You mean like a book saying that the wages of sin is death, yet sinners have normal lifespans?
Or a book saying that the sky is a stone dome with water behind it?
What did Popper say to do with propositions that can’t be tested?
It’s been nearly 50 years since I took a very good course in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Wisconsin (there was only one in those days). The professor made an excellent point in answer to the question “What is God?” He defined God as “that which is supremely worthy of worship.” Which is why we can consider Money to be our god, or Buddha, or the Universe, or whatever we choose. With this perfectly reasonable definition, there is most certainly a God, although perhaps not everyone worships the same one.
A few years ago, I ran across an ancient Greek who gave some very good advice. He said that since most of the world’s people believe in God (true then and true now) we should believe that there is a God who is both benevolent and eternal, and should not discuss it further (in order to avoid conflict in an area where disagreement is assured). Given the passion of human belief, and the enthusiasm for battling at the drop of a hat, this seems wise.
Finally, there is the very wise view of the Tao Te Ching, said to have been written 2500 years ago by Lao-Tse. He said that it all began as One long ago, but exactly what that One was, we do not know. This acceptance of ignorance has made me equally unexcited about the Big Bang and the Hebrew story of everything being created in six days. Could be true, but it was all long before my time. Buddha had a similar view of life after death – observing that we do not know life itself, so speculating about life after death seems unproductive.
And to respond to the comment that our beloved master did not mention Richard Dawkins in his short response, let me say that perhaps Mr. Dawkins is unworthy of mention. Merely writing a book popular for a time with dedicated atheists, does not mean you have written an intelligent or well-reasoned book. His book is surely not one which will be read by future generations, unless education deteriorates further.
Only if you insist that god is omnimalignant, the opposite of omnibenevolent. There’s no Problem of Good if you assume that God is evil, but not obsessively so. A God who spreads plagues and starts wars for fun but who doesn’t bother to micromanage every individual life to maximize suffering is evil, but poses no Problem of Good. The Problem of Evil only exists in the first place because of the Christians who claim he is perfectly good.
But this is supposed to be a proof. It’s not enough to say the First Cause could be atemporal. You have to show that it must be atemporal. Otherwise there’s no proof that the First Cause exists now.
Appeal to authority.
Appeal to tradition.
Ad hominem.
I’m baffled as to why people think that Cecil has attempted to answer, in any normal sense, the question of whether God exists in his column. I think that it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t want to answer the question and is just playing around at its edges without having to take any position about it, in any normal sense, at all. The first paragraph of Cecil’s column is him trying to avoid answering the question by interpreting it completely literally. No, he has never addressed the matter of God’s existence. So, if he were to take the question literally, he can say that he has just answered that question. However, he knows that no one is going to let him get away with anything that transparently silly, so he looks at one of the standard proofs of God’s existence.
The proof that he looks at is the cosmological proof. He acknowledges that even if this proof is valid, all it shows is that there is a First Cause. The existence of a First Cause isn’t very close to the existence of a personal god, and he says as much. He also shows that if the cosmological proof works at all, it shows that there is a sustaining cause for the universe, not a temporal one. So even calling it a First Cause is not accurate, since “First” implies time. So perhaps it’s something like an Underlying Cause.
Then he says (something like) that what scientists do when they try to come up with a complete set of entities and laws that explain the universe, what they are doing is trying to find a First Cause (or, again, really an Underlying Cause). So we can define God in such a vague way that what scientists are looking for is God, since it just means the basic laws of the universe. This statement isn’t going to make anybody very happy.
And perhaps that’s what Cecil means to say. If you start with trying to prove the existence of God, you end up just talking about the laws of the universe. This isn’t as exotic a belief as you might think. There have been scientists who have stated that they enjoy science because it allows them to “look into the mind of God.” Admittedly, this isn’t going to make most religious people happy nor most scientists happy if you were to claim that this is what trying to figure out whether God exists really means.
That’s rather tricky to refute. Show me someone who sins who demonstrably will never die, and I’ll consider that falsified. Short of that, I hold no position on the truth of that proposition.
And that one has been falsified, and so I do not believe it to be correct. What, did you think that that was some great “gotcha”?
And what precisely do you think sleight of hand is used for? Representation or misrepresentation?
