[i:76eca74456][size=18:76eca74456][/size:76eca74456][color=red:76eca74456][/color:76eca74456][/i:76eca74456] :mrgreen: God is according to the ignostic argument a term signifying nothing, the unimformative tautology that God wills what He wills and " hides our ignorance behind a theological fig leaf."Its incompatabilities in attributes make it incoherent. On the other hand to grant if significance for the sake of argument, the Ockham argument, using Ockham’s razor, shows it is redundant, requiring ad hoc assumptions to whatever natural explanations there are. Natural selection shows no need and indeed contradicts a mind behind it. Miracles are just natural phenomena-remissions and frauds, for example. :idea: Either God signifies nothing or He is redundant, one can dispense with Him as an explainer. That cause is thus no cause in the four causes.[color=brown:76eca7 4456][/color:76eca74456]
God is just a mystery surrounded by other mysteries, all signifying nothing.Iit is a personal explanation when the final cause suffices. It is a pseudo-explanation maskerading as saying something,but really is just noise. It is obscurantism buttressed by obfuscation. It is mumbo-jumbo that double talk backs up. It has no reality.
The presumption of naturalism[ Antony Garrard Newton Flew, before his deistic dotage] bases itself on the Ockham. This means that natural causes are primary and efficient. Thus, with either argument, God is no more needed than Thor, demons and gremlins as a personal explanation, contrary to Richard Swinburne. Do we really need angels to explain , with the laws of motion, the orbits of the planets? Do counselors need to invoke demons as behind mental illness? Nothingness is nothing! The cosmos came from nowhere and expands into itself. “Why is there Something rather than Nothing” [ Bede Rundle] is that nothing is the void and is full of energy.Whether as Hartle-Hawking proposes or one of the bounce theories is true, somethng just is.Remember that matter-energy cannot be created or destoyed[ Atheist Universe]. Doug can add his valuable comments here!
How very, very true. Why indeed must anyone have a god especially since any god or unproven invisible being exists except in one’s wild imagination? If I hold in my hand nothing and put nothing in a bowl, add water and stir I still have have the water but the nothing I put in the bowl still remains as nothing. Because something can not come from nothing nor nothing become something because nothing is nothing and remains nothing. If there were a god it still could not create something from nothing anymore than it could turn something into nothing. I can think up thoughts of things that do not exist, but I can’t make them materialize since what I make up is nothing but thoughts and thoughts are nothing. Neither could a god if there were a god as impossible means not possible and not possible means impossible. From nothing comes nothing and remains nothing.
That is the natural is the efficient, necessary, primary and sufficient causes. Some say that science does not deal with ultimate causes and cannot say anyting about God ,but that as shown is nonsense as Victor Stenger in “Has Science found God” and ” God : the failed Hypothesis” shows so well. How could there be nothing? Energy exists in the void; there is no real nothing. Hick, Swinburne and Platinga- lol! With Graham Oppy, I am a fallibilist atheist[ See his opus “Arguing for Gods” for thorough discussions of arguments for and against God and extensive citations from philosophers of religion.Now, my cognitive defects keep me from fathoming the more abstruse parts and the ones using modal logic. ].
That is the natural is the efficient, necessary, primary and sufficient causes. Some say that science does not deal with ultimate causes and cannot say anyting about God ,but that as shown is nonsense as Victor Stenger in “Has Science found God” and ” God : the failed Hypothesis” shows so well. How could there be nothing? Energy exists in the void; there is no real nothing. Hick, Swinburne and Platinga- lol! With Graham Oppy, I am a fallibilist atheist[ See his opus “Arguing for Gods” for thorough discussions of arguments for and against God and extensive citations from philosophers of religion.Now, my cognitive defects keep me from fathoming the more abstruse parts and the ones using modal logic. ]. The word is ignostic. Humanist Rabbi Sherwin Wine, who coined it, and Albert Ellis died two weeks ago.
Well, Physics opinion is divided as to whether the universe started from nothing or whether a very high energy singularity just happened to be there (how that could ever happen, I don’t know) at the start of time. As for Occam’s Razor, philosophical opinion is still divided as to whether or not this was an extremely clever, inciteful and applicable statement or crass and meaningless. I’ve just finished writing a book called Occam’s Blunt Instrument (which I think beats his razor anyday) and it’s rolliing through the presses as we speak.
