Thank you for your good will here, I genuinely appreciate it. It's one of the few acts of sincerity I've received on this board. Because of that, you've inspired me to present my defense. I will attempt to show that evolution is every bit as metaphysical as a belief in God. I will also attempt to answer the question you posed about compartmentalization. I should get to it later today. Thank you again.

>> ^shuac:
>> ^shinyblurry:
I had a little rant here..ive erased it for civilities sake..if you want to address me in civilized manner instead of attacking my intellect, which I will assure you is doing just fine, let me know..
You mistake me, sir, for a common internet thug. My comment takes no such attitude. There exist very learned scientists who are among the most pious Christians ever. People like William Jennings Bryan, Freeman Dyson, and the head of the genome sequencing project, Francis Collins.
The younger Behe's answer about compartmentalization would probably, in my estimation, apply to all of them. That's not an attack on their intellect, sir. At least, I don't see it as one and I certainly don't mean it as one. In fact, a very decent argument could be made that such a sophisticated partitioning would require a degree of sophistication beyond that of normal needs.
For instance, I have very achievable compartmentalization requirements when I carry two opposing thoughts in my head. Typically, they are thoughts like "I hate 80s hair metal but I love that one song by Warrant" or the like. That kind of partitioning doesn't require a lot of mental horsepower but then, my needs are modest. You see what I mean?
As far as the second quote by Behe the Younger goes...well, I believe that sums up the entire ID stance and is similarly in no way an attack on your (or anyone else's) intellect. Hey, I get it: creationists feels strongly about this stuff and I'm not surprised they're trying to get around the rules.
Just understand that we also feel strongly.

Ahhh thanks my fellow person of truth! I have embraced my ignorance, as the word seems to full of people with all the answers.


In reply to this comment by enoch:
In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
Currently, I am very fascinated the metaphysical explanation of immaterialism of George Berkeley. There is a certain simplicity that makes it appealing. It is also unverifiable, thus making any means of discovering the truth of the mater impossible. Recently, I have started to become more of a strong agnostic rather than a weak one. It really does seem like we are ill-equipped to deal with the question of real, certain truth as it pertains to our complete condition. Our current tools are a priory reasoning, science, and intuition; one only goes so far, one can't make truth claims, and the other can't show that it is right. There has to be some other form, that is what faith is supposed to be, divine revelation: that only an outsider could inject insight into your situation. Kind of like Newton's third law, you have to be acted on by an outside source to cause change in a given system. That is an actual scientific argument for faith being a method to discovering truth. It can't, however, tell us how, which one, when we are wrong...and so many other problems it is why I have abandoned it as my method.

that was really well said my man.
i use the term "seekers" often.
never heard of that book.it looks interesting.

I'd also think that someone who's religious, who believes in the divine and metaphysical truth of christianity, would be even more outraged and offended than me about how that truth is being exploited and abused for profit and hedonism.

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
Currently, I am very fascinated the metaphysical explanation of immaterialism of George Berkeley. There is a certain simplicity that makes it appealing. It is also unverifiable, thus making any means of discovering the truth of the mater impossible. Recently, I have started to become more of a strong agnostic rather than a weak one. It really does seem like we are ill-equipped to deal with the question of real, certain truth as it pertains to our complete condition. Our current tools are a priory reasoning, science, and intuition; one only goes so far, one can't make truth claims, and the other can't show that it is right. There has to be some other form, that is what faith is supposed to be, divine revelation: that only an outsider could inject insight into your situation. Kind of like Newton's third law, you have to be acted on by an outside source to cause change in a given system. That is an actual scientific argument for faith being a method to discovering truth. It can't, however, tell us how, which one, when we are wrong...and so many other problems it is why I have abandoned it as my method.

that was really well said my man.
i use the term "seekers" often.
never heard of that book.it looks interesting.

