There’s been some discussion on this site and others whether it’s even useful to ask if there can be evidence for a god, given that the very notion of God is incoherent. I’ve maintained that there can indeed be evidence that would provisionally convince at least me of the existence of a divine being. But others disagree.
One of these is the Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse, whose new book God in the Age of Science? I am much enjoying. It’s a bit of a tough slog, as it’s academic and heavily philosophical, but I can still understand it. Philipse’s thesis is that the notion of God is indeed incoherent, but he also allows that even if you think it’s coherent, there’s no evidence supporting God’s existence. It’s a deeply thoughtful and powerful argument for atheism.
I’m not yet convinced that the question of God’s existence is incoherent, but Philipse makes some excellent points. Today’s lesson is how he argues for God’s incoherence.
Philipse takes as his starting point a widely-accepted concept of God, and it’s one adumbrated by a very respected theologian and philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne. If it’s from Swinburne, it has street cred among philosophers. The quote below is from Swinburne’s book The Existence of God (2004, p. 7):
“I take the proposition ‘God exists’ (and the equivalent proposition ‘There is a God’) to be logically equivalent to ‘there exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things.’ I use ‘God’ as the name of the person picked out by this description.”
Most theists do indeed conceive of God as having such humanlike traits. Given that, Philipse then begins to take the notion apart (pp. 101-103):
“How can one meaningfully say that God listens to our prayers, loves us, speaks to us, answers (or does not answer our supplications, etcetera, if God is also assumed to be an incorporeal being? For the stipulation that God is an incorporeal being annuls the very conditions for meaningfully applying psychological expressions to another entity, to wit, that this entity is able in principle to display forms of bodily behaviour which resemble patterns of human behaviour. In other words, the very attempt to give a meaning and a possible referent to the word ‘God’ as used in theism must fail, because this attempt is incoherent. . .
. . . If this is so, one might object, how are we to explain the fact that the word ‘God’ and sentences such as ‘God loves me’, appear to be used meaningfully in monotheistic language? But explaining this is not difficult. The religious uses of the putative proper name ‘God’ are parasitic upon, and resemble to a large extent, the ordinary uses of proper names and psychological expressions for human beings. What religious believers fail to notice is that by substituting ‘God’ for an ordinary proper name in sentences such as ‘John loves me’, or ‘Paul will condemn him’, they cancel the conditions for using meaningfully the words ‘loves’ and ‘condemns’.
Monotheistic believers often are vaguely aware that the meaning of words eludes them when they utter sentences containing the word ‘God’. But they misinterpret this fact as symptomatic of the spiritual depth of religious discourse. They think that the profoundly mysterious nature of monotheistic language points to a transcendent reality, which cannot be grasped by us, limited human beings. In this case, however, the impression of profoundness is caused by a mere misuse of language. As Wittgenstein aptly remarked, ‘[t]he problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth.”
I love the last paragraph: it reminds me so much of the rambling, discursive, and incoherent theology of people like John Haught. By larding their apologetics with a bunch of numinous words (“depth” is one of Haught’s favorites), they think they’re saying something meaningful.
There’s a lot more to Philipse’s argument (he goes on to dispel Swinburne’s argument—in The Coherence of Theism—that the idea of a “bodiless person” is coherent), but this section is powerful.
No.
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I think there are many ways to elaborate on that, but I’d take a different tack to Philipse.
God is posited as a supernatural entity that is not observable by our natural senses or our scientific instruments, yet He apparently has a way of interceding in the world and influencing naturalistic events. If He can’t interact withe the physical one way, He can’t in the other. Or vice versa.
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+1
And I’m still voting “incoherent”. It all comes down too confusing bad thinking with profundity.
How much one believes god exists depends on how strong of an influence one’s upbringing indoctrinated into him/her that particular god(s). It’s upbringing over science, and incoherent.
