Proofs that God is imaginary

[BasketCase]

So you act as you do in order to achieve some end?

I think this is where a lot of people in this argument are getting their wires crossed. They're assuming life has a purpose. "If God is imaginary, then an unintelligent universe created intelligence for <insert reason here>".

Life doesn't necessarily have a purpose. What if life is the purpose....? In existential threads like this one, we keep wondering what the goal of life is. What if life is the goal....?

 

[BasketCase]

Ad 1) Perfectly true, but again a flaw in the analogy; constructing houses, then selecting one as the preferred would a better one.

Look, don't get all nitpicky here. The analogy doesn't have to be perfect (apples and oranges are different, but they are both round and both grow on trees--they are similar and can be compared). The point is, there's a whole lot of planets in the universe--why did God decide to create intelligent life on only one?

Maybe he only felt interested in one figurative "house"--most of us people only buy one house, but some of us are property investors and own several.

Or maybe God is just lazy and decided after the first "house" not to build any more?

Or maybe God only had enough money to buy one planet from the Celestial Building Permits Office.

Ad 2) & 3) As far as we know only one tree was planted. (And trees competing for water seems to me just a description of how nature works; I think it's safe to assume God has no problem with nature as is.)

You're getting the concept of an example mixed up here. Strike all instances of "tree" from my post and replace them with "human race" for a better picture.

If there's only one human race in all Creation, that human race is unique and special. And it also has lots of room to grow and flourish. But if there are many intelligent races on every available planet (or many human races on ONE planet, i.e. Earth), things will get real crowded and messy. Of course, the fact that there's only one human race on Earth and we're already making things crowded and messy could mean we're getting too big for our knickers.....

Ad 4) Are you saying there are more universes that God didn't create (outside his sphere of influence)? Because that just doesn't seem to coincide with the concept of God.

Why is this a problem? Most religious Bible-type books I'm familiar with only mention the creation of "the" Universe--they never mention any others. Our Bibles only talk about God's creation of this Universe. So it's entirely possible--and acceptable to most religions on Earth--for there to be other Universes with other Gods. There's the added bonus that we can never see or interact with any of those other Universes, because the laws of physics will be different in all of them, and the instant we poked our heads into another Universe to take a peek, we would explode into our component atoms and cease to exist.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Some references to "the heavens" could be interpreted as multiple universes, and I believe that some places it uses the world "world" in the plural too. I forget where, but I think I remember reading at least one verse that in English translation says something like calling god the lord of the whole world but in the Vulgate would be closer to lord of all universes. I think that some verses referring to the hosts of heaven could also be interpreted as meaning a large group of universes rather than a group of angelic beings in a single heaven.


I've heard somewhere that the Koran specifically states that there are many other inhabited worlds/universes (inhabited at least by djinni, who may be immortal and incorporeal but have free will and and need to follow Islam as much as humans do), but makes it clear that Allah created and rules them all.

 

[Plotinus]

Why is this a problem? Most religious Bible-type books I'm familiar with only mention the creation of "the" Universe--they never mention any others. Our Bibles only talk about God's creation of this Universe. So it's entirely possible--and acceptable to most religions on Earth--for there to be other Universes with other Gods.

This completely misses the point of theism as it is understood by most monotheists. God, on their view, isn't just a being who happens to exist and who happens to have created the universe around us. He is existence itself. He is not simply the author of the universe but what makes even the theoretical existence of a universe possible in the first place. Even if no universe existed, the mere possibility of the universe - and of every possible universe - would exist solely as an idea in his mind. Everything that exists does so solely because he created it and because he makes sheer existence possible in the first place; and everything that doesn't exist but is merely possible is possible only because he exists. This is part of what theists are trying to get at when they say that God is the one necessary being, the one thing that simply has to exist irrespective of whether anything else does.

