I thought Slartibartfast did the fjords. 
And some of those concepts would not be without evidence or reason or cogent argument. I’m not talking about the using the word “god” to describe an actual something but the idea of a supernatural deity. Perhaps I should have used the word “supernatural” in my description to make that more clear.
For the record, I don’t know of any atheist that would accept “God is why there is something rather than nothing.” If you think there has to be a “why” you’re not an atheist.
Again, I’m thinking about God from a scientific perspective, not a religious one, because there is no universal concept of God for which everyone agrees. Generally, they all agree that God created the universe and oversees humanity. My reasoning is that for God to be capable of doing so, he’s infinitely more powerful than we mere humans can conceive. It would be like an amoeba trying to conceive of higher life forms like humans.
Maybe I should have began a little higher from the bottom, so let’s say an ant farm. A human kid can love and care for an ant farm, but can the ants love and revere back? Do they see and acknowledge the big face outside the glass? What would ants consider God? A vast version of the queen, the Empress Ant maybe?
Humans usually think of God as an old man, or a more idealized version of themselves. We have no actual proof, and the answer to what God looks like may be more than we can comprehend. That’s the point I’m attempting to make. Since we don’t have the proper scientific data, we con only rely on faith and belief in a higher power, and science doesn’t allow for that.
When I hear those sorts of definitions my face gets all grim and stony because I see such definitions as sophistry of the basest order. The history of religion is riddled with bait-and-switches where God is framed as some simplistic insensate thing one moment, and is loving everybody and burning sinners the next. Wolf has been cried too many times for me to hear “I’m just talking about the Big Bang and calling it ‘God’ for no particular reason!” without immediately leaping to a non-charitable conclusion.
There are three possible reasons one entity could fail to understand the other: perceptual failings, perspective failings, or cognitive failings.
Perceptual changes are where the subject isn’t visible, or is hiding.
Perspective failings are where the subject is lying, putting on an act, or otherwise concealing its nature.
Cognitive failings are when the observer is too stupid to comprehend anything with the complexity of the subject.
I don’t accept that humans are, as a species, subject to cognitive failings of this order. We’re not ants. We’re capable of learning new things and expanding our understanding of them. The notion that God is too mysterious for humans to understand is evasive bullshit that can be summarily dismissed. (In my opinion.)
Whether there’re gods out there who’ve gone into hiding since the time long past when they were lying to people about creating the universe is another discussion.
You might have inferred, perhaps with a more careful reading, that my reference to “semantic games” indicated that I wasn’t endorsing the utility of such definitions, but merely pointing out that the use of the word “any” in the statement “Atheism at its core is the refusal, on principal, to accept the existence of any deities based on faith, without evidence or reason or cogent argument” was so open-ended that both traditional religionist definitions of “god” and non-magical philosophical ones could apply.
Hey, I just said that reading such sophistry fills me with rage. You can hardly expect me to read with perfect precision while I’m enraged, can you? But in my defense I never actually said that you engaged in that sophistry - I just gnashed angrily about the rage-inducing things you mentioned.
On the subject of gods that aren’t gods, I once came up with the following example that could be considered to be a rebuttal to the very concept of atheism: I have seen a god myself. This god was the styrofoam cup I had sitting on my desk at the time. In appearance, size, weight, and all other observable interactions with the physical universe it was indistinguishable from any other styrofoam cup, but this cup was a god. It was omnibenevolent and omniscient but not omnipotent - in fact it only had the powers of a styrofoam cup. But that didn’t change the fact that it was a god - and I personally attest that it was real.
So on the one hand we have a concrete disproof of atheism. But on the other hand we have a witty and incisive criticism of shitty definitions. No rational person would say that I had disproven atheism by pointing at a random object and declaring that it’s a god; that’s stupid. However that’s exactly what people who call the big bang God or the whole universe God or the Hartle-Hawking state God are doing. And it’s still stupid.
This sort of juvenile nonsense is only possible because of the slipshod way the concept of “god” is defined. You don’t have to be eternal to be a god. You don’t have to have created the universe or humanity to be a god. You don’t have to be omnipotent to be a god. You don’t have to be corporeal or incorporeal to be a god. You don’t have to interact with reality to be a god. You don’t have to exist to be a god. You just have to have a single human being call you a god, and nobody gets to tell you you’re wrong.
