Why I Do Not Align with or Fool Around with Atheists and Agnostics
tautology: the saying of the same thing twice in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style
(e.g., they arrived one after the other in succession ).
= = =
No being can come into existence except through a being that already exists.
There must be at least one necessary being, a being that is not capable of not existing.
There cannot be an infinite chain of necessary beings whose necessity is caused by another necessary being.
There must be a being that is necessary in itself.
That being is God.
Edited from The Five Ways – Philosophy entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Steefen
Does this work, not with the human animal, an incarnation of consciousness, but with an individual consciousness?
Does this work with a collective consciousness, such as the iChing?
Some entities of consciousness are just re-incarnations of consciousness.
Some entities of consciousness are new incarnations of consciousness.
Well, one could posit they are newly incarnated as a given type of consciousness, having been a different type of consciousness in a different type of incarnation.
Before human consciousness, there were other types of individual consciousness.
If we back out of the consciousness of all animals, we still have the consciousness of Gaia.
The Gaia Theory posits that the organic and inorganic components of Planet Earth have evolved together as a single living, self-regulating system. It suggests that this living system has automatically controlled global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors, that maintains its own habitability. In a phrase, “life maintains conditions suitable for its own survival.” In this respect, the living system of Earth can be thought of analogous to the workings of any individual organism that regulates body temperature, blood salinity, etc. So, for instance, even though the luminosity of the sun – the Earth’s heat source – has increased by about 30 percent since life began almost four billion years ago, the living system has reacted as a whole to maintain temperatures at levels suitable for life.
Do humans have existential Gods, entities without which, we cannot exist? Certainly.
Atheism and agnosticism is nonsense.
We have prior humans of incarnation (family tree).
We have the collective conscious and the collective unconscious.
collective unconscious: the part of the unconscious mind which is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind, as distinct from the individual’s unconscious.
We also have Gaia.
Gaia has the Sun.
The ancients saw Gaia has a goddess and the Sun as a god, be it Sol Invictus, the Aten, etc.
The ancients were also aware of the stars in the sky. The Sun was a member of its own collective.
That collective was in one of the four arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, one of 54 galaxies is a local group of galaxies.
The three largest galaxies in the Local Group are Andromeda, the Milky Way, and Triangulum (M33).
Look to your near gods without reaching conclusions based on far away gods.
As Earth has some self-regulating properties,
as the Sun has some self-regulating properties,
as the Milky Way maintains its integrity, even with the help of gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism
as all of the 54 galaxies are not all spiral galaxies and therefore have different self-regulating properties,
Let the Lords be Lords and recognize their power instead of speak of the nonsense of agnosticism and atheism.
= = =
I agree, but wouldn’t you also agree that as there are weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism,
there also are the elements of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that move the discussion for gods of humans beyond the near gods to the distant gods?
Steefen
There are Gods and their are conditions/phenomenon. In that I brought in weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism, leaving out the periodic chart is a moot addition.
Robert
bear with me if what I am about to say is totally ignorant: it seems to me another comparable way to paraphrase the thomistic argument(s) is something like this:
An explanation for all existence must exist.
That which explains the existence of all things is what we all call God.
Therefore God exists.
Steefen
Instead of flirting with ignorance, go to Encyclopaedia Britannica or google and look up the Five Ways. That is what was done in my post above.
And Dirk Campbell, to reply to a flirt with ignorance has questionable value unless you are going to steer one away from the risks of ignorance.
Take the time for quality ! ! !
mnels –
Essence to exist
Existence is an abstract property, one that some entity X possesses if and only X is instantiated in the world (world broadly defined). To assert that X exists because X’s essence is to exist is tautology. To assert that God’s essence is to exist, as solely a descriptor, seems interesting on its surface, but does little philosophical work. Why do I say this is the case? Iterate the game, and ask oneself:
– Why/how does anything have in its essence to exist?
– How can I know God’s essence is actually to exist, rather than just define it as such?
Every answer to these I’ve encountered gets swamped in the bog of tautology.
Essence
Essence is also a philosophically problematic concept. How can we distinguish between (a) the essence of “the thing itself” and (b) solely the description of the inclusion criteria for our conceptual schema for labeling something as falling into a particular category. This may at first seem rather facile, but it is a rather deep issue embedded in the way our minds work. It may be the essence of our concept of God that it should exist, but this conceptual essence doesn’t a existent being make – it’s an inclusion criterion for something to fall into the conceptual category “God”.
