God

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by "taking rational thought to the extreme." Can you please elaborate? My exercise in rational thought was to try to help me figure out what I believe without leaning on preconceived notions. Rational thought took me only so far but nevertheless the journey was worth it. I'm not as wishy washy in my thinking as before, although I still don't have answers to many questions.

Edited by Tillerman88 - June 20 2019 at 16:01

BaldFriede wrote: Tillerman88 wrote: Jaketejas wrote: I think we value many of the same things. I'm not a statistician per se, although I apply statistics in my analyses. I think where we may or may not differ is that when we talk about kindness, love, anger, etc., I believe that these qualities are neither good nor evil. What I think is good is applying love at the right time, applying kindness in the right way, ... even anger. A mother who loves her child so much that she smothers and spoils him to the point of his becoming a spoiled brat is not doing good. A soldier angry at an enemy who is committing moral atrocities is justified in that anger. So, moral law and good and evil are not just emotions or qualities to be sought after. Whether or not an emotion or quality is good or evil depends on the context in which it is applied. Sometimes the good action is the one that does not result in a better world for you, but it is the contrary one where you take the brunt in place of someone else. So, I think that there must be a basis for this right and wrong. The conscience does it's nudging, but is not itself the basis. And, that is just about as far as my reasoning can take me.   Your quite good points here steered me to joining in on this discussion. Your thoughts clearly evidenced that logical reasoning doesn't imply good sense (something often lacking in today's "moral laws" as well as in the way laws are put in practice), a lack that often occurs when rational thinking is taken to the extreme. If by "good sense" you mean "common sense" I have to answer you with Albert Einstein: "Common sense is nothing but a collection of prejudices acquired by age 18" (original German quote: "Gesunder Menschenverstand ist eigentlich nur eine Anhäufung von Vorurteilen, die man bis zum 18. Lebensjahr erworben hat").

Edited by Tillerman88 - June 20 2019 at 14:56

BaldJean wrote: Logan wrote: BaldJean wrote: t seems to me that you have a kind of odd definition of God, at least in my opinion. you seem to think that God would have to be some kind of extraneous phenomenon and in contradiction to the laws of physics or at least in contradiction to scientific thinking. but that is not so at all. somehow you remind me of a certain joke: a very pious man is out with his boat which somehow acquires a leak, and he is about to drown. being a pious man he prays to God to rescue him. a ship appears, and the captain offers to take him aboard, but he says: "no, God will save me". a helicopter appears with a rope ladder to save him; again he says: "no, God will save me". a fisher boat appears to rescue him; again he says: "no, God will save me". finally he drowns. after his death he meets God and complains to him: "I am a pious man and prayed for your help. why did you not save me "? answers God: "I sent you a ship, a helicopter and a fisher boat; what more do you want"? You got me wrong, I'm not an absolutist and would never say that God must be this, or must be that. There are many different definitions of god, and I don't work with just one. We had a very long conversation/ semi-debate on this before some years ago (unless it was Friede), wish I could remember the thread, but I guess I didn't make myself clear enough on my beliefs and non-beliefs.   Because I married a born again Christian, I often do operate in the context of what they've told me about about what they think God is, but I know many different people have different ideas. Personally, I think that if there is a God, then God would be part of the "natural" universe or multiverse and tend to prefer the Spinoza conception of God. what I tried to tell you with my joke is that although by your own admission you had some experiences that could be called "revelational" you steadfastly stick to them being just some by-product of your brain. I am actually quite certain that even if God appeared right in front of you and told you he existed (not that this would be consistent with my concept of God; I only say this to bring a point across) you would still not be convinced. I may be wrong with this, but to me it appears as if for some reason the thought of a divine being frightens you and you have to call out "no, no; just a product of my brain" to reassure yourself. however, is ascribing such strange powers to the brain really consistent with the method of Occam's razor?

I liked the joke, and earlier in the thread I wrote something myself that could relate to that somewhat. It's not that witty because I wrote it:

"It certainly might seem ungracious to pray hard for a sign and then casually reject it.

The setting: a sunny day in parched lands. Moses wanders alone.

Moses: "Yahweh, give me a sign!"

God conjures up a rainbow

Moses: "I don't find that sign very convincing. It could be a natural phenomenon. Give me another sign!"

God sets a bush alight

Moses: "That could still be down to natural causes. Give me another sign!"

