Z500

while i don't doubt that there may very well be a "God", i don't think it's necessarily a supreme immortal super-being. none of us have ever actually seen God, so for all we know he's just some guy out in space that found us somewhere and started growing us on another planet. i mean, we do this to bacteria anyway

diana

Welcome, Z500.

I've had the same thoughts, like when I stomp on an ant and crush its tiny life, orphan its children and run the risk of thus upsetting the ant ecosystem.

But if this is true, it's irrelevant to us, isn't it? Unless I've commanded that ant to worship me and crush it because it didn't (or to teach all the other ants a lesson about the utter unpredictability of life, or so nearby ants could thank human that it didn't happen to them, or to call that ant to be with me in glory), then it matters not whether it believes in me or not, and the point is moot.

So if aliens of some sort are gods, then that's effectively equivalent to there being no gods, because it doesn't matter if we believe and worship. Right?

d

Albert Cipriani

Dear Z & D,
Your definition of God determines whether He’s believable. You and Diane have provisionally defined Him as the biggest kid on the block, the Great Human Ant Stomper of the Sky. This is intellectually equivalent to defining eternity as an infinite amount of time, i.e., simply more of the same. But neither eternity nor God has been traditionally conceived of so unimaginatively.

Eternity is the absence of time. Eternity is the experience of all that can be experienced, is being experienced, and has been experienced at once. It is the CD that can be seen all at once as opposed to Beethoven’s 9th that can only be experienced in time one measure at a time sequentially through the playing of the CD.

Likewise, God is the absence of all things and energy. He is the one and only non-contingent absolutely simple (no moving parts, batteries not included) being that expresses what it is like for Him to be by bringing all that exists into existence, by being the prime cause of all effects.

Doesn’t Occam’s razor preclude this supposition of God? Only if you excise cause from our cause-and-effect reality. Did it never occur to you how wildly improbable it is that everything has a cause, how confidently science pursues the causes for the ever expanding ripple of effects we as of yet do not understand? Even if we ever could get to the furthest reaches of knowledge and fully understand the cause of everything, even if we finally do arrive upon banks of a grand unified field theory and could know all that there is to know, how silly for us to stop there!

But if you won’t believe in God, you must. You must stop there. You must say, things are because they are. Existent things must simply be their own reason for existence. Never mind that no thing and no effect of anything that has ever been (and which are collectively leading us to an understanding of all things) is like that. Never mind that all things and effects have a cause.

As an atheist, you must advance no further. You must content yourself with the insanely perverse proposition that everything in this universe has a reason but the universe itself. You must play in the sand along the shoreline of our finite knowledge knowing that all that we know only adds up to "because because." How sad. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Z500

why, thank you, because i am content with that proposition.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Z,
In seventh grade I learned to stop being content. The aphorism at that time that summed up my approach to life as a 12-year-old was: “I’d rather be a dead Socrates than a contented pig.”

God places before us two choices: choose wisely. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Alix Nenuphar

I have a question or comment or statement or two...

While that's charmingly poetic, who else defines eternity as an absence of time? Eternity is my dictionaries refers to 'time without end'.

If God is defined as the absence of all things, then how can he have thoughts? Emotions? Desires? In fact, nothing of what you have just posted can be valid, because you have defined God as essentially indescribable.

Yes.

Simply because you, personally, find this 'wildly improbable' doesn't necessarily mean that it is improbable... Can you demonstrate (or at least quantify) this improbability?

This appears to be a logic contradiction: if we know all that there is to know then there IS nothing more that we can know.

Incorrect; most things that we currently have good information about have causes. Some things (quantum fluctuations, for example) don't.

I see that you are not a mathematician. Stating that every member of a set has property X in no way implies that the set itself has property X. This is an example of poorly thought out logical analysis.

But Christianity states "because because" as well - the only difference is that the causal chain goes back to God and there it stops. Using your logic, Christianity is as sad as atheism...

Albert Cipriani

Dear Alix,
Put down your dictionary and step away from the desk! You’re in a philosophical zone, here. Nothing frustrates me more than dictionary definitions when the subject matter is not common current usage but the essence of our terms. If you doubt the appropriateness of my frustration, look up “God.” You’ll find a perfectly valid invalid argument therein for his existence. If there was a dictionary definition of you, how much credibility would it have with you?!

I believe both Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas expressed the same view of eternity as I.

You next argue an equivocation:
You have equivocated validity with describe-ability. The vast majority of our subjective experiences and much of our objective experiences would fail, by your reasoning, to be valid. For very little is describable. Thank God! for if it were not so, as a technical writer, I’d be out of a job.

Furthermore, even moderator Jobar, an ostensible pantheist here, agrees with me that God is indescribable. God is like the Almond Joy candy bar motto: “Indescribably Delicious!” Our paltry ability to describe is not the stuff upon which to hang our metaphysical realities.

