[Serious] Fallacies & Strategies

[The Grand Nudger]

The general notion was that because a person could describe a god as being itself, it would not be in the same category as a being -but that doesn't hold water. The god of classical theism is the personification of being. IOW..a being in it's own right, even if we decide that this being is the ground of being.

[Deesse23]

being itself,

Verb (or attribute) turned into noun. Sounds cool and somehow impressive... never impressed me much.

Much like the god of running. He is not running, like any runner. He is running itself!!! Its a category error to call him a runner!!! The best and fastest runner, in and outside the universe. How dare you doubt he didnt invent running! He is participating in every race, although you mostly can not see him.

Very, very unimpressive.

[The Grand Nudger]

Or the personification of the waves as a sea goddess, the river as a fertility goddess, on and on and on, yes.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Yes, a theist believes God is real, that's what the word theist means...

An atheist asking a theist for empirical evidence of the divine, for example, has already committed a category mistake.

And an atheist asking you for any evidence?
Stop whining and bring some evidence to the table. Why do you believe in your god. Bring your best evidence, dont bother with the second best. Bring the top one here, right now.

A god who intervenes in the world may intervene simply by means of natural laws, and a naturalist will obviously be content with these as the final explanation.. All the misconceptions with regards to this crucial issue arise from an unwarranted assumption: that god's intervention should be solely through miracles and jaw-dropping events.

Thats, almost, comical.
Who invented (jaw dropping) miracles? Naturalists?

And he's essentially saying his god is indistinguishable from the natural laws. So why bother proposing a god, to begin with? Why put an extra unneeded entity. ?God is no final explanation he's a needless addition to the explanation. And what a fine excuse I no grand miracles are forth cloaked god in the mundane....How very convenient for the theist......

[The Grand Nudger]

Used to split moons and send fairy horses. Now he just makes water flow downhill. The incredible shrinking god is a testament to the secularization of the times we live in - that even faithful people couch their own assumptions..and even about gods, in a naturalists preferred world. The above rejects it's own invocation of a category error out of hand immediately, when it posits that there actually -could- be natural evidence for gods..the very thing it begins by asserting would be an error to so much as ask for.

[Deesse23]

A god who intervenes in the world may intervene simply by means of natural laws, and a naturalist will obviously be content with these as the final explanation.

And he's essentially saying his god is indistinguishable from the natural laws. So why bother proposing a god, to begin with? Why put an extra unneeded entity. ?God is no final explanation he's a needless addition to the explanation. And what a fine excuse I no grand miracles are forth cloaked god in the mundane....How very convenient for the theist......

Natural laws! So why bother proposing a god!? Yeah, really, why?


You (Kloro) know what claiming that "Natural laws, therefore god" is? A fallacy. This is as close as "Look at the trees" as it gets.

Considering that most theists´posts in this thread are a big ole "I dont have anyting to bring to the table, so i just claim everyone to be stupid who believes different than me", "look at the trees" is really, really, quite an achievement.

[The Grand Nudger]

Thread got deliciously meta. Now there's all sorts of different strategies for dealing with logical fallacies (and general missteps). People can judge for themselves which (if any) are useful or impactful in these kinds of discussions. My money is still on "none of them", if being useful or impactful is judged by whether or not a person corrects their view or argument.

[Pat Mustard]

There's a difference from being wrong in-fact, and mounting an argument from ignorance...though I suppose the terms in plain english probably lend themselves well to that conflation.    

Perfectly fair, and another good comparison.  States of belief are facts of a subject, just as their tastes in ice cream are facts of a subject.  Rationalizations or justifications for those states of belief or taste are overwhelmingly ex post facto - and both can and have and do have far reaching consequences. I knew vanilla was the best flavor of icecream before I could articulate why...and some chocolate loving filth will be around shortly to explain why I'm wrong in-fact.  Further, they'll explain, vanilla accelerated the deforestation of madagascar.  Long hair, don't care, still the best flavor of ice cream.  

IDK about these requirements for understanding.  I'm not a surgeon, and I understand why surgeons sometimes intentionally severe arteries and cut open chests.  Even if it were true, despite that observation...that you might need to be a god to understand a god (which probably holds some weight)... I don't think that people with moral disagreements are looking to understand a god, but a moral agent - and we're moral agents...so...surgeon to surgeon, right?  Ultimately, though, the idea that any moral disagreement with gods -must- be an argument from ignorance is an implicit admission that there doesn't appear to be any good reason for many states of affairs.  This defense of a gods alleged existence comes at the cost of it's moral warrant - which is going to be the final word in what and whether a person could cosign or worship - as that's referent to yet another set of facts of a subject.  What they can personally stomach.  You can probably imagine some world with a bad god you wouldn't worship.  You don't believe that this is that world - but...for example, you might not be thrilled to find it was zues or wotan or the dagda or kali running the show, eh?.  