Currently, I am very fascinated the metaphysical explanation of immaterialism of George Berkeley. There is a certain simplicity that makes it appealing. It is also unverifiable, thus making any means of discovering the truth of the mater impossible. Recently, I have started to become more of a strong agnostic rather than a weak one. It really does seem like we are ill-equipped to deal with the question of real, certain truth as it pertains to our complete condition. Our current tools are a priory reasoning, science, and intuition; one only goes so far, one can't make truth claims, and the other can't show that it is right. There has to be some other form, that is what faith is supposed to be, divine revelation: that only an outsider could inject insight into your situation. Kind of like Newton's third law, you have to be acted on by an outside source to cause change in a given system. That is an actual scientific argument for faith being a method to discovering truth. It can't, however, tell us how, which one, when we are wrong...and so many other problems it is why I have abandoned it as my method.

You're welcome I enjoy discussing it, and I'm sorry if some of my comments sounded too harsh or negative, I was basically commenting while watching and pausing the video. I do see how he was trying to tip the scales from god being totally improbable to somewhat probable and to very probable and so on, and I suppose he deserves some credit for trying, and I think its easy to fall into his line of reasoning, because he presents it well. But as I tried pointing out, I found nearly all of his premises deeply flawed.

The main one is i think where we are coming from, namely that he lives in a universe where he basically assumes god exists, and that we atheists havent done a good enough job of disproving that. And worse, he seems unable to see the world from an atheists perspective. Thats the only way to explain why he thinks he's found a good solution to the problem of evil. Its a crappy solution. And its a solution that most atheists are familiar with. (ie: that god has a "larger plan" with all the evil stuff so its not really evil) As I said previously, assuming that there is no god at all, is a solution that's orders of magnitude more satisfying, because it erases the whole problem. Evil happens because the universe and the physical laws that govern it are completely indifferent to human or animal suffering, and humans, altho sometimes brilliant, are basically powerhungry tribal apes with guns and religion at their disposal, and some of them even have pretty much defective brains, lacking our usual specter of emotions, for example.

All that makes sense in a godless universe, where our hardearned human rights also makes sense, not just that we have them, but that it took thousands of years and thousands of wars before we figured we might need them. It also explains why some still dont believe in them.

>> ^enoch:

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
that being said,dont you find the absence of dogmatic speak refreshing?
Yes.
i would think an atheist at least could appreciate this type of conversation.
he is not preachy in this talk,nor is he attempting to convert or convince.
No but it does have a smell of dishonesty about it. He's constantly calling out the atheists for unreasonably demanding that he prove the existence of god, which he then freely admits he cant do, as a sign op a kind of opendmindeness, while subtly making that very same silly demand in return "You cant prove there is no god!"
which god are you speaking of.
a pantheon of deities?
judau-christian?
or any other of the 4500 religions?
Again, this isnt really my problem here: I'm not the one making shit up about elusive, invisible metaphysical overlords. I'm saying there is no evidence.

agreed.
thats why i do not attempt to "prove" the existence of a creator.
to do so would be futile.
but he is making the point..the crux in the argument in my opinion,of the dynamic of proof.
i have had many atheists demand this of me also.
as if it were my job to somehow convince them.
which is is not, but i also do not put myself in a position where i have to i.e: making claims of the certitude of a creator etc etc.
everybody has their own path and come to their own conclusions based on their own subjective realty.
faith is personal while religion is not (though they claim it is..and often).
anyways i thought this was pretty good concerning that very argument and truly felt it was worthy for even an theist to be able to at least understand a person of faiths viewpoint in a non-dogmatic way.
seems i was wrong.
meh.../shrugs.
thanks for replying BRM.
very awesome of you.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

that being said,dont you find the absence of dogmatic speak refreshing?
Yes.
i would think an atheist at least could appreciate this type of conversation.
he is not preachy in this talk,nor is he attempting to convert or convince.
No but it does have a smell of dishonesty about it. He's constantly calling out the atheists for unreasonably demanding that he prove the existence of god, which he then freely admits he cant do, as a sign op a kind of opendmindeness, while subtly making that very same silly demand in return "You cant prove there is no god!"
which god are you speaking of.
a pantheon of deities?
judau-christian?
or any other of the 4500 religions?
Again, this isnt really my problem here: I'm not the one making shit up about elusive, invisible metaphysical overlords. I'm saying there is no evidence.