God: "Oh for heaven's sake!" [strikes Moses down with lightning]

Moses [badly singed]: "Yeah, I think that will do, erm even if it... [Moses thinks better of it as thunder rumbles] No, never mind, that will do very nicely thank you.""

I've thought about what it would take to convince me, and I can't say with certainty without experiencing it, but I have quite a few ideas. Having what seems to be God suddenly appear to me and do something that seems truly miraculous would be more convincing to me than getting a phone call from someone claiming to be God telling me that my computer is infected with the Satanvirus, but he will cure it if I give Him remote access and asks for my credit card number.

I certainly wouldn't automatically dismiss it if it seemed amazing, especially if I thought it could be verified, and if God and I hung out (like not just in my head) and he became a regular feature in my life and shared some of the secrets of the universe with me (not like, hey read the Bible, but more "here's an equation that will astound all of the physicists and through osmosis here's what it means"), I think I'd accept it (not with absolute certainty as I hold no position with absolute certainty, and I don't need to to believe that things are true). It still might not be God....

If God appeared to me, and there was no later evidence beyond that experience to determine that it was more than a product of my brain, or extraterrestrial aliens with sophisticated technology pretending to be God, that someone had drugged me etc., I would at the least have doubts. I might be convinced at the time, but then think of other possible reasons why it might have happened.

While I hold no position with absolute certainty, I do think that I could be convinced given the right conditions and hold that conviction. I'm not a solipsist, let alone a hard solipsist, but I don't even know with certainty that more exists than me etc.. Perhaps I am God, but I've never given myself the right sign, but I digress.

It would depend on the circumstances, but after seeing a vision of what appears to be God, and choosing between hypothesis 1: It really was a God, and hypothesis 2: It was a hallucination, I do think that number two would be more likely and require the least assumptions.   I've had what I believe to be hallucinations before, both when I had high fever, and when I've taken hallucinogens such as LSD, but I have never found so-called evidence for the existence of God compelling (like, hey, a rainbow, that's evidence and proof that God exists -- I've heard that from someone). Hey, the God vision could be an acid flashback or I might have dreamed it. Now if I was with others and we shared the experience, that would be much more convincing. Or if God came to me in a dream and gave me the knowledge to cure all forms of cancer and I remembered it after waking up and it worked, that would also be quite convincing. It still might not be God, it could be aliens, some hidden brain-power, or something else.

Depending on the nature of God, I am not afraid of there being a God. I don't like the idea of a God that demands eternal worship or sends non-believers to hell, as well as damning those who don't believe in a particular religion. I'm not keen on the Abrahamic God as stories go. Other conceptions I find far more pleasing. But what I would like doesn't make one conception more likely than another, or maybe it does for me. Who knows? I would like there to be a wonderful afterlife. I would rather not think that this is all we've got. I don't like the idea of eternal torment so much. I would like to believe in a kind and loving, and possibly sexy, God. By the way, I do have some God fear built in, as just writing sexy there made me nervous. I've never managed to shake certain fears that come from some religious upbringing.

Edited by Logan - June 20 2019 at 13:54

You are right. We probably shouldn't say words like must, but in logical reasoning it happens. My bad! The reason I say that if a creator God exists, should be outside the universe is because the assumption is that God created the universe and therefore, how could the creator God exist solely within the creation, especially at the point of creation? Yes, the creator God may be able to intersect the creation once it is created, but to create within the creation at the onset seems illogical. As a result, I find it an exercise in futility to try to detect God with scientific instruments. Perhaps you have another view?

Lewian wrote: I believe that god is created by belief.

 

YESESIS wrote: Wow, this thread has kind of exploded since I posted that last night. Anyway, I might have asked before for some sign but it certainly wasn't with as much outpouring of emotion as that day, of that I'm sure. And again no other night of my life have I turned on the TV and right there is a program trying to prove the existence God(I don't remember it that well now, only saw it the one time). But that night it felt very strongly like God was answering me. That's what I believe happened, and great point by BaldJean that it maybe can't truly be understood by someone who didn't experience the same thing.

It's been quite an interesting discussion and I'm rather glad you bumped this thread (except that I lost time on other things that I should have been doing what with all the responding, but I visit the forum for discussion, so no real complaints). Thanks for sharing.   

What exactly does "basis" mean in this context? Is the question about epistemological justification?

