New year and all and felt like a mind expansion in this whole which is right and wrong debate on god.
So I have set myself a new task. In stead of formulating my argument from the point of "there is no such this as an afterlife, get a better present live since this is it,I will now change my approach.
I am going to go out into my little mindfield of a mind with the departing argument - “God exists and the Bible is true.” If I can proof beyond a reasonable doubt that that is the fact then there can be a christian god other than in their imaginations.
If I cannot, the conclusion is that such god does not exists or do not reveal itself to you
BTW: Saw a riveting debate between Tony Blare and Christopher Hitchens on BBC this evening on whether religion contribute to wars. Stunning performance from both but little can stand against the Hitch.
Not sure I follow what you want to say here… How will and where will you do this?
I may spare you some time on this though. The bible is filled with contradictions and the God of Abraham have mutually exclusive properties. Two easy conclusions, the bible cannot be true or even True™ and the God of Abraham, old ywhw, cannot exist as described.
Maybe a good place to start would be to list all the properties of God as Biblically revealed, in order to first define what we are talking about when we speak of “God”. Only once a clear cut definition of God transpires from the jumble of incoherent attributes that you are likely to find, can one start to evaluate the likelihood of the existance of such a creature.
En passant, and with reference to cyghost’s input, I’ve often wondered if the property of omnipotence relieves its bearer from commiting logical contradictions. I.e. can God indeed draw that triangular circle, and be simultaneously loving and vengeful? I suspect that omnipotence in itself is an inherently dodgy notion, especially if paired with its evil twin, omniscience.
Descartes, unlike most earlier and many later thinkers, understood very well that we must “allow god to create without restraint” – in other words, that we must accept that god can in fact accomplish the logically impossible (e.g. married bachelors) if we wish to accord him/her full glory. If god is bound to doing only the logically possible, where did these rules of logic come from that make it so? Is there not then something greater than god that constrains his/her actions? Other thinkers like Augustine and Maimon thought that god’s omnipotence is limited to the logically feasible so that they could fool themselves and their readers into believing that they were speaking good logical sense about him/her.
The deeper implication of Descartes’ view, of course, is that god is beyond logic. In turn, this means that we can say whatever pleases us about god and not feel any need to defend our assertions logically because that is what we open the door to when we abandon logic. When theologians and apologists finally understand this (if they ever do), they will perhaps understand Wittgenstein’s wisdom when he said, “Whereof thou cannot speak, thereof must thou pass over in silence.”
It needn’t be coupled to any other infinite power. Semantically, one could argue that the power to do anything already carries with it implicitly the power to know anything, as well as all the other infinite attributes and abilities – i.e. omnipotence can logically be construed as rendering all the other omni- properties redundant. Moreover, it was recognised a long time ago already that there is something fishy about omnipotence. The question was asked whether an omnipotent god could make a rock so heavy that s/he couldn’t lift it. Whichever way you answer, you end up with something omnipotence cannot, apparently, achieve. Long discourses full of dodges, excuses and obfuscations have been written on this question, especially by theologians, but the essential absurdity of omnipotence still remains a pungently indelible stain.
Thanks Mefi, your posts are always such a pleasure to read. I can hardly believe its free!
Very true! Haven’t noticed this obvious fact before! (insert smiley kicking himself).
Here is why I find the rock paradox wanting.
The creation of a heavy rock by God such that God himself cannot lift it, will only present a logical problem if we assume that “unable to lift” is an inability on the part of omnipotent God, (with “inability” meaning the impossibility of achieving a desired outcome). However, if “the will to be unable to lift” is God’s aim with this whole exercise, then the “inability to lift” merely becomes a means to achieve the aim. The focus on aim could well allow God to have his rock and not lift it without bowing to the gods of logic.
I prefer the paradoxes where God is required to change his mind in the future, as this addresses his will as well.
The purpose of the rock question, though, is less to shed light on (a, any) god’s nature and/or behaviour than to highlight the illogicality of the concept of omnipotence. Framed more abstractly, the question asks whether or not omnipotence includes the power to defeat itself without either negating what it means to be omnipotent or dissolving into incoherence. If one asks the same rock question about any finite being, a sensible answer can be arrived at if the relevant governing factors are known. However, as soon as one introduces omnipotence into the mix, the trouble starts, which suggests that there is something inherently preposterous about omnipotence – or, at the very least, about a naïve conception of it – and this problem still needs a satisfactory resolution.
Quote from: cyghost on Yesterday at 07:38:44
Quote from: coenie777 on Yesterday at 00:01:01
I am going to go out into my little mindfield of a mind with the departing argument - "God exists and the Bible is true." If I can proof beyond a reasonable doubt that that is the fact then there can be a christian god other than in their imaginations.
Not sure I follow what you want to say here... How will and where will you do this?
I may spare you some time on this though. The bible is filled with contradictions and the God of Abraham have mutually exclusive properties. Two easy conclusions, the bible cannot be true or even True™ and the God of Abraham, old ywhw, cannot exist as described.
QED
I with you cyghost…pls enlighten us coenie.
The Bible bit was not correct, I know the Bible is errant, since all “holy book” will be man’s interpretations I guess that leaves me with just the first part - God exist.
So to back track on my own post then - I would depart from the view that God does exist and I want to formulate an answer to prove this assumption. Since I already agree that all religion is man made I have already ticked off that.
The existence of God is of course notoriously tricky to disprove. But what makes God such an untestable hypothesis? I think its mostly that “God” means different things to different people. As long as “God” remains shadily undefined, he can dodge being disproved. The fewer his properties, the more immune he’ll be to attack. Have you read the arguments about quality in Persig’s Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Well, same kind of thing. As with quality, we all think we know what God is, but just ask a few friends to come up with a concise definition, and you will be amazed at the colourful bouquet of answers.
Now add to this undefined God the additional uncertainty surrounding the meaning of “exist” (and this never bothered my until I joined THESE forums ::)) and you have a massively improbable entity laughing all the way to the bank.
Now add to this undefined God the additional uncertainty surrounding the meaning of "exist" (and this never bothered my until I joined THESE forums ) and you have a massively improbable entity laughing all the way to the bank.
He is only laughing to the bank to the extend that some human saw a gap for exploitation
I think that if there ever were a creator god, he/she or it would care less if you exploited the concept or treated it with agnosticism. That brought me back to a post I made last time I had this “desire for meaning” on this forum. That debate was interestingly around whether agnosticism is a more logical approach to a creator god than an atheistic one. And I know what you all told me back then ;D
Very nice post, Mintaka. I still wouldn’t let “exist” bother me, navel gazers always have to back down at the brick-against-head double blind experiment.
Maybe you should practise first: try to prove that Santa Clause does not exist.LOL. Of course proving that something doesn’t exist is problematic in any case and as Mintaka says, you need to accredit this entity with characteristics. (which/whose ‘god’ are you speaking of?). The Tokeloshe here in KZN is another entity you could practise on.