God is an Abstraction - arguing with an Atheist - help

[mab23]

****here is a post from a person I was talking too and I am not sure how to reply to the God is an abstraction statement!

thanks in advance for the help****

But God is an abstraction, and as subjective of a concept as any other. He represents good and connectivity, among other things, but the books that you read were envisioned, created and perpetuated by human beings who lived in a point in time when anything unexplainable was either attributed to dark arts, magic, or religious underpinnings.

Saying that something came from God is saying that you have no actual idea of where it came from.

I believe in minimizing human suffering, maximizing human benefit, and that collective human good is non-zero-sum; that is, people doing more good does not mean that others will create an equal balance of negativity. You are right in that morals are subjective, but to say that religiously guided morality is not subjective is misguided.

There are people all around the world convinced that the religion that they were raised with is the one and only religion that is valid. Somehow, people all over the world managed to establish similar moral cues within their religious teachings. Somehow, we see monotheistic, polytheistic, and daoist teachings overlapping in content. Could it be that humans do have innate morals, collectively, that guide us to surviving to this point and onward?

 

[Anthony_V]

****here is a post from a person I was talking too and I am not sure how to reply to the God is an abstraction statement!

thanks in advance for the help****

Catholicism has no single philosophy, but there has generally been a consistent theme in regarding God as the grounding point of reality. Reality isn’t something abstract, but immediately experienced. God, “existence”, “being”, that “ground point” is often accused of being abstract by many an atheist, agnostic, etc. but such a thing could not be farther from the truth, because reality is composed of both a priori and a posteriori conceptions. We are mere participants in reality. We do not “create” our own reality. And so the question is, what exactly are we participating in?

 

[ZRaffles]

"But God is an abstraction, and as subjective of a concept as any other. He represents good and connectivity, among other things, but the books that you read were envisioned, created and perpetuated by human beings who lived in a point in time when anything unexplainable was either attributed to dark arts, magic, or religious underpinnings.

Saying that something came from God is saying that you have no actual idea of where it came from.

I believe in minimizing human suffering, maximizing human benefit, and that collective human good is non-zero-sum; that is, people doing more good does not mean that others will create an equal balance of negativity. You are right in that morals are subjective, but to say that religiously guided morality is not subjective is misguided.

There are people all around the world convinced that the religion that they were raised with is the one and only religion that is valid. Somehow, people all over the world managed to establish similar moral cues within their religious teachings. Somehow, we see monotheistic, polytheistic, and daoist teachings overlapping in content. Could it be that humans do have innate morals, collectively, that guide us to surviving to this point and onward?"

I agree with this 100%.

 

[MPat]

****here is a post from a person I was talking too and I am not sure how to reply to the God is an abstraction statement!

thanks in advance for the help****

Well, he has essentially agreed with existence of the natural law. That’s good, perhaps he should get some praise for that…

On the point “But God is an abstraction, and as subjective of a concept as any other.” - he has given no argument in support of this proposition. It’s probably best to ask why does he think so and wait for answer.

“[T]he books that you read were envisioned, created and perpetuated by human beings who lived in a point in time when anything unexplainable was either attributed to dark arts, magic, or religious underpinnings” - does he really want to describe the time after Plato and Aristotle, Democritus and Lucretius like that…?

 

[ccmnxc]

Paragraph one: I will be honest, this is not something I come across very often. The word “god” can be rather generic, but the Christian God is speicif and far from subjective. This entire premise seems to be working under the assumption that God exists only in the mind. If this were true, they’d be right. However, this remains to be seen. When he references the book. I am assuming it is the Bible, which I agree was written by humans. Again, however, there appears to be the already existing assumption that God did not inspire the Bible. It seems like the entire underpinning of this argument is that he already assumes he is right.

Paragraph two: Um, what? When I say I believe something comes from God, I am saying that option seems more likely than any naturalistic reason. I don’t normally attribute unexplained phenomenon to God. I don’t see why anyone else would either.

Paragraph three: Aside from his last sentece, he is merely stating his worldview, which is fine by me. However, with regards to morals being subjective on theism, some clarification is needed. Is he building on his first patagraph, or is this more of a Euthyphro Dilemma type deal?

Paragraph four: In all honesty, I would say his point more supports our position in that God engrains us all with a moral compass.

 

[derno10]

When discussing religion with Atheists, I have found that you have to get on the same page in the same discussion before you can have any type of meaningful discourse. What I mean is, the poster and maybe you have many ‘I believe this, and I believe that’ type of statements. What I do is walk everything back, usually from a scientific perspective.

He says, “Saying that something came from God is saying that you have no actual idea of where it came from.”
Ask him where he thinks things came from if they didn’t come from God?

The Big Bang Theory? Ok, let’s look at the first law of conservation of mass saying that matter cannot be created or destroyed. Even the ‘Big Bang’ (putting aside for a moment the foremost scientists of their time not too long ago were convinced that the world was flat) holds that there was a dense ball of matter which exploded outward. So, ok where did that matter come from? At what point in time was something created from nothing? This is where eventually any atheists will no longer have an answer, because we as humans hold as scientific ‘law’ that you cannot create something from nothing. I’ve also found discussing the intricacies of the human body and nature to be good starting points.

