And God said, Let there be light: and there was light

No, you shrugged off my answers to that post.

And there, Rick, are Dickynoo's magic stories on full display.

Please elaborate.

Pointless. You're not open.

How convenient.

No one.

But why change the subject? Why not demonstrate that the very concept of God is a logical contradiction?

When you reduce the definition of emotion from "the ability to react in a positive or negative way," as I put it here, also explained as "the ability to say 'This is good' or 'this is bad,'" as I put it elsewhere, to "The ability to react," of course that is no longer a sufficient definition of emotions. Amoebas, computer programs and chemicals do not react in a positive or negative way, they just do what is in their nature to do. None of them can meaningfully say: "This is good" or "This is bad." So they are pretty poor analogies of emotions.

If you think about it, you will see that emotions are your subjective reaction to what you perceive. They are a manifestation of your liking, disliking, approving, disapproving, finding something comfortable, finding it dangerous, and so on. None of the things you mentioned has, even in a rudimentary way, any such capacity, or even any capacity that tends in that direction.

I also might mention that in my psychological studies, we did not use a dictionary as a way of finding out what emotions are...

That is pretty much Diacanu's reaction to everything, but it is unfair to say it about Dan. In the part of this thread in which I have participated, at least, he has been perfectly polite. He has not resorted to insults or mockery, and his questions are valid, even though he does not like the answers he gets.

And the point of a discussion is not to convert people to your way of thought. Otherwise, almost all discussions on Wordforge are pointless. Personally, I find it interesting to see what objections anti-theists (as opposed to apatheists) can raise, to see if any of them have any logical validity. The only two posters who have ever raised any such objections are Storm and Paladin, and even with the two of them, though they did a significantly better job of defending their atheism than other posters with whom I have discussed the subject, they were only able in the end to say "I do not find your arguments for God compelling" but not able to present a compelling argument for saying that God cannot exist. (Storm attempted it, but only succeeded in validly demonstrating that one particular concept of God is self-contradictory.)

IOW, such discussions are an excellent way of testing my own beliefs, to see if they can be defended logically or if they are simply "blind faith," a concept that my scientific and mathematical background finds quite distasteful.

I just did.

The POINT of the God hypothesis, is that it allegedly has explanitory power for the world around us.

But, it HAS NO explanatory power.

Thanks to evolution, and cosmology, IT'S NOT NECESSARY to explain anything in the natural world.

The infinite regression problem merely puts the nail in the coffin.

Yep, I go out of my way to write thought out posts, and then it takes no effort on your part to make stuff like this up.

But I'm the insulting one.

Given where the thread's gone to, I think this may be a good time to reply to your query about the Mormon view of progression to Godhood, Async.

And Diacanu, shame on you for invoking the, "A 'loving' God wouldn't allow tsunamis, the holocaust, child rape, and [-]Dancing With The Stars[/-] Reality TV," argument. That argument is fundamentally flawed and at odds with the concept of a loving parent, let alone a loving God. Here, permit me to couch it in a way that applies to your life: A 'loving' mother or father wouldn't allow tsunamis, the holocaust, child rape, and [-]Dancing With The Stars[/-] Reality TV.

Now, obviously, a mother or father doesn't have any power over tsunamis, the holocaust or Reality TV (or the endemic of child rape on a societal scale), so the comparison's a stretch. Entertain the concept, though: What is wrong (outside the comparative scaler issue) with a mother or father preventing these Problems?

On the surface, this looks good: No natural disasters killing people, no mass murders, no traumatic sexual crimes, no quality-depraved entertainment on the vacuum tubes. Utopia!

Oh, it's that U-word. Utopias, by definition, are someone else's dystopia, especially when they're forced on us. It removes choice, free agency. Remove that, you remove growth, because now you don't have consequences to learn from. We are now merely drones, slaves without any choice in our affairs, because everything's been set out for us, prescribed by the dictates of Utopia, our mother and father (our loving God) who prevent the disasters, the murders, the rapes, and Twilight. We aren't happy, because we don't know what happiness is. We don't even know what sorrow is, for that matter.

