Ogotay

Hey!

I've just had an hour long discussion with a friend of mine about the existence of God..

I'm an atheist, he's an agnostic, and after going around different aspects of belief and non-belief, we ended up both stating the fact that God is illogical.

I used the fact to say that humanity therefore finds itself facing a decision of believing or not, without having any proof. "I believe, and therefore it's true". I stated that we as humans need to act on our sense of logic when deciding between belief or nonbelief, and that the logic choice would be nonbelief. And through nonbelief we can define god as an illusion, a definition we need to be able to understand.

He used our common stated fact to say that a possible God is too illogical for humanity to understand it's existence, and that we therefore cannot determine nonexistence using probability. Because of that, we don't need any definition of God to believe.

We got stuck there, going in circle, and none of us wise enough to get out of that circle.



I'd really like comments, thoughts, corrections, anything!! Whatever input you can give will be greatly appreciated, as I am trying to develop a belief that I can rely 100 % on.

Normal

The problem with logic is that it's based on definitions.

The problem with applying logic to understanding if god exists or not is that so many of the terms used are vague and actual definitions become unclear.

"Perfect", "goodness", "evil", "omnipotent", "omniscient"

We invented these words, god didn't.

Nowhere357

I think he's right that determining nonexistence is not resolvable.

He's wrong however to that "we don't need any definition of God to believe". If we want to know whether we believe something - to whatever degree of certainty we require - we have to know what we're talking about! Of course we need a definition.

The problem I think is that you've given the definition - you call it a fact that we can't understand god!. This begs the question, so the conclusion is unsound.

yguy

Then I guess you're out of luck, because there is no such thing as a definition of God that is not either tautological or laughably inadequate.

hinduwoman

Well Kierkegaard did say that he believed in christianity because it is absurd

Jobar

yguy, if we can't define it, all our attempts to talk about it are useless, sound and fury, signifying nothing.

If you are a monk living a vow of silence, well, maybe that's an honest way of trying to find god. But if you want to speak about god, you must find some definition which is at least not wrong, even if it is not complete.

When you deny the possibility of defining god, you deny the truth and relevance of all words concerning god; the Bible, f'rinstance.

yguy

If I were here to speak about what God IS, you'd have a point. I'm here mainly to talk about what in my view He is not. What He is can only be discovered by the individual.

How do you mean?

Philosoft

However, by eliminating things we know God is not, we ought to be able to get a fair estimation of what God is, no?

Also, why are some things that God is not much easier to identify than others? For example, there is probably a vanishingly small percentage of people who think that Andrea Yates was actually instructed by God to kill her children, but millions think Allah actually cares whether women keep their heads covered in public. Presumably, we know Andrea Yates is mistaken because God condemns killing innocents in numerous NT (benefit of the doubt here) cases. If God can get that message across fairly easily, why does he have such a hard time with other messages? Why do individual conceptions of God differ so greatly (exactly what we would expect so see if God was a fictional being)?

GrandDesigner

Monkeys seem more logical than humans. And fish, moreso. Going by that, it'd be logical for a being superior to humans to find that humans seem more logical than them. And that holds true until the pinnacle is reached. At which point everything is clear and logical.

For one thing to be logical, everything must be.

Grand Ol Designer

Nowhere357

Then we're all out of luck, because there is no definition of anything which is not either tautological or "laughably inadequate".

So your objection is irelevant, and my statement stands:

If we want to know whether we believe something - to whatever degree of certainty we require - we have to know what we're talking about! Of course we need a definition.