[Luis Dias]

Nietszche is not demonic at all. I know *exactly* what you mean, but I tell you, you should read him again. He "sounds" demonic because he's so anti-christian, which might be too much of a turn off to you. But he is so brilliant. To ignore him is to ignore a source of geniality.

I have to ask that you not assume I'm relying on wishful thinking. I believe in a God, not because I have this desperate desire for there to be a God or because I was raised that way, but because at a certain stage in my life I realized that God's existence was the single most important question I had to answer- basically my whole lifestyle depended on it. So, using my own reason (freshly sharpened from my debate training) I studied the topic voraciously, taking in the arguments from both sides. And I came out of that (year? year and a half? hard to say) convinced that there was a God. If you want to try and prove otherwise to me, I'm open to that. But please don't assume I'm using wishful thinking.

No, that wasn't my intention, nor did I want to start a god debate here. I fully support your beliefs and conclusions, be them the more rational or irrational. I undestand the method you are describing here, and I have found people elsewhere making similar paths. I understand.

That said, you'd have to prove to me that Aristotle, and those who built on him (Aquinas, Dostoyevski, Hildebrand, and so on) have been "superceded". It seems to me that the majority of Philosophers who tried to go against him fell into absurdism or else abandoned Morality (Nietszche being an extreme example). Not all such philosophers lost it, certainly. But the fact that he wrote a long time ago doesn't reduce the value of his insight.

Whenever you get Aristotle more deeply and he starts talking about "essences" and "potentials" and whatnots he really really loses me in an instant. I've read modern readings on Aquina's aristotelic reasonings and it's so filled with these same pseudo jargons that are so pre-modern that, again, loses me in an instant. I completely understand you take their words to be wise and true, I'm just sharing with you the location where my reasoning diverges, insofar as their arguments are probably sound, the pieces they use for the arguments are not, they collide with all my own modern scientific intuitions in almost every place I can think of, and I also happen to think that Aristotle's really wrong intuitions about the physical world run parallel to his philosophical divergences. Were he to ponder in our post Quantum Physics world, I happen to believe he would not be Aristotelian at all.

[MP-Ryan]

I agree with Herra that his statements are 100% designed (ah) for social purposes, not theological clarity purposes.

Regarding how science cannot disprove "god", well that is superficially somewhat true, but not completely. Our current understanding on the big bang, abiogenesis processes, evolution and the overal materialistic underpinnings of our beings all but rule out almost everything said about these theistic gods. They don't "disprove" them, but merely state how these gods are absolutely unnecessary to explain everything around us, which is a kind of a slow death to these gods. All that might remain is some kind of a deistic demiurge god, something that sparked the big bang. But even Hawking believes that we now know sufficient stuff to even disregard that necessity altogether.

Science can never disprove the existence of deities.  It doesn't work that way.

What it CAN do is demonstrate that all phenomena attributed to deities are caused by something else that is perfectly explainable without invoking supernatural explanations.  While that may make deities irrelevant in all practical senses as an explanatory concept for the physical world, it does not mean we can ever prove they don't exist or have no influence outside physical reality.

Existence and nature of deities, afterlives, etc are the purview of philosophy and religion, not science, a concept I grow tired of explaining to people (not speaking about HLP, but people in general who insist that science and religious thought are mutually exclusive).

[Luis Dias]

Are you trying really hard not to read what I say and then go on and furiously agree with me and repeat everything I said there?

Or are you perhaps under the silly impression that philosophy is to never have any influence from empirical scientific findings?

[Grizzly]

EDIT: Blarg. How do you get those image tags to work?

Like that.

[Phantom Hoover]

The ability to grasp non-material concepts like justice or courage.

These can both be boiled down into formal terms of game theory and competitive selection pretty easily.

[InsaneBaron]

Nietszche is not demonic at all. I know *exactly* what you mean, but I tell you, you should read him again. He "sounds" demonic because he's so anti-christian, which might be too much of a turn off to you. But he is so brilliant. To ignore him is to ignore a source of geniality.

What I find demonic about Nietszche is the might-makes-right, strong-trample-the-weak morality system he advocates. It's downright sickening put into practice.

