How Do We Know God is Not Evil?

I've seen atheists ask this in various forms. The most recent I've seen is "prove God isn't evil." I answered that with three arguemnts only to find the atheists pulling the old relativism thing. How do we know good and evil even exist at all they said? Well, first of all, in answering the question about "prove god is not evil," the challenge was in reference to Christian ideas. To even ask the question assumes a Christian framework. You can't say on the one hand "God might really be evil," then say "but there's no such thing as evil." That would have no meaning. God might really be this thing that has no meaning and doesn't exist? What kind of meaning does that have? One get's the feeling of being set up for a cheap trick. Like we say "ok so God is evil ni the sense that there is no such thing as evil. so what?" they say "O you admitted it, God is evil you said it ok that's the end of Christianity!" Those are two completely different questions to answer the one you must bracket the other. first I will present my arguments to prove that God is not evil, and to do that assume the Christian framework for good and evil. Then I will deal with the relativistic stuff (that there is no good or evil).

I am assuming there is such a thing as good and we all have a general idea of what that is. Now I also noted that many atheist in the discussion I allude to above (where the challenge was made "prove God is not evil") were assuming a contradiction in the Bible where on the one hand God says "love your neighbor" and on the other hand he says "slaughter the Amelekites kids." So there's the problem of a contradiction between the values God expresses and the behavior God exhibits. Thus we assume the values expressed are true values of good, and that is a meaningful term, but the question is does God seem to betray the very values that he instigates?

Before giving three positive reasons to think God can't be evil, (that is a logical impossibility) we have to deal with the seeming contradiction in the Bible. In the discussion on a certain message board aluded to above, a friend of mine who is an atheist said this:

Originally Posted by mikey_101

No genocide isn't evil, killing children and homosexuals isn't evil, eternal torture for not believing in one particular religion out of thousands isn't evil, slavery isn't evil. Actually you're right, God isn't evil because God is a reflection of OUR evil.

Those are based upon bible verses and bible verses are not creeds, they are not dictum they are not decrees. In short we don't have to bleieve them.

There is NO official Christian doctrine or document or creed or council that say "you must believe every verse in the bible." The fundies say it but they didn't exist until the 1820s. They are merely late commers in Christian history.Each one of those passages must be analogized in the original language and discussed according to the history and culture and textual evidence to show it really belongs in the Bible or not.I can tell you now there is evidence Amalekite passage is added in latter.



The text of 1 Samuel is one of the most heavily redacted in the Bible. As we will see, it's very presence in the canon has been brought into question, but the version we have is probably a corrupted second rate copy, and the LXX is closer, and Q4Sama at Qumran closer still, to the actual original.

Institutte Bibilcal Scientific Studies:

Biblical Archaeology, Dead Sea Scrolls and OT


"1&2 Samuel"

"For the past two centuries textual critics have recognized that the Masoretic Text (MT) of 1&2 Samuel has much textual corruption. The Samuel MT is shorter than the LXX and 4QSama. The Samuel MT has improper word division, metathesis, and other orthographic problems. Certain phrases and clauses go against the Hebrew grammar rules. Parallel passages vary from each other" (See Charlesworth, 2000, pp.227-8).

Redaction of Infant Slaughtering Passage


Notes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible on 1 Sam 15:1-35

"Another story of Saul's rejection: The late source. Compare this section with 13:7-15, Samuel, not Saul is the leading figure once more."

This is the very passage in which Samuel relays God's command to wipe out the infants. So even though I still need to find more specific evidence for that very passage, there is a good chance of proving redaction. While its true that I can't produce an actual MS showing no infant slaughter command, the passage in which that command is given has been redacted. The odds are very high that this command was not part of the original passage, or we can regard it as such. We know that slaughtering infants in evil, and we have no obligation to accept a command as divine that we know to be totally at odds with God's law and God's moral code.

All the other verses must be dealt with in similar fashion, one by one, and an overview entailing a theory of inspiration adopted so that one knows how to approach scripture. For an example on this one might consult my page on the nature of Biblical revelation as an example.

Now I present the three arguments that prove God is not evil:

I. Being is good.

Being is not evil. We are all part of being, we all engage in the act of being. We know from our existence that existing is good and it's not evil. There's no reason to think it is. It's hard for a lot of people to get thier minds around the idea of God as being itself. I've certainly spent a lot of time blogging about the concept. I wont go into it here. It can be found on Doxa in several pages. I'm also just finishing my second book which is on the subject. Wait a couple of years and it will be out.

syllogism:
*God is being itself

being is good.

therefore God must be good.

One objection to this is that some atheists tried to evoke the notion that life is not good. One cna mean this either in terms of "my individual life sux," or in terms of amorality or some form of relativism. That would be cheating the issues here becuase I explain above the original challenge assumes Christian categories of good and evil. Moreover, one can condemn the concept of life itself by one's own experiences. I can have rotten life (to some extent that's what I make it) that doesn't mean all life is rotten. There is a goodness about life itself. Here I take life as a pragmatic form of existence. Existence in and of itself is "good," if not in a moral sense (which is one confussion of the argument--the mixing of senses between moral and pragmatic) at least just in the sense of the (apparent) goodness of open ended possibility.


II. Love can't be evil.

This is one of those mysterious points that of which atheists are most incredulous. Almost every time they will say "you are logic is so bad" on this point. When pressed they never say why. they can't give me a rule of logic that's violated, nine times out of ten it's a matter of rejecting the concept of a priori. That unusually happens becuase they have self esteem problems, as atheists are known to have.

The nature of love makes it the very definition of Good. What is the nature of the good, it's what love is, being kind, being gentile, caring about others, giving to others, living for others. How do we know this? First we have to realize we are not talking about butterflies in the stomach. Many atheists try to lose the concept of love in the emotions that go with it, which they sweep away as the side effect of brain chemistry. The kind of love experienced in romance, puppy love,infatuation, lust, sexual attraction and the like is what is meant here by "love." Here I speak of agape. This is "God's love" sometimes translated "charity." Although that is not a good translation. Paul Tillich defines it as "the will t the good of the other." I think that is a most apt decryption. The Greek does imply the willingness to assign to others the human dignity due them.

It is more or less an axiomatic tenet that love is the background of the moral universe (consult Saint Augustine, and Joseph Fletcher). I am not sure it can be proved, thus making it "axiomatic." Like most axioms trying to deny it would be absurd. This is certainly true in terms of Christian theology.

1 John 4:

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. ¹³ This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. ¹⁶ And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ¹⁷ This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. ²¹ And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

Don't even think about trying to argue that "you are trying to prove the Bible by the bile." I am not trying to prove the bible I'm demonstrating the Christian categories which the original challenge assumes (so I have to go by the to answer the challenge). This is exactly what atheists would do to try and prove than an idea was Christian. If we are considering Christian ethics then we must consider that love is the background of the moral universe. Love is the basis of God's character.

That either the issue becomes redundant if we consider the relativist position (which we will soon enough) or it rebounds onto the Christian categories and becomes a matter of what we think about the Bible. With a fundamentalist view of inerrancy it's hard to see how there is not a contradiction in the categories, what God says and what God does. Yet of course that is not the only Christian answer; there are several other views that take up different approaches to the bible that serve as alternatives.
syllogism:

Love is not evil

God's nature is love and God is the original source of love

therefore God is not evil.


Thus, from the perspective of the Christian categories each of the above arguemnts individually prove that God is not evil and cannot be construed as evil.

