On the existence of God (by request)
From the Belief in nothing? thread:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting 3017amen
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
I decided that this is actually an interesting topic and I'd like to do a post on it, so since 3017amen hasn't made a new thread yet, I'm making this one.
I'll start off with a bit of structure and then some pre-written thoughts of mine on the subject and then I guess let 3017amen or others reply.
So, first we need to know what we mean by "god".
The biggest split is between non-cognitivist and cognitivist meanings. I'll do the non-cognitivists first.
Within the cognitivist meanings, there are transcendent meanings (God as a thing beyond the universe), immanent or pantheistic meanings (God as the universe itself), and incarnate meanings (God as a thing inside the universe). I'll do those in that order.
TL;DR spoilers:
- Non-cognitivist "God": doesn't count as God, but definitely exists.
- Transcendent "God": could count as God, but can't possibly exist.
- Pantheistic "God": doesn't count as God, but definitely exists.
- Incarnate "God": might count as God, could exist, but evidently doesn't.
On a non-cognitivist "God":
TL;DR: there is a real feeling that corresponds to the non-cognitivist meaning of "God", and it is the greatest and most important thing in life, and doing the things that bring about that feeling is kinda like to "become [one with] God", but the occurrence of that feeling really isn't good ground to say "God exists", and doing so just causes unnecessary confusion with people who don't already do that, even people who are intimately familiar with that feeling.
On a transcendent "God", I say that such a thing is not possible, because transcendent things in general are not possible:
And the reason to reject appeals to faith are:
On an immanent, pantheistic "God", I don't have any handy quotes, but I used to be a pantheist myself, until I realized that my actual views didn't differ at all from those of atheists, and just calling the universe "God" didn't really mean anything, if you're not claiming that the universe is a person. A God that isn't a person isn't really a God in the usual sense described by any holy texts, just some kind of abstract metaphysical machinery of one's philosophical framework.
On an incarnate "God":
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm an atheist and I positively affirm that I believe there are no gods, and am happy to defend that.
Quoting 3017amen
Hi Forest!
Just curious, how would you defend your belief system? For instance, which domain would you draw from ( logic/deductive or inductive reasoning, cosmology, phenomenology/consciousness, metaphysics, existentialism, cognitive science/psychology).
I would be happy to debate the EOG based upon all of the above disciplines, if you want to start a thread. Up to you. I'm just wondering how an Atheist thinks, since I'm obviously not one.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don’t feel a need to start a thread of my own just to defend my own view, but I’m happy to explain myself if you want to start one to question it. I gave a brief summary of my view and some brief reasons for it at the end of the post you replied to, if you’d like to quote that in the OP of a new thread or something. I’ll quote it here again for ease of reference:
Quoting Pfhorrest
To cut a lot philosophical arguments short, my current position is that while it is possible that (a) very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very good being(s) could exist somewhere in the universe (but only in the universe, because physicalism; including in some layer of reality outside of what we falsely think is the universe if we are in something like a simulation, for instance), what you're talking about there now is basically an alien, and there is evidently (because Problem of Evil) no such being sufficiently powerful, knowledgeable, and good to fulfill the role of "God" here on Earth. So sure, I'm (weakly) agnostic about the generic existence of nice, smart super-aliens somewhere, but there is definitely no God in the usual sense around these parts.
I decided that this is actually an interesting topic and I'd like to do a post on it, so since 3017amen hasn't made a new thread yet, I'm making this one.
I'll start off with a bit of structure and then some pre-written thoughts of mine on the subject and then I guess let 3017amen or others reply.
So, first we need to know what we mean by "god".
The biggest split is between non-cognitivist and cognitivist meanings. I'll do the non-cognitivists first.
Within the cognitivist meanings, there are transcendent meanings (God as a thing beyond the universe), immanent or pantheistic meanings (God as the universe itself), and incarnate meanings (God as a thing inside the universe). I'll do those in that order.
TL;DR spoilers:
- Non-cognitivist "God": doesn't count as God, but definitely exists.
- Transcendent "God": could count as God, but can't possibly exist.
- Pantheistic "God": doesn't count as God, but definitely exists.
- Incarnate "God": might count as God, could exist, but evidently doesn't.
On a non-cognitivist "God":
Throughout my life, I had experienced now and then times of intense positive emotion, feelings of inspiration, of enlightenment and empowerment, understanding and acceptance, awe, of a kind of oneness and connection to the universe, where it seemed to me that the whole world was eminently reasonable, that it was all so perfectly understandable even with its yet-unanswered questions and it was all beautiful and acceptable even with its many flaws. I greatly enjoyed these states of mind, and I did find that they were also practically useful both in motivating me to get things done, even just mundane chores and tasks, and also in filling me with creative thoughts, novel ideas and new solutions to problems. But although I eventually learned that these were the kinds of mental states often called "mystical" or "religious" experiences, I never took them to be in any way magical or mysterious. I saw them as just a kind of emotional high, with both experiential and behavioral benefits. Friends who had experience with drugs like LSD would even describe my recounting of such experiences as sounding like a "really good trip", further enforcing my view that these were just biochemical states of my brain (even while some of those friends conversely took their own LSD trips and such to be of genuinely mystical significance). While in such states, some things would sometimes seem "meaningful", in the sense of "important", even when I could see no rational reason why, and I always just dismissed this as a pleasantly bizarre mental artifact of the emotional high I was on.
[...]
I have since dubbed [...] that experience of cosmic oneness, understanding, and acceptance, "ontophilia", Greek for the love of being [...] ontophilia generates a feeling of inherent meaningfulness. Meaning, in this sense, is like love: to ask whether "love is real" in any sense deeper than "do people feel love" is a malformed question, because there is nothing more to love that could be real or not than the feeling of it; love is just the feeling of loving or being loved. Likewise, to ask whether there is "really meaning" in any sense deeper than "do things feel meaningful to people" is also a malformed question, because there is nothing more to meaning that could be real or not than the feeling of meaningfulness, ontophilia, or meaninglessness, ontophobia. Neither feeling is rationally correct or incorrect about any actual philosophical question about meaningfulness, but ontophilia is clearly the better state of mind, both for its intrinsic experiential enjoyability, but also for the practical benefits it confers of enlightening the mind and empowering the will
[...]
I am of the opinion that ontophilia is the proper referent of the term "God" as used by theological noncognitivists, who are people that use religious terminology not for describing reality per se, but more for its emotional affect. Most theological noncognitivists do not identify as such and are not aware of this philosophical technicality in their use of language, but it it evident in expressions such as "God is love", whereby "believing in God" does not seem to mean so much a claim about the ontological existence of a particular being, but an expression of good will toward the world and of an expectation that the world generally reciprocates such goodness. It seems also plausibly equatable to the Buddhist concept of "nirvana", or the ancient Greek concept of "eudaimonia", which were the "meanings of life" of those respective traditions.
[...]
That is "the meaning of life", in the conventional sense of the question; that's what life is good for, what to live for: the enjoyment of it. Interestingly, as the ontophilic mood described above brings with it both an immensely greater enjoyment and alleviated suffering, and also, more practically, increases the power of the mind and the will and consequently aids the pursuit of both knowledge and justice, it could reasonably be said that pursuing, achieving, maintaining, and spreading that "meaning of life" feeling, ontophilia, is itself the practical meaning of life.
[...]
...the way to cultivate ontophilia is to practice the very same behaviors that it in turn inspires more of. Doing good things, either for others or just for oneself, and learning or teaching new truths, both seem to generate feelings of empowerment and enlightenment, respectively, and as those ramp up in a positive feedback loop, inspiring further such practices, an ontophilic state of mind can be cultivated. In this sense, it could be poetically said that the meaning of life is to love and be loved, to learn and to teach. Learning truths about the universe, and being the recipient of its goods, shows one how everything in the universe matters, how they fit together into the big picture; and doing goods for the rest of the universe, as well as being a font of truths, makes one matter to the rest of the universe. Learning many great truths and doing many great goods places one in a crucial position in the overall function of the universe, being influenced by as much of the universe as possible through one's experience, filtering true beliefs and good intentions out of it, and then influencing as much of the universe as possible through one's resultant behavior. Approaching such a position is also, on my account, approaching what it would mean to be a god — roughly all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful...
TL;DR: there is a real feeling that corresponds to the non-cognitivist meaning of "God", and it is the greatest and most important thing in life, and doing the things that bring about that feeling is kinda like to "become [one with] God", but the occurrence of that feeling really isn't good ground to say "God exists", and doing so just causes unnecessary confusion with people who don't already do that, even people who are intimately familiar with that feeling.
On a transcendent "God", I say that such a thing is not possible, because transcendent things in general are not possible:
The most archetypical kind of transcendentalist opinion is belief in the supernatural. "Natural" in the relevant sense here is roughly equivalent to "empirical": the natural world is the world that we can observe with our senses, directly or indirectly. That "indirectly" part is important for establishing the transcendence of the supernatural. We cannot, for example, see wind directly, but we can see that leaves move in response to the wind, and so find reason to suppose that wind exists, to cause that effect. Much about the natural world posited by modern science has been discovered through increasingly sophisticated indirect observation of that sort. We cannot directly see, or hear, or touch, or otherwise observe, many subtle facets of the world that are posited by science today, but we can see the effects they have on other things that we can directly observe, including special instruments built for that purpose, and so we can indirectly observe those things.
Anything that has any effect on the observable world is consequently indirectly observable through that very effect, and is therefore itself to be reckoned as much a part of the natural world as anything else that we can indirectly observe. For something to be truly supernatural, then, it would have to have no observable effect at all on any observable thing. Consequently, we would have no way to tell whether that supernatural thing actually existed, as the world that we experience would seem exactly the same one way or the other, so there could be no reason to suppose its existence, no test that could be done to suggest any answer to the question of its existence. And so if we held a belief in it anyway, we would have to do so only on faith; and if we reject appeals to faith, we consequently have to reject claims of the supernatural.
And the reason to reject appeals to faith are:
If we pick our initial opinions arbitrarily — which, as I have said, I think is fine, and as I elaborate elsewhere in these essays, even unavoidable — we then have a very high chance of those initial opinions just happening to be wrong. If we go on to hold those arbitrary opinions (that we just happened into for no solid reason) to be above question, which is the defining characteristic of fideism as I mean it here, then we will never change away from those wrong opinions, and will remain wrong forever. Only by rejecting fideism, and remaining always open to the possibility that there may be reasons to reject our current opinions, do we open up the possibility of our opinions becoming more correct over time. So if we ever want to have more than an arbitrary chance of our opinions being right, we must always acknowledge that there is a chance that our opinions are wrong.
On an immanent, pantheistic "God", I don't have any handy quotes, but I used to be a pantheist myself, until I realized that my actual views didn't differ at all from those of atheists, and just calling the universe "God" didn't really mean anything, if you're not claiming that the universe is a person. A God that isn't a person isn't really a God in the usual sense described by any holy texts, just some kind of abstract metaphysical machinery of one's philosophical framework.
On an incarnate "God":
The usual cornerstone of western religious belief, and the source of the hope that it brings, is belief in a god that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, who therefore could and would right all wrongs and make everything okay; a very comforting idea that I sincerely wish was true. (I would slightly reinterpret these criteria, in the framework of my preceding philosophy, as such a god having: total awareness, or perfectly accurate experience of the universe, which "all-knowing" approximates; perfect processing of those experiences into true beliefs and good intentions to drive its subsequent behaviors, which "all-good" approximates; and total control, or perfectly effective behavior upon the universe, which "all-powerful" approximates). As my position against transcendentalism rules out the possibility of a truly supernatural god, the closest thing to that traditional idea that could possibly exist would have to be a natural being in the universe, not something beyond it, which I expect most would say would not truly count as a god: that would be, in effect, an alien. And a being in the universe could not be all-knowing or all-powerful about that universe, but they could in principle be all-good, and they could be very knowledgeable and very powerful, enough for that to still be something to hope for. There does not at present appear to be any evidence of alien life at all (though it seems statistically probable that there is some of it somewhere), much less alien life that has interacted with our world, but the existence of a very knowledgeable, very powerful, all-good alien being is strictly a possibility one could hope for. It is even strictly possible that what we think of as the universe is something like a simulation set within a larger universe, and that such an alien being resides out there in the larger universe, and is in fact all-knowing and all-powerful over the smaller part of it that we presently think is the whole thing. Such a being could even have created that smaller part that we think is the whole universe. That would be the closest thing to the traditional conception of a god that would actually be possible, and though I don't believe there really is such a being, because there is no evidence I have seen to suggest such a thing, I don't deny that it is technically possible.
But I cannot find hope in that possibility, because such a powerful and knowledgeable being must not be all good, or else an all-good alien being must not be sufficiently knowledgeable or powerful even if it is very knowledgeable and powerful, because if there were a sufficiently knowledgeable, sufficiently powerful, and sufficiently good being, there would be no excuse for the continued presence of bad things in the world, for it would have fixed them already. If it does not know that they need fixing, that would explain why they continue to occur; likewise if it is not able to fix them, or simply is not inclined to do so. This is a very old philosophical issue called the "Problem of Evil": the existence of "evil" (taken to mean bad things generally) in the world implies that anything like a god that exists must be ignorant, impotent, or apathetic (at best, malicious at worst), because if it were not then the "evil" would have been eradicated. Various excuses, called theodicies, have been offered for why an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being could allow "evil" to exist anyway. The most popular of them is called the free will theodicy, which argues that a god could not guarantee the elimination of all evil without eliminating free will, which would itself be evil, making it logically impossible for such a god to do any better than what we have now. But I think that that argument fails on technical grounds because it rests on an incompatibilist conception of what free will is, which I have already argued against in my essay on the will. On my conception of will, freedom of the will consists in your moral judgement being causally effective on your actions, so that when you judge that something is the right course of action, that causes you to do that, in contrast with cases where something else causes you to do something that you judge is not the best thing for you to do. On that conception of free will, if a god had created people with greater free will, that would have made them behave more morally, so there is no contradiction between creating people who would always behave morally and also have free will, making the existence of free will no excuse for the existence of "evil".
Comments (459)
"If we pick our initial opinions arbitrarily — which, as I have said, I think is fine, and as I elaborate elsewhere in these essays, even unavoidable — we then have a very high chance of those initial opinions just happening to be wrong. If we go on to hold those arbitrary opinions (that we just happened into for no solid reason) to be above question, which is the defining characteristic of fideism as I mean it here, then we will never change away from those wrong opinions, and will remain wrong forever. Only by rejecting fideism, and remaining always open to the possibility that there may be reasons to reject our current opinions, do we open up the possibility of our opinions becoming more correct over time. So if we ever want to have more than an arbitrary chance of our opinions being right, we must always acknowledge that there is a chance that our opinions are wrong."
I was just wondering how appeals to faith can be rejected, based on the grounds that you suggest, in the case of a trascendental god. Any opinion regarding the existence of a trascendental god is truly beyond question/reason. Ofcourse, I am not talking about the biblical god. We do have some reason to reject its existence (the problem of evil). However, any opinion you hold regarding the existence of a trascendental entity is simply a matter of faith or the lack of it.
I think that any belief, that you intend to propagate or make universal and not merely use as a coping mechanism, should be based on reasons other than pragmatic ones. So, you can choose to believe that god exists because it explains a lot of the world for you. However, you cannot hope to establish god's existence based on those grounds (faith + pragmatic reason) unless there is some other valid reason.
If you cannot know anything about it, you cannot talk about it let alone establish it's existence.
I agree with everything else in the OP especially the bit about free will.
People's reasons for believing are ultimately their own business and their own responsibility. What you do with your beliefs is the measure of their merit. So if belief in a god makes someone a better person and benefits others, who is to argue with that?
Thanks Forrest!
It will take me some time to digest all of this. In the meantime, there are some good contributions already. I will probably approach it bit by bit, one concept at a time...then respond accordingly.
Good stuff!
Okay, I think you misunderstood me there.
Quoting StarsFromMemory
I do hold that everyone can choose their own belief system and we are no one to question that.
My post was not directed at belittling people who have faith in god. Rather, I was trying to argue for why faith has no place in a philosophical discussion of a trascendental god because I felt that Pfhorrest's argument was a inadequate in the case of said discussion.
I think that faith can be used to justify a belief in god but not the existence of god. If faith and thus a belief in god makes someone a better person, that belief is entirely justified. What is not justified is saying on that basis that god exists.
I say so simply because faith is a matter of interpretation and personal experience. If someone is brought up in tough conditions, it is likely he will lack faith. Interpretation of religious text and indoctrination by society also determine the severity of faith. Hence, it has no place in a philosophical discussion because it can establish nothing objective.
There is an obvious gap between the spiritual and the material. Purely transcendental beliefs (if there are such) are basically meaningless. It is only when a transcendental belief is translated into the practical sphere that such beliefs gain meaning. And the usual way this is done is through normative prescriptions.
I would agree. However, if practicality and not reason is the primary motivation for a belief, then such a belief cannot be justified as true. If someone believes in god because it makes him a better man, then the act of believing is justified, however the belief (that god exists) itself does not become true. In other words, reason alone is not the criteria for justifying the act of believing in something, however it is the only criteria for determing the truth of that belief.
"Truth" is not necessarily applicable to all types of belief. Normative beliefs don't need to be true, they just need to be effective.
Hi Forrest,
Okay, first if we could get some of the definitions out of the way, that would be nice. And as such, are we saying that the classic apologetic Trilemma still applies?
As a Christian Existentialist, I deny such attributes of God from classic theology (Anselm/Aquinas) and instead hold the Epicurean denial of same. Please note it doesn't mean I throw the baby out with the bathwater either. The efficacy and importance of their body of work of course is significant in its own right. And so I draw from those influences that more closely align with my existential view of God.
If you mean the same thing I think you mean (Lewis's trilemma of "lord, liar, or lunatic"), I'm not making any claims here about Jesus in particular, so I'm not sure how that applies. Are you maybe talking about the three "omni"-attributes usually attributed to God instead? (Omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence). Your mention of Epicurean denial sounds like maybe you do. So you're saying the kind of "God" you mean doesn't have to have those attributes? So what are the things that define your concept of "God"? Ignoring those omni-attributes, does your concept of "God" fit into the structure of different senses of the word that I laid out at the start? (Non-cognitivist, transcendent, immanent, incarnate).
Yes, that is exactly what I meant when I said:
Quoting StarsFromMemory
This distinction concerns epistemic warrant, that is, whether warrant is possible (re: cognitive) or doesn't obtain at all (re: non-cognitive). Instead, I prefer (the broadest) theological categories: theistic and non-theistic.
By theistic I understand a conception of divinity attributed the following predicates: (1) ultimate mystery, (2) that created existence and (3) intervenes - causes changes - in the universe. (Btw, concepts such as deism, pan-theism & pan-en-theism I understand as special cases or variations on 'theism'.)
By non-theistic I understand a conception of divinity attributed predicates other than, and excluding, theistic predicates (mentioned above), such as those expressed via e.g. animism, pandeism, gnosticism, acosmism ...
And though the latter tends to be either insufficiently evident (ágnôsis) or inherently undecidable (epoché), I think both theistic and non-theistic categories can be treated either cognitively or non-cognitively. So-called "god debates", however, only obtain where theological cognitivity (i.e. a 'concept of divinity' consisting of propositional statements) is assumed.
When the question is: What is the true nature of the REALITY of existence? (of which "Is there at least one god?" is just a part)...the word "believe" is, understandable, used as a substitute for "blind guess."
We humans have trouble understanding what time, space, time/space means...so the full "true nature of the REALITY of existence" is so far beyond our scope of understanding, the very best we can do is to make blind guesses about it. (Yeah, we can think of our blind guesses as hypotheses, but...)
We blindly guess that what we supposedly "know" about REALITY actually is knowledge rather than a transient hypothesis that will one day be shown as suspect...and we blindly guess that our supposed "knowledge" leads to logical conclusions.
A "belief" in the context of the discussion happening here in this thread, folks...is nothing more than a blind guess in disguise. Given that...what difference does it really make about what we mean when we use "god?"
To believe something is just to think it’s true, nothing more. You could believe for no good reason (a “blind guess”), or you could believe for reasons. My entire OP is a list of reasons why I believe various things that I do. You can contest the cogency of those reasons, but to label the conclusions “blind guesses” without addressing those reasons at all is just to object to the very having of this conversation, in which case... there’s the metaphorical door.
Belief is much more than that, belief changes how you see the world, how you feel, how you act and react, it is more than a thought. It would rather be behaving and being as if something is true.
Regarding the existence of God: is it laws that cause change, or will? Do laws enforce themselves, or does will enforce laws?
Regarding the problem of Evil: is it right to assume that God is necessarily all-powerful? We might have two competing gods, a Good God and an Evil God, who are extremely powerful but not all-powerful. A loving God who is the ultimate source of love and joy and hope and everything that is good and who can transcend the laws of physics (miracles) still counts as God to me.
What is it to think something is true than to be of a state of mind such that you are inclined to act like it is true?
Quoting leo
This question isn’t clear, but on my account will is a process as lawlike as any other, which is to say not completely but substantially enough. And laws of nature are not “enforced” by anything, then aren’t normative laws like those humans pass to govern each other, they are just patterns in the structure of possible ways the universe could be.
Quoting leo
Transcending the laws of physics is not possible because if they could be transcended they would not have been actual laws to begin with. We routinely transcend all kinds of things once thought to be laws of nature; that just shows that we were wrong about what the laws were before.
But as for the problem of evil, if you want to count as God something that doesn’t meet all the regular criteria that’s fine, just a matter of semantics, but still you’re basically talking about a really powerful all-good alien who’s just not powerful enough to overcome the influence of an equally powerful evil alien, neither of whose existence we have an evidence of. That’s kinda crazy sounding and though on my account you’re free to believe it yourself if that really seems the most plausible interpretation of your experience of the world to you, you’re going to need some big evidence to back up any assertions to anyone else that that’s more likely than other, less outlandish accounts.
Quoting Pfhorrest
What I actually wrote was:
"When the question is: What is the true nature of the REALITY of existence? (of which "Is there at least one god?" is just a part)...the word "believe" is, understandable, used as a substitute for 'blind guess.'"
I stand by that completely .
If you disagree...I acknowledge that you have every right to be incorrect on this issue.
I like this characterization a lot. This sounds like a philosophy of "enaction," which I very much espouse.
Quoting Frank Apisa
I did not misquote you.
You left out the complete of what I said...and thereby changed what I actually said.
Allow me to give you a taste of it:
You wrote: "I did misquote you."
See how that works?
I wonder how logical laws - the law of the excluded middle, the law of identity, and so on - fit into this template? I mean, such laws are not physically determined; they inhere solely in the relations between ideas. They are subject to logical, not physical, necessity.
The standard physicalist presumptions simply assume that the 'laws of physics' are determinative with respect to everything that exists - that after all is the underlying 'mythos' of physicalism. This presumably includes language, logic, and everything else, which are said to supervene on the physical.
But biosemiotics philosopher Howard Pattee observes that 'All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in
DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the
brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the
mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of
these same laws.'
(From Physics and metaphysics of biosemiosis. He remarks that this is the same apparent distinction between the reality of symbolic form and matter that motivates Cartesian dualism although acknowledges that Descartes' model 'consigned the relations between them to obscurity'.)
The usual response to the argument that 'the ability to interpret signs and symbols cannot be explained in physicalist terms', is to say that that the human intellect evolved to the point where it can generate abstractions which are but 'useful fictions' in the service of the successful replication; but that this is at root a physical process which is understood through the prism of evolutionary science and neurobiology. This is the standard neo-Darwinian-materialist model.
But I think the argument that undercuts all such accounts is that those models themselves rely on the very logical faculties which the theories seek to explain. In other words, any kind of judgement, scientific or otherwise, implicitly relies on the fundamental operation of logic; if this, then that ... . Thought itself operates within a 'meaning-world' within which all accounts, all scientific theories, inhere. Obviously in respect of modern scientific method, the ability to validate hypotheses against observation is central, especially in the so-called 'hard sciences'. And yet at this juncture, science itself confronts many impenetrable conundrums about the nature of matter, mind and life. But physicalism has this kind of bumptious self-confidence, that even if we don't know all the details yet, we're working towards it. And I think that is what has to be called into question.
Quoting Bilge
:up:
I don't feel like playing games.
There is no difference.
Do you see the difference between thinking the Sun is going to rise tomorrow, and behaving as if the Sun is going to rise tomorrow?
Quoting Pfhorrest
What is it that makes the Sun move in the sky? Is there something that moves it? Does it move all by itself? If you say it moves because the Earth rotates, is there something that makes the Earth rotate? Does it rotate all by itself?
The Earth might suddenly stop rotating. Yet it keeps going. What makes it keep going?
When you decide to pick a flower and you do it, what made the flower be picked? Is it just a pattern, or are you responsible for the flower being picked? Are you just a pattern?
Quoting Pfhorrest
You can break the laws that society imposes on you, does that mean they aren’t laws?
You say the true laws of nature can’t be broken. How would you prove that such laws exist in the first place, considering that we “routinely transcend” apparent laws? If they exist, why would all things follow these laws and not some other laws?
Quoting Pfhorrest
An alien sounds like a being from some other planet being subjected to the same laws of nature as you are, whereas I’m talking about beings (forces, energies, or however you want to call them) who are the source of everything that you see and feel.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Many people have evidence of them. You wouldn’t have evidence of the sky if you were blind.
Presumably when you see a house you interpret it as evidence of other beings even if you haven’t seen them with your eyes, beings who have built that house. But you choose to not see the whole world as evidence of higher beings even if you haven’t seen them with your eyes.
You choose to believe that laws that were there for no reason at all somehow gave rise to this world. You choose to believe that laws are responsible for what you do, that choice is an illusion. You choose to believe that love and suffering and thoughts and beauty and good and evil somehow appeared out of lifeless stuff that is none of that. That’s what sounds crazy and outlandish to me.
Not really. At least, I can’t imagine a scenario where someone who thinks that doesn’t act like it’s true, unless for some contrived reason like he’s pretending to think otherwise.
Quoting leo
The full answer is complicated, but it boils down in the end to there not being a possibility (or there being far fewer possibilities than otherwise) for it to stop. Keeping going is just the most likely, “default” thing for it to do.
