RE: Logical Disproofs of a Biblical Type God
June 13, 2021 at 9:04 am
(This post was last modified: June 13, 2021 at 9:12 am by JohnJubinsky.)
(June 13, 2021 at 7:34 am)brewer Wrote: It's hard to take people seriously, and often frustrating, when they talk about god as if it existed in reality.
John, god is man made, there has never been any concrete evidence that it existed as anything more than a mental concept. Debating the attributes of god is a pointless exercise as man can make god whatever he wants (consider how many gods/religions there are or why god beliefs have changed over time). Might as well be debating the positive or negative attributes of Superman.
I am trying to repudiate a concept of god.
(June 13, 2021 at 12:30 am)Belacqua Wrote:(June 13, 2021 at 12:10 am)JohnJubinsky Wrote: I think we have come to agree on something. You said that the god you are talking about is different from the god of the Bible. I think so too.
Yes, that's what I intended. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about that.
The God you are describing is very specific type, derived from a certain type of reading of the Bible -- a naive reading rejected by many Christians.
So I only wanted to say that while your arguments against that type of God may well be good ones, they won't bother many Christians.
Quote:However, I still have problems as to your explanation of why your type of god created the universe. That is, it existed an infinite amount of time before creating so it would have had all of the time it needed (i.e., an infinite amount of time) to completely fulfill itself before creating, This would eliminate expansion as the cause of it creating. Additionally, being driven by expansion to create still seems to me to be inconsistent with needing nothing.
Normally theologians don't say that it existed an infinite amount of time before creating. Augustine made the argument that became standard afterward, that since time began with the creation of the universe (no stuff=no time) then talking about God existing "before" creation is incoherent. (It's likely that the guy who came up with the idea of the Big Bang was aware of Augustine's argument, since people say similar things about the Big Bang -- there was no "before." The guy who came up with the notion of the Big Bang was Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest.)
And again, the idea that God needed time to "fulfill itself" doesn't jibe with the theologians' model of God. For them, God is fulfillment itself (actus purus), not needing change at any point.
(There was a fascinating divergence from this theory by Jacob Boehme, who thought that God did develop, and actually needed humanity in order to do so. This is not generally accepted by most Christians (e.g. the Pope would hate it) but Hegel stole the idea and got famous for it.)
The argument about emanation is that goodness, by its nature, wants to be good for others. Think of a person who sits in his room all the time and thinks good thoughts but does nothing at all for the world. Is such a person as good as he can be? The argument is that he isn't so good if he doesn't spread goodness outside of his room. So a God which was the Form of the Good would, buy its nature, emanate goodness even though he didn't need to. He had no purpose, needed nothing, but it was just in his nature to spread good. (This argument derives ultimately from Plato.)
I agree that goodness by its nature wants to be good for others but if there are no others for it to inspire why create them as suffering individuals?
