You don't know God is real and you don't know he isn't

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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It’s been awhile, quote me what you want responded to. If you meant “our shared identity self=other” then you’re kind of off-topic. First I want to know which ‘God’ people are referring to. If your God is Jesus Christ, then Christian morality is contingent on treating others as you would be treated, Golden Rule, Human Universalism, yes… but it’s not quite that simple.

Obvious, in the “Human/Hominid” specie, there are races and sub-races which either cannot or should not share living spaces. Some groups are violent, criminal, unruly, low-IQ, and generally chaotic, anti-social, uncivilized… If you expect all “Humanity” to fall under one shared identity, then you must understand Expectations are not realistic.

You don’t treat pigs and dogs as humans, so within humanity there must be designation on exactly who is or is not ‘Human’. What does it mean, exactly? You’ve never gone into that area or deconstruction. Are all human races “equally human”? Obviously not. There are countless ethnic and racial conflicts across the world.

I’ll use the current genocide and extermination of Gazan Palestinians as an example. Israelis and World Jewry, and their Zionist soldiers, cannot tolerate Palestinians living in Gaza, and treat them as Not-Human.

So work on that first.

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You have to turn the question inward. What does it mean to be human? To be fully human is to treat the other as self… to acknowledge the personhood of the other in your thoughts, behaviors, and values. Do you do that? If not, you are behaving inhumanly. You’re not being very personable. If others still treat you as a person, despite your not treating them as persons, does it make you stop and wonder?

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What is personhood though? What is humanity and human morality?

Within the “Human” specie, there is an offset number and portion of people who are Self-Conscious and Intelligent. Should less intelligent people be ‘treated’ the same as intelligent people? No, because the Expectations are different. We don’t expect stupid people to be smart; and we shouldn’t expect smart people to play dumb.

What do dumb people do? They “Trust the Experts”, supposedly, but how? Today, the masses follow the television and media, presumed authorities. If Mass Media says “Orange Man Bad!” then that’s what masses believe. They don’t need reason. They only need emotional training. They only need to see it on tv for it to be their Truth.

In order for Morality to work, in order for there to be a ‘Human’ designation that makes any type of sense, there must first be a presumed Equality. Without that Equality, the rest won’t make sense, and it won’t exist. Therefore, Morality, and Humanity (as extension of Morality), are impositions upon the masses, with implied Hierarchy (God being the Highest).

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Would you want someone to have expectations for you that are higher than you can accomplish? It wouldn’t be very personable of them to do that, would it? You would only want them to have expectations of you that you can actually meet (provided you follow certain steps that make you able to do that). You should do the same for others.

Personhood is a basic awareness of your own being in relation to other persons. The reality of personhood does not change with the level of intelligence.

If someone with the capacity for personhood is not self-aware, someone has not treated them as a person yet.

Makes you wonder how self-awareness or personhood ever kicked off. … and how the capacity got into the material. There must be an eternal personhood who can configure material with said capacity.

The original personhood’s requirement of us (our design) is that we be unconditionally merciful (impassibly compassionate) in their image. Drove Nietzsche absolutely mad.

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Of course I do.

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Don’t quote me out of context, foo.

Try that, see how you manage it, you can work up from there.

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Actually, no. According to the synoptic gospels, Jesus’s message was that God’s kingdom is “at hand” meaning accessible here and now. He taught his followers to pray to the heavenly Father “thy kingdom come”.

I’m completely on board with Christian Platonism which is explicitly expressed in the the Gospel of John chapter one where Christ is portrayed as the incarnate Logos through which the universe comes into being who is the divine light of consciousness in every human being. The problem then, is blindness—“darkness” the evangelist calls it. In John chapter 9:39 Jesus declares, "I have come into this world to give sight to those who are blind.”

There is some truth to what you say. Spiritual Reality is there in tradition for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. But, from a Biblical perspective the biggest problem of America is greed. It is what has brought us to end stage monopoly capitalism. It is what is corrupting our politicians. Jesus warned us.”Watch out, be on your guard against all kinds of greed. Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.(Luke 12:15) The “Greed is good” message that dominated America for so long has reached a crescendo of destruction. If people resort to the systemic “-isms” that you list as alternatives, it’s because they have been “blinded by the god of this age” (II Corinthians 4:4) to the spiritual reality in which they “live and move and have their being”(Acts 17:28).

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I don’t know our disagreement here…

I claimed that the masses need a Shepherd to lead them into the Kingdom of Heaven – which is what makes Christians Christian, since they follow Christ. People don’t have the spiritual fortitude, freedom, or independence required, to understand or succeed on their own.