Quoting leo
Yes. The chain of events leading to the flower being picked was part of a pattern of possibilities like any other events, and I am part of that pattern, but there’s no “just” about that because the only alternative to being part of a pattern is being completely random and that’s not better. And part of my pattern involves examining and altering my own patterns, and that pattern is what constitutes freedom of will.
Quoting leo
Not in the same sense as physical laws, no.
Quoting leo
Starting from a place of now knowing whether the universe behaves in a lawlike fashion or not, we can only assume one way or the other. To assume it does not behave in a lawlike fashion is just to give up all hope of understanding it at all. We may nevertheless still fail to find laws that it consistently follows even if we do assume that there are such laws, but if we act on the assumption that there are such laws by trying to figure out what they are, then we have at least a chance of understanding the universe, if such a thing is possible.
Quoting leo
If what we think is the universe is actually just some construct inside of a broader universe, then whatever being(s) exist outside of this construct in the broader universe are still basically aliens. You're basically saying "what if the universe is a simulation?" I covered this already in the OP.
So the goal of the testing is to establish whether or not a creator / God etc exists or not. As we have a ground of "knowing nothing", let's use a framework to create a structure to work from, let's use the model of Nature (or as it used to be called, Natural Science). We can take any branch within nature, but lets just say, we'll look at a tree and see what we can discover about a tree after at it is life and therefore should contain any creator, if at all.
It begins from a seed, it is placed in the soil, and given sun, water and time, it becomes a big tree. So that's our structure. Now, there were some gaps in the example, for instance, we know a seed is very small. We also know that a tree (in our example) is very big - its an oak tree. How did that happen? Well, we added sun, soil, water and time and there was a tree.
Did the tree come from the sun? Did it come from the soil? Did it come from the water? Did it come from time? It doesn't appear to be in any one of these things, but it was most certainly apparent in all of these things. If we look at any combination of these elements, the tree was not found in any combination of them, other than in full combination. Ok, so what did combining all these things do to change the seed into a tree? Did we plant the seed and the next day it was a tree? No. The tree grew by combining these elements. So what is growth? Let's look at other examples of growth on the planet. In fact, everything on the planet is in a state of growth (or it's opposite). Everything in the state of growth has continuity, everything else is heading towards not being here. So there is an "unknown" force appearing to be evident by the facts of growth and its opposite.
In our experiment, we cannot go beyond this question. Therefore as scientists we have to conclude, we were not able to prove there wasn't a creator, but we can say, if there is one, it lies in Growth or its opposite.
So to categorically say, there is not a creator is to assume that whatever lies in growth or its opposite is not a creator, and yet scientifically, we were unable to prove that. As a manager once said to me, "Don't assume, it makes an ass| (out of) u | (and) me". Now the real question should be, what is your aversion to the concept of a creator or creating force?
As has been pointed out many times to this line of thougt is that your "creator" is not not an answer. Because it only leads to the question: Well, who created the creator? A super-creator? And who created that one?
Infinite regression....
If we are saying we "have to prove there is one", then the question is already flawed and what follows is just non sense, a spinning of the wheels and wasting time. The chap is coming from the point of a view of an atheist (Not a Creator), and yet asking the question, "is there a creator". The former can be answered, the latter cannot.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Not so, infinite growth is in opposition to infinite regression.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Slow down a little, we are too far ahead, we didn't prove the first one existed yet! Or have we fallen into assumption again, and then describing the characteristics of our imagination?
Then defend your position sir, because from where I'm looking it looks like your up to your waste in quicksand... and sinking (in a playful manner of course).
I don't think it's possible to prove that there is no creator. Or god, or whatever you want to call it.
Proof either way by empirical methods is impossible, and by a priori methods is also impossible.
At least this is what I heard. Don't quote me on this, please.
There is NO WAY to establish with any certainty that at least one god exists...or that no gods exist. There is NO WAY to establish with any certainty that IT IS MORE LIKELY one way or the other.
Any assertion in either direction is nothing more than a blind guess...worth nothing more than a coin toss.
People making assertions in either direction should stop doing it...or at least, acknowledge that the assertion is just a blind guess.
If you re-read the statement, you will see we were very careful not to "guess". We used reason to arrive at a conclusion of "we couldn't prove a creator didn't exist, but if one did, it would be in growth or its opposite".
As you rightly say, we have to be careful we don't want to fall into error here.
Quoting Frank Apisa
As stated above, unless your interpretation of "guess" is different from mine. I would say, in the absence of sufficient fact, a "guess" is offered as a "possibility". But you can clearly see, we didn't do that. We were very careful. Please do pull it to pieces if possible, it will help us all. But if you, do, please keep within the rules and within the example so we can all see, and not fall into error of clever misunderstandings or assumptions.
No, the burden should not be to prove a negative. How do you come up with this stuff?
I can not "prove" that there are no pink unicorns on Mars. So if you claim there are, our default assumption should be that there are, and we doubters have to "prove" that there aren`t? Surely you see how ridiculous that is.
Where is the burden? I appreciate there is investment in "no creator" after all, it makes life a lot easier, but that's not the point - that's a distraction. More often than not, this position is one of "I AM Creator or God". I appreciate here I am in danger of making an assumption when I stay this, so I will leave it there.
We were careful not to fall into error by trying to "prove a creator" because we have already established to prove it is not possible, so instead our only option is to see if we can disprove it. This is what a scientist does when they want to gather facts.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Once again, you fall into error. You have made an assumption on what is or what isn't, and having created your position, you are now looking to defend it. In our method we have not made assumptions and we have no position. Facts should remain neutral. And yes, I see how ridiculous your statement is.
IF an individual says, "There are no gods" or "It is more likely that there are no gods than that there is at least one"...THAT IS A POSITIVE ASSERTION ABOUT WHAT IS OR IS NOT.
The burden falls on the person making such an assertion.
IF you are asserting that is not so...YOU ARE WRONG.
Gotta run right now, but I will respond to this in a while, Anti.
As you saw, we didn't positively assert anything, because we already identified the flaw if we did so. There is not positive assertion of "a creator does exist", only a positive assertion that "we couldn't prove a creator doesn't exist". If the position of an atheist is "creator DOES NOT exist", then the assertion is an assumption and therefore in error.
Quoting Frank Apisa
So far, your argument as been in the assertion of "God DOESNT exist". As you rightly say, that is WRONG. If you "change sides" and say "God DOES exist" you are still WRONG. We have done neither. We have pointed out, very carefully, that to assert "God or creator DOESNT exist" was not proved and therefore to do such, is an assumption and therefore in error.
Anti...take your own advise and carefully read before responding.
At no point am I suggesting that YOU are asserting that no gods exist.
I not only used the word "IF" at the beginning of each of those sentences...I made sure to capitalize it.
I am not asking you to prove a god or a creator does not exist...any more than I would ask you to lift the Empire State Building using just YOUR muscles. IT CANNOT BE DONE.
As for "it would be in growth or its opposite" I truly do not understand what that means. I tend to think (whatever it means) is that it is also JUST A GUESS. This "using reason" some people offer is almost always just a denial that guessing is happening.
But, I promise to stay open minded on it if you want to explain why you are doing a non-theist version of what a god must possess that is done by theists in the opposite direction.
The word IF already suggests were a not sure of the ground below us. In the example, we established the ground as "knowing nothing".
Quoting Frank Apisa
Reason is a ladder. We used it to start from "ground" and climbed it to see if we could prove "creator doesn't exist", which is the position the atheist stands on. We managed to climb as far as "cannot prove creator DOESNT exist" and then we acknowledged that from here, we could go no further.
If you go any further than this, you have transgressed because you are in the realm of assumption, which we have acknowledged as making "an ass out of you and me". Or simply, error.
Quoting Frank Apisa
So in the absence of understanding, you drop back into assumption. I feel I'm repeating myself a lot here. What you are failing to grasp, is there nothing to grasp in the example we gave. Your position as "creator DOES NOT exist" has grasped where there is no grasping. Hence, in error.
Because you have asked for it, I will give it.
Been trying to explain exactly that to Frank Apisa for a whole string of messages now, but it is like talking to a wall....
You see, responsibility is part and parcel of your actions, so you are responsible for your part in the destruction of the faith. Imagine you convinced someone who had faith that your non sense was true, and as a result of that, they then gave up their faith. I believe it was written, "it would have been better for them if they had not been born." But, if there is a creator, it is acknowledged that such things happen (such is infinite love), and repentance and acknowledgement of such things may undo your damage, well if you were listen to the written record on faith that is.
But of course, your in a bit of a quandary now, because not only have you made an error on "creator DOES NOT exist", you have also denied the only thing that is capable of saving you - faith. Unless of course you do have faith, and the atheist stand is something else?
I say this as the scientist still, because we started from the position of "knowing nothing" which allowed us to remain "open" to the possibility of "maybe there is a creator" and so far, we could not prove it either way so although I say the above, it's still very much from the position that neither have been proved.
Would be interesting to meet some people like that... I never had that experience. Where I live people are generally happy with "there are things we don´t know", so that situation never comes up.
Quoting Antidote
As I said before, introducing a "creator" does not answer any question. I am curious why as a scientist you do not see that.
YOU...have been trying to explain to me that "If the position of an atheist is "creator DOES NOT exist", then the assertion is an assumption????"
Never in million years. Make that a billion years.
I have been the one stating that...NOT YOU.
Anyone asserting "a god exists" or "no gods exist" or "it is more likely that at least one god exists than that no gods exist" or "it is more likely that no gods exist than that at least one god exists"...
...IS MAKING A BLIND GUESS...or an assumption if that word makes you feel any better. Or a supposition...if that is your preference.
So get off the you've "been trying to explain that" to me.
That's the right starting point. We don't know. Those of the faith "don't know" and those without faith "don't know". In general, those with faith seem to be kinder, more caring but then again, that would follow because they have faith that in the end, they will be judged. And if so, lets make it for the good, not for the not good! If there is no creator, what does it matter, you were kind and caring, you didn't lose anything. I suppose that's the point too.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Look at both your statements here, they are really saying the same thing aren't they? So I certainly do see it.
For the record...and to clear up point of disagreement with you...
...I have never said that a blind guess that there is at least one god...or that there are no gods...
...IS AN ERROR.
Either might be totally correct...and one almost certainly IS CORRECT.
We do not know which is correct.
IF...please note thatIF you are asserting either is an error...that assertion is just a guess.
I do see that. The point is, to make any assertion to "does exist", "doesn't exist" is wrong, in error. We don't know, that was the point. It is unknown. Yes, either might be correct, neither might be correct we can apply all the combinations of either. But as soon as we say, "something is", there is the error. Or we say "IF" we are already presuming a position (we took one step into transgression)... or if we say, "probability of" (again, a footstep into transgression) its still presuming and therefore taking a position, when the truth is, the position is, "no position".
Quoting Frank Apisa
I'm not asserting either (true/false) but I highlighted where a creator could be found using reason (null). Not that we found a creator or proved one. Rather we proved there was a reasonable place where we might find one, and so the assertion of "definitely no creator" could not be true (neither true nor false).
Quoting Frank Apisa
Here lies the error, the assumption. That statement itself shows "not atheist". So I'm glad to see you do have faith! :)
They are not contradicting each other, I don´t know what your point is.
As I said, I can not help you with your obvious reading comprehension problems, so please stop trying to argue.
Absolutely right, I didn't say the were contradictory. I said they were the same, on which point it looks like we agree.
...YOU ARE WRONG.
Here is my take on the issue:
[b][i]I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...
...so I don't.[/i][/b]
I am not arguing...merely trying to get through the concrete in your head.
Nothing whatever wrong with my reading comprehension. You simply are making no sense.
True, same as the rest of us.
Quoting Frank Apisa
Already, in a slightly clever way making a presumption that "creator exists"
Quoting Frank Apisa
Sort of true as the statement is a little woolly.
Quoting Frank Apisa
True.
So it's statement 2 that "suggests" you do, or might do.
Quoting Frank Apisa
Opps, done it again. Now you assumed there isn't. So an assertion, so in error. Remember, the truth is "don't know". :)
OK, boomer...
I'm 83. Hardly a boomer.
We agree...so far.
Not even close. There is absolutely no presumption that a "creator exists" in what I wrote.
Why are you trying to distort my comments?
Not woolly at all. And not "sort of true." It is absolutely true. I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence.
Not sure what you are trying to contort here...or why you think it necessary to contort. I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...and I most assuredly don't.
Ahhh...you are playing a game.
Okay.
Ah, OK. Sorry, did not want to make fun of Alzheimer. Pls forgive.
Now, taking the tree example, yes the tree grows from a seed to a fully grown tree, aided by certain external elements. That's all we know. Now, modern science can prove with evidence how and why it occurs. So, do we really need to establish a creator when we can break down the whole process with microscopic precision?
No problemo. I always cut jerkoffs a big break.
I'm just trying to say, as clearly and concisely as I can, we agree the answer is "not known". If we reason further and say anything more, we are assuming, whether its "does" "doesnt" matters not because we already established "dont know". Not "doesnt". :)
Quoting Frank Apisa
Its the MUST bit I see as wooly. We were only concerned with "does" or "doesn't". Otherwise we are sort of dropping inbetween "does" or "doesnt" and therefore losing the straight clarity we were trying to maintain. The answer we keep returning to is, "don't know". Neither "believer", neither "non believer".
Correct, "don't know" is established, so let's call that "Fact". Because the fact is neutral.
Believers / Non believers are in possession of no greater fact than that we have already established.
Those of faith are in the "believer" camp. We only have two groups here.
Any further move beyond the "fact" will be a transgression. Or we could call is a "persuasive argurement" or just error. We are being "convinced" one way or the other. Of course, each camp will say, "join us". But as scientists, we already have the fact that if we choose one group, we exclude the other in which case we might be in the wrong group because the fact said, "don't know or not known"
Quoting Zeus
Careful, we are in danger of transgression again. Science can prove "why" it grows. Seed, soil, water, sun mix it together, tree. Science cannot however prove, "how" it grows. Or if it can, then we may be able to change the "fact" for a new fact, depending on what science proves the "how" to be.
Quoting Zeus
Grab your microscope, let's go looking, we might be able to prove it one way or the other :) Our experiment only got us as far as proving "creator DOESNT exist" wasn't true. Equally, is proved "creator exists" was true either. So we didn't find the creator, but we did prove that "creator DOESNT exist" couldn't be true. Because there was a place where the "creator" could have existed. The fact it produced was "not known".
We agree that we do not know.
This "assuming" stuff that you are injecting is off-the-wall as far as I am concerned.
My take as proposed is right on the button...and the "assumptions" you presume...are contrived. I repeat:
[b][i]I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...
...so I don't.[/i][/b]
Oh, and there is no hypnosis involved here, and I never finished the course.
Come on Frank, really. You not seeing this? Why you making me hit you with this all the time, I feel bad :(
The "must" is essential to what I am saying there.
Read it again...without allowing any confirmation bias conflict. You should be able to see wyhy.
Stop playing this game!
I do not make a guess in either direction.
Nobody should.
Now just stop the bullshit.
Is "must" affirmative or subjective? If I say to someone, "you can do this if you like", or say, "you must do this". Is it affirmative? The reason it is essential is because as soon as you remove it the "deck of cards" falls down.
You are either playing a game...or are not particularly bright.
I cannot figure out which it is...so I am trying to figure out how best to proceed without being sure.
Talk to someone else for a while...and I'll give it a bit more thought.
We didn't play a game, although I was trying to lighten it up a bit as I felt bad, I will be more serious, sorry.
You read the example, you saw there was no guessing involved. We moved carefully, one step at a time from one point to the other and concluded that fact was "don't know". This is not, maybe could be, must, probably, or any other affirmative word, it was "don't know" or "not known" what ever word you want to use that clearly states, "Neither is true". We were looking at the ground that an atheist stands on "creator DOESNT exist" and proved this wasn't true. We looked at the ground a believer stands on too, "creator does exist" and proved this wasn't true either. However, in terms of did we find anywhere that a creator "could" exist, we said yes, in growth. Because we don't know "how" growth works, a "creator" could be in there. Not that there is, but this ground proves that "doesn't exist" had no ground to stand on, and therefore could not be proved.
That's as far as we got. Until someone can tell us "how" growth occurs, we cannot move further than this. And to be clear, not "why" it occurs, we established that... seed, soil, sun, water, time, tree.
I'm not bright at all. I'm as dumb as a lump of wood. Or as some people call it, receptive.
If you are unable to comprehend it...your problem, not mine.
[b][i]I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...
...so I don't.[/i][/b]
Piece by piece:
"I do not know if gods exist or not"
We seem to agree on that.
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...or that they MUST EXIST.
Obviously if I did...IF is saw a reason to suspect the CANNOT EXIST...or that the MUST exist...
...that first bit about "I do not know" would be absurd.
If they CANNOT EXIST...they would NOT exist.
If they MUST EXIST...they would exist.
[b]I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...
...so I don't.[/b]
What is there about that statement that you cannot or will not understand?
It is clear cut.
If you hold to the "fact" that we have established already, "not known" and no further, you cannot be an atheist without it being an assumption, that is, not a fact. I apologise because I thought you saw that earlier which is why I was being playful.
The same objection stands, it's your last statement, "...so I don't. As in you don't believe creator exists". We established that "creator doesn't exist" wasn't true, or it was false. So your last statement makes you false, wrong. Whatever you want to call it. Forget the wording and your argument, because it is a work of fiction. We proved it time and time again.
Anti...read what I actually wrote.
The "I don't" applies to the "I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction"...not to anything else.
Since you seem unable to follow the continuity of the thought, I'll write it out as a continuous statement using shorter words:
[b]Since I do not see any unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess as to whether at least one god exists...or if no gods exist...
...I do not make a guess either way.[/b]
Please, please tell me that you understand that not particularly complex thought,
By the way...if you insist that I ought to make a guess...
...I am willing to do so. Tell me you want me to do so, and I will flip the coin honestly and report it exactly as it resolves. Heads, I guess there is at least one god; tails, I guess there are no gods.
So having been scientific about this, we can now draw a conclusion. Having tested both ways for the existence of creator, both answers were false meaning, we are no clearer now then when we were when we started. But that's not completely true, because what we have proved is:
Those people who believe in a creator do so by faith.
Those people who dont believe in a creator do so by faith.
I will define faith here for clarity. Faith is what you have when you don't have the fact, and therefore choose to make a choice either way. Your faith says, no creator. My faith says, a creator.
Now as highlighted before, what are the consequences of both our faiths? My faith attempts to make me kind, and caring towards others. I show people love even if they are horrible to me. I try to put the needs of other before me. I do not think I'm God, because i believe in a creator. I attempt to be humble because that is a quality that my faith requires.
We have already seen the virtues of your faith, as I pointed out earlier.
So the choice is yours, we have both choosen our faiths, and i guess we are both happy with them.
Gotta be careful of your wording, Anti.
I disagree with your second sentence...simply because of its wording.
I suspect you actually meant: Those people who "believe" there is no creator do so by faith. (Not the same thing as what you wrote.)
In any case, if you think I "have faith" that there is no creator...you are wrong.
I do not know if there is a creator...and I am not willing to guess that there is...just as I am not willing to guess that there isn't.
I'm willing to stick with "I do not know."
As far as kindness and caring is concerned, I see as much kindness and caring among agnostics and atheists...as I do in so-called religious people; AND I see as much hatred, anger, cruelty, and lack of concern in people devoted to a creator...as I do in agnostics and atheists. In fact, on that latter issue...I personally see more hatred, anger, cruelty, and lack of concern in so-called religious people than in agnostics and atheists.
Did the scientist in the example prove there was no creator?
Did the example leave enough doubt or room for a creator to exist in potential?
Do you consider yourself an athiest (no creator)? If not, then your are not an athiest.
I say this because where we got stuck in a bit of a loop was in the transgression you made when you said, "... so i dont". Perhaps you could explain what you meant by this?
Not only am I not an atheist...I would not be an atheist if you held a gun to my head.
I am an agnostic.
Read that statement of my agnosticism again. I've posted it three times already.
That is not even close to the only difference.
The difference between "people who don't believe in a creator" and "people who believe there is not creator"...is a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon. In another forum right now, I have an ongoing argument with several atheists on just this topic.
We can discuss the considerable difference at length if you choose...but you should be able to see it.
No, Yes...and You goddam right I am not an atheist. How you have missed that point this far into our discussion is beyond me, Anti. Go back and read a few of my posts. Nothing points to atheism at all.
"I don't" refers to "I don't make a guess that a god exists...and I don't make a guess that no gods exist."
Anti, you are just not reading what I am writing...not paying attention.
I just explained that in the post up above...the one with the bolded text that you mentioned.
Here it is again:
The "I don't" applies to the "I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction"...not to anything else.
Since you seem unable to follow the continuity of the thought, I'll write it out as a continuous statement using shorter words:
Since I do not see any unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess as to whether at least one god exists...or if no gods exist...
...I do not make a guess either way.
Perhaps if you are an agnostic then why disagree when the "fact" was in line with such. In effect, in a conversation of "creator exists" or "creator doesn't exist" - you don't have an opinion, do you? Or if you do, then you are playing which ever side suits you in the moment, therefore able to move between the sides as you see fit, but support neither?
Remember, I'm not very clever, so I need this to be clearer to me so I understand. If the "believer" is supported or grounded by "a creator" and a "non-believer" is supported or grounded by "no creator", which in many cases they assume creator position, then where does the "agnostic" stand?
If your agnosticism were a ballot paper, which box would you tick? Non of them? Or is the agnostic actually the antithesis of Christ?
I don't know if you are just fucking with me or what...but it stops right here. I have said in no uncertain terms that I DO NOT KNOW if gods exist or not.
What the hell are you up to here?
Go back and read my posts.
Point out to me anywhere where I disagreed with anything about that.
Jesus H. Christ, man...get your act together.
Happy to leave it there, I'm not sure how we progress from here other than for me to get a better understanding from you on what your agnosticism is? But it sort of doesn't matter, because the entire thread was for atheists, and you're not an atheist !?!
I'm really sorry if this has caused you grief, I think there has been a misunderstanding on my part as I read your messages as though you were an atheist, in line with the first comment of the "thread creator". I've no idea about agnosticism. I did say I was dumb as a lump of wood !
I don't see where your enthusiastic commitment to no possibility of knowledge comes from. What makes you to be so sure of no possibility of certainty? I am curious, more than I am challenging. Is there a foolproof proof that proves that?
Great question.
No, there is no certainty...and I almost always use some tiny qualifier.
Obviously to prove there are no gods...one would have to be everywhere in the universe all at the same time....and detect no gods in order to prove there are none. But to do that...would be proving there is one...the being everywhere in the universe at the same time.
To prove there IS AT LEAST ONE GOD...would require the participation of the god. I am sure a god could provide evidence that it exists.
If it is selective, though (some religious people claim a personal revelation)...the person would have to prove he/she is not delusional.
Good luck doing that.
here is another proof that you require for the proof of the first thing, and you yourself admit that this proof is also suspect even when it's complete.
I am lost. You insist we don't know if there is a god or not; I agree. You insist the existence of god can't be known either way; and you capitulated on that, without saying anything, but showing proofs that would prove the existence either way, and then you proceeded to debunk those proofs.
So... if you don't know that god exists or not, and you don't know if it can be known, why do you say you don't have faith in either existence or non-existence of gods? Are you saying that nobody else logically ought to have faith either, either way? Nobody on Earth is claiming knowledge of the existence of god. It's all beliefs. You seem to be the sole and only one, who denies that beliefs are acceptable.
Quoting Frank Apisa
Obviously, since "gods" is undefined, this statement is nonsense.
Only because your use of "gods" is undefined, that is, the search parameters for any one or classification of your purported "gods" are undefined, which implies having to search "everywhere" for no-defined-thing. :roll:
And that, Frankie, proves you're just blowing nonsense out of your ass. Just merely confused, pedestrian, unbelief ... obviously, not even (Huxleyan) agnosticism.
In terms of agnostic, if the option is for or against the agnostic is sat well and truely on the fence so what is their arguement other than to "be" the arguement in the form of a slippery fish. I will digest. It is not actually practical to be able to live your life as an agnostic so its just a pointless conceptual mental arguement that has no ground.
Are there any other agnostics here with a view point? Is the view point of the agnostic one of refusing to answer the question?
Atheism is just a mirror image of theism. Both positions are just groups of people making blind guesses about the true nature of the REALITY of existence.
Theists, to their credit are honest about it. The acknowledge that they are operating in "belief" and "faith."
Atheists, for the most part, lie about it...pretend they are not doing "belief" and "faith."
Enjoy your self-deceit, 180. And don't mind me laughing at you.
If you think that the position "I do not know the true nature of the REALITY of existence" is fence-sitting...you are, as you claim, as dumb as a bag of wood.
This from a man who says, in effect, he neither believes nor disbelieves - neither knows nor does not know - whether &÷#@$% exists or does not exist. :roll:
All you've got, Frankie, are vapid assertions absent supporting evidence or sound arguments. You're not laughing "at me" but with me at the forum trolls. Are you one of them? (Pardon the snark.) :smirk:
No problem with the "snark" at all, 180. We all use it at times...and, no, I am not a troll.
I'm not even sure of what the point of disagreement is between us.
My position on the question of "Do any gods exist?" is fairly unambiguous: I do not know.
Not sure why that answer causes so much consternation with so many...but apparently it does.
My more complete answer is:
[b][i]I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...
...so I don't.[/i][/b]
What on Earth does anyone see wrong or wrong-headed about that answer?
No, I said I was as dumb as a lump of wood (singluar) - you said, as dumb as a bag of wood (plural). In the very beginning of our example, I established such by saying the ground to start from was "I know nothing". Now back, to the example.
Our scientist did not have a good nights sleep last night, for he realised that having very carefully (and we kept reminding ourselves we needed to be careful) taken each step along the process, the agnostic position was not allowed for. You see our scientist was using reason to see if he could establish anything at all from the experiment. But, fortunately, our scientist (true to his word) said he established the ground for the purposes of remaining open. In this vein, we now need to include the view of the agnostic. He woke up very excited this morning because something new had been added, so perhaps we may be able to find a better answer than we did the first time. This is "buzz" a scientist gets when the learning takes place and we may discover something.