III. Evil can't be the first thing.


Evil is the absence of the good. That means there has to be a good preceding evil to be departed from to create an absence. evil is rebellion against good. Evil is rejecting the good. all of this implies good is first.God is eternal so God has to be first. A lot of people reject the categories of good and evil becasue they don't like the way they are made. One of the major issues in atheism (even though many atheists don't realize it--a psychological problem) is self rejection leads to rejection of the idea that a loving God would make me the way I am. I was an atheist I know what it is to think that way. The old cliche "God is not finished with me yet" has it's uses and this is one of them.If you don't like the way God made you it's only becuase he's not finished yet. If you rebel against God you are not letting him finish you.

That means there has to be a good preceding evil to be departed from to create an absence.

Actual Atheist Objection:

"That doesn't follow. A hole is an absence of earth, the existence of a hole doesn't imply there was earth. Counter example to your premise." I this I argued "are you kidding? Isn't a hole defined by what's around it? That's like saying "I don't believe donuts exist, only the holes exist." A hole with nothing around it is nothing.

syllogism:

evil is falling away from, therefore, good is prior to evil

God is eternal and thus is prior to all things

therefore, God can't be evil.


Now we come to the issue of relativism. For those who do not hold to the Christian categories of good and evil but try to define them either by sweeping them away, or by using the terms relative to other standards, how does one come to ascertain the truth content of the Christian categories? The only way one can really do this is empirically. Of course this assumes there's a god. Though many atheists will try not allow such an assumption, it's pointless to ask about God's character if you don't assume there is a God, at least for the sake of argument. I have certainly spent enough time on this blog giving reason enough why one can assume God based upon any number of things. For those tempted to make comments and demand reasons I tell you now, see my 42 arguments, especially no 7 and no 8. I single out those two becasue they form the basis of the empirical approach. One might also see my essay on phenomenology and Method.
Certainly we are talking about taking religious experience seriously. The same reasoning that would allow one to understand God as reality would also allow one to understand God's character as love. It makes no sens to take up a challenge or to even issue one about God's goodness then turn around and say "you can't prove that becuase you can't prove god exists." Ok so that what sense would it make to argue "god is fictional but he's really evil?" The realization that leads to faith is the same realiation that allows us to understand God's love. It's simply an empirical matter. We experince God's presence, swe sesne God's love. In a life of 30+
years that has never been disproved. Even in times when I lost faith and thought God was disproved, even in times when I lost everything and thought God was evil, he was neither evil, or absent nor unfaithful. (see part 2 here).

excerpt from those last two links:

Looking back on it things actually were better after we left the house. At the time, however, we couldn't see that. Then it seemed like the end. We were scared, we were homeless, we couldn't find an apartment because we had "financial leper" on our credit. Since 9/11 getting an apartment in Dallas was next to impossible. When I first moved away form my parents and went to New Mexico back in 80, no one cared who I was or what my credit was. I gave them money they gave me an apartment. By 2006, however, in Dallas, it was next to impossible even if your credit was good. It really seemed like the end. I began saying "I am dead, I died, they just haven't told the corpse to lay down yet." I also began to say "God has cursed me." "God loves to crush his own guys, this is what I get for caring about my parents." You know I was practicing for the glee club. I was a tower of faith. We did find an apartment, we had a couple of thousand dollars from the guy who bought the house (because he was a Christian he said) even though the mortgage company actually makes them promise not to help the victim, not to give more than the mortgage price in a short sale. It's set up so the the victim losing the house can't get anything for his/her hard earned ears of struggle to buy the house. He bought the furniture and car and then let us keep them.

God was faithful to me even when I was not faithful to him. I was calling him a lair and shouting at him and I said worse than that. I called him a monster and told him he loved to hurt people. He didn't care, he's heard it all. I didn't shame God into helping me, he was working to help me anyway, I only held up the process and made it take longer by not trusting and not looking to seek the spiritual instead of freaking out because things didn't look good. Easy to forget, we walk by faith and not by sight. That means its' going to look grim. That doesn't mean anything you just have to trust God. Cultivate your spiritual relationship with God. Cultivate our inner life! It's a life long project, work on it every day.

That requires a life of faith to understand. The first step is to seek. Then it will fall into place. It wont fall into place when you renounce God and make skepticism your watchword. If your principle is to see through everyging, as C.S. Lewis said, you wind seeing nothing.

How Do we Know God is not Evil?

I've seen atheists ask this in various forms. The most recent I've seen is "prove God isn't evil." I answered that with three arguemnts only to find the atheists pulling the old relativism thing. How do we know good and evil even exist at all they said? Well, first of all, in answering the question about "prove god is not evil," the challenge was in reference to Christian ideas. To even ask the question assumes a Christian framework. You can't say on the one hand "God might really be evil," then say "but there's no such thing as evil."  One get's the feeling of being set up for a cheap trick. Like we say "ok so God is evil in the sense that there is no such thing as evil. so what?" they say "O you admitted it, God is evil you said it ok that's the end of Christianity!" Those are two completely different questions to answer the one you must bracket the other. first I will present my arguments to prove that God is not evil, and to do that assume the Christian framework for good and evil. Then I will deal with the relativistic stuff (that there is no good or evil).
 ,,,,I am assuming there is such a thing as good and we all have a general idea of what that is. Now I also noted that many atheist in the discussion I allude to above (where the challenge was made "prove God is not evil") were assuming a contradiction in the Bible where on the one hand God says "love your neighbor" and on the other hand he says "slaughter the Amelekites kids." So there's the problem of a contradiction between the values God expresses and the behavior God exhibits. Thus we assume the values expressed are true values of good, and that is a meaningful term, but the question is does God seem to betray the very values that he instigates. Before giving three positive reasons to think God can't be evil, (that is a logical impossibility) we have to deal with the seeming contradiction in the Bible.
....The Bible seems to paint a picture, at least in the OT, that God is wiping out other groups of people and commanding he slaughter of their infants and so on. That is pretty strong reason to suggest that God might be seen as evil. He's doing things that the Bible tells us are evil. Then there is strong evidence that the Amalekite passage is added in latter. The text of 1 Samuel is one of the most heavily redacted in the Bible. As we will see, it's very presence in the canon has been brought into question, but the version we have is probably a corrupted second rate copy, and the LXX is closer, and Q4Sama at Qumran closer still, to the actual original.

Institutte Bibilcal Scientific Studies:

Biblical Archaeology, Dead Sea Scrolls and OT


"1&2 Samuel"

"For the past two centuries textual critics have recognized that the Masoretic Text (MT) of 1&2 Samuel has much textual corruption. The Samuel MT is shorter than the LXX and 4QSama. The Samuel MT has improper word division, metathesis, and other orthographic problems. Certain phrases and clauses go against the Hebrew grammar rules. Parallel passages vary from each other" (See Charlesworth, 2000, pp.227-8).

Redaction of Infant Slaughtering Passage


Notes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible on 1 Sam 15:1-35

"Another story of Saul's rejection: The late source. Compare this section with 13:7-15, Samuel, not Saul is the leading figure once more."

This is the very passage in which Samuel relays God's command to wipe out the infants. So even though I still need to find more specific evidence for that very passage, there is a good chance of proving redaction. While its true that I can't produce an actual MS showing no infant slaughter command, the passage in which that command is given has been redacted. The odds are very high that this command was not part of the original passage, or we can regard it as such. We know that slaughtering infants in evil, and we have no obligation to accept a command as divine that we know to be totally at odds with God's law and God's moral code.

All the other verses must be dealt with in similar fashion, one by one, and an overview entailing a theory of inspiration adopted so that one knows how to approach scripture. For an example on this one might consult my page on the nature of Biblical revelation as an example.

