God refutation

Exogen,

The relationship between self creation and personal responsibility.

There may be loopholes here to explore, but please don’t get into the obfuscatory self creation by god given “freedom of choice”, many people already doubt that is a reality. Though if it must be discussed, I’m reluctantly willing.

For a good part of my life I have built things. I am held responsible by myself and others for the way they work, how well they serve their intended purpose. The things I have built have not been responsible for the ways they work. If something is built the builder is held responsible for it.

If I am created my creator is responsible for me, and in particular the ways I work, my behaviors. He (whatever “he” is) has ownership of me. If I create myself I am responsible for myself and have ownership of myself.

If your write your life story, it will be a draft of your own evolution, all those things that had influence on you, for the most part leaving out the relatively astronomical number of things that were influential to your development by their absence. It’s only a very rough draft, it could never be the whole story of your post conception nurture.

None of this is to say I regard mutual creation/evolution a fact. However well developed the concept is, it remains a possibility.

Best wishes.

moreorlessinsane,

Self creation is not the only way in which you could be responsible for yourself. You exist, maybe you were created, maybe you weren't. But either way you are an autonomous being and your responsibility flows from that autonomy give your current existence. You may not be responsible for your existence, but just because your actions are not possible without your existence does not mean you are not responsible for your actions NOW.

This is towards Nameless’ attempt at a proof. Before I begin however, please note I am not defending the existence of God, on the contrary I am a strong believer that there is no ‘God’. However, I do not agree with arguments that do not take consideration the theistic practice and belief system. If you want to prove God does not exist you must be generous to their argument and pick it apart.

The very notion of your example is absurd. It seems straight forward yet ignorant to beliefs of Theist’s. The reason I say this is that your “what if” scenario could never happen. You have to understand what your arguing before you can disprove it. Your arguments fallacy is that it attacks the straw man.

To give a basic counter, If you accept God exists in order to create your example then he is a perfect being. It would be an imperfection for a being below that which is perfect to remove it from existence. (i.e your choice.) Therefore, your argument attacks a God which is not perfect.

Exogen

An autonomous being? Are you independent of your environment?
Does whatever you do have no effect on other people and things? Does whatever you do not do have no effect on other people and things?
You have massive influence, everything does.

If you are responsible for your influential actions, are you also responsible for your influential inactions?

Paraphrasing what you have written:
Your existence does not mean you are responsible for your actions/inactions NOW.

I can conceive no dispassionately logical connection between what you do and do not, and responsibility for those actions/inactions.

May the force be with you.

PaulNZ,

The bible includes statements about itself which are quite different from the hypothesis you present regarding it origins. Moreover, theomatics, bible codes, and spiritual, surprising results from the conduct of experiments conducted following guidelines presented in the bible are consistent with it's claims, and contradict your hypothesis. No man could have written those words, or guidelines, without basically taking dictation from a God, a spiritual Person higher than any human in the scale of life forms based on intelligince

And, I said nothing about punishment, regarding the child's passing. I said that God allowed evil to overtake the child at the time it did because it gave the child the best possible chance for a good eternal life with Him. And, He allows evil because it preserves love. If persons are not free to choose evil, then love has no meaning. Freedom and love are such good things that a world without them, hence a world without evil as we see it, would not be as good.

Freedom includes your right to develope your own theology, a theology being a specific set of hypotheses about higher, spiritual beings. The theology of the scriptures is the most widely considered and, in my experience, tested and affirmed theoretical research program, in the Lakatosian sense. But freedom allows us to work with whichever one we find most plausible or appealing, or even none at all. I assumed, though, when you say that God cannot be good, you mean the God as defined scripturally. People who worship demons can plausibly argue that their god is not good.

