Atheist Under Ur Bed has been arguing that the concept of God is fundamentally absurd. This is my response to the first three articles:
Articles D and E seem primarily to build on, extend, or repeat problems presented in A-C. F addresses counter-arguments which differ from the ones I bring up here. Therefore, I am focusing only on A-C.
Problem of Evil
Another approach to the problem of evil is to note that God allows evil as a product, not of His own will, but of our own freewill. Thus, God, not being the author of evil, can be all-good, and allow evil. He can be all-powerful and will triumph over evil at some point in time, but must not necessarily do so from the beginning. God can be all-knowing, and have chosen to allow a period of evil to ultimately produce a world of even greater good than would have otherwise been possible.
I discuss this concept in greater depth on my blog in the following articles:
Divine Attributes, Logical or Absurd
AUUB tries to argue that divine concepts of “all-good”, “all-knowing”, and “all-powerful” are ultimately absurd, but they are only absurd if one insists in making them so.
All-Good
AUUB’s first argument is that good is a term relative to a specific context and things are often neither good nor bad. However, what is meant by God being all good is the following:
- God is the ultimately, absolute reference point for what is good
- God is morally perfect. All that He does is ultimately the best possible action. He can even use evil to produce good (Rom. 8:28)
The first point illustrates the error of the appeal to relative goodness and the second points out the error of making an analogy between moral agents and neutral objects in terms of morality. Things, not being actors simple are what they are. They are neither good nor bad, but can be used by agents to produce good or evil. To argue that agents must be neutral because non-agents are neutral is a false conclusion based on a false analogy.
All-Knowing
AUUB presents several arguments related to the concept of “all-knowing”.
The first confuses knowledge and experience. Essentially, he argues that knowledge of a state requires experience of a state and as God has not experienced every possible state, God must lack knowledge of that state. There are two good reasons to reject this claim.
First, “experiencing a state” is essentially receiving certain inputs. As God exhaustively knows all inputs, it seems reasonable to conclude that He would not be precluded from experiencing what every state is like.
Second, if knowledge requires experience, there would be no point to trying to teach anything directly. Everyone would have to learn “the hard way”, so to speak. We would not be able to learn something was bad from other peoples experience or learn from history.
The second objection does not make much sense to me. He seems to argue that knowing everything would imply a complete reproduction of everything inside one’s head. However, there seems to be no basis for this claim. One does not say of someone who knows a lot about, say a coffee mug has a coffee mug reproduced in their head, even to some small degree.
The third objection or group of objections seems to simply be the argument that he does not understand how all-knowingness would work, therefore the concept should be rejected. This is absurd. One would expect a transcendent God to be somewhat beyond full comprehension of finite beings such as ourselves. Therefore, lack of full understanding is not a reasonable objection to such a concept.
All-Powerful
The objection to the concept of “all-powerful” is essentially the classic question “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?”. This fundamentally misunderstands the conception of “all-powerful”. The concept is not that “God can do anything imaginable no matter how absurd”, but merely that God can do anything which is merely a question of sufficient power. The concept does not require God to violate logic or do absurd things, it merely implies that anything which can be done given enough power is within His ability.
God and Being
Being
The answer to the question of image is that we are not the same as God but share in imperfect measure of certain of His qualities. The exact mechanics of “being everywhere” are not explicitly discussed in scripture to my knowledge. The way it makes sense to me has to do with understanding presence. One can be present in an entire room or space without materially filling it. Presence is limited by perception. If a room has walls, it limits one’s presence because one can not see through it. Therefore, presence is the space within which a being is sensorially aware. Because God is “all-knowing”, there is no limits on His space of sensorial awareness. He is therefore present everywhere. That does not mean He fills all space with some magical or divine substance.
Spirit
Spirit is merely a different form of being, not a form of “non-being”. There is no reason to insist that “being” is limited to a corporal existence. Much of the rest of AUUB’s discussion here seems to echo his critique of the term “all-knowing”. That one can not fully understand every aspect or mechanic related to a particular concept does not preclude that concept from being true. In reality, there really is not much that we can claim to fully, comprehensively and exhaustively understand in every minute detail (is there even one thing we understand that well?).
Time
Transcending time does not imply that one can not interact within time. It merely means one is not bound by time as we are. One is free to see all time at once and act at specific points. In fact, one might say that relative to such a being there is no past or present. There is only the present. This idea sounds quite a bit like Jesus’ claim that “before Abraham was, I am”.
