<p>Numbers exist like ‘red’ exists or a C flat exists.</p>
<p>They DO exist in the physical sense - they just need something to project them. I can have two apples - hence two exists. Okay, maybe it doesn’t exist physically, but it is a label for something that IS perceivable. It has a context in our universe.</p>
<p>But whatever. Maybe two exists, maybe it doesn’t.</p>
<p>But God certainly doesn’t exist. My proof? Give it 70 years, then you’ll see.</p>
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No, you won’t.</p>
<p>Your arguments just get better and better…</p>
<p>Are you saying that no one will believe in God anymore in 70 years? Is this hypothesis your only “evidence”? And even if this became reality, it would hardly be proof that God certainly does not exist.</p>
<p>****in’ miracles</p>
<p>Are you really that slow Sithis?</p>
<p>You’ll find out in 70 years because you’ll be DEAD.</p>
<p>I guess you won’t really “know,” ever (because there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow), but that’s the point.</p>
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Ah, I didn’t get that because that’s even more ridiculous. I could be dead in 50 years, or tomorrow, etc. Who said I was personally interested in finding out, anyway? This is about what people in general think; it was never about my personal view of God. Nice try, though.</p>
<p>i love how this thread went from “why college students are liberal” to “does God exist”</p>
<p>Anyway- all of you atheists r idiots with no arguments. Well all relize in 70 yrs that theres no God cause we’ll be dead? ya, nice. That proves alot. Any thinking human being comes to the conclusion theres more to life and this world than superficiality. Who created the universe exactly? who created those two molecules exactly? how is it that every human, plant, and single part of thisnworld works so perfectly? Accident- ya right. </p>
<p>Anyway @ itachirumon: im waiting for you to respond to my last post which you did not adress but ill sum up here what im saying and see how you would like to defend liberals…
-Obama was a complete failure in every way. Im not gonna give specific reasons until you respond if you think so or not.
-racial profiling is good. Once again, you havent explained why it’s not worth it to save hundreds of lives yet. All youve said is " anyone with a brain knowns racial profiling is bad". if u dont respond im gonna assume you agree that saving lives is more important than PCness.
-Talking with Iran and negotiating with terrorists (especially without preconditions) is bad and useless. i think we already established you would concur on that point.</p>
<p>peter_parker: Seriously, don’t even bother. If they don’t get it, they don’t get it. I’ve gone through this sort of debate-pattern countless times before. No matter what you say, it will either get misinterpreted, refuted with incorrect statements/logic, ignored, or met with a tangent/strawman opposition.</p>
<p>I’ve found that the only people worth having that sort of debate with are people who are on the fence.</p>
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<p>this is arrogant as hell. i don’t even believe in god and i think this is a pile of crap.</p>
<p>it’s the height of arrogance to believe that your personal ideology shaped by your personal values and beliefs about ethics & metaphysics is somehow derived from pure reason. ‘the one true belief’.</p>
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<p>I’m sure that there are plenty of mathematicians out there who would be a little miffed to hear that their subject of study is just a series of labels for things perceived.</p>
<p>It’s bogus, though: there are plenty of math objects & results so abstract that they don’t have much relation to things you experience.</p>
<p>Hell, if the physicists are right and nature is made up of discrete particles, then there is no way we can even strictly perceive an irrational number: things measured must be related to ratios or numbers of particles & as such, not irrational.</p>
<p>The fact that you see an apple next to another apple side by side and relate this to the concept of two is similar to how a christian looks at just, & righteous things in the world and sees it as a projection of (to use your terminology) god.</p>
<p>silence_kit: It’s not arrogant for me to say “you don’t get the argument” if you don’t get the argument.</p>
<p>BTW we perceive irrational numbers all the time. Draw a 45-45-90 triangle. The hypotenuse is leg*rad2, which is very much irrational, and you can see the line right there on the paper. Making things discrete “particles” doesn’t change how length operations work. Besides, atoms are mostly empty space anyway.</p>
<p>Also:
For example, did you know 1/3 (0.3333…) in base 10 is 0.4 in base 12? Or perhaps that 0.2 in base 10 is 0.2497… in base 12?</p>
<p>“1+1” wouldn’t make sense if our universe wasn’t the right context for it. We made the system the way it was because “1+1” means something in a variety of contexts. Even imaginary planes, complex numbers, etc, all derive from rules that were developed in our very real universe. Such things “exist” but within the properties of our defined system, and we can perform all sorts of operations on them.</p>
<p>Classic example: e^(i*pi) = -1 even though i is an imaginary number and e & pi are irrational.</p>
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<p>You are still talking about ideas. Measure that line. If our science is correct, that line will be so many (carbon?) atoms. </p>
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<p>1/3 is a rational number. I’m not going to calculate it, but i bet 0.2 in base 12 has a representation that is repeating.</p>
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<p>I agree that math things only exist within the properties of the systems in which they are defined. I don’t agree that they depend on what we observe in the universe or what the universe actually is. Conclusions about what is right & what is, work similarly. They only are conclusions given some shared context.</p>
<p>"The fact that you see an apple next to another apple side by side and relate this to the concept of two is similar to how a christian looks at just, & righteous things in the world and sees it as a projection of (to use your terminology) god. "</p>
<p>Except we defined math. It’s not like we just stumbled upon it one day, “Oh! I discovered math in a cave somewhere!” We’ve defined “2” to represent something specific.</p>
<p>Where a Christian might see loving/just/righteous things as proof of God, an atheist would say that’s mis-attributing the results of one thing (biologically evolved human constructs) to another (God).</p>
