Earnest said:
<< I have also said that both the argument from incredulity and the argument from the law of non-contradiction are subjective. >>
I disagree with the latter. The universe, so far as we have observed, contains no self-contradictions. Two plus two equals four, period. It does not equal three or five or anything else. Things cannot be in two places at one time. God cannot create a square circle -- BY DEFINITION. These facts are not subjective and they are not mere opinions.
It is often said by biblical apologists that God is outside space and time. How do they know that? Certainly not by any scientific means. And it is arguable that they know it even by biblical means. The Bible says nothing specific about space or time in the sense that we moderns understand them; it merely implicitly assumes that they exist in the primitive sense understood by Near Eastern peoples thousands of years ago. What these apologists claim is really just the accumulated speculation of several thousand years of religious speculation.
On the subject of whether a loving Christian God exists, I agree with cofty:
<< I am talking about the god of xtian theism the god and father of Jesus. This god is love. Love means what we do to promote the well being of others. >>
The God of the Bible is clearly modeled after the kings of the Near East such as Nebuchadnezzar. As such, Richard Dawkins, in "The God Delusion", describes this God thus:
<< The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. >>
It's easy to find several biblical passages justifying each of these charges. Do these facts in any way describe a God of Love? I think not. Such actions on the part of God are the exact opposite of promoting the well being of others. What they promote is the well being of God.
The logical contradiction is obvious: a God of Love MUST promote the wellbeing of others; a God who does not is not loving. Therefore, a loving God does not exist -- by the Bible's own descriptions of its God's actions and by what we can infer from 600 million years of pain and suffering due to predation in the animal kingdom. A deistic god, or some other supernatural god might exist, but not the omnibenevolent biblical god.
Do Jehovah's Witnesses Accept Evolution?
by jukief 131 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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jukief
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jukief
Earnest said:
<< I will have a look out for the book you mention, "A People For His Name: A History of Jehovah's Witnesses and An Evaluation", and see if I can't find it in a library. >>
Good luck with that. There were only a couple of hundred printed. Right now Amazon has an original for $240, and a facsimile (by Tony Wills, the author's real name) for about $24.
I perfectly well understand your desire to believe in a God of some sort. I don't, but I understand why most people do. There are many things in the world that seem better explained by an intelligent cause, but many more that seem better explained by lack of one. And of course, there is always the problem of where the intelligent cause came from, for which no theist has an answer. "God has always existed" is just as good or bad as "the universe has always existed".
As for most everything about a god being a matter of faith, I long ago realized that faith -- belief without real evidence -- is generally a product of childhood learning. A child absorbs the culture, and is often deliberately indoctrinated with religious belief, without being given solid reasons for it. This persist into adulthood, and it's very hard to shake.
As for JWs being God's chosen people -- no way! Even if the God of Bible exists, he is supposed to be the God of Truth, but JWs, from the lowliest rank-and-file member to Governing Body members, are no more interested in Truth than they are in building spaceships to the stars. They give lip service to the Truth, and they sometimes make a show of devotion to Truth, but in practice the leaders are gross liars, concerned mainly with maintaining their traditions and their membership rolls, and the rank-and-file are perfectly happy with this. They're only too happy to disfellowship anyone who points out where they've not conformed to the Truth. Furthermore, there are dozens of biblical teachings that the JWs do not conform to. When someone points them out, a JW will shout, "apostate!"
You misunderstood my example of being burned to a crisp -- it was ME, not a friend, who claimed to have been burned up. So there is no way to make excuses for my claim, because you're in front of me and I'm speaking directly to you.
What you say about being able to prove or disprove the existence of the Christian God is technically true, but not very practical, in my view. We decide what to do about most things in life based, not on strictly logical or mathematical proof, but on weight of evidence. Since we don't get to chat with God, that's the best we can do. Alan and I have weighed the evidence, as I described above, and made our choice as to what the facts are. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote:
"Fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. . . In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." -
Island Man
If we're to take seriously the kind of gymnastic special pleading reasoning that SBF and other apologists are using, we might as well throw logic out the door altogether and naively believe any preposterous claim no matter how contradictory. There's no position that cannot be justified - no matter how ridiculous and contradictory - with the kind of reasoning being employed by apologists. That is a huge red flag suggesting that there's something definitely wrong with their reasoning.
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cofty
Three interesting posts jukief.
Even the majority of atheists are quick to agree to the statement that 'we can't prove god doesn't exist'. I disagree.
If we define god as the 'god and father of Jesus', and 'prove' in the everyday sense of 'show with objective evidence to be true beyond reasonable doubt', then I am convinced we can prove god does not exist.
The key is not evil in general but 'natural evil' over which humans have no control.
This diversion to your thread is a spin-off from this epic thread...
There is a summary of the topic here...
and a summary of the 8 main arguments that emerged here....
Perhaps I should add the 'Rohypnol defense' and the 'four-sided triangle defense' to the list!
