Scientific proof that God exists?

[Horacewoodwood]

Oh yeah? PROVE IT.
The Eisenbeiss case is listed at #1. How EXACTLY are you going to explain what happened without considering the survival hypothesis?
 
http://www.aeces.info/Top40/top40-main.shtml

Do you even know what it means to be rational? I urge you to give this evidence some rational consideration.

If you searched it you would have find debates about it. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120669

Everything else as I said has been debunked. They are all anecdotal cases, there is no real evidence. A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. How do we test any of this?

I can easily find 2000 cases of people experiencing ghosts encounters and even videos, does that prove ghosts exist?

What is the exact point of your link? A little of it talks about people believing in God. This doesn't have anything to do with scientific proof for or against.

Since you don't understand the rebuttal you are speaking of, how can you know if anything is actually rebutted?

You are talking about testing scientific hypotheses. What does that have to do with proof that God exists?

There are many things you can ask me about the proof for that I will not be able to answer, because I don't know. But the proof for the existence of God is so extremely clear, that only people with an agenda wouldn't understand it... on purpose.

It is an old but good link because right in the OP it says that there is "nothing to suggest any fraud was committed" for this case! Skeptics never provided any evidence to support their beliefs about what happened in the Eisenbeiss case. These are pitiful arguments from pseudo-skeptics who often think they have no burden of proof.

Some skeptics want to claim that Eisenbeiss was responsible for the hoax, this is also nonsense; there is no evidence for this claim whatsoever. Those arguing against the possibility of survival are simply refusing consider the possibility of new paradigms, they also fail to consider the entire body of circumstantial evidence supporting the possibility of survival.

The test in this case was to see whether or not the medium could contact the prior personality and relay the information to Eisenbeiss. The accuracy of the information and the chess game has been established; you should look at the references in the AECES paper for more details, note that some of the links can only be accessed through archive.org.

The realistic portrayal of the chess player by the medium is analogous to the "Events witnessed and heard by NDErs while in an out-of-body state [which] are almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was witnessed or heard during the NDE, their OBE observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate. Even if the OBE observations include events occurring far away from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the NDEr, the OBE observations are still almost always confirmed as completely accurate. This fact alone rules out the possibility that NDEs are related to any known brain functioning or sensory awareness. This also refutes the possibility that NDEs are unrealistic fragments of memory from the brain."
http://www.near-death.com/science/evidence.html#a32

This thread is a great example of skeptical misdirection. Show me some hard evidence, please!

Skeptics use misdirection and fallacious reasoning in order to deny the truth of survival:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_misdirection

If you carry the idea of spiritual contact to some greater levels, you could add the idea that it is the complexity of the human spirit that keeps direct spiritual contact from happening easily. This is a protection for people, so that no strong spirit can easily take control of anybody.

By dabbling with spiritual contact, which we know very little about, one is tearing down his own guards against potentially strong spirits. For example, how do we know if there isn't some spirit that happens to know the answers we are questing for, and that is claiming to be someone that it isn't, and simply feeding the info so that the recipient(s) will force their protective defences to shut down. Then that spirit comes in and takes over the person.

We need to be very careful of not losing ourselves to other-spirit control, and thereby losing our selves and our lives. I mean, isn't this what may have happened to some of the wilder insane people in the asylums?

Episode 13 is here, it is a short one but any information is good. We'll call this episode 'The intellectual suicide of a bad apologist'. We've been reading Badecker's posts where he condemns bringing religion into the subject and telling everyone to stick to the 'scientific' part. Of course he was telling us to do that, he can go religious as many times as he wants because he believes himself to be special having God in his favors. Go ahead and read how our superior human Badecker goes completely nuts about spirits, the defense system of the spirits, other spirits that take over and other science fiction shit that in his mind must be the same as science. Not to be surprised since these fantasy fairy tales are as scientific as his machine theory is, or as his religion is. We conclude that there are two Badeckers: the one who is really scientific and hates religion being brought up (as he believes, the truth is that he knows little to nothing about physics, biology, cosmology, etc) and the one who is very spiritual, completely religious and indoctrinated. Maybe one of the Badeckers is the bad spirit who took over poor Badecker and is trying to make him look insane. I think this kind of a theory would be appreciated by him. The reality is that we know bad spirits are not the answer. The answer is simple: Badecker is really, really, really stupid. His level of stupidity increases with each and every word that he writes here. I am already enjoying our scientific proof of the stupidity of Badecker. Will we maybe get to see some unseen level of stupidity? Can't tell for sure, but it gets promising. Stick around for episode 14 dear folks.
P.S. You have to love how desperate he got by replying to everyone that they are jokers and they are sooooo pathetic.

[Horacewoodwood]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

[Astargath]

I commend you jokers^^^, doing the best you can to downplay and diminish the scientific proof that God exists. But in it all, no proof rebuttal. You just can't do it, can you?

 

I commend you joker ^^^ doing the best you can to try to prove God. But in all, no scientific proof at all, you just can't do it, can you?

But you wouldn't know, would you? You don't understand much of anything except blabbing without any rebuttal.

But you wouldn't know, would you? You don't understand much of anything except pseudoscience and religious propaganda without any actual proof of God. Are you in the wrong thread? This one is about scientific proof of God.

[endenada]

i can follow that, but missing is before absence, as wonder before fear,
someone or something is missing to someone or something, sometimes somewhere,
whether it exists or do not exist in presence (experience) or in (absence) (transcendence)
atom is missing electron, it believes in god, when it is found, well, then "no missing no god"
so, we have made, just now, the proof that god exists in experience, so in presence as in absence (transcendence)

[Astargath]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

Yes you are right. If someone comes and performs a bunch of miracles in front of your eyes and more people and he also claims that he is God, you shouldn't instantly believe him. Yes, he has powers but what if he just an alien or someone with superpowers or any other thing you can imagine, you don't know.

[qwik2learn]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

All rational atheists reject the entire line of spiritual thinking, rebirth is denied by them because they are all humanists (since what else could they be). Therefore, an instance of reincarnation or spirit contact would demonstrate that humanism is false and that rational atheists are mistaken about god(s).

[qwik2learn]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

Yes you are right. If someone comes and performs a bunch of miracles in front of your eyes and more people and he also claims that he is God, you shouldn't instantly believe him. Yes, he has powers but what if he just an alien or someone with superpowers or any other thing you can imagine, you don't know.

Humanists reject the supernatural so an instance of the superhuman would indicate that there is a problem with humanism.
If your theory does not or cannot account for the evidence then you need a better theory.
Humanists reject the supernatural idea that the mind can produce an action at a distance (telekinesis), yet the experts show that this phenomenon is real. How does humanism explain the evidence without admitting to the existence of the supernatural?
http://eegym.com/can-eeg-tell-if-telekinesis-is-a-magicians-trick-2/
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/66xy95/zhang_baosheng_confirmed_cia_psychic_ability_to/

[qwik2learn]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

Miracles would prove that the supernatural is real, and that humanism is false. Jesus did not actually say "I, Jesus, am the son of GOD", but he did teach that the path of goodness is the way into God's kingdom.

[Astargath]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

All rational atheists reject the entire line of spiritual thinking, rebirth is denied by them because they are all humanists (since what else could they be). Therefore, an instance of reincarnation or spirit contact would demonstrate that humanism is false and that rational atheists are mistaken about god(s).

Al rational people reject things that are not proven, period. Rebirth is denied because there is not a single piece of evidence or proof for it, only stupid personal stories that can't be tested. You have those for thousands of ''supernatural'' events, ghosts, demons, you name it. There is never evidence or proof for any of it tho.

[qwik2learn]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

All rational atheists reject the entire line of spiritual thinking, rebirth is denied by them because they are all humanists (since what else could they be). Therefore, an instance of reincarnation or spirit contact would demonstrate that humanism is false and that rational atheists are mistaken about god(s).

All rational people reject things that are not proven, period. Rebirth is denied because there is not a single piece of evidence or proof for it, only stupid personal stories that can't be tested. You have those for thousands of ''supernatural'' events, ghosts, demons, you name it. There is never evidence or proof for any of it tho.

Actually there is physical and medical evidence of a variety of kinds; let me see what you would tell me if I said to you "there is never evidence or proof for any claim that Trump is the president of the USA"? Past elections were rigged, this election could have been hacked; where is the proof that can be tested? Your only "proof" is based on testimony (of the Congress or CIA, for example), so do you reject the idea that "Trump is president" is proven?? Or do you say that there are "proofs converging from many and varying classes of phenomena [which] unite in establishing it"?

For the most part, skeptics have simply criticized from the sidelines, and have produced no experimental research of their own.

Ultimately, it is hypocritical for a skeptic who claims to require scientific evidence before accepting a belief to use this double standard to reject parapsychological research in order to maintain his belief that ESP does not exist.

Actually a rational person will be strongly inclined to accept a claim if it is from a reliable source and it provides a simple explanation of the evidence; in other words, you can be rational without carrying out your own testing. If you doubt the reliability of psychologists, the CIA, Alfred Wallace, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there are certainly many others who were able to test the truth of these claims; there are replication studies and a great need for more research and testing to find out more about survival.

Chris French has also stated he believes that ESP has been proven to scientific standards. However, he does not accept that those results should be accepted by science until the results have been replicated by skeptical scientists. These results have been replicated by parapsychologists. What French is saying is that replications are not valid unless the researcher has a certain philosophical beliefs. That is unheard of in any other branch of science.

[Astargath]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

All rational atheists reject the entire line of spiritual thinking, rebirth is denied by them because they are all humanists (since what else could they be). Therefore, an instance of reincarnation or spirit contact would demonstrate that humanism is false and that rational atheists are mistaken about god(s).

All rational people reject things that are not proven, period. Rebirth is denied because there is not a single piece of evidence or proof for it, only stupid personal stories that can't be tested. You have those for thousands of ''supernatural'' events, ghosts, demons, you name it. There is never evidence or proof for any of it tho.