Now I present the three arguments that prove God is not evil:

I. Being is good.

Being is not evil. We are all part of being, we all engage in the act of being. We know from our existence that existing is good and it's not evil. There's no reason to think it is. It's hard for a lot of people to get thier minds around the idea of God as being itself. I've certainly spent a lot of time blogging about the concept. I wont go into it here. It can be found on Doxa in several pages. I'm also just finishing my second book which is on the subject. Wait a couple of years and it will be out.

syllogism:
*God is being itself

being is good.

therefore God must be good.

One objection to this is that some atheists tried to evoke the notion that life is not good. One cna mean this either in terms of "my individual life sux," or in terms of amorality or some form of relativism. That would be cheating the issues here becuase I explain above the original challenge assumes Christian categories of good and evil. Moreover, one can condemn the concept of life itself by one's own experiences. I can have rotten life (to some extent that's what I make it) that doesn't mean all life is rotten. There is a goodness about life itself. Here I take life as a pragmatic form of existence. Existence in and of itself is "good," if not in a moral sense (which is one confusion of the argument--the mixing of senses between moral and pragmatic) at least just in the sense of the (apparent) goodness of open ended possibility.


II. Love can't be evil.

This is one of those mysterious points that of which atheists are most incredulous. Almost every time they will say "you are logic is so bad" on this point. When pressed they never say why. they can't give me a rule of logic that's violated, nine times out of ten it's a matter of rejecting the concept of a priori. That unusually happens becuase they have self esteem problems, as atheists are known to have.

The nature of love makes it the very definition of Good. What is the nature of the good, it's what love is, being kind, being gentile, caring about others, giving to others, living for others. How do we know this? First we have to realize we are not talking about butterflies in the stomach. Many atheists try to lose the concept of love in the emotions that go with it, which they sweep away as the side effect of brain chemistry. The kind of love experienced in romance, puppy love,infatuation, lust, sexual attraction and the like is what is meant here by "love." Here I speak of agape. This is "God's love" sometimes translated "charity." Although that is not a good translation. Paul Tillich defines it as "the will t the good of the other." I think that is a most apt decryption. The Greek does imply the willingness to assign to others the human dignity due them.

It is more or less an axiomatic tenet that love is the background of the moral universe (consult Saint Augustine, and Joseph Fletcher). I am not sure it can be proved, thus making it "axiomatic." Like most axioms trying to deny it would be absurd. This is certainly true in terms of Christian theology.

1 John 4:

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. ¹³ This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. ¹⁶ And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ¹⁷ This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. ²¹ And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

,,,,Don't even think about trying to argue that "you are trying to prove the Bible by the Bible." I am not trying to prove the bible I'm demonstrating the Christian categories which the original challenge assumes (so I have to go by the to answer the challenge). This is exactly what atheists would do to try and prove than an idea was Christian. If we are considering Christian ethics then we must consider that love is the background of the moral universe. Love is the basis of God's character. That either the issue becomes redundant if we consider the relativist position (which we will soon enough) or it rebounds onto the Christian categories and becomes a matter of what we think about the Bible. With a fundamentalist view of inerrancy it's hard to see how there is not a contradiction in the categories, what God says and what God does. Yet of course that is not the only Christian answer; there are several other views that take up different approaches to the bible that serve as alternatives.
syllogism:

Love is not evil

God's nature is love and God is the original source of love

therefore God is not evil.


Thus, from the perspective of the Christian categories each of the above arguemnts individually prove that God is not evil and cannot be construed as evil.

III. Evil can't be the first thing.


Evil is the absence of the good. That means there has to be a good preceding evil to be departed from to create an absence. evil is rebellion against good. Evil is rejecting the good. all of this implies good is first.God is eternal so God has to be first. A lot of people reject the categories of good and evil becasue they don't like the way they are made. One of the major issues in atheism (even though many atheists don't realize it--a psychological problem) is self rejection leads to rejection of the idea that a loving God would make me the way I am. I was an atheist I know what it is to think that way. The old cliche "God is not finished with me yet" has it's uses and this is one of them.If you don't like the way God made you it's only becuase he's not finished yet. If you rebel against God you are not letting him finish you.

That means there has to be a good preceding evil to be departed from to create an absence.

Actual Atheist Objection:

"That doesn't follow. A hole is an absence of earth, the existence of a hole doesn't imply there was earth. Counter example to your premise." I this I argued "are you kidding? Isn't a hole defined by what's around it? That's like saying "I don't believe donuts exist, only the holes exist." A hole with nothing around it is nothing.

syllogism:

evil is falling away from, therefore, good is prior to evil

God is eternal and thus is prior to all things

therefore, God can't be evil.


Now we come to the issue of relativism. For those who do not hold to the Christian categories of good and evil but try to define them either by sweeping them away, or by using the terms relative to other standards, how does one come to ascertain the truth content of the Christian categories? The only way one can really do this is empirically. Of course this assumes there's a god. Though many atheists will try not allow such an assumption, it's pointless to ask about God's character if you don't assume there is a God, at least for the sake of argument. I have certainly spent enough time on this blog giving reason enough why one can assume God based upon any number of things. For those tempted to make comments and demand reasons I tell you now, see my 42 arguments, especially no 7 and no 8. I single out those two becasue they form the basis of the empirical approach. One might also see my essay on phenomenology and Method.
Certainly we are talking about taking religious experience seriously. The same reasoning that would allow one to understand God as reality would also allow one to understand God's character as love. It makes no sens to take up a challenge or to even issue one about God's goodness then turn around and say "you can't prove that becuase you can't prove god exists." Ok so that what sense would it make to argue "god is fictional but he's really evil?" The realization that leads to faith is the same realiation that allows us to understand God's love. It's simply an empirical matter. We experince God's presence, swe sesne God's love. In a life of 30+
years that has never been disproved. Even in times when I lost faith and thought God was disproved, even in times when I lost everything and thought God was evil, he was neither evil, or absent nor unfaithful. (see part 2 here).

excerpt from those last two links:

Looking back on it things actually were better after we left the house. At the time, however, we couldn't see that. Then it seemed like the end. We were scared, we were homeless, we couldn't find an apartment because we had "financial leper" on our credit. Since 9/11 getting an apartment in Dallas was next to impossible. When I first moved away form my parents and went to New Mexico back in 80, no one cared who I was or what my credit was. I gave them money they gave me an apartment. By 2006, however, in Dallas, it was next to impossible even if your credit was good. It really seemed like the end. I began saying "I am dead, I died, they just haven't told the corpse to lay down yet." I also began to say "God has cursed me." "God loves to crush his own guys, this is what I get for caring about my parents." You know I was practicing for the glee club. I was a tower of faith. We did find an apartment, we had a couple of thousand dollars from the guy who bought the house (because he was a Christian he said) even though the mortgage company actually makes them promise not to help the victim, not to give more than the mortgage price in a short sale. It's set up so the the victim losing the house can't get anything for his/her hard earned ears of struggle to buy the house. He bought the furniture and car and then let us keep them.

God was faithful to me even when I was not faithful to him. I was calling him a lair and shouting at him and I said worse than that. I called him a monster and told him he loved to hurt people. He didn't care, he's heard it all. I didn't shame God into helping me, he was working to help me anyway, I only held up the process and made it take longer by not trusting and not looking to seek the spiritual instead of freaking out because things didn't look good. Easy to forget, we walk by faith and not by sight. That means its' going to look grim. That doesn't mean anything you just have to trust God. Cultivate your spiritual relationship with God. Cultivate our inner life! It's a life long project, work on it every day.

That requires a life of faith to understand. The first step is to seek. Then it will fall into place. It wont fall into place when you renounce God and make skepticism your watchword. If your principle is to see through everyging, as C.S. Lewis said, you wind seeing nothing.

Arguing the "God on the Brain Argument."

