God is simple, not complex

[Willamena]

Samey same for purposes of the discussion. A definition is a description. But to your point....anger would currently be a description of your emotional state. And it partially defines what you are at the moment.

Diffy different for purposes of the discussion, too. God is not automatically defined by calling him truth or love. It's more often the case of an allegorical image being presented to express something about god.

I guess if I was nothing more than my aggregate parts, I might think myself defined by them. But "I" stand apart from any description of my body or person.

 

[Curious George]

I have no problem with that, but as you can see in this thread, atheists here assume "God" designates something debatable. But if the aim is to ascertain truth, it's not. Quoting the article from The Week:

"Every pursuit of truth, every attempt to be good, every longing for beauty presupposes the existence of some idea of truth, goodness, and beauty from which these particular instances are derived. And these transcendental ideas unite in the classical concept of God, who simply is truth, goodness, and beauty. That’s why, although it isn’t necessary to believe in God in some explicit way in order to be good, it certainly is the case (in Hart’s words) "that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not." "
..​

Do they though? This quote presupposes universals. Ironically, if we are going to rely on a constituent ontology, then nothing prevents us from instead assuming something like trope theory and dismissing universals altogether. But if we were to assume universals then we needn't assume a god as the identity of such universals. We could leave them as abstractions and instead adopt a state of affairs ontology, or we could adopt some concept similar to Plato's Forms. And btw god cannot be goodness, truth or beauty. God must be ultimate truth, ultimate beauty, etc otherwise divine simplicity falls apart because god is no longer a single member of the set. Therefore god can no longer be distinct properties (for lack of a better word) and still be simple.​

 

[Curious George]

Describes, yes. But doesn't define.

It defines you in part in that instant.

 

[Willamena]

It defines you in part in that instant.

Not me. It describes a circumstance, one that is fleeting.

 

[Milton Platt]

Diffy different for purposes of the discussion, too. God is not automatically defined by calling him truth or love. It's more often the case of an allegorical image being presented to express something about god.

I guess if I was nothing more than my aggregate parts, I might think myself defined by them. But "I" stand apart from any description of my body or person.

Yes and no.....your body is a part of what you are. No body, no you......so far as science can ascertain. The "I" you are talking about is the thinking, emotional part which is generated in the brain of the physical you.

 

[Milton Platt]

Not me. It describes a circumstance, one that is fleeting.

An emotion is not a circumstance. The circumstances cause the emotion. It describes your emotional state. How fleeting is unimportant.
At that precise moment, it is part of what you are.

 

[Willamena]

Yes and no.....your body is a part of what you are. No body, no you......

We differ on that metaphysical image...

...so far as science can ascertain. The "I" you are talking about is the thinking, emotional part which is generated in the brain of the physical you.

And the metaphysical image you hold of yourself informs how you think about god.

 

[Willamena]

An emotion is not a circumstance. The circumstances cause the emotion. It describes your emotional state. How fleeting is unimportant.
At that precise moment, it is part of what you are.

Yup, it's a circumstance of me.

 

[Milton Platt]

Yup, it's a circumstance of me.

LOL, disagree....but I have followed you elsewhere on this forum......enjoy your thinking.

 

[Reflex]

The word reality is a word which is used to refer to the physical world, not an ethereal supernatural one. You are committing a category error. We can experience the physical world, and scientifically confirm it's properties. The word god is used repeatedly to denote a supernatural being in most religions. What religion and what god are you referring to, then? Again, if you cannot define it, there is no way to know that it exists.

That people entertain widely notions of "reality" does not mean reality does not exist. And even if it is true that "The word god is used repeatedly to denote a supernatural being in most religions," it is completely irrelevant to what is being said. If you read the articles, you would (hopefully) know that. Scientism, what the highlighted implies, is invalidated by the fact that the "scientific method" presupposes the validity of metaphysical assumptions. Ed Feser addresses this at length in two of his books: The Last Superstition and Scholastic Metaphysics. Below is from an interview with Feser regarding the former. This is not the first time I posted it.

Briefly, scientism is the view that science alone gives us knowledge of reality. Of course, that just raises the question of what we mean by “science.” One problem with scientism is that if you define “science” narrowly -- so that it includes physics and chemistry, say, but not philosophy or theology -- then scientism ends up being self-refuting, because it is not itself a scientific claim but a philosophical one. On the other hand, if you define “science” broadly enough so that it avoids being self-refuting, then it becomes vacuous, because it now no longer rules out philosophy, theology, or pretty much anything else adherents of scientism want to be able to dismiss without a hearing as “unscientific.”

