Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jim G on February 16, 2010 at 5:30pm

"But how, I might ask can we refute this kind of deduction?"

That "God" is unmoving is an assumption for starters -- the stopping short of "infinity" is an assumption, there is no proof that things haven't been moving infinitely with no beginning. It is, instead, hard for our homo sapiens brains to visualize movements that have been moving infinitely with no beginning. Also, there is no definition of "God". I have heard some people define "God" as the Cosmos.

If "God" = "Cosmos" Then "God" = "Exists" because we know "Cosmos" = "Exists" because we are part of it. But there is still no proof of "God" thought, only movement, and we have defined "God" here as = the "Cosmos".

Even if you said that "God" = Infinity, you still don't know if Infinity can think.

So it is only faith in "God", unless science can explain "God" which some people are trying apparently, I am not sure to what degree of success, probably it is specualation to say that science can explain "God"?

Ernest Holmes, the founder of Religious Science, and author of 'Science of Mind', said, that "God" = Mind. But where's the proof of any thinking? Beautiful sunsets? We don't know if there was any thinking behind them, we can only have faith that there was thinking behind them.

Intelligent Design has no proof either, it is speculation. Although it is just as fair to say, perhaps, that non-thinking evolution has no proof.

We are left to have faith in "God" / "Mind" or not. Various religions have tried to get us to fear "God", saying that "God" will punish us if we misbehave. If you think about it however, it makes a lot more sense that only we can punish ourselves for our misbehavior, by our misbehaving -- the consequences, in this lifetime or in another lifetime or in reaching Heaven / Nirvana or not ultimately -- whichever the case may be, there are usually consequences for our actions and many believe there are always consequences for our actions whether we are confronted by them in this lifetime or afterwards.

Buddhism makes the most sense to me, of all the religions, and Buddhism ignores "God" -- although that does not mean that Buddhists can't believe in "God". They are encouraged to focus on their own sphere of influence I think.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jim G on February 16, 2010 at 10:25pm

Your frequent claims of reductionism come across to me as crying wolf, David.

david thurman said:"DANGER DANGER POINTLESS REDUCTIVE CIRCULAR"

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jim G on February 18, 2010 at 10:00am

"Well do you mean I'm crying fire and there is no fire or is there a fire and I am crying fire?"

I mean it doesn't matter if it is reductionist or not, and since you cry "reductionist" in every post just about, it doesn't lend well to the credibility that you know what you are talking about.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on February 18, 2010 at 11:08am

Dear Jim & David:

What the notions of creation really entail?

Is Creation the ordering of existing matter or is the calling into being of all things from nothing?

Many early Christian writers took over existing Jewish notions of creations, which tended to see the act of divine creation primarily as the imposition or order on preexisting matters, or the defeat of chaotic forces. Such views remained dominant within Judaism until the sixteenth century. The predominant (but not exclusive) view of the early church was that God could be said to know about suffering, but not to experience this personally. In the twentieth century, an increasing number of Christians came to the fantastic view that God did indeed experience suffering personally, above all as a consequence of the Incarnation.

If you refer to the God who does indeed experience suffering personally, that God probably does not exist. But the fantasy is not to be dismissed. This growing modern interest in the notion of a suffering God reflects a heightened sensitivity toward pain and suffering in the world, and a new concern to relate the suffering of Jesus on the cross to the anguish of the world on the one hand and to the nature of God on the other.

Italian author, philosopher and politician, Gianni Vattimo, a student of Nietzsche and Heidegger, believes that God was born into consciousness to provide some security against the danger of natural chaos: It is the mystery of an order that at once transcends and contains in dynamic equilibrium both the “energy” and “matter” of the universe.

In actual fact, the God of religion is really only a story about God. A story is a matter of words, words that you don’t find in the sky, only in language. But language could give no coherent account of the divine. Can we make an attempt to define God? Or, as Gerard W. Hughes once said, “God, who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves: the ground and granite of our being.” Different religious doctrines are largely about the image of God, which is felt by different groups of people to be most appropriate.

The symbol of God is a metaphor which suggests that someone is the giver. For most people is the central and primary religious symbol, the one in which all the metaphors are combined and into which all are projected. “If I learn what your image of God is I may have a good indicator of what your religion is,” Professor Andrew Greenley says, because “your God symbol tells me the story of what you feel life is about, far more powerfully in fact than do your doctrinal convictions about God.”

Pope Benedict XVI argued that the subject of God occurs in the form of atheism as one of the “three main paths taken by human history: monotheism, polytheism and atheism.” He added: “If one only digs deep enough, everything finally becomes one and foreground differences lose their importance.” Hence when Richard Dawkins dismisses the existence of God, I see it as a personal concern with the subject. It is a form that expresses a particular passion about the pursuit of truth.

Finally, in his biography of Jesus, The Lord, Monsignor Romano Guardini opens the perspective of what form would most appropriately express God, which is too important and too closely linked to, for example, empty space, that this representation of the presence of God in mosques by room stripped of image and implement is a powerful idea in Islam … or perhaps the spaciousness of heaven. Or silence. Or a rocky slope, or the sun. The power of such mute things is great – so great that it can lead to magic.”

The answer is, doubtless, furthest removed from man.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on February 22, 2010 at 1:24pm

Hello David,

Let us talk about morality and how do we construct a morality without God.

Inscribed over the gate of the Delphic oracle was the command which Socrates emphasized with his entire personality: “Know yourself.” And over the gate of Judaism was inscribed: “Know the God of your father.” (1 Chronicles 28: 9), “In all your ways know Him” (Psalms 3:6)

Both commands are unachievable.