I made the argument that I put down here on Wednesday, on CARM that same day. I must say this was one of the most civil and enjoyable exchanges I've had with them. I especially enjoyed talking with Hermit. I must say also that I had to repeat my self a lot. That's to be expected becasue everyone doesn't read every post.

The major weakness of the argument seems to be proving that the experience (or the reaction of the brain) is an idea. The argument turns on the notion that the response to God talk means there's an innate idea of God, of course that was resisted most. First they try to confuse the idea with instinct:

Bust Nack:

There is an innate instinct to believe in religion and susceptibility to anthropomorphize everything, there is no innate idea of a God cocnept.

I argue that instinct is primarily behavior. Ideas require intellectual content and cultural constructs.

Meta:


I don't how it would be possible for the brain to react to talk and not be relating to ideas. If every time you say "paint the fence" someone has an censure then you have to figure "paint the fence" means somethign to them that's got a negative connotation. that means they must know what painting is and what the fence is.

God is not an instinct it's an idea. how could he brain brain react to talk about it without knowing what it means at some level?

No it requires that you have it. you can't react to a word by itself unless you have a sense of it's meaning. hearing "God" you never seen one why not just hear "zapaduggfoe"? why react to that word and no other in that way but you don't know what it mean or have a sense of it as a special thing. that makes no sense at all.

when you see Newberg say "they all have the same idea around the world" it's obvious there's an idea, it's universal but it's a product of culture so it shouldn't be universal. your brain lights up when it hears so there must be some level at which there's an idea there.

there wasn't much talk about the tie breakers. Not everyone grasped the distinction in this argument and the mystical experience argument. Three or four of them made intelligent arguments and were willing to listen, including Hermit.

The other major argument they tended to make was about adaptation. They seemed to really by the notion that evolution could give us genetic disposition to reactions to God talk (again, I'm not talking about a conscious response bu the brain responding by stimulation and by correcting problems of health both mental and physical). No surprise there sense that's really the only choice of explanation they have, which not to say it's a bad one. I did find new evidence agaisnt the idea that the reactions of the brain to God talk are adaptions.

in other endowments we don't mustache belief in fantasy and unreal things that just happens to work out to benefit us.

"Religion Is Not an Adaptation" 159
Lee A. Kirkpatrick
In Where God and Science Meet
ed Patrick McNamara
Preager

Finally, perhaps the biggest problem with religion-as-adaptation theories
is that, in virtually every example I have encountered, it seems clear that a
much simpler design could solve the (presumed) adaptive problem at least
as well as religion. Natural selection is a very conservative process that,
starting from the existing design, fashions new adaptations by changing as
little as necessary. Simpler designs are more evolvable designs. Consider, for
example, suggestions that religious beliefs are adaptive because they provide
relief from anxiety or other psychological benefi ts. In addition to other problems
outlined previously as to how religion could represent an adaptation
designed to produce such effects, it seems obvious that a much simpler way
for natural selection to reduce anxiety would be to simply tweak a parameter
of the anxiety system or mechanism to make it quantitatively less reactive
in response to threats or to simply recalibrate it to produce consistently
lower levels. Such a minor change in an existing anxiety system would be far
easier—and thus more likely—for natural selection to produce than all the
complex systems and mechanisms (not to mention group-level phenomena)
required to produce anxiety-reducing religion.

On the whole I it shows potential to be a fine argument. The major problem is going to proving that the reactions constitute an innate idea. The real point of it all was show that there is hard scientific data and readily lends itself to a logical extrapolation for God arguments.

How Do We Know God is Not Evil?

I've seen atheists ask this in various forms. The most recent I've seen is "prove God isn't evil." I answered that with three arguemnts only to find the atheists pulling the old relativism thing. How do we know good and evil even exist at all they said? Well, first of all, in answering the question about "prove god is not evil," the challenge was in reference to Christian ideas. To even ask the question assumes a Christian framework. You can't say on the one hand "God might really be evil," then say "but there's no such thing as evil." That would have no meaning. God might really be this thing that has no meaning and doesn't exist? What kind of meaning does that have? One get's the feeling of being set up for a cheap trick. Like we say "ok so God is evil ni the sense that there is no such thing as evil. so what?" they say "O you admitted it, God is evil you said it ok that's the end of Christianity!" Those are two completely different questions to answer the one you must bracket the other. first I will present my arguments to prove that God is not evil, and to do that assume the Christian framework for good and evil. Then I will deal with the relativistic stuff (that there is no good or evil).

I am assuming there is such a thing as good and we all have a general idea of what that is. Now I also noted that many atheist in the discussion I allude to above (where the challenge was made "prove God is not evil") were assuming a contradiction in the Bible where on the one hand God says "love your neighbor" and on the other hand he says "slaughter the Amelekites kids." So there's the problem of a contradiction between the values God expresses and the behavior God exhibits. Thus we assume the values expressed are true values of good, and that is a meaningful term, but the question is does God seem to betray the very values that he instigates?

Before giving three positive reasons to think God can't be evil, (that is a logical impossibility) we have to deal with the seeming contradiction in the Bible. In the discussion on a certain message board aluded to above, a friend of mine who is an atheist said this:

Originally Posted by mikey_101

No genocide isn't evil, killing children and homosexuals isn't evil, eternal torture for not believing in one particular religion out of thousands isn't evil, slavery isn't evil. Actually you're right, God isn't evil because God is a reflection of OUR evil.

Those are based upon bible verses and bible verses are not creeds, they are not dictum they are not decrees. In short we don't have to bleieve them.

There is NO official Christian doctrine or document or creed or council that say "you must believe every verse in the bible." The fundies say it but they didn't exist until the 1820s. They are merely late commers in Christian history.Each one of those passages must be analogized in the original language and discussed according to the history and culture and textual evidence to show it really belongs in the Bible or not.I can tell you now there is evidence Amalekite passage is added in latter.



The text of 1 Samuel is one of the most heavily redacted in the Bible. As we will see, it's very presence in the canon has been brought into question, but the version we have is probably a corrupted second rate copy, and the LXX is closer, and Q4Sama at Qumran closer still, to the actual original.

Institutte Bibilcal Scientific Studies:

Biblical Archaeology, Dead Sea Scrolls and OT


"1&2 Samuel"

"For the past two centuries textual critics have recognized that the Masoretic Text (MT) of 1&2 Samuel has much textual corruption. The Samuel MT is shorter than the LXX and 4QSama. The Samuel MT has improper word division, metathesis, and other orthographic problems. Certain phrases and clauses go against the Hebrew grammar rules. Parallel passages vary from each other" (See Charlesworth, 2000, pp.227-8).

Redaction of Infant Slaughtering Passage


Notes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible on 1 Sam 15:1-35

"Another story of Saul's rejection: The late source. Compare this section with 13:7-15, Samuel, not Saul is the leading figure once more."

This is the very passage in which Samuel relays God's command to wipe out the infants. So even though I still need to find more specific evidence for that very passage, there is a good chance of proving redaction. While its true that I can't produce an actual MS showing no infant slaughter command, the passage in which that command is given has been redacted. The odds are very high that this command was not part of the original passage, or we can regard it as such. We know that slaughtering infants in evil, and we have no obligation to accept a command as divine that we know to be totally at odds with God's law and God's moral code.

All the other verses must be dealt with in similar fashion, one by one, and an overview entailing a theory of inspiration adopted so that one knows how to approach scripture. For an example on this one might consult my page on the nature of Biblical revelation as an example.

