Draygomb

Using Logic, Science and the assumption that God created Humans with Free Will What else can we determine about God, God's religion and God's purpose for us?

Note this means you have to prove your Holy Book is True before you can use it.

Theophage

I think this is in the wrong forum; try Existance of God.

Francois Tremblay

Why stop at assuming that a god exists ? Why not any other kind of creative agent ?

Draygomb

I was hoping to find some heavy thinkers here.

Francois Tremblay

Nice insult, but that doesn't answer my question.

If your original question was not in jest, you might as well define what you mean by "god" in the first place, since a god by my definition is incompatible with epistemic free will as we understand it now.
Or perhaps you want to posit an imaginary kind of "free will" that does not include evil actions, but in that case you'd have said so.

[ January 29, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

Ojuice5001

Let's see. There is a hierarchy in the universe, of the form "X has all the characteristics of Y and more." A human has all the characteristics of a warm-blooded animal and more; a star has all the characteristics of a brown dwarf and more, etc. So God(s) would have all the characteristics of a human and more.

There are any number of forces at work in the world. There are inexorable natural laws, random natural events, weather, water, microbes, fungi, plants, insects, warm-blooded animals, criminals, lunatics, other subnormals, ordinary people, great men, corporations, and governments. From this we may infer that God(s) have many purposes for the world--no one purpose is served by all entities. You can invent an unknowable purpose, or claim against the evidence that God has one knowable purpose, such as love, but it's less rational to do that.

Now, are the purposes harmonized with each other? No. They constantly conflict with one another. If there is a supernatural force behind, say, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, or the struggle for survival of a rat population, at all, it appears to be fighting on both sides. Surely a reasonable explanation is that God is not one entity, but many--one who wants Osama bin Laden dead against one who wants him alive, one who likes humans better than rats against vice versa. IOW, polytheism is true.

What about the benevolence of the gods? I think it makes sense to think they would see humans as we see warm-blooded animals. How do we treat warm-blooded animals? With an alloy of 20% kindness, 80% ruthless pursuit of our own interests. It makes sense that the gods would treat us this way. When believing this, you must remember that more than 20% of the actions of a god would seem kind, since our interests and those of a god often coincide.

Finally, what about revealed theology? We have seen that polytheism is the best form of theism. So if we're interested in the gods of Western culture, we should look at alleged revelations of a society of many gods--mythology, in other words. It makes sense to believe that the gods would favor the societies with a better knowledge of them--if the Franks were more successful than the pre-Islamic Turks, they had a truer mythology. Now who was the most successful polytheistic Western culture? The Romans, of course. Therefore, I believe in their gods, from Quirinus, Vesta, and Jupiter on forward.

(BTW, to account for the final defeat of Roman paganism by a theology as flawed as Christianity, I find it necessary to posit one or more gods who had a vested interest in this false theology.)

So that's it. To reject atheism, I have to rely on the logically imperfect triad of faith, intuition, and the Fine-Tuning Argument. But I consider myself able to mop the floor with Christian monotheism . As for pantheism, I really think it is more about emotions than factual belief.

Francois Tremblay

How do you jump from human concept-formation to divine attributes ? I think you're confusing epistemology with metaphysics. Also, there is no reason to relate a god with humanity at all.


You are skipping a lot of questionable premises. For example, you assume that all purposes were made and desired by the god in question (admittedly if he is creator and omnipotent they are, but such attributes would be contradictory in the first place).


Your comparaison is odd. We see warm-blooded animals usually as a source of food or work. Yet this does not seem to be the case with an hypothetical god.


For my part, I'd say that the prime attribute we can derive from a hypothetical "supreme being" (the concept I guess is closest to "god" without being contradictory) is that he sure doesn't like to show himself.

[ January 29, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

Bill Snedden

I have to agree with Theophage. This belongs in the EoG forum.

Bill Snedden

Draygomb

Franc28

The point here is to determine which religion is the one true religion based on sound reasoning. If we can determine what god is like then we can rule out any religion that says god is something else. Any more of an assumption than the one given would bias the results. Any less would lead us into a debate about how the universe got started.

And you're right about Ojuice5001's comments they're full of unfounded premises.

You're also right that god doesn't like to show himself. Perhaps his interference would ruin the purpose for which we were created.

While god is obviously very powerful it remains to be seen whether he is the most powerful thing in existence, let alone omnipotent.

Draygomb

Bill

This seems more like a place to debate the existence of god than the properties of god that is assumed to exist.

Whatever