sbaii

As theists, we believe that the universe is the result of a rational plan and, hence, a rational place. We don't want to live in an irrational world; nor do we believe that it is one.

God Bless,
Kenny


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There is the crux of religion. They want to live in a "rational" world, no matter how much irrationality surrounds them. It's comforting to think that there is a rationality behind the universe that is also benificent. He,at least, uses the term "believe" rather than "know". I don't worry about the people who can differentiate between a belief and fact. It's the ones who KNOW the TRUTH who are the real problem.

Kenny

Interesting. 99Percent maintains our problem, as theists, is that we can’t accept the fact that the world is a rational place. You suggest that our problem is that we can’t accept that it is not.

Well, I believe that I do know, but you likely disagree. Do you believe that you know the truth?

God Bless,
Kenny

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

doodad

I don't think all theists are monolithic in their thinking, i.e., some do not buy the entire bill of goods. I, for example, believe that God exists, but in a conceptual sense rather than in a supernatural sense. Religion is a mind game, and the basic intent of most religions is to influence the behaviour of people so that it is acceptable to others in society.
Personally, I doubt that God created the earth or that Jesus did the miracles the Bible speaks of.
However, the concept of a Heaven and Hell, as fictitous as it may seem to atheists, is beneficial in the sense that one is the reward for behaving yourself and the other is the puishment for not behaving. The behavioral aspects of Christianity, for example, serve a need in society, but there are numerous things in the Bible that are preposterous to me.

99Percent

Kenny: Suppose I’m a solipsist. Prove to me that you exist. Can’t do it? I guess you don’t really exist.

That is irrelevant because if my existence to the solipsist is not provable, then nothing else. We are talking about the existence of the irrational, or God that should be applied to everyone (and death certainly applies to everyone as is the idea of no life after death). Or else why would we be arguing in the first place?

A miracle is: an extraordinary event through which God reveals Himself in a special way above and beyond His ordinary acts of providence in sustaining and guiding the natural world

Oh, that sounds and looks so pretty. Fortunately for us rational, down to earth beings, it is complete nonsense.

“Miracles in the context of Christian theism are not just arbitrary violations of natural law that occur for no discernable reason, but revelatory events which are given their interpretation in the theological context in which they are situated.” In other words, miracles are not “irrational events injected into the affairs of men.”

Why would miracles be relevatory? You mean God is playing intellectual games with us with his "miracles"? We need to strive and put our brains to use to try to understand the ununderstandable and seemingly chaotic? You mean that those who believe in him are better so to do so? Oh I better start catching up on my bible reading! Damn where did I leave that bible around...

So are you saying that being has no content? If so, then why do we experience a world filled with content?

The "filling" of content you so confuse with "being of existence" is our categorization of the elements in our experience - which serves us to help us understand our experience in the first place. The mistake you are making is that these pure essences of categorizations do not go the other way too. For example: I see my cat and I can recognize and categorize this experience as cat. But the essence of "pure" catness cannot exist in concrete.

Existence requires content. Whatever the minimum content it requires, that is the set of characteristics which describe necessary being.

Of which the complete set of categorizations of any object is impossible to define, otherwise you would be able to have the reality of the whole universe in your mind, clearly not achievable due to the limit of matter in your brain, or that of God's brain for that matter...

Because God has revealed it to us, and impressed such knowledge within us.

Sorry, but I had no such "revealments", and no such "impressions" from another being but my own self. But I do wonder why you insist your intelligence and enlightment comes from an outside imaginary being when it is clearly is coming from within your own intellect.

Define “pure.”

Ha! You are the one as a theist who insists in "pureness" of ideas - such as God, no? How about you defining it for once. I never claimed purity can exist in reality (or in "concrete" like you say).

If X changes into Y, then there must be something which is identifiable as X and something latter which is identifiable as Y. The concept of change presupposes the concept of pure identity. I never thought I would find an objectivist who denies that things have identity. After all, isn’t A supposed to be A?

Again, you are confusing what is interpreted and categorized in our human minds as what actually exists in reality. A=A is in reality although we have a concept of A in our minds, that is never equal to it absolutely to its reality. Here I accept that I deviate from the absolutist notions of objectivism in this way by saying we must set a boundary of certainty to what "A" is in the human realm of interaction and language - something that a concept of "God" would never be able to fit in, as it is absolutist in concept.

A necessary being is, by definition, a being which exists in all possible worlds. If such is a coherent concept, then there is at least one possible world in which such a being exists. It is a contradiction to assert that a being that must exist in all possible worlds, exists in at least one possible world but not in others.

Which other worlds can exist but the world we are living now? You mean Tolkien's world, George Lucas' world or some other fictitious world?

