If God only tells you to do what you know is right, that’s fine. God’s authority doesn’t add anything to the obligation though. It would be just as right without a God as there is with it.
I have problems with the idea that God is the source of our understanding of right and wrong though. If you accept that idea then contradictory preferences are evidence against the existence of God, and it’s pretty clear to me that preferences contradict all the time. Plus, I don’t think you’re justified in ignoring the Abraham data point, it seems like a significant and revealing event.
It would be just as right without a God as … with it.
Agreed. However, do you ever need to be reminded of something?
the idea that God is the source of our understanding of right and wrong...
A bit of a fish bicycle, eh? Or, a tautology? At best, the idea is not a truth, it is a way of looking at life. It either works or it doesn’t. It’s empowering or not. That’s all. If used to make a personal sense of right and wrong into an absolute, it’s been corrupted. Contradiction of preferences is decent evidence that the personal sense isn’t absolute, but that doesn’t bear on the existence of God. God made us different, that we might recognize each other. That, again, is Qur’an.
Most arguments for and against the existence of God are rather equally silly. I used to lecture university students on Islam, and once an atheist proudly asserted his position, “I don’t believe in God.” I asked him, “What God don’t you believe in?” I think he was already a bit confused, I forget his answer, if there was one. I then said, “The God that you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.” He was speechless. He’d expected an argument. Of course, it was an argument, just one he’d never heard before. I wasn’t being silly, and I was telling him what was true for me.
(I was more combative in those days. Now, I’m a little ashamed to tell that story. Did I actually communicate something to him—or discover something with him --, or did I merely humiliate him? The fact that I don’t know indicates something was missing.)
I didn’t “ignore the Abraham data point.” After all, I brought it up. To cover the Aqedah, though, could take more than I’m prepared to address today. I wrote, “my condolences,” because that was truly a trial. Can you imagine?
I have seven children. Abraham didn’t have the option to check himself into a psychiatric unit. I would. Still, somehow it worked out anyway.
And, should I mention that it is just a story? Again, a Muslim view, from the Qur’an: God tells stories.
There are more details in the Qur’anic story, but it’s not really necessary here so I’ll leave it.
A bit of a fish bicycle, eh? Or, a tautology? At best, the idea is not a truth, it is a way of looking at life. It either works or it doesn’t. It’s empowering or not. That’s all. If used to make a personal sense of right and wrong into an absolute, it’s been corrupted. Contradiction of preferences is decent evidence that the personal sense isn’t absolute, but that doesn’t bear on the existence of God. God made us different, that we might recognize each other. That, again, is Qur’an.
I wasn’t talking about contradictory preferences between different people, but within one individual person.
I want to be famous but also want to not talk to people. I want to be strong and a hard worker and smart and also want to sit on the couch all day watching TV. I want to be happy but I also enjoy moments of extreme sadness. My preferences don’t make sense at all, they’re not coherent and they change over time and they’re shaped significantly by my genetics and my childhood environment, so it’s extremely more probable that they’re the product of a random process like evolution than that they’re the product of a God. If a God is responsible for my preferences, he is insane and incompetent.
Most arguments for and against the existence of God are rather equally silly. I used to lecture university students on Islam, and once an atheist proudly asserted his position, “I don’t believe in God.” I asked him, “What God don’t you believe in?” I think he was already a bit confused, I forget his answer, if there was one. I then said, “The God that you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.” He was speechless. He’d expected an argument. Of course, it was an argument, just one he’d never heard before. I wasn’t being silly, and I was telling him what was true for me.
Your ability to confuse one naive college atheist isn’t very strong evidence for anything. The atheist should have replied that he didn’t believe in any gods. You weren’t making an argument, just confusing him. Or if you were making an argument, then I’ve missed it, and I need the premises more clearly stated.
(I was more combative in those days. Now, I’m a little ashamed to tell that story. Did I actually communicate something to him—or discover something with him --, or did I merely humiliate him? The fact that I don’t know indicates something was missing.)
I think you probably confused him, or he was bad at thinking on his feet and responding to new ideas, but that afterwards he thought about it and figured out what his reply should have been. I would expect that “I don’t believe in any gods” is a fairly obvious reply to most people. He was probably annoyed with himself, and abit upset at you for confusing him, and he might have been a little embarrassed too.