I couldn’t agree more. This should be biggest finding. You can prove that god does not exists to everyone, but not everyone is equal to accept it even though they cannot deny the proof. It depends on upbringing and indoctrination.
Surely the more powerful argument is that the quality of omnipotence is logically incoherent. For example, as Ben says, can an omnipotent being commit suicide? More generally, there are very strong argument that, at the very least, a triple-omni god (-potent, -niscient, -benevolent) runs into deep logical problems, especially around the problem of evil.
Beat me to the punch….
But, yes. If an entity can only be called a “god” if it can do miracles — which I think is a very reasonable definition — then no entity can be called a “god.”
Miracles are literary devices. The whole point of them is that they’re impossible. If you saw somebody walking on water, it would be very impressive, but you know it wouldn’t be a miracle, because the proof that it’s really happening is right there before your eyes.
You could then twist the definition of “miracle” to “something impressive I can’t possibly understand,” but that then makes Mr. James “The Amazing” Randi a miracle-worker and a god every time he steps on stage with a deck of cards. And you, yourself, become a miracle-working god the moment you figure out the trick to walking on water or pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Not exactly the sort of consequence one would expect from the definition of the divine.
And it’s all really quite simple to demonstrate this. You can attack it from either end, such as by showing things (such as suicide) that are impossible for the allegedly-omnipotent but trivial for the rest or by pointing out that an iPhone would have gotten you burned at the stake a century ago.
All the rest of the definitional characteristics of gods are also literary devices, equally trivially demonstrated fictional. Spirits are perfectly unevidenced, are disproven by how easy it is to modify behavior with alcohol and / or injury, and would violate conservation. An allegedly all-knowing Santa Clause can’t understand the meaning of mystery. An all-loving Jesus would at least call 911 on all the priests raping children.
Gotta run back to work…sorry for the lack of poorfeeding…
b&
…and §….
b&
Haught’s God (and the one believed in by the great majority of American believers) falls at this simple hurdle. It’s why theodicy is alive and well after several millenia of useless chit-chat.
But that doesn’t address the coherence of the proposition of “A God”. Just one specific type.
I remain with Jerry that a coherent proposition of a God is possible and that good enough evidence could convince me of its existence. Just because that evidence hasn’t shown up yet does not make it impossible (IMO).
Now, I don’t for one second ever expect such evidence to ever come — because I am fully convinced that no gods exist (I’m a 6.99999 or so on Dawkins’ scale). But I do think it’s possible.
So how do you distinguish god from not-god? What’s the criteria?
b&
Being unable to offer fail-proof criteria doesn’t in any way rule of the possibility of a God actually existing. It would simply mean that we can never know, with absolutely unshakable certainty, that He exists, regardles of the evidence offered.
We can’t know anything with absolute certainty, hence the lack of any epistemological consensus among philosophers. But that doesn’t mean that we are always wrong, it just means that even if we are right about something we can never actually ground our claim in absolute certainty.
Even if God is unprovable, under any conceivable circumstances, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t and can’t actually exist. We have no right to presume that the universe must conform to our current conceptions of justification and credibility.
Ditto for faries, leprechauns, and Santa Claus. Are you as sanguine about their possible existence as well?
You misunderstand my tone, and hence my argument. I’m as much an atheist as anyone here.
I don’t think that any God exists, but I can’t rule the possibility out. It’s possible but extraordinarily unlikely. The God(s) of all the world’s organised religions, however, are self-evidently ludicrous and infantile.
The God that is theoretically possible, in other words, is essentially ineffable, and would have nothing in common with the God who is widely worshiped, respected and admired.
Some people here seem to think that because they have refuted the God of the masses and the celebrated theologians, especially those of the Abrahamic faiths, that they have thereby also refuted the very concept of God, as such. They haven’t.
But I repeat. I don’t for a second believe in this ineffable God. All i’m arguing is that it can’t be a priori excluded.
