Deductive logic only deals in absolutes. "A implies B" means that B is certainly (absolutely) true when A is certainly true. Logic can tell you when something is absolutely true and absolutely false.

It's also possible to have statements which are somewhere in between absolutely true and absolutely false. These are statements like "There is a 70% chance that it will rain tonight." This is the realm of inductive logic. It is built on top of deductive logic, but takes uncertainty into account.

It's also possible to have truths which are absolutely uncertain, i.e. precisely 50/50% chance of being true. "God exists", for instance, is uncertain to me because I have nothing which even shifts the probability of, much less derives the absolute truth of, the statement.

If a the 500 hundred foot tall creature came around just as you describe shows up, it doesn't mean that it is God. You demand that infinity fit into a thimble and refuse to take your measure almost in protest.

I'm sorry you are seperated from that which creates and maintains the multiverse and all possibilites. It is sad, but you are not as far as you feel. If you felt the reality of being absent from that presence that creates and permeates everything, it would certainly make you a believer.

The 500 foot man who turns Kansas into Gold would have a lot more claim to "god" than a bunch of people with "faith" and old books. (books written and edited by man)

I don't demand anything. There may be a god, there may not be a god.

I am just willing to say the words "I don't know."

How do you know what I am seperated, what if the only true God was the God of the Apache? Then you too are seperated.

Furthermore, what if there is a god and he is a very loving and king being. So kind and loving, that he loves us all regardless of how we live our lives, or weather or not we kneel before altars. In which case I am not seperated.

One of the things that seems most illogical to me about "god" is the demand for worship.
Wouldn't an all powerful being have better things to do than torture people who doubt?

God of the Bible = Kneel before me, acknowledge me as your god, accept Jesus as your savior OR else suffer eternal torture in Hell, a place which I created. And by the way, I will offer no empirical evidence that I exists, you will just have to hope that you are born in a Christian nation. Muslim children get the pitchfork.


Ixtellor

__________________
_______________________________________
George W. Bush "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building"

Blasphemy is a victimless crime.

You cannot argue the existence of absolute knowledge through logic because logic itself is vulnerable. And therefore there is no absolute.

Well, absolutes only exist when you have axioms. "Logic reliably produces absolute truths from the hypothetical absolute truth of another statement" is an axiom in and of itself. You can't know anything to be absolutely true *except* in hypothetical worlds. However, all knowledge exists within hypothetical worlds. Without any assumptions, there is no knowledge.

Given A and A->B are absolutely true, it is absolutely true that B is true, if and only if this logical axiom holds true: for all X and Y, X and X->Y are absolutely true implies that Y is absolutely true.

If that rule does not hold true in the world, then the logic is useless. Logical rules are, themselves, axioms.

Formal logic was invented in Classical Greece and integrated into a `system' of thought by Aristotle. It was, for him, a tool for finding truth, but it didn't keep him from making the most profound errors of thought. Nearly every argument and conclusion he made about physical science was wrong and misguided. Any tool can be misused, and in these pre-scientific days logic was misused repeatedly.So what went wrong? Aristotle understood that logic can be used to deduce true consequences from true premises. His error was his failure to realize that we have no absolutely true premises, except ones we define to be true (such as 2+2=4).

If his mistake was in choosing premises, then don't blame logic, blame his choices. Since knowledge does not exist without premises/axioms, one must choose the premises of ones knowledge. Naturally, if you disagree on premises, your logical deductions, i.e. beliefs, will be different as well. For instance, an empiricist's axioms would include "If I observe the occurrence X, 'I observed the occurrence X' is absolutely true." An axiom that you have chosen is that God exists. Both beliefs are by choice, not necessity, and both lead to different logical deductions.

I think that is a good clarification of the situation.

Okay, cool. We're on the same page then.