Gladly granted! I will restate, however, that even if we accept that the world exists as our collective senses seem to suggest (which means apple pies are not phantoms), that does NOT mean that we can assume that God does not exist–only that we may not be able to find objective proof of God’s existence.
I’m sure we both assess that circumstance differently, but that doesn’t render the existence of God any more or less likely by virtue of a discovery of a spiritual function of the brain. We could, again, find an “apple pie” function of the brain, one that allows us to detect the taste of such a thing. That discovery doesn’t mean apple pies do or don’t exist. It merely means our brains are equipped to detect them.
Such a discovery would be cause for reflection. But my ability to love or feel compassion, etc., is likewise vulnerable to manipulation by outside entities. If aliens reduced my brain’s ability to love (or increased it), that wouldn’t make the act more or less worthy. Unless we’re back to the notion that ANY perception is a potential act of trickery, an illusion, a shadow of something–a notion which we two, the only two persons accepted to exist in this thread, have already disposed of.
I think we’ve pounded the definition into a fine dust. Since we don’t seem to disagree on anything in this exchange except how to assign the word “arbitrary,” I’m not sure there’s much left to clarify. Your definition isn’t terribly troubling to me, though I have a semantical disagreement with it. Again, that’s not the sense of the word others have given it in this thread.
I said there is no universal Truth. Truth with a capital “T” is not the same as lower-case truth. Lower-case truth changes, minute by minute, individual by individual. Therefore, capital “T” Truth cannot exist. You’re welcome to provide an example of a universal Truth if you have one.
I should have been more clear. There are scientific truths, like the theory of relativity, but even those are disputed by some people (I’m not one of 'em). I guess I can actually come up with one truth – we’re all gonna die some day. But even that could be disproven sometime in the future as science advances. I was referring to the religious/moral Truths being discussed here. I hope that makes sense.
Oh, I knew what you meant. I was actually, in my usual assholish way, seeking to support your thesis by asserting that only statements about the physical world can be accorded the value of truth, as statements about religious or spiritual matters are, at best, about subjective matters, and, at worst, are about imaginary ones.
You tell me. It’s not True that there’s a god. It’s not True that all believers in god believe in the same god. It’s not True that god, if he exists, is a “good” god because the definition of “good” isn’t a universal Truth. Do you have an example of a universal Truth?
No, I don’t think the absence of a Truth about the existence of a god equals a Truth that there isn’t. We all have a lower-case truth, whichever way we lean. It’s irrelevant to everyone else which way the other guy leans because it’s all internal.
