Just like the number two exists as an abstraction of the mind, so must God too.

@Posty

Hahaha. As dialectically clear as can be.

Hahaha. As dialectically clear as can be. — Modern Conviviality

Whereof one cannot speak, you know? :wink:

"Belief in God" is not invariably the product of child rearing practices, but it usually is. Parents teach religion to their children. That is where a belief in god comes from.

Adults non-believers are converted by missionaries or by social contact and a wish to belong to the community.

Disbelief is taught in some societies, but where religion is dominant, disbelief is most likely to be the result of individual responses. It is easy to bring a child into religion; an adult has to dig his way out.

My intellect says it's impossible to know, but my heart says there is no God.

What did you have in mind by "God"?

"Belief in God" is not invariably the product of child rearing practices, but it usually is. Parents teach religion to their children. That is where a belief in god comes from. — Bitter Crank

This cannot be where the belief in God comes from because it implies an infinite regress of parents teaching religion to their children. That would mean that there was always, forever in the past, parents teaching their children religion. That cannot be, because their was a time before parents and children. Therefore belief in God does not come from parents teaching religion to their children.

I'm only regressing back to when religion started -- that day paw said, "You know... there's something fishy about that rock."

Days later...

"Hey kid, get over here. Look at this rock. It just spoke to me again. Give the rock what's left of your pork chop. We don't want to piss off the rock god."

Minutes later...

"Hey maw; paws going crazy. He thinks there is a god in a rock."

"Shut up, kid," maw said, "or the snake god will sneak into our hovel and bit you."

That's how religion began. True, there was a time before parents and children: about a billion years ago. (I don't call divided bacteria children or parents.)

You're missing something though. What gave paw the idea that there was a god in the rock? That's the real start to religion, not paw telling the kid to please the god. And we can't say that paw got the idea from his paw because that implies infinite regress. If paw didn't see, hear, or apprehend in some other way, a god in the rock, then where did paw get the idea that there is a god in the rock?

"Belief in God" is not invariably the product of child rearing practices, but it usually is. Parents teach religion to their children. That is where a belief in god comes from.

Adults non-believers are converted by missionaries or by social contact and a wish to belong to the community.

Disbelief is taught in some societies, but where religion is dominant, disbelief is most likely to be the result of individual responses. It is easy to bring a child into religion; an adult has to dig his way out. — Bitter Crank

I was raised Atheist, but later questioned and rejected that faith.

Michael Ossipoff

Some small god of a rock speaking to paw was the result of hallucinations caused by paw's promiscuous nibbling on plants in the forest. The hallucination (which paw had not the sophistication to distinguish from reality) was compelling. Maw, on the other hand, was very fearful of snakes. She dreaded snakes, and because she dreaded them, she just assumed there must be something perverse about them -- like them being supernatural.

So the poor kid was pretty much doomed to hearing about one god or another all the time. When he grew up, he naturally warned his children about rock and snake gods. So, after only the second generation, religion was well on its way.

tell us more about the experience. What religious tradition beckoned to you?

I simply do not believe that the universe in all its complexity, beauty and creativity is entirely the result of purposeless, meaningless, valueless process. I suppose I just have a romantic, idealist and religious inclination. I do not know if God is real but I think the concept (in some forms) is useful and inspiring.

If you have to choose a single most convincing argument for or against the existence of God, what will it be? — Yajur

I don't believe in an absolute God who is also a distinct individual entity separate from me or others because nature, the revelation of reality, has not yet disclosed such. However, I believe in the absoluteness of the 'intelligence' or 'cosmic' activity which unfolds everything and which manifests in and through everything. The same 'intelligence' which we employ a part of, in our lives, is the same which governs our evolution, as well as the mechanics of the planets, solar systems, galaxies, universe and all in existence. The laws which govern existence are omni-present/potent and manifest omniscience in all their associations. Therefore, I believe in Fact/Reality and I worship Life.

The most convincing way to me is to come up with a plausible definition of 'God' that has a referent.