You say: Have you no objective standards, man?! What’s this “personally” business. Next I suppose you’ll posit that I’m “personally opposed to abortion” when you should know darn well that I’m objectively, rationally, morally, religiously, sociologically, pragmatically, and demographically opposed to it.

If every effect we investigate has a cause, my expectation of a First Cause is planted in firmly objective grounds, not based on personal grounds. I bet you that every time you’ve heard the door close and looked up, you saw that it indeed did close. Ergo, isn’t it likewise “wildly improbable” that the final time you hear a door close and look up, it will, instead, turn out to be a 747 Jumbo Jet?

You argue, Then I suppose if your flask can only contain a pint of whisky, there can only be a pint of whisky. You’ve conflated our finite ability to know with the infinite possibilities of what can be known. God is all that can be known. Now we gain that knowledge through His surrogate, Creation. Later, face to face. But even then, He being infinite, and wee being finite, He must necessarily remain incompletely known. Ergo, the subjective source of our eternal awe and objective cause of eternal glory.

You say, Hinesburg’s uncertainty principle has nothing to do with it. I am prepared to accept that the warp and weave of the fabric of reality is inherently unpredictable. That only means that the universe is not mechanistic, a philosophy that implies we have no free will and the universe has no need of a Creator God. God bless Hinesburg.

You say,
I see that you, as a mathematician, are slovenly applying your discipline to areas where it does not apply. Take the set of water. I note that every member of this set, every drop of it has the property of wetness. I induce wherefrom that the property of wetness applies to the set of water, not just to it’s constituent drops. For this, you accuse me exercising a “poorly thought out logical analysis.” Give me a break!

I have to stop now, as this is already far too long. Next time, just unreel one or two lines of reasoning. Unleashing a swarm of flies for me to swat leads us nowhere. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

sandlewood

I have to agree with Alix on that. You may be the only one that defines eternity as absence of time. You can’t go around redefining terms.

If there is no time, there is no change as we understand it. Since conscious thought requires change (as we understand it), God could have nothing resembling conscious thought. So at this point, it’s kind of hard to claim you know what God is.
It sounds to me like you defined God to be nothing. Awfully vague. I don’t see any reason to believe that something like that should be a likely cause of bringing material things into existence.
I’m not so sure that we are convinced that everything has or need a cause. It’s just that all our observations of things in the Universe so far have shown that things have causes. However, we don’t understand the origin of the Universe yet, so we may find that it is something that doesn’t have a cause. In fact this is what Hawking suggests when he says that asking what it was like before the Universe existed is like asking what the surface of the earth is like one mile north of the North Pole.

Jobar

Welcome, Z500 and Alix; I see you have met Albert, our resident Traditional Irrascible Catholic who hates it when you point out he's using words to obfusticate instead of explicate.

For instance-
God is like the Almond Joy candy bar motto: “Indescribably Delicious!” Our paltry ability to describe is not the stuff upon which to hang our metaphysical realities.

Back when that ad was new, even though I liked Almond Joys, I sometimes mocked them as 'indescribably horrible!' You *can*, after all, describe the taste of an Almond Joy, if you have a shared vocabulary of words and common gustatory experiences.

In short, Albert, if God is truly indescribable, you cannot say he's good or bad, perfect or imperfect, physical or spiritual... existent or non-existent. None of your theology or ideology or dogma is valid, because the opposite of any statement you make about God is just as true (or untrue) as the original statement.

And I remind you that my profile reads 'atheist/pantheist'. Any God you attempt to portray, in terms precise or poetic, I can honestly say I am skeptical of it!

Albert Cipriani

Z & Alex,
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, Jobar. Anyone who could say that Almond Joy bars are “indescribably horrible” cannot be trusted. Tho I suppose Jobar can manage to handle unwrapping one of those chocolate bars, as As Jack Nicholson stated in “A Few Good Men” he “can’t handle the truth.”

Just cuz he’s got a great animated Occam’s Razor giff, he thinks that makes him king of the hill here. But at the end of the day, it takes more than fancy graphics to hold sway with the sharp minds on this board. Take me for example, in addition to his graphics, it would take at least a half-dozen Almond Joy bars for me to be de-converted.

Taking off my clown outfit… Jobar argues: Au Contraire. You confuse what it means to describe with what it means to define. Almond Bars and gods can be defined. Describing them is what’s impossible.

For example, I cannot describe colors to a blind man. But that doesn’t mean I cannot define for him precisely what colors are. He simply would not be able to imagine what colors looked like. But if his sight could be restored, he’d “recognize” colors as an old friend. He’d actually see what had only heretofore “through a glass darkly” been defined. And he’d recognize how his inaccurate indescribable imaginations conform to his newfound experience of colors. The Beatific Vision of God is like that. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic