religion = invention

Great Debates
61

Well, people are studying different things. But if a man is conducting a scientific experiment, then as I said, he is drawing from any number of sibling disciplines: revelation or inductive logic to form his hypothesis, deductive logic to test it, and mathematics or metaphysics or ethics to interpret it. It isn’t about the things being studied, but the way things are studied. As Schroedinger pointed out, an understanding of what he is doing is impossible without a philosophical context.

Yes, that’s what I meant by sociology, macro-economics, and “that sort of thing”.

Oh, I got it right, and that’s exactly what Schroedinger’s paper covered — the quality of experiments with respect to quantum mechanics. Owing to the very nature of Heisenberg’s inequality, the inspector of quanta is searching for anomalies. You must know that the spark you see is the emergence of a photon, and not a blotch on the film.

Myself, I like walks in the woods alone.

Fair enough. I think that’s a bit loosey-goosey, but it isn’t worth a battle so long as we both understand that the whole purpose of your experiment is to attempt to falsify your hypothesis.

Well, good luck to you! I always delight in the success of others. And I won’t hijack the discussion into a debate about proving an existential negative except to establish that I disagree that it is in any way problematic. I can prove easily that necessary existence is not impossible.

Okay. But isn’t that pretty much like saying that you can think of a number that is less than 2, but you can also think of a number that is equal or greater than 2? If your point is that clearly defining God matters, then I agree. And that was the whole basis for my original objection about Lissa’s equivocation.

Exactly so.

No contradiction. Love must be defined as carefully as God. I have defined it as the facilitation of goodness. I also have defined goodness as the aesthetic most valued by God. So far as I know, I am the first to treat goodness as an aesthetic rather than an ethic — at least the first philosopher (if I can be called such). Schopenhauer almost got there, but not quite. It was, for me, this realization that pretty much connected all the dots. If goodness is an aesthetic, then it makes sense that some men would value it and others would not. But for it to be objectively the most valuable thing, an objective moral arbiter is required. It need not be the case that there is an infinity of gods (using infinity quite loosely as a “number”); rather, it need only be that there are as many subjective interpretations of one God as there are subjective reference frames.

Except that there are many of your fellow evolved social animals who do not. Some would rejoice over your pending success; some would be jealous, and if possible, deprive you of it. The “it is not enough that I succeed; other men must fail” school is alive and well. Moral choices are choices between the facilitation and obstruction of goodness. It may be “preaching”, but you did ask.

Once again, I encounter the dichotomy between emotion and intellect despite innumerable protestations and demonstrations that it is a false dilemma. Too much Star Trek in the culture, I reckon. There is no ongoing contest between being Vulcan or Human. Emotions are simply the synaptic discharges that occur in the amygdala, while intellect is comprised by the discharges in the frontal lobe. There is no mystery here, and no offsetting of one with the other. A person may be both emotional and intellectual at the same time. In fact, nothing is more emotionally pleasing than the intellectual solution of a problem. It so happens that emotion cannot bypass the intellect. Take a smile, for instance. A genuine smile begins its formation in the amygdala, and traces a path through the frontal lobe, resulting in the tensing of muscles that are not reproduced by a fake smile. Fake smiles begin their formation in the frontal lobe. The mouth muscles move, but the rest of the face does not — the eyes do not wrinkle or “sparkle”. Once again, I’m not talking about emotion when I talk about love. I have defined it clearly and cogently. It is a moral decision to share an aesthetic with others simply because you value it.

But I don’t think you’re blocking your heart to God. You are blocking your heart to a gargoyle. And rightfully so. As to the reason someone might choose a “love theology”, it is for no reason other than that he values goodness above all other aesthetics.

No time to proofread. Gotta run. :slight_smile:

62

Well, if that is what you mean I agree.

I don’t think you have quite the right Theory of Experiments. A quick google on the paper name revealed a brief chronology of his life that mentions the paper. However it does not mention it as a contribution to the statistical ToE, which is odd, because it would be very important. The first text that comes to hand, Practical Statistics by Russell Langley, credits Sir Ronald A. Fisher, and a book called Design of Experiments in 1935. A work 20 years prior would be very important.

