What is it that you think that I mean by “God” such that you think God “supplies” moral values? Can you elaborate?
OK that part parses somewhat better. I would not say “God supplies purpose” any more than I would say “Gravity punishes you for breaking the rule about keeping your balance by hurling you to the ground when you misstep”, but if you can recognize in the latter a somewhat garbled and inappropriately personalized description of how gravity does in fact work, then in that same “well sort of” sense, I suppose it’s fair to say “God supplies purpose”.
I know “huh?” does not make for a brilliant argumentative comeback in a great debate but… huh?
Aren’t answers ideas?
Aren’t the conceptualized problems for which answers are sought also ideas?
What the heck is a “fact”, as differentiated from an “idea” ?
I think I agree with both MichaelJohnBertrand and AHunter3, but it’s sort of hard to tell with a nebulous subject like this.
It seems to me that the whole distinction between “real” and “not real” is a fairly recent human invention in the grand scheme of things. Back in the day, everything - not just beliefs, but knowledge - was passed on through songs and stories and myths. The message got through, and who knew or cared if the story around it was “really true” or not?
Through writing, the printing press, and computers, we’ve gotten infinitely better at learning from our mistakes and predicting the behaviour of a given system. For a few hundred years there it was even starting to look like the world could be described in a rational, consistent way. But it seems as we delve deeper and deeper into physics, we’re back to metaphors and analogies. Light isn’t really sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle, but it’s a useful fiction that helps us understand our observations.
God is as real as Love or Santa Claus but in some ways It (seems weird to use ‘He’) is also as real as “an atom” as a miniature solar system.
If I’m really pushed to give myself a label I call myself atheist, but sometimes I think that’s only because of all the baggage associated with the G-word.
I’d have to differ with these assertions, actually.
Unquestionably, the THING that you indicate thusly ( :: points :: ) and consider to be a dollar bill, a chess piece, or France do exist. But their “dollar-billness”, “chess-pieceness”, “France-ness”, if you will, are not qualities that inher in these THINGS. Nor, for that matter, are they exclusively just “ideas” in your head. These meanings that these THINGS have to you is interactive, existing in the interaction between you and the THINGS, it is the meaning that these things have TO YOU.
You don’t get to know any of these things AS THEY ARE. No one does. What you point to and identify as a dollar bill is also, with equal validity and simultaneously, an aggregate of subatomic particles in a loosely knit matrix, mostly space, interacting with each other, and it is the interaction that creates the appearance you PERCEIVE (not just the visual but the textural and so on). When reduced to that level of analysis the things that to you are its “dollar-billness” are not apparent. They cannot be perceived at that level of analysis. If you were arguing with someone who was determined to remain at this level of analysis, you could not continue to argue that there is a dollar bill there without ending up saying something like “It may not be ascertainable at the level of analysis you’re working at… I agree that if you methodically examine each proton neutron and electron and discard the ones that are not dollar bills, and do so until you’ve eliminated every single one, you can say ‘We went through every thing that is actually HERE and there are no dollar bills’, but there is more to reality than what you can perceive and comprehend when working at this level of analysis.” And your hard-headed “only particles are real” debate opponent would roll eyes and say that you believe in nonreal things.
Or, I suppose, you could be sneaky and bring in someone who deals with reality at the level of neutron cross-sections and mesons and hadrons and so on, someone who would deny the existence of ‘protons’ and would insist that there is nothing here except short lived charges that have a ‘tendency to exist’ and which interact in certain fashions, and try to make the case by extension that just as a ‘proton’ is real while at the same time being “merely” the behavior of smaller divisions of reality, so a ‘dollar bill’ is real as well.
I may be parting company philosophically with MichaelJohnBertrand here (although that would be for him to say) but I would assert that God is real. An abstraction, but as I’ve just pointed out, from some level of analysis so are physical objects.
Consider the entire universe as “a behavior”, if you will, for a moment. It has intricate and beautiful patterns as crystal structures and dances and mathematical equations tend to, and for any level of analysis there are aspects of it that will appear as “THINGS” while other aspects will appear as “BEHAVIORS” or “CHARACTERISTICS” but most of those distinctions are specific to the level of analysis at which you engage. Where is God?
