Discussion To Atheist and Theist, do you think this is the best argument against the existence of god? (abrahamic religion theists specifically)

[NaturalBornNEET]

What? No, "all the greatest sages" were not professing monism, you're making a universal claim with no justification. Unless in your mind "all the greatest sages" is Plotinus and a handful of other guys. Monism is a refuted worldview for centuries now, I've already outlined this above. It's funny that some people still hold to this, it takes an incredible amount of misinformation. Literally the sentence before that you said there's perceived division, which should've set off some bells in your head. If "all was one" then you wouldn't even be able to use cognition or predication because that requires relations and multiplicity among other things. Moreover God cannot be a monad because then he wouldn't be able to be personal since personhood derives its existence from another person by definition. And this is important since only a personal god can give telos and create meaning and order. (Hope you're not going to claim "but there's no meaning and order!" because that is self-refuting and would immediately disqualify you from making logical arguments and even speaking language) If all was one then congrats you can't even define any object or predicate of anything, therefore universals like logic and numbers literally would not exist. It's a hilariously self-defeating paradigm. It would do you well to get familiar with basic philosophy and listen less to "brahhhh like we're all one, man" weed smokers. They're doing you a disservice.

I never mentioned monisn, a better synonym for oneness would be non-duality. There's an apperance of distinctions which arises from consciousness but these appearances of duality are ultimately impermanent and untenable, dynamic and shifting and infinite in the forms they can take, separation exists but it is not fundemental. Consciousness is the proginator of dualities. Whereas monism seems to more just focus on the notion "all is one brahhh" and less address the contradiction of the apperance of multiplcity.

All phenomena are interconnected and interdependent and self referential, it all points back onto itself, you can see the parallels between a telescopic view of the cosmos and the microscopic view of a microorganism culture. The ease with which humans can make metaohors and think symbolically is a testament to non-duality. Creativity itself requires the merging of what was once seen as disparate parts. So yes division exists in that it appears so, but it's all related and the inability to see the relation between two things is an illusion, maya.

If you identity as a human, your very existence is interdependent on so many things that you probably perceive as "not you". Langauge first of all, you didn't create the langauges you can currently speak you were taught them, and language shapes how you view reality in ways that are unfathomable to most people who take it for granted. Your physical body wasn't created by you, rather your parents and their parents ad infinitum, and if you try to trace the ancestral tree to it's roots you won't find a ultimate creator of your body, because the materials of your body you didn't create nor did humans: water, fat, proteins, energy are all things that can also be found in other animals and even dumb unalive matter, like iron which is both in you and rocks and minerals, so why do you draw the distinction between you and all those things?

Your proclivities, tastes, habits: all determined by a causal chain from the moment you were born, your parents being one of the biggest models on how you behave and reguale your emotions. If someone has a fear of dogs because they were bitten by one that's no choice of theirs, they didn't conjure the dog up out of thin air and mind control it into attacking them, yet that fear is now part of their identity, they are the dog in a way. You only like the media you like because you had access to it in the first place, you can't be the fan boy of a potential tv show from some planet in another galaxy. All your mannerisms and postures are unconscious reflections of the humans in your culture for the most part, especially when you're in the presence of others there's a deep subconscious desire to not stand out too much in how you even conduct yourself. So many of your emotions are seemingly triggered by conditioned stimuli.

(Hope you're not going to claim "but there's no meaning and order!"

On the contrary everything is meaning (from the dual perspective at least) and perfectly ordered and blindness to that order is just that, blindness.

It would do you well to get familiar with basic philosophy and listen less to "brahhhh like we're all one, man" weed smokers. They're doing you a disservice.

What philosophies would you recommend

So by that reasoning you're making a claim that you have a universal consciousness that literally knows everything at all times in all states and particulars? Hilariously wrong stance because the human mind is demonstrably limited and you're not telepathic.
If all "knowledge is contained and must be found within consciousness" then ironically knowledge doesn't exist since experience is impossible, the external world doesn't exist and neither does anyone but you (who are you talking to right now?). In fact "you" would not exist too because the self is predicated on relations of opposition to other selves. Universals can also not be grounded in limited human consciousness by definition so logic, laws, numbers, etc. would not exist either.
Unless you're trying to say there's some kind of universal cosmic consciousness aside from humans, which sounds pretty close to believing in God or some kind of deity, and that opens up a whole other can of worms for you.

If consciousness is all that exists then all that exists is right now, and right now consciousness is taking the form of a human communicating with another on his phone is his room, that is the universe right now.

It's a little crazy and even I feel iffy typing this but I'm simply following the logic of empricism to it's extremes: observing directly what is, and the assumption that there will be a hallway when I open my door is just that: an assumption based on memories, the problem of induction.

