Can anyone respond to this claim of "logical contradiction"?

[Anoushirvan]

Salam,

That's a debate old like the world: is God immanent (inside or through time and/or space) or transcendent (outside time and/or space) ? Is there free-will or determinism (or fatalism) ?

Personally, I like the answer from Sufism (at least Rumi, Attar, Hallaj...) in which every self is part of God, the ultimate Self, like a sea is made of many drops and beyond.

There is a poem of Hallaj, saying more or less that when people raise their head towards the sky, asking if God exists or not, God is among them asking Himself the same question.

According to those Sufis, the quest of God is actually the quest of God Himself, searching for Himself.

So in the end, does God exist in time or outside time ? Well, according to Sufism, our self as a drop of the divine sea lives in time, and as a whole it leaves outside.

Can God be All-Knowing without jeopardizing free-will ? Well, according to Sufism, free-will is from the perspective of our own being while from the perspective of God, there is no free-will. The image that Rumi gives in the Mathnavi is that of a baker who wants people to be hungry so that they buy him bread, but doesn't approve hunger because none would buy bread.

So the contradiction appears when we try to appropriate for ourselves the perspective that would only be pertaining to God, and this is what Rumi calls "shirk", association to God.
In fact, Rum shows that whether we accept free-will or not, it will not change the end result of the events flow, so we'd better accept free-will because this is what we usually aspire to.

[Abdun Nur]

Anoushirvan,

You're using circular reasoning, in your premise you assume a god exists, that is refuted, what exists is simply a single consciousness, logically, nothing else could exist, this logic is sound, it requires no other proof than we all possess consciousness, we are share the same perceptual experience in this particular perceptual reality, therefore we are of a single consciousness, physics proves this further through quantum nature, which is at the fundamental level simply the expression of consciousness.

[Anoushirvan]

Abdun Nur,

No, it's not more circular reasoning than what the guy in the link is doing.
He starts from the assumption that God exists, and by reasoning on time and free-will, concludes to logical fallacies.
QED.

I'm just just dismissing his reasoning by arguing that somehow it is tied to his own vision of God, and with another vision, like the one of the Sufis I mentioned, he wouldn't be able to conclude to logical fallacies, at least not so easily.

My reasoning doesn't demonstrate that God does exist or does not exist. In fact, I find non concluding any reasoning about existence or non-existence of God that is solely based on the physical properties of spacetime and universe.

[Abdun Nur]

Reason says evidence is required to hold a belief, even evidence indicating it may be so, however anecdotal, but for the existence of a god there is no evidence, even anecdotal, not even indicating a possibility. There is however evidence to support the idea of a single consciousness, and there is logic to support that conclusion, there is no logic to support a god entity concept. This is how reason functions, it takes what has evidence and then determines if a reasoned conclusion can be drawn from that evidence, there may be other conclusions the evidence would allow in some instances, but to accept anything it should be from evidence, and logic.

Religions function by creating blind faith, this requires the victim to have no discernible ability to reason, as blind faith is belief without any evidence or logic.

I piss people off who cannot reason all the time, and i can live with that, my intention is not to piss people off however, but to attempt to help them. Those who attempt to draw others into their own fantasy world of demons, angels, devils and other such silliness piss me off sometimes, and i can, through that negative feeling, insult them indirectly, which i should not do as it's against logic, it's a challenge.