Religion vs Atheism Book 2

[TrueMetis]

Some paradoxes, sure but not all.

I am a South Carolinian.  South Carolinians always lie.

Am I actually a South Carolinian?

Okay we're getting into an area I'm not terribly well versed in so my contributions will be limited, but what the hell is this supposed to prove? That you can make contradictory statements using a flawed premise?

[OnionAhaiReborn]

OAR,

Ideas don't exist?

I've posed a clear distinction and you're evading it. 

I am obviously not contesting whether the idea of God* (or other paradoxes) exists, but whether the thing itself really (or could really) exist. This is obvious because 1) no one could seriously dispute this and 2) I just said exactly the opposite:

We can conceive of paradoxical ideas and make paradoxical (or seemingly

paradoxical) statements.

We can extend this distinction to non-paradoxical ideas. The idea of me as President of the United States exists. I just had the thought. Do I as the President of the United States really exist, in the sense of there being an actual thing that is both me and the President of the United States? You have my assurances that I am not Barack Obama, and the answer is a clear no.

Now, care to name any paradoxical thing that exists in this sense?

 

*ETA: To be clear, I am not arguing that all conceptions of God or gods are paradoxical, just certain ones, such as the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent version.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

OAR,

I agree that all "Omni's" hit paradoxes.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

I'll take that as a "no" to my direct question, Scot.

[Castel]

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.

I'm still not sure what that means. The phrasing is weird. 

But, yes, atheism doesn't entail materialism and determinism. 

 

As for being "castigated"; not that odd. Plenty of people have talked about the difficulty of grounding morality, even if you believe in a God. Even so, I don't see why it has to have a point.  It seems that anyone can then assert that there is no point to any argument that tries to change their mind/castigate them. 

 

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.

 

I'm "jumping" on you because I actually about cared what you had to say on the matter and assumed that the point of the thread was to discuss it. 

 

Perhaps you and I aren't that well-acquainted, but I don't really run around giving passes to religious people. If I have skipped the discussion on it it's because it simply wasn't interesting to me or I thought there was nothing for me to say at that point. 

 

 

 

 

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"?

This has to bottom out though Scot, otherwise religion disappears. We have to have some understanding. 

 

And, once we start arguing about what we can be said to understand you're just having the exact same discussion as before.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I'll take that as a "no" to my direct question, Scot.

OAR,

To the best of my knowledge you are correct I can't show "existence" of an idea in the sense you are limiting the concept to.  Apologies that I missed your direct question.  

I still believe ideas have a form of "existence" if not concrete "reality".  If not doesn't that imply that consciousness itself is illusory and has no real "existence"?

[OnionAhaiReborn]

OAR,

To the best of my knowledge you are correct I can't show "existence" of an idea in the sense you are limiting the concept to.  Apologies that I missed your direct question.  

I still believe ideas have a form of "existence" if not concrete "reality".  If not doesn't that imply that consciousness itself is illusory and has no real "existence"?

I am not limiting the concept of existence to a single sense. I am saying ideas exist in one sense and things really exist in another (see my POTUS example).

That God exists in the 'idea' sense is obvious. The idea has been posed countless times, so it clearly exists as an idea, even though it's paradoxical. That paradoxical ideas can exist in the sense that all ideas exist has no importance to the question of whether paradoxical things exist in the other, 'real thing-ly,' sense.

Your argument confuses the two senses in attempting to claim that because paradoxical ideas exist in the one sense, it must also be possible for paradoxical things to exist in the other.

[TerraPrime]

 

 

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.

I don't see how your response here addresses what I said. 

Organized religions claim that they know what the divine being wants them to do in this life, whether it be to do charitable work, to not receive blood transfusion, or to pray only in private. Therefore, the will of the divine being that they worship must be knowable to them to some extent. It is self-contradictory, therefore, to claim that humans cannot know the will of God. At best, one would have to establish what parts of God's will are knowable, and why that is different from the other parts of God's will, which is declared to be unknowable. If we know that God does not want us to murder people, which seems like a good rule, then we need a reconciliation of the events where God murders people. There are any number of explanations/apologetics to be had, but "God's will is unknowable" is singularly ... weird. 

 

 

 

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.

 

I am not asking for consistency across multiple strands of the faith. I am saying that "God's will is unknowable," without a lot of qualifications and a lot of reconciliation, is a lacking response for any religion that claims to know the way we ought to lead our life according to divine wishes. I know that for most of the more developed religions, there are scholarship within it to wrestle with the contradictions in their doctrines and history. And that's a good thing, because most of them do have contradictions. As an outsider observing, there are answers that are much better than "we cannot understand God's will" to some of these questions. 

