1. I clearly do believe that God exists (as a reading of the document at the link shows) but not a God who is a person.
2. Moreover, a Christian might view the OP as explaining how a "God-shaped hole" arises in individuals.
3. I respect people but don't respect ideas which I believe to be false, some of them obviously false. A talking serpent, God drowning the entire world - babies, the elderly, kittens and puppy dogs - everyone except Noah & Company, God stopping the sun in the sky so the Hebrews could finish killing their enemies? Get real. I do not respect such ideas.
4. The last 3 lines of your 5 line paragraph are ad hominem. Just wanted to point that out.

I think when Kip uses the word destroyed, he really means converted. — universeness

What he says seems clear:

Thorne at 5:28: There is not matter in that black hole. It’s not a dense object made of very dense matter. There is no matter at all. There is matter in the star that gave birth to the black hole. Long ago, a star like our sun, but somewhat heavier, will have burned its nuclear fuel. It can no longer keep itself puffed out by its internal heat. It starts to cool off. It then implodes. And all of the matter in that star, much more matter than we have in our sun, goes crashing into the center and is destroyed at what we call a singularity at the center . . . All the matter’s destroyed. There is nothing left except this warped space and warped time.

What he "really means" is anyone guess. Besides, I'm not clear about the difference between "matter is destroyed" and "matter is converted." In a nuclear bomb, matter is destroyed/converted to energy.

What do you mean by destroyed? — universeness

I'm quoting Kip Thorne. Listen to the Closer To Truth episode to hear then entire session.

Here's a possible response.

My friend is kind; my friend is unkind. Contradiction.

My friend sometimes behaves in a kind way; my friend sometimes behaves in an unkind way. No contradiction.

If we think in terms of “is,” i.e., noumena, we have a contradiction. If we think in a phenomenological way, we do not.

I made a similar point in my “Against ‘is’” thread.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13370/against-is/p1

Tate,

The Historical Jesus link to Wikipedia "Historical Jesus" has this: "There is little scholarly agreement on a single portrait."

Hm. Sounds like some, if not all, of the portraits are fictional.

• For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ Matthew 15:4 — Art48
This is not what Jesus himself believed and taught! — Alkis Piskas

OK, so I know what Jesus said according to the bible.
And I have someone I don't know on the Internet claiming to know what Jesus meant, what Jesus would have said if only Jesus could speak clearly so as to be understood.
Hm. What should I believe?

If one takes a coherentist approach to epistemology, the fine tuning argument holds weight as a “piece” of an argument for God. — Paulm12

The fine-tuning argument is simply the successor to the idea that lightning and thunder are physical signs of God's displeasure.

A point against fine-tuning which I didn't mention is that a great deal of the surface of the Earth (oceans, deserts, top of mountains) is hostile to human life in that a unclothed human being would soon die. And in 99.999999... percent of the universe, a human being would die instantly.

It's folly to take Jesus at face value. — ThinkOfOne

Correct. What has come down to us is mostly fiction.

Can you explicitly state why you think that Jesus was "not a great moral teacher" based on the verses that you cited? — ThinkOfOne

Killing a child who curses a parent is not the moral thing to do.
It's an evil teaching.

I doubt there is really "pre-science".
Science is rather a spectrum from minimal to maximal scientific rigor. — Yohan

Can you suggest a better label than "pre-science"?

If you deny doxastic voluntarism (the belief you can decide your beliefs) outright, then what triggers your belief other than a deterministic force, — Hanover

The facts as I understand them determine my belief.

Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and do not doubt ... (Matthew 21:21)
If faith is not a matter of choice then what does this mean? — Fooloso4

It means that we shouldn't take the Bible too seriously.
I don't accept "the Bible says" or "Jesus says" as a valid argument.

Faith is a matter of choice. Intelligence is not. — Fooloso4

I don't accept the idea you can chose what to believe. To use God language, I'd say both faith and intelligence are a gift of God. In my experience, many Christians say faith is a gift of God.

You also seem to feel a lack of respect for people who disagree with you in that regard. You cast doubt on their intelligence. — T Clark

Not at all. I'm fully aware there are Nobel laureates who are religious (Francis Collings is a case in point). My point is that the lacking faith accusation (which I've seen often on religious forums) seems to me ad hominem and I wonder why many religious people think that accusation is perfectly OK but would be insulted with Alex's counter-accusation

I'm asking people who believe what Chris says is OK but what Alex says is insulting to explain their reasoning. (I personally don't think there is a good reason but am opening to changing my opinion if I hear a good reason.)

I'm still not clear about the rationale for monism. — Agent Smith

If I'm a realist about a cat and a tree, then I see both as substances, as independent entities with their own essential properties that make them what they are. A cat is not a tree, and vice versa. Therefore, there are multiple things in the world.

But if cat and tree are appearances, if they have some inner essence (wavefunction, nomeuna) which is inaccessible to us, then it's conceivable their inner essences are identical.It's conceivable that monism is true.

Wikipedia has the entry "Universe wavefunction" where "The universal wave function is the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence, regarded as the "basic physical entity"[8] or "the fundamental entity, obeying at all times a deterministic wave equation."

If, in fact, there is a single, universal wavefunction which accounts for the entire universe, that would be monism, agree?

I don't claim these thoughts prove monism. I merely claim the thoughts don't rule it out; they allow that monism may be true.

Quantum mechanics is science. It is a description of how the world is or appears to be, or at least how we think it is. Noumena and phenomena are metaphysical entities. They are not facts about the world, they're ways of looking at the world. Mixing up science and metaphysics is one of the most common mistakes in philosophical discussions. — T Clark

Which is why I wrote "QM reminds of Kant’s distinction . . ."

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy. The book that arguably begin modern science is Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, i.e., The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Mixing up science and metaphysics may be a common mistake, but that doesn't me the two should never be mixed. (I'm not saying you believe the two should never be mixed. I don't know if you do or not. I'm just saying "common mistake" doesn't necessarily lead to "should never be done.")

Albero,

I’m a Schopenhauer newbie not an expert. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Arthur Schopenhauer
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/
has “An alternative title for Schopenhauer’s main book, The World as Will and Representation, might well have been, The World as Reality and Appearance. Similarly, his book might have been entitled, The Inner and Outer Nature of Reality.”

Maybe “will” is not an ideal label for what Schopenhauer had in mind?

they refer to 1) a "rational" God and 2) a God that think as humans think. Yet, such a God may not exist. — Alkis Piskas

Yes. One take away from the lack of a scripture (as described in the OP) is that God as often conceived may not exist.

Well the theists always use the same argument in that context: God is not guilty of human's free will. — javi2541997

What about earthquakes, drought, famine, disease, childhood cancer, etc.?

Why stop there? A god could surely just implant complete knowledge in all human minds, without the need for any long-form narrative — Tom Storm

Yes.

But Christians do say God has written the moral code in our hearts. Great. But when they are asked what the God-written moral code says about capital punishment, stem cell research, etc., etc, they don't agree. God seems to have a problem communicating clearly.

You're on the mark, but what if there are immaterial aspects of this our universe - perfected to house souls and satisfy their needs - that we're unaware of? — Agent Smith

Then it's up to proponents of the fine-tuning argument for God to identify those aspects and, in an ideal case, to prove them.

Please note, your argument is novel and interesting and as far as I'm concerned the only way to counter it was to replace a benevolent god with a malus deus. You should take that as a victory in my humble opinion even if scoring points is the last thing on thy mind. — Agent Smith

Thanks.

How do you know the universe isn't fine tuned for souls as well? Do you know something we don't? — Agent Smith

From the OP: But suppose we really are immaterial, immortal souls. If we are immaterial, immortal souls, then the type of universe we inhabit is irrelevant. The universe could be made entirely of green goo, and it wouldn’t matter to an immortal soul. A ghost doesn’t care if it’s raining or not. It’s immaterial; it doesn’t get wet.

