Quoting from the OP in this thread:
Pauline writes:
People of most commonly held worldviews, whether knowingly or unknowingly, declare one single thing/person to be the ultimate authority.
Curiously, this reminds me of the title in another currently active thread in the "Miscellaneous Topics" section here at EvC: "Creationists think Evolutionists think like Creationists." Here is Pauline, who avows a firm belief in some version of a Christian God ("the one true" version, obviously) as an ultimate authority, and **surprise!** "people of most commonly held worldviews" think the same way as Pauline (but are asserted to have different "things/persons" as their "ultimate authority"). Yup, a very familiar theme.
I guess that (in Pauline's assessment) atheism and agnosticism do not count as "commonly held worldviews": I'm fairly confident that the notion of an "ultimate authority" is utterly meaningless and useless to agnostics and atheists (not that I'm an authority on this, of course, but I can certainly speak for myself, and I have seen evidence that others agree with me on this).
Honestly, Pauline, if you want to assert that I recognize and acknowledge some "ultimate authority", you might find personal comfort in that (because it is consistent with your own way of thinking), but you would be wrong.
As for trying to rationalize as non-circular the belief that God is the ultimate authority because God's word (the Bible) says so, I guess this snippet from later in the thread comes closest to the heart of the issue:
Pauline writes:
You do realize that God does things to show how He is the ultimate authority after claiming it , right? Right.
Um, no, that's not right. I certainly never "realized" anything of that sort. What are the particular things that God "does"? How is it determined that God "does" these things?
If you're talking about the "miracles" described in the bible, those don't count, because to the best of my knowledge, that stuff is all just mythology and allegory, having no basis in observable evidence (e.g. no evidence of a global flood, or tower of Babel, or ...)
If you're talking about the "everyday miracles" (biological reproduction, "natural beauty", earthquakes, volcanoes and all that), I'm sorry, but there's no direct indication of divine agency for any of that; it all happens as a result of discernible physical causation, in accordance with recognized physical laws (some of which are not yet fully understood, but we are making progress on that).
If you're talking about souls, redemption, salvation, afterlife and so on, well, these all actually end up being poorly defined terms referring to nebulous concepts whose existence in reality is open to question, to say the least. There's no actual, reliably observable demonstration of God doing anything here -- just bare assertions involving abstract and imaginary notions.
In any case, I have always found it both puzzling and telling that so many irreconcilable versions of religious practice are based on "the one true God" as the "ultimate authority". The main problem here is not the circularity of the reasoning -- it's the flat-out, plain-obvious falseness or vacuousness of the claims, and the demonstrated lack of any honest and earned authority founded on objective, empirical grounds.
Indeed, just accepting the notion (and any given assertion) of "ultimate authority" is itself the root cause of a serious problem (well, many serious problems, actually), and it should have been abandoned long ago. "Contingent authority" is good enough.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : (simplified the grammar in the last paragraph)
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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