You seem to think DSYoungEsq was trying to argue in favor of God’s existence. He wasn’t.
That’s not really the god of the Bible now, is it? What you just did happens all the time as the definition of god keeps changing depending on the person, the interpretation, and what is known about the natural world. My claim of falsifying God rev B.1 says nothing about God rev J.5. Theists really should put in some version control software.
Being Jewish, I can call Christians a bunch of newbies. Clearly tradition doesn’t make anything right, or we’d all still be worshiping big breasted Venus figures (not that we aren’t.) And I’m not denying either the concept of God or the influence of that concept through religion. I’m only concerned with his actual existence.
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I wrote as much. Again, if need be, I can be fairly labeled a “strong atheist” when it comes to religion.
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It bears repeating, because it is the thing that makes this argument useless for any specific religion. For well over a decade I’ve challenged theists to connect their god with a first cause, and no one has even really tried.
I’m only certain about well defined gods, not poorly defined or undefined one. I own Smith’s book, and I wasn’t very impressed by it. For example, his argument against first cause was a “proof” that the universe must be eternal - which appears to be wrong. I’d never use that book to convince a theist of anything. There is one which uses rigorous philosophical arguments against reasonably well stated theistic arguments. I forget the author and name. It’s not exactly simple reading, but the reasoning is orders of magnitude better than what you can find in Smith.
I use exactly the same argument to explain away bugs in my code.
Let me try it this way.
There are an infinite number of hypothetical gods, say labeled g1, g2, …gn, …
Each of these gods has some definition, even if it is that we know nothing about the god. We can generate these descriptions on the fly, filtering out nonsense ones, or look them up in Borges’ library.
We can sort each got into one of a few categories. The first category is a god which has been described some some human or humans, and which has testable characteristics. One example is the god described by the inerrant Bible. We get confused by this set since each theist seems to be claiming that the god he worships is somehow the god, but is actually a slightly different god from everyone else. This is what I was getting to in my reply to Measure for Measure.
I personally can further divide this set into those I have heard of and those I have not. I can say quite firmly that I deny and can falsify to some reasonable level each god in this set I’ve heard of. Since any gods I haven’t would probably get better press if they had solid evidence, I’m pretty certain that the ones I haven’t heard of are bogus too.
The next set consists of the gods spoken of by humans which are not falsifiable - they live in that other universe and maybe set things in motion but never have interacted with us. They clearly are unfalsifiable. I believe these don’t exist, because with no evidence the chance of anyone getting it right is very small - but I can’t be sure the way I can be sure that the inerrant god doesn’t exist.
The third set consists of gods who no human has described. I don’t think we can say anything much about them. I believe that they don’t exist, due to lack of need for them, but how can I be sure?
The problem we face, which I alluded to in my Elmer joke, is that theists claim the first class of god exists, in order to justify their moral code, but switch it to the second class whenever you start asking for evidence. A god can’t be in both classes. These theists are actually polytheists without realizing it.
Well, that may be the longest reply to the shortest question in Dope history, but I hope it explains where I am coming from. I can see how people can be sure that gods in class 3 don’t exist, but I’ve been too well trained never to write an absolute without good justification to be sure myself. I suspect anyone who is in the sciences has been slapped down by an adviser or reviewer for making such a statement, and it makes you cautious. I sure have been.
Likewise. Anthropomorphic gods melt under scrutiny. I especially enjoy the gods that are “beyond human comprehension” and are then explained to us in excruciating contradictory detail.
As a primer it ain’t bad. As a guide it sucks due to the rigidity I wrote about before – and the lack of philosophical arguments you mention. IIRC it doesn’t address the Ontological argument either.
As for the one you mention, could it be Soel’s Logic and Theism? TBH, I put it down a third of the way in least I got addicted to Tylenol.
It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
Ayup.
Not trying to be difficult, but it could also be a matter of differing perceptions or even differing aspects of the same fellow. An individual can be father, fireman and weekend golfer; there’s no reason why a god can’t have diverse traits. So you can label g1, g2, …gn, but you will also be able to draw circles around versions that are not mutually exclusive.