I have to ask that you not assume I'm relying on wishful thinking. I believe in a God, not because I have this desperate desire for there to be a God or because I was raised that way, but because at a certain stage in my life I realized that God's existence was the single most important question I had to answer- basically my whole lifestyle depended on it. So, using my own reason (freshly sharpened from my debate training) I studied the topic voraciously, taking in the arguments from both sides. And I came out of that (year? year and a half? hard to say) convinced that there was a God. If you want to try and prove otherwise to me, I'm open to that. But please don't assume I'm using wishful thinking.

No, that wasn't my intention, nor did I want to start a god debate here. I fully support your beliefs and conclusions, be them the more rational or irrational. I undestand the method you are describing here, and I have found people elsewhere making similar paths. I understand.

Okay, thanks. That clears things up.

That said, you'd have to prove to me that Aristotle, and those who built on him (Aquinas, Dostoyevski, Hildebrand, and so on) have been "superceded". It seems to me that the majority of Philosophers who tried to go against him fell into absurdism or else abandoned Morality (Nietszche being an extreme example). Not all such philosophers lost it, certainly. But the fact that he wrote a long time ago doesn't reduce the value of his insight.

Whenever you get Aristotle more deeply and he starts talking about "essences" and "potentials" and whatnots he really really loses me in an instant. I've read modern readings on Aquina's aristotelic reasonings and it's so filled with these same pseudo jargons that are so pre-modern that, again, loses me in an instant. I completely understand you take their words to be wise and true, I'm just sharing with you the location where my reasoning diverges, insofar as their arguments are probably sound, the pieces they use for the arguments are not, they collide with all my own modern scientific intuitions in almost every place I can think of, and I also happen to think that Aristotle's really wrong intuitions about the physical world run parallel to his philosophical divergences. Were he to ponder in our post Quantum Physics world, I happen to believe he would not be Aristotelian at all.

I agree he's REAL hard to understand. I don't claim to be an Aristotle Scholar myself, I understand a fraction of his work at best, but I found that fraction extremely helpful to my own truth-hunting. Aquinas is a lot easier to follow IMO, but if he turns you off as well... maybe try C. S. Lewis? Mere Christianity and Miracles are both logically solid and far easier to understand than Aristotle, but they build on the same tradition.

I think we're to the point where all we can do is give eachother "further reading" suggestions, which might be for the best.

@ Joshua: Ah, thanks.

[The E]

I agree with Herra that his statements are 100% designed (ah) for social purposes, not theological clarity purposes.

Regarding how science cannot disprove "god", well that is superficially somewhat true, but not completely. Our current understanding on the big bang, abiogenesis processes, evolution and the overal materialistic underpinnings of our beings all but rule out almost everything said about these theistic gods. They don't "disprove" them, but merely state how these gods are absolutely unnecessary to explain everything around us, which is a kind of a slow death to these gods. All that might remain is some kind of a deistic demiurge god, something that sparked the big bang. But even Hawking believes that we now know sufficient stuff to even disregard that necessity altogether.

Science can never disprove the existence of deities.  It doesn't work that way.

What it CAN do is demonstrate that all phenomena attributed to deities are caused by something else that is perfectly explainable without invoking supernatural explanations.  While that may make deities irrelevant in all practical senses as an explanatory concept for the physical world, it does not mean we can ever prove they don't exist or have no influence outside physical reality.

Existence and nature of deities, afterlives, etc are the purview of philosophy and religion, not science, a concept I grow tired of explaining to people (not speaking about HLP, but people in general who insist that science and religious thought are mutually exclusive).

Are you trying really hard not to read what I say and then go on and furiously agree with me and repeat everything I said there?

Or are you perhaps under the silly impression that philosophy is to never have any influence from empirical scientific findings?

Both of you, do NOT go down this route. Luis, accusing others of not reading your posts doesn't add to the discussion. MP, not reading what you are responding to is not a good thing.

[MP-Ryan]

Since when does quoting someone mean I was disagreeing with them?  Last I checked, quoting someone to expand on what they've written, including ideas you agree with, is a perfectly legitimate use of the quote function.  If I disagreed with Luis I would have expressly written a post about how he was wrong.  I quoted him explicitly because I was continuing along a similar tack.  Good grief people.

[SypheDMar]

It's a cop-out, but better than the alternative.

He's still essentially saying that:

-universe couldn't have started without a creator - big bang being the means of creation, rather than the original cause itself. It's much better than literal interpretation of Genesis, but still fundamentally unscientific (understandably).

