parkdalian

The following are a few of my favorite thoughts regarding the existence of God. I'm not a scientist although I suppose I have better-than-average science knowledge, especially in paleoanthropology (and I think it is a beautiful, complex and epic story how we evolved from very ape-like ancestors).

My atheism stems mainly from my observations of religion and religious people and not from detailed scientific facts. Most if not all these observations I have heard before from other atheists/agnostics but I am curious about a theist's response to those assorted thoughts.

Here they are:

1 My belief is that God exists as an imaginary being (if we include the purely imaginary as part of an expanded reality) and a necessary corollary would be that religious people are simply mistaken or delusional as to the nature of God, not necessarily about God's "reality" in that expanded sense of the term. IOW I can't say "God does not exist" when I have just used the term "God" in a sentence. My concept of God is that it exists as an imaginary being but without objective existence. The only truly nonexistent things are those which have not been thought of by any (real) intelligent being.

2 Miracles generally decrease in scope in the biblical time scale and go from being "out of thin air" miraculous (creation of the universe) to mechanistic (the rain-god of "The Flood"), down to today's parlor tricks. It is also true that details of events become distorted with time and oral tradition stories tend to become exaggerated.

3 Consciousness is severely affected by radical injury to the brain so how could it survive death.

4 Theism and religion represent an attempt to complete a world-view, while scientific atheism acknowledges maybe not all questions are or can be answered.

5 Beliefs are not universal (Millions have lived and died without the opportunity to learn of Christianity or other monotheistic beliefs).

6 Religions and associated beliefs are manipulative, coercive (rewards and punishments).

7 Mostly, people have particular cultural and religious beliefs because of their indoctrination in childhood.

8 Religion originated with primitive, ignorant, even if intelligent people. However, there is no substitute for experience and we were younger as a species back then. Just like a child who once felt he was the center of the universe, we have adjusted our world view, realizing we are not special, and we are not protected by a parental figure anymore. Non-fanciful atheism is consistent with that analogous concept - that we are all growing up as a species as well as individually, going out on our own, exploring the world and fending for ourselves.

Parkdalian

Ojuice5001

I have a comment about your second point. You are right to imply that claims of huge miracles are a thing of the past, and that this probably means huge miracles never existed. But I think "mechanistic" miracles are perfectly workable, and that they were never even seemingly refuted.

Why can't the rain be influenced both by natural causes, and by supernatural causes? Given that no mainstream scientist thinks we will ever be able to predict the weather like we predict a cannonball's path, I think mechanistic miracles are plausible rather than otherwise. Both your position and mine are unprovable and unfalsifiable. Also, mechanistic miracles do not occupy the middle of a continuum between large-scale miracles and parlor tricks. They represent a different approach to the relation of nature and supernature.

I think the reason the Christians (BTW, I am not a Christian but a pagan) toned down their claims of mechanistic miracles was not that the gaps of human knowledge shrunk, but that their own priorities changed. The theory of evolution split Christian theology into liberals who move away from supernaturalism, and fundamentalists who get much more worked up about books like Genesis, which makes clear, grandiose claims, than the subtler tradition of God's interference in random events. Neither of these camps has much interest in giving a defense of mechanistic miracles, and that is why you don't hear many apologists argue for it. Not because it was refuted.

Easy Be

parkdalian,

I agree with most of your post but have a few questions regarding 1.
ex·ist Pronunciation Key (g-zst)
intr.v. ex·ist·ed, ex·ist·ing, ex·ists
To have actual being; be real.

So can something be imaginary yet still exist?

If so, does this mean that God could exist but only as a concept of the human brain?

Is it possible to define God as only a concept of the human brain?

Coljac

The concept of God exists just as much as the concept of unicorns exists. But to equate the existence of the concept with the existence of the thing it describes is incorrect.

I once read a paper - I think it was by W.V. Quine - that put forward the idea that nouns were the cause of the problem. He preferred that descriptions of things, like the pegasus, would rather refer to "a thing that pegasizes" where "to pegasize" meant to have all the attributes associated with a pegasus. Thus rather than having to presuppose such a thing as a pegasus to begin a discussion of its existence, we can just ask, "Does anything that pegasizes exist?"

Does anything that Godiates exist? I don't think so.

Colin

parkdalian

I was commenting on the descending overall impressiveness of religious miracles rather than classifying them into distinct types. I presented it because the grandiose miracle drop is consistent with what you would expect from oral traditions passing on and magnifying myths.
Also, the more removed in time a particular event takes place the more difficult it is to verify or refute.

Weather events are pretty well understood by science. The problem is the randomness and the sheer amount of data that predicting it entails. It's like an idiot-savant telling you that a certain date in twenty years will fall on a wednesday. You can grasp how he does it in priciple but you can't practically do it in your own head. God influencing the weather and other random events is just another God of the gaps argument.

Parkdalian

Philosoft

I would argue that, ultimately, the concept of God is a willful illusion. We merely act as if the concept exists because we have allowed theists to presume its self-evidence. To use the God- and unicorn-concept example, the important difference between God-concept and unicorn-concept is that I can tell you what properties my unicorn-concept has so that you may have the same concept. I can't do the same for God. I can't tell you anything about a God-concept at all because I know the Zeus-analogue I am picturing is not what Judeo-Christians mean when they say "concept of God." God is often said to be omniscient, omnipotent, etc. but I can't conceive those attributes without a mental picture of a being to whom I can attach them. When I dredge up my concept of Pat Robertson, I don't have a mental picture of "sociopath," I see his face in my head. I may think, "sociopath," as well, but what I am implicitly saying is, "the chunk of matter that is represented by this concept is a sociopath."

Sorry, not trying to hijack this thread. I'll stop now.

parkdalian

I included this idea as a thinking device for a counter to the theist/agnostic argument that one cannot prove a negative or prove that something does not exist. Thus an alternative, reworded argument atheists can make is not necessarily that God does not exist, rather, God is defined by the atheist as imaginary.

So the nature of God is different to atheists and they can go about proving their positive assertion that God is imaginary.

Studies of belief by the weak-minded or insane, differing concepts of a real God depending on the individual, examining childhood religious indoctrination along with correlations of culture and belief etc. are implied by that strategy.

Also note that atheists' idea or definition of God is pretty well uniform (mythical being) as opposed to the theists' pantheon.

Parkdalian

Jayhawker Soule

Actually, while I concur with your atheism, I'm not overly thrilled with the rest.

Easy Be

Coljac, Ah! This is precisely what I was trying to figure out. Thanks for the insight.

When I argue that God doesn't exist to my theist friends they say that God has to exist or I wouldn't be able to conceptualize its existence. I didn't know how to answer them.

For the sake of the argument I concede to my theist friends that it's possible to have a concept of God even though I agree with you Philosoft.

I understand what you were implying parkdalian I just think your definition of God is improperly worded.

1. God is imaginery.
2. Nothing imaginery can exist.
3. Since God is imaginery God cannot exist.
4. God does not exist

lpetrich

To my mind, saying that something exists as a figment of the imagination does not prove anything. The same argument could "prove" the existence of every figment of the imagination there ever was.

Also, as Richard Carrier has noticed, the declining impressiveness of miracles was noted 250 years ago by David Hume; that observation is still true

Consider all the miracles worked by medieval saints; in <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/lecture.html" target="_blank">Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection</a>, RC notes that:

In 520 A.D. an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years before that. In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead. No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened--by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin.

By comparison, the Vatican has to scrape the bottom of the barrel for miracles to attribute to present-day would-be saints; most of the examples they mention are seemingly-mysterious recoveries from disease.