Robert said
Any god whose existence can be proven or denied isn’t God anyway.
Let me try to unpack this.
Any god whose existence you can prove, isn’t God. So, if you can prove God exists, he doesn’t exist.
Any god whose existence you can deny, isn’t God. So if you can prove God doesn’t exist, he doesn’t exist.
But:
‘Those who seriously entertain the concept of an unknowable God have already given up on the concept of God altogether.’ So, if you think you can’t know God … you can’t know God?
I like your scholarship Robert but I have reservations when it comes to your sophistry. The bare fact is that the existence of God can never be proved or disproved, because the very idea of God is outside the domain of knowledge-based evidence. Even in religion God is beyond human reasoning. What definition of God, who (by definition) is beyond definition, can mean anything? It’s trivial. Far better to concentrate one’s energies on serious issues, like the fate of Planet Earth and everything that lives on it.
Dirk Campbell
I like your scholarship Robert but I have reservations when it comes to your sophistry.
Steefen
sophistry:
-
a fallacious argument.
I have reservations when it comes to your use of fallacious arguments with the intention of deceiving.
From the first statement: “Any god whose existence you can prove, isn’t God,” follows: “If you can prove that God exists, any other god except Him doesn’t exist.” Referring to Him as “he” in the latter, not capital, reinforces the first statement.
On the other hand from the: “Any god whose existence you can deny, isn’t God.” follows accordingly: “If you can deny that God doesn’t exist, any other god except Him does exist.”
A definition of God, who (by definition) is beyond definition it’s trivial but not meaningless.
Is it far better to concentrate one’s energies on some other serious issues?
Like Chesterton (*) said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”
Like the fate of Planet Earth and everything that lives on it.
(*) although not traced in his works; first recorded as ‘The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything’ in Emile Cammaerts Chesterton: The Laughing Prophet (1937)
I was just concerned with the formality of the sentence, not it’s content. I might agree with you or disagree. Any earnest escatology about God is worth a review, but it’s aside from my aim.
I browsed the discussion for some time, and I have to confess that it didn’t bother me particularly.
Then I read the sentence and realized that something was off.
I viewed it differently, and without really formalizing the reasoning I wrote it down my contro-proposal.
Reviewing it, I feel that it can be posed in a semi-serious way in this guise: Since God is a god, let’s say G belongs or is a g(), so is a part of the family of gods, and given that any god that satisfies the property “not proven” (let’s call it -g(), a sub-universe of g()) implies that god is not God, then, if for absurd God was “not proven” he had to belong to -g(), contrary to the assertion.
But if God exists then is the only one that exists, since g()-God = -g(), hence my statement.
I think is fairly simple to demonstrate that if God had that property is the only one that satisfies it.
DirkCampbell said
janmaru said
Like the fate of Planet Earth and everything that lives on it.You think that’s trivial? What planet are you living on?
A planet where people read your words and do not put them into your mouth, pretending they are yours.
But as you said, it’s MY planet, and I’m not pretending of sharing it with thou.
For me, alles ist gut.
Just the statement: “(A) Any god whose existence you can prove, isn’t God. (B) So, if you can prove God exists, he doesn’t exist,” is not formally correct.
A doesn’t imply B. That’s all. I mean, it’s the basic grammar of reasoning. Once a shared ground is laid, then it’s possible to get deeper into any question. Tho, this time, I don’t feel compelled to do so.
It’s not “my” A or “my” B. I just picked them up. Since the legitimate owner is known, no possessio uti dominus would allow me to keep them as my property.
Bytheway, the sound of one hand clapping does make a lot of sense. It’s a device used by the Zen Teacher to put off a student who got stuck on the way to liberation. It’s a riddle, an existential one. It lives outside the realm of rationality, so the category of reason does not apply.
Stephen said
Yahweh has meaning, Zeus, Allah, Odin, Maria Regina Caeli, Kali…the gods that people believe in and pray to – or fear. All exist in the imagination, in the stories. All are powerful and knowable, none undefinable.
The Solar System or the Sun, the Moon, Gaia, the Earth, these gods exist outside imagination. Their power to create, maintain, and destroy life are knowable and definable.
Our immediate god, the solar system, is contextualized beyond itself via the fundamental forces and the principles of quantum mechanics.
In physics, there are four observed fundamental forces or interactions that form the basis of all known interactions in nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces. Some speculative theories have proposed a fifth force to explain various anomalous observations that do not fit existing theories. The characteristics of this fifth force depend on the hypothesis being advanced. Many postulate a force roughly the strength of gravity (i.e. it is much weaker than electromagnetism or the nuclear forces) with a range of anywhere from less than a millimeter to cosmological scales. Another proposal is a new weak force mediated by W′ and Z′ bosons.
The life giving, life preserving, and life extinguishing solar system is also contextualized via a whole number and fractional numbers of dimensions.
Robert said
OK. I thought you were originally attributing that thought process to me so I wanted to clearly distance myself from it. I also agree that Zen koans have utility; that’s why I compared them above to the language of apophatic theology.
Wow, so you distanced yourself from something I never said.
How hard can it be to follow a thread in a blog?
Anyway, I said that Koans make “sense” even if they are not enforced through the rational mind.
The distinction involves the notion of emotional intelligence and its distance from the rational one.
I suggest reading this book: ** you do not have permission to see this link **.
It’s about how intelligence is measured (the IQ test), which includes mostly puzzles, math problems, patterns, and vocabularies. On the other hand, critical thinking is also important.
It’s the ability to think rationally in a goal-orientated way and the strength to use it when appropriate.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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