A second problem with scientism is that science cannot in principle give us a complete description of the world, both because science takes for granted certain assumptions it cannot justify in a non-circular fashion (such as that perception is reliable, that there is order in the world that is really there and not just projected onto it by the mind, etc.), and because the methods of science of their nature can obscure as much as they reveal. For example, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell -- who was no friend of Scholasticism or of religion -- often emphasized, the methods of physics give us only the abstract mathematical structure of physical reality, but do not and cannot tell us the intrinsic nature of whatever is the underlying reality that has that structure.

A third problem is science cannot in principle provide a complete explanation of the phenomena it describes. Science explains things by tracing them down to ever deeper laws of nature. But what it cannot tell you is what a “law of nature” is in the first place and why it operates. It really is amazing how unreflectively atheists and advocates of scientism appeal to the notion of “laws,” given how deeply philosophically problematic the very notion is. Earlier generations of scientists were aware of the philosophical puzzles raised by the nature of scientific explanation, and some contemporary scientists (such as Paul Davies) are also sensitive to the puzzles raised by the very idea of a “law of nature” (which is actually a holdover from an idiosyncratic theology to which Descartes and Newton were committed, but which Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophers reject just as much as atheists do).

But most contemporary scientists tend not to have the general education that figures of the generation of Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg did. They don’t know philosophy well, and they also don’t know what they don’t know. This goes double for the more aggressively atheistic ones among them -- people like Lawrence Krauss, Peter Atkins, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne. Hence they repeatedly commit very crude philosophical mistakes but also refuse to listen or respond when these mistakes are pointed out to them.

Anyway, the main reason scientism has the following it does is probably that people are, quite rightly, impressed with the technological and predictive successes of modern science. The trouble is that this simply gives us no reason whatsoever to believe scientism -- that is to say, it gives us no reason to believe that science alone gives us knowledge. To draw that conclusion you need to assume that if something is real, then it will be susceptible of a precise mathematical description that will make strict prediction and technological application possible. Now that is itself a philosophical or metaphysical assumption, not a scientific one. But it is also an assumption that there is not only no reason to believe, but decisive reason to reject, as I argue in the book.

What the mathematically-oriented methods of modern physics do is to focus on those aspects of nature which can be strictly predicted and controlled and to ignore anything that doesn’t fit that method. As a result, physics tends brilliantly to uncover those aspects of reality that fit that method, and which can therefore be exploited technologically. But it simply does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality. To think otherwise is like the drunk’s fallacy of assuming that his lost car keys must be under the street lamp somewhere, because that is where the light is.
​

 

[Reflex]

...Therefore god can no longer be distinct properties (for lack of a better word) and still be simple.

Well, duh.

 

[prometheus11]

It defines you in part in that instant.

Can any one instance define a being made up of billions?

 

[prometheus11]

An emotion is not a circumstance. The circumstances cause the emotion. It describes your emotional state. How fleeting is unimportant.
At that precise moment, it is part of what you are.

The brain state at that moment is a circumstance...a storm of electricity across synapses and clouds of chemicals deemed most important by the rational center of the forebrain.

 

[prometheus11]

That people entertain widely notions of "reality" does not mean reality does not exist. And even if it is true that "The word god is used repeatedly to denote a supernatural being in most religions," it is completely irrelevant to what is being said. If you read the articles, you would (hopefully) know that. Scientism, what the highlighted implies, is invalidated by the fact that the "scientific method" presupposes the validity of metaphysical assumptions. Ed Feser addresses this at length in two of his books: The Last Superstition and Scholastic Metaphysics. Below is from an interview with Feser regarding the former. This is not the first time I posted it.

Briefly, scientism is the view that science alone gives us knowledge of reality. Of course, that just raises the question of what we mean by “science.” One problem with scientism is that if you define “science” narrowly -- so that it includes physics and chemistry, say, but not philosophy or theology -- then scientism ends up being self-refuting, because it is not itself a scientific claim but a philosophical one. On the other hand, if you define “science” broadly enough so that it avoids being self-refuting, then it becomes vacuous, because it now no longer rules out philosophy, theology, or pretty much anything else adherents of scientism want to be able to dismiss without a hearing as “unscientific.”

A second problem with scientism is that science cannot in principle give us a complete description of the world, both because science takes for granted certain assumptions it cannot justify in a non-circular fashion (such as that perception is reliable, that there is order in the world that is really there and not just projected onto it by the mind, etc.), and because the methods of science of their nature can obscure as much as they reveal. For example, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell -- who was no friend of Scholasticism or of religion -- often emphasized, the methods of physics give us only the abstract mathematical structure of physical reality, but do not and cannot tell us the intrinsic nature of whatever is the underlying reality that has that structure.