Perfect
It is interesting that AUUB claims God can’t exist because He can not even be conceptually understood, but understands the concept well enough to claim that a perfect being would never create anything. We might not understand everything about Him, but that does not preclude His existence or creation.
Than would have otherwise been possible? What happened to “anything which can be done given enough power is within His ability?”
Here’s the deal, you have a party of four (all good, all powerful, all knowing, existence of evil) but only a table for three available. You simply can’t seat all four, and every apologetic which addresses the PoE subtly shows one of the four to the door. Even Plantinga turned all powerful away.
By: PhillyChief on September 1, 2009
at 18:29
I develop these arguments further in the entries linked to under the problem of evil. I recommend you read them.
I qualified God’s omnipotence as the ability to perform anything which merely requires sufficient power or energy. Therefore, it is quite reasonable to conclude that some good thing God may be trying to accomplish may not be immediately achievable merely by the application of power. I discuss a specific example in the cited articles.
Your party of four is not an argument, it is merely a claim. I suggest you justify your claim and deal with the arguments I presented to the contrary.
By: arthenor on September 2, 2009
at 17:09
Well I have arived at that point from addressing PoE apologetics before and I’d normally enjoy applying it to yours but I see after reading some of them and your responses to commenters, there’s little point. Your defenses are mostly just assertions.
Btw, your omnipotence qualifier proves my point about the party of four but don’t feel bad. You’re in good company. Like I said, Plantinga couldn’t get around it either.
By: PhillyChief on September 2, 2009
at 19:24
As opposed to your defenses, which so far have been all assertions?
What do you mean by assertions? If you insist on calling any argument I have made mere assertion because it lacks absolute certainty, see my article here: Reason, Philosophy, and Faith.
If you insist on “all-powerful” being absurd, your gang of four seems to have more problems than inter-principle conflict.
By: arthenor on September 3, 2009
at 16:12
None of the above
By: PhillyChief on September 3, 2009
at 17:04
[...] definitionally absurd and illogical concept), because His various attributes are not absurd (see my response to AUUB’s first series of objections). Possibly related posts: (automatically [...]
By: The Deducibility and Detectability of God « Arthenor’s Ramblings on September 7, 2009
at 19:43
While there are some interesting arguments to make about the omni-attributes, I think that the last section here gets to the meat of the matter.
You said, “That does not mean He fills all space with some magical or divine substance.”
There is a conceptual distinction to be made between being present everywhere and being aware of anything. To be aware of anything requires a sensorial means of acquiring that awareness. We are visually aware, for example, of far along objects by intercepting their light. If God isn’t everywhere, then by what means does God ’sense’ everything (or anything for that matter)? What makes God aware of the movement of a particular atom? The problem here is that it inevitably becomes reduced to magic. You have an end with no means. You claim that this is not sufficient to reject the concept, but where is the concept? It is incoherent. Incoherent concepts ought to be rejected as such.
And it goes on. “Spirit is merely a different form of being, not a form of ‘non-being’. There is no reason to insist that ‘being’ is limited to a corporal existence.”
Spirit is not defined in positive terms as a different form of being. It is defined as the negation of being (not material, not spatial, not temporal, etc). Spirit, therefore, is logically equivalent to non-being. We do not have to insist that being is limited to corporal existence, but we do have to insist that any other kind of being proposed must be properly defined in a meaningful way. Being is conceptually understood in terms of corporal existence. There is no concept of being apart from the corporal. It is not, therefore, that we simply cannot fully understand what you’re talking about. We cannot understand it AT ALL. Since there is no concept, it should be rejected as such.
Again with time. “Transcending time does not imply that one can not interact within time. It merely means one is not bound by time as we are. One is free to see all time at once and act at specific points.”
These are meaningless assertions. Time and interaction are mutually dependent concepts. Nothing ‘happens’ apart from time because change is built into the concept of time. Therefore, it makes no sense to say that something can be active yet not bound by time. Again, the ideas you are professing are incoherent and should therefore be rejected as such.