So Leibniz (this is in his Theodicy Essays II 225 if you want to know):

The infinity of possibles, however great it may be, is no greater than that of the wisdom of God, who knows all possibles. One may even say that if this wisdom does not exceed the possibles extensively, since the objects of the understanding cannot go beyond the possible, which in a sense is alone intelligible, it exceeds them intensively, by reason of the infinitely infinite combinations it makes thereof, and its many deliberations concerning them. The wisdom of God, not content with embracing all the possibles, penetrates them, compares them, weighs them one against the other, to estimate their degrees of perfection or imperfection, the strong and the weak, the good and the evil. It goes even beyond the finite combinations, it makes of them an infinity of infinites, that is to say, an infinity of possible sequences of the universe, each of which contains an infinity of creatures. By this means the divine Wisdom distributes all the possibles it had already contemplated separately, into so many universal systems which it further compares the one with the other. The result of all these comparisons and deliberations is the choice of the best from among all these possible systems, which wisdom makes in order to satisfy goodness completely; and such is precisely the plan of the universe as it is. Moreover, all these operations of the divine understanding, although they have among them an order and a priority of nature, always take place together, no priority of time existing among them.

On this view, God is quite literally the sum total of all possibilities. That means all actual things (including all things in all universes that actually exist) as well as all non-actual but possible things (including all things that do not actually exist but which could). There is more to God than that, of course, or we'd just have a form of pantheism, but the point is that God is what makes all these actuals and possibles actual and possible in the first place. Indeed Leibniz constructs an argument for God's existence from this view, along the lines of: for possibles to be possible, they must exist in logical space; but possibles are possible; therefore logical space exists, and this is God. The important thing, however, is that God is the basis, as it were, for all possible combinations of things and events - not merely the ones that occur in our universe, but those that occur in any other universes that exist, and also the infinite universes which could have existed but don't.

So whether there are many universes or only one is really irrelevant. All existing things, no matter what universe they are in, exist only because of the one God. There cannot possibly be more than one God even if they are separated away in different universes, any more than there can be more than one of "the number three" (this is not to say that God is abstract in the way that a number is, though). God is not inside this universe or any other, he stands outside and beyond and beneath them all. So on the assumption of many universes, the notion that God is somehow limited to this universe and has counterparts in other universes would be completely unacceptable to classical theism. I doubt, at the very least, you'll find many Christians willing to countenance the idea.

 

[Smidlee]

I think this is where a lot of people in this argument are getting their wires crossed. They're assuming life has a purpose. "If God is imaginary, then an unintelligent universe created intelligence for <insert reason here>".

Life doesn't necessarily have a purpose. What if life is the purpose....? In existential threads like this one, we keep wondering what the goal of life is. What if life is the goal....?

So not only did an universe without any intelligent suppose to somehow create intelligence but also a purposeless universe create creatures that happen to do things on purpose. Boy, this is just getting better all the time.

 

[Plotinus]

So not only did an universe without any intelligent suppose to somehow create intelligence but also a purposeless universe create creatures that happen to do things on purpose. Boy, this is just getting better all the time.

Instead of mocking those who disagree with you, you'd do better to try to understand them. There is nothing inherently absurd about the notion of beings with a certain property emerging from those that lacked that property. For example, animals that could breathe air evolved from animals that could not. That is perfectly explicable in terms of the law of natural selection.

Similarly, there is nothing absurd at all about the notion of beings with intelligence evolving from beings without intelligence. And there is nothing absurd about the notion of beings with purpose evolving from beings without purpose. These phenomena can be easily explained by appealing to natural selection as well. Animals that wandered around without any purpose at all would not tend to survive and pass on their purposelessness to their descendants. Animals that acted in ways that tended to bring about their own survival would survive and pass on this tendency. The same goes for intelligence. This is not arcane and obscure stuff.

If you think that there is something absurd about the notion of intelligence or purpose emerging in such a way then it is up to you to explain why. Just making a snarky, sarky comment about it is utterly pointless, won't convince anyone, and will only make the "religious people are all stupid" brigade - who infest this board in sufficient force as it is - all the more convinced that they are right.

