How many here are atheists?

[dalebert]

One thing I've noticed as of late is that the use of the word `god' signifies not only an inability to reason but also a significant deficit in one's ability to understand the nature of words.  Those who use the term `god' seem wholly unaware that god is first and foremost a word. They also seem unaware that for a word to have meaning or to refer to an existing thing, that word must have a definition. They also seem completely unaware of what constitutes a definition, and will attempt to define a word through metaphor and other invalid methods. It seems to me that the god meme is some sort of nuero-linguistic virus which cripples ones ability to use and interpret words in a meaningful way. The inability to reason would seem to be merely symptomatic of a deeper problem related to linguistic confusion. To inoculate against the virus would require education not merely in logic but more importantly in basic linguistics.

C'mon Dale, you're not really going to bring in that weaksauce are you? Let's break it down, then let me give a little advice to my atheist friends.

First, this guy's snippet is only a few seconds long, so it's hard for me to really figure out where he's coming from. But several of his statements are just so jaw-droppingly simplistic that, whereas I wouldn't normally comment on a link, it just needs to be addressed. It seems to me that your source is the one who needs education "not merely in logic, but more importantly in basic linguistics."

I thought the statement made sense in the context of what we've been discussing, in terms of very abstract descriptions of God and traits that seem contradictory so I didn't link a very recent video by the same guy that kind of sets up the video about the god meme. Since it's kind of long, I'll summarize by saying he talks about a frequent tendency for the less fundamentalist types to define God in metaphors like God is love, God is everything, etc. I think that's why Vitruvian was trying to ask you some concrete questions about traits of God so that you can answer yes or no and we can talk about what concrete claims you do make about God. Again, it's an attempt to stop wrestling with an amoeba.

God is stuff and things

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kOPcnIW3njI

[Caleb]

I'll get around to this later. For now, since your source talked about thought viruses, it reminded me of this:  Enjoy. 

http://www.videosift.com/video/Bloody-Mary-One-of-South-Parks-most-Controversial-Clips

[Pat K]

[Lloyd Danforth]

If that was one of their most controversial clips, I haven't been missing much.

[dalebert]

[dalebert]

[Caleb]

Ok, I'm finally going to take a few minutes to address this whole idea that people feel cheated if there isn't a precise definition of the term. I was going to work on the whole memes and thought virus concept too, but I've decided that just isn't relevant. Even if God is a meme, in Dawkins worldview every idea is a meme, so that doesn't speak to whether it is true or not. I don't want to get sidetracked by every flight of Dawkins' fancy.

So language. I think people have sort of endowed language with this magical set of properties. There were even a bunch of philosophers who, a few decades back, thought that definitions were the only thing to philosophy, and if we just defined everything, all the philosophical questions would be solved prima facie. I think that failure, of course, could have been predicted with even an elementary understanding of the limits of human reason, but hey, it was worth a shot. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" as they say. (Of course, they also say "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise", so I try not to listen to anything "they" say anyway.)

Ok, language. First, what language is "NOT". Language isn't primary. We don't define something, and then experience it. If we die, things that we describe still exist. Things aren't tied to our thoughts. Can I prove this? In an absolute sense, no. I don't know what will happen when I die. If all the outside world is just my thought creation, then poof, if I go, it goes. Since I'm not a solipsist, I don't believe this. I don't think that outside things are tied to me. So definitions, in the grand scheme of things, don't change reality one whit. ALL DEFINITIONS DO IS HELP ME TO UNDERSTAND BETTER. This is a very crucial point. I'd repeat it, but I trust that the all caps made the point.

Now, is everything perfectly definable? I don't think most things are. The more I was trying to come up with examples, the more I realized that everything is an example. All of our nouns, certainly, (except maybe a few proper names) all of our verbs are very general and vague. This makes sense. If we had to describe everything as a separate entity, the English language would become completely burdensome, even unlearnable. It would have trillions of words. Maybe more. So words are classifications. Symbols. They are very general. Particularly nouns and verbs. Now, a lot of our adjectives and adverbs are more specific. They are linguistically designed to make the classification more precise. But the key here is that even adjectives and adverbs are just less general. They are not ultimately concrete. They still are themselves generalizations. A good example is "green". Green is a color, but even within this color band there are a myriad of variations. We can try to get it down a little closer. "hunter green." This is a little more precise, but still is a range. It's not ultimately specific and concrete. It's vague and general. I'm going to come back to "green" in a minute.

