It appears to be impossible to argue that God exists?

Hi!! Nice to see you back here.... I hadn't noticed you here for a long long time.

Good question. In fact I agree with your point. I have always believed that If there is God, the powerful creator of our universe, it wouldn't make any sense to suppose Him to be a part of it...... nevertheless, our experience is obviously limited only to whatever is within our Universe.... hence we ought to be incapable of 'experiencing' God and I have always realized that all our knowledge and understanding is born of our cumulative experience in the ultimate analysis (experience to me includes our thoughts as well)...... therefore we can only imagine God and never know...... our experience is defined within the boundaries of the three dimensions combined with the unidirectional 4th dimension of time...... this gives me the idea that if God exists, He ought to exist in a 'higher' dimension so that He would have complete and instantaneous access to all and every part of the complete reach of our existence, all at once, whereas we can only imagine His existence in the 'higher' dimension as we are bound by and limited to the 4 dimensions that define our 'experiential' boundaries.

Thus indeed it is fruitless on our part to either argue or try to comprehend if God exists or not..... we can NEVER experience or know for sure either way.

I have been thinking along similar veins. For example, it's often said God is eternal. He has always been and will always be. Skeptics use this as an argument that, simply put, an omnipresent God cannot be omniscient because He could not know how he came into being.

However, maybe God is eternal because he exists out of time. Eternity, forever, is a way people can put that in words that can be understood. Can you conceive of a place without time? I've tried and tried but it's harder to wrap my head around than the trinity.

You see similar language issues among people of different cultures. Some words just don't translate.

You are living in a miraculous era which is going to end sooner or little later. It has an age of a normal human being. The people who born in this era think that this is natural and the world was like this once with a soul connected to all. In fact this is not the truth. If you don't understand now, you will understand after end of this era. The point is God exists.

We are created beings. That doesn't comes under natural way of life. We are not natural but unnatural beings. I mean we are just robots made of different materials (flesh, bones, tissues etc.,). There are ever existing eternal beings which knew neither death nor birth and God is the chief of these eternal beings. In fact this is the real ever existing phenomena. Some people asks "Who Created God?". This is because they think from the state what they are. That's why they are unable to understand the truth.

I like the idea that the necessary language does not exist in order to describe an idea that may or may not exist. Language and thought are very closely associated, and for many of us it seems almost impossible to think outside language. It is true one can think in a visual form, but that form is based upon experience, hence many peoples visual idea of God is perhaps the figure painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In any case, when thinking via forms, are we even sure we are not associating words with those images? The words used to describe God are mostly to describe his purpose rather than physical appearance, for how can he be physical if appearing only as a burning bush, and how can we know of his mind if it is believed by many to be so much greater than ours.

In science too, words come more easily with evidence and its description bringing new words into language, rather than when hypothesising. It seems to me M-theory is just as much a hypothesis as is God, with the exception that M-theory is best argued with the language of mathematics, whereas the idea of God has no such description being infinite in all dimensions.

As you say, the existence of God cannot be proved. He is but an idea without evidence, unless everything in existence is held up as evidence. The best science can come up with is the probability of God's existence, and using Occam's Razor the probability is incredibly low. Therefore, any language based upon experience is very limited, which is possibly why the Bible uses the plight of a civilisation coming to terms with the conditions and laws laid down by their God, originally in language used by Iron Age Man, and made quite beautiful in the English Bible. Even so, this is not scientific evidence, nor, some might say, credible history.

In your computer simulation, the idea of a creator is also unverifiable, but I would say in this virtual reality faith in a creator would be stronger. In the every day reality we experience, there are clues as to our origins from evolution by natural selection and DNA which is strong evidence against the idea of God. In your computer simulation there appear to be no such evolutionary clues because it is a totally 'personal data' dominated reality which can be known and designed to be reproducible in ever greater complexity, and therefore can be known to explain the virtual world in which these simulated entities exist. Either way, I think the language of the unknown cannot properly exist until it becomes knowable.

