I don’t think that thinkers for thousands of years have failed to disprove El. I mean, they failed to convince dedicated theists that their disproofs have merit, but there are dedicated theists that use their beliefs to deny medicine. It’s no shame to fail to convince the unconvincable.
A more interesting discussion point is whether disproving the myths disproves the god. Or put another way, what’s the difference between El and George Washington? The wig?
(I of course already discussed this issue - you for some unknown reason didn’t address that discussion. That’s okay. It’s a fun discussion, so I’ll do it again.)
What is a god? How do you identify a god? How can you tell one god from another? How you can you tell whether you and another person are talking about the same god or not?
With humans, chairs, tables, and most real things, it’s possible to identify them temporospatially - of the trillions of people called begbert2 in the world, I’m the one sitting here, now, at this computer, typing on this message board. Of course you folks out there can’t really see me, so there’s some risk you might get confused about which begbert2 is which when you run into one of my many fans and impersonators, but regardless of your confusion I’m the one that’s right here, and a sufficiently dedicated person could find me and identify me uniquely. And regardless of what myth and lies people tell about me (some say I’m mortal!), I can still be uniquely identified by locating me in physical space and saying “I’m talking about that one.”
This is harder to do with gods, because we can’t locate them. Elusive little buggers, they are.
So, absent temporospatial identification, what options do we have? Their name? But lots of people have the same name. There are doubtlessly tens of thousands of Jesuses out there. Which one is divine?
The answer, of course, is we look to their descriptions. But regarding El - what does he look like again? A shapeshifter you say? Sometimes is just a blinding light? Well I’ve seen blinding lights that (probably) weren’t El, so we clearly can’t go by appearance alone. What else do we know about him? Created the world in seven days you say? Had his son executed for confusing reasons you say? Oversaw the parting of the red sea, you say? Sometimes mimics Odin and Thor and smites people with lightning, you say?
This is actually not a bad way to identify somebody. “The Pentagram Killer killed Joe.” Find the guy who killed Joe, and you found The Pentagram Killer.
But if nobody killed Joe, and Joe is still alive, then that’s one less thing you know about The Pentagram Killer. If that’s all you knew about The Pentagram Killer, if The Pentagram Killer is just an alias the news used to refer to the unknown killer, then the fact the myth is false means that The Pentagram Killer didn’t exist after all. There might be other people around, even other killers, but they aren’t The Pentagram Killer, because they didn’t do the thing The Pentagram Killer is known for.
I consider this ‘God/El/YHWH’ guy to be the same kind of deal. Unless we can actually find this guy, by his works we shall know him. And if it turns out that the works are fake, then the guy is too.
For the record, I would never make the boast that I could disprove any diety you cared to mention. (You might mention me!) There are certainly theoretically possible gods that can’t be disproven. I’ve got an ipod on my desk that’s a god, for example. It has ipod powers. And it quite definitely exists.
However Czarcasm got lucky, and you happened to pick a god that can be disproven. And it has been, because the nifty thing about Zeus is that when he was conceived, he was defined as the source of all lightning. Part of the Zeus myth is that he’s the just-so story for lightning in that culture.
Disprove the just-so story, and you disprove the Zeus. There could be other Zeuses - there could be even be other gods named Zeus, but the Zeus that is the cause of all lightning remains fictional and disproven.
(By which I mean, the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says is contradiction, not argument. (Cite: the argument sketch.) This is Great Debates. You have to do better than that.)
There is ample evidence for Washington’s existence regardless of the easily disproven myths. There is none for Zeus or other gods. Asking someone to disprove something for which there is no evidence of existence in the first place makes no sense.
I do hope you didn’t interpret my chuckling at your ‘argument sketch’ joke implies in any way that you haven’t been utterly demolished from an argumentative standpoint.
I mean, my posts (and yours) are still there. Plain to see. All anybody has to do is scroll up to see how utterly debunked this garbage you’re repeating is.
Yes, a purely abstract god could exist - but he wouldn’t be necessary since you can conceive of greater gods. Once you get out of abstraction to a god who interacts with the real world in a physical way you get to examine the evidence.
Also, do Platonists think that i exists? It clearly is an abstraction used to define things which do exist. Perhaps a non-existent god is useful in the same way.
Plus, if God exists as an abstraction in our minds, how to distinguish it from the non-existent abstractions? While it is possible he influences us, so do non-existent things.
A necessary god by itself is begging the question, since if you just define god as necessary then god must exist which is the question. But your cite doesn’t make that mistake. It notes that necessariness come from defining god as the greatest possible. But that assumes that some entity is the greatest possible, and that is not supported, and in fact is logically inconsistent.
