Have you ever thought of taking a breath and reading what people write before you answer a post?evolution wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 8:26 amIf the 'absence of evil' would NOT necessarily mean 'a perfectly harmonious world', then what does an 'absence of evil', to you, necessarily mean?Sculptor1 wrote: ↑October 14th, 2020, 4:00 pm
It's not Ripper's God. His argument is based on the standard God of the Christians.
You then follow up your bile with a strawman, as if the absence of evil would necessarily mean "a perfectly harmonious world". Your argument here is in fact trivial, since you create a false dilemma.
Will you provide some examples?
If yes, then will you discuss them from an OPEN perspective?
If yes, then GREAT.
LOL
The only pain 'you', human beings, feel is the one brought on by the, so called, "adult/grown up" ones.
And, saying, "there is so much death that seems to fall upon the good and evil indiscriminately", is just plain and obviously ABSURD.
Death falls on EVERY one, EQUALLY.
Proof there is no God
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Re: Proof there is no God
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Re: Proof there is no God
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Re: Proof there is no God
Is the polio vaccine a good thing? If it is, we should recognize that it would be impossible without polio.Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 15th, 2020, 10:42 pm
I think you missed the point of Candide. It is ridiculing the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. Since almost every person can think of ways to improve it, it is obviously idiotic to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds.
But for the sake of the unimaginative, do you think that coming up with the polio vaccine improved the world? Humans are constantly working on making things to improve the world, which, if created by a god, leaves a lot to be desired. Otherwise, people would not need to work so hard for making improvements.
Your ally in the War against God, Sculptor, thinks (based on his comments in one of the thousands of fate v. free will threads) that everything has a cause, and thus nothing can happen "freely". If that's the case, this is the best of all possible worlds. It is also the worst of all possible worlds. The two statements are not contradictory.
A.E. Housman wrote this poem:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Is suffering and death vital to joy? Housman seems to think that if he were immortal -- if the springs in which the cherries bloom stretched on forever -- he might NOT bother to head out to the woodlands.
Andrew Marvel appears to agree. He tells his Coy Mistress:
In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", William Blake makes the case for the impossibility of good without evil, soul without body, or heaven without hell. He may (or may not) have been thinking of Jack when he wrote, "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." (It's one of the "proverbs of hell".)At my back I always hear time's winged chariot hurrying near..... (so)
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
From the start of that book:
Your literalism and Fundamentalism are showing, Jack. One of the "Proverbs of Hell" is: "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.""Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what religions call Good and Evil Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from energy."
Heaven and hell are (perhaps) different ways of looking at the same thing. Is one impossible without the other? "The Kingdom of God is within you," said Jesus. According to Blake, at least, so is the Kingdom of Satan.
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Re: Proof there is no God
Felix wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 5:44 amYou're missing the point. Certain physical conditions are required to form a material reality that will support the genesis and growth of life.Jack D. Ripper: "And what sort of argument are you making when you allege it is not possible to make a better realm?"
You seem to be assuming that having a material world in which things evolve is desirable. That is something for which evidence should be given before anyone believes this.
You seem to be assuming that the laws of physics could not have been made to be something else. That is something for which evidence should be given before anyone believes this.
But even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the laws of physics must be as they are, the laws of physics do not prevent a god from telling humans how to make a polio vaccine or any other such thing that would have been beneficial if people had them earlier than they did. So you still end up with an evil being, if there is a being that is omnipotent and omniscient, since that being obviously did not give people the information to make the polio vaccine before it was discovered or invented by people.
There are countless other such examples of no god helping out at all, when it would be easy to help, without violating any laws of physics. So this introduction of having to follow the laws of physics is a red herring, a smokescreen, that even if true, does nothing to show that your god is not an evil bastard (or would be, if it existed).
Felix wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 5:44 am Omnipotence does not mean being able to do the impossible, but rather being able to do whatever is possible. That is, even an omnipotent God would have to acquiesce to the laws of physical manifestation, e.g., physical light would require a material source of light.
No, because Heaven is not considered to be a physical realm, surely you know that?"If a perfect harmonious realm is impossible, that makes hash of the Christian idea of heaven."
First of all, that is a matter of some controversy, with some Christians believing that heaven is a material place. (There are some Biblical verses which strongly indicate that.) But I will set that aside.
If heaven is not a physical realm, that seems to suggest that having a physical realm is just a bad idea. Making an unnecessary realm that has evil is an evil thing to do.
