From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 8:38 AM
To: 'Gary Kirkland'
Subject: RE: god

The only conflict I have with it is that everything is a mental concept. I don't know what this has to do with our disagreement.

You were the one who decided to declare you were an Idealist.

BH: To say that "there is no gravity" is either misleading or false.

GK: You are right when mention that quantum mechanics does not agree with the theory of relativity.  Science does not agree with itself.

To say that "science does not agree with itself" is either misleading or false. You have a habit of making such statements. Is this some kind of attention-getting device?

Found a graviton?

Even if gravitons turn out not to exist, it will remain misleading or false to say that "there is no gravity".

Aristotle did the same thing when he came up with the Unmoved Mover.  This was Aristotle's "god."  He did not use the common English word "god."  English did not exist.  This is why I said the Big Bang Theory is the modern version of Aristotle's God.  I meant no more than that.

And I already explained to you why you were wrong: Almost no informed atheist would seriously claim that the Big Bang -- or more precisely, the framework of physical laws that allow the Big Bang to arise from an uncaused singularity -- is its own cause completely ex nihilo. The Big Bang is indeed hypothesized as a first event, but it assumes an elaborate infrastructure of physical laws to serve as its causal framework. It's simply not analogous to an uncaused cause.

The modern atheistic alternative to God as Uncaused Cause is in fact the metaphysical theory called modal realism, which explains the existence of our universe by saying that all possible universes are equally real -- or at least seem real to their hypothetical inhabitants.

I belong to the the Methodist Church which is part of the World Council of Churches.  They recognize The Unmoved Mover as one description of god

One description of a Dog is an animal with fur and four legs. Cats meet this description, but that doesn't make them dogs.

The ancient Egyptians worshiped the sun as a god, but it was not supernatural, as far as I can tell.

We indeed now know that the sun is not supernatural. But they thought it was a personal agency.

On can pile modern dictionaries up to the moon.  It won't change the fact that some gods are natural, regardless of the language one uses.

All gods have so far turned out to be natural (or non-existent). It doesn't change the fact that those who believed in them considered them supernatural.

cause and effect is a description of god.  Behaving as if cause and effect is true is worshiping god.  Modern scientists, including Scientific Naturalists worship god.

Just because a principle -- like causality or parsimony or non-contradiction -- is essential to a worldview does not make it a "god" of that worldview. It may be fun to play the village atheist, but are you really willing to construe anything as a 'god' just for more chances to reprise that role? Again, this behavior suggests a desire for attention.

 

These facts remain:

My purpose here was to cite these facts in order to correct your assertion that science and religion share a common god. So far you've failed to refute any of these three facts.
Facts are what I believe are true.  Others believe other things and have different facts than I do.
No, a fact is a synthetic proposition that is demonstrably true. In the end you won't be able to refute any of the above three facts; that is the nature of facts.