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.
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?....betty boop
Yes!
So many reputable scientists (not those of the Carl Sagan/Paul Ehrlich bent, mind you)...even those initially embracing atheism....the closer they become to 'understanding' that part of the universe in which they study, the more they seem to accept (or at least acknowledge the possibility of) the concept of a Supreme Being. I have read countless accounts of such 'conversions'. The intelligent, timeless, often mind-boggling deliberate design of the universe cannot help but lend itself to the notion that it was created (by a Master Scientist/Mathematician), rather than simply just happening.
I defy anyone to come up with something of any universal significance that doesn't have an innate sense of order/design. The assertion that the universe is eternal, yet uncaused amazes me. That anything in this universe (life, in particular) evolved through blind forces of nature (or whatever else you might choose to call the supposedly random happenings involved) literally defies logic.
I have a degree in mathematics, but I teach music. I am blessed to enjoy 'the best of both worlds.' Yet, in reality, they are one. The same concept of order/deliberate design permeates both (and, to my mind, every other 'study' that exists). Pythagoras was attracted to the study of musical harmony because it exhibited common numerical relationships that could be found elsewhere....in innumerable elsewheres....in the universe. His discovery of the arithmetical ratios between harmonic intervals persuaded him that there must be a concrete and all-pervasive link between music and mathematics -- two seemingly unrelated fields, but two fields which are really inextricably intertwined. And the intertwining does not end with harmonic intervals. Music (both the hearing and appreciating of it, and the composing of it) is simply (but beautifully) an aesthetic branch of mathematics.
Other Greek philosophers agreed. In his book 'The Artful Universe', John Barrow says:
In Plato's mind, what we hear of musical harmony is a pale reflection of a deeper perfection in the world of numbers....We appreciate it only because the rhythms of our body and our soul are pre-formed to resonate with the harmony in the celestial realm. It was this transcendental philosophy of music that Plato reinforced by his wider belief that the world of appearances is a shadow of another perfect world filled with the ideal forms of the things around us.
Louis Agassiz (acknowledged even by current researchers as the greatest natural scientist of his day -- the late nineteenth century) stated:
In our study of natural objects we are approaching the thoughts of the Creator, reading his conceptions, interpreting a system that is His and not ours.....facts are the words of God, and we may heap them together endlessly, but they will teach us little or nothing till we place them in their true relations, and recognize the thought that binds them together.
There is an interesting substantiating trend that has been occurring for many decades: the number of inventions based on copying 'nature' (Some would define the 'nature' that is being copied as millions of years of mindless, random evolution, rather than God's handiwork. So be it.)
Janine Benys, in 'Biomimicry', observes:
We realize that all our inventions have already appeared in nature in a more elegant form and at a lot less cost to the planet. Our most clever architectural struts and beams are already featured in lily pads and bamboo stems. Our central heating and air conditioning are bested by the termite tower's steady 86 degrees F. Our most stealthy radar is hard of hearing compared to the bat's multifrequency transmission. And our new 'smart materials' can't hold a candle to the dolphin's skin or to the butterfly's proboscis. Even the wheel, which we always took to be a uniquely human creation has been found in the tiny rotary motor that propels the flagellum of the world's most ancient bacteria. How do dragonflies outmaneuver our best helicopters? How do hummingbirds cross the Gulf of Mexico on less than one tenth of an ounce of fuel? How do ants carry the equivalent of hundreds of pounds in a dead heat through the jungle? These individual achievements pale, however, when we consider the intricate interliving that characterizes whole systems, communities like tidal marshes or saguaro forests. In ensemble, living things maintain a dynamic stability, like dancers in an arabesque, continually juggling resources without waste.... Studying these poems day in and day out, biomimics develop a high degree of awe, bordering on reverence.
One of the most incredible books I have ever read is 'The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics', by Roger Penrose. The following excerpt pertains here:
How 'real' are the objects of the mathematician's world? From one point of view, it seems that there can be nothing real about them at all. Mathematical objects are just concepts; they are the mental idealizations that mathematicians make, often stimulated by the appearance and seeming order of aspects of the world about us, but mental idealizations nonetheless. Can they be other than mere arbitrary constructions of the human mind? At the same time, there often does appear to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided toward some external truth -- a truth which has a reality of its own, and which is revealed only partially to any one of us.
Is mathematics invention or discovery? When mathematicians come upon their results, are they just producing elaborate mental constructions which have no actual reality, but whose power and elegance is sufficient simply to lull even their inventors into believing that these mere mental constructions are 'real'? Or are mathematicians really uncovering truths which are, in fact, already 'there'? -- truths whose existence is quite independent of the mathematicians' activities?
I have always understood, appreciated, and respected the mindset of those who do not acknowledge the existence of God on a personal level. Yet, if one refuses to acknowledge God in the world around us, then, at the very least, I would hope that one would acknowledge (omnipresent, in all fields of study, discovery, invention and observation) amazingly apparent order and deliberate design that cannot possibly be attributed to random chance, even a randomness that spans an eternity of time.
Universal, natural 'truths' have their own mysterious independence and timelessness. The physical world and the Platonic world of pure mathematics are (forgive the use of an overused word) awesome. The distinguished number theorist, Paul Erdos, talks of 'God's book, in which all the best proofs are recorded.' Even the best human scientists and mathematicians are occasionally only allowed to glimpse part of a page. But what a privilege.