By: James on September 8, 2009
at 05:54
– Omniscience –
The fact that we do not understand how God knows everything and that the mechanism is likely to be supernatural does not make the concept of God incoherent. If it is incoherent to suggest a process which is not exhaustively and comprehensively understood, then pretty much everything human’s propose is incoherent because, we never really have exhaustive knowledge. On the other hand, the claim that positing the supernatural is inherently incoherent begins with the assumption of naturalism and assumes nothing supernatural can exist. This is circular reasoning.
– Spirit –
Being is not corporal existence, but mere existence. Therefore, one can deny corporality without denying being.
Here again you rely on a circular argument based on your assumption of naturalism. You assume, based on that assumption, that being is exclusively corporal and therefore that that which is not posited to be corporal can not exist.
As corporal beings, it should come as no surprise that extracorporeal existence is somewhat hard for us to grasp. However, that does not mean such an existence is absurd or incoherent. Nor does it mean we can not understand it at all as you claim. People have conceptualized a spiritual realm since the dawn of civilization. Attributes have been ascribed to a supreme spirit such that AUUB’s article has to begin with common concepts of knowing, power, presence. Even the corporal world is not fully understood, which is why we continue to learn from scientific endeavors all the time. You would not argue that such lack of knowledge makes the corporal world lacking in conceptual integrity and therefore incoherent. In respect to intellectual integrity, please refrain from advancing such absurd and vacuous arguments regarding the reasonableness of a non-corporal realm.
– Immutability –
Your argument that time is necessary for change is one which many theists would accept. For this reason, God is often described as an immutable being. Being outside of time implies an inability to change. Therefore, God’s action is unlike our action. He doesn’t sit around, watching things occur and then intervene. God “sees” everything and executes all actions simultaneously. From our perspective in time, God’s actions unfold over time. From God’s perspective, outside of time, the past, the present, and the future are all actual. For this reason, Jesus can say “Before Abraham was, I am” rather than “Before Abraham was, I was”. This conceptualization may be simply an assertion, but the ability to form a reasonable conception proves a level of possibility which refutes the claim that such concepts are “incoherent”.
By: arthenor on September 8, 2009
at 19:51
You doth protest a lot but don’t really address any of my core criticisms.
As for omniscience, it is not simply that we do not understand all of it. It is not understandable AT ALL. It is incoherent because it proposes a kind of knowledge that is entirely different from our normal understanding of knowledge and offers no explanation for why such knowledge is reasonable. If such knowledge is stored in an unknowable way and acquired in an unknowable way then I submit that such a proposition is meaningless and I reject it as such.
As for supernatural, it is not circular reasoning. Supernatural means nothing more than “not natural.” But what is that? Can you name at least one characteristic of a supernatural existence that is logically distinguishable from non-existence? You can’t. There is no differentiating the two. Supernatural can’t ‘exist’ because you don’t know what it would mean to say that something not natural ‘exists.’
This is the same argument that I advance for ’spirit’. What does ‘mere existence’ mean if not tied to corporeal reality? Certainly nothing. When we general speak of existence we talk about things which occupy space at a particular time. To propose a being that exists apart from space and time is not to propose a different ‘kind’ of existence – it is to negate the very concept of existence itself. Unless you can describe in positive terms what such an existence would mean, then you have nothing to stand on.
Again with time. What does “outside” of time mean? Here you are speaking of time in terms of spatial dimensions – as if someone could physically walk in and out of time like a building. Likewise with “seeing” all time as if time was simply a filmstrip that could be played in its entirety simultaneously. In physics, time is understood of as a dimension. An object that does not move through time not only does not change but cannot itself act – because acting requires changing states of being.
The problem with your responses is that you want us to use words in ways that do not correspond at all to their normal meanings but are incapable of assigning any new meaning to them. Walter Kauffman summed this up brilliantly in his 1958 book, Critique of Religion & Philosophy:
“In sum, terms applied to God do not mean what they generally mean. Those who say that God exists do not really mean that he ‘exists’ in the same sense in which anything else exists. Those who say that God is being-itself, or a spirit, or love, do not mean these terms in any ordinary sense. But if terms applied to God do not mean what they generally mean, if they have a unique meaning when applied to God, then all such talk about God is conducted in a peculiar language with rules of its own.” (178)
Indeed – and with rules that are completely unknown and unknowable! One could get away, in chess, with calling the Bishop a fool and the King a Devil, because the underlying rules would remain the same. However, to say that God ‘exists’ is to say nothing at all if by ‘God exists’ we mean something entirely different from what we normally mean when we say that something exists. Without the rules there is no game to play.
