible" (we can tentatively assume that this is well defined). This is not a true dichotomy and there might be other interpretations out there, but most Christians accept one of these two definitions and so that is what I will address.

Suppose that God can only perform tasks that are logically possible.

On the list of impossible tasks, right before "make a square circle" and right after "make a one-ended stick," is the task of "do something by acting on nothing."

In the absence of creation, nothing existed except for God. Even given unlimited power, how does one do something by acting on nothing? Creation is a process of causality, and causality requires an input and an output. That's how it works. The Christian assertion is that God used causality to generate an input without an output, which is logically impossible.

Suppose instead that God can perform any task, even if it is logically impossible.

Why, then, did Jesus die on the cross? What is the point of that if God is able to forgive us as an act of will? I don't need to cut off my hand to feed my dog - he will love me just the same if I give him dog food. So I don't see why Jesus would need to pointlessly suffer to show his love for us when he could just do that by giving us eternal life.



So please tell me which horn of this false dilemma you want to defend, or feel free to defend a third horn by redefining omnipotence. Or perhaps explain how it is that acting on nothing is actually doing something. Thanks.

Click to expand...

I have to say I do appreciate your attempt at profundity here, NV, but for me, all of what you're setting up in this OP is kind of similar to pondering what it'd be like for Godzilla to blow us a kiss .....................................if Godzilla did that kind of thing.


Can we all sing together now, "History shows again and again...la da da da, da da da da, da da da da!"

Nihilist Virus said:

And until that possibility is dismissed, your own argument renders God's existence redundant.



You're on the wrong forum then. This is apologetics.



So... is that like how people pretend the police don't exist so they can rob banks? Oh wait, no one on earth does what you're talking about.



Uh, if I'm going to pretend he doesn't exist, wouldn't I avoid Christian forums?



Hold on let me check... uh... terms of service... ok... statement of purpose thread... hmm... where, exactly, does it say I have to explain myself to you?

Click to expand...

Let us know when you are ready to convert.

Nicholas Deka said:

I argue on here for fun, and it's good exercise for my brain. There's lots of reasons to hang out here, arguing about the existence of God, other than a hatred for a being that we don't believe exists.

Click to expand...

I don’t think your hate anybody. Your friend, well that is a different story.

Nihilist Virus said:

Suppose that God can only perform tasks that are logically possible.

On the list of impossible tasks, right before "make a square circle" and right after "make a one-ended stick," is the task of "do something by acting on nothing."

In the absence of creation, nothing existed except for God. Even given unlimited power, how does one do something by acting on nothing? Creation is a process of causality, and causality requires an input and an output. That's how it works. The Christian assertion is that God used causality to generate an input without an output, which is logically impossible.

Click to expand...

All of our understanding of logic is driven by the constants observed in physical reality. What you call a circle or a square, for example, doesn't exist at quantum scale. There you have events that manifest to us as circle and square by means of recurring events that we can anchor to and relate to in some coherent fashion.

By the above analogy, God is a being that operates at the scale of that "low level fundamental reality", so your question is absolutely incoherent in that regard. It's like asking "Can quantum processes make circle a square?". Well, perhaps in some odd version of reality, but it naturally wouldn't make sense to you in this one.

Christianity is not a "low level" religion. It doesn't really care to explain "how" of God from the POV of God. It explains God using the language of 1st century agrarian culture as anchor concept. Today we have broader metaphors and concepts, so we can think about that more deeply and discuss God at conceptual "low level".

But, if you are looking for these explanation in Christian Biblical narrative... you won't find it unless you actually discuss it with philosophers and hardcore apologists who care to speak that conceptual "low level" language.

Likewise, that's not what Christianity is for. It's there to provide a coherent framework for progressive human sociology. It's not there to explain the meta-nature of God. It's pragmatic in its philosophical focus, and the primary purpose of the narrative is to frame human relationships against other human relationships rooted in Christian ideal.

Nihilist Virus said:

Suppose instead that God can perform any task, even if it is logically impossible.

Why, then, did Jesus die on the cross? What is the point of that if God is able to forgive us as an act of will? I don't need to cut off my hand to feed my dog - he will love me just the same if I give him dog food. So I don't see why Jesus would need to pointlessly suffer to show his love for us when he could just do that by giving us eternal life.

