Board index ‹ God

[Abernathy]

Is God a being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions? Is Jesus God? Do Muslims have the concept of God correct? Do you think God is a being perfect in power and wisdom?

Does God know everything and can do anything (including what is logically impossible)? What are the limitations (if any) on God?

Did God create everything? Has God always existed?

Is God just a conception developed by humans and not really exists? Is there more than one God?

So far, I don’t have any reason to believe there is a God and think God was invented by humans to answer why we exist.

[jimwalton]

God can be pretty difficult to define—the larger the subject, the more difficult to express in one sentence. Given your challenge, though, I would define God as "a supreme supernatural divine being."

But then you rattle off a list of other questions!!

Is God a being...? Yes.
Is Jesus God? Yes.
Do Muslims have the concept of God correct? No.
Do you think God is perfect in power and wisdom? Yes.

Does God know everything? Trick question. I'll answer no, because he can't know what it's like to not know everything.

Can God do anything? No. He do what is logically impossible or self-contradictory.

Did God create everything? Yeah.

Has God always existed? Yep.

Is God just a conception? No.

Is there more than one God? No.

Was he invented by humans to answer why we exist? No. If there is no God, there is no purpose to existence. We're just mutations of chemicals and processes and not essentially different from any other part of nature. Purpose isn't in the cards, just survival. Truth and reason aren't even in the cards. How can I trust my reason if it's just the result of random processes, time, and mutations? I can't.

Alvin Plantinga rightly reasoned, "The probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low. (To put it a bit inaccurately but suggestively, if naturalism and evolution were both true, our cognitive faculties would very likely not be reliable.) But if I believe in both naturalism and evolution, I have a defeater for my intuitive assumption that my cognitive faculties are reliable. And if I have a defeater for that belief, then I have a defeater for any belief I take to be produced by my cognitive faculties. That means I have a defeater for my belief that naturalism and evolution are true. I cannot rationally accept them. Therefore, if I can’t accept them—the pillars of contemporary science—then there is serious conflict between naturalism and science."

Nietzsche said, "Only if we assume a God who is morally our like can 'truth' and the search for truth be at all something meaningful and promising of success. This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life."

Thomas Nagel: "If we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory (e.g., true beliefs) were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious skepticism about its results."

Barry Stroud: "There is an embarrassing absurdity in [naturalism] that is revealed as soon as the naturalist reflects and acknowledges that he believes his naturalistic theory of the world. … I mean he cannot it and consistently regard it as true."

Patricia Churchland: "Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems it to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. … Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost."

What Churchland is saying is that from a naturalist perspective, what evolution guarantees is at most that we behave in certain ways—in such ways as to promote survival, or more exactly reproductive success. The principal function or purpose, then, of our cognitive faculties is not that of producing true or near true beliefs, but instead that of contributing to survival by getting the body parts in the right place. What evolution underwrites is only (at most) that our behavior is reasonably adaptive to the circumstances in which our ancestors found themselves; hence it doesn't guarantee true or mostly true beliefs. Our beliefs might be mostly true, but there is no particular reason to think they would be: natural selection is not interested in truth, but in appropriate behavior. What Churchland therefore suggests is that naturalistic evolution—that is, the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism with the view that we and our cognitive faculties have arisen by way of the mechanisms and processes proposed by contemporary evolutionary theory—gives us reason to doubt two things: (a) that a purpose of our cognitive systems is that of serving us with true beliefs, and (b) that they do, in fact, furnish us with mostly true beliefs.

The fact that you can think, reason, analyze reliably, and even converse with me with some sense of purpose, betrays that there is more going on than naturalism allows.

[Numbers]

>I'll answer no, because he can't know what it's like to not know everything.

Why not?

> Has God always existed? Yep. Is God just a conception? No. Is there more than one God? No. Was he invented by humans to answer why we exist? No.

Can you support these claims?

> If there is no God, there is no purpose to existence.

Why not? Why is personal value not enough?