Felix wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 5:44 amMaybe, maybe not. It's a big universe, possibly even infinite, I imagine there are both better and worse habitats than ours, and locales where the residents take better care of their neighbors and neighborhoods."However, Sculptor1 is correct, that things could be better, if there were a god."
You yourself know of countless ways to improve the world. You can pretend that you don't, but no one is going to believe you. The whole history of humanity has been a quest for improving the world.
You need to do more than just claim a victory. Of course, when you have no real argument, you are reduced to such silliness.
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Re: Proof there is no God
evolution wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 6:30 amWhy were you shocked?Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 12th, 2020, 2:49 pm That should be (with bold emphasis added to note the correction):
When I was young and naive and a believer, I was shocked when other believers openly told me that they would lie or say anything to convince others of the truth of religion.
I find the blatant contraction truly humorous.
I was shocked because I was young (a child) and naive. Some of those people were members of the church I attended.
Now, of course, I am not surprised when I encounter Christians who are total hypocrites and who affirm contradictory nonsense. It is almost shocking if one encounters a Christian who is not obviously hypocritical and who does not openly affirm contradictory nonsense.
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Re: Proof there is no God
evolution wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 7:17 am...Through your "argument" you go from majority of people agreeing on the basic principles of morals, and from that general perspective of things there is near universal agreement about, so called, "bad" things happen, "in the world", like, for example; it is bad when children die, agonizingly, from bone cancer, and from there you move to "societies would not be possible" and "standards of conduct".Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 12th, 2020, 8:37 pm Indeed, if there were not such close agreement, society would not be possible, because everyone would constantly be against everyone else on all of the standards of conduct.
Conflating 'bad' with children dying in "agonizing deaths" from bone cancer and with morals and standards of conduct is just absurdness in the extreme.
...
If there were an omniscient and omnipotent being, it could prevent all of those things. Since it obviously does not prevent them, its inaction demonstrates that it is evil (or would, if such a being existed).
When there is a house of fire on the other side of town, I do not call the fire department because I am unaware of it being on fire. An omniscient being must necessarily be aware of it, and consequently it would be in a position to do something. Yet this being, which is also supposed to be omnipotent, which would make it capable of putting out the fire, doesn't even bother to call the fire department. So we may judge this being to be evil, if it existed.
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Re: Proof there is no God
Terrapin Station wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 8:54 amFirst, saying that x doesn't have property φ, even though property φ is postulated of x, doesn't imply that x doesn't exist, unless x is supposed to be exhaustively identical to φ (that is, x is identical to φ and only identical to φ, so that if there's no φ, there's no x).Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 14th, 2020, 5:45 pm
After I was done with this site for the night, I regretted what I wrote almost immediately. Not because I thought it was wrong, but because it is unimportant to the task at hand. It does not matter, for the purposes of this discussion, what the correct view of ethics is. (And that would be better discussed in the ethics section of this site instead of the religion section of this site.)
What I should have stated is something like this:
You seem to be taking a straight up subjectivist approach to ethics. Thus, with:
1) S says, "X is good."
where "S" is something that can make an affirmation, like a human, an alien being like those seen on science fiction shows (if such a being were real), a talking dog like Mr. Peabody (from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show, if he were real), an angel (If real), a god (if real), etc., and where X is anything that would make a meaningful sentence, like "freedom from pain", "torturing small children with flaming hot pincers", etc.
The straight subjectivist approach, based on 1 above, is to affirm:
2) S likes X.
And that is the full significance of 1, on the subjectivist interpretation.
Now, what that means is that, if that view is correct, the statement "X is good" within 1 is not really about X, but is about S. It is about what S likes. So that the true subject of what is being said is S, which is more clearly indicated with 2, because with 2 the grammatical subject is what the statement is about.
Now, how this relates to the opening post is that with the statement:
3) God is good.
That is supposed to be telling you something about God. But, on the subjectivist interpretation, it is not. It is telling you about whoever it is who says "God is good." In the opening post, the statement about God's goodness is supposed to be about God. If the idea of "goodness" as a property of a thing is wrong or incoherent, then the description in the opening post is wrong or incoherent. And if that is the case, then the God of the opening post simply does not exist, because nothing has that property of goodness that is being affirmed about God in that description.
So we don't even have to think about omnipotence or omniscience or about evil (which, of course, on the straight subjectivist interpretation, evil is also not a property of a thing, but a feeling about the thing, just like good). Because, on the subjectivist interpretation of "good", there is no God as described in the opening post because goodness is not a property of a thing.
If it is clearer, what is meant by "God is good" is:
4) God has a property [of goodness].