Actually there is physical and medical evidence of a variety of kinds; let me see what you would tell me if I said to you "there is never evidence or proof for any claim that Trump is the president of the USA"? Past elections were rigged, this election could have been hacked; where is the proof that can be tested? Your only "proof" is based on testimony (of the Congress or CIA, for example), so do you reject the idea that "Trump is president" is proven?? Or do you say that there are "proofs converging from many and varying classes of phenomena [which] unite in establishing it"?

For the most part, skeptics have simply criticized from the sidelines, and have produced no experimental research of their own.

Ultimately, it is hypocritical for a skeptic who claims to require scientific evidence before accepting a belief to use this double standard to reject parapsychological research in order to maintain his belief that ESP does not exist.

Actually a rational person will be strongly inclined to accept a claim if it is from a reliable source and it provides a simple explanation of the evidence; in other words, you can be rational without carrying out your own testing. If you doubt the reliability of psychologists, the CIA, Alfred Wallace, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there are certainly many others who were able to test the truth of these claims; there are replication studies and a great need for more research and testing to find out more about survival.

Chris French has also stated he believes that ESP has been proven to scientific standards. However, he does not accept that those results should be accepted by science until the results have been replicated by skeptical scientists. These results have been replicated by parapsychologists. What French is saying is that replications are not valid unless the researcher has a certain philosophical beliefs. That is unheard of in any other branch of science.

Easy, you can go yourself to the USA and visit Trump or go to one of his conventions. You also have thousands of videos about Trump. There is no evidence for any supernatural claims so far. The scientific method works and you can type this thanks to it because science works, pseudoscience, religion and other mystic things do not and can't be applied to anything. Sorry to burst your bubble and welcome to the real world.

[BADecker]

Oh yeah? PROVE IT.
The Eisenbeiss case is listed at #1. How EXACTLY are you going to explain what happened without considering the survival hypothesis?
 
http://www.aeces.info/Top40/top40-main.shtml

Do you even know what it means to be rational? I urge you to give this evidence some rational consideration.

If you searched it you would have find debates about it. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120669

Everything else as I said has been debunked. They are all anecdotal cases, there is no real evidence. A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. How do we test any of this?

I can easily find 2000 cases of people experiencing ghosts encounters and even videos, does that prove ghosts exist?

What is the exact point of your link? A little of it talks about people believing in God. This doesn't have anything to do with scientific proof for or against.

Since you don't understand the rebuttal you are speaking of, how can you know if anything is actually rebutted?

You are talking about testing scientific hypotheses. What does that have to do with proof that God exists?

There are many things you can ask me about the proof for that I will not be able to answer, because I don't know. But the proof for the existence of God is so extremely clear, that only people with an agenda wouldn't understand it... on purpose.

It is an old but good link because right in the OP it says that there is "nothing to suggest any fraud was committed" for this case! Skeptics never provided any evidence to support their beliefs about what happened in the Eisenbeiss case. These are pitiful arguments from pseudo-skeptics who often think they have no burden of proof.

Some skeptics want to claim that Eisenbeiss was responsible for the hoax, this is also nonsense; there is no evidence for this claim whatsoever. Those arguing against the possibility of survival are simply refusing consider the possibility of new paradigms, they also fail to consider the entire body of circumstantial evidence supporting the possibility of survival.

The test in this case was to see whether or not the medium could contact the prior personality and relay the information to Eisenbeiss. The accuracy of the information and the chess game has been established; you should look at the references in the AECES paper for more details, note that some of the links can only be accessed through archive.org.

The realistic portrayal of the chess player by the medium is analogous to the "Events witnessed and heard by NDErs while in an out-of-body state [which] are almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was witnessed or heard during the NDE, their OBE observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate. Even if the OBE observations include events occurring far away from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the NDEr, the OBE observations are still almost always confirmed as completely accurate. This fact alone rules out the possibility that NDEs are related to any known brain functioning or sensory awareness. This also refutes the possibility that NDEs are unrealistic fragments of memory from the brain."
http://www.near-death.com/science/evidence.html#a32

This thread is a great example of skeptical misdirection. Show me some hard evidence, please!

Skeptics use misdirection and fallacious reasoning in order to deny the truth of survival:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_misdirection

If you carry the idea of spiritual contact to some greater levels, you could add the idea that it is the complexity of the human spirit that keeps direct spiritual contact from happening easily. This is a protection for people, so that no strong spirit can easily take control of anybody.

By dabbling with spiritual contact, which we know very little about, one is tearing down his own guards against potentially strong spirits. For example, how do we know if there isn't some spirit that happens to know the answers we are questing for, and that is claiming to be someone that it isn't, and simply feeding the info so that the recipient(s) will force their protective defences to shut down. Then that spirit comes in and takes over the person.

We need to be very careful of not losing ourselves to other-spirit control, and thereby losing our selves and our lives. I mean, isn't this what may have happened to some of the wilder insane people in the asylums?

Episode 13 is here, it is a short one but any information is good. We'll call this episode 'The intellectual suicide of a bad apologist'. We've been reading Badecker's posts where he condemns bringing religion into the subject and telling everyone to stick to the 'scientific' part. Of course he was telling us to do that, he can go religious as many times as he wants because he believes himself to be special having God in his favors. Go ahead and read how our superior human Badecker goes completely nuts about spirits, the defense system of the spirits, other spirits that take over and other science fiction shit that in his mind must be the same as science. Not to be surprised since these fantasy fairy tales are as scientific as his machine theory is, or as his religion is. We conclude that there are two Badeckers: the one who is really scientific and hates religion being brought up (as he believes, the truth is that he knows little to nothing about physics, biology, cosmology, etc) and the one who is very spiritual, completely religious and indoctrinated. Maybe one of the Badeckers is the bad spirit who took over poor Badecker and is trying to make him look insane. I think this kind of a theory would be appreciated by him. The reality is that we know bad spirits are not the answer. The answer is simple: Badecker is really, really, really stupid. His level of stupidity increases with each and every word that he writes here. I am already enjoying our scientific proof of the stupidity of Badecker. Will we maybe get to see some unseen level of stupidity? Can't tell for sure, but it gets promising. Stick around for episode 14 dear folks.
P.S. You have to love how desperate he got by replying to everyone that they are jokers and they are sooooo pathetic.

Well, you continue to be a pathetic joker. and not only that, but you brag about it as well.

The proof for God's existence still stands unrebutted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737322.msg10718395#msg10718395
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1355109.msg14047133#msg14047133
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1662153.40
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1054513.msg16803380#msg16803380.

Thanks for helping to spread it by continually speaking your drivel in the forum, here.

[Astargath]

Oh yeah? PROVE IT.
The Eisenbeiss case is listed at #1. How EXACTLY are you going to explain what happened without considering the survival hypothesis?
 
http://www.aeces.info/Top40/top40-main.shtml

Do you even know what it means to be rational? I urge you to give this evidence some rational consideration.

If you searched it you would have find debates about it. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120669

Everything else as I said has been debunked. They are all anecdotal cases, there is no real evidence. A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. How do we test any of this?

I can easily find 2000 cases of people experiencing ghosts encounters and even videos, does that prove ghosts exist?

What is the exact point of your link? A little of it talks about people believing in God. This doesn't have anything to do with scientific proof for or against.

Since you don't understand the rebuttal you are speaking of, how can you know if anything is actually rebutted?

You are talking about testing scientific hypotheses. What does that have to do with proof that God exists?

There are many things you can ask me about the proof for that I will not be able to answer, because I don't know. But the proof for the existence of God is so extremely clear, that only people with an agenda wouldn't understand it... on purpose.

It is an old but good link because right in the OP it says that there is "nothing to suggest any fraud was committed" for this case! Skeptics never provided any evidence to support their beliefs about what happened in the Eisenbeiss case. These are pitiful arguments from pseudo-skeptics who often think they have no burden of proof.

Some skeptics want to claim that Eisenbeiss was responsible for the hoax, this is also nonsense; there is no evidence for this claim whatsoever. Those arguing against the possibility of survival are simply refusing consider the possibility of new paradigms, they also fail to consider the entire body of circumstantial evidence supporting the possibility of survival.

The test in this case was to see whether or not the medium could contact the prior personality and relay the information to Eisenbeiss. The accuracy of the information and the chess game has been established; you should look at the references in the AECES paper for more details, note that some of the links can only be accessed through archive.org.

The realistic portrayal of the chess player by the medium is analogous to the "Events witnessed and heard by NDErs while in an out-of-body state [which] are almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was witnessed or heard during the NDE, their OBE observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate. Even if the OBE observations include events occurring far away from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the NDEr, the OBE observations are still almost always confirmed as completely accurate. This fact alone rules out the possibility that NDEs are related to any known brain functioning or sensory awareness. This also refutes the possibility that NDEs are unrealistic fragments of memory from the brain."
http://www.near-death.com/science/evidence.html#a32

This thread is a great example of skeptical misdirection. Show me some hard evidence, please!

Skeptics use misdirection and fallacious reasoning in order to deny the truth of survival:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_misdirection

If you carry the idea of spiritual contact to some greater levels, you could add the idea that it is the complexity of the human spirit that keeps direct spiritual contact from happening easily. This is a protection for people, so that no strong spirit can easily take control of anybody.

By dabbling with spiritual contact, which we know very little about, one is tearing down his own guards against potentially strong spirits. For example, how do we know if there isn't some spirit that happens to know the answers we are questing for, and that is claiming to be someone that it isn't, and simply feeding the info so that the recipient(s) will force their protective defences to shut down. Then that spirit comes in and takes over the person.

We need to be very careful of not losing ourselves to other-spirit control, and thereby losing our selves and our lives. I mean, isn't this what may have happened to some of the wilder insane people in the asylums?

