Can Christianity Be Proven?

Thanks for pointing out that Gandhi is not actually referenced in the Bible.

What about those alive before Jesus' birth? Clearly there are exceptions.

 

Not for the truly devout. To them, the rest of us are already dead.

 

Let 'em burn.

 

I'm not denying that there could be some higher meaning to our existence, all I'm saying is that I don't think there is. And when I'm talking about a purpose here I'm talking about a universal purpose or meaning for all of humanity. The only such purpose I can think of is to try and spread your genes as much as possible, which really isn't a lot.

Other purposes with my existence is either given to me by something outside of me be that a religion, my family, or something else, or I choose to define a purpose with my existence whatever that may be. Of course it's normally a mixture of both.

KJ

 

Just as an aside (I really don't want to argue this stuff), I wouldn't punish Adolf Hitler with eternal hellfire. A couple weeks maybe (ouch!).

 

So Jesus Christ is this character that is supposed to be half-human, half-god. Presumably, his god-half gets a free pass to heaven. If Jesus does not accept Jesus as his personal savior, does his human-half rot in hell for all eternity?

If that is not the case, can I accept myself as my personal savior, in order to avoid the eternal death penalty supposedly imposed by Christianity?

 

It could be disproven if it makes claims that are logically contradictory, or counter to established facts.

 

No, it could be shown to be unlikely. You can't really prove a negative.

 

Here is a question that's really bothering me: if Heaven is going to be full of Christians, is it really worth trying to get into?
Methinks, I'll just fully extend my middle finger to Mr. Christ right now. See that, Jeesie boy?

 

Sure you can. You can prove a negative if the positive claim is (like I said) logically inconsistent or counter to established facts. If someone claimed that there exists a man who is both married and a bachelor, then it is possible to prove that such a man does not exist because his traits self-contradict. If someone claimed that a bird was sitting on my head, it is possible to prove that such a bird does not exist because I can look in a mirror and see there is no such bird. If someone claimed that the largest carbon based biped weighs 30 tons, then yes I would need to do the impossible task of searching the entire universe throughout all time to determine the claim was false because it is neither logically inconsistent nor counter to known facts (who knows if there aren’t large bipeds on other planets?).

It isn't possible to prove that there is not any being that could conceivably be called "God". However, once you start giving God traits (all-knowing, long beard, pink, whatever...), it starts to become possible to show contradictions in a definition and thus prove that a God with certain attributes cannot exist. That is why, for example, the "problem of evil" is a problem. A god that is all-powerful, all-good and all-knowing is not consistent with a world containing evil, so a god with those attributes cannot exist. A god defined as holding the people of earth so special that they are the center of the Universe is not consistent with the observable fact that the Earth is just a minor planet orbiting a minor star in a galaxy of stars. This is why Galileo was persecuted, as the Church had a vested interest in maintaining that definition of God. Eventually the Church had to change the definition of God.

Try these articles:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/ipnegep.html
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/theory.html

 

Yes.

First He makes the rock, and then He makes it smaller and lighter, so He can lift it.

Don't work harder, work smarter.

 

It's easy to be certain. If you just blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, you will be certain of going to hell because that is the one unforgivable sin. (Matthew 12:31) This is a good way of stopping short any conversation with door-to-door evangelists.

 

Come on spejic. I'm more than familiar with this line of argument. However, admitting for the existence of a supernatural being who is beyond our comprehension assumes that he is able to survive the contradictions our minds can discern.
The same does not hold true of your bachelor example, as nothing in that example removes it from the world of Newtonian physics where 1 does not equal 2.
As for Catholic dogma - I find it wonderfully romantic and inconsistent. You have to give a lot of credit to a people who took their religion's bylaws so seriously they spent time determining just how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

 

They will dance!
Thay will make him laugh!
They will be his monkey!

 

That's what I tell people who tell me there's no tooth fairy.

So are you saying that the married bachelor is a supernatural being beyond our comprehension? That's one of the most interesting arguments against analytic statements (where analytic is understood to mean "true by virtue of meaning") that I've ever run across. Quine would be amused.

In any event, and I honestly am confused by what you said, you seem just to place deist claims outside the realm of human reason and thereby force them to be justifiable only by a fideism. Fine by me, and of course an argument could be made that at the end of the day we all just accept some group of claims on faith... but that would be a bad argument. Not all contingent claims are equal.

I'm going to go away now. I can't beleive I watched that mindnumbingly dull Crew/Revs match instead of doing something fun. there is no god. arrrghhh.

 

Saying that our logical standards shouldn't apply to an almigthy God is a actually quite defensible. Such a being is assumed to be eternal, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient (sp?) etc. Such a being would ultimately be outside our limited human understanding, thereby rendering us totally unable to define what God is. If you insist that such a being should follow our human logic is to lower it to our level in at least one area of existence and implies that in at least one aspect of existence there's limitations to what such a being could do. This is simply not the case with God as portrayed at least in the christian faith. God is God and is unfathomable to us, simple as.

