Note to others:
Make of this what you will. Or, sure, what you must.
And this from someone who is always bitching about me for breaking the posting rules!!
He’s basically Sculptor light. Or Karpel Tunnel.
Refuse to agree with his points and [eventually] he can come apart at the seams.
Note to Jebus Christ:
Are you His first cousin or something?
He definitely is a case.
“I see no support for hard determinism.”
Neither do I, as the good David Hume has taught me.
However, I arrive at hard-determinism by reverse engineering the problem. I claim to that for lack of any empirical evidence either way, the safer theory to hold is determinism.
It would be much more difficult to explain how freewill could work in a material universe, then it would be to explain how it doesn’t.
Freewill, in essence, would be like having a superpower or something, because you’d be able to both violate and suspend the natural laws as we understand them. Especially at a neuro-anatomical level; physical causation can account for every observable action and state of the nervous system possible, and there is no need to postulate things like Cartesian second substances or Aristotlean three-part souls to explain why joe got up instead of staying seated.
God certainly is not mysterious for those who have had a God experience of belonging to all that exists. What is mysterious is why one would pick a supposed God attribute such as omniscience for endless argument, which has nothing to do with explaining God or human choices. The argument derives from theological suppositions, not from real happenings in the real world. It’s all in the head, whereas experience is not. The concept of eternal punishment is such a theological proposition. It assumes to know what is possible in the hereafter. No one knows that or even if there is a hereafter.
Free will in the real world involves what choices one can make within the parameters of Natural determinism. And there is enough room therein for choices that do not indicate coercion or divine foreknowledge.
Really? How do “we” know that?
Spinoza’s conception of God is incompatible with the theistic conception from which you were arguing about omnipotence and omniscience.
Oh and the word for the serpent who is devouring its own tail that you were searching for is “ouroboros” not “aurora borealis” which refers to the Northern lights.
One way that theists attempt to understand God in a rational way is to stipulate that God cannot be required to do what is logically impossible. Therefore God cannot be required to know what is logicaly impossible to know. So it is logically impossible to know without the possibility of mistake what someone will do freely tomorrow. If I am free to choose tomorrow whether I will go to town or stay home, then if anyone today has some belief about what I will do (for example stay home) I have it in my power to make that belief false (by going to town). So no one not even God can know today without the possibility of mistake what I will choose to do tomorrow.
According to this view God is understood being omniscient as God knowing at any time all that is logically possible to know at that time. That will not include knowledge before they have done it of what human persons will do freely.
If God is omnipotent it will only be because God allows there to be free persons that there will be any free persons. So this limit to Divine omniscience arises from the consequences which God could foresee of his own choice to create free agents according to this conception of God.
I don’t know. To me God stands for the ultimate mystery of being.
Felix dakat. If u cannot infer that promethean75 knows what an ouroboros and aurora borealis are, and that in using the wrong phrase purposely, he was trying to make a funny… u clearly have not the mind power to know ‘god’, and I bid u good day.
Oh, I get it! 
You are way too clever for me!
“Spinoza’s conception of God is incompatible with the theistic conception from which you were arguing about omnipotence and omniscience.”
That is absolutely correct, sir. I failed to really clarify what was going on when I entered the discussion, tho I did hint at it with the language on vacation reference to W.
What I did wuz entertain an erroneous conception of what a ‘god’ would be (i.e., the Christian conception) for a moment in order to be able to get inside the argument and point out contradictions and inconsistencies generated by its own reasoning - Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, et al. - when concerning the existence of freewill in man.
Even while the total set of propositions within the theological language here is nonsensical, one can still draw conclusions from individual statements and arguments along the way. For example, ‘god’ doesn’t need to exist for me to be able to imagine what an argument for the existence of a ‘god’ might look like if made by a human. Even without ‘god’ existing - which means my subject (‘god’) is meaningless - I can know that if he did exist, certain things about the nature of reality, experience, life, etc., would be a certain way. One thing I can know a priori is that freewill would be meaningless if ‘god’ existed. I do this by inferences drawn from things about his nature and the consequences of that insofar as ‘god’ is actively involved in the universe’s existence.
But all the while, none of this is sensible, because this ‘god’ doesn’t exist. Not in the way those listed above, believe.
Yes tho, spinzs deviates quite a bit from accepted theological doctrine, and his concept of ‘god’ is radically unique.
To me, he was the end of metaphysics. He had given nature about as much divinity as it rightly deserved, and not a penny more.
Thanks for clarifying that. I surmised that and now it’s clear that you were aware of what you were doing.