You have heard the answer 100 zillion times: “everywhere”. But think of “everywhere” a bit more specifically now. The entire universe (including its entire 12-15 billion year history, the entirety of everything that has ever been as a single event), THAT everything. With every other possible conceivable other “everything” obviously a subset of it. Got that?
I shall now assert that intentionality exists. Meaning and purpose. I won’t say where. YOU say where. Point to it. Be prepared to defend your answer
For those who believe, where else do they come from? Even Jefferson justified the basic rights of man from his deistic view of god. I’m speaking of morals in general - clearly different views of different gods result in a different set of morals.
I’m assuming a god here who does think - unlike gravity. Isn’t god supposed to supply an answer for the question of “why are we here?” Do you think that identifying god with the mindless universe is going to inspire anyone to do anything? Maybe I’m confused, but I thought the issue in this thread was if the idea of God alone was enough to give the benefits of god belief without the assumption that a true god exists outside our minds.
Sure facts are ideas, but I’m assuming that an idea alone is weaker than a fact. A real god would spin off ideas of course.
How does the fact of god matter? In most religions, god made us. This is true even if the process is indistinguishable from evolution. Theistic evolution says that we are the intended end product of the evolutionary process, one so subtly manipulated or set into motion that it is indistinguishable from what I’ll call atheistic evolution. Atheistic evolution, on the other hand, says that we are the product of chance in a sense - that intelligence could just as easily arisen in dinosaurs or large rodents. Many people, not me, get inspiration from the first case. Is that a reasonable statement?
Consider three cases for the creation of the universe. In the first, God started things off with the intention of producing at least us, if not other races. In the second, the universe arose spontaneously, with no intelligent source. In the third, some bored grad student created it, and being on the other side of the event horizon has no further interaction. He had input to the mix, to make the universe stable, but he might have botched c or something.
Do you think many people would be inspired by cases 2 and 3? And just to make sure that you don’t think I mean the hairy thunderer in case 1, it can be any god you think of. The act of intentional creation is the crucial thing here.
I hope that makes things clearer. I’d say the idea of god, without belief in the reality of any god, is a lot closer to case 2 and 3 than to 1.
As I’ve said many a time on this board, “to think” is to mull things over and examine things in your mind. A process that takes place over time. A time-bound, mortal process, therefore.
I cannot seriously posit a genuinely existent GOD taking an idea into consideration on Tuesday, cogitating on it through most of Wednesday and attaining clarity and reaching a conclusion by Thursday morning, if you see what I mean.
It is probably an oversimplification, and therefore a distortion, to say “The universe is conscious”, but behind that oversimplification I think the more accurate rendition would be that ‘consciousness’ as we comprehend it is a subset of something that is a characteristic of the universe.
But because it IS an oversimplification, I’d be uncomfortable with the phrase “The universe THINKS”, though.
That which “is moral” is moral for reasons that exist with reference to actual laws (whether we understand them yet or not) which govern behaviors and behavioral outcomes, individually and socially. In the patterns of those laws and the patterns of resultant wise behavior as organized by an understanding thereof, there are elements and aspects in the way it all FITS TOGETHER that are beautiful and elegant.
But I’d agree with any atheist who says a good moral code comes from a profound understanding of human needs and the outcomes of behaviors. The atheist might not agree when I say that is just a rephrasing of saying that they come from God, but then there are many theists who would disagree with that assertion as well.
AHunter3–I agree with some of what you are saying. There is a sense in which the chess piece’s existence is dependent on us, and a sense in which it is independent of us. The chess piece *qua *piece of wood exists independently of us. It (or the agglomeration of particles constituting the chess piece) are there no matter what, and would continue to exist even if all humanity were to suddenly cease to exist. But the piece of wood is a chess piece (as opposed to, say, a bit of currency) in virtue of the rules of chess, which are of course a purely human invention. So the chess piece *qua *chess piece exists in virtue of the norms of chess, which are purely human conventions.
But here, I think, you are caught on the horns of a dilemma. The chess piece *qua *piece of wood exists independently of humans; does God *qua *(whatever God is supposed to be) exist independently of humans? There are two possible answers.
