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

This might be of interest to some...

http://www.h2g2.com/A452666

Contemplation

I think Thomas Aquinas phrased five "proofs" of Gods existance, but I might be mistaken. I've only read one of his proofs and, well, mideavel (sp? I never get that word right!) logic never ceases to amaze me. Basically it's a sound argument IF you belive in God. But then if you do, you don't need the argument, and if you don't belive, the arguments are just silly. I've never heard of the title "6 Reasons We Know There is a God", but if I remember wrong, Thomas might have written that.

Thomas and Aquinas both formed one of Europes most powerfull organizations. A church that laid waste to an entire world, and that continues to wreak havoc on frail minds everywhere. If that is not the result of great (but sadly twisted) minds, then what is? I am of the conviction that a person can be a great thinker even if their ethics are way of and their sanity left ages ago.

Brief summary of Descartes: Doubted everything, said nothing was real unless proven real. Proof of "real existance" can only be founded on premisses already proven real. (See his problem?) To be able to accept that anything existed, he needed to find a base premiss that everything else was built upon. He came to the conclusion (intuitivly) that he himself existed, because SOMEONE had to doubt everything: I doubt, therfore I am. This was rephrased as "I think, therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum). However, one premiss is not enough to make an argument, so he had to find a second base premiss. He concluded that "God exists". How he came there, I do not remember unfortunatly. I belive he went on about "intuit knowledge" and "the stuff everybody just KNOWS". Go figure

Pascal's Wager? Sounds exciting. What is it?

Pascal's Wager = see http://www.h2g2.com/A341920

pluggity plug

Descartes doubted everything
so he set to discover a
premise that everything else was built upon
cogito ergo sum
His is unquestionable as to query it you
must exist.
(there may be an argument that Decarte was to
precise and all we can really say is that there
are thoughts there for theses thoughts exist but
this is largely an argument of definition)
From this premise that no one can argue about he
did indeed jump to the existence of God.
He said that what we perceive has to come from
some were. If we perceive of things that are
more perfect then our selfs then there origin
must be in something more perfect then our selfs
from God.
God (he said) was the embodiment of perfection and
the source of any ideas we have above our station.
He all so said that the reality that we perceive must
be in some sense to do with how thing are as even
though our senses can some times wrong God (being
perfect) is no deceiver and would not want us to
be wrong all the time in are perceptions.
(sorry this is a bit scrappy but its early)

Yes, but do you exist? What if I snip the cord connecting the hemispheres of your brain such that they have to function autonomously? What if I point out that the ego is an illusion necessary for the human brain to map out the data it collects? What if I point out that human life is a *Process* and not a state of "Being" at all?

Descartes was on a futile quest to discover a fundamental tenet of the real, but all he could build at best was a self-authenticating model of it. Not that this isn't worth doing; but there's nothing fundamental about Descartes' conclusion. In a sense, he didn't quite doubt enough for my taste.

Let's debate the relative meaning of the terms "existence" and "think" and "I" and see if we can show Descartes up..

existence -in the realms of the active
think -thoughts-patterns of abstract ideas
I -the total of all the thoughts perceived and the ones that arnt perceived but that still influence the thoughts that are.

With these def.s I except
I think therefor I am.

> "I -the total of all the thoughts perceived and the ones that arnt perceived but that still influence the thoughts that are."

Heh. With that definition "I" am all of you lot, and more. Except those of you whose thoughts don't influence mine...

Hivemind?

Bees, bugs, or tyranids?

Nah, just that when people think X, they tend to tell me about it, and that influences my thoughts. Even if X happens to be something dumb like "All men are equal", in which cases it spawns the thought "this guy is an idiot"...

The question is, what sort of God do you believe in? An all powerful one, who is responsible for everything? This sort of God can be prayed to for help, but do you want to rely on an almighty God responsible for cancer, plague, war, etc?
If you believe in freewill, and that God is testing us like some kind of laboratory mice - well fine, but then he's not really relevant to anything we do, is he?
The trouble with God is that people think they have some kind of direct link with him - they can then justify anything they want to on the grounds that it's God's will. This attitude must be rejected and human beings must be made responsible for their own actions without reference to any kind of God.
Good and evil certainly exist - but they exist within people, not outside them. Some people are good and some are evil, and there are all shades in between.

Yeah, cause...
Cause..
Couldn't find anything witty to say. Sorry.
How did it all start?
Someone said
"God is dead"

I disagree - you can pray to any sort of God at all. I semi-regularly pray to the Lord Chance, and he's completely unreliable...

OK

Chance would be a fine thing.

Let's go back to Descartes. I'm presuming the summary give from Jk is correct.

If a platypus perceived there was something more perfect than itself, we would not say this was proof of God. We would say the platypus was perceiving correctly. There are, after all, things more perfect than platypi.

Only humans would presume that there is nothing more perfect than themselves that could not come from a force as unquestionable as God. Our hubris is unmatched on Earth. But rather than buy this egoism, I believe that science, art, and imagination are all perfectly capable of creating something more perfect than humans.

