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

I'm gonna pee some gasoline on this fire.

God is allowed to kill people because He can also make them alive again.

If you want to know if God exists and who/what God might, try imagining what being God would be like.

What is a soul, and is it immortal? And, if a soul is immortal, would murder still be wrong? Why, or why not?

Answers please.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Rule one of logic is to ask answerable questions.

How can you know a question is answerable before it is asked? Unless you already know the answer in which case why did you ask the question in the first place?

Hmm.. a toughie... but since an angel is all form and no substance, I'm guessing that there is room for infinite angles dancing on the point of a pin. Or was it the head you were asking for?
Seriously though, I have nothing worthwhile to add...:
If you belive in God, you accept some higher being who is the source of ethics. God can do whatever God darnwell (see how I avoided the prophanity?) pleases. It's something I can't cope with, but then I don't belive in God either...

You can know that a question is answerable by poising it in such a way that you might conceive a fictional answer. Also, if you confine your questions to stuff that can be _tested_, you've come a long way...

I assume that you are being facetious, young ex-Spearcarrier.

I am really - I was sort of bookmarking this in case there were any developments I needed to know about...what with floods of biblical proportions aflicting the country I might have to about face and jump ship...or is that too many mixed metaphors?

If I were a seaborne rat (and there are those who think I am) facing in the wrong direction (and sometimes I think that I am) then about facing and jumping ship would be a jolly good idea. On the whole, however, YES.

So explain to me why it is not possible to answer the question of whether the soul is immortal.

If you regard that question as unanswerable, here is a more answerable one:

Does the soul survive the death of the body?

The question of whether the soul survives the body is answerable, as is the question of whether it is immortal, but it's not possible to prove the answer by logic.

In order for us to know anything, in the logical sense, it has to be true, we have to believe that it is true, and we have to have sufficient evidence that it is true. Evidence can never be sufficient - just because the sun has risen every day in our experience doesn't mean it necessarily will tomorrow. We take it on trust that the world operates as we have been told by those who have studied it, and that things will continue to happen in the way that they always have - but we could be mistaken. We can't always rely on our senses or memories, and those who have made a study of the world could be mistaken - they often have been. So our knowledge is always provisional.

The problem is that we don't have any evidence at all that the soul exists - or that it doesn't - as souls are usually held to be invisible and generally undetectable, so we can't know if it survives the body.

All you can do is believe that it exists or not. Like God, if you have faith in the concept than it exists for you, if not then not - but the fact of faith cannot make the soul survive in any objectively demonstrable way. Which is an answer, but you may feel it's not a very satisfactory one.

Oh dear, semantics again. I should not have said 'answerable'. If a hypothesis is not disprovable then, for rational people, it is useless. If a question is based upon a hypothesis that is not disprovable then, to me, it seems a pretty stupid question, albeit an answerable one.

To right religious people
bang on about there being
no way to disprove God and
the afterlife as if that is
a good thing! What it means
is that if god exists he has
no relevance to life or this
reality (not that I am surjesting
this is the only one).
Just because one can not prove
there is no after life dose not
mean that it is real.
I would like some one to disprove
my belief that there are invisible
non material metaphorically pink
fairies that buzz around the universe
in imaginary metaphorically red London
buses fighting each other with pure
energy.
GO on disprove it!
JK
THe unwise

Touché.
By that power, is it possible that popular characters from our immedate pasts folk-tales (or even contemporary film/book-heroes) can become the messiah's of tomorrow?
It would be fun wouldn't it? Church of Superman.

Terry Pratchett calls it 'narrative causality'.

Well I think God is an Evil Piece of work. Killing people for not believing in him, casting out Humans from the garden of eden for eating an apple, making Abraham go up to a hill top to see if he would kill his son. Smiting babel and babylon, showing intolerance and other crap. Letting wars, natural disaters and other terrible acts happened. inventing Paedophiles, rapists, murderers and etc.