 

[PeteAtoms]

That is, we may talk about "purpose" in everyday life and explain some things by appealing to teleology ("I put the tea bag in the pot because I wanted to make some tea"), but really that just masks more fundamental efficient causation ("Really I put the tea bag in the pot because my muscles moved in that way, and that only happened because my neurones fired in a certain way, and that only happened because I received some sensation in my brain, and so on backwards"). On this analysis, teleology itself is just a phenomenon of animal life which is itself caused by other factors, and so it cannot be an ultimate explanation for anything.

Just for my own understanding of the concept... the teleological explanation assumes free will? What if you said, "I put the tea bag in the pot because I wanted to make some tea. And I wanted some tea because of a combination of past experience and my body telling my mind I was thirsty?"

EDIT;

So looking back at your post, I guess free will is not a prerequisite for teleological explanations:

So teleology is the explanation for everything, and that simply means that everything is the way it is because that's how God wants it to be.
-Plotinus

 

[Traitorfish]

Possibly. But people can have religious feelings (in fact I'd say religion without feeling does not make sense/has no content). If people interpret these feelings as relating to God, I'd say that makes sense.

I disagree. "God" is defined as a deity, and, in the sense used here, an absolute one. Redefining "God" as something other than a deity completely ignores the fundamental question of said deity's existence. It's merely redefining terms until you can find an answer that suits you, rather than actually attempting to deal with the question as stated. It's one thing to dispute the nature of the deity, another to claim that God is something different altogether.

In the same vein atheism (which is generally presented as rational) generates emotion in atheists.

Not true. Neither theism nor atheism are inherently emotional, they are merely assertions as to the nature of the universe. The fact that human beings can be inspired to emotion by these assertions is irrelevent. Religion, perhaps, has an emotional component, but religion and theism are far from mutually dependant, let alone equivalent.

 

[Plotinus]

Just for my own understanding of the concept... the teleological explanation assumes free will? What if you said, "I put the tea bag in the pot because I wanted to make some tea. And I wanted some tea because of a combination of past experience and my body telling my mind I was thirsty?"

EDIT;

So looking back at your post, I guess free will is not a prerequisite for teleological explanations:

That's right. Free will is a metaphysical concept. Whether we have free will or not is open to debate; but it is hardly open to debate whether we do things for a purpose, unless there's anyone here who moves only in random jerks. Explaining your putting the bag into the pot by saying "Because I wanted to make tea" is a teleological explanation, and that is simply neutral on metaphysical questions such as free will. We all explain our actions and other people's actions in this way absolutely all the time, so there is no doubt whatsoever that teleological explanations are legitimate and informative. The question is whether they are reducible to other forms of explanation or not. But that is another issue.

Teleology isn't limited to human beings either. You can say that the dog is whining because he wants to go out or even that the ant is running along because it's looking for food. Indeed you can say that the plant is growing in that direction in order to to capture as much light as possible, or that the light has come on the dashboard to tell you that there is no petrol left, or that your virus checker has opened a window to alert you to a security risk. These are all teleological explanations because they appeal to purpose of some kind or another. Purpose doesn't have to be deliberate or conscious or designed. Again, this is because purpose doesn't have to be an irreducible category - we might say, for example, that the purpose of the ant is explicable wholly in terms of material, formal, and efficient causation, and so are the purposes of the other things. But such explanations would be very long-winded, which is why we talk about purpose - just as even the most ardent evolutionist can say "The peacock has bright colours in order to attract a mate." It is a figure of speech, but an enormously useful one.

What atheists would typically say is that all purpose can be explained in this way. Just as the peacock doesn't really have its colours in order to attract a mate, but has evolved that way through the operation of natural laws because such colours tend to attract a mate, so too our own purposes and our own intentions in performing the actions that we do can be explained in a similar way. Theists, by contrast, would say that there is at least one example of purpose which cannot be explained in this way, namely the purposes of God, and they would typically want to say that much of the purpose that we see around us is ultimately explicable in terms of the purposes of God and not in terms of alternative, non-purposive explanations.