Now I present the three arguments that prove God is not evil:

I. Being is good.

Being is not evil. We are all part of being, we all engage in the act of being. We know from our existence that existing is good and it's not evil. There's no reason to think it is. It's hard for a lot of people to get thier minds around the idea of God as being itself. I've certainly spent a lot of time blogging about the concept. I wont go into it here. It can be found on Doxa in several pages. I'm also just finishing my second book which is on the subject. Wait a couple of years and it will be out.

syllogism:
*God is being itself

being is good.

therefore God must be good.

One objection to this is that some atheists tried to evoke the notion that life is not good. One cna mean this either in terms of "my individual life sux," or in terms of amorality or some form of relativism. That would be cheating the issues here becuase I explain above the original challenge assumes Christian categories of good and evil. Moreover, one can condemn the concept of life itself by one's own experiences. I can have rotten life (to some extent that's what I make it) that doesn't mean all life is rotten. There is a goodness about life itself. Here I take life as a pragmatic form of existence. Existence in and of itself is "good," if not in a moral sense (which is one confussion of the argument--the mixing of senses between moral and pragmatic) at least just in the sense of the (apparent) goodness of open ended possibility.


II. Love can't be evil.

This is one of those mysterious points that of which atheists are most incredulous. Almost every time they will say "you are logic is so bad" on this point. When pressed they never say why. they can't give me a rule of logic that's violated, nine times out of ten it's a matter of rejecting the concept of a priori. That unusually happens becuase they have self esteem problems, as atheists are known to have.


The nature of love makes it the very definition of Good. What is the nature of the good, it's what love is, being kind, being gentile, caring about others, giving to others, living for others. How do we know this? First we have to realize we are not talking about butterflies in the stomach. Many atheists try to lose the concept of love in the emotions that go with it, which they sweep away as the side effect of brain chemistry. The kind of love experienced in romance, puppy love,infatuation, lust, sexual attraction and the like is what is meant here by "love." Here I speak of agape. This is "God's love" sometimes translated "charity." Although that is not a good translation. Paul Tillich defines it as "the will t the good of the other." I think that is a most apt decryption. The Greek does imply the willingness to assign to others the human dignity due them.

It is more or less an axiomatic tenet that love is the background of the moral universe (consult Saint Augustine, and Joseph Fletcher). I am not sure it can be proved, thus making it "axiomatic." Like most axioms trying to deny it would be absurd. This is certainly true in terms of Christian theology.

1 John 4:

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

¹³ This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. ¹⁶ And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ¹⁷ This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. ²¹ And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

Don't even think about trying to argue that "you are trying to prove the Bible by the bile." I am not trying to prove the bible I'm demonstrating the Christian categories which the original challenge assumes (so I have to go by the to answer the challenge). This is exactly what atheists would do to try and prove than an idea was Christian. If we are considering Christian ethics then we must consider that love is the background of the moral universe. Love is the basis of God's character.

That either the issue becomes redundant if we consider the relativist position (which we will soon enough) or it rebounds onto the Christian categories and becomes a matter of what we think about the Bible. With a fundamentalist view of inerrancy it's hard to see how there is not a contradiction in the categories, what God says and what God does. Yet of course that is not the only Christian answer; there are several other views that take up different approaches to the bible that serve as alternatives.


syllogism:

Love is not evil

God's nature is love and God is the original source of love

therefore God is not evil.


Thus, from the perspective of the Christian categories each of the above arguemnts individually prove that God is not evil and cannot be construed as evil.

III. Evil can't be the first thing.


Evil is the absence of the good. That means there has to be a good preceding evil to be departed from to create an absence. evil is rebellion against good. Evil is rejecting the good. all of this implies good is first.God is eternal so God has to be first. A lot of people reject the categories of good and evil becasue they don't like the way they are made. One of the major issues in atheism (even though many atheists don't realize it--a psychological problem) is self rejection leads to rejection of the idea that a loving God would make me the way I am. I was an atheist I know what it is to think that way. The old cliche "God is not finished with me yet" has it's uses and this is one of them.If you don't like the way God made you it's only becuase he's not finished yet. If you rebel against God you are not letting him finish you.

That means there has to be a good preceding evil to be departed from to create an absence.

Actual Atheist Objection:

"That doesn't follow. A hole is an absence of earth, the existence of a hole doesn't imply there was earth. Counter example to your premise." I this I argued "are you kidding? Isn't a hole defined by what's around it? That's like saying "I don't believe donuts exist, only the holes exist." A hole with nothing around it is nothing.

syllogism:

evil is falling away from, therefore, good is prior to evil

God is eternal and thus is prior to all things

therefore, God can't be evil.


Now we come to the issue of relativism. For those who do not hold to the Christian categories of good and evil but try to define them either by sweeping them away, or by using the terms relative to other standards, how does one come to ascertain the truth content of the Christian categories? The only way one can really do this is empirically. Of course this assumes there's a god. Though many atheists will try not allow such an assumption, it's pointless to ask about God's character if you don't assume there is a God, at least for the sake of argument. I have certainly spent enough time on this blog giving reason enough why one can assume God based upon any number of things. For those tempted to make comments and demand reasons I tell you now, see my 42 arguments, especially no 7 and no 8. I single out those two becasue they form the basis of the empirical approach. One might also see my essay on phenomenology and Method.

Certainly we are talking about taking religious experience seriously. The same reasoning that would allow one to understand God as reality would also allow one to understand God's character as love. It makes no sens to take up a challenge or to even issue one about God's goodness then turn around and say "you can't prove that becuase you can't prove god exists." Ok so that what sense would it make to argue "god is fictional but he's really evil?" The realization that leads to faith is the same realiation that allows us to understand God's love. It's simply an empirical matter. We experince God's presence, swe sesne God's love. In a life of 30+
years that has never been disproved. Even in times when I lost faith and thought God was disproved, even in times when I lost everything and thought God was evil, he was neither evil, or absent nor unfaithful. (see part 2 here).

excerpt from those last two links:

Looking back on it things actually were better after we left the house. At the time, however, we couldn't see that. Then it seemed like the end. We were scared, we were homeless, we couldn't find an apartment because we had "financial leper" on our credit. Since 9/11 getting an apartment in Dallas was next to impossible. When I first moved away form my parents and went to New Mexico back in 80, no one cared who I was or what my credit was. I gave them money they gave me an apartment. By 2006, however, in Dallas, it was next to impossible even if your credit was good. It really seemed like the end. I began saying "I am dead, I died, they just haven't told the corpse to lay down yet." I also began to say "God has cursed me." "God loves to crush his own guys, this is what I get for caring about my parents." You know I was practicing for the glee club. I was a tower of faith. We did find an apartment, we had a couple of thousand dollars from the guy who bought the house (because he was a Christian he said) even though the mortgage company actually makes them promise not to help the victim, not to give more than the mortgage price in a short sale. It's set up so the the victim losing the house can't get anything for his/her hard earned ears of struggle to buy the house. He bought the furniture and car and then let us keep them.

God was faithful to me even when I was not faithful to him. I was calling him a lair and shouting at him and I said worse than that. I called him a monster and told him he loved to hurt people. He didn't care, he's heard it all. I didn't shame God into helping me, he was working to help me anyway, I only held up the process and made it take longer by not trusting and not looking to seek the spiritual instead of freaking out because things didn't look good. Easy to forget, we walk by faith and not by sight. That means its' going to look grim. That doesn't mean anything you just have to trust God. Cultivate your spiritual relationship with God. Cultivate our inner life! It's a life long project, work on it every day.

That requires a life of faith to understand. The first step is to seek. Then it will fall into place. It wont fall into place when you renounce God and make skepticism your watchword. If your principle is to see through everyging, as C.S. Lewis said, you wind seeing nothing.

