The illogic of Atheism

In the mind of a small child there’s plenty of evidence. In both cases it’s just a question of seeing through the evidence.

This, again, requires an a priori assumption that the evidence is to be seen through. That sure makes it seem like you're going to do everything you can to see through the evidence, as many skeptics do, trying to find any little gap they can to dismiss it, rather than analyzing it in a more fair way.

Gee, let me think, because it's so hard for you...

I can easily imagine an NDE or a mystical experience would do the trick in convincing someone that there is something that exists beyond our comprehension or imagination or being able to be dreamed up, which requires imagination to do so.

So... there would be something that cannot truly known nor understood, yet exists.

Like a fairy?

This is not the god of religion... this is the "God" of mysticism, of philosophical meandering, the "God" whose nature is a mystery, yet the journey toward trying to understand is built upon. Thus, Plato's One, Lao Tzu's Tao, Hinduism's mystical concept of Brahman, etc.

Yep. You may well be right. What I am finding interesting is that folk are having to get very slippery and non-specific with their definition of ‘god’ to argue against the ‘tooth fairy’ argument.

This may suggest the argument is sound with the vast majority of gods and religions at which it is directed.

Perhaps the question is “what evidence is there to support the existence of a supreme being versus that for the Tooth Fairy (or similar entity)?”.

I think it would be hard to argue there’s no evidence that might support the existence of a supreme being. However how one interprets it is another matter. I’d say I can’t think of anything that supports the existence of a Tooth Fairy.

You're trying to hard not to see it. The evidence is the money found under the pillow the next morning.

In the mind of a small child there’s plenty of evidence. In both cases it’s just a question of seeing through the evidence.

I think it’s more a case of assessing the evidence. Children believe because they trust what they are told without questioning it very often and haven’t developed the analytical skills based on experience and knowledge. But you know this really don’t you?

Like a fairy?



Yep. You may well be right. What I am finding interesting is that folk are having to get very slippery and non-specific with their definition of ‘god’ to argue against the ‘tooth fairy’ argument.

This may suggest the argument is sound with the vast majority of gods and religions at which it is directed.

Surely we can put this one to bed? We can all see that you are having fun defending the indefensible but the fact is that the argument is a false equivalence.

The definition of God is a problem for everyone - including Dawkins - but he insisted on including all gods. Some very profound philosophy surrounds some of those definitions but Dawkins, by his own admission, seeks to mock and ridicule. As we have seen in this thread, even other atheists are uncomfortable with his approach but the audience he is playing to are those I described as the YouTube atheists - the mocking, insulting tribe you can see ranting under any video suggestive of a spiritual reality.

I would suggest, Malf, that many of the proponents like and respect you and, though I'm not saying you should pander to that, we can all see that you have picked a loser here and are persisting, perhaps out of loyalty to your hero or perhaps just to yank our chains.

I think it’s more a case of assessing the evidence. Children believe because they trust what they are told without questioning it very often and haven’t developed the analytical skills based on experience and knowledge. But you know this really don’t you?

In a sense, aren’t we all those children?

 

In a sense, aren’t we all those children?

 

Speak for yourself. Lol

I think it’s more a case of assessing the evidence. Children believe because they trust what they are told without questioning it very often and haven’t developed the analytical skills based on experience and knowledge. But you know this really don’t you?

This says otherwise. There's a whole series of videos on this YT channel: My world is getting dumber: Some Americans are ignorant and proud 127 What is the shape of the Earth   https://youtu.be/6c6qEmIX-8s

Some very profound philosophy surrounds some of those definitions

Yeah this is what I wanted to get into by referencing that Feser post. It seems reality's basement, for the atheist, must either be what some philosophers refer to as "indeterminism" or even in some cases "hyperchaos" OR a set of brute facts about Nature that cannot be explained in and of themselves. They need not be materialist, I think immaterialists like the atheist Raymond Tallis or Gregg Rosenberg would also think the latter.

