RE: Why atheism cannot escape absolute truth
November 5, 2015 at 2:11 am
(This post was last modified: November 5, 2015 at 2:13 am by Mudhammam.)
(November 4, 2015 at 8:16 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: Naturalism cannot account for that knowledge. Only Theism can.
(November 4, 2015 at 8:16 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: Then there is no point of me explaining it again is there? Of course there is always simplified summary and a detailed explanation. But here goes nothing. If your essence is derived from God's essence, and you point to his praise, and your praise is derived from his praise, and all praise in creation, through a connection to God, a living light, a living knowledge of him, that your witnessing of praise being objective and real in your soul, is derived from God witnessing his own absolute praise, his divine unity, his absolute greatness, etc, then it's very easily explainable. Just as God knows he is absolutely Praiseworthy, that knowledge in a lesser finite limited degree exists in creation, derived from his own knowledge of himself. Seeing the divine connection of praise to the absolute source of all greatness, is itself also possible by God's very knowledge of himself. He is the outward and inward, the manifest and the hidden, the explicit and implicit. If your treasure in your soul and what you ought value descended from a higher reality, than that being the property of it can be witnessed, in the same way God witnesses all praise in his unity and witnesses himself as absolute source of all praise, the absolute life by which all life exists.I think I detect an ontological argument in there... It sounds to me like you're saying that one can possess certain knowledge about the world because 1. God is not a malicious deciever and 2. God imparts certain knowledge, such as the knowledge that premises 1 and 2 are true. Do you not see anything viciously circular in that reasoning? Why not just grant that assured knowledge is ascertainable regardless if God exists since any effort to establish either of the two must necessarily defer to that presumption anyway? Furthermore, if God is not a deceiver and certainty about some things can be attained due to his illumination, why the preponderance of error on our part, not only about the world, but this very God many desperately wish to appease in an abundance of mutually exclusive contexts?
You want to say that knowledge or value cannot exist unless God exists. Why not? What makes them conditioned on God in such a way that the skepticism you initially maintained dissolves even though the affirmation of God's existence is far less evident than the possibility of self-knowledge or self-value (which is the soil from whence you can begin to build upon knowledge qua knowledge and value qua value as they relate to the world at large)?
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza