There is only 1 god.
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
After 2 votes and with 8 points ahead, the winner is...
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- One day
- Max argument characters
- 15,000
- Voting period
- One week
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
Rules:
Pro: Has to defend the monotheist position
Con: Has to defend a polytheist/henotheist position. Con can be a polytheist, henotheist, pluralist, or something similar.
both:
* do not commit these fallacies: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
* Follow website TOS
* The rules will apply equally to both pro and cons.
all of the elements usually represented by different gods in a polytheistic religion are highly interconnected and ultimately based on the same subatomic particles.
If everything is interconnected, then there can be a god for everything, and that god of everything is very similar to the monotheistic god.
a spirit or being believed to control some part of the universe or life and often worshipped for doing so, or something that represents this spirit or being
one of several deities, especially a male deity, presiding over some portion of worldly affairs. Compare goddess (def. 1).an image of a deity; an idol.any deified person or object.a nebulous powerful force imagined to be responsible for one's fate
Generally, entropy is defined as a measure of randomness or disorder of a system. This concept was introduced by a German physicist named Rudolf Clausius in the year 1850.Apart from the general definition, there are several definitions that one can find for this concept. The two definitions of entropy that we will look at on this page are the thermodynamic definition and the statistical definition.From a thermodynamics viewpoint of entropy, we do not consider the microscopic details of a system. Instead, entropy is used to describe the behaviour of a system in terms of thermodynamic properties such as temperature, pressure, entropy, and heat capacity. This thermodynamic description took into consideration the state of equilibrium of the systems.Meanwhile, the statistical definition which was developed at a later stage focused on the thermodynamic properties which were defined in terms of the statistics of the molecular motions of a system. Entropy is a measure of the molecular disorder.Other popular interpretations of entropy are as follows;
- If we talk about quantum statistical mechanics, Von Neumann extended the notion of entropy to the quantum domain by means of the density matrix.
- While discussing the information theory, it is a measure of the efficiency of a system in transmitting a signal or the loss of information in a transmitted signal.
- When it comes to dynamical systems, entropy defines the growing complexity of a dynamical system. It also quantifies the average flow of information per unit of time.
- Sociology states that entropy is the social decline or natural decay of structure (such as law, organization, and convention) in a social system.
- In cosmology, entropy is described as a hypothetical tendency of the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity. It states that the matter should be at a uniform temperature.
In any case, today the term entropy is used in many other sciences very much distant from physics or mathematics and we must say that it no longer maintains its rigorous quantitative character.
For a demonstration that overturned the great Isaac Newton’s ideas about the nature of light, it was staggeringly simple. It “may be repeated with great ease, wherever the sun shines,” the English physicist Thomas Young told the members of the Royal Society in London in November 1803, describing what is now known as a double-slit experiment, and Young wasn’t being overly melodramatic. He had come up with an elegant and decidedly homespun experiment to show light’s wavelike nature, and in doing so refuted Newton’s theory that light is made of corpuscles, or particles.
But the birth of quantum physics in the early 1900s made it clear that light is made of tiny, indivisible units, or quanta, of energy, which we call photons. Young’s experiment, when done with single photons or even single particles of matter, such as electrons and neutrons, is a conundrum to behold, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of reality. Some have even used it to argue that the quantum world is influenced by human consciousness, giving our minds an agency and a place in the ontology of the universe. But does the simple experiment really make such a case?
In the modern quantum form, Young’s experiment involves beaming individual particles of light or matter at two slits or openings cut into an otherwise opaque barrier. On the other side of the barrier is a screen that records the arrival of the particles (say, a photographic plate in the case of photons). Common sense leads us to expect that photons should go through one slit or the other and pile up behind each slit.
They don’t. Rather, they go to certain parts of the screen and avoid others, creating alternating bands of light and dark. These so-called interference fringes, the kind you get when two sets of waves overlap. When the crests of one wave line up with the crests of another, you get constructive interference (bright bands), and when the crests align with troughs you get destructive interference (darkness).
But there’s only one photon going through the apparatus at any one time. It’s as if each photon is going through both slits at once and interfering with itself. This doesn’t make classical sense.
Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there. If that were all that occurred we would still be confident that it was a real effect because it is an intrinsic part of quantum mechanics, which is extremely well tested, and is a complete and tightly woven theory--if any part of it were wrong the whole structure would collapse.
But while the virtual particles are briefly part of our world they can interact with other particles, and that leads to a number of tests of the quantum-mechanical predictions about virtual particles. The first test was understood in the late 1940s. In a hydrogen atom an electron and a proton are bound together by photons (the quanta of the electromagnetic field). Every photon will spend some time as a virtual electron plus its antiparticle, the virtual positron, since this is allowed by quantum mechanics as described above. The hydrogen atom has two energy levels that coincidentally seem to have the same energy. But when the atom is in one of those levels it interacts differently with the virtual electron and positron than when it is in the other, so their energies are shifted a tiny bit because of those interactions. That shift was measured by Willis Lamb and the Lamb shift was born, for which a Nobel Prize was eventually awarded.
Quarks are particles much like electrons, but different in that they also interact via the strong force. Two of the lighter quarks, the so-called "up" and "down" quarks, bind together to make up protons and neutrons. The "top" quark is the heaviest of the six types of quarks. In the early 1990s it had been predicted to exist but had not been directly seen in any experiment. At the LEP collider at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, millions of Z bosons--the particles that mediate neutral weak interactions--were produced and their mass was very accurately measured. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts the mass of the Z boson, but the measured value differed a little. This small difference could be explained in terms of the time the Z spent as a virtual top quark if such a top quark had a certain mass. When the top quark mass was directly measured a few years later at the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, the value agreed with that obtained from the virtual particle analysis, providing a dramatic test of our understanding of virtual particles.
a spirit or being believed to control some part of the universe or life and often worshipped for doing so, or something that represents this spirit or being
- You have to prove that there is a man in the sky riding a chariot pulled by 2 goats.
- You have to prove that this humanoid wields a magical lightning hammer.
- You have to prove that this humanoid wields a magical belt that doubles this man's strength.
- You have to prove that lightning is caused by this man.
- You have to prove that there is a giant snake that encircles the globe.
- You have to prove that there are giants that this man attacks with his hammer.
- You have to prove that the hammer has the ability to return and never miss when this man throws it.
- If you want to go further you have to prove that there is a giant cosmic tree that holds the earth on one branch, the underworlds on other branches, and the heavens on others.
- You have to prove that Odin exists.
- You have to prove that a race of godlike giants exist.
If particles at the core of our reality are able to behave in two contradictory ways at once, even be in 2 places at once and defy laws that Newton suggested for reality, it similarly links to lack of morality in our reality. Rapists and frauds can thrive while the honest victims perish and suffer, even killing themselves due to the debt. There very blatantly is something wrong with our reality if it is a monotheistic God with a moral code... What if it isn't? I say it's unlikely it is.The same God preaching about saving lives and being kind to thy neighbour is not likely to be making storms, having infants die or suffer to unbearable diseases and domestic abuse or neglect without setting things right.A single God would need to be having multiple personalities in order to justify reality...
An analogy might be if my dog ate bees after I told her not to, and now her mouth hurts. Is it true that it's her own fault for not listening to me? Yes. Is it going to hurt when I have to touch it to put medicine on it? Yes. But really, the most important thing for her to know is that I am here to help her, and she needs to trust me. She may not understand why her mouth hurts, she may not understand why I am touching it and making it hurt more, but she does understand that I am her human, I know more than her, and I love her. That's what she needs to know.
"I am going to largely ignore Pro's Round 2 because no part at all covers why there is only 1 god, instead Pro explains why there could possibly be 1 God and why Pro has particular personal issue with the complexity involved in polytheistic mechanics of gods such as Thor needing to interact with the general Greek god paradigm but I didn't say I support Spartan/Athenian depictions of Gods."
you: "I will cover what I said in Round 1 and prove that it isn't an appeal to emotion."
Trying to prove zeus or Thor or the grand majority of polytheistic gods is like trying to prove the existence of the easter bunny. They both require very specific evidence that a humanoid exists which does similar things to them.
1. This world is just preparation for heaven. Heaven is a place were no evil, death, or suffering exists. There is free will in heaven, but the reason sin can't happen over there is the same reason you no longer put everything in your mouth like when you were a baby - you know better than to do so.
2. The famous Augustinian prophecy aka the free will theodicy which states that God chose to give people free will, and people freely chose to do evil; the evil that we suffer is a consequence of that.
3.The Irenaean theodicy holds that the evil that we suffer happens to make us better people afterwards.
* This argument can be compared to taking a vaccine, it hurts will you take it, but afterwards you get immunized to a specific pathogen.
4. The theodicy in the book of Job which states that humans are too limited in intelligence, wisdom, and perception to truly know the whole array of reasons why God does anything.
I think that starting in Round 1 Con took a large advantage just because of how little Pro actually included in their first round. Pro proposed three different arguments but only really explained the first one in any detail to give the argument some weight, thus making it so that Con was easily able to respond to these arguments in his first round. Con effectively makes an argument against the application of Occam's Razor and shows that Pro's 2nd argument makes a leap from 'could' to 'is'. I think that Con's argument against Pro's paradox is also effective, though its main effectiveness comes in creating a semantic difference between the monotheist 'God' and polytheist 'gods' which is useful for a later argument.
Because Pro did not go into enough detail on the arguments in Round 1 it allowed Con to not only be able to mount an effective Round 1 rebuttal, but also to pose an issue for monotheism in the Problem of Evil. This set the pacing for the entire rest of the debate and made it so that Pro, instead of Con, had an uphill battle in the remaining rounds.
