SubscribeIf you can be convinced by proof that there is a god, then by definition you are agnosticOh, baloney. An atheist is not someone who believes THERE IS NO GOD AND THERE CANNOT POSSIBLY BE ANY HYPOTHETICAL PROOF SHOWING OTHERWISE. An atheist is someone who doesn't believe there's a god.
LOLXIANS and all that... But we atheists are left with what some philosophers call "the super-ultimate question": Why should something exist rather than nothing?I fail to see how theists are not left with exactly the same question.
Meanwhile, most actual definitions of "agnostic" -- you know, from dictionaries -- say that an agnostic thinks that the question of god-or-not is not only unknown, but also almost certainly unknowable. So if anything, the person who you mention, who "can be convinced by proof", is anything but an agnostic.To add to this:
Unless and until physics can give us a handle on the super-ultimate question, atheists are just guessing like everybody else. Though, to our credit, we're less preoccupied with making sure the queers ride at the back of the bus.Last I heard, no one offers any explanations for this: theism simply swaps "god" for "the universe" and defines god as eternal. This is a bit like lamenting that atheists haven't run a one-minute mile, without noting that theists define a "minute" as "however long it takes to run a mile."
Oh, yes that would be so nice. I was sort of into Bones for a while until I realized that every episode will contain some little nugget linking Bones's dysfunctional social relationships to the fact that she's feminist, well-educated, childfree or atheist.Well, to be fair, her Catholic partner is a hypocritical lunk who thinks "introspection" as a special kind of anthrax.
I would be extremely difficult to convince that there is a God. Not impossible perhapsIf an omnipotent entity exists, it could convince you that it is God. It could convince you easily, as if you were the most willing-to-believe human alive. That's part of what "omnipotent" means.
I've gone on and on about how if God exists, there would have to be evidence, and you seem to be implying that God is real as a concept... which is weird, since no theist believes in God as a concept, but as a living thing.You're reiterating rather than addressing the argument.
-grubi
We can easily assign attributes to God that are non-physical, take omnipotence as an example.Or, for example, existence.
A side note for verb, the second idea that you put forward, about God being the rules, is pretty similar, in spirit, to what Spinoza argued for.In the sense that Spinoza called the observable natural world "God," to the point that his views were considered synonymous with atheism, yes.
But there is an older, though still relevant and in use, sense of the term in which laws are thought to be real things with full ontological status. This is the sense which supports the claim that laws have a causal role in the world.Can you offer an example of one of these ontologically 'real' laws? A law that does not simply describe the consistent behavior of the universe, but that actually acts as a causative agent?
When a student asks why does the pressure of a gas increase when the volume decreases, one might respond by saying something like: well there is a law of the universe, that we approximate with Boyle's Law, which makes it so. (Is that what you mean by an example?)Something like that, yes. In the above example, I think it's fair to say that anyone calling the "Law beneath Boyle's Law" equivalent to God is operating outside the bounds of what people refer to as 'religion'. Hell, I'm an atheist and I'll call gravity 'God' if it makes for an amusing semantic game. That doesn't mean anything has changed -- just that I'm playing word games.
(Now, I won't speak to the merit of such an explanation, but one benefit of it is that it keeps things like the many instances of a phenomenon from being coincidental. That is, it's not just an accident that every time we observe a decrease in volume we see an increase in pressure. The descriptive model understanding of laws can't offer an such assurances, since by definition it's merely a description of what has happened and cannot fix future events. )The model you describe is nothing but the descriptive model plus denial. Which, I suppose, does make it a lot like God.
The cases in which "and god" add insight, clarity, or better predictions to those systems have generally been fairly weak.My impression -- from the earlier portions of the conversation, at least -- are that oddman was arguing that 'a godlike force' could be classified with many of the same fundamental principles and axiomatic statements. Or, perhaps that all fundamental principles and axiomatic statements could be grouped together and called 'God'.
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posted by leotrotsky at 8:30 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]