Click to expand...

Well, in case of God, it is a case of cutting off one's proverbial hand to both make the dog and to feed it.

Likewise, I'm not sure why you would say "pointlessly suffer". The purpose of Christ narrative is first and foremost for the sake of the narrative. That's how we get to know and understand anything. If the narrative of any sort isn't there, then there is no knowledge or experience. And that would be the conceptual nothingness. Knowledge can only exist in a narrative context and so would a reality of "us".

That's the reason we love narratives. You wouldn't say "Why would these writers make these characters suffer pointlessly on the screen"? There's a point to a Christian story. If you haven't figured out what it is after all of these years of hanging around here, I'm not sure I could be of service either.

Nihilist Virus said:

So please tell me which horn of this false dilemma you want to defend, or feel free to defend a third horn by redefining omnipotence. Or perhaps explain how it is that acting on nothing is actually doing something. Thanks.

Click to expand...

Again, you are assuming that our "high level logic" must propagate to the "low level" existence. This world is illusory in a sense that it exists as a layered abstraction of reality that we call "God". If you want to take Buddhist analogy... we are "God's dream" so to speak. Again, it's only an analogy, but there's no way to describe something on the fringe without analogizing it to some relevant experience of ours.

Absolute nothingness doesn't exist. God is the ultimate reality. For our reality to exist, infinite must become as a finite, and timeless must be locked into sequential context of conscious observation. There isn't a need to explain it from our perspective anymore than to attempt to figure out why fundamental is fundamental. It just is. We go with it as axiomatic assumption to build frameworks of knowledge and understanding.

Of course, you can run with a purely pragmatic narratives and avoid diving into these fundamentals, but you asking "Why is God the way it is" is no different than asking "Why is fundamental reality, whatever it is, the way it is".

Do you think there's a regressive infinity to these "Why" questions?

devolved said:

All of our understanding of logic is driven by the constants observed in physical reality. What you call a circle or a square, for example, doesn't exist at quantum scale. There you have events that manifest to us as circle and square by means of recurring events that we can anchor to and relate to in some coherent fashion.

By the above analogy, God is a being that operates at the scale of that "low level fundamental reality", so your question is absolutely incoherent in that regard. It's like asking "Can quantum processes make circle a square?". Well, perhaps in some odd version of reality, but it naturally wouldn't make sense to you in this one.

Christianity is not a "low level" religion. It doesn't really care to explain "how" of God from the POV of God. It explains God using the language of 1st century agrarian culture as anchor concept. Today we have broader metaphors and concepts, so we can think about that more deeply and discuss God at conceptual "low level".

But, if you are looking for these explanation in Christian Biblical narrative... you won't find it unless you actually discuss it with philosophers and hardcore apologists who care to speak that conceptual "low level" language.

Likewise, that's not what Christianity is for. It's there to provide a coherent framework for progressive human sociology. It's not there to explain the meta-nature of God. It's pragmatic in its philosophical focus, and the primary purpose of the narrative is to frame human relationships against other human relationships rooted in Christian ideal.



Well, in case of God, it is a case of cutting off one's proverbial hand to both make the dog and to feed it.

Likewise, I'm not sure why you would say "pointlessly suffer". The purpose of Christ narrative is first and foremost for the sake of the narrative. That's how we get to know and understand anything. If the narrative of any sort isn't there, then there is no knowledge or experience. And that would be the conceptual nothingness. Knowledge can only exist in a narrative context and so would a reality of "us".

That's the reason we love narratives. You wouldn't say "Why would these writers make these characters suffer pointlessly on the screen"? There's a point to a Christian story. If you haven't figured out what it is after all of these years of hanging around here, I'm not sure I could be of service either.



Again, you are assuming that our "high level logic" must propagate to the "low level" existence. This world is illusory in a sense that it exists as a layered abstraction of reality that we call "God". If you want to take Buddhist analogy... we are "God's dream" so to speak. Again, it's only an analogy, but there's no way to describe something on the fringe without analogizing it to some relevant experience of ours.

