I’m desperately trying to tie this into the OP. I think it goes something like this:
Witch: Mwahaha! I use the power of demons to get things done! Behold that couch that doesn’t look like it would fit through my front door? Beelzebub moved it in for me!
Phil: So you believe in God?
Witch: No, and stop interrupting me! I use the power of demons to cast spells on people! Do you see my bald neighbor? He used to have hair, until I called on the power of Pazuzu to destroy all his hair! Ahahaha!
Phil: But about God…
Witch: THERE IS NO GOD BUT I AM NOT DONE! I am super famous because of the power of demons! Mammon, sure, let’s say Mammon, he bought me a prime time sitcom starring role! I am actually Ted Danson! Now I am done!
Phil: Ted Danson, you should believe in God! The demons were angels created by God who rebelled against His authority and chose to follow Satan. He is infinitely more powerful than they are, so much so that He created the entire universe and everything else that exists. So, His power is far greater than that of any demon, as He preceded them, He existed before they did.
Witch: That’s . . . actually an excellent point. I guess I believe in God after all. Thanks, Phil!
@phillipdalton, your argument depends on us already believing in your god, believing that witches call on demons, and that demons actually exist, am I right?
As is common with such arguments it assumes its own conclusion; even if demons actually existed, that isn’t evidence for God any more than humans existing is evidence of God. If anything it’s a worse argument since at least proving that humans exist isn’t difficult; you’re just adding an extra hurdle.
But, again: anybody remember the Menéndez trial, back in the ‘90s? Saturday Night Live used to riff on it? Anyone? Anyway, the point is: the brothers were found guilty of killing their parents — you know, the ones who existed before them and created them?
To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever argued that the brothers must be innocent, because they couldn’t possibly have destroyed people who existed before them and created them. Instead, it seems entirely possible that those parents, uh, no longer exist: that, oh, sure, they existed back when they created people who could go on to kill them — but that’s not proof that said parents (a) still exist now, or that they (b) were more powerful than the people who, as it were, killed them.
I encountered that argument all the flippin time when I was a teenager and liked to argue with street preachers.
Me: How do you know God exists?
Preacher: It says so in the Bible!
Me: But what if the Bible’s wrong?
Preacher: God wrote it, it can’t be wrong!
Me: But how do you know God wrote it?
Preacher: It says so in the Bible!
and round and round…
The “demons are God’s brats” argument feels less sophisticated than that argument.
It’s even worse than that. As I hinted at before, there’s nothing in the Bible about a rebellion of Satan/Lucifer and other angels, their defeat and downfall into hell, becoming demons. That’s all later fanfic. You can’t conclude the OP’s argument from that circular Bible/God logic, because the Bible doesn’t have that story.
More a protection racket. “Nice soul you got there. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. That nasty Debbil guy wants it, but we’ll protect you from him for only 10% of your earnings.”
Being Jewish, I was brought up with the notion that people who didn’t believe what I did back then were going to be fine in the afterlife (which wasn’t for a long time) and probably better off than us in this life.
Christianity is all marketing. Just like life insurance, you talk about the hellmobile driving to the mark’s back door.
They owned a nice lunch place in Princeton before they murdered their parents. But if their parents were omnipotent and invulnerable, and they knew it, they’d have to be real idiots to even try to hurt them. And there would be no murder trial.
These days, if the demons know the Bible is correct, and see what happens in Revelations, they’d have to be idiots to not surrender. Or maybe they can’t, having no free will, in which case God is responsible for their rebellion.
But is the idea that there may be certain knowledge that can’t be communicated so strange? Take riding a bike: it’s something I certainly know how to do, but could not explain to you (in the sense of instilling the same knowing-how in you, if you don’t already possess it) by any length of communication. I could, at best, show you, and you could emulate my example, and then fall of the bike a couple of times, before things click and you acquire the same, certain, knowledge.
Or maybe things never do click for you, if you don’t have the right propensity, and you remain convinced that there must be some trick to it I haven’t told you about. Perhaps ‘spiritual’ knowledge can be considered similarly—something acquired through practice, rather than explanation and argument.
Or consider whatever it is Mary learns when she is first confronted with the sensation of color: this knowledge is not acquired through argument (nor evidence), but is still as certain as anything (regarding her own color qualia, of course, not those of anybody else).
So it seems there are ways of knowing that don’t boil down to evidence or argument, yet that can still engender certainty. Is there such knowledge regarding the spiritual or the divine? Well, I don’t know. All I can say is that I see no compelling reason to believe so, but a lot of circumstantial evidence not to.
