BadBadBad

Hello Eric H,

I searched for the meaning of God and answers to your three questions. Here is what I found:

1..What greatest purpose can God have to create children in his own image?

I don't know. What was his purpose and where was his love when only a few chapters later, he drowns them all?


2.. To find a greatest purpose for all God’s children.

Hmmm. Greatest purpose. Still looking for my greatest purpose. How about you?

3.. What greatest thing can God create?

How about the invisible pink unicorn? That'd be pretty cool.


No, I don't think I've found the answers to your questions. Perhaps that's why I'm an atheist. Oh and you said God must represent the greatest possible good in all things. He represents some pretty evil things too. How do you work out the concept of a being that represents the greatest good, while at the same time representing the some of the greatest evil ever recorded? Do you use logic and reason, or do you have to resort to fantasy?

BadBadBad

I'm still laughing Hawkingfan. That was funny

Pyrrho

Beastmaster states:

First of all, I think that the term “god” is not merely not rigorously defined, but is typically so undefined as to be virtually, if not absolutely, meaningless. The gibberish that is typically put forth as an explanation is generally as unintelligible as the term it is meant to explain. Imagine, for example, that I were to say that “slithy toves” exist. When asked what slithy toves are, I “explain” this by saying that they are beings that are not located in space or time, and that they are the foundation of the universe, and suppose I go on in a like manner for 500 pages of text. The question is, do such “explanations” really explain anything at all? What does it literally mean to say that a being is not located in space or time? Can you say that such statements have a clear meaning? If not, why would anyone suppose that they serve to clarify anything rather than to simply further muddy the water, so to speak?

Now, let us contrast this with your examples of “love” and “intelligence”. These are, to be sure, vague terms that are used somewhat differently by different people. But I don’t think we would get the same kinds of unintelligible gibberish if we ask for clarification of these terms. For example, for “love”, someone may try to explain that love is a feeling that people have (whether other things feel it or not), in which they care about the well being of the thing that they love. Examples can be given to help explain this, such as a spouse actually listening to what the other one says they want, and actually caring about what they want. One could say further that one does not wish for what one loves to suffer. There are some very specific kinds of statements that can be made that have very definite and precise meanings. This is extremely different from the case of the typical “explanation” of what “God” is.

With “love” and “intelligence”, these terms may be difficult to precisely define, but that is not to say that they are indefinable. When you assert:

you put the term “god” in an entirely different category from terms like “love” and “intelligence”. They are vague, and used variously by different people, but they are not indefinable.

Pyrrho

Your comments and question to me:

I do not believe it is available online. From a quick search, it appears that it is now also reprinted as a chapter in a book, which you can find at:

http://www.prometheusbooks.com/site/.../book_462.html

It is unfortunately not overly inexpensive. It would probably be less expensive to purchase a copy of the back issue of Free Inquiry. And I see at:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/cart/fi-backissues.htm

that is will cost $6.95 plus whatever they charge for shipping (if anything). They call it:

Spring 1981, Volume 1, Number 2

As I observe that you live in Southern California, it may be possible for me to obtain a copy of the essay to give to you if you lack the funds for purchasing this back issue. If so, please send an email message to me regarding this matter. Of course, you should always be careful about meeting people online, and since you do not know me, it would be safest for you to simply order the magazine from Free Inquiry.

As for your other remarks about expressing yourself intelligibly to others, I could not agree with you more. Sloppy language is used to hide sloppy thinking. If you cannot clearly say what you mean, then maybe you don’t have a clear meaning. “…what can be said at all can be said clearly…” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, from the Preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (and no, I am not recommending that book here; I’m still only recommending the essay by Kai Neilson mentioned earlier).

beastmaster

Pyrrho, thanks for your reply.

As an atheist, I welcome your argument.

And yet I am not thoroughly convinced of the (implied) logic that the inability to define something in English and with logic means that it doesn't exist.

But that is defining love according to its symptoms. And if you can define *god* according to its symptoms, then you should have no problem in defining god at all.

The trouble with god definitions isn't in defining his symptoms, but in defining his nature.

Physicists tell us that light has the characteristics of both a wave and a particle. A contradiction? Does that mean that light is incoherent and meaningless? Does that mean that physicists are being shifty? Does it mean that light doesn't exist? Or does it mean that external reality confounds the phenomenal experience, pre-loaded logic, and limited language of the human brain?

Maybe we atheists are demanding too much to ask that god be coherent.

And so I offer up my solution because I consider it to be a more fatal blow to god-belief.

My proposal is this:

Although the nature of god (like love) cannot be defined and although the definition of god (like light) may be incoherent, these shortcomings in the definition of god do not destroy the plausibility of his existence.

However, what is unique about god (unlike love or light) is not that he is merely undefinable, but that he is beyond human comprehension. The incomprehensibility of god destroys the plausibility of belief. How can you authentically worship something you cannot understand?

Does this make sense?

I consider it a friendly amendment or elaboration to Cipher Girl's OP.

