Look, I’ve been butting heads with Liberal more than most this past week, but I think you’re jumping the gun here, Lightnin’ - **Lib **hasn’t said anything about having to believe his definition or anything like that, he’s been very civil. I’d like to think the rest of us are holding our own. I could be deluded, of course.He’s just repeating his thoughts for clarity. I, for one, find it interesting.
Lib, I’d just advise to stay out of the Pit, and hang out here where we can shoot the breeze for as long as the Board holds, yeah? Don’t listen to any “off his meds” posters or anything, just stay on game. OK, you can have time off for AmIdol threads too
I mean no disrespect to Lib, of course. I actually enjoy reading his posts, even though I tend to find these thread exasperating (and, I must admit, much of the logic used here is over my head- I’m an artist, dammit). I’m just hoping that we aren’t heading down the path we’ve seen before.
I suppose I should add to the thread, though. As an atheist, the only way I can define God is “that impossible father figure that the religious insist exists, although it can’t be proven to exist”. One thing I’ve noticed is that there is no One True Scots… uh, God. Every believer believes in his/her own God, which is different in the details from the God that every other believer believes in.
That’s why I find arguing with the religious so irritating- the goalposts keep moving.
That might be your problem, no disrespect intended. Lib may be wrong, but he is rigorous, he shows every step, and he responds to all legitimate criticisms. I’m a programmer and I love this stuff, but I don’t like spirtual fuzzy wuzzy stuff. I’m not at all surprised that these threads are not the favorites of everyone, but it takes all colors of threads to make a carpet, doesn’t it?
The problem is, you are likely to filter your experiences in accordance with your premise, not out of malice or an attempt to cheat, but as part of human nature. Triple blind studies are done not to prevent intentional distortion, but to prevent unintentional distortion.
A while back you said that you did not expect your experiences to be reproducible, that is you did not claim that the vision of God you had during your epiphany would be the same as that of others. That’s fine, but in a sense you are claiming support for your view of the supernatural from your experiences, while saying that you are not expecting support from those of others. That’s odd.
As an example, while you have indeed exposed your beliefs to scrutiny, and not changed them, so have people whose beliefs are not as well thought out, or as supportable, as yours are. Ditto for those whose beliefs (or lack thereof) are ven better thought out - like me for example.
Do you have a list of expected observations (whether internal or external) given that your premise is true? We need to prevent selective filtering of experience, and the unintentional dropping of expected results that did not come to pass. In a sense you are claiming to have conducted an experiment around your beliefs, I’m wondering if this experiment followed good deisgn principles.
Yeah, you know honestly, I don’t know what draws me to the Pit anyway. Lately, it’s gotten to where I post there as though it were GD anyway, so I might as well post here instead. Especially, since Buck has assured me that I misinterpreted his post some time back. I’ve just lost the fire, I reckon. Thanks for your sincere conciliation. I hope it won’t offend you if I quote Jesus: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be children of God.”
I do not consider logic to be science. Logic is a tool that science (and other disciplines) routinely use, but the two words are not synonyms.
Logic examines what science cannot — analytic things. It was used to build science, in fact. The Popperian aspect of science is built upon a philosophical principle: falsification, which itself is not falsifiable. With science, I can verify whether 1+1 ever fails to yield 2. But it takes logic to prove that, in every instance, 1+1 will always yield 2.
Logic is useful for examining God because so many of His aspects are analytic in nature. Science, on the other hand, is useless for examining God. It can observe some effect in the universe caused by the supernatural, but it cannot do it the other way around.
That’s why, for example, coordination of activity in the limbic system with religious experience may be used to argue either for or against the existence of God with equal effect. Science cannot tell us whether the phenomenon is man invoking God or God invoking man. And the fact that we can manipulate religious experiences by direct interference doesn’t help; after all, we may simply be demonstrating how God does what He does.
You might never ever convince of the existence of a Higher Being, but you are well on your way to convincing me there’s such a things as “Lib, The New Improved Version.”
I guess, ultimately, this is the bit I don’t get. I don’t see how you can use logic to analyse experience. Well, the kind of logic you’ve been using - modalities speak of possible experience, but you’re dealing with one real experience, your own. Your experience collapses the possibility field, as it were.
There is little if any space between us on the limits of science. I’m not sure where to stand on the limits of logic though. You have given us a premise that the supernatural exists. Isn’t it a further premise that the logic here obtains* there? How could we know?