Aha! No, in many cases the whole purpose of the experiment is not falsification, though the experiment must be designed to allow falsification. It must be designed to limit the chance that alternate hypotheses explain the result. Say your experiment is whether fertilizer A encourages growth in a plant. The hypothesis can be falsified if the plant does not grow. However if you don’t control for water, sunlight, etc., a fertilized plant might grow more for other reasons. You might have an experiment to determine which of a set of fertilizers maximizes growth. I suppose falsification here means none do, and to allow this you need to define in advance what “growth” means.

I have seen it said that defining god is impossible, since god by definition is something beyond our understanding. That seems reasonable. However we can partially define god, and also define god’s interaction with the physical world, which we must be able to describe, if not understand. If the god we are describing caused a flood, we should be able to find evidence of the flood, even if we do not understand how he caused it. If your god exists, he has caused a physical effect in your brain that allows you to describe your experience of him. This gives us some degree of access to the impact of god, and lets us compares the impacts. You’ve already addressed this, and I’ll respond to it below.

BTW, even pure materialists understand the concept of process and the concept of concept. The accusation that there are things we cannot hold in our hands disproves materialism is based on a strawman concept of materialism. A factory is made up of storerooms, materials, transportation mechanisms and people, all very material and easy to describe. However the processes occuring in that factory are orders of magnitude more complex than the material parts of the process, and in my experience impossible to describe to a great level of accuracy.

Is this what you are saying?
Goodness = aesthetic most valued by God.
Most -> objective evaluation function.
Objective evaluation function -> arbiter
Arbiter -> God.

However if you drop “god” from your definition of goodness, we can say that goodness is what we most value, and by the same argument we can be the arbiter. You are assuming, in an unstated premise, that goodness is a universal. Thus it makes sense to say some men value goodness more or less than others. If goodness were described individually, we can say men value other’s goodness less or more, but not their own. And I don’t see why goodness can’t be a function of intelligence, just like we agreed morality is.

Another way: if goodness is what is most valued to god, and if god interacts with people, then those who do not block his interaction, and truly report on it, should agree about what goodness is. And that defines an experiment you can do!

But the variance in the level of our socialness is evidence that it is evolutionary based. If there could be none, it could evolve through natural selection. If we all had the same level of socialness, it could not be selected for or against. Antisocial individuals may wind up dead or in jail at greater rates than social ones, and will be at a selective disadvantage. There is probably some optimal mix of levels of sociability, so that society has resource to deal with different situations. Some antisocial losers might be quite beneficial in times of war (call it the Dirty Dozen theory) so the disappearance of this trait would be disadvantageous to the population as a whole. So evolving a base level of sociability does not mean that we all have it.

Perhaps I misread you. Talking about Jerry Falwell led me to believe that you were saying that some people reject god because they emotionally react to those who misuse his name. I’m sure that is true some times, but not for me. The interaction between emotions and intellect is a whole nother topic. Suffice to say that some emotions are physically based, as anyone who has had the pleasure of dealing with a pregnant wife can testify, while ideally intellect is not. (Though you don’t think the same way tired as you do refreshed, so our intellect is affected.) We cannot truly separate them, but I’m sure you’ve done something for emotional reasons that you know was dumb, and something that you knew was right that was emotionally unsatisfying. The message of Star Trek, clearly, was that the successful human integrates emotion and intellect, and that concentrating on one or the other is unsatisfactory.

Anyhow, I get that God is that which most values goodness, the “thing” that defines an ordering on goodness. (thing quoted since I use it loosely, and don’t wish to imply a physical manifestation.) So we have an objective ordering of good. If we can show that those who interact with god have the same ordering, we’re fine. If not, either we are dealing with many gods, each with their own, different, ordering, or the ordering is done inside the heads of those who claim this interaction. We also need to be able to filter those who have truly spoken to god, and those who are misled or lying.

So now we have a program to help us determine whether your god exists outside your head or not.
A pleasure as always talking to you.

63

I appreciate that. :slight_smile:

Yes, part of the universe, though not necessarily applicable to everything in it.

I don’t follow. Surely, sentience could have evolved naturally, even without any creative force directing it. There is nothing unanswerable about the temporal lobe; it performs its functions based on the molecular interactions in its neurons.

How does one demonstrate that sentience in humans was created, rather than evolving on its own? Besides, to say that sentience is something akin to a universal law or constant would seem to support the idea that it would evolve sooner or later anyway (likely sooner) without intervention.

