h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There seems to be a lot to talk about on this topic.
I find myself considering things differently as I read on.
Many interesting points have been made and I would like to add another one if I may.

I'm thinking RELEVANCY.

Relevancy to our lives as we live them today.

It seems to me that a lot of people have come and gone and I expect they believed all sorts of different things. I don't think it matters much who believed what except to the extent that it affected the world we live in now. That's not to say it didn't matter to them at the time but that is over now and all our discussions can't help them.

I suggest that the point of sorting this god thing out is to help us to understand the best way to live.

I desire to live a happy and satisfying life.

How to go about doing that can be quite elusive. My emotions don't seem to give a fig about what my intellect has to say at times. Fears, depression, anxiety, sadness, emptiness, etc. can kind of get to a guy at times.

And what about morals and ethics that are easier to talk about than to live.

Sometimes the thought of god can be quite comforting. Sometimes the idea can be inspiring, especially if he/she/they is/are all-powerful and perfectly good.

It's a false idea though, and through this falseness comes all sorts of mischief.

Killing, social abandonment, power mongering, greed, hate, etc. all done under the guise of an all powerful, all good, athority. Granted, such things happen without divine intervention as well, but the implication that god is backing the inhumanity is what pertains here.

People claim his/her/their direction and don't even realize that it is not real themselves.

Too bad he's not really there.



YB

E&C. Exactly. You just have to know the rule for addition. It doesn't stand much further explanation except to point out that it fits in with all the rest of our arithmetic system. In other words: the system is coherent, and addition is a part of it.

You could, of course, demonstrate it by a 'reductio ad absurdum'. What you do there is to show that if you accept that 1+1=3, then all sorts of unacceptable consequences follow. What is 3-1? What numbers add up to 2? What does 1+1+1 equal?

toxx

toxx: Indeed, it would involve all sorts of difficult questions if one stated that a particular equation was true when it disobeyed the laws of mathematics.

YB: You have an extremely good point. I don't know why no one in RL seems to understand that. I didn't think of it either, until now, when it seems perfectly obvious now that you've said it.

YB. I think you'll find that those things have been done in the name of *religion*, not God. Christians, Muslims and Jews have fought and persecuted one another. As far as I can see, they believe in the same God - so it has to be religion that's separating them.

I think ethics and morals reflect the interests of human societies. It can be argued that God knows what is in our interests and told us in order to save us having to working it out. I guess He knew that most of us would get it wrong!

toxx

E&C. People have argued that way for thousands of years. I have learned from some top people. Sometimes I worry that I make it too difficult to argue against me. I like to think that being right comes into it a bit; but a lot of it is knowing exactly how to say things so that they are difficult to attack!

toxx

As you please, Matholwch - some people are happily permitted to do so, but those who made me change in the first place, ought to acknowledge that change! It makes me cross, and in the words of Lewis carroll's rhyme they "do it to annoy/because (they) know it teases."

Jez, he doesn't want to ignore me, he wants to make life here as difficult for me as he can! He'll attack anything I say, and good luck to him. I can't be bothered with him at all!

Another lie.

If you really werent bothered you wouldnt even mention me would you.

He'll attack anything I say, and good luck to him.

No not quite right I'll *challenge* anything ANYONE says that I can see;

includes false information from tainted sources (lies),

is opinion given as fact,

is clearly false use of logic,

or is needlesly nasy and racist, sexist or homophobic, etc.....


Which when you are around does leave an awful lot to challenge. When you turn this into a war (your words not mine) and set about having me kicked off the site is it surprising that people view this as a conflict straight rather than an intellectual struggle.

He'll [challenge] anything I say, and good luck to him.

With an adivisery like you I dont need luck but thnks all the same


one love

Hi, good folks, In all this I wonder if we are not just trying to come to terms with our mortality. Just want to say that that is where all my own reasoning leads me. I have to have the potential for existence greater than just this earthly one or I have only the void to work with. Maybe there is some kind of a clue in that, taking the Ginesis myth into account?!!

Keep smiling, ed.

Coming to terms with mortality, is a big part, if not most of what it's about, I think ed. For each of us, awareness of that comes at a different time of our lives, some of us very young..

Hi Noggin:
'Is it possible to be self-referentially omniscient if one is bound by what is logically possible?'

The question makes my head swim, what with Godel in the background; but (we) Christians presumably believe implicitly that God is self-referentially omniscient. This is the thumbnail explanation of the generation of the second person of the Holy Trinity.

Hi Esty & Coren:
'I personally think that if there was something worthy of being called a 'god' there must be/have been more than one. I object to omnipotence.'

This is interesting. The problem is that without omnipotence as an attribute it is difficult to see how the creator could have produced something out of nothing. And I can't see 'space' for more than one omnipotent being because as far as I can see, an omnipotent being, if such exists, would have to be necessary existence itself (following Aquinas's third way, rather than Anselm).

I would quite like to see a polytheist 'take' on creation (to give it a term), not to argue against it, but just to know what they think about it.