By: James on September 8, 2009
at 22:37
FYI: Atheist Under Ur Bed has written a short reply to the other parts of this post that I will publish when the series is completed, which is soon. Stay tuned.
By: James on September 8, 2009
at 22:38
– Omniscience –
How is omniscience not understandable at all? Exactly how is the proposition “God knows X” inherently and incoherently different from the proposition that “Bob knows X”? Are you implying that “Bob knows X” is coherent because Bob has a physical brain and “God knows X” is incoherent because we do not see God’s “brain”? Frankly, the idea that God is an incoherent concept because we have never seen His “brain” and do not know how it might function or what form it would take? I do not see how such an objection is fundamentally different from saying “we do not know everything about God, therefore God can not be real”, which seems like ridiculous grasping at straws to me.
– Supernatural –
“Not natural” means just that. Something is not naturally possible or beyond nature. Something not bound by the mechanistic processes of this world. Three such properties have been discussed: omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. None are naturally possible in a finite realm because they imply infinite knowledge, presence, and power.
It seems to me that what you are doing here is defining everything that is natural (that is, the sum of everything you accept as being) as the only thing which can exist or be coherently understood. You then argue that because anything outside your accepted definition of being is “non-being” or “incoherent”, is inherently absurd. Essentially, you are defining that which is rational as naturalism and then complaining that other views are inherently irrational because they don’t fit into your definitional game. That is circular, semantic reasoning.
– Spirit –
The fact that most things which we talk about as existing are physical objects does not mean all extant things are physical. To propose non-physical existence is not to negate the concept of being, but to propose the possibility of a different kind of being. This different kind of being, being is in some ways dissimilar to our mode of being, may not be a simple or easy concept for us to grasp, but there is no reason to suggest that truth must always be simple or easy to discover and understand.
Furthermore, as I have already argued, discussing this different kind of being from our frame of reference (the natural) is likewise difficult. To argue that something is “not-natural” is not to suggest an incoherent or impossible concept, but to attempt to explain a form of existence outside our normal frame of reference. Key differences are therefore seen in negative terms “not-natural”, “not-corporal”, not because such concepts are incoherent, but an attempt to explain a different form of being from the context of our form of being.
If I visited another country and came back describing their culture as “not doing x, y, and z”, you wouldn’t say “ah ha, you have described this culture only in negative terms, therefore it is incoherent and does not exist.” You would understand me as describing their culture with references to our culture. The same is true here of the spiritual world.
– Immutability –
This is one reason God is described as immutable. Not being bound by time, God is unchanging. The reason He can be unchanging and also an actor in time is that God does not change from states of inaction to action and then to inaction again as we do. Not being in time, all of God’s actions are simultaneous and never ending (from His perspective).
– Terminology –
How am I using terms in completely non-standard ways? When I say that God exists, that is exactly what I mean. God is real as opposed to imaginary. When I say that God is omniscient or omnipotent, I am not suggesting that God has a unique form of knowing or a different form of power which can make square’s round, but simply a different degree of knowledge and power. When I say that God is omnipresence, I did so with reference to how we are present.
Frankly, it seems to me that you are the one playing the game of equivocation. You reject the common understanding of “being” as merely “existing” and insist that it must mean “existing in a corporal state”. By attaching exclusively natural concepts to common words, you are essentially defining naturalism as definitionally true. Does that make naturalism an untestable and therefore useless concept?
By: arthenor on September 9, 2009
at 16:18
Clearly you are still having issues with understanding the point of my arguments. So let’s take this one thing at a time.
“Exactly how is the proposition ‘God knows X’ inherently and incoherently different from the proposition that ‘Bob knows X’?”
This I thought I had made clear. To say that Bob knows X is to say something definite. Bob acquired some knowledge X through his physical senses (of which we are all familiar) and that knowledge X now resides in his conscious, physical brain. Should Bob along with his brain die (and therefore loose consciousness) that knowledge dies with him (unless it has been acquired by another person). To say that God knows X doesn’t mean anything definite – indeed, it doesn’t mean anything at all. It is to say that God acquired knowledge X through an unknowable means and stores it in an unknowable way.