Of course a god could be in both classes: the problem isn’t ontological (a matter of what G-d is) it’s epistemological (a matter of what we can know). If we knew whether the Creator was a researcher, hobbyist, parent or bored adolescent we might be able to speculate about a plausible divine mission; absent that we can only draw our conclusions based upon what we know about the outcome of His efforts.
Ok, but I was arguing for tradition as something that has salience when combined with faith; it’s a complementary property. However…
Yes, I think I’ve been a little slippery here.
As I said some months ago, the basis for my empirical agnosticism is my discomfort in drawing conclusions about theism in the absence of a firmer understanding of consciousness. Admittedly, we can make some observations without a working model: I’m willing to conclude that a given human consciousness ends with the destruction of the brain. I also accept that human characteristics formed via natural selection. But I wonder whether, say, an ant colony could have a working consciousness, or whether a collection of animals who possess language could have the same. Those are just 2 examples: without a better model I have trouble understanding from where this property can emerge from.
That sounds familiar. I have a perverse fascination for excruciatingly complicated discussions like in that book, which is why I hang around in GD. I can hardly fault anyone who is normal not getting through it.
Indeed, but I’m only interested in the case of contradictory characteristics, not orthogonal ones. A God can’t both have a son and not have a son, and a God both can’t be described by the Bible as literally creating the earth in 6 days and also causing the earth to be created over billions of years from natural causes. Surely you agree that the gods described by some set of religions are mutually contradictory, right? BTW, the definitions I am talking about are determined by the interpretation of the Bible. By selecting different passages as controlling, two people can get contradictory gods out of the same book. Example: Fred Phelps vs sane theists.
No - a god who stays strictly outside the universe cannot also tell us not to spill our seed upon the ground. We can certainly speculate on the characteristics and motivation of an absent god, but it is unfalsifiable and the purest guesswork. Looking at the universe we can come up with the conclusion that god loves us or god hates us equally plausibly, and have no way of checking. And if people truly believed in that kind of god we wouldn’t have the problem of religion, since no believer could honestly say they knew what god wanted, and so would never attempt to force anyone else to adhere to their beliefs. I emphasize force - we might argue that lemon pie is best, perhaps forcefully, but only a lunatic would force someone to eat it at knifepoint.
Hive minds are a common sf theme. Plus, there is the anti-based processor in Discworld. (Anthill Inside.) So, maybe.
Again though, we need to allow for differing visions of the same God. Suppose two people disagree about whether Joe has a brother. It could be that they are talking about 2 people - Joe Smith and Joe Doe. But it could also be that they both are talking about Joe Smith; it’s just that one of the two characterizations is wrong.
Thirdly, there’s the metaphor option – a Unitarian might say that Genesis is a metaphor of the emergence of moral choice.
That said, I trust that some definitions of the supreme Deity are contradictory.
I mostly agree with that, except insofar as the Chief runs the afterlife, a phenomenon for which evidence is also lacking.
Ok, but I maintain that’s not so much a problem with religion, as a problem with fundamentalism. There isn’t a lot of armed conflict between the Unitarians and the Baha’i.
From Revelation X: The “Bob” Apocryphon, Chapter 8: “Heaven and Hell”:
But there is hope! Now you can save your soul from Heaven! Just send it with $30 for shipping & handling costs to:
The Church of the SubGenius
c/o Reverend Ivan Stang
P.O. Box 181417
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118-1417
Eternal salvation guaranteed – OR TRIPLE YOUR MONEY BACK! 
But you’re assuming there is a Joe Smith. Unless you can test this contention, you have now way of knowing if there is actually anyone there - and the more contradictory information you get, the less you believe it. If one person tells you Joe has a brother, weighs 300 pounds and is the only resident of 10 Maple Street, and another says Joe has no brother, weighs 200 pounds (today in both cases) and is the only resident of 10 Maple Street, either one or both of them are deluded. If 30 people give you contradictory depictions of Joe at 10 Maple, isn’t it best to assume they all are. (Or, that the shape shifters have arrived.)