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I don’t know if there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and you don’t either.

I don’t know if Elvis is dead, and you don’t either.

I don’t know if ghosts are real, and you don’t either.

Etc etc. The fact is that what you said can be applied to almost anything, so that is a huge problem: it’s not a good argument.

Bertrand Russell solved this problem, learn about ‘Russell’s Teapot’. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t believe in God, by the way. Ironically, when he was younger, he did, and when he understood he could not, he was devastated. Just mentioning this as people will often attack Russell as being a mere ‘atheist’.

PS. I don’t recall who said: ‘If it can’t be demonstrated, it’s not worth talking about’. It’s a waste of time, in most cases, though probably not all; most of metaphysics cannot be ‘demonstrated’ anyways, but it’s worth talking about, but not in all cases. Of course, there are things that cannot be ‘demonstrated’, but the effects of which, can, such as Dark Energy, etc.

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That depends on what you mean by God. I define God as existence itself. To exist is to participate in existence, which is God. God is not a being that exists. God is being itself. The teapot argument imagines God is an arbitrarily existing entity. That’s a category error. Religious or mythological language which imagines God as a being operating within the universe is also a category error when interpreted literally. No one doubts that they exist and no one doubts that they are conscious, which is the same thing.

In terms of the OP, where are you talking about some being with omni characteristics exists outside of oneself I agree with the OP. You can prove that such of being exists But you can’t explain the existence of universe either. Which is not to claim that I’m explaining it either. On the contrary, I claim existence is a brute fact that cannot be explained. Everything must be explained in terms of it rather than the other way around which is the job of ontology.

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Well that depends entirely on the meaning of the subject under discussion, doesn’t it? This cannot be over generalized. Each thing you brought up has specific reasons backing up its “could be real” and its “could not be real” sides of that issue. You would need to actually THINK ABOUT and ANALYZE those reasons specifically to that issue itself, to get to the bottom of it. Not make merely blanket generalizations of mere form without even looking at the content, as if all contents would somehow fit equally meaningfully into the same form.

The rest of what you mention, Russell and the allusion to Wittgenstein, is beneath my even bothering to reply to.

192

Here’s a trap you can catch your christian friends in if you guys are bored and wanna argue.

According to the bible, a day of judgement is coming on erf… which means things are supposed to get bad and will get bad.

How then could a christian ever condemn a destructive act if they can’t be sure that act wasn’t supposed to happen… wasn’t one of the bad things described in the Bible (metaphorically) that was going to happen?

In fact, the situation on erf is now so complicated and fucked up, you may even be a christian participating in one of those destructive acts and not even know it. For example, the christian capitalist. A literal oxymoron. This guy could be an active participant in the destruction of social order and the erf through capitalism while believing he’s actually doing the right thing. This would mean that some christians were preprogrammed horsemen who lived double lives… one as a tepid moron and the other as a destroyer moron.

Today, to be a real christian would mean to pack a bag and walk into the woods never to return, for anything one might do or be actively part of in this world at this moment has a very high chance of being evil.

If you don’t do this, you are one of the two types of moron.

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God is a manmade construct..

The overarching law of nature is the one true God, of all.

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At the end of the day all we can really say is ‘there is nature’. We can’t say natural ‘laws’ and we sure as shit can’t say there is a natural law maker. Bert’ll explain…

“Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favourite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going round the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a law-giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which way you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were you are then faced with the question, ‘Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?’ If you say that He did it simply from His own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues He had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it—if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God Himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You have really a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because He is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am travelling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard, intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralising vagueness.”

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I don’t think Russell‘s arguments are conclusive. There are regularities in the universe that resulted in things being the way they are including life and evolution and humanity. You can call them laws or regularities at the point as they didn’t have to be there and they didn’t have to result in life and us so then why do they exist or are they just accidental? It’s a question which if you think it can’t be answered definitively one way or another you agree with the OP i.e. You can’t prove that God exists, and you can’t prove that God doesn’t.

The second argument is like Plato‘s Euthyphro only applied to natural law instead of piety like Plato does. Socrates, asks is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious or is it pious because it’s loved by the gods? If the answer is the former, then the pious is superior to the gods, if the answer is the latter then the pious is arbitrary. So Russell is saying this about natural laws. If the order of the universe and the teleological result is a good thing in itself then you don’t need God and if it’s not good in itself, then the fact that God exists doesn’t change that. It’s just the case.

