On 08 Feb 2017, at 04:53, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 2/7/2017 9:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Which is exactly why I'm explicit in defining what the theism is
that I consider preposterous and what other god ideas I'm merely
agnostic about. Then Bruno criticizes me for "supporting" the
former; rather than help him muddy the meaning of "God" so he can
call the truths of arithmetic "God".
Let us try to agree on some definition of God. Most people, after
and before Christ agrees on this: it is the origin of everything,
it is what everything proceeds of, unnameable and transcendent,
that is beyond us.
Are you OK, with it. Don't hesitate to improve it.
No, I'm not "OK" with it because it is a misleading appropriation of
a common word that is used to denote a superpowerful and
knowledgable person who not only created everything, but cares about
human beings and demands certain conduct and who acts in the world
in response to prayer. Your definition doesn't even rise to the
level of a deist god. Even a deist god is supposed to care about
human conduct.
The definition I gave is more general, and let such question open. All
atheists, christians and muslims I met do agree that their God satisfy
my definition. Why adding the controversial attribute? We are already
know that atheists do not believe in those attribute, and I am
agnostic on it. When we do science, we search the axioms on which more
people agree and then do the reasoning and see where we are driven.
Why use a so peculiar special theory, given that almost nobody in this
list agrees such a god does not exists, or even that, if it exists, we
do not yet have evidences for it? Just to say I don't believe in it?
This is completely weird. You could as well say that science has guven
evidence that Earth does not exist, by making earth flat by
definition. This is not how science works. Why insisting that we use
the notion of God which has been imposed to it by terror and violence
for a very long time? You are completely illustrating what Einstein
said on the atheists and "free-thinker"(*): they are completely unable
to leave the religion they hate so much, up to the point of hating
even more the religion which use different notion of God, like the
original scientific one of the greeks and Indians (and chinese ...).
Many religious people believe that the idea that God cares more on
humans than on spiders (say) is just utter arrogance, vanity, and
delusional. No one serious would postulate that, even if some will
continue to hope it, but there are no evidences at all, so let us be
agnostic, and not put this in the definition.
Bruno
(*) I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food
guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who
profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose
intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious
fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are
still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off
after hard struggle. They are creatures who---in their grudge against
the traditional "opium for people"---cannot bear the music of the
spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one
cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and humans aims.
(Einstein, See the book by Jammer on "Einstein and Religion", page 97).
Brent
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