In Reply to: baloney! posted by I am a Nerd (period) on November 04, 2006 at 10:10:10:
So only by first accepting that God exists we can then demonstrate that God exists?
What about "discovering" God? In other words, when we don't accept that God exists and then God just simply appears? Since this is what happened to me, something is not right about the pre-existent conditions in the logic.
For this “discovery” or “revelatory” problem, God is not inside your system but outside and therefore your metrics, being internal, cannot measure external phenomena. In other words, your proof is not universal but only for one specific problem.
A more appropriate way to demonstrate whether God is real or not was (unwittingly) used by Kurt Goedel. Some people have talked about him here before. He defined a system and then showed that there is always a super-system that totally engulfs the original system. As a result, the capabilities, rules and other characteristics of the first system are expanded. There is much more to it but this is the most simple version.
He went on to demonstrate that the progression from sub-system to system to super-system is ad infinitum and therefore by induction one can see that the end is the system that encompasses all systems because it is the ultimate super-system that engulfs all characteristics and possibilities. – thus God is in that SUPER system.
If you want to know more, it is also known as the incompleteness theorem. I hope this helps.
Food for thought: He also came up with what is now called his second incompleteness theorem. This proves that if one can demonstrate the consistence of the system by only using the rules that exist with that system, the system is by necessity inconsistent. The web is full of references and writing about all of this. After all, it is a major milestone everybody should know about. :-)