I fail to see how it could be less convincing in its theistic-ness, personally.
They are to an atemporal entity, who can see the future effect as clearly as the present cause.
Because I feel that this God of yours would be every bit as much of a catarrhal dilettante, actually. You asked me not for examples of the strife he caused, but of the deception I feel he is guilty of.
God, being supposedly omniscient, never presupposes anything. If he exists, he knew all along what humans would be bound to think of his oh-so-natural-looking universe.
It could if I regurgitated what was clearly said in each lecture but you failed me for not ignoring what was clearly said in favour of completely imaginary material of my own choosing.
Then I would be in a class of delusional fantasists who liked your imagination-based criteria for making them feel special.
If God exists, his existence can’t be refuted at all. But since his existence has not been verified, seeking parsimonious explanations for the universe and everything in it including human thought is a thoroughly reasonable endeavour.
If he exists, he can do whatever he pleases. But I would still call him a deceptive alien because I still wouldn’t believe him when he said he wasn’t.
If you were a full-blown atheist, then the only quality you would assign him would be non-existence.
Your carts and horses are themselves sadly backwards. If X exists, then nothing can be used to refute that existence. But the whole point of this discussion is that there is much disagreement on this premise, and so we must each employ useful philosophical tools in order to arrive at our working conclusion. Supernatural entities were once proposed to explain planetary motion and the diversity of species: no longer. Ockham’s Razor cut those gaps too small for God to fit in any more. And it has now cut those gaps too small even in fields like cosmology, biomolecular chemistry cognitive science.
Agreed, but you asked me about what I’d think of the nonexistent old imaginary friend for grownups ifhe really did exist. Ask a silly question…
As a radical atheist, I have no problem with the concept that I may, at some point, be proven wrong. However, should any god prove to exist, a god who would require hell for eternity for anyone for any reason is certifiably insane. An infinite punishment for a finite crime? Isn’t that a bit extreme, regardless of the crime or the punishment.
I would be more than willing to banish my own damned self to hell, with or without this god decreeing it, in protest at such extremism. Besides, do I really want to be in heaven with only this god and the people he has found acceptable? The very idea is morally repugnant to me.
I have no fear of oblivion, as this is what I expect. To live in fear of ending is to live in horror of the time before one’s birth. Is the concept that your conciousness did not exist before any less disturbing than the possibility that it may not exist at a later date?
How is this so, and how do you know it? If we can’t verify the existence of atemporal entities, how can we speak for them?
From what I’ve read, not all atemporal beings have the same abilities. We are talking about The Main Dude here though, so I presume he would know it all.
But it baffles me that somehow that means that cause and effect—as it relates to him—cannot be distinguished. Should I infer that to mean that whenever there is confusion, there must be deception? What about simple malice on his part? (that would cause confusion) Sport? Caprice? Some Other Purpose?
How do I know it’s him at all? The only reason I’ve belabored this deception/confusion thing is that there may be a distinction between God and religion, or between God and some religions; essentially between the message and the messengers.
I haven’t owned up to any god in this discussion. And I did ask for examples of the deception you feel he is guilty of. But the only example you gave was one of a deceptive online bank/fraud.
It wasn’t God I was accusing of presupposing the cause, based on the effect. It was you.
We can agree on the effects—the ‘strife.’ I’ve yet to see the deception; or, a convincing argument as to why we should both assume and accept divine deceptionas a matter of fact, simply because the world is in some confusion/chaos.
There is a lot in this statement, so I’d like to leave analogy-land for a moment and translate for the audience at home. Please correct me if I get it wrong.
Clearly our professor is God, and the ‘test’ is gaining knowledge of him, his purposes, personality and requirements as a means of living in accord with those requirements. (presumably for our benefit) Our “course of life”—the choices we make— is the real test ,and may be manifest in many different ways, all of which make up the basis of a “passing grade.” Depending on your flavor of god, this “passing grade” can be heaven, or some other ‘reward.’.
The problem, of course, is God, if he exists, isn’t making house calls to humans. (Although reportedly he had in centuries past) And historically man has “found” God via some sort of religion, as essentially “proctors” for God.
But you have not taken this test. If God does in fact exist, and if you were to fail [to reach a passing grade] as manifested by going to heaven etc, it’s because you refused to take the test. Nor did you hear in lecture what you claim to have heard. I don’t know of many religions—that presumably speak for God—that are centered on the creation vs the creator.
If I [God] failed you it was because you presumptuously chose to reject his credentials and devised your own test. You were never asked to “regurgitated what was clearly said in each lecture”----you weren’t asked to do that!
Even if sincere, by choosing willful ignorance and devising your own standard by which to understand God and his purposes and creation you guarantee failure.
It sure is. It is a reasonable endeavor to seek understanding about us and our world, and to search for meaning or purpose in life.
Agreed. But I would be concious of the fragility of an argument that includes applying human constructs to a presunmably divine being, and I wouldn’t persist in insisting that God, if he exists, is somehow no more powerful or more knowledgeable than I am. That’s just silly.
You make take comfort in Ockham’s Razor. But surely you are aware that Ockham, and other axioms are human constructs**,** devised by humans**,** centered on the human experience**,** and cannot be applied to a divine being that cannot, by definition, be constrained by human limitations. I haven’t appealed to theology, or to the existence of God. But it is absurd to spout things like Ockham, when, if God exists, he would not be bound to them.
