The Case Against the Existence of God

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So the question is, whether an eternal mind created the universe, or whether this thing, the universe, has always existed, and from it sprang forth creatures with minds, such as ourselves and perhaps certain animals.

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From our experience with the mind, it can do nothing without the aid of "things," namely our body.So another option would be that the mind is eternal, along with the "things" it uses to create the universe we see today.

Logic pierces the veil of subjectivity.I don't know this for certain, of course, for just as we do not have a ground for morals, we have no ultimate ground for logic either. But it's something we have to assume--at any rate for the sake of argument. If we don't assume it, then science, for example, need not be taken seriously.Some people on this forum speak as though Logic was just whatever you wanted to be--that anything is possible no matter if it contradicted itself or not. Purple Dawn speaks of "my" logic, as though logic was something personal. Logic is not personal; it's impersonal. It's objective.Perhaps Purple Dawn understands this, and just means that "my" logic is flawed. That may very well be; I'm no great logician. It has to be pretty simple before I can grasp it.Logic puts limitations on what can be. That which contradicts itself cannot be. A round square cannot be. Something cannot come from nothing--which would be another contradiction.But if you are like Ifen, you despise what he calls "Western" logic. You prefer subjectivity. Not me.NWR makes this to-do about the word "belief"--says it's always emotional. I just mean by "belief" the idea of being convinced by some proposition. Unlike NWR, apparently, I think it is possible to reason objectively--no doubt another naive idea of mine.Arguments against the existence of God consist of finding flaws in the arguments given in favor of God. I was looking for some argument we could make that was not just that, but something beyond finding flaws in arguments for the existence of God.I set up a concept of God (a common one, I think) that made sense to me, to see if we could find an argument against such a being. The concept of God does not make sense unless this God is an ideal Being, the answer to everything. For if He is not an ideal being, then there would be something anterior to Him which would render him unnecessary. It's like the old response to the First Cause argument: Who made God? Exactly, unless God is defined as eternal, and then there would be no maker of God.So either the universe has always existed or an eternal Being made it. If the universe was made by another universe, then of course we just revert to option #2--the universe has always existed. It does not matter what form it was in for the sake of this argument.I thought at one time there was a "moral argument" against the existence of God. It is indeed a very common claim. If there was a God as described in the OP, he would not allow the suffering we see in the world. This God would be immoral, having done harm to innocent creatures. Certain Christans answer this charge with the concept of the Fall, but evolution does away with the possibility of a Fall. I think now, however, that this argument fails. Our morals, being ungrounded, are presumably subjective. If so, a subjective moral judgment accusing God of cruelty fails, because a subjective judgment is no good at all as evidence of any charge against anybody, God or people.So I have not yet found some argument against the existence of God. It is not quite true, however, that the existence of God is "unfalsifiable," if we have some definite qualities of God that we can consider. We have that in the God described in the OP.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 04-08-2006 12:08 PM

Not following part of this. WHICH argument fails? The Fall? I don't think you mean that but its position in the paragraph leads one to that thought. And I think you must have left out a step or two to demonstrate that our morals are ungrounded.

As happens with many words, the term "logic" can have multiple meanings. Sometime it is used as synonymous with "reasoning" or "thinking". This makes it subjective, since it is the mental activity of a subject. Others use the term to mean the mechanistic following of fixed rules of inference, and we can treat that as an objective meaning. You are reading too much into this.I am attempting to account for why people can have beliefs, while it is generally agreed that computers cannot have beliefs.Reasoning is done by a subject, so in inherently subjective. However a reasoner (as a subject) can follow objective principles of reasoning. When you use the expression "objective reasoning", are you intending that to single out the principles followed in the reasoning (which can be objective), or are you intending to single out that there is a reasoner (a subject)? Okay, that was a rhetorical question, so no need to answer.I think you are seeing a profound disagreement between us, when it is more likely that I am trying harder to avoid ambiguity by being careful in my use of terminology.

The OP limited the discussion to western thinkers. Plotinus was an important western philosopher and it would appear that his study in Persia introduced him to some ideas from the Hindus, but his sources are also Greek (Plato) as well as other non Hebrew western philosophers. The author of the OP appears to want to limit the options to those provided by Judaic sources or atheistic sources that oppose them.Advaita vedanta is an important source for me as well. However, Korzybski and Wittgenstein with their analysis of language and modeling or mapping arrive at a very similiar conclusions to the Eastern non dualists.lfen

I would just like to point out that God is not the God of the west but the entire world. And if there was one specific place it would be Israel in Asia, Inbetween the three major continents (before they spread out to much it is where the Christ was born, and as they spread out the gospel did with them including into the west.)