I'm not sure that's a question...but as long as I'm here, I just think about the use of a capitalized, generic term like god. And how it was pretty much a thought that was introduced. Myths and legends aside, it has become a conscious focal point for many as a description of that which has no description. But it is still just a faint echo in the realm of possibilities. So...proof? I would agree with you. But I would also agree with those who say it isn't their job to prove another's idea. To me, the whole god thing is elaborate and speculation compared to what we actually know in an observable, and measurable way.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

C.S. Lewis

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

C.S. Lewis

Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening a mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

There is no need to argue over God's existence in the world pal. Proving God's existence is not our duty...I would agree with you that we have not found yet the perfect language to prove the God's foot prints as the Creator of the Universe. But, as a believer of God i could be an other Sim(which believes it was created by a programmer)

Having had contact with God, I challenge your statement that no one can argue that God exists; I know He does from personal experience, which of course, proves nothing to you or anyone else.

However, when you see the next elected Pope emerge from the Papal Conclave is Jesus Christ at his second coming, then you too will know for a certainty that God does exist.

As an ordinary human being, the only way that I can know this in advance is because God showed me, through the Bible, what is to come.

Whether He exists outside or inside His creation then becomes meaningless, because in our terms of reference, He has to have had a beginning and be somewhere, but we could be wrong. After all He is unique in anyone's terms, and this could include His being outside of any terms of reference that we could apply.

All arguments for and against anything at all are based on inferences and assumptions.

the law of non contradiction holds, assumption

therefore reason can lead to knowledge, inference

Without assumptions and inferences evidence would not make any sense at all.

(I begin with the assumption that I have a hand and there exists at least one ball.)

I let go of a ball in my hand - observation

the ball drops to the ground - observation

I repeat 100 times with the same result - observation

law of cause and effect - assumption

the next time I drop a ball it will fall downward - inference

If your reasoning is sound all knowledge is impossible because it is based on inferences and assumptions. Scientists have been jerking off for centuries and jets stay in the air by accident.

Come to think of it if your reasoning is sound it is based on assumption and inference, so it doesn't mean anything anyway. If you're right you're wrong and if you're wrong you're wrong. So you're wrong.

If it can be shown, and it has been, that the concept of god is incoherent, that would be proof that god does not exist. All of the arguments for the existence of god have been shown to be fallacious and analysis of god's properties shows them to be incoherent also. In short, it has been shown that god does not exist. It has also been shown that the neo-conservative policies are failures and global warming is real, but there are people who continue to deny these too.

Follow-up

Your argument shares certain features of similar arguments by Kant and early Wittgenstein. The only problem is that we understand the object of the argument and as such we know something about it or what properties it must have if it were to exist. (If this were not true you would not know what I am talking about and your original post would be gibberish) Since we do in fact have a concept of god, (not only a concept of god, but we are able to understand your metaphorical programmer that represents god) we can discuss and reason about it. If we can reason about it, we can determine if the concept is coherent.

Putnam has an argument to the effect that the programmer in your scenario is incoherent and thus can not be referred to in the way that is needed for that programmer to function as an object of reference by us. This not only establishes that the concept is incoherent, it escapes the universal skepticism that your analysis forces us to accept.

The only reason you assert that my argument fails is because we are referring to an object outside of time and space, but in order to accept that premise I have to rely on assumptions and inferences to deny that my assumptions and inferences do not lead to a determinate answer in this case. Hence if we can rely on reason then we can't and if we can't rely on reason then we can't.

Additionally, we can show that the Pythagorean theorem is true about triangles and , while triangle-like things exist, triangles themselves do not exist in time and space. If your analysis is correct, then we can not accept any mathematical argument since it is talking about something that does not exist in time and space.

In short, you make the same mistake Kant made when he asserted that we can have no knowledge of the thing in itself. The very fact that we can refer to it denies the assertion.

For better or worse, we link knowledge to reason. Everything we think we know is logical or reasonable. Any time someone comes along and says oh yes but this may exist outside of reason - we cannot comment, because none of us, including the claimer, can ever go outside of reason to have a look. Wherever we can go look, the mantle of reason comes with us like some long air hose.

Hence it's a stymieing proposition, but external to our world of reason and therefore unprovable, inapplicable, moot, and caustic to reason itself. That it is stymieing does mean it is true, nor even considerable.