catastrophicize : If there is no evidence for the spiritual, why do you believe in it? In fact, according to you, spiritual stuff is illogical. Wouldn't that make it really, really dumb to believe in a spiritual world? You have no reason to believe in the spiritual. Its "reasonless", or, "illogical". So your brain doesn't obviously rule your life, how about your will? Does God exist because you want him to exist? Nope. How about your emotions? Does God exist because you just feel he exists? Nope. So don't believe in him. Or, give me a REASON, because things with REASON are REASONABLE, also known as LOGICAL.

God is not illogical! If you want to believe that God cannot be proven, then none of my proofs will work. If you think that maybe its possible, your eyes may open to the logical necessity. He does exist, you're right on that, but why lump yourself in with those that deny working proofs? If you don't understand them, it doesn't make them wrong (not saying you don't actually understand them). If logic doesn't work, God is illogical and no one should believe in the concept.

Txgangsta : In no way do I think of my God as illogical & I do apologize if that's the message I conveyed with my post. In evidence of my own life; I can see that God is real & by looking around at what He has done for others, seen His hand work through miracles and simply look at the world around me; I can see very plainly that He is in no way illogical and is very, very tangible. 

When I say that God can not be proven; I was addressing Atheists that go around saying "Well, God isn't real because *some random thing about science* Science can not be used to address the spiritual, as science is purely the study of the physical. The proofs that I address in proving His existence are all personal and thereby; subjective. Going to someone else and saying "God delivered me from disabilities; He's real!" may not do anything for them as they were not there to see it & the common rebuttal is "The human body does amazing things under stress" or something else like that. I'm getting off topic. 

What "proves" God for me may not "prove" anything for someone else.
And the way I see it; I don't NEED to prove His existence! I don't NEED to prove that He is real because I live by faith, not by sight & I know by faith that He is real, tangible and very logical. Do I need to prove that to the world? No. The only thing I can do is live for Him and spread His word & light where I can. If someone asks me to talk about my faith, then I talk about it. I think that God will "prove" Himself in each individuals life differently and that trying to come up with reasons and theories on how He is real just makes us run around in circles. We don't need to prove anything; "the proof is in the pudding." type thing. 

Sorry for the book lol.

catastrophicize : Ah, gotcha! I misunderstood your using of "proof". You mean it in the sense that it convinces the other person. I was thinking you were talking about how God is this unknowable thing but you believed this unknowable thing exists any way. Seeing that's not the case, I leave you with a smiley face and a picture of a baby otter.

Txgangsta : I like baby otters! c: And sorry for the misunderstanding, I can be a bit unclear at times lol.

In order for one to answer whether or not their is a god, one must first pick which type and what specific god they are choosing to believe in and debate against. For example, the debate over a powerless god who acted at the event of creation, and therein had no power is different than the debate between over a triple O god (omnipotent, omnipresent, omni benevolent). Since you chose to pick the Christian god, and he is the vastly most popular god on this thread I will argue against his presence on a series of logical assumptions.
1.) God is all powerful (definition of omnipotent)
2.) God is all knowing (omnipresent)
3.) God is good and only good (Omni benevolent)
4.) God allows free will in all of his creations
5.) God created mankind in his image
With these assumptions, directly derived from the bible itself I present to you some logical conditions which can be derived from them as denoted 5a.) would be an assumption derived from prior assumptions.
1a.) At any point god can chose to stop anyone or anything from existing
1b.) At any point god can violate the laws of nature/physics
1c.) No Power can defeat God
2a.) God knows your thoughts
2b.) God knows the consequences of his actions before he performs them
3a.) If free will of an equal or greater number of beings will be violated god must intervene by damaging the free-will of the smaller group
3b.) God cannot willingly inflict punishment on a being for any reason unless it would result in the benefit of more people than the punished
4a. ) Only humans are given free will
4b.) Since humans are given dominance over any creature, sacrifice of those creatures to help a human must be allowed
5a.) Since God is good, humans have an intrinsic attraction to good, as we are created in his all good image
5b.) Mankind morals must be similar at their core to those of god

