RE: The honest truth of it?
May 24, 2010 at 5:49 pm
(This post was last modified: May 24, 2010 at 5:51 pm by Welsh cake.)
(May 24, 2010 at 3:36 pm)Watson Wrote: But there is one problem any smart believer will have when faced with attempting to describe and explain God to a non-believer, and it is really a very simple one; the entirity of God cannot be explained.So by your definition God is all 'mystification' and whatever we deem to be 'incomprehensible' at the time, how convenient, except this is nothing grander than a logical fallacy of untestability. You continually affirm this god as being beyond scrutiny and/or investigation yet you make claims about its existence repeatedly. Nothing of what you or anyone else understands "God" to be produces any kind of consensus, all you can manage is a half-arsed "You have to be god to understand god" pile of nonsense, its all one circular argument.
I fully admit that I do not understand or know everything about God. There is no possible way any one, individual human with our limited subjective perspective could accurately and fully explain something so massive, yet so simple. To do so would require a completely objective stance, a perspective completely free of individual preconception and bias. Essentially, to do so, one would require...well, a complete oneness with God in His entirity. haha
This is how God works. In order to truly understand what a believer is saying, an atheist or non-believer of any sort needs to first experience God for his or herself, and attempt to honestly further their understanding of that experience on their own time. A paradox is created here, you see. A non-believer simply is not going to recognize the experience for what it is, and will likely brush it off with some kind of dismissal or denial of the experience's relation to God.
The "paradox" as you put it stems from another contradiction in your premise in that you stated it is impossible to know this god's nature. However you already used the term "god" in the monotheistic sense and not more honestly proposing a 'hidden cosmic creator' hypothesis, so you've already got a working conceptual definition in place and then run on to assert various properties and attributes about this entity that supposedly exists outside space, time and more worryingly, outside human knowledge. If you can't understand god, give a measure of it, or explain how it works to others then why even claim its real to start with? Why bother associating the idea with anything else demonstrable when you can't define what it is even or how to identify whether we've ever encountered or interacted with said entity at all?