Let me see if I understand this. You’re making a distinction between the legitimate use of the word ‘is’ to make a statement about objective reality vs the use of the word ‘is’ to state a subjective preference, and your only concern here is with confusions between the two contexts that result in a subjective use of ‘is’ appearing to be an objective use? — Joshs

Correct.But I'll add that I consider many apparently objective statements to be subjective.
Example: "The cat is on the table" -> "I see the cat on the table"

As a mathematician I must object to your example though. Saying 'two plus two is four' rather than the more formal 'two plus two equals four' will often lead to confusion. We just don't need 'is' in that context and it causes trouble if we do use it. The word 'equals' in mathematics conveys a relationship with a precise meaning that differs from that usually attributed to the dreaded verb 'is'. — andrewk

Good point and good response overall. Do you have a better example of a truly objective statement?
What about "There is no largest prime number"?
I consider that as a genuine objective statement (that is true).

Using it to express category membership (attributing properties) also seems harmless to me, and shorter than the e-prime alternative. Only the 'identity' and 'existence' uses cause serious trouble. — andrewk

I think attributing properties can be problematic, too, as in "That is a good movie"
But maybe attributing to myself is OK. "I am feeling happy"

I have worked on minimising my use of the the verb 'to be' over the past few years and find it a really helpful discipline, with profound benefits. — andrewk

Yes. I think the book I wrote in mostly E-Prime is a better book than it would have been otherwise.
But sometimes E-Prime seems awkward. For instance, the last sentence could have been
Yes. I regard the book I wrote in mostly E-Prime as superior to what I might have written otherwise.

Open question: Does the E-Prime attitude better accord with quantum mechanics in that, under the Copenhagen Interpretation, QM tells us what we will see if we measure rather than what IS happening when we aren't measuring. (On the other hand, Bohmian Mechanics does tell us what is happening.)

you could say: force equals mass times acceleration.
Or are you objecting to this as well because it seems to confer godlike authority? — Fooloso4

Object is too strong a work. Certainly, the world will continue using "is" as it has in the past. But, yes, "force equals mass times acceleration" is a statement about objective reality when in actuality it is what we believed before Einstein.

3+1 "is" 4 but 3+1 "is not" 2+2 — Fooloso4

The comment seems irrelevant to this thread.

So, which of all of the above meanings of "is" are you against? — Alkis Piskas

I disapprove of statements that use "is" to purportedly make a statement about objective reality that hides the fact that the statement better qualifies as someone's experience of objective reality.

Not to any competent language user. — SophistiCat

There is some truth to your statement. (Notice how "is" makes that sentence about objective reality. I should have said "I partially agree with your statement.) So, if I say "This ice cream tastes good" most people know I mean "This ice cream tastes good to me." But someone might mistake "The floor is hard" as a statement about objective reality. See my next comment.

“If I say "the floor is hard, . . ." — Joshs

"The floor is hard" is a statement about objective reality. Compared to a diamond, the floor is soft. Compared to neutron stars the floor isn't much more than a wisp of smoke.

Getting rid of it altogether is surely an overreaction. — Banno

Agree. But being aware of how "is" tends to remove the speaker from the statement so the statement appears to be objective reality seems reasonable.

Perhaps some preacher somewhere said that, but I doubt it is the position of any conservative church. For them, I think homosexuality is a sin, not a mental disease. — T Clark

You may be correct but I used what the preacher said merely as one example of the fundamentalists' dormant mind. Many other examples could be given.

I'd say both solipsism and idealism derive from a common observation: that I directly experience only my physical sense data, my emotions, and my thoughts. So, I experience shades of green and brown; the green patches feel smooth; the brown patches feel rough. The idea of a tree arises in my mind. I do not directly experience the tree.

Solipsism: that's all that exists. There is no tree. The tree is just an idea in my mind. Nothing exists outside of me. Matter is no more than a thought in my mind.

Idealism: something exists outside of me which causes my sense data. What is that something? Materialists say its matter. Berkeley says it is God causing my sense data but other idealist answers are possible.

A = A is simply the most basic form of saying that ~A = A is false. It is the axiom that tells us that contradictions are always false. — ArmChairPhilosopher

Then why the roundabout way of stating ~A = A is false? Is it hat we don't want to introduce the "not equal" connective?