KJ

 

1. You HAVE defined "god" as eternal, omni-everything, which are concepts we DO understand. It's just that when the inherent problems with such a definition fail, you assign the additional attribute "undefinable". If it is undefinable, god might very well be a mean bastard, and Segroves' piety is the evidence.

2. Of course you can ASSERT thtat such a being exists, but that is not a defense of the such a being's existence.

3. If God is incomprehensible to the human mind, you have given it a limitation.

4. Why not just say that your reason for believing in god is faith and stop making crappy arguments?

I think Nicephoras was wrong to dismiss spejic's "married bachelor" example. I can tell you that the claim "there are no married bachelors" is true by the meaning of the words. You simply, say, well, that's fine, but my concept of "married bachelor" is beyond human comprehension. There are married bachelors, see, it's just that we cannot understand them. Oh, and by the way, they are all loving and all knowable. That's all you're doing. You're aserting the opposite of a logical conclusion and giving it the mystical quality "undefinable/unfathomable". Then you claim that charcateristic as a logical basis for refuting the apparent force of the argument that drives you to such an assertion. Saying you have faith is the obvious solution, and sure seems like the whole point of, you know, having faith in god.

 

Who, of course, cannot be disproven. We've just chosen this particular faith based belief to be stupid.

No, I'm saying that in order to believe in the concept of a married bachelor, one would have to assume its a supernatural being. Because otherwise, it cannot be true. You'd have to have faith that such a contradictory being exists. That doesn't disprove the existence of an unmarried bachelor provided you are willing to go beyond logic and enter the realm of faith.
However, there is no tradition in human history of belief in unmarried bachelors, thus I would imagine no one believes that. Religion is something that, again, must be taken on faith, much like the existence of a contradictory being.

Well of course that's what I said (the first part of your post). The moment you say "I believe in a supernatural being that can do X, Y and Z", how is that NOT beyond the realm of human reason? The whole argument of religion is that "God has a plan". Well, of modern religion, anyway - Zeus's plan was fully implemented in "Old School", except Vince Vaughn was too much of a pu$sy to screw that girl. Clearly we aren't clever or intelligent enough to discern that plan (god knows the side of my family in Europe in the 30s and 40s wasn't), so we have to believe in it despite the fact that its reason is beyond us.
The argument for Christianity would then be to say that we understand enough thanks to the teachings of Jesus, but not enough to fully divine God's plan or existence. Either he created us with limited capability to process such knowledge, or he in his inifinite wisdom has chosen not to explain it. I don't know. But then again, I also don't believe in Christianity or God.
I guess at the end I didn't like the bachelor example because it boils down to this - bachelor and marriage are concepts entirely within our realm of logic. Nothing about them requires us to understand anything beyond those concepts themselves. There's no faith to be taken in either concept - I've seen a bachelor (me) and a married man (my dad). Provided we are willing to accept the Platonic rather than Kantian view of metaphysics (as I understand them to a very limited degree), that the world is as it is, (as opposed to the world being the way it is just because I see it that way) then a married man cannot be a bachelor. Just like one cannot equal two. But in a discussion of God, you begin your assumption by saying "I believe in X despite my inability to prove it to you through logical means". That takes us out of the realm of normal logic, and once we do that, I see no reason to apply that logic selectively to the rest of the argument disprove a being who's existence we've assumed on pure faith.
I hope that made sense.

So you're saying NIetzsche proclaimed God was dead after watching a Bayern Munich game?

 

Come on out to San Francisco and see more married bachelors than you can shake a stick at

 

Don't make me say "synthetic unity of apperception".

It does make sense -- I see now what you mean by "out of the realm of logic". A better way to put it, though, is that beliefs in god are outside the realm of reason. These beliefs just aren't a part of the rational justification game, where this game includes both a posteriori and a priori justifications that allow for both deductive and inductive proofs. And as a smart dude, you know that inductive conclusions aren't logically forced even though they are valid. (btw, you could believe that there exist married bachelors on faith - it is completely analogous, but I am not going to push it any further).

At the end you and I are on the same page. An honest fideism does not need to engage in these ridiculous attempts at proving god's existence, let alone that god has certain qualities and hairstyles. So when Mike says that "it cannot be unproven" he is simply letting us all know that his belief in god is not a part of the proof game. Faith does all the work. The only bumer is that faith does all the work for a lot of people, both deists and atheists (much to their cognitive dissonance), and turns out pretty crappily for everyone. And we cannot adjudicate between the "reasonable-ness" of faiths.

Either that or he pronounced it after looking into the future at Chelsea's early matches this year.