(1) Yes; God *qua *(whatever God is independently of our conventions) exists independently of humans… If so, then I don’t see how God *qua *God can be a human creation. In the example of chess, or money, we take part of the world, and divide it up according to human convention according to what serves our needs. There is no natural division of the world into “chess pieces” and “non chess pieces” aside from human convention. But to take this approach to God is to deny that God *qua *God has any reality independent of human convention, which is frankly a strange claim, to me. The whole point of God is that He is sovereign, and not merely a product of human convention. (You might disagree with this, since you regard God as an abstraction).
(2) No; unlike the wood constituting the chess piece, there is nothing constituting God that exists independently of human conventions. Then there is no corresponding reality for the term ‘God’ to refer to. We are back to God being in the same category as rainbow unicorns: a concept that doesn’t actually refer to anything in the world.
That is a circular argument. Humans idea of a God and what a God wanted are what is printed in the Bible, so your argument is not for a God but what some humans said about a God and what God wants.
You cannot use the words of humans to prove your idea of God or what God wants.
This one, of your two options. And, yes, a very meaningful distinction, that.
I do not think of God as “sovereign”; that would be yet another oversimplification. To be sovereign is to be in charge OF something, something apart from the Sovereign’s self, over which the Sovereign weilds authority. To possess hegemony.
Like the hypothetical person sorting through the atoms comprising a dollar bill and failing to find a single dollar bill anywhere among them, we would fail to ever isolate and identify God as long as we think we can distinguish God from what God is NOT. God is THAT WHICH IS. Rather than being sovereign over something separate from God, the entire universe is “God BEING this 'n that” in the same way that the dollar bill is subatomic particles BEING a dollar bill. The universe as we know it (and, for that matter, as we do NOT know it) is a behavior. That which is doing the behaving is God.
Just as there is no natural division of the world into “chess pieces” and “non chess pieces”, there is no intrinsic division between God and Universe, or for that matter between you and stardust or between “the big bang event” and “cosmic events of the latter 10 billion years”. Between behavior and THAT WHICH BEHAVES. But we find it useful and often find it downright necessary to divide the world up, to think in such terms. And to that end, I do find it entirely useful, and on a few occasions found it quite necessary, to understand the entirety of the universe as the behavior of God, and as the body of God; to see that whatever intentionality and consciousness ultimately really are, they do exist, and therefore do exist as a subset of the all-inclusive overset “universe”, and similarly insofar as anything is ever the consequence of conscious intentionality (and it is), the entire production is the consequence of, if not conscious planned intent per se, then some process such that conscious planned intent is a subset of what that is.
The intuiting of this over the hundreds of millennia of human existence has led to anthropomorphizing it. It takes fewer words and is less of a cognitive reach to simply say God THINKS, or God WANTS, or It is as God wishes it because God IS IN CHARGE. And to have wishes and desires and thought processes is to be quite akin to US and so, soon enough, we are painting God wearing robes and sporting a mane of white hair.
The awe and sense of importance attached to our understandings has led to emphasis and proselytizing, and then to institutionalization and mandatory belief. It’s a deceptively small step from “This is stupendously amazing and has changed my life, and I fervently wish that you come to comprehend this, too” to “Everyone MUST subscribe to these religious tenets because you all MUST be saved from the depths of your ignorance thereof”.
The latter two paragraphs are probably sufficient to prompt Der Trihs (among others) to say “Yeah, see? The outcome of this ‘understanding’ y’all think you have is to invent Ghost Daddy and then shove him down our throats and along with him a choking freedom-restricting change-suppressing bloodthirsty Control-Freak organization. Reason enough to toss the whole mess on the discard pile!”
Perhaps. (It’s a pretty compelling indictment that should be seriously considered). And yet perhaps there’s a way to learn from the horrible historical mistakes of being apostolic about it all and trying to “spread the word”, and of doing it in a different fashion.