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<p>A christian who has thought about his faith would not call it a ‘proof’. He’d realize that you’d have to believe a priori that god exists.</p>
<p>Kind of like you can choose to accept the axioms your linear algebra class and then talk about the results that follow, or you can throw a tantrum and refuse to accept them, and then call the spectral theorem a pile of crap.</p>
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<p>The <em>COUNT</em> of particles may be discrete, but that doesn’t mean the distance that they span must also be discrete. This is a completely silly argument and I don’t know why you’re trying to bother leveraging it.</p>
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<p>Okay: The number pi in base-pi is 10. Likewise, all numbers after 3 in base-pi would start to look pretty irrational. Same sort of thing for base-e.</p>
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<p>Again you misinterpret (again, a concept you’re calling arrogant on my behalf). You say “math things” exist within the properties of the systems defined but that they DON’T depend on what we see in the universe? What do you think we even created a mathematical system for?</p>
<p>How can you say “what’s right and wrong” is also something that doesn’t have its basis in the universe? We base right and wrong on very real-world secular concepts (very, very few – even amongst religious types – get their morality from the Bible). They’re conclusions based on a context that is not only “shared,” but real-world.</p>
<p>Give me one example of an ethics concept that has no derivation from the real world.</p>
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<p>Exactly. But one could forward the argument that our perception of right and wrong within this world is a reflection of the ideal of right and wrong in another, or some concept that transcends our limited viewpoint – religious persons might call a perfect entity whose law is by definition right “God.” </p>
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<p>There is no such concept – morality involves interpersonal relations by nature, and therefore necessarily involves the real world. Even those who believe in God have something like the Golden Rule 99% of the time – a concept that has little meaning outside of the real world.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the existence of God and religion cannot come without assumptions – an atheist operates under the assumption that God does not exist (or holds this as a consequence of other assumptions), and religious people obviously are in the same situation.</p>
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<p>Except the axioms would have to be “true” first. I’m not going to make an axiom saying 1 + 1 = 3 if it doesn’t make sense. If I have one apple and then I get another apple, I do not suddenly have three apples. I have two apples, in the purest sense of the word. You imply that the results simply depend on an axiom being blindly accepted or not. Axioms aren’t blind. We can verify them for ourselves. God is not “axiomatic” in this sense. The question comes down to “Why do you accept God as true in the first place?” The answer is almost always related to some form of human utility: “No afterlife is depressing/I was brought up this way/the universe is too beautiful and complex/love is too ineffable/I fear punishment/etc,” and surely you’re not going to say that something is true just because you want it to be.</p>
<p>I think math has more to do with the way we perceive and think about things. We see that one apple and another apple form a collection of two apples as a demonstration, and we create the universal abstraction from this that one thing and another thing make two things. We do not need to go out and create every possible combination of two things in the world together to see that this is true, due to the way we think. Now, say that we have never seen an orange. We cannot say that one orange and another orange make two oranges, and assume this is a statement based in reality. The truth of the universal says nothing about the particulars in the real world. This is where math largely is divorced from being part of physical reality–we can argue that even if no physical objects existed whatsoever, that one thing and another thing still make two things. “2” is an arabic numeral that represents a collection of two things, so in this way it is a definition agreed upon by those who use the arabic symbols for math. This does not mean that we humans “decided” to agree upon the idea that one thing and another thing make two things.</p>
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What do you mean here?</p>
<p>You are absolutely right legend in that it is senseless to debate. Especially people who can’t even grasp your arguments, save refute them. I don’t mean to personally offend but it’s like talking to a wall.</p>
<p>Someone said one proof of God is that the world works perfectly. How did you get that? The world doesn’t work perfectly - that is an opinion and a value statement.</p>
<p>The reasons God doesn’t exist is because if a conscious, thinking being did exist (aka something unlike Einstein’s God or the transcendentalists’ God of some mystical force) — well, all minds require a framework to operate in.</p>
<p>Decisions are made based on values, rules, weights, pros and cons, prior experience, and feelings.</p>
<p>If someone asked you to kill a child, but you’d go to prison, and it would cost you $1,000,000 - you would not do it. You didn’t really decide not to kill the child. The framework and values already present in your mind predetermined your choice of action.</p>
<p>God’s mind, unless making decisions at random, also requires a framework and values. OR AGAIN, if there was no framework, it would be random. Hence, the framework, the uncaring rules, are superior to him. Such an omnipotent mind cannot exist by default because a mind, by definition, by the very basic laws of logic and nature and physics, CANNOT be a first cause. A mind REQUIRES other first causes to ACT UPON and ENGENDER IT, so A MIND CANNOT BE A FIRST CAUSE.</p>
<p>You will still almost certainly misinterpret and misconstrue this. You will almost certainly instantly dismiss my argument as some weird pseudo-intellectual ramblings without even bothering to understand it. But, for some thinking people, and primarily the atheists already on this thread, you might appreciate the argument and theory.</p>