64

Actually, I have the fifth edition of Design of Expermiments, if you mean the book by Montgomery. I can’t recall whether he credited Schroedinger or not, but history isn’t really linear like that. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that Schroedinger developed a theory of experiments as a stand-alone discipline, and since it is merely incidental to his body of work in quantum mechanics, it is understandable that a website chronology wouldn’t expand on it much if at all. But it is only natural that a man whose entire field is based in statistics, who pioneered much of the statistical analysis of quantum mechanics, and who had expressed a concern about the purity of experiments would be a significant, if uncredited, contributor to a later emerging field in statistics. The Schroedinger Method alone — which seeks the probability of an event defined in terms of random variables arranged in increasing order — would have to influence anyone developing a statistical theory of experiments.

Oy. This is an issue on which either we fundamentally disagree, or else (as I suspect) we are monumentally talking past each other. The purpose of an experiment cannot be to perfect the experiment; otherwise, the experiment has no context. It is merely a thing unto itself, completely abstract and without meaning — what Kant called a “thing in itself”. (This is more evidence of the need, expressed by Schroedinger, for science to call upon the broader discipline of philosophy for context.) It is certainly an important part of the deductive portion of an hypothetico-deductive exercise to sterilize the exercise as much as possible, lest we end up thinking water makes us drunk. Consider an experiment in which a man hypothesizes that water makes him drunk. He devises the deductive portion by mixing water and whiskey, water and gin, and water and vodka. He declares his hypothesis correct, since water is the common element each time. His purpose was to find out what makes him drunk, but his implementation was careless. Design philosophy is concerned with the implementation of an experiment, but an experiment’s purpose is to attempt to falsify an hypothesis.

Lucky for me, then, that I made no such accusation. The existence of analytic entities does not disprove materialism, but they are a problem with which it must deal. It must account for a mechanism by which a metaphysical gestalt arises from a physical universe without that prior portion existing. That is the reason that modern materialists (or physicalists) MUST hold that the universe is eternal. If the universe was preceded by nothing, then it is a logical impossibility to account for there being a mechanism of creation — that is to say, how can something come from nothing when nothingness implies the lack of any mechanism by which something may arise? Similarly, the problem on the other side remains. If indeed there exist things, processes, or any entities that are not accountable by physical manifestation or law, then by definition, the supernatural exists. It certainly is a problem that is being addressed, but there is still much controversy, such as the qualia of consciousness over which debate has raged in philosophy for the past ten years.

Except that there is no “we”, not in the sense of a shared consciousness. I cannot experience your consciousness, and you cannot experience mine. That makes our reference frames subjective.

No, I have in fact stated that premise. You even quoted it: “But for it to be objectively the most valuable thing, an objective moral arbiter is required”.

I did not agree on, and do not concede, any such thing. In fact, I’ve gone to great pains to prove the opposite. The entire history of mankind is positively saturated with brilliant evil people. Practically every mass-murdering tyrant — from Genghis Khan to Amerigo Vespucci to Mao Tse-Tung — has been of necessity quite bright. On the other hand, there are innumerable examples of people who live in the very bowels of poverty and ignorance who are nevertheless kind-hearted, trustworthy, and honest. There is no correlation between intelligence and morality.

Except that what they are reporting are their own subjective perceptions of goodness. (Again, philosophy would be helpful to contextualize your assertion.) That is the nature of an aesthetic. Two men can look at a needle on a meter and agree that it points exactly to five units. But two men can look at a Picasso, and one beholds it with awe while the other beholds it with incredulity. One says it is worth a million dollars, and the other says a monkey could paint it. Without an objective arbiter, who is to say which man is correct? Now, suppose that each man had the freedom to react in whatever manner he saw fit. One man will take the painting home, while the other wants it nowhere near his home. The painting itself is not making any decision. Nor is its painter. It is the same with God. It is not a matter that God punishes a man for immorality; rather, the immoral man simply does not value the goodness that God values and therefore chooses not to “take Him home”. An atheist who has rejected God while having a good heart has rejected a mere caricature, a poor copy of a Picasso done by an inept painter. This is what people like Fred Phelps represent. They are enemies of God who present him as the devil. Any man, atheist or theist, is right to reject the god of Phelps. That is a mere intellectual decision. By the same token, a man might have much intellectual knowledge of Picasso, but until he sees the painting face to face and decides whether to take it home, he has not made the equivalent of a moral decision, but only an intellectual one. It is entirely possible that he spend his whole life ridiculing this image of Picasso that he has heard third hand, knowing about only the very unsatisfactory reprints he has seen in books. But to behold the thing itself, with its textures, its true colors, and its haunting realness, he might very well suddenly burst open with joy. “This is so beautiful!” he might exclaim, “nothing like what I was told!”