It would have to be in an environment totally intolerant of any assertions that “You must believe this even if you do not understand it”, an environment of open-minded but skeptical folks uninclined to believe anything until they have seen it for themselves, now wouldn’t it? Conveniently, such an environment would almost by definition also not be particularly inclined to pay heed to the argument that “Whether there is anything to this line of thought or not, too many horrors have been unleashed on the world in the name of ‘religion’ for it to be a safe or useful line of inquiry”, especially once it has been sufficiently pointed out that that is, in fact, what they are arguing
I believe I understand where you are coming from, but the residual discomfort I feel from all this is that by embracing this, I feel that you are jettisoning all in the concept ‘God’ that made the concept worth retaining in the first place. If it is an undesirable anthropomorphization to say that God thinks or God wants, and the God is nothing more (or less!) than the whole universe and its behavior, then God is no more capable than the universe of doing the following: giving meaning to life, giving us an objective foundation to morality, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good, etc. And since the universe is not capable of doing any of this (only something that can think and want can do this stuff–and so only humans have any shot at accomplishing any of these things), then why not jettison this God-talk and just talk about the universe?
In another thread about changing the meaning of ‘God’, I (rather snarkily, I admit) reproduced the following exchange from Alice in Wonderland. I reproduce it here, non-snarkily:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
The universe is, no doubt, awe-inspiring. But is it God?
I can write more tomorrow, but it’s nighty-night time in these parts.
Suppose, hypothetically speaking, that one were to discard the massive stack of human musings upon meaning and morality and instead turn to the universe as a whole, its actual laws such as they govern (n the sense that the laws of gravity “govern” orbits and whatnot) human interaction and behavior, and just happened to find, upon doing so, that lo and behold, what one ends up with upon taking such physics-like laws into account, and making rational informed reasonable decisions based on them, gives a very strong overlap with the “cream of the crop” of the old human religion-inspired musings and moral codes?
Of course, that would necessarily require that what you consider the cream of the crop coincide to a marked extent with what I consider it to be. But ignore that for a moment, let’s just suppose it were true based on YOUR subjective appreciation for the best moral codes.
You would have, just prior to reaching that conclusion, have been in a state of mind where God, as such term would have any meaning to you, had been erased from the picture. Nothing going on here but an impersonal universe, no warmth of the sort that comes from “the right shall prevail” or any kind of reward in any context for those characteristics we, for some reason, would like there to be a God to reward: kindness, and similar things, characteristics very far from adversarial competitive striving against one another, etc.
Yet now you find that very “warmth” embedded in the very fabric of the rules governing human interaction. Imagine that!
I’m glad that I made my assumption clear. When I think of consciousness, I think of an entity monitoring its own thoughts, the kind of thing that does not happen in our subconscious mind even when it is solving very difficult problems, and which does not seem to happen with my dog, who can think ahead, generalize, and even be creative. Thus a conscious universe would think by definition.
Now, would an omniscient (including the future) god even have to think? It would basically have a script of all actions it will take and all words it would say. Supposedly it would make these decisions sometime, at t = - infinity, perhaps. If the universe was not conscious, and thus did not think, how is it different from an atheistic universe?
Might the laws you speak of come from evolution? If we produced litters of 14 children in a world of limited resources, our moral laws about the sanctity of babies would be very different. They were even in the human past, as babies did not become human until enough time passed so there was some reasonable probability of survival - which is why Jewish circumcision is not done right after birth. I agree with your general drift, except to say that which fits together beautifully changes over time, and our ancestors were no less moral by their circumstances than we are by ours.
I very much agree with S&I’s discomfort with your view of God. As for this, you are assuming physics like laws and a rational selection process. Over two millennia of ethical reasoning
hasn’t found any such. The base laws that all societies seem to follow can be explained by social evolution, there is so much variance in all the others I doubt your program can ever be successful.
The fact that much of commonly accepted morality aligns with the necessary social contract of a functioning society has nothing to do with the universe as a whole - it has to do with societies and the way they function. All the universe has to do with it is that the universe supplies a playing field for social animals like humans to play out their interactions in - much like a piece of paper hosts mathematical equations written on it. This doesn’t mean that the universe caused morals or that the paper caused math; morals and math are the result of higher-level systems that just happen to be happening on the mediums provided, but could occur on other mediums that had the most basic of abilities to support them.