In Round 2 Pro accepts the definition of 'god' used by Con in Round 1, but then proceeds to equivocate the two (using a god from mythology that Con never mentioned) in an ontological argument to try and show polytheism is illogical. Pro uses the rest of the 2nd round to Gish Gallop a response to the Problem of Evil while calling the usage of this argument an appeal to emotions. This really made Pro fall even further behind, and Con took advantage of that. Con rightly points out that the entire first half of Pro's Round 2 does not address Con's arguments and then proceeds to show that the criticism of the Problem of Evil as an appeal to emotion does not work. While Con does not dismantle the various theodicies, considering they were brought up in a Gish Gallop this does not seem to be a mark against him.
Pro's attempt to move ahead in the 2nd round just did not succeed. The only saving grace Pro had at this time was that Con did not make an extensive Round 2, thus Pro should still have some ability to pull ahead if they do everything perfectly in Round 3. Sadly, this last opportunity was not capitalized on. I think that Con could have easily finished this by arguing that by the definition of 'god' that Pro had just accepted in the beginning of Round 2 that Pro had conceded the debate by saying that "Even more evil proves that Satan exists" (as Satan seems to fit the definition). Con, however, did not capitalize on this opportunity.
Pro's Round 3 really did not expand on anything, and, considering Con was in the lead so far, this pretty much sealed the debate. Con does respond to the theodicies to an extent in this round, as Pro did bring them up again, but by this time none of Pro's arguments for monotheism were really left standing. By the 3rd round it seemed to have shifted to debating whether Con's argument against monotheism worked and Pro did not manage to make a convincing case.
This ends with Con winning the points for arguments.
Obvious setup flaw in not forcing con to assume a religious stance. This debate needed a scope limiter (such as "Assuming any deity exists outside of mythology, there is most likely only one.")
I found pro's opening to be an enjoyable read, but he's against a good debater, so it was of course going to be immediately and effectively Kritiked by the suggestion that no god is necessary and thus no god is more likely. Con then goes on to leverage the problem of suffering to dispute that if there is a god, it is more likely multiple to explain the sad state of the world.
From there pro gets lost in the weeds, talking about types of gods and Thor specifically (I agree with con's defense that he didn't argue Thor). ... And ending the round with this: "Even more evil proves that Satan exists." I literally facepalmed. Conceding a god named Satan exists, while also arguing a god named God exists, suggests a henotheist rather than monotheist world. Even not caught by con, this is a huge blunder.
Con basically repeats some of his points.
Pro accused con of ad hominems. He does show why he made the point, but it doesn't really challenge con's logic which did not rely upon Thor or the Easter Bunny.
As for the 4 theodicies, this is Gish Gallop terretory, and pro is lagging too far behind already.
Sources:
Largely awarding this due to con openly challenging a source. He otherwise came in ahead with a variety of good sources such as Scientific America, to support polytheism as more likely if any gods exist; but really, what got me to pay attention to sources was engaging with the opponents source as not properly tied into the debate.
My only error, in my eyes is I said greek paradigm when it was Norse.
Something interesting is that desert climates lead to monotheism while more cryptic climates with a lot of nature and caves etc, lead to polytheism.
I do think it was too much of an uphill battle that it was extremely unlikely that it could be turned around, but I don't discount the possibility of turning it around. There was just too much wasted potential in the first 2 rounds though.
I do not agree that Pro could win in round 3 but thanks for the vote, it was a solidly reasoned vote.
Thank you for your vote.
The devil actually always struck me as odd even as a child. There is something about the devil that implies either God has an alter ego or there is a being literally able to defy God, neither made proper sense to me but I assert that Satan is not Lucifer and instead is an alter ego of God if the Bible is true.
That website you love has made an expansion for bias types, such as:
https://yourbias.is/just-world-hypothesis
there's only 3 days left to vote.
I'll try to look at this in the next couple days.
In Hinduism, Shri Krishna showed Arjuna his Celestial appearance (Vishwa-swaroopa) and proved that he was God. Lord Rama had legendary powers, but chose not to use them. He defeated evil as a mortal and not as a God. They both showed that the real power comes from within and belief in the Para-Brahman.
Lord Shiva is the most powerful God in Hinduism, not because he has the third eye. It is because he IS Para-Brahman. He is infinite. He controls the flow of time. He is master of death. He is the very breath that we take and give out. He is the cosmic destroyer.
“Ananta koti Brahmandanayaka “ Literally means ‘O Lord of infinite crore Universes.’ Someone who is existent yet non-existant and who is capable of taking out an infinite number of universes by just opening his third eye is kind of hard to beat, don't you think?
I will get around to voting within the next few days, a little busy today and tomorrow so don't expect it immediately.
you can now vote.
Feel free to vote on this. Thanks in advance.
very well kid, Ill do it if I can.
have your own debate with him and make it a masterpiece then
Have to say, this could have been an interesting debate but it is just so disappointing...
If you want to do this debate a second time then I would be game. Just let me know when you would like to give it a shot.