Spinoza’s concept “universal substance” seems to be based on an awareness of something that transcends the cleavage between subject and object. Spinoza’s conception of “God” was the basis for Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as a “feeling of absolute dependence”.
To Spinoza philosophy is service to God. In it intellectual love unites intellect and emotion in the most rational state of mind. Thus, Spinoza unites mystical and rational elements.
Spinoza establishes and naturalistic pantheism which identifies god with the universal essence of being and in doing so it denies both finite freedom and the freedom of God. By necessity God is merged into finite beings and their being is his being.
God is the substance of everything. Therefore there is no substantial Independence or freedom in anything finite.
Again, all you need do here is to concoct this God intellectually in your head. Theoretically, you think up what it means for Him to be omniscient when one of us choose Coke or Pepsi. Then “free will” here is predicated entirely on accepting that your own concoction is by default the starting point in any discussion.
At least until a God/the God – which here and now neither pood nor I actually believe does exist – reveals Himself to the world and settles it.
Or: How hard, really, is it for you to completely accept the circular logic embedded in the hypothetical God that I thought up. Define your own God into existence.
Note to Sculptor:
You’re not coaching him here, are you?!
Can we surmise what the future will be given projections of now into then?
Atheists will claim there is no afterlife. Theists will claim there is. An atheist cannot explain why not. A theist cannot explain why. Is this a stalemate?
I suppose it is fun to psychoanalyze on the basis of personal choices, to examine what made one make a certain choice; but such examination is of the person choosing, not of the choice.
Are we done here? Or do we need more scrutiny of each other?
“Our theories of the eternal are as valuable as are those which a chick which has not broken its way through its shell might form of the outside world.” - Buddha
Thanks, Phyllo.
Exactly!
Theories about the eternal are a dime a dozen. If you’ll pardon the pun, God knows how many have already been thought up. And that’s just on this planet.
Note to God if You’re reading this:
With so much at stake here for mere mortals…morality here and now/immortality there and then…wouldn’t it make more sense for You to give us much clearer signals that 1] You do in fact exist and 2] what exactly our obligations down here are in order to pass muster on Judgment Day.
Of course for the Buddha, it’s even more hopelessly ambiguous!!! With no a God/the God around to anchor our faith to, who the hell really knows what’s expected of us on this side of the grave…let alone what our fate will be on the other side. Reincarnated as a cockroach? The ever nebulous “Nirvana”?
Though, sure, Phyllo, keep coming up with those “it’s so deep it’s meaningless” figurative speculations to nudge us in best direction.
Edit:
Last night on Nova [PBS] they aired a documentary on the Milky Way galaxy. And [as per usual] in the segment, they threw out all the staggerring facts about the sheer enormity of the universe.
One fact in particular: that there are hundreds of billions [maybe even trillions] of galaxies out there.
Simply out of curiosity, if an existing God is thought to be all about us mere mortals on planet Earth, what is the point of all that staggering vastness “out there”.
Seriously, does that suggest that God is passing judgment on other “mere mortals” on other planets? Might there actually be billions of planets out there populated by “the faithful” just like us?
This always brings me around to wondering if God created the cosmos and the “laws of nature” by “thinking up” what they would be…or if he thought it all up only because He himself must be in sync with the laws of matter.
If that’s the case maybe the laws of matter and not God are responsible for all the terrible pain and suffering that we attribute to “acts of God”.
Note to Christians:
Please feel free to use this to explain it all away.
Note to the blathering gasbag:
The word is enormousness, not enormity — unless you wish to suggest that the universe is enormously evil.
Buddha said that you ought to work on reducing your suffering. He figured that out by observing and reasoning.
If you think that you are not suffering or you are not bothered by your suffering or you just think Buddha pulled it all out of his ass, then don’t follow his advice. He said that too.
Words to live by. Or not.
I googled “the enormity of the universe”:
google.com/search?q=the+eno … _UQ4dUDCA8
Last Stooge Standing to others:
This imbecile doesn’t even know it’s Googled not googled!!!
And, again, the sheer irony being that in regard to the points I raise among the faithful here, he could have posted them himself.
You know, if he was clever enough to.
This guy – and I still suspect he is karpel tunnel/moreno – goes absolutely ape shit in regard to me here. Even though our political and religious prejudices often overlap.
If he is karpel tunnel, I suspect it still revolves around my “fractured and fragmented” assessment of “I” in the is/ought world.
Or, again, his Sculptor Light tendency to go ballistic when someone refuses eventually to agree with him about, well, everything.
And, in polemicist mode, I do tend to piss these types off.