random thought; are you claiming it’s logically impossible for an omnipotent being to do something because he’s omnipotent?
Sorry if this becomes a long post; it’s my first real chance to reply since yesterday.
You’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say we couldn’t understand God in any way. We can, because God had revealed some things about himself to us.
First of all, I didn’t say anything about abortion; you are projecting your image of God on me. Reasonable believers disagree on abortion. I would say that God abhors the taking of innocent life; we can disagree on whether or not abortion falls in that category.
When you say “God’s supposed actions throughout history” I’m not sure what you’re looking for. God works through people. Any event I point to, you can say “That wasn’t God, it was so-and-so.” As far as God’s moral direction, most of that is part of our nature. God wants us to do justice, to love mercy, and to be in right relationship with each other and God.
God is not dependent on a literal reading of Genesis. I’m declaring that part of who God is, is the First Cause.
That’s not disproof; you’re just complaining that God hasn’t acted differently than he has. I believe there are bits of truth in Asian religions that point to the Judeo-Christian God, and I don’t have any problem with God creating the universe via the Big Band 13 billion years ago (if that’s what you’re getting at).
I would say that he did, in some form. But even if he had left the Egyptians comletely in the dark it doesn’t prove his non-existance. The Egyptions didn’t know about me either but I exist.
Yes, its an assertion – one that you can’t disprove, which is my point. The Adam & Eve is a red herring, I already said that I (like most Chrisitan thinkers and theologians) am not a literalist.
not true; we do know things He has revealed to us
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one that created the Universe but told a story nothing like the history of a universe,
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it sounds like you’re assuming Biblical literalism again
Only because there is no such thing as his absence.
You haven’t falsified anything yet. I thought this was going to be easily disprovable? It sounds like the only God that’s easily disprovable is the one you think we believe in.
He does interact with us. At least, he interacts with me and we have a history of accounts from people who say that He’s interacted with them. How are you going to verify that?
It’s only evidence to me. But I’m not trying to prove God here; you’re trying to disprove him. I believe both are impossible.
“Ineffable” just means inexpressible – a shorthand way of saying our minds and language are insufficient to fully comprehend God. I’ve given you some of his properties.
I know you’re waiting for bated breath for me to describe God as all-powerful and all-loving. But that’s a trap, because we don’t really know what all-powerful, and especially all-loving, mean.
I’m describing a God who is not “the universe” and who does intereact with us.
Apparently quite a lot, according to the information we have.
I don’t think this was addressed to me, but God is not defined by the historicity of an epic flood.
Can you comprehend an omnipotent God who chooses not to control everything?
Yes, the Bible has internal contradictions and errors. That doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist.
Why not? We can not fully comprehend God, but we can understand him partially. “Ineffable” means indescribable, not unknowable.
Give me an example of something specific about God I’m not saying.
I haven’t seen anything yet that comes close to “disproving” the God of Christian doctrine and theology; only tired arguments against popular misunderstandings and strawmen.
Please remember that most of the worlds Jews and Christians do not believe in a literal Bible. The authors were inspired by God, and wrote according to their understanding of what God was doing in their culture, and from that testimony we can learn how God has interacted with people throughout history. But God’s existence does not depend on a six day creation or a great flood or Moses and the stone tablets.
Ineffability means you can’t even add 1+1 and expect to get the same result twice.
That’s not ineffability then, because if God were ineffable, you could not attach any meaning to your experience, with any certainty whatsoever.
But we do. We don’t need perfect knowledge to invoke the POE, for instance. And anyway, you’re just appealing to ineffability again, which renders anything else you might ascribe to god bunk, by your own admission, like I said.
I wouldn’t say “just” quite so loosely.
And every time you do that, you show that you, personally, do *not *believe your god is ineffable.
*Of course *we know what they mean - it’s our terms, after all.
Easily. But he couldn’t also be all-loving.
But it is strong evidence that the Bible is no guide to god (especially an omnimax one such as the Christian god).
Yet you continually describe him…
Give me a break! God’s not completely, entirely ineffable. God has ineffable qualities. Is that better? :rolleyes:
No, I do not think we know what perfect power and perfect love look like. At best we have a good idea.
Sure he can; we just can’t understand how.
Why not?
But not very well, you’ll notice.