That's interesting. It seems there was some confusion as I never intended to imply that Occam's Razor is the apparent reasoning behind the quote. Jaketejas was responding to a post I made to Yesesis about his revelation where I brought up Occam'r razor, and earlier in the thread I had responded to his revelation by starting my post with "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I feel that both concepts apply to the claim/ revelation. They both relate to what I have said in this thread on a particular matter, and I would argue that one can find relations between the concepts themselves. Methinks that it was a more mundane comment than you inferred.

I'm not convinced that Occam's razor always, or does indeed at all, favour divine intervention because that requires the assumption that God exists, the assumption that God is omnipotent, the assumption that God created the universe and other assumptions about the nature of God.   And then one gets into the whole if a God was required to create the universe, was another needed to create God? And so on. It's not as simple as we only require one assumption, God, we then have to make assumptions about God.

Are you familiar with the Solomonoff prediction and Occam's razor?

I'm going to lazily quote from an article on this instead of trying to explain it in my own words (it's late): https://unherd.com/2018/09/can-occams-razor-prove-god-doesnt-exist/

Tom Chivers wrote: ...the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, in a 2010 paper, deployed Occam’s razor when he suggested that God is the simplest explanation for the universe, because God is a single thing. “God did it” is certainly simpler to say than “the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations in space-time”. But I would say that Occam’s razor is an argument against the existence of God. Who’s right? Conveniently, in the 1960s, the mathematicians Ray Solomonoff and Andrey Kolmogorov developed a mathematically formalised version of Occam’s razor. One version of it is known as ‘minimum message length‘, and it asks: what is the shortest computer program that could produce what we’re seeing? Let’s start with a simpler example than the creation of the universe: producing a string of numbers. I’ve taken this example from a Czech mathematician/computer scientist called Michal Koucký. He gives three strings of numbers: 33333333333, 31415926535, and 84354279521. If you wanted to write a program that carried on those strings for a million digits, what’s the shortest it could be? The first you could do very easily: a simple bit of code saying “print the number 3 a million times”. You could do it in four lines of the beginners’ programming language BASIC. The other two look random. But, in fact, the second string is simply the first 11 digits of pi, and you could print it out to a million digits by using one of the many quite simple algorithms which determine the digits of pi. The third, however, is truly random. To write it out to a million digits you would need the program to specify all one million of them. According to the ‘minimum message-length’ version of Occam’s razor, the first string is the simplest; the second is nearly as simple; and the third is the most complex. So what does this mean for Swinburne? Well, the equations needed to describe the Big Bang are certainly complex. But they are sufficiently simple for humans to have written them. The algorithms needed to describe God – an all-powerful, all-knowing being – are not. We haven’t even managed to write software that’s as powerful as a human brain yet. From a minimum message-length perspective, God is much more complex – and therefore unlikely – than physics. The same is true of evolution – you can quite easily write a program that approximates evolution by natural selection. But an intelligence sufficient to design all the creatures that evolution has made would be amazingly hard to program. It also has implications for arguments within science. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory, which says that every fraction of a second the universe splits into billions of parallel universes, sounds complex. The alternative, the “Copenhagen” interpretation, which says that quantum events aren’t resolved until they are observed, needs only one universe, and so sounds simpler. But the program you’d need to create millions of universes would be pretty much the same as a program needed to create one universe – just have an extra line in it which says “do that again”, essentially – while a program that had to keep track of what every human in the world was looking at would be much more complex. According to minimum message-length Occam’s razor, a cosmos consisting of infinite universes can be ‘simpler’ than one that contains just one. None of this means that these arguments are correct. The Copenhagen interpretation might be right despite being more complex. God might still exist; if the evidence shows that intelligent creation is more likely than the Big Bang, then it doesn’t matter how simple the theories are. But it means that you need more evidence for them. William of Ockham was by all accounts one of the finest philosophical minds of his time, but he was also a friar and a Christian. I don’t know if he would be pleased to see me using his razor as an argument against the existence of God. But I think he would appreciate the simplicity of Solomonoff and Kolmogorov’s update of his argument for simplicity.

I'm not sure if you saw my comment "I'm not on a soapbox here. Maybe someone else has a different viewpoint." I welcome other perspectives on philosophy. I find the discussion interesting, and I thank folks for sharing their views, as well as how they came about them. Isn't that what a forum is for?