Essay talk:Refutation of 'Proof That God Exists'

This essay is open to contributions and different perspectives, by the way. My hope is it will become good and complete enough to be moved into main-space. Nihilist 18:00, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Too long?
I just breezed through Sye's questionnaire without even slowing down. The only thing not obvious is that his definition of "absolute" in "absolute moral laws" is implying a supernatural cause, so "no" to that.

What am I missing? --193.254.155.48 (talk) 14:44, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh GOD This is SO Boring. Please Kill Me, i totally forgot i wrote this.
 * It's supposed to be a page-by-page refutation, so yeah, it's a little longer that it needs to be. If you want to edit it, go ahead, as long as they're good. (talk to a) Nihilist  03:15, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

This essay is open to contributions and different perspectives, by the way. My hope is it will become good and complete enough to be moved into main-space. Nihilist 18:00, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

- http://www.godorabsurdity.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/proof-rebuttal-fail.html
 * Dear 'An American Nihilist' and anyone else interested. I wrote a refutation of your refutation on my blog here

00:06(UTC) 30 January 2014, 30 January 2014
 * Much later: no. No you didn't. You went on a rant about nihilism and how you thought without evidence the Bible was absolute truth and that they were just "rejecting God". Full of appeals to emotion as well. Not a refutation, sorry. I'm not even saying I agree with the points made in the essay and in fact I'm anti-nihilist but you did not refute anything. TheAtheistComrade (talk) 09:11, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Critique Doggy Pyrrhonist
--DogmaticPyrrhonist (talk) 08:57, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Critique and or editorial and or waffle from my point of view, where it differs from the article as of 29/01/2014

The question of Absolute Truth

I can't help but cringe at "Truth" with a capital. There's a few thoughts before I start because of that. Some terms, when used by creationists, tend to get used in multiple ways. I fully expect a term like Truth to be one of them. The argument method is to phrase a proposition like "Is there a universal truth about reality?" or "does the second law of thermodynamics hold for biology?" and once they have the answer you're looking for, "extrapolate" using every other meaning possible for the word. But, I'll call that when I see it.

In the narrow sense of "Is there a universe that is the same regardless of observer?", then yes, there is a universal Truth. As to whether that "Truth" implies anything other than a shared set of physical laws, I seriously doubt it. Seeing as the article fails to define any of the terms, I grudgingly give it conditional "Yes, depending on your meaning of the word 'Truth'." Although I strongly suspect the Truth they are asking about is the Truth An_American_Nihilist is talking about.

Laws of Logic

Daft question. A better question is whether you know what the rules surrounding formal logic are. I suspect the article author(s) don't. Rhetoric, they have that down pat, but logic, not so much. I think at this stage arguing about existence vs conceptual meaning is just wasting space. Because the creationists are warming up to shoot themselves in the foot anyway.

Laws of Mathematics

Same as with Logic. Although with mathematics, with sufficient university inflicted trauma, you can also ask "Which mathematical laws?"

Laws of Science

Well, who didn't see this coming?

The laws of science DO NOT EXIST. In science, a law is essentially an equation that helps you work stuff out. It has no existence. Hell, some are guidelines, not what these creotards think of as laws. So, yes, (sorry Scotty), you can break the laws of physics. Every confirmation of Einstein's THEORY of General Relativity, broke Newton's LAWS of motion. But those laws still hold, because they're bloody useful. Hell, the 2nd law of thermodynamics (that creationists with no clue love) is a statistical guideline. It holds true simply because in any meaningful quantity, the averages never deviate because there terns to be serious fuckloads of atoms. Again, it's still a "law". Is in, a useful guideline/formula. The formula exist on paper, but they have no existence outside humanity.

His example is even bullshit. Yeah, JUST using the gravity equations we can predict the speed of an object falling "if it's heavier than air". FFS. Idiot.

Absolute Moral Laws

Fuck no. There are some "consistent across all human cultures" moralities. Most of which the Christian churches have breached. But that's by no means Absolute. What the hell is child molestation to bacteria? And some people lack the parts of the brain that provide moral thinking, or simply differ in the details they would agree on as moral.And then there's learnt or thought out morals. I agree with An_American_Nihilist quite a lot in his discussion of this section. The article author clearly has no clue what he's talking about at this stage.

Step Five, where we try to link everything together as if it related.

No, I fucking disagree with the basic premise and I won't be distracted by daft questions about whether these things are physical or not.

Maths and logic are established ways of taking a set of information and deducing further information. That's IT. Their methods and structure can have proof, structure and universality. BUT they operate on information. They have no substance on their own. If you feed lies into logic or maths, you'll get lies out the other end.

The laws of science is a diversion into misrepresentation.

Absolute moral code is not like the others.

And then there's some drivel. Like, really. It makes no sense and is discontinuous. FIIK.

PROOF

Um, no, see those logic laws. That's begging the question. X is true because X. And, as An_American_Nihilist points out, they fail to even attempt to provide evidence, but crap on about "proof". Unless you are talking pure logic, or maths (which, see above, takes you from a point to another, but always has an abstract starting point), there is no Proof. No-one in science proves things. Scientists provide evidence for or against hypotheses and/or theories. By invoking the term Proof, they relegate themselves to talking about imaginary things. And then go on to firmly establish they care not a jot for reality by ignoring the question of evidence.

And they hinge their argument on their need for proof. I think a quick summary of their argument goes thusly;

If you believe in an absolute morality, then you can only prove that such a thing exists if you believe in my god (I do notice they conflate every possible religion to their own, but let's ignore that for now).

The discussion about logic, maths, science, etc etc is camouflage for this postulate.

The key elements are;

Absolute Morality: They haven't shown such a thing exists, and by their own admission, they can only prove it with a god. More to the point, it's demonstrably false.

That the existence of an absolute morality requires there to be a "proof": What?

That to provide that proof, you need to invoke a god: I suspect you can invoke any bullshit to "prove" absolute morality using that logic. The key is invoking bullshit. Absolute Moral Code does not follow from the proposition "God". There's the implication that Christians etc get their "absolute" moral code from the assorted ancient literature they prefer over reality, but even a cursory look through the texts and observing people's behaviour shows that as false.

End rant, cos I'm starting to type angry. :-)

Refutation of the 'refutation'
As mentioned above I've written a refutation of the supposed 'refutation' which you can find at my blog here http://brendantruthseeker.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/proof-rebuttal-fail.html It will be interesting to see how many people actually read this and check out my blog so that the truth can be known. I'm happy to discuss this (civilly)... The fact of the matter though is that the transcendental proof is watertight and any attempts to refute it fail. 00:13(UTC) 30 January, 2014

This entire article (not the refutation) is a complete non sequitur

 * It's basically the Trancendal argument for god! PRATT much?--TemplarJLS (talk) 05:42, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't understand.
So I ran through this giving all the answers expected of me and I came to the punchline:
 * To reach this page you have admitted that absolute truth exists, that you can know things to be true, that logic exists, that it is unchanging, that it is not made of matter, and that it is universal.

But the conclusion paragraph is simply an assertion. There is no way it obviously follows from the preceding one.--Weirdstuff (talk) 10:50, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Truth, knowledge, and logic are necessary to prove ANYTHING and cannot be made sense of apart from God. Therefore...