₦airaland Forum

Since the dawn of human history, Religious people have advanced all sorts of arguments to support the existence of whatever God or diety that they believe in.
In the the prescience era, their arguments carried a lot weight, mostly because proof or evidence was not a requirement.
In the modern scientific era however, goddists have struggled to explain the existence of their particular God in the face of numerous advances in knowledge about the universe, our Earth and biological life.

So these days, the Religious folks have to do quiet a lot of logical acrobatics, mostly absurd fallacies, to justify their faith.

On this particular forum, non believers have been asked several times to prove that God does not exist.

Well, even though it is the responsibility of the believers to show proof of the existence of God, the nation of Nigeria does make a compelling case ,in fact, absolute proof, that God does not exist.

This is a nation of 200m+ people who expend the most time and energy to worship and pray to God.

In my 50+ years of life, no single prayer has been answered in Nigeria and for Nigeria.

Despite our absurd fixation with religion and our religiosity, Nigeria can best be described as a God-forsaken nation.

When will it become conscious in our minds that whoever sold us this grand bogey, has left us holding the bag full of desert sand ?

How long shall we continue to carry this bag of desert sand ?

Cc: Deepsight

plaetton:
Since the dawn of human history, Religious people have advanced all sorts of arguments to support the existence of whatever God or diety that they believe in. In the prescience era, their arguments carried a lot weight, mostly because, proof or evidence was not required.
In modern scientific era, goddists have struggled to explain the existence of ,their particular God, in the face of numerous advances in knowledge about the universe, our Earth and biological life.

So these days, the Religious folks have to do quiet a lot logical acrobatics, mostly absurd fallacies, to justify their fate.

In this particular forum, non believers have been asked several times to prove that God does not exist.

Well, even though it is the responsibility of the believers to show proof of the existence of God, the of Nigeria does make a compelling case ,in fact, absolute proof, that God does not exist.
This is a nation of 200m+ people who expend the most time and energy to worship and prayer to God.
In my 50+ years of life, no single prayer has been answered in Nigeria and for Nigeria.
Despite our absurd fixation of religion and our religiosity, Nigeria can best be described as a God-forsaken nation.

When will it become conscious in our minds that whoever sold us this grand bogy, has left us holding the bag full of desert sand ?

How long shall we continue to carry this bag of desert sand ?

Cc: Deepsight

We both agree that the constructs of God contained in religion is mostly false. We both have a very dim vim of the Abrahamic God in particular. Nonetheless I think you know very well my position that an eternal and transcendental element necessarily exists, and which, I refer to as God.

To be clear, I don't believe that element created this world.

Interesting.

This is a clear case of the enemy of my enemy

I don't think the existence of God should be a debate. You can't look at the universe and think you can observe God.

God is a spirit, not a scientific fact.

That is the issue. Everything else can be explained by science (or almost everything)

So why can't God.

Versitee:
I don't think the existence of God should be a debate. You can't look at the universe and think you can observe God.

God is a spirit, not a scientific fact.

That is the issue. Everything else can be explained by science (or almost everything)

So why can't God.

Science can't even explain you: what you are.

DeepSight:
Science can't even explain you: what you are.

Well, science can explain things about me. For example, science can explain how my heart beat is crucial to my living.

Science can explain how to take care of my body.

U Gerrit?

Versitee:
Well, science can explain things about me. For example, science can explain how my heart beat is crucial to my living.

Science can explain how to take care of my body.

U Gerrit?

You are not your body. Your body is a shell, a biological machine which enables you to work in the physical world.

DeepSight:
You are not your body. Your body is a shell, a biological machine which enables you to work in the physical world.

You know that's just an educated guess, at best.

If scientific investigation, the foundation of everything we currently know about the universe, cannot explain spirit or God, then what are basis for a belief not grounded in the immutable laws of math and physics?
If we don't have foundational basis (science) with which to understand reality, then it all comes down to " just believe me bro" .

DeepSight:
Science can't even explain you: what you are.

Science is a quest, a series of questions, one after the other.

plaetton:
You know that's just an educated guess, at best.

If scientific investigation, the foundation of everything we currently know about the universe, cannot explain spirit or God, then what are basis for a belief not grounded in the immutable laws of math and physics?
If we don't have foundational basis (science) with which to understand reality, then it all comes down to " just believe me bro" .

