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peso73
Guest
God can created all the square circles He wants, I’d imagine…I think perhaps you should either start, or stop smoking marijuana…
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mschrank
Guest
cough! like, dude, what if, like STUFF, wasn’t cough STUFF!
Whooaaa. deep dude!
Whooaaa. deep dude!
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buffalo
Guest
One needs to understand what almighty means. It means God can do what He sets out to do.
Things He cannot do:
He cannot lie
He cannot deceive
Things He cannot do:
He cannot lie
He cannot deceive
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DanteAlighieri
Guest
I can’t comprehend why you would want to disprove the existence of God…does that mean you don’t exist?
Peace,
Dante
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ateista
Guest
First, a clarification. I am not talking about the Christian God, with its usually declared attributes. I am talking about the alleged “necessary being”, the existence of which is postulated to explain the percieved “inadeqacy” of the natural universe.
From that assumption it follows only that this being cannot be material, and it cannot be constrained by our space and time. This is fine, no problem. Since this being is not material, it is acceptable that it has no spatial attributes.
However, it is not acceptable that it has no termporal attributes - if this being is allged to act in any sense of the word. The word “act” must have some meaning if one wishes to postulate that this necessary being effected the contingent universe. It is not important to know the wherewithal of this action, its ways and means can be totally outside our knowledge.
But if the word “action” or “creation” is to be used, and it is supposed to have a meaning, then it must have a temporal attribute - and thus it does lead to the contradiction I delineated above.
The only way to negate it is to deprive the word “action” or “creation” of any meaning whatsoever, rendering the sentence or proposition: “god created the universe” totally meaningless.
Your choice: either accept the contradiction, or admit that the word “action” or “creation” is simply gibberish or gobbledegook, without any meaning. You could say that “god hifsdyu the universe” and declare that “hifsdyu” is something that we all totally unfamiliar with, something that is totally incomprehensible to us. That proposition does not lead to a contradiction, but it has no meaning either. As I said: it is your choice.
A side note: I have had the same type of conversations about other alleged attributes of the Christian God: love, mercy, justice, omnipotence, omnisicence, etc… The final result was always the same: the apologists always declared that these words have a totally different meaning when applied to us and when applied to God.
A second side note (this time about the Christian God): what you say is in contradiction with the Bible, where God actually makes covenants, walks in the Garden of Eden, gives out the Ten Commandments, in other words “acts” within our space and time and “acts” in a meaningful manner. It is also alleged that God performs miracles, that is he interacts with our physical existence. All these are spatial and temporal activities - and as such they lead to the aforementioned contradiction.
So you guys are not in an enviable position: either accept the contradiction, or accept that the whole Bible is a myth, or retreat into a world where words have no meanings when they are applied to God. Which one will it be?
From that assumption it follows only that this being cannot be material, and it cannot be constrained by our space and time. This is fine, no problem. Since this being is not material, it is acceptable that it has no spatial attributes.
However, it is not acceptable that it has no termporal attributes - if this being is allged to act in any sense of the word. The word “act” must have some meaning if one wishes to postulate that this necessary being effected the contingent universe. It is not important to know the wherewithal of this action, its ways and means can be totally outside our knowledge.
But if the word “action” or “creation” is to be used, and it is supposed to have a meaning, then it must have a temporal attribute - and thus it does lead to the contradiction I delineated above.
The only way to negate it is to deprive the word “action” or “creation” of any meaning whatsoever, rendering the sentence or proposition: “god created the universe” totally meaningless.
Your choice: either accept the contradiction, or admit that the word “action” or “creation” is simply gibberish or gobbledegook, without any meaning. You could say that “god hifsdyu the universe” and declare that “hifsdyu” is something that we all totally unfamiliar with, something that is totally incomprehensible to us. That proposition does not lead to a contradiction, but it has no meaning either. As I said: it is your choice.
A side note: I have had the same type of conversations about other alleged attributes of the Christian God: love, mercy, justice, omnipotence, omnisicence, etc… The final result was always the same: the apologists always declared that these words have a totally different meaning when applied to us and when applied to God.
