http://www.rpi.edu/~faheyj2/SB/COURSES/INTAI/C5PICTS/god.jpg

really laughed hard. maybe it's because im a nerd

[Keep images <= 1024x768 -JG]

I'm not smart enough to understand it.

me neither

Ditto.

Chinese makes more sense.

Using your logic, we shall prove the existance of a proof that God does not exist:

http://img385.imageshack.us/img385/2688/notexist1pr.jpg

And therefore, God does not exist.

[What I said above -JG]

Translation:

For all things, everything is self-identical. (that is anything is itself)
God is God, and by definition, God is "He who Is"
If everything is self-identical, God is one such thing, God exists.

Nevertheless, while this argument is logically valid, I question its soundness.

Furthermore, while this argument proves the existence of the concept of "God", the only property of such "God" is self-identity, a trait common to all things in the universe... so you're not really telling us that much. It's one thing to prove the existence of an idea of God on the emrit that in order to refer to God we implicitly assume His existence. It's an entirely other thing to prove the existence of a God under any religious notion.

Damn Godbotherers.

Leave the g-man alone, if he wanted us to know he's there, he'd drop by uninvited for cookies and sex once in a while.

Already doing that.

InbefodaGold!

Then...

Inbefodalock!

:p

Using science to prove God's existence? Not in my religion!

So how divine is he?

Can we make the image smaller? It's hard to read.

So would the corollary to this theorem be that the devil exists?

i guess you could prove pretty much everything.

That depends on your definition of "prove." It is easy to come up with a valid logical proof for complete nonsense. As long as someone admits the premises...

This pretty much "proves" that God exists because we made Him. (because the premises are postulates that we define(d))
:p


edit: bah grisy wrote what I meant in a much more articulate way

physicists sucks yo

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Last year for science fair one of my friends did "Does Prayer Work?" He had 2 sets of plants, prayed over one, didn't over the other, gave them "equal" treatment. The ones he prayed over "Lived better". I saw no difference in them, except maybe the ones he prayed over were a bit more lively (a bit of bias in the care, I think).

What I found funny about this: God refuses to prove that he exists. He then lets these plants grow better than these other plants. Therefore, God has proven his existance and vanishes in a puff of logic.

God doesn't "refuse to prove that He exists"

He just gives us the ability to decide for ourselves whether or not He does.

Zloc, if you don't believe in God, then I could imagine Him, popping up in front of you in all His glory and proclaiming "I am God!" and you'd probably say it was Aurora Borealis and the effect of the wind whistling through the trees.

The fact is, we interpret "proof" however we're predisposed to.

I think it's more a question of whether we've been trained to be a thiest or an athiest.

A thiest will see the aurora borealis and say "A true miracle from God! Using radiation to show that He exists."

An athiest will see the aurora borealis and say "An interesting effect of the natural properties of radiation!"

It's all just a matter of whether or not you ASSUME that God exists in the first place that determines your point of view.

I'm sorry, but if you can't understand that....just....no.

I chuckled when I saw this. :p

This could be my ignorance of the forumla as a whole, but it seems as if the part with the logic of affirming the anticedent in p --> q , p therefore q was quite irrelevant to the rest of the forumla and was just thrown on there to add something because I didn't see any other P's or Q's on the page

then again as I said, I don't really understand any other part of that forumla so if it does fit in, I just didn't catch it

I noticed that too. It kind of looks like a 6th grader's geometry homework.

Especially the way he threw in random integers :p

Most 6th graders don't have Geometry.

I did

And thus, the basis of Monoxide's entire post is toppled

Not really, I was raised Catholic and am now agnostic. I decided on my own to question God's existence when everything around me said just go with what everyone else says.

Not quite logically valid. All it does is prove that the God is equal to itself. It does not prove that there is such a God that is equal to itself, only that being equal to itself is a property of a God.

It's similar to the wordy proof that says:
To prove God exists, we will first prove the stronger statement that an existing God exists.
This second statement is clearly true, since to have an existing God that does not exist is absurd.
Therefore God exists.

The fallacy in the argument is the use of the word "an". Here are two examples of the use of the word "an".
1) An owl has large eyes.
2) An owl is in the house.

In the first statement we are referring to the set of all owls. Every owl has large eyes.

In the second statement, we are referring to a specific owl. You don't (hopefully) mean that every owl is in your house.

In the first case, there is no prerequisite for the set of owls to be a non-empty set. In the second instance, the set of owls must be non-empty, since one of them is in your house.

Here's how I expressed the proof:

1. Everything is self-identical.
2. There exists something that is self-identical.
Therefore,
3. Something exists.

That something being "God."
(In this case, premise 1 may be superfluous)

You're just proving the concept of God.

I'm not proving anything. I'm merely presenting an English interpretation of the argument.

And I already said I was referring to the concept of "God." Hence I'm mentioning "God" and not using God.

I disagree with that. When using "a/an" you are still talking about one item of the set. (we really need mathematical symbol capabilities here) Think of it like this

[forall]owls[/forall] [exist]owl[/exist] : the owl has large eyes. We can also say [forall]owls[/forall] ~[exist]owl[/exist] : the owl has large eyes.

By the way I just added two new BBCode tags [forall] and [exist]

But do you believe in the existence of God and just say we don't know anything regarding that existence/the existence of a God is irrelevant?

or do you NOT believe in the existence of God?

I don't believe in the existence of Schming!

Let me now restate this, thanks to JG's tags.

The argument in the image is the following*:

I: x is self-identical.

(1) ([forall]x[/forall]) Ix Premise
(2) Ix (Universal Generalization)
(3) ([exist]x[/exist]) Ix (Existential Instatiation)

* I have used a monadic quantifier to express identity to simplify the demonstration.

This is merely an example of the rule that "all" implies "some."

I'm unsure as to how that operates in a truly unrestricted universe of discourse, though. This is starting to confuse me, however, as I'm not entirely comfortable with the use of identity. Especially when "God"'s existence is technically defined as.... its existence.

I would rewrite the argument like this:

(1) ([forall]x[/forall]) Ix Premise
(2) ([exist]x[/exist]) Ix & Gx (Premise)
Therefore,
(3) ([exist]x[/exist]) Gx

This is dumb; you can prove anything if you just devide by zero.

This reminds me of these. Neat stuff to think about.

Or if you contradict yourself.