If you tell me that something is unknowable when you yourself have made no attempt to find an answer, I may assume that you are afraid the answer might not be to your advantage.
If this is supposed to be directed at my post, I haven’t claimed anything to be unknowable (but rather, some knowable things to be incommunicable or undiscoverable by empirical means), I have a precise answer to how some things come to be such (basically, because all that can be discovered in that way is essentially structural, while facts regarding experiential knowledge are facts about structure-transcending properties), and I don’t really think there’s any answer that’s any more to ‘my advantage’ than any other (advantage for what, exactly?).
My point, though, was that @philipdalton seemed to be reasoning not from omnipotence and invulnerability, but from something else entirely: “So, His power is far greater than that of any demon, as He preceded them, He existed before they did.”
Seems to me that the “as” there — in light of the “So,” that kicks off the sentence — means he believes that ‘preceding them and existing before they did’ means ‘being far more powerful than them, and still existing.’
And if he’s got that dead wrong — if we can rattle off dozens of examples at need, but hardly need to if José and Kitty Menéndez already show that it’s not so — then, even if we for some reason start off by granting that demons exist, and that someone else preceded them and existed before they did, we can’t ‘so’ and ‘as’ our way to concluding that ‘someone else’ is more powerful and still exists.
If A and B precede C and D — and existed before they did — and promptly got killed by them such that they no longer exist, and philipdalton knows it, then it makes no sense for @philipdalton to so-and-as his way from claims about ‘preceding’ and ‘existing before’ to conclusions about comparative power levels and whether someone still exists. As far as I can tell, those claims are irrelevant.
As far as I can tell, it’s as if @philipdalton had said ‘So, his power is far greater than hers, as he broke his leg in Madrid and met Jimmy Carter once.’ I don’t see how those claims would have any bearing on whether someone was more powerful than someone else — or on whether they still exist — just as I don’t see that the claims @philipdalton made have any bearing either.
Getting back to the OP, one argument that sometimes gets some traction is the argument that human beings are so far superior to animals that the notion that we are in a separate category (and therefore, indirectly, made by God to be something different) is valid.
A cow today is the same as a cow 1,000 years ago, or a cow 1,000 years from now, in the sense that cows will always be stuck at the grass-munching level that they are. Cows will never start building houses or farming their own grass or start a cow civilization. Even highly intelligent animals like octupi, ants or crows haven’t created technology or done anything of the sort.
Meanwhile, humans have split atoms, sent men to the Moon, built submarines, invented the Internet, computers, etc.
This argument, of course, only persuades a small slice of people. But it does have some convincing weight to it.
It’s an illusion, though. The only reason there’s a “line” between human and animal intelligence is that we genocided all our near-peers. Anything smart enough to look like a rival was exterminated.
Nature doesn’t really sort itself into the neat, bright-line categories humans like.
There’s really two parts to convincing someone. The first part is convincing someone that a super being exists in the first place. Assuming that can be done, the second part is convincing them that this super being is the God as described in the Christian Bible.
The difficulty with the first part is that the arguments for a super being are weak and non-logical. The argument is generally something like “The universe is so complex that it must have been created by a super being”. But if that’s the case, it would be trivial for such a being to make it obvious that the universe was created that way. If they can make the universe, then they could do something relatively trivial like putting some giant structures on the moon that look like humans that we can see from Earth. It would be undeniable to everyone that something put them there. We might not know if they were put there by gods or aliens, but we would know that something put them there. But there’s nothing like that. Everywhere is just dirt, rocks, air, plants, and animals that are all explained by astronomical and evolutionary theories.
Assuming someone can be convinced of this super being, then convincing them that the Christian God is this super being is relatively easy. Christianity is the religion of “Do whatever you want and go to heaven no matter what.” Sounds good to me. I’m not joining the religion where I have to do a bunch of religious acts all the time, eat weird food, study dead languages, live with suffering, etc. I’ll pick the easy religion where I don’t even have to go to church and I still get to have a wonderful afterlife.
Being easy doesn’t mean it is correct. I suspect there are some Eastern religions where you don’t have to lose your Sundays, or hurt your knees. Plus, if you decide to be Christian, you have to figure out which type of Christian you are going to be.
In any case, if there is a god he is definitely not the Christian god, since the Bible is so full of errors. Way back in Usenet days I issued a challenge - assuming a god did create the universe, tie that god to the Christian one. No one ever answered it.