Also numbers and mathematics are not objective. To the layman looking at a piece of art they would see it as simply one unit, "the painting" as a whole. To the more curious dilettante they may break it down into multiple elements, maybe they'll view it as 5 elements: person a, person b, the umbrella, the rain, the background. To the artist who made the piece they'll see every single stroke, even elements unseen like the muses, experiences and emotions that inspired the piece, countless elements. Do mathematics exist for sharks? Lizards? Mules? Rocks? Doubtful. Even in your life there are numerous states of consciousness you enter every day where numbers aren't on your mind, so they literally do not exist then.

I don't like the word solipsism, even if that is basically what I'm expressing, it has too many bad connotations and is too easily corruptible by the naive. Non-duality is a more palatable term.



an example to demonstrate the subjectivity of numbers:

there's a human and an alien

they are presented with objects on a flat surface. These objects being cherries, a single cherry and two cherries joined by the stem creating a double cherry structure. The human and alien are then told to add them up.

The human writes down the expression "1+1+1=3"

The alien writes down the expression "1+1=2"

The alien has never seen a cherry up until now, or any fruit so it is unfamiliar with the patterns of fruit, for the alien it just sees 2 objects separated by space on a flat surface. Whereas the human chooses to distinguish between the double cherry structure as being two things, two cherries just conjoined at the stem. The very notion of numbers is arbitrary.

You may say that numbers can be separated from objects as just pure abstraction, but that abstraction in essence are just thoughts of the human mind thinking them at that point in time which can be seen as objects too (the abstract thoughts), that abstraction is subjective too, a projection of the human mind which is capable of thinking in such abstraction, an animal isn't. And even then most people rely on symbols to conceptualize maths.

And when you consider mathematics only exists when you think of it, most mathematics-based thoughts are had with an end in mind, using maths as simply a means to that end, utilizing it, very few people ponder mathematics out of pure love and reverence for it in itself. So mathematics is inseparable from human egoic wants and desires. These are my observations anyway.

 

[Lyscx]

If God exists, He is traditionally defined as omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (all-good).

1. An all-powerful God could create any possible world — including one without brutal suffering, without violating free will.
2. An all-knowing God would foresee the exact consequences of every possible world He could create.
3. An all-good God would prevent unnecessary or unjustified suffering, especially among innocents.
4. God allegedly designed our minds — including our moral intuitions and emotional responses — to see suffering as evil, and pleasure as good.
5. The actual world contains widespread, extreme, and unjustifiable suffering — both moral (caused by agents) and natural (caused by design).
6. Therefore, God intentionally created a systemwhere:
   • He programmed us to feel suffering as evil,
   • He populated the system with it anyway,
   • And He expects us to trust Him based on a morality He himself designed — while violating

Im not sure about religion but how do we know exactly that this version isnt the version where sufferring is at lowest logically possible level. What is our proof that natural suffering could have been much lower without that explanation affecting our universe/world drastically or causing more suffering somewhere else. If there is a scientific proof for this thenit would be the strongest argument. Especially animal suffering

 

[WeepingWorm]

Sorry for replying late again.

inability to see the relation between two things is an illusion, maya.

Maya is actually one of the easiest points for critique against eastern religions. Maya and a few other principles are all illusory and yet somehow supposed to be the profound guiding principles of life. First, if there's no real distinctions, then you cannot define any objects and metaphysics don't exist, so what are we even talking about? That would be monism, in fact. Knowledge would be impossible, because knowledge is dependent on a real agent who knows. Second, if everything is illusion, is knowledge of that fact illusion? Whoops, you can't define any object anymore. Third, it falls apart epistemically since if "your mind" was separated from "actual reality" then you wouldn't be able to know it, ever. Since the "source of knowledge" behind your knowledge claims would be unreliable: your experience of coming to know it is also part of the illusion/matrix programming. This is also the problem with deism and solipsism. They have the same refutation.
Objects having relations also doesn't lead logically to this worldview, nor does your hypothetical biographical story have anything to do with the argument of free will. The fact that some conditions are defined does not mean you don't have free will.