A second side note (this time about the Christian God): what you say is in contradiction with the Bible, where God actually makes covenants, walks in the Garden of Eden, gives out the Ten Commandments, in other words “acts” within our space and time and “acts” in a meaningful manner. It is also alleged that God performs miracles, that is he interacts with our physical existence. All these are spatial and temporal activities - and as such they lead to the aforementioned contradiction.
So you guys are not in an enviable position: either accept the contradiction, or accept that the whole Bible is a myth, or retreat into a world where words have no meanings when they are applied to God. Which one will it be?
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mschrank
Guest
I’ll ask Our Lady to let God know that he doesn’t exist! Gosh, that guy is so behind the times!
fatima.org/essentials/facts/miracle.asp
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ateista
Guest
My friend, I do not wish to influence what you want to post. However, I intended this thread as a philosophical discussion, not a theological one. Just clarifying my intent. Of course this puts no constraint on you or anyone else. However, I will not waste time on replying to posts which are unconnected to the subject.
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dmar198
Guest
Actually, no, that does not necessarily follow. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that a god exists temporally. Only Abrahamic religions claim that God the Creator is eternal. Your argument would not apply to Hindu gods, for example.
You fall where you ignore the use of anthropomorphisms. Normally, the words “act” and “create” involve an object being changed by the subject from one condition to another over a period of time - indeed that is what those words were invented to indicate.
The Christian God does not “act” or create" in that sense: He does not cause the universe to cease being non-existent and start being existent over a period of time. But our language does not have adequate words to describe God, therefore, we must use inadequate ones such as “act” and “create” and clarify - when objections like this arise - that they are not used in the human, temporal sense.
God is the source of the universe. That is the Christian claim, when we delete such inadequate buzzwords as “act” and “create”. When an objection to this formulation comes along, confirming its inadequacy, then another formula will be provided that debunks the objection. The formulae are all pointing to the same Truth; they simply use different words to express different aspects of it. To take the formula “God created the heavens and the earth” and assume that it is supposed to express the whole Truth adequately - as you have done - is a horribly mistaken understanding of a formula’s purpose.
The entire intent of formulae like these is to express meaning to the hearer. Even though with the proper qualifications it could be defended as accurate, the formula “god hifsdyu the universe” would not express any meaning, and so is useless.
You are correct on only one point: as regards God’s existence as pertains to temporality, the words “action” and “creation” have no meaning. But that is my point! These words are not intended to carry such meaning. They are intended solely to express that we are contingent on Him. They serve that purpose. But when applied to His eternality, they are totally inadequate. You can’t use those words to express His position inside or outside of time because that is not the purpose of the formula.
Yes! Words invented for use in this world - this nature - are inherently inadequate to explain the otherworldly - the supernatural. No one claims that they adequately do so; they are simply anthropomorphisms for the purpose of expressing a higher Truth to a lower creature.
Those events are anthropomorphisms and/or revelations of the Humanity of God the Son, usually the former. Miracles are established parts of the Creation since Creation - they were always going to happen, from eternity past, having been fully imparted to the Creation by the eternal Creator. It was only a matter of when we caught up to that moment in time.
Such events as portray God letting people “see His back” (e.g. Exodus 33:19-23) are revelations that God (in the Person of the Son) also has a Human nature, which He took on for our sake at the Incarnation.
I choose none. You have not proven your thesis, which is that such language reveals a contradiction in Christian doctrine. There is not really such a contradiction; only one that arises in your mind from a mistaken understanding of the formula “God created…”.
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ateista
Guest
No, it would not. Nor would it apply to the Roman or Greek or Egyptian gods. However, no one believes in those gods any more, so you show their nonexistence is an unnecessary exercise.
You say exactly what I say. The gods are anthropomorphic inventions of humans, who invented them to “explain” the currently unexplainable.
Then you do not have the epistemological right to use those words, because you create confusion. Words are supposed to have meanings, to convey understanding. If there are no proper words to describe something, then there must be silence. One can “invent” new words, for sure, but they will be meaningless, until there can be a common understanding as to what they mean.