Well, we all wind up dead. And your assertion possibly holds for monkey jails and wolf societies, but man has a unique perspective on evolution and natural selection. That is, he can make the selection quite un-natural. He can subsidize whatever behavior he wishes, both economically and socially. And in fact, modern centrism, in seeking a political mean of expediency, seeks to do exactly that, with wealth redistribution and public education schemes. It seeks to “level the playing” field. Besides, in human societies, the antisocial are often the most successful. After they produce their progeny, they may become complete recluses, or even full-blown nutcases like Howard Hughes.

Well, the reaction could be emotional or intellectual. My own impression of Falwell, both when I was an atheist and now, was that he was an idiot.

— and, most importantly, the thing Which facilitates it. That is how I define love. And God is love, the perfect facilitator of goodness.

You’ve just nailed what Ramachandran was talking about. There is no scientific method for determining which is which — is the temporal lobe calling out to God or is God calling out to the temporal lobe? In the end, it is a marvelously eloquent and brilliant plan in its conception for the implementation of free moral will. As Sentient says, we take a position. The decision is ours. Faith is preserved by the ambiguity of an amoral universe.

Likewise. :slight_smile:

65

One doesn’t. One can’t. And that’s rather the whole point. Free moral will is based on moral ambiguity. Let me give you an admittedly weak analogy, but one that might help you to conceive the point. Suppose you worked for a company where the owner is unknown (and in fact unknowable), and who has built a mansion to house those who share his taste in decorating upon their retirement. In an ordinary company, it is possible for you to “suck up” to the boss, brown nose him by feigning an interest in his favorite topics, and weasel your way into the retirement mansion simply by “acting right”. But if you do not know who the owner is — possibly even one of your co-workers — then there is nothing for you to do but make decisions on your own, behave the best way you know how, or even take a position that you prefer to build your own retirement home. The owner’s interest is in those who genuinely share his admiration for his own aesthetic. For whatever reasons (logistical, practical, or otherwise), he shows himself and his home to some of the employees at various times and under various circumstances. Some of these people like him and his taste. Some don’t. Some share what they know with others. Some keep it to themselves. But sooner or later, everyone will meet him. even if only when their employment obligation expires, and will then decide whether this is or is not a place they want to stay in. Some of those who hadn’t met him before will change their minds. Some will have declared that they want their own place, but upon seeing his, will move right in. Others will have declared that they can’t wait to move in, but upon seeing it, will say, “What a dump!” From God’s eternal reference frame, temporal existence is a non-issue. My having seen Him gives me no advantage over you. Your not having seen Him yet puts you at no disadvantage to me. Just as with everything else in life, the consumation of an event renders the prior anticipation of it to the past — a thing for memory. For God, all events have simultaneously not yet begun, are ongoing, and are finished. If it takes me twenty-five years and you forty years, they are merely years and are not relevant to an eternal reference frame.

Consider carefully this parable told by Jesus:

======================================

"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

"About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.

"He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’

"‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

"He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

"When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’

"The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

"But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

66

Okay, I’ll put it another way. Using your analogy, why should I believe there even is an owner? Maybe everybody or nobody owns the company. By definition there is no way to demonstrate an owner even exists.

I am confused by your characterization of god - are you making the case for a discrete (nonphysical) entity, or are you just defining the term so that it applies to human æsthetics?

I’ve seen that somewhere before (probably right here on the SDMB) and wasn’t the idea that the ones who only worked an hour were being compensated for their time spent standing around? Even so, it just sounds too much like saying “these are My rules and if you don’t like it, leave.” :wink:

67

Well, I can prove that the owner exists, assuming you’re not one of those people who accepts logic when it suits you but rejects it when it doesn’t. Still, even logic requires faith in both its premises and rules. But the point I’ve been making all along is that it doesn’t matter whether you believe there is an owner. He is offering his retirement mansion, not to people who believe he exists, but to people who share his aesthetic taste. There are lots of employees who believe he exists, but who demonstrate again and again that they value nothing that he values.

