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

Noggin

Do you think we have got as far as we can in trying to convince each other of our point of view...? By all means add other thoughts / challenges to me if you like, its been good to think about my worldview and to consider whether or not I'm totally deluded!!!

mich2ael

Hi Mich2ael.

If you are deluded I suspect you will not be easily convinced.

Presumably you worship the god you seem to believe in so what exactly is the purpose of worship?

F

>>The bible, as it has come down to us, is not an historical document, it is a collection of faith-based articles. And that's fine.<<

i beg to differ. The bible is full of historical documents which even historians accept as history.

someone earlier said that the gospels contradict each other. i would love to see how they contradict. bearing in mind one of the main reasons why historians accept them as true descriptions of events is that they aren't identical. the main thrust of all four is the same they differ in the details but they don't contradict.

>>Presumably you worship the god you seem to believe in so what exactly is the purpose of worship?<<

when you believe that God sent his son to die for me, a sinner, then you worship him. the way i lead my life should result in death. when im judged if God looks at my actions i should be punished, the same as every other person on this earth. i however wont be punished because i believe and trust on Jesus. When God looks at me he sees the perfect life of Jesus. How can I not worship a God who did that for me?
worship is a fancy name of saying thank you. the purpose of it is thanking God and acknowledging he is there and what he has done for us.

Hi Nicky.

So who does the worship actually benefit - you or God? Why would an omnipotent god need or even want to be worshipped?

F

I'm not particularly trying to convince you of anything, Mich2ael, but I am pointing out some places where I think you haven't thought things through as far as you could. In that respect, further excavation is always a good thing. In that respect Jez's question is a good one to get you thinking.

You could challenge some of my premises too.

As is often the way we've bifurcated into two separate discussions. One is essentially philosophical, the other about the historicity of the bible. I'll make some more comments on both of these in due course.

Noggin

ps
Hi Fathom, how are things going with you these days?

So I assume Michael doesn't want to debate with me because

a) He think he cannot win

or b) he thinks I cannot lose

--

I wonder which it is?

--

Does the Christian god have free will?

--

Jez

Why just one God?
And who is to say that He is always there?
That's the monotheism problem.
However, polytheism is not without its share of flaws too.
And so is nihilism.

Maybe this gives atheists something good to laugh at.
But, just because you laugh at a religion doesn't change your own beliefs.
A Christian can still laugh about something about Christianity that s/he thinks is funny.
Or a Muslim about Islam. Or Hindu about Hinduism.
Perhaps irreverence is universal?

Well, looking at it again depending on the strictness or severity of said individual's degree of beliefs, s/he might not laugh at something about his or her own religion.

People frown on laughing about other people's religions and yet some still do so too.

By universal I mean with the assumption that it would only span through the human race since I can't really speak for the rocks or the trees or the fish or invertebrates, or have any idea whether animals have a sense of humor or not. And I'll leave other worlds or planes of being out of it too because that might get skeptics very fired up and not very many people can agree on exact stuff having to do with those sorts of things anyway. Or so it would seem.
Hmm.

I forget the point of what it was I was trying to say now too, but it lay somewhere buried in there. This is awkward.

Oh , I mixed together and converged the concepts of religion and outlook-on-life/philosophy again.

Sorry about that.

Hi Bouncy.

"What is this free will, that it is exempt from the laws of nature? Why have we not observed this?"

I haven't claimed that freewill is exempt from the laws of nature. In fact, I'm a compatibilist in most senses.

We know of only two general and metaphysically different types of causes. The material causes beloved of science (skipping the quantum mechanics question for now), and causes by personal agents such as ourselves. One obvious difference is that material causes begin to operate as soon as the set of initial conditions for the effect come into existence. In contrast, agents consider when to act.

Furthermore, we have a whole other vocabulary to talk about agent causation: such as 'reasons', 'desires', 'beliefs' etc.

There are many ways of supposing that the two vocabularies have, in principle, a means of mapping onto each other. Nevertheless, 'reasons' is a very difficult concept to attempt to express in purely material terms. Fred Dretske considers this in his book ("Understanding Behaviour: Reasons in a World of Causes", I seem to recall). It is rather wordy, but he makes an interesting case for the irreducibility of reasons.

To apply such thinking to the freedom of the will: one might argue that agent causation is not essentially (or, at all) subject to material influences (given 'physical possibility' of course). What it does appear to respond to is appeals to reason. This habit seems so ingrained in the human race that people are frequently seen misapplying it by swearing at inanimate objects.

Jbird

Hi Noggin, I'm OK thanks.

Hi jbird.

Are you suggesting that 'personal agents' are somehow exempt from the laws of physics?

"one might argue that agent causation is not essentially (or, at all) subject to material influences" Oh, I see that you are.

Don't you think that these personal agents are made of physical stuff then? Or are you arguing that even though we are made of common materials our minds are somehow exempt from the laws that govern the properties of those materials?

F

Hi Fathom.

''Or are you arguing that even though we are made of common materials our minds are somehow exempt from the laws that govern the properties of those materials?''

I'm rather arguing that there might be *extra* laws that govern the behaviour of minds. For example: when we think, it is *about* something. Nothing in the material world is *about* anything. This is the good old philosophical problem of 'aboutness', and how it is to be understood. However, it also seems to militate in favour of mental items being metaphysically distinct from physical ones. Plenty of further arguments exist.