Now lets look at how the world actually works and the inherent contradictions denoted as #x#.) to indicate which assumption they violate
1b1.) The laws of God's nature have been proves to be false. For example, a god given cure for leprosy or in other translations mildew in a person or house an can be solved by spraying bird blood over a person. Since God is more powerful than science, and his book advocates this cure, than it should just work magically, needless to say it doesn't
1a1.) Since all things are created with the blessing of god and scientifically god stops up to 1/4 of all pregnancies naturally, god chooses to randomly allow people such as Charles Manson , Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, et. All, which seems like a mistake not possible by an omnipotent being
1c1.) Why would any being logically oppose God? The devil clearly does of his own volition and must be permitted by god not only exist, but also to tempt others into evil
    Sub contradiction : 1c1.) denotes a contradiction to 4a.) and also a contradiction to 4b.)
4a1.) Rape is defined as the violation of a persons consent to sexual intercourse, therefore their FREE WILL is being violated, since by god doing nothing he is permitting the free will of the women to be raped, by acting he violates the Free Will of the rapist. In any case 1 persons free will is violated therefore god must act to violate the free will of the rapist, since god allows free will in all human creations
4b1.) Animals frequently rebel against their masters and kill humans. God promises mankind dominance over all creatures, and no other animal is given free will, they should not logically be able to attack a human
2b1.) Why would god create a digestive system in humans, claws in creatures, white blood cells in humans etc as part of his intelligent design. According to the bible in the garden of Eden, nothing could die, therefore humans would not need defense from virus's and bacteria in their intelligent design, since death is not possible. The bible mentions no altering of the physiology of mankind after eating the forbidden fruit
2b2/31.) Why even give any animal the possibility of killing a human, and why make any animal require the killing of another thing to be able to live. According to the ten commandments given to Moses, thou shall not kill. If humans are explicitly told not to kill, why require it of animals who do not have free will.
I could continue on all day with these, but I frankly have no desire to post more examples until you can get past these logical questions, and don't say "he works in mysterious ways' or "its all part of a plan", because unless you want to redefine what good is (contradicting the 10 commandments or another biblical assumption of good (of which there are many which humans find detestable)), you are unable to logically argue these.

Is there a god? That cannot be answered I believe in a force in the universe out there that is watching us but whatever is out there watching us or not I don't know but whatever created this if there is a figure out there who did doesn't want us worshipping him I know I wouldn't I think whatever created us wants us to just enjoy and not worship but... that is just my opinion ^^ if you can understand :p what I posted sorry if you cannot.

smotpoker86 :  "Absolute statements go both ways. If someone is going to state that a God exists they better have some absolute proof to back it up."  
I think I did a couple of posts ago with the "painting and painter" comment

SoL@R : Your Painter and painting argument fails because the fundamental assumption for arguments such as this is that the object must be created. With this being said the argument you are basically presenting is "paintings can't create themselves, there is a painting, therefore there must be a creator or a painter". This argument holds so long as you know that something cannot be created without the metaphorical painter. Due to the lack of evidence that the universe was created by anything, your argument of the universe exists, something had to create the universe, therefore god created it. I would argue alternatively lets imagine you come across a series of trees. Do you believe that there had to be a planter of those trees, or could they have come into being without a maker. The answer is of course, when you walk into a field of flowers in the former "No-Mans Land" of World War I, do you think there was a celestial gardener, of course not. Because things that can spontaneously come into being do not require a maker, the explanation for how god himself was created, the religious person must also accept that this argument can be made for the universe. If you accept the non-required creator paradox and state that god is exempt from it by being timeless space less and always being, you could instead logically speaking turn this argument into one for the universe. For objects such as a chair, they cannot come into being without anything other than a maker for something such as a universe, we do not know. Your painter and painting analogy therefore cannot provide as absolute proof. You also chose to debate the existence of the Christian god, and yet you are unable to provide any proof other than your painter painting argument. For absolute proof to be provided, you must argue some of the logical paradox's that have been inherently presented in Christianity. I have posted a few of them in my prior post in this debate topic, and let me give you a few things that do not count as proof.
The Bible being written by god proves god exists (no it doesn't this is a circular logic problem)
God Said so (Assumes god for validity)
I choose to believe (not absolute proof).

Kirbybanjo:


A couple of things:
1. Starting assumptions:
-Omnipresent means God is present everywhere, not all knowing. Omniscience means God is all knowing. You should include that in the assumption as well.
-You forgot that God also has a will. This Creator does not create things just because He is bored or without a purpose. God does things with a purpose.

