RE: If you learned that the god of [insert religion] is real, would all bets be off?
January 8, 2024 at 12:19 am
(January 7, 2024 at 11:52 pm)Sicnoo0 Wrote: what I really want to know more than all else is whether you believe any god could convince you that they're capable of creating a married bachelor, or other such oxymorons, assuming you would still have the ability to think logically
The reason I'm curious about this is that some atheist friends of mine have been unwilling to concede that a hypothetical real-life god probably cannot defy logic. They're too open-minded about what a god could be capable of, in my view.
Personally, I can envision myself challenging such a real-life god to create a married bachelor, fully confident that this god cannot do so.
As long as I'm convinced I'm living in the real world and not in a fairy tale, I cannot see how even a god could create a square circle or a married bachelor
God existing would cause me to question many things I thought I knew, but I would nonetheless still be confident that logic cannot be defied
Tangentially, I'd also like to ask you the following:
Can the belief that married bachelors cannot exist be considered a dogmatic belief?
I often see theists saying "well your belief in logic and reason is just as dogmatic as my belief in god"
I guess since we're speculating, I have to say that MAYBE everything I know about logic is simply a local and contingent misunderstanding. Since I don't have the knowledge that (we imagine) God would have, I have to admit I might be entirely wrong.
That said, I don't see how a God would defy such logic, or would want to. As I said, none of the major theologians picture God that way.
Maybe one thing to be wary of is how we use the word "logical." Strictly speaking, logical problems are like math problems, and should have tautological answers. But in conversation, we may use it to mean something more like "reasonable." So we'd say "Why would Trump send his minions to attack the Capitol?! That's not even logical!" In such a case, we're not talking about married-bachelor type issues -- more like a reasonable expectation.
So if someone said "It isn't logical for God to allow us to sin and then send his son to die for us," I don't think that's really a logic problem. It's more like questioning his efficiency. Maybe he had good reasons for it which I don't know of.
And I don't think that logical problems, of the married-bachelor type, can be called dogmatic. What they boil down to is tautologies, in which the term on one side of the copula is identical to the term on the other side, if we understand the meaning of the terms.