A tri-omni god would be the greatest possible, I’ll admit. In fact let’s toss out omnibenevolence, since I don’t see any reason why a benevolent god would be greater than an evil one. Plus our world is clearly not the work of an omnibenevolent being unless you want to bring up the best of all possible worlds nonsense, which is also begging the question. So let’s go with a bi-omni god.
That god is logically inconsistent also. If god knows what he will do, he is limited in doing things that would invalidate omiscience. If god has absolute freedom to do anything at any time, he can’t predict what he can do, so that invalidates omnipotence. Even two gods, one omnipotent and one omniscient, have this problem. They both can’t exist.
Speaking of math, this is like lattices under partial ordering. You can define a lattice and a partial ordering so that no one thins is the greatest under that ordering. Greatest in the god discussion is not well defined.
And don’t say that the problem goes away because god chooses not to do things he doesn’t see himself doing. We are talking about what is possible, not what he does.
How do we choose if omnipotence is greater than omniscience? A matter of taste, I’d say, and not logically required. So, no greatest being exists, so there is no requirement for necessity, so the argument from necessity fails.
That doesn’t prove that there are no gods, of course. Lots of gods are defined to not be the greatest and necessary. Which leads us to wonder how to define god, but that is another matter.
Define it too loosely and you have a problem. Someone once said that god exists because Augustus was considered a god and Augustus existed. See the problem?
Yes, if God exists I’ll accept that some people could have direct knowledge of him. But what is seen as direct knowledge of god does not mean that god exists. We now understand a lot of the physical causes of this kind of internal state, and have yet to find a case requiring external causes.
In other words, if you claim to have direct knowledge of god ask him to prove whether of not P=NP or, more usefully, give me the names of all the winners at Belmont tomorrow.
I can give you a Turing Test. Plus my belief that you are conscious consists of external evidence. A sleeping person looks the same as an awake person with her eyes closed - how can we tell she is conscious without her speaking? Or if that isn’t enough, how about a freshly dead person?
That’s why I’m not an agnostic. If a god exists its existence can be demonstrated by someone with direct knowledge giving information proving he didn’t get that knowledge naturally.
But no such demonstration has ever been made. And if it was, we’d have to eliminate other possibilities like alien telepaths.
Also, note that a direct experience of some god doesn’t solve the definition problem. Even if you hold that god is maximally great, how do you know the god talking to you falls into that category. Why not an angel? Why not Satan?
And now we got to the unfalsifiable god. You need to have some way of distinguishing a world with god or one without god. If you can’t, god becomes useless.
No one is doubting the experience of god or that of a headache. What I am doubting is the cause of the experience. Is the headache from a bonk on the head, or too much to drink, or a migraine? Is the experience of god caused by god, or drugs, or mental states causing hallucinations of god?
We can induce religious experiences. That doesn’t mean that all religious experiences are false, but it does mean that they need to be tested, since there is an alternate and simpler explanation. And an induced experience is just as real as a non-induced one.
I used to go to a seminar (as a guest, not a student) at the end of the day, and if the talk was boring enough I experienced all kinds of knowledge which I later found to not be true. In the moment it was very convincing.
And here we agree. It was all gas. The point being that even if we accept that this direct knowledge is possible - which is a lot easier than accepting a god - it needs to be tested since there are many other more likely possibilities.
I definitely accept the possibility of intelligent life in space. But I’m not going to accept that a UFO is an example of them visiting without eliminating all the more likely possibilities.
I didn’t mean that god is abstract, but that if there’s a sort of existence—that of abstracts, Platonic forms, or something—that differs from the existence of physical objects (as you suggested), and that can be known by pure reasoning (as, for instance, by existence proofs), then god likewise could exist in a way such that it can be known by pure reasoning (unlike, say, a table). I don’t necessarily agree that it’s useful to consider different sorts of existence, nor do I even really know what’s meant by that; it was you who brought that up.
‘Necessary’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘greatest’, though. It could be that the only way to get a universe is by divine creation, in which case god would exist in every possible world, and hence, be necessary. Also, I’m not so sure that being physical is so much greater—after all, the physical is finite in extent, limited in power, and bounded in time, which are all things god typically isn’t thought to be. Indeed, to a Platonist, physical objects are merely imperfect approximations of eternal forms, so the perfect necessarily isn’t part of this world in one sense or another.