So, having been presented with new information (the agnostic) and I must say, thank you to the patience of our agnostic because, recognising our scientist was a dumb as a lump of wood, he stuck with us until it finally got through his thick skull that the agnostic, even if presented as such, was not an atheist. The example was certainly sufficient for the "believer" or "non believer" so I wont repeat it.
Now, our scientist knows, thanks to his fellow scientist (Einstein) that the world "out there" is relative. He describes this much better than our dumb scientist can, so I won't repeat it, but the principle of such is very simple, thus:
Hot doesn't not mean anything without cold.
Fast doesn't mean anything without slow.
If we just had HOT, then it would just be, and temperature would have no meaning. Fortunately, everything in the outside world has an opposite. This is a dichotomy. Not to say it's only a dichotomy but this is evidenced in the outside world.
One pole we call "Hot", the opposite pole we call "Cold". The spectrum we call "temperature".
One pole we call "Fast", the opposite pole we call "Slow". The spectrum we call "speed".
And so on, and so forth.
Our original example had this automatically built into the example by having two poles. "Believer" and "non-believer". The spectrum could loosely be called "faith".
Now sadly, we only have one agnostic, so creating a relative link between to fellow agnostics would have helped us a great deal. Wiki, sadly, is not much clearer because what becomes apparent is that of the "fathers of agnosticism" presented there, none of them seem to agree much with each other. If we look at our atheists, they all agree very well. So do our believers, they all very much agree too.
So to this end, we are going to have to look at the "cornerstones" present by our one agnostic in the form of the 4 principles presented and see if we can find something there. A little more digesting, then we'll have a try. After all, our agnostic could indeed have a better answer than we, and perhaps their position is a better one. We will see.
Is there any chance of re-writing these principles in singular form, for the sake of ease? If not, we'll work with what we have.
I do no know if gods exist
I do not know if gods don't exist
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect gods cannot exist
I see no reason why gods could exist
[b]I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
[/b] I see no reason that gods must exist
I see no reason why gods would exist
I see no reason that gods are needed to explain existence
[b]I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...
[/b] I do not see enough certainty of evidence to base a "best guess" that gods exist
I do not see enough certainty of evidence to base a "best guess" that gods don't exist
[b]...so I don't.
[/b] So I don't make or form a view or opinion either way.
Please be patient with me, and please keep in mind I'm as dumb as a lump of wood so I get confused very easily. Can you please confirm where we have gone wrong on the above, so we can put it right, in the view of the agnostic so we understand better what the view point is.
Work with what you have. The notion of just God...means working with just one idea of a god.
I prefer to use "gods."
The part highlighted makes no sense, Anti...and does not follow from what I said.
Gotta go to work right now. Will be back in about 6 hours.
Whether there is one, or more than one, will still firmly sit in the "exists" camp, if we can agree that?
Quoting Frank Apisa
No problem, there's my stupidity again. I've highlighted the bit that I understood it relate. It would be easier (because I know nothing) if you could then re-define what you meant, but if not, we'll try and get there instead.
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason why gods could exist
should this be:
I see no reason why gods would be impossible to exist
Could you expand on this a little? You see, being careful with this and scientific, we cannot get to an "idea" of God, because we haven't yet established existence yet. Damn my stupidity, as a scientist, I understand the importance of Order and Disorder. I very easily fall out of order if I'm not careful.
The concept of "god / creator" is as being of the First Order, assigning to "creator" acknowledges this position. Would you say there are potentially many gods appearing as the First Order?
I've just a had a look at history regarding "Gods" to see if there is any concept of the First Cause being "multi" and so far, cause I'm stupid, I've not seen any. I re-read the wiki agnostic views again, and some of them seem to reference "Gods" but not in context of a First Cause, instead they reference "God" as the First Cause (existent of not).
Again, please be patient, I'm sure we will get there, if you can help with this bit, we can move on to the next bit.
Whilst your working, I'll read up on the law of Cause and Effect so I understand that a bit better too.
This is what's wrong with it. Read for comprehension, Frank, as many times as it takes for you to get the gist. A hint: define the gods - classes or particular ones - at issue for you. :wink:
Anti...I do not think you are dumb or stupid.
I think you are an asshole.
And I suspect you are unable (or perhaps, unwilling) to compose a coherent sentence.
Just want to be sure we are not misunderstanding any of that.
What do you mean by "wrong?" Please define it.
So are you ready to carry on ?
Carry on?
I am willing to have a meaningful discussion with you if you knock off the bullshit.
Let me know that you intend to stop with the bullshit...and we can discuss a few things. (I'd prefer to discuss your apparent disagreement with something I have written.)
Could you expand on this a little? You see, being careful with this and scientific, we cannot get to an "idea" of God, because we haven't yet established existence yet. Damn my stupidity, as a scientist, I understand the importance of Order and Disorder. I very easily fall out of order if I'm not careful.
The concept of "god / creator" is as being of the First Order, assigning to "creator" acknowledges this position. Would you say there are potentially many gods appearing as the First Order?
I've just a had a look at history regarding "Gods" to see if there is any concept of the First Cause being "multi" and so far, cause I'm stupid, I've not seen any. I re-read the wiki agnostic views again, and some of them seem to reference "Gods" but not in context of a First Cause, instead they reference "God" as the First Cause (existent of not).
Again, please be patient, I'm sure we will get there, if you can help with this bit, we can move on to the next bit.
Which Dialogue are the two of you reenacting? :lol:
At first, I thought of responding to this with:
Sure.
T h e n o t i o n o f j u s t G o d...m e a n s w o r k i n g w i t h j u s t o n e i d e a o f a g o d.
But I figured that was too corny.
So instead, I opt to go with:
I would rather not expand on it.
I prefer to discuss the topic at hand using "gods" rather than "God" (which implies a particular God) ...so if that is a game stopper, perhaps it would be better for you to discuss it with someone else.
I actually hope it is not.
Cute.
I am Glaucon.
So, we created an example of using reason to see if we could prove there was or wasn't a creator. That we did to its conclusion, we couldn't actually prove either, so we concluded both the Christian (believer) and Atheist (non believer) were actually on the same side because they were both on the side of "faith". It couldn't be proved, so each had to use "faith" to make the conclusion. Nice and simple.
Then the agnostic appeared. Now, our scientist had no idea about this, because he thought the "atheist" and the "Christian" were polar opposites (in relativity). But it turned out the question was really, "Faith" or "No Faith". And the Atheist had faith, as did the Christian. It was the Agnostic that had "no faith". Bear with me please.
Now, unknown to our agnostic, he wasn't using reason. In fact he didn't understand reason, but what he did understand was "logic". What we know about "logic" is this. Firstly, it was a system created by the Ancient Greeks (Plato and the like), the system was created because the Ancient Greeks did not have "faith", far from it. They actually attempted to destroy faith, for whatever reason. The weapon of choice for the Ancient Greeks was "logic".
Now, using the Law of Cause and Effect, we know a few things about Order. That is, a cause creates an effect, creates a cause, etc. The law states, ONE cause creates an effect, it is not possible for a cause to be more than one, because Cause and Effect works like a tree and branch and creates a hierarchy. The "faith" question is always one of "First Cause".
So we look to the beginning of "logic". It was created. In fact, it was created just before 0 AD, dates aren't important. The system of "logic" was created using "reason". We can now say, Reason came first, and gave birth to Logic. Logic therefore can never be the First Cause because it is already an "Effect". As "Logic" was created, it is bound by relativity. You cannot create a logical argument with only one side (I've been telling my wife this for years). Hence why an agnostic needs an "opposite" in order to create an argument. The principles presented were just twisted logic so he could move position as he needed to. Otherwise the agnostic has no position. It is all "logically" good, but as people kept noticing, it is not reasonable.
If you look at wiki, you will see, the starting point for anything in "logic" is "Argument". Those Greeks were clever, but fortunately they weren't clever enough to beat reason. But then they couldn't, because "Reason" gave birth to Logic. The "son" does not come before the "father" that's just plain insanity if it did.
The agnostic's don't realise that "logic" is flawed against reason. Reason is always above logic. Plato - Republic is a classic example of this. Reason, like Growth, Love, Light, etc. are potential attributes of a creator. So, like the soul, as Plato highlighted, reason is unbeatable. The Ancient Greeks attempted to use the system of logic to debunk the faith. And this has worked for over 2000 years, to a degree because if you look at the statistics, its not "atheism" that has grown, its "faithlessness" that has grown. And the agnostic represents the "faithless". If the agnostic had a ground to stand on, they could tell us but they can't because the starting point in "logic" requires 2 sides or more.
Logic has two aspects to it, it is relative, because it was created. It has "expression" that's the outside appearance of it, and it has "definition", that's the inside appearance of it. Plato, like the agnostic, plays a little game, using a single letter in the language (remember the Ancient Greeks invented the language we now use, albeit via Latin). The letter in question is "s". This is the difference between "singular" and "plural". Now our scientist couldn't understand why it was so important to keep re-stating "gods" not "god", even when our scientist hadn't mentioned "God". But this is why.
If you mix "singular" definition with "plural" expression (or switch them), you have a mess because the expression and definition have to match otherwise it is illogical. Or disorder, or chaos or whatever, it doesn't matter what its called, what you don't have it order or logic. Now if there is a creator, one very obvious trait is "Order". Everything of the creator is in order.
What struck the scientist was that agnosticism mentions "Gods" in one breath, then describe "God" in another (splitting expression and definition). I don't think this twisted logic is limited to the agnostic. They only been around for a few hundred years, so everything that ascribes to the Ancient Greek logic, will incorporate the error or splitting that which cannot be split. It can be manipulated.
If there is a creator (it will be by division), the effect of this is "multiplication". In terms of a creator, the plural is always in the effect whereby the cause will always be singular.
So the logic system was framed without a first cause, that was it's intention (logic is faithless). So it is impossible for logic to answer the question of "is there a creator" because logic itself was obviously created. Reason however, has an opportunity to answer the question. That was why we were very careful to stick to reason, and not let logic get in the way and introduce the fundamental error.
I have created another thread "Ancient Greek, Logic and Reason" for those who are interested or have a view on that. Because the Ancient Greeks knew what they were doing, they switched around the positions of "reason" and "logic" in the education system they created.
However, the universal law of Cause and Effect shows us, Reason came first, Logic came after. As the switch is done right at the beginning, or hidden in a tiny letter (devil is always in the detail) most people never even notice it and incorporate it into their thinking / logic. However, our thinking is, and always has been based on Reason, then logic arrived from 0 AD onwards.
Reason = Cause, Logic = Effect. If you have logic without reason, you are in the realms of insanity and the golden rule with that is "you cannot reason with insanity". You can bin them both off (Atheist) or you can have just "reason" Christian, but you cannot have just Logic because we already know, logic was created from reason, and that means its below reason in the causality chain.
The position of the Christian = There is a God (by faith).
The position of the Atheist = There is no God (by faith).
The position of the Agnostic / Antagonist = Logic is God or I am God if I win the arguement (faithlessness).
The agnostic position explains why the Ancient Greeks were very interested in Justice and guilt and the like, because they firmly believed they were God / Gods.
If anyone knows any really clever people (because I'm dumb as lump of wood) pass it on to them and ask them if it's right? Maybe its not, our scientist got it wrong (ish) last night.
????????
I asked 1 clever person, who said the following, not verbatim, because I can't remember rote stuff:
The positions of the Christian and the of the Atheist are rightly asserted.
The position of the agnostic as written in the proposition is the only position an agnostic can't claim or assert. If I am agnostic, I claim no knowledge of god. But god would certainly have knowledge of god. So to claim that an agnostic thinks he or she is god while he claims no knowledge of god despite being god himself or herself is the stupidest conclusion anyone could draw.
Thanks very much for the help on this, I've update the 3rd position with a little more description as the Agnostic is very much the "antagonist" which no view but full of arguement. That's good the same conclusion was drawn :)
This is what's wrong with it. Read for comprehension, Frank, as many times as it takes for you to get the gist. A hint: what is wrong is that you have not defined the gods - classes or particular ones - that you claim not know whether or not they exist; saying "all gods" says nothing definite.
For example, I'm agnostic about a class, or concept, of divinity termed 'pandeism' and another 'animism' which are conventionally defined; on the other hand, I believe - as you insist that I have a belief - that the 'negation of theism' (also defined) is true, which makes me an anti-theist and only by implication also an atheist.
I provide the above link again to a prior post where I argued that what is wrong with your alleged "agnosticism" is that it's incoherent because your use of "gods" is wholly undefined.
How about this now,
The position of the Agnostic / Antagonist = Logic is God or I am God if I win the arguement (faithlessness).
“Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the "bosh" of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.”
~ Thomas Huxley
So, what position were you talking about?
Quoting god must be atheist
I am agnostic (a slightly modified version of Huxlian agnosticism). Who is the agnostic claiming to be god. I have never heard of this?
What do you mean by the word "wrong?"
Nonsense (or in your crotchety parlance - "bullshit"!) Not. Even. False.
So, now you are saying that what I am saying is nonsense.
Why didn't you use "nonsense" in the first place instead of "wrong?"
I do not troll.
I sometimes give pests a taste of their own medicine.
You seem to be shuddering. Must not taste good...
...right?:wink:
LOL, welcome to the fan club. Trying to argue with the guy is like banging your head against the wall... he simply does not comprehend what is being said and goes back to his one single line about atheism, which he never tires of repeating.
What I say about atheism is correct. That seems to be what bothers you. Stop allowing me to bother so easily.
People who use the word "atheist" as a descriptor...use it because their either "believe" there are no gods...or who "believe" it is more likely that there are no gods than that there is at least one.
The pretense that they do it just because they lack a "belief" (in) a god...is farce.
One can lack that "belief"...and choose not to use the word. The choice is predicated on the "beliefs" I mentioned...not on a definition in some dictionaries.
Not sure why that bothers you so.
It shouldn't.
You actually know it to be true.
Yeah. All Frankie's got is trollin' ... and some of us are bored enough to play whack-a-troll with him. What a hypocrite though: he allows himself to define "atheism" in a self-serving manner but does not allow anyone else to define "agnosticism" - even for the sake of discussion - in any way other than the way he does. And then he wonders why he's the piñata du jour. :yawn:
When you show him black-on-white, quoting him, that he is wrong, he will call you an asshole and go on with his own beloved self-created stickhorse. His stick-horse, however, is a one-trick pony and we have seen all it could perform, over and over and over again.
I used to know a guy in a social setting back twenty-thirty years ago who very vehemently had some views on the relationship between intellect and literacy; and he proposed it in a very aggressive and provocative way; it always incited someone in the company to respond and argue with him, but that's all he did. He was otherwise a kind, friendly, helpful sort of feller, he was not jealous, greedy, defiant, or unreasonable otherwise.
I'm allowing you guys to beat the piss out of yourselves...and laughing each time I get to the keyboard.
You guys are too easy, though. I like when I have to put some effort into an exchange. But on those occasions where I can get opponents to damage themselves...the best I can do is to enjoy the show.
Thanks guys.
atheist: A word people use to describe themselves when they "believe" there are no gods...or "believe" it is more likely there are no gods than that there is at least one.
Ya know..."believers"...like the theists they mock so often.
Agnostic: Ummm...various things. But my agnosticism is:
[b][i]I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction...
...so I don't.[/i][/b]
Ohhh...atheists do not like that at all. It cuts through their bullshit...and even they realize the superiority of that position over the goof-ball nonsense they try to sell.
:lol:
It applies to you also.
You're in over your head in this, Frank. When you are reduced to comebacks that lose their effectiveness past grade three, you know you have run your course and out of ammunition. Time for you to migrate to Philosophynow.org.
Oh, he is a well-known troll around here? I had sort of written it off as senility. Either way, I plonk him, but if it is not Alzheimers I scrap the sympathy too.
You are an amateur.
But...let's not make this thread about you and your errors.
I most assuredly am not "in over my head"...which is the kind of thing that loses its effectiveness once out of the sandbox.
But let's not make this about you and your errors.
If you could logically show any of my arguments to be illogical...you would have done it.
You haven't. All you've done is what Trump does so often...claim a victory of some sort.
There was no argument, let alone several. Now go away, troll.
So you cannot.
Okay...I didn't think you could.
And I am not going anywhere.
"If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God."
Edit: NIV Hebrews 10: 26-27
I have no problem with the concept of sin, Antidote...providing "sin" is thought of as "doing something someone considers wrong, unnecessarily harmful, or evil." If it is simply defined as "doing something that offends (a god)"...then all bets are off. If a particular god demands that everyone kiss its ass as often as possible...and deems not doing so to be "sin"...we have parted company. Big time!
So... this says, literally, that if you sin, after receiving the knowledge of truth, then
-- all enemies of god will be consumed by fire
-- We, the deliberate continuers of sinning, can fearfully expect judgment and the fire that consumes the enemies of god
-- but it does not say that we've become the enemies of god.
---------------------
Furthermore, it states by omission, but definitely follows from it:
-- the enemies of god will not be consumed by fire if WE (we, who are a body independent of body of the enemies of god; by "body" I mean group of people) don't continue deliberately sinning.
This is the word of thy God, asshole.
No. People like you ignore evil, unhelpful things. I, and people like I, fight against them.
The Bible quote -- was it a quote? or your paraphrasing a section? You ought NEVER to paraphrase the Bible, and you MUST ALWAYS give line and reference numbers, as well as name of translation -- was a completely meaningless statement, or else it was badly paraphrased.
WHY DO YOU DO THINGS LIKE THAT???!!!???
I feel I may have caused confusion, so here's the full paragraph: NIV Hebrews 10:26-31
26 If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, 27 but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. 28 Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. 29 How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
One existential thought about God could relate to the meaning of life. If God is Life, we would wonder if he/she is the essence of Life. Can we know the essence of life through metaphysical knowledge/consciousness? Can we know it through some paradoxical knowledge about thought itself, against the background of the truth concerning the world? Or rather can we know it, and truly know it (both objectively and subjectively), only in and through Life itself.
The paradox there would be that we can know the essence of God only in God. Just like you only know yourself, yourself. What you are not, you cannot perceive to understand. (Even still, we don't really know our true selves because we are constantly changing.)
So what does life really mean? Existentially, life could consist of a pure subjective experience of oneself which seems to perpetually oscillate between suffering and joy. A "sentient experience" is not an impersonal, blind and insensitive force like the objective forces we meet in nature, but a living and sensible force experienced, from within, that results from an inner desire and effort of the will to satisfy it.
Life then could be invisible by nature because it never appears in the exteriority of a look. The fact of seeing does in effect presuppose the existence of distance/separation between what is seen and the one who sees. Or, between the object that is perceived and the subject who perceives it. A feeling (whether from seeing a color or listening to music or experiencing love), for example, can never be seen from the exterior, it never appears in the "horizon of visibility" of the world; it feels itself and experiences itself from within the living of life. Love cannot see itself (any more than hatred). Feelings are felt in the secrecy of our hearts, where no look can penetrate.
In the same way, when we look at a person's face, it is not the person that we see, but only an image of a face, a visible appearance in the world. But, we as humans, have a will to be seen, heard, felt, loved, et al.
What kind of truth does life present to us? I think we have to start there.
Hi Forrest!
Of course. Who would know the mind of God (can pure reason help us here... ).
Again, as a starting point, I would ask you to consider what kind of truth that life presents to oneself. I gave some starting examples from a perspective of phenomenology/living this life. Another succinct sort of question is, in consciousness, do humans have some sort of intrinsic or innate spiritual need?
As for "do humans have some sort of intrinsic or innate spiritual need", I think there is a state of mind that feels like some gaping un-fill-able hole, some kind of problem to which nothing could possibly be a solution. I call that feeling "ontophobia", but it's basically existential dread:
[quote=The Codex Quaerentis: On Practical Action and the Meaning of Life;http://www.geekofalltrades.org/codex/practice.php"] It wasn't until decades into my adult life that I first experienced clearly identifiable existential angst like had prompted the many writers on the Absurd for so long. I had long suffered with depression and anxiety, but always fixated on mundane problems in my life (though in retrospect I wonder if it wasn't those problems prompting the feelings but rather the feelings finding those problems to dwell on), and I had already philosophized a way to tackle such mundane problems despite that emotional overwhelm, which will be detailed by the end of this essay. But after many years of working extremely hard to get my life to a point where such practical problems weren't constantly besieging me, I found myself suddenly beset with what at first I thought was a physical illness, noticing first problems with my digestion, side-effects from that on my sinuses, then numbness in my face and limbs, lightheadedness, cold sweats, rapid heartbeat and breathing, and eventually total sleeplessness. Thinking I was dying of something, I saw a doctor, who told me that those are all symptoms of anxiety, nothing more. But it was an anxiety unlike any I had ever suffered before, and I had nothing going on in my life to feel anxious about at that point. Because of that, at first I dismissed the anxiety diagnosis and tried to physically alleviate my symptoms various ways, but as it wore on for many months, I found things to feel anxious about, facts about the universe I had already known for decades (many of which I detail later in this essay) but never emotionally worried about, which I found suddenly filling me with an existential horror or dread, a sense that any sentient being ever existing at all was like condemning it to being born already in freefall into a great cosmic meat grinder, and that reality could not possibly have been any different. Mortified, I searched in desperation for some kind of philosophical solution to that problem, something to think about that would make me stop feeling that, even trying unsuccessfully to abandon my philosophical principles and turn to religion just for the emotional relief, growing much more sympathetic to the many people who turn to religions for such relief, even as I continued to see the claims thereof as false and many of their practices as bad.
As a year of that wore on, brief moments of respite from that existential angst, dread, or horror grew mercifully longer and more frequent, often being prompted by a smaller more practical problem in my life springing up and then being resolved, distracting me from these intractable cosmic problems, at least for a time. In those moments of respite, I would often feel like I had figured out a philosophical solution to the problem: I saw my patterns of thinking while experiencing that dread as having been flawed, and the patterns of thinking I now had in this clearer state of mind as more correct. But when the dread returned, I felt like I could not remember what it was that I had thought of to solve the problem, and any attempt to get out of that state of mind, simply to not feel like that any more, felt like hiding from an important problem that I ought to keep dwelling on until I figured out a solution to it, even though it seemed equally clear that no solution to it was even theoretically possible. It wasn't until nearly a year of this vacillating between normalcy and existential dread had passed that the insight finally stuck me: the existential dread was just the opposite of the kind of "mysterical experiences" I had occasionally had and attached no rational significance too for my entire life. Just as, during those experiences, some things sometimes seemed non-rationally meaningful, just an ordinary experience of some scene of ordinary life with a profound feeling of "this is meaningful" attached to it, so too this feeling of existential dread was just my experience of ordinary life with a non-rational feeling of profound meaninglessness attached to it. The problem that I found myself futilely struggling to solve, I realized, was entirely illusory, and it was not irrational cowardice to hide from the "problem", but rather entirely the rational thing to do to ignore the illusory sense that there was a problem, and do whatever I could to pull my mind out of that crippling state of dread, wherein I had painfully little clarity of thought or motivational energy, and get myself back into a clearer, more productive state of mind.
I have since dubbed that feeling of existential angst, dread, or horror "ontophobia", Greek for the fear of being, where "being" here means both the existence of the whole world generally, and one's own personal existence...[/quote]
...and I already addressed the opposite feeling, ontophilia, in the OP, and agreed that that is the object of the noncognitivist sense of "God", and that...
Quoting Pfhorrest
Forrest!
Thank you for that... It speaks in part to the limitations of what logic can do for us. Notwithstanding Aristotle's recommendation of 'proper thinking' being our so-called saving grace there, it unfortunately has had its existential limitations, as you so well experienced/pointed out.
I also noted the recurring narrative/theme relating to potential dangers associated with the classic religious paradigms. To that end, we know that primarily, existential philosophy started in the book of Ecclesiastes ( three centuries before Christ). And as such, we also know that regarding certain things, no amount of rationalizing will allow ourselves to think our way into nirvana.
I also noted the element of fear, that you have had (human's) experienced. And essentially, if I could paraphrase here, a leap of faith that would conceivably connect some of the dots. Can you elaborate a bit more on these intrinsic fears? In other words, how does fear impact our way of Being, as you suggested... .
If the concept of God relates to life, and if fear is part of life, in either case it would still be germane to the discussion.
.
From my experience last year, and my hypothetical projection of that experience onto the experience of other people writing about the Absurd, there can be first a feeling, a wholly non-rational feeling, just a kind of mental illness, whereby someone first feels the symptoms of fear, anxiety, dread, horror, and then finds things to pin that fear on.
This builds off of already well-established psychological functions of narrative following action: we tend to do things, and then subconsciously look back and construct excuses for why we did them, the way that we would infer in the third-person the motivation of someone else that we just saw do something.
(You can especially see this in split-brain cases: there are people who've had the corpus callosum that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain severed, and researchers can communicate with those hemispheres separately because each is connected only to the opposite ear, eye, hand, etc. So they can ask the right brain, through an earpiece in the left ear, to do something with their left hand; and then ask the left brain, through an earpiece in the right ear, why it did that with its left hand, and even though the left brain had no control over the left hand and no connection to the right brain, the left brain will still just invent a reason for doing that, and swear up and down that that reason is why they did it, even though the researchers (and the right brain of the subject) clearly know otherwise.)
Anyway, I think that this mental illness is the root of concern about "meaning" in life, the "innate spiritual need". And that's not to insult people suffering from it, because I've only just recently gotten over suffering from it myself. But having been both mentally well and suffering from that feeling, in my well state like right now it seems clearly just an illness, and the question of what life means, or the need for meaning, are both illusory.
It's quite like an addiction: someone suffering from withdrawal from heroin feels a need that an ordinary person doesn't, but it's not because the ordinary person has an adequate supply of heroin, it's because the ordinary person is healthy and not addicted to it, they don't feel a hole in themselves that heroin is needed to fill. I really wouldn't be surprised if it weren't the exact same neurological mechanism involved in both, seeing as how severe anxiety is a common symptom of withdrawal.
