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Author | Topic: I Know That God Does Not Exist | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
But surely there had to be some who thought up the idea first?
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
You write
quote:By your way of thinking, the idea of a secret agent with a license to kill, equipped with clever gadgets, etc. is not an "illogical" thing, even though a particular one labeled 007 doesn't exist. Fair enough. But the idea of Tarot cards (which we agree do exist) telling your future is not logical, even though one could go through the process of reading someone's fortune and, often (especially with a judicious use of cold reading) attain surprising accuracy. In the same way that the process of Tarot card reading is not a logical method of foretelling the future, the idea of a deity (by whatever you mean your deity to be, whether an explanation for lightning bolts or a morality car wash to clean away your sins) is not a logical thing.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
It's tough to stake out the position that there is no evidence for a deity in the face of statements that some of the great philosophers of the past have thought there was a deity.
Nevertheless...
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Still, it's interesting. If we see something we don't understand there may be a natural tendency to impute a cause (SOMEBODY must be up on a mountain throwing those thunderbolts!) but the ideas of the monotheistic religions? How they developed must have been far more convoluted.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
It almost seems as if the religionists have specifically designed their concept of a deity as something that cannot be objectively proven or disproven...
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
But I haven't said any of literary characters you listed (007 etc.) are illogical.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
You listed James Bond, Holden Caulfield, Tom Joad, Long John Silver, Lemuel Gulliver and Jesus in your list of literary characters. In the next paragraph you talk about god. If you had intended god to be in the list of literary characters . . .
Anyway, you've not answered my point quote:
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
If you were to project the size of an American family extrapolating from data of the years 1900 to 1940 you might miss the Baby Boom following the war, but your process would not be illogical. It might merely give the wrong answer. But Tarot cards, as a way of making a similar projection, even if it were accurate, would not be logical. Do you see the distinction here?
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons people believe things that are illogical. That doesn't make those things logical.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Perhaps there is a difference in the ways you and I conceive of the terms "logical" and "illogical"?
Could you give me an example of a thing (or process, if you wish, though a process is also a "thing" in the broad sense) which you would consider illogical? I only ask because you seem to want to categorize everything as logical and only have the concept of "illogical" come in as a possibility when we talk about "belief" in that thing.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined:
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But what is your concept of a god? If you believe in a god because you have experienced it, that is logical, in the sense that you have sensed it and so think it is there. That's fine, so far as it goes.
But what is god? The god of Moses? The god of the KJV? The god as conceived by the deists who founded the United States? We must know what a thing is before we can decide whether or not it is logical.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
A person who sees thin ice, thinner than ice that, in their experience, people have always fallen through, nevertheless says, "I'm going to walk across this!" Is that "illogical" in your way of thinking, or just "wrong" because there's no specific fallacy or something else in the philosophical jargon that is involved here, however irrational the situation?
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
But be careful about quoting famous people!
Shockley (to take an example of another famous scientist) may have been a genius, but his views on some issues were not ones you'd want to quote.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
Hmm. Interesting.
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Sarah Bellum Member (Idle past 595 days) Posts: 826 Joined: |
I find it depressing to hear people say even great physicists (or other scientists, scholars, etc.) can be wrong. It's true, I suppose, but it's not like making a moral choice (to steal or not to steal) and being wrong. One can live one's life without making a wrong moral choice, but one can't study science without going down dead ends, making mistakes, trying and failing. In fact, that's practically the definition of science: try something and see if it works.
The scientists who are "wrong" are no more "wrong" than the explorers who tried to climb Mount Everest before Edmund Hillary (no, Hillary Clinton was not named after him: she was born in 1947 and Everest wasn't conquered until 1953).
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