What I’ve found, david, is that nobody ever gets around to offering a definition for the ineffable type of god that nobody actually believes in. All we get is the same insistence that you’re offering here that there could be such a definition, and that there therefore could be such a god…but the definition itself is always missing, just like the gods themselves.
I’d be thrilled if you could break the trend.
Once, again, what sort of an entity do you think would be deserving of the “god” appellation, whether or not you think any such entity actually exists?
Cheers,
b&
I’m sorry, but you’re being incoherent.
We can know, with perfect and absolute certainty, that are not, never have been, and never will be any married bachelors. We don’t even need to examine any evidence to know the truth of the matter. There’s no need to survey bachelors and query their marital status or the like. It is simply a fact that no bachelors are married, and that nobody who is married is a bachelor. With absolute, unshakable certainty.
That’s the situation we’re dealing with with respect to gods. Those who profess the reality of gods describe them in logical terms every bit as incoherent as “married bachelor.” They claim, with a straight face, that their gods created “everything,” but that their gods weren’t themselves created; the only possible conclusion is that said god isn’t part of “everything” and is, in fact, therefore, exactly nothing.
Which is exactly why gods only make sense as literary devices, just like faeries and wizards and dragons and all the rest of the creatures you’ll find in the type of literature where we also only find “evidence” for gods. Literature needn’t concern itself with logic; if it’s fun or interesting or whatever, in it gods. Indeed, the best stories have at least six impossible things just before breakfast….
Cheers,
b&
No, i’m not being incoherent.
“Tulse” made the same point as yourself and perhaps you never saw my reply? His/her example was 3-sided triangles.
I replied” There are various kinds of logic; some are tautologies, others are, in the final analysis, derived from empiricism. Your triangle example is a tautology, but the concept of God isn’t”.
Your “bachelor” example is an analytic proposition, it is definitionally true, as you point out.
Even here however, I would dispute your claim that we “know” something with “absolute, unshakeable certainty”, but that would require a much lengthier and time-consuming response on my part, so i’ll pass over it if you don’t mind . . .
The more important point is your claim that believers offer nominally “logical” and “coherent” arguments in their favour. This simply isn’t true. The God that, for example, Pascal and Dostoyevsky believed in, bears no relation to this characterisation.
Humor me, david, if you would.
Present a logical and coherent definition of the term, “god.”
b&
I remain with Jerry that a coherent proposition of a God is possible and that good enough evidence could convince me of its existence.
Ah, but:
* Is there any religion on Earth that actually worships a version of God that is described by that coherent proposition?
And
* Would a coherent proposition of that God actually be worth worshiping?
Those are separate questions.
Ben: It would be mighty hard to differentiate powerful aliens from a supposed God; but I don’t close off that possibility as strictly impossible. (Thought experiments fail me here; but that probably says more about me than anything else.)
I’m not asking for an experimental protocol you’d apply in the real world to actually make the determination; I’m asking for the textbook definition you’d use.
Imagine you’re writing a work of fiction, but that you intend it to be realistic fiction, say, in the style of James Michener. And your story revolves around two characters, nearly identical, except that the one is a god and the other isn’t. What makes the one a god and the other not a god?
Cheers,
b&
Ben,
I’ve already offered you the example of believers such as Pascal and Dostoyevsky, neither of which believed in the sort of God you’re insisting upon (which is essentially a God of the logicians), but got no reply.
What’s your response to individuals like these?
It’s very easy to conflate two different issues here. On the one hand, there are conceptions of God which are unreflectively shared by countless millions of people, and there are theologians who use sophistry in order to reconcile these unreflective views with *sophisticated theology* of various orthodox kinds.
On the other hand, some critics of the “New Atheists” complain that, Dawkins for example (someone I have great respect for), effectively ignores the exceptions among believers and concentrates too much on vulgar forms of belief. I think Dawkins et al are right to focus on the sociologically powerful beliefs and behaviors, because, in the final analysis, this is where current religious toxicity is most visible.