The point here is that our concept of knowledge is derived from natural phenomena. When you attempt to lift that idea from its conceptual framework, as you must do with God, then it is now divorced from its basis in reality and becomes a floating abstraction. In other words, when you try and extend such natural concepts to a supernatural (non-natural) realm you sacrifice its content. Since you can’t (or at least haven’t even tried) to explain what kind of knowledge God’s knowledge IS apart from any natural context then God’s knowledge does not mean anything definite, and therefore, is incoherent as I have concluded.
You said, “I do not see how such an objection is fundamentally different from saying ‘we do not know everything about God, therefore God can not be real.’”
That’s because you are seeing it wrong. The objection is “we do not know ANYTHING meaningful or coherent about God” therefore God is not “real” in any particular or definite sense of the word. All the “properties” that you list are not properties at all. Properties are limiting characteristics of things. Unlimited properties are not intelligible, akin to magic, and at worst floating abstractions, as I demonstrated above with respect to omniscience.
I made one significant challenge in my previous comment that you did not attempt to meet:
(1) Can you name at least one characteristic of a supernatural existence that is logically distinguishable from non-existence? Unless you can describe in positive terms what such an existence would mean, then you have nothing to stand on.
That’s really all that you have to do. If your concept of ’supernatural existence’ has any definite meaning apart from the natural, then you should be able to define what that means in positive terms. If you cannot, then my objection stands.
You cultural analogy doesn’t quite work, because it is already understood that a culture is a collection of symbols and traditions shared by a social community of human beings. Therefore, my failure to describe in positive terms what the content of that culture actually is (as opposed to what it is not) does not preclude me from describing in positive terms what it means for that culture to “exist”. In other words, listing a few of the things that a particular culture does not do does not negate the concept of culture as a whole.
A better analogy would be to take a made up word, like Zork, and tell you that Zorks are living creatures that are not biological organisms. Since we understand ‘living creature’ in terms of biology, now my definition of Zork has negated that normal understanding of living creature without augmenting it with a new one. A living creature that is not a biological organism is meaningless unless I can give positive meaning to that concept. Zork would be as incoherent as God.
By: James on September 9, 2009
at 17:59
If you want to run with the culture analogy further, however, then let’s first lay down a definition for culture. Here is one that I think is reasonable:
A culture is the shared collection of meanings and symbols of a particular human society at a particular time and place.
Now imagine that I returned from that country and told you that I found an amazing culture there.
You: Cool, what is it like?
Me: Well, it’s not like other cultures. In fact, this culture has no shared collection of meanings or symbols, and is not participated in by any particular human society at any particular time and place.
You: Well, if it is not what we generally mean by culture then what is it?
Me: Just because you can’t know everything about this culture doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
You: But your description of the ‘culture’ simply negates our understanding of what culture is. Therefore, the ‘culture’ you have described is for all purposes meaningless unless you can give a positive description of what ‘culture’ can possibly mean apart from humans, symbols, place, and time.
Me: Now you’re getting it! By negating the concept of culture the idea looses its content unless I can replace that content with something else that is positive and definite.
By: James on September 9, 2009
at 18:15
[...] My Case Against God. Arthenor begins to examine Part 1 of that series in a post on his blog called Rationality of Theism. For what it’s worth (and with the hope that it might benefit someone), here are a few of my [...]
By: A Few Responses to Arthenor | AnAtheist.Net on September 13, 2009
at 05:21
I think it is time we took a step back and examined in general terms what your arguments attempt to prove and how they attempt to arrive at that conclusion.
– The Core Argument –
** Goal **
Essentially, the goal here is to prove naturalism or atheism. To do that, one must go beyond the common arguments which merely assert that naturalism is the most rational or default position and that insufficient evidence exists to discredit it. One must go further and prove that no supernatural existence is possible and that only natural existence is possible.
** Argument **
Your key argument is the claim that the concept of God is self-contradictory. This argument is essentially the argument that any description of a supernatural being, God in particularly, contradicts itself. The clearest example of this is the argument regarding the dual claims that (1) God exists and (2) God is spirit (that is, a non-corporeal entity). The argument you advance is that terms applied to God, such as existence, imply a physical or natural element, which is contradicted by the 2nd claim, that God is incorporeal.
** Challenge **
Based on this argument, you issue a challenge: describe God according to your highly restricted rules. Because that can not be done, you declare that this only further proves that God can not exist.
– Refutation –
** Definitional Revisionism **
My primary objection to this argument is simple: you aren’t really proving anything. You have not demonstrated incorporeal existence is impossible. Rather, you insist on extended, non-standard definitions of key terms which simply make it impossible to describe such an existence. In other words, you are not demonstrating, anything, you are just sneaking your assumptions into terminology to force any other view to be indescribable or self-contradicting. To put it another way, you are defining naturalism to be true, not proving it to be true.
Furthermore, your key justification for attaching a naturalistic understanding to key terms is, frankly, bogus. Essentially, you are arguing that the use of a term must carry with it original or most used context. If that were true, arguments by analogy or attempts to describe anything new would universally be invalid, because any example or term would have to carry all its particulars with it, making it impossible to describe anything other than it’s primary object.
** Unreasonable Challenge **
As for your challenge, your demand is impossible. The reason this is impossible is because you demand that the theist describe God, a supernatural being, with terms you have infused with exclusively naturalistic descriptive power. In essence, you demand that a supernatural being be described in purely natural terms. Such an attempt will fail by definition.
Alternatively, I have justified the usage of natural analogy in describing God. Being natural beings, our primary experience is natural. To describe something beyond our common experience the best approach is to enumerate similarities by analogies and differences by negation. Essentially, if supernatural beings do exist, we would expect them to describe themselves to us in our terms and we would best understand them by such terms. This does not prove the existence of such beings, but does demonstrate the reasonableness of common descriptions of them, contrary to your claims.
By: arthenor on September 23, 2009
at 16:42
[...] Bed on the Rationality of Theism Atheist Under Ur Bed has responded to my article on the Rationality of Theism in A Few Responses to Arthenor. Below is my [...]
By: Response to Atheist Under Your Bed on the Rationality of Theism « Arthenor’s Ramblings on September 23, 2009
at 17:25
Looks like I have some more work to do correcting your understanding of me.
(1) Goal – You state that my goal is to prove naturalism. It’s not. My goal was merely to show why supernaturalism is not a meaningful (as yet) alternative.
(2) Argument – You claim that my argument attempts to show that the concept of God is self-contradictory. No, that’s not it, either. My claim is that any description of a supernatural being, God in particular, is not meaningful (ie, not a description at all).
(3) Challenge – You claim that my challenge involves highly restrictive rules and that your inability to meet those rules proves that God does not exist.
First, my “rules” are not restrictive. I am merely demanding that the words we use to talk about things like existence have definite meanings attached to them. If you can’t even agree to that reasonable “rule” then you might as well stop engaging in discourse with anybody, let alone myself. As such, I asked you to explain what a supernatural existence would actually mean in positive terms – something that could distinguish it from non-existence. That you refuse and/or cannot do so is highly illustrative to me.
This quotation demonstrates your misunderstanding: “In essence, you demand that a supernatural being be described in purely natural terms.”
No. In essence, I demand that a supernatural being be described in ANY POSITIVE TERMS AT ALL. I would not expect them to be natural. As such, however, they must be something else. This is not definitional revisionism. This is the failure of you to adequately define your terms when carried over to a new context. When you say that I am “defining naturalism to be true” you again misunderstand me. Natural terms give existence a meaning. Is it the only meaning? Well, I am still waiting…
Second, I have not stated anything to the effect of ‘proving’ that God does not exist. Instead, what I have repeatedly said is that existence is meaningless apart from natural concepts unless you can fill in the hole (which you have not). Thus, to say that God exists is not to say anything definite at all. Again, when you strip words from all of their context they loose all of their content. You said that this would render finding anything new invalid. Not so. We find new things that exist in the world all the time. All of them carry the same meaning of existence as we normally use the word. It is just that none of them are supernatural.
Let me close by saying something about ‘natural analogies’ since you bring that up at the end (without bothering to give a few). The exercise seems self-defeating. If God is beyond our experience and knowledge, then it is impossible to understand what God is, compare that to natural things, and then conclude there are similarities. The making of analogies requires that the person making them already have direct knowledge of the things being compared. Think about that. When you say X is like Y , that means that you already know what both X and Y are in order to make the comparison. We do this to explain what X is to a person who does not know what X is but knows what Y is. That is just the function of analogies.
Thus, the appeal to natural analogies fails – miserably. Without knowing what God is in the first place you cannot know what God is analogous to.