For example, there are no triangles outside actual triangular objects in trope theory. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And mathematically there are no actual triangular objects in the physical world, merely approximations.

Saying they are two different balls because they are in two different locations is not that helpful either. Relative location is a derived trait, one that changes with context. If such derived traits are part of identity then you would be a different person when you're north of your house than you are when you're south of it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good point

The next thing is that the law of identity allows that a thing might be continuously changing, yet maintain its status as the same thing. This is very difficult to conceive of . . — Metaphysician Undercover

unless change is part of the thing's identity, as a whirlpool for instance, or the human body's continuous process of food intake and subsequent evacuation.

He wants to move past propositions such as, "the apple is red," that take the apple and its redness as existing outside of the perceiving mind. Identity has to be different because identity changes and grows more complete over time as our knowledge grows (as the dialectical progresses). And he doesn't want to look just at the apple as being a part of an individual subject's mind, since he is not a solipsist or subjective idealist, but how it is for all minds. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You might find E-Prime relevant to the above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime#:~:text=E%2DPrime%20(short%20for%20English,conjugations%2C%20contractions%20and%20archaic%20forms

That's phenomenalism as I understand it. — Tate

I think it also qualifies as representative realism because I'm leaving the existence of external, independently-existing object an open question.

Why do you have confidence the standard model if you learned about it through your senses? — Tate

Because for millennia human beings have worked to understand what they experience through their senses and the standard model is one result.

There are a lot more senses, which are recognized today as such, beyond the classic 5 ones: balance, weight, motion/movement/kinaesthesia, velocity/speed, spatial/orientation, body position, pressure, vibration, temperature, pain, and more ... — Alkis Piskas

I'd classify them as variations of the sense of touch.

Well, a tree is not an abstract idea so that we have an idea of it. It is an object, something concrete. So I would say that, independently of its name, i.e. the word "three", it exists in our mind as an image connected to various data (knowledge) we have about it. — Alkis Piskas

I'd say we have more than the image. We have the idea of a tree which tells us more than an image: tree begin as seeds, they grow slowly, etc. Whenever we learn something new about trees, we revise our idea of them.

Ok, but this does prove there is anything we don't have access to — Richard B

We have indirect access to physical objects.

Ok, your eyes don't see sense data of trees, they see trees. — Richard B

My eyes only see light. If free-standing 3D holograms existed indistinguishable from real trees, my eyes would see exactly the same thing.

Please explain what direct access means. — Richard B

In means no intermediary. I take it I have direct access to what my eyes see, my mind thinks, etc.

We do, in fact, not experience reality past our senses — Christoffer

Yes.

We don't have to accept the illogical conclusion of reality only existing because of our perception of reality in order to accept the importance of differentiating perception versus actual reality. — Christoffer

And yes, again.

Is it reasonable to then conclude, “see, this proves that we can never know the actual/the real color of the table, the thing-in-itself.” — Richard B

It's reasonable to believe the table has no color independent of us.
A color-blind person does not see the table's color as we do.
An alien who sees in the infrared or ultraviolet or x-ray bands of the electromagnetic spectrum would see the table quite differently. Look at an infrared image of the table. Does the image show the table's "true" color? No, because the table has no true color independent of the perceiving being.

The question arises: how did we determine that our knowledge stops with experience? — Tate

Can I take this question in terms of Kant's thing-in-itself? Kant said we cannot know the thing-in-itself, only phenomena. I'm making a more modest claim: that what we know of the physical world is based on sensory input and ideas our mind creates in response. I don't deny the existence of the exterior physical world, only that we don't have direct access to it.

Hume was a phenomenalist. Why would exploring his ideas go in a different thread? — Tate

OK, what ideas do you have in mind?

I don't think that's what Hume was thinking. Would you want to explore his ideas more? By going through the logic of bundle theory? — Tate

I'd be interested but I think it should be in another thread.

I do not directly experience electrons/protons; but with my senses and some scientific theory, I can infer their existence indirectly. Similarly, I do not directly experience sense data — Richard B

I think this captures part of our disagreement. We have five physical senses and I'd say we experience the sense data from these sense directly. Question: do you believe we experience anything directly and, if so, what?