How can we know our personal self, the I, which is the subject of our thinking, when thinking by its very process, turns it into an object, so the I vanish at the very moment of our thinking, becoming a me?

Why did our philosophers saw that knowledge is the source of morality? According to Socrates, to know the good is to do the good, for the moral good only means that it is good for us, and no one harms himself out of his own free will. Thus, for Socrates, when evil occurs, it can only be an error in judgment, like an error in arithmetic or in geometry.

The Biblical view is somewhat as follow: the scientific mind is inadequate to attain to moral discernments, for moral cognition is “the knowledge of God,” seeing through God, seeing Morality through Morality, and is therefore autonomous. Why did only God know good and evil? The answer is that the ability to see morality through Morality, was at first withheld from man.

We thus see that the ancient Hebrews tried to show that morality was universal and absolute, a categorical command not dependent upon reason or any goal beyond it. Morality is autonomous; it exists for its own sake.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Roman Kozlowski on February 22, 2010 at 2:59pm

PROBLEM: Someone understands the statement that "God exists,” but claims that it is not true. --- Just because someone might understand a concept, doesn't mean to say it's true. And just because I study and to some extent understand the sub-atomic aspects of physics, doesn't mean to say my belief in its structure will enpower me to run through a brick wall without hurting myself. Well, not yet anyway. But give me time.
POSSIBLE OUTCOMES: Either God does not exist in reality, but exists in the mind (because we understand the statement “God exists” and can imagine him) or God exists in both mind and reality. --- So if we imagine Santa Claus hard enough, he might exist?
PROPOSITION 1: “God” is the name we give to the greatest thing we can imagine. --- Sorry to be pedantic, but God is not a name, it is a title like king or lord. Bill or George are names. But yes, I can understand where you're coming from, when we think of some like Hendrix and Bach who we can refer to as God-like.
PROPOSITION 2: It is greater to exist in the mind and reality than only in the mind. (Or put differently, a real ice-cream is better than an imaginary one, no matter how good we imagine the imaginary one to be.) --- Imagination is a powrful thing and can deeply affect our biological emotive embodied experience, of that there is no doubt. But to experience direct contact with an external entity that claims to be a supreme being, is I think another matter. Oh and by the way, I love ice-cream. Have you tried Cornish ice-cream. It's simply the best.
SUMATION: If God existed only in the mind, it would be possible to imagine something in reality which was greater, but which was not God. --- Depends on how great your imaginary God is.
CONCLUSION: Therefore, in order to be the greatest thing possible, God must exist in reality. --- I think what you don't seem to realise is just that, that our imaginations are far greater even than our concepts of a God. And there I think the delusional problems of wanting to believe in such things arise.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on March 8, 2010 at 1:46pm

God is not properly but metaphorically called Prime Mover. The intention of such a description is that he is untouched by change, that in him nothing whatever initiates. All such expressions are “according to human language.” The whole point is that the attributes ascribed to him are those associated with his acts. He does not have any qualities.

What Aquinas meant when he said that God exists necessarily is he has not any accident by which he exists, which would render his existence similar with ourselves. Isn’t know that human species is an accident of Natural Selection? Existence is not something that God may or may not have.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Claudia M. Mazzucco on March 31, 2010 at 10:09am

My next concern is that the argument of a first cause leaves open the question of how quantum events could exist at all. They appear to be things that pop into existence without a cause. One who would defend Aristotle’s First Cause and the Cosmological arguments for God’s existence would have to argue that the origin of the universe is not sufficiently similar to a quantum event to overrule the widely established principle that, at least in general, things do not come into existence without a cause.

It seems impossible to rule out the possibility that the universe popped into existence with absolutely no cause. We need a “modified argument,” that instead of claiming that everything that comes into existence is caused to exist by something else, it will claim that it is highly likely that something like the universe would not come into existence without cause.

Such an argument, if successful, does not necessarily prove the existence of God. And, as Richard Dawkins states, there is absolutely no reason to endow that unmoved mover with any of the properties normally ascribed to the Christian God of Intelligent Design.

And then there is the principle of sufficient reason, which in its circular logic became the basis of Leibniz’s argument for the existence of God. Can anyone explain it?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff H on April 1, 2010 at 11:21pm

"POSSIBLE OUTCOMES: Either God does not exist in reality, but exists in the mind (because we understand the statement “God exists” and can imagine him) or God exists in both mind and reality. --- So if we imagine Santa Claus hard enough, he might exist?"

You always leave out the answer that God existed before the mind, and before anyone imgagining, which is of course the truth, but not permissible in some circles.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Khem the Is Real-ite on June 7, 2010 at 11:29pm

Bingo!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Roman Kozlowski on June 8, 2010 at 9:13am

Jeff said "God existed before the mind, and before anyone imgagining, which is of course the truth" - Is it? Is it bollocks!

Show me the science apart from mythologically induced stories.

We either made God (psychologically), or are in fact God, or more than is likely, we are aspects of a combination of the two. Of course, my idea of God is not the same as yours Jeff, my idea of scientific contemplation on the matter remaining invalidatory to your fairytale musings. But hey, so what? There I think we differ.

It's good to believe in farytales and fiction, it stimulates and further expands the mind towards new possibilites. The only gripe I have is when some feel the need to impose such things on a societal or even political level. To me, that's out of order and deeply disrespectful towards the human condition.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Khem the Is Real-ite on June 11, 2010 at 9:19am

I don't know about Jeff, but I ain't no believer. I'm a Knower.

God existed before the mind, and any science that seeks to establish the human mind as the beginning of knowledge is junk science. Period.

http://khemthenautonnier.blogspot.com/2010/01/gospel-of-khem.html

• ▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page