I’m well aware that theist apologists adopt an ultra low feature version of the concept of “god” when attempting to work up a proof. This is so they have almost nothing to prove. You see the same thing in debates on this messageboard.
It’s a dishonest ruse. Using the same word for the minimalist concept (and really, it’s just a concept) that Aquinas posits as for the prayer hearing, moral setting, Jesus raising big guy in the sky is just plain fraud. You say Aquinas looms large in the Catholic pantheon, but does your average Catholic in the back pews understand that when Aquinas came up with a “proof” he came up with a proof for something that bears no resemblance whatever to the thing the guy in the black frock at the front of the congretation talks about?
I don’t think it’s a gotcha. I think that you grant religion an unreasonable amount of leeway.
You need evidence that God isn’t real, but accept as a matter of course that leprechauns aren’t. The only reason that you give for this, is that leprechauns don’t affect your life. But in the event that their mythology claims they did, you demand evidence to believe in it.
If you judged religion like leprechauns, you’d rate them the same. As nonsense.
Reader asks is there a god?
Cecil replies, well if by “god” you mean a “first cause” then the answer is… maybe.
Okay but NO, that’s NOT what we mean by “god”. When people ask you if you believe in god, nobody is really asking your opinion on the existence of a “first cause”. You just gave the word “god” a ridiculous definition and then gave a wimpy answer based on that definition.
When most people discuss the (non)existence of god, what they REALLY mean is… Could there be someone out there who watches me all the time, reads my thoughts, cares what happens to our civilization, and punishes those of us who do bad things? A “first cause” doesn’t even come close to that.
Theists are common. But it’s much rarer to find somebody who seriously believes that the existence of God has been proven: most accept it as a matter of faith. And those who do believe in such proofs tend to have at least the sense that their proof is constricted. So if you want to look for religious fraud, God-proofs aren’t a particularly bountiful source.
“First Cause” is an ambiguous term: it has 2 different senses. The proof operates differently for each of them. First cause-temporal establishes* the existence of God, but as you noted that God could be dead. An example might be the big bang. First cause-conceptual establishes* the existence of a persistent God, provided we’re discussing necessary conditions. An example might be the 6 forces of the standard model: if they go away, there is no world.
sbunny: But creation is one of God’s roles, and First Cause handles that. If you want to get into other aspects, you might try building an argument parallel to Cecil’s with fredricwilliams’ definition: that which is most worthy of worship. Princhester might observe though that you would be discussing concepts as opposed to entities. (I would have to work through the actual argument.)
This discussion is becoming oddly polytheistic.
Der Trihs: I agree, actually. You can also resolve/address the PoE/PoG by varying the power variable. The twins are similar, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are identical, as empirical observation presumably matches E-G-d or G-G-d better.
- Establishes: well it would be more accurate to say, “Defines”.
I feel it would be very generous to grant this point, and I’m not that generous. By “constricted” you really mean “essentially ineffective”. A constricted proof for something that is not the thing you are setting out to prove is not a constricted proof of the latter, it is just a failure. And when someone chooses to use the same word for the thing they set out to prove and the almost entirely different thing they may have managed to prove, one has to be naive to think that person is not trying to pull the wool over others’ eyes.
It’s slightly tangential to the discussion, but I remember reading (but don’t remember where), that one of our problems is the language barrier when discussing the big bang. Our language has its roots in references to space and time, both of which may simply be products of the universe. For that reason, it may be nonsensical to talk of “before” the big bang, either spatially or temporally.
The cosmic improbability or teleological argument isn’t particularly useful when discussing a benevolent God (assuming they’re supportive of human life) because the Earth is quite predictable in terms of its effects. For example, it’d be supremely useful to humans if fire could cook meat but not human flesh, or if the ground was solid for someone taking a jog but the perfect safety net for someone falling from a window. I could easily construct a far better universe conceptually for humans to live in: one where the the majority of it is not toxic to human life, for example. At this juncture the usual response is “the fall”, but that’s wishing to have one’s cake and eat it.
Then surely you will not mind when we change our national motto to “They’re magically delicious”. But seriously, you make a good point and that’s pretty much my view of God. The problem is that other people seem to keep dragging God into my life. What would you do if the host at dinner asked you to hold hands while we thanked the leprechauns for dinner? Or your Congressman justified his position on abortion by quoting from the back of the Lucky Charm’s box?
