Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by yguy :

God can prevent more suffering without forcing people into doing things they don't want. He's omnipotent.

Please tell me why I should believe that I have "flipped the bird" to God, so to speak.

And also, I think it's even the case that you should save someone despite them presenting a rude gesture to you, especially if they were too cognitively limited to know what they were doing.

Logic provides its own objective standard, by definition. A situation is logically possible iff it contains no contradiction. So "there is a married bachelor" is logically impossible, but "there is an unhappy bachelor" is not.

Then you don't know what the word "omnipotent" means?

There's the crux. No atheist will believe that we've been warned of anything without already believing that God exists. And even then, it doesn't seem as if I've been warned of anything.

Furthermore, even if someone makes a mistake, it's still often morally better to help them out anyway if it doesn't cost you anything. Given the choice, I would cure all the syphilis in the world, despite it being the result, sometimes, of people's poor choices.

yguy

If you mean as an exponent for atheism, I don't know that you have. If you mean as a person, that would be when you did something you knew you shouldn't have and then made an excuse to justify it.

Your qualifier makes all the difference. My example assumes that the potential rescuer knows the person doesn't want his help, would resent it, in fact.

And how do you know that?

I can look up dictionary definitions like anyone else. The question is whether you can shoehorn the Creator into any of them.

If your conscience ever told you not to do something, you've been warned.

Most people realize they haven't sufficient stature to be President of the most powerful country on Earth, and here you are implying you could do a better job running the planet. Wow.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by yguy :

Ah, but there' s a difference. I have no way to know that by going against my conscience, that will thereby cause me and some nonhuman animals to suffer. If I were aware of that result, I wouldn't go against my conscience as much. Furthermore, it still seems true that God could find a better way to warn us.

I wouldn't resent any help from God in reducing the suffering in the world.

The former is an analytic truth justified a priori. If you want to be a skeptic about analytic truths, there's not much we can say to each other. The latter is an empirical fact.

So you don't know whether God is omnipotent. You're in the minority among theists.

Any time you try to effect any sort of change whatsoever, you've implied you could do a better job running the planet.

yguy

If you are putting yourself in the place of Adam, he was of course told that he would die. It seems he couldn't have realized the actual consequences without experiencing them

So you don't mind risking death as long as it doesn't affect others. How altruistic. Problem is, when any of the children of Adam repeats his mistake, the motive is selfishness, from which we may reasonably deduce that Adam's motive was the same. Therefore, to say he would have acted differently on consideration of the suffering his sin would have brought upon others is highly questionable, to say the least.

I don't see how. If Adam didn't believe God when He said eating the apple would kill him, why would he believe it if God showed him a movie of the goings-on in Auschwitz? Is it really believable that eating something would come to that?

Which reminds me of a movie about the Nuremberg trials with Spencer Tracy, where at the end, one of the Nazis who still had a conscience says to Tracy, a judge, "I didn't know it would come to this", to which Tracy replies, "It came to that when you signed those papers you knew were illegitimate", or something to that effect. The point is, he knew everything he needed to.

a priori:

Proceeding from a known or assumed cause to a necessarily related effect; deductive.

In light of the above, it appears that the answer to "How do you know" is that you know - or that you assume. If the latter, the assumption remains unjustified. If the former, you are essentially admitting either that you don't know how you know.

Sound familiar?

I don't think God conforms to your definition of the word, which, judging by the illustrations you have used based on it, I find absurd.

Ice

How is this? Adam was never explicitly told the possible consequences of eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

If person X does action Y so as to discover the consequences of Y, then that discovery is his motive. However, if person A does action Y after person X has already done that very action, and the consequences are known to him, it cannot be said that he did Y for the same reason as X did.

Curiosity killed the cat.

yguy

There is a qualitative difference between cuiosity about, say, how an engine works, and curiosity about what happens if you stick your baby sister's finger in a light socket. I would suggest Adam's curiosity was more like the latter than the former.

RevDahlia

i usually don't play on the big-kid fora, but i've been watching this one and must admit i'm perplexed.

what, exactly, is yguy's point?

here's what i understand about his argument thus far. i could be completely wrong.

1. he firmly believes that god exists.
2. the evidence which has convinced him that god exists is omnipresent -- thunderstorms, trees, children, etc.
2a. he says that if the great unwashed can't see god in such things, they are hopelessly deluded.
2b. however, he has yet to provide any reason why we should infer the existence of god from the above phenomena.
2c. (editorial) this is kinda like having an argument with a passive-aggressive spouse. they're obviously pissed, but if you ask them why, they say "if you don't know already, i'm not gonna tell you."
3. he understands that the existence of god cannot be conclusively proven.
4. he sneers at any attempt to prove ANYTHING conclusively.
5. he believes that the existence of god is self-evident, despite the lack of conclusive proof.
5a. he has yet to illustrate WHY the existence of god is self-evident. or even why it is evident to him. we're just kinda supposed to grok god, i guess.

huh?

yguy appears to be saying that "y'all just don't know for sure". okay, that's fine... but again, why the smug didactic song-and-dance?

is this supposed to be a kind of socratic questioning thing? if it is, it doesn't look like it's working. if not, what in heaven's name is it?

yguy, question for you: what is your goal with this discussion?

(if the answer is "you tell me," or some other such nonsense -- i am asking a DIRECT question -- well, good day to you, sir. big loss, i know.)

yguy

I don't believe I ever claimed anyone was hopelessly deluded, but in any case I don't see why it's remarkable considering that the hard core atheists here haven't been the least bit hesitant to imply the same about me.

Did I do something to you?

If I sneer at anything, it is at attempts to discount God's existence using standards which are demonstrably defective.

My intention is not to get anyone to believe in God, but to demonstrate the logical flaws in dogmatic atheism.

I believe I'm showing here that hard core atheists have this in common with Bible literalists: they think they know why they believe what they believe. They don't.

RevDahlia

yguy

You don't understand. I'm not holding back anything because I don't have it to hold back. I don't have any words of wisdom that will make everything fall into place for you guys. If I hang around long enough, I might say something that will click with one of you, but that's a longshot.

Is this thread supposed to be evidence of such neutrality?

If that were all there is to it, they wouldn't trying so hard to convince me that I don't know for sure that He exists.

Since you perceive my assertion as being directed at you, my guess is that you have your ego attached to the idea that there is no God. Perhaps thinking Christians are deceived gives you the same sense of superiority that a thumper gets from thinking you're going to hell.