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Is there proof God can not exist?
- Thread starter TJ73
- Start date
Frank Merton
Active Member
Define your terms as you like, and catalog what various groups teach as you like; I am interested in a "God" that transcends what is physically possible. Without such transcendence, skip the capital "G."
(Call it a god, or a demiurge, or Zeus, or superman, or the Logos, or the creator, or whatever, it is not something to worship and is something that can be studied).
I agree that we can hypothesize a God with this or that set of attributes, and then deduce the universe that would result; I even agree that we would call this a sort of "science." The actual existence of any of these hypothetical Gods is more problematic, since no amount of evidence can resolve something of this sort -- one must always deal (good luck) with the meme's defense of "faith." This quickly stops being scientific at all (and no one even tries to claim it is).
Frank Merton
Active Member
Not bad. In fact, I wouldn't think of trying to top it.
Frank Merton
Active Member
I don't know that the human mind is so limited. I would also say that "understanding" is a slippery idea -- usually with many different levels.
That we can't imagine such a thing is certainly true enough.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
It doesn't matter so much what you are interested in as how people use the term. It has a number of senses, including the one you attribute to it. As has already been pointed out, your kind of omnipotence is tantamount to an argument that God cannot exist. There are some theists who dogmatically assert that God can even do the logically impossible, but most theists seem to see that position as untenable and are happy to go with "anything that is logically possible". That was the position of both Thomas Aquinas and the popular Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. Wikipedia gives 5 different senses for "omnipotence":
- A deity is able to do anything that it chooses to do[1].
- A deity is able to do absolutely anything, even the logically impossible, i.e., pure agency.[2]
- A deity is able to do anything that is in accord with its own nature (thus, for instance, if it is a logical consequence of a deity's nature that what it speaks is truth, then it is not able to lie).
- Hold that it is part of a deity's nature to be consistent and that it would be inconsistent for said deity to go against its own laws unless there was a reason to do so.[3]
- A deity is able to do anything that corresponds with its omniscience and therefore with its worldplan.
Wrong again. You are taking the position that was famously expressed by Stephen Jay Gould as Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). While that seems to be the most popular point of view, there are a lot of people who maintain the opposite--that God is invariably portrayed as a being that causes physical effects in the universe and is therefore a proper subject of scientific investigation. That is why the Catholic Church so carefully kept scientists away from its "miraculous" Shroud of Turin for so long, only to find in a weak moment that three separate science labs independently verified that it was a medieval fraud. To the extent that God impinges on the natural world (as scripture has him doing all over the place for a very long time), the claims of people who assert his existence are open to scientific investigation. Physicist Victor J Stengel is best known for articulating this alternative point of view.
Frank Merton
Active Member
Being that you merely provided various dictionary definitions, which does nothing except mark you as a dictionary thumper (the same species as Bible thumper or Buddha thumper), you did not show where I was wrong. You also soured the milk. My point remains, that absent true transcendence (going beyond human theoretical potential), you do not have "God" but only a thunder maker.
In spite of your name-dropping, I must say I am glad to have such a luminary on my side.
Your comments about the Shroud of Turin are well taken, but seem beside the point here. Yes, specific claims about history or artifacts, and so on, can be scientifically tested. What has that to do about the Man in the Sky?
Well, to de-glibify my last statement, so what if this or that piece of claimed evidence for a demiurge is refuted -- the train rolls on.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Actually, I did show quite clearly where you were wrong, and I cited both Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis as examples of what I called the more common understanding of "omnipotence". As for "thumping dictionaries", I feel that I have reasonably good credentials for that sort of thing. After all, lexicology and lexicography are a big part of my day job.
Good question. The answer is that the existence of God is really a question of plausibility, not possibility. Just because we cannot prove the impossibility of flying pigs, that does not obligate us to take their possible existence seriously. The word "proof" in the OP should be construed more broadly than one of purely logical proof. The question is really an empirical question.
Yes, but that is the wrong train. If you can give good reasons not to believe in flying pigs, then you can give good reasons not to believe in gods.
Frank Merton
Active Member
I suppose some trains will someday run out of steam in the jungle and the passengers will have problems to deal with. However, we need keep in mind that there are often many routes to the same destination, and there are many worthy destinations.
(If I might make an aside; the earlier part of your message seemed defensive to me, and as though you were actively looking for things to disagree with, in order to have something to post. I guess at times I may be guilty of that too.)
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
No problem, Frank. I would rather appear defensive than offensive.
blackout
Violet.
Basically, you don't fit into the pigeonhole concept of a Biblical literalist. Makes people sad. After all, all theists are identical in beliefs, aren't they?
When your concept of God does not fit in a person's "God Smasher" 'machine',
then that couldn't POSSIBLY be a legitimate God concept
sitting there on the conveyer belt, don't you know?
Otherwise it would fit the God smashing machine. (by definition of the 'operator')
yeah yeah....
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Breathe
Hostis humani generis
LOL! Exactly, Vi.
If a concept of God doesn't fit in the God-smashing machine, then obviously the concept of God and the other person is at fault; the God-smashing machine is PERFECT, after all.
LOL! Exactly, Vi.
If a concept of God doesn't fit in the God-smashing machine, then obviously the concept of God and the other person is at fault; the God-smashing machine is PERFECT, after all.
All joking aside, if a person can't give a good answer to the question "why do you consider _____ a god?" then there's no obligation on anyone else to accept it as a god. And if you can give a good answer, it will probably have some things in common with other god-concepts.
