Okay. I don't think I've advanced an opinion of my own as to why God is inaccessible to logic - you seem to be saying something similar to the one possibility that I did present. I suggested that if there were a God, He might very well want it that way, and you've chosen to fill in the "how he did it" part - by being not a thing or external to reality or outside the plane or blah blah blah. Whatever. I don't think that contradicts the possibility I presented, so much as supplementing it.
Of course, I do have an opinion of my own. As Man has sought to insulate God from the progress of science and discovery, and to prevent God from being falsifiable by such, Man has necessarily been forced to redefine God in terms that increasingly place Him outside the realm of logic. The side-effect of rendering God unfalsifiable is that God is also unprovable. You say God is "supra-logical" - oddly, I agree with you. I just think that it was Man that put Him there.
ME: Does God make a habit of revealing Himself directly to men in order to give them proof of His existence? Of course not?.
YOU: God doesn?t reveal Himself to men to ?prove His existence? to men; He reveals Himself in order to have relationships with men.
Which is basically the same thing I said. I said He doesn't reveal Himself in order to prove Himself. You said the same thing, and added a bit of opining about what He does reveal Himself for. Fair enough.
No, He doesn?t; and if He did, it wouldn?t end all doubts about the Reality of God. If He were to do these things, our atheist/materialist/positivist/phenomenalist friends would turn themselves inside-out to come up with a ?plausible explanation? for the fireworks from ?natural,? immanent causes. You know that as well as I do, general_re.
I don't know any such thing. And neither should you, by the tenets of your own faith. You're not seriously telling me that God could not, if He wanted, reveal Himself and provide irrefutable proof of His own existence, are you?
I admit, it's been a while since I've been to church, but have they discarded that whole omnipotence thing in the last decade or so? Because I missed it if they did - I thought omnipotence was still a central part of Christian doctrine.
Awfully presumptuous, telling God what He can't do...
But you know, while we're on the subject of presumption, let me take a moment to tell you about the advantages of dropping this God concept, and instead taking the universe (or, as I've come to think of it lately, Un-v-rs-) to be eternal and uncaused, and existing of its own accord.
Advantage number 1. It's not abstract, and doesn't avoid providing proof of its own existence, unlike some other metaphysical concepts I could name. Look around you - the existence of Un-v-rs- is obvious. It's everywhere you look. Everything you see is a part of it. There's no question of whether it exists, unless you're a postmodernist. But they don't believe in much of anything outside themselves anyway, so who cares about that sort of irrationality?
Advantage number 2. Un-v-rs- is not personifiable. It doesn't have desires or wishes or goals or anything silly like that. This means that Un-v-rs- doesn't require anyone to do things like worship it, or evangelize its existence, or stuff like that. This frees up a great deal of time, especially when comparing Un-v-rs- to some other, more demanding metaphysical concepts I could name.
Oh, sure, if you want, you can go forth and proselytize about the existence of Un-v-rs-, but because Un-v-rs- is obviously omnipresent (unlike some entirely abstract metaphysical concepts I could name), you'll probably find that the only people who seriously deny the existence of Un-v-rs- are those same postmodernists. And they won't listen to you anyway, unless you're prepared to spend a great deal of time wallowing in phrases like "transgressing the hermeneutical boundaries of the genderless self-actualization", or similar nonsense. My advice is not to bother - leave them in their little sandbox to play with themselves, and they generally won't bother you much.
Advantage number 3. Because Un-v-rs- is not personifiable, it's not hung up on imposing its own meaning on itself, or on you. This is great, because, unlike what some other metaphysical concepts I could name would permit, you can decide for yourself what the "meaning" of your life is, or even what the "meaning" of Un-v-rs- itself is. For myself, I have chosen to believe that the meaning of life and Un-v-rs- is encapsulated in one simple phrase - "Laissez les bon temps rouler". Un-v-rs- is not a party-pooper about such things.
Advantage number 4. The "rules". Unlike some more abstract metaphysical concepts I could name, the "rules" that apply to our everyday lives are generally simple and easily quantifiable. Rules like F = ma, which help us to understand why it is a bad idea to run into things, or to have things run into you. Unlike some other abstract metaphysical concepts I could name, Un-v-rs- doesn't just tell you "Thou shalt not jump off of ladders", or whatever. Instead, you can simply apply the rules to your situation in advance, and decide for yourself whether jumping off that ladder is a good idea.
Obviously, the advantages of accepting Un-v-rs- are far greater than just this, but hopefully I've given you some insight into what they are...
More people would have experiences of this sort if it weren't for the fact that most "educated, intelligent" people these days slam the door shut on God, thinking Him "dead." I am so amused, however, that for three hundred years now, the "executioners" or "murderers of God" have been nervously busying themselves about the putative "corpose," as if to reassure themselves that He is, in fact, still dead.
Think about that for a minute: If God did not "exist," if He were really "dead," then why has a cottage industry of "undertakers" been devoting itself to "refuting" or denying Him for lo, the past three centuries?
Old habits take time to break. Not everyone is rational all the time. But if we're going to accept things on faith, I urge you to consider the advantages of Un-v-rse-.
Okay. I don't think I've advanced an opinion of my own as to why God is inaccessible to logic — you seem to be saying something similar to the one possibility that I did present. I suggested that if there were a God, He might very well want it that way….
Yes, I caught your speculation on that in the earlier post. That paradoxically, the seemingly total absence of “objective” proof actually points to a “hidden god” who “wants” man to come to Him by faith alone. At any rate, “the absence of proof is not proof of absence.”
