if the intellect cannot grasp god let's just follow wittgenstein and stop talking about it, huh?

and let's stop shitting on science for all the wrong reasons

now where did diesel go...

I shit on science once because my toilet was broken and I didn't want to shit on m^a(t)h.

i was going to respond to that but i thought i had gone on long enough.

ok, there are two possiblities: either god (assuming he exists, for the sake of argument alone) can suspend the laws of logic or he can't. if he can't (as i argue), he's not really omnipotent. now let's explore the possiblity that he can. if he can, then what happens to our knowledge? the foundation upon which all our knowledge is based is the laws of logic. if these, of all things, are merely contingent facts subject to reversal by arbitrary divine whim, all our knowledge would be on shaky grounds; we would, in essence, have to append every proposition with "assuming god doesn't get a bug up his ass and decide to change logic."

but i think there's an even stronger rebuttal to your claim, which is that statements like that are not so much defenses of god as dismissals of rational inquiry. if you take god out of the field of reason by asserting that he is impervious to it, the only other way to "prove" his existence is through your own arbitrary feelings -- which are in fact not proofs at all, because emotions are not tools of cognition.

Diesel...Have you been eating McDonald's?

Hah I'm just making fun of everyone asking if you're drinking.

I'll answer the stronger rebuttal first. Knowledge of God is of a different order. It requires a belief in the "substance of things which are not seen," or "faith." By faith, I don't mean "believing what the priest tells you anyway, in spite of the fact that your intellect tells you something else is true." This is a lazy attitude. I'm not talking about dogma, I'm talking about the willingness to have an experience.

This kind of knowledge, which is called "gnosis," can only be achieved by interior means, and not through epistemological, "subject/object" inquiry. Science and reason describe the attributes of the physical world, but do not penetrate its essence. The conundrum for the materialists is that they never experience God because they are asking the wrong questions and using the wrong methods.

The question of whether or not he can suspend logic is irrelevant, because if he could, how would we know whether or not he could?

Did you know Wagner was an antisemite? It really saddened me to hear that such a visonary guy who basically brought opera to the people was an antisemite =\

Yeah, I knew that. A lot of intellectuals were anti-Semites before the holocaust.

Here's something I just read:

"Science has as its object the study and the theoretical reconstruction of the order of the world--the order of the world in relation to the mental, psychic, and bodily structures of man. Contrary to the naive illusions of certain scholars, neither the use of telescopes and microscopes, nor the employment of most unusual algebraical formulae, nor even a contempt for the principle of noncontradiction will allow it to get beyond the limits of this structure. Moreover it is not desirable that it should. The object of science is the presence of Wisdom in the universe, Wisdom of which we are the brothers, the presence of Christ, expressed through matter which constitutes the world."

--Simone Weil

right, but those "interior means" are necessarily subjective. you can either look outward with the light of reason (an objective method) or look inward to your own feelings (a subjective method). whether you call it gnosis, faith, revelation, or whatever, it all refers to the same thing: the reliance on your own feelings to "prove" things, which can't be done. that kind of epistemological method is tantamount to saying "i feel that god exists, so he must," which is a totally invalid way of demonstrating anything, let alone the metaphysical basis of ultimate reality.

You are making the assumption that if something is not capable of being proved by logic, that it is therefore relegated to the vagueness of "feelings." Mystical experience is not a vague feeling or a sentiment, nor is it subject to logic--it is the apprehension of the Real. Logic and science do not apprehend Reality, they describe our experience of the shared dream of the physical in relation to those elements of being which compose our personalities.

You are also supposing that the confines of human logic are sufficient to hold the infinitude of God, which is fallacious. You place logic above God, using it to demonstrate his non-existence. However, the limitations of the human intellect make it impossible for the intellect (or the feelings) to apprehend the divine in the first place, which is why your whole argument seems silly to me...

