(March 2, 2020 at 8:08 pm)Objectivist Wrote:(March 2, 2020 at 2:40 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Indeed in fact believers like to move around what god means to please themselves. So my first task for any theist is to define god.I reject the whole notion of a definition of God. We don't define concretes. Definitions apply to concepts. What we are actually getting from theists is descriptions of the god they are imagining. We don't define a rock or a tree because these things are concrete. Similarly, God is supposed to be a real existing thing and unique so the notion of defining God is a misapplication of the concept "definition". We don't define a single shell that we pick up on the beach. We identify it as a member of the class "shell" and we might describe this particular member of the class "shell" by its color, size, etc., but we don't form a definition of it. We define the concept "shell". We don't form concepts of single one-off things. A concept is a mental integration of two or more similar things with their particular measurements omitted. So anyone who offers a definition for God does not understand how concepts and definitions work. There is no need for the concept "God" if there's only one. That would negate the whole purpose of concepts in the first place. The only way that "God" could be a concept is in the way that some writer comes up with a concept for a character in a story like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. The pupose of a definition is to name the things a concept subsumes, its units, and to condense that to essential characteristics. A definition does not name every attribute of a unit but it implies them and only lists the essentials. Another role of definitions is to differentiate a concept from other concepts in the mind, to keep them separate and to organize them.
Often they seem aghast as though the concept is crystal clear and not as I find it as clear as mud. I
don't know what a god is supposed to be, how one is supposed to have come into existence or how its supposed to do what they say it does.
Its like saying Brexit means Brexit, a nonsense and people believed it.
If people wanted us to respect their beliefs they'd stop having such silly beliefs.
The "concept" "God" is actually an anti-concept. If the purpose of a concept is to make cognition possible, an anti-concept renders it impossible. They are cognitively useless and meaningless. They can mean anything anyone wants them to mean. After two thousand years, the "definition" of God is still not clear. While the definition of the concept "apple" is. That's because the concept "apple" is a legitimate concept with real cognitive usefulness.
I've said more or less the same thing frequently. There may be plenty of 'definitions' of God, but that's exactly the trouble: plenty of definitions. No one defines an apple as 'a small aquatic bird' or 'the Earth's primary natural satellite' or 'a savoury pie made with minced beef and onions.' We can all agree on what an apple is. Agreeing on what God is has caused no end of unpleasantness.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax