Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

[JWeinCom]

WolfpackN64 said:

setsunatenshi said:

1. i started by saying this argument has false premises which I have clearly demonstrated.

2. the fact you accepted time and the universe to have begun at the same time (which is intellectually honest of you) absolutely disproves the premise of the universe having a cause. 

3. I'm not under any delusions that now you'll find yourself an atheist and negating your faith and beliefs because at the end of the day that's what they are. you believe those things because you were conditioned since you were a child, you hold on to those beliefs as a victim of your own sociological context and the beliefs of those around you. 

4. More importantly to one of my first points, there's nothing in this argument that points to the specific deity you defend. It uses a special pleading argument that for some reason makes you ignore the impossibility of a cause to the universe but you're happy to ignore a cause to your deity. 

5. The usual leap in logic that occurs after the premises i stated is "therefore god caused the universe". I didn't state it on purpose to see if you would do it. But doing so would necessitate somehow we all agreeing that your deity didn't "begin to exist" which is a laughable special pleading :)

1. I disagreed and shown why clearly enough.

2. Also shown why that isn't necessarily true

3. I have to dissapoint you, I'm a reborn Catholic

4. Necessary beings have no cause, that's the whole stick of the argument

5. If God didn't exist, he couldn't come into existence, since a necessary being that is a first cause is always prior to existence. Since God is prior to the universe and time, he is in the only position to be the first cause.

Yeah... that's special pleading.  You can't say everything needs to have a cause, and then create a class of things that don't.  You'd also have to justify that something can exist outside the universe and time, and I'm not sure how that can be done, or if it is even a sensical statement.  The only experience of existence we have is temporal and spatial.  I don't know what existing absent of time and space means.

JWeinCom said:

WolfpackN64 said:

I believe the reasons stated to be good reasons that are yet inconclusive for the very reason that there is so much debate around it. We can at the most use abductive and introspective reasoning here (for now). So both sides are eventually limited to building claims on one side and refuting it on the other.

Knowledge is a true belief that is formed through the success of your cognitive or perceptive faculties. Both sides have their respective believes (the existive of God or not) and there have been cognitive and perceptive successes on the side of belief (which has sparked many an argument of course). Both sides however struggle to definitively show that their belief is true.

For me, the matter is pretty conclusive. I have experienced God, so I know my belief is true and therefore I know of his existence. I do fully understand that won't sway many atheists though so the debate and building and destroying of arguments continue.

I would disagree that the reasons you've provided so far are good reasons.  They at best point to a deistic god, but the premises of each are flawed.  I've yet to hear a solid reason to justify belief.  

I'd also quibble about the definition of knowledge.  Most of the time I see that definition it includes the word "justified".  I can have a belief that is true, but that may not be justified.  For example, I can say I know that your favorite color is blue, because my psychic powers told me.  Your favorite color may actually be blue, but it really wouldn't be accurate to call it knowledge, because I have no way to justify it as of now.  Justified true belief also has some issues as a definition for knowledge, but it is stronger.

I'm probably not grounded in philosophy well enough to really debate this.  To my knowledge there is no universally accepted definition of knowledge, as they are all flawed.  But I would argue that to claim one knows something would require justification of some sort.

Back to the example I gave, let's hypothetically say your favorite color is blue.  Did I know that when I originally said it?