Nevertheless, it is simply wrong to suggest, as you have, that believers (all believers) are somehow deficient in elementary logic (of an analytic kind) and don’t appear to realise that they are worshipping something “logically incoherent”, and therefore phantasmagorical.
As I say, neither Pascal nor Dostoyevsky believed in the God you’re insisting on. It would be equally misleading, for example, to cite Kant as the destroyer of the Ontological argument for God, while omitting the fact that he believed in God nevertheless. The honest among the faithful know perfectly well they can’t prove God’s existence, that’s why they call it “faith”.
David, again, help me out here.
How did Pascal and / or Dostoyevsky define the term, “god”?
I’d really like to make sure I’m not arguing with a straw man, either a mischaracterization of their definitions or of your understandings of their definitions.
b&
The issue isn’t evidence, but logical consistency. You can’t say that a triangle with four sides may be possible, the evidence just hasn’t shown up yet.
There are various kinds of logic; some are tautologies, others are, in the final analysis, derived from empiricism. Your triangle example is a tautology, but the concept of God isn’t.
So, give already.
Given two similar entities, what distinguishes the god from the non-god? What’s the dividing line?
Or just a simple, coherent definition of the word, “god,” will do fine, if you prefer.
Cheers,
b&
Well, before I get to that question, let’s keep in mind that, for example, physicists still use the word “atom” even after their discovery of sub-atomic particles.
First of all, I don’t like Swinburne’s definition, popular though it is. Most of these conceptions derive from Christianity and since I see no reason to take Christianity (intellectually) seriously, I see no reason why I, or the entities of the universe, should be bound by them.
e.g. Let’s suppose that a being exists who is almost omnipotent and almostomniscient, and that no greater power or intelligence exists in (or “outside”)the entire universe. Would such a being “deserve” the title of God? I would say Yes.
Alternatively, suppose that an all-powerful and all-knowing being actually exists but that this being has no interest in human life, or perhaps even enjoys the spectacle of human suffering as a trifling amusement. Again, would such a being “deserve” the title of God? Again, I would say Yes.
The point is that “God” can be defined in a variety of ways and none of them need conform to current theology. It’s not for me to say what the precise “dividing-line” is between God and not-God, because this “dividing-line”, whatever it is, will be, obviously, simply a product of my contingent and arbitrary wit and imagination; and as we all know, there is no reason to believe that the universe pays any attention to my opinions.
david, “almost omnipotent” makes no more sense than “almost infinite.” And, as we’ve already been through repeatedly in this thread, an allegedly all-powerful being can’t commit suicide, and an allegedly all-knowing being can’t know if somebody else is really feeding him the answers.
So that’s both of your example definitions as incoherent as a “married bachelor.”
I’ll ask again: can you offer an example of a coherent definition of the term, “god”?
b&
How are the qualities of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence derived from empiricism?
You highlighted (current human) conceptions of “logical consistency” as if they were the ultimate judge and boundaries of actuality. I replied that some principles of logic are actually derived from empirical presuppositions (e.g. Aristotle’s law of identity and the law of contradiction). I could also have added that some historical forms of logic have subsequently been shown to be wrong!
But I never engaged with the concepts of “omniscience”, “omnipotence” and “omnibenevolence”, so I don’t understand your question?
david, if you’re seriously suggesting that the law of non-contradiction might not actually apply, then you’re truly being as irrational as it is possible for a human to be, and there’s little more to do than point and laugh / and or sigh.
May I suggest? Avoid zebra crossings.
b&
David’s “…some historical forms of logic have subsequently been shown to be wrong..” is crying out for an example from him, so that at least we partly understand what “wrong” would mean here, and whether any of these examples were ever seriously considered correct.
On the other hand, perhaps prior to getting this razor-sharp definition of the noun ‘god’ which Ben demands, it would be useful to have a razor-sharp definition of the verb ‘to exist’.
