My take on the one debate that matters, does God exists ?

I have decided to put in one page what I consider a reasonable response to the often repeated taunt of the ones who are duped into “believing” that we the “theists” somehow don’t get it. We get it alright and some of us  do this 24/7 :)  we come across all sort of "beliefs" and convictions, what we also get very well is the fact that whenever someone demands empirical evidence for the existence of God they don't have a clue what they are looking for in 99.9% of the cases. We have also become experts at evaluating whether a person belongs to the 99.9% group or the rare 0.1% group. We do that in a number of ways ranging from our initial interaction with the person and analyzing the copycat weasel terminology used by them or the other dead giveaway; poor logic. Not to mention ignorance of how the historical debate on the issue has progressed and stand settled from an individual’s limited window of opportunity perspective, say 50 to 100 years.

A promise of settlement in absolute terms is beyond everything we collectively know in our limited human condition.

Allow me :) bits and pieces of this write up can be found on my blog, I apologize for the repetition. Without getting into an Epistemological debate to determine whether knowledge is empirical in nature or strictly based on a priori reasoning or based on intuition, or indeed solely revealed, which itself is without a resolution and each premise has its own set of unresolved problems. As we know, philosophers have been debating it over the last 40 to 50 centuries without a conclusive outcome. The matter becomes a bit clearer once we have reached a certain threshold of understanding; whenever we venture further, evidence begins to point more towards a confirmation bias rather than any further clarification. The eyes see what the mind knows. 5000 years of philosophical gymnastics has concluded that we cannot hope to go beyond proving the existence of our own consciousness, yes just our own and even that when we get to that final stage if ever. We need help.

There are many avenues and all of them lead to either consistency or completeness. Completeness at the expense of consistency and the other way around has been demonstrated by Gödel, not only does it make sense mathematically; it fits in perfectly with the historical debate. Gödel is not alone with insight into the issue (incidentally this brilliant thinker actually came up with ontological proof for the existence of God that is by far the one to watch. Please go here  http://lifecheat.blogspot.com/p/godels-proof-for-existence-of-god.html ) Max Dehn before him and Alan Turing just after Gödel's work was proposed did the same thing. And many after they were able to demonstrate, in a number of disciplines, the problem of "undecidability" and that there is no consistent, effective formal system which proves for every question A in a given system that there is a certainty of a "yes" or a "no" answer exists. In light of this glaring limitation, is it logical to ask for proof of God which by definition is beyond limits or is this another logical fallacy, pointing to some other unknown? But can a logical victory be claimed by either side of this historical debate out of this insight? Furthermore dismissing thousands of intellectual on the other side of the fence, irrespective of which side you are on is nothing short of delusion of grandeur.

If now one were to take a position that there is no God it essentially is a cop-out. It is a cop-out because in spite of the often repeated mantra of the Atheists that it is not that they don't believe in God but that for them there is no God, what they are essentially saying is that in the Universe of cause and effect we will pretend there was no cause this once. All the subsequent questions like who created God will not resolve the first cause issue. Neither will the assumption that the Universe (matter) has always existed.

As I already pointed previously and will repeat here with the hope that given the context it may make more sense to those who are truly looking for answers. Proofs by their very nature are problematic unless the frame of references is well defined. OK let’s try another way, how much time and resources are you willing to spare in order to verify a given proof within a well-defined context?

Let me point out a true Muslim's position first, we are acutely aware that ordinary people get to the bottom of things on a daily basis thus essentially proving enough to act on an unseen event through a series of on the fly probability calculation or detailed inferences are drawn from what we do see. Hence Faith without verification or demanding of something we are not equipped to comprehend nor capable of physically recognizing, even if it were right in front of us, are both seriously flawed positions and prone to complete breakdowns.

Getting back to the proof bit :) Just to keep things in perspective and before you jump in, it took two of the most celebrated mathematicians of our time, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead to be exact, 378 pages before almost proving that 1+1=2. In fact, they only figured out how it could be done if they first proved some other stuff first like; what is addition. Not to mention Gödel telling everyone don't waste your time.

Now, how much time are you willing to allocate to get to a reasonable position of believability :)

I think instead of running after "proofs" the best one can ever hope for (in this Universe) is to verify that it would have been impossible for any human (I mean the 200 plus I.Q. types) to write the Quran. If we are able to do that with a high probability then rest assure it is as good as it gets.

If by now you are really interested please read a couple of my posts and then the short summary of the so far discovered facts about the Quran. There are many critics of this particular approach but the only way to go forward is to verify it for yourself or not :)

Anybody with middle school level math skills can directly verify it for themselves.

Please go here http://lifecheat.blogspot.com/2011/03/case-for-mathematics.html  and here http://lifecheat.blogspot.com/2011/04/update-on-case-for-mathematics.html to get started and here to verify http://lifecheat.blogspot.com/2010/12/short-intro-to-four-serious-attempts-at.html

The rest is up to you and you alone. Nobody will be able to pour the “proof” of the existence of God in your plate; your plate is not big enough.