agreed.
thats why i do not attempt to "prove" the existence of a creator.
to do so would be futile.
but he is making the point..the crux in the argument in my opinion,of the dynamic of proof.
i have had many atheists demand this of me also.
as if it were my job to somehow convince them.
which is is not, but i also do not put myself in a position where i have to i.e: making claims of the certitude of a creator etc etc.

everybody has their own path and come to their own conclusions based on their own subjective realty.
faith is personal while religion is not (though they claim it is..and often).
anyways i thought this was pretty good concerning that very argument and truly felt it was worthy for even an theist to be able to at least understand a person of faiths viewpoint in a non-dogmatic way.
seems i was wrong.
meh.../shrugs.
thanks for replying BRM.
very awesome of you.

that being said,dont you find the absence of dogmatic speak refreshing?
Yes.
i would think an atheist at least could appreciate this type of conversation.
he is not preachy in this talk,nor is he attempting to convert or convince.
No but it does have a smell of dishonesty about it. He's constantly calling out the atheists for unreasonably demanding that he prove the existence of god, which he then freely admits he cant do, as a sign op a kind of openmindeness, while subtly making that very same silly demand in return "You cant prove there is no god!"

which god are you speaking of.
a pantheon of deities?
judau-christian?
or any other of the 4500 religions?

Again, this isnt really my problem here: I'm not the one making shit up about elusive, invisible metaphysical overlords. I'm saying there is no evidence.

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

Oh boy, you have been "educated" on the bible, havent you. Too bad its all wrong.


Atheist error #1Translation upon translation has corrupted the original bible so now we don't know what it actually said
The truth: Today there survives more than 25,000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament alone, not to mention hundreds of Old Testament manuscripts that survive today dating back to as early as the third century B.C. These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Bible we have in our possession today is the same Bible that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago.

This isnt really relevant, the bible could be the most accurately translated book of all time, and I'd still be an atheist.(its not, but I dont really care)

Atheist error #2 The bible is only confirmed by the bible, there is no outside external verification
The truth: There are over 39 sources outside of the Bible that attest to more than 100 facts regarding Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. External sources verify that at least 80 persons from the bible were actual historical figures, 50 people from the Old Testament and 30 people from the New Testament. This includes Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas the High priest, and King David.


Again, not really relevant. The bible, along with the outside sources, were all written by superstitious desertdwellers some 2000 years ago, who gives a shit if these sources confirm eachother. Most of it confirms things like historical facts (Names of kings, major events , who lived where, and so on) None of it confirms the truth of any of the metaphysical claims, so at best, the bible is historically accurate(again, its not, but this is a long discussion)

Atheist error #3 The bible is unscientific
The truth: The bible contains no scientific errors. In fact, it reveals a number of facts about the Universe that simply were not known at the time. For instance, the bible states that the Sun is on a circuit through space, yet scientists at the time thought it was stationary. Even more amazing, the bible states the Earth is round when everyone else thought it was flat:
Isaiah 40:22 says, “It is He [God] who sits above the circle of the Earth." Job also talked about the earth being round.
This was 300 years before aristotle. The bible was over 2000 years ahead of its time. It was also widely thought at the time that the Earth was carried on the back of something else, like a turtle or the greek god Atlas. The bible taught the truth: Job 26:7 “He [God] hangs the Earth on nothing.” Scientists did not discover that the Earth hangs on nothing until 1650.
Another amazing fact that the bible uncovered far before man discovered the facts is that the number of stars is as the sand in sea.
Jeremiah 33:22 “The host of heaven [a reference to the stars] cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured.”
Before the telescope was invented, man was able to number the stars. The count was usually just over 1000. That was the prevailing scientific knowledge until the telescope was invented. The bible revealed though that there were more stars than anyone could count.