Ben Goren,
1. Please explain to me why “almost omnipotent” makes no sense?
Why must we deal in absolutes? Is the concept of “speed” nonsensical because it can’t be infinite? Like most things, the concept of power is a relational concept. It doesn’t cease to exists because it is not unlimited.
If a superstitious and ignorant fool tells a child that all humans are immortal, do humans thereby cease to exist once the child realises that we all must die?
2. I’m baffled that you can claim that “both” of my provisional definitions of “God” are incoherent, when I explicitly designate one of them as lacking omnipotence!
You seem to be defining “God” in a very singular and arbitrary fashion, and rejecting all formulations which don’t conform to your model. But as i’ve already pointed out, there’s no reason on earth to believe that actuality must conform to your criteria.
3. I’ve already stated that a God who is essentially ineffable is perfectly possible (even though I don’t myself believe in such a being), and you’ve offered no arguments to dissuade me from this conviction. “Coherence” is, let’s not forget, a contingent, provisional concept, directly related to our own species at this historical juncture.
You speak as if our current conceptions of “coherence” represented some infallible oracle. It doesn’t.
4. You suggest that the “law of non-contradiction” is impervious to any doubt and that my theoretical scepticism is laughable.
Which is it? Are you saying that no philosopher contests the validity of this “law” or are you saying that all those that do are mistaken?
Let’s take Heraclitus, for example: he denied the law of non-contradiction, and affirmed the concept of Becoming over the concept of Being. The concept of Being is indispensable for logic and for the “law of non-contradiction”, and Heraclitus’s contrary concept of perpetual flux, as Aristotle and Plato recognised, denied the validity of such a law.
Now fast forward over 2,000 years to one of the ablest logicians of the last century, Bertrand Russell, who stated “The doctrine of the perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to refute it”.
Please tell me why Heraclitus and Russell (and more philosophers I could mention) are necessarily wrong?
Peter,
Apologies, but it won’t let me reply directly to your question, so I can only hope you’ll see this.
Progress in Logic.
“[Leibniz] did work on mathematical logic which would have been enormously important if he had published it; he would, in that case, have been the founder of mathematical logic . . . He abstained from publishing, because he kept on finding evidence that Aristotle’s doctrine of the syllogism was wrong on some points; respect for Aristotle made it impossible for him to believe this, so he mistakenly supposed that the errors must be his own”.
Bertrand Russell.1946.
So much for the supremecy of apparent “logical coherence”.
David:
I cannot find that quote from Russell, to see if there is enough more there to see that we actually have an example here. But I think not, i.e. that “wrong” is wrong, and “incomplete” is right. An error of more than 2 millennia by almost all (but not Leibniz) was believing nothing really new could be added Aristotle’s logic. An explicit instance of “wrong” would be needed to convince me that that really occurred in Aristotle in a more than ‘misprintish’ way. A good reference likely is Gabbay’s book “The Rise of Modern Logic from Leibniz to Frege”, but I have just looked at snippets of that.
Peter,
Apologies once again, I don’t seem able to reply to you directly.
The Russell quote can be found on p.572 of his History of Western Philosophy.
Aside from that i’m not sure what you’re saying. The quotation speaks very clearly of Aristotle’s logical “errors”.
What more do you want?
The larger point i’m making is very simple; the axioms and inferences of “logic” are NOT universally accepted by all philosophers, and logicians sometimes disagree. Are you disputing this?
Yes, it’s like quantum columns; there’s a minimum possible width and we can’t make it skinnier in replying!
“What more do you want?” :
That’s an example of Russell seeming to claim there’s an example of Aristotle being “wrong”. It is a specific example of the latter which I’d like to see. I suspect that Russell misspoke there and should have said “incomplete” (which by 1946 should have been ‘woefully incomplete’).