That is the reality of the situation, and I reject that reality and substitute my own. I claim the right to say no, I don’t accept that that thing you’re talking about is a god. I’m the final arbiter for whether I think something qualifies, and when people tell me the universe is God, I reserve the right to blow them off. Thus are my powers manifested, because I am a god.
And most religions connect these two things without justification. Even if there is a god who created the universe, it does not imply that this god has anything to do with us. People who think so are pre-Copernican, still thinking that the Earth is the center of the universe.
A god creating the universe is unfalsifiable. The premise that a god oversees the earth and isn’t doing a piss poor job of it is easily falsified.
Depends on what the god’s interests in the world are.
I was the god overseeing the world of the sims, and there were many, many deaths.
Because there is no evidence of the gods or God that is compelling to them. Hell, I’m on the fence, being an agnathest, and I don’t really see all that much compelling evidence. Just because it’s not scientific, per se, doesn’t mean they should just toss that skepticism out and accept theism. Science isn’t really about proving God or the gods exist…it’s about answering questions about the universe, and doing so in ways that are replicable, making hypothesis and then looking at the data to see if it’s supported or not. Theists are the ones who would, logically, be on the hook to ‘prove’ God or the gods exist, but, as they aren’t scientists mainly, or not in a science about gods or God they aren’t really compelled to do so.
So…how did your one post on this board (an in the Pit) go for you? Did you learn anything?
:smack: Didn’t even notice this was a zombie thread. Oh well, guess it didn’t go well for the OP, as they never came back…
nm
Good enough for half of our Founding Fathers is good enough for me.
To paraphrase Han Solo, I dunno, I can conceive quite a bit.
Such as, I can conceive of a being capable of creating the universe. No joke, “a being capable of creating the universe” is a seven word phrase that captures the thing that you suggest I’m incapable of understanding.
“But God must be so much more than that!” you may argue… But I don’t need to understand THAT, whatever that is, to understand that this being is God. I don’t need to understand the inner workings of His divine power to understand that He is divine and created the universe.
One doesn’t need to understand the inner workings of a GPS to understand that a GPS can pinpoint your location. We can understand the WHAT (a being that created the universe) without understanding the HOW.
Ants, being incapable of higher order thinking, are simply incapable of understanding the WHAT to begin with, because they are generally incapable of understanding* anything.
*Based on a human understanding of what understanding something means. I’m not going to understand God the way God understands Himself, but I am capable of a human understanding of God, and that’s good enough for us humans to work with.
I suppose my theory stems from the Perceptual. This is why I concluded some time ago (sneer all you want, it satisfies my spiritual void) that God is the whole universe. I say that because the universe is vast and we’re only capable of exploring a tiny bit of it. What we do discover changes our assumptions about the universe, like back when we thought Earth was the center of it all. Now we’re discovering new stars, black holes and planetary systems, but we won’t be able to properly explore them until the probes we sent out in the 70s travel dozens of light years, or we somehow pioneer FTL travel.
That goes with the “God moves in mysterious ways” supposition. At first, the statement sounds like we’re not allowed to fully know God’s intentions (for our own good), but if God is on a similar scale with the universe, we’re currently incapable of understanding God. Our telescopes only go so far, thus the “mysterious ways.”
Why create a new term-“God”-when we already have the term “whole universe”? What value is added with this?
And if, like, God is the universe, and I’m part of the universe… Then, God is part me, and I’m part God. We all are…
passes bong
Sounds common to religion in general. Psychedelia not required (although it helps).
Hold on a second, let me get my sneer face on.
Hmm, I don’t seem to have one. I think this’ll do instead though: :rolleyes:
But seriously, my response to that is, “You’re defining that word in a strange and confusing way to no clear benefit.” Seriously, what do you get out of pointing straight up and saying “That’s God”? Sure you can say all kinds of meaningful-sounding things, like “I am part of God” or “Part of God is inside me” or “God doesn’t give the tiniest little shit about my existence”, but you know that you’re not talking about some powerful supernatural entity. You know you’re just talking about the insensate ground we’re standing on. Calling it “God” doesn’t make the universe more powerful or amazing, and it doesn’t make Christianity make sense. It’s just slapping on a label that everybody’s going to misinterpret.
You can define god as a bottle of ketchup if you want, that doesn’t mean that there’s a shelf full of divinity at the local supermarket.