Already covered that. His god isn’t the same as the god who actually did it.
That said, I trust that some definitions of the supreme Deity are contradictory.
The problem is that once you accept that your leader or founder has a direct connection to the creator of the universe, anything he says goes. That’s true no matter if he believes in the inerrant Bible or makes up his own Bible. A god who is the moral arbiter has the last word, and we can’t judge him or deny him using our human morals. I don’t care if everything he has asked for so far is just dandy. I am just as wrong to blindly obey his commands to feed the poor and heal the sick as I am to obey commands to slaughter his enemies. I may do the same thing he commands from independent moral reasoning, but we don’t need a god for that.
Well, actually in that case I would withhold judgment, since they all agree at least that somebody lives at 10 Maple.
But admittedly that’s not what we’re dealing with here: it’s a case of the invisible pink unicorn vs. the invisible blue water sprite. But getting to the point, we can define G as the Creator of the universe who also currently runs the show in some manner. A Deist would fall would have no problem with the first part, but would qualify the 2nd by saying that while the physical universe runs itself, the spiritual component, the afterlife and other unobservables are another matter. They could meaningfully say that they believe in the same God as Joe Fundi: it’s just that their descriptions differ. Put another way, g1, g2 could refer to descriptions or hypotheses just as easily as discrete entities.
But whether that necessarily leads to religious strife is an empirical matter. And basically all of the Christian religions influenced by the enlightenment (as contrast to the ones opposing the same) tend towards ecumenicalism. The problem with Islam is that it hasn’t gone through an enlightenment or reformation. The problem with fundamentalism is that it has rejected the former.
I’m not sure about this, as typically scripture invokes moral reasoning in one form or another. Some of it is merely parental: “Do what I command, I am YHWH.”, but not all of it. That said, there is a problem when one invokes a 2500 year old legal code for reasons other than historical interest.
For completeness, I should note my second reason for agnosticism, which unlike the first might be currently resolvable along atheistic lines. There are solid reasons to believe that math is discovered, not created. But if it’s discovered that makes it a phenomenon independent of human mind. And we know that math has no mass or physical properties. Sure it’s an idea, but it’s more than that, insofar that ideas are typically thought of as an aspect of consciousness. What I require here is for a metaphysicist to propose a taxonomy that encompasses everything, as both Descartian dualism and my ordinary materialism seem to be falling short.
That’s fair. Until you try to look up 10 Maple to see for yourself, and see the numbers there start at 100.
If all our witnesses only agree on that a human being lives there (and some say Jo does) we’re going to have a hard time deciding what size shirt to get the guy as a present. If religion were only a New Age way of saying the cosmos is awesome, man, this would be fine. But when they start talking about how to live, and what the purpose of life is, we’ll need a bit more information about whatever god they are positing. Your g1 and g2 would work quite nicely also, that’s a good generalization of the problem.
I’m not really concerned with strife. The problem is more what the adherents are told to believe, and is the same whether they are told to kill other religionists, to convert them, or to kiss them - or even ignore them.
The reason we like a reformation is that it makes the religion better match what our society has come up with through other means. If there was a god, how do you know the hardest line Islamist isn’t closer to following his will than the wimpiest Unitarian? If God does exist, God said so is a good reason for anything.
For me, there was no choice. It just appeared in my brain, as though it had been there forever. And now I can’t “choose” to pretend it isn’t there.
Why not? You’re choosing to pretend it is there.
Of course it’s a choice. You chose to take the easy way out, to not have to think about the hard stuff in life. To never have to face death and never have to rage against an unthinking, uncaring universe. You chose an easy, simple fairy tale to believe in. Good for you.
But don’t pretend that you can’t face reality. You just don’t want to.
Gratuitous, pretentious, and idiotic. Ignored.
Kind of like some people can’t stop thinking about leather? Got it. 
You’re not that bad.
I guess I was wrong. But since ignoring problems is your specialty I suppose it’s not unexpected.