No, because it’s understood that G-d is mysterious. In fact it’s part of the doctrine. A decent citation for this folk wisdom is the AA 12 step method, devised in the 1930s and making explicit reference to an ambiguously defined “Higher Power”, rather than God, Allah or what have you. This was before atheists got organized – it was based upon ecumenicalism, which itself has a set of implications. When you start work on any difficult problem, you start small, then build up. You can see that in the theological discussions by Berkeley and Descartes. They never claimed that their core arguments (their most interesting parts philosophically) were complete.
So yes, I would say that those discussing existence proofs have a sense of their narrow scope. And to repeat, existing monotheist institutions tend to emphasize faith, not proof. Sociologically this discussion is a side-show or less.
PoE can also be resolved by varying the power variable or positing that Good may not be so anthropocentric. These are standard arguments. Less conventionally, one may substitute “Goal” for “Good”: the Creator may have His own agenda.
Will everyone admit that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic G-d is composed of a number of primary characteristics and that their existence or non-existence can be discussed separately? Some of these characteristics include Creator, Overseer of the Afterlife, Entity to Pray to, Entity That Grants Prayers, Representative of Good, Love and/or Benevolence, Macro-consciousness, etc. I’m probably missing a few. Because I think an argument could be made for most of these separately, using the Cecil’s cosmological argument as a template. Joining a subset of the characteristics into a single entity would be trickier though: that would involve a different approach.
That said, it’s not clear to me how or whether a version of Cosmo-theism would advance ecumenicism, thwart intolerance, or enhance human welfare. Though perhaps such concerns are extra-topical to this thread.
It’s not a matter of whether there should or shouldn’t be a god, it’s a matter that the evidence provided and the justifications given are insufficient and at odds with what we do know. It’s a matter of not being convinced there is a god, so choosing to live as if there isn’t one.
Thank you, you have much more eloquently stated my point.
I don’t believe in worship.
This is exactly the same problem - redefining terms, then pretending they all mean the same thing because they all have the same name. It’s like assuming everyone who is talking about John is talking about the same John. “Did you hear? John just got a promotion. And John just shot his wife. And John just graduated from kindergarden.”
If we’re not going to discuss it further, then it doesn’t matter if I believe there is a God who is both benevolent and eternal, or if I believe there is a God that is a ham sandwich, or if I believe there is no god. Because we’re not going to discuss it, so it’s never going to come up, so we’ll never have to argue the matter.
Because he bothered to write a column with that as the question?
We’re back to that baggage I mentioned. Throwing labels around willy nilly does not lead to clarity, it leads to confusion. Conflating the underlying cause of the universe with “God” only works if you aren’t trying to drag all the baggage that comes with the label “God”. But then why invoke that label? Seems to me the only reason is to foster the confusion it creates.
“I have proof that God exists. God is the origin of all things and is manifest in all things. A baloney sandwich, being a thing, is therefore a manifestation of God. I had a baloney sandwich for dinner. Ergo, God exists.”
“YOU ATE GOD!”
Irishman writes:
> We’re back to that baggage I mentioned. Throwing labels around willy nilly
> does not lead to clarity, it leads to confusion. Conflating the underlying cause of
> the universe with “God” only works if you aren’t trying to drag all the baggage
> that comes with the label “God”. But then why invoke that label? Seems to me
> the only reason is to foster the confusion it creates.
Which is why I don’t think that Cecil has intended to answer the question “Does God exist?” in any normal sense. Trying to answer it by some standard sort of proof (in fact, the most famous proof) has only lead him to (at best) a statement that doesn’t answer the question at all in the sense that most people mean. And that’s what Cecil was trying to do. He wanted to show that the most famous proof (and perhaps any proof) doesn’t really answer the question asked at all. So he wanted to show that he couldn’t answer the question and, to be honest, didn’t want to answer the question.
Yes, this is the point that MfM is not adequately meeting. Starting small and working up is one thing, but an honest person does not, when starting small, say “I have found a proof of a tiny element of what I set out to prove but I am going to describe that tiny element as “X”, which co-incidentally [blushes] is the same word as is used for the major thing I set out to prove”. I don’t much care for the idea that this is all OK because those academics who are well versed in the topic understand that X is not X. If it isn’t X, and you aren’t trying to fool anyone, then why are are using the word X to describe not X? There is no satisfactory answer to that question.