No, that’s still not quite right. A pure creator god may leave no trace, yet he’s undeniably interacted with the world. On occasionalism, god interacts with everything all the time, but you won’t find any trace. A god that mediates between the mind and the physical world also clearly interacts with the latter, but you likewise won’t find any trace of that interaction. On Berkeleyan idealism, everything is just ideas in god’s mind, so he literally is everything around us, and indeed, even ourselves. Even a more conventional interventionist god might craft his interventions such that globally, they’re indistinguishable from chance.
All of these are gods that meaningfully interact with the real world, but you won’t find any evidence of them.
As I understand it, to a (mathematical) Platonist, i does indeed exist, in as much as every mathematical entity does. I’m also not sure what existent things you think it’s used to define—it’s used to define complex numbers, which are just as ‘abstract’ as i itself. It’s also used to model certain things, say the phase of a current, or an electron’s wave function, or simply rotations, but that’s something quite different.
Well, I don’t really want to go into apologetics for a god I don’t believe in, but this argument doesn’t hold as much water as one might think. I know for a fact I ordered pizza yesterday; does this mean that I couldn’t have ordered something else? But god’s knowledge of the future is basically like my knowledge of the past. So knowing what he’ll do doesn’t necessarily invalidate his ability to (counterfactually) do otherwise.
Also, even god can’t be expected to do the logically impossible. So god can’t create a boulder he can’t lift, but only because such a boulder is logically impossible, and thus, this doesn’t invalidate omnipotence. Likewise, one may argue that if perfect foreknowledge exists, then doing something not in accord with that foreknowledge is logically impossible.
Again, I’m not intending to make an argument from necessity. I don’t believe any such argument holds up. I mean, if I did, I could hardly be an atheist, could I?
What I am saying is that there may be channels of knowledge that allow knowledge of god that are not mediated by evidence—little more. I brought in the necessary / contingent distinction merely because you pointed out (correctly) that our knowledge of things in the world is typically (very) fallible. One way to explain this potential difference is to point out that most things in the world are contingent: i.e. there are possible worlds in which they don’t exist. So it’s not really possible to have a priori knowledge of these things: we must find out whether we’re in a world in which they exist, or not. With a necessary god, this isn’t the case: he exists in every possible world, so we don’t have to go out into the world and check, so to speak.
None of this really has anything to do with perfect-being theology or ontological arguments.
That is indeed a problem. The question is, what are the essential properties of god, as opposed to the merely incidental one? (Or in the parallel discussion running right now, what are the essential properties of Zeus, or George Washington?) We probably can agree that it would still be a god if Jesus wasn’t his son, although it would not be the Christian god; so ‘being the father of Jesus’ seems like an incidental property, and pointing out that there was no Jesus, or that he was conceived by good old sheet acrobatics, won’t do anything to disprove god, as such.
I would submit as a candidate essential property for god in the modern sense—even if it excludes many traditional deities, such as the Greek pantheon—being uncreated. That is, there’s god, and his creation (or all created beings; there’s no reason god couldn’t delegate the task of actually building a universe to lesser beings); and everything that is created ultimately flows (‘emanates’) from god. But he himself has no further cause external to himself; he stands on his own, so to speak.
I don’t think such a thing is really possible—I’ve actually written an essay arguing that the notion of such an ‘ultimate cause’ is basically just a confusion between our models of the world (which contain some fundamental facts, like axioms) and the world itself (which need not). But I’m doubtful enough to at least entertain the possibility.
A Turing test establishes competence; it does nothing to establish comprehension, much less consciousness.
How can you tell she is conscious with her speaking? Consciousness doesn’t merely mean alertness; it means awareness, having subjective impressions.
That wouldn’t be any kind of proof of god; it would merely be a proof for superior knowledge. But there’s no reason that superior knowledge couldn’t have another source. The person could just be a wizard.
I think every sort of miracle-based ‘proof’ of god ultimately fails short. In a stage magic show, I might see lots of things that I have absolutely no idea how to explain. I don’t take any of those as proof of the supernatural capabilities of the performers. They might be more capable than I am, but I feel pretty confident that this is due ‘merely’ to cleverness and hard work.
God might preside solely over the afterlife; the mundane world is merely a test of merit, to decide between eternal bliss and damnation. Such a god, and belief in him, would be very useful, yet you couldn’t distinguish a world with such a god from one without (in the world without, you’re dead after, uh, death, so can’t form any beliefs anymore at all).