Hi Toxx, I did actually mean materialist, definitely NOT determinist. The best explanation we have for how we got here (on earth, ignore cosmological stuff for a mo) is given by assuming that the forces we see at work today are the ones which happened in the past. There is an absolutely enormous amount of evidence for this, I can't think offhand of any other coherent explanation at all to be honest.

1+1=2 - Some things have to be taken as given, true, because it seems that logic just works that way. I will also accept that all knowledge is filtered through our brains and our way of thinking, but even a small child can see that 1 orange + 1 orange = 2 oranges. I know that this argument is rather circular, but surely our brains have evolved to make sense of the outside world, so we have grounds to believe that while we will never know the *exact* truth about nature, we will be fairly close.



'something immaterial, personal and eternal' must have started it. Why? Surely this only follows if you believe the premises of your agrument. If you don't, then perhaps it doesn't.

Me <>

HS <>

Pragmatically, and for most everyday purposes, this is of course how explanation works.

But it can't be sufficient for questions like "Is the questioner's satisfaction justified?"

Noggin

Morning Andrew

<<...but (we) Christians presumably believe implicitly that God is self referentially omniscient.>>

The problem is that (pace Godel, as you suggest, but also Church and Tuhring)this seems not to be logically possible. This would seem to mean that God is not bound by any logic, and all explanation ceases. If the universe is to be coherent, and therefore in any way knowable, the bottom line of existence has to be a "that is", not an "I am."
This is the point at which I part company with toxx.

Noggin

E&C. Exactly. You just have to know the rule for addition. It doesn't stand much further explanation except to point out that it fits in with all the rest of our arithmetic system. In other words: the system is coherent, and addition is a part of it.

You could, of course, demonstrate it by a 'reductio ad absurdum'. What you do there is to show that if you accept that 1+1=3, then all sorts of unacceptable consequences follow. What is 3-1? What numbers add up to 2? What does 1+1+1 equal?


Question

Is the coherence of the system sufficient, though there are internally consistent systems which are inconsistant with wider 'reality'

For example, Newtons laws of gravity were internaly consistant, but as the number of observations of the universe increased it was clear that Newtons Laws were insufficient to describe the observations, hence Einstein, whos own mathematical model is also internaly consistent but equally incapable of describing the universe as observed, which leads to string theory ect ect...

Logically the only theory which could adequately explain the big bang in sufficient detail for it's origin even to be speculated about, would be the long sought after and probably mythical unified field theory. The discovery of which will probably result in a DNA inexplicability event.

I some how find myself coming back to the limitations of the human brain/mind/perceptual system which leads to the unerring conclusion that 'God' as a concept is fundamentaly a product of the human mind and society, and given the infinite nature of the universe we believe we percieve, the referant object in the real universe is by definition unknowable, because it is infinite and therefore beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend.

'God' is just the way we try to describe it. The origin of the big bang question is in some ways spurious because however it is answered it raises another question. IF thing 'X' came before the big Bang then, what came before 'X'?

Hey, Andrew. See, omnipotence raises illogical and paradoxical questions, such as 'If God can do anything, can He create something so heavy He can't lift it?' The answer, at a glance, is yes, but of course the next question would be 'So then can He lift it?' and, since He can do anything, the answer would also be yes, thus making the answer to the first question 'No', and making it untrue that He can do anything. There are many such examples, but I like that one.

A polytheistic take on Creation? Look to the Greeks, my friend. They gave the Earth and Sky names and said that the Titans came from them. The gods came from the Titans, and humans and animals alike were also created by the Titans. When humans were all killed, they were restored through the blessing of the gods, as far as I can tell. I think the Greeks just assumed that the Sky (whos name I forget) and Earth, or Gaia, had always been around. Did I get everything right? *looks around* If I didn't, someone tell me, please.



See, if I object to omnipotence, it stands to reason that there needs to be more than one celestial being in order for everything they need to do to get done. Therefore my polytheism is justified by my objection to omnipotence, which does not originate from my polytheistic beliefs, it originates from my belief in logic.

SD: That's way too complicated for me. I know almost nothing about Newton's laws or Einstein's theories or anything like that. Whatsa unified field theory? I should know, I think, but I've forgotten. I may have known once... My brother says that gods are an outdated concept, that people created them to explain unexplainable phenomena such as weather and their very existence. I personally disagree, although I've never been able to put my disagreement into words. I think that people still need gods as someone or something to blame for all the cruelty and wickedness that hasn't left the world. Man never needed Satan. He'd got himself.

Esty and Coren

Re Omnipotence and Logic.

Shurely Omnipotence would mean that 'god' would have the power to suspend the laws of logic for his own ends.

Therefore he could decree that the object was both too heavy for him to lift whilst at the same time being able to lift it because he was an omnipotent being.

To be honest this is not as strange as the idea from quantum mechanics that a photon can pass through two different holes in a piece of card at the same time, which is supposedly a mathematically proven idea.

My point is that we come back to the fact that humans would need perceptive skills and minds far more complicated than the ones we currently possess to even hazzard a guess about the true nature of 'God' or 'Non-god' if you prefer.

Feh. I still don't like omnipotence. I like my world to make sense, and it doesn't. The world, that is. But neither does omnipotence.