 

 

Re: Ser Scot

That's begging the question that God is more complex than a paradox. If we cannot know the full nature of God, then how do we know it's more complex than a paradox? Isn't that a paradox in itself? 

Obviously, religious convictions require faith precisely because the concept of a transcendental supernatural sentient being is difficult to fit into the materialistic physical world in which we inhabit. So in that sense, not knowing the full nature of God is a given, and faith is more than capable of overcoming that barrier to belief. But I am not questioning the validity of belief or faith - I am questioning that if we accept a certain description of God is true, that He exists, then how should humans respond to the actions and thoughts attributed to that being? It's like asking why doesn't Frodo just get a ride from the eagles to drop the ring off into Mount Doom, or why don't the wizards in the Harry Potter world just lay a permanent confundus charm on the muggles and live openly, etc. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

OAR,

Consciousness is the ability to think, conceive, to cogetate.  Is it real?  You've said Paradox can only exist in the realm of ideas.  Does that mean the "realm of ideas" can exist and be non-material?

[OnionAhaiReborn]

OAR,

Consciousness is the ability to think, conceive, to cogetate.  Is it real?  You've said Paradox can only exist in the realm of ideas.  Does that mean the "realm of ideas" can exist and be non-material?

Yes, I believe consciousness is real.

I do not think there is any reason to believe that ideas exist non-materially, but I suppose they could. The distinction I'm drawing between existing as 'idea' and existing as 'real thing' certainly does not imply that ideas necessarily are non-material, so I don't think this is pertinent.

[Wise Fool]

But if an idea exists, surely it is non-material? It exists in a non-material way by nature because thoughts cannot be reduced down to material terms.

[TerraPrime]

But if an idea exists, surely it is non-material? It exists in a non-material way by nature because thoughts cannot be reduced down to material terms.

Huh? What are thoughts but patterns of neurons activating in our brains? 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Huh? What are thoughts but patterns of neurons activating in our brains? 

TP,

Isn't that the trillion dollar question?  

If consciousness is merely neurons firing why can we not us MRI's to determine exactly what someone is thinking based upon brain activity?  Not generally, specifically?

 

 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

But if an idea exists, surely it is non-material? It exists in a non-material way by nature because thoughts cannot be reduced down to material terms.

This is a circular argument.

[TrueMetis]

If consciousness is merely neurons firing why can we not us MRI's to determine exactly what someone is thinking based upon brain activity?  Not generally, specifically?

 

Why can't we use a car to get to the moon? If we're going to simplify the issue to such a degree one might also wonder why we haven't cured cancer, after all cancer's merely rapid cell growth.

Though the possiblity may not be that far off. Not if this article on creating memories is right.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

TM,

That's really interesting but until you can "implant" a memory in someone who can describe the previously unknown memory consciously I'm going to remain skeptical.  The experiment itself is very clever but we can't interrogate a mouse about what it's experience of a memory is like.

[TerraPrime]

TP,

Isn't that the trillion dollar question?  

If consciousness is merely neurons firing why can we not us MRI's to determine exactly what someone is thinking based upon brain activity?  Not generally, specifically?

Consciousness is a theoretical concept awaiting physical evidence, just like a Higg's boson did -- we knew that it must exist, in order for the natural observations to make sense, but we didn't find the physical evidence for it until we can find a way to do the experiment.

In a similar way, I suspect that once we have the ability to read the activities of individual neurons while monitoring the entire brain, we will be able to do this. We will probably still need individual codexes because we probably encode our experience differently, even if we utilize the same regions of the brain (mostly) for similar types of experience. That is, if you don't tell me what your patterns X, Y, and Z means, I cannot tell you what your pattern W means.

 

ETA:

The physical relationship between neurons and memories is well established, in the sense that we know people with brain/neuron injuries lose memories, like in Alzheimer's disease or people with concussions. Obviously, manipulating neurons will manipulate memory, because numerous pathologies tell us so. The question is the extent that we can engineer and manipulate memory deliberately, outside of what ravages from a disease can do.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

TP,

We know that without those portions of the brain the individual cannot access their memories.  Until we have more I think that is an important distinction.

[BloodRider]

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.

Pardoxes do not occur in concrete reality.  They occur in abstract reality when the abstracted model inccacurately maps to concrete reality.  Typically this arises out of semantic mapping.  Language is an abstraction.  Language exists, but it does not map one-to-one to concrete reality.

What you have done, SSE, is known as the reification fallacy.

[TerraPrime]

TP,

We know that without those portions of the brain the individual cannot access their memories.  Until we have more I think that is an important distinction.

I'm sorry, what distinction is that, again?

Memories have physical basis, as in, they are neuropatterns in our brain. Therefore, there are physical things that are memories. Where's the controversy?