I guess where I’m headed is questioning the necessity and prudence of mixing statements of faith with a formal system/study (if not science) of logic. Why not simply make a statement of faith, label it clearly as such, and stop there. Adding significant amounts of language usually associated with inescapable proof could be construed as an attempt at misdirection.
*See a word, learn it, use it, own it. (Hopefully correctly)
That doesn’t bother me. Remember this thread is a poll of sorts collecting definitions of god and not so much ways to refute them. My quibble is with the clarity of the line between faith and reason in the definitions. There are seeds of many future Great Debates here.
I am bothered because I feel you are using mathematical logic to show things about the real world in a way that is totally invalid. Logic is a very effective tool for mathematics, but it can rarely prove things absolutely for real world situations. Logic requires assertions to be perfectly well defined. That is true in mathematics. It is not true for most real world concepts. Virtually all real world definitions are fuzzy. Things like “natural”, “supernatural”, and the incredibly vague “edification” simply are not well enough defined to be used in hard, mathematically rigorous deduction.
A well formed formula is a sequence of symbols. The supernatural is not a sequence of symbols. It cannot therefore be a wff and presumably can’t “obtain”.
What I see here is not sound use of logic but a lot of word games. I dare say that nobody has been persuaded by the actual logic of your arguments, although some may have intimidated into thinking you have a sound argument because they don’t understand what you’re talking about and they assume, because of your jargon, that you know more than they do. You use some terminology I am not familiar with, but what you say that I am familiar with seems sufficiently illogical that I don’t trust the rest at all.
Clever word play that has a superficial resemblance to formal logic is something that has been used by philosophers throughout time, including those who claim to have “proved” their religious dogma true, people who have “proved” God doesn’t exist, and probably many of the people holding tenured positions in university philosophy departments at the present time. We should be particularly suspicious of anyone who claims to have derived knowledge of the real world without making use of any actual empirical data. It can’t be done.
Which pretty much defines God as a form of insanity. Unconditional love is crazy, as is unconditional hunger, or unconditional lust, or unconditional anger, or unconditional fear.
Honestly, all these attempts to attach the name “God” to well regarded abstracts and emotions like love or compassion or justice, without considering if the idea makes sense or has the slightest evidence strikes me as less theological and more something I’d expect out of an advertising agency. It’s like the Sweduish Bikini Team of religion; an attempt at creating a false association ( God + love, or sexy women + beer ) to sell a product.
Funny; I thought that the undefined word in that was “love”. “Unconditional” I can understand. It means without conditions. That’s not so hard. I know parents who unconditionally love their children. It doesn’t matter what that kid does, or whatever else happens; the parent still loves them. (Presuming for a moment that the death of the parent doesn’t count as a cessation of their love.)
Of course, by all my understandings, ‘love’ is an attribute or an action, not an independent thing. It’s like ‘height’: things can have height, but nothing is height. So to say that God “is” love, to me is an unparseable clause.
If the intent is to claim that God “continually and omnidirectionally expresses” unconditional love to everyone and everything, then I would say that that claim cannot describe any God that has been described in the literature of any major religion of which I am familiar (which does not include all of them, but does include Christianity).
Regarding the OP, by my definition a god is an intelligent entity with the power to alter physical reality as we understand it to an essentially unlimited degree. The simplest analogy I can think for this is either the GM of a roleplaying game, if entities of the (in-game) world have free will, or the author of a book, if the entities of the world (that is, the book) don’t have free will.
If they really have unconditional love for their children, that is crazy. If their offspring is a mass murderer or a torturer, then continuing to love them is warped. And yes, I know some people do just that.
I have a problem with that as well.
Also, I fail to see how that’s supposed to be a virtue. That’s a sign of extreme poor judgment, not some sort of divine enlightenment.
Hmm. You may have a debatable point; however I still dispute that you can definitively state that, under any set of circumstances, “loves unconditionally” -> “insane”. I’ve heard it claimed that to God, all of us are children, and while this usually is used to justify calling atheists stupid, it can also be used to support a tolerant paternal attitude of “Well, little Adolf’s just gotten a little out of control”. (Elements of ‘earth is just a RPG to God’ may come into play here as well, but those are concievable as well.)
Any particular problem, or can I just refute any random position and call it good?
Again, context, context, context. Since this phrase was dropped into the debate by lekatt, and he clearly doesn’t view God as the standard Christian god, who knows what we’re dealing with. Maybe God’s just a huge metacosmic puppy.
