Albert Cipriani

Dear Technos,
I apologize for over-reacting negatively to your prior post. Re-reading what you wrote, I now see that it wasn't your Freudian slip, but this statement:


I resented the false dichotomy between either "simply" (translation: "dumbly") believing God did it or becoming knowledgeable about physics. Most physicists today believe in God precisely because of their knowledge about physics.

So that set me off. But I am getting better, so my wife tells me. Without drugs, I'm training myself to be more calm... no thanks to you!!! (Just joking.)

So, with the exception of your word "simplified," I agree with your summation:


With this caveat: God IS it is more accurate than God DID it. The universe is not substantially God, but reflectively God. And just as you do not DO your reflection in a mirror, it just happens by virtue of where you are standing, so too, the universe is not something God DID, as in manufacturing the Deists' watch. The universe is something that God revealed about Himself through Himself.

If you insist upon the concept that the universe is something God "did," I can accept that verb only in the sense of whatever He did He does to Himself. Like turning on the bathroom light so that the figure that was already there (yikes! ) can be bathed in photons so that it is made apparent to others by means of it appearing in the mirror. Ergo, we are made in His image.

On a side note, does not the combination of matter and anti-matter result in the annihilation of energy? Sure it releases energy, but does it not also annihilate some along with all the matter? Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert Cipriani

Dear Helen,
So you don't believe in free will? This is elemental. Plus it is fodder for this board, for without a belief in free will it makes sense to be an atheist.

So I revise my assessment of you, you are a fundy AND an atheist at heart. I'd be interested in the rational basis for your Calvinist view on un-free will.

E tu? I'm amazed at how many bi-polars are on this board. It ought to be re-christened "The Arctic Zone".

Perhaps we all have mental problems because we are all focused on an intellectual problem that, like the Gordian Knot, CANNOT be unraveled. We can only cut through it one way or another and that non-intellectual short cut to a conclusion bothers our conscience like a pebble in our shoe no matter where we go for as long as we're going. So the going gets tough for us more than for others. -- Cheers, Albert 2/28/02

HelenM

John Page

quote:
Originally posted by Albert Cipriani:
Dear Helen,
So you don't believe in free will? This is elemental. Plus it is fodder for this board, for without a belief in free will it makes sense to be an atheist.
I wonder if the atheists agree with you? Maybe we'll find out now you'd said that

Helen:

Yup, no free will. Does it make sense to be an atheist? - depends on your criteria.

The only way you could get free will is to have a non-causal universe. Unfortunately, you would then have no way of knowing you had free will, let alone act on it.

Draygomb

Lack of Free Will to accept Logic would be a good reason for Theism.

John Page

Only if you believe in god.

Religious folks seem to delight in the argument that we have free will because god gave it to us. This gives them a nice wedge on determinists who also want to believe they have free will.

doubtingt

As others have pointed out, being an atheist simply means that your philosophy is "non-theistic",
just like the term 'asexual' means "non-sexual" and not "anti-sexual".

More importantly, there are two separate questions that all thinking people must answer as to
the issue of God. The first is "Are any of the current conceptions of God accurate?"
This is a question that can be answered rationally and empirically. All the evidence of nature, human history, and what is known about motivated behavior suggests that it would be impossible
for a creator responsible for this universe to be all powerful and loving. If God exists then he is either not all powerful or he is cruel and unloving. Thus, one can conclude on rational grounds that such Gods do not exist.

The point is that many specific conceptions of God can be rejected as false based on their logical inconsistency with all known observable facts. There are those who would say that this is not the case, but to accept their arguments requires that one reject any basis to ever believe that any idea is false. Such a position directly refutes itself, because it is the equivalent of saying:
"I believe that the claim that one can rationally believe an idea is false is false."
Sound absurd and self-contradictory? It is, and it is the absurd foundation of many a useless
philosophical arguments.


As for the issue of whether any future conception of God might be accurate, by definition, such Gods do not even exist as concepts yet, so it is not possible to think about them, let alone
decide whether you believe in them or not.

My advice is to take your God's one day at a time

doubting thomas

Automaton

I have to make this brief as I'm going out soon. Sorry.
The keywords here were temporal and non-temporal. It is good that your argument does not rest on these terms, otherwise one of your premises would be, basically, A is ~A.
Nope, haven't done that yet (still in highschool you see.)
That is not my point. I was saying that an entity cannot exist in one dimension. Time comes with space. Space comes with time. If there is this mythical fifth dimension, then we, as well as God, exist in all of the five. So the logical conclusion of this is that God exists in our spacetime as well, which defeats the purpose of your original rationalization.
Nit-picking semantics are nothing more than pointless rhetoric. My question still stands (see above).
Absolute nothing as the total ontological state is logically self-contradictory. The absence of being cannot be state of ultimate being. Thus there must have been "something", for example a void or vacuum. With space, there is time. When there is time, there is a sequence of events. Plus, causality requires a change on behalf of both the cause (God) and the effect. There is no change without time.
No, it's not. I demonstrated the fallacy of this with my "fossil strata" analogy above.
Nonsense. You still can't even establish it a priori, which you most certainly could do if it was "up there" with the law of noncontradiction.
So say I make a universe-size quantum omnicomputer that can do pretty much everything, but I program it to slaughter little children? Would it be more moral?

Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubtingt,
Your potentially true assertion:


carries a hidden assumption. It assumes that this temporal playing field is the only field upon which cruelty and love mix it up.

I would agree with you, that the pain IN THIS LIFE exceeds the pleasures IN THIS LIFE and therefore if there is a god that god must be a sadist, were it not for the hope in an afterlife. Only an afterlife can balance the scales of justice by providing eternal compensation for our temporal pains.

Pleasure and pain are a kind of duality, where each is predicated by the other. For example, the aphorism: "Hunger makes the best sauce." Translation: the pain of hunger reduces one to the condition in which even an uncooked cockroach could taste good. The pain of thirst gives rise to the pleasure of quenching that thirst. The frustration of lust gives rise to the... well, you get my drift.

So, on the cosmic scale, one can see our entire life, in relation to eternity, as the temporal pain that necessarily goes before the eternal pleasure. Or conversely, as in the case of Lazarus in the Old Testament, the temporal pleasure that goes before the eternal pain.

One of my favorite phrases in the Roman Catholic Latin Mass (that has been effectively banned by the apostate Novus Ordo Catholic Church), refers to the Eucharist as "an eternal remedy." I like to think that every act we perform is capable of adding to the eternal remedy for our condition in this cruel and unloving world.

I agree and doubt there are any theists on this board who would disagree with your assertion:

-- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert Cipriani

Dear Atuomaton,
My turn to be brief:



I said a dot is an entity that exists in the first dimension.



Yes He does. I don't understand how that defeats anything that I've argued.



Questions don't stand. Conclusions may or may not stand. Pointless rhetoric is nit-picking semantics, i.e., you've said nothing, and managed to do so redundantly.



Nothing can't exist because it must have been something. I see... what you don't see is that this is a circulus in demonstrando.



Analogies, at best, illustrate logically demonstrated conclusions. Fallacies, like train wrecks, can only be pointed to, not demonstrated. In any case, I did not understand what you meant with your fossil strata analogy.



OK. So then, establish the law of non-contradiction a priori. Do what you say I should be able to do. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

[ February 28, 2002: Message edited by: Albert Cipriani ]</p>