RE: Why God doesn't stop satan?
June 12, 2021 at 3:44 am
(This post was last modified: June 12, 2021 at 3:48 am by Angrboda.)
(June 11, 2021 at 4:18 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:(June 10, 2021 at 3:07 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Which axioms would those be, for you and the atheist?
Aside from God's existence, we all share the first principles of thought (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle) and our own existence as axioms. Unfortunately they are not enough to prove that there is an external reality, that's why Descartes was a theist, he understood that without presupposing God we are just stuck with solipsism.
Well, setting aside that we don't all share those first principles, either necessarily, or in fact, and that there's nothing inherently incoherent about solipsism (and bear in mind that a solipsist is an atheist), I think we need to back up a moment here. You said that without reference to an absolute, nothing you say has any truth value whatsoever. You readily acknowledge that you do not have access to God, and so you cannot reference any of your beliefs with respect to an absolute (God), and so by your own admission, nothing that you, Klorophyl, say has any truth value whatsoever. So given that, rejecting your assertion that the axioms underpinning an atheist's world are incoherent is true takes no effort whatsoever since you've acknowledged that it isn't incoherent in any absolute sense and that nothing you say has a truth value.
While this is a handy sidestep, and I'm content to avail myself of it, I still don't understand why you feel the atheist worldview is incoherent. You'll need to explain that more fully. Start with explaining what is incoherent with the hard solipsist's worldview. And once you've done that, you've provided good reason to embrace an alternative without needing to reference any absolute.
And as long as we're talking about incoherence, I'll simply point out that coherence is a relatively cheap commodity. If my worldview happens to be incoherent, I can solve that problem by rejecting or adding one or more axioms. Coherence can be cheaply bought. Pyhhronic skepticism would seem to be immune to the complaints you are making because it doesn't choose to embrace any axioms. But if it can be cheaply bought, it can be hard to regain for some people. In particular, the Abrahamic god is himself incoherent. And since the god of Islam is an Abrahamic god, that means that your lodestar is itself a hotbed of coherence problems.