I’m very confused. Over the years there have been millions of people who have claimed revelation from gods and thousands of religions. The revelations are often mutually contradictory. This exercise is for you to build some sort of coherent model of god which we can try to refute. You say there are revelations. How do I tell which are from God and which are made up by people - intentionally or not? You say God was us to do justice. Well, much of our moral sense can be explained by social and physical evolution, and we see variation in it, such as the existence of sociopaths, which make a lot more sense with a physical explanation than a religious one.
I don’t care what you think about abortion - I care how you extract a position from a set of works which in some places treats it as no big deal, and in others seems to care. I have no image of God, I’m just trying to figure out what yours is, and how you came up with it, and if there is any selection criteria for what you think God wants beyond it more or matches what you think is right.
How do you know God was the first cause? If Genesis is a bunch of bull, did any God anywhere ever bother to tell his people what the real story was? Clearly humans want to know how the universe began - thus creation stories in almost all cultures. Does God not care?
You were not around back then, God supposedly was. If there is an eternal god, who cares about his creation, why wait? Is it more plausible that his God just chose not to show up until late in human history, or that this God showed up then because that was when this version was created by that culture? The latter, I think. We’ve already gone over how crucial Adam and Eve are to Christianity - to Judaism they are a just-so story, and no big deal.
one that created the Universe but told a story nothing like the history of a universe,
I’m only assuming that if God was in any way responsible for inspiring the Bible, he’d want to get the stories in it close to the truth. Why not give a high level view of what really happened? You say literalism, but what are you really saying is that there is no reason to think the Bible isn’t a pack of myths. Funny thing to base a faith on.
If you can’t tell the difference between God being absent and being present, he is as good as absent. How do you see the presence of God? In volcanoes, oil spills, and earthquakes? Does God see every sparrow fall, or does he push the sparrows off the branch also. (I think pTerry wrote something like that.) As for what you believe, we’re trying to figure that out. All I get is that God is nice, and you can tell what God isn’t by anything which is demonstrably false.
Easy. If five people who have claimed to talk to God say he wants five different things for humanity, this is not verified. If God told them something they didn’t know, that could be verification. Ask God if P = NP the next time you chat with him, and either a proof or a counterexample. No, the big revelation is that we are supposed to love one another. Wow, that sure takes divine intervention to come up with. Hell, you might even ask him for help in debating more effectively.
Not if you nail down a definition of God. If a particular God is defined as one who created the world in 6 days 6,000 years ago and caused the Flood, we can disprove him. If it is a tri-omni god, we can disprove him through logic.
Purpose of creation? Don’t put the cart before the horse. One, God has goals. Two, God is omnipotent. Three, God’s goals are immediately achieved, because he’s omnipotent. There is no Four.
If god is omnipotent, creation logically can’t exist for a secondary purpose, because then it would be a means to an end, and omnipotent beings don’t need means to ends. Creation as it is, now, must logically exist because god sees creation as it is, now, as an end goal. The journey would have to itself be the point, exactly as you’ve been arguing - it logically can have no other purpose.
Let’s be quite clear about what we’re discussing, because I see a potential for confusion. Here are three statements:
- “begbert2 ought to be an asshole now.”
- “begbert2 ought to be a nice person now.”
- “begbert2 ought to be a nice person in thirty years.”
Logically, one could hold both 1 and 3 to be important; maybe this is a story about dramatic redemption and like in most such stories the person has to start out bad so they can improve as part of the satisfying resolution. Which is to say that what’s important isn’t so much whether I’m an asshole or not, but the story as a whole - the journey. If this is what you mean when you say that both the journey and the destination can be equally important, then there’s no problem - except that this directly contradicts the god-models under discussion.
The god-models in question explicitly claim that 2 is true. It should be pretty clear that both 2 and 1 can’t be true at the same time. But if God is omnipotent, then 1 must be true, because I am an asshole and it’s impossible for me to be successfully defying the will of an omnipotent god.
This talk of ‘journeys’ and ‘destinations’ is obfuscating the fact that these Gods are claimed to think that people ought to be nice now. This is logically impossible, and painting this desire that we be nice as a ‘destination’ is actually sort of moving the goalposts.
Right - and it precisely doesn’t match the other stuff those religions tell us god wants us to be doing.
