My latest infatuation with logic.

[Latentsanity]

Originally Posted by Flaming_Dingleberry

You can't put events in a time-line before there was time. Saying He had a never-beginning existence is about as reasonable as saying God existed before time... and who knows what that was like? Maybe God was there, doing his God thing for "no time", which (being beyond all human minds' comprehension) is what humans refer to as "all time" or "never had a beginning" and such. Of course I'm just thinking out loud. I'm just treating it as if the two theories are plausible, and this is apparently what came of it.

The main issue with both of our theories is that the only way either of us can possibly 'prove' ours to be correct is to assert that what we believe is true, and then try and explain events from the point of view of someone who sees that theory as fact, and see which seems more logically possible. Of course you can't put events in a time-line before there was time, but my assertion was that there wasn't any point at which there was no time. Similarly, I suppose assuming that God exists outside of time leads to the conclusion that God created time, etc. Circular reasoning either way, but discussing something that is essentially explicitly stated as being beyond comprehension probably leads to a lot of that.

Originally Posted by MrRubix

Then again, plenty of theists I talk to aren't really concerned with truth. Pick their claims apart with physics/evolutionary processes/etc, and it's almost always the same: "That makes sense but I still believe in God," which either means "I can't really explain to you why I believe in God despite your claims" or "I don't actually understand your claims." Usually people can't elaborate on the former because it's always something like "I've just believed it my whole life and it 'feels' right" without really considering the implications of such a statement.

The main reason people will continue to believe in God is because to any person who doesn't know for certain whether or not there is a God, there is really nothing to lose by believing in God. If God exists, and needs you to believe in his existence to avoid eternal damnation, people who believed in God win, and get to not be burnt to a crisp. If God doesn't exist, whether or not you believed in a God is irrelevant. From a strictly numerical standpoint, even if the odds of God existing are so incredibly small, the post-life average outcome for someone who believes in God is positive, while that of a non-believer is negative.

Of course, this all falls apart when you consider that there are multiple religions, many of which think the other religions are wrong, and will condemn you to fiery punishment if you picked the wrong one. Oh well.