Fundamental Misunderstanding of the Nature of God

Great Debates
141

This is exactly why I feel atheism to be irrational. How can one de facto disbelieve in God if God is a synonym for existance? Certainly one can disagree with the usage of a word, but largely what I see is an argument over semantics, which is something i’ve been saying OVER AND OVER AND OVER. Then someone comes and cleverly states that what I am describing is no different from atheism, which isn’t entirely accurate, because there is one little tiny polarizing difference that seperates the two, which is semantic.

Now, I do not think that the bible has any greater authority over the nature of God than anything else. Clearly God exists. The question is: ‘What is God?’ not “Does God exist?” Maybe God is purely conceptual. Maybe God is everything, maybe I am wrong about the nature of God maybe I am right. We can argue that from here to eternity. However, it is straight up ignorant to say that God does not exist, because by typing the word God or any derivation thereof, you are accepting that clearly God DOES exist. Atheism therefore is oxymoronic, as it depends upon a concept of theism in order to even be a word.

Now what I would argue is that religion is at the root of all of our consciousnesses, like it or not. We all evolved from the belief systems of our forebears, and we cannot escape that, we can only change the belief systems we hold today.

Generally the atheist argument requires a narrow definition of God that is easy to debunk, and is therefore completely pointless. It assumes a stable definition of the word God in order to debunk it.

Now, most atheists believe in existance. Most atheists believe in consciousness. You combine those two concepts and you are starting to get an inkling of what the word “God” means. I would argue not that a rock itself is conscious, but that it is consciousNESS. The Consciousness determines the form that existance manifests itself. The reason I see Atheism as being irrational is that they will take information structures that occur in nature such as DNA, and use them as evidence of lack of a deterministic consciousness. This makes absolutely no sense.

What is information? IN Formation. If something has a form, then it contains information that helps to determine that form. Information on a physical level could then be considered as the thoughts of existance, or God’s thoughts. A star is a piece of information, it’s relative location to it’s planets is information, it’s color spectrum is information and so on and so forth.

What I find ironic is that people find their inability to understand what I am saying as evidence of MY idiocy. The basic assumption is that I do not know what I am talking about. I do know what I am talking about, I just don’t necessarily have the common vocabulary to describe it.

I am extremely skeptical of SentientMeat’s concept of a universe with a specific size. I am willing to buy into the idea of a Planck length, but that the length of that Planck unit was derived based upon our knowledge of the sizes of structures we currently knew to exist. I do not see how this helps to determine the size of the universe. Of course my knowledge of Quantum Physics is in short supply, so I cannot possibly argue with someone like SentientMeat who’s cosmology is quite developed. I would need to learn a great deal more about the cosmology he is using in order to offer a satisfying debate on the subject.

I have used the Sefer Yetzirah which discusses how multidimensionality springs up merely by the contemplation of a singularity. Again lacking the understanding of SentientMeat’s cosmology I cannot say for certain, but I am extremely dubious about his concept of what a singularity is, and I would say that Existance is most definitely an infinite curvature of spacetime, and that you cannot have singularitIES, for there is only one singularity, for it is SINGULAR, meaning the only thing that exists, for something to exist beside it would stop it from being Singular. In short you cannot have more than one singularity in all of existance. Existance itself is the singularity. Perhaps a Black Hole is a good window into the fundamental singular nature of existance.

Now the reason I believe people dismiss Kabbalah is because they have no reference for it. However here I am going to offer up a Wikipedia link for you. Ein Sof

So atheism by this logic is irrational, because it is arguing against a term that is defined many different ways. To deny God, one is denying all possible definitions for God. Basically it’s a linguistic paradox, that doesn’t exist in any actual sense, only that one can use terms to oppose one another.

So simply because one can cleverly pit two words against one another, what does this pitting of words tell us about anything? As everyone seems to agree, no matter which side of the debate they are on, it tells us NOTHING. The paradox enlightens us to the limitations of our language, and is not a good indicator of the overall nature of existance/God.

So by saying God does not exist you are denying every possible definition of God. Now to deny every possible definition of God, you must KNOW every possible definition of God. I am doubting that any of the atheists here KNOW every possible definition for God. God as a singularity has no opposite. It’s like applying existance to “Nothing”, which means simply “No Thing”, which is a dualistic tool with which to describe the existance of a “thing”, not because Nothing exists empirically for it to exist it would stop being Nothing and become A Thing. We understand things in a dualistic model, but the object itself is not dualistic, it is monistic. This is why I do not disagree with SentientMeat when he says that all things are physical. I disagree with his idea that there is no such thing as the metaphysical. Metaphysics is the study of things that have no position in time or space in and of themselves. Take for instance, Passion, I can have passion right now, but that passion is dependent upon me and my position in time and space to manifest, but as a concept it exists eternally, free to be used whenever it is necessary.