By: James on September 25, 2009
at 18:04
– Goal –
This was clearly the goal of AUUB’s initial remarks, as evidenced by comparing the concept of God to the concept of a four-sided triangle. Just as a four-sided triangle is disproved by the observation that the description is self-contradicting, violating the law of non-contradiction, and therefore false, AUUB argued that the concept of God is not only unproven, but proven false. In defending his argument and using language such as “incoherent” (not logical or consistent, i.e. self-contradicting), it seems to me that you similarly affirm this goal as your conclusion.
You seem to be arguing that you can squeeze out of this characterization because you are not denying the existence of God, but merely the coherence of His description. However, if a given description is incoherent (four-sided triangle) and therefore false, it follows that if the concept of God as commonly understood is necessarily incoherent, then God, as commonly understood, is likewise false. In other words, the only room you have left yourself to allow is that God can exist, but only in some form other than that in which He is generally conceived.
– Argument –
It seems to me that your problem here is focusing on your conclusion rather than our disagreement. Our disagreement is not fundamentally related to your conclusion (God is an incoherent concept), but the means by which you arrive there. Your argument is primarily predicated on an expanded understanding of common terms.
Take for example the concept of “knowing”. As far as I am concerned, and it seems to me most other people, “knowing” is an abstract relational concept between a mind and a proposition. As such, there is no particularly problem in conceiving of a supreme mind with supreme knowledge. That is simply a mind which has a relationship of knowing rather than not knowing the truth value of all propositions. However, you object to this concept by insisting that “knowing” implies not only mind and propositions, but either (a) material brains and data storage or (b) a fully understood concept of a spiritual mind. The problem with the first expectation is that it ignores any possible abstraction and insists on a conceptual one-to-one correspondence in all ways with our experience, rejecting any possibility of something else. The problem with the second expectation is that it irrationally rejects a concept simply because it is not fully understood.
If you are going to hold out and reject the existence of a transcendent being simply because I can’t explain Him in complete detail, you will never accept such a being because, particularly due to our non-transcendent and finite existence, exhaustive understanding is not possible for us. You have therefore defined away any possibility of an acceptable demonstration of God’s existence. Furthermore, if you were to be consistent, you would have to reject our own ability to know, because that is not fully understood and therefore fully explainable either. Therefore, your objection is unjustified (what justification is there for rejecting a proposition simply because it is not fully understood?) and inconsistently applied.
– Challenge –
Perhaps it would help if you clearly defined what you mean by a “positive term”. You seem to be suggesting that the common conception of God describes Him only in terms of “not-X” and “not-Y”. This is not a claim I accept. It is true that some descriptions of God focus on differences between us. For example, God is spirit, not corporeal. However, other descriptions are not so negative. For example, God is the supreme mind, God knows all things, God is all-powerful. These are not negative descriptions, ways in which God is “not us”, but ways in which God has similar positive qualities to a much greater degree than we do.
I will admit that you have not explicitly stated that God must be understood in purely natural terms. However, that is implied by your argument and I have explained how this is so. Therefore, your denial is not particularly meaningful. What would you consider to be a “non-natural” term? I would consider knowing to be an abstract, neutral term, but you have taken it and redefined it in purely natural terms. In this way, you have indirectly stacked the deck. You claim that you are open to “non-natural” descriptions, but you then turn around and redefine every attempted descriptions as an incoherent misuse of natural terms. Furthermore, the argument you use to conclude that such terms must be naturally understood seems to imply that any term must be naturally understood. You even seem to acknowledge this, perhaps unintentionally, when you say “what I have repeatedly said is that existence is meaningless apart from natural concepts unless you can fill in the hole .” But that’s the problem. You insist that nothing apart from nature has meaning. That leaves me with nothing to potentially fill the hole with. Therefore, you leave no terms left that you will accept to describe God.
– Analogies –
That we can never fully understand God does not mean we can not understand Him at all. Therefore, I see no reason to conclude that we can not describe at least some basic properties of God. Furthermore, even if one must have knowledge of both the natural and the divine to make a useful analogy, there is one being capable of producing a useful analogy: God Himself. If God were to reveal analogies between Himself and nature, as many believe that He has, then through those analogies, we can hope to understand Him, not fully, but to an extent greater than no understanding at all.
By: arthenor on September 28, 2009
at 17:29