It is philosophically irresponsible to attempt to judge or critique any theoretical system which one does not understand. To refute the God defined by the scriptures, one needs to study carefully what sort of God is described there. Taking issue with the "scriptural" god as defined by biblical religionists is a different matter. Their views are second-hand, and their usual practise of hypocrisy produces a hypothetical god which, as you say, is not good. But it is not the God described by the scriptures, when they are read outside the religious interpretations, following philosophical guidelines for interpreting writings.

The report of history that it is worthwhile getting this right.

Groktruth said:

"The bible includes statements about itself which are quite different from the hypothesis you present regarding it origins. Moreover, theomatics, bible codes, and spiritual, surprising results from the conduct of experiments conducted following guidelines presented in the bible are consistent with it's claims, and contradict your hypothesis. No man could have written those words, or guidelines, without basically taking dictation from a God, a spiritual Person higher than any human in the scale of life forms based on intelligince"

Can you give me some examples please and explain to someone who hasn't studied the bible within the framework you describe, such as myself, how the examples given prove the claim you make in this paragraph.

Thank you.

Groktruth said:

"The bible includes statements about itself which are quite different from the hypothesis you present regarding it origins. Moreover, theomatics, bible codes, and spiritual, surprising results from the conduct of experiments conducted following guidelines presented in the bible are consistent with it's claims, and contradict your hypothesis. No man could have written those words, or guidelines, without basically taking dictation from a God, a spiritual Person higher than any human in the scale of life forms based on intelligince"

Can you give me some examples please and explain to someone who hasn't studied the bible within the framework you describe, such as myself, how the examples given prove the claim you make in this paragraph.

Thank you.

In bible code studies, the letters of the scripture, especially the Torah, are scrambled randomly, in what they call "monkey" texts. Then words are searched for, using skip sequences, taking every other letter, for example. Words that have some historical connection (9-11, twin towers, for example) are then located in both the preserved scriptures and in the monkey texts. In several thousand monkey texts, the closest proximity of these words to one another is measured, and a statistical distribution of these distances found. Then the distance is measured in the given text, and located on that probability distribution. It is commonly found to be way out in the tail, to the short side, closer than expected. The probability that it would fall where it does in the real text is often as low as one chance in several thousand monkey text results.

This is done for hundreds of pairs or larger groups of words, and usually confirmed, even though the association of the words comes from historical events that happened well after the Torah was written. In one stunning case, anticipated scud missle attacks on Jerusalem were fed into the proceedure with many future dates during the Gulf war. Three dates stood out as unusually closely associated. The Israeli military, on those dates, told all citizens to carry gas masks, and never stray more than ten minutes from a shelter. (The missles took ten minutes from launch to get to Jerusalem). The attack came on the first date, but even though 1400 apartments were destroyed by the attacks, there were no civilian casualties.

These "codes" were predicted to exist by many Rabbis and also by Sir Isaac Newton, for centuries. But they require computers to find. They were predicted to exist because of claims that God had said that He would set up such a proof that the bible could not be written by human intelligence.

I know, I know. You would think that this would be better known. As I say, read Jeffrey Santinover's book on the Bible codes. Theomatics, also, and Frank Loehrw' prayer studies on plants, are useful. John Mcternan's book on God's judgements, as correlated with actions He said He would judge.

Exogen

An autonomous being? Are you independent of your environment?
Does whatever you do have no effect on other people and things? Does whatever you do not do have no effect on other people and things?
You have massive influence, everything does.

If you are responsible for your influential actions, are you also responsible for your influential inactions?

Paraphrasing what you have written:
Your existence does not mean you are responsible for your actions/inactions NOW.

I can conceive no dispassionately logical connection between what you do and do not, and responsibility for those actions/inactions.

May the force be with you.