Episode 13 is here, it is a short one but any information is good. We'll call this episode 'The intellectual suicide of a bad apologist'. We've been reading Badecker's posts where he condemns bringing religion into the subject and telling everyone to stick to the 'scientific' part. Of course he was telling us to do that, he can go religious as many times as he wants because he believes himself to be special having God in his favors. Go ahead and read how our superior human Badecker goes completely nuts about spirits, the defense system of the spirits, other spirits that take over and other science fiction shit that in his mind must be the same as science. Not to be surprised since these fantasy fairy tales are as scientific as his machine theory is, or as his religion is. We conclude that there are two Badeckers: the one who is really scientific and hates religion being brought up (as he believes, the truth is that he knows little to nothing about physics, biology, cosmology, etc) and the one who is very spiritual, completely religious and indoctrinated. Maybe one of the Badeckers is the bad spirit who took over poor Badecker and is trying to make him look insane. I think this kind of a theory would be appreciated by him. The reality is that we know bad spirits are not the answer. The answer is simple: Badecker is really, really, really stupid. His level of stupidity increases with each and every word that he writes here. I am already enjoying our scientific proof of the stupidity of Badecker. Will we maybe get to see some unseen level of stupidity? Can't tell for sure, but it gets promising. Stick around for episode 14 dear folks.
P.S. You have to love how desperate he got by replying to everyone that they are jokers and they are sooooo pathetic.

Well, you continue to be a pathetic joker. and not only that, but you brag about it as well.

The proof for God's existence still stands unrebutted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737322.msg10718395#msg10718395
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1355109.msg14047133#msg14047133
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1662153.40
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1054513.msg16803380#msg16803380.

Thanks for helping to spread it by continually speaking your drivel in the forum, here.

Which was debunked:

''All around us, in nature and the universe we see machine-like operations. These operations are extremely complex inside life and the cells. Machines have makers.'' (Where did you get the idea of machines have makers, you said that a monkey using a rock is a machine, how does that tell you it has a maker, how exactly did you get to that conclusion)(You also still haven't defined what machine-like operations actually mean, then you post a bunch of videos explaining how cells work, ok?)

''The advanced machines of the universe have an advanced Maker - God. Machines have makers.'' (Again assumptions for no reason, how do you know advanced machines of the universe have an advanced maker and how do you know the advanced maker is god)

1) Premise: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

1A) Firstly this is just an appeal to intuition and intuition isn't always a pure pathway to truth (i.e. - intuition states that the Sun goes around the Earth). There may indeed always be a cause for anything and everything that has or ever will come into existence, including whatever came into existence at the Big Bang event (the postulated beginning of our Universe), but that cause isn't always evident. Some quantum physicists would in fact claim that there are uncaused things (i.e. - radioactivity).

1B) Whatever cause in itself that has come into existence has, IMHO, thus resulted from a previous cause, which had a previous cause which had a previous cause and that chain can be extended as far back as you wish. Stated another way, there is no such thing as a First Cause.

1C) Whatever thing that came into existence came into existence from a previous thing(s) which existed and which in turn came into existence from a previous thing(s) which in turn came into existence from yet a previous thing and so on as far back as you wish to go. Stated another way, you can only bring something into existence from a previous something. You cannot bring a material something into existence from pure nothingness or from anything immaterial.

2) Premise: The Universe began to exist.

2A) I need note here that the "Universe" is defined as the sum total of all the bits and pieces that collectively make up the, or our, "Universe". The "Universe" is just the label we give to all of those bits and pieces (particles, atoms, molecules, dust, rocks, planets, stars, etc.) that came into existence in-the-beginning or later emerged into existence out of simpler states (i.e. – molecules from atoms).

2B) The assumption here is that our Universe is the be-all-and-end-all of the Cosmos**. While that may be the case, it's not necessarily so. Just because you came into existence doesn't mean that others don't also exist. Our Universe could be one of many. There could be parallel universes or even a postulated Multiverse or Megaverse - maybe.

3) Conclusion: Therefore, the Universe has a cause.

3A) The effect (resulting from the cause) of the Universe coming into existence or coming into being is called the Big Bang event, so the cause of the Universe (i.e. - the cause of the Big Bang event) was something prior to the Big Bang event. If the Universe had a cause then that cause was obviously pre-Universe or before the Big Bang event.

3B) That's where the cosmological buck has to stop since we can't observe or measure anything prior to the Big Bang event.

3C) In context all we can say is that our Universe came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang event and that the Big Bang event had a cause. That says nothing about the larger context as suggested in 2B. It could be that our Universe popped into existence from within a larger Cosmos just like a baby pops out of the womb at birth.

4) Conclusion: Therefore the cause behind the existence of the Universe was God.

4A) Nearly all theists state that the cause of the Universe was due to an omnipresent (all-present), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), all-loving, perfectly moral, and perfectly benevolent Almighty Being (i.e. - God). However these traits along with an entity who is itself uncaused, beginning-less, changeless, eternal, timeless, and space-less; an immaterial all powerful being who is a personal agent, endowed with freedom of the will, aren't verified; aren't all mutually inclusive and logical, with many an inherent philosophical inconsistency as well as many being actually contradicted by Biblical chapter-and-verse passages (i.e. - God is hardly all-loving).

4B) But a supernatural deity with some or all of these traits is also a total fallacy even if for no other reason than that the Cosmos has to be eternal (temporally infinite) since as I noted above there can be no First Cause and because you can't, and not even God can, create something material from the immaterial. It's a logical contradiction to postulate the creation / existence of an absolute something from an absolute state of pure nothingness and even God has to conform to logic (i.e. - God can't create a spherical cube). If you can't create something from nothing then something has always existed. If the Cosmos is infinite or endlessly cyclic, an infinitely repeating causal loop where A causes B and B in turn causes A, then what need for a God? If therefore, as theists want, that the Cosmos is finite since infinities aren't possible (i.e. - they tend to throw spanners into theistic philosophies - see 4D), then God too is temporally finite, therefore had a beginning and therefore had a cause. That of course contradicts the concept of an eternal deity and raises the obvious question, what caused God? If God is eternal then God created the Cosmos and our Universe an infinite time ago which is clearly not the case.

4C) Since science can't explain or actually identify the "cause" that caused the existence of our Universe, on the grounds that the cause preceded the Big Bang event and thus this cause can't be observed or measured, theists step into the gap and conclude that God is that cause. This God-of-the-gaps conclusion is also a fallacy since there are numerous other alternatives. The cause of the Universe could have been the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any deity or deities from any of the world's hundreds of creation mythologies. Maybe it was just a natural Big Crunch (a contracting universe) turning inside out at crunch time into a Big Bang; maybe an unknown and perhaps unknowable other natural cause we haven’t imagined yet; perhaps a quantum fluctuation; even perhaps (and this is my bias) a mortal, fallible, flesh-and-blood computer / software programmer fills the gap. God is only one hypothesis of many.

4D) Theists, even some cosmologists mistakenly say that there can't be an infinite Cosmos due to entropy (the state of useable energy available). An infinite Cosmos would have attained a state of maximum entropy an infinite time ago but that is not what we observe. I contend that at the moment of the Big Bang the clock was reset to time equals zero; the Universe was restored to original factory settings (including a state of minimum entropy). Consider this analogy. You only started ageing, started running down, and started increasing your entropy, at your conception. That's when your clock started. That state of conception was your original factory condition. What came before was irrelevant since as far as you are concerned, there was no before (although clearly there was). You had a cause therefore there was a state that existed before you. That cause was your parents and their state of entropy is an irrelevance as far as you (their child) is concerned at conception.


Even assuming that there is a first cause, the argument utterly fails to address how we can know its identity. The assertion that it must be the particular God that the arguer has in mind is a complete non sequitur. Why not the deist God? Why not some kind of impersonal, eternal cosmic force? Why not shape-shifting aliens from another dimension? Why not a God that sends Christians to hell and atheists to heaven? Or maybe the simplest of all, why not the Big Bang as the first cause? There is nothing in the argument that would allow one to determine any attributes of the first cause. (You have failed to explain this problem over and over)

There is nothing in the argument to rule out the existence of multiple first causes. This can be seen by realizing that for any directed acyclic graph which represents causation in a set of events or entities, the first cause is any vertex that has zero incoming edges. This means that the argument can just as well be used to argue for polytheism. (You yourself say that machine have makerS with S)

Through modern science, specifically physics, natural phenomena have been discovered whose causes have not yet been discerned or are non-existent. The best known example is radioactive decay. Although decay follows statistical laws and it's possible to predict the amount of a radioactive substance that will decay over a period of time, it is impossible — according to our current understanding of physics — to predict when a specific atom will disintegrate. The spontaneous disintegration of radioactive nuclei is stochastic and might be uncaused, providing an arguable counterexample to the assumption that everything must have a cause. An objection to this counterexample is that knowledge regarding such phenomena is limited and there may be an underlying but presently unknown cause. However, if the causal status of radioactive decay is unknown then the truth of the premise that 'everything has a cause' is indeterminate rather than false. In either case, the first cause argument is rendered ineffective.

[Horacewoodwood]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

Yes you are right. If someone comes and performs a bunch of miracles in front of your eyes and more people and he also claims that he is God, you shouldn't instantly believe him. Yes, he has powers but what if he just an alien or someone with superpowers or any other thing you can imagine, you don't know.

Humanists reject the supernatural so an instance of the superhuman would indicate that there is a problem with humanism.
If your theory does not or cannot account for the evidence then you need a better theory.
Humanists reject the supernatural idea that the mind can produce an action at a distance (telekinesis), yet the experts show that this phenomenon is real. How does humanism explain the evidence without admitting to the existence of the supernatural?
http://eegym.com/can-eeg-tell-if-telekinesis-is-a-magicians-trick-2/
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/66xy95/zhang_baosheng_confirmed_cia_psychic_ability_to/

This is also a fallacy. Rational people that you call humanists do not reject the supernatural, in fact they do not reject many things that could exist. Otherwise, they would not be rational. Instead of that, you are confronted with evidence, proof, understanding, observing, researching of everything, natural or supernatural. Of course that what is supernatural requires the same level of evidence, proof and all the other things. We must know what supernatural event might occur with certainty in order to claim it true. Aliens are considered supernatural, poltergeists, telekinesis, spirit, etc. If someone would successfully prove, for instance, that aliens with superpowers exist, that would not conclude that God exists. The supernatural means a suspension of the natural along with its laws and theories. However, that does not mean that a God is involved, the evidence leading to a connection between the two would be still missing. To conclude, humanism does not reject the idea of supernatural, it only requests the proper evidence and proof for it and there is absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to find out the truth without making unproved claims.

