Y'all come in. I'll make you religious (unless you wish otherwise of course)

Great Debates
1

They got this word “God”. They got a lot of ideas about what God is like, but with extremewly rare exceptions at the core of it all God is The Good. The rest is all “that which is ascribed TO The Good”, and they are not all in agreement. Hither and yon, lots of personification going on. For now bracket that off. If there were ancient Romans who wrote as if they believed in an actual blindfolded chick named “Justice” that wouldn’t get in the way of you appreciating their jurisprudence or court procecures, yeah? Just bracket that stuff aside. We’re into abstracting “That Which Is the Good” here.

They got a set of notions about how one knows what The Good is all about. You know, moving from a very general abstraction to how it would manifest in various situations. Same as how a general principle would manifest in various described situations. That’s the kind of logic problem that’s fun and easy to apply (and occasionally challenging as well) when the params of the general are laid out. But instead of defining “The Good” in some terms and then from then on that’s what you refer back to, it kind of stays undefined. Like if I asked you to define “what is good” and you said “here’s some off-the-cuff criteria and observations but I’m not done yet…” and then we moved on anyhow to trying to apply the general rule to various situations when you’re actually still involved in the process of defining the general rule. You say you reserve the right to change your operational definitions as various hypothetical situations come up and perhaps make you think in new ways. I say yes. So it’s not formal logic, it’s more like a logical “jam session”. You’re still formulating your axioms and terms, OK?

Now, for the sake of political (GD) argument, what if, on no more basis than that, you declare the entire process in which you’re engaged “a religion”, as a discursive tactic when facing off with the religious? I’m guessing you’re thinking:

a) It’s conceding intellectual territory. I would be moving from a position of saying there ain’t no God and religion is unmitigated horseshit to a position of saying God exists and religion is fine, it’s just that I know God better than they do and their religion sucks ass.

and

b) It’s intellectually dishonest and I don’t DO intellectually dishonest. I don’t regard this abstraction as “God” or the mere process of pondering “what’s good” to be somehow special or unusual among my thoughts & contemplations. It’s philosophical inquiry, not religion, end of story.
… but is it really conceding intellectual territory and/or being intellectually dishonest? Or is it a genuine attempt on your part to compare apples with apples, corresponding realities with corresponding realities (and perhaps, perchance, to get them to re-examine theirs) and to challenge them to explain anew how their approach differs from what you’ve outlined?

Strategically you would be entering their turf. That could be viewed as a concession but that’s not the only available interpretation of entering someone else’s turf. Strategically you would be deploying some of their terminology. That could be viewed as a concession but that’s not the only available interp there either.

Yeah, I consider myself theistic. I’m happy to take on folks from either contingent.

2

Maybe it’s the late hour but… huh?

3

It’s intellectually dishonest because the vast majority of believers in God–at least in the Abrahamic monotheist tradition (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) don’t believe God is just some process of seeking the Good, or whatever it is you’re driving at. The vast majority of the three billion or so believers in the monotheist God believe God is a person, with attributes like a will, knowledge, the capacity to take actions or cause events to happen, the capacity to have such emotions as love, jealousy, or hate, and the roles of creating, ruling, and governing the Universe. Some of these things may be seen as anthropomorphized analogies; certainly references to “the hand of God” or “the face of God” will be seen as analogical, not literal, by most believers (with Jesus being a complicating factor for Christians). Still, trying to radically redefine “God” away from being some sort of Person (Whom countless believers are convinced they have a personal relationship with) in the face of of the actual usage of billions of people over many centuries, is simply confusing the issue.

It’s basically the inverse of the No True Scotsman Fallacy. Perhaps we could call it the Five-Legged Dog Fallacy, after the supposed Abraham Lincoln quote: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” “Five?” “No, four–calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

4

There are a lot of ideas out there about what Santa Claus is, and some differing opinions as to his exact nature; why, there are some who have even trained themselves to say “Santa Claus doesn’t exist”. And yet, at the core of it all, Santa Claus is love and generosity and devotion. Sure, people talk about other bits, but we’re abstracting here. Surely we can all agree that love and generosity and devotion abound? It seems to me a greatly clarifying terminological advance for us to accept that Santa Claus exists, just that some people have different views on what Santa Claus is like from others.