The religions in question were designed under a ‘powerful warlord, scaled up’ concept of god, without real comprehension of what omnipotence actually entails. It makes sense for powerful (but limited) warlords to send their slaves our to do stuff and then call them back and reward the most obedient and successful. But for an omnipotent being, having slaves do tasks is unnecessary to start with, unless what you actually want is the show of them doing the task, not the completion of the task itself. And being omnipotent, you’ll make servants that put on exactly the show you want to see.
You don’t get to cite (libertarian) free will until you can convince me that it exists. It’s both conceptually incoherent, mechanically unresolvable, and also explicitly contradictory with an omniscient god.
Yes, it’s another one of those unliftable rocks things.
Pardon me for this but I mean it sincerely,
The word god is a human contruct that has come to mean different things to different people. We attempt to describe what we think are qualities of god we’ve experienced but we ultimately don’t and can’t know. Still. the experience or experiences lead us to draw some conclusions and to continue on based on those, although we understand that those very conclusions are subject to review and change as we experience more.
Is love ineffable? Much of our humanity revolves around it and our concept of love, yet all we can really do is follow the lead of our own heart, mind, and experience which varies greatly from person to person for a multitude of reasons We have general ideas about what love may be and agree on some of those but life still challanges us at times to examine our definition, our belief and faith in love, and to choose based on what can only be uncertainty. Will we stop trying to understand and describe those experiences because love remains ineffable?
We don’t need perfect knowledge as much as we need perspective. If we ascribe omi qualities to god that we can never have ourselves then we lack the perspective to claim a logical inevitibility about any argument. IMHO.
The POE is a valid argument and a question that needs to be repeated , but we can only appraoch it from our human perspective. We cannot stand back and encompass all creation , how it all works , and it’s purpose. Lacking that ability we can’t really talk about a supposed omni being who has those abilities and claim logic dictates it’s impossible. IMO logic dictates that our limit is that we can personally find god’s existance incredibly unlikely because of that argument.
That’s a prerfectly reasonable position.
The claim that we can logically disprove god’s existance fails.
And in my opinion omnipotence makes things very easy to understand - there are no exceptions to worry about! No special cases, no unusual circircumstaces, because the awesome power of the omnipotence bulldozes through everything. No unusual abilities are necessary to understand that if an onipotent god wants something, then it happens. And honestly I don’t see how a change in perspective could change this fact without stripping the god of its omnipotence in the process.
I don’t give god an ineffability/get-out-of-logic-jail card. Nothing gets a get-out-of-logic card, though, so at least I’m being fair.
All knowledge of God is imperfect. How do we determine the validity of revelation? We measure it up against other revelation: nature, scripture, human reason, and so on. If someone says “God told me to kill all these children” we compare it to what we know about God to see if it is reasonable or not. A lot of time people disagree, but that means some people are wrong. It doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist.
Social and physical evolution may be the mechanism by which God has instilled in us a sense of justice (or mercy or love or whatever).
I look at Scripture and church tradition in whole and try to determine what my attitude toward abortion should be. Other Christians come do different conclusions than I do.
I don’t “know” God was the first cause in any provable sense, I believe he was and there is so far no reason to believe otherwise. Genesis is not a bunch of bull – it’s a very important story that illustrates God’s relationship to humankind in General and (later in the book) the Jewish people specifically. It’s a theological text, not a science text.
When the bible was written, no one would have been able to understand how the universe began. Gensesis tell us the important things: God created humans and wants to be in relationship with them. The rest is not that important. And as humanity has grown, we have learned more and more about the physical mechanism of creation. That’s how God seems to work.
Why wait for what?
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Is it more plausible that his God just chose not to show up until late in human history, or that this God showed up then because that was when this version was created by that culture? The latter, I think.
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Late in human history? Awareness of spiritual beings goes back as far as we can reasonably tell.
I missed that conversation - why is it crucial that A&E were historical figures?
He told the important bits. He revealed the details later.
The stories are truth, whether or not they really happend. The Bible is not a history or science book. The Bible may have a lot of myths, but they are true myths.
Whole books have been written about this. In natural disasters, I see God inspiring people to help each other. Taking leave from their jobs to clean up oil. Adopting children orphaned by earthquakes. Helping people recover when their homes are destroyed by flood (which recently happened right here in Nashville).