It is not by mistake that "physics" as a word is a derivative of "physical." Thus the science of physics can only address the physical world.
There is reality beyond, before and after the physical.

The physical is not even as real as the non-physical.
Evidence of this rests in the transient nature of the physical.

The intangible and spiritual are much more real and abiding.
It is what you are, and you cannot change it.

You are not a physical being. You dwell only for a time in a physical encasement.

DeepSight:
You are not your body. Your body is a shell, a biological machine which enables you to work in the physical world.

Ok

DeepSight:
It is not by mistake that "physics" as a word is a derivative of "physical." Thus the science of physics can only address the physical world.
There is reality beyond, before and after the physical.

The physical is not even as real as the non-physical.

Sounds quite sweet and romantic as a belief, to soothe our anxieties about our mortality.
No evidence has ever been adduced to support the so-called non-physical. Even in spooky arena of sub-atomic physics (quantum physics), we still employ scientific methodology to try understand it bit by bit.

" just believe me bro " just doesn't cut it.

DeepSight:
Evidence of this rests in the transient nature of the physical.

The intangible and spiritual are much more real and abiding.
It is what you are, and you cannot change it.

You are not a physical being. You dwell only for a time in a physical encasement.

No evidence.
How you feel or one's personal perspective is not the same as EVIDENCE.
Evidence means something that is objectively standard to anyone, everyone, everywhere, everytime.

plaetton:
Sounds quite sweet and romantic as a belief, to soothe our anxieties about our mortality.
No evidence has ever been adduced to support the so-called non-physical. Even in spooky arena of sub-atomic physics (quantum physics), we still employ scientific methodology to try understand it bit by bit.

" just believe me bro " just doesn't cut it.


No evidence.
How you feel or one's personal perspective is not the same as EVIDENCE.
Evidence means something that is objectively standard to anyone, everyone, everywhere, everytime.

Did you participate in this thread with Lordreed and I?

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind

Plaetton, let me draw your attention to particular posts in that thread -

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind#109443133

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind#109443350

Versitee:
I don't think the existence of God should be a debate. You can't look at the universe and think you can observe God.

God is a spirit, not a scientific fact.

That is the issue. Everything else can be explained by science (or almost everything)

So why can't God.

The debate here is that every Nigerian believes in God. Every God believer believes that God is the architect of their fortunes, personal and collective. Every God believing Nigerian prays multiples times a day from childhood to old age.
Churches and Mosques pray multiple times each day and night. Offerings, vigils, tithes, seed sowing, evangelism are all done to beseech and placate a God that is expected to acknowledge, bless and protect the faithful.
Faith, worship, offerings , prayers, etc, are deemed spiritual investments from which celestial dividends are expected, and much much needed in this darkest hour of Nigeria's checkered existence.

If faith and worship are spiritual investments, at what point in our personal and national life do we put a stop loss , cut our losses, and perhaps begin to consider other investment options?

For goodness sake, Nigeria's investment in the God stock has plummeted in value over the past 200yrs (?) to zero.

What gives ?

DeepSight:
Did you participate in this thread with Lordreed and I?

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind

No I didn't. I wasn't even aware of it.

plaetton:
Since the dawn of human history, Religious people have advanced all sorts of arguments to support the existence of whatever God or diety that they believe in.
In the the prescience era, their arguments carried a lot weight, mostly because proof or evidence was not a requirement.
In the modern scientific era however, goddists have struggled to explain the existence of their particular God in the face of numerous advances in knowledge about the universe, our Earth and biological life.

So these days, the Religious folks have to do quiet a lot of logical acrobatics, mostly absurd fallacies, to justify their faith.

On this particular forum, non believers have been asked several times to prove that God does not exist.

Well, even though it is the responsibility of the believers to show proof of the existence of God, the nation of Nigeria does make a compelling case ,in fact, absolute proof, that God does not exist.

This is a nation of 200m+ people who expend the most time and energy to worship and pray to God.

In my 50+ years of life, no single prayer has been answered in Nigeria and for Nigeria.

Despite our absurd fixation with religion and our religiosity, Nigeria can best be described as a God-forsaken nation.

When will it become conscious in our minds that whoever sold us this grand bogey, has left us holding the bag full of desert sand ?

How long shall we continue to carry this bag of desert sand ?

Cc: Deepsight

Stop advertising your foolishness.

Nigeria is even a case which proves God for when everything was good people were jumping up and down but now things are bad as God had foretold, it is now you all are wailing.

