Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
It´s not about what you think they are or what evidence there is. It is about the intended meaning of the statement.
I am the only person who is an expert in the scriptures. No one can contest my knowledge. I know the Bible better than any person on this planet. So if you disagree then you are committing blasphemy in my opinion!
Claims of knowledge and belief are the same category: both are based upon evidence. The difference is that "knowledge" is based upon intersubjective evidence while belief is not.
Not really. Both are based upon evidence.
Not really. Both are based upon evidence.
Now, let's go back a bit and remember what "evidence" is. ALL evidence is personal experience: what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, or feel emotionally. If you want the reasons behind this conclusion, go back to
David Hume. He is the one who articulated this and reasoned it out. No one has validly disagreed with him since.
So, what we "know" is based upon personal experience. For instance, I "know" the taste of Brussels sprouts or the smell of Sphaghettios. However, many people "know" a taste of Brussels sprouts that is different than mine and one poster here has said that he "knows" the smell of Sphagettios is vile. Most people "know" a different smell of Sphaghettios.
What this means is that most of what we "know" is based upon personal experience that is different for some people under approximately the same circumstances. However ,there is a small set of personal experience that is the same for everyone under approximately the same circumstances. We all "know" the same thing. Examples include:
The sky is blue.
Seawater tastes salty.
Objects heavier than air, when released, fall.
Distant galaxies exhibit a red shift in their spectra of emitted light.
A solution of 0.1 M sulfuric acid reads 1.0 on a pH meter.
You can go on with the list.
"Belief" applies to personal experience that is not intersubjective or reasonably potentially intersubjective. I believe Brussels sprouts taste vile. Bitter but beyond bitter to the point that I involuntarily vomit whenever I taste them. I believe bagpipe music is tonal and pleasant. I believe there are no teapots orbiting Mars.
In the last case we have very little personal experience to go on. Yes, we have sent a few probes to Mars and they have not collided with an orbiting teapot. However, let's face it, there is a huge amount of space available there where a teapot could orbit Mars and not collide with any of the Viking spacecraft.
As it happens, nearly everyone shares that belief. However, that doesn't make it "knowledge", but simply a shared belief.
No. If you "lack belief" in the existence of leprechauns (which is what we mean when we say "I believe in leprechauns"), then you are saying "I believe leprechauns do not exist." Only because you are deliberately obfuscating the issue.Simple. You believe SassyPants the Magnificent doesn't exist.
Why not? If we are deciding on a criteria for things to exist, you can't set up a Special Pleading for the supernatural.
Claim: Coke is the best soft drink. Response: I do not believe Coke is the best soft drink. There is nothing in the proposition about Mountain Dew.
Not really. You have personal experience your car starts. Christians have personal experience of God.
So? The smell of Sphaghettios exists only in your mind. That "putrid smell" does not exist on the store shelf. Nor does it exist in the minds of the millions of people who have eaten Sphagettios and found the smell "not putrid".
Really? How? Walk us thru the similarity, please.
Yes. But "sophisticated" behavior does not have to arise from "awareness". A chess playing computer program displays some pretty sophisticated behavior, but it is not "aware", is it?
Because that is how everyone uses it in everyday language. I gave 2 examples. Did you not notice them or did you not agree?
Sorry, but atheism believes things in the absence of objective, intersubjective evidence. That is faith.
No. It means I don't know whether Leeds will be promoted or not. What you are doing here is creating a false dichotomy. There is a 3rd choice.
Astronomers have observations supporting the existence of "dark energy", "dark matter", and the theory of inflation.
The "situation" is that nobody can empirically demonstrate that space ever expands or that objects move faster than the speed of light. Since that's never been done, there's no real link between the redshift we observe and the ASSUMPTIONS you've made about that phenomenon being related to movement. It could just as easily be related to tired light processes, in which case, no "faster than light speed" expansion is required.
Like I said earlier, I see no difference between what you're calling "knowledge" and I would I call 'belief". I have no 'knowledge' that space expands. I have no evidence that space expands. Therefore pointing at the sky and claiming that "space expands" is really just another "leap of faith" IMO. It's an "agreed upon belief", but it's still just a very subjective interpretation of the data, and therefore it's a very subjective "belief", one I simply don't share with the mainstream.
Within Judeo-Christianity, God's intervention is an observation. Your proposed mechanism is not adequate to explain the intervention. The EM field can't do the things Judeo-Christians have observed God to do.
Not that I can see. Those are 2 separate activities. Sustaining the chemical reaction of hydrogen and oxygen to get water has nothing to do with Parting the Red Sea so the Hebrews can escape from Pharoah's army, does it? God can do the sustaining but never intervene in human history.