He's a nasty piece of work and I'm going to hell...


And your all coming wif me

Conor

This post has been removed.

Brilliant. There is no way for me to answer that post in a satisfying way, so I'll let Shakespeare support part of your argument. (You figure out what)

Shall I compare thee to a summers day?
Though art more lovely and more temperate
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
and summers lease hath all too short a date
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines
and often is his gold complexion dimm'd
and every fair from fair sometimes decline
by chance, or nature's course untrimm'd
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
nor loose possession of that fair thou ows't
Nor shall Death brag thou wanders't in his shade
when in eternal lines to time thou grows't
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
so long lives this, and this gives life to thee


Hint: It's the last part that's important.

Jar, my edition of Shakespeare has a different twelfth line.
'In lines eternal unto time thou grow'st'
I would point out that forever is a long time and that one day there may be no sentient being to remember the Bard.

I refuse to repeatedly type 'The Unmentionable Marauding Pillowcase' so I'm going to refer to you as UMP. I hope that you don't get it. The 'ump that is.
Hypotheses have to be framed in a disproveable fashion. 'Baboons exist' may be a meaningful statement, but it is not a useful hypothesis for the very reasons you so ably explain. So 'God is merely the conscious mind of the universe' is a meaningful statement but, similarly, not a useful hypothesis. Statements can be meaningful but also untrue and\or useless, and that is how I regard your pontifications about God. Linking theism to fine sentiments, such as 'a sense of compassion', or to beguiling mush, like 'deepen our own conscious awareness', does not make it a true or useful concept.
I am a rational person, some of the time. I am also a poet, occasionally, and I have an interest in philosophy. As for mysticism and prophecy, you can add them to my list of useless concepts. I am really rather uncomfortable with the promotion and perpetuation of theist myths to my fellow human beings, because sadly not everybody is rational enough to understand that we cannot prove anything. We have to live in a set of probabilities and if we have any free will at all we should exercise it by rationally calculating the likely outcome of our actions, not by some unthinking reference to 'God'.

The main problem with a conscious universe is that information transfer appears to be limited to the speed of light. As such, the bigger something is, the dumber it is. The universe, being very big, would have the level of consciousness of a BBC Micro...

If you wanna say that your soul is your memeplex, that's fine, but I suggest it's not what most people think of as souls, and it certainly ain't immortal.

Here, here.

Lucinda, I see you're still hung up on light speed! You underestimate the nature of intelligence! Stay around, maybe you will soon see a few amazing things that will make you reconsider. As for the soul being a mememplex, it is that but also more than that as a mememplex is not "merely" a mememplex because it needs a medium to exist in; I believe that that medium is permanent and that there is also a permanent "realm" where memes exist, are created and come from. Call that realm "Hilbert space"; it is a realm of concepts and meaning and it is independent of actual spacetime.

Percy, why are you distrustful of religion, mysticism and prophecy? Just because some people talk nonsense about these things does not mean that there cannot be truth in these things, no more than the fact that some people are disappointed in love means that there is no such thing as true love and that people should therefore not try to find it.

Here is another prophecy: there will always be some sentient being, and perhaps the words of Shakespeare will become garbled or forgotten, but the truth that they express will always be known. Is this a useless prophecy? I think not. Irrespective of whether it is true or not, just by pondering it people might discover something about the meaning of words, about truth, about memory, about sentience, about life and about eternity. This might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed all good prophecies are self-fulfilling because they serve to spur people on to the action necessary to create the particular future of the prophecy. Personally I will always make optimistic prophecies that can help (motivate) people towards the attainment of some desirable future. Here are more examples of such prophecies: humanity will solve environmetal problems and the earth will once more be filled with a rich variety of living creatures - even more biodiversity and a greater quantity of beings than ever lived before; we will eliminate wars; we will conquer death and humans will be potentially capable of living forever; soon EVERYBODY will be on the internet and its speed will be so much faster that people will be able to communicate all over the globe at the speed of thought. Let's see how useless or useful those prophecies turn out to be!