Please let all the wailers wail don't bring God into it for He forewarned us that theses days will come and it has come, so you are talking rubbish

plaetton:
No I didn't. I wasn't even aware of it.

Breeze through the posts I highlighted above pls. The argument I sought to make is that we can logically infer that our minds are not constructs of matter alone.

Versitee:
Well, science can explain things about me. For example, science can explain how my heart beat is crucial to my living.

Science can explain how to take care of my body.

U Gerrit?

Things about you and but not you which is what Deepsight said.

DeepSight:
Breeze through the posts I highlighted above pls. The argument I sought to make is that we can logically infer that our minds are not constructs of matter alone.

I don't need to read the post to be able to refute the argument that mind is this or that.
It's like saying that information is independent of the source.
Brain ( matter) generates consciousness ( mind). Consciousness is not independent of the brain that generates it. A foetus becomes conscious only when the electrical activity in the brain reaches a certain voltage threshold.
Consciousness, a.k.a mind, is the product of electrical activity in the physical brain.
Brain injuries in different parts of the brain helps us to understand how mind, reality and perspective are controlled by the physical brain.
Even the ' spiritual experience ' is housed and controlled and affected by a certain portion of the brain.

Pls read up on Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and the Religious experience.

Dtruthspeaker:
Stop advertising your foolishness.

Nigeria is even a case which proves God for when everything was good people were jumping up and down but now things are bad as God had foretold, it is now you all are wailing.

Please let all the wailers wail don't bring God into it for He forewarned us that theses days will come and it has come, so you are talking rubbish

Pls tell me when things were ever good in Nigeria.

plaetton:
I don't need to read the post to be able to refute the argument that mind is this or that.
It's like saying that information is independent of the source.
Brain ( matter) generates consciousness ( mind). Consciousness is not independent of the brain that generates it. A foetus becomes conscious only when the electrical activity in the brain reaches a certain voltage threshold.
Consciousness, a.k.a mind, is the product of electrical activity in the physical brain.
Brain injuries in different parts of the brain helps us to understand how mind, reality and perspective are controlled by the physical brain.
Even the ' spiritual experience ' is housed and controlled and affected by a certain portion of the brain.

Pls read up on Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and the Religious experience.

Well that thread ran for 39 pages so you can understand some significant energy and thought was devoted to it which I cannot easily replicate. All I can tell you is that -

1. A material thing cannot produce an immaterial thing.

2. If matter is the source of all that we are, there is no such thing as freewill and everything that happens is predestined and pre - determined, ergo there is neither good nor evil and thus nothing to complain about in the world

3. Matter cannot be conscious by itself.

I understand that these statements may require elucidation / expatiation, but I will have to leave you to dwell on them as I cant rehash such a subtle, detailed and nuanced matter all over again.

DeepSight:
It is not by mistake that "physics" as a word is a derivative of "physical." Thus the science of physics can only address the physical world.
There is reality beyond, before and after the physical.

The physical is not even as real as the non-physical.
Evidence of this rests in the transient nature of the physical.

The intangible and spiritual are much more real and abiding.
It is what you are, and you cannot change it.

You are not a physical being. You dwell only for a time in a physical encasement.

My Ol pal,
You know on a private level, I might say that agree with you on most of these postulations and educated guesses( which is what they are). But that a notion sounds good to me, for which I might be inclined to ' brlieve ' is not the same as accepting it as fact. Facts are built upon evidence.
There are a lot of things I personally believe, for which there are no factual evidence to support them. So , they would always remain in the realms of postulations and myths.

plaetton:
My Ol pal,
You know on a private level, I might say that agree with you on most of these postulations and educated guesses( which is what they are). But that a notion sounds good to me, for which I might be inclined to ' brlieve ' is not the same as accepting it as fact. Facts are built upon evidence.
There are a lot of things I personally believe, for which there are no factual evidence to support them. So , they would always remain in the realms of postulations and myths.

Oh to be clear, I remain agnostic as to the nature of reality and our existence.

OK!

DeepSight:
Well that thread ran for 39 pages so you can understand some significant energy and thought was devoted to it which I cannot easily replicate. All I can tell you is that -

1. A material thing cannot produce an immaterial thing.

2. If matter is the source of all that we are, there is no such thing as freewill and everything that happens is predestined and pre - determined, ergo there is neither good nor evil and thus nothing to complain about in the world

3. Matter cannot be conscious by itself.

I understand that these statements may require elucidation / expatiation, but I will have to leave you to dwell on them as I cant rehash such a subtle, detailed and nuanced matter all over again.