Of course. I merely present it as a possibility that a person of faith could reasonably attach themselves to in order to explain why no logical proof is possible.
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.?
That argument might carry more water if I didn't suspect that this is exactly how you regard everyone else's god(s). I'm not particularly interested in what sorts of things people ascribe to God, or how they explain this fiction that they see. Your motives are your motives, and do not change the truth or falsity of what you see or do not see. As is true for me, of course.
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.
Isn't that clever? It must "hold the object in consciousness in order to perform mental operations with it". Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?
This is precisely why the intentionalist fallacy is a big steaming load of excrement. In one fell swoop, you've invalidated all abstract thought whatsoever. I'm sure you don't think so, but you have.
So, basically, unless I can fully grasp the (posited) nature of God, any mental calculus I employ is invalid, because I cannot fully imagine all the implications and ramifications of God. I cannot fully and deeply comprehend the essence of God, so any thoughts I have are invalid.
Of course, I don't think you fully grasp the essence of the Eiffel Tower I mentioned earlier. You can't possibly understand every strut and stair, every nut and bolt, every single atom of the thing. You've just abstracted it away from "reality" with your thought-symbols, haven't you? In fact, I bet you do that with every single thing you've ever talked about in your entire life - you've reduced it away from its essential reality into some abstract representation, and thus lost its essence in the process. You are now unqualified to discuss anything at all, because you can't capture the reality of the thing you wish to discuss with your "words" and "thoughts" and "symbols".
Is it really any wonder that this sort of thing is really nothing more than a modern revision of the Sophists' arguments? Congratulations - you've discovered that the representation of a thing is not the thing itself. This occurs to most thoughtful people independently, usually in about middle school or so, but most people manage to let go of it in favor of a world where we can talk about things and think about things that exist. When you're ready to rejoin the world where words have meaning, even though they are not the things themselves, we'll be waiting.
But, if not, the MLA's annual convention is in New York this year, in December. It's not too late to submit a paper - they eat this stuff up over there, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that you can certainly make a fat pile of money with this sort of thing these days.
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.
None of them at all? The Bible-as-literal-truth and as the literal Word of God still works for you, does it? Catastrophism, creation-in-six-literal-days, all that stuff still works for you? I'm tempted to dig up Physicist's example of the value of pi in the Bible, but I'll defer to others. Anyone who wishes to jump in at this point, please do so, and help BB find some passages that, when interpreted literally, might be troublesome.
I would have thought you'd be champing at the bit to suggest that God might occasionally speak in metaphor or allegory, but have it your way.
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.
Well, there you go. If God is omnipotent, then he must be able to reveal Himself in such a way as to convince everyone of his reality and his divinity - if He couldn't, he'd be something less than omnipotent. Why doesn't he do so? I don't know. It's your metaphysical concept, not mine - I'll leave it to you to figure out.
Your brackets, again:
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.]
Just as an aside, we've moved away from Un-v-rs-, and have now settled on Univ* as being more suitable. The HTML to properly represent Univ* can be found in post #621. If you're not comfortable with that, you can continue to refer to it as "the universe", or whatever. Univ* is not hung up on nomenclature, nor does Univ* have any hangups about "blasphemy" or "heresy".
Anyway. People say a lot of things about God, don't they? Maybe proof is doctrinal, maybe it's experiential, maybe it's not there at all. Whatever floats your boat. With Univ*, there's no such confusion and argumentation - here it is, all around you. Point to Univ* - 15-Love.
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?]
I don't know - which way was it? With Univ*, there's no such confusion, again. Univ* is, Univ* always was. The human mind that came about later was just a side-effect of the application of the rules. Point to Univ* - 30-Love.
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.]
Any apparent order is a result of the operation of the rules of Univ*. The fact that we can make sense of it is an accident as well - the rules produced brains capable of abstract thought and reason, and so we can make some sense of what we see. At least, those of us who accept Univ* and are not postmodernists can. Point to Univ* - 40-Love.
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.
You can't do anything with it, since you've admitted you can't do anything with representations, remember. Be that as it may, we're fresh out of God substitutes. My wife keeps some packets of sugar substitute for guests who prefer such things, but no God substitutes - we have no need of them, but if we find we do, I'll keep an eye out for it. I imagine the packaging will tip me off - "All the power and glory of God, with half the guilt! Less fattening! Fewer calories!"
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.
That "Bible" thing was just a joke then, eh? Spilling the beans in advance like that... ;)
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.
The natural laws came with Univ* - it's a package deal. As for "moral" laws, as you noted, I pointed out to Diamond that we could bootstrap them for ourselves. Whether you find that answer good or persuasive is up to you - persuasion is ultimately in your hands, and I have no control over it. I must note, however, that regardless of how good or persuasive it is perceived to be, it remains as yet unrefuted.
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?
But we already have multiple sources for the law. Unless you are going to tell me that the Constitution is also the literal word of God, then you have little choice but to accept yourself that law may come from God or it may come from Man. And within the Constitution itself is enshrined the notion of federalism, where there are two possible sources for the laws that govern me - Congress and the legislature of my state. And in reality, I have to obey laws from four sources - the laws of my town, my county, my state, and my country. And I won't even get into how the law differs from nation to nation and society to society. If there is only one source of law, how come we can't seem to agree on what the law is?
No, I think we abandoned the notion that law can only flow from one source at about the same time we abandoned the notion of the divine right of kings. Point to Univ* - it explains law better than God does. Game, set, match to Univ*.