If gods could be bad, and were bad, would it mean they couldn't exist?  Well, no, that's a bad argument..i agree... but not on any point of fact.  It's the structure.  A bad existent god is still an existent god.

I'm inclined to agree that post hoc justifications are common when it comes to religious beliefs. But we know that people can change their religion or give up on it, or become deists, etc. There is clearly room for objective evaluation of facts to make an informed decision. But I don't see how that's comparable to icecream flavors.. one prefers the flavor that tastes well for them, and the story stops here.. because it involves immediate senses, namely the taste. Religious belief is much more complicated, and it's usually the basis for the individual's entire worldview.

Now about the possibility of there being a deity which is not benevolent .. First, I don't see why anyone would be interested in this possibility, let's assume there is a perfectly sound.and valid argument for the existence of a supreme malevolent entity, so what? How would that have any bearing on how anyone lives their life?
Secondly, no one ever proved that there is unnecessary evil in this world, ever. Consider Rowe's famous example of a fawn trapped under a giant tree trunk, in the middle of wildfire, the fawn slowly agonizes to death for several days, while vultures are feeding on its living flesh. Now clearly, the suffering of the pawn seems unnecessary for everybody. In stone cold rigor, however, it doesn't follow its suffering is really unnecessary. We know we're not omniscient -a trivial fact that is always worth mentioning. So nothing justifies the move : apparently unnecessary => unnecessary, no matter how much one feels sorry for the fawn. It's worth mentioning that there is inherently an upper bound for suffering in this world, too much pain numbs the senses and death also means the absence of pain. Is death evil? No, because death is a negative concept.

So what does that mean? It simply means we have no reason to postulate malevolent entities. We do have good reasons in favor of benevolence, however. The emergence of ife in its most rudimentary form isn't something a malevolent entity would do, let alone the emergence of conscious agents with free will, capable of experiencing pleasure and achieve various forms of welfare.

So you've no interest in the abrahamic god and deny its existence. Then why do you expend so much energy defending it?

[The Grand Nudger]

Ironically, insisting that omniscience is required is a textbook argument from ignorance. We can't confidently state that the conclusion "god is immoral" is false, because we don't know something. Nor could we, for that matter, confidently state that the conclusion "god is immoral" is false on account of some particular argument being fallacious. Bad reasoning can be leveraged in support of a true conclusion. If I had to pick which fallacy gets used the most, it's the fallacy fallacy, either explicitly or implicitly. As far as strategies go on that one - I like to try and remind myself to say things like "so if this is true, it must be true for some other reason". Inviting them directly to reassert their conclusion by some other means.

[R00tKiT]

If humans cannot judge god evil because humans lack omniscience, it follows that they also cannot judge him to be good, precisely because humans lack the knowledge needed for that judgement too.

That means that all this yammering about "god is good" etc is just so much blather-- according to your own logic, you worship a god who may or may not be good or evil, and you too cannot know one way or the other.

That' a fair objection. But you are slightly misrepresenting the theist's position. In fact, we don't judge God at all. God judges us, not the other way around. That's something that all belief systems have in common. We can of course try to form arguments pointing to character of God, but this doesn't amount to judging God. 

A quick example to clarify this: people falsely accuse each other all the time. In serious cases, you have wrongful convictions of innocent people. We judged them based on incomplete or factually wrong information. If we can make such horrible mistakes in everyday issues that we are familiar with, we will surely make them when it comes to metaphysical issues that far removed from mundane experience.

About assessing the character of the divine, there is something very important to keep in mind: evil only makes sense if there is some amount of good to begin with. Disease is evil because it interrupts or decreases welfare, so without a rudimentary level of good health and welfare, the word disease no longer makes any sense. Losing loved ones amounts to suffering  because there were loved ones in the first place. Natural disasters are called disasters because we used to enjoy non-disastrous states of affairs for a considerable period of time, etc. 

Therefore, any complaint about evil is an implicit admission that there were good old days that were interrupted. But God doesn't owe anybody one second of welfare, let alone lengthy good days. And yet billions of people get decades of them.

Let's take more serious instances of evil: 9 million children die under the age of 5 each year, because of malnutrition and disease. What are we to make of this depressing statistic?  Under theism, there are three elements that help us with such an assessment : 

1/God doesn't owe anyone life to begin with. And one second of life -some philosophers would argue- is infinitely precious and valuable. The fact that life has a finite duration, and sometimes an exceedingly short one, doesn't decrease its inherent value.

2/As I said before, we have incomplete information. An omniscient God may have inaccessible reasons for allowing catastrophic instances of evil

3/The afterlife that purportedly all people go to after death can't be neglected here. One should look at the set {earthly life, outcome in afterlife} to assess whether the person led a fair existence.