[Horacewoodwood]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

Miracles would prove that the supernatural is real, and that humanism is false. Jesus did not actually say "I, Jesus, am the son of GOD", but he did teach that the path of goodness is the way into God's kingdom.

You'll find it weird, but miracles are a suicide idea from the beginning. In a very real way, miracles are not possible by their very own definition, that is if we refer to miracles defined by religion and not singularities, which have nothing to do with. Here is the problem: if a miracle can be explained or understood by anyone, it is not a miracle. In order to name a miracle, you would have to rule out absolutely everything. The possibilities of a miracle happening are equal to being face to face with God.

[sirazimuth]

Which was debunked:

''All around us, in nature and the universe we see machine-like operations. These operations are extremely complex inside life and the cells. Machines have makers.'' (Where did you get the idea of machines have makers, you said that a monkey using a rock is a machine, how does that tell you it has a maker, how exactly did you get to that conclusion)(You also still haven't defined what machine-like operations actually mean, then you post a bunch of videos explaining how cells work, ok?)

''The advanced machines of the universe have an advanced Maker - God. Machines have makers.'' (Again assumptions for no reason, how do you know advanced machines of the universe have an advanced maker and how do you know the advanced maker is god)

1) Premise: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

1A) Firstly this is just an appeal to intuition and intuition isn't always a pure pathway to truth (i.e. - intuition states that the Sun goes around the Earth). There may indeed always be a cause for anything and everything that has or ever will come into existence, including whatever came into existence at the Big Bang event (the postulated beginning of our Universe), but that cause isn't always evident. Some quantum physicists would in fact claim that there are uncaused things (i.e. - radioactivity).

1B) Whatever cause in itself that has come into existence has, IMHO, thus resulted from a previous cause, which had a previous cause which had a previous cause and that chain can be extended as far back as you wish. Stated another way, there is no such thing as a First Cause.

1C) Whatever thing that came into existence came into existence from a previous thing(s) which existed and which in turn came into existence from a previous thing(s) which in turn came into existence from yet a previous thing and so on as far back as you wish to go. Stated another way, you can only bring something into existence from a previous something. You cannot bring a material something into existence from pure nothingness or from anything immaterial.

2) Premise: The Universe began to exist.

2A) I need note here that the "Universe" is defined as the sum total of all the bits and pieces that collectively make up the, or our, "Universe". The "Universe" is just the label we give to all of those bits and pieces (particles, atoms, molecules, dust, rocks, planets, stars, etc.) that came into existence in-the-beginning or later emerged into existence out of simpler states (i.e. – molecules from atoms).

2B) The assumption here is that our Universe is the be-all-and-end-all of the Cosmos**. While that may be the case, it's not necessarily so. Just because you came into existence doesn't mean that others don't also exist. Our Universe could be one of many. There could be parallel universes or even a postulated Multiverse or Megaverse - maybe.

3) Conclusion: Therefore, the Universe has a cause.

3A) The effect (resulting from the cause) of the Universe coming into existence or coming into being is called the Big Bang event, so the cause of the Universe (i.e. - the cause of the Big Bang event) was something prior to the Big Bang event. If the Universe had a cause then that cause was obviously pre-Universe or before the Big Bang event.

3B) That's where the cosmological buck has to stop since we can't observe or measure anything prior to the Big Bang event.

3C) In context all we can say is that our Universe came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang event and that the Big Bang event had a cause. That says nothing about the larger context as suggested in 2B. It could be that our Universe popped into existence from within a larger Cosmos just like a baby pops out of the womb at birth.

4) Conclusion: Therefore the cause behind the existence of the Universe was God.

4A) Nearly all theists state that the cause of the Universe was due to an omnipresent (all-present), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), all-loving, perfectly moral, and perfectly benevolent Almighty Being (i.e. - God). However these traits along with an entity who is itself uncaused, beginning-less, changeless, eternal, timeless, and space-less; an immaterial all powerful being who is a personal agent, endowed with freedom of the will, aren't verified; aren't all mutually inclusive and logical, with many an inherent philosophical inconsistency as well as many being actually contradicted by Biblical chapter-and-verse passages (i.e. - God is hardly all-loving).

4B) But a supernatural deity with some or all of these traits is also a total fallacy even if for no other reason than that the Cosmos has to be eternal (temporally infinite) since as I noted above there can be no First Cause and because you can't, and not even God can, create something material from the immaterial. It's a logical contradiction to postulate the creation / existence of an absolute something from an absolute state of pure nothingness and even God has to conform to logic (i.e. - God can't create a spherical cube). If you can't create something from nothing then something has always existed. If the Cosmos is infinite or endlessly cyclic, an infinitely repeating causal loop where A causes B and B in turn causes A, then what need for a God? If therefore, as theists want, that the Cosmos is finite since infinities aren't possible (i.e. - they tend to throw spanners into theistic philosophies - see 4D), then God too is temporally finite, therefore had a beginning and therefore had a cause. That of course contradicts the concept of an eternal deity and raises the obvious question, what caused God? If God is eternal then God created the Cosmos and our Universe an infinite time ago which is clearly not the case.

4C) Since science can't explain or actually identify the "cause" that caused the existence of our Universe, on the grounds that the cause preceded the Big Bang event and thus this cause can't be observed or measured, theists step into the gap and conclude that God is that cause. This God-of-the-gaps conclusion is also a fallacy since there are numerous other alternatives. The cause of the Universe could have been the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any deity or deities from any of the world's hundreds of creation mythologies. Maybe it was just a natural Big Crunch (a contracting universe) turning inside out at crunch time into a Big Bang; maybe an unknown and perhaps unknowable other natural cause we haven’t imagined yet; perhaps a quantum fluctuation; even perhaps (and this is my bias) a mortal, fallible, flesh-and-blood computer / software programmer fills the gap. God is only one hypothesis of many.

4D) Theists, even some cosmologists mistakenly say that there can't be an infinite Cosmos due to entropy (the state of useable energy available). An infinite Cosmos would have attained a state of maximum entropy an infinite time ago but that is not what we observe. I contend that at the moment of the Big Bang the clock was reset to time equals zero; the Universe was restored to original factory settings (including a state of minimum entropy). Consider this analogy. You only started ageing, started running down, and started increasing your entropy, at your conception. That's when your clock started. That state of conception was your original factory condition. What came before was irrelevant since as far as you are concerned, there was no before (although clearly there was). You had a cause therefore there was a state that existed before you. That cause was your parents and their state of entropy is an irrelevance as far as you (their child) is concerned at conception.


Even assuming that there is a first cause, the argument utterly fails to address how we can know its identity. The assertion that it must be the particular God that the arguer has in mind is a complete non sequitur. Why not the deist God? Why not some kind of impersonal, eternal cosmic force? Why not shape-shifting aliens from another dimension? Why not a God that sends Christians to hell and atheists to heaven? Or maybe the simplest of all, why not the Big Bang as the first cause? There is nothing in the argument that would allow one to determine any attributes of the first cause. (You have failed to explain this problem over and over)

There is nothing in the argument to rule out the existence of multiple first causes. This can be seen by realizing that for any directed acyclic graph which represents causation in a set of events or entities, the first cause is any vertex that has zero incoming edges. This means that the argument can just as well be used to argue for polytheism. (You yourself say that machine have makerS with S)

Through modern science, specifically physics, natural phenomena have been discovered whose causes have not yet been discerned or are non-existent. The best known example is radioactive decay. Although decay follows statistical laws and it's possible to predict the amount of a radioactive substance that will decay over a period of time, it is impossible — according to our current understanding of physics — to predict when a specific atom will disintegrate. The spontaneous disintegration of radioactive nuclei is stochastic and might be uncaused, providing an arguable counterexample to the assumption that everything must have a cause. An objection to this counterexample is that knowledge regarding such phenomena is limited and there may be an underlying but presently unknown cause. However, if the causal status of radioactive decay is unknown then the truth of the premise that 'everything has a cause' is indeterminate rather than false. In either case, the first cause argument is rendered ineffective.

great post my friend, thanx.
couple of  books come to mind you should check out if you haven't already...


"Cycles of Time"  by Roger Penrose
"A Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss

[BADecker]

Oh yeah? PROVE IT.
The Eisenbeiss case is listed at #1. How EXACTLY are you going to explain what happened without considering the survival hypothesis?
 
http://www.aeces.info/Top40/top40-main.shtml

Do you even know what it means to be rational? I urge you to give this evidence some rational consideration.

If you searched it you would have find debates about it. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120669

Everything else as I said has been debunked. They are all anecdotal cases, there is no real evidence. A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. How do we test any of this?

I can easily find 2000 cases of people experiencing ghosts encounters and even videos, does that prove ghosts exist?

What is the exact point of your link? A little of it talks about people believing in God. This doesn't have anything to do with scientific proof for or against.

Since you don't understand the rebuttal you are speaking of, how can you know if anything is actually rebutted?

You are talking about testing scientific hypotheses. What does that have to do with proof that God exists?

There are many things you can ask me about the proof for that I will not be able to answer, because I don't know. But the proof for the existence of God is so extremely clear, that only people with an agenda wouldn't understand it... on purpose.

It is an old but good link because right in the OP it says that there is "nothing to suggest any fraud was committed" for this case! Skeptics never provided any evidence to support their beliefs about what happened in the Eisenbeiss case. These are pitiful arguments from pseudo-skeptics who often think they have no burden of proof.

