snip: kosta50 keeps insisting that we prove God to him.
Spirited: It is sheer hypocrisy and the folly of pride for kosta to insist that God be proven to him when kosta cannot even prove the existence of his own dreams. That he dreams is self-evidently true.
He knows he dreams,we know he dreams, yet kosta cannot prove by way of his senses that he does in fact dream.
That said, should kosta attempt to convince us that he dreams, we could ‘do unto him as he does unto us’ by donning the armor of doubt, dishonesty, denial, and mockery. We could dishonestly claim, as all agnostic-atheist doubting-Thomases do, that we know nothing about dreams and that unless he presents sensory evidence of his dreams he is just ‘imagining’ them.
We could say as Scrooge said, “It was just a bit of bad meat,” the implication being that kosta is crazy while we, the dishonest mockers, are sane.
This brings us to another issue: While we, the defenders of the living God hold ourselves to transcendent moral standards, the deniers-of-God do not, for with ‘God’s death,’ came the death of immutable truth, objective standards of right and wrong, sex norms, and yes-—of man’s God-endowed individual soul and mind. The point being that while we strive to speak truth, deniers-of-God have licensed themselves to equivocate, deceive, double-speak, and tell outright lies.
Dreams represent detectable elctrical brain activity and eye movemments. So, yes, we can detect dreams.
We could dishonestly claim, as all agnostic-atheist doubting-Thomases do, that we know nothing about dreams and that unless he presents sensory evidence of his dreams he is just ‘imagining’ them
You compare God to dreams? I agree, SI. While dreams do exist, what we dream is not rea. They are confined brain acitivies. In other words a subjective illusion of reality.
Yet, for some reason your hypothetical contructs are somehow 'honest' but doubting Thomases' are not? The believers are 'good' people and those who don't buy into hypothetical beliefs are not? They are 'dishonest?' Can you prove that?
We could dishonestly claim, as all agnostic-atheist doubting-Thomases do, that we know nothing about dreams and that unless he presents sensory evidence of his dreams he is just ‘imagining’ them.
The difference is that there is no human being on earth who claims he or she doens't dream. The difference is that we can describe dreams, we can even detect them electronically. So, your analogy doesn't hold.
Can you describe God? I have asked on many an occasion what is God and I have yet to get an answer. Because no one can say what is God, what is divine. And if you don't know what is God how can you know it is God that you are experiencing? Even the Bible tells you that it could be Satan.
A better analogy would be to say "I dream" but not being able to say what is a dream, but that you "know" it is, yet you don't know what it is! So far I have bene told that God is undefinable and undetectable experence in some but not all.
Oh yes, the defenders of the living [sic] God (is there any other kind?) have demonstrated their high moral standards on numerous occasions; their ruefulness and honesty too; their lack of pride and arrogance; they never tell a lie. That's about as believable as the very thing they are defending. And about as honest too. Hypocrisy rules.
Well put.
Perhaps it might be postulated that dreams can be detected by REM sleep indicators on instruments or watching eyelids move.
HOWEVER, THAT IS NOT THE SAME as detecting one’s dreams consciously by one’s SENSES. The brain is not, per se, a sense organ. It registers the impulses from the sense organs and makes uhhhhh . . . sense . . . out of them . . . in, hopefully, most cases.
Touch, Taste, Sight, hearing, taste, smell . . .
brain is not listed.
Certainly one can train one’s self to be aware that one is dreaming while one is dreaming and even to make some decisions in the midst of said dreams.
Certainly one can wake up within 20 seconds to 2 minutes and remember a dream.
NEITHER awareness is from one’s SENSES per se.
Your point still stands.
This ballyhooed hypocritical screed !!!!DEMANDING!!!!! of Almighty God that ALMIGHTY GOD conform to prissy criteria for “proof” to the finite screecher is absurdity to the max.
Yet again this nonsense that only “provable” facts are facts.
Only data which makes it through the hoops and gauntlet of a certain set of artificial limitations on reality can ‘qualify’ to be labeled ‘reality’ . . . and this by folks usually given to denying major chunks of reality right and left.
God have mercy on them if they tried to live the rest of their lives with such prissy strictures on ‘reality.’
“No, Dear. I don’t know where you put the love-micrometer. I guess you’ll just have to accept my love on faith today. I don’t know where the love-scale is, either. No, the love-wave-length detector hasn’t been seen for months. Yes, I can hear the sounds of silence but I can’t detect the sounds of love. No, I have no grounds for labeling THAT exercise the sounds of love. That’s just utilitarian itch scratching.”
“No, now that you mention it, Dear, everything you do in my life is only construable as self-centered, self-serving utilitarianism. Grand fantasies of “love” are utterly groundless and archaic in the ‘SCIENTIFC’ age. As Skinner articulated so God-like . . . man is nothing more than a rat, a pigeon, a radish [or a rock].”
“Clearly, Dear, you are just another mindless cog in a mindless machine that functions by some mindless miracle . . . oh, Dear . . . minute after minute, millenia after millenia . . . now that IS a logical problem . . . Ah well, who said that super rationalists were really rational?”
At post 814, betty boop explains:
The scientific method likewise can only measure the physical effects of the mind. Dreams, minds, souls and indeed qualia (love/hate, pain/pleasure, etc.) cannot be subjected to empirical tests.
To the metaphysical naturalist, such things are not "real" because they are not physical. But that conclusion is absurd because physical laws themselves are not physical, neither is logic, nor information nor physical causation nor space/time - without which the metaphysical naturalist would have nothing to say in the first place.
And ironically the Higgs field/boson which the Standard Model suggests must exist to account for mass has neither yet been created nor observed though CERN is still trying. And so the metaphysical naturalist has faith in something which is yet unproven and may in fact be the shadow of extra-dimensional momentum components we cannot detect!
In sum, the metaphysical naturalist does not even approach reality with the albeit reduced framework of science which bases it work on methodological naturalism because science admits to such things as massless particles which have no direct or indirect measureable affects, i.e. they cannot be said to not exist.