Then you’re still not quite getting the analogy I’m drawing. I’m not saying knowledge of god is like knowledge of the causes of our experience—it’s like knowledge of our experiences themselves. Take Berkeleyan idealism: we are ourselves, ultimately, thoughts in the mind of god; that’s our innermost being. If we can know this, we don’t know it by our innermost being causing something to happen in us, but rather, simply by being, just as we know our experience simply by experiencing it.
It’s similar to how Schopenhauer tried to bridge the Kantian divide between noumena and phenomena: Kant argued that the thing in itself is always removed from our experience, so we can never know it directly; we can only know our experiences of that thing. Schopenhauer, however, realized that we ourselves are ‘things in themselves’, too; so we can know the character of the thing in itself by knowing our own character. He thought that what we find there is will (hence, “The World as Will and Representation”); on a Berkeley-like conception, the fundamental nature of all things is god, however.
Then describe, to me, how to test knowledge of your own experiences. Against what would you test it? How could you be wrong about having a headache (not about, I repeat, what causes that headache)?
You could have ordered something else at the time. But if you go back in time to change your order, then your memory of ordering pizza is incorrect. We don’t have perfect memories, but if we did then this would make your memory imperfect.
And god’s knowledge of the future makes things worse. The first time god thinks about the future, he knows everything he does - even before he decides to do anything. So an omniscient god is a slave to choices made somehow infinitely far in the past - or not made at all. And as I said, choices he cannot change. He can choose just fine - he is limited by not being able to change his mind.
And I’m not accusing you of believing this stuff - just giving you some reasons why these traditional arguments for god don’t work. Public service.
Also, even god can’t be expected to do the logically impossible. So god can’t create a boulder he can’t lift, but only because such a boulder is logically impossible, and thus, this doesn’t invalidate omnipotence. Likewise, one may argue that if perfect foreknowledge exists, then doing something not in accord with that foreknowledge is logically impossible.
Again, I’m not intending to make an argument from necessity. I don’t believe any such argument holds up. I mean, if I did, I could hardly be an atheist, could I?
What I am saying is that there may be channels of knowledge that allow knowledge of god that are not mediated by evidence—little more. I brought in the necessary / contingent distinction merely because you pointed out (correctly) that our knowledge of things in the world is typically (very) fallible. One way to explain this potential difference is to point out that most things in the world are contingent: i.e. there are possible worlds in which they don’t exist. So it’s not really possible to have a priori knowledge of these things: we must find out whether we’re in a world in which they exist, or not. With a necessary god, this isn’t the case: he exists in every possible world, so we don’t have to go out into the world and check, so to speak.
None of this really has anything to do with perfect-being theology or ontological arguments.
That is indeed a problem. The question is, what are the essential properties of god, as opposed to the merely incidental one? (Or in the parallel discussion running right now, what are the essential properties of Zeus, or George Washington?) We probably can agree that it would still be a god if Jesus wasn’t his son, although it would not be the Christian god; so ‘being the father of Jesus’ seems like an incidental property, and pointing out that there was no Jesus, or that he was conceived by good old sheet acrobatics, won’t do anything to disprove god, as such.
I would submit as a candidate essential property for god in the modern sense—even if it excludes many traditional deities, such as the Greek pantheon—being uncreated. That is, there’s god, and his creation (or all created beings; there’s no reason god couldn’t delegate the task of actually building a universe to lesser beings); and everything that is created ultimately flows (‘emanates’) from god. But he himself has no further cause external to himself; he stands on his own, so to speak.
I don’t think such a thing is really possible—I’ve actually written an essay arguing that the notion of such an ‘ultimate cause’ is basically just a confusion between our models of the world (which contain some fundamental facts, like axioms) and the world itself (which need not). But I’m doubtful enough to at least entertain the possibility.
A Turing test establishes competence; it does nothing to establish comprehension, much less consciousness.
How can you tell she is conscious with her speaking? Consciousness doesn’t merely mean alertness; it means awareness, having subjective impressions.
That wouldn’t be any kind of proof of god; it would merely be a proof for superior knowledge. But there’s no reason that superior knowledge couldn’t have another source. The person could just be a wizard.
I think every sort of miracle-based ‘proof’ of god ultimately fails short. In a stage magic show, I might see lots of things that I have absolutely no idea how to explain. I don’t take any of those as proof of the supernatural capabilities of the performers. They might be more capable than I am, but I feel pretty confident that this is due ‘merely’ to cleverness and hard work.
God might preside solely over the afterlife; the mundane world is merely a test of merit, to decide between eternal bliss and damnation. Such a god, and belief in him, would be very useful, yet you couldn’t distinguish a world with such a god from one without (in the world without, you’re dead after, uh, death, so can’t form any beliefs anymore at all).
