RE: Do you wish there's a god?
April 9, 2019 at 12:39 pm
(This post was last modified: April 9, 2019 at 1:00 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(April 9, 2019 at 10:23 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Right, value requires a valuer. I'm a valuer, and I believe my life has meaning and significance to me and hopefully to those close to me; just as their lives hold meaning to me.
I'd say that it's the apprehension of value that requires a "valuer", not the existence of that value itself. In this, we as valuers provide all that would be required for the apprehension of value, even if that value did not actually exist where we thought it did, or as we thought it did.
If there is no inherent value, a valuer can
a see that.
or
b imagine that there is.
If there is inherent value, a valuer can
a see that.
or
b imagine that there is not.
This..to me at least, suggests while we can very clearly posit that the apprehension of value is demonstrably subjective, the existence of value can be independant of that and may or may not be. In either case, the actions and value judgements of human beings would look exactly as they do. The notion that human value schemes can be representative or unrepresentative, can hit or miss, isn't novel or new or insensible. Ultimately, the difference between subjective value and objective value is whether a given value is a property of the valuer or the valued, and while it's easy enough to establish many cases in which it's a property of the valuer, everytime we overlook some thing that we might later find value in it lends credence to the notion that the valuer can inaccurately apprehend value. This, in turn, suggests that the missed value very much may be a property of the valued thing.
We were walking all over iron and silicon for hundreds of thousands of years. Are those properties of iron or silicon that make them useful, even to us - our subjective apprehension- properties of ourselves, or of iron and silicon? If we decided that iron and silicon weren't useful - a subjective apprehension, what about those properties would change or be altered? If there were no human beings on earth, would silicon and iron then be reduced to uselessness?
Objectivity doesn;t require that there be no relational value between the two objects in question, or between the object and the subject..if we prefer. Only that the apprehension of that value does accurately refer to some property of the other thing and is not wholly reducible to the properties of just one of the objects in question (or just the subject to the exclusion of the object, again if we prefer).
(April 9, 2019 at 12:33 pm)Acrobat Wrote: Judging that you nor I, (or anyone else here so far) can make sense of our desire for meaning in light of nihilism, then I have no basis to agree that "it does makes sense".Probably to do with you not knowing what those terms refer to, just like every other set of terms you've tried to employ or argue against thusfar.
Quote:I have no idea what you mean by "god meaning", particularly expressed as something distinct from inherent meaning, or in addition to it, so I can't make sense of this question to provide any answer for it.The only sort of meaning unavailable to an atheist is god meaning. A thing can have inherent meaning in the absence of having a god meaning. You can't "make sense" of that, but so what...you can't even make sense of the term sense..so that;s hardly illustrative of anything other than your own limititations, your own ignorance and lack of imagination.
If some atheist, as we can and do, posits inherent meaning, but a theist responds that this is incoherent, that absent godmeaning, there is no such thing..which of the two is actually proposing nihilism? This is a very easy question to answer if you understand what nihilism is and refers to.
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