 

[Flying Pig]

I think this is where a lot of people in this argument are getting their wires crossed. They're assuming life has a purpose. "If God is imaginary, then an unintelligent universe created intelligence for <insert reason here>".

Life doesn't necessarily have a purpose. What if life is the purpose....? In existential threads like this one, we keep wondering what the goal of life is. What if life is the goal....?

That's the basic point of atheism.

 

[warpus]

That's the basic point of atheism.

There is no "point" of atheism. Atheism is an incredibly broad definition that includes a lot of different schools of thought.

Some people mean "Those who are certain that God does not exist" when they say "Atheist", and some even mean "Those who are in opposition to theology", but those definitions are wrong and are mainly used to easier make a point and direct it against a perceived "opposition".

 

[Flying Pig]

You can't really have proper atheism with a belief in the afterlife.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

You can't really have proper atheism with a belief in the afterlife.

Sure you can. If this life can exist without a God (so goes the reasoning of atheists), then why not the next one as well?

 

[warpus]

Sure you can. If this life can exist without a God (so goes the reasoning of atheists), then why not the next one as well?

That is the reasoning only of a subset of atheists, but you're right.. in a way. It's not impossible.

 

[Flying Pig]

At that point, it becomes a religion, though

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

That is the reasoning only of a subset of atheists, but you're right.. in a way. It's not impossible.

I meant the first part to be the reasoning of all atheists, and the second part to be a derivation of that position.

At that point, it becomes a religion, though

No, it is just simply a property of existence we don't understand and can't prove. You don't have to believe in God and whatnot to understand that you don't understand something, or that something can't be proven right now.

 

[Plotinus]

You can't really have proper atheism with a belief in the afterlife.

Nonsense. There is nothing about atheism that in itself precludes belief in life after death. Anyone who believes in substance dualism, for example, believes that the mind could exist without the body - and anyone who believes in that can easily believe that the mind separates from the body at death and continues to survive. The arguments given by Plato in the Phaedo and Descartes in the Meditations for this position have got nothing whatsoever to do with theism.

At that point, it becomes a religion, though

That's also rubbish. Believing that there is life after death doesn't make you religious - unless perhaps you think Platonism was a religion! Suppose science proved the existence of a soul which survives death - would science become a religion then? As I've said repeatedly, religion is not just about doctrine but about all sorts of other things too. And besides this, even if it did constitute a religion - so what? what's that got to do with anything?

 

[Flying Pig]

Nonsense. There is nothing about atheism that in itself precludes belief in life after death. Anyone who believes in substance dualism, for example, believes that the mind could exist without the body - and anyone who believes in that can easily believe that the mind separates from the body at death and continues to survive. The arguments given by Plato in the Phaedo and Descartes in the Meditations for this position have got nothing whatsoever to do with theism.

That's also rubbish. Believing that there is life after death doesn't make you religious - unless perhaps you think Platonism was a religion! Suppose science proved the existence of a soul which survives death - would science become a religion then? As I've said repeatedly, religion is not just about doctrine but about all sorts of other things too. And besides this, even if it did constitute a religion - so what? what's that got to do with anything?

In order for atheism to be justified, the central position needs to be 'We admit no more causes or natural things than the evidence insists'. By this logic, the afterlife, dualism, platonic philosophy are all against the idea, since we have no good reason to belive in them. While technically atheism means lack of a God, I take it to mean lack of religious convictions.

 

[warpus]

In order for atheism to be justified, the central position needs to be 'We admit no more causes or natural things than the evidence insists'. By this logic, the afterlife, dualism, platonic philosophy are all against the idea, since we have no good reason to belive in them. While technically atheism means lack of a God, I take it to mean lack of religious convictions.

No, the central (and only) position of atheism is: "do not believe that God exists"

I should create a lolatheist poster to illustrate the point.. hmm

 

[Lone Wolf]

I should create a lolatheist poster to illustrate the point.. hmm

"God doesn't exist. However, I'm sure that all the Jews of the world are allied with the inhabitants of Falklands with the goal of sinking the whole country of France"?