I didn’t “ignore the Abraham data point.” After all, I brought it up. To cover the Aqedah, though, could take more than I’m prepared to address today. I wrote, “my condolences,” because that was truly a trial. Can you imagine?
That’s fine, it’s a big issue. I felt like you were lampshading it, but if you’ve got a lengthy complicated explanation of it that you’d rather not go into I sympathize and agree. I’d rather not go into detail with it either.
If a God is responsible for my preferences, he is insane and incompetent.
Great. What is this thing called “responsible”?
There are at least three major possibilities here, once we get past a definition. Feel free to add other possibilities.
God is responsible.
You are responsible.
Nobody is responsible, these are just circumstances, meaningless.
The conclusion (insane and incompetent) does not follow from the premise, however. It requires unspecified assumptions. Which one of these shall we examine first?
I don’t mean responsible, I guess. That was poor phrasing.
If God intentionally chose my preferences and my preferences contradict in ways that don’t make sense then God is crazy or incompetent or doesn’t care about my preferences because my preferences wouldn’t contradict if they were designed for any sort of reason.
In most of these conversations, God is a fish bicycle, isn’t that obvious? There is a possible conversation about what “God chose,” but the theologies that make sense to me essentially zero out the God contribution, beyond creating some expectation that it all makes, in the end, some kind of sense, and that we can search for that. God is, I’ll just say, outside of time and so placing God’s choice in the past, again, makes no sense. What is “God,” anyway?
Since you don’t accept the idea of God, whatever reasoning you create about God is made up, fantasy about fantasy.
Was there any choice at all involved in the creation of your “contradictory preferences”? What are you talking about? What is “choice”?
Okay, the core: you assume that contradictory preferences mean that something is wrong. Otherwise you would not conclude from them that God is crazy or incompetent. I’ll just make up something not-wrong. You have differing preferences because they give you different points of view, and when you can see from more than one point of view, you get depth perception, right? Is depth perception valuable?
My own answer, by the way, about the three possibilities is All of the Above. Those are simply three stories we can tell about responsibility. Each one produces, if held in mind, consequences. Each has a value, but generally the most empowering is the second: you are responsible for your identity, which includes what you describe as your preferences.
Isn’t that obvious? Okay, maybe it’s not. We don’t ordinarily think of ourselves as something that we created, we tend to “blame” it on our parents, society, or circumstances. But our identity was formed out of how we reacted to those factors. Did we chose these reactions or were they just automatic and predetermined? I’ll leave the question there for now.
Your ability to confuse one naive college atheist isn’t very strong evidence for anything.
It was not asserted as such (remember, I wrote that I was “a little ashamed”). Consider it dicta, but it does contain an argument about atheism, one which I’d expect would be well-known, here. Perhaps someone will point me to consideration of it.
I would expect that “I don’t believe in any gods” is a fairly obvious reply to most people.
In the original conversation, it was just “God.” But the problem is the same. What is this thing that is being disbelieved? The words “God” and”gods” have very different meanings for different people, even among people who supposedly are part of the same “sect.” What is it, precisely, that is being accepted or rejected? Or is the concept being accepted or rejected at all, is this just another form of “I’m right” and “You and people like you are wrong,” which, like any such expression of identity, bears no relation to any reality other than personal?
What I confronted with that student—this was about 18 years ago—was his assumption that he knew what I believed. If I “believe in God,” I must think this and that and the other thing.
Do I “believe in God”? That would be a fair question, eh? It wasn’t asked. Nor have I been asked it here. Nor have I been asked to define my terms, -- what is “God,” after all? -- and what I’ve indicated about it has not been heard (by anyone who responded). Hint: it’s related to that capitalization issue. You’ve seen enough to be able to say what I believe, if you’ve been paying adequate attention—or you will if you pay it now.
Chaosmosis, is there anything that you do “believe”? We need, of course, a definition of “believe.”
People can argue with each other for years, getting nowhere, because the terms being used are never specified so that fundamental disagreement—if it exists, sometimes it does not, and I have some suspicion that it never exists outside of psychopathology—can be identified.
