(January 12, 2023 at 12:53 am)Objectivist Wrote:Indeed the idea that any being can be the basis of reality flies in the face observation. Minds can perceive reality or at least representations of it. But creating or dictating it let alone grounding it is simply contrary to observation.(January 11, 2023 at 4:10 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Right. You're saying IF an omnipotent god wanted a certain thing, he would certainly do certain things.Hello and good evening, Belacqua. I apologize because I don't know how to do the quote function on this forum. I haven't spent much time here on this forum and I haven't learned it yet. Plus, I'm not very good with computer stuff. So Bear with me.
My response is that we don't know what an omnipotent omniscient God would do. We don't know what it would want for us, if anything.
Also, if God is the ground of being and the form of the good and the actualization of all potentials, as Christians claim, then we DO have a relationship with it -- an extremely involved one. It's just not the kind of anthropomorphic relationship which people here seem to want.
I don't know of any other kinds of rationality. But I am a human being, and I think like a human being. It's a big universe -- who knows what things exist which humans can't begin to grasp.
Also there's the question of what the facts are. History shows that people's ideas of the facts tend to change. Naturally, we think we are the only time and place and social group in history to have the facts right. But more skeptical people keep in mind that we may be wildly wrong -- and are certainly severely limited.
It does sound as if your personal experience of Christianity was not a persuasive one. As with all human institutions, a great deal of what we encounter is disappointing.
I'm saying an omnipotent being gets what it wants. There would be nothing denied to it.
To your point about reason: I don't know what else exists out there in the universe either regarding other ways of thinking but if it were fundamentally different to human reason then I don't know why we would identify it as the reason. My answer is if we discover some other type of reason then we'll deal with it then. Until then it's just an arbitrary and useless concept. I think that reason and faith are entirely incompatible with each other and faith destroys the ability to reason since things taken on faith can not be integrated with our other knowledge. I like Harry Binswanger's saying: faith is an icepick to the brain.
Of course, we can't know what a god will do because it is a completely arbitrary notion. But I do know that if this god supposedly created us then it knows our means of knowledge is reason and it would be able to perfectly interact with our way of knowing and it would not ask for us to have faith.
As far as anything being the ground of being, I think this is nonsensical. Existence exists. It doesn't need grounding. Our knowledge of it certainly does but being itself does not and metaphysically it can't have a grounding. The fact that existence exists is absolute and the idea of there being a ground to being rests on stollen concepts. So I reject it completely.
As far as there being disagreement on facts, we have a way to resolve these disagreements. Your statement essentially says that we can't have knowledge because we can never have certainty that we have the facts right. If that's the case then there's no use discussing anything. But I know that this is not the case. We can have certainty. There are certain fundamental facts that we can all know and we can't be wrong about them. These are facts that are self-evident, fundamental, conceptually irreducible, and inescapable. They ground our knowledge in reality. We can use them as a standard by which to judge all knowledge claims. They represent an objective starting point for knowledge.
Yes, my experience with Christianity has been nothing but a disappointment but that is not why I reject it. I reject it because it isn't true.
"Change was inevitable"
Nemo sicut deus debet esse!
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“No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?”
–SHIRLEY CHISHOLM
Nemo sicut deus debet esse!
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“No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?”
–SHIRLEY CHISHOLM