Bad Chihuahua! (An Inability To Separate God From Religion)

[Heyo]

So ... the basic complaint here is that "God" is a mystery. I agree. But this is not an argument for or against God's existence. It's only an argument against our knowing of it. But our knowing of it was not the proposal. The proposal was simply that God exists (presumably whether we know of it or not).

So, basically, "we don't know what it is, and we don't know what it does, but we are sure that it is there" - and you call that rational?

So this ends up being a bit of an example of demanding evidence for an assertion that was not posed. So instead, and if we stick to the proposition, itself, what is the evidence that supports it? And what is the evidence that negates it? And is there any other evidence that would further clarify it? Without going into a whole dissertation, the evidence that supports it is the mystery itself. The existential questions of source and purpose are being "begged" by our reality, and are NOT being answered by any other logical possibility. So that even though we can't define this source/purpose, we can logically determine it's necessity.

The second bit of evidence comes from the fact that we are asking about it, at all. And not just 'we', but all humanity all across the globe and throughout all human history. That not only enforces the idea of logical necessity as mentioned above, but of something even more interesting I think. And that is that we humans have developed a cognitive nature that MAKES us ask. Such that it's not just ourselves asking, but existential nature, itself, is asking, ... through is. We are designed by nature to NEED these answers. To seek them. Very interesting, that.

Which is evidence for a human character trait. Humans have also dreamt of immortality, flying and a perfect society - which is not evidence that these things exist.

And finally, there is the fact that nothing we know of can or has ever negated the possibility that God exists. Even in a universe that negates a great many possibilities, and is even defined to a great extent by what it is as opposed to it not being anything else. Even within this ocean of specificity, "God" is still a possibility. And the ultimate possibility.

We can't exclude the existence of some god, but we have already excluded a lot of gods which can't logically exist, beginning with Epicurus.

 

[Heyo]

OK - so why not? And should things be rejected out of hand because most people don't agree - popular opinion used to get people burned at the stake as witches.

If you have knowledge, you can teach it to others. Scientific knowledge is universally accepted by all who have studied it. It may take some time to spread the knowledge, but theists had millennia to spread their knowledge and failed. That is a strong indicator that they don't know what they are talking about.

So why could God not be a "physical phenomenon"?

It could be. Find a phenomenon, name it "god" and convince everybody that that is god.

 

[Spice]

But how do any of us know what "evidence" to look for?

Perhaps like any basic concept - you have a theory - you ponder it from every conceivable angle - you research and study similar concepts - you continue to ponder and adjust your theory as your findings come to light. The "evidence" is like you -- unique.

...their religious indoctrination never really found a place in me partly because I "knew better".

I know that feeling! And I fought it long and hard like a good little Christian is taught.

What does it mean to "believe in" God?

To believe in "something" that makes us needed, useful, a small part of something good and decent and worth every breath -- by just being our best -- and here for a purpose unseen.

Yet I can still choose to hope that a God of my preferred understanding exists. And I can still choose to live as if that hope will turn out to be true. After all, I have no evidence that this God I prefer to hope exists DOESN'T exist. And neither does anyone else. And not only that, but I have gained ample evidence that my choosing to hope in this God's existence, and by living as if it exists, makes my experience of living life far better than before I made this choice. So that the choice then produces its own evidence.

And there you have it! Your theory becomes substantiated by living and the "fruits" your life produces. As most anyone can tell, my Christian foundation is still under me, but the house was fully renovated.
Namaste

 

[Spice]

Like Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, where gods are literally created by belief in them and their divine powers wax and wane based on how many believers they have? It was intended to be humorous of course.

Or in Brom's _Lost Gods_ where all the gods that have lost their followings are waning in Purgatory.

 

[Tomef]

On another thread someone asked atheists why and how they became atheists. And nearly every response sited some unresolvable issue with religion, and/or with how some religion was defining God. The idea being that as the atheist rejected the God as it was defined by that religion, they rejected the idea of God all together.

And for some reason the irrationality of this thought process never seems to have crossed anyone's mind. As to a person, some religion or other was being allowed to define God, without doubt or exception, so that in rejecting that religion's 'God', the entire concept of and gamut of alternative possibilities was being dismissed, en total.