> How can I trust my reason if it's just the result of random processes, time, and mutations?

Because evolution isn't a random process, despite the prevalent misconceptions.

> Alvin Plantinga rightly reasoned, "The probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

Can you support this claim?

[jimwalton]

> "he can't know what it's like to not know everything." ... Why not?

Because we're dealing with reason, not absurdities. There is no such thing as an entity that is absurd and self-contradictory. If we're going to have a meaningful conversation, we have to begin with reason. If A can equal non-A, then no word has any meaning and our conversation, by necessity, must end here. But if you are able to understand what I am writing, then we are dealing with reason, not absurdity, and we can reason that A must equal A.

> Can you support these claims?

I can support them with logical arguments, of course. The arguments are far stronger for theism than for atheism, for causality over spontaneous generation, and for monotheism over polytheism.

> Why not? Why is personal value not enough?

Personal value without true purpose is merely a contrived gain. Anyone can say anything, but that doesn't yield any bona fide substance. If we are nothing but matter+ time + "chance" from impersonal sources and forces, then purpose isn't in the system. It's like asking a traffic light to learn to recognize your car and turn green whenever you arrive. It's not in the system and is therefore impossible. With no purpose in the system, any personal value attributed to anything is artificially imposed. One might as well impose unlimited wealth for all if we're just going to establish what we wish.

> Because evolution isn't a random process, despite the prevalent misconceptions.

Evolution is a blind, impersonal, and non-intelligent process. Genetic mutation is random, changing the "instruction manual" haphazardly. Natural selection knows nothing of the instruction manual, but only selects or rejects (both misnomers since they imply intelligence) based on suitability or survivability. But both processes are blind. GM knows nothing of what NS is doing, and NS knows nothing and has no input over GM. Not only are they both blind, but they are both impersonal and non-intelligent. You have a long way to go to show that reason that can be trusted as reliable can come from such foundations.

> Alvin Plantinga... "Can you support this claim?"

Here's Plantinga's argument: "Our cognitive faculties, or powers, or processes include memory, whereby we know something of our past. There is also perception, whereby we know something about our physical environment, not only locally, but also distant object such as the moon and stars. Another is a priori intuition, by virtue of which we know truths of elementary arithmetic or logic. By way of a priori intuition we also perceive deductive connections among propositions; we can see which propositions logically follow from which other propositions. In this way, starting from a few elementary axioms, we can explore the great edifices of contemporary logic and mathematics.

"But there are still other cognitive faculties: sympathy, introspection, testimony, and some would say moral sense. These faculties or powers work together in complex and variegated ways to produce a vast battery of beliefs and knowledge, ranging from the simplest everyday beliefs (it’s hot in here, I have a pain in my knee) to more complex beliefs of philosophy, theology, history, and the far reaches of science. In science, clearly enough, many of these faculties work together.

"My argument will concern the reliability of these cognitive faculties. My memory, for example, is reliable only if it produces mostly true beliefs—if, that is, most of my memorial beliefs are true. What proportion of my memorial beliefs must be true for my memory to be reliable? Of course there is no precise answer, but presumably it would be greater than, say, two-thirds. We can speak of the reliability of a particular faculty (e.g. memory) but also of the reliability of the whole battery of our cognitive faculties. And indeed we ordinarily think our faculties are reliable, at any rate when they are functioning properly, when there is no cognitive malfunction or disorder or dysfunction. We also think they are more reliable under some circumstances than others. Visual perception of middle-sized object close at hand is more reliable than perception of very small object, or middle-sized objects err some distance. Beliefs about where I was yesterday are ordinarily more likely to be true that the latest high-powered scientific theories.

"But suppose you are a naturalist: you think there is no such person as God, and that we and our cognitive faculties have been cobbled together by natural selection. Can you then sensibly think that our cognitive faculties are for the most part reliable?"

Then came the paragraph I cut and pasted in the previous post.

[Abernathy]

> Did God create everything? Yeah.
> Has God always existed? Yep.

How do you know this is true?