If you, and everyone else, experiences sense data directly, why do you explain what you mean by examples of illusions and other representations of reality? — Richard B

One reason I like posting here is to get feedback on my ideas. Perhaps I didn't write the OP as clearly as I could have. With hindsight, it may have been better if I had expressed my thoughts as follows.

We may think of a human being as having four parts: body, emotion, mind, and consciousness. Our body has five physical senses: touch, taste, seeing, hearing, and smelling. Our consciousness directly experiences three types of input: physical, emotional, and mental.

Our mind automatically processes visual sense data to create a visual picture of reality. Sometimes the picture is accurate in that it corresponds to reality. Sometimes the picture is inaccurate as in the case of an illusion, a mirage.

In the checker illusion, our eyes experience visual sense data directly (our eyes experience the same shade of grey from square A and B). Our mind automatically processes physical sense data to create a picture of reality. Our mind creates the idea of a check board with square A and B differing in color.

So, I'd describe experience of the physical world as consciousness aware of pictures created in our mind based on sense data.

You may recall that our eyes see everything upside down but flip the image so we see rightside up.
Here's a quote from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/91177/how-our-eyes-see-everything-upside-down
So why doesn’t the world look upside down to us? The answer lies in the power of the brain to adapt the sensory information it receives and make it fit with what it already knows. Essentially, your brain takes the raw, inverted data and turns it into a coherent, right-side-up image.

It says that an object basically is its properties. There's no extra "object" out there that has redness, or softness, or whatever.
"Light" and "mind" wouldn't be exceptions to that. See what I mean? — Tate

Light and ideas are exceptional, in that we experience them directly.
We experience objects "out there" indirectly via our physical senses and our mind.

Lets say we both are standing in front of a tree. I look at you and see you directly looking at and experiencing a tree. I don’t see you directly experiencing sense data. Is this not being objective? Whatever is occurring “inside” is not in my purview. Whatever is occurring “outside” is shared by both of us and thus we gain an understanding of what we are talking about. — Richard B

The point is I can directly experience only five physical senses.Based on what my senses tell me, I think of a tree.

Similarly, imagine a mirage. My eyes see light; my mind misinterprets what I see as water. Or imagine in a few decades, free-standing 3D holograms have been perfected so that the hologram appears exactly as a tree. Only when I pass my hand through the hologram do I realize it's not a genuine tree. My mind saw a tree until passing my hand through it showed the error.

I mentioned earlier all we can see on a computer monitor is light.
Check out the Adelson Checker-Shadow Illusion.
https://www.illusionsindex.org/ir/checkershadow
The squares A and B are exactly the same color. (I had to print the image and cut out the two squares to convince myself.) Our eyes see exactly the same color of squares A and B. But our mind creates the image where the squares appear different.

The point is we see only light; our mind does the rest.

From John Searle’s “Seeing Things as They Are” — Richard B

Searle disagrees. Can you tell me why in your own words?

but directly perceive only our subjective experiences. — Richard B

The OP doesn't mention "subjective experiences".

The OP points out we only have 5 ways of accessing the physical world: touch, taste, hearing, seeing, and smell. Can anyone describe another way to experience a physical tree?

We experience the tree via our senses, but it would be silly to conclude that therefore we do not experience the tree. — Banno

The issue is direct vs indirect experience. Physically, we can directly experience only the five senses. We directly experience the idea of a tree and indirectly experience the tree as a physical object. (An analogous situation is seeing a tree on a computer monitor. All we can see on a computer monitor is light.)

Think "brain in a vat". Or the movie, The Matrix. Both make a similar point.

How are maths and logic accomodated by this theory? — Wayfarer

I had the physical world in mind when I wrote the original post.We receive physical sense data via our five senses, then our mind accesses an appropriate idea which makes sense of the data.

As to maths and logic, our mind can access mathematical and logical ideas, too.

Remind me what the conclusion is again, if you don't mind. — praxis

A: I was getting to my point. “ . . . the Jews invented Yahweh; the later Roman Empire invented Jesus?” That seems like an obvious corollary to what you’ve been saying. — Art48