"A chihuahua bit me once as a kid so I reject and despise all dogs to this day."

It seems to me that there is a strong prejudice being served, here. As evidenced by a blanket dismissal prior to any honest exploration or investigation into the many possible ways we humans might choose to define or conceptualize "God".

You misunderstood the posts in that thread. What is being said is a) gods are fictions, created to explain things we didn’t understand, and b) we have no reason to believe there are any actual, non-fictional gods.

An understanding of how religious texts/religions came to be adequately explains a and the better understanding we now have of the cosmos supports b.

 

[siti]

Scientific knowledge is universally accepted by all who have studied it.

Well not really...in fact the whole ethos of science resides in the continuing effort to falsify current "scientific knowledge" and replace it with progressively better models. And in some scientific disciplines there are widely differing opinions about what we "know".

theists had millennia to spread their knowledge and failed. That is a strong indicator that they don't know what they are talking about.

Failed? Good Lord! Monotheism alone overturned millennia of more ancient belief systems and even now accounts for the religious affiliations of half the world's population...and if you count Hindus and indigenous religions as theistic, add another billion...all up about 70% of humans maintain some kind of theistic belief. And "they" certainly know what they're talking about...even if you and I don't get it.

More to the point, even if they had failed to convince anyone, is that really a measure of the veracity of an idea?

It could be. Find a phenomenon, name it "god" and convince everybody that that is god.

OK...I'm on it...but here's one to get the thinking started...look up Paola Zizzi's "big wow"...I'll try and find a link to the paper tomorrow when I'm back at my pc...but basically I think the idea goes that the early universe may have behaved as a quantum computer so complex that it experienced a moment of "cosmic consciousness" in which the parameters for the evolution of the universe thereafter were consciously selected...yeah I know it sounds like woo woo...but read the paper...Zizzi is a serious physicist and bases her idea around the Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR theory of consciousness... which has also been criticized as unscientific...but I don't consider myself smart enough to dismiss anything Roger Penrose proposes so easily.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I'm not "with the scientism crowd", I'm a "the right tool for the task" guy. That's why I asked about the field we are in.

In philosophy, I accept arguments as evidence, and I grant that there have been arguments made that seem to indicate that theism is a rational position. I guess we both know them, and also the rebuttals from the atheists.

I want to address the irrationality of theism as a philosophical idea - even so it seems rational at first glance.
1. As we discuss a philosophical ideal, we don't have an example specimen from which we can get its properties by examination.
2. No agreed upon definition of "god" exists.
3. No property of god can be rationally derived from any agreed upon axioms.
4. Any axiom we proclaim will be arbitrary.
C: God (i.e. a description of an entity with a set of properties) can not be logically derived, therefore it is irrational to assume its existence.

If I can just take issue with point 4. above;

The first axiom on which belief in divine agency is derived, is identical to the first axiom on which logic is derived; that there is order in the universe.

 

[Heyo]

Well not really...in fact the whole ethos of science resides in the continuing effort to falsify current "scientific knowledge" and replace it with progressively better models. And in some scientific disciplines there are widely differing opinions about what we "know".

There are always debates on the currently investigated edges of any theory - but the ever-growing core is accepted.

Failed? Good Lord! Monotheism alone overturned millennia of more ancient belief systems and even now accounts for the religious affiliations of half the world's population...and if you count Hindus and indigenous religions as theistic, add another billion...all up about 70% of humans maintain some kind of theistic belief. And "they" certainly know what they're talking about...even if you and I don't get it.

That is only if you put them together, but they don't belong there. People of differing religions are at each other's throats since forever, and there is no sign that will ever end. There is no single or combined group of believers, who agree upon the nature of god, as big as the group who thinks that it doesn't exist.

More to the point, even if they had failed to convince anyone, is that really a measure of the veracity of an idea?

No, it is a measure of the power to convince others to accept that view.