Deapth of Being and Tillich's Impied Ontological Argument

Realization of God and The Depth of Being

My approach now days is not to prove the existence of God, and to be continent with merely a rational warrant for belief, but go around the problem of proof and demonstrate a way that the inquirer after truth can become a believer by tapping into our place in being as humans. If we learn how to make the link between God and being we can realize that God is being itself and our place in being is as contingent creatures of God. Making this realization will be true heart felt belief. To get we have to clear away the clutter and part of that clutter is created by materialism, reductionism, scinentism and atheism. Clearing all of this away is a matter of understanding the nature of Being. Those aforementioned minions of doubt view being as surface only, it's just empirical and it's just a matter of the surface fact of existence. This is why the atheists clamour for empircal proof and harp on their mantra "there's not a shred of proof for
God." Of course when you tell them you have to look at things in a deeper way, no no I'm only interested in the surface if you can't give that then forget it. that's just the atheist template. the ideology of atheism gives them a template to hold up to the world that screens out depth.

Tillich says that if We know being has depth we can't be atheists:

"The name of infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of our being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not."

--Paul Tillich, The Shaking of The Foundations

What this means this depth of being is that there's more to being than just the fact of things existing. Part of that is modes of existing, such as necessity and contingent, part of it is the existential dimension and the phenomenological dimension. One such aspect is transcendent truth. IF we could know there is a transcendent truth we could know there's depth tha would give us a handle on the kind of depth that is a clue toward realization of the divine. Tillich did not make a formal argument stating "here is my ontological argument." Many see implicit in Tillich's work a new approach to the ontological.

Tillich’s implied OA

What follows are examples of my own attempts and the attempts of others at making God arguments based upon Tillich’s ideas and implicit arguments. The first one is based upon Duane Olson’s idea of Tilich’s implied ontological argument. The second and third arguments are based upon my own first understanding of what Tillich was saying about God and being itself. This is the crude understanding I had leavening seminary. These are supposed to examples of “talking points” not “proofs” of God’s existence. They are demonstrations of aspects of the depth of being, indications that being has depth. We can use this concept, indications that being has depth, as the orientation for God arguments, rather than “proofs” of “God’s existence.” Tillich never put these ideas together in this way to call them “arguments” but these are ideas I take from Tillich, although without being put over as “arguments.” In fact here they are not so much arguments as “points of embarkation” to move into the realization process. That is the process that leads to “realizing God.”

Several authors have tired to demonstrate that Tillich’s understanding implies a ready made ontological argument:

Paul Tillich’s name is not ordinarily included in a list of thinkers who have made a significant contribution to the ontological argument. Those who find affinity with Tillich’s thought have tended to overlook what he says about the arguments for God’s existence, influenced perhaps by Tillich’s sometime statements about the improper nature of such arguments.[i] Those who work with the arguments for God’s existence have tended to avoid Tillich’s ideas, perhaps for the same reason, or perhaps because his critique of the “existence of God” seems to belie a connection with arguments attempting to prove God’s existence. Despite this overlooking, I contend that Tillich made a significant contribution to the ontological argument and that it is important to examine this contribution for several reasons. 1) Tillich sought to reconceive the argument from its traditional interpretation in which the argument is understood as attempting to prove the existence of a theistic deity on the basis of an idea of this deity. [ii]

In addition to Olson’s version there Is also John M. Russell at Methodist Theological School in Ohio.[iii] I am only able to obtain the Olson article so that’s the one I’ll deal with. Olson argues that Tillich works with the classical correspondence theory of epistemology. Truth is correspondence between subject and object. “The focus of Tillich’s main argument is not on concrete judgments, or any truths in any field of knowledge, but on the fact that the subject has the capacity to make judgments about reality. This capacity involves applying a correspondence-norm, or a norm of truth, to a concrete subject-object interaction.”[iv]

The indubitability of the norm of truth is shown by a reductio argument regarding the process of knowing. In different places and in different ways Tillich points out that denial and doubt in knowing presuppose the norm of truth.[xvii] I want to systematize Tillich’s reductio argument at this point to show that all major theoretical postures presuppose this norm.

We can imagine four major postures taken by a subject to any theoretical judgment. One could affirm the judgment, claiming it corresponds with reality; one could deny the judgment, claiming it does not correspond; one could doubt, question, and debate the judgment; or one could claim a decision cannot be made about the judgment. All of the options presuppose the subject’s ability to apply a correspondence-norm, or norm of truth. Certainly one must apply a norm to affirm a judgment. One must also apply a norm, however, to deny a judgment. Any negative judgment presupposes and lives from the positive bearing of a norm of truth by the subject. One cannot deny that a judgment corresponds to reality without presupposing the subject’s ability to make judgments about reality. Doubting, questioning, or debating a judgment presuppose a norm of truth as well. One could not debate the veracity of a judgment without presupposing the capacity in the debaters to determine that veracity. Doubting or questioning a judgment is only meaningful under the presupposition of a norm that gives validity to that questioning and doubting. Finally, the claim that one cannot know whether a judgment is true presupposes the bearing of a norm to determine how or why a decision cannot be made.

It is important to note that the argument for a correspondence-norm, or norm of truth, is on a different level than arguments about the specific nature of the correspondence between subject and object. The correspondence itself may be conceived in terms of naïve realism, idealism, or a multitude of positions in between. Every theory about the nature of the correspondence, however, relies on the presupposition of a correspondence-norm that would make it possible to formulate, and affirm, deny, debate, or declare uncertain that theory. Put differently, the theory of the specific nature of the correspondence between subject and object is another field of knowledge that is subject to the ultimate criterion of knowledge, which is what is disclosed in the idea of a correspondence-norm.

To claim that the capacity to apply a norm is indubitable is the same thing as saying the subject bears an indubitable awareness of truth. In other words, when one analyzes the major postures toward judgments and shows how a norm of truth is presupposed as something borne by the subject in every posture, one is pointing out an awareness of truth the subject has, though it is something the subject may overlook, especially in doubting or denying particular truths. Through the reductio argument, one focuses attention on the fact that the subject bears a norm of truth, thus raising it to conscious awareness. I speak more below about the character of this awareness, but for now I simply affirm something Tillich presupposes, which is the identity between the affirmation that the subject bears a norm of truth and the subject’s awareness of this norm.[v]

The awareness of the norm of truth is the awareness of something transcendent and unconditioned, beyond the dichotomy of subject/object. This transcendent unconditioned is beyond both subjectivity and objectivity. But subject and object participate in the unconditioned, and it is a transcendent unity that makes possible all concrete affirmation, denial, down and uncertainty in the process of knowing. It is being itself appearing in the theoretical function as that which transcends subject and object. The norm of truth is not limited to subjectivity because it is used to judge the correspondence with objects. Since the subject bears it, it is not merely objective. It is not an object at all in the sense of being anything with which the subject can have a synthesis.

The subject cannot condition the norm of truth, but is conditioned by it. The subject can deny or debate or doubt any particular truth but cannot deny either her own capacity to apply a norm of truth itself. Nor can the subject down the concept of truth. The certainty about the norm of truth is different from any other contents of knowledge. The norm is grounded in necessary truth. One could not challenge the concept of truth except in terms of the untruth of truth, which implies a truth; the notion of truth, to be meaningful, but also contain the assumption that it’s opposite is untrue, and vice versa.[vi]

As supplementary arguments Tillich asserts that the quest to know drives the seeker on toward an end goal of total knowing. The unconditioned nature of the norm of truth is implicit in all knowing and in the desire to know.

Let’s try to summarize what this argument is really saying by isolating and enumerating it’s most basic and necessary points. This is not an attempt at a formal presentation of logic, but merely a way of summarizing, a thumbnail sketch.