Actually, that’s part of it - you’ve hit on something very important. God made us rational beings. If we believe something about God that is shown demonstably false, then we are wrong about ascribing that to God. That’s why God is unfalsifyable incapable of being unproven.
If five people say that God has told them five mutually contradictory things, you’ve only proven that at least four of them are wrong.
I’m not trying to prove God. You’re trying to disprove him.
So God is controlled by the majority rule? Whatever’s in the majority of the stuff we decide is revelation wins?
Please don’t pay attention to nature, scripture, or human reason then; in nature “might makes right and the weak get killed and eaten” is the universal rule, in the majority of scripture that I’ve seen unbelievers are treated similarly, and human history hasn’t exactly been populated by nice guys either…
God is not “controlled” by anything. But as far as developing doctrine, and offering what we think we know about God, we look for general consensus. And obviously there is a lot we disagree about.
No, you’re right, the world is messed up. But how do you know its messed up? By what standard?
Sorry, I tripped over the fact that God doesn’t actually exist, and thus is entirely defined by what people say about him, regardless of how you choose to pick which opinions win.
Playing the game that God is some subtle* entity whose intents can be plumbed by examining the world, one might point out that science and sociology already has the examining of nature and human nature pretty much covered, with little progress on finding any god’s intents or proterties. And when it comes to examining human opinions on the subject independent of external support, one questions the usefullness of taking a poll about guesses.
- in actuality an omnipotent god’s desires are at one level not subtle at all, by definition: what we see is what he wants. Why he wants it may be in question; he may be torturing that baby because he’s a sadist, or because it’s part of the game, or because it’s good drama - that’s up in the air, though we do minimally know that he does want the torture to be occur.
Who said it was messed up? It’s got evil in it, but evil is a human construct. The world (particularly nature) is barbaric, dangerous, and cruel from the perspectives of a modern civilized society. I like not being tortured, so I have a problem with humans being tortured, but this doesn’t necessarily hold for a god. And if there’s an omnipotent god, then we know it doesn’t hold for them, because it’s being allowed to happen.
Thank you for your response. You’ve provided a textbook example of the absurdity of the religious view.
We have proved that the version of God who actually orders people to kill children doesn’t exist, don’t we? You don’t seem to actually have a definition of god, you seem to have this broad view of his characteristics, which you refine by chopping away ones you don’t like. If we are god’s creations, why can’t he tell people to kill children of enemies? Isn’t odd that the moral guidance of the Bible evolved with the evolution of human ethics?
A great example of unfalsifiability. I provide an example of how ethics and morals develop without the need for a god, and you shoehorn him in, invisibly. If God directed the evolution of morals through genetics, why did he allow the kind of variance which produces sociopaths? You can’t use a free will argument, for many of these people are driven by their hormones, and do not make informed choices to do evil. Pure evolution explains it quite well, I don’t think you can.
Why is your position more valid than theirs? Isn’t what you are really doing is making a decision based on whatever ethical and moral positions are important to you, and then using religion to back it up? An ethical guide which both condones and condemns killing is not much help - to use it you must throw away the parts you don’t like.
First, there is no reason to believe in any sentient first cause - it raises the problem of where the first cause came from. But let’s say there is, and we can call it a god. We must connect that god to a human god. If there was some connection, then the human god who was the first cause can be differentiated by human created gods who weren’t by being accurate about creation. Your god either got it wrong or never bothered to describe it. However, there is a better reason why no human created god is the first cause. The universe is very old, and our sun did not even begin until 6 - 7 billion years after the Big Bang. If a god created the universe with the intention of also creating sentient life (if indirectly, through evolution) why wait so long? Thus, it is implausible that any god we know of created the universe. So your supposition about God creating humans doesn’t hold up. Learning more about the universe as we mature works perfectly well if there is no god, even better, since if there was a god he could have told us something useful about it, which he didn’t.
If God created us to interact with us, why wait until hundreds of thousands of years after the first human. Sure the ancients worshiped - fertility goddesses, animals, the Sun. Are you saying god was fine with idol worship?
As for A&E, Christ’s salvation requires there be an original sin to make us be saved from. If God created us sinful, then rescuing was from what he did would be absurd. If there was no Adam and Eve, no one to sin for all mankind, to make that choice, then there is no reason we who live later should suffer.