-life couldn't have started without a creator - a statement strictly relating to abiogenesis, which has nothing to do with biological evolution, but spits in the face of chemical evolution and chemistry in general. As far as I'm concerned, abiogenesis is a simple statistical result of the fact that it's possible for a self-replicating molecule to exist - when that happened in suitable conditions, life occurs.

-evolution is real but can only happen after life has been created - again much better than "intelligent design" or any variant of creationism, but unclear in its meaning.


To what extent his statements have to do with evolution is difficult to decipher. Does he mean that in his view God created the first micro-organism that was qualifiable as "life" and all other species evolved from that point on, sharing common ancestry?

Or does he say that God supposedly created several species of organisms (if so, how many and at what point of the phylogenetic tree of life did this occur) but the theory of evolution is still valid because that's how things work post-creation?


Basically, it sounds to me like a very, very carefully formulated statement engineered to annoy as little people as possible. He doesn't want to alienate the conservative members of the church, but he wants to make his church less backward for the more progressive religious people.


Obviously, it's sort of understandable that the leader of Roman Catholic Church doesn't want to completely remove God as the original cause for as many things as possible, but to me it's rather annoying how much influence the position of a religious leader still has - progressive as he may be by comparison to his predecessors.

I don't actually see him contradicting abiogenesis. Rather, supposing that abiogenesis is happened, it happened the way it did because God willed it.

In fact, it seems pretty clear to me that the Pope isn't being scientific at all, merely saying that whatever actually happened has happened the way it did because God made it happen that way. In fact, I think he's future-proofing the Catholic Church from future scientific discoveries rather than making claims about how God went about doing it.

edit: Wow! What the **** happened? Okay just to clarify, I agree with Herra on most things with a small bit of interpretation.

edit edit: I think we need a lesson in reading court decisions and learning the definition of concurring opinions. Maybe that'll teach us how quote buttons work.

[Phantom Hoover]

Nietszche is not demonic at all. I know *exactly* what you mean, but I tell you, you should read him again. He "sounds" demonic because he's so anti-christian, which might be too much of a turn off to you. But he is so brilliant. To ignore him is to ignore a source of geniality.

What I find demonic about Nietszche is the might-makes-right, strong-trample-the-weak morality system he advocates. It's downright sickening put into practice.

Have you ever actually read Nietzsche? (I haven't myself but I've heard enough to discount the many third-hand accounts that he was some sort of evil personified.)

e: oops, should've read the full thread. Can you actually point to him specifically saying you should go around trampling the weak?

[Luis Dias]

Well if you quote my words and begin your treatise with a negative sentence like that, yes I will assume you are responding to what I said in a negative manner.  If then the thought is actually a repeat of what I said, then I will assume he didn't read me correctly, because that's the most generous assumption.

hint, if you agree with someone, don't quote them and go on with a sentence like "X doesn't do Y, it doesn't work like that, what it CAN do is Z...."

And The_e, that sentence of yours was hilarious. Try reading it out loud without laughing.

[Herra Tohtori]

I have to ask that you not assume I'm relying on wishful thinking. I believe in a God, not because I have this desperate desire for there to be a God or because I was raised that way, but because at a certain stage in my life I realized that God's existence was the single most important question I had to answer- basically my whole lifestyle depended on it.

I'm curious to know what made you think that is the single most important question you have to answer, because that seems genuinely mystifying to me. As is the statement that your whole lifestyle depended on what the answer to that question is.

Whatever your reasoning is, I suppose that qualifies you as a gnostic primarily, and a theist secondarily.

So, using my own reason (freshly sharpened from my debate training) I studied the topic voraciously, taking in the arguments from both sides. And I came out of that (year? year and a half? hard to say) convinced that there was a God. If you want to try and prove otherwise to me, I'm open to that. But please don't assume I'm using wishful thinking.

There is no way to prove such a thing otherwise. That said, I may be willing to go through your apologetics and see if I can't convince you to revert your conclusion, but not in this thread. PM's or another thread would be more appropriate, I think.

I don't actually see him contradicting abiogenesis. Rather, supposing that abiogenesis is happened, it happened the way it did because God willed it.

Well, that's just a null statement. It's essentially the exactly same platitude as saying "God works in mysterious ways".

The Pope could just as validly say that the Flying Spaghetti Monster manipulates everything with his Noodly Appendages to make the universe work the way it does, and to give us an illusion that there's some underlying physics working.