When religious people tell you that "God is good", haven't you gotten the impression that they mean to be saying something about God, rather than just saying that they like God? That God being good is a selling point of the religion, that is supposed to make you like God, too, because of this property of "goodness" that God allegedly has? This is quite different from someone telling you that they like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla ice cream, because that is not something that is supposed to make you prefer chocolate, though someone might want you to try it, thinking that your tastes may be similar. Sometimes, of course, someone jokingly says that it is wrong to eat vanilla ice cream and that it is only right and proper to eat chocolate ice cream, often as a way of trying to emphasize their love of chocolate ice cream.
But we need not pursue that here; the point is, the description in the opening post is supposed to be about God, certainly not about how I feel about God. If goodness isn't a property of a thing, then the description is inaccurate, which is to say, no such thing exists.
...
The denial of God having any of the three defining characteristics is a denial that a god exists that has all of those characteristics. I explicitly stated in the opening post that this does not prove that some other conception of a god does not exist. It is only about a being that has all of the three characteristics of the opening post. If a being has two of them, but not the third, then the being is not the God described there. Or if it has only one of the characteristics, or none of them, then it is not the God being discussed in this thread. I even gave an example, Zeus, whose existence is not disproven by anything in the post.
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Re: Proof there is no God
evolution wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 9:23 amWhy does a Thing 'have to' have a duty of care towards Its creation?Fanman wrote: ↑October 14th, 2020, 5:57 pm SilverRing,
I think that you make a valid point. In that killing, in essence, is wrong. But dependant upon the circumstances killing may not be viewed as wrong if it is done for a particular, justifiable reason. Such as self-defence, or as you give reference to, the military. I think that our individual sensitivities come into play here, whereby some may not be as offended by killing as others, depending on what we have seen, what has influenced us and our general perceptions of right and wrong, in terms of ethics.
With regards to God, I think that he would, if he existed, have a duty of care towards his creation.
If a thing creates something, then does it NOT have the right to do whatever it wants with its creation?
Do I not have the right to use and do whatever I see fit with what I create?
...
So you do not think that parents, who create their children, have any duty to care for them? That parents have the right to do whatever they want with their children? So they may set them on fire or eat them or sexually assault them or anything else that they might wish to do with them?
Do you really believe that, or is it that you don't believe your own proposed principle, that a being may do whatever it wants to its creation?
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Re: Proof there is no God
It is an arguing tactic to overwhelm one's opponent with a huge pile of crap to try to make it so that the other person will either waste an incredible amount of time, or be left open to the accusation that the person did not deal with some "essential" point. And since many of the questions and comments appear to show no understanding of what has been said, or even what the thread is about, we can expect more of the same to any replies that may attempt to address any of the statements made.
This type of argument style is called "Gish Gallop", which you can read about online in multiple places, such as:
https://effectiviology.com/gish-gallop/
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
It can be combined with argumentum ad nauseum [which differs from Gish Gallop in that it is repeating the same thing(s)]:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_nauseam
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/log ... Repetition
It is a strategy anyone can use who has sufficient time to write more things. One can pretend that the one thereby "wins" the argument.
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Re: Proof there is no God
Ecurb wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 11:30 amIs the polio vaccine a good thing? If it is, we should recognize that it would be impossible without polio.Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 15th, 2020, 10:42 pm
I think you missed the point of Candide. It is ridiculing the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. Since almost every person can think of ways to improve it, it is obviously idiotic to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds.
But for the sake of the unimaginative, do you think that coming up with the polio vaccine improved the world? Humans are constantly working on making things to improve the world, which, if created by a god, leaves a lot to be desired. Otherwise, people would not need to work so hard for making improvements.
The polio vaccine is only good because there is something bad (polio) that it protects people from. So, in a perfect world, the polio vaccine would not exist, which would not be a bad thing, because there would be no need for it.
There are many things in this world whose existence, like the polio vaccine, points to what is bad in the world.
To put this another way, a world in which a polio vaccine were not needed, but is otherwise the same as this world, would be a better world than this one with the vaccine.
Ecurb wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 11:30 am
Your ally in the War against God, Sculptor, thinks (based on his comments in one of the thousands of fate v. free will threads) that everything has a cause, and thus nothing can happen "freely". If that's the case, this is the best of all possible worlds. It is also the worst of all possible worlds. The two statements are not contradictory.
...
The idea that everything has a cause does not entail the conclusion that this is the best of all possible worlds. If there were a God, it could have given the world a different beginning, and consequently the world could be better.