The words that we use that are most precise are our numbers. But even these are a little vague. One. The simplest number. What is one? An atom is "one". But it has an electron, a neutron, and a proton. So it is still a composite unity. One? Yes. But composite. Not as concrete as we'd like. And you are "one", but you are literally composed of billions of entities. So even mathematical words are not completely precise, and they are the best we've got. Ultimately, no word can really be understood apart from our experience. And our experiences are ultimately tied to our language through the human art of classification; any attempt to understand language without understanding classification will fail miserably.

Go back to green for a minute. Green is a color. Define it for me please. And please don't tell me about an electromagnetic spectrum. I don't want to know where green is on a light wavelength chart, I want to understand its "greenness", if you know what I mean. Can you define green for me in an approachable and understandable way? Or might you be reduced to telling me that I have to experience it? You might try to define green by contrasting it with "red" and "yellow" and "sissy blue" (my high school colors were powder blue and silver, which was a running joke. We called it "sissy blue".) But if you try to appeal to red and blue and yellow to help me understand green, you are really only begging the question. Suppose I don't understand any of these things. Can't you just simply define it for me? But you are ultimately doing the only thing you can do. We use words to define words, and it ends up being a circle. It's a circle because if I ask you to define the words you are using to define a word, you will eventually run out of words without going back to other words that you have defined (or else creating new words). That's because the amount of words is a closed set. If you don't believe this, just peruse a dictionary real quickly. Take the primary definition of any word, and start looking up the key words that it uses to define that word. It generally won't take you too long to get back to where you started. Sometimes the very next definition is defined by the original word. At any rate, since words are a closed set, there is no way of defining them except with recourse to other words. It can't but be circular.

And all this makes sense, that words are limited, because words are a function of our reason. And our reason is limited. So language hits the same brick wall that our reason does. That's why I shake my head when you agree with me that reason is limited, and then still demand a precise definition of God. It's kind of like, "Ok, I agree that, given God, we can't do this, but let's do it anyway." And it feels like this hostile approach is only so that you can get down to the business of "refuting" something that you can't even understand. You want me to create an idol, a strawman, so that you can get down to the business of refuting my fake creation. But an idol is all I can create. I can't create the real thing, because it's beyond me.

So let's look at God. I've tried to approach him. I've tried to show you what things I think God is. To do this, sometimes I use adjectives, the same way everyone does to try to clarify vague concepts. But then we get accused of "saying that God is love is silly. We already have a word for love, why create another one?" But this is just silly, Dale. I mean, when a person is saying that God is love, he isn't saying that love and God are exact synonyms. If a person says, "Dale is kind", they aren't suggesting that kind and "Dale" could simply be used interchangeably. That isn't  the nature of adjectives at all, and I'm sure when you think about it, you will admit this. We use adjectives to approach reality in a more conclusive way. A more "defined" way, if you will. But what I'm trying to tell you is that we can only approach God. We can't define him, because that presumes that I have a a greater ability to understand than I actually do. Words don't exist independent of my reason. Limitations on my reason are limitations on my language. All I can do is approach. And when I approach, I do well to remember that I might be creating an idol. It's all I can do, though. I use words like, infinite, first cause, etc. You don't seem to mind these. I suppose if I called God "the force" you would be just fine with it. But the instant that I suggest that this "force" might be quite like a mind, that becomes repugnant to you, because you can imagine a certain type of infinite that couldn't logically possess mind. But that same type of infinite also precludes you existing, so I'm pretty sure that isn't the infinite in question, regardless of whether it's personal or impersonal.

[Cyro]

Logical fallacy No. 532:

Argument from Ridicule.

[Jacobus]

I've come to have a sort of sympathy for the idea of an external God because that God is necessary if you accept the dominant idea of materialism.  The problem is this:

1. All real stuff is made up of physical, vacuous substance, whose interactions are governed by deterministic laws.

2. We each have a subjective experience and exercise some degree of self-determination (i.e. free will).

I believe that point 2. cannot be derived, scientifically or philosophically, from point 1 and as a result they are mutually exclusive.  To reconcile them, we must therefore posit something supernatural (and we then become dualists I guess).   

Now the modern scientist laughs at the God-believer for this reconcilitation, but in my opinion, does something even more foolish: reconcile the two points by rejecting the second.   

