Jobar

A fine topic, Jamie.

Liquidrage, I am going to save this quote-
"[P]assing the buck from an unknown to an unknown with a name somehow provides an answer[?]" Precise and pithy!

I think that anyone who honestly pursues answers to 'the big questions' will wind up rejecting the notion of god(s) if they pursue far enough. Theism simply explains nothing- in fact it complicates the search by its postulation of an unnecessary entity.

WJ, I read your quote through three separate times, and every time my response was a rather un-moderatorly "Bullshit!" This is not addressing Jamie's point in the least, and doing terminal damage to the normal meaning of the word "know". I challenge you to tell me one single thing that can be "known" without being "proved or demonstrated"- and if you say "God" I will throw you to the lions!

WJ

Jobar!

Of course, I disagree. But then again, you are an atheist, shouldn't we have disagreement? At any rate, you said:

"I challenge you to tell me one single thing that can be "known" without being "proved or demonstrated"- and if you say "God" I will throw you to the lions!"

1. 'Throw you to the lions' sounds quite prophetic doesn't it?


2. I'll take your challenge. To answer your question, and to quote a religious thinker:

Truth is Subjectivity.

Please tell us how that has to be proven?

I await your reply.

Walrus

[ August 20, 2002: Message edited by: WJ ]</p>

WJ

Jobar!

I hope you didn't overlook the obvious in the text that I posted, (although you said you read it several times). To begin the discussion, you might want to compare (subjectivity) with the fact that mathematical abstracts needs no 'proof'... .

FYI.

Jamie_L

WJ,

I don't think this particular question of mine has anything to do with "proof, demonstration, knowability, and the like."

Irregardless of whether god can be known or how god can be known, my OP has to do with people seeking answers to ancient philosophical questions about the universe.

Why don't most people have the same questions about God as they do about the universe? All that I know well enough to know this about them fell this way. That is, God answers all these questions for them, despite the fact that they don't have answers to similar questions about God.

This is the double standard. Many people feel the universe needs an explanation "why". Life needs a "meaning" or "purpose". These same people do not feel God needs an explanation "why". No one asks "why does God exist."

Why is that? To me, these are the logical next questions.

Jamie

WJ

Jamie!

On the contrary, would you like to discuss the question of whether God has to exist?

Let me know. In the alternative, are you wondering about the nature of existence, or are you just concerned with folks who've concluded that some things are brute facts and have no explainations at all, and/or are mysteries?

Take the cosmological argument for the EOG. Are you concerned with the leap from 'all events have a cause' to a causal agent known as God? Or are you concerned that there needs to be something to explain what caused God to exist(if in fact one asserts that a God does exist)? If so, I'm not sure there is anyone on this planet who knows about the nature of our own existence let alone a supernatural-God's. But, there are theories about the so-called mind of God. Or, we can simply speculate.

However, my experience has been that such speculation and/or many theories about what caused God to exist is not very noteworthy.

Walrus

Volker

Hi Jamie!

If we don't know the meaning of the universe, the life and everything, not even god can know. Most answers to this question are meaningless. If you think about god, it worsens:

In <a href="http://www.ffrf.org/lfif/theologian.html" target="_blank">Dear Theologian</a>, Dan Barker tries to reformulate these questions for god. From this point of view all the answers vanish into the void.

There is only a psychological answer to your question. Most people want to have an absolute answer, timeless, not relative to ones own knowledge. Because we don't know anything about god (and we can't know, too) nothing stands in our way to project our own (relative) answers on this mysterious being and assume that from now on we have the absolute answer (which can be changed over time, if we feel the need for it - we have both absolute and relative morals, for example, or so it seems).

This doesn't help much from a logical point of view, but with faith we have to throw out reasoning anyway, so its enough that we assume it helps. In medicine, we call this a placebo effect. It does nothing but gives the warm, comforting feel that it answers our question on absolute (certain) grounds.

Of course, there can't be an absolute answer to those questions. Every reason we find will lead to ask for the reason for that reason, ad infinitum. We can't find reasons indefinitely, we have to stop the process somewhere (that's dogmatic) or we end in circular reasoning, which is both undesirable.

So god is nothing like a stop sign: Don't ask any further than this sign! Well, we could use the universe as a stop sign, too, because it has one advantage: We know it exists. But it isn't suitable to project our own thoughts on it, because we could be proven wrong. With god, this can't happen. God won't prove us wrong. God won't interfere with our thinking. He won't complain if we're dead wrong.

We (well, not us, really - the theists) have now an "absolute" basis for all we want the world to be. And please, don't question their answers, because that will put them out of control!

Philip Osborne

The answer to "why does God exist?" can be found in what is called "Anselm's Principle": God, if He is to exist at all, must have metaphysically necessary existence. He is not some cosmic dude who might not have existed. Presumably, an explanation of the form "it logically could not have been otherwise" counts as an explanation. Thus, God can actually said to be self-explaining. As Richard M. Gale and Alexander Pruss say, God is self-explaining in that there is a successful ontological argument for His existence, "even if we cannot give it." It might be more proper to say that God is self-explaining in the sense that the mere possibility of His existence is enough to entail that God exists.

"If it is the "uncaused causer" by definition, it must have been responsible for it's uncaused nature."

Why is this so? After all, I am not responsible for my caused nature. Why should it be different for God?

-Philip

HRG

If you can say "if he exists at all", doesn't this contradict necessary existence ?
But "A being with properties P exists" does not follow from any logical system, unless P is tautologically true for every being.
According to which logical deduction ?

If G(x) denotes the property "x is God", what makes G unique among other properties (like "x is yellow" or "x is the Invisible Pink Unicorn) such that the mere statement that "~(Ex)G(x)" is not a tautology already implies that (Ex)G(x) is true ?


Regards,
HRG.

Liquidrage

This is strictly not true.

Most people prefer to believe in a god with a necessary existence but that doesn't mean it is so.
If you truely believe this then you are ignoring my god "Lucky" that was picked at random amongst 6 gods by chaos itself.

No, "Anselm's Principle" does not provide a reason. It provides an excuse.

WJ

Philip,

I agree. It's funny when atheists like volk talk about logic because in Anselm's ontological argument, it returns us back to logical necessity. So the inconsistency in the use of logic lies in the method the atheist or theist use in hanging one's hat on analytical, propostional logic.

The advantage, however, usually goes to the theist, because he realizes (whether he knows it or not)that induction and the aposterior or experience, rather than deduction and the apriori, fills the gap from that one-sided use of logic. And so putting the logic all together [synthetic apriori] makes for the direct inference that God is the first causal agent, in this context of the cosmological argument, that is.

Then of course there's the religious experience argument, but that's for another time. There again, it's induction not deduction that provides for the clues from human logic.

Physics always use synthetic propositions in their discovery of a thing, theory, etc. because it can be empirically tested.

Hail to Kant!

Said another way, if one uses both induction and deduction, like Kant, you naturally either become an agnostic, or make the leap and choose theism.

But without using both forms of logic, you become an atheist.

Logically inconsistent, Jamie.

Walrus

[ August 21, 2002: Message edited by: WJ ]</p>