Basically, when talking to an atheist I think you have to start from square one. Otherwise he’ll talk about apples and you’ll talk about oranges.

This is an article I wrote about the beginnings of my faith (it’s not online otherwise I would have linked it):

I once looked up at the sky, as we all have at some point, and wondered what is out there? In this vastness of space, the infinite beyond, is our planet the center of all things or do we merely sit on the periphery of time and space? I came to the conclusion that I do not know, but that would not keep me from asking the question.

Christians are often criticized for believing in things that are mystical, supernatural, and unexplained. A Christian will tell you that some things must be taken on faith, while an atheist will tell you that if something cannot be proven then it must not be true. Is there a God? How could that be? Why doesn’t he show himself? According to some, the answer to life, the universe, and everything is simply explained away by scientific fact, logic, and theories.

Since I was young, I have sought knowledge, and have never shied away from a good battle, intellectual or otherwise. In my search, I thought to uncover the truth of why things the way they are, and what that means for my life today. So, I took to examining the common scientific theories and laws of how we understand the creation and functionality of our world and the universe.

I began where modern scientists think it all began, with the ‘Big Bang Theory.’ They believe that beyond a reasonable doubt, the universe had a beginning, and that it began in an incredibly small, extremely dense singularity, or ball of matter. This matter expanded to form the universe we know today. Of course, this is an unproven theory, and only the best guess of scientists. However, I wanted to delve deeper into scientists best guess. For now, let us assume they are right. So there was a densely packed ball of matter, ok, where did that come from?

In my 6th grade science class I learned that matter posses mass and occupies space, and mass is the amount of matter in an object. I remembered learning something else too, the law of conservation of mass, which states that the mass of an isolated system will remain constant over time. Basically, mass cannot be created or destroyed, but it can change forms as particles are rearranged.

That logical conclusion was the first step in my faith journey. If you follow the scientific bread crumbs in any direction you will eventually come to the same conclusion. There is no scientific explanation for how such perfection and functionality was introduced into this universe. In fact, since I have sought to discover the depths of the universe, I am stunned when an atheist tells me that faith is ridiculous. As I have become a Christian, I have learned to take many things on faith, but the existence of God is not one of them. Of this, I am certain. In fact, I think it would take much more faith to defy all logical explanation, and come to the conclusion that there is no God.

When I look at my own body, and study the complexity of smell, touch, taste, sight, t-cells, digestion, the ability to heal, the mind, the nervous system, and so many other things that function in perfect unison it is simply illogical to believe that my ancestors sprung from a primordial soup and slowly over billions of years developed the ability to see. Two eyes sprang from my head, and connected themselves to my brain and nervous system! Imagine! What a mystical, exciting time that must have been! This is not to discount the entire evolutionary process among species, in fact, evolutionary evidence persists after the origins of life. It may be an explanation to some how’s, but certainly not to the why’s. In the end, evolution is a theory, a theory with large gaps and missing pieces.

What I do know, is that even though I complain about my thick, straight hair, and the fact that at 28 I still get pimples, my body functions in such an amazingly perfect way that the only plausible explanation for its existence rests on the existence of the divine. Just as I look at the universe, the mysteries, and the unknown, I look at the world around me. I think about the ecosystem of a river, the swim-bladder of a fish, or incisors of my dog, and it enriches my faith.

This was my first step. There is a God. But, I wonder, does he care for me?

 

[Arthropod]

****here is a post from a person I was talking too and I am not sure how to reply to the God is an abstraction statement!

thanks in advance for the help****

You know what I would do? I would say that if he doesn’t believe in God, if he is a naturalist, why does he believe in you? Or himself?

Think about it, the only reason he believes anything is that his senses tell him so. He can see, hear, touch, taste . . . . .

If you are a true atheist, then the only reason you can sense anything is because of the behavior of atoms. Atoms cannot help doing what they do, they must do it, and can act in no other way.

If your atheist believes that a brain is not fundamentally different to a bowl of cornflakes, why should we trust the reasonings and sensory processing of our brains any more than we trust the reasonings of a bowl of cornflakes?

 

[mab23]

Thanks everyone for the helpful replies

 

[thenobes]

You know what I would do? I would say that if he doesn’t believe in God, if he is a naturalist, why does he believe in you? Or himself?

Think about it, the only reason he believes anything is that his senses tell him so. He can see, hear, touch, taste . . . . .

If you are a true atheist, then the only reason you can sense anything is because of the behavior of atoms. Atoms cannot help doing what they do, they must do it, and can act in no other way.

If your atheist believes that a brain is not fundamentally different to a bowl of cornflakes, why should we trust the reasonings and sensory processing of our brains any more than we trust the reasonings of a bowl of cornflakes?

Because they seem to give better answers.

But really, the whole problem revolves around moralilty, and why should mine be any better than yours? To resolve this question, we need a whole set of meta-moral rules, saying which moral rules are more important than others, and therefore should be selected before others.

But these meta-rules themselves are selected by rules, meta-meta-moral rules, and the whole process of selecting morals becomes based on a infinite hierarchy of rule systems.

Thus moral systems have no perceivable root (assuming there is no God).
Or they end up in a “gut” feeling.

Assuming the second, inasmuch the first has no reasonable basis of belief, who is to say one’s gut is better than another’s?

peace
steve