(December 28, 2015 at 11:10 pm)Nestor Wrote:I guess a deistic god, Platoistic god, and a pantheist god would all be closer to the 0, the Christian god would be closer to 1. That's mostly what I'm thinking. I'm just thinking out loud here.(December 28, 2015 at 10:49 pm)Pizza Wrote: Imagine a scale 0 to 1, 0 being very much not like a human, 1 very much like a human, and 0.5 being in the middle.Allah can probably considered to be such a deity.
Let's say we go along with personal cause (defined as a cause with rationality, self-consciousness, volition) existing, I see no reason to assume this cause would have to be near 1 on the scale in terms of thought and behavior patterns. Why not 0.5, 0.4, or lower? Why does a personal cause need to be very much human-like?
The main reason I pointed out this problem of what a personal god is is because theists seem to move too quickly to claims about the nature of god without much argument at all and overstate their case. For example, like how Craig will just take it as a given that a personal cause is very much like a human based on his KCA. I don't see why a personal cause couldn't be radically inhuman, or even why a cause couldn't just have person-like (processes similar to rationality, self-consciousness, volition yet different) traits but be more like a force of nature than a human. Apologists seem to just skip over these difficulties. They can't handle thinking in grayscale and degrees about the issue of what a "god" could be.
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all. - Denis Diderot
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We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. - Gore Vidal