(to sbaii) Interesting. 99Percent maintains our problem, as theists, is that we can’t accept the fact that the world is a rational place. You suggest that our problem is that we can’t accept that it is not.

What you cannot accept as theist is that there is no other reason for existence other than the plain reason to exist. As theist you make up false rationalities to your existence, namely that there is a superior being with unfathomable purposes that is guiding the supposed purpose of existence. In effect by making false rationalities (of which you so surely claim to be "true") you are being ultimately irrational.

Do you believe that you know the truth?

I do know there are degrees of certainty to the truth in everything. I can be 99.9999999% (and maybe more) degree certain I will live the next second. I can be 99.9999% certain (approximately) that the sun will rise tomorrow and that I will live another normal day. I can be 99.9999999999999999% degree certain that when I die I will cease to exist. As you can tell I like the 99percentageness in things The question is why can't you?

doodad: However, the concept of a Heaven and Hell, as fictitous as it may seem to atheists, is beneficial in the sense that one is the reward for behaving yourself and the other is the puishment for not behaving.

Assuming that heaven and hell exist in the first place. The problem on basing morality on the afterlife is that consequences in the current life (and the only one that really matters anyway) have no effect. Hitler can be perfectly in heaven while six million Jews are in eternal suffering in hell. So what would be the point of this system of morality in our current real life affairs?

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: 99Percent ]</p>

Thor Q. Mada

Poor Kenny, and bless you to, but I think you are a really hopeless case whom uses feeble arguments, not to convince others, but rather to convince himself the man inspired delusion he has presumably been living by was god inspired and not man inspired. I wish I were there to see your face after death, but by my definition that doesn't happen, and neither do miracles.
I do understand that at a certain moment in one's life, (I am not too young anymore) you ask yourself whether it was all worth it, and the answer is yes, provided you have not painted yourself in a self inflicted corner, and i am afraid kenny that you are exactly such a person. Please if you need miracles to convince yourself , go ahead, blind yourself and make a fool of yourself, but leave us alone, and don't use the words rational and rationality as an argument in what is basically an irrationality.

doodad

Existence requires content? By content I suppose you mean something concrete, material, tangible, something that can be observed by using the normal senses. If I had a house design in my head does it exist? Frank Lloyd Wright carried the design for Falling Waters in his head for about six months before finally drawing it out on paper for others to see. Did the design (concept) exist before he drew the plans?

The idea that a plane's fuselage can be a lifting body existed in conceptual form for years before it was perfected and actually incorporated into the space shuttle. Did the concept exist?

Note that I stated "the CONCEPT" of Heaven and Hell. They exist in conceptual form, and it is the belief in their being a reward or punishment that influences people, not their actual existence in the material sense. I can see you point about consequences in the afterlife having no effect on mortal behavior, but that is the intent of the behavior system that religion promotes. It's the fear on not going to Heaven or the fear of going to Hell that is supposed to keep people in line. These concepts serve somewhat the same purpose as the existence of secular law, in that fear of or respect for the law is supposed to be a deterrant to mis-behaving.

The point of this system of morality is to promote human behavior that is acceptable to others. Granted, it's not the only system, but it is a very popular way of teaching and promoting concepts of morality.

Kenny

I was merely pointing out that the inability to provide a proof of X that is not convincing to the skeptic of X does not make X false or irrational.

Whether you think it is nonsense or not, something along those lines is how a miracle is typically defined in the context of Christian theology. Miracles are not understood, in a Christian context, as “that which defies logic.” Thus, my original charge stands. You are constructing strawmen. I asked you to show me a single Christian theologian who defines a miracle that way, which you did not. Oh, and BTW, it is one thing to label a concept as “nonsense,” and quite another to argue that it is.

Because that’s part of what it means, in the context of Christian theism, for something to be a miracle. That’s kind of like asking “why are circles round?”

As I’ve been trying to point out to you, miracles are not “ununderstandable and seemly chaotic.” The are designed to reveal something about God to those who witness them. Christ’s resurrection from the dead, for example, in light of Jesus ministry, teaching and death, revealed to the disciples that Jesus really was the promised messiah and that through him God had fulfilled His covenant promises and had overcome the realities of sin and death.

Yes, miracles are given their interpretation in the context of faith.

Might do you some good


Yes, but my question to you is what is it that makes it possible to categorize our experience in the manner that we do? Do our categorizations actually reflect something about reality. If so, what, and why is that those particular categorizations apply and not some other?

That’s a good example of something which can not exist in the concrete. This is because the essence of “catness” is a pure universal, the set of properties which all cats share in common, but a cat is a particular. For each individual cat, however, in addition to the set of properties which all cats share in common, there will be an additional set of properties unique to that cat which differentiate it from other cats and other objects plus certain accidental qualities (such as where it is, what family it belongs to, etc.) Thus, there is an entire set of abstract properties which describe that particular cat -- its “essence” in addition to certain accidental qualities -- which are being concretely manifested.

Okay, first, yes, the “complete set of categorizations of any object” is impossible for a finite being to retain in its mind, but so what? That says nothing about the existence or definability of that set. I can’t retain the entire set of real numbers in my mind either, but that does not make the “entire set of real numbers” a meaningless concept. Second, God has a mind, but not a “brain,” as God is not a material being, and God is understood to be omniscient which means that He posses knowledge of all true propositions, including, “the complete set of categorizations for any object.”

I was asking you because you were the one who made the claim that “there can be no pure elements in reality.” I was trying to figure out what you meant.

Okay, so you agree that there is a distinction between what something is in reality, the complete set of properties which define it, and our limited abilities to categorize it. Well, so do I. I also agree that God’s nature is something that we as humans can never fully grasp or understand, but seeing how you just made the above distinction between what is and our ability to understand it, I fail to see why you regard this as a reason to disbelieve in God.

I am speaking in terms of logical possibility. In terms of modal logic, a “possible world” is a maximal description of a logically consistent state of affairs.

I agree that being has to be, that the concept of “non-being” is incoherent, because it cannot be the case that the state of affairs is that there are no states of affairs. The question which is left unanswered, however, is why this state affairs as opposed to some other state of affairs? Why does being manifest itself in this particular way and not some other particular way? The answer to that question, from a theistic perspective (which I am not arguing for at the moment, merely describing), is that there is a certain state of affairs which are essential to being such that being could not be without them. Since being has to be, this state of affairs has to be. This minimal state of affairs are what make up the essence of God. In other words, strip away all non-essential qualities of being (such as there exist things like galaxies, human beings, etc.) and what you have left are the qualities which describe God. It is also understood, in a theistic perspective, that God is a personal being with the ability to actualize states of affairs in addition to His own existence, and that God has chosen, in accordance with His purposes, to actualize that state of affairs which describe our universe.

As an atheist you feel uncomfortable with the fact that God exists and that you are held accountable to Him both in your actions and your thoughts. You want to be the own master of your existence, so you find the thought that a being such as God exists to be terribly uncomfortable and even frightening. Thus, you rationalize God’s existence away, even though God has made His existence clear to all people, and repress the truth, ultimately making you irrational. In other words, we can both play this game of “label the other person as irrational” all day, but I don’t see how its going to get us anywhere.

This is just a side comment, but I wonder how an objectivist would handle the problem of induction? That is, inferences such as the above assume that there is a certain uniformity to nature such that the future tends to resemble the past, but how do you know that assumption is correct? It won’t do to say that that nature has tended to be that way in the past as that assumes what you are trying to establish, namely that nature’s past behavior will continue to reflect its future behavior.

On what grounds?

God Bless,
Kenny

[ February 02, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

HRG

But our definition of a particular class of objects as "cats" came first; the essence of catness is simply the set of properties that all elements of this set share. Change the class (e.g. by including mythical cats like the Cheshire cat, or by excluding all Persians), and the set of properties (aka "essence") will change.
But there will not only one, but many of those sets of abstract properties which characterize an individual. My cat is simultaneously:

- the offspring of two particular cats born at a specific time,
- the only mammal in my household which I call Bagheera,
- the only organism larger than 1 cm which can be found on my desk from time to time.

Each property defines him uniquely. So pray tell - what is his essence ?

IOW, we cannot distinguish "essence" and "accidental qualities", except by an (arbitrary or not so arbitrary) whim. No offense meant, but I regard "essence" as a Humpty-Dumpty word: it means exactly what its user intends it to mean, neither more nor less.

Regards,
HRG.
Homo mensura omnium rerum.

Kenny

HRG,

Okay, but the point is that we can meaningfully distinguish such a class and identify which objects fall into it. This is because there really is a meaningful set of properties which we have labeled “catness.” Now this set is subsets of larger sets and there are sets which are subsets of it, so in terms of language, where we draw our distinctions may be somewhat arbitrary in certain situations (but not always), but the fact that such meaningful distinctions can be made is not.

Change the class, and you are no longer talking about the same concept of “catness” as before, but either a subset or a set of which that concept is a subset.

True. Some of those properties will be essential while others will be accidental.

His essence includes the set of properties which he holds in all possible worlds where he exists. In other words, his essence is the set of properties without which he would no longer be the same individual. Intuitively, it seems meaningful that there is such a set of properties, though specifying what they are may be somewhat difficult. It seems, for instance, that having less hair would not make him a different individual or failing to be the only object than 1 cm every time he hops on your desk, or having a different name. Would being born to a different set of parents make him a different individual -- well that’s debatable. The essence of some objects are more easily discovered than others. For instance, the number 7 has the essential property of being prime, but the accidental property of being the number of dwarfs in the fairy tale snow white.