What we consider "personality" is a product of our brain. And, within the brain, it is a product of the firing of neurons in specific sequences. My gastrocnemius muscle, for instance, doesn't have a personality. A bacterium doesn't have a personality. It's not funny, or moody, or brave, or considerate, etc. So being alive and having a personality are 2 separate things.
First, I said quite clearly, "if pantheism is true". Panentheism pretty well forbids the universe being alive.
Those alledged electronic circuits are incapable of manufacturing anything. The best you can hope for is some type of non-intelligent communication along the circuits.
First, you have not established that there are any "electronic circuits in space". Second, I dispute that what you have described is "sophisticated". By "sophisticated" in terms of living organisms or manufactured by humans, there is specificity. In an electronic circuit, current is restricted in where it can go. IOW, in a transistor radio, the current can only flow from one transistor to another, for from the on/off switch to one transistor. But the Birkenhead circuits are not specific. If you are referring to "plasma circuits", then stars put out plasma in every direction. No specificity. Such non-specific circuits in living organisms or in human artifacts don't do anything. In fact, when current leaves the restricted path, we call it a "short-circuit" and it stops the functionality.
From what we know of personality, it's not even a possibility. We know the circumstances in which personality happens. In pantheism, those circumstances are not present. At best, the idea of personality in pantheism is an unsupported speculation that relies on personality arising in circumstances totally different from those in which personality is seen.
Actually, we don't experience the President the same way. For one thing, we don't all see the President at the same time. many of us may see the President at particular speeches -- such as the State of the Union -- but some of us have met him personally as he is on the campaign trail in New Hampshire or Iowa. What is more, our "experience" in this case is colored by our expectations. Those that like his politics are prone to see positive personality traits. Those that dislike his politics are prone to highlight their experience of negative personality traits.
It's you who is assuming a "standard" force that we are familiar with enough to have a system to measure it! I am not assuming that, which is why I doubt the ability to measure the force and focus on the effect.
I said "singular" instances. Apparently I should also have said "spatially and temporally limited intances". You have a withdrawal of sustenance all over the universe. However, what happens if God withdraws the ionic attraction in the granite overlying the magma pocket under Thera in 1500 BC or so? The result is the dissolution of the granite, a catastrophic upwared welling of the magma, and a massive volcanic eruption. The results of that eruption are many of the "plagues" in Egypt.
Notice I said:
There's no "assumption" here. I simply said that it is possible for God to intervene and not be detectable. I didn't say any and all influence was "necessarily undetectable". As it happens, it may be that all influence is undetectable, but that is different than such influence is "necessarily" undetectable.
The same way scientists define it: An entity is alive if it has all 4 of the following characteristics:
Now why did you assume that?
What, besides living organisms, can you demonstrate as having "awareness"?
But do all examples of "current" or chemistry produce awareness? That seems to be a hidden assumption of yours: if there is "current" then there is awareness. Is that assumption justified? Are there not examples where there is current or chemical processing but no awareness? Is your computer "aware"?
Are you seriously thinking that God being aware of a drop of water is the same as the water drop being aware?
A timeline is an expression of the continuity between past, present, and future. Thus, in saying that cosmologists make such a timeline, you have refuted your own claim that they suspend such a continuity! IOW, you just refuted yourself.
You're serious about this? Christianity maintains that we cannot possibly imagine the totality of God. Right? Yet we are compelled to absorb the idea of God, aren't we? In trying to argue against the Big Bang, you have constructed an argument that says it is "intellectual suicide" to believe in God!I don't follow this. What are Christians supposed to "know better" about? Are we supposed to know that the Big Bang never happened? Why?
How is Big Bang an ideology? It looks like you are using the Argument from Personal Incredulity. It appears that you find it difficult to imagine that there is no "center" to the universe. That's a personal difficulty, not a difficulty with Big Bang. Look, I strongly suggesst this article:
Interesting. Can you give me a full citation for this quote? No, you can't. Because it is in a letter Galileo wrote and he didn't give a full citation.
The quote from Galileo of St. Augustine insists that the head must instruct the heart!
I'm having difficulty relating this to what I wrote Of the many religions extant in the Roman Empire when Constantine issued this, nearly all except Christianity no longer have any worshippers. Since you are saying force was not used to eliminate these religions, we are left with the question of why the adherents of those religions decided that the version of deity was false and stopped worshipping.
You see, the soldiers of the Roman Empire at the time were nearly exclusively Christians. Yet Christianity was a banned religion. You can see the potential problem. So could Constantine. 