Narwhol, what is this blunt instument in short? It sounds interesting.I understand that mattter-energy are eternal- their conservation.It is up to astro-physicists to find out if it is bounce to bounce[Team Ashtekar] or bud to bud[Steinhard and Turok]. Fellow naturalists/rationalists ,please add to our comments as these two arguments in a nutshell are the basis for any atheology. Quentin Smith has done yeoman’s work in this area. See the criticism of him in “Logic and Theism.”
All arguments for God rest on the mere feeling that there must be a super intlelligence behind and beyond the Universe. This probaly started out in thinking as animists do that the moon and sun are gods. This mere feeling and simple reasoning shows itself like seeing Yeshua in a tortilla or the man in the moon-pareidolia.
The book is “Arguing about Gods” and see “Logic and Theism,”
I was at the booklaunch for it today, and thoroughly enjoyed doing stuff on stage again. Occam’s blunt instrument is the antithesis of Occam’s Razor. It states that the most ridiculously convoluted explanation is usually the most entertaining. It is 23 short stories that deal with everything from the reasons why so many Americans are abducted by aliens to the phenomenon of indigo children. And instead of refuting these nonsensical claims it picks up the ball and runs with them in the form of para-parables (stories that advocate against the thing they illustrate rather than for it). Basically it is unrepentant sarcasm in the form of short stories in order to point out that, whist extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, bullshit really needs an extremely ridiculous back-story to fill in the holes.
God is just a mystery surrounded by other mysteries, all signifying nothing.Iit is a personal explanation when the final cause suffices. It is a pseudo-explanation maskerading as saying something,but really is just noise. It is obscurantism buttressed by obfuscation. It is mumbo-jumbo that double talk backs up. It has no reality.
I don’t think it can be that simple, otherwise such a large amount of people would not believe it, and educated people would not make endless philosophy about it…
The occam argument against that would be to say that these people are just a bunch of impressionable eegits. I think history proves that any number of people can be hopelessly, stupidly wrong about any number of issues. Look at Nazi Germany, look at people who think they have been abducted by aliens, people who have believed in gods, ghosts, goblins and aromatherapy. All of these people are wrong. Nearly all of them are impressionable eegits, The prime movers of all of these beliefs I would place in the separate category of stark raving bonkers and charismatic. It just takes a charismatic, determined loon with a megaphone to start your own private army of deluded morons.
skeptic griggsy Posted: 17 August 2007 06:42 PM
Some say that science does not deal with ultimate causes and cannot say anyting about God ,but that as shown is nonsense as Victor Stenger in “Has Science found God” and “ God : the failed Hypothesis” shows so well.
Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers also would say “nonsense”. Science can help to explain the causes of belief in God[s] as well as dismantle arguments for “proofs of God[s]”, but it can not say anything about God. The question of God, is at this time, and most likely will stay, insoluble to science. Science simply can not answer the question; “does God[s] exist”. Victor et al. are using the sciences to argue against a position, not the affirmative proposition that there is no God. Science can not prove a negative (at least not this negative). So, I think they are simply wrong, it is misguided framing.
The fashionable analogies to unicorns and fairies is a way to frame the debate also, it is an effort to correlate in peoples minds the belief in God with the belief in fairies etc. It is a way to do as Sam Harris has suggested, that belief in God should be looked at with the same disdain as someone who believes in astrology. It falls back on the idea of respect and the use of “conversational intolerance”. Going one God further says nothing about what science can say about the existence of God.
:mrgreen: God is according to the ignostic argument a term signifying nothing, the unimformative tautology that God wills what He wills and " hides our ignorance behind a theological fig leaf."Its incompatabilities in attributes make it incoherent. On the other hand to grant if significance for the sake of argument, the Ockham argument, using Ockham’s razor, shows it is redundant, requiring ad hoc assumptions to whatever natural explanations there are. Natural selection shows no need and indeed contradicts a mind behind it. Miracles are just natural phenomena-remissions and frauds, for example. :idea: Either God signifies nothing or He is redundant, one can dispense with Him as an explainer. That cause is thus no cause in the four causes.[color=brown:76eca7 4456][/color:76eca74456] 