I'm still worried that this will sound insulting, and I really don't mean it to. I'm just reporting on my own personal experience with these feelings. For most of my life I wondered "what exactly is it that you need?" when people expressed that kind of existential dread, and at other times I had this bountiful overflowing of love and awe etc that other people identified as a "mystical experience", and it wasn't until last year that I experienced the opposite of that and realized that that is what people having existential crises are on about. But I see those three states, the bottomless pit of despair that begs to be filled, the normal flat surface that doesn't need anything, and the overflowing bounty of joy and such, as just states of me, and not indicative of anything outside of me, like God.
Hi Forrest!
Thanks again... . There are a lot of intriguing things to unpack.
1. I see confirmation that the will precedes the intellect (from your opening paragraph). Thus the tenets of philosophical Voluntarism: "Voluntarism is the theory that God or the ultimate nature of reality is to be conceived as some form of will (or conation). This theory is contrasted to intellectualism, which gives primacy to God’s reason. The voluntarism/intellectualism distinction was intimately tied to medieval and modern theories of natural law; if we grant that moral or physical laws issue from God, it next needs to be answered whether they issue from God’s will or God’s reason. "
Perhaps like you (not sure), I personally believe that the will precedes the intellect.
2. Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm not sure I am following that illusionary description there. No doubt about it, many things in life are indeed illusionary (for example, in some other threads we've been discussing the phenomena of the reality of Time itself). But the meaning of life, or as I like to phrase it: "What kind of truth does life present to us?" is something I think we need to parse a bit further.
3. There is no need to feel like you are insulting anyone. Fear is real. In college, I had an ADD/disorder mainly due to an undiagnosed state of depression. A depression due to the will to want to be a somebody, yet not knowing what that is. Not knowing one's intrinsic passion's in life can be very disconcerting. (And combine that with an extreme sense of introverted-ness; not knowing or having the tools to know how to reach-out.) It manifested in changing major's numerous times. Quite frustrating to say the least.
But back to fear. I was suicidal at the time. I attempted suicide out in a remote part of the mountains of Colorado. I didn't know what I wanted to be. What were my fears I wonder?
4. The heroin example is interesting. What kind of need causes a person to get addicted to drugs I wonder, any clue?
5. Quoting Pfhorrest
I interpret part of that as the meme of one losing oneself to find oneself. The need for interconnectedness. A need to reach out and feel loved. A feeling to love both yourself, life and other people. Where or who can we find inspiration from, and what is inspiration; what purpose does inspiration serve? Is it a metaphysical survival need, I wonder?
Does any of that (or the foregoing) separate us from the Darwinian thought process?
It sounds like you understand "will" to mean something different than I do, so I don't think I would agree with those words as stated. But the gist of what I was saying before I think goes along with what I think you mean by those words. I guess I might say "feeling sometimes precedes thought". I think there are both "cognitive and conative" (descriptive and prescriptive) feelings and thoughts each, and thoughts can influence feelings that come after them, but it's not so straightforward that everything we feel is because of something we think. (Nor is is straightforwardly the other way around). Sometimes (often) we just feel things for no good reason (which isn't to say for no cause, but causes aren't always reasons), and then retroactively think of reasons to justify that, without realizing we're doing so.
Quoting 3017amen
The idea is that we get this feeling of need first, and then ask what is the thing that we need. But the feeling is not caused by the genuine lack of something, so there is no real answer to that question, and in that way the question is illusory. It's not like we first realize that we are lacking "meaning", and then start feeling bad because we lack it; we first feel bad, irrationally, and then that feeling prompts questions about "what is the meaning of life" as though there is some answer we could be aware of that would resolve that feeling, the ignorance of which is the source of that feeling. But ignorance of "the meaning of life" isn't the source of the feeling; the feeling is the source of the question, and the question, being irrational nonsense, has no real answer. The closest thing to an answer is a method to make the bad feeling go away.
Quoting The Codex Quaerentis: On Practical Action and the Meaning of Life
Quoting 3017amen
I'm really sorry to hear that. I hope you are doing better these days.
Quoting 3017amen
I think it's that the drug promises that kind of overflowing high that is the opposite of what the need for the drug causes, but after the high goes away the mind doesn't just go back to the flat normal state it was before, it falls into a pit that then needs to be filled... by more drugs, only exacerbating the problem.
I've heard that some drugs, like LSD, literally just straight up give you that feeling of meaningfulness, a "mystical experience", and when I've recounted my naturally-occurring experiences to people who've done such drugs, they tell me it sounds like the same thing.
Quoting 3017amen
I'm not sure what this question means.
Also, I'm still not clear what any of this has to do with God, unless you just mean the noncognitivist sense of "God", which I've already said in the OP that I think exists (it's just this feeling of ontophilia), but I don't think deserves to be called "God", which would make any disagreement between us purely verbal.
I'm not sure what you mean by noncognitivist... .
To clarify the concern, consider the following concepts we've been discussing: anxiety, depression, hope, the will, sentience, psychedelic drugs, meditative practices, invulnerability, mathematics, abstracts, meaningfulness, et al.
I just pulled those from all the words that we've shared. Accordingly how does that square with the darwinian thought process?
In other words, are some if not all, of those metaphysical concepts or features of consciousness confer any type of meaning to lower life-forms? For example, using your definition of will; did the will evolve?
Obviously, I'm drawing inferences relative to EOG, or negative theology if you will.
I mean theological noncognitivism, which I described in the OP:
Quoting The Codex Quaerentis: On Practical Action and the Meaning of Life
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting 3017amen
Yes, on my account will evolved, as did consciousness, and all of those emotional things we've been talking about, and many of them (or prototypical variants of them) are shared with "lower" life-forms.
Forrest!
Great. Let's parse each of those concepts. I would like to explore many other metaphysical phenomena from consciousness such as mathematical abstracts, the feelings from looking at colors, feelings from music, feelings from a sense of wonderment, and other abstract metaphysical properties.
Let's start with the will. Think about an explaination of how lower life-forms experience the will. How would, say, that compare to instinct and survival needs in lower life forms? You may have other theories about the Will. Please share how the will is necessary for survival of the fittest, when instinct works perfectly. (Are they concerned about the meaning of life?)
Since we were talking about depression, mood swings, the need to take drugs, and so forth, if animals have some form of will would they too want to commit suicide? In a sense, do they seek out other forms of psychedelic drugs?
Those are just a few thoughts about the will....
Thank you for creating this post. I have a question about your definition of supernatural. Why can supernatual not be defined as a higher realm of the universe.
In your incarnate definition of God, it is defined as some omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent alien that created a lesser universe that we all reside in.
In this case, the supernatural being, a being that lives in a higher realm, is the alien. This alien is acknowledged to have power over the lesser realm therefore we can observe the effects of the alien's control. Whether we understand these observed effects on nature as casued by the alien or by some other mechanism is not importants as this type of God's existance is not dependent on our understanding.
If the effects of this alien can be observed indirectly, then the alien's higher universe must be some compenent of nature. Therefore, it is not contractory to say that God exists in nature if he exists in some higher partition of nature. This allows God to be both transcendental and incarnate.
That has the consequence, however, that “supernatural” is only relative, and that relative to virtual worlds we create, we ourselves are supernatural.
That also has the consequence that “natural” means something different (and relative) too, and we’d need to come up with new words to mean the things that I meant by “supernatural” and “natural” in the OP.
This seems incorrect to me. It is essentially restating the irreducible complexity assumption as an argument against counterarguments to irreducible complexity. Our (overstated) logical capabilities need not be irreducible, and thus could be (i.e. were) evolved iteratively.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I identify with this. I recall speaking to a Catholic friend of mine about how I felt wandering randomly into Durham cathedral when (and as far as I'm aware, this rarely happens in Durham cathedral) a choir happened to be performing. I recounted a similar profound experience at evensong at King's College, Cambridge.
My friend suggested that this was proof that God speaks to us all, even redeemable atheists such as myself, if I only listen by, for instance, entering a church.
I counter-suggested that, after millennia to practise, Christians have over time perfected some wonderful stimuli that, to them, best approximated what a divine feeling should feel like (in honour of Him, no doubt), and that these stimuli were as apt to excite me as any believer. I have certainly never felt the same profound feeling in a more modest or modern house of God where one presumes my ear is as bent toward God as it is in a magnificent 11th century cathedral or the candlelit 15th century chapel of a wealthy institution.
Same goes for music. People say the same of the visual arts too, although I don't recall being moved by religious art of that vein in the way I've been moved by, say, a Bacon (his Crucifixion notwithstanding) or a Goya.
In light of that, and of this:
Quoting Pfhorrest
God is not the worshipped but is in the worshipping.
In your "supernatural" definition of god, (I see someone made a similar argument, but I would make it more specific,) how do you consider a case that the consequence of god's activity can be observed but it does not appear in regular as a natural phenomenon like wind, therefore some people do observe the evidence of god, but can not record it so mankind can not have an agreement on god's existence.
I think there is a presumption of your classification of god: that you know the definition of "nature". However the human definition of "nation" is evolving, thousands of years ago, humankind considered lots of things as mysteries, "supernatural", "nature" is underestimated by them, and now you believe everything you experience is natural, in the faith that science will eventually explain everything. Is this belief well-founded?
If it does not at first appear regular, even just to one individual, or does not appear accessible to all individuals equally, then we need to figure out what the differences are between the circumstances when it does appear and when it doesn’t, and between the people to whom it appears and the people to whom it doesn’t. We must proceed on the assumption that there are some such differences that account for the apparent irregularities, because to do otherwise is simply to assume that the phenomenon is inexplicable, rather than that we simply haven’t explicitly it yet. More on that below.
Quoting farmer
There is a difference between something being unexplained and something being unexplainable. There can be all kinds of unexplained phenomena, even ones people would want to call “paranormal”, without any if them being unexplainable in principle. And if we would like to explain things where possible, we must try to do so. But if we assume it is not possible then there is no point in trying, in which case if that assumption is wrong and it is possible, we will never find out. So we must proceed always on at least a tacit assumption that such explanation is possible, and that things we haven’t explained yet just haven’t been explained YET, not that they can never be explained.
I completely agree with you that we should try our best to understand or explain all phenomenon we see, I think the opposite is what you called "non-cognitivist". But I think "there might be something that is unexplainable" is a more gentle presumption than "anything is explainable". Because the fact that the world is explainable itself is not explainable ( or at least not explained), as Einstein said similarly. I suppose the burden of proof is on the "anything is explainable" side.
No, non-cognitivism is using words in a way where truth isn’t even something that applies to them, because they’re not trying to convey literal truths at all, but rather e.g. to evoke emotions.
Quoting farmer
“Anything might or might not be explainable” is the least assumptive position. Burden of proof is on anyone who would vary from that either direction. But in our actions we cannot help but belie a tacit assumption one way or another: that explanation is in principles possible (belied by trying to find it), or that it’s not (belied by not trying). Assuming it’s not, by not trying, guarantees that you won’t. Assuming it is, by trying, doesn’t guarantee anything, but it leaves open the possibility that you might. That is a pragmatic reason to act always on the assumption that explanation is possible, by trying, and never on the assumption that it is not, and so giving up.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, do you mean ("everything is explainable" or "everything is not explainable") is the least assumption, or "anything is either explainable or unexplainable" is the least assumption, or otherwise?
(But as soon as we act, we tacitly assume more than that, in one direction or the other).
I see your point, but I think one (like me) could assume a thing is explainable and act as so while keeping in mind the possibility of the opposite. Figuratively, a football player plays as if he will win, but he could also be aware of the possibility to lose.
And my critique of supernaturalism is grounded in criticism more than objectivism. The supernaturalist posits that there is something out there that is objectively real (so far so good), but beyond our ability to investigate. So any opinion we hold on it must just be taken at someone’s word — maybe just our own — without question, which is exactly that kind of arrogance that “THIS is the winning play” that my principle of criticism is against.
We must always proceed on the assumption that there is some answer or another out there, but that any particular proposal might not turn out to be it, if we want to have any hope of narrowing in on whatever the right answer is, if that should turn out to be possible.
I'm not sure whether this is against your position, because "there is a thing beyond our ability to investigate" does not mean "this thing is beyond our ability to investigate".
Quoting Pfhorrest
I can‘t see how the last sentence deduces this one.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I agree. But when we are talking about "supernatural" god, we are not talking about a god supernaturalists refer to, we are talking about an objective supernatural god that either exists or not. So no matter how "supernaturalists" behave (as your description or not), we should not take their behavior or their definition in our account, right? And the possibility that the supernatural god is influential but unexplainable seems to me is not neglectable, which hinders your deduction on the supernatural god.
I’m not talking about what some self-identified group of supernaturalists say about themselves, rather I am saying something about belief in the supernatural myself. A god (or anything) that is influential is definitionally not supernatural on my account.
Does it mean you put the influential but unexplainable (if exists) god in the class of "incarnate", I don't get the precise definition of "incarnate", but if you use "alien" as an example, seems to me it's not a good analogy for that god I describe?
We can never know if something is unexplainable, only that it is not explained yet.
Quoting farmer
Yes.
Quoting farmer
That’s why I think that incarnate things are not fit to be referents of the term “god”.
You’ve got powerful aliens, the impersonal universe itself, impossible nonexistent things beyond the universe, or else some warm fuzzy feelings. None of those things except the one that can’t exist seem like they really deserve to be called “god”, so nothing that deserves to be called “god” can exist.
I agree, but we need to leave a space for "unexplainable" in our deduction, even when we are trying to explain everything, therefore your 4 definitions of "god" can not cover all possibilities.
The only things that could possibly be unexplainable in principle are supernatural things that have no effects on the world, so that falls into that category of things that could count as God, but couldn't exist.
It's kind of a loop, a god that is influential and unexplainable is denied by your categories.
Wanting to admit an influential but unexplainable God is just wanting to declare that something is inherently a mystery just because. It’s nothing more than giving up.
Adding to this, 'anything is explainable' might scratch the same old itch that theology scratches. We are afraid of the dark, and stories are perhaps the torches we cling to as we move through it.
I think I fully understand your position now. There's a jumping in either my reason or yours or both, I was keeping saying "A is possible" while you kept claiming "A does not exist". Since we are both so confident, I don't think a further discussion will help, let's stop here.
Thanks for your attention.
I agree with you. Besides, these two respectively define “the dark" different ways, and when you call "the dark" as "the dark", you have already presumptively taken some perspective.
I agree with you about the presumption involved in how 'darkness' is understood. What do darkness-managing stories have in common? Well, the managing of darkness, at least. Perhaps there is also always an other who is lost in the darkness (whoever rejects that particular darkness-management strategy.)
Speaking as an atheist, I find this nothing more a bit too strong. Consider the gap between the believer in some creed and the more cautious person who doesn't quite believe his own creed, including a creed like this 'nothing more.'
Consider Hume's point about our animal faith in the uniformity of nature. Perhaps a certain type of philosopher (or just everyone) needs to keep something tied up in the basement.
To use your darkness metaphor, it’s all about the choice to either just sit in the dark, pretend it isn’t dark, or else TRY to find your way out of the darkness.
It maybe is just an admission that the horizon of knowledge is not the bounds of the universe. I want to try and articulate a notion which is that the scientific mentality of only considering as real, what can be explained in its own terms, is only applicable to what can be subordinated to that approach. Whereas what is traditionally associated with metaphysics, is the attempt to understand what is superordinate to the understanding - what must be the case for understanding to exist in the first place. And that may involve an intuition of something or some being which is 'over the horizon' of direct knowledge - something 'above' or 'prior to' the understanding. (Actually it's something like the sentiment expressed in this Einstein aphorism.)
Consider this: are scientific laws and principles themselves explainable? I'm inclined to say they're not, that they're the basis of explanation, not the target of explanation. I mean, science obviously understands many things, but it doesn't necessarily understand 'the nature of science'. That is why philosophy of science is different to science (and often dismissed on those very grounds - 'philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds', said Feynman.)
So seeking self-understanding in scientific terms seems to me to involve a kind of contradiction. That realisation in itself opens out to a different attitude.
Speaking of 'sitting in the darkness', a metaphor I once thought about, was that science and discursive knowledge is like a lamp held up in the darkness. We can see by that light, everything that comes into the circle which it casts. But perhaps if we extinguish the light, we become aware of a vast space which is dimly lit - we can't see it in the same kind of detail, but we can sense its vastness. And that there is a kind of light inside the dark.
If belief is manifest in action, then perhaps so is explanation. The 'explained' is what we know how to deal with, as long as the world doesn't change on us.
I paraphrase what you said as: nature is uniform, because we need it to be, and not because we can prove or explain it. Can I doubt the uniformity of nature? I don't know. I don't feel that I am deciding to act as if.
We can’t conclusive prove anything about the external world, only disprove. And uniformity or explainability is not something that can ever be disproven, only something we can give up on or keep trying at. (Any particular claim that it is uniformly some way or explicable in some way is falsifiable, though).
I like 'falsifiable' theories, but doesn't this notion of falsifiable depend on the uniformity of nature? A theory makes some bad predictions or leads to a disaster, so we abandon it. But maybe the world will change so that the theory becomes vital.
I'm not saying that we should hide in a bunker, paralyzed by skepticism. Perhaps we just ignore the 'darkness' to get along. Perhaps sanity is 'irrational' and the sane man is Oedipus, self-blinded.
This is a good metaphor. But in his position, the answer would be: when one holds a lamp, he can't assume there is a thing within the light range but not seen.
That's what I had in mind, but without the moonlight that you go on to mention. This story of the moonlight would itself be light from the lantern. 'Darkness' is what a basic story doesn't account for, doesn't notice in the first place, or gets wrong in the sense of leading us into trouble.
I like your analogy, it reminds me of the idea that the Christ is the light of the world. Wherein the light is not the light we see with our eyes, or known to science, but a spiritual light, which by its illumination animates life and consciousness, is the very quick of these things.
If I have God as an 'alien' who can physically preserve me, I don't need to argue for God's existence. Why should I care what the less favored think?
From this perspective, philosophy is intrinsically atheist. It's the 'religion of science' trying to make sense of both science and itself, 'rationally.' It is exoteric (aimed at anyone) as opposed to esoteric (aimed at the blessed, the three-eyed, etc.)
What you're saying, is that whatever is not empirically detectable can't be considered real. Basically, and I know you will object to this, this is empiricist positivism - that only what can be known or detected by the senses (augmented by instruments) is real or able to be considered.
However this excludes as a matter of definition the domain of what is subjectively real.Of course, you do allow for the reality of what you consider to be ecstatic states of being, which you (fallaciously, in my view) equate with Nirv??a.
So, having introduced that term, let's consider what the Buddhist tradition means by it.
To start with, the Buddha does seem to agree that what is detectable by the senses is all that can be spoken of:
(Sabba Sutta SN 35.23 trs Thanissaro, Access to Insight.)
And indeed, some scholars have argued on these grounds that the Buddha was indeed an early proto-naturalist, or proto-positivist, even. However, that would be mistaken, for the Buddha, having established the identity of ‘the All’, then advises that this is something to be abandoned:
(Pahanaya Sutta, SN 35.24, trs Thanissaro, Access to Insight).
Does this say, then, that beyond the ‘six sense gates’ and the activities of thought-formations and discriminative consciousness, there is nothing, the absence of any kind of life, mind, or intelligence? This is dealt with as follows:
(Kotthita Sutta, AN 4.174, trs Thanissaro, Access to Insight.)
In the early Buddhist texts, 'the Buddha' (j.e. 'enlightened one') goes through seven stages of dhyana (contemplative quiescence) culminating in Nirv??a which is 'release from the cycle of transmigration' (sa?s?ra). This is not, as the last of the above quotations indicate, mere nothingness or non-being. But what it is, is unknowable to the discursive intellect. We might say that it is a form of gnosis that completely transforms our understanding of the nature of things.
Now, whether to take that on faith or not - I don't claim to have any direct familiarity with such states or to have realised such higher states of being. On the other hand, I am disposed towards accepting that statements about them are, in modern philosophical terms, veridical, that is, they convey insight into reality. But what kinds of insight, and what conception of the nature of reality, is what is at issue.
The naturalist worldview that I think you advocate, is very much an artefact of the European Enlightenment. And indeed it has a great deal to commend it, I for one would not have a livelihood without modern science and technology. But even though I respect it, I don't think it circumscribes the horizons of what is real. 'More in heaven and earth' - that kind of thing.
But what are we as outsiders to make of this? It sounds like a knowledge that doesn't involve words.
It sounds like 'God as a feeling' that doesn't want to be 'just a feeling.'
Quoting Wayfarer
While talking with a friend recently about buried spiritual scrolls, it occurred to me that their role as forgotten/repressed wisdom 'was' the message. The idea of forgotten/repressed spiritual secrets is already more stimulating perhaps than the secrets themselves.
Is the envelope the letter here?
Every theory is just postulating that the world is uniform in such-and-such way. To falsify it is to show that the world is not uniform in that way. But that tells us nothing about whether the world is uniform in some other way. We can never prove or disprove whether or not it is uniform at all, only assume one way or the other; and we cannot help but tacitly make such an assumption by our actions, choosing to search for the uniformity we presume is in there somewhere, or not.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nah, I don’t object to that, so long as we’re only talking about description of reality. My only real objections to positivism are that they were generally confirmationists / justificationists (“verificationists”) rather than falsificationists / critical rationalists, and more importantly, that they refused to engage in or acknowledge that there is more to thought than just description; especially, prescription is an equally important activity, with a whole philosophy comparable to their descriptive philosophy needed to underpin it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don’t view the objective and the subjective as cleanly separated. Empirical experience is inherently subjective; objective reality as I construe it is just the limit of accounting for more and more such experiences, gradually removing subjective bias in the process. In holding reality to consist entirely of empirical stuff, I’m denying that there is anything utterly beyond subjective experience, affirming that objective reality is made of the same stuff as our subjective experiences; it’s just ALL of them, rather than only some.
Quoting Wayfarer
You clearly know more about Buddhism than I do, so I won’t argue about whether or not the kind of state I call “ontophilia” really is or isn’t the same thing as “nirvana”, but I would like to explain why it seems so to me.
Essentially, it is because in ontophilic states as I’ve experienced them, there is a sense of utmost peace and detachment. There is so much positive feeling welling up from inside about nothing in particular that it feels like one could not possibly want for anything, such that even death of oneself or the whole universe is not a frightening prospect. At the same time, because of that same overwhelming positivity, it seems intrinsically worthwhile to keep on living, and to keep the world going well too. Either living forever or dying right now, or anywhere in between, seem acceptable. Everything seems acceptable. There is no want or longing.
In contrast, the opposite of that feeling, “ontophobia” as I call it, is existential dread, where one is constantly afraid of death, yet also finds living to be a misery, and the prospect of living forever seems a fate perhaps worse than death. Nothing is acceptable, and one feels a bottomless hole of perpetually unfulfillable desires inside them, a hunger for something that can’t exist, and so a hunger that can’t possibly be sated.
As I understand it, nirvana is supposed to be just such a state of detached contentment, the extinguishing of all desire, the opposite of existential dread. So it really sounds like what I mean by ontophilia.
We can't help ourselves, as Popper saw. We creatively project structures/uniformities on the world. So where is the choice you mention? We can find ourselves attached to a critical tradition in which one gives reasons for one's theories and adapts them to criticism.
'Darkness' seems to be tacitly assumed within any critical tradition (a tradition of being anti-traditional.)
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"Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do not we squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,—till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away?—Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once."
"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our ME: wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not."
"So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:—and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?—O Heaven whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.
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In general it's an amazing text.
We cannot help but assume one way or another, through our actions. The choice is which way to assume, by which actions we take.
Nice text, clearly written by someone who has conceived of being as spirit, or flame. Finishing with the realisation of the decent and return to the source.
Maybe! I haven't had many such experiences myself. I have had momentary epiphanies which have been life-changing, though. (Must say, I'm not taken by 'ontophilia' even though I can see the semantic sense of it.)
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think that's where you differ to philosophers of a couple of generations back. The separateness of the subjective and objective realms was a deep assumption for scientific realism. I think that realisation is quite accepted now, but was central to the Bohr-Einstein debates. (See does the universe exist if we're not looking?)
In any case, and getting back to the topic - Buddhism is not a theistic religion, in the sense that it's not oriented around God. Although, that said, devas - divine beings - are assumed to be real in the early Buddhist texts, but the realisation of Nirv??a doesn't depend on this. That's one of the reasons that Buddhism became attractive to modern Europe - some of the early translators presented it as more compatible with science, in fact the reason the word 'enlightenment' was used to translate the Buddhist term 'bodhi', was because of the consonance of that term with 'enlightenment values'. However later scholars have cast doubt on this interpretation of Buddhism, pointing out that in practice it remains firmly embedded in a mythological culture in which 'the Buddha' to all intents and purposes has assumed the role of an all-knowing deity.
Quoting Yellow Horse
If the reference is to the Nag Hammadi scrolls, the story behind them is indeed fascinating. They were unearthed from a cave in Egypt in the 1970's and after the house mother had found they weren't particularly good fuel for cooking on, taken to an antiquities market. They were found to be a treasure trove of lost Gnostic gospels, including one that has since become famous, The Gospel of Thomas.
The point about the gnostic gospels is that they present an alternative form of early Christianity. I studied comparative religion and Buddhism as part of my philosophical quest, hence my interest in it. During the course of those studies, I formed the view that the early gnostics were a lot more like today's new-age and countercultural religious types. It's much more like Eastern religious practices, with much less emphasis on belief - doxa - and more in developing wisdom - gnosis. As it turned out, however, the gnostics were basically buried by what emerged as mainstream Christianity, and in such cases, history was definitely written by the victors.
Here's a list of current titles on Gnostic Christianity including many drawn from the Nag Hammadi finds.
I like what I know of it. What I was getting at, though, was that the idea of suppressed spiritual knowledge was already by itself a spiritual text, a myth/symbol with a certain potency.
A life can be satisfactorily structured as a pursuit, with not suffering but despair as spiritual danger.
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His disciples said, "When will you appear to us, and when will we see you?"
Jesus said, "When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid."
(Gospel of Thomas)
Yes indeed, and I agree with you that being is spirit or flame (or time or...). Carlyle apparently influenced Emerson, and other passages remind me of highlights of 20th century philosophy.
The book is online at Gutenberg.org, which saves me from typing these out.