At any rate, if we deny that objects have essences, that puts us in the position of denying that things have any meaningful identities outside of the arbitrary conventions of human language. This also means that there are no real meaningful distinctions outside of human language. This, in turn, means that our language says nothing about the world as it is, but only as we have chosen to characterize it. Finally, this means that we have no real knowledge of reality, no real truth to describe, only our “language games” which really say nothing at all.

God Bless,
Kenny

[ February 02, 2002: Message edited by: Kenny ]</p>

99Percent

Kenny: I was merely pointing out that the inability to provide a proof of X that is not convincing to the skeptic of X does not make X false or irrational.

This is the whole proving of negatives problem. It is the theist who has the burden of proof after all.

Whether you think it is nonsense or not, something along those lines is how a miracle is typically defined in the context of Christian theology. Miracles are not understood, in a Christian context, as “that which defies logic.” Thus, my original charge stands. You are constructing strawmen. I asked you to show me a single Christian theologian who defines a miracle that way, which you did not. Oh, and BTW, it is one thing to label a concept as “nonsense,” and quite another to argue that it is.

Ok, so miracles don't defy Christian logic, which is logic that has been severely twisted to fit their own interpretation of the world in order to make life after death possible and to allow for a personal God. Oh well. The point I am trying to make is that the belief in miracles validates this twisted logic and says that if they do happen, then the irrational can exist in the real world. I just wonder if you would really want to have this irrationality (of which you don't call it that way because you are simply denying it - when you find it convenient).

Christ’s resurrection from the dead, for example, in light of Jesus ministry, teaching and death, revealed to the disciples that Jesus really was the promised messiah and that through him God had fulfilled His covenant promises and had overcome the realities of sin and death.

Don't you find it a bit strange that the promised messiah would have to go through so much trouble as resurrecting from the dead to prove that he is so? Don't you think this is only wish fulfilling on the part of us mortal beings? Can't you honestly accept that the belief in miracles are really wishes for the existence of the supernatural? So that you can then breakdown logic and have a chance at living after death?

Okay, so you agree that there is a distinction between what something is in reality, the complete set of properties which define it, and our limited abilities to categorize it. Well, so do I. I also agree that God’s nature is something that we as humans can never fully grasp or understand, but seeing how you just made the above distinction between what is and our ability to understand it, I fail to see why you regard this as a reason to disbelieve in God.

Precisely because of this very same reason! We cannot have the complete set of properties of anything that defines it in reality so we cannot assume that a pure man made property will exist in reality and less if we don't even understand it! Besides I fail to see the point about believing in something you don't even have a chance of entirely grasping its meaning at, much less talk about it.

The question which is left unanswered, however, is why this state affairs as opposed to some other state of affairs? Why does being manifest itself in this particular way and not some other particular way? The answer to that question, from a theistic perspective (which I am not arguing for at the moment, merely describing), is that there is a certain state of affairs which are essential to being such that being could not be without them. Since being has to be, this state of affairs has to be. This minimal state of affairs are what make up the essence of God.

From an atheistic and objectionist view the state of affairs just are that way. If they were in another way we would be still asking the same question. He have the ability to ask this question because we can control our own state of affairs in the human realm of interaction. But this does not mean that what we cannot control, some other being is intentionally controlling it, and this is where you confusion arises. If you didn't exist you would not be there to ask why you don't exist. If you were born someone else you would be asking why you are that someone else and not you. It just becomes pointless to be contemplating the "nature of being" this way, and a question that should not be answered because it is not a real question to begin with.

In other words, strip away all non-essential qualities of being (such as there exist things like galaxies, human beings, etc.) and what you have left are the qualities which describe God. It is also understood, in a theistic perspective, that God is a personal being with the ability to actualize states of affairs in addition to His own existence, and that God has chosen, in accordance with His purposes, to actualize that state of affairs which describe our universe.

For what purpose? What is the point of imagining that there is a purpose if you won't be able to even understand this purpose?

That is, inferences such as the above assume that there is a certain uniformity to nature such that the future tends to resemble the past, but how do you know that assumption is correct?

Because contrary to theists, we completely believe in our senses which continously confirm our previous experiences. If you can't believe in your own senses, you can't confirm your own existence.

On what grounds (I can be 99.9999999999999999% degree certain that when I die I will cease to exist)?

Because no one has come back from the dead not even Jesus. The whole point in believing in the miracle of Jesus' resurection is so that you are not so certain that you will cease to exist when you die, which in turn is to validate the impossible.