As Man has sought to insulate God from the progress of science and discovery, and to prevent God from being falsifiable by such, Man has necessarily been forced to redefine God in terms that increasingly place Him outside the realm of logic. The side-effect of rendering God unfalsifiable is that God is also unprovable. You say God is "supra-logical" — oddly, I agree with you. I just think that it was Man that put Him there.
Here’s where you lose me, general_re. It seems you buy into Feuerbach’s and Marx’s “projection theory” — that all God is, is merely the sum total of human aspiration and desire “reified” as a fictional being who, when you come right down to it, looks suspiciously like man himself “idealized.”
On the other hand, in these statements, you seem to be in the grip of the intentionalist fallacy. You have taken God, isolated certain attributes which you impute to Him, and created an “idea” or “symbol” of God out of them, which you employ as a notional substitute for Him in your arguments.
When we say “intentionalist,” we don’t mean that the person in the grip of the fallacy is a person of bad will or anything like that. All “intentionalist” means is that the human mind is so constituted that, in order for it to process information, it must “intend” an object in order to think about it. It must hold the “object” in consciousness in order to perform mental operations with it.
In short, we intend the objects we think about and in the process convert them into language symbols that are meaningful for us. Instantly, we are at a “first remove” from Reality itself; we have entered the world of abstraction. An abstraction may be further burdened by the natural propensity of the human mind to be strongly conditioned by the pull of “thingly” reality. Even though not all objects of thought are “things.”
God is not a “thing,” as in an existence in thing-reality. Yet in order for man to think about God at all, he has to “reduce” Him to a cognitive symbol that he can understand; and what man most understands is thing-reality. And thus we begin to “lose God” in the translation.
Just had to get that off my chest. We need to revisit this: “ Man has sought to insulate God from the progress of science and discovery, and to prevent God from being falsifiable by such, Man has necessarily been forced to redefine God in terms that increasingly place Him outside the realm of logic.”
General_re, this is the total “inversion” of the way I see it. Man has to defend God from the progress of science??? Good grief, I’d always thought that science itself is an indispensable bearer of God’s continuing revelation. Why would God need to be defended against the revelation of His own Truth?
The fact is, no finding of science has ever, to date, refuted any “proposition” articulated in the Bible. If you doubt this, then go find me one.
You're not seriously telling me that God could not, if He wanted, reveal Himself and provide irrefutable proof of His own existence, are you?
Heaven forfend that I, a mere mortal, should ever “tell God what to do.” Fact is, I don’t know what sense it makes to speak of “what God wants.” But if I had to, I’d say that, whatever it is, He can do whatever He wants. I.e., He is omnipotent.
But why would He do a thing like that? What purpose would it serve? God has already given man everything he needs. Man just needs to use his mind and open his soul to God. The rest takes care of itself.
…let me take a moment to tell you about the advantages of dropping this God concept, and instead taking the universe (or, as I've come to think of it lately, Un-v-rs-) to be eternal and uncaused, and existing of its own accord.
yikes! Okay. This is you, [I’m in brackets]:
Advantage number 1. It's not abstract, and doesn't avoid providing proof of its own existence…. [God reveals; he leaves the matter of proof to us. Some say it is to be found in a doctrine; others, in conscious experience of the world; still others, in some combination of the two.]
Look around you -- the existence of Un-v-rs- is obvious. It's everywhere you look. [Yes, God’s creation is truly breathtaking! As the ancient story goes, He created the world, and found it to be “Good.” Then He put man into it – man “made in His image” – that is, in possession of reason and free will. God made the world into an intelligible order that the human mind could understand. Or was it the other way around?]
Advantage number 2. Un-v-rs- is not personifiable. It doesn't have desires or wishes or goals or anything silly like that. This means that Un-v-rs- doesn't require anyone to do things like worship it, or evangelize its existence, or stuff like that. This frees up a great deal of time…. [No, Un-v-rs- doesn’t have desires or wishes; what it seems to have is an ingrained and highly dynamic ORDER. Or at least that would be a fair description of “universe” IMHO. Where did this ORDER come from? Good grief, not just the theologians, but scientists know that ORDER is there; indeed, it is the entire job of science to explore and articulate it.]
Advantage number 3. Because Un-v-rs- is not personifiable, it's not hung up on imposing its own meaning on itself, or on you…. [As I take it, general_re, Un-v-rs- for you is the “god substitute.” You posit its nature as impersonal. Fine. But frankly, I don’t know what to do with an “abstraction of an abstraction” like this. But if we could speak of God instead, then it seems to me that He is not trying to “impose” on us; He doesn’t need to, by logic. He has already given man everything man needs to thrive in life, importantly including the ability to ascertain for himself the truth of his own existence. And since God created Reality, I can’t imagine that God would disapprove of man’s quest of the truth of Reality, the exploration of which He expressly fitted man for, and which – far from being a divine imposition -- God seemingly has left an “open question” for man.]
Advantage number 4. The "rules". Unlike some more abstract metaphysical concepts I could name, the "rules" that apply to our everyday lives are generally simple and easily quantifiable…. [Well, sure, general_re. But you still ditch the question: From whence do “rules” derive? And by rules, I mean both the laws of nature and the moral laws. Diamond queried you on your moral defense against an Eichmann. You had no good answer for him, really. Point is, speaking logically, law can have only one source, not many. If there were more than one, “law” wouldn’t be law; it would be one among different competing answers to the question: What is law?]
"Old habits are hard to break?" Well, maybe that's a good thing.
Better stop for now, general_re – don’t want to be a “bandwidth hog” (Ooooppps! Too late!) Thank you truly for your last. All my best, bb.