Remember from chapter 4 that Tillich identified God with truth based upon God’s eternally necessary nature and the eternal and transcendent nature of the Platonic forms and God’s self revelation in Exodus 3:

(1) Tillich understand’s God to be the unconditioned, eternal, transcendent, ground of all being;

(2) Truth is an unconditioned norm based upon the correspondence theory; truth is correspondence between subject and object.

(3) The norm of truth is self verifying sense; truth as a concept cannot be untrue unless the concept of truth is affirmed in contrast to the possibility of untruth. Any particular truth can be doubted but not the concept of truth itself.

(4) Due to this unconditioned, necessary, and indubitable nature the norm of truth is understood to be transcendent of subject and object, and transcendent of any particulars of nature.

(5) The transcendent unconditioned is equated with God in Tilich’s understanding of being itself (from 1); the existence of such a norm is demonstrated in the nature of the norm of truth.

(6) Therefore, we have a rational warrant for understanding the ground of being as synonymous with Tillich’s understanding of “the divine.”

Tillich basically makes the argument himself, in Theology of Culture where he talks about God construed as truth (see chapter 4, Augustine on Being itself). Then he says:

Augustine, after he had experienced all the implications of ancient skepticism, gave a classical answer to the problem of the two absolutes: they coincide in the nature of truth. Veritas is presupposed in ever philosophical argument; and veritas is God. You cannot deny truth as such because you could do it only in the name of truth, thus establishing truth. And if you establish truth you affirm God. “Where I have found the truth there I have found my God, the truth itself,” Augustine says. The question of the two Ultimates is solved in such a way that the religious Ultimate is presupposed in every philosophical question, including the question of God. God is the presupposition of the question of God. This is the ontological solution of the problem of the philosophy of religion. God can never be reached if he is the object of a question and not its basis.[vii]

This is the part not quoted in previous chapter:

The Truth which is presupposed in every question and in every doubt precedes the cleavage into subject and object. Neither of them Is an ultimate power, but they participate in the ultimate power above them, in Being itself, in primum esse. “Being is what first appears in the intellect…” this being (which is not a being) is pure actuality and therefore Divine. We always see it but we do not always notice it; as we see everything in the light without always noticing the light as such.

According to Augustine and his followers the verum ipsum is also the bonum ipsum because nothing which is less than the ultimate power of being can be the ultimate power of good.[viii]

Tillich never calls this “my ontological argument.” He may or may not hint that it is somewhere but I have not see that. He does not, to my knowledge, put this over as a version of the OA. Yet I feel that it is and it’s essentially what Olson is talking about.

---

[ii] Duane Olson, “Pual Tiillich and the Ontological Argument,” Quodlibet Journal vol. 6, no 3, July-sep 2004, online journal, URL: http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/olson-tillich.shtml visited 8/4/10

Olson has two foot notes in this quotation which are important to examine:

1) “In one of the more significant recent monographs on Tillich’s thought, Langdon Gilkey flatly states “[Tillich] denied that an argument for the transcendent power and ground of being was possible” (Gilkey on Tillich (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000), 105). Gilkey never discusses Tillich’s use of the traditional arguments.” (2) “In his detailed and extensive volume on the ontological argument, Graham Oppy mentions Tillich’s name only once in the literature review, and he never analyzes any of Tillich’s statements (Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 275). To Oppy’s credit, he discusses a type of argument to which Tillich’s is related. I comment on Oppy’s analysis of this argument in the final section of this paper.”

[iii] John M. Russell, “Tillich’s Implicit Ontological Argument” Sophia, Netherlands: Springer. Vol.2 No. July 1993, 1-16. Online: URL http://www.springerlink.com/content/q5324702874k2257/

visited 8/4/10

[iv] Olson, Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid, Olsen foot notes two sources at this point, in thinking of the indubitable nature of the norm. He sites Tillich’s Theology of Culture, 23, and the same source page 13, for the latter: This explains Tillich’s somewhat obscure statements that “God is the presupposition of the question of God,” and “God can never be reached if he is the object of a question and not its basis (Theology of Culture, 13).”

[vii] Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, 12-13

[viii] Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, op cit, 14

Answering Ojbections to Model Argument.

I'm not going to spend the rest of my life answering these arguments. But Hermit (regular poster and extreme critic of this blog--well, he's Canadian--) produced a link that is a skeptic attacking modal arguments. I am going to make some comments on one of his attacks. From Skeptic's Play, "a modal ontological argument."  

scroll down to second article on the page.

This guy writes in symbolic logic which would lead one to believe that he knows modal logic. Yet I think many of his uses are misleading and he doesn't really unpack everything that's in the argument.  If he understands it he's being a bit shady in his dealings with it.

To briefly review the simpler ontological argument: The argument says that we can define God as a necessarily existing being. Therefore, by definition, God exists. However, this takes the power of definition too far. The most we can say is that if there exists an object which we can properly call God, then that object, by definition, exists. If God exists, then God exists.

Right away he begin with a dishonesty (let's skip over the bad understanding of the Supra essential Godhead in the use of "a necessarily existing being" since most of the users of model arguments don't read Tillich, and Tillich criticizes them for that very thing) but this is a false version of the argument up front. Why do these guys have such an conversation to quoting actual theistic arguments up front? Is it becuase they know if they do that they can't beat them? None of the major users of modal ontological argument say "we can define God as X therefore God must exist." The conclusion  of God's existence is not predicated upon the definition but upon the consequences of demonstrating that the definition by corroborate to something real. Atheists believe that this is what theists are doing so their criticism always follows that line even though it's made plain that it's not the case!


The first line of the argument I use says:

(1) If God exists, he must exist necessarily, if God does not exist his existence is impossible.
See the difference? I don't' say "Since if define God as existing then he must exist." It begins conditionally, "If God exists."
 His confused ramblings about the nature of definition are designed to destroy the belief system so that one is no longer defending one's belief but the straw man the atheist wishes him to defend:

The most we can say is that if there exists an object which we can properly call God, then that object, by definition, exists. If God exists, then God exists.

This is by No means "the most" we can say. Since Christians believe that God is the basis of all reality, being itself, the ground of all being, then we have to define God in that way, period. We choice but to do so because anything less would not be that in which we believe. In fact Anselm does this when he says "the greatest thought should be about the greatest reality." That's basically what Anslem's original ontological argument was saying. This is not defining into existence because it takes up form a bleieve system that is already in place and merely asserts the ontologically necessary nature of that thing. Of course the atheist can't understand this because bound up in thing hood. He can't reason from from the basis of realization of God's reality due to the depth of being so he has to reason backwards from things and because that's all he can do he imagines the believer must be doing so as well. This is why atheist wind up making the mistake of thinking that "the reason" to believe is because we need to explain how things came to be. Actually this is really far removed from the core reasons for belief.

The problem with the argument is that it's rather useless to define God as a being which exists. But hold on! I never defined God as a being which exists. I defined God as a being which necessarily exists. This definition is not quite as useless. We can say that if there exists an object which we can properly call God, then that object, by definition, necessarily exists. If God exists, then God necessarily exists.

By definition of God: g g

Now here he is right in that the model aspect, which is taking account of the particular kind of existence under discussion add something to the nature of the case and is more than just saying "I define God as existing." It's a conditional statement however, as my statement above "If god exists he must exist necessarily" and this guy is not reflecting this fact. He acknowledges the model aspect he's not recognizing the conditional nature of it.

The letter "g" represents the specific statement "God exists". Note, however, we did not completely define God. In fact, we could replace God with all kinds of absurd objects, and the proof would still hold. This is actually quite a problem for the ontological argument (as well as many other proofs of God). The proof is valid for any statement p as long as pp is necessarily true. For instance, we could replace the object God with "the invisible pink unicorn which necessarily exists" or "a left shoe which necessarily exists".