Which important bits? Which details got revealed? Is the Large Hadron Collider some sort of holy site where revelations will be made?
Try to step outside your faith and read this passage. You are sure your religion is true, so you say even the lies it propounds are really true. If someone found the body of Jesus, dead as a doornail, you would no doubt claim that he was spiritually resurrected, and that there is no need to change your belief. I wonder what you could learn that would make you change?
As for natural evil, you saying god made these kids orphans so that some nice people could adopt them. Sucks to be their parents, doesn’t it? Could he someone have managed this marvelous feat without drowning entire families? Your god is a monster.
This is precisely why we asked for you to define God, and why you are unable to. As people demonstrate to you various aspect of God are false, you just chop them out of your definition and act as nothing had changed. I have news for you - that a view is unfalsifiable is not a good thing - it means the view is intellectually vapid. I can claim that my dog created the universe last Thursday, and you have no way of disproving it. That is as empty an assertion as your god assertions.
For most of human history the consensus was that there were multiple gods. Why is ours any better?
Let’s say you have a beloved dog who the vet discovers to have a cancerous tumor. You might decide to euthanize your pet; or you might decide to have it undergo intrusive and painful surgery; or you might choose to let it go and hope the dog doesn’t suffer too much before it dies. From the dog’s perspective, are any of these loving actions by you? She doesn’t understand cancer, all she knows is that either you’ve killed her, allowed her to be tortured, or allowed her to suffer. Does that mean you don’t love your dog?
When you define God as all-powerful and all-loving, yet observe evil and suffering, you come to the conclusion that there is no God. I come to the conclusion that we don’t fully understand love or suffering, nor do we fully understand God.
We only know that he allows it to occur. I often allow my children to do things I would prefer they didn’t.
You don’t grok omnipotence - if an omnipotent god decided to euthanize the dog or to have it undergo intrusive and painful surgery or to let it go and hope the dog doesn’t suffer too much before it dies, then all of those actions are needlessly cruel. The loving action would be to just cause the pain to stop without needless cost.
But why do you allow it?
Let’s just pick an example - suppose your child steals a candy bar from a store. Keeping in mind omnsicience, you’re watching the whole time and could stop them anytime. Why don’t you? Do you want them to learn from their experience? An omnipotent god could grant that knowledge without inconveneincing the store owner. Do you want them to have a candy bars? Keeping in mind omnipotence you could just give them one.
I could keep speculating, and answering my own speculations, but I’ll just let you answer instead. Be wary of citing libertarian free will though - it doesn’t exist, and besides it’s hardly an end unto itself. What’s the end game?
Glad to be of help.
I can say this confidently: I don’t understand how God would or could give that order. I could be wrong, but it seems to contradict what we know about God through the rest of the scriptures and the testimony of Jesus. Others will disagree with me.
I try to chop away ones that are inconsistent, if that’s what you mean.
He could, but that would seem inconsistent with his character and that’s why I think it’s unlikely.
I would say that as human ethics evolved, we became better able to understand and apply revelation (from scripture, nature, etc.)
Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to tell you? It’s unfalsifiable.
I can, it’s a little doctrine I like to call The Fall.
Why do you assume God would tell us how he created the universe? He gave us the ability to figure it out.
I’m saying that God revealed himself in part to those ancients, and they responded as best they knew how.
Christ’s salvation presupposes sin, but not necessarily the doctrine of Original Sin.
He did not create us sinful. He did create us with the ability to sin, which we have all taken advantage of. The doctrine of Original Sin is not a defining aspect of God - Jews don’t believe in Original Sin, for example, and neither do many Christian denominations.
The parts about who God is and his relationship with us.
They’re not lies, they’re stories. Is the Illiad a lie? But to answer your question, if Jesus’s body were found it would certainly cause me to re-evaluate my Christian faith. I’m not sure it would cause me to no longer be a theist, though.
You’re looking at it from the dog’s point of view (reference to my earlier post).
Hey, I don’t know what to tell you. You and others made the claim that any God-theory is easily disprovable. Have I won that argument? I can show you a lot of evidence that the universe wasn’t created last Thursday.
Ah, ok, why does an omnipotent God allow any suffering at all to occur rather than magically making everyone perfect automatons? And, I’m not allowed to cite free will?
Hell if I know. What am I, God?