This is a slippery topic, and leads to the mind-bending world of modal logics. If we live in a sufficiently deterministic reality, then there is no contingent fact in a strong sense – all is necessary, given the prime-cause. If we live in an indeterministic reality, then contingency becomes synonymous with randomness. If we try to have an admixture of the two types of reality, our concept of contingency is no better off for it. Conceptual necessity vs. actual (existential) necessity is also a thorny offshoot from here given the limitations of how our minds work. Formal logic is a schematic of sorts of what our minds find as necessary relationships – but does that internal schematic therefore map onto reality out there?
Immaterial vs material
Prime mover
The impulse we all have (at least all those weirdos like us who’ve spent time thinking about it!) to label something as prime-mover, prime-cause is the conundrum of why there is something rather than nothing. Much like the hard problem of consciousness, or the problem of induction, or the problem of causation, our minds break down on this enigma. The nearer we get to the heart of the problem, the harder it becomes to avoid tautology or bald assertions of brute fact.
My own opinion is that our strong desire to impute that there be an agent (God) at root of everything, vs a cold/impersonal universe (writ large), stems from a seductive mixture of our minds’ cognitive bias towards agentism and our limited capacity of analogy with respect to our own inner subjective experience. We hit the impenetrable (for our minds) problem of something rather than nothing, and then our mental biases push us towards positing a prime-cause of a type that we find most aesthetically satisfying (but alas explanatorily vacuous). Neither God (broadly defined) nor an eternal universe writ large provide the foundational explanation we’re after, but we will lean towards the one which we find more intuitively attractive, tautologies notwithstanding.
Robert said
Steefen said
Robert
[It’s been an awfully long time since I was a minimally competent …in philosophy so] bear with me if what I am about to say is totally ignorant: it seems to me another comparable way to paraphrase the thomistic argument(s) is something like this:An explanation for all existence must exist.
That which explains the existence of all things is what we all call God.
Therefore God exists.
… Take the time for quality ! ! !
Better yet, read Thomas’ five ways in the Latin, understand the context of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, and translate them into a modern paraphrase of the implicit rationale being employed. If you’re able to critique that, please do!
Steefen:
Send that to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
because you think encyclopaedia entries or philosophy textbooks … What? Cannot convey the Proofs of God?
Tell them, stop publishing because Robert erroneously thinks the only way to learn the arguments of Thomas Aquinas is to do the following:
1. read Thomas’ five ways in the Latin
2. understand the context of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics
3. translate them into a modern paraphrase of the implicit rationale being employed.
4. and finally, critique that
As Robert makes his erroneous suggestion, let’s see his try at
1. read Thomas’ five ways in the Latin
2. understand the context of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics
3. translate them into a modern paraphrase of the implicit rationale being employed.
4. and finally, critique that
Let’s see how he sets the bar at improving Philosophy textbooks and entries in reputable encylopedias.
it seems to me another comparable way to paraphrase the thomistic argument(s) is something like this:
An explanation for all existence must exist.
That which explains the existence of all things is what we all call God.
Therefore God exists.
versus this (Aquinas’s third demonstration of God’s existence, the argument from contingency):
No being can come into existence except through a being that already exists.
There must be at least one necessary being, a being that is not capable of not existing.
There cannot be an infinite chain of necessary beings whose necessity is caused by another necessary being.
There must be a being that is necessary in itself.
That being is God.
Edited from The Five Ways – Philosophy entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Encylopaedia Britannica
Do humans have existential Gods, entities without which, we cannot exist? Certainly.
Atheism and agnosticism is nonsense.
We have prior humans of incarnation (family tree).
We have the collective conscious and the collective unconscious.
collective unconscious: the part of the unconscious mind which is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind, as distinct from the individual’s unconscious.
We also have Gaia.
Gaia has the Sun.
The ancients saw Gaia has a goddess and the Sun as a god, be it Sol Invictus, the Aten, etc.
The ancients were also aware of the stars in the sky. The Sun was a member of its own collective.
That collective was in one of the four arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, one of 54 galaxies is a local group of galaxies.
The three largest galaxies in the Local Group are Andromeda, the Milky Way, and Triangulum (M33).