Then you’re still not quite getting the analogy I’m drawing. I’m not saying knowledge of god is like knowledge of the causes of our experience—it’s like knowledge of our experiences themselves. Take Berkeleyan idealism: we are ourselves, ultimately, thoughts in the mind of god; that’s our innermost being. If we can know this, we don’t know it by our innermost being causing something to happen in us, but rather, simply by being, just as we know our experience simply by experiencing it.
It’s similar to how Schopenhauer tried to bridge the Kantian divide between noumena and phenomena: Kant argued that the thing in itself is always removed from our experience, so we can never know it directly; we can only know our experiences of that thing. Schopenhauer, however, realized that we ourselves are ‘things in themselves’, too; so we can know the character of the thing in itself by knowing our own character. He thought that what we find there is will (hence, “The World as Will and Representation”); on a Berkeley-like conception, the fundamental nature of all things is god, however.
Then describe, to me, how to test knowledge of your own experiences. Against what would you test it? How could you be wrong about having a headache (not about, I repeat, what causes that headache)?
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How about this: can I be a theist and an atheist at the same time? Sometimes I feel there’s this all-powerful life force energy that connects us all, sometimes I feel that Jesus and Vishnu had important things to teach us, and sometimes I think the whole religious idea is ridiculous. There are many boxes I would prefer not to fall into; I enjoy the conversation.
Let’s try this again. I hit submit too soon and the edit window ran out, so only the first paragraph of my response above is the response.
Right, within omnipotence only logically possible things count. The problem here is when you combine omnipotence with omniscience. If foreknowledge forbids god from doing anything except what is foreseen, god does not have free will and is in fact more limited than the average mortal. Worse, his actions are set in concrete infinitely long ago.
If we have another god who does not have omniscience he would have more freedom to act as he wishes, though he cannot know what he will do in the future. Which god is more powerful? I don’t think we can say, but neither is the greatest possible. Given that, neither is necessary.
You brought it up. Just explaining why the argument fails based on a fuzzy definition of greatest.
I agree that in a world with a god you could have direct knowledge of that god. But you cannot tell if your knowledge is of god rather than being a brain fart without recourse to evidence. I’m not rejecting direct knowledge, just rejecting that you can know you have direct knowledge a priori. This is true even in a world in which god does exist. Some people may think they have knowledge of a true god but do not.
That’s reasonable, but an uncreated entity might not have any special powers or knowledge, and may not resemble any reasonable god. Look at the whale in Hitchhikers. Being uncreated is necessary in being a god, but not sufficient.
The whole purpose is to see if the machine can mimic consciousness, which Turing said would be equivalent to truly being conscious.
As well as we know anyone else is conscious, but that’s another discussion. The point is that you can’t tell just by looking.
I’m sorry, but you’re just repeating some tired old canards nobody has taken seriously in centuries (if ever). No theist will be convinced by them, and frankly, it’s a bit embarrassing to witness an intelligent atheist repeat them as if they constituted some sort of knockdown ironclad argument.
But as I said, I’m really not interested in defending a god I don’t believe in. If you want the traditional response to these arguments, it’s laid out here.
I brought up necessary being; I didn’t bring up ontological arguments, or perfect-being theology.
This still doesn’t quite get at what I mean. Do you have to resort to evidence in order to decide whether your knowledge is of your experience of a headache, or a brain fart? No, of course not. The notion is incoherent: having a headache is knowing you have a headache. In the same way, participating in the knowledge of god is knowing there is a god. There’s no mediating step here, as there is with knowledge of external objects, which are known only through experience, which can be faulty, and hence, caused by something else than we think it is.
What the Turing test tells you is whether a machine acts intelligently; as intelligence is defined behaviorally, this is sufficient to judge it intelligent. Consciousness, however, is another matter: it’s very hard to define, in behavioral terms, the subjective experience of redness, say. Think about how you would explain that experience to a blind person: if it could be objectified in the behavioral sense, this should be possible in principle. After all, every task performed intelligently could be explained to them (about as well as to any other person, at least). So it’s not straightforward to argue for consciousness from behavioral data. There have been intriguing arguments, and counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments made, but to even scratch the surface here would lead too far.
Perhaps to build intuition, consider that a sufficiently large lookup table could perform flawlessly on every Turing test you ever care to chuck at it. But does it strike you as plausible that the rote act of looking up entries in a table could lead to subjective experience?
The point being that even if we accept that this direct knowledge is possible - which is a lot easier than accepting a god - it needs to be tested since there are many other more likely possibilities.