A loving parent, a loving God, for that matter, wants us to be happy. But we have to earn it. How? We get ground rules, but we pretty much get to do what we want. We learn by following or breaking those rules; it's our choice either way.

Now you've probably heard God referred to as God the Father or Heavenly Father at one point or another. The Latter-Day Saints take a literal view to this: We are all God's children. He made us in his image, no? And he wants us to be happy. We gotta earn it.

The LDS (and I imagine there has to be some other protestant denominations that do as well) belief holds that prior to Adam and Eve being placed in the Garden, a Council convened in heaven, in which literally every one of us were present, to determine the Order of Things, as it were. There were two plans presented, one by Lucifer, who would guide Man and ensure every last one of us would return to God, with no exceptions -- and the Glory would be Lucifer's. The other plan was Jesus', where we'd be free to choose our own way, he'd go down and save us from our own sin and all Glory would be God's. We voted; 1/3 of the Hosts of Heaven went for Lucifer's plan, 2/3 went for Christ's. Lucifer and his faction rebelled against the ruling and were cast out.

That sounds harsh, does it not? Ironically, it follows the consequences of free agency quite nicely: You're free to rebel, but you have to pay the consequences of doing so. In this case, it's forfeiting getting a mortal body and returning to God.

What about Lucifer's Plan? Under him, everyone would have returned to God. Sounds great... except it was an enforced Utopia where no one sinned (else they couldn't return to God). If it was enforced, there is no choice. If there is no choice, there is no growth, no knowledge of Right and Wrong or happiness and sorrow. Lucifer has since worked to drag as many of us as possible to his side and into misery (whether here in mortality or in the afterlife).

Async: Because we Mormons believe God is literally our father in the eternal senes, we believe that God wants us inherit everything he has should we prove ourselves. This includes Godhood. Like you commented in the other thread, this doesn't mean an end of Progression; it's just another step down the unending road. If God wants us to have everything he has, how did he get it himself? It stands to reason that he himself must have had a similar life experience to what we go through: Mortality, family, life, death, resurrection, Judgement. In the process, it's clear he developed a personality, and each trait that Dan Leach mentions in part of his query (need, imperfection, emotion, experience, memory) is easily attached in this case.

The difficult thing to accept, of course, is the notion that God went through mortality (let alone the concept of us mere mortals becoming gods ourselves). But if God is our heavenly father, then (based on the LDS stance on the family) there is a heavenly mother (who sadly is irrelevant to our Story at large; she's just there), Jesus is our brother (making the Trinity three in body, one in purpose -- ok, the Holy Spirit doesn't have a body). How did God and Mrs. God meet? Our best guess and belief is during their own time in Mortality.

Remind me the rest of your question to me, as I don't think I've touched on it all, and I doubt this is a good enough of an explanation to sate you.

Says who? The cosmological argument, to which you refer, certainly has little to do with why I believe in God.

And in any case, the concept of an uncreated God is not a logical contradiction.

So you are still failing totally at demonstrating that the very concept of God is self-contradictory. You've been ducking and weaving more than a one-legged drunken boxer, but not managing to hit on anything solid.

Nope. No other Christian group believes that, unless you count the various dissident offshoots of the LDS. It is not what the Bible teaches, and no other group accepts the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, or Doctrine and Covenants as inspired books.

As for your answer on progression, my question was simply whether or not you believed it. I do not, because it is clearly contradictory to what the Bible teaches. (Psalm 90:2: "From eternity to eternity you are God." Isaiah 43:10: "Before me there was no God made, and there will be none after me." Among numerous other passages.)

But thanks for the answer.

BTW, that was a typo that I didn't notice until I saw it in your rep comment (and which I have corrected in the post). It is actually Isaiah 43:10

Well, you either get infinite regress, which is a logical contradiction, or, you get the "outside of time", bullshit, which no theist can/will explain the mechanism by which such a being could interact with our universe.

And without that necessary element, there's no reason to entertain such a hypothesis.

All of which is irrelevant.