Some skeptics want to claim that Eisenbeiss was responsible for the hoax, this is also nonsense; there is no evidence for this claim whatsoever. Those arguing against the possibility of survival are simply refusing consider the possibility of new paradigms, they also fail to consider the entire body of circumstantial evidence supporting the possibility of survival.

The test in this case was to see whether or not the medium could contact the prior personality and relay the information to Eisenbeiss. The accuracy of the information and the chess game has been established; you should look at the references in the AECES paper for more details, note that some of the links can only be accessed through archive.org.

The realistic portrayal of the chess player by the medium is analogous to the "Events witnessed and heard by NDErs while in an out-of-body state [which] are almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was witnessed or heard during the NDE, their OBE observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate. Even if the OBE observations include events occurring far away from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the NDEr, the OBE observations are still almost always confirmed as completely accurate. This fact alone rules out the possibility that NDEs are related to any known brain functioning or sensory awareness. This also refutes the possibility that NDEs are unrealistic fragments of memory from the brain."
http://www.near-death.com/science/evidence.html#a32

This thread is a great example of skeptical misdirection. Show me some hard evidence, please!

Skeptics use misdirection and fallacious reasoning in order to deny the truth of survival:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_misdirection

If you carry the idea of spiritual contact to some greater levels, you could add the idea that it is the complexity of the human spirit that keeps direct spiritual contact from happening easily. This is a protection for people, so that no strong spirit can easily take control of anybody.

By dabbling with spiritual contact, which we know very little about, one is tearing down his own guards against potentially strong spirits. For example, how do we know if there isn't some spirit that happens to know the answers we are questing for, and that is claiming to be someone that it isn't, and simply feeding the info so that the recipient(s) will force their protective defences to shut down. Then that spirit comes in and takes over the person.

We need to be very careful of not losing ourselves to other-spirit control, and thereby losing our selves and our lives. I mean, isn't this what may have happened to some of the wilder insane people in the asylums?

Episode 13 is here, it is a short one but any information is good. We'll call this episode 'The intellectual suicide of a bad apologist'. We've been reading Badecker's posts where he condemns bringing religion into the subject and telling everyone to stick to the 'scientific' part. Of course he was telling us to do that, he can go religious as many times as he wants because he believes himself to be special having God in his favors. Go ahead and read how our superior human Badecker goes completely nuts about spirits, the defense system of the spirits, other spirits that take over and other science fiction shit that in his mind must be the same as science. Not to be surprised since these fantasy fairy tales are as scientific as his machine theory is, or as his religion is. We conclude that there are two Badeckers: the one who is really scientific and hates religion being brought up (as he believes, the truth is that he knows little to nothing about physics, biology, cosmology, etc) and the one who is very spiritual, completely religious and indoctrinated. Maybe one of the Badeckers is the bad spirit who took over poor Badecker and is trying to make him look insane. I think this kind of a theory would be appreciated by him. The reality is that we know bad spirits are not the answer. The answer is simple: Badecker is really, really, really stupid. His level of stupidity increases with each and every word that he writes here. I am already enjoying our scientific proof of the stupidity of Badecker. Will we maybe get to see some unseen level of stupidity? Can't tell for sure, but it gets promising. Stick around for episode 14 dear folks.
P.S. You have to love how desperate he got by replying to everyone that they are jokers and they are sooooo pathetic.

Well, you continue to be a pathetic joker. and not only that, but you brag about it as well.

The proof for God's existence still stands unrebutted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737322.msg10718395#msg10718395
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1355109.msg14047133#msg14047133
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1662153.40
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1054513.msg16803380#msg16803380.

Thanks for helping to spread it by continually speaking your drivel in the forum, here.

Which was debunked:

''All around us, in nature and the universe we see machine-like operations. These operations are extremely complex inside life and the cells. Machines have makers.'' (Where did you get the idea of machines have makers, you said that a monkey using a rock is a machine, how does that tell you it has a maker, how exactly did you get to that conclusion)(You also still haven't defined what machine-like operations actually mean, then you post a bunch of videos explaining how cells work, ok?)

''The advanced machines of the universe have an advanced Maker - God. Machines have makers.'' (Again assumptions for no reason, how do you know advanced machines of the universe have an advanced maker and how do you know the advanced maker is god)

You are on the verge of showing yourself to be an idiot. Show us the car, or airplane, or ship, or computer, or any machine, that spontaneously jumped into being without at least one maker.

1) Premise: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

1A) Firstly this is just an appeal to intuition and intuition isn't always a pure pathway to truth (i.e. - intuition states that the Sun goes around the Earth). There may indeed always be a cause for anything and everything that has or ever will come into existence, including whatever came into existence at the Big Bang event (the postulated beginning of our Universe), but that cause isn't always evident. Some quantum physicists would in fact claim that there are uncaused things (i.e. - radioactivity).

Suggesting that radioactivity doesn't have a cause is getting even closer to showing yourself to be an idiot.

1B) Whatever cause in itself that has come into existence has, IMHO, thus resulted from a previous cause, which had a previous cause which had a previous cause and that chain can be extended as far back as you wish. Stated another way, there is no such thing as a First Cause.

Entropy shows that there was a beginning, by the simple fact that entropy that had existed forever would have reduced all complexity to pure simplicity by now.

1C) Whatever thing that came into existence came into existence from a previous thing(s) which existed and which in turn came into existence from a previous thing(s) which in turn came into existence from yet a previous thing and so on as far back as you wish to go. Stated another way, you can only bring something into existence from a previous something. You cannot bring a material something into existence from pure nothingness or from anything immaterial.

This is true: You cannot bring a material something into existence from pure nothingness or from anything immaterial. That is why God did it.

2) Premise: The Universe began to exist.

2A) I need note here that the "Universe" is defined as the sum total of all the bits and pieces that collectively make up the, or our, "Universe". The "Universe" is just the label we give to all of those bits and pieces (particles, atoms, molecules, dust, rocks, planets, stars, etc.) that came into existence in-the-beginning or later emerged into existence out of simpler states (i.e. – molecules from atoms).

2B) The assumption here is that our Universe is the be-all-and-end-all of the Cosmos**. While that may be the case, it's not necessarily so. Just because you came into existence doesn't mean that others don't also exist. Our Universe could be one of many. There could be parallel universes or even a postulated Multiverse or Megaverse - maybe.

God created it all.

3) Conclusion: Therefore, the Universe has a cause.

You are so good here. At this point, you have vindicated yourself from your former self-inflicted idiocy. However, what is below might change that.

3A) The effect (resulting from the cause) of the Universe coming into existence or coming into being is called the Big Bang event, so the cause of the Universe (i.e. - the cause of the Big Bang event) was something prior to the Big Bang event. If the Universe had a cause then that cause was obviously pre-Universe or before the Big Bang event.

According to places in the Psalms, God thunders. So, you might say that His creation was a big bang.

Remember, scientific big bang is just theory. A mini BB has been made by scientists in the lab. Two points about this:
1. If scientists keep at it, they will be able to produce dozens of different forms of BB in the lab;
2. There still is no real scientific suggestion that a BB was what caused the universe. It's all guesswork when applying it to the universe.

3B) That's where the cosmological buck has to stop since we can't observe or measure anything prior to the Big Bang event.

Exactly what I have said at various times.

3C) In context all we can say is that our Universe came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang event and that the Big Bang event had a cause. That says nothing about the larger context as suggested in 2B. It could be that our Universe popped into existence from within a larger Cosmos just like a baby pops out of the womb at birth.

At this stage of the game, BB is a fiction regarding the reality of the universe. Ask any scientist who is versed in BB. He will tell you that we have no certainty that BB is how our universe came into being. but if he says that it does, get him on tape and publish it. Then watch the turmoil.

4) Conclusion: Therefore the cause behind the existence of the Universe was God.

I thought #3 was the conclusion.

4A) Nearly all theists state that the cause of the Universe was due to an omnipresent (all-present), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), all-loving, perfectly moral, and perfectly benevolent Almighty Being (i.e. - God). However these traits along with an entity who is itself uncaused, beginning-less, changeless, eternal, timeless, and space-less; an immaterial all powerful being who is a personal agent, endowed with freedom of the will, aren't verified; aren't all mutually inclusive and logical, with many an inherent philosophical inconsistency as well as many being actually contradicted by Biblical chapter-and-verse passages (i.e. - God is hardly all-loving).

Verification is done through the results that we see all around us today. God, whatever he/she/it is, created this stuff. We know that He must be extremely knowledgeable, intelligent, and powerful just to do it. But when you look at the way He did it through cause and effect, you see that He excels beyond understanding in knowledge, intelligence and power.

4B) But a supernatural deity with some or all of these traits is also a total fallacy even if for no other reason than that the Cosmos has to be eternal (temporally infinite) since as I noted above there can be no First Cause and because you can't, and not even God can, create something material from the immaterial. It's a logical contradiction to postulate the creation / existence of an absolute something from an absolute state of pure nothingness and even God has to conform to logic (i.e. - God can't create a spherical cube). If you can't create something from nothing then something has always existed. If the Cosmos is infinite or endlessly cyclic, an infinitely repeating causal loop where A causes B and B in turn causes A, then what need for a God? If therefore, as theists want, that the Cosmos is finite since infinities aren't possible (i.e. - they tend to throw spanners into theistic philosophies - see 4D), then God too is temporally finite, therefore had a beginning and therefore had a cause. That of course contradicts the concept of an eternal deity and raises the obvious question, what caused God? If God is eternal then God created the Cosmos and our Universe an infinite time ago which is clearly not the case.

Until you recognize that entropy destroys the idea that there is no beginning, you are missing it in a big way.