Words do have meanings... even the word "god". And when they cease to have meaning, they cease to communicate meaning when used.
Yes, of course!
Examples: the notion of a God who is sometimes not God - or a morally good creator who sends evil into the world.
However, no formal or logical argument proves an empirical fact, but can only demonstrate truth or falsity in propositions.
Breathe
Hostis humani generis
Yeah, I agree.
Words do have meanings, naturally, but the problem is the presupposition that comes with the words, especially such a small and vague word as God, which explains a wide range of things, really. Let's face it: we have panentheists, pantheists, dualists, soft polytheists, hard polytheists, henotheists, and Deists who all use the term "God" to refer to their (or one of their) gods. That's a lot for such a small word.
For most people in the West, the word "God" tends to have an Abrahamic feel to it: Creator, King, Judge, and so on. Yet in the East, God does not necessarily have the same personal attributes. It gets more complex, really, with people's individual as opposed to communal views on God, which can vary.
Before one can even begin to discuss whether God exists or not, one needs an explanation on what the God is that they believe in - but not everyone believes "God" is Abrahamic as we know, so what do we do?
AFAICT, the only thing I've been able to identify that's common to all god-concepts is the idea that a god is an object of human worship.
IMO, this has an interesting side effect: it means that the question of the existence of God necessarily includes the question of whether human beings have knowledge of God. After all, if human worship is part of what defines a god, then even if there is an entity floating unknown out in space that people might decide was a god if they ever encountered it, until they do encounter it, it's by definition not a god.
Therefore, the only things we need to consider when trying to decide whether gods exist are the things that people actually worship, and concluding that all god-concepts come from things other than actual knowledge of the god in question would necessarily imply that no gods exist.
However, even if the definition of God/god is fuzzy, I think there are limits beyond which we can say that a thing is not a god. For instance, I think it's safe to say that a toaster over isn't a god, and neither is the colour green. That might be useful in figuring out the question: instead of "does God exist?" we can make it "does anything exist apart from things that aren't God?" It's still probably an intractable problem, but at least we can specify a few things that definitely fall into the set of "things that aren't God".
And of course, if we want an approach that takes into account the vague definition of the term "god", there's always ignosticism.
Breathe
Hostis humani generis
I dunno about that. I'm sure there are some movements who do not worship God. For example, would one say that, say, Pandeism worships a God? This is still a God belief, is it not? I don't even know if Deists actively worship, nor have I any pantheists who "worship", either. Maybe it's just I've never met any, but there probably going to be some movements out there that do not believe in worshipping God, even if they believe it exists.
Hell, considering one may find "polypanendeism" out there, why not one that does not give worship to this Supreme Being?
It depends again; some people believe that absolutely everything is God, as in absolutely everything. One only has to look at the Japanese, who believe that everything has a soul, including pens and so on--to see it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they were God, not really, and the Ainu (for what little I know), iirc, they had spirits that worked their way into groups (something like, for example, individual dog spirit < king of dog spirit-god < king of animal spirits-god < supreme two spirits-gods (I forget the last one)". I may have forgotten something, it was a while ago I learnt this, but you get the idea.
When does something, for example, change from a spirit to a deity? This ties into the God/gods thing to some extent, I think.
...but even then, there are people who believe that gods are facets of the Supreme One.
Complex, that, really.
Apologies, wording is all over the place. :cover:
Frank Merton
Active Member
What is worship?
When I bow to the statue of the fat Buddha (this is the Chinese variety seen in Vietnam) as part of a ritual, is this worship? It doesn't feel like it to me -- it seems to just be a form of exercise, and maybe respect for a cultural -- but even Americans who fully understand this have a great deal of difficulty with it.
I think this works as a definition, courtesy freedictionary.com:
Ardent devotion or adoration
In the case of religious worship, I might be inclined to throw something in there about the object of worship being considered sacred, but I'm willing to give some wiggle-room in that regard.
That depends - are you ardently devoted to Buddha (either that particular statue or Buddha in general)?
Edit: out of curiosity, how do you think your attitude toward Buddha is relevant? I'm not saying that every object of worship is a god; I'm saying that every god is an object of worship. These two statements aren't equivalent.
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Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Odion, I think that we all start ought with the roughly the same concept of a "god". A god is a thinking agent that controls some or all aspects of reality through volition. A god is a supernatural being that can contravene natural physical laws--a producer of miracles. As people mature, all of their vocabulary evolves to accommodate new knowledge about the nature of things. For most people, the prototypical concept of their god(s) does not get very far away from the original concept, and that is true in both the West and the East.
Smart, sophisticated people in both the West and the East develop more sophisticated models of God, but there is one thing about those sophisticates that strikes me as ironic. They still tend to pray and to relate to God as if he/she/it still fit the more conventional prototype. They still tend to worship God even while denying the conventional prototype. The sophisticated wrappers that they use to justify belief in their modified version does not fundamentally change how they behave towards God. God still remains a force of empowerment in their lives, and I think that it is instinctive fear of loss of empowerment that drives them away from the conclusion that there likely is nothing there to justify it. Well, that's a very general statement, and there are usually plenty of exceptions to such generalizations.
Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie remarked in his landmark Faces in the Clouds that religion goes through periods of de-anthropomorphizing its gods, but the less anthropomorphic viewpoints never seem to last. People always return to the fundamental, prototypical concept of a god as a product of their natural tendency to personify nature.
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