Ask a Theologian IV

[kiwitt]

I think of worship as something that a Leader / Dictator / King / Emperor demanded of his people towards himself. Whereas I believe if an entity exists as powerful as God supposedly is He would not really need to or expect to have such lowly beings to 'worship' Him. In addition, if He has given us 'free will', it is therefore also something that makes us an 'equal' in so far as our dealings with Him, i.e. talk to him as we would a friend or family member.

 

[Plotinus]

When it comes to worship, could it not just be viewed as recognizing the authority of an unknown entity? The way most of the stories were written, seems to show that worship was automatic without asking why. It was more involuntary than actually placing this entity in authority by some human means.

Alas, I would need to pay for access. But I read the abstract, and didn't find it convincing

Here's a summary of that paper, then.

First, worship isn't just about recognising something - it's a more emotional attitude you take to something. E.g. I might recognise that the prime minister has certain authority, but that doesn't say anything about my attitude to the prime minister. My attitude to God, if I worship him, isn't like that but more so - it's a different kind of thing altogether. It involves affective elements such as awe, marvelling, love, notions of the holy and sanctity, and so on. So the authors call worship a "cluster concept", i.e. one of those things that varies (different religions regard worship differently), with many concepts that are part of it, but it's not totally clear which ones are essential. E.g. can I worship something that I think isn't holy? There's no obvious answer to that.

Second, there's the question of the "uniqueness thesis" - if you're a theist, must you hold that God is the only appropriate object of worship? Most theists would probably say so, but then many theists also venerate angels, saints, etc., and the attitude of veneration is hard to distinguish from that of worship. (There's also the fact that people hold attitudes to sports heroes, older family members, etc. that may be similar to worship.) The theist who does hold the uniqueness thesis might say that this isn't really worship but something different, or they might say that worship comes in degrees, and it's OK to worship something other than God as long as it's relatively mild worship.

The authors then distinguish between two claims:

(1) Reasonableness thesis: Necessarily, it is reasonable for us to worship God.

(2) Obligation thesis: Necessarily, it is obligatory for us to worship God.

They take (1) as given for the sake of argument, but question (2). Typically, theists do hold (2) - they think we have a moral obligation to worship God, and that someone who doesn't worship God is failing in that moral obligation. There's something morally wrong about saying "Yes, God exists, but I won't worship him."

But it's hard to see how it could be obligatory to worship God. If you consider the concepts that seem to make up worship - admiration, awe, etc. - we don't normally think that these are the sorts of things that one can be morally obliged to do. I may recognise that Michelangelo's David is the sort of thing that it's reasonable to admire, but that doesn't oblige me to admire it, and I'm certainly not guilty of a moral failing if I don't. Similarly, I may recognise that God is the kind of thing that it is reasonable to worship, but that doesn't make me obliged to do so.

The question then is what might make the obligation thesis true. Suppose that we are morally obliged to worship God - what is the truth-maker of this fact? i.e. what is it that makes us morally obliged to worship him? The authors consider several possibilities.

Creation

The authors quote Richard Swinburne:

If there is a God and he has made and sustains the world and issued commands to men, men have moral obligations which they would not otherwise have. The grounds for this are as follows. Men ought to acknowledge other persons with whom they come into contact, not just ignore them – and this surely becomes a duty when those persons are our benefactors. We acknowledge people in various ways when we meet them, e.g. by shaking hands or smiling at them, and the way in which we acknowledge their presence reflects our recognition of the sort of individual they are and the kind of relation they have to us. Worship is the only response appropriate to God, the source of all being.

The authors raise a number of objections to this idea:

(1) This doesn't explain how things not created by God would have a moral obligation to worship him. Many theists think there are such things - numbers, propositions, possibilities, etc. (I can't say this strikes me as a strong objection.) The authors argue that even if there are no things uncreated by God, we could still imagine them. And such beings, by Swinburne's argument, would not have an obligation to worship God - but this is unpalatable to theists.

(2) Swinburne's argument assumes that if God created us we have grounds to be grateful to him. But it's not clear that we would. Generally, we have grounds for gratitude to someone if their action leaves us better off than we were before. But creation does not meet this criterion. When I am created, I do not become better off than I was before, because I didn't exist at all before. If you really thought that bringing people into existence does them a great good, then you'd think that we're all morally obliged to have as many children as is physically possible. (This seems to me a much better objection to Swinburne.)

(3) Even if bringing people into existence is generally beneficial, there are some people who seem not to be benefited by it. Consider people who live lives of great pain and anguish. It is hard to see why they should be grateful for being created.

(4) Swinburne's argument makes our attitude to God basically the same as our attitude to others, e.g. our parents, just more so. If we have an obligation to worship God for creating us, we'd also have an obligation to worship our parents for procreating us. But surely there should be something unique about our obligation to worship God. Our attitude to God should not be comparable to our attitude to mundane beings.

(5) If you make the obligation to worship basically the same as the obligation to be grateful, you leave out all of the other stuff that makes worship interesting: the awe, the sense of holiness, etc. Just being grateful to God - even being really, really grateful - isn't the same thing as worshipping him.

Maximal excellence

The authors cite Robert Merrihew Adams to the effect that worship is a matter of acknowledging how amazingly wonderful God is. In the Anselmian tradition, God's maximal excellence is a matter of his having maximally excellent-making properties, such as his perfect goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, etc. But it doesn't seem right to worship God just for having these. As the authors rather nicely put it, worshipping God because he's incredibly powerful or knowledgeable has a bit of a fascist ring to it. Perfect goodness seem more promising, but still, we typically recognise that some other people are our moral superiors, but we wouldn't think that this gives us a reason to worship them, let alone an obligation to do so.