But the way I see it prophecies are not even supposed to become literally true - they merely represent a tool for forming concepts of the future and hence for guiding the present towards the future. Similar with speculations about God. If you are not dogmatic about your speculations, they can be extremely useful as tools for forming pictures of reality. I believe that imagination is ultra-important, I truly believe that what manifests in reality depends on what we are able to conceptualise, and that depends on our imagination. The truth of reality is that it is so vague that it is possible to form many different pictures of it, every one of them internally self-consistent. My prophecies don't need to become literally true, and my speculations don't need to be literally true. They also don't need to be provable or disprovable - but they can still be useful!

What kind of hypotheses do YOU consider to be useful? Useful for what?

The "use" that I am thinking of is this: understanding ourselves and the reality we live in. Any kind of concept that we can form, we can later use to form new concepts. If we can form concepts of God (the more, the better) and of the soul, and of immortality, we are able to use those concepts to form different concepts or to compare other concepts with. And that leads to an improved ABILITY to understand, an ability to adjust and refine our concepts to make them more consistent with each other and with our experiences. Another truth is that reality is ultimately beyond our comprehension. But still we ought to try and understand as much of it as possible. Discarding concepts of God or the speculations of the thousands of generations of people before us who have thought deeply about existence is somewhat like shooting ourselves in the foot.

About rationality: one of the impulses that I see as religious by nature is the impulse to know things, to understand things, to THINK. So the word "unthinking" does not apply. People must think as much as possible. The more different ways they can find to think about things, the better. Wisdom comes from trying to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable ideas. True mental satisfaction comes from seeing patterns, from perceiving analogies, from constructing metaphors. Thinking should be pro-active, not just reactive. We need logic and rationality, but there is also a dimension of intuition and creativity that we need beyond mere logic and rationality. For instance in practice it is utterly impossible to logically calculate the outcome of any really worthwhile action. The actions that really matter are precisely those whose outcomes are utterly unknowable - leaps in the dark, leaps of faith! The things that I try to do depend entirely on extreme motivation in the face of daunting uncertainty: trying to teach people to be tolerant, to empower themselves by growing in wisdom and sensitivity, trying to reverse the environmental destruction in the world, trying to bring harmony and to reconcile apparent opposites. There is no way to rationally calculate the outcome of these efforts. They in fact depend, for motivation, on an overreaching vision that has to be trusted despite the lack of supporting evidence.

Here is now a personal view: God exists, but nobody knows the truth about God. Nevertheless it is imperative that we find out this truth and encourage everybody to find it out and also to understand it. We NEED to empower people to the extent where they are rational enough to be able to deal with the most complicated concepts. People need to be able to "handle the truth"! I force nobody to adopt any religious view - I merely encourage them to think about the problems. For themselves. For that reason I will not go into long arguments trying to prove that God exists, nor will I produce documentation of alleged proof.

And I still contend that these "hypotheses" are extremely, exceedingly, incalculably useful. Because in searching for God we will, at the very least, find what is best in ourselves. And that will, at the same time, enable us to be the best that we can be. There is an immense voyage of discovery that every one of us can and should embark on. And I say - every tool that we can get, we should use. I encourage people to use the tools of logic and rational science, and see what knowledge they can get by that means, but to also use the tools of subjective internal exploration, by different methods of mysticism, or reading so-called sacred texts, and see what knowledge they can get by THAT means. And I still contend that the greater diversity of different kinds of knowledge you can experience, digest, understand and assimilate into a harmonic whole, the more fulfilled you will be. And the closer to the TRUTH you will be. You can say yes, or you can say no. My only goal is to make people aware of the options, of the possibilities. The choice is up to them.

Either these concepts are useful to you, or not. Their potential usefulness is not objective, but subjective. This means their usefulness is dependent on whether you can find a way to make them useful to yourself.