2. Your conditions based on the assumptions
-1b: You may want to also include that God can use nature for His purposes as well.
-3a is not valid. God being good has nothing to do with someone's free will being violated. It also has nothing to do with whether the majority's free will is violated or not. Example: Noah and the Flood: Only Noah's family survived God's judgment because they were the only ones that were deemed righteous and followed God, Sodom and Gomorrah: Only Lot and his daughters escaped the judgment.  
-3b is false. God can intervene and inflict punishment BECAUSE He is good. Again, it has nothing to do with numbers. "Good" does not equal "majority." 
-4a...did you just contradict your own assumption?
-5a. That is also false because you are missing an assumption that affected the good creation: sin. Sin corrupts God's creation and Man on their own are not attracted to good, but to evil.
-5b. True to an extent. It actually means that everyone has a conscience...whether the person follows their conscience is not universal due to the previous point.

3. Your contradictions:
-1b1's contradiction is false. First of, some things that seemed to go against natural law does not mean that it is against natural law, especially when you don't know the whole story. It can definitely be a natural law that mankind hasn't discovered yet or that we didn't see the whole picture. Next, the study of quantum mechanics would show that our natural laws are governed by the subatomic interactions between particles and they don't act the same way as the macroscopic world. A manipulation of these particles in a certain event can easily change something to not follow our current natural laws. Next, you have forgotten that God is....well God. He is capable of doing things that do not seem to be natural to us. God governs the universe, not the other way around. Furthermore, arguing that there is such a thing as Natural Laws is to attribute to a creator because of how orderly the universe is set that we can see patterns that governed it. Any minor changes in the constants of our universe, like the speed of light, or Planck's constant, would affect the way that we live, even our existence. We would not even be here living on earth if those constants were off by a small percentage. It's order like this that shows evidence of a creator, like me lining up leaves in a straight line in front of your driveway. You cannot say that they all randomly landed from a tree like that. Your common sense tells you that someone must have place it there. 

Your example is also false considering the fact that you didn't read the verse correctly. Leviticus 14 states that the bird blood ritual is done AFTER the leper was deemed cured. It is a ritual that the Hebrew priests used to deem the person to be clean, because leprosy is considered to be an "unclean". This we would have to go into the study of what it means to be "clean" and "unclean", which I won't get into, but it's not even a cure, and therefore not contradicting science. 

-1a1. Again, you missing the assumption of the corruption of sin is the reason why this seems to be a contradiction. When Man sin, all of creation is corrupted.

-1c1. Again, sin and free will. Devil can choose to follow God or rebel. The Devil is jealous of God, decided to rebel. One thing went to the other.

-4a1. Again, sin. It is not God who violates free will, it is the MAN who practices his free will by sinning against God. Free will means that people can choose what to act on their own. It does not mean that they have the strength and ability to do so. You can obviously see that in your life. You believe we have free will, but it does not mean that we have the ability to do everything we want. I can have the will to be the greatest athlete in the world. It does not mean that I WILL be.

-4b1. Again, read the previous point.

-2b1. Don't understand why this is a contradiction, considering the fact that God knows that Man would sin and death follows.

4. If you really want to argue under the conditions of the Christian God, you need to include everything else into this discussion, like God's will, the topic of sin: the corruption of sin, the inherited sinfulness of Man, Mankind's free will acted on sin, etc. You also need to define your terms correctly, like "good", "free will", etc, as this caused some of your original assumptions to be false, which leads to a false conclusion. From the way you are arguing, you are depicting more of a Deistic God, as if God does not intervene in the natural world. You are also arguing that all of this lands on God's hands, when in fact it is our free will, a privilege given by God who is does not mindlessly control people, that causes us to sin and that we choose to rebel against God. 

Yes without God there would be no world No jesus chris well thats a possiblity. But yes most defeintly there is a god without it Earth and everything else would not exist .

SoL@R : " "Absolute statements go both ways. If someone is going to state that a God exists they better have some absolute proof to back it up."
I think I did a couple of posts ago with the "painting and painter" comment "

Wow that sure is some absolute proof. Thanks for enlightening me. I mean it's so obvious, paintings have a painter therefore god must exist! So simple and brilliant!

Now would you care to tell me where God put his signature on this "painting" ?

smotpoker86 : "Now would you care to tell me where God put his signature on this 'painting'?"

If there were a "signature" to the "painting", it would be Order.

I believe that there is a god because if their was no god this universe would not exist .and also because their is proof that some of the places in the bible if not all of them are real or once existed.

Kirbybanjo :  See play4fun's post.  He was in before me

'play4fun: First off thanks for attempting to use logic to attack my points, I am actually happy to see someone to debate with who isn't going to fall back on the book said so.

Response to your points:

"Omnipresent means God is present everywhere, not all knowing. Omniscience means God is all knowing. You should include that in the assumption as well.
-You forgot that God also has a will. This Creator does not create things just because He is bored or without a purpose. God does things with a purpose."