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"Yes, Friends," elsewhere observes the Professor, "not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what is Sense but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in from the circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows'-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value little differing from a horse-shoe? It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognize symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?
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That's from the 'Symbols' section. Personally I like to render unto science what is science's. This might sound like 'religion is just symbols,' but this is only reductive if we underrate symbols.
While this is a pretty awesome way of viewing things (reality as the intersect of dreams), it ignores the successful-in-my-view destruction of the subject in 20th century philosophy.
I don't mean that the concept loses its utility, but only that it is undermined as a foundation.
Rather than building up the shared world from individuals, it (counter-intuitively) looks more plausible to me to work in the other direction.
Perhaps we both see private minds as 'constructions' or 'fictions' then, or at least ontologically secondary or derived or dependent.
What is language? Is it mental? Is it physical? Neither works for me. It is within language that such distinctions are possible in the first place.
It is within language also that we can talk of individuals with their private minds (stuffed with more language, toothaches, and God-as-love.)
I agree with @Adam's Off Ox in their rejection of those bulleted points. I mention this in case it illuminates some of the thoughts presented in this thread.
Wasn't that one of Kierkegaard's main points? I haven't ever read his works, but feel as though I ought to.
My take on the sense in which 'mind is fundamental' or Eddington's 'the stuff of the world is mind-stuff', is *not* that the mind or mind-stuff or whatever is objectively real. Rather it's that everything we judge to be real is, well, a judgement, and judgement is first and foremost a mental act. This doesn't mean, also, that objects are simply figments or illusions, however it does mean that they lack intrinsic reality - a point which I think is amply confirmed by 20th c. physics.
While I also see something primary in judgment, the leap from language to the 'mental' is problematic. This is the dove trying to fly in an airless space.
To what degree does this Aristotle quote express what today is common sense?
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Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. (On Interpretation)
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The idea that spoken words directly symbolize mental experiences, however initially intuitively plausible, turns out to have some serious problems.
The most obvious issue is epistemological. If the 'mental' is also 'private,' then we have created a realm that excludes objectivity (and critical thinking) from the beginning.
Note that even the meaning of 'mental' is lost in the fog this way, along with the meaning of 'meaning.'
But Aristotle also sees something else, which subverts his opening.
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By a noun we mean a sound significant by convention, which has no reference to time...
The limitation 'by convention' was introduced because nothing is by nature a noun or name- it is only so when it becomes a symbol...
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Perhaps we should say significant as convention. ????? comes to mind here.
I'm suggesting that language or ????? is prior to the mental/physical distinction, which would make it the structure of the world, with this structure still being born and dying off.
I am reminded of Heraclitus.
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It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.
But isn't that a good argument for universals? The fact that an idea can be expressed in different languages, and using different symbols, but retain exactly the same meaning, shows that the meaning and the form that the meaning is encoded in, are separate. Say a precise formula is transmitted by a number of different systems and languages - in each case, the expression is completely different, but the meaning is identical. What is it that enables the mind to recognise the same information in such different forms? I am inclined to say that it is intelligence, which is derived from 'inte-legere', 'to read between'. And that ties in with the Greek notion of nous, which is the faculty that sees meaning.
Quoting Yellow Horse
It's not as if the word is one thing, and the mental experience another - that would indeed be something like representative realism, which is a can of worms.
What I'm criticizing is the view that Kant describes as 'transcendental realism':
(CPR, A369)
I'm of the view that what Kant describes as 'transcendental realism' is the innate tendency of thought - that we naturally presume that the objective domain exists independently of any act of judgement on our part, that it would exist just the same if you or I or every human ceased to exist. But what this doesn't see is that the mind itself provides the framework within which every judgement about 'what exists' is meaningful. In other words, there is a subjective pole or element in the absence of which nothing exists whatever; you can't take away the observing intelligence and leave the world. And I think that observation has been borne out by many of the developments in 20th C. science and philosophy. (Have you read Michel Bitbol?)
So
Quoting Yellow Horse
I don't read Greek but Google Translate gives that as 'reason'. And I agree - I think it is reason that provides the structure through which the world is intelligible. The issue is that in modern philosophy, reason is subjectivised or instrumentalised - you will notice in a number of debates, the suggestion that reason is real independently of what humans deem it to be, is vigorously disputed.
This is the theme of Horkheimer's book Eclipse of Reason and it's spot on. Not that I think a 'return' to some idealised archaic notion of reason is possible. But I think the neo-thomist philosophers have something crucial to say about this.
I thought of a better way to post our difference. See whether it makes sense.
I understand your position as that the human reason is intrinsically against mysteries or supernatural, otherwise, how can it work without assuming it works, right?
I agree with this and I think it's the foundation of modern philosophy and science.
However, besides this, I also hold another more postmodern idea that reason might have its limitation, although I can not think of, with reason, a case where reason does not work, it's kind of paradoxical, I can see the possibility by analogy, however. So I suppose to save the possibility of the human reason not working in my deduction. In our case, I would accept the possible existence of influential but unexplainable things, which is against the nature of reason (I don't think so, but I understand your agreement with so).
My position brings a bunch of other issues, for instance, if the human reason is not trustable, what's the point to make a deduction at all?
Note, though, that Aristotle offers no argument and only articulates what he takes for obvious.
Quoting Wayfarer
That translation occurs in some sense does support the fuzzy hypothesis of mental stuff, but this same hypothesis forecloses any investigation into whether some exact meaning is communicated.
Recalling the OP, this is related to difficulty of knowing whether I or my guru is 'enlightened,' if being enlightened is understood as one and the same state potentially attainable by anyone.
If we know the tree by its fruit, then perhaps the fruit is primary.
I can't peek into the mind of the other at language-independent thought-stuff is there.
I just used Google translate to translate 'meaning is ineffable' into Icelandic: 'Merking er óhagkvæm.'
Exactly.
The visual metaphor is noteworthy here. ????? meant visible form or shape. What is this inner eye? And why does it depend on an eye-metaphor?
Meaning tends to be anchored in the world, though philosophy strives against this anchoring in its construction of a literal-as-possible terminology. This reminds me of a soul trying to escape the body and the dove that wants to fly in an airless space.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yup, that's what I am saying. If nouns are sounds entangled in conventions, and we think with nouns,...
Quoting Wayfarer
On the contrary, one of the big themes in more recent philosophy is a critique of the subject (for instance, arguments against the intelligibility of a private language.)
Quoting Wayfarer
That sounds more plausible, especially since reason independent of human language is hard to parse.
Perhaps the problem is the hypothesis of two reasons, the world's and then derivative human reason.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nor does an observing intelligence makes sense outside of a world. What I see is a system of interdependent concepts.
We might say that philosophers have tended to anchor the entire system in/through just one of its elements, forgetting that the sense of this element depends on the system it is supposed to anchor or ground.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But this isn't a binary situation (no trust versus complete trust.) Instead we are on Neurath's boat.
It's like reading Darwin against Darwin too strongly or not reading Darwin against Darwin at all.
I just wanted to add a thought related the inverted spectrum scenario. If 'my' red is not 'your red, it doesn't matter as long as we both agree that 'roses are red.'
Perhaps the spectrum from fact to interpretation is the spectrum from uncontroversial propositions toward more controversial propositions that depend on the less controversial.
I don't see how a solid epistemology can fit with direct perception models, whether what are perceived are universals or sense data.
If there are 'epistemological atoms' (here is where we agree), they seem to be something like uncontroversial judgments (facts), which are only intelligible as part of a living language.
I don't think you see what I mean - I'm not talking about anything of the kind. Something much more prosaic - the recipe for a birthday cake, say but it could be any 'item of information'. What I'm saying is that anything of that kind can be written in any number of languages - Greek, English, Chinese or whatever - and many different kinds of media - binary, handwritten, carved in granite. (Hence, 'Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.')
In each case both the symbolic form and the media are completely different from each other - but the same information is communicated. So in this and countless other cases, an exact meaning is communicated, despite the external form and even the media of the communication being different.
So I think what Aristotle is referring to here is something much more precise that simply 'thought' - I think he's talking about a concept, something about which a definite idea can be formed. I wouldn't count colours amongst them - I'm thinking more of the kinds of concepts which have universal applicability and a determinate reference.
Nice, for me it reads as "fantasy" is referring to ego and personality. Such feeds on symbols as it lives and builds the sense of self, society and culture. All people share a common mental faculty and world of symbols (I like to view "all people" as one being in this sense, amongst the kingdoms of nature).
I agree about the dove trying to fly without air, I see a causal world in which mind is embedded. There being a common thread on which they both hang in incarnation.
Oh, I understand that, and this is perhaps why 'meaning' has the use it does in our language, to get at what all translations share. Translate comes from 'carry-across,' and comes with the notion of an X (language independent meaning) that is being carried from one 'vehicle' to another.
Such translations can be uncontroversial (function as facts.) In other cases, we have translators' prefaces explaining why a perfect translation is impossible.
The question remains, though. What is this language independent meaning? We never see it naked. It's always in the clothes of this or that medium or language.
If we want to reason about such things (be scientific), we can't appeal to uncheckable intuitions or private mental experience.
While the color issue is mundane, it connects to talk about the experience of gnosis and enlightenment or God ---and therefore to the OP.
Do we infer that there is only one kind of gnosis simply because a single noun is used in different contexts?
If this word is 'anchored' by or 'defined' as a pointer to private mental experience, then perhaps there are billiions of kinds of gnosis (or actually trillions, since surely our personal concepts of gnosis evolve with experience and reading.)
I'm trying to point out that grounding language in private mental experience leads to an epistemological apocalypse.
I like incarnation as a metaphor. 'In itself' the 'mental' and the 'physical' are one, or something like that. We impose useful distinctions and forget we have done so, it seems to me.
I agree also that symbols are the glue that holds us together. If you want to know an ego, figure out what symbols it incarnates (they incarnate).
If you could break what physicists or sociologists thought were laws of their respective domains of investigation then they wouldn't be universally applicable in the form given. If you were able to break the laws of society or the laws of physics (as espoused by PHYSICISTS) and if a law in both contexts is something which most apply in all circumstances in the form defined then yes they wouldn't be laws. Note that the only reason we are interested in discovering or cataloging laws of nature are because we have found some aspect of nature that is universally applicable in all circumstances due to metaphysical necessity/a constant pattern of nature, if they were not universally applicable but merely arbitrary patterns why call them laws of nature?
To discover said laws or even suspect they exist we need to allow for the possibility that the world is coherent and isn't inherently random in all respects. This implies there are patterns or non-random aspects to nature that exist which are applicable to most situations. . . why don't you find them and inductively test them until they either do or do not break. Even finding false laws of nature is inherently helpful because you have found an important regularity in nature which always applies in certain situations and could clue you into more fundamental notions. Remember the difference between the map and what we interpret is among the terrain from said map.
Finally, why would they follow these laws? You mean metaphysically they could've been other wise (NOT JUST CONCEPTUAL POSSIBILITY)? Is it metaphysically possible that reality could ACTUALLY be anything else than it already is.
Define life first. As i'm pretty sure you will not include much info into what a living organism is made out of (as the iron in my blood is NOT ALIVE) but that a living being is a collection of patterns and processes. You're made up of non-living atoms so what distinguishes you from the environment. . . could be the patterns and processes that this NON-LIVING matter under goes that defines it as living.
Second, the laws could be there for no reason, some reason, metaphysically necessity (given there is no metaphysically possible way it could have been other wise), or even a self-sufficient reason within it. So many possibilities you CHOOSE to ignore and not investigate for the betterment of human knowledge or philosophy.
Third, how do you define beauty, good, or evil. Is it a substance things are made out of or more likely a relationship between processes and patterns of behavior such as social connections as well as our psychology? What sounds crazy to me is a persons adamant use of vague terminology and rampant straw-man of internet atheists.
Maybe giving it form is part of what makes it intelligible. Substance and form = hylo~morphe.
Quoting Yellow Horse
Perfectly agree. But if time permitted, which it doesn't, I could find numerous examples on this forum where language (and mathematics!) is, at least, treated as a subjective construction, a kind of social construct. Case in point:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What I think this shows, is that there is an implicit understanding of 'self' and 'nature' as independent domains - the subjective and objective domains, you might say. Whereas, I'm inclined to say that it is of the nature of concepts to mediate these apparently-separate domains in such a way that they're not separate.
'Aquinas endorses the Aristotelian view that the soul is potentially all things, and he holds that cognition involves its actually becoming a given thing or, as he sometimes puts it, its being assimilated to that thing in a certain way. As Aquinas sees it, the development of this notion of cognition as the soul’s assimilation to the objects cognized requires him to deal with two sorts of issues. First, he needs a metaphysical account of the two relata: the human soul and the object of human cognition. Here he draws primarily on his Artistotelian hylomorphism.'
Anyway - these are rushed notes, as duty calls, I'm on a contract.
That's what I'm suggesting. The separation of language (for instance) into substance and form happens within language.
It's the same with 'mental' and 'physical,' a related interdependent pair of concepts.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ah, but social constructs are not subjective ('based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.'). The social is the transpersonal or impersonal.
Even if one wants to explain social conventions in terms of something else (Platonic realms), it's the social realm that is given or factual.
Claims about grasping set theory with the inner eye are basically 'defined' to be uncheckable.
To be clear, I don't think we are all p-zombies, and I think there is something like mathematical intuition, but the more we rely on vague intuitions the less we are being philosophers.
Intuitively the earth does not move, for instance.
Quite, we (humanity) might well be the incarnated symbol of another, unknown being.
I like this. Even if we can figure out ten milliion useful things, embrace countless narratives, it's seems valuable to remember the darkness as we philosophize. As you say appearances. We ghosts see only apparitions.
Quoting Punshhh
This also speaks to me. 'Limited position' is good. We might also talk of finite personalities, blossoming in soils they did not choose, adapted to that soil, dreaming that what has been is necessarily what will be.
Quoting Punshhh
Ah, utility. The language we learn as children with all of its distinctions is that dark soil that makes our partial vision possible while it makes a perfect vision impossible. I mean that 'our' distinctions are not the only distinctions possible, which we strangely discover by means of 'our' distinctions, the ones we did not choose.
We work hard to obtain a little knowledge of our ignorance.
But the point is, it has ramifications far beyond language. Or put another way, language is not merely self-referential. It conveys information we might not have found by any other means. Although I can see already that we're speaking at cross-purposes in what is already a tangent, so I'll stop thrashing about now.
Yes, I agree. Concepts such as reference frames help us understand the (seeming) external world. But what does the concept of Winnie the Pooh mediate? (And Tigger too, of course.) :rofl:
I agree that language is not merely self-referential. It's one thing to deny sensation and intuition and another thing to say that they can't function as foundations epistemologically.
To stay on topic, if one is arguing theism in a philosophical context, then one can only argue from facts (uncontroversial propositions) towards interpretations as candidates for facts (that God makes sense as part of an interpretation of the facts.)
I suggest that facts are primary, and that the language they are 'made of' can't be reduced to either mind-stuff or matter-stuff, for reasons we've touched on.
While I try to approach all of this critically, a classic line occurs to me here:
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In the beginning was the Word...
I was harking back to your comment about the concept of 'reference frames' (I'm not a physicist, but have a rough idea) as being 'not real'. Because, you see, I am trying to show that proper concepts are real, and not simply because there's someone around to entertain them.
I'm trying to avoid 'arguing for theism'. What I'm trying to argue for, is the concept of degrees of reality. I'm trying to show that certain kinds of intellectual or intelligible objects are real but not material. I have always been tremendously impressed by this argument from Augustine and refer to it regularly, in the somewhat wan hope that someone else will like it too.
There's another example, however, and one which is nearer Kenosha Kid's bailiwick. That is Ruth Kastner's gloss on Heisenberg's interpretation of Aristotle's potentia, as discussed in this paper. The phrase that interests me is this:
You see, I don't think modern philosophy, generally, has room for the notion of 'degrees of existence'. I think that we think that something is either real or it isn't - reality is a univocal term. So I think that's significant. (I do wonder if Heisenberg's reputation as a philosopher was somewhat overlooked because he was, after all, a senior figure in Hitler's atomic weapons program.)
I suggest that we already do accept degrees of reality in a loose way as suggested by various distinctions in language.
The difference is perhaps that you want to make such a distinction primary or foundational.
Socrates was mortal, but the words of Socrates are (relatively) immortal. Generations come and go, relearning the same old Pythagorean theorem, agreeing that it is a fact about space. Then of course the use-meaning of 'bread' outlasts any 'actual' bread that one would care to eat.
I think Augustine was reifying aspects of language.
Here's a quote from Aristotle that seems relevant (On The Soul).
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The case of mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. If it could be destroyed at all, it would be under the blunting influence of old age. What really happens in respect of mind in old age is, however, exactly parallel to what happens in the case of the sense organs; if the old man could recover the proper kind of eye, he would see just as well as the young man. The incapacity of old age is due to an affection not of the soul but of its vehicle, as occurs in drunkenness or disease. Thus it is that in old age the activity of mind or intellectual apprehension declines only through the decay of some other inward part; mind itself is impassible. Thinking, loving, and hating are affections not of mind, but of that which has mind, so far as it has it. That is why, when this vehicle decays, memory and love cease; they were activities not of mind, but of the composite which has perished; mind is, no doubt, something more divine and impassible.
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Socrates is mortal, but his best sentences are something 'more divine and impassible.' I like the idea that philosophy is objective (transpersonal) 'thinking' (language).
It happens 'in' or 'for' various mortal philosophers who thereby participate in and contribute to something relatively deathless and impervious.
Here I am, after all, quoting a translation of Aristotle.
I'm inclined to say that philosophers of all people should be especially sensitive to ambiguity and polysemy. Just how modern are the philosophers you are talking about here?
I think I do sometimes meet with the attitude that I think you have in mind, and I think of it as the collapse of objectivity into objects.
Note, though, that this collapse can involve psychical as well as physical objects.
Then how are they mediators of the subjective-objective divide if they depend only on the objective, i.e. are independent of the existence of subjectivities.
And if you EVER disrespect Tigger like that again, I swear...!!!
In classical philosophy there was an hierarchy of the understanding, such that mathematical and scientific reason were said to be higher than (mere) sensory knowledge. Higher still was knowledge of the Ideas (which then became incorporated into theology). Something of that became incorporated into early modern science - Galileo's entire methology was built around his conviction that the book of nature was written in mathematics. Science has retained the mathematics, but I think it's lost any sense of there being an axis along which the term 'higher' is really meaningful; it is after all a kind of value judgement.
Quoting Yellow Horse
[quote=Some Geezer]The phrase 'Everything is relative' is spoken emphatically by the very people for whom the atom or its elements are still the ultimate reality. Everything is relative, they say, but at the same time they declare as indubitable truth that the mind is nothing but a product of cerebral processes. This combination of gross objectivism and bottomless subjectivism represents a synthesis of logically irreconcilable, contradictory principles of thought, which is equally unfortunate from the point of view of philosophical consistency and from that ethical and cultural value. [/quote]
Quoting Yellow Horse
Bearing in mind, 'substance' was 'ouisia' and 'mind' was 'nous' - much has been lost in translation, I think.
Thomas Nagel: Thoughts are Real.
I say the difference is analogous to the difference between the physical symbol and its meaning. We ourselves live in a meaning-world - even the declaration that the world has no meaning is dependent on that. It is from within that meaning-world that all judgements are made.
These personalities might be described as the dreams of the S?k?ma ?ar?ra, as it travels the spheres. Brought to the west by the Theosophists.
https://theosophy.wiki/en/Linga-Sharira
As I discussed in the pomo thread, I have observed that there are a pair of common worldviews that suffer from this exact problem but in opposite ways, differentiated along the is-ought / fact-norm divide. One of them is scientism, which is what’s described above: it takes a cynical, relativist, and therefore ultimately nihilist view toward normative topics, and while it does much better on factual topics, it often goes a little too far into a kind of transcendentally materialist ontology and elitist authoritarian academics. The other is social constructivism, which takes a cynical, relativist, and therefore ultimately nihilist view toward factual topics, and while it does much better on normative topics, it often goes a little too far into a kind of transcendentally materialist teleology and populist authoritarian politics.
We can thank more recent philosophy (improving on Kant?) for destroying sense-data empiricism as a serious option. Facts are primary (true sentences). Not 'sensations' of redness but statements. "The light is red."
We basically agree, except that we might as well call it a language world. Yes, language is meaningful, but emphasizing 'language-independent meaning' just abandons the critical conversation for an epistemological apocalypse.
From my POV, we don't want to make the same mistake as ontological materialists and reify one aspect of the world with its words. (The world words. The word worlds.)
I find Sellars useful on this issue. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
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Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.
Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically structured. There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods.
***
Personally I think knowledge is hierarchically structured (if we like) in a different way, namely in the spectrum that runs from facts to interpretations.
'Potential' is 'real' in the sense that interpretations are 'fact candidates' that are neither true nor false but currently undecided. In other words, we live in a world not only of actualities but also of articulated ('meaningful') possibilities (which may oppose one another).
Is this not itself significant? How could we check? We can't look into the private minds (long vanished) of those who first used the words philosophically.
Scholars can look at texts and write their own texts about those texts, responding to one another.
We can't look into those scholars' minds to see what they 'really think' behind the words. We have only their texts. Perhaps they have only their texts. They can't prove otherwise given certain assumptions about minds.
For me that framework is (to write it in a fancy way) ?????. Isn't it misleading to call it 'subjective'? If we are 'rational animals,' it's because we talk with one another and celebrate 'transpersonal' (objective) talk as disclosing the facts, be they facts about numbers, neutrons, or nothingness.
Private mental experiences get us nowhere, conceived as they are to make critical thinking about them impossible in principle. The critique of sense-data empiricism is also the critique of the 'Inner Light' (or the reverse if you like, as Locke discovers his sword is sharp on both sides.)
Other posters seem to imply that the 'space of reasons' is 'inter-subjective.' Personally, I think 'interpersonal' or 'social' is better.
If we care or at least pretend to care about justifying our assertions, then such justification is social (for others.)
Yes! Key insight.
But I emphatically agree, this framework is not individual. We're each instances of it but it is basically collective, 'what everyone knows' to be the case. We're embedded in a matrix of meaning, so to speak.
But it's not 'objective' in that it's not discoverable by empiricism; it's transcendent, in the Kantian sense of 'shaping experience but not disclosed by experience'. It's just that analytic philosophy tends to dismiss it BECAUSE it's not objective, and then demand you 'prove' that it's something real. Get the irony? It's like locking yourself into a room and forgetting where the door is. 'What the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it.' ~ Jacques Maritain. And mostly this appears as an implicit 'appeal to science' even though the matter is, as it were, pre-scientific.
Quoting Yellow Horse
I think, mainly, some strains of European philosophy, and that philosophy in the English-speaking world - analytic philosophy - is still ultimately grounded in scientific rationalism. Which is understandable - it's the attempt to retain the aspects of the Western tradition which are relevant to the natural sciences, while ring-fencing 'the supernatural'.
[quote=David Loy]The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Many assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. Yet that is the secular view of secularity, its own self-understanding... The secularity we presuppose must be "de-naturalized" in order to realize how unique and peculiar such a worldview is.[/quote]
Terror in the God Shaped Hole
Quoting Yellow Horse
That's what hermeneutics is for. It takes into account the cultural and historical context of such texts. Plainly many of the ideas of ancient philosophy are archaic and embedded in various forms of mythological cosmology. And us moderns cannot 'un-see' what we've learned. But my intuition is that the ancients sought a kind of synthetic vision of unity - an awareness of the Whole - which is actually the meaning of 'cosmos'. So when Aristotle talks of 'contemplating the first principles', it's much nearer to a kind of visionary state than today's fragmented objectivism.
https://satyagraha.wordpress.com/?s=aristotle
Right. Language is the easiest example, especially once it is grasped that meaning is public. Then one can recognize that language depends on the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
I see why you say that, and I agree that it's not available to a sense-data empiricism that doesn't bother to account for its own possibility.
But, as we agree above, the framework is collective or social. If we abandon the 'myth of the given',
we can see why it makes sense to describe the world as all that is the case. That is to say that the world is fundamentally if not perfectly intelligible. We move in and as significance.
Quoting Wayfarer
Maybe that shoe fits some 'analytic' philosophers, but consider this from Sellars.
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The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.
****
Objectivity is not about (physical) objects. Instead statements about physical objects are prototypically objective, but then so are mathematical statements.
This might explain the 'ancient war.' What is more 'real'? Numbers or atoms? Since both physicists and mathematicians are celebrated for objectivity, the temptation is to find some non-linguistic object that explains this objectivity.
But such objects turn out to be epistemologically invisible, or at least more controversial (as interpretations) than the facts they are supposed to explain.
The Loy quote takes accurate aim at those who grow up secular and take it for granted. Philosophy is one kind of poisonous cure for our all too human tendency to sleepwalk.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, and that too happens in an essentially public space of reasons.
Quoting Wayfarer
That sounds like a description of philosophy to me. Sellars saw it that way too.
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The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
***
I like that Aristotle quote, too.
Sure, though I'd consider these dreams more symbols (as perhaps you also do.)
Right. To recall the forgotten/inherited framing of the situation that we don't even think to question is perhaps more than anything else philosophy's task.
Loy gets it, but I'm suggesting that philosophy also denaturalizes taken-for-granted concepts of consciousness, matter, reality.
This is what Carlyle called 'custom.'
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Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?
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Institutionalized revolution.
I have tackled the well-known Sellars paper a couple of times - the one associated with his 'myth of the given', although that's not the title - generally I liked what I could glean from it, but it requires serious study. Caryle is on the mark - the use of 'custom' in that context reminds me a little of what is called in Indian religions 'samskaras', 'habitual formations'.
Quoting Yellow Horse
We need maths to work out *what* is objective, don't we? If you're presented with a large or ambiguous data set then mathematical analysis is often brought to bear on deciding its objective value.
The prototypically quantifiable objects are of course those of physics - well, they used to be, anyway. :wink:
Now to introduce a metaphysical perspective, specifically the nature of deity in the sense understood by classical metaphysics and theology. Whereas the things of perception are composed of parts and have a beginning and an end in time, 'God' is, according to classical theology, 'simple' - that is, not composed of parts- and 'eternal', that is, not beginning or ending in time.