“The larger point i’m making is very simple; the axioms and inferences of “logic” are NOT universally accepted by all philosophers, and logicians sometimes disagree. Are you disputing this?” :
There is a very standard idea of 1st order logic, and a fairly standard idea of higher order. There is controversy over whether the latter is logic or set theory, and similar controversy over whether things like modal logic really produce any new knowledge. That is a terribly brief statement and needs 2 or 3 books (of which I’m incapable anyway), but I think it is hard to find an example of a logic which is or was reputable with real logicians and which would be said to be “wrong”. Of course, if you use “wrong” in a much wider way than,say, mathematicians do, maybe there is. For example, my opinion right now is that various things mostly philosophers do with modal logic (such as fiddle with the so-called Ontological Argument, and build sandcastles such as a subject called Axiomatic Metaphysics) are a total waste of time as far as contributing to real knowledge. But that is different from saying that modal logic is “wrong”. I think some of the claimed applications of it to program verification (i.e. dynamic logic) and to proof theory (Godel’s then Boolos’ provability logic)
are both great stuff, but aren’t really modal logic to me, but do use its ideas somewhat.
Ben Goren: “Miracles are literary devices. The whole point of them is that they’re impossible. If you saw somebody walking on water, it would be very impressive, but you know it wouldn’t be a miracle, because the proof that it’s really happening is right there before your eyes”.
No. Impossible for us is not the same as impossible for God.
First, which god?
But, never mind that.
If your god is capable of doing anything and everything, including everything that a mere mortal can do and more — the very definition of “omnipotent” — then how is your god supposed to abdicate the throne, feel the pride of seeing his children surpass his own greatest achievements, or even, depressingly enough, commit suicide?
Were your god to commit suicide, then there’s an infinite variety of things it can’t do. Once it’s committed suicide, it can’t even lift a finger, let alone walk on water. But if it can’t commit suicide, then there’s something trivial that we know full well can be done that your god can’t do. Either way, despite your initial premise and insistence, we’ve found something trivial that your god can’t do that even you yourself can, meaning that the mere notion of “omnipotence” is itself incoherent.
Cheers,
b&
Interesting, on topic, comic at http://www.tomthedancingbug.com,
link here:
http://gocomics.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5f3053ef017d41be56df970c-pi
Even when 2 of the omni’s are considered, omniscient and omnipotent, they are contradictory; an omniscient god would know it’s future but would be powerless to alter it.
Arguably omnibenevolent and omnipotent are also contradictory, since if one can do only good, one is not omnipotent.
But not to worry, this is where sophisticated theologians come to the rescue.
In the case of omniscience, they give god different types of knowledge, natural knowledge which god gets to know a priori (like mathematical truths), free knowledge which only becomes known to god after he acts and middle knowledge which is sort of like free knowledge but maybe it never happens or maybe it does.
So by the time the STs finish their philosophical hatchet job, god comes across as a deity with multiple personality disorder, sort of like a metaphysical “The 3 Faces of Eve”.
You mean, The Trinity.
Actually, there was a fantasy novel on that theme; in a polytheistic world, one divinity decided to prove its superiority by committing suicide (or more precisely, having its existence completely destroyed), and then coming back from oblivion anyway. It was kind of a dickish deity, unsurprisingly.
I don’t recall much else about the novel; there was an organization called “the Invisible College” that didn’t like the plan, the protagonist was female… and that’s about it. I read it some time in the early 1990s, I think.
I think this business of infinitely powerful, infinitely good, omniscient… are like little boys bragging about their dads. It is not based on logic or observation. That’s why is makes no sense when you look at it closely.
There is always a disconnect in believers’ bragging about their particular god. If he/she/it/they are ineffable – defying description – then trying to describe them is foolish. If ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ then how can we know anything about his/her/its/their intentions?