The authors suggest that the most plausible candidate for a worship-worthy property of God is holiness. Worship could be seen as the appropriate response to holiness. It's not clear exactly what is meant by the claim that God is holy, but theists typically seem to think it's a primitive property, i.e. it can't be explained in terms of other properties that God may have. But the authors raise two objections to this view:

(1) Holiness is a pretty obscure notion itself. What does it mean to say God is holy at all? If we can't explain holiness, it's not very helpful to try to explain the obligation to worship in terms of holiness.

(2) We think that other beings can be holy as well, though perhaps to a lesser degree, e.g. great saints, but we don't think we should worship them.

A more general objection to the whole maximal excellence theory of worship is that there could, in principle, be more than one being with maximal excellence. Then we'd be obliged to worship them both. Many theists will say that there couldn't be two maximally excellent beings; one of the features of being maximally excellent is that you preclude the existence of another maximally excellent thing. But even if this were impossible, we can still meaningfully ask whether, if there were (per impossibile) two maximally excellent beings, we ought to worship them both. The authors say that most theists would say no - in which case, they don't think that the obligation to worship is based on God's maximal excellence.

Adams suggests that God is identical with Goodness itself, and that this is why we should worship him. The authors don't think much of this suggestion, since (a) it's hard to make sense of the claim that a concrete particular is identical with a property, and (b) why ought we to worship "Goodness" anyway?

Prudential reasons

An alternative argument for why we ought to worship God grounds the obligations in prudential reasons, i.e. consideration of what will happen to us if we don't. E.g. if we don't worship God he will send us to hell. This doesn't help, because it doesn't explain the moral link. Suppose that, if we don't worship God, he will indeed send us to hell; this doesn't tell us why he would be morally justified in doing so.

An alternative version of this account makes the obligation to worship God similar to our obligation to look after our health. Worshipping God is what makes our lives complete - it is essential to human flourishing, just as eating, exercising, etc. is essential to our health. We have a moral obligation to look after ourselves, and worshipping God is part of this.

The authors respond that even if it is true that we have a sort of psychological impuse to worship, it doesn't follow that its object has to be God. People evidently find happiness in worshipping all sorts of things. They also point out that this whole theory is based on self-interest. If we worship God only because of what we get out of the process, it doesn't seem very moral. Maybe worshipping God would bring various rewards, but it surely shouldn't be motivated just by the prospect of those rewards.

Groundless worship

An alternative is to give up trying to find a reason why we are obliged to worship God, and say it's just a "brute fact", i.e. it's just how things are and there's no reason for it.

The authors find a number of objections to this:

(1) If God's worshipfulness is a "brute fact" that isn't derived from his nature, then it is a contingent property. I.e. he could have not had it - it could have been the case that we weren't morally obliged to worship him. Or to put it another way, there are possible worlds in which God exists but no-one is morally obliged to worship him. This seems problematic.

(2) If God's worshipfulness is a "brute fact" then it's not based on anything we know of God (his creative activity, his love for us, etc.). So how would we know whether God is worthy of worship in the first place?

(3) We typically think that if we have obligations to people, there are reasons for those obligations. E.g. if I have an obligation to thank someone, it must be because of something that person did. So if we have an obligation to worship God, there must be some reason for it. Theists shouldn't get away with saying that we just do, and that's it.

On the basis of (3), the authors go on to say:

When the grounds of a putative obligation elude identification it is natural for the obligation itself to be called into question. One might argue that the lesson to be learnt from the failure to find the grounds of worship is not that worshipfulness is brute, but that there is no such property. Here we have the makings of an argument against the existence of God, for God is typically regarded as demanding of our worship. Of course, any such argument would have to be developed with care. Sometimes it is reasonable to think that p is the case even when one has no idea what might make it the case that p. The theist might argue such a description applies to the necessity thesis: we know what it is true, but we do not know why it is true. It is always possible for the theist to insist that although God-worshipfulness is grounded, its grounds are hidden. Nonetheless, insofar as it is reasonable to think that the grounds of worshipfulness would be scrutable to us, our inability to determine what those grounds could be gives us reason to call into question the claim that we have obligations to worship God.

(although I tend to think there is no "argument that God doesn't exist" that holds any water, compared to "argument that there is no argument FOR the existence of God", which makes enough sense to me).

I would disagree - I think there are good arguments that God doesn't exist. But even putting that aside, the argument that there are no good arguments for God's existence is surely itself at least an argument that it's unreasonable to believe in God. After all, if there's no good reason to believe something, it would seem that it's unreasonable to believe it. And that's pretty close to being an argument against God's existence, surely.

 

[lovett]

I'm surprised the authors don't consider divine command theory as a source of the purported obligation. That seems to me the most fruitful source of this obligation for the committed theist. This is subject to a similar criticism as the first one they level at Swinburne I suppose; in those possible world in which God doesn't command us to worship Him there is no obligation to worship Him. But that's not such a great cost. If theists do want this, it just means they can't get everything they want...