4C) Since science can't explain or actually identify the "cause" that caused the existence of our Universe, on the grounds that the cause preceded the Big Bang event and thus this cause can't be observed or measured, theists step into the gap and conclude that God is that cause. This God-of-the-gaps conclusion is also a fallacy since there are numerous other alternatives. The cause of the Universe could have been the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any deity or deities from any of the world's hundreds of creation mythologies. Maybe it was just a natural Big Crunch (a contracting universe) turning inside out at crunch time into a Big Bang; maybe an unknown and perhaps unknowable other natural cause we haven’t imagined yet; perhaps a quantum fluctuation; even perhaps (and this is my bias) a mortal, fallible, flesh-and-blood computer / software programmer fills the gap. God is only one hypothesis of many.

Yet the scientific laws, cause and effect, entropy, and complexity, show us a lot about God.

4D) Theists, even some cosmologists mistakenly say that there can't be an infinite Cosmos due to entropy (the state of useable energy available). An infinite Cosmos would have attained a state of maximum entropy an infinite time ago but that is not what we observe. I contend that at the moment of the Big Bang the clock was reset to time equals zero; the Universe was restored to original factory settings (including a state of minimum entropy). Consider this analogy. You only started ageing, started running down, and started increasing your entropy, at your conception. That's when your clock started. That state of conception was your original factory condition. What came before was irrelevant since as far as you are concerned, there was no before (although clearly there was). You had a cause therefore there was a state that existed before you. That cause was your parents and their state of entropy is an irrelevance as far as you (their child) is concerned at conception.

A believer in the existence of BB for the cause of the universe, puts the believer into a BB religion. There is no proof for BB.

Even assuming that there is a first cause, the argument utterly fails to address how we can know its identity. The assertion that it must be the particular God that the arguer has in mind is a complete non sequitur. Why not the deist God? Why not some kind of impersonal, eternal cosmic force? Why not shape-shifting aliens from another dimension? Why not a God that sends Christians to hell and atheists to heaven? Or maybe the simplest of all, why not the Big Bang as the first cause? There is nothing in the argument that would allow one to determine any attributes of the first cause. (You have failed to explain this problem over and over)

There is nothing in the argument to rule out the existence of multiple first causes. This can be seen by realizing that for any directed acyclic graph which represents causation in a set of events or entities, the first cause is any vertex that has zero incoming edges. This means that the argument can just as well be used to argue for polytheism. (You yourself say that machine have makerS with S)

If you get a bunch of engineers together, and manufacturers, etc., they build a car. A car might last a long time if it is not used. But without replacing parts, it might last only 20 years.

The point is that this is the best the combined will of a bunch of people can do.

When we are talking about component parts of God, we could be talking about many spirits and minds working together. But, if this is the case, jointly, they are one God, just as there is one Ford or one GMC.

Through modern science, specifically physics, natural phenomena have been discovered whose causes have not yet been discerned or are non-existent. The best known example is radioactive decay. Although decay follows statistical laws and it's possible to predict the amount of a radioactive substance that will decay over a period of time, it is impossible — according to our current understanding of physics — to predict when a specific atom will disintegrate. The spontaneous disintegration of radioactive nuclei is stochastic and might be uncaused, providing an arguable counterexample to the assumption that everything must have a cause. An objection to this counterexample is that knowledge regarding such phenomena is limited and there may be an underlying but presently unknown cause. However, if the causal status of radioactive decay is unknown then the truth of the premise that 'everything has a cause' is indeterminate rather than false. In either case, the first cause argument is rendered ineffective.

This is exactly why we can't use carbon dating to verify the age of things. The Bible record suggests that there might not have been any C-14 in the atmospher prior to the Great Flood of Noah's day.

The point isn't the Bible record. The point is that we can't go back very far with any certainty. We don't really know how much older than 5,000 years the universe is, through scientific observation.

Having fun yet?

[BADecker]

Because of the technology nowadays, there are lots of proof that God truly exist. If you are familiar with the series "Ancient Aliens" or the History channel there are many proof and evidence that God truly exist. The cloth that He used on wiping his bloody face and the big cloth for bury are one of the common and preserve proof that he truly exists. Im not telling this because Im Catholic I just simply want to share how His philosophy works and His story is truly unbelievable. Now its up to you if you want to believe because of these proof and evidences, or you want to believe because He is in your heart and His story makes you a better Christian and a person.

That is a fallacy. Even if there is enough proof to say that Jesus existed, he did the miracles, he even died and came back to life, there is no actual proof that God exists and Jesus was his son.

Miracles would prove that the supernatural is real, and that humanism is false. Jesus did not actually say "I, Jesus, am the son of GOD", but he did teach that the path of goodness is the way into God's kingdom.

You'll find it weird, but miracles are a suicide idea from the beginning. In a very real way, miracles are not possible by their very own definition, that is if we refer to miracles defined by religion and not singularities, which have nothing to do with. Here is the problem: if a miracle can be explained or understood by anyone, it is not a miracle. In order to name a miracle, you would have to rule out absolutely everything. The possibilities of a miracle happening are equal to being face to face with God.

The explanation of a miracle is something that God does without using cause and effect.

[stats]

Oh yeah? PROVE IT.
The Eisenbeiss case is listed at #1. How EXACTLY are you going to explain what happened without considering the survival hypothesis?
 
http://www.aeces.info/Top40/top40-main.shtml

Do you even know what it means to be rational? I urge you to give this evidence some rational consideration.

If you searched it you would have find debates about it. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120669

Everything else as I said has been debunked. They are all anecdotal cases, there is no real evidence. A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. How do we test any of this?

I can easily find 2000 cases of people experiencing ghosts encounters and even videos, does that prove ghosts exist?

What is the exact point of your link? A little of it talks about people believing in God. This doesn't have anything to do with scientific proof for or against.

Since you don't understand the rebuttal you are speaking of, how can you know if anything is actually rebutted?

You are talking about testing scientific hypotheses. What does that have to do with proof that God exists?

There are many things you can ask me about the proof for that I will not be able to answer, because I don't know. But the proof for the existence of God is so extremely clear, that only people with an agenda wouldn't understand it... on purpose.

It is an old but good link because right in the OP it says that there is "nothing to suggest any fraud was committed" for this case! Skeptics never provided any evidence to support their beliefs about what happened in the Eisenbeiss case. These are pitiful arguments from pseudo-skeptics who often think they have no burden of proof.

Some skeptics want to claim that Eisenbeiss was responsible for the hoax, this is also nonsense; there is no evidence for this claim whatsoever. Those arguing against the possibility of survival are simply refusing consider the possibility of new paradigms, they also fail to consider the entire body of circumstantial evidence supporting the possibility of survival.

The test in this case was to see whether or not the medium could contact the prior personality and relay the information to Eisenbeiss. The accuracy of the information and the chess game has been established; you should look at the references in the AECES paper for more details, note that some of the links can only be accessed through archive.org.

The realistic portrayal of the chess player by the medium is analogous to the "Events witnessed and heard by NDErs while in an out-of-body state [which] are almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was witnessed or heard during the NDE, their OBE observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate. Even if the OBE observations include events occurring far away from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the NDEr, the OBE observations are still almost always confirmed as completely accurate. This fact alone rules out the possibility that NDEs are related to any known brain functioning or sensory awareness. This also refutes the possibility that NDEs are unrealistic fragments of memory from the brain."
http://www.near-death.com/science/evidence.html#a32

This thread is a great example of skeptical misdirection. Show me some hard evidence, please!

Skeptics use misdirection and fallacious reasoning in order to deny the truth of survival:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_misdirection

If you carry the idea of spiritual contact to some greater levels, you could add the idea that it is the complexity of the human spirit that keeps direct spiritual contact from happening easily. This is a protection for people, so that no strong spirit can easily take control of anybody.

By dabbling with spiritual contact, which we know very little about, one is tearing down his own guards against potentially strong spirits. For example, how do we know if there isn't some spirit that happens to know the answers we are questing for, and that is claiming to be someone that it isn't, and simply feeding the info so that the recipient(s) will force their protective defences to shut down. Then that spirit comes in and takes over the person.

We need to be very careful of not losing ourselves to other-spirit control, and thereby losing our selves and our lives. I mean, isn't this what may have happened to some of the wilder insane people in the asylums?

Episode 13 is here, it is a short one but any information is good. We'll call this episode 'The intellectual suicide of a bad apologist'. We've been reading Badecker's posts where he condemns bringing religion into the subject and telling everyone to stick to the 'scientific' part. Of course he was telling us to do that, he can go religious as many times as he wants because he believes himself to be special having God in his favors. Go ahead and read how our superior human Badecker goes completely nuts about spirits, the defense system of the spirits, other spirits that take over and other science fiction shit that in his mind must be the same as science. Not to be surprised since these fantasy fairy tales are as scientific as his machine theory is, or as his religion is. We conclude that there are two Badeckers: the one who is really scientific and hates religion being brought up (as he believes, the truth is that he knows little to nothing about physics, biology, cosmology, etc) and the one who is very spiritual, completely religious and indoctrinated. Maybe one of the Badeckers is the bad spirit who took over poor Badecker and is trying to make him look insane. I think this kind of a theory would be appreciated by him. The reality is that we know bad spirits are not the answer. The answer is simple: Badecker is really, really, really stupid. His level of stupidity increases with each and every word that he writes here. I am already enjoying our scientific proof of the stupidity of Badecker. Will we maybe get to see some unseen level of stupidity? Can't tell for sure, but it gets promising. Stick around for episode 14 dear folks.
P.S. You have to love how desperate he got by replying to everyone that they are jokers and they are sooooo pathetic.

Well, you continue to be a pathetic joker. and not only that, but you brag about it as well.

The proof for God's existence still stands unrebutted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737322.msg10718395#msg10718395
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1355109.msg14047133#msg14047133
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1662153.40
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1054513.msg16803380#msg16803380.

Thanks for helping to spread it by continually speaking your drivel in the forum, here.

Which was debunked:

''All around us, in nature and the universe we see machine-like operations. These operations are extremely complex inside life and the cells. Machines have makers.'' (Where did you get the idea of machines have makers, you said that a monkey using a rock is a machine, how does that tell you it has a maker, how exactly did you get to that conclusion)(You also still haven't defined what machine-like operations actually mean, then you post a bunch of videos explaining how cells work, ok?)