5

Which, since God is a figment of the imagination, allows the believers to simply declare their personal prejudices to be the one and only Good. No need for logic, evidence, consistancy, compassion, a concern for consequences, mercy, common sense or anything else worthwhile in your moral code when you can just say “God says so”. Believing in God has no positive effect on people’s goodness that I’ve ever seen, and usually the opposite.

And claiming that “God is the Good” or “God is Love” like people say requires that you warp those terms until they don’t mean what they say. “God is Imaginary” or “God is Evil” or “God is Uncaring” fit the states of the universe and humanity much better than unsupported platitudes about how wonderful God is. And they don’t require you to warp “good” until it means “evil”.

6

Praise Jesus and his mighty reindeer! :confused:

7

Would this be yet another case of coming to a conclusion, then form-fitting the evidence to match the conclusion?

8

Now, folks, let’s hold a moment. AHunter3’s just reinvented Buddism, near as I can tell: a religion that can be without a deity at all. Am I in error? (My great great grandfather did the same back in Ought Three. Called it the Great I Am.)

How’s his construct differ? How can you relate the pair of 'em to religions with an actual Godhead?

9

The OP rankles me, in that if ‘Goodness’ is assimilated by the concept ‘God’ making the two indistinguishable, it implies that Goodness is rooted in the supernatural, giving God all the credit, while all that we can muster as human animals is sinfulness and fallibility as usual. The human imagination is quite capable of creating the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (and indeed ‘god’).

10

Did I bring up “supernatural”?

You don’t like it, dispense with it. Define God as natural and deny the usefulness of “supernatural” as a category.

11

Okay, but if all I’m left with is mundane Goodness, can’t we dispense with ‘God’ and His accompanying baggage altogether?

12

If we’ve dispensed with “supernatural” there’s not much use for “mundane” either, at least not as you’re using it.

13

What “natural” God could even exist ? Once you start talking about real, as opposed to supernatural things, you start running into pesky things like logic and physical laws.

It has the “use” of being real.

14

For what it’s worth, I do, personally, believe that ‘Goodness’ and ‘God’ are both Indistinguishable.

15

Well, you are simply wrong. There’s no logical reason why a God couldn’t be evil or indifferent.

16

I suggest you take another look at what you’ve quoted, paying particular attention to the bolded bit. :slight_smile:

17

:dubious: None of it is bolded.

And if your argument is that it’s your personal belief, then your “personal belief” is wrong, and not all that personal, since it’s a claim about a supposed objective reality and a logical principle. God either is a certain thing ( “good” in this case ) or not, and God is either distinguishable from good or not. The first is unknowable and ridiculously implausible ( given the unlikelyhood of there being a God to begin with ), and the second flatly wrong.

18

Edit window passed due to sluggish hamsters : Ah. I get the joke now, but it would be funnier if I didn’t often hear people say that dead seriously.

19

Is it not possible that, as with your miscommunication with Indistinguishable above, you’re kind of missing the point somewhere in here while operating under the confident assumption that you aren’t?

If you wish to assert that Goodness does not exist, I am ready and willing to read your argument to that effect.

And if we’re stipulating that there is no “supernatural” the term “mundane” is useless infofar as (at least as you appear to be using it) it refers to things that are “not supernatural”, which by our mutually agreed-upon definition means “everything”. Everything is mundane in that sense.

Which brings us back to

“All”?

20

How much of a concession are you talking about here? Do I have to accept that such a “God” exists, in actual factual reality? Why? You haven’t given any evidence that one does; you’re just speculating.

If all I have to do is temporarily entertain the question of “what if such an amorphous God exists, what would that mean”, then I and other atheists do this all the time. Religious discussion around here aren’t:

Theist: “How can we know god loves us?”
Atheist: “There is no god.”
T: “Says you; but supposing there was a god, how can we know-”
A: “There Is No God.”
T: “Just for the sake of argument-”
A: “No argument! No God!”
T: “But-”
A: “NO GOD NO NO NO NO!”
T: “I’m just-”
A: “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA”

Um, no. We can entertain the possibility of God and heaven and whatever else for the sake of argument just fine. Sure, we often then immidiately proceed to proving something the theists don’t like based on the assumptions they’re asking us to entertain, and we occasionally call theists doodyheads, but that doesn’t mean we’re entirely incapable or unwilling to even speculate about what it might mean if some God existed.

During virtually every discussion on this board, atheists entertain the theoretical possibility of a god, and use theistic terminology to boot. If that’s not enough, what more do you want?