It’s a mystery! Are you trying to spoil all the fun?! 🙂
It seems to me that it’s only coherent if you accept Cartesian mind-body dualism (i.e. you can have a mind without a body). That doesn’t solve the logical contradiction of being simultaneously all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good that others have pointed out. In my experience, most people’s conception of a god is an immortal, all-powerful version of themselves.
That’s where I stop as well. The “omni” business above is a huge digression. Once one realizes that non-corporeal stuff that is aware is itself an incoherent concept, then it’s “game over”.
It is incoherent because of our knowledge of what thinking IS… (what awareness is) — which really is a reaction against physical stimuli, emBODied in our matter that remembers and/or simply reacts to that stimuli. The nuts and bolts of it all has no allowance for experience/awareness (including that of bacteria) not made of stuff. To think otherwise throws away all of conservation, causality, etc. It’s an all-or-nothing kind of proposition.
That being said, I’d suppose that makes me a 7.0, but I CAN envision all sorts of shit that would make me say… “whoopsie, I guess I was wrong”. But I’ve got a very fertile imagination… I can imagine all kinds of impossible shit that violates causality and conservation. So what? (it ain’t happening)
Swinburne wrote a book around 1977 (OUP) directly about this allegation of incoherence: The Coherence of Theism. I suppose that Philipse engages it, too? But cases like this are notoriously hard to make at any conceptual level. There is a pretty long list of (I think) successful rebuttals in the analytical philosophy of religion.
Arguments against belief in God are better off centered on evidential than purely logical grounds.
But arguments against atheism and/or for theism are usually metaphysical in nature and thus centered on logical rather than evidential issues, so atheist philosophers can’t ignore – and indeed should be well-versed in – these types of argument. Plus, evidence requires interpretation, so logical issues inevitably arise.
The start of this most recent discussion was the question of whether there could even be evidence for a god, in part because of these issues of incoherence.
“Creator of all things” seems problematic if there are things (such as God) that are “necessarily eternal”.
In a similar vein, I’m not clear on what “perfectly free” is supposed to mean, but it seems incompatible with “perfectly good”. Is God free to do evil or not?
The “creator of all things” is so indistinguishable from “the set of all sets” that it’s actually painful to hear anybody propose it as an essential property of their deity. Why not just come right out and profess their love for the Great Married Bachelor Who Live In A Perfectly Cubical Sphere and be done with it?
Cheers,
b&
Or who works in a spherical cubicle!
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Curiously enough, those who work in cubicles tend towards a personal spherical geometry themselves….
b&
It’s First Cause™ :
1. All things must have a cause
2. (well, er, except for this one thing, that I hereby declare to be without cause and slap the name God upon it!)
3. Therefore God exists because he had to have caused all the other stuff!
4. QED
It’s rubbish all the way down.
von Neumann-Godel-Bernays set theory has a “class of all sets”, and if Ben can establish that system’s inconsistency, he will become a very famous and rich fellow! I have, of course, slightly misquoted him, but
1. a teachable moment mustn’t be wasted; and
2. “creator of all things” might better be replaced by “creator of all non-self-created things”.
Right, but now you’ve put “creator” in conflict with “necessary”. If there can be self-created things, then we can no longer say that there “necessarily exists” a creator.
…and this has what, exactly, to do with the price of tea in China?
In many non-Euclidean geometries you can construct a triangle with more than one right angle. Such a “gotcha!” response is as uninteresting as redefining “line” to mean “conic section.”
Of course different set theories reach different conclusions from their different premises. That’s why they were created in the first place.
Is it your contention that you can use an alternate set theory to demonstrate that truly anything is possible? If so, you’re the one in imminent danger of being graced with fame and fortune.
Really, that’s what it all comes down to. However you want to formulate it, if omnipotence is a real property, it truly does mean that anything is possible and that nothing is impossible. And while that makes for great Hallmark tearjerkers, it’s so patently obviously not true in such an infantile and childish way that I’m still more than a bit flabbergasted that we’re expected to treat with respect those who espouse it as a serious proposition.
