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Religion vs Atheism Book 2


Stubby

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I don't understand the question. If God is omnipotent, there doesn't need to be an explanation. He can just fix it. 

He did fix it, you just don't like the way he went about doing that. :)

More seriously, most versions of God are portrayed as extremely reluctant to make direct alterations to the minds of individuals (which seems to me to be the most obvious way to fix this kind of problem).

All of what you wrote is true, yet nothing of it contradicts anything I wrote.

That the universe has no inherent moral and morals are just a social construct doesn't mean they don't have a place in our world. 

They surely do have a place in our world. My point was that for physicalists, they are not merely a social construct, they're an inconsistent social construct because they rely on freedoms which physicalism explicitly claims do not exist.

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He did fix it, you just don't like the way he went about doing that. :)

Because he did it in a objectively terrible way. I can solve world hunger pretty fucking easily, but no one's going to give me a medal for it.

More seriously, most versions of God are portrayed as extremely reluctant to make direct alterations to the minds of individuals (which seems to me to be the most obvious way to fix this kind of problem).

Well not when it would actually help the people it wants to help. The biblical god had no problem hardening the pharaohs heart. Despite the fact it supposedly was on Moses' side.

Though again, Omnipotent. The Biblical god had literally infinite possibilities on how to deal with this issue. But it chose mass genocide.

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He did fix it, you just don't like the way he went about doing that. :)

More seriously, most versions of God are portrayed as extremely reluctant to make direct alterations to the minds of individuals (which seems to me to be the most obvious way to fix this kind of problem).

They surely do have a place in our world. My point was that for physicalists, they are not merely a social construct, they're an inconsistent social construct because they rely on freedoms which physicalism explicitly claims do not exist.

This is not true. It may be that at a deep level our brains are all obeying the laws of physics, be they stochastic or deterministic in nature, but as long as we have a mind and can think and reflect on good and evil, morality is just as real a construct as the mind itself. What I want is a result of outer factors, but once I know what I want, I can act upon it by free will.

This discussion is old and may be worth a thread of its own if we wish to discuss it at length. 

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Yes, but you say nothing of your own solution to this biblical scenario of irreversible world corruption. God gave humanity dominion over the earth and rested. When God looked back, the "real" metaphysical forces of evil, sin, and violence irreparably corrupted and polluted the created world. What does one do? How does one fix it? Stand back, do nothing, and let it fall further to ruin? So what about your own character?

There seems to be a big range of options between "do nothing and let things fall further to ruin" and "wiping out 99.999999% of all living entities," especially for the creator of the entire universe. Like, perhaps, sending down angels to punish each transgressive act until people learn better? I'm sure a supernatural entity capable of creating the universe would have a list of options far beyond what my mere mortal intellect can conceive. And, apparently, killing off 99.99999% of all living things was what He chose.

 

I would agree that most liberal Christian theologians would likely not consider Altherion's interpretation "good theology," at least as far as humans attempting to rationalize the divine or a good divine being worth worshiping, but he does have a point. Many authors assert in the biblical texts that God's perspective is not human, as humans - as we are told - have far more limitations of senses and cognition than God.

That may well be a valid explanation for the apparent contradiction, but it is highly unsatisfactory as an answer to a skeptic or a non-believer. It comes down to "we can't understand the will of God" and "what God says applies to us, but not to Him." You might as well thrown in "Do as I say, not as I do" in there while you're at it.  

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That may well be a valid explanation for the apparent contradiction, but it is highly unsatisfactory as an answer to a skeptic or a non-believer. It comes down to "we can't understand the will of God" and "what God says applies to us, but not to Him." You might as well thrown in "Do as I say, not as I do" in there while you're at it.  

It was just a wordier way of saying "god moves in mysterious ways".  Which is no kind of good answer.

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Hell is God sternly judging you every time you have a lustful thought about a man, and you can't not see his disapproving face - there is no looking away!