In being everywhere means he has been at every and any point throughout time, this means that he would also know everything, as when he is all present and all powerful he must also be all-knowing to be all powerful. By the logic of god being ever present, and being all powerful the two can be combined to form the logical meaning of Omniscience, and by the very nature of being all powerful and all knowing the possibility of having a free-will can be debated unless you allow for multiple universes, since if he knows all things that can and will happen in this universe and there is only 1 temporal state, he has already performed all of his actions from the merit of being, since he exists everywhere and anywhere since inception his fate has already occurred, and he knows every action he can and will take, this very premise argues against free-will.

Response to next point:
"1b1's contradiction is false. First of, some things that seemed to go against natural law does not mean that it is against natural law, especially when you don't know the whole story. It can definitely be a natural law that mankind hasn't discovered yet or that we didn't see the whole picture. Next, the study of quantum mechanics would show that our natural laws are governed by the subatomic interactions between particles and they don't act the same way as the macroscopic world. A manipulation of these particles in a certain event can easily change something to not follow our current natural laws. Next, you have forgotten that God is....well God. He is capable of doing things that do not seem to be natural to us. God governs the universe, not the other way around. Furthermore, arguing that there is such a thing as Natural Laws is to attribute to a creator because of how orderly the universe is set that we can see patterns that governed it. Any minor changes in the constants of our universe, like the speed of light, or Planck's constant, would affect the way that we live, even our existence. We would not even be here living on earth if those constants were off by a small percentage. It's order like this that shows evidence of a creator, like me lining up leaves in a straight line in front of your driveway. You cannot say that they all randomly landed from a tree like that. Your common sense tells you that someone must have place it there. "

On an interesting note, the current constants actually predict the complete destruction of the Universe, and make the vast majority of it inhospitable to life. Additionally, there is slight debates onto whether or not the speed of light is a constant which will later be disprove at some point, as our technology advances and there is no reason to believe that this is the absolute fastest the universe can go. All that has currently been proves is that on Earth with our current technology there is no way YET to go faster than the speed of light, due to many factors 1 important one being friction. Furthermore, the speed of light according to some physicists is a major limitation which likely be disproved in the next 100 or so years, just like it was originally believed that matter could not be created or destroyed and this was forced to be changed to energy.
Onto Planck's constant, the constant itself has been altered at least once to my knowledge. Another thing I see you doing is the old probability manipulation, and you use the leaf example to do this. When you state that the odds of the leaves falling on my driveway are incredibly small I will give you that, but once it has already happened there are only two options, a.) it happened or b.) it didn't. Your argument that if the constant is different is proof that the creator is not all powerful. An all powerful creator could make the constants as ridiculous and paradoxical as he wanted, after-all he is all powerful. He could have set up any set of constants to work, and yet the vast majority of the universe, THE VAST majority is inhospitable to human life, but back to the main point. The probability is still very small, but it was bound to happen eventually assuming the multi-verse, if we could observe all of the universes, we would find that the vast majority are not hospitable to life, but this one is, proving the probabilistic statement true, and again discrediting the need for a creator. Additionally, why would a creator make the Universe so empty, if we humans were god's chosen species given dominance over all other life. Over 70% of the Earth under God's design is inhospitable to life, since mankind cannot survive in the ocean or Antarctica, in addition to places like the Sahara without massive intervention from mankind's own creations. This leads me to believe that since more than 99% of the universe cannot be inhabited by man it was not fine tuned for us by a creator, and that this infinitesimally small space is a merit of the same ridiculous odds you cite as being against us in the first place

The point of Leviticus 14:1 - 14:7 there is an inherent contradiction  in the verse itself, so I chose to use Leviticus 14:7 as it is the last written thing. While Leviticus 14:1-14:3 are vague in implying that the person is 100% cured before the ritual, Leviticus 14:7 clearly states that
"Seven times he shall sprinkle the one to be cleansed of the defiling disease, and then pronounce them clean. After that, he is to release the live bird in the open fields..." Instructions continue on the person TO BE cleansed through Leviticus 14:8 all the way through to Leviticus 14:21. It is clear from the direct quote from 7 and all the way through 21 that these instructions are to be done before they are cured. My translation is from this hyperlink as I do not currently have a Bible in my possession (www.biblegateway.com). Could it be possible that I am reading a flawed translation, yes, but this is the version I recall reading.