Accordingly, 'God' does not exist [sup]1[/sup], being of a different nature to any perceptible existent. Theologians might say 'God' was superior to or beyond existence (for example Eiriugena's “nothingness through excellence” (nihil per excellentiam.)) I don't think this is a controversial statement either, when the terms are defined this way (and leaving aside whether you believe in God or not, although if you don't the discussion might be irrelevant or meaningless.)
Now consider intelligible objects, such as number. Obviously we all concur on what a number is, and mathematics is lawful; in other words, we can't just make up our own laws of numbers. But numbers don't exist in the same sense that objects of perception do; there is no object called 'seven'. You might point at the numeral, 7, but that is just a symbol. What we concur on is a number of objects, but the number cannot be said to exist independent of its apprehension, at least, not in the same way objects apparently do. In what realm or sphere do numbers exist? 'Where' are numbers? Surely in the intellectual realm, of which perception is an irreducible part. So numbers are not 'objective' in the same way that 'things' are; but they are nevertheless real. (This of course is denied by many modern philosophers precisely because of the axiom that only what exists is real; naturalism abjurs Platonism. )
Objects of perception - ordinary things - only exist, in this understanding, because they are instances (instantiations) of ideas or universals. Particulars are simply ephemeral instances of the eternal forms, but in themselves, they have no actual being. Their being is conferred by the fact that they conform to ('participate in') the idea. So existence is - and I think this is the sense it was intended by the Platonic and neo-Platonic schools - illusory or at least, not what it appears to be. Sensory objects of perception exist, but only in a transitory and imperfect way. They are 'mortal' - perishable, imperfect, and transient. Whereas the archetypal forms subsist in the One and are apprehended by Nous: while they do not exist they provide the basis for all existing things by creating the pattern, the ratio, whereby particular things are formed (which is made explicit in Plotinus). They are real, above and beyond the existence of wordly things; but they don't actually exist. They don't need to exist; things do the hard work of existence.
'The One cannot itself be a being. If it were a being, it would have a particular nature, and so could not be universally productive. Because it is beyond being (epekeina tes ousias, a phrase from Plato's Republic 509b), it is also beyond thought, because thinking requires the determinations which belong to being: the division between subject and object, and the distinction of one thing from another.'
Wikipedia
The upshot is that most arguments about the 'existence of 'God'' are predicated on a misconception of the subject. 'The transcendent' is transcendent in relation to 'existence'; what transcends existence, doesn't itself exist, or rather, is beyond existence.
Now, do I believe any of this? I don't know if I do. But I think I'm beginning to understand something of it - enough to know that what is usually discussed about it is, shall we say, wide of the mark.
I feel I should add the caveat, although I doubt you require it yourself, that I am not referring to the beings and processes understood by science, or an academic sense, but in a more esoteric sense.
In general I relate to this. At the same time, I would frame it in terms of language or ?????. There are patterns in the world. The 'same' river doesn't have the 'same' water, but rivers are still 'made' of water.
The 'One' is (for me) 'just' the old ?????, and the 'mind' that is supposed to gaze on form is itself another pattern in that ?????. It is a useful pattern, but upon close examination we see that the individual 'mind' is an 'effect' of language, an emanation of the 'One.'
Where we perhaps disagree is that I think you understand some of these patterns to exist independently of human beings. To me that's uncheckable and even hard to parse.
If one sees language, as I do, in terms of social conventions, then the ????? is completely incarnate. There is no river without water, and the dove can't fly in a vacuum.
On the God issue, I think it's helpful to clarify (however roughly) between a God that interferes in the
world and perhaps the afterworld and a philosopher's or mystic's God that involves gnosis, ecstasy, etc.
I don't personally believe in the first kind of God. The year 2020 is not helping, and humans tend to get lost in their fantasies.
As far as the second kind goes, I have enjoyed and do enjoy my own version of it. To me it's going to be poetry, metaphor, myth, symbol, art. That's not necessarily a demotion, since human beings live and die for these things.
My philosopher's god would be philosophy itself, but it would be bad philosophy to call philosophy itself God, and I wouldn't abuse my god that way, so...
Do you mean a mystic god is poetry, metaphor, etc? I may be misreading you.
At first I meant that talk of the philosopher's god was poetry, but given the proposed primacy of ????? also expressed, yes: the mystic's god is poetry-in-progress.
The concept of the poet is one more poem here, as is the (self-referential here) concept of poetry.
Interesting. Do you connect ????? to the concept of "Kairos" at all?
That's my philosopher's god too, more or less.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Maybe it's bad philosophy out proper context, but given that philosophers tend to accept as real only what they can justify philosophically (rationally), the metaphor isn't so bad.
Not sure what you mean.
For me time in general is hugely tied up with ?????, given that language evolves while also 'remembering.'
As far as Kairos goes (I have seen the word used by other thinkers but haven't used it myself), what comes to mind is saying the right thing for that moment.
I am thinking of the temporal context: Individual words aren't really bearers of meaning, as far as I can tell. Only the total historical context determines meaning (inasmuch as it can be determined.)
More locally, I think of the way that meaning 'plays over' a sentence as we anticipate the completion of a thought. In musical terms, a certain pitch gets its meaning from its context.
I mean that 'subjects' or 'egos' or 'minds' or 'poets' are themselves 'poems.' They are interpretations of us having (in some ways) separate bodies.
If one thinks of concepts as neither physical nor mental but rather as caught up in or rather as social conventions, then one has a kind of 'meaning field' that can't be reduced to something more elemental --- though philosophers love to try!
The 'space of reasons' is perhaps a better term, though this over-emphasizes epistemology perhaps while neglecting of other poetic effects (in particular, invention.)
I'm a poet but I'm having trouble with this. It's not poetic to say that subjects, egos, or minds, or poets are poems themselves. It's just clunky. So clearly you mean to use the metaphor differently? I don't know what it means that "they are interpretations of us having (in some ways) separate bodies".
I will try to rescue the metaphor. The intelligibility or structure of mundane reality is dead poetry, or at least on its death bed. Even 'poet' is a dead metaphor.
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Notable enough too, here as elsewhere, wilt thou find the potency of Names; which indeed are but one kind of such custom-woven, wonder-hiding Garments. Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we have now named Madness, and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us: What is Madness, what are Nerves?
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm#link2HCH0024
I very much agree. Owen Barfield's "Poetic Diction" is of the same vein.
Awesome. So I rescued my metaphor a little bit? (I'll check out Barfield.)
I also found one more passage that I was looking for (really digging Carlyle at the moment):
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Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,—then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphorical style you shall in vain seek for: is not your very Attention a Stretching-to? The difference lies here: some styles are lean, adust, wiry, the muscle itself seems osseous; some are even quite pallid, hunger-bitten and dead-looking; while others again glow in the flush of health and vigorous self-growth, sometimes (as in my own case) not without an apoplectic tendency.
Why do we put bodies in separate graves, under individualized headstones? Why is the rule or custom one soul per body? Why not some other number? Or an undetermined number?
I'm not complaining and hopefully not insane but just trying to point out what is 'too' obvious, which is the dominance of the concept/custom of the isolated soul or mind.
Starting from this dead poem, we get all kinds of philosophy that takes it for granted. Again, I'm not objecting, but only pointing at dominant dead poetry that functions as a context for live poetry. I mean complex debates about the relationship of an internal world (if any) and an external (if any) and their complex relationship (if any.)
Where are all the debates about how many egos per skull?
Why not 'we think therefore we are'? How did Descartes know there was only one of him in there, if his body (assumed singular) might be an illusion?
Habits of interpretation are (mis-)taken for bedrock, for super-facts, for the screen on which a world is projected.
Carlyle had me at the word "tawdry" :sweat:
But I would recommend Barfield's "Poetic Diction" on this topic; i.e. dead metaphors.
Eh I feel like you're trying to play into me saying I'm a poet.
I found a Barfield quote that speaks to me:
Yeah, I'll have to read more.
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Language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.
Actually I want to convince you that you are a poem.
'Noble dust' is a nice name, btw, so maybe I am half way there.
Nice! That's a decent little encapsulation of some of his thought.
Quoting Yellow Horse
Sure, go ahead.
Really I'm repeating an old idea, that identity is a 'fiction' (or useful hypothesis).
I'm fairly Wittgensteinian when it comes to meaning, so I think meaning is 'public' and 'between us' rather than 'inside' --despite relating to the natural-by-custom intuitions otherwise.
So identity is a kind of enacted largely linguistic pattern, unified by custom and a proper name.
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The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.
...
We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous.
...
If people say the world we perceive is a 'construct' of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought.
...
Before the scientific revolution, [man] did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do.
...
Therefore it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even at the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.
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The first quote echoes Heraclitus. Others remind me of Wittgenstein.
To me it seems that sharing a language is sharing a world (if imperfectly, given that the world is a self-writing poem-in-progress, with our help.)
I wrote what, to me, seemed a hugely significant essay in my twenties, called 'God is not God'. The point of the essay was, in short, that what we refer to or think of when we use that name, is nearly always a social convention or collective idea comprising layers of meaning that have been built up over centuries. That was what I had in mind.
At the time, I was exploring the path of mystical syncretism through various readings and encounters with spiritual teachers. I was deeply persuaded by what is sometimes called, very prosaically, the Way of Negation. I know that if I try and explain it, it will fall flat, but the inspiration for it at the time was Krishnamurti and my readings of popular books about Zen. Another figure that I found deeply moving was Ramana Maharishi, died 1960, who was the inspiration for Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge (turned into a very ordinary film by Bill Murray).
So the upshot of all that was that I came to the view that what a lot of people mean by 'God' is actually a version of Jupiter, to all intents - rather like Father Christmas, albeit at a cosmic scale. It seems to me, anyway, what many believers accept, and what many atheists reject. So, if that's what you have in mind, then I probably agree; I suppose most regular Christians would probably consider me atheist, and in their terms, it's probably true. But the thing is, I simply will never be persuaded by any form of materialism, and I believe that scientific naturalism is incapable of reaching an ultimate truth, on the grounds of its constitution. To reach that, requires what the sages describe as 'realisation'. So I guess, at the end of the day, I'm still on the religious side of the ledger, although I rather hope more towards the gnostic end of that scale.
Quoting Yellow Horse
[quote=Albert Einstein]I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. [/quote]
I agree with Einstein, although I think his 'approximately' is an unwarranted caveat. BUT, what I genuinely think that Einstein, genius that he was, overlooked, is that the Pythagorean theorem, though it is certainly not dependent on anyone's knowing of it, can nevertheless only be grasped by a rational intelligence. And it's the same with all such principles, laws and the like; they're only perceptible to reason, but they're real. So mind-independent, in one sense, but only perceivable by a mind. That, I think, is what is meant by objective (as distinct from subjective) idealism (and interestingly, C S Peirce is often cited as a representative of that general stance.)
This is one of the insights that Barfield is known for. I think it's profoundly true, and hardly ever understood. 'The past is foreign country - they do things differently there' ~ L.P. Hartley, The Go Between.
For me they live in the same world largely because they live together [s]in[/s] as the language of that time and place. Language just is the intelligible structure of the world, I suggest, and the rational minds thought needed to grasp that structure are themselves 'more language.'
'Language speaks the subject' and the ego is an effect not of the world it gazes at but the world from which it emerges with/as an illusory sense of its isolation. Or that's an idea I like.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd say that they are reason and agree that they are real, and that the word real has not two meanings but rather too many meanings (as many as we want.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I suspect that thinking in general is like this. At our best we can think (in our inherited conventional language) against social conventions like meanings, but only by using them as we do so, else we would not be intelligible.
I call myself an atheist as the least wrong summary, but a less wrong summary is referring to Sartor Resartus.
If I have a religion, it's something like philosophy...which is it to say perhaps endlessly a work-in-progress.
The problem is, that doesn't allow for anything other than language - no referent, nothing beyond words. So the intelligibility of the world is not dependent on language - it's more that when h. sapiens evolves to the point of being able to speak and count, then she has the intellectual tools to discover that intelligible nature. So we do differ on that. But I think the classical idea of intelligibility that I keep harking back to, is now regarded as an anachronism or anthropomorphism.
But in any case, humanity's 'sphere of the knowable' has continually changed, morphed and grown, and not only by dint of speaking or language.
I am intending to get hold of the recent bio of Paul Dirac - this one. One of the things Dirac was known for was being taciturn in the extreme 'This Dirac' said Bohr, 'he seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything.' I'm fascinated by the fact he predicted anti-matter because it 'fell out of the equations' but that its existence was only confirmed much later. That, to me, again, is more evidence of the power of reason, and it's certainly not simply a matter of language, seems to me.
Emptiness is the ultimate truth? Not much practical value, you must admit, other than stress relief and perhaps something to build a religion around.
Perhaps it doesn't allow for any thing (in its thingness) apart from language. If one casts language as the (intelligible) structure of the world, this is not to say that the world is just language.
It is perhaps to drop the notion of the chair-in-itself hidden somehow behind the chair we talk about.
The word qualia 'wants' to point at something 'outside' language (and so also outside objectivity).
We might think of language as the skeleton of the world and sensation/emotion as its flesh.
I will try to account for this from my POV.
To predict anti-matter is to voice an expectation that certain statements involving 'anti-matter' will become facts (to present a fact candidate).
Reason looks like a useful reification, but then that's what language does: it reifies, carves the 'One' into the many.
It discloses new knowledge; it facilitates discovery - that is just what the word means, 'uncovering' something previously not seen. It provides insight into nature.
N?g?rjuna denies that ??nyat? is 'ultimate truth'. That is a reification. But I've long learned that discussions of ??nyat? on internet forums is a hamster wheel.
As far as I'm aware, "realization" in Buddhism (the perspective that I assume you believe in) refers to the realization of emptiness, so what other ultimate truth do you think is realizable? Oh, I see, anything that you might say would be a reification so, once again, you've been rendered silent. "He who knows does not speak" and all that funky jazz. Cool, super cool. :cool:
I can't speak for Bhuddism, but there was always to be found within the various traditions a core of esoteric knowledge of the make up of the heavens and the origins of existence. But it was not taught to the average follower because it would become a distraction and was only really intelligible to the initiated anyway.
Also, to the initiated there was generally an understanding that there were ultimate truths, or narratives, but that they were unintelligible until certain exalted states had been achieved, if at all.
You’re right, it’s rather uncool of the wayfarer to hypocritically reify the ultimate truth.
Quoting Punshhh
This is an essential aspect of religion. After all, what good is a religion that doesn’t promise ultimate truth? And just as significantly, what good is a religion that delivers it? Zero, on both counts, because the point is social cohesion via social hierarchy. Worse is that religion doesn’t actually promote the development of virtue because that leads to independence from the group and hierarchy.
Yes, although I was referring to the esoteric schools. They were though, part and parcel of the system as you describe it.
Ultimate truth is the worst thing one could reify, in my opinion.
Btw, I didn’t recognize you with the Frida avatar until just now when your thoughts/manner felt familiar.
As for pure atheism, I don't think it can be defended. We are not in a position to say 'God does not exist'. Such a position, I believe, cannot be defended. Ultimately, agnosticism is the only non theist position.
What is each contingent thing has as its source some other contingent thing, such that there are no non-contingent things? What then is God?
And even if there did have to be some necessary thing that was the source of all contingent things, that could just be some event like the Big Bang. If the Big Bang turns out to be the source of all contingent things, and is not a person or in any way at all like a mythical deity, just some impersonal cosmic event, would you call that "God"? I don't think many would.
That is only true for non theists. Theists would disagree. So flat-out atheism must assert theists are misguided/deluded and that claim cannot be convincingly defended. Also, things can be argued to exist through pure reason, without general experience of those things. For example, sub atomic particles can be discovered through mathematical physics. Black holes and other astronomical bodies can be deduced to exist by reason alone (black holes were predicted long before they were an empirical reality). The pure atheist cannot reason in the opposite way and declare that God does not exist.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But the big bang must be contingent. You have to go back further, into eternity, the get to the source.
Must it? Explain.
Quoting EnPassant
So in an account where there was some eternally existing "primeval atom" that then spontaneously exploded into the whole universe as we know it, you'd be willing to call that primeval atom "God"? That's the original account of the Big Bang (no longer current in physical cosmology).
Or does the eternal thing have to be forward-eternal too? In that case, if it were proven that there was some kind of boring simple physical thing that had always existed, had done something like smash into an eternally-existing space-time to transform it into the universe as we know it, and continued to exist somewhere out there beyond our space-time now, would you call that "God"?
Or how about the most contemporary account of physical cosmology, eternal inflation, in where there is an eternal and infinite quantum field, the inflaton field, that goes on existing even now and will exist forever, that on occasion spontaneously shifts in one spot to a different phase resulting in what we perceive as a Big Bang, which is actually a much much much more slowly-expanding little bubble in the still-expanding spacetime mostly still occupied by the inflaton field. Is the inflaton field "God" on your account?
What I'm getting at here is whether you're okay with the notion of a God that is not a person, that doesn't have thoughts or feelings or wills, that can't hear prayers or issue commands, or judge souls after death, etc. It's just some thing that kicked off existence, and nothing more. Is that really enough to count as "God" to you?
Because I expect it's not to most theists, who are not theists because they were convinced by faulty metaphysical arguments that there must exist some boring piece of metaphysical machinery to enable the existence of the ordinary universe, but rather were charmed by childhood stories of a loving powerful being who's watching out for them.
Um, no. The existence of black holes was deduced as a theoretical consequence of the theory of relativity- as a valid solution to the relativistic field equations for catastrophic gravitational collapse of massive bodies- a theory about the physical world that had been confirmed observationally. This deduction could only be interpreted as a claim about the physical world (rather than merely about the consequences of a particular mathematical construction) once relativity had been empirically corroborated. As always and as we've known for quite some time, reason alone can never establish any non-trivial existence claims, and so there is no asymmetry here between the theist and the atheist. Which is of course why all the various forms of the ontological argument are such complete failures. You can never tell what exists in the world, without looking at the world to find out (and unfortunately, theism fares no better in that regard either, which is why theism is untenable on any rational or empirical basis, and so is only held as a matter of faith).
Forrest!
Are you denying your own metaphysical conscious existence? Surely that could not be objectively true!
It’s objectively true that I’m conscious. I suspect like kaarl you’re conflating epistemology with ontology. Just because you don’t know for sure what’s going on in my mind doesn’t mean there’s no truth about it.
Not so fast. If we're talking about the nature of your own conscious existence is that not a metaphysical truth?
sSory but I lost sight of this thread I'll be happy to debate EOG with you!
"The definition of God as the necessary source of all contingent things is sufficient for 'belief in God' and sufficient for a simple definition of God."
Better still, if you identify a being which is incontrovertibly necessary for you to have a belief in God, namely yourself. Then you have identified a necessary being that undeniably exists. Then all you have to do is understand how you are yourself God. Indeed, it couldn't be any other way. In reality it is the atheists and scientismists who are deluded, distracted by this physical world we find ourselves in, to such an extent that they think that this world we find ourselves in is all there is. Even when they know that no one has a clue as to how we got here, or to our origins.
Quite.
I'm not clear what you mean by "metaphysical truth" exactly but it's a truth of some kind, an objective one, in that any claim about it is either right or wrong, even though those claims are about what a subjective experience is like, and even if nobody but the person having those experiences can know whether those claims are true.
Are you sure Forrest? Is my will to live or die, love or not love, wonder or not wonder, for example, qualify as an objective " right or wrong " proposition? In other words, what kind of truth's do those things represent (?).
In either case, yes there is an objective right or wrong evaluation of them, that may or may not be practical to figure out, or in practice accessible to anyone but yourself.
Quoting 3017amen
This makes me think you're wondering about moral evaluations of the contents, in which case that question is the topic of meta-ethics, about which I have a thread going right now, and my answer to which became the focus of another recent thread.
Wait a minute, I thought you said you're sure that objectivity can explain those things that exist? I won't give you a free pass on that one so we'll come back to that.
In the meantime, you seem to be hung up on epistemology/ontology as an exclusive means and method for complete understanding about the nature of these existing things. Let's start with simple definitions again;
Love: ontological, epistemological, logical, ethical/moral, metaphysical, phenomenological?
The Will : [ insert domain's?]
Wonder : [ insert domain's?]
Causation : [ ?]
Sentience : [?]
So using your approach or default mechanism toward objectivity, tell me which domain can best explain the reason for my will to live or die?
Which domain can best explain the reason I choose to love or not love?
Which domain can best explain the nature of my sense of wonder ?
Which domain can best explain the nature of causation ? (Why should we believe that all events must have a cause.)
Which domain can best explain the nature of my reaction to seeing the color red, and/or my reaction to music that I love?
Take one at a time if you like, and we can parse which domain is most suitable in trying to explain the nature of those things in themselves.
Yes? I’m having a hard time following your sentence structures. There are objective answers to questions about those things. Where have I ever said otherwise?
I don’t understand the rest of your questions about domains. Asking why you have all those mental states is a psychological mental question. I don’t know the full psychological answer to them, especially because each answer would involve particulars about your life that I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean the answers to them aren’t objective, i.e. there is one correct answer that everyone should give to the questions about you, even if the answers about themselves are different, even if they don’t know the answers about you, etc.
Great. I'll wait for your answers to those questions about the nature of those things we are parsing.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Wait a minute I don't understand. I thought you said you knew everything objectively?
Quoting Pfhorrest
But would that not suggest omnipotence of some sort? Do you have that capability through your objective (analytical) abilities?
What's new pussycat, [insert Tom Jones]!
Forgive me but I couldn't resist, I'm getting punch drunk.
If it only has to do with a description of a thing or object, what if I'm unable to describe the thing or the object accurately? Does it become right, wrong or something else entirely?
I dont think we can describe anything accurately, but even if we did, we would be talking about a correct/right description, and not a correct/right answer or evaluation. What does a right answer even mean or look like, in terms of love like you ask, anyway???
Not good enough.
For X to be necessary in general, X must figure in all possible worlds. What do all possible worlds have in common? Say, R[sup]3[/sup] is a self-consistent whole, a possible world (however boring). Want to continue finding commonalities among whatever possible worlds, in order to narrow down your definition? You won't find anything alive thinking dishing out commands to mankind (worthy of of worship), or Shiva, or Yahweh, down that path. It's a line of thinking reminiscent of (neo)Platonic theologizing.
Well, your definition isn't anything I'd call God or a god at least.
Thanks I'm glad you appreciate my odd sense of humor :grin:
Anyway I'm not so sure about that. Of course if something questioned is not described correctly, then objectively it becomes a wrong description.
In terms of trying to describe love objectively; it would be wrong to say the existence of love can only be described objectively.
In cognition, obviously some metaphysical features we experience from love are primarily phenomenological. But the nature of love's existence surely cannot be described or explained correctly as objectivity could it?
How many times to I have to tell you that there being an answer doesn't mean anyone knows the answer?
I don't know the answers to those things. But there are answers. Because to assume otherwise is simply not to try to answer them.
Quoting 3017amen
Now I'm starting to feel trolled. I never said I know or that anyone knows, just that it can be known. Do you not understand the difference between "can" and "is"?
How many fingers I'm holding up right now? Is there some correct answer to that question? Since you can't see me, the answer to the first is "I don't know", but the answer to the second is still "yes", because I am holding up some number of fingers, and anyone who guesses a different number is guessing wrong, and anyone who guesses the number of fingers I'm holding up is guessing right, but nevertheless nobody knows. "Unknown" doesn't mean "neither right nor wrong".
How many times do I have to say that?
Quoting 3017amen
Only if for something to be true it has to be known. But it doesn't. Things can be true, but not known. Like see above. There doesn't have to be some omnipotent being for there to be a specific objectively correct number of fingers I'm holding up despite that nobody knows how many that is.
Quoting Pussycat
"Objective" absolutely does not mean "descriptive". That redefinition would just prima facie rule out any possibility of objective morality, or subjective reality. A prescription can conceivably be objectively correct, and a description can conceivably be only subjectively correct.
"Objective" just means "without bias": correct or incorrect without regard to any point of view. (But not without regard to the contents of the state of affairs being evaluated: who or what you're talking about, when and where they are, etc, can make a difference in what is correct or incorrect to say about them. But whatever is correct to say about them, is correct for everyone to say about them, and incorrect for anyone to say contrary).
And "right and wrong" can mean either "true or false" or "good or bad".
People kill people. Is that true? Yes.
People kill people. Is that good? No.
People kill people. Is that right? That depends on whether you mean "right" as in "true" ("yes that's right, people do kill people") or "right" as in "good" ("no that's wrong, people oughtn't kill people").
Contingent means there must be a preceding substance. For example, matter cannot exist without the preexistence of energy. It is not possible to have a property (contingent thing) without substance. Properties can only be a property of a substance in the way that matter is (sometimes) a property of energy
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm saying that in order to establish an eternal source it is only necessary to argue that that source/substance must exist. Thereafter it is possible to argue that that substance is mind because the universe is mind-like. It is such because it is mathematical. See also The Fine Tuning Argument. Before talking about God it is easier to establish the existence of a necessary substance and work forward from there and ask questions such as:
Is this substance mind?
Is it a person?
Is it possible for this person to relate to humanity?
Can this person be concerned about what his/her creation does or becomes?
etc.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. See last answer.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Because matter must have a preexisting substance, energy. Matter is not an ultimate substance, it is a condition that energy is sometimes in. The same may be true of what we call energy; it may be contingent on the existence of some deeper energetic reality. But ultimately this process of deconstruction cannot go on forever, there must be a necessary substance to keep contingent realities in existence.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
Theism is not dependent only on faith. It is a reasonable viewpoint.
Faith also teaches that it is possible to know God. So 'unknowable' must be qualified. Faith says that it is possible to know God as a person but that does not mitigate against the argument that God is ultimately unknowable by human beings. In other words, God can be known as a person but not fully knowable by the human mind.
Quoting tim wood
Claiming that God exists and claiming that God is (completely) knowable are not the same thing.
Can something that is objective be, at the same time, incorrect?
Is there such thing as "without bias"?
Sure, phenomenologically? Example: the ineffable experience. Kind of a paradox, no?