Oh boy.. Where to start here... Only a really religiously distorted mind could write this nonsense.

And nonsense like it has been written to "confirm" the accuracy of other holy texts as well. I was hit with a list of "facts" from the Quran much like this in a discussion once, one such "fact" was some nonsense about the "mountains securing the firmaments of the earth" was somehow confirmed by modern Plate-tectonics. I wonder whether you religious nuts can see through eachothers claims, can you see for instance, whats wrong with that Quran-argument, or does that seem reasonable to you? If not, why do the above arguments from the bible about god "hanging the earth in its place" seem like good decriptions of astronomical fact?

Atheist error #4 The history of the bible is made up, it is just mythology
The truth: In every instance where the Bible can be, or has been checked out archaeologically, it has been found to be 100% accurate.

Wow, thats almost 100% inaccurate. Israeli archiologists have, with great religious entusiasm and eagerness, for decades tried to document the 40-year travel through the desert from Egypt that the Jews are said to have done. One of the most famous bible stories, and, one would think, one of the best candidates to be proven true by archeology, yet they have all come up empty handed. It is, for all intends and purposes, as if it never happened.

@GeeSussFreeK I'm going to pick and choose from your comment instead of quoting, since it's huge.


There are some major problems with this claim, IMO. I would like to clean up the wording of your second sentence. Something that doesn't interact in anyway with the cosmos, doesn't exist meaningfully. So something that does not, cannot, and will not interact with an object doesn't exist to that object. Indeed, when our own galaxy is racing away from the other galaxies at a speed faster than the speed of light (the space in-between being created at a rate which pushes us away faster than the speed of light) you can say the same thing, that our galaxy is the only object that exists in the universe. Other objects existed, but the no longer do. They might "exist" in some theoretical way, but they don't meaningfully exist. I completely agree with this position. If a being we want to call God doesn't exist here in any way physically, than he doesn't exist.

I'm not sure you can say that something doesn't exist, just because we cannot observe it directly anymore. Galaxies moving away from ours at greater than light speed still have had an effect on things around them and we can see the "traces" of them, which at least suggests that they exist - like black holes, which we cannot see directly either. Futhermore, we can observe on the galaxies moving parallel or at least along side our own, how they move and can thus estimate the position of the big bang and theorize from the given evidence that galaxies moving in the opposite direction should exist even if we cannot see them or in essence EVER interact with them again.

A similar argument can't be made for God.


Which brings us to your first point. How does the universe exist? I assure you we have more question in that than answers. And every answer brings forth new questions. We are no closer today to understand basic ideas than thousands of years ago.

You are being a bit facetious here, I suppose? We are quite a bit, actually a huge leap, closer to the basic ideas than we were thousands of years ago. The problem is that the target keeps moving further back. First cells, then molecules, then atoms, now quantum entanglement (or what its called).

For instance, how to objects move? Force is applied to an object making it move relative to the world. The world moves in the opposite direction, but only relative to the opposite force, which means very, very little.

If space is infinite, how do finite objects transverse infinite space in a finite time?
It isn't and they wouldn't.

What determines gravity attract at the rate it attracts?
I'm not a physicist, so I won't venture too far off ground here. It's understood as far as I know. @Ornthoron could you perhaps confirm for me?

Why are macro objects analog and quantum objects digital?
Macron objects are perceived as analog, because we don't look closely enough and in short enough time spans. Any perceived analog object can be simulated digitally if you use enough data to do it. This is my understanding, anyway.

We can't even show that the sky is blue, only that it exists as a wavelength of light that human preservers sometimes interpret as a mind object of blue, we are no closer to understanding if blue is a real thing or a thing of mind.
This is a distinction between what is and what something is perceived as. Essentially you're touching upon qualia, which some cognitive scientists believe in and others don't. Blue is a real thing in so far as it's a wavelength of light. As for the rest, I don't know. It's a much harder question than you lead on, because a theory of mind is one of the hardest questions there are left.