Look to your near gods without reaching conclusions based on far away gods.
Steefen
We have life through the Sun.
Okay, that is fine. One cannot live without the Sun and without the Earth rotating on its axis, facing the Sun giving us day, not facing the Sun giving us night, and without the Earth orbiting the Sun, giving us seasons.
Much of creation on Earth depends on the day, the night, and the seasons, but is our particular Sun the creator?
The answer, is no. We are back into the periodic table of elements section of the discussion.
The Sun is a star. So, you have the Helium and Hydrogen but it is with the death of stars that we get heavier elements.
Living God and Death of God creates life.
Monotheism is a failed hypothesis.
“You do not exist without stars going kablooey.”
When stars die, they leave behind three very crucial things for human life:
– Carbon (the backbone of all living matter, including us
– Nitrogen (which makes up approximately 80% of the atmosphere)
– Oxygen
David Biello, TED Science Curator
You need a stellar mortician to know what the death of stars contribute to life.
Our Provider-God is the Sun, a star;
our Creator-God ARE Dead Stars and a Living Star.
Uncharted, Friday, May 15, 2020 / NPR TED Radio Hour
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Steefen said
Do humans have existential Gods, entities without which, we cannot exist? Certainly.
As a spiritual atheist I would have more sympathy with your position if I could understand it. Your post is full of unsubstantiated assertions. For example ‘The ancients saw Gaia as a goddess.’ Er, no, not all of them. Which ancients are you talking about? How did they know? and how do you know what they thought? The Pirahā tribe of the Amazon rainforest have no gods, no creation myth. They believe they were always here and the world has always been here (See Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep There are Snakes. Everett was a Christian missionary sent to convert the Pirahā. They converted him to atheism). So not everyone needs gods. What do you mean when you say that atheism and agnosticism are nonsense, then go on to say that monotheism is a failed hypothesis? Are you a pantheist or what are you? By the way you missed out hydrogen from your list of crucial elements for life (See Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous).
Dirk,
Welcome to The Forum. Having been here since 2013, I’ve seen a number of members leave in frustration over incredible comments. Just know we are are all kinds of members. I, for one, am a believer who has absolutely no academic credentials to justify comments made on occasion. (The kindness of these members has been appreciated!)
mnels said
Hngerhman
A) When there is a marked lack of evidence for something in the face of an extraordinarily thoughtful and effortful search for that thing, it is unlikely that said thing exists.
B) Having conducted a extraordinarily thoughtful and effortful search, we have found no evidence that X exists.
Therefore:C) It is unlikely that X exists.
I would probably challenge premise A here. It may be that humans lack the technology or brainpower to understand something at that moment in history. If you scanned the beach for hours using a metal detector and determined after a thoughtful search that “cardboard does not exist on this beach”, it wouldn’t show that cardboard is unlikely to exist, only that the tool you were using was not appropriate to the task. The fact that scientific approaches don’t show evidence of God (and people like Francis Collins would probably challenge this) does not mean that God is unlikely to exist, only that a different approach (e.g. philosophy of religion) is the better way to go.
OK, as promised that I would come back to this framing (which I liked). I agree that my colloquial framing above isn’t as precise as it could be, but it was meant to intuitively point up a difference in how we tend to treat no evidence for X with respect to certain entities vs. others. No evidence for Leprechauns, as a trivial example.
Let me take care to distinguish between (a) lack of evidence for X leading to low probability that X exists and (b) lack of evidence for X rendering belief that X exists as unjustified. If one searches (sufficiently) exhaustively (via science, philosophy, religion, etc.) and comes up with a marked lack of evidence for X, is it rationally justified to believe “X exists, but our detection tools must be too dull” over “X doesn’t seem to exist”? They would be epistemologically indistinguishable propositions, but one helps itself to the existence of additional, unsupported entity.
Dirk Campbell,
Do you really want to quibble? Because if you do, I do not have sympathy for your trivial reply.
Steefen
In Greek mythology Gaia was the mother goddess who presided over the earth. She was the mate of Uranus and the mother of the Titans and the Cyclopes.
Dirk Campbell
Not everyone needs gods.
Steefen
Everyone needs our living star, the Sun.
Everyone needs our dead stars which contributed to our Table of Elements.
The living star, the Sun, is our Provider God.
Dead Stars are our Creator Gods.