Definition:
'God' refers to that which is:
unified and continuous (not made of parts),
eternal (not in the sense of infinite time, but in the sense of non-temporal, absolute simultaneity),
omnipresent (spatially everywhere, i.e. is space),
omniscient (not in the sense of knowing the set of all facts but in the sense of an omnipresent conscious substance aware of its behaviours)
omnipotent (not in the sense of being able to perform any act described in any random sentence with a verb (e.g. kill something that's dead), but in the sense that there is no power which is not God's. All existing things are relatively stable behaviour-patters of God's body. This power to self-move, do Big Bangs, create particles which then persist seemingly autonomously, is God's omnipotence.)

Objection1: Why on earth call that 'God'? That's just the universe, or reality.
Answer: Because the universe or reality is not commonly considered to be conscious and intentional. This definition makes that explicit. Surely a conscious universe is about as Goddish as you can get, but I'm not bothered if you don't want to call it 'God', especially if you want to avoid a whole lot of other false and pernicious baggage that often goes with the word.

But consciousness emerged late in the history of the universe.
This is the big substantive question that cannot be solved by making a definition. No, it didn't, in my view. Consciousness is not emergent. Panpsychism is true. See every other post on the forum I have ever made ad nauseum.

Objection2 Even if I agree with this definition and that the universe is conscious, I still don't see what this has got to do with the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, and all the holy texts and creation myths of any religion that espouses a creator God consistent with your definition. Nor do I see why such belief means we should hate fags, suicide bomb people and deny evolution.

Answer: That's all fair enough. As far as holy texts and creation myths are concerned, there tends to be very little metaphysical commitments in them (unless you take them literally of course, which would be foolish). The reason I might want to maintain a connection between such texts and a belief in the conscious reality defined above is that I think it might be the case that such stories contain subjective metaphorical accounts of what it feels like to create an universe, and may provide insights into the relationship between the creator and the created and the intentions behind such actions. Science is clearly much better placed to provide an objective non-metaphorical account of the physical details of what happens, but it is silent on what it feels like to be the substance undergoing those processes. There are no characters or drama in physics, and as such it is incomplete.

Also, I have no problem with cherry-picking. Just because I find one bit of the Bible edifying, I don't have to swallow the lot.

In summary, this approach is defining God as the reality-as-continuum we already know.

There are no convincing arguments for or against God's existence; there is no arguing the case for a malformed question. The effort itself is abortive.

There are no convincing arguments for or against God's existence... — StreetlightX

And....

There's no convincing evidence that we even understand the concept of existence well enough to make the God debate question meaningful.

As example, the overwhelming vast majority of reality at every scale is space. Does space exist? At the least this is debatable. More likely, the phenomena of space transcends our simplistic yes/no definition of existence.

Here's a summary of the God debate.

1) Does God mangobombka?
2) What does mangobombka mean?
3) We have no idea.
4) Ok, let's debate mangobombka!!

My Theism is largely an impression suggested by metaphysics--by which I mean metaphysics of the describable, Of course the matter of God or Reality isn't describable, but the way describable metaphysics looks suggested impressions about Reality.

But I'd say that a hint came from one of the people interviewed by Jim Holt, in his book of interviews about why there's something instead of nothing.

Michael Ossipoff

I should add that I'm not a Fundamentalist or a Biblical Lilteralist. Atheists tend to take those persuasions as the meaning of Theism. No, those are just some Theists. But those are usually the only Theists and Theisms that Atheists have heard about.

Though I'm a Theist, I don't regard Theism as a matter for assertion, argument, debate, or proof.

But Atheists who'd like to find out about other Theisms could look up Apophatic Theism, or find that interview in the Jim Holt book that I referred to.

But I feel that the notion of "creation" is anthropomorphic. And usually I avoid using the word "God", because that word has anthropomorphic connotations.

This thread's OP asked for arguments, and, as I said, I don't do argument about Theism vs Atheism But one thing that I can say here is that there's very little that can be said about the matter..

Michael Ossipoff

The most convincing way to me is to come up with a plausible definition of 'God' that has a referent. — bert1

Definition. God is that which is most important.

Everyone has something that is most important in their life. One gives supreme worth to something - worships it. Self, wealth, society, power, fame, family, love, justice, pleasure, survival, some book or tradition, etc. Even 'nothing' can be one's god, but that is a miserable life.

This is a tiresomely practical definition that has little to do with the expression of beliefs or unbeliefs, or the existence of what is worshipped; "Ye shall know them by their fruits". Accordingly, it will find favour with no one, because everyone likes to think they have the right of it.