I'd rather see what conception of God is engendered by the assumptions than attempt to shoehorn in a totally irrelevant conception for the sole purpose of refutation. — fdrake

We can conclude that only an illogical god is engendered by the proof.

"God is said to be the purely actual actualizer, and is unified, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, good, omnipotent, and omniscient."

Well that is one version. Was that so hard to type?
To be omniscient and omnipotent it would have to be omnipresent too.
Here's one problem omnipresent and good would mean that no evil can exist.
Here's another: it cannot be incorporeal AND actual.
It cannot be immutable and an omnipresent, since there is such a thing as change.
In fact it cannot be an actualiser and immutable.

Have you god a more usable version of god?

It does mean it is important to say what god is in the context of the "proof".

So what do you mean by god?

Don't be ridiculous. The thread title is "Demonstration of God's Existence I: an Aristotelian proof", and the OP is a modified version of Aristotle's so-called proof with some of the language changed.

But that is totally disingenuous since the thread pretends to "prove" god. It's just question begging nonsense. It could be anything from a disinterested unconscious big bang to a breaded guy wearing dress.

Honestly? The interesting thing about this thread isn't whether there is a God or isn't one. It's in what metaphysical assumptions generate that conclusion, and how those metaphysical assumptions are justified. — fdrake

Oh pleeeese. You cannot say anything about those assumptions and conclusions if you are not prepared to say what/which god/s you are talking about.
If you are not willing to say what you mean by god then the thread is empty.

So you have shown that the existence of Atheists shows that there are people that believe in God - like you.
But you have failed on several counts to make any arguments over 7 pages of thread.
1) You have not said what you mean by god, which you would need to do for 2. It's pointless to say "But OP is not about looking at God, but about looking at atheism."
2) You have not shown how atheists are a clue that god exists (whatever that is!)
3) You have not offered any atheist arguments, though you have denigrated atheists, but by refusing to say what "god" is your claims are empty.

It may be represented, or it may not be. — Wayfarer

If it is not represented then it is not information.
The world is as it is. From time to time humans get interested in it and that interest becomes information. It's just an abuse of language to say that information is some pristine objective quality of the universe.
Information is nothing if not a set of ideas, partial, incomplete and interested. We can never get at the thing in itself, we can only say things about the world we perceive.
Information is not "OUT THERE", it is that which we extract and collect, measure and codify.
It is about the world, but it is of us.

No you can't believe what you like and bring it on here as if it were factual.

Yes you do all that using perception as a source. Even lying down with your eyes closed in a quiet room your many senses are telling you all about your existence. You can hear and feel your heart, sense the amount of sugar in your blood and the food in your gut. Proprioception tells you where your limbs are in relation to one another, and you feel the thing you are lying on. There is no escape from this constant information flow, until death.

1.) Change occurs (and this cannot be coherently denied - the denial of change is itself a form of change, for example)
2.) Material objects that change can only do so because they have potentials that have been actualized; a cup of coffee has the potential to cool down, an acorn has the potential to grow into a tree. Change is just the actualization of a potential.

Nope. Change can also happen by external forces, such as a high speed chalk-board eraser hitting the dull head of the theist pupil.

3.) A potential cannot be actualized except by something already actual.

Actually circular, and meaningless.

4.) Things exist in hierarchies; a cup of coffee rests on a table, which rests on the floor, which is supported by the ground, which is held together by gravity, etc. The cup of coffee cannot hold itself up - it must rest on the table. But the table cannot hold itself up either - it must rest on the ground. Each member of a hierarchical system has derivative causal power conferred on them by other things. It cannot be infinitely long.

False assumption number one. It is not possible and can never be possible to determine the infinitude of things without an infinitely long time to view those things, even then you have to ask what might happen next.

5.) Things can only change, however, if they exist in a hierarchical system; a cup of coffee cannot grow cold unless it exists, for example.

Hierarchy is about perspective. It is an abuse of language to imply one thing has a higher level than an other in this context. This is just a childish attempt to posit on unmoved mover. Which has already failed since it contradicts the already false statement you have had about things existing needing to be in a system.