All of this however, ignores the point I was originally trying to make the point that the laws of nature as stated in the bible are not logically possible, in fact every single scientific statement in the Bible can be proved false, including the idea of a virgin birth, transmutation of elements without a massive release of energy (water into wine), magic bird blood cures, water plus prayer  = bull set on fire, transmutation of a person into salt, splitting an entire sea by striking a staff into the ground, etc, ,etc.

Now onto your next attack on my contradictions.
1c1.) it is never stated in the bible that angels are given free will.
4a1.) so god is not able to violate humans free will, its not like he did that countless times in the old testament now did he (please see the murder of Job's servants and children). God violated humans free will all of the time, did god not violate countless Egyptians free will be sending a plague to kill all of their first born in the night, God can clearly violate free will when he chooses too, and in an event in which no matter what he does action or inaction the free will of 1 person gets violated, and god has clearly violated humans free will before, he must if he is all good choose to violate the free will of the person who is acting evil.
2b1.) If god knew that mankind were to sin than he isn't giving them free will, he is acting on a plan that they would. God immediately knew that mankind would sin, and designed them so that they would survive after sin, this implies that God knew that they were going to sin, and therefore failed at creation. Furthermore, the bible clearly states that god wants everyone to get into heaven, which means he designed us to fail, if he created the capacity of white blood cells, digestive systems, etc, he was betting on his creation to fail him. When a watch is faulty do you blame the watch or the watchmaker, if god created us with the capacity against death than he was powerless to stop us from sinning, and you are assuming the free-will defense (in fact most of your arguments are based around the free will defense), without explicitly stating your version of the free-will defense I cannot argue against it, and it would require an entire other post to deal with this, but you did not successfully address any of my contradictions without use of free will, which will take an entire other post, in which you state your version and I state my response

smotpoker86 :  OK, forget about the painter scenario.  It was just meant to be a simple example.  I think the real issue in denying the existence of God (God of the Bible; The Creator of Heaven and Earth; The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Christian God) is the following, and I've mentioned this in a previous post (quote from an ex-atheist): I think that the freedom to believe and live the way that you want, is so important to you that the thought of someone being in charge of this whole thing and having a standard that He (God) is going to hold you accountable to, is just way too much for you to want to submit yourself to, because that means it might put a wet blanket on some of the things that you want to do.  Or am I missing the mark completely?
If God does exist, why doesn't everyone in the world acknowledge it?  It's because people are running from God.  The apostle Paul wrote in the Bible: "There is no one who is righteous, not even one. There is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God" - Romans 3:10,11.  Instead of seeking God, people are seeking to live without God.  People also do not wish to see the truth and they do not want to know that God exists.  The Bible says that wicked humanity is suppressing the truth of God: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth." - Romans 1:18.  This is an active willingness on the part of the people to keep the truth of God from coming to them.  Another reason for people rejecting the existence of the one true God is that they substitute false gods in His place: "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles" - Romans 1:19-24.  These people worship the spirits of their ancestors, trees, rivers, mountains and false gods and goddesses.  They will rather worship anything else than the only God who exists.  
The great thing is that Jesus Christ made it quite clear that anyone who wishes to know the truth about God's existence can certainly know it: "If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." - John 7:17.  It's a matter of people being willing to know whether or not God exists.  
Now I've quoted a lot of scripture and Kirbybanjo made it quite clear that I cannot use scripture as proof that God exists.  For that to be true, I have to prove that the Bible is indeed what it claims to be, the divinely inspired, authoritative, trustworthy Word of God, but that's a whole new thread.  Of course I cannot force my beliefs on anyone, it is not up to me and definitely not my place.  I can only hope and pray for those who do not know the one true God and who is still seeking for some truth in their lives, that they will indeed seek Him and get to know Him, because if you truly do, you WILL find Him:  ""But from there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find [Him] if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul." - Deuteronomy 4:29

SoL@R :
If you wish I would be more than happy to have that debate with you about whether or not the book is actually divinely inspired, but at the end of the day I don't think that delusions help people. The delusion that you will be rewarded or punished based on this life is not a good reason to do good, if that is your reason for being a good human being you are basically saying you are only good to bribe god, I don't believe that this is true about anyone who is truly good, and the thought of someone being in charge makes this just a giant test, which means it is actually this life that has no true meaning, and is merely a preface for real life, in which case I ask why bother with the preface, if he is omnipotent he already knows the second you are born whether or not you will be good, so why bother with this test in the first place

And this is why it is 13+
As far as I know, or think, yes. I am not super religious but I do stand up for my religion.