A third problem is science cannot in principle provide a complete explanation of the phenomena it describes. Science explains things by tracing them down to ever deeper laws of nature. But what it cannot tell you is what a “law of nature” is in the first place and why it operates. It really is amazing how unreflectively atheists and advocates of scientism appeal to the notion of “laws,” given how deeply philosophically problematic the very notion is. Earlier generations of scientists were aware of the philosophical puzzles raised by the nature of scientific explanation, and some contemporary scientists (such as Paul Davies) are also sensitive to the puzzles raised by the very idea of a “law of nature” (which is actually a holdover from an idiosyncratic theology to which Descartes and Newton were committed, but which Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophers reject just as much as atheists do).

But most contemporary scientists tend not to have the general education that figures of the generation of Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg did. They don’t know philosophy well, and they also don’t know what they don’t know. This goes double for the more aggressively atheistic ones among them -- people like Lawrence Krauss, Peter Atkins, Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne. Hence they repeatedly commit very crude philosophical mistakes but also refuse to listen or respond when these mistakes are pointed out to them.

Anyway, the main reason scientism has the following it does is probably that people are, quite rightly, impressed with the technological and predictive successes of modern science. The trouble is that this simply gives us no reason whatsoever to believe scientism -- that is to say, it gives us no reason to believe that science alone gives us knowledge. To draw that conclusion you need to assume that if something is real, then it will be susceptible of a precise mathematical description that will make strict prediction and technological application possible. Now that is itself a philosophical or metaphysical assumption, not a scientific one. But it is also an assumption that there is not only no reason to believe, but decisive reason to reject, as I argue in the book.

What the mathematically-oriented methods of modern physics do is to focus on those aspects of nature which can be strictly predicted and controlled and to ignore anything that doesn’t fit that method. As a result, physics tends brilliantly to uncover those aspects of reality that fit that method, and which can therefore be exploited technologically. But it simply does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality. To think otherwise is like the drunk’s fallacy of assuming that his lost car keys must be under the street lamp somewhere, because that is where the light is.
​

It's just that physics makes objects that alter our reality better than philosophy and religion. Cell phones, MRI machines, computers, toasters, even. And no philosophy or religion can overcome a dehibilitating drug or bomb or bullet.

 

[Curious George]

Not me. It describes a circumstance, one that is fleeting.

How is it a circumstance and not you in an instance. Instances are only fleeting with respect to a larger picture. I am not talking about that larger picture I am talking about your identity in an instance.

 

[Willamena]

How is it a circumstance and not you in an instance. Instances are only fleeting with respect to a larger picture. I am not talking about that larger picture I am talking about your identity in an instance.

Because I am not my anger. It's circumstance because it arises through no account of mine, although I can be the instrument of it settling by reminding myself of my circumstance, bringing it to the fore of awareness.

 

[Curious George]

Because I am not my anger. It's circumstance because it arises through no account of mine, although I can be the instrument of it settling by reminding myself of my circumstance, bringing it to the fore of awareness.

You are not equal to your anger because your anger is only a part of your identity. To be equal to your anger you would need to have no other parts.

If we process this with the abstract concept of anger, then anger is still a property that you at least approximate in that instance so it is still descriptive of your identity. Just as circular is descriptive of a circle. You could say that the circle is not it's circular-ness but without that quality it would no longer be itself.

 

[Curious George]

Because I am not my anger. It's circumstance because it arises through no account of mine, although I can be the instrument of it settling by reminding myself of my circumstance, bringing it to the fore of awareness.

You seem here to be deriving an abstract concept of you-ness for which you then judge instances of you. Is there anything permanent in you to support such a notion?

 

[prometheus11]

You seem here to be deriving an abstract concept of you-ness for which you then judge instances of you. Is there anything permanent in you to support such a notion?

What? You seem to be implying some sort of mysticism. How many of a person's moments define him? How many circumstances does a person contain?

 

[Reflex]

It's just that physics makes objects that alter our reality better than philosophy and religion. Cell phones, MRI machines, computers, toasters, even. And no philosophy or religion can overcome a dehibilitating drug or bomb or bullet.

Try reading the excerpt, which says, in part: "The main reason scientism has the following it does is probably that people are, quite rightly, impressed with the technological and predictive successes of modern science. The trouble is that this simply gives us no reason whatsoever to believe scientism -- that is to say, it gives us no reason to believe that science alone gives us knowledge." And, mind you, that is a much reduced from what is said in his books.

Atheists here like to muddy the waters by drawing the discussion away from what theists are saying by inferring things that are not, in fact, being said at all. I don't know whether they do this simply because they like being argumentative, are incapable of understanding what's being said, or because they believe that in order to discuss God and religion at all, it must be on their terms and according to their definitions.