We can make scientifically valid God arguments. we don't need to because bleief in God is a personal issue. It's existential it's phenomenological. It's not science. I don't have to have the same kind of proof. Atheists get into the fortress of facts, which si not science, but they pretend it is. Its' their ideolgoical template. So you are so used to that that you start thinking everything has to be proved scientifically. Science can't prove everything. most things can't be proved and there is no guarantee they can or will be. Since rational warrant is the best we can do on God talk that's the standard we don't need a bigger one. Belief in God makes my life work. that's all I need. I don't need scinece I don't need atheists corn ball special pleading. I only need my little search for truth by myself without your permission.
got it?
Demand for empirical evidence of God is unfair and misplaced
God is beyond our understanding. God is not given in sense data and thus the demand for sense data proving God is silly and useless.
In one of their typically hypocritical moves those who claim they don't believe in the fortress of facts concept will turn around and take a page right off the heart of the fortress concept and demand empirical proof of God and when it doesn't come they will say "this is proof there's no God." But they have arleady been told "God is not amenable to this kind of evidence.
We know form scinece that there are many thing in scinece, whole knowledge levels above the scientific that are not given backed by any direct evidence and yet scientists assume they are real or that they could be real.
*big bang
*singularity
*string membranes
*dark matter (getting close)
*direct observation of *neutrinos (were historically *accepted as real long before any direct evidence, still don't have direct observation of them).
*Hawking's no singularity thing, (although that's pretty much set aside but it was accepted up front on the premise that we can't have direct proof).
Multivese (no direct proof, mathematical doesn't count).
that means not having direct evdience is not any kind of proof that they are not real.
The facts are just that we have to use other means of understanding God. that's all there is to it and theology has met that challenge by developing with scientific thinking, as with process theology.
Several reasons why it's not fair to expect direct evidence:
(1) God is not a thing in creation.
He's not on a par with objects in the world. he's the basis of all reality. that would be like expecting to find a piece of the laws of physics or the door to the unified field.
(2) God is not a big man in the sky but is being itself.
God is in everything. He's too big and too basic to be seen.
(3) God is the mind that thinks reality
we re figments of God's imagination. That means we can't get outside the thought and see what's thinking it. How could we possibility do that? I hate the film "the Matrix" no one bring it up. I prefer the holodeck on Star Trek TNG. how could a character of the Holodeck never know the truth?
(4) God's wants the search.
God doesn't' want ot make it obvious. He makes it possible for us to find him but we have to seek. the reasons are laid out in my thing on soeteriological drama.
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com...cal-drama.html
Atheists might say God could make it obvious if he wanted to. Yes, but he doesn't want to because that would frustrate the process of interlinking values. Its' not unfair because the possibility is there. you only have to let go of your ego and seek God though the means that he may be found.
7 comments:
The Holodeck character cannot know the truth unless the Holodeck creator reveals him/herself. I remember CS Lewis framing this analogy in terms of a novel being written. If God is writing a story and we are characters in that story, it is impossible for us to get outside the book in order to find God. The only way, Lewis said, for Sherlock Holmes to meet Arthur Conan Doyle is if Doyle wrote himself into the story as a character. This is, then, the idea behind the Incarnation of Christ.
You're probably familiar with this. The Holodeck is a more up-to-date picture, of course.
I agree, good points. thanks for using Holodeck and not Matrix.
Liking TNG and not Matrix is what separates from the animals ;-)
I'm not a Matrix fan-- but what is it that you hate about it?
Well first of all it doesn't do anything withe epistemology that it raises. It's just an adventure deal. If they are getting at any higher point it does a bad job of it.
It just goes on and on and on and on and on.
the Martial arts is too stylized.
when it first came out people on the net made over it like this was this great philosophical thing, the greatest film since the seventh seal.
I agree about the overemphasis on the adventure. Maybe they thought it was a big philosophical deal because they'd never seen the point raised quite so dramatically before.
It's not a great movie, but if it gets people thinking about epistemology, it's worth something. :)
Metacroc,
Hello again. Had to have a name change due to copy right laws. But any way, there is a slight problem with your logic. You say, "God is beyond our understanding." In the third paragraph yet later you go on to say, "God wants the search". Which one is it? Since you are bringing up epistemology, this question is directly towards the subject. If your God is "beyond you understanding", then how can u state what he/it wants? The whole concept of being in gods mind directly states that he is non material (how you get to a mind that does not have a brain based in matter is another story). Since by your standards he is non material there is no seperating what he is from that he is. If one aspect of your God is unknowable, then all aspects are unknowable. So to claim to know anything about your God, i. e. He wants u to search, is to claim knowledge of the unknowable. This negates its unknowable status. If its known then your God should be quantifiable. How do you reconcile this glaring contridiction?
I may answer this with a main article on the blog tomorrow.
Stwped monkey:
"Metacroc,
Hello again. Had to have a name change due to copy right laws. But any way, there is a slight problem with your logic. You say, "God is beyond our understanding." In the third paragraph yet later you go on to say, "God wants the search". Which one is it?
That is no contradiction. One can always move toward the infinite even if one never adhesives it. Besides that's not counting what happens after death. Once we are with God face to face (so to speak) we might told everything.
"Since you are bringing up epistemology, this question is directly towards the subject. If your God is "beyond you understanding", then how can u state what he/it wants?"
He can tell us.All talk of God is analogical. Even if we don't really know it works to follow the course of the saints and mystics.It's empirically proven by psychology studies to work in that it produces a better life.
"The whole concept of being in gods mind directly states that he is non material (how you get to a mind that does not have a brain based in matter is another story). Since by your standards he is non material there is no seperating what he is from that he is."
that is not adding anything to what I have already answered.
"If one aspect of your God is unknowable, then all aspects are unknowable."
that is doesn't follow. Not even a logical statement. That's like saying "If we don't know what started the big bang expansion then we can't know anything about big bang." There are lots of things we know something about even though we don't know all.
"So to claim to know anything about your God, i. e. He wants u to search, is to claim knowledge of the unknowable."
Know its not. I said I was talking about knowledge that can be passed on in words. We can experience what we don't understand and we can know things intuitively As a result of that experience. The point of knowing God is to know God first hand, by experience, not just by words on paper.
"This negates its unknowable status. If its known then your God should be quantifiable. How do you reconcile this glaring contridiction? "
You are confused. You can know something about a thing and not know all about it. You can know it experimentally and not know it intellectually.
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