6.) Things can only exist, however, if it has the potential to exist which is actualized.

Saying something twice does not make it more true, only more false

7.) Therefore there must be a purely actual actualizer of everything that exists.

No such conclusion is warranted since it already contradicts what you have said.

8.) There cannot be more than one purely actual actualizer, as differences between them would entail some difference in potential, which cannot be since it is actualized.

This is simply rubbish. You have not even offered any support for this bland statement.

9.) Since it it pure actuality, it cannot change, so it is immutable.



This is simply rubbish. You have not even offered any support for this bland statement.


10.) Since it cannot change, it does not exist in time, and is thus eternal.

There is no time for such a thing to exist; therefore it does not exist . And contradicts everything you have said.


11.) If it were material, it would exist in time and could change, but it does not. Thus is must be immaterial.

Not. Consequently is simply does not exist, and there is nothing necessary for it to exist.

12.) If it was corporeal, it would be material, but since it is not material, it is not corporeal.
13.) Since it has no unactualized potentials, it must be perfect.

YES!!! Perfectly non-existent. LOL


14.) gibber gibber gibber... - therefore God exists. — darthbarracuda

Therefore nothing that is not an effect can exist.

Nope. Aristotle's laughable "proof" of God has been refuted with regular efficiency for over two thousand years. It was rubbish then, and it remains rubbish.
It is a reflection of the utter shame upon which we have to view the mind tainted with the myth of theism that this risible bit of flim-flam is still lifting its head above the barricades.

Humans constructed the idea of DNA, named DNA and built the idea that DNA was information.
All ideas are dependant on representation.

So where else is the source of our knowledge?
And if I were a visitor, the god assumption would be a reasonable one. There are plenty of god botherers out there and several of them on this Forum.

Beethoven's Ninth on YouTube on my TV.

Circular set of unjustified and false assumptions.

It's a human interested construction too.
Information implies an informer and the informed.

Nope not even the relationship between right angled triangles exist in nature.
Without humans to conceive information there is no information. Information is ideal.
Pythagoras' theorem is an invention, based on a fantasy 2D world.

such that folks can express the same view in different ways; one truth writ differently. — Banno

This holds the false assumption that a "fact" is a disinterested thing about the universe that people chose to represent in their own way.
In fact, a fact is always subject to its relevance to the observer. Without people there are no facts at all.
You can say what you like about the universe, and these things might remain unchanged we you and I to die, but they would not be factual. It's meaningless to have an idea without a conceiver.

Is Information physical.
An amazingly long thread of 45 pages for such a simple question.
All information relies on its physical existence, be that a tape, a CD ROM, a flash drive or a book.
Information held in the memory of a person is no different. If you don't believe me I can demonstrate the destruction of information with a Stanley blade, a bone saw and a spoon. Care to take the challenge?

Just because I recognise that we are not bestowed by God with knowledge, and that all humans have learned is from what they can sense in the world says NOTHING what ever about reductionism.
Are you on drugs?? Uh huh!!

I get that you see the world through the eyes of a reductionist ontology. — apokrisis

Wrong.

Evolution is an effect not a cause.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

PS your graph is a fiction in any event.

Atheism requires no argument, Theist does.

It's like saying evolution causes things to change.

Everyone seeing this thread will be dead in 90 years or less. Some of us much less than that. I'll be lucky to get 30 more years, and would not relish getting any more than that. All I have made, thought, and built; all those I love, or know will be swept away and turned to dust.
What possible 'grand meaning' can such an ephemeral thing have?
What arrogance have humans!!

Do you really mean "thought process", or are you after something else.

Dah.
Atheists are a clue that Theists exist, not God. 8-)

My position is that the relating creates the division into knower and known. — apokrisis

This is an abuse of language.

No. You are making fudge, not I.
Perception is the relation, obviously.
Since you have mentioned the "knower", you would agree that something lies between the knower and the thing to be known about, and that relation is perception.