 What's he's saying here is total bull shit. It's quite strange that this guy knows symbols for modal logic (which I don't) but he still doesn't know the argument now does he know the literature. He could really do with reading John Hick's book The Many faced Argument. This approach (that we could define God in any number of ways) is nothing more than one of the oldest arguments again Anselm, and one of the most fallacious, the Perfect Island argument by Gaunilo (1033-1109) (see On Behalf of the Fool). It just says we should say God is a prefect island and by the same logic the argument would prove that a perfect island exists, therefore, something must be wrong with this logic since it would prove such a ridiculous thing. But the answer is that it would not be possible to assert God is a perfect island (perfect tomato, purple, cow, pink unicorn, swizzle stick,  or what have you) unless that thing was eternal, necessary, and the ground of being. Why assert that the necessary ground of being is some contingent thing like an island or a tomato? At that point, since it has to have the attributes of God it is God then there's no point in linking it with things that are clearly not God, that contingent, temporal, man made and so on. What it really boils down to is that we cannot define God in any old way we wish. There is a very strict definition of God, that dis guided by the basic belief systems that embrace the notion of God. In all major world religions these same basic attributes are always there for the major God, the father God, those are: the creator God: eternal, necessary, ground of all being. It matters how one defines it and you can't do so in just any old way.

Nonetheless, let's continue onward. I'm going to go through the proof, step by step.

• Theorem 1: ¬g ¬g (The contrapositive of the definition of g)
  
• Theorem 2: ¬g ¬g (Using the definition of to substitute into Theorem 1)
  
• Theorem 3: (¬g ¬g) (Application of Axiom N to Theorem 2)
  
• Theorem 4: ¬g ¬g (Application of Axiom K to Theorem 3)
  
• Theorem 5: ¬g¬g (Axiom 5 applied to ¬g)
  
• Theorem 6: ¬g ¬g (Combining Theorems 4 and 5)
  
• Theorem 7: ¬¬g ¬¬g (The contrapositive of theorem 6)
  
• Theorem 8: gg (Using the definition of to substitute into Theorem 7 twice)
  
• Theorem 9: g g (Combining Theorem 8 with Axiom T)

You may have noticed that I did not prove what I set out to prove. I only proved g g, which says that if g is possible, then it is true. That's not quite the same as saying that g is true, but it's still something. Now, all we have to do is prove that g is at least possibly true.

And here is where the problems begin. All the previous work was purely logical manipulation, and is necessarily true if you accept the axioms of modal logic. I thought the axioms were pretty reasonable, and rejecting them would be too high a price to pay. However, it seems we need another premise, g. To support this premise, lots of arguments have been offered by various people, but I don't think they're nearly as fun or rigorous as the modal logic section.

That's all basically true. But of course the argument does turn on not the idea that g is possible the idea that g is not merely possible. If g is not impossible then since g can't be merely possible (might or not might not be) then g must exist. In other words, g must be impossible or else g must be. Thus since g is not impossible  g must be. He's wrong here again where I put it in red, he changes the meaning of the argument. This is why I don't like this guy because he tries get away with subtle changes that have profound implications and yet he carefully avoids the real answers that theists have given. The subtle difference is that g can be merely possible so it's not a matter of if g is possible then g must be true but rather that g is not impossible.

One common argument for g is that g is self-consistent. I can conceive of a God without having any contradictions. Based on my current knowledge, it is entirely possible that God exists. It's possible that God exists, therefore God exists.

Again he does not present this properly.He should really be saying that the basis for asserting that God is not impossible is that there are contradictions to belief in God. The atheist has the burden to assert what criteria would prove the impossibility of God. Its' not fair to expect the theist to mount an endless litany covering every possibility when the argument is rightfully the atheists burden to prove. That is if the theist has done his job properly and not argued 'this proves the existence of God' but set it up the right way and argued rational warrant.


The problem is that this same argument seems to apply to the statement ¬g. ¬g is a self-consistent statement. I can conceive of a world in which God does not exist without having any contradictions. Indeed, I can conceive of a world where nothing at all exists, where there could not possibly be any contradictions since there is nothing around to contradict. Based on my current knowledge, it is entirely possible that God does not exist. Therefore we can take the premise ¬g. By Theorem 2, we conclude ¬g: God does not exist.

Obviously, the premises g and ¬g cannot both be true. Either God exists in all possible worlds, or God exists in none of them. Since we used the same argument for both both g and ¬g, that argument must be fallacious. But where exactly did it go wrong?

The error, I think, is in the concept of . g does not quite mean "g is possibly true." In fact, it means "Among all possible worlds, there exists at least one in which g is true." The concept of "All possible worlds" was never exactly defined. In fact, the definition is arbitrary. I could have declared "all possible worlds" to be our world and our world alone, and you never would have been able to prove me wrong from the axioms.

Possible words don't change the argument. It's just a  means of introducing modes of being, possible worlds are contingencies, every contingent thing represents a possibility of its own negation. It' garbage to thin that "possible world" is not defined. That's a major main stay of reformed apologetic everyone from Plantinga to Hartshorne has defined it well.  that is not problem anyway because all it means is in the likelihood of each contingency negated. what he says declaring all possible worlds to be our world is dead wrong. He doesn't set it up right, but the modal argument be made without the possible word's even being mentioned. That's another argument, it's a good argument and he's treating it wrongly, but that's not germane to this one.

I also could have declared "all possible worlds" to be the set of worlds which are metaphysically possible (a rather complex philosophical concept). Under this definition, we would not be able to prove g or ¬g.

He's made a red herring. He can't answer the actual argument that he started with so he's shifted to something that's not even part of Hartshorne's modal argument so the can harp on it. The reader is diverted from the fact that he never answered the argument to begin with.

However, if I had declared "all possible worlds" to mean the set of all worlds which are self-consistent, then we would run into problems. Because under this definition, both g and ¬g appear to be true (unless the concept of God is inconsistent). And they contradict each other.

But no one did. another red herring.

Similarly, if I had declared "all possible worlds" to mean the set of all worlds which are epistemologically possible (meaning, it may be true, for all we know), then we would have the same contradiction.

And what happens if we construct a pathological definition of "all possible worlds" such that g is true and ¬g is not true? Then I might question Axiom T, since it is no longer obvious that our world is included among this so-called set of "all possible worlds."

The possible world's thing is easily defended. But I am not going to do so here because it's not part of the argument I made. take that out because its not part of my argument and look at my argument and that he did not answer it. Hermit thrust this link because he doesn't understand what it says. He thinks any sort of criticism of any ontological argument beats all of hem and such is not the case.

And it goes on and on. Well, wasn't it clever, at least at first? I think so. It seemed for a moment that we arrived at a paradox, a sort of 1=2 moment. Ontological arguments tend to be that way. Most people immediately recognize that it is a little too clever, that it proves a statement which is a little too strong to be true. Similarly, most philosophers think that ontological arguments fail, though they may disagree on exactly why they fail.

Now he's trying to beat the argument by quilting it for being beyond his understanding. It's too clever for him, he seems to think that's a liability if it was an argument for atheism is we would be bragging about how clever it is and how stupid stupid theists don't get it. But the "too-clever" bit is not even part of the original argument which he has still not answered. None of his mocks against possible words beat the argument that says "If God is not impossible then he must be necessary." To that one he tells us nothing about it's apparent fallacious nature.

In my opinion, ontological arguments are merely interesting philosophical curiosities. It's rather silly when an apologist actually tries to use one as a serious argument.

Yes that 's what Gaunilo said, on behalf of the fool.