''The advanced machines of the universe have an advanced Maker - God. Machines have makers.'' (Again assumptions for no reason, how do you know advanced machines of the universe have an advanced maker and how do you know the advanced maker is god)

1) Premise: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

1A) Firstly this is just an appeal to intuition and intuition isn't always a pure pathway to truth (i.e. - intuition states that the Sun goes around the Earth). There may indeed always be a cause for anything and everything that has or ever will come into existence, including whatever came into existence at the Big Bang event (the postulated beginning of our Universe), but that cause isn't always evident. Some quantum physicists would in fact claim that there are uncaused things (i.e. - radioactivity).

1B) Whatever cause in itself that has come into existence has, IMHO, thus resulted from a previous cause, which had a previous cause which had a previous cause and that chain can be extended as far back as you wish. Stated another way, there is no such thing as a First Cause.

1C) Whatever thing that came into existence came into existence from a previous thing(s) which existed and which in turn came into existence from a previous thing(s) which in turn came into existence from yet a previous thing and so on as far back as you wish to go. Stated another way, you can only bring something into existence from a previous something. You cannot bring a material something into existence from pure nothingness or from anything immaterial.

2) Premise: The Universe began to exist.

2A) I need note here that the "Universe" is defined as the sum total of all the bits and pieces that collectively make up the, or our, "Universe". The "Universe" is just the label we give to all of those bits and pieces (particles, atoms, molecules, dust, rocks, planets, stars, etc.) that came into existence in-the-beginning or later emerged into existence out of simpler states (i.e. – molecules from atoms).

2B) The assumption here is that our Universe is the be-all-and-end-all of the Cosmos**. While that may be the case, it's not necessarily so. Just because you came into existence doesn't mean that others don't also exist. Our Universe could be one of many. There could be parallel universes or even a postulated Multiverse or Megaverse - maybe.

3) Conclusion: Therefore, the Universe has a cause.

3A) The effect (resulting from the cause) of the Universe coming into existence or coming into being is called the Big Bang event, so the cause of the Universe (i.e. - the cause of the Big Bang event) was something prior to the Big Bang event. If the Universe had a cause then that cause was obviously pre-Universe or before the Big Bang event.

3B) That's where the cosmological buck has to stop since we can't observe or measure anything prior to the Big Bang event.

3C) In context all we can say is that our Universe came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang event and that the Big Bang event had a cause. That says nothing about the larger context as suggested in 2B. It could be that our Universe popped into existence from within a larger Cosmos just like a baby pops out of the womb at birth.

4) Conclusion: Therefore the cause behind the existence of the Universe was God.

4A) Nearly all theists state that the cause of the Universe was due to an omnipresent (all-present), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), all-loving, perfectly moral, and perfectly benevolent Almighty Being (i.e. - God). However these traits along with an entity who is itself uncaused, beginning-less, changeless, eternal, timeless, and space-less; an immaterial all powerful being who is a personal agent, endowed with freedom of the will, aren't verified; aren't all mutually inclusive and logical, with many an inherent philosophical inconsistency as well as many being actually contradicted by Biblical chapter-and-verse passages (i.e. - God is hardly all-loving).

4B) But a supernatural deity with some or all of these traits is also a total fallacy even if for no other reason than that the Cosmos has to be eternal (temporally infinite) since as I noted above there can be no First Cause and because you can't, and not even God can, create something material from the immaterial. It's a logical contradiction to postulate the creation / existence of an absolute something from an absolute state of pure nothingness and even God has to conform to logic (i.e. - God can't create a spherical cube). If you can't create something from nothing then something has always existed. If the Cosmos is infinite or endlessly cyclic, an infinitely repeating causal loop where A causes B and B in turn causes A, then what need for a God? If therefore, as theists want, that the Cosmos is finite since infinities aren't possible (i.e. - they tend to throw spanners into theistic philosophies - see 4D), then God too is temporally finite, therefore had a beginning and therefore had a cause. That of course contradicts the concept of an eternal deity and raises the obvious question, what caused God? If God is eternal then God created the Cosmos and our Universe an infinite time ago which is clearly not the case.

4C) Since science can't explain or actually identify the "cause" that caused the existence of our Universe, on the grounds that the cause preceded the Big Bang event and thus this cause can't be observed or measured, theists step into the gap and conclude that God is that cause. This God-of-the-gaps conclusion is also a fallacy since there are numerous other alternatives. The cause of the Universe could have been the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any deity or deities from any of the world's hundreds of creation mythologies. Maybe it was just a natural Big Crunch (a contracting universe) turning inside out at crunch time into a Big Bang; maybe an unknown and perhaps unknowable other natural cause we haven’t imagined yet; perhaps a quantum fluctuation; even perhaps (and this is my bias) a mortal, fallible, flesh-and-blood computer / software programmer fills the gap. God is only one hypothesis of many.

4D) Theists, even some cosmologists mistakenly say that there can't be an infinite Cosmos due to entropy (the state of useable energy available). An infinite Cosmos would have attained a state of maximum entropy an infinite time ago but that is not what we observe. I contend that at the moment of the Big Bang the clock was reset to time equals zero; the Universe was restored to original factory settings (including a state of minimum entropy). Consider this analogy. You only started ageing, started running down, and started increasing your entropy, at your conception. That's when your clock started. That state of conception was your original factory condition. What came before was irrelevant since as far as you are concerned, there was no before (although clearly there was). You had a cause therefore there was a state that existed before you. That cause was your parents and their state of entropy is an irrelevance as far as you (their child) is concerned at conception.


Even assuming that there is a first cause, the argument utterly fails to address how we can know its identity. The assertion that it must be the particular God that the arguer has in mind is a complete non sequitur. Why not the deist God? Why not some kind of impersonal, eternal cosmic force? Why not shape-shifting aliens from another dimension? Why not a God that sends Christians to hell and atheists to heaven? Or maybe the simplest of all, why not the Big Bang as the first cause? There is nothing in the argument that would allow one to determine any attributes of the first cause. (You have failed to explain this problem over and over)

There is nothing in the argument to rule out the existence of multiple first causes. This can be seen by realizing that for any directed acyclic graph which represents causation in a set of events or entities, the first cause is any vertex that has zero incoming edges. This means that the argument can just as well be used to argue for polytheism. (You yourself say that machine have makerS with S)

Through modern science, specifically physics, natural phenomena have been discovered whose causes have not yet been discerned or are non-existent. The best known example is radioactive decay. Although decay follows statistical laws and it's possible to predict the amount of a radioactive substance that will decay over a period of time, it is impossible — according to our current understanding of physics — to predict when a specific atom will disintegrate. The spontaneous disintegration of radioactive nuclei is stochastic and might be uncaused, providing an arguable counterexample to the assumption that everything must have a cause. An objection to this counterexample is that knowledge regarding such phenomena is limited and there may be an underlying but presently unknown cause. However, if the causal status of radioactive decay is unknown then the truth of the premise that 'everything has a cause' is indeterminate rather than false. In either case, the first cause argument is rendered ineffective.

Very nicely put.

Thanks for putting this together as many people who ready Badecker's links will then read this and understand BADecker is a hypocrite and a moron.

[BADecker]

Oh yeah? PROVE IT.
The Eisenbeiss case is listed at #1. How EXACTLY are you going to explain what happened without considering the survival hypothesis?
 
http://www.aeces.info/Top40/top40-main.shtml

Do you even know what it means to be rational? I urge you to give this evidence some rational consideration.

If you searched it you would have find debates about it. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120669

Everything else as I said has been debunked. They are all anecdotal cases, there is no real evidence. A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. How do we test any of this?

I can easily find 2000 cases of people experiencing ghosts encounters and even videos, does that prove ghosts exist?

What is the exact point of your link? A little of it talks about people believing in God. This doesn't have anything to do with scientific proof for or against.

Since you don't understand the rebuttal you are speaking of, how can you know if anything is actually rebutted?

You are talking about testing scientific hypotheses. What does that have to do with proof that God exists?

There are many things you can ask me about the proof for that I will not be able to answer, because I don't know. But the proof for the existence of God is so extremely clear, that only people with an agenda wouldn't understand it... on purpose.

It is an old but good link because right in the OP it says that there is "nothing to suggest any fraud was committed" for this case! Skeptics never provided any evidence to support their beliefs about what happened in the Eisenbeiss case. These are pitiful arguments from pseudo-skeptics who often think they have no burden of proof.

Some skeptics want to claim that Eisenbeiss was responsible for the hoax, this is also nonsense; there is no evidence for this claim whatsoever. Those arguing against the possibility of survival are simply refusing consider the possibility of new paradigms, they also fail to consider the entire body of circumstantial evidence supporting the possibility of survival.

The test in this case was to see whether or not the medium could contact the prior personality and relay the information to Eisenbeiss. The accuracy of the information and the chess game has been established; you should look at the references in the AECES paper for more details, note that some of the links can only be accessed through archive.org.

The realistic portrayal of the chess player by the medium is analogous to the "Events witnessed and heard by NDErs while in an out-of-body state [which] are almost always realistic. When the NDEr or others later seek to verify what was witnessed or heard during the NDE, their OBE observations are almost always confirmed as completely accurate. Even if the OBE observations include events occurring far away from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the NDEr, the OBE observations are still almost always confirmed as completely accurate. This fact alone rules out the possibility that NDEs are related to any known brain functioning or sensory awareness. This also refutes the possibility that NDEs are unrealistic fragments of memory from the brain."
http://www.near-death.com/science/evidence.html#a32

This thread is a great example of skeptical misdirection. Show me some hard evidence, please!

Skeptics use misdirection and fallacious reasoning in order to deny the truth of survival:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_fallacies
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/skeptical_misdirection

If you carry the idea of spiritual contact to some greater levels, you could add the idea that it is the complexity of the human spirit that keeps direct spiritual contact from happening easily. This is a protection for people, so that no strong spirit can easily take control of anybody.