Atheists think the universe just happened, without anyone to create it. If an uncreated God is a logical contradiction, and therefore cannot exist, an uncreated universe is equally a logical contradiction, and therefore cannot exist. But as soon as you admit that something is uncreated (uncaused), then it is no more contradictory to say that may be God than to say it may be the universe.

You are still failing miserably at attempting to show that the concept of God is inherently contradictory. At most, you are backing yourself into a corner by implying that anything you cannot understand is impossible (such as how a being who is outside of time as we know it can interact with time), which means that the Big Bang is impossible. Yet there appears to be very solid scientific evidence for the Big Bang, even though no one has yet been able to come up with a coherent explanation of the conditions that brought it about, or preceeded it.

Hey, I posted again!

Heh. Now there is an interesting point. My little pop-culture take on God is that there is only one God. He just has a pretty sophisticated marketing department. Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Shiva, the Thunderbird, Heimdall--take your pick. Each culture has a different ability to understand "God", so like Proctor & Gamble and their 18 different brands of detergent, there is a slightly different approach to understanding something that is too big for us to understand.

Because that's what it boils down to--humans can't understand God because "he" is, well, God.

That said, we're probably a lot more able to understand "him" than nomadic West Asian sheep herders. They probably couldn't get their heads around the Big Bang, the solar system, evolution, and a host of other things. Heheh. Shit, just look at marketing 20-30 years ago and today and look how sophisticated ads and movie trailers have become. Look at cartoons and comic books from the 1970s. Heck, compare Season One of "Batman: The Animated Series" to the latest episode of "Justice League".

A lot of things in the Bible don't stand up today because we know a lot more as a society than they did 2-4 millenia ago.

That concept used to be popular, but the weight of scientific evidence is clearly against it now. Big Bang theory does not allow for anything before the Big Bang. The possibility of an oscilating universe (though without a scrap of evidence to back it up) had been proposed before, but it is pretty much accepted science now that the universe will never contract from the Big Bang.

So what most are proposing today is that the Big Bang created time, matter, energy, and everything.

OTOH, if the universe has been here forever, then it still is uncreated, which leaves the point intact that the concept of something uncreated is not in itself contradictory. It appears in fact to be a logical necessity.

^ Exactly. Which is why the first cause argument does not prove the existence of God. It only shows that there must be something that is uncaused, either because it happened spontaneously, or because it always was.

Nevertheless, the concept of something being uncaused is not, in itself, contradictory. Theists cannot explain how an uncaused God can exist, and atheists cannot explain how an uncaused universe can exist. But each side, if they are honest, must admit that the other position is not self-contradictory in and of itself.

Actually, non-belief in Gods is all atheism puts one on the hook for.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, you should read up on it.

...of the type proposed by Theists to shore up their myth.

See my last two paragraphs.

Perhaps, but given the millions of possibilities, there's no reason whatever to shoehorn a magic man into the equation.

The God of any "revealed", theism is contradictory, because humans apply traits to that being that are doomed to contradict.

All you're left with is a Deist God, and a Deist God is so powerless and silent as to be meaningless.

No, all you're left with is a deist God.

God is very present in my life, thank you. (Which, as I have said many, many times, is why neither you nor anyone else has any chance of swaying my beliefs on whether or not he exists. It's like JohnM talking to Neil Armstrong and telling him the moon landings were faked. Neil couldn't prove it was all true, of course, but John would never have the slightest chance of convincing him it wasn't.)

Well...that was mature...

Care to snap a Polaroid sometime?
That might help.
Just sayin...

That may be speculated, however it's very far from having any solidity. Current models predict a singularity at the beginning of time, but that's only because they break down under such extreme conditions. The direction that newer theories seem to be heading in would remove the singularity, and the big bang (and thus the universe) would be a quantum fluctuation arising from an earlier more primitive "sea" of such fluctuations.
In this primeval sea, it may be that things like time, and cause and effect are not fundamental in the way that they are to us.

I wonder how theists would react to a theory that explained the origin of universe in a full and coherent mathematical way.

please clarify by directing us to the poster who has asserted God is "an established fact"

(or indeed, anyone. No one would suggest that you need "faith" if that which was the object of faith was an established fact)