That is just as meaningless as the other words.
In other words, we are engaged in a game of “hide and seek”. Believers make an assertion, the atheists show that it is meaningless, and then the believers abandon their words, and try to use another one… How would you describe this process? I would say that the believers have no idea what they are talking about.
That is what is supposed to be the outcome, not a premise. That is why the different “proofs” of god were invented.
Sorry, you are back to mysticisms, revelations and the like. Those have no place in a philosphical discussion, though they are adequate in a theological one.
In my eyes you did. You did choose the last one: “humans cannot say anything substantial about god”. And if that is case, then we engaged in a futile exercise.
I give you a challenge: choose any one of God’s alleged attributes, which can be properly expressed in human terms. Let’s see if we can have a meaningful conversation about it.
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peso73
Guest
~ Source of everything ~ there’s an attribute. Meaningful human terminology, and our universe cannot have come from nothing without being created at some point by a force/being/eternal mind, or whatever. That is logical to me. I think that falls back into your argument re: time and action, but how come this “God” could not OUTSIDE of our concept of time and space, create everything again?
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jkarp
Guest
Really, there are no Hindus in the world? The last time I checked the statistics it was somewhere around 900 million. But hey, if in your logic 13% of the world’s population equates to no one . . .
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BlaineTog
Guest
ateista:
Do you claim that language is always entirely adequate to explain all possible human experience?
Do you claim that language is always entirely adequate to explain all possible human experience?
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ateista
Guest
There are still Greeks, aren’t there? The Romans are nowadays called Italians… none of their gods are around, are there? I am not familiar with the Hindu mythology, so I cannot comment on those “gods”.
Be as it may… I explicitly (and several times) declared that I am not interested in any specific “gods”, I was simply talking about the philosophical concept of “necessary being”. As I also said, I am not in the position to dictate what you should post, but it is quite frustrating to see the attempts to derail the conversation…
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ateista
Guest
That is not an attribute… it is something that this being allegedly did. The “creation” aspect has already been discussed and the final result is that the word “creation” does not apply.
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ateista
Guest
Of course. Eventually all human experiences are translated into a linguistic form. Sometimes new words have to created to describe the hitherto unknown phenomena, and they gain “meaning” from mutual acceptance of the new terminology.
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peso73
Guest
well, perhaps I should steer clear of the philosophy threads as I am not as ejumakated as yoo, but I think if you would realize that one cannot prove or disprove the existance of God, you might be better off, whatever
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BlaineTog
Guest
I take it you’ve never tried to write a poem?
It’s been long excepted by writers and poets that language is woefully inadequate to even approach accurately describing virtually any human experience. Language only works by relating one experience to another; metaphor, for example, does this explicitly, and it’s one of the better ways of describing things. In general, you can describe physical, immediately tangible things fairly readily, but you still need source material to work from, and the situation gets much worse when describing intangible things, like emotions and love (even the very best poets aren’t going to give you the feeling of what deep romantic love is unless you’ve felt it yourself). If you had to explain what a kitten looked like, for example, you could probably do that with an ok degree of accuracy, though even then most people would probably have a hard time imagining it without already knowing what a kitten looks like, but trying to explain to someone how holding a kitten feels is a number of order of magnitudes more difficult, and probably impossible if they’ve never pet anything cute.
So why should language be at all adequate to describing God?
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ateista
Guest
I sure tried it when I was young and failed miserably.
What you say is true. However, emotions and feelings are subjective. When it comes to reality, you are not restricted to everyday words. The word “electron” was concocted at a point of time, and it gained meaning when the physicists were able to describe its attributes. You can also use other ways of sharing information: symbols, mathematics, drawings, etc…
If God is reality, and not just a subjective concoction of the human mind, then words should be able to describe it. Even if it is just a concept, words should be able to describe it. Any being or concept without some attributes is indistinguishable from nonexistence. The question is: do those attributes have a meaning?
This thread is a great example of what happens when a serious conversation is attempted between a believer and an atheist, and it is kept at purely rational level, without referring to revelations or other mysticims.