By dabbling with spiritual contact, which we know very little about, one is tearing down his own guards against potentially strong spirits. For example, how do we know if there isn't some spirit that happens to know the answers we are questing for, and that is claiming to be someone that it isn't, and simply feeding the info so that the recipient(s) will force their protective defences to shut down. Then that spirit comes in and takes over the person.

We need to be very careful of not losing ourselves to other-spirit control, and thereby losing our selves and our lives. I mean, isn't this what may have happened to some of the wilder insane people in the asylums?

Episode 13 is here, it is a short one but any information is good. We'll call this episode 'The intellectual suicide of a bad apologist'. We've been reading Badecker's posts where he condemns bringing religion into the subject and telling everyone to stick to the 'scientific' part. Of course he was telling us to do that, he can go religious as many times as he wants because he believes himself to be special having God in his favors. Go ahead and read how our superior human Badecker goes completely nuts about spirits, the defense system of the spirits, other spirits that take over and other science fiction shit that in his mind must be the same as science. Not to be surprised since these fantasy fairy tales are as scientific as his machine theory is, or as his religion is. We conclude that there are two Badeckers: the one who is really scientific and hates religion being brought up (as he believes, the truth is that he knows little to nothing about physics, biology, cosmology, etc) and the one who is very spiritual, completely religious and indoctrinated. Maybe one of the Badeckers is the bad spirit who took over poor Badecker and is trying to make him look insane. I think this kind of a theory would be appreciated by him. The reality is that we know bad spirits are not the answer. The answer is simple: Badecker is really, really, really stupid. His level of stupidity increases with each and every word that he writes here. I am already enjoying our scientific proof of the stupidity of Badecker. Will we maybe get to see some unseen level of stupidity? Can't tell for sure, but it gets promising. Stick around for episode 14 dear folks.
P.S. You have to love how desperate he got by replying to everyone that they are jokers and they are sooooo pathetic.

Well, you continue to be a pathetic joker. and not only that, but you brag about it as well.

The proof for God's existence still stands unrebutted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737322.msg10718395#msg10718395
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1355109.msg14047133#msg14047133
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1662153.40
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1054513.msg16803380#msg16803380.

Thanks for helping to spread it by continually speaking your drivel in the forum, here.

Which was debunked:

''All around us, in nature and the universe we see machine-like operations. These operations are extremely complex inside life and the cells. Machines have makers.'' (Where did you get the idea of machines have makers, you said that a monkey using a rock is a machine, how does that tell you it has a maker, how exactly did you get to that conclusion)(You also still haven't defined what machine-like operations actually mean, then you post a bunch of videos explaining how cells work, ok?)

''The advanced machines of the universe have an advanced Maker - God. Machines have makers.'' (Again assumptions for no reason, how do you know advanced machines of the universe have an advanced maker and how do you know the advanced maker is god)

1) Premise: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

1A) Firstly this is just an appeal to intuition and intuition isn't always a pure pathway to truth (i.e. - intuition states that the Sun goes around the Earth). There may indeed always be a cause for anything and everything that has or ever will come into existence, including whatever came into existence at the Big Bang event (the postulated beginning of our Universe), but that cause isn't always evident. Some quantum physicists would in fact claim that there are uncaused things (i.e. - radioactivity).

1B) Whatever cause in itself that has come into existence has, IMHO, thus resulted from a previous cause, which had a previous cause which had a previous cause and that chain can be extended as far back as you wish. Stated another way, there is no such thing as a First Cause.

1C) Whatever thing that came into existence came into existence from a previous thing(s) which existed and which in turn came into existence from a previous thing(s) which in turn came into existence from yet a previous thing and so on as far back as you wish to go. Stated another way, you can only bring something into existence from a previous something. You cannot bring a material something into existence from pure nothingness or from anything immaterial.

2) Premise: The Universe began to exist.

2A) I need note here that the "Universe" is defined as the sum total of all the bits and pieces that collectively make up the, or our, "Universe". The "Universe" is just the label we give to all of those bits and pieces (particles, atoms, molecules, dust, rocks, planets, stars, etc.) that came into existence in-the-beginning or later emerged into existence out of simpler states (i.e. – molecules from atoms).

2B) The assumption here is that our Universe is the be-all-and-end-all of the Cosmos**. While that may be the case, it's not necessarily so. Just because you came into existence doesn't mean that others don't also exist. Our Universe could be one of many. There could be parallel universes or even a postulated Multiverse or Megaverse - maybe.

3) Conclusion: Therefore, the Universe has a cause.

3A) The effect (resulting from the cause) of the Universe coming into existence or coming into being is called the Big Bang event, so the cause of the Universe (i.e. - the cause of the Big Bang event) was something prior to the Big Bang event. If the Universe had a cause then that cause was obviously pre-Universe or before the Big Bang event.

3B) That's where the cosmological buck has to stop since we can't observe or measure anything prior to the Big Bang event.

3C) In context all we can say is that our Universe came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang event and that the Big Bang event had a cause. That says nothing about the larger context as suggested in 2B. It could be that our Universe popped into existence from within a larger Cosmos just like a baby pops out of the womb at birth.

4) Conclusion: Therefore the cause behind the existence of the Universe was God.

4A) Nearly all theists state that the cause of the Universe was due to an omnipresent (all-present), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), all-loving, perfectly moral, and perfectly benevolent Almighty Being (i.e. - God). However these traits along with an entity who is itself uncaused, beginning-less, changeless, eternal, timeless, and space-less; an immaterial all powerful being who is a personal agent, endowed with freedom of the will, aren't verified; aren't all mutually inclusive and logical, with many an inherent philosophical inconsistency as well as many being actually contradicted by Biblical chapter-and-verse passages (i.e. - God is hardly all-loving).

4B) But a supernatural deity with some or all of these traits is also a total fallacy even if for no other reason than that the Cosmos has to be eternal (temporally infinite) since as I noted above there can be no First Cause and because you can't, and not even God can, create something material from the immaterial. It's a logical contradiction to postulate the creation / existence of an absolute something from an absolute state of pure nothingness and even God has to conform to logic (i.e. - God can't create a spherical cube). If you can't create something from nothing then something has always existed. If the Cosmos is infinite or endlessly cyclic, an infinitely repeating causal loop where A causes B and B in turn causes A, then what need for a God? If therefore, as theists want, that the Cosmos is finite since infinities aren't possible (i.e. - they tend to throw spanners into theistic philosophies - see 4D), then God too is temporally finite, therefore had a beginning and therefore had a cause. That of course contradicts the concept of an eternal deity and raises the obvious question, what caused God? If God is eternal then God created the Cosmos and our Universe an infinite time ago which is clearly not the case.

4C) Since science can't explain or actually identify the "cause" that caused the existence of our Universe, on the grounds that the cause preceded the Big Bang event and thus this cause can't be observed or measured, theists step into the gap and conclude that God is that cause. This God-of-the-gaps conclusion is also a fallacy since there are numerous other alternatives. The cause of the Universe could have been the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any deity or deities from any of the world's hundreds of creation mythologies. Maybe it was just a natural Big Crunch (a contracting universe) turning inside out at crunch time into a Big Bang; maybe an unknown and perhaps unknowable other natural cause we haven’t imagined yet; perhaps a quantum fluctuation; even perhaps (and this is my bias) a mortal, fallible, flesh-and-blood computer / software programmer fills the gap. God is only one hypothesis of many.

4D) Theists, even some cosmologists mistakenly say that there can't be an infinite Cosmos due to entropy (the state of useable energy available). An infinite Cosmos would have attained a state of maximum entropy an infinite time ago but that is not what we observe. I contend that at the moment of the Big Bang the clock was reset to time equals zero; the Universe was restored to original factory settings (including a state of minimum entropy). Consider this analogy. You only started ageing, started running down, and started increasing your entropy, at your conception. That's when your clock started. That state of conception was your original factory condition. What came before was irrelevant since as far as you are concerned, there was no before (although clearly there was). You had a cause therefore there was a state that existed before you. That cause was your parents and their state of entropy is an irrelevance as far as you (their child) is concerned at conception.


Even assuming that there is a first cause, the argument utterly fails to address how we can know its identity. The assertion that it must be the particular God that the arguer has in mind is a complete non sequitur. Why not the deist God? Why not some kind of impersonal, eternal cosmic force? Why not shape-shifting aliens from another dimension? Why not a God that sends Christians to hell and atheists to heaven? Or maybe the simplest of all, why not the Big Bang as the first cause? There is nothing in the argument that would allow one to determine any attributes of the first cause. (You have failed to explain this problem over and over)

There is nothing in the argument to rule out the existence of multiple first causes. This can be seen by realizing that for any directed acyclic graph which represents causation in a set of events or entities, the first cause is any vertex that has zero incoming edges. This means that the argument can just as well be used to argue for polytheism. (You yourself say that machine have makerS with S)

Through modern science, specifically physics, natural phenomena have been discovered whose causes have not yet been discerned or are non-existent. The best known example is radioactive decay. Although decay follows statistical laws and it's possible to predict the amount of a radioactive substance that will decay over a period of time, it is impossible — according to our current understanding of physics — to predict when a specific atom will disintegrate. The spontaneous disintegration of radioactive nuclei is stochastic and might be uncaused, providing an arguable counterexample to the assumption that everything must have a cause. An objection to this counterexample is that knowledge regarding such phenomena is limited and there may be an underlying but presently unknown cause. However, if the causal status of radioactive decay is unknown then the truth of the premise that 'everything has a cause' is indeterminate rather than false. In either case, the first cause argument is rendered ineffective.

Very nicely put.

Thanks for putting this together as many people who ready Badecker's links will then read this and understand BADecker is a hypocrite and a moron.

However, anybody who wants to waste the time looking through it, can easily find the scientific inequities therein.

In the face of the proof that God exists, all the above talk from Astargath shows either the ignorance of the author, or his intentional trolling.