Hume had no need to argue for against that which came after him. Hume's shoulders were those upon which Kant stood.

He might have clarified Hume in this respect he did not add to him. Hume's work assumes that we understand causality. It is just Kant's hubris to claim that he had a special idea my making causality a basic category, which is, with space and time, not "knowledge as we accept it" but the ground of understanding upon which knowledge is built.

It's a times like these that I wish there was a "Like" button! :)
:D

It is irrefutable.
There is no knowledge without perception, not even Kant disagrees with this. I'm not saying perception is knowledge. But you seem to what to avoid that what we perceive is the source and fudge it by saying it comes from a 'relation'. Even if that we not a fudge, it would still not avoid the irrefutability of the statement, as there is no relation without that which is perceived, and ipso fact the perception IS the relationship between the world and the knowledge.

Marky has been too eager to attack me for saying that the source of all knowledge is perception, thinking he has spotted a naive empiricist (not that one exists), even though I refute thetabula rasa, of Locke, which even for him is not so rasa as people think.
It's fight picking, without due consideration for considering what I have said.

1) the source of all knowledge is perception. This is irrefutable
2) If there is an exception it would have to be an abuse of language which considersinstinctive intuition as the same thing as knowledge; it is not.
3) If we were utter tabula rasa then we would be rendered incapable of understanding percpetion, and all sensory data would be white noise.
4) Kant's notions ofCategories of an inherent substrate understanding of time and space act to give us a ground of understanding upon which to build our interpretation of the world might be helpful in this, but his understanding of psychology is far too logical/ cerebral and anthropocentric in my view, and does not account for how simple animals function too.

I have more respect for Hume than Kant. Kant's view is tainted by his theism as this gives him licence to impart humans with whatever quality God wanted to bestow on them - however incredible. Humans are an example of a special creation, able to summon up objective knowledge without so much as an agreement. Hume was a skeptic and does not allow himself to enter into any such flights of fancy.

You are misrepresenting Hume. Please state where you think he says "the only reason that..."
His argument is more subtle, suggesting that a priori reasoning does not predict the outcomes of causal interactions and that as humans we have since time immemorial simply had to OBSERVE and conclude from observations causality.
If you have something better, let me know.

Rubber Duck!

Yeah I saw it. I was funny that the guy who everyone thought would like it, was the one guy that did not. Keith Allen is a well known contrarian god-shite though. He'd argue against it just to be bloody minded.

My first drug was tobacco which i was hooked on at age 11. That time there was still a lot of denial about its carcinogenic effects.
By the time I was 21 I had had my fair share of alcohol which I also started early, buying pints of beer at the local pub at age 16. And that is also when I had my intro to hashish.
Reaching 21 and finding my self in the smog of LA my lungs packed up and so I gave up smoking tobacco, but was still able to tolerate joints made with pure marijuana.
Alcohol never interested me that much, but Pot was a friend for years, and have tried it as oil, hast, bush, bud, you name it. I also tried speed, and one or two prescription drugs like valium for fun.
In the autumn we all used to enjoy freshly picked Psilocybin mushrooms when I could get them.
Over the years I've tried opium, crack and coke. None of which I have liked enough to risk addiction to.
Eight years ago i was diagnosed with tonsil cancer stage 4A. I suffered from extensive radiotherapy and chemotherapy which caused a lot of distress and pain. Tramadol and Morphine were the chosen pain killers, both opiates. I did get dependant on Tramadol and coming off them caused whole body spasms, but it did not last too long. When the neck pain gets too bad I sometimes take one with a strong inflammatory - by try not to do this more than once at week at most.
Smoking has been the worst for addiction, and that despite giving up for ten years, stupidly started again, with the addiction as strong as ever immediately. I gave up again 12 years ago, and will never smoke again, after having cancer.
I can happily say that I am not addicted to any drug. Even when in pain I can take them or leave them as I wish. Mindful management is the key here; and setting basic rules for yourself.