The Case Against the Existence of God

I'm not sure what you are excluding and what you are looking for. For example are you excluding Spinoza? Or would you accept his philosophy as an acceptable rebuttal of God as a omniscient omnipowerful person with thoughts, feelings, etc. like humans?lfen

He was not an atheist. Here is something I found: I think Einstein had views along these lines. I think there is a good chance Phat would characterize Spinoza as a pantheist but I'm not sure that his philosophy meets the technical definition of that word.lfen

I'm running out of time this morning and my work schedule gets busy for the next couple of weeks dang it, as this is a very good question and does incite me to much thinking."God" is a word, a concept, and I think it's function is as an explanation for all manner of things. Would you then be interested in reframing your question to asking about the validity of different explanations for the Universe, consciousness, etc?Religion is also about the authority of the tribe, city state, nation, empire etc. God is on our side as the ultimate validation of the rightness of our actions whether we support the status quo or challenge it. God is ubiquitous. To ask if God exists asks about the validity of the explanation of Y being explained by X. We would need to examine what explanations are and what it is to assert existence.Cleary God as explanation exists and refers to various phenomena some of which I accept as existing.Would you be interested in reasoning back from What Is to see if the notion even of a source of What Is is neccesary? The Universe is huge and contains huge energies. We know that mathematics demonstrates infinities as properties of certain sets such as integers. Is it important that God is all powerful or simply the most powerful by a wide magin but still mathamatically finite?I'm taking it that you aren't so much interested in what any particular ancient manuscript asserts as you are in the abstract concept of the explanation?lfen

Damasio makes it even more interesting in this book in that he talks about how Spinoza lived his life and also ties Spinoza to Damasio contemporary explorations of consciousness and the human brain. Damasio is a joy to read. I always recommend all of his books.Looking for Spinoza : joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain BookAuthor : Damasio, Antonio R.
Publisher, Date : Orlando, Fla. : Harcourt, c2003. - Edition : 1st ed.
ISBN : 0151005575 - Description : x, 355 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.I'm open to either logical necessity or evidential necessity. Unfortunately my work and family are needing extra attention for the next couple of weeks so I wouldn't be writing much. Would have to let others carry this thread. I think ultimately I'd like evidence of divinity and not just logical inductions, deductions, etc. Only the most naive believers think that there is evidence or proof hence the emphasis on faith.lfen

Just a snippet of thought that I will mull over came to me reading your post.Organisms function as time processes totally dependent on their environments. Plants for example require sunlight, water, nutrients. Their activities are undertaken and depend on necessities. This is true of animals and humans also.So a human organism is dependent on the environment providing for it's needs. But humans actively undertake a wide range of activities for their survival. Humans engage in seeking, planning, goal oriented activities.If we go out looking for food, or shelter, or a mate, etc. We have to hope, believe, have faith that we might find what we need. In the complex neurology of the motivation and behaviours of the brain a human needs to "believe", or "have faith" that the activities have the hope of success. Faith and belief are aspects of the complex functioning of human consciousness and are an expression of a living organisms complex dependence on it's environment to function and reproduce.My first rough draft of a definition of belief is that is a corrolate of the nervous system's goal oriented functioning.God then would be a personification of the entire environment that humans relate to. This is not limited to the earth and universe but also to the social group and culture and "mental" worlds that humans have developed. Humans have a prolonged dependence of their parents and this personification is often cast in parental terms whether it is the ancestors, or divine mothers and fathers.lfen

One of the things that Wittgenstein or was it the logical positivist observed was that discussions of the BIG topics in philosophy tended to lose sight of the logic of arguments because the topic was so beguiling.So instead of using the example of God, which is a major concept, why not look at other things that may or may not exist and see if we can prove their non existence. Some suggestions might be Atlantis, or Little People, or telepathy, or Centaurs, Pink Unicorns, etc. How would one prove the non existence of one of these? Or disprove the claims that they exist. Are there any proofs that they exist?On thing to consider is if a claim is falsifiable or not. If it's not falsifiable can it be disproven?lfen

Well, yeah! okay, ummm, what do we know "for sure"?lfen

This is a discription of enculturation and hynonsis not proof. If you enter any rationalized closed system such as Islam, Mormonism, Catholism etc. then many but not all people can get the results claimed. We can see this in the Hari Krishna's, the UFO believers etc. It's an ancient phenomena but it's not about facts or proofs it's about how the human brain works as it creates its experience of reality.lfen

Well, then, what level of confidence are you interested in? What degree of uncertainty would you be willing to accept and still be assured?By restricting your OP to the western notions of deity you've tied at least one hand behind my back you know. Ramana has such interesting things to say about "I am", but he was Indian.lfen