The fact of self-consciousness gets around the problem you raise for autonomy. I may be indeed affected by my environment and as such determined to a degree insofar as my choice must take place in context. It is context that my choice is predicated on after all. However just because context is a necessary component of choice, does not make choice, and hence autonomy, any less real. I may be in a situation which is not my choice but that does not mean that my reaction to that situation need be determined. I am capable of realizing my situation and making a decision one way or the other. Self consciousness is an example of being both aware of a one's self in context and also being part of it, a fact that is incompatible with determinism. Think of it like a river, if we are a river of change flowing along how is it we can come to recognize the change? To say we can is to say we can divert the flow of the river, where "we" is meant to be the river itself. Thus the river is diverting itself. That is a fact neither reducible to the constituents parts of the river (in this case water) nor the pattern or behavior of the aggregate constituent parts. To say it would be either of the two would be to deny self consciousness. Self consciousness as a fact should be impossible if determinism is true, yet here we are.

Exogen.

I think the difficulty for you, me and everyone else is that our consciousness does not easily allow us to imagine we are a part of the river, and could never be anything else. But we have no existence on the river bank, we can’t be mere observers.

Please consider the following.
Everything in the universe is a part of the universal system. For the sums to add up everything must be cooperative. If you say something is being uncooperative you are merely expressing disapproval of the way it is cooperating (and being appropriately cooperative).
The universe is the only individual, it cooperates with nothing else.
(You’ve probably already considered the possibility it’s a self organizing system).

We attribute behaviors to things. We individualize what is a cooperative unity, the totality, principally by appearance and behaviors. We are then able to project a future from the interplay of things, and in a kaleidoscope of different situations. We anticipate local evolution and maneuver for advantage. Clearly this ability gives us survival advantages … and competition.

We can individualize anything (it is a thing because it is individualized). We individualize events so that they become extracted from evolution. We break up cause and effect (and the river stops flowing).
We are able to segregate a child’s development from his adult behaviors. “Happy birthday kid, now you’re responsible for all your culturally honed predispositions, nobody else is”.

But (multiverse aside) the only individual is the universe, its composition must be cooperative.

You are not an individual, merely an individualized and absolutely cooperative part of this fluidly evolving universe.
Nevertheless, as I have tried to express, in my opinion your behaviors are no less significant to the course of evolution than those of anything and everything else.

What’s so immediately vital to the course of evolution? Your evolved emotionality.

This, in part and very roughly, is what I presently believe to be real.

Pro life is pro death … I get tired of “best wishes”, it begins to lose sincerity.

Groktruth said:

"The bible includes statements about itself which are quite different from the hypothesis you present regarding it origins. Moreover, theomatics, bible codes, and spiritual, surprising results from the conduct of experiments conducted following guidelines presented in the bible are consistent with it's claims, and contradict your hypothesis. No man could have written those words, or guidelines, without basically taking dictation from a God, a spiritual Person higher than any human in the scale of life forms based on intelligince"

Can you give me some examples please and explain to someone who hasn't studied the bible within the framework you describe, such as myself, how the examples given prove the claim you make in this paragraph.

Thank you.

In bible code studies, the letters of the scripture, especially the Torah, are scrambled randomly, in what they call "monkey" texts. Then words are searched for, using skip sequences, taking every other letter, for example. Words that have some historical connection (9-11, twin towers, for example) are then located in both the preserved scriptures and in the monkey texts. In several thousand monkey texts, the closest proximity of these words to one another is measured, and a statistical distribution of these distances found. Then the distance is measured in the given text, and located on that probability distribution. It is commonly found to be way out in the tail, to the short side, closer than expected. The probability that it would fall where it does in the real text is often as low as one chance in several thousand monkey text results.

This is done for hundreds of pairs or larger groups of words, and usually confirmed, even though the association of the words comes from historical events that happened well after the Torah was written. In one stunning case, anticipated scud missle attacks on Jerusalem were fed into the proceedure with many future dates during the Gulf war. Three dates stood out as unusually closely associated. The Israeli military, on those dates, told all citizens to carry gas masks, and never stray more than ten minutes from a shelter. (The missles took ten minutes from launch to get to Jerusalem). The attack came on the first date, but even though 1400 apartments were destroyed by the attacks, there were no civilian casualties.