More deeply, i'm rather inclined to think that the focus on obligation is misguided here. Worship, as they depict it, it more like an attitude then an act. It is like blame, indignation, shame and guilt. Or, more positively, praise, gratitude, pride and -well- veneration. But these things -conceived as attitudes rather than acts- are neither obligatory or forbidden. That is partly because they are involuntary. One does not feel guilt -or its lack- by choice. Something can be obligatory only if it is voluntary ('ought entails can'). Rather, the appropriate terms of moral evaluation here are appropriate and inappropriate. So a theist of this bent should want to say that worship is appropriate (like the attitude of blame directed towards an unrepentant murderer). This seems a much easier position to support.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

But even putting that aside, the argument that there are no good arguments for God's existence is surely itself at least an argument that it's unreasonable to believe in God. After all, if there's no good reason to believe something, it would seem that it's unreasonable to believe it. And that's pretty close to being an argument against God's existence, surely.

Well, I do find it perfectly reasonable not to believe in God if you have no reason to do so. But I also think that there is a difference between "I have no reason for" and "I have specific reasons against".

 

[Plotinus]

Sure, but at least in many spheres, the lack of a reason for is a reason against. If I see no reason to believe that there's a tiger in the room, that seems a pretty good basis for saying that there isn't one. In other cases, this doesn't hold - e.g. I have no reason to believe that there's a spider in the room, but that doesn't provide me with a basis for saying that there isn't one. The question is whether God is like a tiger or a spider.

 

[MilesGregarius]

I doubt that the US support of right-wing dictatorships throughout South America was really a reaction to liberation theology, though. That sounds to me rather over-the-top. If anything it was a reaction to the spread (or feared spread) of left-wing politics and communism, of which liberation theology was one (relatively small) manifestation.

US support of right-wing regimes in Latin America had many impetuses, but there is no denying that regimes with US advisors specifically targeted nuns, priests, and laity who had liberation theology inclinations. The Banzer Plan was formulated explicitly to combat the spread of liberation theology. Oscar Romero, the Jesuits of UCA, and the Maryknoll sisters murdered on December 2, 1980 are just the most high profile victims of a reign of terror that received at least tacit approval, if not active assistance and/or direction, from elements within US intelligence.

In Guatemala in the early 1980s, Rios Montt went further, declaring that all good Guatemalans were born-again. Then, the Guatemalan military would murder left-leaning priests in rural villages, along with many of their flock, before foisting evangelical, Pentecostal, Mormon, or Jehovah's Witness missionaries - paid for with money provided by Ronald Reagan's CIA - upon the surviving villagers in order to eradicate any last trace of left-wing Catholicism.

Claiming that liberation theology was the cause of US support for repressive Latin American regimes may indeed be over the top, but liberation theology and its proponents were definitely seen as a threat - presumed, rightly or wrongly, to be in league with Communism - and were viciously, mercilessly persecuted with the full knowledge, and perhaps the guidance, of the CIA.

 

[timtofly]

Here's a summary of that paper, then.

Spoiler :

First, worship isn't just about recognising something - it's a more emotional attitude you take to something. E.g. I might recognise that the prime minister has certain authority, but that doesn't say anything about my attitude to the prime minister. My attitude to God, if I worship him, isn't like that but more so - it's a different kind of thing altogether. It involves affective elements such as awe, marvelling, love, notions of the holy and sanctity, and so on. So the authors call worship a "cluster concept", i.e. one of those things that varies (different religions regard worship differently), with many concepts that are part of it, but it's not totally clear which ones are essential. E.g. can I worship something that I think isn't holy? There's no obvious answer to that.

Second, there's the question of the "uniqueness thesis" - if you're a theist, must you hold that God is the only appropriate object of worship? Most theists would probably say so, but then many theists also venerate angels, saints, etc., and the attitude of veneration is hard to distinguish from that of worship. (There's also the fact that people hold attitudes to sports heroes, older family members, etc. that may be similar to worship.) The theist who does hold the uniqueness thesis might say that this isn't really worship but something different, or they might say that worship comes in degrees, and it's OK to worship something other than God as long as it's relatively mild worship.

The authors then distinguish between two claims:

(1) Reasonableness thesis: Necessarily, it is reasonable for us to worship God.

(2) Obligation thesis: Necessarily, it is obligatory for us to worship God.

They take (1) as given for the sake of argument, but question (2). Typically, theists do hold (2) - they think we have a moral obligation to worship God, and that someone who doesn't worship God is failing in that moral obligation. There's something morally wrong about saying "Yes, God exists, but I won't worship him."

But it's hard to see how it could be obligatory to worship God. If you consider the concepts that seem to make up worship - admiration, awe, etc. - we don't normally think that these are the sorts of things that one can be morally obliged to do. I may recognise that Michelangelo's David is the sort of thing that it's reasonable to admire, but that doesn't oblige me to admire it, and I'm certainly not guilty of a moral failing if I don't. Similarly, I may recognise that God is the kind of thing that it is reasonable to worship, but that doesn't make me obliged to do so.

The question then is what might make the obligation thesis true. Suppose that we are morally obliged to worship God - what is the truth-maker of this fact? i.e. what is it that makes us morally obliged to worship him? The authors consider several possibilities.

Creation

The authors quote Richard Swinburne:



The authors raise a number of objections to this idea:

(1) This doesn't explain how things not created by God would have a moral obligation to worship him. Many theists think there are such things - numbers, propositions, possibilities, etc. (I can't say this strikes me as a strong objection.) The authors argue that even if there are no things uncreated by God, we could still imagine them. And such beings, by Swinburne's argument, would not have an obligation to worship God - but this is unpalatable to theists.

(2) Swinburne's argument assumes that if God created us we have grounds to be grateful to him. But it's not clear that we would. Generally, we have grounds for gratitude to someone if their action leaves us better off than we were before. But creation does not meet this criterion. When I am created, I do not become better off than I was before, because I didn't exist at all before. If you really thought that bringing people into existence does them a great good, then you'd think that we're all morally obliged to have as many children as is physically possible. (This seems to me a much better objection to Swinburne.)

(3) Even if bringing people into existence is generally beneficial, there are some people who seem not to be benefited by it. Consider people who live lives of great pain and anguish. It is hard to see why they should be grateful for being created.

(4) Swinburne's argument makes our attitude to God basically the same as our attitude to others, e.g. our parents, just more so. If we have an obligation to worship God for creating us, we'd also have an obligation to worship our parents for procreating us. But surely there should be something unique about our obligation to worship God. Our attitude to God should not be comparable to our attitude to mundane beings.

(5) If you make the obligation to worship basically the same as the obligation to be grateful, you leave out all of the other stuff that makes worship interesting: the awe, the sense of holiness, etc. Just being grateful to God - even being really, really grateful - isn't the same thing as worshipping him.

Maximal excellence

The authors cite Robert Merrihew Adams to the effect that worship is a matter of acknowledging how amazingly wonderful God is. In the Anselmian tradition, God's maximal excellence is a matter of his having maximally excellent-making properties, such as his perfect goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, etc. But it doesn't seem right to worship God just for having these. As the authors rather nicely put it, worshipping God because he's incredibly powerful or knowledgeable has a bit of a fascist ring to it. Perfect goodness seem more promising, but still, we typically recognise that some other people are our moral superiors, but we wouldn't think that this gives us a reason to worship them, let alone an obligation to do so.

The authors suggest that the most plausible candidate for a worship-worthy property of God is holiness. Worship could be seen as the appropriate response to holiness. It's not clear exactly what is meant by the claim that God is holy, but theists typically seem to think it's a primitive property, i.e. it can't be explained in terms of other properties that God may have. But the authors raise two objections to this view:

(1) Holiness is a pretty obscure notion itself. What does it mean to say God is holy at all? If we can't explain holiness, it's not very helpful to try to explain the obligation to worship in terms of holiness.

(2) We think that other beings can be holy as well, though perhaps to a lesser degree, e.g. great saints, but we don't think we should worship them.

A more general objection to the whole maximal excellence theory of worship is that there could, in principle, be more than one being with maximal excellence. Then we'd be obliged to worship them both. Many theists will say that there couldn't be two maximally excellent beings; one of the features of being maximally excellent is that you preclude the existence of another maximally excellent thing. But even if this were impossible, we can still meaningfully ask whether, if there were (per impossibile) two maximally excellent beings, we ought to worship them both. The authors say that most theists would say no - in which case, they don't think that the obligation to worship is based on God's maximal excellence.

Adams suggests that God is identical with Goodness itself, and that this is why we should worship him. The authors don't think much of this suggestion, since (a) it's hard to make sense of the claim that a concrete particular is identical with a property, and (b) why ought we to worship "Goodness" anyway?

Prudential reasons

An alternative argument for why we ought to worship God grounds the obligations in prudential reasons, i.e. consideration of what will happen to us if we don't. E.g. if we don't worship God he will send us to hell. This doesn't help, because it doesn't explain the moral link. Suppose that, if we don't worship God, he will indeed send us to hell; this doesn't tell us why he would be morally justified in doing so.

An alternative version of this account makes the obligation to worship God similar to our obligation to look after our health. Worshipping God is what makes our lives complete - it is essential to human flourishing, just as eating, exercising, etc. is essential to our health. We have a moral obligation to look after ourselves, and worshipping God is part of this.

The authors respond that even if it is true that we have a sort of psychological impuse to worship, it doesn't follow that its object has to be God. People evidently find happiness in worshipping all sorts of things. They also point out that this whole theory is based on self-interest. If we worship God only because of what we get out of the process, it doesn't seem very moral. Maybe worshipping God would bring various rewards, but it surely shouldn't be motivated just by the prospect of those rewards.

Groundless worship

An alternative is to give up trying to find a reason why we are obliged to worship God, and say it's just a "brute fact", i.e. it's just how things are and there's no reason for it.

The authors find a number of objections to this:

(1) If God's worshipfulness is a "brute fact" that isn't derived from his nature, then it is a contingent property. I.e. he could have not had it - it could have been the case that we weren't morally obliged to worship him. Or to put it another way, there are possible worlds in which God exists but no-one is morally obliged to worship him. This seems problematic.

(2) If God's worshipfulness is a "brute fact" then it's not based on anything we know of God (his creative activity, his love for us, etc.). So how would we know whether God is worthy of worship in the first place?

(3) We typically think that if we have obligations to people, there are reasons for those obligations. E.g. if I have an obligation to thank someone, it must be because of something that person did. So if we have an obligation to worship God, there must be some reason for it. Theists shouldn't get away with saying that we just do, and that's it.

On the basis of (3), the authors go on to say:

I think they went for the more generalized term of worship.

Since most religions play off the emotions of people, they may not even recognize who God is. The term we use today is idolize.

Worship is not an emotional attachment to something, that would be idolize. If one recognized God, their first reaction would be worship and it would not be voluntary. The ability to reject God would come later. The children of Israel were given a choice to worship God, or the gods of the land they were about to enter. Jesus resisted the temptation of satan with the quote, "Worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve." I may be wrong, but it seems that both the Hebrews and satan had first hand knowledge of God. We may deny that as hearsay, but it is no different than any other document where humans wrote down their thoughts.

Free will may be an illusion to some, but because of it we do not have to worship God. There is no obligation, nor reasonableness to do so. We can even claim that God does not exist. To use worship as proof of God, without recognizing God, will never work. We are back to the form idolize. If someone knows God, they would not "feel" obligated to worship God, and they would need no other proof that God exist. When humans get caught up in the emotion of idolization, they may not be experiencing God, even if it is called worship. I am not denying that Worship does not happen today. How would we know, if we cannot even be sure of knowing God?

 

[uppi]

Sure, but at least in many spheres, the lack of a reason for is a reason against. If I see no reason to believe that there's a tiger in the room, that seems a pretty good basis for saying that there isn't one. In other cases, this doesn't hold - e.g. I have no reason to believe that there's a spider in the room, but that doesn't provide me with a basis for saying that there isn't one. The question is whether God is like a tiger or a spider.

I have to disagree here. The lack of reason for something is never a reason against. What is a reason against is the non-occurence of reasons I expect to be connected to a particular event. I do not believe there is a tiger in this room just because I do not see any tiger, but because I do not see a tiger despite expecting to see it if one was here. I would not discount spiders in this room, because I do not expect every spider to provide prominent evidence of their existence. (of course, prior belief also plays a role, but that is not a reason in itself).

So the question is, does one expect there to be reasons for believing in God?

 

[Plotinus]

US support of right-wing regimes in Latin America had many impetuses, but there is no denying that regimes with US advisors specifically targeted nuns, priests, and laity who had liberation theology inclinations. The Banzer Plan was formulated explicitly to combat the spread of liberation theology. Oscar Romero, the Jesuits of UCA, and the Maryknoll sisters murdered on December 2, 1980 are just the most high profile victims of a reign of terror that received at least tacit approval, if not active assistance and/or direction, from elements within US intelligence.

In Guatemala in the early 1980s, Rios Montt went further, declaring that all good Guatemalans were born-again. Then, the Guatemalan military would murder left-leaning priests in rural villages, along with many of their flock, before foisting evangelical, Pentecostal, Mormon, or Jehovah's Witness missionaries - paid for with money provided by Ronald Reagan's CIA - upon the surviving villagers in order to eradicate any last trace of left-wing Catholicism.

Claiming that liberation theology was the cause of US support for repressive Latin American regimes may indeed be over the top, but liberation theology and its proponents were definitely seen as a threat - presumed, rightly or wrongly, to be in league with Communism - and were viciously, mercilessly persecuted with the full knowledge, and perhaps the guidance, of the CIA.

That's very helpful - thanks.

I think they went for the more generalized term of worship.

Since most religions play off the emotions of people, they may not even recognize who God is. The term we use today is idolize.

Worship is not an emotional attachment to something, that would be idolize.

So what is it, then? I take it that worship involves an emotional attachment. To worship something is to adopt some kind of emotional attitude towards it, but there's more to it than just that.

Also, presumably by definition one can't idolise the true God. If God really exists, and I have an emotional attachment to him that somehow falls short of real worship (in some way), that wouldn't be idolatry, would it? It just wouldn't be enough to count as worship - if, say, I really liked God, but nothing more.

If one recognized God, their first reaction would be worship and it would not be voluntary. The ability to reject God would come later. The children of Israel were given a choice to worship God, or the gods of the land they were about to enter. Jesus resisted the temptation of satan with the quote, "Worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve." I may be wrong, but it seems that both the Hebrews and satan had first hand knowledge of God. We may deny that as hearsay, but it is no different than any other document where humans wrote down their thoughts.

Free will may be an illusion to some, but because of it we do not have to worship God. There is no obligation, nor reasonableness to do so.

First you said that the first reaction to recognising God is worship "and it would not be voluntary" - but then you said that we have free will and we do not have to worship God. Surely this is a contradiction, isn't it?

Perhaps you're saying that if someone were faced with God, right in front of them, they would have no choice but to worship him. But in other circumstances, when we're not presented with God in this direct way, we do have a choice. Would that be right?

If someone knows God, they would not "feel" obligated to worship God, and they would need no other proof that God exist. When humans get caught up in the emotion of idolization, they may not be experiencing God, even if it is called worship. I am not denying that Worship does not happen today. How would we know, if we cannot even be sure of knowing God?

I think that to make sense of this we'd need to have a clear understanding of what the difference is between idolisation and worship. I would have thought that the idolisation simply is worship, but it's worship directed to the wrong object. Assuming that God exists and is the only proper object of worship, I could worship God or I could worship something else, and in the latter case this would be idolatrous worship.

It seems clear to me that people do, as a matter of fact, worship all kinds of things. Of course the fact that someone worships something is no evidence that that thing is really worthy of worship or even that it exists. The question that the authors of the paper I summarised were asking was different: it was, assuming that God does exist, why might we have a moral obligation to worship him? And they were arguing that it's very hard to see how we could have a moral obligation to worship anything. Their point was that normally people who believe in God say that we do have a moral obligation to worship him; but if in fact such moral obligation is impossible, that could be a reason to suppose that God doesn't exist (at least, that a God-such-that-we-are-obliged-to-worship-him doesn't exist).