Which term? Goodness? I don’t know how my description of God could be more clear. He is the only free moral agent with an objective frame of reference, Who values goodness above all other aesthetics.

Voyager summed it up pretty well above, but let me put it all together for you here in one place, and maybe that will help. Goodness is an aesthetic in the formal philosophical sense. A philosophy may be identified by these criteria: its metaphysical claims, its ethics, its epistemology, and its aesthetics. The question of a thing’s aesthetic is a question of whether it has value. Goodness is defined as that aesthetic which edifies. It creates, builds up, and increases value without destroying, tearing down, or decreasing value. By its very nature, the sharing of goodness has the positive effect of creating more goodness. CS Lewis once said that God prizes goodness so much that were there a creature more good than He, He would worship it. God is that entity Which facilitates the sharing of goodness among free moral agents, thus multiplying the amount or intesity of goodness that there is. This same frame of mind, as it were, is understood by most humans. When you see or experience something you really adore, there is no greater pleasure than sharing it with someone else who shares your adoration. That facilitation is called love.

:smiley: I hadn’t heard that one. They aren’t being compensated for anything at all. Nothing about the story suggests that the land owner is not a philanthropist as well as an employer. I’m sure he just gave the denarious to anyone who asked for it. It isn’t a story about compensation. It is a story about temporality. I asked you to study it carefully. The ending sentence says what it is all about. Study it again. When you’ve informed me that you have discerned the proper interpretation, we’ll continue our discussion.

68

No doubt many before a formal theory of design of experiments was promulgated understood it. Just a historical curiousity.

Oy. This is an issue on which either we fundamentally disagree, or else (as I suspect) we are monumentally talking past each other. The purpose of an experiment cannot be to perfect the experiment; otherwise, the experiment has no context.

[/quote]

I agree, and that was not my point. One of the things Design of Experiments does is to indicate that your amusing example is not a good experiment. Consider Edison trying to find a filament that works for a light bulb. He actually did the experiments one at a time, but say he had a mechanism that tested 1,000 filaments simultaneously, in separate bulbs. There is a falsification angle here, in that each mini-experiment offers the possibility of falsifying the hypothesis that a particular material works. But the experiment goes beyond that, to comparing materials. A useful outcome of the experiment is how long each material burned. I suppose you could consider a set of parameterized hypotheses, such as material M burns for t minutes, t = 1 to 100,000, and consider a result falsify the hypothesis for t = 1004, but not for t = 1003. Not very useful, though. Remember that my position is that falsifiability is necessary but not always sufficient for a good experiment.

Sorry, when you bring up what “2” is, it seemed to me that you were approaching the argument, which you did not make explicitly but which other anti-materialists do, that not being able to hold love in your hand disproves materialism.

Your first cause argument has the hidden assumption that there is a cause. If there can be uncaused things, that don’t violate the laws of physics, then your argument does not hold. But materialism only holds for this universe. (Since we can not say anything about others.) If either a deity or grad student was able to create a materialist universe, and not be able to interact with it, it is the same from our perspective as if the material only universe was created non-causally. If you wish to consider my example as evidence of the supernatural, be my guest, but in our universe, operationally, the supernatural still does not exist.

My bad. My use of “we” is for a number of independent entities, each of whom has a possibly different version of goodness, not a shared definition. I see how the latter meaning could be understood, though.

Right, so God as the arbiter exists by definition. Goodness implies god, but goodness by your meaning cannot exist without god. Or am I missing something.

Sorry again. My meaning of intelligence was sapience, not IQ. That a large percentage of humans are descended from Genghis Khan shows that unsocial behavior is not evolutionary disadvantageous - but of course he was very social among his group, just not outside.

Except that what they are reporting are their own subjective perceptions of goodness. (Again, philosophy would be helpful to contextualize your assertion.) That is the nature of an aesthetic. Two men can look at a needle on a meter and agree that it points exactly to five units. But two men can look at a Picasso, and one beholds it with awe while the other beholds it with incredulity.