1. False
For more than 100yrs now, we have been making transistor radios(material objects) that generate electrical signals( immaterial) across miles. In fact, the transistor has transformed life on earth as we know it.

Pianos( tangible) produce music ( intangible).

2. I think I opened a thread several years ago to show that freewill is not freewill.
Even the bacteria in our bowels control what we think is our own freewill.

plaetton:
1. False
For more than 100yrs now, we have been making transistor radios(material objects) that generate electrical signals( immaterial) across miles. In fact, the transistor has transformed life on earth as we know it.

Pianos( tangible) produce music ( intangible).

You are wrong. The piano is only a tool for the physical expression of music created in the intangible mind.

I addressed this here -

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind/2#109468871

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind/2#109468961

2. I think I opened a thread several years ago to show that freewill is not freewill.
Even the bacteria in our bowels control what we think is our own freewill.

Fine, then cease to complain about any events that ever occur in the world, or anything anyone ever does or says, including the state of Nigeria.

Culled from an old post of mine.

-----

Just yet another detour/ stop-over. I am inspired by my own analogy of a song.
Is a song a physical thing?

Not at all, otherwise you would have to show me its atoms / molecules! A song can only be represented or conveyed by physical things. It can be conveyed by musical instruments, it can be written down in the language of musical notes, it can be written down in multiple technical and human languages even, it can be recorded onto physical instruments - a tape recorder, a compact disc, a computer drive, in all of these forms it will appear as informative code of different kinds: smash and destroy all of these things a million times over, and yet you would not have touched or harmed the song. The song remains completely immaterial - even when it is sung by a person, what you hear are actually informative codes which float along sound waves and reach your ears to be transmitted to your brain. If you like grab those sound waves, squash and distort them in any way imaginable, you still will not have touched the song. The song is completely immaterial, a child of the mind and often of the soul as well, you cannot account for the existence of the song or even the nature of the song using physical reference points alone, this just remains impossible.

This is something to dwell deeply upon!

So LordReed when you talk about "seeing" images on the computer, that is something we can liken to the analogy of the song - none of the "images" you are seeing are in fact the thoughts which are being expressed, if you like edit or delete them, the thoughts will not have been destroyed, what you are seeing are merely physical designs which form a code which you have been educated to recognize and interpret in your mind. Therefore you are not seeing immaterial things. It is another absurdity to say that you can see an immaterial thing. Your list of absurdities is growing and somewhere in this thread I will compile them, and when I do, I trust that they will probably provoke you to claim that you never said any such things - whereas you did.

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind/2#109468961

plaetton:
Since the dawn of human history, Religious people have advanced all sorts of arguments to support the existence of whatever God or diety that they believe in.
In the the prescience era, their arguments carried a lot weight, mostly because proof or evidence was not a requirement.
In the modern scientific era however, goddists have struggled to explain the existence of their particular God in the face of numerous advances in knowledge about the universe, our Earth and biological life.

So these days, the Religious folks have to do quiet a lot of logical acrobatics, mostly absurd fallacies, to justify their faith.

On this particular forum, non believers have been asked several times to prove that God does not exist.

Well, even though it is the responsibility of the believers to show proof of the existence of God, the nation of Nigeria does make a compelling case ,in fact, absolute proof, that God does not exist.

This is a nation of 200m+ people who expend the most time and energy to worship and pray to God.

In my 50+ years of life, no single prayer has been answered in Nigeria and for Nigeria.

Despite our absurd fixation with religion and our religiosity, Nigeria can best be described as a God-forsaken nation.

When will it become conscious in our minds that whoever sold us this grand bogey, has left us holding the bag full of desert sand ?

How long shall we continue to carry this bag of desert sand ?

Cc: Deepsight

Are you black, I mean are you a black person?

DeepSight:
Oh to be clear, I remain agnostic as to the nature of reality and our existence.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8907974/#:~:text=Neuroscience%20has%20furnished%20evidence%20that,the%20features%20of%20our%20experience.

Here is an excerpt from the long article.