These "codes" were predicted to exist by many Rabbis and also by Sir Isaac Newton, for centuries. But they require computers to find. They were predicted to exist because of claims that God had said that He would set up such a proof that the bible could not be written by human intelligence.

I know, I know. You would think that this would be better known. As I say, read Jeffrey Santinover's book on the Bible codes. Theomatics, also, and Frank Loehrw' prayer studies on plants, are useful. John Mcternan's book on God's judgements, as correlated with actions He said He would judge.

I like the bible as far as it goes and I am in awe of some of its layers of meaning and content, but I'm afraid I can't subscribe to the view that it is the word of god "dictated" to us mere mortals. Given that Groktruth, I think we will have to agree to disagree. Thanks.

PaulNZ

MoreOrLessInsane wrote #151 :

The relationship between self creation and personal responsibility.

There may be loopholes here to explore, but please don’t get into the obfuscatory self creation by god given “freedom of choice”, many people already doubt that is a reality. Though if it must be discussed, I’m reluctantly willing.

Same here. Them loophole is that although we have no Free Will we also have no powers of prediction beyond the inductive power including intuitive inductive power, and we have very limited rational judgement. These facts allow us to act as if we had Free Will. To put it another way, if we were omniscient as God is said to be, we would have not even a semblance of Free Will but , together with all-powerfulness, we would be able really to self create.

What we can do, with our semblance of Free Will, and our feeling that we have genuine choices, is improve upon those seeming choices with whatever wisdom we can have. Science already does this with tremendous effect and we are needing to catch up on the success of science by improving our morality. We are necessarily what we are, created by nature, but this does not imply that we should be fatalists. Our best efforts at self creation aspire towards a future that's better than the status quo. Indeed if the old fashioned theistic God of all goodness existed I guess this is what he would want us to aspire to.

PaulNZ,

I found your questions most stimulating, and thank you for getting them on the table. In my few years on the South Island, I believe I learned that what I ought to say is, "Good on you for bringing it all up." I sense we understand one another, which is very satisfying.

Groktruth

Exogen.

I think the difficulty for you, me and everyone else is that our consciousness does not easily allow us to imagine we are a part of the river, and could never be anything else. But we have no existence on the river bank, we can’t be mere observers.

Please consider the following.
Everything in the universe is a part of the universal system. For the sums to add up everything must be cooperative. If you say something is being uncooperative you are merely expressing disapproval of the way it is cooperating (and being appropriately cooperative).
The universe is the only individual, it cooperates with nothing else.
(You’ve probably already considered the possibility it’s a self organizing system).

We attribute behaviors to things. We individualize what is a cooperative unity, the totality, principally by appearance and behaviors. We are then able to project a future from the interplay of things, and in a kaleidoscope of different situations. We anticipate local evolution and maneuver for advantage. Clearly this ability gives us survival advantages … and competition.

We can individualize anything (it is a thing because it is individualized). We individualize events so that they become extracted from evolution. We break up cause and effect (and the river stops flowing).
We are able to segregate a child’s development from his adult behaviors. “Happy birthday kid, now you’re responsible for all your culturally honed predispositions, nobody else is”.

But (multiverse aside) the only individual is the universe, its composition must be cooperative.

You are not an individual, merely an individualized and absolutely cooperative part of this fluidly evolving universe.
Nevertheless, as I have tried to express, in my opinion your behaviors are no less significant to the course of evolution than those of anything and everything else.

What’s so immediately vital to the course of evolution? Your evolved emotionality.

This, in part and very roughly, is what I presently believe to be real.

Pro life is pro death … I get tired of “best wishes”, it begins to lose sincerity.

You present a false dichotomy. You make it sound as though the only choices are between an ontological individuality (being truly fundamentally separate at the very basic level of being) or a determined unity. That is simply false to suggest that those are the only coherent options.