I'm not quite sure why you jump from atheist to strict deterministic physicalism, the two don't have to be connected like that.  I don't believe in an absolute right and wrong, I believe in a right and wrong based in what is good for society and the subjective experience of the individuals within that society. Obviously what I feel is good for society and the subjective experience of the individuals is itself subjective, but I don't try pretend otherwise - I know that homophobic bigots think the elimination of homosexuals would be good for society, but that's one case where the minority of individuals within are really trumping what a majority may feel.

From my lack of belief I can either think there is no choice, no free will and everything is set in stone, in which case I can't ever think other than I do at this point in my life anyway and that is that I can't think that way. The alternative is that we have a consciousness which emerges from the physical body which is capable of making meaningful choices about what we do with heavy influence from the meat machine that we are made out of and the cumulative experiences of our lives. Neither of these has to have the slightest thing to do with "God".

Isn't this just the "if you believe we have no free will why argue?" fallacy? 

The self is not the same as free will is it? You can clearly change your mind, but that doesn't in any way affect the issue of free will, which stands at a higher level. And yes, that sentence is deliberately laden with intentional language, because trying to come up with another way to phrase is just sounds odd. "The entity known as karaddin can have shifts in viewpoints" what? 

Interesting though, that your position seems to imply this sort of distinction between self and meat machine. You're not a "physicalist" or materialist? 

 

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This is not true. It may be that at a deep level our brains are all obeying the laws of physics, be they stochastic or deterministic in nature, but as long as we have a mind and can think and reflect on good and evil, morality is just as real a construct as the mind itself. What I want is a result of outer factors, but once I know what I want, I can act upon it by free will.

This discussion is old and may be worth a thread of its own if we wish to discuss it at length. 

I think you have to redefine what you mean by morality to keep it real. But yes, this is an old argument (I think it goes at least back to Aristotle), though I would bet the compatibilists will have a harder and harder time as neuroscience advances.

 

That may well be a valid explanation for the apparent contradiction, but it is highly unsatisfactory as an answer to a skeptic or a non-believer. It comes down to "we can't understand the will of God" and "what God says applies to us, but not to Him." You might as well thrown in "Do as I say, not as I do" in there while you're at it.  

I'm not sure why you think of these as unsatisfactory. "We can't understand the will of God" is completely self-evident given our current understanding of the universe. We cannot understand the structures at scales much larger than us nor those much smaller -- we've managed a partial description of them that allows us to certain things, but it is severely limited, only a few people truly understand it and even for these it barely grants a glimpse of comprehension. We cannot understand our societies (if we could, there would not be so many arguments and so many disastrous decisions in politics and economics). It can even be argued that we don't understand the small groups that we spend most of our times with (i.e. family and friends), at least not completely. If this universe has a creator, what in the world would make anyone think that they're capable of understanding such  an entity? The same is true of "what God says applies to us, but not to Him" and "do as I say, not as I do" -- we accept it as self-evident when the difference in intelligence and ability between whoever is issuing the order and the whoever is being told what to do is large and the difference between a creator and even the greatest human beings is very large indeed.

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I'm not sure why you think of these as unsatisfactory. "We can't understand the will of God" is completely self-evident given our current understanding of the universe. We cannot understand the structures at scales much larger than us nor those much smaller -- we've managed a partial description of them that allows us to certain things, but it is severely limited, only a few people truly understand it and even for these it barely grants a glimpse of comprehension. We cannot understand our societies (if we could, there would not be so many arguments and so many disastrous decisions in politics and economics). It can even be argued that we don't understand the small groups that we spend most of our times with (i.e. family and friends), at least not completely. If this universe has a creator, what in the world would make anyone think that they're capable of understanding such  an entity? The same is true of "what God says applies to us, but not to Him" and "do as I say, not as I do" -- we accept it as self-evident when the difference in intelligence and ability between whoever is issuing the order and the whoever is being told what to do is large and the difference between a creator and even the greatest human beings is very large indeed.

You're just conflating the different shades of meaning of "understand" to make your argument here.