I think you give to much credence to our understanding for this claim to be sufficient. To my knowledge, we have little understanding of the functional dynamics of the cosmos. We have pretty good predictive models, but that is a far cry for absolute certainty, a necessary for a claim such as this.


There are many metaphysical examples of all powerful beings and absence of their direct physical interactions being detectable as well. One of the more famous is of the "God mind" example. In a dream, you are in control of all the elements. Let's call all the elements of your dream your dream physics. The dreamer is in 100% control of the dream physics. The dream itself is a creation of his dream physics. The dream physics themselves are evidence of the dreamer. In addition, the dream, being wholly created from dream physics is also evidence of the dreamer. Parallel that back to us and you have one of the easiest and elegant explanations of the universe.

I think you are confusing a dream with the idea of a dream. You rarely have any control in dreams and even lucid dreamers don't have 100 % control. How a dream actually is made/dreamed is also a point of discussion in itself. A fundamental problem with this hypothesis is that WE think. Actors in our dreams don't think or do anything that has any effect in the world other than our memory of them. Like our thoughts, dreams don't have wills of their own.

Indeed, it is so comprehensible other views of the metaphysical nature of the cosmos will seem overly complex and lauded with burdensome hyper explanations, making this model satisfy an occam's razor over other possibilities. But complexity is hardly a model for evaluating truth, so I leave that just as an aside.

All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. But all other things aren't really equal here. Some thing are just inherently complex, like gravity or magnets. When you don't think about the details, it's easy to think your hypothesis is correct, but when you dig deeper it falls apart.

Actually, even if you accept the premise, it still means that the dreamer is completely removed from us; he has no control, because not even traces of it has been observed in our reality (the dream). So the complete lack of evidence also points to this hypothesis being false.

When you think it even further, we run into the ever present homunculus argument. Who's dreaming of the dreamer? And so on.

That our reality is actually a real, physical one is a much better explanation, because it neatly explains itself more completely - thereby actually fulfilling Occam's razor better.


Indeed, there are further explanations that would seemingly leave little evidence for God except for things happening just as they "should". One being the Occasionalism model, which interestingly enough, comes from the same mind as the previous example, George Berkeley. There is no proof that causation is the actuality of the universe. Just as if I setup a room full of clocks, and from left to right the clocks would sound off 5 seconds from the previous clock. To the observer, the clocks "caused" the next clock to sound, and on down the line they go. The problem is, there is actually no causal link to bind them, I created it after seeing A then B happen again and again. The fact is, no such link is there, I, the clock creator created it to appear that way, or maybe I didn't and you just jumped to conclusions. It is a classic example that Hume also highlights in his problems on induction.

Correlation does not imply causation. We have much supporting evidence of causation though. Forces are demonstrably interactive. Whether they were secretly set up to seem as if they interact aren't necessarily relevant, because demonstrably they do. There is no evidence to the contrary at all.

In your clock example, it is a physical room, so there are plenty of things to test the hypothesis that the clocks cause each other to ring. Are the clocks identical? Are there cogs inside the clocks? If we break one, will the chain still go on without it? Etc etc.

From observing X number of clocks you cannot strictly speaking extrapolate that to all clocks. That's the essence of the induction problem. Your hypothesis is based on limited data, and on further analysis it falls apart. Causality itself hasn't fallen apart yet. I'd like to see a proper argument against it, for certain.

I will leave it there. I am resolved to say I don't know. I also don't know that can or can't know. I am uber agnostic on all points, I just can't say. And I don't even know if time will tell.

It's a good start to all questions to say "I don't know". I do that too on many, many things. It's a much better starting point than when preachers usually say, "I know".

Your questions are interesting to me, because they deal with a lot of philosophical and physical stuff, I like those.