Perhaps we are talking past each other. let me copy my questions to you again. I mean, come on, you're a philosopher, let's dive into one of these domains and parse the concept(s) accordingly:
Concepts:
[i]Love: ontological, epistemological, logical, ethical/moral, metaphysical, phenomenological?
The Will : [ insert domain's?]
Wonder : [ insert domain's?]
Causation : [ ?]
Sentience : [?]
So using your approach or default mechanism toward objectivity, tell me which domain can best explain the reason for my will to live or die?
Which domain can best explain the reason I choose to love or not love?
Which domain can best explain the nature of my sense of wonder ?
Which domain can best explain the nature of causation ? (Why should we believe that all events must have a cause.)
Which domain can best explain the nature of my reaction to seeing the color red, and/or my reaction to music that I love?
Take one at a time if you like, and we can parse which domain is most suitable in trying to explain the nature of those things in themselves.[/i]
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm not understanding. Philosophically, what does 'Unknown' mean then? That is an important question with respect to your OP is it not?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Interesting. I think we are making progress. Do you have examples of existential things that are true but are unknown? Let's take the Will for example. It seems like it is true you have a Will, yet the nature of such is unknown correct?
This is the main point of contention that you seemed to just brush past in the first part of your reply. Why can’t it go on forever? Every contingent thing has a source. Sometimes that source is another contingent thing. Which might in turn be sourced to another contingent thing. Why at some point must it be different? Why not an infinite string of contingent things sourced from other continent things?
And even if for some reason that’s not possible, how do you decide at what point it has to stop? If you get back to God, why can’t you ask where God came from? And conversely, if you can just stop at God, why not just stop at energy, or spacetime, etc?
Something can be objectively incorrect, sure.
And we may not in practice be able to eliminate all bias, but me can move arbitrarily far in the direction of less bias, and have a notion of the unbiased ideal we are moving toward.
I can’t tell you that something in particular is true but unknown, because I would have to know that it is true to tell you that.
But I’ve given several examples already:
There’s something in a box. We don’t know what. Nevertheless some guesses will be correct and some will be incorrect, because there is some truth about what’s in the box, even though we don’t know what it is.
I’m holding up some number of fingers. You can’t see me so you don’t know how many that us. But still there is some true number of fingers I’m holding up, and your guesses would be objectively right or wrong because of that, even though you don’t know.
Are you sure? Let's see, common sense says you have a will to live. So it is true you have a will.
But the nature of your will (how it really works, it's design, it's origin aka : the-thing-in-itself) is unknown.
Therefore, how is your forgoing quote correct?
What is this bs? Obviously.
How could anyone even question your incredible logic?
Though you might want to be a little more precise in what you are referencing... "will to live"? "will"?
The nature of it may be unknown (I don’t think so, but that doesn’t matter here), but there is some true nature of it anyway. That true nature is true (duh), even if we don’t know it.
Interesting. Why don't you think so? Please share your theory, if you have one.
Key!
Sure. Explain your will to live and not die?
Surely you can do better than that! Meaning, all that's required in natural selection is instinct.
No will to live is required. Therefore, once again, explain to me your will to live and not die.
The three words "will to live" may only not be instincts because they're used to describe instincts.
Also I'm not entirely sure that's a super-duper accurate statement...
Okay great! So should I interpret that as meaning the reason why you exist is to eat and drink?
Interesting. What is your theory then? The reason I ask is because if you don't understand emergent properties of animal instinct, nor your own features of existence/your will to live, how can you possibly make any factual statements about existing or non-existing things?
In other words,you say you exist but you don't know why or how, no? The nature of your own existence seems to be somewhat of an enigma I suppose...
What other things consist of this will to live? In principal, if you say ' nothing', then you are essentially relegating yourself to a lower life-form, right?
Ohh, ohh, teacher, teacher I have the answer!
Quoting Key
I'm cool with that.
But why do you exist? All you've said so far is to eat and drink. If everyone thought that there would be no procreation hence you would not exist. I'm confused.
Oh my! Are we going in circles?!
Quoting Key
Would you be okay if I hunted you for meat then LOL
Don't include me in the mess you've made of your logic LOL
Quoting 3017amen
At last, I have found true love!
Well, if that's the argument it is wrong. Many mystics have known God's Presence.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Contingent things are essentially properties. A property depends on substance to exist. Take a circle. It is a mathematical abstraction. As such you can't hold it up and show it to anyone; it does not exist. To make it exist you need to give it substance; draw it with graphite. Now the graphite is the substance of the concept of a circle and, having substance, the circle is made manifest. Contingent things are essentially properties, they cannot exist without substance and a regression of substanceless properties cannot exist because a property is a condition of some preceding existence. You are saying that reality can be made of a regression of essentially abstract properties without substance.
Besides, a regression of properties, p1, p2, p3, ... is really just one property. For example, you have a substance, energy and a property of energy, matter. This is how it goes:-
Energy -> p1 (atoms)
Energy -> p1 - > p2 (molecules)
Energy -> p1 - > p2 - > p3 (a cell)
But the distinction between atoms, molecules, and a cell is only by way of classification. In real terms there is only one property (p1 U p2 U p3) = P so
Energy -> P (cell)
The cell is just one complex property of energy. As far as contingency and properties are concerned P (cell) is all that is needed.
Nice! What kind of love did you find LOL
That would be a huge tangent from this thread, and I plan to do another thread on it in the future anyway.
But you’ll also say that graphite is contingent, no?
Quoting EnPassant
And is that energy contingent or not?
Sure!
In the meantime, if you are unable to answer my questions I understand.
I will take your silence as acquiescence to the inability of making factual statements about existing and non-existing things.
Yes, graphite, being a physical substance, is a property or is contingent.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Maybe it is. If energy, as we define it, is contingent upon some deeper substance/energy then that deeper substance is the substance of energy. But there may be an even deeper substance and so on for a bit. But only for a bit. The process of deconstruction cannot continue forever. It cannot be 'turtles all the way down'.
A hydrogen atom is a concept or state. As such it is a physical image of energy. All material constructions are images of energy. That is because they are contingent. The Cosmological Argument says that contingent things must have a beginning. Otherwise there are only states without substance and I don't see how that can be.
If you want to argue in bad faith, you do you. I’m out.
Even if that was true, which it isn’t, how do you decide where to stop and say “this is the last turtle”? How do you know your God is the last turtle, or that energy or spacetime or the inflaton field or something like that isn’t?
Quoting EnPassant
The cosmological argument hinges entirely on not understanding predicate logic. Just because every mouse is afraid of some cat doesn’t mean there is one particular cat of whom all mice are afraid; each mouse might be afraid of a different cat. And just because everything comes from something doesn’t mean there is one particular thing from which all other things come; each thing can come from a different thing.
Okay, as you wish. Unfortunately, since you are throwing in the towel, my only conclusion here is, the fact of bringing to light your deficiencies in your arguments only substantiates my claim that you really don't seem to have a basic grasp of things like metaphysics, phenomenology, existentialism, etc..
Ironically, based upon the spirit of your OP/God, you seem to be afraid to answer those metaphysical/the nature of existence questions.
What matters is that there is an initial substance. Contingent things are properties of that substance. As I said, first steps first. What I'm trying to establish first is that the universe is made/contingent. And it must be contingent upon some ultimate substance.
The question then becomes What is that substance? If it is a 'mind' and is conscious and intelligent then that is close to a definition of the traditional God.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That is unlikely because then you would have numerous sources and numerous eternal existences but then why would they be so congruent to each other? All these contingent things are the same in the sense that the are in the same reality and obey the laws of nature. They are made of the same stuff as far as we can tell. Tea cups and stars are made of the same thing, energy. So are mountains and oak trees. On the level of energy the universe is one thing, a field of energy.
If only this were true, eh? Unfortunately, utterly lacking in evidence as it is (and the arguments for God's existence being, without exception, either invalid or question-begging), it is dependent (almost completely) on faith, and is not a reasonable (i.e. sufficiently warranted) viewpoint. If it were, then for consistency's sake it would have to follow that pretty much anything is a reasonable viewpoint (regardless of the absence of positive evidence, or abundance of contrary evidence), and that anything goes- young earth creationism, flat earthism, moon landing denial, anti-vaxxism, and so on. But its not a reasonable viewpoint, and so we're not committed to such an unfortunate consequence (thankfully).
You cannot seriously compare theism to flat earthism. Some of the best minds in history have presented very reasonably arguments for theism. It is a reasonable viewpoint.
When we say that someone is biased (about something), we also mean that they are wrong, right? Or can a biased person somehow be right?
Thing is that there is no real criterion for bias, neither one can know whether they are biased. This is what I think anyway. And so, for me, objective, as you put it, is empty, or wishful thinking, at best. And so I prefer to think of objective and objectivity as "devoid of any value judgment", biased or not, right or wrong.
Yes, a biased opinion is a wrong opinion.
Quoting Pussycat
We can know someone is biased if we know of some reasons, some point of view, they are not accounting for.
We can never be sure that we are not biased, but we can tell when someone is and demand that they correct for that. And then keep doing that, forever, moving ever and ever closer to completely unbiased.
I stated on what basis I did so, and I stand by it. And some of the best minds in history have presented arguments for theism that are, without exception, invalid or question-begging (e.g. the causal/cosmological, ontological, teleological, moral, transcendental, etc. arguments or so-called "proofs" of God's existence). Being among the best minds in history doesn't mean ones arguments are necessarily sound (see: well, virtually any philosopher you care to pick, from Plato to Wittgenstein or anyone in between- they're all still human, and so not immune to error).
But since the philosophical arguments for God's existence are all invalid or question-begging, and there is no substantial amount of empirical evidence for the existence of God, theism is without sufficient rational warrant- it is not reasonable. Which the smarter/more insightful theists (e.g. Aquinas, Luther, Paul) have often conceded, emphasizing faith as a necessary condition for theistic belief (and faith, in the relevant sense, just is belief in the absence of sufficient evidence). But then, lacking sufficient warrant places it in the company of other rationally disreputable views, such as those that I mentioned. As they say, the truth hurts... but that doesn't mean its not still the truth nevertheless.
what would empirical evidence for a transcendent being comprise? I mean, if you reject out of hand all of the Biblical and other accounts of miraculous occurences, which I presume you do, where or how would you seek empirical evidence? What kind of instrument would you use? What would you be looking for? Would you use the Hubble? ('Look - out there - 25 parsecs to the left of Proxima Centauri.....what's that?!?....)
The point is, the absence of empirical evidence for a transcendent being says precisely nothing beyond the obvious statement that empiricism itself has certain criteria which purported transcendent beings will invariably fail to meet.
No, not out of hand. The only things that can be dismissed out of hand are trivialities- i.e. logical falsehoods, self-contradictions. But evidence for scriptural claims, instances of miracles, etc would indeed be one candidate here, i.e. evidence for the existence of God, the absence of which undermines theism (which is precisely what we find, and thus the irrationality of theism).
But you do make a good point here (although it may not have been intentional)- it may well be that belief in (non-trivial) transcendent entities is inherently irrational, since evidence of such things may well be precluded as a matter of definition. But theism is rarely consistent in this respect so its mostly moot, as the God of western monotheism is causally active in the world- not only in the initial creatio ex nihilo, but in the perpetual sustenance of the world, and periodic interventions therein (e.g. the person of Jesus Christ, miracles, etc.) and is thereby distinguished from deistic deities.
What would evidence for invisible garden fairies look like? Sagan's garage dragon? Fictional characters? Perhaps more pertinently, how would you differentiate?
Quoting Wayfarer
And thus things ranging among fictional characters, imaginary beings, hallucinations, what-have-you, come to life. Especially in the minds of humans. What would prompt insisting on their existence in the first place?
or that
and of course, despite the oft-quoted canard to the contrary, absence of evidence is evidence of absence (indeed, this is a theorem of probability theory). So there is an asymmetry here between the theist and the atheist.. its just not the one EnPassant claimed: the evidence strongly favors atheism and disfavors theism.
Well, 'God' may be an 'invisible garden fairy' to you, but that might only be a reflection on your belief system.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
Condescension noted.
It might be that 'God' is beyond reason, not beneath it. The most compelling argument for (at least) a higher intelligence, is the fact of the rational order of the Universe. It is something which many people think science explains, but in reality, science relies on it, it doesn't explain it. And explaining that order - for that matter, explaining what natural laws actually are - may likewise be beyond the scope of science even in principle. (It's just this which leads to a lot of nonsense about multiverses.)
Worth noting that none of the medieval 'proofs' were remotely considered as anything like a proof in the modern or scientific sense. There was a long-gone blog post which showed that these were mainly understood as exercises in intellectual edification for the faithful, never as rhetorical or polemical devices for unbelievers. The fact that the Dawkins of this world seize on them as examples of terrible empirical evidence merely goes to show their utter incomprehension of the kind of arguments they really are.
I should also protest, on behalf of those who profess a faith, even if I'm not necessarily amongst them, that 'faith' is not 'clinging to nonsensical propositions in the face of evidence to the contrary'. For those with a religious faith, when asked for what constitutes 'evidence', they will simply gesture towards the fact of existence.
*whooosh* ?
I wasn't saying that it was unintentional that you made a good point- I don't doubt you're perfectly capable of making good points and do so quite frequently- the part that I suspected might be unintentional was that you gave the impression that the bit about transcendent deities lacking evidence as a matter of definition/necessity was intended as an objection or counter-argument to what I said.. when in fact its a point I'm quite happy to grant. If I misinterpreted the thrust of your comment I apologize.. but I don't think I did.
And so similarly, "beyond" or "beneath" is a distinction without a difference here, since God's existence escaping rational evaluation rules out positive belief every bit as much as negative disbelief (and by the same token). Either way its a maneuver the theist is welcome to, though I expect few have the stomach for it if knowing what it entails- it basically amounts to sawing off the branch they're sitting on.
Agreed. Which is why someone like Aquinas had a good deal more sense than his modern counterparts- e.g. William Lane Craig, Edward Feser, Alvin Plantinga and so on- who somehow believe that these invalid or question-begging arguments are sound or persuasive, despite purportedly being professionals (or at least trained) philosophers! Aquinas at least was aware of the nature of his project, and its limitations, as other fideists have been before and since.
Who are you quoting here? I never defined faith as "'clinging to nonsensical propositions in the face of evidence to the contrary". Faith in the relevant sense is believing something in the absence of sufficient evidence/warrant. This quote here doesn't even make sense- how can you have evidence to the contrary of a nonsensical proposition? If its genuine nonsense, how could you tell what would count as evidence for or against?
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
As I always do I'll just put it out there that I know next to nothing. But this strikes me as absurd.
What do you mean "purportedly"? I would personally call my own rationale into question rather than call trained philosophers out for failing to make their arguments valid. That's the first thing one ought to do? Where does this happen?
I can see unsound and persuasive. And I can certainly agree that premises of arguments for God are contentious. But the former 2 seem grand. I'm not entirely convinced that your condescending tone is justified.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
Sure but, Again, from someone who knows close to nothing. Aquinas mentions principles. Self-evident in the eyes of all. Does he not believe that his 5 arguments are based on these very principles that he believed all can see? He didn't take them as proofs but still as ways to argue for God?
It was. You were asking what 'substantial empirical evidence' there might be - having already declared that all rational argument was invalid or question begging. And I'm point out, it's not an empirical question. So asking for empirical evidence of an issue which is not subject to empirical evaluation is a kind of category error. (On the other hand, I have actually come across a form of evidence for divine intervention, although in light of the above, it might not be worth bringing it up.)
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
I'm not at all inclined towards Craig, I don't his personality or argumentative style. Plantinga and Feser I read. I find them quite competent philosophers, but then, I'm not a convinced atheist; I don't share their religious convictions, but I think their philosophical arguments against naturalism and materialism are quite sound, on the whole.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
That's something I often say about Daniel Dennett. He, after all, insists that humans are essentially 'moist robots', that free will is an illusion, and that what we understand as the mind is really the concerted behaviour of billions of unconscious cellular components - 'unconscious competence', he calls it. In which I case, I ask, how does he himself have anything to say? How can what he argues 'make any difference'? We're all simply tools in the first place. Whereas, if the religions are right, then there's at least the possibility of eternal felicity, and things happen for a reason above and beyond what is determined by material necessity.
Anyway, the argument I always hark back to is the 'argument from reason'. I might start a thread on that.
It was intended to be... but it turned out it wasn't. And hence my comment about it being unintentional. But you not only effectively conceded the point, you put it in stronger terms than I had- i.e. God as lacking evidence for his existence, as a (necessary) matter of definition, rather than a contingent fact of experience. Like I said, I'm happy to grant this because its perfectly consistent with what I've said; if transcendent entities cannot have evidence for their existence, by their very definition, then by their very definition belief in their existence can never be rationally warranted.
We are quite explicitly talking about arguments for the existence of God, not arguments against naturalism or materialism or anything else. Not sure why you brought this up.
That's nice. Also not relevant to the present topic, but thanks for the bit of personal trivia, I guess?
I mean allegedly. Reportedly. I'm not sure how else to put it. They have academic credentials that should prevent the sorts of errors that infest these arguments. Like being able to discern whether a given argument is deductively valid, apart from whether or not they personally happen to accept the conclusion. And indeed in much of their other work they're perfectly capable philosophers (well, Feser and Plantinga at any rate- I'm not convinced WLC is anything but a blowhard and a fanatic). I guess its just something about personal religious commitments that make objective analysis or reasoning highly difficult. And for that reason we should be immediately suspicious of arguments that purport to establish what we already believed as a matter of faith or upbringing, that they are not post-hoc rationalizations that are measured for the conclusion.
And I'm not exactly going out on much of a limb here, I doubt there are many arguments that have been more thoroughly or frequently refuted than these arguments for the existence of God. That they are neither sound nor persuasive is more or less taken for granted at this point, and has been for a long time (by virtually everyone save those philosophers who make a living by formulating such arguments). Heck, in many instances, they still fail for the same reasons documented literally centuries ago by the likes of e.g. Hume. And certainly there are more modern (and rigorous) treatments, not least of which being Sobel's excellent Logic and Theism which gives full formal/symbolic step-by-step breakdowns of these arguments so that one can see precisely where they go wrong (in the cases where they are simply deductively invalid, as in the case of the traditional ontological argument). Moreover, its a pretty predictable result, given just a basic appreciation for how deductive arguments work: you can only get out what you put in, they can't establish any new facts, but merely bring out what was logically contained in the premises. That's ultimately all a deductive inference is. So its almost trivial to say that any/all valid arguments for the existence of God must be question-begging at some level... else the conclusion could not logically follow from that particular set of premises and they would have to be deductively invalid.
It seems obvious to me that most of the arguments against the existence of God are grounded in materialism and/or naturalism. Am I mistaken?
Again, we're talking quite explicitly about arguments for the existence of God. You know, the causal/cosmological, ontological, teleological, etc arguments. Even if we grant (if only for the sake of argument) that all of e.g. Feser's arguments against naturalism or materialism are sound and persuasive, it would not follow that his or anyone else's arguments for the existence of God are not invalid or question-begging (and so utterly unpersuasive). These two things could both be true. So its irrelevant, unless it was intended as "whataboutism", in which case its just fallacious. And I expect everyone on this board is familiar with your feelings about materialism at this point, so it gets tiresome that you insist on inserting it into every discussion regardless of whether its relevant or not. We get it, materialism= bad, and anyone who says materialism=bad is OK in your book. Great, awesome, whatever- that doesn't mean that the traditional philosophical arguments for God's existence aren't still rubbish.
'Rational warrant' and 'empirical evidence' are different things. Empirical evidence, as construed by modern naturalism, starts, as a matter of principle, by excluding consideration of anything beyond the natural domain, and then demands evidence to the contrary, having already made the in-principle commitment not to consider it.
Within the natural domain, there is an endless variety of phenomena to study - but, from a philosophical point of view, can the argument be made that naturalism has discovered the primal cause of existence? I would say, at this time, that has to be answered in the negative, because, as is well-known, current scientific cosmology is riven by apparently irresolvable arguments about whether the Universe is even, in fact, a universe.
Atheism rejects this contention as a matter of principle, but it can't do that as a matter of evidence; both sides see the same phenomena, its their interpretation of what it means that is at issue. As far as a Plantinga is concerned, belief in God has a rational warrant, on the traditional grounds - anticipated by Plato - that the harmony and intricacy of the natural world bespeaks an intentional creation. The counter-arguments from scientific naturalism, are what seem question-begging from that perspective, because they assume that the order of the cosmos is somehow self-generating or spontaneously occuring
I think that's what is behind Wittgenstein's exclamation that 'At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.'
So, again, I think the argument from natural law to a first principles is quite rationally warranted. Whether you believe it is again, largely a matter of disposition.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
Again - as you point out - it's comes down to a matter of conviction, no matter what the arguments, as you point out. But it is stimulating to debate an articulate opponent, even though we're plainly on opposite sides of the fence.
Sure. And hopefully it goes without saying that even spirited disagreement (shall we say) doesn't imply any personal animus (but I'll go ahead and say it nonetheless, just in case).
But its late so I'll respond to the rest of your comment tomorrow.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
I'll have to read many of these relevant books before I get an opinion on the matter. Perhaps I won't see it the same way you do.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
But then whats the point in saying that they're question begging? If all the premises are correct then the conclusion must follow? We can't just swoop away deductive arguments altogether for begging the question as such, right? Is only the ontological argument invalid?
Surely these arguments are rejected for other reasons than these two.
There are many arguments based on a reasonable assessment of the situation we find ourselves in. Eg the cosmological argument, the fine tuning argument, etc. The argument that the universe seems intelligently designed because it is intelligently designed is not easy to refute - like the man said 'Sometimes a cigar is a cigar'. Sometimes things really are what they seem to be. Positing multiverses and what not is not an answer. That is, for the most part, pulling rabbits out of hats to make the question go away.
As for claims to personal awareness of God. These are brushed aside with baseless accusations of 'Delusion'. That is not an argument.
The scientific methodologies do not inherently (heck, you could launch examinations of "supernatural magic" if there was much to examine).
They're just self-critical, seeking to self-error-correct, minimize bias, falsify, all that.
And it so happens that, say, Sagan's garage dragon, fictional characters, imaginary beings, hallucinatory claims, etc, tend to be discounted as a consequence. And why wouldn't they anyway? Mental attempts to populate the world with such ... stuff doesn't make it so.
If you cannot differentiate whether, say, Shiva or Yahweh are fictional or real, then why insist (and preach indoctrinate proselytize) that they're real in the first place? (If pressed, I might take this a step further, and say that some such activities converge on fraud or deception.)
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
If a giant voice would emerge from nowhere saying:
"Hey humanity, it's God here! I know that some of you have doubted my existence, so just to make certain that everyone knows I'm real - for the next 24 hours I'm going to reverse the rotation of the earth".
And sure enough the next morning the sun rises in the west.
That - or something equivalent - would be sufficient empirical evidence. Of course it would be most helpful if the giant voice would also tell us the proper religion:
"Oh, and by the way? The Methodists have the correct religion. OK, either the Methodists or the Sunni Muslims. Either one is fine with me" :razz:
Grant me "divine superpowers" for a couple days, and I might just be convinced.
Evan Baxter SceneBruce Almighty (2m:22s youtube)
(The fun I'd have...) :D
By God and as a home for creation.
Quoting EricH
God is not going to force faith on anyone. To do that would be to destroy free will. There is no need for God to shout, He will be heard by those who listen.
God is substance. One of the most difficult questions in philosophy is why there is something rather than nothing. We don't know why or how but we know there is something. That substance that is, is eternal (otherwise it came from nothing, impossible). This substance is identical with existence. It is existence. Every contingent thing that exists exists because it is in existence/God. Creation is more than existence, it is being; life, consciousness...
Matter is contingent so it is made. It is an image of energy. When creation fell away from God it descended into 'veils of matter' (Origen)
You're apparently conflating scientific evidence- constrained by naturalism as a methodological principle- with empirical evidence more broadly. Empirical evidence just means evidence from experience, from observation- it needn't be constrained by naturalism, and so it needn't rule out evidence for theism. And of course what counts as natural is flexible (i.e. Hempel's dilemma), so there's reason to suspect that if divine intervention were real, and that there was observable evidence for it, that it couldn't qualify as natural and so within the sphere of scientific investigation. As jorndoe notes, its more that evidence of this variety is lacking as a contingent matter of fact more than being ruled-out a priori. If there were substantial evidence for theism, obviously there's a great deal about our theorizing about the world that would have to adapt. But there doesn't seem to be, and so it doesn't, at least not at present.
The quintessential refutation of the design/teleological arguments do not come from "scientific naturalism"- as you say, naturalism as a methodological principle rules it out out of hand- but from e.g. Hume, as in his DCNR. The argument's flaws are very real, and not a matter of an a priori rejection. Like the other traditional arguments for the existence of God, its just not a good argument... and thus that half of the problem here- the traditional philosophical arguments for the existence of God are all fatally flawed, and there is no empirical evidence for God's existence, so belief in the existence of God appears to be entirely unwarranted (and therefore unreasonable).
I do feel as though I should respond to that, as it's not the first time you've said it. Expressed in these terms, it reduces the entire question to personal prediliction, 'what I like'. I think criticism of materialism is more profound than that, as it is the de-facto philosophy of secular culture. I don't believe the main stream of Western philosophy is materialism at all.
Quoting EricH
I'm interested in philosophy of religion.
Quoting jorndoe
The historical situation of the founding of modern science was such that certain ways of thinking, certain kinds of ideas, were excluded from it as part of its constitution. For example at the foundation of the Royal Society, which was the first scientific association as such, it was declared that 'we shalt not touch metaphysics with a barge pole', or something similar.
A consequence of the division in early modern philosophy into 'primary and secondary' qualities was the emergence of the view that only the mathematically quantifiable attributes of physical bodies were among the primary qualities. The mind, the observer, was at least implicitly relegated to the domain of 'secondary qualities' and therefore subjectivized and relativized.
If you study philosophy of science and history of ideas, none of that is controversial.
As for your depictions of 'Shiva, Yahweh, Tooth fairy' - popular religion operates through popular archetypes in the guises that popular culture will respond to.