[/quote]

I don’t think Picasso helps your case any. By social convention today, Picasso’s work is beautiful, and a person who says that he prefers poker playing dogs is a lout. But remember Shakespeare was nearly forgotten for centuries. There is no arbiter for art.

But say there was. And we don’t know who it is, but he whispers what is beautiful (and maybe why) to many people. Now, those who are not that arbiter are not totally ignorant of what makes beauty. There are some standards, but they are sometimes wrong. So, if a man says that the arbiter of art whispered to him that the poker playing dogs are beautiful, we can conclude that he did not talk to the arbiter, or ignored what he said. Given that, there should be some consensus among those that say they spoke to the arbiter about what is beautiful, and it should not follow the experts. If in a decade the experts say style B is beautiful rather than A, and all the consensus of those who claim they have spoken to the arbiter follows the opinions of the experts, we may wonder whether any of them spoke to the arbiter. If claimants from various countries with different schools each claim art approved by their school is beautiful, and art considered by other schools isn’t, we may doubt that any one of them spoke to the real arbiter.

I hope that’s clear, and good analogy.

which is something without a true definition unless there is a god. (or arbiter.)

I think you are defining your god so that there can be no scientific confirmation. First, you rule out physical (as opposed to mental or spiritual) interactions. (I’m not saying I agree that mental is not physical, but let’s agree that you can’t measure god’s word with lab equipment.) If there is a transmitter of a single standard of goodness, and it arrives at a population of peopls, albeit through a noisy channel, there should be some way of reconstructing the signal. If we cannot, then isn’t it reasonable to provisionally accept the hypothesis that there is no signal there, that those who report the experience of god are finding patterns in noise, the way Lowell saw canals on Mars?

69

Very well. Prove to me that a god exists, using only logic.

Not really, because in the case of logic the premises and rules are actually definitions. Equality, for instance, is defined specifically to refer to a demonstrable relationship of two or more parts. If A=B, then we can demonstrate that A and B are equal, but we might just as well say that A and B are oogidy-boogidy.

I won’t disagree with you on this point, and here’s why: I have been various places on the internet and talked to various people in real life, where certain beliefs (mostly New Age) have been expressed. Quite a variety of beliefs, as a matter of fact, and it gives me the impression that Wiccan, Pagan, Eastern, indigenous American, and so forth all have a certain common thread. If it should turn out that any such thing as “supernatural” exists, I would be inclined to believe that the Eastern faiths and the New Age would have the big picture pretty much right on. Therefore if a creator exists, he/she/it must be as kind as you say.

It seemed a few posts back, you were defining god as the æsthetics themselves. Such a definition would of course make it difficult or impossible to refute the existence of a god, although again we could just as easily call it oogidy-boogidy. Anyway, I was asking if you were talking about a discrete entity, or just a set of æsthetics.

I don’t see why neural activity is insufficient to account for any of that.

Because we all find out for ourselves in the end? You’re saying that it doesn’t matter if we believe it or not; if we value the correct æsthetics we get our reward in the end. I won’t argue with the lack of a requirement for belief. Afterlife or no afterlife, it would surprise me greatly if belief were a prerequisite. I, for one, intend to welcome the experience when it comes time. I look forward to finding out once and for all if the supernatural exists.

70

Hey… lay easy on Genghis. Although it might seem apt for us to label (and consequently, judge) him as a “mass-murdering tyrant”, the truth is that he was bought up in a very harsh environment in 13th century Mongolia. Bandits from a rival tribe poisoned his father, which left his immediate family circle open to attack. He had to grow up with a harsh mentality in order to survive. It’s said that he coldly killed his half brother (from his father, who had two wives) in an altercation over a fish. But the truth is, in a line of succession it was not uncommon for you to be killed in order to prevent a rival party seizing power and authority in the tribe.

Remember still, that his wife was kidnapped when young (most likely raped), which began the quest to annhilate that tribe and so set him on a chain of events that would result in him being the undisputed ruler of much of Asia and some parts of eastern Europe.

The idea that he simply butchered people for the fun of it is ridiculous. In truth he was pragmatic. He quashed rebellions ruthlessly, this much is fact. However, bear in mind that he had to please his retainers in order to keep alliances with them. This meant more wealth and booty. And this only came through increasing landmass and taking over more tribes/peoples. If he didn’t have some way of unifying the tribes and keeping them under his control, there would have been far more bloodshed as intra-tribal warfare broke out.