Jbird

So now the debate has ashifted to stuff about arguments for and against the concept of a soul?
Hmm.

"I'm rather arguing that there might be *extra* laws that govern the behaviour of minds."

So you're arguing some kind of mind/brain duality. That there is a difference in form between mind and brain is clear enough just as there is a difference in form between computer hardware and software or between music and a piano. Nonetheless the rules governing the operation of software or the production of music are still firmly rooted in and dependent upon those which govern all material objects.

"Aboutness" is simply about symbolic representation. A map is 'about' the area it describes just as a thought is 'about' a particular subject where it is represented by the firing of neurons in the brain. A computer output is 'about', say, a spreadsheet in the way it is represented by electric charge in specific memory locations. A sculpture is certainly in the material world and may well be 'about' the subject, the viewer or the artist or even the relationship between them.

Mental items are neither distinct nor separable from physical (or metaphysical, although you should look that word up) ones.

Thorn; let's stick with the concept of mind before we get into the implausibility of the soul or [don't say it] consciousness [he said it].

F

Hi Jez

Here are some bible verses that describe the God I believe in...

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" - John3:16

"Then Jesus told them this parable: "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbours together and says, 'Rejoice with me: I have found my lost sheep.' I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent." " Luke15:3-7

"When the sun was setting, the people brought to Jesus all who had various kinds of sickness, and laying his hands on each one, he healed them." Luke4:40

mich2ael

But the question was

Does the Christian god have free will?

Thorn - it doesn't matter much whether one looks at body/mind, or spiritual/material or whatever. They are just different manifestations of dualism, the belief that there are two totally different types of substance.

The question as to how this works has been a standing one here on hootoo since forever. As yet, I'm not aware of a single attempt to answer that question by those that believe in it. It's just studiously avoided. Like it has been on this thread.

Noggin

Thank you for quoting the bible, michael.

Does the Christian god have free will?

--

Jez

The 'aboutness' of a map is in the mind of its creator or user - not in the map itself, or whatever it has been *chosen* to represent. All your attempted counterexamples fail similarly. As a simple illustration of the point, let's consider Wittgenstein's duck/rabbit representation. What it's about depends on the mind-set of the observer. There are other visual illusions that make the same point such as the wife/mother-in-law illusion. To whom do symbolic representations mean anything? The answer is to a mind. The symbol 'pain' would be about different things depending on whether the mind were of an English or French speaker OTBE.

It seems to me that you're arguing the eliminativist line: that there just aren't any mental objects. What about living and inanimate things. Living things can die, so distinguishing them from inanimate ones. Are you also suggesting that these categories don't exist either and that only inanimate things exist? Don't we usually accept a duality between what is alive and what isn't? When it comes to mental qualities, we also observe 'behaviour' as distinct from 'movement'.

I guess I'm not so much a dualist as one who tries to argue for *emergent properties* that are of a different (higher?) order. Would you want to suppose that a rock can think? Not quite as Math might, but on the grounds perhaps that under some system of representation, the arrangement of its parts *means* something - although not actually *to* anyone.

I'm quite content for now with your: 'Nonetheless the rules governing the operation of software or the production of music are still firmly rooted in and dependent upon those which govern all material objects.' That's unless, at the same time, you want to give up the idea that some material objects have beliefs. If so, why not all of them and wherein lies the difference?

Why raise a debate on a fairy tale owd mate?
If you want to discuss inventions on how to make life easier then a chat would be usefull but to talk about ficticious beings is just a waste of good time when there are more important things to dicuss like how to cure a certain illness or how to build a mosquito free house in a swamp. etc. Cheers and hope you find what you are looking for because God and the Devil are a myth invented by man.
Cheers Mate.Tom :0)

Welcome to the debate - we don't expect you to read the previous posts, as there are several thousand of them

But feel free to join in from wherever you feel most contentious.

There are atheists, agnostics, polytheists like myself, monotheists both of the One True Way and heretics, all for your delectation.

--

Jez the heathen

Noggin - the spiritual has, so far, eluded science.

Science can explain the chemicals which course through the body when a mother loves her child, but cannot isolate compassion, or mercy, or produce a single poem by stimulating the brain of a non-poet.

So far, these things exist, but are not measurable nor reproducable. In scientific terms, they are meaningless, because they cannot be tested by current scientific means.

Inspiration is still unexplained, and so is belief.

No amount of surgical intervention can produce a Christian or a heathen, at least not yet.

Until that breakthrough in science, we are goingto have to accept the spiritual on its own terms, and thus accept that it is at least possible, that there is something unexplained about the worlds. That something may well include whatever it is that I all a god, whatever it is that a poet calls his/her muse, whatever it is that causes us to be 'moved' by a beautiful image, or a scent, or a sound. There is no way, yet, that science can create a single memory, though it can now affect memory stored in the brain, and yet we all have memories. Maybe I have never 'seen' or 'heard' my gods, maybe I have simply had those memories added, whole, into my head by some being or force that /can/ manipulate memory? It is at least a possiblity, because the making of memories as still not understood.

So - I cannot prove the existence of my gods to you. I simply know they exist, for me. I can also not prove the existence of inspiration, and yet all of humanity acts as if it is real.

--

Jez