OTOH, Bernardo has said (in the past at least, not sure where he is now on this) that the Transcendental Mind isn't self-conscious, just awareness. Is that a God, or a metaphysical lynchpin then? From what I am getting out of Neo-Platonism the One is potentially self-conscious but this consciousness, once awakened, is then the Intellect. But we too are of the One, as much as the Universal Intellect (which we are also a part of), so then who/what exactly is worshiped? (Elaine Pagel's, in her book about the Gnostics, has suggested it is this very point of our sharing of Divinity that made religion about orthodoxies rather than mysticism. The Church (as a symbolic stand in for all religions in a sense?) arguably couldn't stomach Gnosticism/Hermeticism b/c it defies systems of control.)

The other challenge for me is the aspects of God that I think are most amenable to being proved don't necessary suggest a personal God. A Prime Mover must, at least by Aquinas' definition, be Changeless. A Universal Intellect is holding time transcendent logical/mathematical Truths in Its divinity. Yet such a Being, outside of our conception of Time, seems so removed that worshiping It would be like worshiping the Natural Laws?

At the same time would we find comfort in a God that is as lost as we are, the kind Franco Ferrucci describes in his beautiful work God: An Autobiography? ->

One day I raised my eyes and saw the birds. I will never forget that moment, and I've kept it alive throughout the ages, in scattered paintings and writings, down to recent times. With the gaze of the reptiles, I stared at the birds as if they were lost poems. I could not believe that it was I who had made them, and I didn't understand why I had not noticed them until that moment.

There's even a later part where God screams out an apology upon looking at the violent chaos of the animal world...At the same time I recall in conversations about god during my Catholic School days and it felt like most didn't care so much about parting seas or voices in the thunder...one person even said "I just want someone to say, 'It's okay, I'm here, I love you' during my darkest hours"...

So what's the reconciliation between a Being in Time, whose compassion can reach us as individuals, and the God that we can express some metaphysical confidence in as the force that facilitates all Change and establishes the Platonic Forms of Logic & Mathematics? I've no good solution...Whitehead and his successors in process theology have some ideas about this, but digging into Whitehead is hard at least for me.

The Wikipedia entry at the least offers some clarification ->

It should be emphasized that for Whitehead, God is not necessarily tied to religion.[115] Rather than springing primarily from religious faith, Whitehead saw God as necessary for his metaphysical system.[115] His system required that an order exist among possibilities, an order that allowed for novelty in the world and provided an aim to all entities. Whitehead posited that these ordered potentials exist in what he called the primordial nature of God. However, Whitehead was also interested in religious experience. This led him to reflect more intensively on what he saw as the second nature of God, the consequent nature. Whitehead's conception of God as a "dipolar"[116] entity has called for fresh theological thinking.

The primordial nature he described as "the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality,"[114] i.e., the unlimited possibility of the universe. This primordial nature is eternal and unchanging, providing entities in the universe with possibilities for realization. Whitehead also calls this primordial aspect "the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire,"[117] pulling the entities in the universe toward as-yet unrealized possibilities.

God's consequent nature, on the other hand, is anything but unchanging – it is God's reception of the world's activity. As Whitehead puts it, "[God] saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved."[118] In other words, God saves and cherishes all experiences forever, and those experiences go on to change the way God interacts with the world. In this way, God is really changed by what happens in the world and the wider universe, lending the actions of finite creatures an eternal significance.

Whitehead thus sees God and the world as fulfilling one another. He sees entities in the world as fluent and changing things that yearn for a permanence which only God can provide by taking them into God's self, thereafter changing God and affecting the rest of the universe throughout time. On the other hand, he sees God as permanent but as deficient in actuality and change: alone, God is merely eternally unrealized possibilities, and requires the world to actualize them. God gives creatures permanence, while the creatures give God actuality and change

"In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute 'wisdom.' The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.
"It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.
"It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.
"It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.
"It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.
"It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.
"It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God ...
"What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world ... In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands."
 -Process and Reality