RE: Do you ever doubt your atheism?
August 16, 2014 at 8:50 pm
(This post was last modified: August 16, 2014 at 9:02 pm by Mudhammam.)
(August 16, 2014 at 3:40 pm)Rhythm Wrote: That's a big chunk of comprehension you just offered for what has been described as "infinitely incomprehensible". If you wish to maintain that attribute, you're going to have to give all of that up. Let the "Infinitely incomprehensible" be, truly, incomprehensible - or drop the "infinite" bit...or perhaps, rephrase is as "currently unintelligible".Well, I don't know if I'd quite agree. That we can reason negatively to what this thing cannot be, if our logic is at all to be trusted, and hence come up with ideas such as "necessary," "infinite," "intelligible," that cannot be said to equal comprehension. I say "infinitely incomprehensible" because everything that is confined to empirical experience, and finite, as all else that is not this thing would seem to require, could never have any amount of knowledge that would enable an empirical conception of this thing--as it is only rationally defined, and as it is the prerequisite for any empirical experience in the first place. Can rational without empirical be conceived as anything, besides a glimmer of the idea only? I don't know, but I don't think so.
(August 16, 2014 at 7:20 pm)pocaracas Wrote: So, if I understand it properly, pickup, you're saying that we can call the collection of all the unknowns which, among other things, may be providing us with a common ground on which to experience reality a "god"?Let's just put it this way; if nature is all there is, and is at bottom eternal, necessary, and free from the physical, causal mechanisms that conscious beings, being bound to this experience, will inevitably run up against in terms of conditioned limitations, isn't this similar to God? Might the more honest, thoughtful theists have been on to something? I think it is worth considering from time to time, less I sink into a dogmatic tunnel of reality; and does that still make me an atheist? Or an agnostic--or deist--or both?
I'd prefer to call them unknowns.
The term "god" carries too much baggage, rendering it improper for the concept you want to pass over.
Seen like this, I see no reason to doubt any atheism.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza