RE: God, Santa, and The Tooth Fairy
December 7, 2021 at 4:48 am
(This post was last modified: December 7, 2021 at 4:55 am by Fake Messiah.)
(December 6, 2021 at 10:41 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: How can we rationally square that god is simultaneously not of the world, yet tangible in such a way that makes comparing god to magic and fantasy a category error? If a theist proposes that god is being erroneously lumped in with a particular stripe of concepts that he/she/it, de facto, doesn’t belong with, then I would say it’s the theist’s responsibility to lay out a pathway to grounding god in reality that actualizes god without leaving him/her/it susceptible to the same evidentiary standards used for any other real, material thing.
Yeah, what God, Santa, and The Tooth Fairy share in common is a whole tower of ad hoc excuses, and other logical fallacies, to "prove" their existence.
For instance, one example is the location Faerieland from a serious book about faeries by Brian Froud
Quote:Where is 'Faerieland'? Its position is elusive. It is sometimes just over the horizon and sometimes beneath our feet [so fill in the blank yourself]. Yet there have been periods when faerieland was thought to be an actual geographical area [faerie literalists], although even this has tended to shift [so maybe it's just a metaphor, but it is really a fusion of both when you use different points of views when you need them]. For instance, the Welsh first thought it was to the North of their mountainous land, and then in the mysterious, rocky and misty west peninsular of Pembrokeshire [oh, real geography]. Later it moved to an island lying in the Irish Channel off the Pembrokeshire coast [it's magical, it can move]. It was seen sometimes by sailors [anecdotal evidence], and even landed on, but would then disconcertingly disappear [ah, so close, some people are obviously not worthy of it]. Nevertheless, its faerie inhabitants were said to be frequent visitors to the markets of Laugharne and Milford Haxen [anecdotal evidence]. The Irish called the phantom isle Hy Breasail and, for them, it lay to the West. To Britons it was the Isle of Man that was the faerie isle. The Isle of Man is a rich source of faerie lore [oh there must be something there since there is so much 'lore'].
So Faerieland exists but it is always out of reach, and it is both a metaphor and real, and some honest people had interaction with it.
And then there is a famous example of purely ad hoc construction where Carl Sagan uses only ad hoc excuses to prove that there is a dragon in his garage in his book "The Demon-Haunted World". Sagan offers a story concerning a fire-breathing dragon who lives in his garage. When he persuades a rational, open-minded visitor to meet the dragon, the visitor remarks that they are unable to see the creature. Sagan replies that he "neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon". The visitor suggests spreading flour on the floor so that the creature's footprints might be seen, which Sagan says is a good idea, "but this dragon floats in the air". When the visitor considers using an infrared camera to view the creature's invisible fire, Sagan explains that her fire is heatless. You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.`Good idea, except she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick.'
So one can never really disprove that there is no dragon, but there is also no difference if there really is an invisible, incorporeal, dragon living in an imaginary dimension and no dragon at all.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"