It was not asserted as such (remember, I wrote that I was “a little ashamed”). Consider it dicta, but it does contain an argument about atheism, one which I’d expect would be well-known, here. Perhaps someone will point me to consideration of it.
It’s a bad argument against atheism. Atheists don’t just disbelieve in any particular God, they disbelieve in all of them. Of course, if you redefine God to mean “potato”, then atheists will believe in God. But that’s a bad use of language, and the default assumption is to use the word in its normal context.
In the original conversation, it was just “God.” But the problem is the same. What is this thing that is being disbelieved? The words “God” and”gods” have very different meanings for different people, even among people who supposedly are part of the same “sect.” What is it, precisely, that is being accepted or rejected? Or is the concept being accepted or rejected at all, is this just another form of “I’m right” and “You and people like you are wrong,” which, like any such expression of identity, bears no relation to any reality other than personal?
Any beings which have supernatural powers or knowledge aren’t believed in by atheists. This would include everything that is normally considered a god, and a few extra things too.
What I confronted with that student—this was about 18 years ago—was his assumption that he knew what I believed. If I “believe in God,” I must think this and that and the other thing.
No, you confused him. That doesn’t mean he understood this point.
What God do you believe in? Your point only makes sense if your understanding of God differs from the conventional one(s) in some important respect, which it probably doesn’t.
Do I “believe in God”? That would be a fair question, eh? It wasn’t asked. Nor have I been asked it here. Nor have I been asked to define my terms, -- what is “God,” after all? -- and what I’ve indicated about it has not been heard (by anyone who responded). Hint: it’s related to that capitalization issue. You’ve seen enough to be able to say what I believe, if you’ve been paying adequate attention—or you will if you pay it now.
Are you basically a deist?
Chaosmosis, is there anything that you do “believe”? We need, of course, a definition of “believe.”
Definition of believe: “to accept as true or real”. I don’t believe with certainty in anything. (Technically, my intuitions are certain about certain things. Other parts of my brain disagree with their confidence though.) I slightly believe in everything, in that anything is possible because I’m fallible. But for everyday purposes, I believe that I am a human, that the sky looks blue sometimes, that rain is wet, and about ten million billion other things.
People can argue with each other for years, getting nowhere, because the terms being used are never specified so that fundamental disagreement—if it exists, sometimes it does not, and I have some suspicion that it never exists outside of psychopathology—can be identified.
What God do you believe in? Your point only makes sense if your understanding of God differs from the conventional one(s) in some important respect, which it probably doesn’t.
I pointed to the Mu’tazila in another post to connect my position with an old tradition, one which is frequently thought to be heretical. The real story is that the Rationalists were very successful, early on, which might say something about the compatibility with the “proof-texts” of Islam, i.e, the Qur’an and the stories of the Prophet, but they asserted their power to attempt to crush contrary opinion. No surprise, they then lost power, and were in turn crushed.
To be fair, it was not the rationalist theologians who did this, it was their powerful supporters, who made the reserved and rational interpretations into a state-enforced dogma. Perhaps we could say that they did not adequately restrain their supporters.
Many “Muslims” would consider my comments heretical, I’ve run into this. I was considered to be too accommodating to “non-Muslims,” who, they believed, were doomed to Hell if they did not “accept Islam.” This got to the point that when I recited and translated a section of the Qur’an to a group of visiting Christian seminary students, the imam of the mosque was waving frantically at me to try to get me to stop. His religious affiliation trumped any concept that our responsibility might be to convey what was actually in the Qur’an. He was mostly ignorant of it. Small mosque, in a small town, a big fish in a small pond.
Definition of believe: “to accept as true or real”. I don’t believe with certainty in anything. (Technically, my intuitions are certain about certain things. Other parts of my brain disagree with their confidence though.) I slightly believe in everything, in that anything is possible because I’m fallible. But for everyday purposes, I believe that I am a human, that the sky looks blue sometimes, that rain is wet, and about ten million billion other things.
Great. Could we say that you believe in your experience? I would put it a little differently. You trust your experience. But for what?
In any case, can we distinguish between experience and what is concluded or expected from it?