Also, it is not a war against God. It is a war against people having the silly belief that there is a God. God is untouched, in the same way Santa Claus is untouched when someone argues against the existence of Santa Claus.
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Re: Proof there is no God
Sure, a denial of a God that has a property of omnibenevolence where omnibenevolence is supposedly a mind-independent (including a God's-mind-independent) property is a denial of a God that has such a property (among others), but that's not a denial of an omnibenevolent God period, and there would be no way to show that all believer claims of omnibenevolence are claims of a supposedly mind-independent property. In fact, I think that's quite implausible, as I'm sure that most believers would say that the notion of good that matters here, the core notion of moral good period, is a property of God's nature--and specifically of his mind's nature.Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 2:42 pm The denial of God having any of the three defining characteristics is a denial that a god exists that has all of those characteristics. I explicitly stated in the opening post that this does not prove that some other conception of a god does not exist. It is only about a being that has all of the three characteristics of the opening post. If a being has two of them, but not the third, then the being is not the God described there. Or if it has only one of the characteristics, or none of them, then it is not the God being discussed in this thread. I even gave an example, Zeus, whose existence is not disproven by anything in the post.
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Re: Proof there is no God
A property of God's nature, but not an opinion or personal preference about God's nature. That is the key. In other words, it is supposed to mean something more than just that this being approves of itself, and more than just some people approve of it. The exact nature of the property need not be precisely defined, but it must have some association or correlation to the common use for the term "good". (I.e., it should make sense to use the term "good" in connection with this property.) That is, for example, if a property is such that this being enjoys torturing animals, then that isn't the property that could be meant by "good". It has to be that the property in question does not result in a twisted and distorted meaning being given to the word "good", where the term "good" is wildly misused.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 4:09 pmSure, a denial of a God that has a property of omnibenevolence where omnibenevolence is supposedly a mind-independent (including a God's-mind-independent) property is a denial of a God that has such a property (among others), but that's not a denial of an omnibenevolent God period, and there would be no way to show that all believer claims of omnibenevolence are claims of a supposedly mind-independent property. In fact, I think that's quite implausible, as I'm sure that most believers would say that the notion of good that matters here, the core notion of moral good period, is a property of God's nature--and specifically of his mind's nature.Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 2:42 pm The denial of God having any of the three defining characteristics is a denial that a god exists that has all of those characteristics. I explicitly stated in the opening post that this does not prove that some other conception of a god does not exist. It is only about a being that has all of the three characteristics of the opening post. If a being has two of them, but not the third, then the being is not the God described there. Or if it has only one of the characteristics, or none of them, then it is not the God being discussed in this thread. I even gave an example, Zeus, whose existence is not disproven by anything in the post.
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Re: Proof there is no God
Well as I previously stated; NOT 'EVERY' endorsement of consensus on such matter is 'argumentum ad populum'. And to think or believe it is, is VERY foolish, indeed.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 10:58 am"It" was a pronoun standing for what's under discussion: argumentum ad populum.
So, what WAS under discussion WAS something different BEFORE you changed the discussion around, ONCE AGAIN, I will add.
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Re: Proof there is no God
You're just making this part up.Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 5:19 pm In other words, it is supposed to mean something more than just that this being approves of itself, and more than just some people approve of it.
it must have some association or correlation to the common use for the term "good".
And you're just making up that the conventional sense of the term has objectivist connotations.
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Re: Proof there is no God
I am suggesting that saying that "God is good" is supposed to be a description of God, and not a description of what people think or feel about God.Terrapin Station wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 7:09 pmYou're just making this part up.Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 16th, 2020, 5:19 pm In other words, it is supposed to mean something more than just that this being approves of itself, and more than just some people approve of it.
it must have some association or correlation to the common use for the term "good".
And you're just making up that the conventional sense of the term has objectivist connotations.
When people say, "God is good," they typically do not mean for that to be dependent upon people, they do not typically mean for it to be a description of people (of their opinions) rather than description of God.
I am not saying that everyone uses the term "good" in an objectivist sense. I am suggesting that most people who say, "God is good", mean for that to be an objective expression. They mean for it to be a description of God, and not a description of what people think or feel.
It is fine for God to approve of God, but the reason why God is supposed to approve of God is that God is good; it is not supposed to be that God approving of God is what makes God good. Because that would just mean that God approves of God, which does not explain why God would approve of God.
Now, since you seem to suppose that I am wrong, what, exactly, do you suppose the typical Christian means when they say that God is good? Is that an expression about God, or about something else? What is it that you believe is commonly meant?
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