This is false NWR. All reasoning is done by a subject, but some reasoning is objective because it involves giving attention to the external problem or object or to the terms of the argument. It is about truth not about feeling or attitude.In journalism, back when people still believed in objectivity, it was the discipline journalists cultivated of keeping their own views of a situation scrupulously out of their report. At a minimum it is an avoidance of value judgments. It is in fact possible to do this. In recent years it seems to me and some others that including value judgments or "spin" in a news report is the method of choice, usually done covertly or subtly with the choice of a word.This is not to say that all objective reasoning leads to truth, as there is always still error in the best of reasoning, but it is objective nevertheless if it is aimed at discovering truth.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-08-2006 05:02 PM

Of course God is God of the entire world. The reason for focusing on the concept of the God of Western Tradition is that it is the concept of God most familiar to us in the West. And this is no doubt because the Biblical God had the biggest impact historically in Europe and America over the last two millennia, up until relatively recently, although the specific theology of the Christian God (the Trinity for instance) is not part of the definition that Robin gave.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-08-2006 05:09 PM

I meant the moral argument against God fails.

Actually, I have the idea that it is the only possible God, the only God that makes sense.Ifen, of course, would disagree. But if so, he needs to set out his arguments one by one starting at the beginning.

I mean deduction and induction, upon which all our knowledge is built.If somebody wishes to reject "sweet reason"--as the Medieval thinker put it, recognizing its vast significance--they should tell me ahead of time, for there is no point in talking to them.

Let's restore the full context. Our disagreement is really about what we mean by "reasoning". You are using the sense in my second sentence (the publically expressible steps taken), while I am using it as the mental activity of the reasoner. The best journalists still believe in, and practice, objectivity.

But the term is simply not used in this latter sense, and to use it that way is to derail the discussion.
============================================================ABE: Summary Comments: I didn't really understand the idea of trying to come up with a positive reason to reject the idea of the existence of God (as opposed to the usual attempt to discredit the arguments for the existence of God), but hoped to see it developed, and am disappointed that it bogged down in all these definitional concerns -- although I think I finally understand why it did. Maybe these issues should have been taken to another thread as they disrupted the intended topic.I'm interested to see that Robin has rejected the moral argument against God, which I gather he finally did on the basis of the subjectivity of moral arguments, rather than on the basis of the Fall. --?I'd like to see a list of the arguments against the existence of God.Maybe a new thread would be in order in which definitional sallies are kept to a minimum and these kinds of arguments are spelled out in the OP?This message has been edited by Faith, 04-08-2006 07:51 PM

I take this as an invitation to set out my arguments. I hope this summer to review Korzbski's great work: Science and Sanity, an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, published in 1933.I think my use of Non-Aristotelian logic is one of the key things you take issue with. But it's been some decades since I read Korzybski so I can't attribute very much to him though he did contribute a lot to the way I understand the world.Key to understanding the world is the notion of levels of abstraction and that the map is not the territory. Our nervous systems interact with select aspects of the environment and also represent only select aspects of that environment.Failing to take into account this abstraction leads to an error that Korzybski called the "is of identity". To say the sky appeared blue to me at 3 pm April 23rd, 2006 from by backyyard would be misrepresented by saying the "sky is blue". "Is" implies that something is essentially true.If you assert that classical logic is sufficient then your argument will satisfy you and my argument will be meaningless.My approach is to examine the concept of "being" and "thing". Nouns are grammatically functional at the level of every day reference. If I ask you for an apple I will probably recieve an edible fruiting of an apple tree. In this case the map which is the word/sound/symbol "apple" is adequate to the function of me getting something to eat.What I mean by naive and native is the assumption that this level of abstraction that works day to day so well preserves it's meaning at the extremes. Science demonstrates the at extremes,for example say velocities very near the speed of light the universe sometimes functions very differently than it does in the neighborhood of the planet earth.If we engage on a Platonic or Aristotelian quest to discover how an apple is a thing, we might end up in nominalist/realist debate. Korzybski did something else. He observed that an apple isn't a thing at all. It's a process, a verb. Now concepts like number might be accurately represented by a noun (there are ways that doesn't quite fit but that would be a digression) but when we examine the objects of our environment we discover they are all transforming constantly at different rates.I'll stop here and wait to see if you find this much acceptable or what your objections might be because the first step of my argument will be that literally no things exist, instead what exists are processes and that we use names to refer to selected segments of the process and this gives rise to the naive perception that things exist, and I think our nervous systems which are abstracting the environment also perceives "things" as we interact with our environment.lfenedited typoThis message has been edited by lfen, 04-08-2006 09:18 PM

If god is the god of the entire world why would this revelation be only be to some people.