My argument for atheism +

[EgoDeath]

At work.

Well, to bolster/defend some aspects of Belaqua, I would hazard a guess EgoDeath that;

I would place some of Bel's more idiosyncratic traits to a form of 'Language barrier'.

Now Bel has explained that they are a native English speaker. (What flavour of English I do not know)

They have also explained their place of current residence is the 'Land of the rising Sun' and that they have mastered the language of this exotic shore.

Now, being confluent in both dialects has produced/given rise to Belaqua's unique turns of phrasing and word usage, I would again hazard to guess.

Having worked with folks from many disparate parts of the world (Listening to a Native of Nigeria conversing with former resident of the great subcontinent of India as they worked at transferring concepts between each other via their only shared means of English I found wonderous as it gave me, a somewhat native English speaker, an insight into both their way of thinking and a 'Second hand' veiw of how others find my language to 'Be'.)

I've also worked with some one who's native languge was from the more Northern climes of Africa plus a little dash of the Cyrillic.  Who had then travelled to the shores of the US of A wherein they learnt to master and tame English.

In quite a few instances the nuances in the differances between their idioms and mine became enough that substantial loss of understanding occurred and required much further expansion and explanation to overcome the difficulties.

Of course I'd be more than happy to be further educated in regards to such matters.

Cheers.

Yeah, those are interesting thoughts. I think it's just more so, as Gae pointed out, that Bel truly believes that he knows more than we do, and loves to take every chance he can to correct one of us atheists about how wrong we are in concerns to religion, more specifically Christianity.

The issue is, Bel's view of Christianity seems to be almost completely disconnected from the real world. His view that most Christians are these seasoned, sophisticated, philosophical thinkers is just rubbish and nothing more.

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

Belaqua's unique turns of phrasing and word usage, I would again hazard to guess.

Oh, that's interesting.

I wasn't aware that my English is odd at all. I try to use standard clear language.

It's possible that, as you say, I've been influenced by speaking Japanese most of the time. 

What comes across as "unique" to you?

That's the rather hard thing to do.

The only close thing I can relate is, again, other co-workers.

Interacting with some one who hails from Nigeria and then some one who hails from Ghana I can say that;

They both speak and use well the idioms of English.

However. Their colonial past has coloured some what the way and manner of how they were taught the skill.

Nigeria adds a wonderful 'French' lilt to their phrases. As that part of the world was rather heavily influenced by said French and their language descended as it is from the classic 'Romantic' languages.

Then there's Ghana. A land influenced by the British isles.

I suppose part of it would include not just particular word use but how they formed their overall sentences?

Sorry for seeming so vague.

Cheers.

[Belacqua]

At work.

That's the rather hard thing to do.

[...]

Sorry for seeming so vague.

Cheers.

That's OK.

In fact I'm sure that there's nothing odd about my English.

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

That's the rather hard thing to do.

[...]

Sorry for seeming so vague.

Cheers.

That's OK.

In fact I'm sure that there's nothing odd about my English.

Not the words/letters you use, no.

But sometimes your turns of phrase and sentence structure come across as....... different.

[EgoDeath]

I agree with Peebo there.

[Mister Agenda]

The term 'Christianity' is basically the glaze on thousands of different religions with varying thicknesses of the glaze in common. Most generalizations about them are going to be over generalizations, it's just the nature of the beast. No matter what you say about Christians, someone else will be able to say 'not all Christians'. Of course not all Christians, it's vapid to insinuate that the person who made an observation about Christians was talking about 100% of them. For the sake of brevity and communication, it should be taken as read that a comment about Christians in general, while it may apply to millions of Christians, does not apply to all of them. If I complain about Christians who try to get ID taught in science classes; I'm not complaining about the Christians who aren't doing that. If I say Christians believe in demonic possession, I'm not talking about the Christians that don't. If I complain that white people get special privileges in America that people of color don't get, I'm not talking about the poorest white people in Appalachia. Knowing when to chime in about 'not all X' and when not to is part of reading comprehension.

When Donald Trump says that Muslims are terrorists and Mexicans are rapists, it's your fault for not assuming that he doesn't mean all of them.

Were you actually trying to come up with an awful comparison that is fundamentally different from what I'm talking about?

[LadyForCamus]

This is basically an alternative version of "you can't see the wind" argument.

I've never heard the "you can't see the wind" argument. Is it just when people say that you can't see wind but you know it's real? 

That would be more of an analogy than an argument, I think, and I agree it wouldn't be persuasive about religious issues.

At the same time I think we want to avoid a "we haven't found Bigfoot" argument, which is a label I've just made up for a kind of argument I have heard. It is where people talk about God as if it must be similar to Bigfoot (tangible, material, visible if we knew where to look), and declare that since we haven't got physical evidence it means that it doesn't exist. This would be a mistake, because ever since the time of Plato no one has asserted that God is a physical object with a quantifiable body. Such an argument would be declaring a lack of evidence for something which no one has argued for in the first place. 

1) If god isn't "knowable" through any sense apperata, what distinguishes god from nothingness?
2) Which is the same as saying god doesn't exist.

Are the laws of mathematics something or nothing?

The laws of mathematics as well as logic are descriptive. So, yes. They describe reality.

[Mister Agenda]

They're also an abstraction. Is God an abstraction?

[Belacqua]

The laws of mathematics as well as logic are descriptive. So, yes. They describe reality.

Yes, that seems right. It also makes me see that when I refer to this argument in the future, I shouldn't use the word "laws." I don't mean to talk about descriptions, and I certainly don't want to risk the misinterpretation that I am referring to commandments handed down by a demiurgic legislator, which the physical universe reads from tablets and obeys. 

Probably I should use a word like "regularities," "necessities," or just "the way things work." These are the "something" that isn't nothing. The order that I'm talking about. The Neoplatonists and Stoics used the word "Logos" for this. And of course John draws the idea into Christianity by declaring that "In the beginning was the Logos," and associating the way of things with Jesus.

---

They're also an abstraction. Is God an abstraction?

I'm wary of the word "abstraction" because to me an abstraction is something that has been derived from -- abstracted from -- something more complete. It's true that the "laws" of nature are concepts we have abstracted from the real regularities of the world.

So if you write an academic paper you or your editor can write an abstract of the paper to put on the web site. Or the early abstract artists called themselves this because they always had in mind a model -- a person, situation, or mood -- from which they were abstracting a visual correlate. 

And it's true that people's concepts of God would be merely abstracted from the real God. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a real God behind the abstractions. Most theologians are careful to say that human concepts of God are always insufficient -- abstractions made by limited minds.

So I won't say that in theology God is abstracted from anything. In fact it's better to say that in these theories, everything else is abstracted from God. As far as I can tell, all the Greeks said that God is a non-material something from which the material world emanates. Kant merely updates this in line with Newton's physics, when he says that the noumenon is the world prior to the mind perceiving, interpreting, and abstracting it into phenomena. 

Kant, being a Christian, is comfortable with the fact that although we never have direct knowledge of the noumenon, we nonetheless can abstract knowledge from it, and have faith that in some way it has order and regularity -- he still believes in something like Logos.

It's Nietzsche who tosses Logos. He claims that the order and regularity we interpret and abstract from the real world is like a dream image --- a falsehood we require to live comfortably. The real, pre-interpreted, pre-abstracted world is, for him, Chaos. This is why Nietzscheans say that most scientists are not yet sufficiently atheist. By assuming that there is a Logos-like order behind phenomena -- even if it's not fully knowable to humans -- we are still full of faith.

[mordant]

It's Nietzsche who tosses Logos. He claims that the order and regularity we interpret and abstract from the real world is like a dream image --- a falsehood we require to live comfortably. The real, pre-interpreted, pre-abstracted world is, for him, Chaos. This is why Nietzscheans say that most scientists are not yet sufficiently atheist. By assuming that there is a Logos-like order behind phenomena -- even if it's not fully knowable to humans -- we are still full of faith.

I don't think this view is accurate. Science sees regularity that can be used to derive a practical predictive power in most situations (including what we call natural "laws" for lack of a better term) based on probability, but I very much doubt that most scientists see some mystical inherent order that's not emergent from the natural world. Too often, we see patterns that don't apply at extremes of scale or of time, for example. Hence Newtonian physics is adequate for most purposes and is still used for example to do routine orbital mechanics calculations -- yet, it had to be modified by quantum electrodynamics for extremely large or small scales. Similarly our understanding of time becomes useless as we approach the BB and our understanding of the universe is increasingly being subsumed into multiverse hypotheses.

This doesn't mean there's an underlying "Logos-like order" or even a single theoretical model that undergirds everything. It just means our understanding is incomplete at present and in an infinite universe may never be complete -- just less incomplete.

Sadly, our minds seem constructed almost specifically to be drawn to concepts that attempt to "explain everything", such as "Logos-like order". We abhor uncertainty. It is an acquired talent to learn to sit with it.