God, Santa, and The Tooth Fairy

[polymath257]

Open-mindedness! Here in the 21st century! This makes me happy.

One good book on this subject is The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart. He is an academic, Eastern Orthodox Christian. This book avoids unreadable jargon and provides an introduction to what you're asking about here. 

I predict it will NOT make you a theist, but it will show how the God = tooth fairy argument is naive. The quote from the Guardian on the Amazon page is accurate, I think:

"Hart marshals powerful historical evidence and philosophical argument to suggest that atheists—if they want to attack the opposition's strongest case—badly need to up their game."—Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Be...filtered=1

Out of a spirit of Christian charity, I suspect Dr. Hart would be OK if you pirated a copy:

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OK, I started reading this. I'm only about a third of the way in. I am intrigued by the distinction made between God and the demiurge in this. I suspect that the vast majority of theists would almost violently disagree with this distinction, but such is as it is.

The author makes a number of very basic mistakes early on and continues them. For example, describing matter as 'inert' and 'lifeless' is, at best, problematic since most physical things are *defined* by how they interact (which certainly makes them NOT inert!).

There is also the old trope than physicalism cannot be its own support. That misunderstands the way knowledge is arrived at via the scientific method. Such knowledge is *always* tentative and subject to revision is new evidence points in a different direction. In particular, the hypothesis of physicalism is tested by seeing whether it produces results. And it is unquestionable that it has. That is the basis for its support.

And, to give a particularly atrocious quote:

"All things are subject to time, moreover: they pos-

sess no complete identity in themselves, but are always in the pro-
cess of becoming something else, and hence also in the process
of becoming nothing at all. There is a pure fragility and necessary
incompleteness to any finite thing; nothing has its actuality en-
tirely in itself, fully enjoyed in some impregnable present instant,
but must always receive itself from beyond itself, and then only by
losing itself at the same time. Nothing within the cosmos contains
the ground of its own being. "

This is simply false in the case of fundamental particles, such as electrons, muons, quarks, or neutrinos. They *are*, in fact, a 'complete identity within themselves' and are NOT in the 'process of becoming nothing at all'.

But we should get to a more basic question: what in the world would it even mean to have 'actuality entirely in itself'?? That, to me, seems like a wonderfully meaningless turn of phrase. Things exist. They don't 'have actuality' and in what way do these things not have 'actuality in themselves'? Again, what does that even mean?

And what does a 'ground of its own being' mean? From what I can see, this is a completely empty phrase as well. Among other things, it *assumes* there is a 'ground' (?) of being. That seems to be highly unlikely in any reasonable interpretation.

Anyway, thanks for the book recommendation. I will continue to read it, but I suspect that the biases in it are going to prevent anything close to agreement with its premise. From my perspective, it uses an outmoded metaphysics to arrive at very questionable conclusions.