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Deism, Atheism, and False Dilemmas
#21
RE: Deism, Atheism, and False Dilemmas
(March 15, 2015 at 9:48 am)remagination Wrote: I am concerned that I may have inadvertently committed a False Dilemma fallacy when I concluded that the existence of God is improbable. No, I am not saying that the conclusion that I reached is wrong --- it could very well be correct. I am just saying that the means by which I reached the conclusion may be flawed, and that therefore I may have to re-evaluate things while avoiding this fallacy.

How might I have committed the False Dilemma fallacy? I calculated that the existence of God is improbable because I was only considering two possibilities (1) a universe with a somewhat anthropomorphic God or (2) a completely Godless universe.

However, I may have not given adequate consideration to various traditions that hold to an existence of God without such anthropomorphisms - such as Deism and Pantheism.

Any input as I embark on re-examining the possibility of God's existence while keeping my mind open to the possibility of a non-anthropomorphic God?

I will start with the secondary points first. With deism, the primary motivation in the past seems to have been that people did not understand how life began and the earth came to be, so that while they realized that stories like one finds in the Bible are silly (so they gave up on a full-fledged Christianity), they thought that they had no better idea of how things began that to appeal to the idea of a god creating everything. We can say two things about that. First, we have some explanations for some of these things now (e.g., evolution). Second, saying "god did it" isn't really an explanation of anything anyway. It tells us nothing of how the earth was formed, or life started, or even why these things happened. It is a pseudo-explanation, in which it seems like it is a kind of explanation, but it does not really explain anything. Which explains why they ought not have been deists even without a real explanation of how life started and the earth was formed, etc. If one does not know something, the truth is that one does not know; making up some BS does not solve the issue and supply one with truth. Not knowing how life started is no reason to believe in a god.

The second secondary point will be made nicely by asking a question: What is the difference between being an atheist, and being a pantheist? What, exactly, is being added to the universe, if one asserts that atheism is wrong, and that pantheism is correct?


But now I will get to the main point. What, exactly, do you mean by the term "god?" Before we look for one, we will need to know what we are talking about, won't we? If you are going to say that the term "god" may refer to anything that anyone might refer to with that term, then you are going with no idea at all about it, and something just being called a "god" makes it a god. Some have probably said, "Brad Pitt is a god!", and I defy you to prove that Brad Pitt does not exist.

If the term "god" has no meaning, then you are never going to be able to come to the conclusion that "god does not exist" is true. That is because, in order for that to be true, it has to mean something, and in order for the sentence to mean something, the term "god" needs to mean something.

So, what, exactly, do you mean by the term "god?" If the term does not mean anything, then you are not talking about anything when you use the term.

"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
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