Your philosophical dissertation brings to my mind after all these years the sophomoric philosopy, I and my friend were in our sophomore year of college, that was developed in an afternoon in the college coffee shop.It went pretty much like this.There are two classes of things in the universe, aside from big and little, those things which eat and those things which are eaten.It is the moral imperative of this philosophy to seek to be the former and avoid being the latter.All else is redundant.
QEDWell we were joking, but are you? What is this with the universe being limited to being and things? And it appears they are mutually exclusive! One of these days I will give up posting to this site. Nobody understands what I write.You clearly have the intelligence and education to grasp the fundamentals of General Semantics. If you would at least pay me and GS the respect of refuting our observations on process I might not feel that all my efforts were totally in vain, but being entirely ignored in favor of a naive sensory model of the universe as comprised of things and beings with out even explaining the relationship of the two seems like we are beneath your notice.What happened to physics with the concepts of matter and energy?lfen

Define "a being" and "a thing" please. What is the difference?Btw, being limited to your two possibilities is why I lost interest in the west and turned to the east. The east has a much more profound grasp and understanding of the problem, though Korzybski and Wittgenstein have advanced the western positions.lfen

Ah this is the crux, but it would have to be another thread. I don't know how many contemporary Christian church's still hold the dogma that the Gospels were actually written by disciples rather than attributed to them.Perhaps you or someone else would like to start a thread on the authorship of the Gospels?lfen

Oh no, not me. I think entities are artifacts of our brain structure and the language we have developed. There are no entities. There are only processes. Better there is only the process of incredibly complexity that we call the universe, or All That Is.Interesting to note that matter and energy are forms of the same process, Energy equalling mass times the square of velocity of light in a vacuum.My critique of Robin's position is that he naively accepts the notion of "things". Heraclitus said you can't step in the same river twice. I'm still trying to track down who said that that being the case you can't step in the same river once.But my favorite is the Riddle Song. "I gave my love a cherry without a stone. I gave my love a chicken without a bone." Cherry is a dynamic process of matter/energy. One space/time segment of cherrying is blooming and in that sequence prior to blooming is budding and all the way back to a seed sprouting. Because we can interact with a cherry to derive energy and nutrition we are most interested in that segment of the process and use the noun "cherry" to designate it but no cherry exists as an entity. It's in constant change though say through a process of freezing the rate of change can be slowed down a great deal or through heat speeded up.Quite possibly Robin is wanting to distinguish between living things and non living things. What I am saying is that is a meaningless distinction because there are no things (entities) at all. All there is is a complex processing that is ongoing.lfen

Consciousness and it's relationship to matter/energy is what I ponder these days.At this point I see life as the same sort of manifest potential of the universe as are stars or black holes. Life is one of the processes matter/energy transforms into.As I've complained about earlier, Robin's restriction to western models is very handicapping for me altough some modern thinkers do give me access to process models instead of static thing models.One of the elegant aspects of the theory of the singularity as Hawkings originally described it was that it was in perfect balance. What created the universe, what was required to create the universe was a disturbance. Somehow perfect symetry had to have an imperfection introducted into it to destabilize it thus precipitating the expansion and cooling of the singularity which resulted in the universe that we now know. He has since come up with at least one other possiblity having to do with indeterminancy of some sort. Still it pleases me to think that God's initial act of creation was the introduction of imperfection. Think of an artist. What they have to do is disturb the clean expanse of paper or canvas by getting it dirty. Creation is messy business! Just one way of thinking about it.lfen

Well, this is what I call the naive, or native viewpoint. This is how things appear to us given the language we've developed.It's seems obvious to me that humans have created God or gods in the image of humans and then turned it around to say God or gods created us in their image. Physics using mathematics is pushing the envelope of our human viewpoint to model more deeply the universe.I am drawn to a Wittgensteining approach to the problem that you are presenting in that I think it is entirely an artifact of human conceptual language.This may be pantheistic I'm still not clear on that. It maybe Plotinus's neoplatonic system,butI will throw in a third explicit possiblity: Being is Consciousness and that it gives rise within itself to the complex process that is the universe. So it is the source and the object. There are not two separate catagories: entities and things, or subjects and objects which I suspect is the grammatical structure that brings that perception about. There is only being consciousness that in certain processes functions as material, matter.
see:Plotinus - WikipediaThe universe as it appears to our human nervous system is a functional artifact of that nervous system and not the universe in itself as it is. There are no separate beings. Only the appearance of separate beings. We know matter and energy to be a continuum as space time is a continuum. I suspect eventually matter/energy space/time will be a single continuum as will consciousness.To disprove your hypothesized Creator Being as distinct from other beings would take only a demonstation that no beings exist except as codependent interdependent processes of the whole.On the other hand that Creator Being does exist as the whole, All That Is, and the only "things" that have a shadow existence are the various illusions that it has dreamed. Those illusions as Shakespeare saw are you and I. We aren't our bodies and brains, we are the dream that these bodies and brains are beings. Was Romeo a being? Hamlet, Juliet? In one sense they don't exist. In another sense they have a kind of existence but are not real.This is a theme found in Shakespeare and Borges. Your field is literature I believe. Jorge Luis Borges' short fictions often illustrate this very well.lfenedit: cleaned up a couple of typosThis message has been edited by lfen, 04-08-2006 08:24 AM