Yes, his rule did lead to much destruction in some parts (most notably Khwarizm). And I’m certainly not trying to make him into a saint. All I’m saying is that he was a product of his times, bought up in an environment where survival was key. He did not have the luxury to examine aspects of metaphysical philosophy nearly as deeply as we do. Nor could he develop his eye for the ultimate aesthetic - goodness - as you would call it. But I don’t see this as a fault of his own.

You might say that he would have known in his heart of hearts that he was doing wrong - but I just wouldn’t agree with you.

71

I agree in part and disagree in part, but rather than have my discussion with three people branch off into twelve topics, I will allow you to substitute Indian Hater Jackson for Genghis Khan for purposes of the point that was made.

72

Prove

G (God exists in actuality)

Definition

Let G = Supreme Being (ontological perfection)

Argument

  1. ~~G (It is possible that God exists) Induction

  2. (G -> G) (It must be the case that if God exists, then He is the Supreme Being) From the definition of God

  3. ~G -> ~G (If it is not the case that God must exist, then it is necessarily the case that God does not necessarily exist) Reductio ad absurdum by Becker’s Postulate, i.e., necessity obtains

  4. G -> G (If it is necessary that God exists, then He exists in actuality) Modal Axiom

  5. G v ~G (Either it is necessary that God exists, or else it isn’t) Law of Excluded Middle

  6. G v ~G (Either it is necessary that God exists, or else it is necessary that God does not necessarily exist) Substitution from 3 and 5

  7. ~G -> ~G (If it must be the case that God’s existence is not necessary, then it must be the case that God does not exist) Modal modus tollens from 2

  8. G v ~G (Either it is necessary that God exists, or else it is necessary that He does not) Substitution from 6 and 7

  9. G (It is necessary that God exists) Disjunctive syllogism on 7 and 1

Conclusion

  1. G (God exists in actuality) Modus ponens from 4 and 9
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Well, okay. Extremely minor quibbles on certain details, but I will accept that falsifiability is necessary. We can move on.

I haven’t made any first cause argument. Quite the contrary, I stipulated that for modern materialists, there cannot be a cause — first or otherwise.

Well, it isn’t the case that He exists by definition. We can’t define things into existence. And it isn’t a matter of whether goodness implies God. Remember that existentialism is a rather new philosophy. Long before Sartre, it was held that essence precedes existence — that is, a thing is not essentially what it is because it exists; rather a thing exists because of what it essentially is. Goodness is God’s essence. What I maintain that is different from interpreters of Jesus before me is that His essence is an aesthetic rather than an ethic. This is, it seems to me, exactly what Jesus teaches.

Thanks, and I think your comments were clear, and reveal one of the principle misunderstandings between us. It is dreadfully difficult to shake off traditional notions that are so ingrained from experience that they are second nature. However, it is important not to confuse the theology I’m presenting with a theology that holds goodness as an ethic, i.e., a right and wrong moral decision. The moral decision that I am talking about is taste — discernment, appreciation, preference. It becomes, in my theology, irrelevant whether a person is right or wrong about his moral decisions. I have discarded the notion of righteousness and sin as opposites, just as Jesus does. I have defined sin, not as disobeying a rule, but as obstructing a facilitation, just as Jesus defines it. His problem with the Pharisees was not that they disobeyed the law. In fact, He pointed out that they obey it to a fault (“straining gnats and swallowing camels”.) His problem with the Pharisees was that they obstruct God’s sharing of goodness with ordinary men. “You put upon men’s shoulders,” He told them, “burdens that are impossible to bear and that you are unwilling to bear yourselves. You yourselves do not enter heaven, and you block the way for others to enter as well. You search the ends of the earth for one convert, and having found him, turn him into twice the son of hell you are yourselves. You are like whitewashed tombs, all clean and white on the outside, but inside full of dead men’s bones and decay. You are hypocrites and vipers.” Thus, there is no cause for anyone to fret over whether he is making right or wrong decisions. God need be a concern of yours only if it matters to you whether you share His appreciation for goodness. As Jesus teaches, God will give you exactly whatever reward you desire, if any. He is not judging you; He is giving you what you ask for — what you prefer. If your preference is that, in your own subjective frame, He be nothing more than a topic of debate and intellectual or scientific investigation, then that is exactly what He gives you. If your preference is that, in your subjective frame, He be a personal guide and a facilitator of what He values in your life, then that is what you will have. “Seek,” says Jesus, “and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened. All who seek find, and all who knock see the door open. Men always seek what they treasure, for where your treasure is, there your heart is also.”

