(November 25, 2013 at 3:36 am)FiniteImmortal Wrote: I don't see the need to get too deep in analyzing what may be a candidate for an existing god when it comes to failing meaningful criteria prima facsia. I don't need to bother with an god that hasn't made a truth claim, and hasn't claimed to have created me, or hasn't attempted to describe me in a coherent way that conforms to reality as I know it. There may be someone who had a dream that there was a god of hurricanes of Jupiter. Whether there is or isn't, has no bearing on me and is wholly irelevant to me or our lives here on earth. The only God that is worth exploring it one that has relevance to reality. Such as, has compelling answers for the 4 main questions that fuel our lives. 1) Origin. 2) Meaning. 3) Morality. 4) Destiny. Any worldview worth entertaining must have meaning answers or at least interaction in a coherent way concerning all these simultaneously. And each idea answer must be logically consistent, empirically adequate, and be existentially relevant.
So a god has to claim to have created you (among other things) to be worthy of consideration? Now that's a can of worms. And if a god exists, it by definiton has relevance to reality because, duh, it exists.
1) This is one where, as far as religions have been concerned, has been utter nonsense, with no empirical justification beforehand, so it fails one of your own criteria.
2) Is subjective by definition, regardless if a god exists. In other words, even if a god exists and created everything for a specific purpose, whether or not you find meaning in that will necessarily depend on your own in-built values and preferences, hence subjective.
3) I don't see the relevance of a god to this. He's a subject, hence his views on morality would't a priori matter to us more than our own and would necessarily be his own subjective views on it.
4) I don't really see what this has to do with worldviews. It assumes destiny is actually a thing.
Quote:I have explored panthiesm, and it fails to me in that, a real God must be infinite in nature (in order to be God) and so a an infinite being swallows up an finite number of gods. If there are an infinite amount of Gods, thats the same as an infinite God. You can't multiply infinity times infinity, contrary to my childhood arguing games with my sister.
And this is where you're not making sense. When you capitalize the 'g', I can only assume you mean your god. But then that means you're saying "Only my God can be God", a tautology. This is what I mean when I say you assume your position to be true, when I'm asking you how you know it's true.
I think you need to go read more about pantheisms. Spinoza's pantheistic god was infinite, because it possessed infinite attributes. And from what I think I understand of Hinduism, the Brahman is infinite.
The reason you can't multiply infinity by infinity is because it's a concept, not a number. :p Further, all infinites are not equal. There are in fact greater and lesser infinities, so an infinite number of gods could possibly be 'greater' than a singular infinite god.
Quote:I don't see how the Big Bang is any different or less supernatural of a beginning that God speaking matter and time into existence. From Nothing comes everything, from an infinitesimally small singularity, expanding to the unknown depths of the universe... Seems equally explosive and awe-inspiring to me. Maybe two desciptions of the same event?
Because the Big Bang 1) refers to an expansion event which has a great amount of evidence to support it. 2) whatever the state of the universe prior to this expansion is not currently known and may be empirically unknowable. Even the idea of an infinitesimal singularity is quite possibly wrong since singularities are mathematical objects usually indicating a flaw in the theory, which in this case is the lack of a theory of quantum gravity. It's certainly not the case that we know there was 'nothing' before it. 3) This is what I mean by apologists just retconing their preconceived belief to try and fit what is later discovered. There's is nothing in the Biblical account that sounds anything like an expansion event, it's just God saying something and light appearing.
Quote: About imagining a God who is wholly evil, how does that work? If there really was a God that is behind all this that is wholly evil, would the world look the way it does? How would you define love? It slipped by the evil God while he was tying his shoes? People love to indite God by saying if a loving God existed, there would be no evil in the world. This is a moral pronouncement that has implications of ought. The world ought to be better, people ought to respect and love eachother, but alas, we make selfish choices and do henious things to eachother. We push God out of every facet of our lives, then when 9-11 or a Tsunami hits we wonder when the coward is hiding. We want it both ways. Moral pronouncements require a moral framework, it can only come in two flavors: Humanist, or Transcendent.
What you're talking about is the logical problem of evil, which I didn't bring up. As for how the world could be like it is if there is an evil god, that's easy. I can just run a Free will defense for the existence of good. If the evil god wanted there to be a world with moral evil, he needs to allow for free will to exist. So the evil god has to allow for some good in order to allow for the greatest evils. And this could further be augmented by saying that the evil god intends for an ultimately evil end, which necessitates moral evil for some reason. This is literally just a flip of the Christian apologist answer, so you can't deny it without special pleading.
Quote:Everything does in fact go through an evolutionary process, and everything in nature as well as convention that has ever been observed has been by guided means. Look at cars, phones, weapons, aircraft etc., every change was brought about by reason and engineering as more streamlined design. Micro-evolution in nature is, of course irrefutable. Making the leap from primordial soup to a bangle tiger is still at best, an interesting, though problem-ridden theory. The destruction of pieces of information in a DNA chain by radiation over time has never been demonstrated to produce more increasingly complex organisms.
And you turn out to be an evolution denier; why am I not suprised? "Macro-evolution" has been demonstrated repeatedly both experimentally in a lab and in nature itself. To say it's a "problem-ridden theory" is only something someone who is speaking on something they don't understand or know of.
Quote:I'd like to see a quote from God that has been proven to be false, or in any way spurious. He claims to be truth. He either is, or isn't.. and if he isn't he isn't God.
Without God being proved to have existed, that's a non-sequitur because if he doesn't exist, he can't make any statements at all.. It further ignores my point entirely, which was that "the scope of a mind does not change the fact that the mind could be wrong or have ulterior motives". And you further just assume he exists by saying that a being who claims to be God, and yet is proven wrong on some matter, isn't God. That's you assuming there is a referent to your belief before evidencing it.
Quote:I agree, to a point. Complexity multiplies morality. A cow can't be very good or bad. A Dog, a little more one one or the other. A child even more. An average man, capable of much good or bad as history shows, a genius; the devil incarnate or a righteous and noble hero. (think Hitler vs. Gandhi).
Okay.