I have to disagree here. The lack of reason for something is never a reason against. What is a reason against is the non-occurence of reasons I expect to be connected to a particular event. I do not believe there is a tiger in this room just because I do not see any tiger, but because I do not see a tiger despite expecting to see it if one was here. I would not discount spiders in this room, because I do not expect every spider to provide prominent evidence of their existence. (of course, prior belief also plays a role, but that is not a reason in itself).

So the question is, does one expect there to be reasons for believing in God?

Right - in the case of the tiger, there are certain things I'd expect to see, hear, and smell if there were a tiger in the room. In fact it would be pretty much impossible for there to be a tiger in the room without me seeing, hearing, and smelling these things. So in their absence I can confidently say there's no tiger in the room.

And, yes, the case of the spider is different because there are no phenomena I would expect to see if there were a spider; a spider-containing room is phenomenologically indistinguishable from a spiderless one.

The problem is that we know the sorts of phenomena that are to be expected with both tigers and spiders, which is why we can distinguish between what a room with a tiger would be like from a room without one, and between what a room with a spider would be like from one without one. But we don't know this in the case of God. We have only one universe to examine and we don't know whether or not it contains a God (and indeed if there are more than one universe, either they all contain a God or none does, because if God does exist he exists necessarily; so even if we could examine different universes, they would all be exactly the same as far as God goes). So we don't know what sort of phenomena we should expect to see if there is a God, which means that we don't know whether we are seeing those phenomena or not.

I suppose there are the following possibilities:

(1) God is like a tiger (there are clear phenomena we'd expect to see if he existed) and we don't see these phenomena.
(2) God is like a tiger and we do see these phenomena.
(3) God is like a spider (there are no clear phenomena we'd expect to see if he existed), so it's impossible to tell.

Most theists, in my experience, seem to go for either (2) or (3); if they go for (2) then they say there are clear signs of God's existence (the existence of the universe, the order in the universe, religious experiences, etc.) and these are the kinds of things that are best explained by God's existence. If they go for (3) then they're more likely to say that God's existence is a matter of faith and it's wrong to look for evidence. In practice, theists tend to oscillate between these two positions.

Atheists seem to go for either (1) or (3). If they go for (1) then they say that the universe does not appear to be the way we'd expect it to be if God existed; the prime example of this is the prevalence of suffering. If they go for (3) they're more likely to say that there's no good evidence for or against God, but in the absence of this evidence we should assume that he doesn't exist, since supposing something exists when there's no good reason to violates Ockham's razor (or something like that).

Now my inclination is a tentative (1). I think that there are phenomena that we might reasonably expect to see if God existed, and that we don't see them. That's not to say that we certainly would see them if God existed. Obviously we can't be sure, for the reasons already given. It's quite possible that God does exist and just doesn't behave as we'd expect (or that he doesn't exist, but if he did, he wouldn't behave as we'd expect, in which case my conclusion is right but my argument is wrong). But we have only our own intuitions and reason to guide us in this, and if it seems more likely that God doesn't exist, then there's nothing wrong with saying that this seems to be what the evidence indicates in the absence of anything more compelling.

 

[timtofly]

Thank you Plotinus, you did a better job at summerizing my thoughts than I did.

I have no reason to doubt that God exist. I have had doubts though. Perhaps life experiences that form us at a young age may factor in. I have no reason to doubt that the Bible is God's revealed word, yet humans have tried their hardest to prove that it is just a work of man. I have no reason to doubt the stories in the Bible, yet others claim they are just moral metaphors.

In the beginning God walked and talked with humans. There have been other examples where humans have been called friends of God. I have no reason to doubt such things happened. We hold today that God is approachable in spirit and truth. Idolization is worship, but not directly with God, but an image of God. It is idolatry if that image takes the place of God. An image could even be an illusion of what we think God is. The reason that we do not trust our emotions, is because they may not be as stable as an unchangeable truth. Sometimes though we cannot tell the difference between a truth and what is just an emotion.

I may be wrong but religion is grasping for truths, whether or not they are the real things or just illusions. We may create an illusion of the tiger in the room and even experience all of the phenomena. Most people do not have such illusions, but trusting only in emotions, they are possible. So idolization would seem to me a replacement for worship, that is tied to emotions which tend to be based on an image or illusion that we think is God. That it is passed down from generation would seem to concrete it into young minds as "biblical" truths.

I do not have a good answer why the Bible would not fit the same criteria as other religions. Sure the stories could be made up as people grasping for a reason to worship a God. Abraham may not have existed and there were never two seperate nations that today we would call Arabs and Jews. Arabs could still hold themselves as a nationality without associating themselves with any religion even Islam. Jews today, can associate themselves to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob without involving themselves in the religion of Judaism.

Even today one could say that Jesus was God on earth and disassociate themselves from any form of Christianity we have today. More than likely because they find no emotional attachment to keep themselves associated with such a group. If one needs to satisfy an emotion to belong to a group, would that not be just an illusion and not the genuine thing?

To clear up the contradiction of the will. It seems to me in all accounts of where humans claimed they experienced God first hand, the only response was to worship. There was no control of the will, but only worship. That one has to give up one's will the rest of one's life does not follow. We still have the choice to worship God or anything else we so choose to do, even after an encounter with God.

What is debatable is the fact that all humans have an encounter with God. If there is no encounter and they have from childhood heard that such a God exist, how would they react? Would they try to "illusion" forth such a God, or claim one does not exist, because they have never known God?