everything is meaning

No, "everything" is not meaning. Meaning requires preconditions because you can't have meaning without intent. Even description requires prescription (meaning which is imported and prescribed by intent). So you need telos. Telos is prescribed purpose and the end to which all things were made and brought into being. Telos is the ground for value-judgments and for intelligible meaning whereby all things are properly and correctly predicated. It's not just the "end" or the "goal", but the actual criteria whereby things are judged by value. Without objective telos, you can't also have the intentionality which grounds the intelligibility of the good.
Descriptions rest upon meaning, and meaning rests upon intent, which is inherently teleological. Both value and meaning are prescribed. And this is why subjective ethics and subjective telos destroy knowledge: they reduce value and meaning to subjective categories. Telos can only be given by a personal entity, therefore all deistic worldviews (like Buddhism with maya) are false.
Meaning doesn't exist in things themselves. Things are just ontology. Meaning is something beyond mere ontology. Meaning is prescriptive and entails an intentional synthesis of concepts. And those concepts are then intentionally mapped onto the external world by intentional predication. Meaning is prescribed by a mind, hence it is intentional and prescriptive, and this intentional mind grounds objective telos, which grounds objective ethics and objective meaning. Meanings and concepts are products of the mind, which means meanings and concepts are by nature intentional and intelligible. You can't have contents of a mind without a mind. You can't extract contents of a mind from a mindless void, or impersonal chaos.
Meaning is prescribed, and if it is prescribed, then its precondition and source is intentional. If you don't have a Divine Mind to ground these things, then logic, telos, truth, etc. are meaningless. Because you can't have prescribed meaning without an intentional mind. Logic itself would unintelligible, if it is not grounded in an intentional Mind. No, you cannot ground all meaning/knowledge in human minds. The human mind can't ground all knowledge, because it's contingent, has its own gaps in knowledge, is always in the process of decreasing and/or increasing, is in constant flux and change, etc. It is not invariant, so it cannot ground things that are invariant—logic, telos, value, etc. So it can only participate in the things that are invariant.
So, if you take some deist worldview, like Buddhism, you will see that deism reduces to atheism, because deism leads to an impossibility of knowing the deity in question, and has no mechanism by which to account for telos, ethics, and knowledge. If you have invariant conceptual entities and intelligible contents of the mind without a mind, then that's a contradiction. This is why Platonism doesn't work also, for example (meaning is not "inherent in creation" because Platonism posits mindless forms and mindless concepts as well as unintentional and unintelligible concepts, same as Buddhism). If said invariant categories exist without a mind, then they are non-intentional, and therefore non-intelligible. And therefore, objective meaning and objective knowledge are impossible. Mindless conceptual entities also can't know anything. You can't ground knowledge in things that know nothing.

What philosophies would you recommend

The one that could actually provide an account for their worldview. Check my previous posts for reading material.

If consciousness is all that exists then all that exists is right now, and right now consciousness is taking the form of a human communicating with another on his phone is his room, that is the universe right now.

See: problem of access to the external world. If one denies the existence of the external world and objects in it, then that collapses the possibility of knowledge at all. Critique of solipsism, deism, etc. applies.

logic of empricism

Empiricism presupposes logic, it does not own it. The scientific method relies on the presupposition that logic already exists. Logic is not an empirical fact. It cannot be verified by sensory data and scientific observation. Logical principles do not derive from sensory input and cannot be observed in the same way empirical facts are. And justifying logic through empirical verification would be circular since you presuppose logic.
Science requires that reality is already ordered, structured and intelligible. Categories like identity, non-contradiction, causality and unity are not derived from empirical observation but are presupposed in any act of reasoning. Without them, there would be no coherent distinctions between things, no way to recognize patterns, no means of formulating scientific laws.
Human cognition does not merely passively receive sensory input; it organizes it according to these necessary structures. The very act of perceiving an object as distinct from another or as having properties assumes the laws of logic and the unity of consciousness. Categories like space, time, causality and substance must already be in place before any experience or scientific inquiry can occur. Hume pointed this out several centuries ago refuting people who put empiricism as the foundation of their worldview. Because they dogmatically presuppose these things that cannot be verified empirically.

Non-duality is a more palatable term.

Doesn't matter what the word is, the referent paradigm is the same and faces the same critique.

Also numbers and mathematics are not objective. You may say that numbers can be separated from objects as just pure abstraction, but that abstraction in essence are just thoughts of the human mind

Already gave plenty refutations above on why you can't ground universal invariant things in a human mind. Math derives from logic, which is objective and universal (if you deny this, you forfeit) and has the same status. Numbers, sets and equations are not physical objects and require and transcendental structure that makes mathematical knowledge possible. Math is discovered, not invented. It contains objects that are infinite like Mandelbrot sets, for example, (so they must be stored somewhere if it exists - not a human mind), and objects that are not instantiated in reality at all. Where it maps onto reality, it does so universally. We're using a computer right now.
Objective means exists outside any particular mind, so it doesn't matter whether it's a human or a hypothetical alien, the reality would not change. Your main point of confusion comes from the fact that you think everything might be an illusion or there may be no access to the external world. If that was the case, "you" would not be able to "think" at all or know anything. You should read up on those problems and how they are defeaters for knowledge, and everything will become much more clear.