Because the proponents of these arguments (at least some of them, like Craig) make quite strong claims about them, like that they are both sound and persuasive and warrant theism (and render atheism/agnosticism unwarranted/irrational)... claims which aren't tenable. And the problem is often precisely that the premises aren't correct- or, at least, can't be regarded as such without simply assuming the conclusion that is in dispute (rendering the whole exercise pointless). And there are numerous variations of each type, the ontological argument is certainly not the only one that is invalid, but that's going to vary on a case by case basis I expect (its easy, even trivial, to construct a valid argument for any conclusion.. the fly in the pudding is finding acceptable premises). The ones that are valid, are question-begging, and visa versa. And I don't doubt that people reject these arguments for other reasons, you'd have to take a survey. I'm not sure what relevance that has here, though. Whatever other reasons people may have for rejecting these arguments, its hard to have a better reason than the fact that the arguments either don't logically entail their conclusions and/or have premises which have not been established as true (as these are sort of the basic things an argument needs to do in order to be successful, i.e. sound).
The problem here is that it wasn't relevant and so was a change of topic. If I wanted to defend or talk about materialism, I would find a thread about materialism. I wasn't really interested in talking about e.g. the quality of Feser's arguments against materialism or the supposed failings of Daniel Dennett when the topic is the existence of God and the quality (or lack thereof) of the arguments/evidence in its favor.
As mentioned, I don't believe Christianity has ever relied on philosophical arguments to establish the existence of God. But as to whether all such arguments are 'fatally flawed' - that's another matter altogether. I think Kant effectively deflated Hume's scepticism.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
I should, however, mention one body of solid empirical evidence for, at least, divine intervention. You will recall the origin of the term 'devil's advocate' - it was a role accorded to an ecclesiastical offical whose job it was to try and debunk evidence of the miracle cures that were required for the process of the beatification of Catholic saints. And the reason that this body of records is 'solid' is because the process has been carried out over centuries, and has been meticulously recorded, so there's a reasonable data set. This caught the attention of a haemotologist, Jacalyn Duffyn, whose expert testimony was sought regarding one such case. It piqued her interest and she began to study the records. She said:
From here and here. It is of note that Duffyn continues to profess atheism and was not converted by this research, but she does acknowledge that the cures in all these cases defied scientific prediction.
Quoting Enai De A Lukal
I can't see how they're not related; they're two sides of a coin. The philosophy of secular culture assumes a naturalistic basis for existence. But I say that historically, this grew out of and effectively inverted theism, such that belief in the powers of natural reason now occupies the place once accorded to the priesthood. The 'jealous god' dies hard.
My own religious belief is not grounded in the religious tradition I was purportedly brought up in (although my own family was not at all religious). It is grounded more in 60's 'higher consciousness' type of understanding. But that has allowed me to re-interpret the symbolic meaning of religious ideas. Whereas as I see it most secular philosophy is born out of a reaction against Christian dogma, so it's got this 'don't mention the war' undercurrent which conditions everything it thinks about the subject.
Tell that to Craig. I also recall seeing a survey where a plurality of theists listed "evidence of design in nature" as the top reason why they believed in God. So while there's no question that there is a huge variety of reasons why people accept theism, its simply false to say that no theists ever claim that philosophical arguments establish the truth of theism (this is also completely neglecting the relevant cultural/social/historical significance of, for instance, Aquinas and his Ways). There's an entire industry of apologists who do basically just that for a living, Craig not least of which. And Kant certainly did not refute Hume's criticisms of the design argument (Kant did not disagree with Hume on this point), and indeed Kant would be another key philosopher to cite as far as those philosophers who made major contributions to destroying that sort of natural theology as a valid or useful enterprise. But Hume's refutation of the analogical design argument specifically stands to this day.
Regarding this as positive evidence for the existence of God/divine intervention is a pretty textbook "god-of-the-gaps" fallacious appeal to ignorance. Lacking a scientific explanation->god-did-it is not a valid or reasonable inference. If that's the strongest evidence there is, this only strengthens my point: theism is not sufficiently warranted by either empirical evidence or philosophical arguments.
Of course there are connections, but there was no direct relevance to the conversation at hand. The quality of Feser's arguments against naturalism has no bearing on the quality of his arguments for the existence of God. The possibility of e.g. Daniel Dannett sawing off the branch he's sitting on doesn't mean that theists claiming God is "beyond reason" aren't also sawing off their own branch. That's what I mean when I say they were not relevant.
Which is that even where evidence is cited, it can easily be dismissed!
Is this a definition, or an observation?
Well but this just begs the question: what attributes of good do we "see", in whatever way you propose we can, in reality?
It is not a supposition that form/contingency, must have substance, otherwise the universe is an abstraction.
Quoting Banno
It is a deduction. There can be no properties/contingent things, without substance. The eternal substance that is, is the substance of all contingent things. You cannot have a property/form without substance.
Odd, these notions. What is substance then? Not mass. Not space. Not anything familiar from physics. Not a notion that has been part of the vocabulary of science for a few hundred years. From the SEP article...
That's an awful lot of baggage to drag around behind your notion of God.
Draw a circle in ink. You now have two things, substance/ink and form/circle. If there are two things you can separate them - that is, if the circle, as an abstraction, can exist without substance. But how can you do this? Can you lift the abstraction away from the ink so you can hold up an abstract circle? What would that look like? If there is no substance the universe is an abstraction. But abstractions cannot exist without, at least, a mind to keep them in being.
Space? Space is a positive existence, it is not nothingness.
Again, Quoting Banno
See my post here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8779/turtles-all-the-way-down-in-physics
SO if I have it right, accepting that God exists, for you, involves accepting a a bunch of obscure, somewhat archaic metaphysical notions.
Not going to get too many believers that way.
That is an extreme rhetorical distortion of what I believe. My beliefs are based on many things including reason - see my last few posts - and many other things too. The world is immensely complex and theism is, for me, the best explanation by far, despite the awful distortions in religion. Religion often gives the wrong view of God but it still has truth within it. I believe mythological religion has served its purpose and maybe in the future humanity will have a more purified spirituality.
Yet your response goes ahead and presupposes "Him" anyway. :confused: Presupposition does not make it so (and is not particularly philosophical in this context). This is what you'd have to show in the first place.
Quoting Punshhh
Using intellect? † Let's also go by evidence. (y)
Anyway, how might we differentiate whether (fictional) characters, (imaginary) beings, (hallucinatory) claims are real or not?
Or maybe reality is what you meant by "Him" "God", then? Or maybe we're talking the unknown, personified? That's all fine (except personified); I'd just use terms with less baggage.
Should we go by diluted (watered down) phrases, that tells us roughly nothing in this respect, and are put together in such a manner that they could mean more or less anything, avoiding means to differentiate?
@Wayfarer promotes Biblical stories of miracles only to relegate Yahweh as being an archetype (no particular argument given), and without having attempted to differentiate fictional and real in the first place. So, these supposed super-beings continue to be removed from sight if you will, evading attempts to differentiate, yet continue to be claimed real in the same breath, just like ghosts of imagined entities, existentially dependent upon the minds of us.
Why is that a problem?
I actually get to more or less that conclusion myself (that the universe is an abstraction), in the form of mathematicism.
In the same way that we can construct a series of sets that behave exactly like the natural numbers and so are indistinguishable and thus identical to them, so too can we construct complicated mathematical objects that behave indistinguishably from the fundamental constituents of reality and so are, for all intents and purposes, identical to them.
And it is not a special feature of contemporary physics that says reality is made of mathematical objects; rather, it is a general feature of mathematics that whatever we find things in reality to be doing, we can always invent a mathematical structure that behaves exactly, indistinguishably like that, and so say that the things in reality are identical to that mathematical structure. If we should find tomorrow that our contemporary theories of physics are wrong, it could not possibly prove that those features of reality are not identical to some mathematical structure or another; only that they are not identical to the structures we thought they were identical to, and we need to better figure out which of the infinite possible structures we could come up with it is identical to. We just need to identify the rules that reality is obeying, and then define mathematical objects by their obedience to those same rules. It may be hard to identify what those rules are but we can never conclusively say that reality simply does not obey rules, only that we have not figured out what rules it obeys, yet.
The mathematics is essentially just describing reality, and whatever reality should be like, we can always come up with some way of describing it. One may be tempted to say that that does not make the description identical to reality itself, as in the adage "the map is not the territory". In general that adage is true, and we should not arrogantly hold our current descriptions of reality to be certainly identical to reality itself. But a perfectly detailed, perfectly accurate map of any territory at 1:1 scale is just an exact replica of that territory, and so is itself a territory in its own right, indistinguishable from the original; and likewise, whatever the perfectly detailed, perfectly accurate mathematical model of reality should turn out to be, that mathematical model is a reality: the features of it that are perfectly detailed, perfectly accurate models of people like us would find themselves experiencing it as their reality exactly like we experience our reality. Mathematics "merely models" reality in that we don't know exactly what our reality is like and we're trying to make a map of it. But whatever model it is that would perfectly map reality in every detail, that would be identical to reality itself. We just don't know what model that is.
There necessarily must be some rigorous formal (i.e. mathematical) system or another that would be a perfect description of reality. The alternative to reality being describable by a formal language would be either that some phenomenon occurs, and we are somehow unable to even speak about it; or that we can speak about it, but only in vague poetic language using words and grammar that are not well-defined. I struggle to imagine any possible phenomenon that could cause either of those problems. In fact, it seems to me that such a phenomenon is, in principle, literally unimaginable: I cannot picture in my head some definite image of something happening, yet at the same time not be able to describe it, as rigorously as I should feel like, not even by inventing new terminology if I need to. At best, I can just kind of... not really definitely imagine anything in particular.
I am wholeheartedly against Platonism regarding abstract object, but I think that a kind of existence can nevertheless be applied to abstract objects after all, a kind of existence abstracted away from the more familiar notion of concrete existence.
In the most restricted sense, one could say "only what I am experiencing right here right now exists". Everything else that we talk about existing is some degree of inference and abstraction away from that. There is a position in the philosophy of time, called presentism, that holds that only the present exists, neither the past nor the future. I agree with them to the extent that in a sense only the present exists: only the present presently exists, right now. But a part of what I'm experiencing right now in the present is memory, from which I infer (automatically, intuitively, without thinking about it) the existence of other times, having an experience of moving between different times, from those remembered past times and toward projected future times, and there is a perfectly serviceable sense in which I can say that those other times "exist" in a timeless sense of the word: they don't exist now, presently, for sure, but they still exist at other times. And in that "movie", so to speak, of my past, present, and future experiences that I have now inferred, I have the experience of seeming to move around different places, so I further infer that other places exist too, besides just the here that I am experiencing now. Like with presentism, only the place I am at exists here, but those other places can still reasonably be said to exist elsewhere.
In this way, a spatiotemporal kind of existence is already abstracted away from the more primitive kind of existence relevant to my local, present experiences. But beyond that, some philosophers such as David Lewis hold, and I agree, that other possible worlds, like the kind that we use to make sense of talk of alethic modalities like necessity and possibility, really exist, and aren't just useful fictions, even though they don't actually exist, because "actual" is an indexical term like "present" or "local": it refers to things relative to the person using the word. Just as other times don't presently exist but are still real in a more abstract sense, so too, on this account, other possible words don't actually exist, because "actually" means "in the possible world I am a part of", but they are nevertheless still real in a still more abstract sense. Likewise, to finally get on to my point about the existence of mathematical objects, since we can in principle equate our concrete universe with some mathematical structure or another, and that mathematical structure definitely concretely exists (because it just is the concrete universe), we can say that other mathematical structures, i.e. abstract objects, don't concretely exist — because "concretely" is indexical, like "actually", it means "as a part of the mathematical structure that is our universe" — but they can nevertheless be reasonably called "real" in some even broader sense, the most abstract sense possible: they abstractly exist.
This completely obviates the need for any kind of explanation for why this universe instead of another, or why something rather than nothing, what's the necessity that enables all these contingencies, what's the substance that underlies all this form. Everything is just form with no mysterious substance, it's only ever features of some forms that are necessary (which is to say, their negations are impossible) so every form is merely contingent, and every form that can possibly exist does exist, while nothingness can't exist (there is no possible world at which there is no world, there is no mathematical structure that is not a mathematical structure), so since this world can exist it does, and since it features us in it, we experience it as our actual world.
So... that's supposed to be better? I think there might be a few unstated assumptions...
I am referring to the intellect in the way it is used to answer unanswerable questions. Regarding the evidence, how does one distinguish evidence from that which is not evidence? As I said to Enai De A Lucil, the fact that I exist is evidence of the existence of God. How could I possibly exist without God bringing me into existence?
For example?
How is that an attribute?
In principle yes, but here you are only talking about contingent things. I'm still having great difficulty seeing how there can only be abstractions 'turtles all the way down'. Suppose you have an abstract mathematical idea. Where does that idea exist? In your mind. But is your mind an abstraction? Even in a computer you can't have abstraction only. You have to go the the shop and buy a substantial computer if you want to compute.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That begs the question; you can grow cabbages on the real territory but not on the map, so there's a difference.
Quoting Pfhorrest
See last answer.
Quoting Banno
This is psychoanalysis. Once you go down that road you can make anything true. Like they say Reality is what your shrink tells you it is.
Evidence could be anything. You show, we take a look. (And we may also try to differentiate.)
Quoting Punshhh
Evidence of ... what exactly?
Quoting Punshhh
http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/lo/Logical_fallacy___Lack_of_imagination
Exactly. Russell said there was not 'enough evidence' for God's existence. But everything is evidence. Every dust mote, every star, planet and galaxy. The question is 'What is it evidence for?. "Evidence for" is subjective. It is how we interpret the evidence.
Yet the claim is that this God of yours exists entirely independently of us and our interpretations, yes?
Incidentally, also mentioned something about this (reality and such).
Our interpretations are the adjustable parts.
Mentioned something about how we typically differentiate a few times by now. How might we differentiate?
I gave you my evidence in my last reply to you.
You may have noticed by now, I am saying that we as human minds can't determine what exactly, with any philosophical rigour.
This was a question, not an assertion, or an assumption. Care to answer it?
Not entirely. God can be known as a person. That is not total knowledge of God, it is an aspect of God that God wants the individual to understand.
Ok, but there is an implicit assumption here: That "God" is the creator, and not some other player in the world. That's not something you got from observing the world. That's you defining a term.
Yet there is an assertion implicit in the question, "God", which I've inquired about for a bit now.
(You could at least have posted "God is the all-creator, hence the answer to my question follows.") ;)
Anyways, what exactly are you asking, then, if not about "life, the universe, and everything"? (I'll assume responding "my parents" will trigger a number of other questions, diallelus style.)
You miss a relevant point — it's not about whatever I don't know, it's about the claims of those that pretend they do, without which a good lot such discussions wouldn't have come about in the first place.
Not quite what I meant, apologies for being unclear. You're apparently referring to whatever you (claim to) know, i.e. epistemic, whereas (I think) was referring to the truth of the matter, so more ontological. In other words, by your claim, the mere existence of this God of yours is entirely independent of any/all of us and our beliefs, interpretations, daily lives, etc, right? Whatever we may or may not believe has no bearing on the mere existence of your God (according to your claim)?
I know a few persons, presumably you do as well. You also claim to know a person you label God. Would this be Knowing by Acquaintance?
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article also lists Knowledge-That, Knowledge-Wh, and Knowing-How, by the way.
Offhand, I'll venture to guess "no", at least not in any way that lends itself to answer ...
... like most other acquaintance. (Also check here and here.)
Sure, but that computer is made of stuff that can be described perfectly by more mathematical abstractions... such that the computer itself might be a simulation inside another computer, which itself might be a simulation, inside another computer, that might be a simulation, etc. That’s alternating between getting down to a perfect mathematical description of the thing in question, and then supposing that that structure is implemented atop another structure, of which we can give another perfect abstract description, before supposing that that is implemented atop yet another structure, and so on. Why stop at the “and there’s some other structure this is implemented on top of, no deeper details of which can ever possible be known” step, instead of the “and here is the most perfect abstract description of things, which is not implemented atop any deeper structure” step?
Quoting EnPassant
If you can’t do something with the “perfect” map that you can do with the territory, then its not really a perfect map.
Our beliefs about God tell us something about God. They may be simple compared to the reality of God but they provide a context in which to comprehend God. George Harrison said "God is not a man with a beard in the clouds - but He is if you want Him to be" In other words, it does not really matter what images we have of God (so long as they are reasonable). What matters is our religious imagery is good enough to form a context into which God can enter.
Quoting jorndoe
Yes. God can be present in whatever form is acceptable to the witness.
In much the same way as you would discriminate between dreams and reality. There is no clear answer. How do you know you are not dreaming right now? Probably because your present state is similar to all other non dreaming states. You are familiar with reality and can tell you are not dreaming. Likewise with questions about the difference between hallucination and vivid reality. It is not possible to give an exact test between the two but one knows in more subtle ways. The reality of mind and thought is more real than physical tables and chairs. Thought is the source of the world and of matter.
Ok, I'm getting your drift. If the world is really a 'mathematical' abstraction then how is it possible to construct such a world from the atoms and primitive axioms of mathematics?
For example how does 1 + 1 = 2 become 'substantial' enough to evolve into higher and more sophisticated mathematical entities, like group theory etc? Because if mathematics can become something like substance the very atoms of it must also be capable of becoming such. But I don't see how 1 + 1 = 2 can have any reality at all unless it exists in a mind. Abstractions might seem very potent to us but that is because our minds animate them and give them a kind of reality. It seems to me that mind is required to give mathematics any degree of potency. So mind must first exist if abstractions are to exist.
First we define a series of sets, starting with the empty set, and then a set that only contains that one empty set, and then a set that only contains those two preceding sets, and then a set that contains only those three preceding sets, and so on, at each step of the series defining the next set as the union of the previous set and a set containing only that previous set. We can then define some set operations (which I won't detail here) that relate those sets in that series to each other in the same way that the arithmetic operations of addition and multiplication relate natural numbers to each other. We could name those sets and those operations however we like, but if we name the series of sets "zero", "one", "two", "three", and so on, and name those operations "addition" and "multiplication", then when we talk about those operations on that series of sets, there is no way to tell if we are just talking about some made-up operations on a made-up series of sets, or if we were talking about actual addition and multiplication on actual natural numbers: all of the same things would be necessarily true in both cases, e.g. doing the set operation we called "addition" on the set we called "two" and another copy of that set called "two" creates the set that we called "four". Because these sets and these operations on them are fundamentally indistinguishable from addition and multiplication on numbers, they are functionally identical: those operations on those sets just are the same thing as addition and multiplication on the natural numbers.
All kinds of mathematical structures, by which I don't just mean a whole lot of different mathematical structures but literally every mathematical structure studied in mathematics today, can be built up out of sets this way. The integers, or whole numbers, can be built out of the natural numbers (which are built out of sets) as equivalence classes (a kind of set) of ordered pairs (a kind of set) of natural numbers, meaning in short that each integer is identical to some set of equivalent sets of two natural numbers in order, those sets of two natural numbers in order that are equal when one is subtracted from the other: the integers are all the things you can get by subtracting one natural number from another. Similarly, the rational numbers can be defined as equivalence classes of ordered pairs of integers in a way that means that the rationals are the things you can get by dividing one integer by another. The real numbers, including irrational numbers like pi and the square root of 2, can be constructed out of sets of rational numbers in a process too complicated to detail here (something called a Dedekind-complete ordered field, where a field is itself a kind of set). The complex numbers, including things like the square root of negative one, can be constructed out of ordered pairs of real numbers; and further hypercomplex numbers, including things called quaternions and octonions, can be built out of larger ordered sets of real numbers, which are built out of complicated sets of rational numbers, which are built out of sets of integers, which are built out of sets of natural numbers, which are built out of sets built out of sets of just the empty set. So from nothing but the empty set, we can build up to all complicated manner of fancy numbers.
But it is not just numbers that can be built out of sets. For example, all manner of geometric objects are also built out of sets as well. All abstract geometric objects can be reduced to sets of abstract geometric points, and a kind of function called a coordinate system maps such sets of points onto sets of numbers in a one-to-one manner, which is hence reversible: a coordinate system can be seen as turning sets of numbers into sets of points as well. For example, the set of real numbers can be mapped onto the usual kind of straight, continuous line considered in elementary geometry, and so the real numbers can be considered to form such a line; similarly, the complex numbers can be considered to form a flat, continuous plane. Different coordinate systems can map different numbers to different points without changing any features of the resulting geometric object, so the points, of which all geometric objects are built, can be considered the equivalence classes (a kind of set) of all the numbers (also made of sets) that any possible coordinate system could map to them. Things like lines and planes are examples of the more general type of object called a space. Spaces can be very different in nature depending on exactly how they are constructed, but a space that locally resembles the usual kind of straight and flat spaces we intuitively speak of (called Euclidian spaces) is an object called a manifold, and such a space that, like the real number line and the complex number plane, is continuous in the way required to do calculus on it, is called a differentiable manifold. Such a differentiable manifold is basically just a slight generalization of the usual kind of flat, continuous space we intuitively think of space as being, and it, as shown, can be built entirely out of sets of sets of ultimately empty sets.
Meanwhile, a special type of set defined such that any two elements in it can be combined through some operation to produce a third element of it, in a way obeying a few rules that I won't detail here, constitutes a mathematical object called a group. A differentiable manifold, being a set, can also be a group, if it follows the rules that define a group, and when it does, that is called a Lie group. Also meanwhile, another special kind of set whose members can be sorted into a two-dimensional array constitutes a mathematical object called a matrix, which can be treated in many ways like a fancy kind of number that can be added, multiplied, etc. A square matrix (one with its dimensions being of equal length) of complex numbers that obeys some other rules that I once again won't detail here is called a unitary matrix. Matrices can be the "numbers" that make up a geometric space, including a differentiable manifold, including a Lie group, and when a Lie group is made of unitary matrices, it constitutes a unitary group. And lastly, a unitary group that obeys another rule I won't bother detailing here is called a special unitary group. This makes a special unitary group essentially a space of the kind we would intuitively expect a space to be like — locally flat-ish, smooth and continuous, etc — but where every point in that space is a particular kind of square matrix of complex numbers, that all obey certain rules under certain operations on them, with different kinds of special unitary groups being made of matrices of different sizes.
That special unitary group is considered by contemporary theories of physics to be the fundamental kind of thing that the most elementary physical objects, quantum fields, are literally made of. Excitations of those quantum fields, which is to say particular states of those special unitary groups, constitute the fundamental particles of physics, which combine to make atoms, molecules, stars, planets, living cells, and organisms, including us. So in a very distant way we can be said to be made of empty sets.
(And as all of the truth functions, and so all the set operations, and all the other functions built out of set operations, can be built out of just joint denial, and the objects they act upon are built up out of empty sets, everything can in a sense be said to be made out of negations of nothing)
God, seems as if it's a story written by love-foolishness, instead of with self-control, who would've expanded on the original idea.
I agree with notions such as:
1. [s]God[/s] watches us.
2. [s]God[/s] is just.
3. [s]God[/s] created the universe.
4. [s]God[/s] is super-powerful, more probably by way of a super-computer; and less probably by way of super-computational super-power.
I don't agree with notions such as:
1. [s]God[/s] agrees with the bible.
2. [s]God[/s] is Christian.
3. [s]God[/s] loves us.
4. [s]God[/s] is a superhero.
Or another way to view it is, on the assumption that we don't know, or are unable to determine if we can know, the means of our origins (so all bets are off). What can we say about the real, or actual means of our origins? Is there a G/god involved, or if not, what is the alternative?
Indeed it is such a strong piece of evidence that I would require a thorough explanation of my origins coming about by some other means, for me to change my mind on this.
I know but it doesn't matter how you define these things the question still remains,
how can {0} U {0} = {{0},{0}} have an existence unless it exists in a mind? And if the fundamentals can't 'self-exist' how can the more sophisticated mathematical objects be built on them?
You put it so eloquently I thought I would use it to define my position by changing it a little;
That if God is the necessary ground of all existence, so since he knows that he himself exists, that is Bona fide evidence of God, should God exist.
So I'm not saying I can prove that God exists, but rather I can provide sufficient evidence of a God should God exist.
So if God exists, then I have provided a good evidence of it. However if God doesn't exist there is no way we can determine that my evidence is false. Whatever arguments we bring to the table we are necessarily none the wiser as to the existence of God.
The upshot of this is that the theist can't prove the existence of God, or further their case philosophically. But also that the atheist, or God denier, can't disprove the existence of God, or further their assertion that God doesn't exist. So we are left with a 50:50 outcome.
Can anyone provide evidence that God doesn't exist?
It is an intriguing idea and, granted, we have not looked deeply enough into reality to go beyond its contingent elements. But I'm sceptical...
As for evidence that God doesn't exist, the absence of evidence for pretty much all scriptural claims with any direct bearing on God's existence (creation, divinity of Christ, etc.) is a good place to start. The absence of evidence for any sort of divine causal intervention quite generally. The near-certainty falsity of the traditional dualistic picture of the immortal, immaterial soul. The (evidential) problem of evil has been mentioned. The fact that historically religious (including theistic) explanations all eventually are superseded by naturalistic ones. The world simply doesn't look like what we'd expect, if something like the deity of western monotheistic traditions (especially the Christian Bible) existed- so creation ex nihilo, a moral world order, immortal souls, and all the rest- and looks an awful lot like we'd expect if it was not created by a moral personal agent.
Well, you said that this was an attribute God has, so God is a creator. He might be other things, but if he is all things, we're back to square one.
Actually, I said should God exist, my existence and the existence of the world I live in is evidence of this.
I'm not commenting on my beliefs. I have adopted a philosophical position for the purposes of discussion. So as to point out that there is no way we as limited minds can prove, disprove, or determine in any way whether God exists. Or in other words whether our origins are magical/supernatural/of spirit, or some other, dreamt up, so called materialist explanation.
The reasons, or arguments you give are actually irrelevant because we don't have a "control" (a known example of a universe not created by a God) to compare it with. I am happy to explain this further, if you can't see the working.
In this endeavour, the first conclusion I have arrived at is what I have just pointed out to Enai De A Lukal, that there is no way we as limited minds can answer the question philosophically. So we have to look elsewhere.