I believe the correct reconciliation is to reject the first point.  But I can excuse my neighbor for inheriting the "common sense" view of materialism that leads to belief in an external God; I am not so forgiving to the self-described intellectuals who apparently champion iteration, open-mindedness, rationality, and rigor.

[dalebert]

Logical fallacy No. 532:

Argument from Ridicule.

It's not an argument. It's just a funny comic that happens to be on topic.
Sheesh.

[dalebert]

...we must therefore posit something supernatural (and we then become dualists I guess).

Anything that exists is natural. If an external God exists, then he's natural. I don't believe that one does for the reasons I gave quite some time back in the thread.

The definition of free will remains ambiguous from my point of view so I'm still not in a position to argue for or against its existence.

[dalebert]

I know that evolution and abiogenesis are not arguments against the existence of all notions of a creator, such as Caleb's view, but this seems like a good video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

[Ron Helwig]

I've come to have a sort of sympathy for the idea of an external God because that God is necessary if you accept the dominant idea of materialism.  The problem is this:

1. All real stuff is made up of physical, vacuous substance, whose interactions are governed by deterministic laws.

2. We each have a subjective experience and exercise some degree of self-determination (i.e. free will).

I believe that point 2. cannot be derived, scientifically or philosophically, from point 1 and as a result they are mutually exclusive.  To reconcile them, we must therefore posit something supernatural (and we then become dualists I guess).   

Now the modern scientist laughs at the God-believer for this reconciliation, but in my opinion, does something even more foolish: reconcile the two points by rejecting the second.   

I believe the correct reconciliation is to reject the first point.  But I can excuse my neighbor for inheriting the "common sense" view of materialism that leads to belief in an external God; I am not so forgiving to the self-described intellectuals who apparently champion iteration, open-mindedness, rationality, and rigor.

The problem with the first point is the "governed by deterministic laws" part. Quantum physics, IIRC, is based more on probabilities than absolutes.

My take on it would be that point 1 should be modified to be "All real stuff is made up of physical substance, whose interactions are describable by discoverable laws."

[dalebert]

http://silenceinthedarknessonq16.comicostrich.com/

[Caleb]

Just a couple "drive by" thoughts... 

I think Jacobus hit the nail on the head. The solution to the mind/body "world knot" problem has typically been solved via either an ontological dualism or else a materialism. The problems with both worldviews are well known and each side advocates for their own viewpoint on the grounds that "at least it's not as bad as the other guy's viewpoint."  The solution to the riddle lies in rethinking the nature of matter.

Dale said something earlier about Ryan suggesting that freedom could be achieved by an appeal to quantum indeterminacy. I've noticed Ron hinting the same thing. For several reasons, this idea fails. First, there is only quantum indeterminacy at the subatomic level. For beings at our level of existence, there is no quantum indeterminacy because, as Ron noted, while the actions of any individual particle cannot be determined, the result of the aggregate will be known statistically. You could no more make a human "free" by this standard than you could make your computer "free" by appealing to this standard. You know that your computer will behave in a physically reliable way, (and most tellingly, you know that if, perchance, your computer breaks it will be a result of physical malfunction subject to the laws of physics, not an indeterminate quantum event.) If the results of quantum physics were applied to aggregates, there could be no physical laws. The fact that physical laws exist demonstrates the reliability of the physical world at our level of experience.  The second reason, (and probably one that is even more fatal) that quantum indeterminacy cannot be used as a basis for proposing freedom is that, even if the laws of quantum applied at the macro level and could be extrapolated to our experience, that would only suggest randomness not freedom. Our universal experience is not just one of randomness, but a directed quality: we have the ability to make our own destiny, to chart our own course, to be what we want to be. All this presupposes a free agency which has, not only a will and an awareness, but a power to actualize it.

With all due respect, Dale, your claim not to understand the concept of free agency is difficult to address. It's a bit like the guy who denies that he is alive. "Well of course you're alive. You're asking the question aren't you?" "I don't understand. What do you mean?"  I can't explain it any simpler. We've already tried to define freedom, but freedom is something that we all have as a universal experience. It's a matter of what David Ray Griffin calls "hard-core common sense". It can't be denied because it involves self-contradiction to attempt to deny it, just like it does to deny that you able to think. Every time that you feel shame or guilt, or else experience disappointment or anger at another person, you are presupposing that you or they have some free will by which they could have altered the outcome, such that you or they are accountable.

I would actually argue that freedom and consciousness are simply two adjectives to describe the same basic existence, but that's another post.