Deism for non-believers

[Angrboda]

I see you didn't answer my question about Shaktism.

Oh, sorry! I should have clarified that I briefly researched Shaktism and I responded to it by implying it's in the category of 'world religions'. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the belief is that the god visited the society 22 000 years ago. Well, we've all seen the flaws with Jesus so I wasn't going to bother trying to disprove an incarnate god that lived 11 x 2 000 years ago. Or was there something that I missed about this belief?

Yes, indeed there is quite a bit more. There are Shaktisms that would postulate a goddess that is indistinguishable from your Deist creator god. Same for other branches of Hinduism, Buddhisms and more. That you don't see these gods as plausible relative to your deist conception is not because they are not equally plausible — indeed, some are indistinguishable from yours — but because you are knowledgeable about your deist ideas, and ignorant of the same ideas in other religious contexts. Which gets me back to my earlier point, that you are constrained by the past, specifically your past, which leaves you capable of imagining certain answers in certain ways, but less able to imagine others, such as those you have no knowledge of, such as Shaktism. If you were born in India as a Shakta, you might be arguing the exact opposite, wondering what I see as flawed with thinking about the goddess, and ignorantly asking if deism is a world religion that postulates the creation of the world in 4,004 B.C. and believes in three gods. Your statement and your conclusions would be just as ignorant, and just as much a function of your ignorance.


But there's an even more significant problem with your thinking. You suggest that the universe had to have a motive for coming into being. Now I don't agree, but even if I did, motive implies an agent. Universes don't have motives, only agents do. So you are trying to reason backward from the effect to the potential cause. Even if a motive and agent is involved, this is likely to prove unproductive. Can we determine the reason an agent might create a universe? We have no experience with such examples to even know where to begin. And all your "models" are largely analogues of creation by human agents. Maybe a god-agent needs six mutually contradictory goals to have a motive to create a universe. How do we know what motives a god uses.

But beyond that, the whole method is flawed. You have an effect, the universe, and you're trying to guess a reason an agent might create it, and from that reason figure out what type of an agent might have those reasons. Reasoning backward in this way, each step is fundamentally unconstrained by the prior step. Does a physical universe imply a physical creator agent? How do we know? A physical universe doesn't require any specific process of creation; some are more probable, but as Rhythm points out (and Brian in his ignorance fails to see) is that assuming that because a physical universe can result from physical causes, that doesn't mean it had to do so; the latter is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. If I'm in the forest and I come upon a spot where there are plants arranged in a perfect circle, I might ask myself the same questions. Surely these plants didn't end up in a circle by accident. What purpose did putting them this way serve, and what does that tell us about the agent that did it? It actually tells us nothing, as this particular plant, actually a fungus, just naturally grows that way as a result of physical and biological constraints. You need to start with the agent, and evidence for that first, and then try to understand its motives, as the reverse will lead you astray.

I assume you're familiar with the Mona Lisa. What does that effect/artifact tell you about the motives of its creator? If you didn't know the artist, would your speculations about the artist's motives help you pick him out in a crowd, perhaps after in-depth interviews? Doubtful. Yet this is your method.