The will of God, as in, what God wants us to know about Him, and how he wishes us to live, is supposedly conveyed by divine revelations to humans who then transcribe it for others to understand. Holy men are supposed to gain insight into what God wants through meditation and reflection, and then let us know what it is. The existence of a sentient supernatural entity who would busy itself with humanity presupposes that they have some desire to see us behave in one way, and not the other. Thus, it is important that we do know what that instruction is. When people claim that the will of God is unknowable in some cases, as in, why He chose to kill 99.9999% of all living organisms, it raises the question on why then, are we sure that he wants us to not kill each other and to keep the Sabbath holy. In other words, if the case is that God's will is clear on condemning homosexual people, but unclear when it comes to appropriateness of genocide against enemies of Israel, then it has a consistency problem.

How that differs from our lack of understanding of the physical universe is that in our pursuit of understanding the natural world, there is no presupposition that there IS something to understand. We seek, but there's no guarantee that there will be answer. There is also no guarantee that the any and all answers are discoverable. For most religions, particularly the Abrahamic faiths, that is not the premise. Believers are extolled to behave in certain ways, i.e., worship no false idols, don't eat pork and shellfish, and don't charge interest in money you loan out, on the promise that this is what God wants us to do, which means, we know what God wants. That certainty is challenged when, in a different context, we say that we cannot know the will of God fully because it is a being so different from us that comprehension is impossible.

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The will of God, as in, what God wants us to know about Him, and how he wishes us to live, is supposedly conveyed by divine revelations to humans who then transcribe it for others to understand. Holy men are supposed to gain insight into what God wants through meditation and reflection, and then let us know what it is. The existence of a sentient supernatural entity who would busy itself with humanity presupposes that they have some desire to see us behave in one way, and not the other. Thus, it is important that we do know what that instruction is.

The last sentence does not necessarily follow from the rest of the paragraph. Imagine a world where we actually knew what God wanted -- not had faith in ancient revelation, not suspected based on unverifiable arguments, but knew, with the same certainty that you know a pen dropped from the table will fall to the floor. It would be radically different from the world we live in and the vast majority of human beings would certainly not behave in the same way as they do. The world as it currently is requires a considerable degree of uncertainty.

How that differs from our lack of understanding of the physical universe is that in our pursuit of understanding the natural world, there is no presupposition that there IS something to understand. We seek, but there's no guarantee that there will be answer. There is also no guarantee that the any and all answers are discoverable. For most religions, particularly the Abrahamic faiths, that is not the premise. Believers are extolled to behave in certain ways, i.e., worship no false idols, don't eat pork and shellfish, and don't charge interest in money you loan out, on the promise that this is what God wants us to do, which means, we know what God wants. That certainty is challenged when, in a different context, we say that we cannot know the will of God fully because it is a being so different from us that comprehension is impossible.

The Abrahamic traditions are almost certainly a mix of things which may have made sense millennia ago, but no longer mean much to us, things that benefit the priests (both then and now) and possibly a touch of the divine (or at least ideas which appear to be valuable across many different cultures throughout time). I don't think there are people who adhere to all of it literally and the even those who take the entirety of the holy texts seriously are rare (as was mentioned above, most people pick and choose and interpret). They never led to a consistent understanding of God's will -- the societies they generated varied widely in many respects and, even within a single society, the ruling class usually interpreted them differently from the masses (see, for example, Nietzsche's description of master-slave morality). At best, they provide guidance, but it is quite vague and does not amount to comprehension.

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Isn't this just the "if you believe we have no free will why argue?" fallacy? 

The self is not the same as free will is it? You can clearly change your mind, but that doesn't in any way affect the issue of free will, which stands at a higher level. And yes, that sentence is deliberately laden with intentional language, because trying to come up with another way to phrase is just sounds odd. "The entity known as karaddin can have shifts in viewpoints" what? 

Interesting though, that your position seems to imply this sort of distinction between self and meat machine. You're not a "physicalist" or materialist? 

 

No, that's not what that is. That's not what I was arguing, that was my perception of what Altherion was attributing to all atheists - that the logical progression of our lack of faith is pure meat machine determinism that can't be other than it is.  If I be other than I am, and I believe I have meaningful choice in life, then castigating me over believing I have a choice seems pretty pointless.

