On 13 Jan 2013, at 18:56, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>> If, as so many have, you redefine the word "God" to mean "a
power greater than myself" then I am a theist who firmly believes in
God because I believe that bulldozers exist.
> Bulldozers are not responsible for your existence.
Both my parents were bulldozer drivers who first met at a bulldozer
convention. So a bulldozer is God.
I was using "responsible" in a less literal sense.
> one consistent notion of God is enough to make atheism into a
dogmatic (non rational) belief
There is no way to make sense out of the notion of God,
? (Note that you are not commenting me).
but you can redefine the word "God" so radically that it becomes
virtually unrecognizable to the billions of religious on this
planet, and then and only then does the word "God" correspond with
something that actually exists, even if there is already plenty of
perfectly good words for that thing. People just want to say they
believe in G-O-D, what the word actually means is unimportant.
Study the field, please. You might find help in Aldous Huxley's
"Philosophia Perrenis".
In the greek sense you are a believer in God, and even close to
Aristotle theology, once you believe in the existence of primary
matter, or naturalism, physicalism, etc.
But you are also more christian than the pope as you want God be
defined by the current common religion, which is nothing but using the
same authoritative argument than the fundamentalist.
Yes, all creature believe in "God", but this does not make the notion
trivial at all, as all creature can "see" God very differently.
> I have never met a theologian genuinely believing in both
omnipotence and omniscience.
I've had 13 years of formal religious training and I never met a
theologian who didn't preach that God was omnipotent and omniscient.
Well. I am sorry for you.
I don't know how many genuinely believed in the bullshit they were
spouting but I'd guess most of them did, certainly the vast majority
of those listening to the crap swallowed every word of it, in fact
I think I was the only one who did not.
You can't know that, but of course, we live in different countries. I
do have a feeling that in the US there might be more literalist indeed.
Again, we know that since the closure of Plato Academy (+500) the
field has been betrayed, exactly like genetics in the USSR, but on a
much larger historic-geographic scale.
It is normal as it touches very deep questions having relation with
identity and culture.
But today we can't avoid coming back to those questions through
computer science, with question like "can a machine think?", or "is
the brain a machine?", etc.
Note that I use computer science mainly to show how those questions
become hard, .. with the "comp simplifying hypothesis".
This reminds us that the big divide (Plato/Aristotle) has not yet
been decided, if ever, in any scientific theories. Seriousness entails
modesty.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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