Feel free to continue arguing until the cows come home. I find it pointless and a barrier to any relationship that would lead to trust that is required to have hard, meaningful, valuable discussions.
Carry on. You seem fully invested.
I am fully invested in it. I try not to argue with people who don’t want to argue. I think you are right though, it can be a big barrier to meaningful relationships as being right is overrated. However, this Biologos forum seems like a place for discussion as well as a place to challenge one another in thought. Naturally, if you are going to challenge someone else’s thoughts, there will be conflict. It is not my intention to simply argue with insults towards other people. I personally find it quite interesting hearing the thoughts of other people who disagree with me. Perhaps I have the wrong idea though, if this is not the place for that, I will switch to reddit. 
The FAQ may answer some of your questions.
Thank you, I will try to follow those rules better.
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I’d prefer: “In modern philosophical terminology, metaphysics refers to the studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality.”
Doesn’t that still imply that those things are beyond the physical?
Just beyond the ability of an empirical determination but God isn’t the only item in that basket.
“Just math” how do you get that? So you believe God because of logic/math? It isn’t God you are exploring.
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I would agree with that.
So it could be physical then, just not empirically verifiable?
It could certainly be continuous with the physical and I think it is.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. Definitely interesting to think about. Would you say it is similar to higher dimensions having different properties yet still having the common trait of dimensionality?
Nope, infinitely simple.
Dimensions to get infinitely simpler though right? or more free/less limited at least?
The problem is thinking you can pin God down with words - or math. All our representations of reality create a hall of mirrors in which we stop seeing what is there and only see our feeble attempts to describe it. God will be what God will be and it isn’t for us to take his measure.
This is a good objection but I personally don’t see this as a problem for how I put the argument. Life is a real thing. We just want more of it. We desire to live because life is real.
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I don’t think we resist death anymore than we pursue life. Maintaining equilibrium is what life does with or without our thoughts about it. Staying on the life side of things forever would mean an end to life, not the conquest of death.
The larger question is how would you test that proposition? How could we determine if it is true or not?
From what I can see, it is not testable. If there is a desire that has no evidenced way of being satisfied you seem to be saying that this must indicate there is some unevidenced way of satisfying the desire, thus saving the claim.
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Peter Kreeft phrases it this way:
Premise 1: Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
Premise 2: But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
Conclusion: Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
The first premise implies a distinction of desires into two kinds: innate and externally conditioned, or natural and artificial. We naturally desire things like food, drink, sex, sleep, knowledge, friendship and beauty; and we naturally shun things like starvation, loneliness, ignorance and ugliness. We also desire (but not innately or naturally) things like sports cars, political office, flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world championship.
There is no word like “Ozlessness” parallel to “sleeplessness.” But more importantly, the natural desires come from within, from our nature, while the artificial ones come from without, from society, advertising or fiction. This second difference is the reason for a third difference: the natural desires are found in all of us, but the artificial ones vary from person to person.
Then I think this was the point I was getting at in arguing for the premise based on observation:
We can and do come to a knowledge of universal truths, like “all humans are mortal,” not by sense experience alone (for we can never sense all humans) but through abstracting the common universal essence or nature of humanity from the few specimens we do experience by our senses. We know that all humans are mortal because humanity, as such, involves mortality, it is the nature of a human being to be mortal; mortality follows necessarily from its having an animal body. We can understand that. We have the power of understanding, or intellectual intuition, or insight, in addition to the mental powers of sensation and calculation, which are the only two the nominalist and empiricist give us. (We share sensation with animals and calculation with computers; where is the distinctively human way of knowing for the empiricist and nominalist?)
I think this is where T’s comment went wrong: “Not atheism of the gaps. It’s a matter of burden of proof. If the premise states that humans can’t be born with desires that can not be met, then there needs to be proof for that assertion. Pointing to some cases where this is true is not proof that it is true in all cases. The other problem is the lack of falsifiability.”
I think I can make the unfalsifiable statement all humans are mortal quite comfortably. I think I can also make the statement that all our other innate desires correspond to actual things since in case after case they do. This is observationally true. Sure, you can claim the next desire we examine might not follow the rule but maybe gravity will behave differently tomorrow too. It is not going to even if neither of us can prove that.
This a decent argument and conversation starter. For an atheist to claim only the deeper religious desire is the innate one not corresponding to external reality seems to be the same type of fuzzy thinking (special pleading?) YECs apply to science and that is why I view it as “atheism of the gaps.” When every other innate desire corresponds to something real, in case after case, I think that is sufficient reason to expect this last one to as well. That is how experience generally works for us.
Ask the atheists why humans are so prone to religion then. It seems the atheist needs to believe all our innate desires correspond to something actual except our deep religious ones. I’m not buying that bridge…
I didn’t sense any unnecessary weight. He asked what we thought and defended the position with a few responses. I do sense a common theme of you coming in to defend T in thread after thread here.
Vinnie
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We assess each desire and see if there is any evidence that each can be satisfied. Atheists don’t see evidence for deities, so we tend to think that desire will not be satisfied. We also see no reason why human desires must map to something objective in nature. There’s no physical law requiring such a relationship.
You sat down and actually wondered if food was real, if sex was real? Did it take a grocery store visit to finally convince you of the former? I won’t inquire as to how you figured out the latter.
I think the theist is presenting this as evidence but since atheists think deities do not exist they do not accept this evidence as valid. In assessing the situation, I tend to think it is not the theist “begging the question” here.
Do you think we have a whole bunch of other innate desires that don’t correspond to anything real?
There is no logical reason or proof why the laws of physics must continue operating tomorrow as they did today. Do you think they will or do atheists not dare to hold such unproven beliefs? Do you require physical law to believe everything? Is there a logical reason or even a physical law you can appeal to that shows that physical law necessarily won’t change tomorrow? Or do you just accept the uniformitarian pattern and assume earth will keep spinning as it should? I’m not sure this standard of evidence would be consistently applied to life by anyone.
I think the laws of physics will operate as normal tomorrow just because they have consistently done so as far back as we can tell. What other reason do I have? Just as I think our religious desire corresponds to something actual because all our other innate desires do as far as we can tell. If all our other innate desires correspond to real things, why are atheists not connecting the last dot? I’m sure in life that many other dots (much further apart) are connected regularly by atheists.
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Newtonian gravity accurately predicted the path of all planets except for Mercury. Do we just ignore the exception and proclaim that Newtonian gravity is completely correct anyway?
All of them? What if someone desires that there not be gods? What if someone desires that the Koran be the actual words of Allah? What if someone desires that fairies are real? It is entirely possible for people to desire things that are mutually exclusive, as another example.
I can look out my window and see two red cars. This must then mean all cars are red. If you claim to see a car that isn’t red you have to be mistaken since they all have to be red because some cars are red. Does that make sense?
Because there is no evidence connecting them.