I am prone to silly questions, but I don’t remember asking what you’d think about our imaginary friend. I asked you what, if any, significance there was if you disbelieved. The only appropriate answer is “none”, which you offered.
The ensuing editorial was bonus material I presume, was not the result of me asking what you thought of him. That’s not relevent. I was simply pointing out that, if God exists, it makes your point no more compelling to call him a “catarrhal dilettante.” :rolleyes:
It appears that even if you don’t ask a silly question you may still get a silly answer…
What? Hell is a ripping good time, my little friend. After all, it is where all the fun people go! So come join me and I’ll show you the time of your life, well, of your afterlife, anyway.
Again, you asked if God exists, how is He deceptive? Of course I don’t believe that God, with all his odd temporal properties such as the ability to create time, exists.
If he knew full well what we would find confusing, yes.
I would class malice, caprice or simple sport under the heading “deception”, just as a con artist would still be “deceptive” even if he was doing it for laughs rather than money.
Again, you asked me what I think would constitute deception on his part. You can think what you like of him, of course.
But in all religions I know of (bar a handful of rather more atheistic philosophies which one can;t really call “religions”), the supernatural entity called g/God is responsible for this oh-so-natural looking universe. I therefore see deception in every religion.
Good, neither have I … What were we talking about, again?
ie. wherein someone creates a perfectly plausible mechanism which works without any need to appeal to some highly unlikely deception responsible for it.
God is defined to be eternal and outside the physical bounds of entropy. That is not a ‘presupposition’ on my part, other than to presuppose we’re talking about the same dictionary entry.
I haven’t agreed any such thing yet, actually.
Again, you asked me why I would feel deceived if God existed (which you could never, ever convince me of), my answer being that when he was thinking what kind of universe to create, he could see the future apemen scientifically explaining the universe without him as clearly as anything else. I consider this deceptive, but you can consider it whatever you like.
Again, you can consider the test to be whatever you like - I’m not really interested in passing tests other people make up. I consider that the test is whether or not God is necessary in order to explain every aspect of our lives and the universe we live in. Which He isn’t - cosmology tells us that the universe he supposedly created has always existed: whither “creation”?
God’s lecture is the universe He set before us. It tells us about itself by scientific experiment. The scientific explanations for itself and everything in it including human thought and divine experience require no God. Thus, to pass your test, I would have to ignore the lecture.
Again, cosmology tells us that there is no such thing as “creation”: the universe has always existed, over all time.
I am asked to do that every day in which I seek an explanation for my existence. If God does not ask us to be curious in this way, he ought not have given us curiosity.
I characterise willful ignorance as that shown by anyone who does not understand, or seek to understand, the scientific explanations for everything God has supposedly created.
The second is a category error.
Which is why I insist no such thing. God, if he exists, can be as clever as he likes compared to me: I still wouldn’t believe him.
As is God a human construct, of course.
And if God was a multiplicity of unnecessary bananas, or angels which pushed the sun around the Earth, they would not be bound by Ockham either. But I, of course, reject your absurd “if” premise precisely on that basis.
Well, OK, given that I reject your “if” as surely as if you’d have said “if God was an invisible pink unicorn …”, and that we now apparently agree that he is imaginary, I see no need to respond to any more of your “if God exists …” absurdities.
The ouputs of my cognitive apparatus are all the “significance” I’ve got. There is no such thing as objective “significance”. What was ‘significant’ in the 13.7 billion years before humans existed?
As far as laughing at the idea of God goes, call me a hobbyist.
That is a beautiful summary of the history of religion.
Fewer tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, deserts, ice ages, asteroids colliding with planets, wasps laying eggs in live spiders, birth defects, and diseases and plagues for starters.
Reading this through, I think I owe raindog an apology for not being clear on his initial question. In response to my point that I will never believe that God exists no matter what stunt he pulls before my very eyes, he asked:
Note that this question does not quite follow from my statement that I would consider God to be an alien deceiving my very eyes with advanced technology. It asks what deception there is if God wasn’t merely deceiving my eyes technologically, but if God was really really real.
At this point, raindog, I should simply have repeated what “deception” I referred to in my original statement (that of the mundane Matrix-style sensory input kind), and also repeated that your “if God exists …” might as well be “if angels push the sun around the Earth …” or “if men co-existed with dinosaurs …”. However, it was an interesting enough question so I thought I’d go along with your “if” for the sake of argument and explore the logical consequences of God creating a universe which he knew full well would look perfectly natural to future scientific humans. You replied:
(which we can’t, ever, given my mistrust of advanced technology, incidentally)
There’s a lot in this which I missed first time around. You are suggesting that if God exists, then human-created scientific explanations which don’t reference him are untrue. That is quite a statement! A scientific explanation of the Earth’s fossil record involving billions of years of evolution is untrue compared to God’s 6-day creation? A scientific explanation of planetary motion involving an inverse square law of gravitation is untrue compared to angels pushing them around? A scientific explanation of the Big Bang involving curved spacetime is untrue? A scientific explanation of divine experience involving temporal lobe epilepsy is untrue?
Clearly, if God exists in the way you suggest, we are sadly deluded in our scientific explanations. Surely, if God could see how the vast majority of educated people would be taken in by such untrue explanations, then expecting them to reject scientific explanations even in the face of their demonstrable worth, predictive power and objective verifiability would be as deceptive as laying a pit trap which looked like a solid piece of ground?