Maybe when two electrons repel each other, it's not Coulomb force that is responsible, but rather two noodly appendages pushing the electrons apart. Or when a photon impacts your retina, maybe there was no photon and instead noodly appendage is exciting the molecules directly, creating a perfect illusion of an energy quanta traveling through space and causing the chemical reaction to trigger nervous action potential.

Or perhaps noodly appendages are manipulating your visual cortex directly to create illusion of images.

Perhaps there is no visual cortex, just noodly appendages all the way.

The point is, once you have a statement that explains everything by explaining exactly nothing, you might as well go full solipsism, which is a fundamentally unsatisfying and counter-productive way of looking at life.

In fact, it seems pretty clear to me that the Pope isn't being scientific at all, merely saying that whatever actually happened has happened the way it did because God made it happen that way. In fact, I think he's future-proofing the Catholic Church from future scientific discoveries rather than making claims about how God went about doing it.

That sounds about right. In a way, you could see it as an application of differential calculus to theology; taking advantage of the fact that we can never be satisfied that the gaps in our knowledge have been reduced to zero.


It's converting the God of the Gaps from finite gaps in our knowledge into infinitesimal gap. Since that gap will always exist, the future of religion is assured. Hooray.


The problem is that although in reality this just means that God's relevance to real world is infinitesimally small, religions like Christianity craft an imaginary world where God's relevance is supposedly everything. Cleverly, this construct is fashioned in a way that is beyond scientific method and objective reasoning, typically proposing things like continued existence of self after physical death, and more importantly how said afterlife will turn up based on what you believed when you were alive.

[Herra Tohtori]

derp

[Scotty]

I think there's some merit to examining a particular point in this thread.

The point is, once you have a statement that explains everything by explaining exactly nothing, you might as well go full solipsism, which is a fundamentally unsatisfying and counter-productive way of looking at life.

Why?

To clarify, why must this point of view be fundamentally unsatisfying?  I have no doubt that you, Herra, would be wholly unsatisfied to be forced for whatever arbitrary reason to accept it, but why must InsaneBaron, or Luis, or any number of the other multiple billions of people on the planet?  I have a sneaking suspicion that if you produce a reason that makes logical sense, many would still disagree that such a worldview is unfulfilling.

To me, that's really the crux of the issue here.  We think differently ('we' in the collective human sense).  What may seem wholly unsatisfying to you could very well be a transcendent experience for someone else.  And that's not a bad thing.  This is why I'm always left a little confused and mostly irritated by folks arguing so strongly against anything faith-based, whether by way of objective rationality or otherwise.  It's not really anyone's business to tell anyone else what to believe.  Even if you strongly disagree, and have several well thought out reasons for why you disagree, belief is still not something that can be forced, nor should it.

[Lorric]

I do not understand why so very many people in this World regard those who believe differently to be idiots (not saying that about Herra or anyone else, just saying.) What great accomplishments do they have to their names that make them know the mysteries of the universe with such certainty, while most of the rest of the World are morons?

My beliefs are my own. I have taken in what I have seen of this World to form my own conclusions, but I am not arrogant enough to believe everyone who thinks differently is an idiot for not seeing it the way I do. I do not know what life experiences they have had while walking this Earth to form the conclusions they have done, and I do not think there's anything so special about me that I can have such confidence I have chosen correctly while most of the World has not. It doesn't matter what you believe in, most of the World has chosen to believe in something else. So are they all idiots? Are they all inferior to you?

I've just done what I can to make sense of this World from what has been put in front of me, which is all any of us mere mortals can do. None of us will see anything more than the tiniest sliver of what there is to see in this universe. What makes any one of us qualified to say with certainty we know these things?

[watsisname]

Why?

To clarify, why must this point of view be fundamentally unsatisfying?

Poor predictive power.  The entire point of physics is to derive and develop fundamental laws that describe how reality works, so that you can predict the future given some information about the initial conditions of a system.  There ought also to be, for any theory, feasibly-performable experiments that could conceivably produce results that contradict it -- falsifiability.   It is not so easy to do these with a "God Works in Mysterious Ways^TM" mentality.  It's basically a cop-out from actually testing one's ideas of how reality works against evidence.  No matter what happens, you ascribe it to unknowable divine interventions. 

Some may find such a perspective to be satisfying, but, as with Herra, it mystifies me.  I do not understand the appeal.

[Herra Tohtori]

Why?

To clarify, why must this point of view be fundamentally unsatisfying?

Let me elaborate.