 

[Borachio]

Mathematics isn't a thing, though. It's not some kind of object, floating around out there, that God either did or did not create. It's just how things are, and they couldn't be any other way. There's no possible world in which 2+2 fails to be 4; there's no possible world in which I can have two pebbles and another two pebbles and somehow not have four pebbles. "4" is just another word for "2+2", and vice versa.

I've been thinking about this and I'm not really sure it's true.

2+2=4 seems to be a feature of the natural numbers but I'm not sure a universe where this didn't apply is inconceivable. It's certainly possible to develop an algebra where the counting numbers only go up to 2, so that 2+2 might be defined as 0 or 1 or 2 or any (or all, or none) of these. Quite how useful such an algebra would be I wouldn't like to say.

Is it possible to say, with assurance, that the natural numbers are an inescapable consequence for any universe?

Of course, once I admit that things aren't necessarily "how they are", and they certainly could be another way, the bottom does tend to drop out of my world, doesn't it?

 

[Agent327]

It seems you are either thinking of an illogical universe or have a limited view on what mathematics actually is.

 

[ParkCungHee]

No, he's a history student. Specializes in Tudor and Irish history.

Are you a grad student right now PCH? I don't remember.

Yes, right now I'm a grad student still. Haven't been able to take courses for a few months, but that should be changing soon.

 

[Wrymouth3]

Is there a special reason why thetans at level 8 get to go on that special cruise ship in the "religion" of Scientology? Like is that the holiest site for them, do they gain enlightenment while on the vessel?

 

[Mouthwash]

Plotinus, I recall you mentioning that certain people believed that God could overcome logic (forgot where; I think in this page or the last). How did they justify the existence of evil, then? It may be that some mechanism like free will gives God an incentive to let us do what we want, but if he could overcome the constraints of logic then he could, by definition, do literally anything. There couldn't be a possible response to the Problem of Evil under that framework.

 

[Borachio]

It seems you are either thinking of an illogical universe or have a limited view on what mathematics actually is.

Are these the only two possibilities?

Iirc, Peano arithmetic (which deals with the arithmetic of the natural numbers - though I may well remember it wrong) is essentially an intuitive and unprovable affair (see Godel et al). I suggest that this may indicate it's a product of the human mind rather than an intrinsic feature of the universe.

I'm not sure what you mean by an "illogical" universe. Are you suggesting that any conceivable universe must of necessity be a "logical" one? This would seem a rather extravagant claim, to me. I'm not quite sure that the universe we inhabit is logical.

Still, to take another tack, imagine that I'm a bird (or some other suitable organism of your choice). And that I can't count (whatever "count" may mean in this context) beyond two. So, apocryphally, I see four people go into the bird-watchers hide, two leave, and I assume the hide is empty. Hence, in my bird-universe, 2+2=2. Does this make any sense? (Assuming I catch you on a charitable day, that is.)

(Of course, it's more than likely I'm just using my normal random rambling nonsense mode.)

 

[Plotinus]

I've been thinking about this and I'm not really sure it's true.

2+2=4 seems to be a feature of the natural numbers but I'm not sure a universe where this didn't apply is inconceivable. It's certainly possible to develop an algebra where the counting numbers only go up to 2, so that 2+2 might be defined as 0 or 1 or 2 or any (or all, or none) of these. Quite how useful such an algebra would be I wouldn't like to say.

Is it possible to say, with assurance, that the natural numbers are an inescapable consequence for any universe?

Of course, once I admit that things aren't necessarily "how they are", and they certainly could be another way, the bottom does tend to drop out of my world, doesn't it?

We're getting into philosophy of mathematics here, which is very much not my area. It seems to me as a lay person that one can construct all kinds of mathematical systems which are internally consistent, but as soon as you try to apply them to the real world, it gets a bit implausible. So, sure, one can imagine a mathematics where the numbers go up to 2 only, and then wrap around, so 2+1 might be 0. But how could that work in reality (even an alternate reality)? I have two potatoes, someone hands me another one, and they all vanish? I suppose that such a universe is possible - God could set things up so that things behave this way - but then it wouldn't really have alternative laws of logic, it would just have some rather weird divine behaviour that simulates alternative laws of logic. There would also be odd problems such as: how close do the potatoes have to be to each other to count as being "added"? If I merely think about my two potatoes and another potato on the other side of the world, how could I avoid there being three of them? Could it be that such a universe simply couldn't contain more than two potatoes, or indeed more than two of anything (or more than two objects in total)? Perhaps that is possible - I'm not sure. As you say, once one starts to entertain these kinds of possibilities, everything rather falls apart. This is especially so when one starts to think in terms not of mathematics but of logic. Perhaps there could be a universe where the laws of maths are such that no more than two objects can exist. But could there be a universe where it's possible for something to be true and not true at the same time? What would that be like?

Is there a special reason why thetans at level 8 get to go on that special cruise ship in the "religion" of Scientology? Like is that the holiest site for them, do they gain enlightenment while on the vessel?

I don't know - I'm only level 6.

Plotinus, I recall you mentioning that certain people believed that God could overcome logic (forgot where; I think in this page or the last). How did they justify the existence of evil, then? It may be that some mechanism like free will gives God an incentive to let us do what we want, but if he could overcome the constraints of logic then he could, by definition, do literally anything. There couldn't be a possible response to the Problem of Evil under that framework.