Now hopefully some of you will get what I am saying. If you do not, please don’t mistake your lack of understanding for MY lack of understanding. My inability to relate it to you depends as much on my understanding of YOU as it does upon my understanding of the subject at hand.

Erek

142

I liked Wish You Were Here better

143

I should have added that there’s nothing there to agree with, either, beyond agreeing that Monavis was using the word “God” in the way she did.

You seem, strangely, to make no distinction between the description and the thing described.

It can, indeed, be so considered. SentientMeat’s physicalism and your panpsychism are, in my opinion, equally impossible to contradict or verify by any appeal to experience.

I hope that by you you don’t mean me.

144

By disagreeing that “god” is a synonym for “existence”. If it were, then it would also be a verb, eg. “I think therefore I god”, “There gods no integer greater than 2 for which x, y, and z such that x[sup]n[/sup] + y[sup]n[/sup] = n[sup]n[/sup] ” or “The universe has always godded”.

ie. imaginary.

Do believe in faeries? An answer of “no” on your part would be just as “oxymoronic” (and I don’t think you know what that word means - the word you are looking for is contradictory) since even using the word “faerie” is apparently a tacit admission of their existence.

Not. The root of consciousness is sensory input and memory.

No, since my beliefs are directly opposed to those of my ancestors. We evolved from bacteria. Call them ‘conscious’ if it makes you happy, but you might as well talk to the weather.

Why conflate the two so unnecessarily? Would you have the surgeon ask the anaesthetist “Is the patient ungod yet?”

Then you handle language more clumsily than an egg-collector with Parkinson’s disease, and create just as much unnecessary mess.

No, that entire sentence made no sense. A corpse is not conscious, but is still made of DNA.

An arrangement of physical matter which is encoded to represent memory, whcih is itself demonstrably physical.

It is precisely because you don’t use common vocabulary, but seek to pick alternate definitions out of thin air, that you struggle to make yourself understood here.

The speed of light in vacuo is constant, and the universe expands at that speed from a highly compressed size around 13.7 billion years ago. You will receive a Nobel prize for demonstrating either of these facts to be false.

No, please listen. I have told you several times that you are wrong about this. The Planck scale is constant.

If you confuse cosmology with quantum physics you are confused indeed. Do you not trust me when I tell you what you are factually incorrect about?

It is a point of infinite curvature of spacetime, such as at the centre of black holes (which demonstrably exist).

Again, you are using the word incorrectly: more than one black hole exists. Just because it happens to contain the word “singular” doesn’t mean there’s only one of them, any more than your username means that you are a creation of Microsoft.

Use your language as clumsily as you like, but don’t expect to be taken particularly seriously. Presumeably, when spacetime isn’t infinitely curved there is no existence?

You are gibbering. You can make whatever sounds from your mouth, or place whatever shapes on my screen, but you are not actually saying anything of substance.

Not every definition: the “imaginary entity” can be said to exist as a superposition of properties (memories) in the biological computers of humans, rather like the existence of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Congratulations. Now if we could just agree to use the same English dictionary, we might have a lot more to say to each other.

The you directly contradict your last sentence in which you agreed that all things are physical. Metaphysical means beyond the physical.

Concepts exist as “averages of memories”, which are themselves physical.

Then you won’t mind me defining your posts as incomprehensible. After all, it’s only words, huh?

145

You’re quite right - we can only ask each other what description we agree on. Everyone is perfectly entitled to call rocks, corpses and DNA molecules conscious, but I would strongly discourage them from becoming professional anaesthetists. :slight_smile:

146

In fairness, mswas, doesn’t, at least in the sentence I was responding to, call rocks conscious.

Not that I would expect you to find this any more satisfactory.

My comment in my previous post should not be taken as an endorsement of panpsychism, but as an attack on physicalism.

147

Fair enough. I have never pretended that physicalism is a falsifiable or testable position. Indeed, none of the alternatives to it are either, and so one must either sit on the fence for one’s entire life or move, however infinitessimaly, towards a position which cannot be tested: that is the nature of “one’s philosophy”.

Put simply, if a biological machine did begin to ‘think’, it could never think of an unattackable philosophical position. It could only say which option had the least serious weaknesses.

148

I don’t think that avoiding unfalsifiable propositions should be characterized as “sitting on the fence”. It’s more like saying “what fence?” I admire your commitment to the scientific method, and hate to see you deviate from it.