Absolute nothingness doesn't exist. God is the ultimate reality. For our reality to exist, infinite must become as a finite, and timeless must be locked into sequential context of conscious observation. There isn't a need to explain it from our perspective anymore than to attempt to figure out why fundamental is fundamental. It just is. We go with it as axiomatic assumption to build frameworks of knowledge and understanding.

Of course, you can run with a purely pragmatic narratives and avoid diving into these fundamentals, but you asking "Why is God the way it is" is no different than asking "Why is fundamental reality, whatever it is, the way it is".

Do you think there's a regressive infinity to these "Why" questions?

Click to expand...

Geesh, devolved!! How about we just cite NV's OP as a Category Mistake and call it a day ...

... unless someone knows better than I do how much force is required to move a ton of Forgiveness.

Nihilist Virus said:

What's the mistake?

Click to expand...

IMO, the mistake is to think of the concept of Omnipotence as applying to moral acts, even those of God, acts that, if anything, would belong to the concept of Omnibenevolence.

Moreover, I might also spot that it isn't coherent to think of Omnipotence generally conceived, even if by Christians, as a theological term denoting, let alone connoting, an "ability" to perform the semantically illogical. In giving us forgiveness, God isn't pushing or pulling train loads of forgiveness, and we're not measuring to see if He has the power to do so like He's some kind of cosmic locomotive. If you want that kind of semantic story, then you need to go re-read,



So, no more talk about "power" of any biblical sort in relation to either: 1) changing squares into circles, 2) or expecting forgiveness to be extended without the necessary moral and metaphysical conceptual essentials that come with biblical forgiveness within, and accompanied by, the necessary biblical contextual sources and traditions of thought (i.e. those that are generally Jewish).

Nihilist Virus said:

But even the quantum world has rules. For example, there's the uncertainty principle. The exclusion principle. Are there any rules that apply to God? Because if there are, then my question isn't "absolutely incoherent." If there aren't, then your analogy fails.

Click to expand...

God is source of infinite possibility of "the rules" that can be expressed into any number of possible realities. I keep telling you that you can't cast the logic of the higher-level abstractions on the lower-level events, and you keep trying to force the conversation in the direction of the logic of the higher-level abstraction, insisting that there must be a continuum there... and that God must obey the same rules of logic that we do.

Why do you think that would be the case?

Nihilist Virus said:

So then apologists who go around claiming that the Christian worldview offers a better explanation for the how and why of nature than scientific naturalism should cease and desist, right?

Click to expand...

It's not a better or worse. In order to judge "better" you need some reference as to what you are claiming it to be better at. Naturalism is reductionist. It's great at chunking up the reality, describing it, and then measuring ratios of one sets of events to other sets of events. That methodology is good for describing consistent recurrences of reality in some reductionist setting, but it really can only work as a reductionist concept.

Religion deals with fundamental as it relates to our being. You can keep running pragmatic calculations, and correlating the brain function with perception, but you can't distill functional description consciousness out of that. It's a useless pursuit, because it's irreducible experience. So, there's some things that naturalism can't do, and claim that because it may in some future we should avoid millennia-long philosophical context for discussing fundamental nature of our reality and its source.... that would be more irrationally exuberant than religion could ever be.

Nihilist Virus said:

Well here I am, waiting. Should I not be on the apologetics section of the Christian forums? Am I in the wrong place?

Click to expand...

Do you understand what apologetic is for? It's here to lay out MY framework that explains and defends as to why I believe what I do. I'm not attempting to reconcile naturalism with Christianity. And I'm not here to prove Christianity to you from a position of your naturalistic assumptions. I've said it many times, if you have something to bring to the table in which we can discuss some concepts on which both of us could improve our belief system... fine. But this sophomoric "you tell me your reasons and I will shoot it down" approach to discussing these issues is both unwarranted (since you never actually justified your beliefs to me), and unproductive.

Likewise, you seem to think that there's some monolithic "Christianity" and "religion" concept that you can argue against, when it's largely personal understanding derived through philosophical framework of certain narrative.

Nihilist Virus said:

By doing things like institutionalizing slavery, advocating the execution of those who labor on the Sabbath, and ordering divine genocide for the purposes of stealing land?

Click to expand...

