On 18 Jan 2015, at 22:56, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/18/2015 9:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 15 Jan 2015, at 19:18, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/15/2015 3:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
It is the reason why I stopped, a long time ago, to qualify
myself as an atheist. I realized that atheists believe to much in
the christian God, paradoxically enough.
By your logic one cannot disbelieve in anything
?
I disbelieve in a number P which would be prime and such that all y
with x > P would be composite numbers.
I disbelieve in triangular square. I can't conceive them.
I can conceive a personal god, but if it is literally the one of
this or that text, I am skeptical, especially if endowed with
positive attributes and even more so if it is claimed he gave
normative rules.
because to do so you have to conceive of what it is your are
failing to believe
Yes, a contradiction. I can conceive that I *was* wrong or
inconsistent. Or that I am or will be.
(otherwise you don't know what you're talking about); and
therefore you believe in it because you conceive it.
Not really, because even if I can conceive it, I can conceive also
that it might not exist.
Then you need to stop saying atheist who conceive that the God of
theism is unlikely to exist are really supporting the Christian god.
You are the one saying that the God of theism is well defined, and
used by the christians.
My belief in God is trivial. All machine introspecting are
confronted to it, and from outside, in the metatheory, we can see
that they can confused it (correctly, or not) with truth.
The problem of the aristotelians is that they often take for
granted the physical reality, which is comprehensible when doing
physics, but when doing theology, the physical universe is an
hypothesis, and as such, there are no evidences for it.
That's fine, but it has no bearing on the relation of atheism to
Christianity.
Then you should have no problem with using god for definition of god
larger than the abramanic god.
And it's not at all clear what Aristotle meant by physical reality
(I doubt he even used that term).
it uses the word fusis (greek), which means nature. I have at last
find the passage where Aristotle "refutes" Plato, but it is already
only "mockery".
Aristotle postulated the existence of substances which filled all
space and had certain teleological tendencies. The latter fit well
with Christian eschatology and so his ideas were taught in the
ecclesiastical schools. Aristotle didn't engage in experimental
science; he was as much driven by "pure" thought as Plato. As JKC
says he was a very bad physicist - and not "just for his time"; he
could have followed the Ionian school which did measure as well as
reason.
I am not sure. If your read his zoology and botany, Aristotle did
observation, with bad protocol, but it was a beginning. Theatetus, by
Plato, already look at the problem between observation and truth, and
eventually leads to the beginning of modern epistemology. yes, They
were Platonist, and search for the first theoretical principles. They
were just trying to understand, and the big theological split is
between Plato and Aristotle, not existence of God or not existence of
God, which was always trivial for them, as God was defined by the
reason of reality. No greek theologian took seriously the greek fairy
tales, or any fairy tales. Plotinus diod even resist to theurgy,
unlike his students who were impressed by the success of the
christians. It is really sad that we lost Porphyry's book "Against the
Christians".
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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