It’s a bad argument against atheism. Atheists don’t just disbelieve in any particular God, they disbelieve in all of them. Of course, if you redefine God to mean “potato”, then atheists will believe in God. But that’s a bad use of language, and the default assumption is to use the word in its normal context.
You persist in this, Chaosmosis, in assuming “against.” What I presented was not an argument “against” atheism, per se, it was a question as to the nature of atheism. If “atheism” is disbelief in “God,” then there must be some definition of “God,” or it’s totally meaningless.
I don’t define God to be a thing. I equate God with Reality. What is that? I do not assume that I understand God. I did not invent this understanding, I found it. It’s actually pretty standard Islam. God has many names, and one of them is al-Haqq. The Truth or the Reality. Because this is a reference to a singleness, I capitalize it, this is not a reference to the ordinary individual realities, the body of facts, all of which are conditional and relative.
I don’t “believe” in this, I “trust” it, which is a better translation of the word in the Qur’an which is ordinarily translated as “believe.” That is, there is an operating hypothesis here, on which I lean. It has effects. But it happens to be one which does not constrain my reasoning, that encourages it. But it is arbitrary, it’s a choice.
I am responsible for it.
And you have your own choices to make.
In any case, “belief” is about an assumption of truth. “Trust” is only about a mind-state, in fact, or what I more routinely call a “condition of the heart.”
If I unpacked “disbelieves in God” to “has not encountered a concept of God they both believed (“did not disbelieve”, if you prefer) and did not consider a silly conception of God”, would atheism still be meaningless? Would that be a horrible misconception of atheism?
Are you sure there’s nothing bundled in with “God is Reality” beyond what you state? Let’s say I said “God is Reality. Reality is not sapient and has never given explicit instructions on anything.” Would you consider that consistent with your belief that God equals Reality?
I’m not trying for Socratic Method arguing here, I’m just not quite sure where you’re coming from.
If God only tells you to do what you know is right, that’s fine. God’s authority doesn’t add anything to the obligation though. It would be just as right without a God as there is with it.
I have problems with the idea that God is the source of our understanding of right and wrong though. If you accept that idea then contradictory preferences are evidence against the existence of God, and it’s pretty clear to me that preferences contradict all the time. Plus, I don’t think you’re justified in ignoring the Abraham data point, it seems like a significant and revealing event.
Agreed. However, do you ever need to be reminded of something?
A bit of a fish bicycle, eh? Or, a tautology? At best, the idea is not a truth, it is a way of looking at life. It either works or it doesn’t. It’s empowering or not. That’s all. If used to make a personal sense of right and wrong into an absolute, it’s been corrupted. Contradiction of preferences is decent evidence that the personal sense isn’t absolute, but that doesn’t bear on the existence of God. God made us different, that we might recognize each other. That, again, is Qur’an.
Most arguments for and against the existence of God are rather equally silly. I used to lecture university students on Islam, and once an atheist proudly asserted his position, “I don’t believe in God.” I asked him, “What God don’t you believe in?” I think he was already a bit confused, I forget his answer, if there was one. I then said, “The God that you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.” He was speechless. He’d expected an argument. Of course, it was an argument, just one he’d never heard before. I wasn’t being silly, and I was telling him what was true for me.
(I was more combative in those days. Now, I’m a little ashamed to tell that story. Did I actually communicate something to him—or discover something with him --, or did I merely humiliate him? The fact that I don’t know indicates something was missing.)
I didn’t “ignore the Abraham data point.” After all, I brought it up. To cover the Aqedah, though, could take more than I’m prepared to address today. I wrote, “my condolences,” because that was truly a trial. Can you imagine?
I have seven children. Abraham didn’t have the option to check himself into a psychiatric unit. I would. Still, somehow it worked out anyway.
And, should I mention that it is just a story? Again, a Muslim view, from the Qur’an: God tells stories.
There are more details in the Qur’anic story, but it’s not really necessary here so I’ll leave it.
I wasn’t talking about contradictory preferences between different people, but within one individual person.
I want to be famous but also want to not talk to people. I want to be strong and a hard worker and smart and also want to sit on the couch all day watching TV. I want to be happy but I also enjoy moments of extreme sadness. My preferences don’t make sense at all, they’re not coherent and they change over time and they’re shaped significantly by my genetics and my childhood environment, so it’s extremely more probable that they’re the product of a random process like evolution than that they’re the product of a God. If a God is responsible for my preferences, he is insane and incompetent.
Your ability to confuse one naive college atheist isn’t very strong evidence for anything. The atheist should have replied that he didn’t believe in any gods. You weren’t making an argument, just confusing him. Or if you were making an argument, then I’ve missed it, and I need the premises more clearly stated.
I think you probably confused him, or he was bad at thinking on his feet and responding to new ideas, but that afterwards he thought about it and figured out what his reply should have been. I would expect that “I don’t believe in any gods” is a fairly obvious reply to most people. He was probably annoyed with himself, and abit upset at you for confusing him, and he might have been a little embarrassed too.
That’s fine, it’s a big issue. I felt like you were lampshading it, but if you’ve got a lengthy complicated explanation of it that you’d rather not go into I sympathize and agree. I’d rather not go into detail with it either.
Great. What is this thing called “responsible”?
There are at least three major possibilities here, once we get past a definition. Feel free to add other possibilities.
God is responsible.
You are responsible.
Nobody is responsible, these are just circumstances, meaningless.
The conclusion (insane and incompetent) does not follow from the premise, however. It requires unspecified assumptions. Which one of these shall we examine first?
I don’t mean responsible, I guess. That was poor phrasing.
If God intentionally chose my preferences and my preferences contradict in ways that don’t make sense then God is crazy or incompetent or doesn’t care about my preferences because my preferences wouldn’t contradict if they were designed for any sort of reason.
In most of these conversations, God is a fish bicycle, isn’t that obvious? There is a possible conversation about what “God chose,” but the theologies that make sense to me essentially zero out the God contribution, beyond creating some expectation that it all makes, in the end, some kind of sense, and that we can search for that. God is, I’ll just say, outside of time and so placing God’s choice in the past, again, makes no sense. What is “God,” anyway?
Since you don’t accept the idea of God, whatever reasoning you create about God is made up, fantasy about fantasy.
Was there any choice at all involved in the creation of your “contradictory preferences”? What are you talking about? What is “choice”?
Okay, the core: you assume that contradictory preferences mean that something is wrong. Otherwise you would not conclude from them that God is crazy or incompetent. I’ll just make up something not-wrong. You have differing preferences because they give you different points of view, and when you can see from more than one point of view, you get depth perception, right? Is depth perception valuable?
My own answer, by the way, about the three possibilities is All of the Above. Those are simply three stories we can tell about responsibility. Each one produces, if held in mind, consequences. Each has a value, but generally the most empowering is the second: you are responsible for your identity, which includes what you describe as your preferences.
Isn’t that obvious? Okay, maybe it’s not. We don’t ordinarily think of ourselves as something that we created, we tend to “blame” it on our parents, society, or circumstances. But our identity was formed out of how we reacted to those factors. Did we chose these reactions or were they just automatic and predetermined? I’ll leave the question there for now.
It was not asserted as such (remember, I wrote that I was “a little ashamed”). Consider it dicta, but it does contain an argument about atheism, one which I’d expect would be well-known, here. Perhaps someone will point me to consideration of it.
In the original conversation, it was just “God.” But the problem is the same. What is this thing that is being disbelieved? The words “God” and”gods” have very different meanings for different people, even among people who supposedly are part of the same “sect.” What is it, precisely, that is being accepted or rejected? Or is the concept being accepted or rejected at all, is this just another form of “I’m right” and “You and people like you are wrong,” which, like any such expression of identity, bears no relation to any reality other than personal?
What I confronted with that student—this was about 18 years ago—was his assumption that he knew what I believed. If I “believe in God,” I must think this and that and the other thing.
Do I “believe in God”? That would be a fair question, eh? It wasn’t asked. Nor have I been asked it here. Nor have I been asked to define my terms, -- what is “God,” after all? -- and what I’ve indicated about it has not been heard (by anyone who responded). Hint: it’s related to that capitalization issue. You’ve seen enough to be able to say what I believe, if you’ve been paying adequate attention—or you will if you pay it now.