I can't take the above seriously for a couple of reasons:

1) You are abstracting the generic progression of humanity through its moral path, and you are pinning isolated historic narrative as "terrible crimes" that are committed by religion against humans in the past, etc, etc. While at the same time you are ignoring that it's been the case for generic progression of humanity. Tribal warfare and endless conflicts and conquest is how we progress to our peaceful state today with a millennia worth of experience.

2) You are ignoring that the fact that Christian narrative is a progression of human choice of rejecting God and progressing through the path of "trial and error". So...

Romans 1:24 Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity for the dishonoring of their bodies with one another.

would be the context for God honoring human choices, while at the same time setting limits and directing those towards some viable outcome.

So, yes, and no.

Nihilist Virus said:

Why not?

Click to expand...

Because it would be like asking a .NET developer to write software by explicitly writing instructions at the level of the electric charge manipulation. It's too complex for any human to grasp. We generally have illusion of understanding, while all we have is our models.

Nihilist Virus said:

And I would say it failed utterly at that purpose. Wouldn't you? Or do you think human rights are a stupid thing and that the church should be able to torture people?

Click to expand...

Church is people, so you are talking about people torturing people. People are complex beings, and as such, their motivations are complex and driven by a wide range of factors. So, to say that their torturing ways was motivated purely by religious narrative is absurd!

Likewise, human rights are secured by contractual agreement among people in a civilized society to uphold ideals. Whenever you are dealing with ideals you are exiting materialistic context. You can't claim that we are just bunch of chemicals shuffling around, and at the same time we should have standards as to how these chemicals mix or move. If you merely appealing to your preferences... then it's just a tyrant of preferences that you enforce on those who disagree?

Nihilist Virus said:

So, like zippy, you're saying that Christ's death on the cross was performance art?

Click to expand...

For your reading the story today... yes. It only exists as a reference narrative for us that communicates broader reality that we never see. But the ideals of that narrative structure our and direct our individual behavior towards these ideals.

You can take it as Christian existentialism as the base, and transcendent experience at most. In either case, it's a narrative first that structures a worldview.

Nihilist Virus said:

So what did God act on to create us?

Click to expand...

I don't know, and I don't really think we can know. Just like we can't know the fundamental structure of reality. Again, that's like asking .NET developer to write a software in machine code. They wouldn't have a clue. We operate at the higher level of perception of reality. We've never observed a single electron. All of our "observations" relevant to subatomic processes are circular feedback of instruments that were built with assumptions that are driven by chunking aggregate into ratios that line up. But, because we can correlate ratios to events doesn't mean that our picture of reality is accurate.

Hence, I don't really care what God acted on to create this reality. We can go with Eastern idea and think that everything is God's dream, and God is dreaming a billion dreams for each of us. Or we can go with Western thought, and think that God spun up and maintains events that manifest as reality running on "God machine"... as per Whitehead, for example. I have no idea, but that's not really relevant as to the vastly diverging perspective that our conscious experience is a byproduct of expansion of eternal matter that happened to localize and assemble into you and I....

That would be an appeal to magic. A conscious mind creating reality as it imagines it... is something we do every night.

But at any rate, how could we ever know that, given the subjective limitations of our being?

Nihilist Virus said:

Must X become not X?

.....

That's worthless. And if that is your actual opinion, I do hope you go around telling apologists that while you agree with their religion, they're wrong to point out that they have a better explanation for the problem of existence than atheists do.

Click to expand...

Again, we don't have a "better explanation". Before you get to "better" we have to agree on parameters of making these judgements. If the parameters are structured from vastly different frameworks, then you screaming "Mine is better" is merely a preference.

And I'm man enough to admit that mine is a preference driven by necessity for my worldview to be coherent. Again, it stems from a simple fact that self-assembled chemicals observing themselves and structuring intentional .... seems incoherent as a worldview.

Nihilist Virus said:

Do you have an actual answer to the OP? You said my question is absolutely incoherent, and then you went on to ramble for paragraph after paragraph saying a whole lot of nothing.

Click to expand...

But you don't get to do that here. I've given you multiple reasons for why I hold my worldview. You don't get to sit and shoot them down and then claim that these are wrong because these are not living up to the preference of your satisfactory philosophical standards.