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Does not necessarily exist != necessarily does not exist. Modus tollens (a little more than halfway down the page).

From the site:

Let S = god; P = exist; Q = supreme. Modus tollens applies when Q is a result of P. You have already defined S (by citing Dictionary.com) as necessarily being Q, bypassing P as a requirement. In line 7, you attribute Q to necessity rather than supremeness. Necessity is required when P = true, but supremeness is not.

To say that any entity can exist is to contradict the statement that it cannot exist. An entity that might exist also might not exist. The excluded middle between necessary and unnecessary is separate from that between exists and does not exist.

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:slight_smile:
Sorry. You’re still my favourite poster on the SD.

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Your post makes no sense.

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Re: the proof.

My problem is with step 1. Define “Supreme Being.” Supreme indicated that there is some sort of ordering, in which you can decide whether one being is more supreme than another. But I’d claim that no such ordering exists, in fact you can define lattices in math such that there is no ordering among some of the members.

This is the point of the hoary old issue about god making a rock too heavy for him to lift. The usual answer is that he doesn’t want to, which is not much of an answer. Since he can’t do both, the question is, which is more supreme - lifting or creating? Clearly the question makes no sense. The existence of a Supreme being implies an answer to this question, since there is none it is not possible for a Supreme Being to exist, step 1 is invalid, and the whole argument crumbles.

If you don’t like that one, there are a bunch of other paradoxes associated with Supreme beinghood. Could a surpreme being solve the halting problem? Actually, he must be able to, since he is omniscient.

In other words, the induction that supposedly shows a Supreme Being is possible assumes an ordering on beings, no such ordering exists, so induction does not work.

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I’m not anywhere close to discussing people choosing right and wrong, only whether there is a right and wrong. Forget about God’s opinion of what we do - if you asked god if an action were right or wrong, would he be able to give an answer, and would it be the same for all people asking it, assuming substantially similar situations. That’s what I’m trying to get at - I’m not interested in salvation.

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He would not tell you whether a moral decision was right or wrong, but whether it was — to Him — valuable. He would not answer on behalf of others because we all are free moral agents. We decide for ourselves what we value. If what we value coincides with what He values, then we are one with Him. Atheist, theist, deist, pagan, wiccan, Christian, Jew, Muslim, whatever — these are irrelevant.

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I did. Ontological perfection. But now, no doubt, you will ask me to define that as well. And if that’s the game we are to play, then I will ask you to define both “problem” and “step”. And when you do, I will ask you to define key terms in your definitions. This is a game of maypole with words; it is purposeless, useless, and leads to nothing. There must, of necessity, always be certain undefined terms. Otherwise, we start going in circles because there are only so many words to go around. I have no problem with insistence on defining a vague term or tightening up a loose definition, but this definition is cogent. There is no materialist philosopher that I know of who pretends not to know what is meant by God in this argument. I reject categorically any attempt at obfuscation that is born of nothing more than dissatisfaction with the argument’s conclusion. So should you.

The ordinarilly accepted ordering, for rather obvious reasons, is that an ontologically necessary being is supreme. That is because such a being exists in all possible worlds. Since it is impossible to exist in more worlds than that, it is the supreme existence.

Never heard that response. The question is simply self-contradictory, like asking whether someone can make a square circle, or a number 2 that is greater than 3. Words easily can be put together into nonsense. The mere asking of a question does not constitute a burden on anyone to answer it.

What? :smiley:

Yeah…

Nonsense. The problem is with the question, not the being. You just said so yourself.

Again, nonsense. The halting problem has been proved to be undecidable. That is what an omniscient being would know. You are asking for there to be knowledge where knowledge is irrelevant. You’re not omniscient, but you can do arithmetic, right? What is the whole number solution to the square root of 2? You can’t answer, not because you don’t have the knowledge, but because there is no answer. That is what you know.

I’m afraid you need to go back to the drawing board.