OK...I'm on it...but here's one to get the thinking started...look up Paola Zizzi's "big wow"...I'll try and find a link to the paper tomorrow when I'm back at my pc...but basically I think the idea goes that the early universe may have behaved as a quantum computer so complex that it experienced a moment of "cosmic consciousness" in which the parameters for the evolution of the universe thereafter were consciously selected...yeah I know it sounds like woo woo...but read the paper...Zizzi is a serious physicist and bases her idea around the Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR theory of consciousness... which has also been criticized as unscientific...but I don't consider myself smart enough to dismiss anything Roger Penrose proposes so easily.

I will have a look, but from what I have glanced with a superficial web search, there is no phenomenon, just a hypothesis of one.

 

[siti]

That is only if you put them together, but they don't belong there. People of differing religions are at each other's throats since forever, and there is no sign that will ever end. There is no single or combined group of believers, who agree upon the nature of god, as big as the group who thinks that it doesn't exist.

So your argument is...

More people think there isn't a God than the number of theists who agree with each other about the nature of god

Therefore there is no God

At best that's an ad populum fallacy...assuming that your premise is correct...bit I think you'll probably find there are more Muslims (who do more or less agree on God's infinite, transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient...etc. nature) than there sre atheists in the world. So by your argument from popular opinion and given that Christians can't agree on who or what God is, we should all convert to Islam

No, it is a measure of the power to convince others to accept that view.

Well on that measure science is a bigger failure...witness climate change denial, persistent creationism...etc.

I will have a look, but from what I have glanced with a superficial web search, there is no phenomenon, just a hypothesis of one.

Consciousness is a phenomenon...so is experience... are they fundamental to physical reality or radically (miraculously?) emergent?

 

[Heyo]

So your argument is...

More people think there isn't a God than the number of theists who agree with each other about the nature of god

Therefore there is no God

Therefore, we don't know what a god is or does - or if it exists.

At best that's an ad populum fallacy...assuming that your premise is correct...bit I think you'll probably find there are more Muslims (who do more or less agree on God's infinite, transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient...etc. nature) than there sre atheists in the world. So by your argument from popular opinion and given that Christians can't agree on who or what God is, we should all convert to Islam

Islam is also split into denominations, just like Christianity or Judaism, just not as much.
And the biggest group of all is those who think that those who don't agree with their picture of god, are wrong.

Consciousness is a phenomenon...so is experience... are they fundamental to physical reality or radically (miraculously?) emergent?

Consciousness suffers the same flaw as god, nobody knows what it is.

 

[siti]

Consciousness suffers the same flaw as god, nobody knows what it is.

But it is a phenomenon...right? Or what? Because we don't all agree about what it is we should assume it doesn't exist?

 

[PureX]

You misunderstood the posts in that thread. What is being said is a) gods are fictions, created to explain things we didn’t understand, and b) we have no reason to believe there are any actual, non-fictional gods.

A has nothing to do with the theist proposition, but is a misinformed and misapplied complaint about religious depictions of God/god's.
B is simply false, as there are a number of logical reasons to accept the proposition that God/god's actually exist. Your rejecting then, or ignoring them does make them go away.

An understanding of how religious texts/religions came to be adequately explains a and the better understanding we now have of the cosmos supports b.

Your post only exemplifies the observations posed in the OP.

 

[Heyo]

But it is a phenomenon...right? Or what? Because we don't all agree about what it is we should assume it doesn't exist?

Yes, I agree, it's a phenomenon.

 

[PureX]

Yes, I agree, it's a phenomenon.

Existence is phenomenon. Everything that exists, exists as phenomena. Even matter, the holy grail of "objective reality" of the materialists is just more phenomena.

 

[siti]

Yes, I agree, it's a phenomenon.

OK - so is it fundamental to reality or does it appear by magic at a certain level of physical complexity? I mean it has to be one or the other - right? Fundamental or radically emergent?

 

[Tomef]

A has nothing to do with the theist proposition, but is a misinformed and misapplied complaint about religious depictions of God/god's.

That’s just a factual description of how we came to have the current religious texts. As a basic overview, people appear to have started out with the idea that all natural things were imbued with spirit in some sense, leading to the idea that rivers, trees, mountains and so on where inhabited by gods. Later, when people began to build cities, they invented a god for their city, empires led to fictions about gods with a wider purview, and eventually came the idea of a god over all gods, omnipresent and etc. That is simply where the idea of gods came from - that people believe there actually are real gods beyond the written fictions is nothing more than the result of millennia of habit, custom and indoctrination.