On the contrary, everything I am saying seems silly to you because of your individualism and materialist bias.

you have to examine exactly what logic is, logic is a set of patterns and properties that happen consistently in our humanly lives. these patterns where formed naturaly through the development of the universe. if god did indeed provoke the big bang i'd strongly suggest that he let it develop further on its own course, resulting in a butterfly like effect. the logic we perseve is arbitrary, set by the natural course of the universe which i assume had the intervention of god to a degree.

in the spiritual realm there is no mathimatical logic, common sense or anything of the like because those are purely products of the material world. id say in the hypothetical sense god does in fact have the power to change it, but why in the fuck would he?

people put way to much superstition into god, alot of people call science the enemy of religion when really its a supplement. here we are able to see the physical evidence of what god has done.

i have more to say, but im being called for dinner

Nice! Enjoy dinner.

"god is an object by which we measure our pain" - john lennon

lol diesel

edit:
rep ++

So if you've always been capable of intelligent posting, why were you posting such utter shite for so long?

I'm leaving the vagaries of the well-worn argument to one side here.

I'm with !@#$%! on this: I think that since there's no way for the intellect to define what god (perhaps Brahman would be a better word), so why bother trying to have an intellectual conversation about such things? I suppose that when you "strip down" the word into what it really means, or perhaps what it could mean in terms of science, logic, etc. than nobody can really argue with you that some force exists that started turning the wheel of creation, and therefore can be seen as the sum of all forces that exist inside creation (if the singularity that existed before the big bang was still, then motion was the creator, no?). Now... what this "god"--again I hate to use the term because it gets tangled up with deities and all that, and those are whole 'nother story entirely--let me start over. What does "god" have to do with our day to day lives? It is obviously there because its everywhere, but its role in our lives is nonexistant. We may recognize that it created the potential energy that eventually put the right particles in the right place at the right time to forge single celled organisms from the furnace of the Earth which would eventually evolve into the massive collections of cells that is a hungover writer-wannabe typing some long spiel about God on an internet message board, but why all of this happened, how it happened, whodunnit, whatever, isn't worth worrying about. I think the only thing one needs to worry about, spiritually thinking, is one's own humanity. We're all a part of creation, but we can distinguish ourselves from the rest because we have reached a level of cognition where our free will is capable of trumping every one of our instinctive urges. This means that, with practice, we can eliminate those of our instincts (I'm speaking mostly about emotions here, which is the primary area of human thought that is still considered to be 100% instinctual, an idea that I disagree with stongly) which, although they were necessary for survival at one point in time (think fear, agression, greed, etc), are capable of creating negative consequences for other sentient beings and unhapiness or dissatisfaction for ourselves. So instead of thinking about a higher power which is there and it isn't there and carrying on with that trip until the end of eternity, I'm content to do my best to elminate unnecessary suffering from my life and the lives of others. Anyway...........

If people give me utter shite, I give it back.

Funny thread!
Keep on going!

I'm not entirely convinced of a 'higher power' in the sense of something that created and controls us, but I accept that there are forces/phenomena that we do not understand - it may be that they all become logically comprehended as scientific phenomena, it may be that some of them can only be comprehended within the framework tof a new philosophical or scientific paradigm, or it may be that some of them, when understood, are indeed found to be a 'higher power' of some sort. I consider the second option to be the most likely, but that said, considering something to be the most likely is no indication of faith or a sense of inner truth.

I certainly do not feel an absolute truth or divine working in the way that persons such as Juliana of Norwich, Oliver Cromwell or Aleister Crowley have.

I refuse the Christian idea of God because if He is good, perfect and omnipotent then it must be the case that everything that happens is good, for He is good and perfect and omnipotent and by His omnipotence and divine power He has allowed it to happen. I've met a few 'Christian fundamentalists' (my term, not intended in a derogatory manner) who believe this, absolutely; I find it abhorrent but logical if one is to believe as a Christian is required to. I admit freely to being predisposed to a refusal of the Christian god, so it is unsurprising that I find a way to justify my personal spiritual instincts.