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Vidiot
Island Man - "If we're to take seriously the kind of gymnastic special pleading reasoning that SBF and other apologists are using, we might as well throw logic out the door altogether and naively believe any preposterous claim no matter how contradictory. There's no position that cannot be justified - no matter how ridiculous and contradictory - with the kind of reasoning being employed by apologists. That is a huge red flag suggesting that there's something definitely wrong with their reasoning."
Very eloquently put; well done.
(PS: not being a smartass)
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Vidiot
In the vein of Island Man's post...
The more any given Biblical account becomes dependent on additional contrived divine intervention in order to maintain plausibility in the face of logical dilemmas, internal inconsistencies, and increasingly incomplete narrative framework...
...the less credibility said account ends up having (ironically), to the point where it ultimately becomes too implausible to be believable.
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jukief
Island Man said:
<< If we're to take seriously the kind of gymnastic special pleading reasoning that SBF and other apologists are using, we might as well throw logic out the door altogether and naively believe any preposterous claim no matter how contradictory. There's no position that cannot be justified - no matter how ridiculous and contradictory - with the kind of reasoning being employed by apologists. That is a huge red flag suggesting that there's something definitely wrong with their reasoning. >>
Exactly. William Lane Craig is among the most vocal of Christian apologists, and if you listen closely to what he argues, you find that much of it is special pleading. He even continues to repeat bad or false arguments that were defeated by his opponents years ago, such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
I admit to having a hard time reading the writings of such apologists, but a memorable one was Alister McGrath, a theologian who in 2007 published the book "The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the denial of the divine" in response to Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". It's not memorable for good arguments, but for its incessant, gobble-de-goop claims that to the ignorant seem to be arguments, but not to anyone who carefully parses his sentences. I read a number of paragraphs up to three times, and still could not figure out what he was trying to say. I'm a professional editor of technical material, and have often been responsible for rewriting obscure papers to make them readable. I'd be hard pressed to do that with McGrath's book. Slimboyfat's writing is similarly obscure. I've often wondered if such obscurantism is a product of thinking muddled by an emotional need to uphold childhood beliefs, or is deliberate. I'm convinced that many JW apologists, including JW leaders, suffer from both problems. -
jukief
Cofty said:
<< Even the majority of atheists are quick to agree to the statement that 'we can't prove god doesn't exist'. I disagree.
If we define god as the 'god and father of Jesus', and 'prove' in the everyday sense of 'show with objective evidence to be true beyond reasonable doubt', then I am convinced we can prove god does not exist.
The key is not evil in general but 'natural evil' over which humans have no control. >>
I completely agree. That's why Alan and I usually are careful to specify "the biblical God" (note the caps) or "gods" (without caps). Like Russell's Teapot, the existence of gods has no solid evidence for or against, but the biblical God is fairly well defined, both by the Bible (despite all manner of contradictions) and by three millennia of Jewish/Christian/Islamic tradition. It's within that tradition that fatal contradictions arise: contradictions between biblical statements about God's nature and personality and descriptions of his behavior; and between many biblical descriptions of God and his actions, and physical reality. The contradiction between "God is love" and "God ordered the killing of 42 children who mocked Joshua" is an example of the former; the contradiction between "God is love" and 600 million years of pain and suffering due to predation and all manner of natural disasters illustrates the latter.
<< This diversion to your thread is a spin-off from this epic thread...
There is a summary of the topic here...
and a summary of the 8 main arguments that emerged here.... >>
Wow! That dwarfs even the old chronology threads!
I really like your summary.
<< Perhaps I should add the 'Rohypnol defense' and the 'four-sided triangle defense' to the list! >>
I agree, except that the former is so crazy that only its originator would defend it. -
Earnest
jukief : I perfectly well understand your desire to believe in a God of some sort. I don't, but I understand why most people do. There are many things in the world that seem better explained by an intelligent cause, but many more that seem better explained by lack of one. And of course, there is always the problem of where the intelligent cause came from, for which no theist has an answer. "God has always existed" is just as good or bad as "the universe has always existed".
I have never understood the "problem of where the intelligent cause came from". To my mind we have to accept that something has always existed even if we cannot comprehend it. The idea of something coming from absolutely nothing is, to me, even more far-fetched than something always existing. And if I accept by default that something has always existed it is, to me, more reasonable that the universe that we know had an intelligent cause. This is not because I need to have God in my life, but only because any other explanation I have heard is even more absurd than an intelligent first cause.
jukief : It is often said by biblical apologists that God is outside space and time. How do they know that? Certainly not by any scientific means.
I am no cosmologist although I do try and understand cosmological fact and theory. What I understand is that before the big bang there was neither space nor time. If that is a scientific conclusion then the intelligent first cause must be outside of space and time.
My intention here is not just to repeat an argument. I am quite willing to be convinced I am wrong. It is no skin off my nose. But I find it difficult to understand why others come to a conclusion different to mine. Not for the first time.
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Hanged Man
Everything comes from nothing.
We all came out of our mothers zero.
But it was the "one" that got it all going.