Christopher13

Beastmaster, you are making a good argument. Perhaps you would care to examine my recent posts in the Aquinas thread in this forum. But, Cipher Girl, and many atheists, I can sympathize with your dilemma. Many theists make the mistake of trying to prove, for example, the Christian understanding of God. As a fan of Thomas Aquinas, I subscribe to the notion that human reason, unaided by a divine revelation, can go only so far in talking about God and His Attributes. As I have explained in the other thread, the famous proofs for the existence of God are causal proofs which reason backwards from the effects we observe to the necessary existence of a cause. The essence of the thing in question is not known, only named, in the minor premise. The conclusion only involves positing the existence of the thing in nature. Properly speaking, the essence of God can never be known by reason, only the existence of a thing we call God. After many such demonstrations (and I am not trying to make them conclusively here), we only end up knowing a handful of things about God, and these all can be understood as dancing around the fringes of His Essence--known through negation, that is--God is shown in Aquinas' proofs to NOT be a body, NOT be finite, etc. This is true knowledge, but it is not true, Beastmaster, that to demonstrated the existence of a thing means to know it comprehensively. In one Thomist image, to set out on a sea voyage, and later to be adrift at sea, with no landmarks, one can still know that he is so many miles from such-and-such coast . . . To know God is similar. He is beyond essence, but to know that he is there, and to know other things around us, is to know God in a real way.
I hope this helps, Cipher Girl. I just wanted to indicate that not all Christians attempt the folly of proving their specific idea of God. Aquinas showed (adopting the arguments of pagan, Jewish, Moslem, and Christian philosophers) that God exists, but it is a rather vague God indeed, you are right, but it is the only claim natural reason can make for God. But you might also agree that it should put atheists out of business . . . and yet they walk in our midst today. That is more of a mystery from the point of view of the history of philosophy. Why is atheism a modern phenomenon? Has science hoodwinked us? Has the Vulcan mind-meld of dogmatic religions broken? What? I think I know, and the answer lies in the errors of modern philosophy itself, but I have a nasty habit of opening up new threads, so forget it.

Mageth

Eric's reply is a good example of why it sometimes so frustrating to talk to a theist about the existance of god. They themselves cannot define god in any concrete details, so they retreat into convoluted and almost incomprensible language (godspeak?). Or else they retreat into assuming god exists for emotional reasons. It makes them feel good that some powerful force notices them, even if there is not a shred of evidence to back this up.

I don't mind this, except that they seem to have this need for me to be exactly like them. Why, I don't know.

It's simple, really. When you ask many xians about the nature of god, for their definition of god, their best offense is to try to convince you through the emotional "love argument" like Eric's post into accepting their god without question. Then you would understand who their god was and wouldn't ask such difficult questions anymore!

Pyrrho

To beastmaster

First, let us begin with an agreement. I agree with you when you state that it makes no sense to worship or love something which you completely fail to understand.

However, I cannot agree when you state:


First of all, before there is any definition of a term, it is silly to say that the 'thing' does not exist. Indeed, if one encounters a term, let us say it appears to be a noun, and one has no idea what it means, then one should not be saying anything about it. Indeed, there is no concept of it about which one can form judgments of any kind. So, the first thing to do is to get some idea of what the term stands for, if it stands for anything at all. The natural question is, "What does that mean?" Until there is some kind of answer to that question, there is nothing to be said about it.

Now, with the term "God", we are dealing with a word that has sometimes been somewhat defined, though very differently by different people. Someone may worship a statue, believing it to have supernatural powers. In such a case, their god may very well exist, but not have the properties that they imagined. In other cases, that are more familiar at places like this, the term has many associations, but no clear meaning. The various expressions that one typically encounters in attempts at saying who or what God is are such that they do not serve the purpose of clarifying what "God" means. To make this all the more clear, suppose we were observing two people, one who says, "God transcends the universe" and another who says, "God does not transcend the universe". Now, I ask you, what possible support could either of them have for what they say? What experienceable state of affairs would favor one and count against the other? If absolutely nothing would be different if one were "true" rather than the other, what is it that they are really asserting?

They superficially appear to be contradicting each other, but are they really saying anything different? Are they doing anything other than creating different sounds, like a difference in two types of grunting?

Or imagine another pair, one who says, “The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe” and another who vehemently says, “The slithy toves did NOT gyre and gimble in the wabe”. What is the difference between their utterances, beyond the mere sound? To even qualify as being statements, they must have meaning.

They may, indeed, kill each other because of the different sounds they make, but that does not mean that any of them are actually asserting anything.

Please carefully consider the questions above.


Now, regarding your criticism of my rough first attempt at defining "love", with the part you quote being:

"For example, for “love”, someone may try to explain that love is a feeling that people have (whether other things feel it or not), in which they care about the well being of the thing that they love."

You state:


How is saying that love is a feeling defining it according to its symptoms? Please explain.


Regarding light, you state:

The questions above regarding "God" should give you the idea of how to proceed with this. But to directly answer all of your questions, no, it is not a contradiction. No, it does not mean that light is incoherent and meaningless. No, it does not mean that light doesn't exist. No, it does not mean "external reality confounds the phenomenal experience, pre-loaded logic, and limited language of the human brain". It means that light, when observed under certain circumstances, appears to be a wave, and when observed under different circumstances, appears to be a particle. If you now were to complain that we do not have a full grasp of what, exactly, light is, I will be quick to remind you that having such a theory is irrelevant, because light can be defined ostensively. I can point to it, and say "that is an example of light". This differs greatly from what most people say about "God", as they do not generally say, "that is an example of God", though they might say "that is an example of God's work". The difference is extremely important, as the existence of whatever it is that is pointed to was probably not in dispute, but only its supposed connection to "God", which still remains undefined.

smalltown

1st time user to this forum, and I am a Christian.

I have a question to the following I found in this thread. The quote is as follows :

"If an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God has the ability to keep sin and evil from man, yet evil exists"

My question's are as follows, If you claim there is no God, then isn't good and evil relative ? Who decides what is evil and good, if there is no God then wouldn't it stand to reason good and evil are neutral, and that morality is simply up to the interpretation of each individual since there are no higher laws?

Jobar

Hello smalltown, and welcome to Internet Infidels.

Who makes morals? Humans do. Each of us chooses the rules we live by, with society as a whole enforcing some rules, and our personal integrity holding us to others. No Gods involved, despite the frequent claims of priests and preachers.