One can be part of the river but distinct. Something can be unified and cooperative but also be distinct and in that distinction is where self-consciousness and thus autonomy arises.

What you mean by "cooperative" is determined. You a reductionist, just without the usual dermatology. Your also an objective monist. I don't think that there exists a "universe" because my metaphysics is that reality always exists from a point of observation where consciousness and the world it experiences are in one unity. The is a distinction between consciousness and the world but no division, and in that unity there is autonomy due to self consciousness. This autonomy is not something godlike and absolute but it is erroneous to say that it would therefore need to be impotent if not godlike.

Your issue is you are presupposing the universe existing as one "thing" (monism)which is that you think the universe exists outside of perception or objectivity.

Exogen

My consciousness would have me believe I’m something distinct and autonomous. I feel responsible for my actions. I feel I’m an individual and have ownership of myself.
What evidence is there for the honesty of these feelings?
Do feelings, sensations and intuitions have intrinsic objectivity, or are they more closely related to instincts (e.g. life preserving/life creating)?

“Your issue is you are presupposing the universe existing as one "thing" (monism)which is that you think the universe exists outside of perception or objectivity.”

I suspect there is an objective reality, but that none of us has perfect objectivity, we’re all swayed by our emotionality (or feelings). Some of these will be common to, and in the nature of, the species.
So yes, I believe there is a universe with qualities beyond our subjective perception, it would be like a parallel dimension, except the one we perceive is an illusion.

Without an imposing sense of autonomy (self ownership etc.) I doubt whether the species would have survived whatever rigors evolution presented. An abiding feeling of “At one with the universe” wouldn’t have been propitious confronting a saber tooth. Any such emotionality would have been naturally deselected (and prove difficult to reacquire, if it was ever in our nature evolved from precursor species).

Probably I can be individualized as a reductionist, but I have no abnormal skin condition that I am aware.

Salutations

Exogen

My consciousness would have me believe I’m something distinct and autonomous. I feel responsible for my actions. I feel I’m an individual and have ownership of myself.
What evidence is there for the honesty of these feelings?
Do feelings, sensations and intuitions have intrinsic objectivity, or are they more closely related to instincts (e.g. life preserving/life creating)?

“Your issue is you are presupposing the universe existing as one "thing" (monism)which is that you think the universe exists outside of perception or objectivity.”

I suspect there is an objective reality, but that none of us has perfect objectivity, we’re all swayed by our emotionality (or feelings). Some of these will be common to, and in the nature of, the species.
So yes, I believe there is a universe with qualities beyond our subjective perception, it would be like a parallel dimension, except the one we perceive is an illusion.

Without an imposing sense of autonomy (self ownership etc.) I doubt whether the species would have survived whatever rigors evolution presented. An abiding feeling of “At one with the universe” wouldn’t have been propitious confronting a saber tooth. Any such emotionality would have been naturally deselected (and prove difficult to reacquire, if it was ever in our nature evolved from precursor species).

Probably I can be individualized as a reductionist, but I have no abnormal skin condition that I am aware.

Salutations

Again your giving me an evolutionary hypothetical to account for autonomy as being only a feeling and not something that exists in reality. So my "feeling" of autonomy would be only a feeling that has resulted from evolution to ensure my species survival.

But my argument for autonomy had nothing to do with the facts about our emotions. It was predicated purely on a metaphysical description of reality, one that is in contrast to yours. The way we might feel or think things are is not the way they in fact may be (a distinction you recognize), thus necessitating reason when it comes to claims of knowledge and understanding.

So even if the feeling of autonomy has evolved as a survival mechanism it has nothing to do with us in fact having real autonomy. Also there is a huge difference between perception and emotion.I don't "feel" like I have autonomy, I perceive it and as a result of reflection on that perception and facts about my experience I conclude that I am autonomous.

You simply take a different view on reality then I do. It is the difference in how you see reality metaphysically that leads you to have your view on theism, which was my original point.