It was an effort to open your mind to possibities. You did make the statement "god can't be proven" and I negated that statement. From my end I have neither made a claim about "god exists" not "god doesn't exist". You made assertions like "god can't be proven". I made no such assertion either side. The burden of proof is on you to mathematically disprove God. Please do it, we are waiting.
DrBarani - It does not make sense to 'prove' or 'disprove' a concept of 'Personal God' since it is all subjective. Objectively by definition this cannot be proved or disproved either as shown in
post #21
Those who only understand and have
faith only in binary logic will continue to make outlandish claims under the name of logic which is amusing.
Additionally, let us see how Sri Nara gets out of your question (rather using his expression 'cop out' )
I already know the answer having interacted with him other people of 'faith' but I dont want to be a 'spoiler'
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Since you seem to be someone who has expressed your stand logically and with precision in my view which is refreshing, I want to ask you about your view on
Godel's incompleteness theorem (assuming you are familiar, if not you can ignore this question) which is proved by using steps which somewhat amounts to showing self referential statement such as "This statement is false" cannot be true or false.
"The first incompleteness theorem shows that any consistent formal system that includes enough of the theory of the natural numbers is incomplete: there are true statements expressible in its language that are not provable" ...Of course the statement about natural numbers to logic statement are done in a standard ways by which logicians use symbolic manipulations.
"Authors including
J. R. Lucas have debated what, if anything, Gödel's incompleteness theorems imply about human intelligence. Much of the debate centers on whether the human mind is equivalent to a
Turing machine, or by the
Church–Turing thesis, any finite machine at all. If it is, and if the machine is consistent, then Gödel's incompleteness theorems would apply to it." (follow link to the theorem for the quotes)
This theorem has been used by people of both faith and atheist to claim that concept of God cannot be true or false. My post #21 did use a very high level approach to showing the same.
While going through all the steps to show the above claims is not realistic in a forum discussion, let me at least provide a very sketchy , non-rigorous approach to making this point.
The theorem can be shown to imply that human thinking cannot be reduced to set of algorithms which means that our logic and how we perceive the world can never be reduced to a set of 'machine implementable process' which has implications on limits on the field of 'Artificial Intelligence'. The people of faith take this to mean that our existence and functioning in the universe is more than physical processes of a brain (which if understood could be turned into a computing state machine which cannot be both consistent and complete). The incompleteness means there is more to the existence of this universe than what could be modeled as a computer (implying some intelligence outside the universe).
The theorem can be shown to imply that if a complex system is able to prove itself self-consistent, then we could argue that the universe is self-sufficient. The proof of the theorem implies that the universe is infinite or else look for infinity outside the universe as theists do.
What we know is that universe is not infinite from the current knowledge. There could be parallel universes which operates on a different realm of time and space but our universe when modeled in higher than 3 dimension is finite from what is known today. This means an intelligence 'outside of this physical universe' as a possible reason for what goes on within it. This is a Theist argument.
The atheist argument could be that it is not a personal God that responds to your prayers.
A more serious argument could be that Godel's theorem imply that a system that is consistent cannot be complete since it requires a higher order intelligence to verify it. Now if one imagines a system that includes our universe and this intelligence then the same theorem can be applied requiring even higher order intelligence. This will lead to infinite regression.
Again number theory and logic extended to processing of mind characterized by 'rational thought', cannot verify themselves. An infinite levels of higher order intelligent system is required by implication. So logic and working of the mind cannot be proved to rationally complete and consistent requiring 'intuition' which becomes very basic need.
Let me stop before I lose all the readers of this post