In other words, imagining that the universe crafted morality is incorrect, except in the sense that it also ‘crafted’ war, pestilence, famine, and death just because they happened within it. Granting the universe some kind of direct credit in the creation of morality, and claiming that such happenings were intentional on its part are just broad anthropomorhization. You might as well be saying that the peice of paper is a mathematical genius.
And personally, I reject the notion of hanging the “God” label on the universe - the universe doesn’t match what I consider the word “god” (much less “God”) to mean.
My experience differs; but let’s go with yours. Now we come full circle back to MichaelJohnBertrand’s original thesis. What if you posit, “as an idea”, the vision of a universe in which it was so that the actual laws applicable to human behavior did in fact favor such good & benign things?
As an ancillary comment I would note that what we call ‘civilization’ is a mere 10,000 years old, and even that may be stretching it. Evolutionary process of the sort that would act against the long-term survival of societal mechanisms and structures that do not effectively take into account God’s law (i.e., the natural laws of human social interaction) have scarcely had time to do much serious weeding.
Now, to me, that reads more or less like saying “The fact that laser device design utilized by thousands of laser-using sentient species in the various galaxies aligns with the necessary physics of optical behavior has nothing to do with the universe as a whole - it has to do with societies and the way they design laser devices. All the universe has to do with it is that the universe supplies a playing field for laser-using animals like humans to design laser devices in”.
Maybe you should stop playing, then, and admit you have no evidence.
No one here is playing any game with you. People are cutting through the nonsensical games played by religious hobbyists for centuries.
Wrecking a game isn’t playing a game. That much should be obvious.
Ah, but you don’t just have pretty and convenient verses and passages in your incredibly sick, stupid and dangerous book. You are stuck with your deity-of-choice being hung up on foreskins and menstruating women. He was so hung up on the former that he was going to kill Moses until Zipporah intervened. (This makes no sense, BTW. Even you must know that as soon as your deity-of-choice wanted someone dead, they would be dead.) Slaughtering the whole world in a silly, mythological flood(including babies) and commanding his chosen cutthroats to wipe out every tribe that was in the way of the Israelites, including one very unsuspecting, peaceful tribe… THAT’S you hero?! :eek: :rolleyes:
You are stuck with the efficacy of mandrakes, and “holiness” being something that priests could accidentally spread to others by clothing. And plenty more silly, superstitious passages.
Can’t answer that, can you? And before you accuse me of ignorance of your wholly babble, I HAVE read all that crap! Everybody should read it from cover to cover. True Believers would have nothing to lose and sanity to gain!
That’s part of the reason I’m free of it. I can only wish that I were so lucky as some people who have never been indoctrinated in the first place.
Yes - you’re overstating the level of effect that the univese and its natural laws have on the situation, by grossly understating the effect of the limitations you put on the problem by talking about the morality of sentient species interacting in a civiliztion.
Your example actually illistrates my point - if you were defining a laser as “a devise that produces a laser in exactly the manner humans do with their technology”. Then, we’ll note, you are filtering all the other beam weapons and devices that do not fit that definition by specifically referencing “laser-using sentient species”. At that point, it’s not the universe that’s defining what they’ve got as being a laser - it’s your definition.
When you talk of the morals of a human society, you’re presuming by definition that you have interactive agents with needs, which feel pain, which have mortality, have memories, which communicate, and whose young need protection to survive. By presuming this, you have effectively filtered out everything that doesn’t fit the abstract model of society, at which point, the laws of functioning societies start to make the rules that the universe did not.
If the universe was wired with the laws of morality, everything would have it, not just societies. Rocks would have observable moral behavior. Volcanos would behave morally. Stars. Clouds. Planets. Air. Radiation. Everything. Of course, in reality, such things don’t exhibit moral behavior at all. Because morality isn’t a function of natural law, like gravity. It’s a function of and result of societal laws, not natural laws.
To anthropomorphize nature as being instilled with intention and moral tendencies is to put yourself a bare half-step from thinking that lightning and bear attacks only happen to people who deserved it, and poof we’re back to making stone age nature dieties again. Before we start throwing virgins into volcanos to appease the disgruntled nature spirits again, let me state that that’s an idea of god that’s not only enough, it’s too much.
But really, Ba’al.