Chaosmosis, is there anything that you do “believe”? We need, of course, a definition of “believe.”
People can argue with each other for years, getting nowhere, because the terms being used are never specified so that fundamental disagreement—if it exists, sometimes it does not, and I have some suspicion that it never exists outside of psychopathology—can be identified.
It’s a bad argument against atheism. Atheists don’t just disbelieve in any particular God, they disbelieve in all of them. Of course, if you redefine God to mean “potato”, then atheists will believe in God. But that’s a bad use of language, and the default assumption is to use the word in its normal context.
Any beings which have supernatural powers or knowledge aren’t believed in by atheists. This would include everything that is normally considered a god, and a few extra things too.
No, you confused him. That doesn’t mean he understood this point.
What God do you believe in? Your point only makes sense if your understanding of God differs from the conventional one(s) in some important respect, which it probably doesn’t.
Are you basically a deist?
Definition of believe: “to accept as true or real”. I don’t believe with certainty in anything. (Technically, my intuitions are certain about certain things. Other parts of my brain disagree with their confidence though.) I slightly believe in everything, in that anything is possible because I’m fallible. But for everyday purposes, I believe that I am a human, that the sky looks blue sometimes, that rain is wet, and about ten million billion other things.
Sure.
I pointed to the Mu’tazila in another post to connect my position with an old tradition, one which is frequently thought to be heretical. The real story is that the Rationalists were very successful, early on, which might say something about the compatibility with the “proof-texts” of Islam, i.e, the Qur’an and the stories of the Prophet, but they asserted their power to attempt to crush contrary opinion. No surprise, they then lost power, and were in turn crushed.
To be fair, it was not the rationalist theologians who did this, it was their powerful supporters, who made the reserved and rational interpretations into a state-enforced dogma. Perhaps we could say that they did not adequately restrain their supporters.
Many “Muslims” would consider my comments heretical, I’ve run into this. I was considered to be too accommodating to “non-Muslims,” who, they believed, were doomed to Hell if they did not “accept Islam.” This got to the point that when I recited and translated a section of the Qur’an to a group of visiting Christian seminary students, the imam of the mosque was waving frantically at me to try to get me to stop. His religious affiliation trumped any concept that our responsibility might be to convey what was actually in the Qur’an. He was mostly ignorant of it. Small mosque, in a small town, a big fish in a small pond.
Great. Could we say that you believe in your experience? I would put it a little differently. You trust your experience. But for what?
In any case, can we distinguish between experience and what is concluded or expected from it?
You persist in this, Chaosmosis, in assuming “against.” What I presented was not an argument “against” atheism, per se, it was a question as to the nature of atheism. If “atheism” is disbelief in “God,” then there must be some definition of “God,” or it’s totally meaningless.
I don’t define God to be a thing. I equate God with Reality. What is that? I do not assume that I understand God. I did not invent this understanding, I found it. It’s actually pretty standard Islam. God has many names, and one of them is al-Haqq. The Truth or the Reality. Because this is a reference to a singleness, I capitalize it, this is not a reference to the ordinary individual realities, the body of facts, all of which are conditional and relative.
I don’t “believe” in this, I “trust” it, which is a better translation of the word in the Qur’an which is ordinarily translated as “believe.” That is, there is an operating hypothesis here, on which I lean. It has effects. But it happens to be one which does not constrain my reasoning, that encourages it. But it is arbitrary, it’s a choice.
I am responsible for it.
And you have your own choices to make.
In any case, “belief” is about an assumption of truth. “Trust” is only about a mind-state, in fact, or what I more routinely call a “condition of the heart.”
If I unpacked “disbelieves in God” to “has not encountered a concept of God they both believed (“did not disbelieve”, if you prefer) and did not consider a silly conception of God”, would atheism still be meaningless? Would that be a horrible misconception of atheism?
Are you sure there’s nothing bundled in with “God is Reality” beyond what you state? Let’s say I said “God is Reality. Reality is not sapient and has never given explicit instructions on anything.” Would you consider that consistent with your belief that God equals Reality?
I’m not trying for Socratic Method arguing here, I’m just not quite sure where you’re coming from.