On a purely pragmatic level though, they are largely not that important. look at it this way, do you live your life as if causality exists? If you do and it works as you expected, then causality probably exist. If you live as if it doesn't exist, then the world is suddenly a very strange place. Do you live as if what you observe as blue is actually blue? Do others see it as blue as well? If they all do, then it's probably just blue. Does it make a difference if some people see it as green? Not really, I'd think.

Do you live your life as if there's a God? Do others? Does it make a difference? That's a very basic test of whether he actually exists. I argue that it doesn't make any difference at all, other than expected behavior of either party - some live as if a God exists and other live as if he doesn't exist. If the only difference in the people themselves, then the God falls out of the equation.

I think I've sufficiently trudged through this now. Sorry for the wall of text, hope it makes sense.

God is a spritual concept. Does god exist? That's a metaphysical question, best to totally ignore it. Does a river exist as it changes from instant to instant?

Rather when I say to you, "you are against god" "God will protect you" "God will avenge me"
these are spiritual concepts. unbelievers may laugh, but spiritually minded people (who aren't as filled with prejudices as you wish to think) understand the meaning perfectly.

Sorry If I judged all you unbelievers.

@Drachen_Jager

You assume that because you can make an infinite number of statements about the truth of something, that all statements must be true, which is a fallacy. There is, correspondingly, an infinite number of false statements that could be made. It would be as high an order of infinity as the number of truth statements. There is also a corresponding theory of the quantum multiverse where all of reality exists as a quantum reality, and all realities are realized. Creating a infinite set, of infinite sets to the infinite power.

The most important thing is that all statements are not true statements, even if they are infinite in number (of both true statements and statements in general). You can't make a statement that is false, say it's true, and by that virtue discredit my metaphysic's truth value if you knew it was false in the first place. You are creating the same fallacy people make when they say "Can God make a rock in which he cannot lift?" Something that isn't logically consistent (like stating something that is true which isn't) is a pseudo-question like "Gods that can make square circles".

But now, I sleep, so no responses for awhile. I feel as if you are talking to me like I am a "believer", which I am not. There is a certain condescending nature in your tone that I get from people who "know better" than those silly people of faith. Perhaps I am wrong, but that is the perception I have of some of your phrasing.

There are some major problems with this claim, IMO. I would like to clean up the wording of your second sentence. Something that doesn't interact in anyway with the cosmos, doesn't exist meaningfully. So something that does not, cannot, and will not interact with an object doesn't exist to that object. Indeed, when our own galaxy is racing away from the other galaxies at a speed faster than the speed of light (the space in-between being created at a rate which pushes us away faster than the speed of light) you can say the same thing, that our galaxy is the only object that exists in the universe. Other objects existed, but the no longer do. They might "exist" in some theoretical way, but they don't meaningfully exist. I completely agree with this position. If a being we want to call God doesn't exist here in any way physically, than he doesn't exist.

Which brings us to your first point. How does the universe exist? I assure you we have more question in that than answers. And every answer brings forth new questions. We are no closer today to understand basic ideas than thousands of years ago. For instance, how to objects move? If space is infinite, how do finite objects transverse infinite space in a finite time? What determines gravity attract at the rate it attracts? Why are macro objects analog and quantum objects digital? We can't even show that the sky is blue, only that it exists as a wavelength of light that human preservers sometimes interpret as a mind object of blue, we are no closer to understanding if blue is a real thing or a thing of mind. I think you give to much credence to our understanding for this claim to be sufficient. To my knowledge, we have little understanding of the functional dynamics of the cosmos. We have pretty good predictive models, but that is a far cry for absolute certainty, a necessary for a claim such as this.