And the distinction isn't between self and meat machine, the meat machine is a part of self. The distinction is that meat machine does not return the same exact answer every single time given the same input, there is a thing called consciousness.

I find it interesting, and by interesting I mean fucking infuriating, that I can't state "hey you are misrepresenting my lack of belief" without being jumped on as inconsistent when religious belief is fucking accepted regardless of how irrational it is, it's worthy of being respected for some reason incomprehensible to me.

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No, that's not what that is. That's not what I was arguing, that was my perception of what Altherion was attributing to all atheists - that the logical progression of our lack of faith is pure meat machine determinism that can't be other than it is.  If I be other than I am, and I believe I have meaningful choice in life, then castigating me over believing I have a choice seems pretty pointless.

And the distinction isn't between self and meat machine, the meat machine is a part of self. The distinction is that meat machine does not return the same exact answer every single time given the same input, there is a thing called consciousness.

I find it interesting, and by interesting I mean fucking infuriating, that I can't state "hey you are misrepresenting my lack of belief" without being jumped on as inconsistent when religious belief is fucking accepted regardless of how irrational it is, it's worthy of being respected for some reason incomprehensible to me.

Really? You find it "fucking infuriating" that someone is analyzing the consistency of your views, WRT religion or the lack thereof, in a thread specifically devoted to discussion about religion and atheism? With all due respect, if that infuriates you, maybe you shouldn't enter the discussion..?

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TP,

Can we explain the existence of logical paradoxes?  Of which the concept of "Omnipotence" is one?  If a being is Omnipotent they should be able to create "a taco too hot for them to eat" at which point the are not omnipotent or if it cannot do so it js not omnipotent.  Omnipotence is self referencial but to be "Omnipotent" it must also deal in self-referencial actions.

If we cannot understand or explain how paradoxes can exist how can we  explain or understand something like "God"?

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TP,

Can we explain the existence of logical paradoxes?  Of which the concept of "Omnipotence" is one?  If a being is Omnipotent they should be able to create "a taco too hot for them to eat" at which point the are not omnipotent or if it cannot do so it js not omnipotent.  Omnipotence is self referencial but to be "Omnipotent" it must also deal in self-referencial actions.

If we cannot understand or explain how paradoxes can exist how can we  explain or understand something like "God"?

We can't? :P

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Stubby,

But paradoxes do exist even though we cannot understand or explain them.  The inability to explain or understand something is not proof of its unreality.

No, but that's not proof of it's reality either.

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Scot, 

but we can understand paradoxes - on a meta-level, anyway. We can also explain them and explain why they are paradoxical. We by now even know why they must prop up eventually when ramping up our logical systems (hi, Gödel!). We may not always be able to solve them logically (sometimes we are!) but that's just about the only thing we can't do about them. 

And I'm with Stubby that paradoxes, while to some degree unavoidable, make a perfect being less, not more, likely. After all, would a perfect being not be able to express itself without resorting to the paradox?

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Stubby,

But paradoxes do exist even though we cannot understand or explain them.  The inability to explain or understand something is not proof of its unreality.

We can conceive of paradoxical ideas and make paradoxical (or seemingly paradoxical) statements.

There are no things which we know to exist which are paradoxical in the sense of having qualities contradictory in their own terms.

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OAR,

Ideas don't exist?

Stubby,

Indeed, I'm not offering it as proof of the existence of God.  I'm simply saying  the existence of the incomprehensible is not proof of its unreality.

TGFTV,

Some paradoxes, sure but not all.

I am a South Carolinian.  South Carolinians always lie.

Am I actually a South Carolinian?

I love Godel's proof but I disagree that its existence means the existence of God is less likely.  If God is able to perceive the Universe in its totality perhaps what we percive as paradox is perfectly rational from God's perspective.

My point, again, is not that incomprehensible paradoxes mean God exists.  But that incomprehension is not proof God screwed up or cannot exist.

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