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I really like how the “empirical” evidence for god’s existence is just “math has rules and there are patterns in nature, therefore god exists” (hexbear.net)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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And you know what, that might just very well be true if we’re talking about some supernatural force that is indifferent to its creations, not out of malice, but because it simply is truly neutral.

But as evidence for the religious capital ‘G’ God, the one who communicates and plans every little detail because he loves us so much? What is the point of these “subtle” proofs that took thousands of years to be studied and recorded when he has shown that he can just pop up anywhere or perform miracles and whatever the fuck.

It is no coincidence that the vast majority, possibly 99%, of devout religious people do not give a shit about using math to explain god because it’s all proven in their holy books. It is no coincidence that the “empirical” evidence is, in reality, just pointing at the existence of features and concepts of math and science rather than utilizing said features and concepts to prove the existence of god. And no, philosophical musings about morality using the language of mathematical proofs does not count as utilizing math and science (literally, all the axioms in these types of "proofs" are subjective shit like "bad" and "good" and not, say, the difference between 1 and 0).

And I didn’t even want to make a post dunking on religion, but I’m irritated because YouTube recommended some dumbass video by a channel called “Reformed Zoomer” and one of the arguments is “there is an infinite range of numbers between two numbers, and if we turn those numbers into letters, then every book possible has already been written. Checkmate atheoids”. https://youtu.be/z0hxb5UVaNE?si=RpjF6S0fHiF71iH-

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Hegel argues that god exists because everything has a cause. The natural question then is, what created god?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The unmoved mover is from Aristotle.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I thought that was from Thomas Aquinass' quinque vieae (or however you say it; fuck latin).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Much of Thomas Aquinas is a meditation on Aristotle, and the unmoved mover is Aristotle. It's from metaphysics

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I see. That makes sense. My first exposure to the idea was in a mandatory theology class at my catholic high school where the teacher made a big deal at how "irrefutable" they were. Catholic school is weird.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Virgin deist "everything has a cause" vs chad Taoist "the Tao is self-generative"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think it is logical that there must be a supernatural cause of some sort. And I mean supernatural in the most literal sense - something above or outside of the rules and bounds of the physical universe as we are able to observe it. If everything must have a cause, then at some point you need to posit something that did not have a cause to get the whole thing started. That thing is, therefore, not bound by the rules that everything real and observable to us is bound by.

But to posit anything in particular about that supernatural cause - that it any way resembles any religion's conception of God or divinity, or higher dimensional aliens, or a computer simulation, or a conscious process at all, or whatever you wanna come up - is itself contradictory, because the only thing we can say is that cause doesn't (or didn't) operate by the rules of the world we are capable of understanding. Maybe the cause is just that it was never possible for nothing to exist, so instead something does.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'd convinced myself of this argument a few years ago, but it's not really set in stone. The universe didn't necessarily "start." We know that at some point there was a big bang and we think the universe started with it, but there is no proof that there was nothing before it. It's just as possible that something had always existed within nature, without a cause.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I don't really assume that the Big Bang was the start of reality. But even if you take the stance that reality itself is without cause, then that's essentially supernatural - our understanding is that all things must have a cause. So there's some component of existence which doesn't comport to the rules we can observe. Same deal.