Therefore, we are correct in perceiving that something is more perfect than ourselves. Of course there is. But God doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. That's just my humble opinion.

JAR - I was paraphrasing the title for Aquinas' work... obviously I could not remember the title or the author, nor, apparently, the number of proofs (although I still think it was six), but you're talking about the same work I was.

The underlying fallacy in most of Aquinas' "proofs" is that everything comes from a common source. Such as (paraphrased):

"There is a certain amount of good and evil in the world. Everything has some good and some bad in it. However, there must be something that is all goodness, and that is what we call god."

He starts out by personifying a fuzzy human concept of goodness, then goes on to say that it stems from a common source. We could make the same argument for light. Some things have more light than others, and that light all has to come from somewhere, and we call that source the sun. But what about electric lights, be they from man-made bulbs or electrical storms? How about fire? And don't the stars generate their own light?

Bottom line, Thomas Aquinas was a nut, and I would never call him one of the great philosophers of the Western world.

He'd fit right in on H2G2, then

3

JOTD: I haven't lost my mind -- it's backed up on tape somewhere.

Colonel: Yup, we're talking about the same piece of work here (but don't forget proving god's existance through "logic" was the hot thing to around that time. More people that Thomas has tried).
In defence of Thomas (who I agree have not contributed to making the world a better place, and whose logic was flawed):
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away there was a man (let's call him Aristoteles) who described the world and how it was built up by the elemental spheres. The inner sphere was earth, then came water, air, fire and finally the celestial element (sometimes called ether). There was another guy around that place (I think it was Democrit) who claimed that everything was made of itsy bitsy tiny unbreakable pieces of matter, but he was obviously mad, Aristoteles could defend his theory much better using logic:
Everything seeks it's natural place. Earth travels downwards, water travels downwards but remains above earth, air and fire travels upwards. Ether is a special, celestial element and will never be found anywhere but above all other elements. You can test this theory by throwing a rock up in the air. You'll notice travels up a while, then stops, turns and heads back to the ground, below air. If there's water where the rock lands, it will travel through the water as well, and settle on the oceanfloor. (Fire was a hard nut. I'm not sure how he solved that one, but I guess you see that fire reach for the sky and that "proves" it is above air.)
This philosophy was widely accepted by the greeks. It was the basics of alchemy, beliving that everything consists of a varying portion of the four baseic elements, and continually searching for that fifth element. It was also close to the world of Thomas Aquinas. Electricity was at best considered a small renegade power with of no consequence for humans. The sun was made of celestial stuff, and so was the moon and the stars. They weren't great balls of fiery plasma. Fire belonged to the sphere between ether and air, and was thus almost celestial. Light is something I have yet to see discussed by any of the old thinkers. It was a common belif that everything was built from varying elements, and the soul was no different. However, the elements of the soul was a big issue. If someone claimed that good and evil was a part of the human soul, well, that was a valid claim. Such fuzzy human concepts were accepted as real things. You can't really blaim him for using the fuzzy concepts of his own reality to argue issues important to his own time. If we did that, then few of history's great personalities deserve mentioning. (da Vinci and Sun Tzu are the only two I can think of right now,) Freuds psychoanalysis is getting old fashioned, Marx's socioeconomic models have been replaced.
What Thomas did was make Aristoteles valid for even the medieval (anybody want to show me how to write that word? Please? ) thinkers. Without the church, I'm guessing (only guessing) that europe would be much further ahead scientifically and philosophically, but without Thomas, the church would be even further behind. Scary thought?

All this IMO, of course.

Maybe Thomas of Aquinas was a nut, but so was Einstein. (Without whom we would not have Tsjernobyl, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.)

JAR, the devils advocate

The people you describe were, as you ably demonstrate, not nuts. They made the best sense they could with the ideas that existed in their temporal and cultural frames; or most of them did. In due course our own ideas will seem hopelessly primitive. It is this evolution of ideas (memes) that we need to understand and we can only understand it by studying the past.
The problem with people like Thomas Aquinas (mediaeval!)is that they tried to explain the why and how of everything in order to justify the supremacy of the church and their own belief in God. They were not comfortable with uncertainty and probably did not understand the mathematical models that describe probability.
I hope that the more educated amongst us can cope with the idea that not everything is explicable or knowable. We can learn more and more about the universe but we shall end up with a another set of questions. This need not depress us, for each of us can in some small way contribute to progress. We just have to accept that others will benefit and that there is no personal nirvana at the end of it.
Religion was not without merit, much of this argument can be found in Ecclesiastes, but perhaps the time has come to put it aside.

Percy von Wurzel, you deserve a hug.

I think it is good
to debate our
belifs has any one
reached any concultions?
I started this debate of
with God is dead
but i think most people
on the list think he
needs futher discution before
he is burred, I wonder
if we could ever reach
a concultion that
conviced all the open minded
(i my selph am not open minded)
?
Well is he dead?