Again, it’s a great mystery, but it isn’t dispositive of a necessary conclusion either way. The traditional argument was that God‘s laws are the result and an expression of his nature. The problem with that is that it limited God‘s freedom. Prior to the modern era theology took a turn towards nominalism. They concluded that God was absolutely free. The meant that anything was possible. That actually led to the rise of empirical science. If God could do anything that it was necessary to study nature to find out what he actually did do since you couldn’t discover it by reason alone. Anyway Russell’s arguments are interesting but inconclusive. So they support the OP.

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“I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions”

Ironically it was Einstein who agued against the randomness with his “god doesn’t play dice”… Anyway what he suggest, that Einstein disclosed a number of natural laws to be human conventions is untrue. Relativity doesn’t rely on human agreement. It is objectively factual. Man couldn’t use it for technology if it weren’t.

“There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design.”

That doesn’t mean that hard order is absent (not that this means there is design, none of this all matters to that idea) - if it were, then “if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times” would be untrue. Even if you thew the dice a billion times, you would get a billion double sixes as likely as anything else.

“if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design.”

That makes no sense at all, does it? Why would God design it that way?

“Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow”

It may get more refined, but previous physics will not be contradicted. Or, haven’t been. Archimedes still stands. Einstein, or QM didn’t change Newtons laws. They just disclose some context.

The arguments for and against design didn’t change either.

“Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” - Bohr

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And what kind of evidence is required for sexual preferences? If he wasn’t married, but preached “love” between men? It’s all quite obvious. For you, simple logic is unacceptable, because the wild lies of the Bible are more convenient, right? You won’t be able to explain why the conflict even arose between orthodox Jews and the so-called “propaganda of love” in any other way than that the propaganda didn’t align with the accepted morality of Jews at the time. That is, the intolerance towards homosexual relationships. This is precisely what led to the execution on the shameful cross. As a lesson that sex between men is forbidden among Jews.

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That’s your claim. Where is your evidence? A defensible claim is that homosexuality is human so it is present among Christians as it is among the rest of humanity. And, it has been recognized more or less among all cultures which have assumed various attitudes about it. That’s well documented throughout history.

If what you say were true, I feel confident that the Judean authorities would have said so and responded to the first Christians accordingly. Why didn’t they? Or, where is the evidence that they did?

As far as the early Christians themselves, their approbation against homosexuality is well documented beginning in the New Testament. Do I need to recite chapter and verse? Does that mean it wasn’t practiced? Of course not. There would be no need to address the issue if it weren’t being practiced.

The three main types of love in ancient Greek philosophy are Eros, Philia, and Agape.

is passionate, romantic love, often associated with desire and sexual attraction.

represents friendship and affection, a love between equals based on shared interests and mutual respect. It’s characterized by a sense of companionship and loyalty.

is selfless, unconditional love, often described as a divine or universal love that extends to all beings. It’s a love that is rooted in compassion and goodwill.

If you go through the New Testament with a Greek interlinear text, you’ll see that the love between Christians that is being espoused and practiced is generally the agape or phileo kind, the normative practice of eros being limited to marriage.

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I would say, rather, that God is God, and man has made many concepts attempting to represent the actual truth of God although we simply do the best we can with our limited knowledge. I can’t believe that nature is God but I do think nature is probably an aspect of God, like everything is probably an aspect of God somehow.

Two very good philosophies lead in the direction of God, one in the direction of God being logically implied as a manifestation of the maximum possible valuing, what we call love for example; and the other in the direction of God being the logically required furthest-possible metaphysical derivation of ideation as such, what we call ‘mind’ which is really pure truth manifested ‘in the flesh’. Both approaches are very cool. They seek to understand a logical space for God’s actually possible existence in a way that goes beyond what humans typically imagine. Such views can contain all the human ideas and religions about God and gods, as well as contain or perhaps correctly indicate and point to the actual reality of God (assuming there is an actual reality of God) in helpful ways. Of course all of this is philosophy, as it should be, although I am not discounting that some people may have more literal-direct experiences or encounters with God or with aspects of what we might call god-like realities.

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I think for the most part, ‘God’ is the process of animals becoming self-aware or self-conscious. At first, your “Self” seems like a foreign entity. But, as you become self-aware, you begin carefully delineating and separating which Thoughts, Beliefs, and Ideas are truly “your own”, versus all the ones which are Not, which are Other peoples’ ideas.

If most or all of a person’s Thoughts are not their own, then they’re not “in control” of “him/herself”, correct?