Well, Descartes thought that evil (or at least error) could be attributed to the misuse of creaturely will, so he was a fairly orthodox Augustinian in that regard. But if you think that God transcends the laws of logic then you don't really need a response to the problem of evil at all. You can say that God just makes his own existence compatible with anything. You can even admit that the problem of evil disproves God's existence while insisting that God nevertheless exists, because if God transcends logic he can both exist and not exist at the same time.

 

[Atticus]

Basically the number 4 is just a name given to the number 2+2 (it's possible to go into nitpicky details here, but let's not). The assumption is that when you say "two", you mean the natural number with the usual additionm multiplication etc. If you claim that 2+2 doesn't equal 4, you are either 1) really bad at arithmetics, or 2) speaking of another system where "2", "+", "=" or "4" have different meanings.

Borachio's bird is an example of the first one. I don't think that bird's poor maths skills give reason to doubt the basic arithmetics. People count things wrong all the time, it's just mistakes or poor reasoning.

The second case is a real possibility: There are some cases when people use 2 for a different thing, for example an element in Z₃, that has elements 0, 1 and 2, which are summed, subtracted and multiplied just llke ordinary numbers, except whenever you get something over 2 or under 0, you add or subtract 3s until the result is 0, 1 or 2. So for these things it would be 2 + 2 = 1.

This does not however undermine the usual arithmetics, as doesn't any other algebra either. Say, if you changed your name to Obama and christened your child Barack, that wouldn't make Barack Obama any less president of the USA. It could mean that you should be more cautious with your language though.

The disappearing potatoes and such, they don't challenge maths either. They challenge whether some particular system in maths is applicable to the real world, but not the maths itself. The ordinary arithemetics wouldn't describe that world, but it would be just as valid as maths as the above example of Z₃ is in our world.

Take some real examples: Is the geometry of the world we are living in Euclidian or non-Euclidian? Does it contain infinitesimal distances or not? These questions, they are for physicists and philosophers to decide. Mathematicians are concerned only on the internal consistency of what they're doing.

So, a mathematician wouldn't claim "Pythagorean theorem is true", he would say "If you assume Euclid's axioms, parallel axiom included, then Pythagorean theorem is true". Or: "You can deduce Pythagorean theorem from Euclid's axioms".

That is why maths is used as the example of something God can't have an influence on. It's (at least supposedly) only about logic. I think it's a bit unnecessary to speak about maths in this kind of cases though, since speaking of logic would suffice. You could equally well say "God can't create an universe where the law of excluded middle doesn't hold".

Could there be a world where logic doesn't hold? Maybe, but usually people who speak about that possibility don't mean actual logic, but have whole different things in mind: a world where unexpected or crazy things happened, like things came to in existence from nothing or disappeared just like that.

That kind of universe however wouldn't defy logic. It would be needed that the things came to existence from nothing, but they didn't come to existence from nothing. They were all the time there. They weren't there at all.

The thing is that if there is a world where logic doesn't apply, then there's no way I can make sense or speak of that world, so it is useless, and we can just limit ourselves to thinking of the worlds we can imagine.

 

[Agent327]

Which are the more elaborate answers, but still basically what I said. Theoretically an omnipotent being might create a universe where 1+1 does not equal 2, but it would be beyond human understanding. (One can imagine such a universe, but not exist in it - for the reasons explained just now.)

 

[timtofly]

If some one did not think nor reason logically, how would they communicate with those who claim to do so? Was logic defined because it exist, or was it defined because that is the way humans understood their reality to work?

It seems to me that logic is based on understanding. One has to understand logic in order to use it. One would have to understand logic the same way every one else understands logic in order to use it properly. So does logic exist or is it just a human construct? Does good or evil exist or is it just a logical result of certain choices? It is not logical to think (in a world where bad things happen) to say that every choice should result in good. Now if we did not understand what evil was, then even evil would seem to us good. We do however have an understanding of good and evil and they are different, and most feel they are opposite of each other.

Now we may have evolved to realize that there was a difference between the two outcomes, or we may accept the notion from antiquity that as a result of one choice, we were granted the curse of knowing such concepts as good and evil.

But to call either good or evil a force is the result of logic and IMO, a human construct, since the use of logic was constructed so humans could figure out their reality. The biggest event that would be considered evil not caused by humans would be the weather. Today we know that weather is just a naturally occurring event, and not produced as an entity's choice to do us harm. Because of such knowledge there is no need to look at weather as an evil force.

It is debatable that humans are forced by an unknown entity to do evil, ie. satan. That does not make evil a force, it just means that a person is forced to do something against their will. So when it says that humans gained the knowledge of good and evil, while it afforded that knowledge it did not unleash two new forces into the realm of reality. It can be reasoned on why God allowed such a destructive choice hanging around to begin with. It would be consistent with God testing humans to prove something to satan. We seem to be told that even though God seemed to create everything complete, that did not mean that it would always be complete, but would eventually and naturally deteriorate.

Whether or not God allows or just has no control over natural deterioration, would seem to me the biggest proof that God does not exist. If God does not exist, then there would be no created entity by the name of satan. There would be no need to understand good and evil, and there would be no need for forces at all. Things that happen are just naturally occurring events in the universe. Humans have very little if any choices to counteract these events. Doing something good or doing something evil is still just a construct to show the results of actions. Some smarter humans have come to the conclusion that by drugging people they can use such choices to their advantage. There however is no real need to enforce people to do good, since the natural order of things is deterioration. Scientist have duped themselves into thinking that things are evolving to higher levels, even though the latest rendition is the most destructive of all.