Not only is it unsatisfying from the perspective of knowledge and understanding, because once God is invoked, there is no more intellectual incentive to further investigation. It's just something that is, happens, for reasons we don't understand and don't care to learn about. "God did it" is the end of cognitive process.

But in addition to that, it is exceedingly dangerous as well, in many ways.


Using the popular statement "God works in mysterious ways" as an example, to me it exemplifies the problems associated with predeterminism. It seems to me like it encourages fatalistic, apathetic attitude about events occurring in the world and in our lives. It is not useful in any way to predict anything. However, it can be used to justify anything and to support any agenda you might want to.


Second reason I find this outlook of life especially troubling is that even if there is a God, and even if he does have a mysterious plan, there is no guarantee that the plan is beneficial to us. Everyone just likes to think that God's plan will favour them personally. God bless the USA, eh? Why should God bless the USA, it only has a fraction of people living on Earth. It's the Promised Land of Israelites all over again - why should they be God's chosen people out of all the people in the world?

Considering the amount of differing agendas and factions on the world, God's Plan cannot favour everyone. In fact, there is no indication that "God's Plan" favours humanity at all.

To paraphrase a certain well-known fictional character: Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan".

Well, when everything is part of "God's Plan" (because it's categorically defined as such) then clearly there's no reason to panic because we can't really do anything about it... even if in reality there might well be good reason to panic, and start doing something about things that aren't going so well.



This can very easily lead to completely irrational decisions and actions, causing potentially irreparable damage and loss of life.


Examples of such logic in action:

-vilification of birth control as it goes against God's Plan (ignoring the fact that maybe birth control was also God's Plan)

-refusing medical treatment because life and death are for God to decide, or worse yet forbid their children to be treated

-ignoring the effects of releasing hundreds of millions of years worth of accumulated carbon into atmosphere within a few hundred years and expecting Earth to be just fine about it


The last example is not necessarily always religious in nature. However, "All Part of God's Plan" logic seems functionally identical to the reasoning that assumes humans to be too insignificant to meaningfully change the Earth and therefore Earth is fine regardless of what we do.



TL;DR: "God Works in Mysterious Ways" reduces human independent agency to such an extent that it doesn't even matter any more.



Addendum: I know that people's brain work differently and we perceive things differently. There are strong indications that religiousness is something that some people have a neurological, likely genetic predisposition toward. I'm not trying to devalue the way religious people perceive the universe, but it also has the potential to cause tremendous problems, as with every case where people make decisions based on things that are not necessarily true.

If I choose to make my decisions in life based on something I believe, I would like to know if my beliefs are true or not, because if they're false I might end up making poor decisions.

[InsaneBaron]

I have to ask that you not assume I'm relying on wishful thinking. I believe in a God, not because I have this desperate desire for there to be a God or because I was raised that way, but because at a certain stage in my life I realized that God's existence was the single most important question I had to answer- basically my whole lifestyle depended on it.

I'm curious to know what made you think that is the single most important question you have to answer, because that seems genuinely mystifying to me. As is the statement that your whole lifestyle depended on what the answer to that question is.

Whatever your reasoning is, I suppose that qualifies you as a gnostic primarily, and a theist secondarily.

Three things. First, the basic questions "Does God exist?" "Is there life after death?" "Where does morality come from?" are, I would argue, extremely important questions to answer. If there is a good God I ought to be worshipping Him and following His commands- and making an effort to figure out where those commands are to be found. If there's life after death I better be getting ready for it.

Second, how does taking a reason-based approach make me a Gnostic? I'm a Christian.

Third, I must respectfully disagree with your frequently repeated claim that belief in a God hinders science. I love science. The statements "God made the world" and "We should learn everything we can about the world He made", far from being contradictory, are mutually supportive. And the claim that Theists are somehow opposed to medical treatment of all things is outrageous to the point of not requiring refutation. (For the sake of moderation I'll avoid the birth control question you raise.)

[Luis Dias]

Gnostic in the sense of not being agnostic, that is, being certain there is a God. I think that's what Herra meant. However, this is confusing because "Gnosticism" has another quite different historical meaning, soooooooo......

[InsaneBaron]

Gnostic in the sense of not being agnostic, that is, being certain there is a God. I think that's what Herra meant. However, this is confusing because "Gnosticism" has another quite different historical meaning, soooooooo......

Okay, but how is Gnostic in that sense different from Theist?