There are many metaphysical examples of all powerful beings and absence of their direct physical interactions being detectable as well. One of the more famous is of the "God mind" example. In a dream, you are in control of all the elements. Let's call all the elements of your dream your dream physics. The dreamer is in 100% control of the dream physics. The dream itself is a creation of his dream physics. The dream physics themselves are evidence of the dreamer. In addition, the dream, being wholly created from dream physics is also evidence of the dreamer. Parallel that back to us and you have one of the easiest and elegant explanations of the universe. Indeed, it is so comprehensible other views of the metaphysical nature of the cosmos will seem overly complex and lauded with burdensome hyper explanations, making this model satisfy an occam's razor over other possibilities. But complexity is hardly a model for evaluating truth, so I leave that just as an aside.

Indeed, there are further explanations that would seemingly leave little evidence for God except for things happening just as they "should". One being the Occasionalism model, which interestingly enough, comes from the same mind as the previous example, George Berkeley. There is no proof that causation is the actuality of the universe. Just as if I setup a room full of clocks, and from left to right the clocks would sound off 5 seconds from the previous clock. To the observer, the clocks "caused" the next clock to sound, and on down the line they go. The problem is, there is actually no causal link to bind them, I created it after seeing A then B happen again and again. The fact is, no such link is there, I, the clock creator created it to appear that way, or maybe I didn't and you just jumped to conclusions. It is a classic example that Hume also highlights in his problems on induction.

I will leave it there. I am resolved to say I don't know. I also don't know that can or can't know. I am uber agnostic on all points, I just can't say. And I don't even know if time will tell.
>> ^gwiz665:

It can be know, because that's the way the world works. There is nothing "outside" the world as it exists. While you technically might say that there could be something wholly removed from the physical universe, there is no overlap - there is no manifestation here or there of the other. Therefore, even though you could on a purely theoretical basis make the argument, it is ultimately a waste of time and futile.
>> ^Psychologic:
>> ^gwiz665:
If a god is like the regular God, a deity that just is eternal, then no they cannot exist.

"Cannot"? As is the existence of a being that exists outside of what we perceive as time is impossible? How can that be known?

Penn is 100% right in all of his language here. It is a very confusing subject, so don't hate on the people that get it wrong, but all his definitions/understandings are correct. For the interested, I am going to spell them all out there explicitly.

Belief: Any cognitive content held as true.
           Everything is a belief.

Atheism: An absence of belief in Deities.
               Atheism can be explicit or implicit.

Theism: The belief in Deities.

Agnosticism: A belief that the belief in, or non-belief in Deities and metaphysical beliefs is unknown/unknowable. In other words, it questions weather is it possible to turn any belief into knowledge.
                     There is both strong and weak form of agnosticism.

Knowledge: This refers to belief. Knowledge is true belief; or to say it backwards, knowledge is belief in something that is true.

Truth: Your fat. No wait, that's not it. It is conformity with fact or the ultimate reality (Your fat, AND lazy).

Implicit Atheism: Is lack of belief in Deities without actively rejecting the idea of Deities. The example would be someone whom has never been exposed to the idea of a Deity. Children could be counted in the ranks (before they are exposed to the idea) as well as people isolated from these ideas, like tribal people, or people incapable of forming that idea.

Explicit Atheism: Rejection of the idea of a Deity. Most atheists you would meet are explicit atheists.

Strong Agnosticism: A belief that the existence or nonexistence of a deity (or deities), and the nature of ultimate reality (truth) is unknowable.
                              
  This is the ultimate skeptical position.

Weak Agnosticism: The belief that the existence or nonexistence of a Deities (or Deities) is currently unknown but is not necessarily unknowable.
                              
 This is opinion; The highest level of skepticism you can have while also being completely rationally consistent (I am a weak agnostic atheist, so totally no bias at all).

Many of these are mix and matchable. You can be an agnostic atheist. You can Be an agnostic theist. You can be a weak agnostic atheist, which are the most sexy and have large reproductive organs. Everything is a belief here, so try not to abuse that word theists. Off to go be verbose somewhere else! And correct me anywhere I made a mistake and I will fix it, it all gets so confusing and I might of mistyped.