Neuroscience research, led by the funding that supports it, is dominated by research into disorders of the nervous system. The pursuit of treatments and cures (and the research efforts into understanding the normal function of the brain) builds on decades of discovery into all levels of neural organization – seemingly none of it reliant on knowing very much at all about consciousness. Studies of how consciousness is generated, and why it has the characteristics it does, is nevertheless a focus of considerable interest and effort. There is no consensus about how it is generated, or how best to approach the question, but all investigations start with the incontrovertible premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain.

The approach the majority of neuroscientists take to the question of how consciousness is generated, it is probably fair to say, is to ignore it. Although there are active research programs looking at correlates of consciousness, and explorations of informational properties of what might be relevant neural ensembles, the tacitly implied mechanism of consciousness in these approaches is that it somehow just happens. This reliance on a “magical emergence” of consciousness does not address the “objectively unreasonable” proposition that elements that have no attributes or properties that can be said to relate to consciousness somehow aggregate to produce it. Neuroscience has furnished evidence that neurons are fundamental to consciousness; at the fine and gross scale, aspects of our conscious experience depend on specific patterns of neural activity – in some way, the connectivity of neurons computes the features of our experience. So how do we get from knowing that some specific configurations of cells produce consciousness to understanding why this would be the case? Behind the voltages and currents electrophysiologists measure is a staggeringly complex system of electromagnetic fields – these are the fundamental physics of neurons and glia in the brain. The brain is entirely made of electromagnetism (EM) phenomena from the level of the atoms up. The EM field literally manifests the computations, or signaling, or information processing/activities performed by connected cellular ensembles that generate a 1st-person perspective. An investigation into the EM field at the cellular scale provides the possibility of identifying the outward signs of a mechanism in fundamental terms (physics), as opposed to merely describing the correlates of our mental abstractions of it.

DeepSight:
Culled from an old post of mine.

-----

Just yet another detour/ stop-over. I am inspired by my own analogy of a song.
Is a song a physical thing?

Not at all, otherwise you would have to show me its atoms / molecules! A song can only be represented or conveyed by physical things. It can be conveyed by musical instruments, it can be written down in the language of musical notes, it can be written down in multiple technical and human languages even, it can be recorded onto physical instruments - a tape recorder, a compact disc, a computer drive, in all of these forms it will appear as informative code of different kinds: smash and destroy all of these things a million times over, and yet you would not have touched or harmed the song. The song remains completely immaterial - even when it is sung by a person, what you hear are actually informative codes which float along sound waves and reach your ears to be transmitted to your brain. If you like grab those sound waves, squash and distort them in any way imaginable, you still will not have touched the song. The song is completely immaterial, a child of the mind and often of the soul as well, you cannot account for the existence of the song or even the nature of the song using physical reference points alone, this just remains impossible.

This is something to dwell deeply upon!

So LordReed when you talk about "seeing" images on the computer, that is something we can liken to the analogy of the song - none of the "images" you are seeing are in fact the thoughts which are being expressed, if you like edit or delete them, the thoughts will not have been destroyed, what you are seeing are merely physical designs which form a code which you have been educated to recognize and interpret in your mind. Therefore you are not seeing immaterial things. It is another absurdity to say that you can see an immaterial thing. Your list of absurdities is growing and somewhere in this thread I will compile them, and when I do, I trust that they will probably provoke you to claim that you never said any such things - whereas you did.

https://www.nairaland.com/6942843/matter-mind/2#109468961

I am not sure what you are trying to convey but you seem to be contradicting yourself. You say a song is immaterial, but you can hear it just fine while rejecting that the image on your computer screen is immaterial yet can be seen. Very contradictory.

I just went over the things I said in that thread, and I still stand by them. What is more likely, as evidenced by this post, is you will tie yourself up into pretzels trying to overthink what is very evidently reality.


BTW what do the words "virtual reality" convey to you?

LordReed:
I am not sure what you are trying to convey but you seem to be contradicting yourself. You say a song is immaterial, but you can hear it just fine while rejecting that the image on your computer screen is immaterial yet can be seen. Very contradictory.

You may be the one overthinking things. If you missed it, the point is that a song, just like a thought, is immaterial and conceived in the mind. It is only expressed physically and heard physically by physical tools such as musical instruments and the ear.

If I recall correctly, on that thread you said that a thought can be seen on a computer screen. You really need to rethink that. A thought is invisible. What you see when something is written down are mere symbols of expression.

BTW what do the words "virtual reality" convey to you?

VR resonates with me as I believe thats what this world is. A simulation. A shadow or reflection of reality.