B is simply false, as there are a number of logical reasons to accept the proposition that God/god's actually exist. Your rejecting then, or ignoring them does make them go away.

Not really, there are arguments that seem logical if you already believe there must be gods, but they are all out of date and don’t stand up in the context of current human knowledge and understanding.

 

[PureX]

That’s just a factual description of how we came to have the current religious texts. As a basic overview, people appear to have started out with the idea that all natural things were imbued with spirit in some sense, leading to the idea that rivers, trees, mountains and so on where inhabited by gods. Later, when people began to build cities, they invented a god for their city, empires led to fictions about gods with a wider purview, and eventually came the idea of a god over all gods, omnipresent and etc. That is simply where the idea of gods came from - that people believe there actually are real gods beyond the written fictions is nothing more than the result of millennia of habit, custom and indoctrination.

Again, none of this negates the theist proposition, or the evidence in support of it. In fact, it actually supports it. Fiction is fiction. Yep. And we use fiction to help us cognate the inexplicable aspects of our experience of reality. Yep. Thus, our experience of reality is in many ways, or at least in some fundamental ways, inexplicable. Yep. Creating the necessity for this inexplicable solution that we call "God". Yep.

Not really, there are arguments that seem logical if you already believe there must be gods, but they are all out of date and don’t stand up in the context of current human knowledge and understanding.

You are apparently unaware of the actual philosophical evidence in support of the philosophical proposition called theism. Your mind is stuck in science, but theism is not a scientific proposition, and therefor is not related nor beholding to your personal obsession with scientific evidence. Or scientific explanations.

This is why so few atheists are even capable of posing a valid logical philosophical rebuttal to the theist proposition. Their minds are stuck in material science, and scientism. To a point that they are completely unaware of the philosophical debate. And completely unable to engage in it.

 

[Tomef]

Again, none of this negates the theist proposition, or the evidence in support of it. In fact, it actually supports it. Fiction is fiction. Yep. And we use fiction to help us cognate the inexplicable aspects of our experience of reality. Yep. Thus, our experience of reality is in many ways, or at least in some fundamental ways, inexplicable. Yep. Creating the necessity for this inexplicable solution that we call "God". Yep.

You are apparently unaware of the actual philosophical evidence in support of the philosophical proposition called theism. Your mind is stuck in science, but theism is not a scientific proposition, and therefor is not related nor beholding to your personal obsession with scientific evidence. Or scientific explanations.

This is why so few atheists are even capable of posing a valid logical philosophical rebuttal to the theist proposition. Their minds are stuck in material science, and scientism. To a point that they are completely unaware of the philosophical debate. And completely unable to engage in it.

You’re jumping the gun a bit there. It’s generally more useful when engaging in an argument to work through it in stages rather than blurting out a load of random stuff without any basis for knowing if it’s relevant or not. Which arguments for theism do you find convincing, and why?

 

[PureX]

You’re jumping the gun a bit there. It’s generally more useful when engaging in an argument to work through it in stages rather than blurting out a load of random stuff without any basis for knowing if it’s relevant or not. Which arguments for theism do you find convincing, and why?

See posts 81 and 90, above.

 

[Tomef]

See posts 81 and 90, above.

I was thinking more of an argument that you support, one that is fully developed I mean, in the public domain. That would be better for the purpose of discussion as otherwise a whole load of random tangents are likely.

But what you seem to be saying is that the fact we’re all here means there might be a god. Well that was a valid point before there were alternative explanations, hence the invention of gods by people to try and explain the why and wherefore of us being here. Over time we’ve developed better explanations that we can test and develop further.

The idea of there being a god however is a total fiction, we invented it. It didn’t come to us from outside, but from inside. You can easily trace how that idea developed over time, proving quite conclusively that there is nothing to it but fiction. Nothing even slightly indicates otherwise, it’s a fiction supported solely by fictional evidence. You seem to have some obsession with scientism, but this is just about the development of human thought, the current status of a long and ongoing struggle towards better understanding. One thing that can be said with confidence at this point is that an argument that is only supported by its own claims is not worth taking seriously.