Failure to realize a necessary condition, ignorance, is not a rebuttal.
Steefen
Everyone needs our living star, the Sun.
Everyone needs our dead stars which contributed to our Table of Elements.
The living star, the Sun, is our Provider God.
Dead Stars are our Creator Gods.
Failure to realize a necessary condition, ignorance, is not a rebuttal.
I am reminded of a terrific short story entitled If the Stars are Gods by science fiction writers Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund which won the Nebula Award for best short story in 1977. An alien starship approaches Earth and the occupants request a meeting with a human who “knows your star the best”. The earth folks assume they mean an astronomer so they send the protagonist, a famous ex-astronaut, to meet the aliens. But they claim the stars are conscious entities with which they can communicate and it is only a courtesy to approach earthfolk before they commune with our star. It seems their own star has gone silent… The short story was later incorporated into a novel with the same title. It details the further adventures of the astronaut but alas, doesn’t rise to the level of the original story. But it is worth seeking out just for the original story which is incorporated as a single chapter.
DirkCampbell said
Steefen said
Do humans have existential Gods, entities without which, we cannot exist? Certainly.
By the way you missed out hydrogen from your list of crucial elements for life.
Steefen
What?
I did not miss hydrogen. My post clearly included hydrogen:
The Sun is a star. So, you have the Helium and Hydrogen but it is with the death of stars that we get heavier elements.
The living star, the Sun, is our Provider God.
Dead Stars are our Creator Gods.
At one time I recognized the Solar Nebula is a Creator God.
The nebula that gave birth to the Sun consisted of recycled material from an earlier generation of stars [Super Stars]. This material was largely hydrogen and helium, but with significant amounts of heavier elements and dust. Five billion years ago, something triggered the nebula’s collapse. It could have been the close approach of another star or the shockwave from a nearby supernova. As the nebula began to condense, it flattened into a bulging disc with a huge ball of gas, the young Sun, at its center.
As the cloud of gas that would become the Sun collapsed inward, it heated up and began to pull more and more material onto itself. Eventually, conditions at the center of the cloud became so hot and dense that nuclear fusion took place, releasing enormous amounts of energy. The Sun ignited in a fierce blaze of radiation, similar to the bright stars that have just formed in the galaxy.
- New Sun is surround by solar nebula.
- Gas and dust mix together to form small bodies of gravitational attraction.
- Planets begin to form in the thinning gas.
As radiation from the young Sun blasted out through the remains of the solar nebula, it started to blow away the light gases that had survived. The inner Solar System rapidly thinned out, leaving mostly dust particles called chrondules. In the outer Solar System, the radiation was weaker and so the gas survived long enough to be pulled into the massive atmospheres of the giant planets.
Over tens of millions of years, the chrondules in the inner Solar System began to clump together and stick to each other (accretion). Eventually, a few dozen bodies (protoplanets) became big enough for their gravity to pull in more material from around them. Finally, some of these protoplanets collided to form the modern terrestrial planets.
For half a billion years more, meteorites bombarded the young planets keeping their surfaces in a hot, molten state.
Source: The Way the Universe Works by Robin Kerrod and Giles Sparrow, 2002
Probably obtained by me on a 2002 or 2003 visit to the Hayden Planetarium / Rose Center for Earth and Space
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Reply:
Once you have been out of body / had your life lovingly steered by unseen intelligence(s) / remembered previous lives that made you cry – how can you possibly deny the spiritual realities?
Steefen:
Spiritual realities cannot be denied.
Yet, there is much evil on Earth from which comes much suffering.
Yes, the Sun is a Lord, if not a God. Yes, there may be Lords/Gods of the galaxy, especially because astrology looks beyond the ecliptic with the parans of this or that star rising while this or that planet was in culmination, etc.; and, because I think some astrologers speak of the galactic center.
Let the goodness and the evil influences in our galaxy be the scope of our gods without trying to affirm or negate a notion of gods encompassing the 54 galaxies in our local group of galaxies.
If the gods of Earth revolving on its axis, the Moon, and the Sun give us excellent days and nights,
let there be gods/lords that can give us truth, justice, and happiness
despite there being people who have not transformed into truth, justice, happiness, for all their Mercury-Pluto or their Jupiter square Mars orientations,
despite people who cannot get away from the dangers of Moon Opposition Mars interactions that are dysfunctional/degrading.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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