[jimwalton]

It is inferring the most reasonable conclusion. What we see around us had to have come from somewhere, something that made it come into existence. Nothing that we know of self-generates from non-existence. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Scientists are united that the universe began to exist. They postulate it from a non-dimensional singularity, then the Big Bang, and voila, the universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a cause outside of itself, because we know of nothing that is self-caused. Everything that had a beginning was brought into existence by something else that already existed. Therefore there must be at least one entity that is both eternal and self-existent. God is a reasonable choice as to that cause.

Another approach: If God doesn't exist, then his existence is logically impossible—the very concept of God is inconsistent or self-contradictory. But if God really does exist, his existence is necessary. It can't be otherwise if he is truly God and He truly does exist. Therefore God's existence is either impossible (inconsistent and self-contradictory) or necessary; there is no halfway position.

If God's existence is logically impossible, then even the concept of God and everything we think about him is contradictory. We are trying to make a reality what is not only nonsensical, but impossible. But the concept of God is not contradictory. There's actually reasonable sense to it in many ways, for example, that something caused what we see. While some may not agree, it's certainly not contradictory.

Therefore, if God's existence isn't contradictory (that choice is removed from the equation), then the only reasonable choice remaining is that God is logically necessary.

[Abernathy]

> Nothing that we know of self-generates from non-existence. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Does this statement include God?

[jimwalton]

The statements don't apply to God because God didn't "begin to exist" and was never generated nor needed to self-generate. Something was always there. We know if we have nothing we get nothing. If anything can pop into existence (begin to exist) from nothing, there there is no such thing as science. Generally it is thought that something was either matter or the first cause. But since science is of a consensus that matter didn't always exist, then we are left to find another First Cause that didn't begin to exist. God is a reasonable logical conclusion.

Leibnitz spoke of a "Principle of Sufficient Reason." Everything has to have a reason for existence. There are basically two choices: (1) self, or (2) something outside of self. Therefore the universe has a cause for its existence. What would be a sufficient cause?

There must have always been something, so it must be an eternal cause.

If the past is infinite, we would have no present (Kalam's argument). Only if the past is finite can there be a present, so the sufficient cause must be timeless.

There must be a personal cause. Impersonal causes must have first causes. Only personal causes are capable of being first causes, to cause other things to come about. Kinetic energy is energy is motion; potential energy is energy stored. The only way something begins in motion is if there is a first cause. What puts a system in motion?

What if the universe always existed? For the universe to have eternal existence, it must have been static (potential energy). But what moved the universe into kinetic energy? How did it get in motion? Personal causes are the only things capable of being first causes (though not every personal cause is a first cause.) You can never have an infinite chain of causes—it regresses. Whenever we see a chain of causes, we can always ask, "Who caused it?"

It had to have been a powerful cause. The universe displays immense power and complexity.

It had to have been an intelligent cause because we have informational data. We have no example of informational data that does not come from an intelligent cause.

What we are inferring is an eternal, timeless, personal, intelligent, and powerful cause. If we are inferring the most reasonable conclusion, God is a reasonable answer.

[Abernathy]

> don't apply to God because God didn't "begin to exist" and was never generated nor needed to self-generate.

I go back to my first post—How do you know this is true? Nobody knows that God was always there or has always existed or even if there is a God. This is just a guess, so the rest of your writing really is not applicable. It is not a "reasonable inference" to make the conclusion there is a God that has always existed and created everything.

[jimwalton]

Then I'll go back to my first answer, because I answered your query: It is inferring the most reasonable conclusion. What we see around us had to have come from somewhere, something that made it come into existence. Nothing that we know of self-generates from non-existence. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Scientists are united that the universe began to exist. They postulate it from a non-dimensional singularity, then the Big Bang, and voila, the universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a cause outside of itself, because we know of nothing that is self-caused. Everything that had a beginning was brought into existence by something else that already existed. Therefore there must be at least one entity that is both eternal and self-existent. God is a reasonable choice as to that cause.