The proponents of God will refer to an alleged attribute, something they consider a positive attribute (like: love, justice, mercy, knowledge, power, benevolence, etc…). But these are just words. When the atheist tries to find out what they mean when applied to God, then the hide-and-seek starts.
Just like in this thread the final result is that the believers admit (after a long chase) that the words describing God have absolutely no meaning when applied to God. In other words, the believers have no idea what they are talking about, but refuse to come clean and accept it.
They say that one cannot comprehend God fully, but one can comprehend God at least to some extent. Sure, this is a sensible proposition, I have no problem with it. However, the proof of the pudding is that it is edible. When one scratches the surface of God, eventually it turns out that there is nothing there, nothing that we can understand. It is totally incomprehensible.
Even the proposition: “God exists” is meaningless. The word: “existence” loses its meaning when applied to God. And that is precisely what the atheists say.
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dmar198
Guest
You claimed that you weren’t speaking of any specific deity, however your statements only apply to the Abrahamic deity. I was pointing that out, so the exercise was not futile.Dmar198:
…[For] you [to] show their nonexistence is an unnecessary exercise.
I disagree. The language used to describe God is anthropomorphic, but God Himself is not. The “God of the gaps” (the god who is appealed to solely to explain something unknown) is attractive to those who want to discuss the origin of the universe, but the God of the gaps is not the God of Abraham.
God is not an invention made to explain how the universe exists. Even the earliest concepts of God betray an assumption that He already exists; people thus believed in Him long before they started trying to understand how the world came to be.
I am not using them epistemologically. I am using them anthropomorphically. Thus I didn’t even claim to have a right to use them epistemologically, so your objection is moot.
Words like “create” etc. are used in a context, and in their proper context they are not confusing. E.g., “Create” as applied to God was used in the context of teaching that we are contingent on Him for existence. In that context, it is not confusing. It is when you strip the word of its proper context and apply your own - as you have done - that it becomes confusing.
So really it is your fault: words like “create” are all used in their respective contexts, none of which have to do with God’s atemporality. When you applied them to His atemporality and noted that they lead to contradiction, you were simply stating the obvious: those words don’t belong in that context.
The phrase “God created the universe” does have meaning and does convey understanding: that we need God. They are thus proper to explain that Truth.
But when you misapply those words to His atemporality, then they lose all meaning and stop conveying understanding, and must be discarded from that context. That is what I’ve been trying to do: show you that you misapplied those words to a context that had nothing to do with the formula which they were originally used in.
No. The formula “God is the source of the universe” is adequate in the context that we are speaking of. But it is surely inadequate in another context, and when an atheist applies it to that other context it must be discarded from that context. Both formulae, however, are proper to their original contexts. Atheists merely confirm that these formulae are meaningless in the wrong contexts.Dmar198:
In other words, …Believers make an assertion, the atheists show that it is meaningless, and then the believers abandon their words, and try to use another one…
No, contingency was assumed when those formulae were originally used. It was later that those assumed formulae were backed up.
You brought up the Bible as revelation and miracles are mysticisms. I was simply pointing out that these are consistent with the Abrahamic view of God.
I suppose I did say that any choice of human words is inherently inadequate to fully express the attributes of God. Sorry for that oversight. However no choice of words can adequately express love as well, and yet people understand it. All we have are human words that can never express our meaning to their full extent - but it is certainly within the bounds of linguistics to use those words to explain what we mean to a limited extent. After that comes faith.
There is no such attribute.
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jkarp
Guest
Now you’re confusing race and religion. Hindu refers to a religion practiced by people from many countries, India for example. Greek or Roman refers to the ancestry of people from Greece or Rome (Italy). The religion practiced by the ancient Greeks and Romans was a form of pagan religion, pagan refers to a wide variety of folk religions.
The point that I am trying to make is that your posts are consistently contain inaccurate information and are full of personal opinion and bias. You are basing claims upon those things and saying, “see, I am right.” I don’t think this is a square circle, but it certainly is circular logic.
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