First prove to me your worldview as a standard, or at least let's agree on some common ground from which you can make these claims. Otherwise, you are like a 7 year old claiming that anything that they don't understand is boring and stupid. If that's the case, then go play computer games or something and stop wasting my time.

Nihilist Virus said:

Münchhausen trilemma - Wikipedia

Click to expand...

You didn't answer my question. I'm aware of this problem, and that's why I'm pointing that each of us gets to set a fundamental assumptions to create coherent models of reality.

You seem to think that accidental explosions of some uniform matter can produce complex variations with various distinct properties that eventually result in some localized parts of that matter assembling into entities having a capacity of subjective thought and creativity. And you don't seem to find a need to explain that fact before you accept it as a default.

So, you assume that whatever we observe validates this position, and you raise yourself in some intellectual high-horse where I have to launch ideas at you that you get to either accept or reject.

Care to validate your own assumptions?

devolved said:

All of our understanding of logic is driven by the constants observed in physical reality. What you call a circle or a square, for example, doesn't exist at quantum scale. There you have events that manifest to us as circle and square by means of recurring events that we can anchor to and relate to in some coherent fashion.

By the above analogy, God is a being that operates at the scale of that "low level fundamental reality", so your question is absolutely incoherent in that regard. It's like asking "Can quantum processes make circle a square?". Well, perhaps in some odd version of reality, but it naturally wouldn't make sense to you in this one.

Christianity is not a "low level" religion. It doesn't really care to explain "how" of God from the POV of God. It explains God using the language of 1st century agrarian culture as anchor concept. Today we have broader metaphors and concepts, so we can think about that more deeply and discuss God at conceptual "low level".

But, if you are looking for these explanation in Christian Biblical narrative... you won't find it unless you actually discuss it with philosophers and hardcore apologists who care to speak that conceptual "low level" language.

Likewise, that's not what Christianity is for. It's there to provide a coherent framework for progressive human sociology. It's not there to explain the meta-nature of God. It's pragmatic in its philosophical focus, and the primary purpose of the narrative is to frame human relationships against other human relationships rooted in Christian ideal.



Well, in case of God, it is a case of cutting off one's proverbial hand to both make the dog and to feed it.

Likewise, I'm not sure why you would say "pointlessly suffer". The purpose of Christ narrative is first and foremost for the sake of the narrative. That's how we get to know and understand anything. If the narrative of any sort isn't there, then there is no knowledge or experience. And that would be the conceptual nothingness. Knowledge can only exist in a narrative context and so would a reality of "us".

That's the reason we love narratives. You wouldn't say "Why would these writers make these characters suffer pointlessly on the screen"? There's a point to a Christian story. If you haven't figured out what it is after all of these years of hanging around here, I'm not sure I could be of service either.



Again, you are assuming that our "high level logic" must propagate to the "low level" existence. This world is illusory in a sense that it exists as a layered abstraction of reality that we call "God". If you want to take Buddhist analogy... we are "God's dream" so to speak. Again, it's only an analogy, but there's no way to describe something on the fringe without analogizing it to some relevant experience of ours.

Absolute nothingness doesn't exist. God is the ultimate reality. For our reality to exist, infinite must become as a finite, and timeless must be locked into sequential context of conscious observation. There isn't a need to explain it from our perspective anymore than to attempt to figure out why fundamental is fundamental. It just is. We go with it as axiomatic assumption to build frameworks of knowledge and understanding.

Of course, you can run with a purely pragmatic narratives and avoid diving into these fundamentals, but you asking "Why is God the way it is" is no different than asking "Why is fundamental reality, whatever it is, the way it is".

Do you think there's a regressive infinity to these "Why" questions?

Click to expand...

I tend to agree with what you wrote about higher and lower level concepts, the purpose of Christianity, and man's undeniable connection with narratives. But in light of all that, there doesn't seem to be much room for Christianity to be literally "true" in the sense that the word is normally used. If this is your view, do you identify as a deist? Because your response seems to go "God is the ultimate reality to which we anchor all our rational beliefs, but the Bible and its many narratives are just poetic expressions of deeper truths about the human condition (and other philosophical musings) as articulated by ancient civilizations."