149

Well, that limits me very gravely in my pursuit of happiness and clarity in everyday life. Can I opine on the taste of a given wine, or express my preferences in music, or cheer my chosen football team safe from your disappointed tut-tutting that I can’t back up my position with some verification?

If we cannot set forth why we select our entire worldview from the numerous ludicrous options, then one wonders when we should converse with each other at all.

150

And, incidentally, you are most definitely jumping off the fence in favour of the scientific method. Can you please show me how this is a verifiably justified jump to make?

151

Thank you for reining in my overstatement. My objection to unfalsifiable metaphysical pronouncements is that they take the form and have the appearance of scientific statements, and not of aesthetic judgments.

152

Heh heh, no worries. Some very clever people go their whole lives without being able to distinguish the two! I try my best to make it abundantly clear what is my position and what is scientific, but thanks for forcing me to clarify it once again.

153

I really urge you to find someone who shares your beliefs who can provide you with the appropriate voacbulary. Frankly, as a theist, I find your attacks on atheism, using words that have common meanings in ways that no one else uses them, to appear nonsensical.

For example,

Read in standard English, this is gibberish. It argues that a totally imaginary construct must exist simply because somene has imagined it, then uses a misunderstanding of “exist” to confuse the recognition by atheists than one can imagine something that does not exist and the actual existence of that imagined object. By that logic, you must admit that the Invisible Pink Unicorn must exist because we can talk about her.

You may be attempting to say something different, but that is the meaning that your words have in accepted English in the early 21st century.

154

SM, I’m enjoying this too much to let it drop. I was rereading your OP on Sonic the camcorder-doom player, and find myself in full agreement with your twelve propositions. This raises the question of what it is that we might possibly be disagreeing about, if anything. The answer, I think lies with the Stanford article on physicalism you so often cite.

I would suggest that these two formulations are actually quite different statements. The latter is, to my eye, actually a scientific and not a philosophical observation. The former, which implies that atoms, rocks, galaxies are physical is the sort of statement that I object to. Do you see my point?

155

I can’t quite see the distinction in that cited sentence, but I think I get your general point. I would agree with old Lud Wittgenstein when he says that “There are physical objects” is a premise, a foundational belief, than an empirically testable statement.

In other words, if we agree that some things can reasonably be called “physical”, then we can go on to explore what things can’t be so described (or what must happen to those phsyical things to yield a meta- or non-physical entity), ie. we can go on to ask what supervenes and what doesn’t. Even then, I could supply all the experimental results I though supported a given supervenience and, like some here, you could automatically naysay and I could do nothing except repeat myself.

But if we don’t agree that anything can be described using the ‘p’ word, we really don’t have anywhere to go at all - least of all appealing to some scientific test which demonstrates that some entities are “physical”. All I could ask such a disagreer would be “if the atom, rock or galaxy can’t be called physical, what can you call it?”.

156

I find it painful and embarassing to disagree with my dear Wiggy, but to call “There are physical objects” a belief puts it on the same level as to say “There are green objects”. I do not suggest that it is impossible to meaningfully use the word “physical”. A definition is not a belief.

157

Yep. Problem?

Hmm, I’m not sure I can go with you there. We can disagree on whether a certain thing falls within the boundaries of a certain linguistic referent: when we do, we are expressing an opinion, an aesthetic judgement of whether or not describing a thing as physical “sits well with us”. That sounds a lot like a belief to me. Indeed, by disagreeing you are surely saying “I do not believe that beliefs and definitions are equivalent”? :slight_smile:

158

Oh, muddlemuddlemuddle. I’m feeling my way here. I can test “There are green objects” by looking out my window at the pines. Is this an equally satisfactory test for "There are physical objects’?

In a trivial sense it is. But for someone who considers the reality of the physical a real question, it ain’t. Ask** Liberal**.

159

Ah, whoa there hoss. The trees emit EM radiation of wavelength between 500 and 560 nm. We have not yet agreed that this is the definition of “green”. Measure the wavelength all you like; without that agreement, it will all be for naught. Similarly, we might agree that the tree is physical and even some tests which physical objects pass compared to other ones, such as emitting EM radiation. But without that initial agreement, we’re going nowhere.

I have, many times. We disagree. Our beliefs diverge. But it’s not Lib I’m sending screen shapes to right now, it’s you.

160

B-b-but we might agree on tests for the physicality of the tree, but not on a test for the physicality of everything. This would be despite our agreement on the definition of physical quoted above. “Everything is physical” stated in a context of philosophical discussion is not a matter of mere definition, nor a statement of aesthetic preference, nor yet is it contingent upon any material observation. I don’t think it means a damn thing.