Cheers,
b&
Jeez, Ben, is it possible you didn’t read me saying right there that I had “slightly misquoted” you? I hope that my ‘class’ rather than your “set” (“of all sets”) was the only place I did it, but if you saw a different one, and so missed that one, please let me know.
If you think that a fact which can be derived in ZF (and in vN-G-B as well of course, but maybe you were unaware) is any more than jokingly analogous to “creator of all things”, I’d like to see your serious analysis of the analogue, and then I can start to take a few more comments here seriously myself. Maybe you could start by explaining why there is anything in this pop-theology, or anything much in supposedly real theology, which is in any way seriously related to mathematics. Then I’ll stop thinking of your responses here as being much more than tongue-in-cheek. I do take what you say as definitely reflecting your real sentiments in these matters, but surely the degree of certainty asserted is at least somewhat jocular!
On something more technical, you seem to imply that redefining words (as might be a way of expressing the existence of phenomena in non-euclidean geometry which are negations of ones in euclidean) can somehow also be done in set theory to produce a coherent system where Cantor’s paradox does not ‘occur’, despite not explicitly avoiding it as in the famous set theories above. A reference to anything remotely resembling set theory with that property would be nice to have. It is true that the existence of both non-euclidean geometry and of the set theoretic paradoxes were seminal in the creation of modern logic, but the implication in your 1st two paragraphs, that these are very similar, seems a bit tenuous or worse.
Glib certainties should be attempted to be made more believable to the uninitiated by using vague references to famous technical results only by getting those results correct (or maybe by creationists who are sure that no non-unitiated will be reading it).
“creator of all non-self-created things”.
Is that like the barber who shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself?
How are they incompatible? God could be ‘perfectly free’ to do evil and yet never do it, which would make him ‘perfectly good’.
Your description is no different from a misunderstanding that 0.999… somehow isn’t actually equal to 1.
Search all of infinite time and, if something never happens, it’s impossible for it to happen. Whatever it is that prevents it from happening is irrelevant; if it never actually happens, it’s by definition impossible for it to happen.
Cheers,
b&
bla
Sorry, didn’t mean to type that.
There is more than one meaning of the word “impossible.” For instance, suppose it were known that the tallest dinosaur that ever lived was 100 feet tall. Since dinosaurs are now extinct, we would know that no dinosaur ever will be 101 feet tall, and so by your definition we could declare that it is impossible for dinosaurs to be 101 feet tall. But this doesn’t sound quite right. This usage of the word “impossible” seems to be different than what is meant when we say things like “it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light.”
It’s actually all the same meaning; it’s just a matter of whether you’re considering all the variables or not.
For example, it’s very common to state that it’s impossible to draw a triangle with two right angles. It’s also very common for some smart-alec to reply that you can, and do so by telling a joke about a polar bear in a snowstorm.
Well, yes and no. When somebody indicates the impossibility of drawing a triangle with two right angles, said person is generally quite familiar with non-Euclidean geometries, and is simply using the same shorthand that permits us to not have to clarify that “lines” don’t curve — else, of course, if you use curved “lines,” you can also trivially draw a triangle with two right angles. Or a “triangle” with four sides, or whatever.
The point is, if you fully specify all the parameters, including the definition of a triangle and Euclidean space and all the rest, then the end result is that, yes, it really is impossible to construct a triangle with more than one right angle.
Same thing with the Universe. Using your example, it is impossible for a terrestrial Cretaceous dinosaur to have raised its head much more than 17 meters (assuming the reliability of the Wikipedia entry on S. proteles). Perhaps there could have been plausible pathways to a taller dinosaur…but that ship has long since sailed, and we’re drawing our triangles in Flatland, not on a globe.
Cheers,
b&
But why does he never do it? If it’s because his good nature prevents him, then he’s not free to do it after all. He’s constrained by his nature.
If he is truly free to do evil, i.e. if the capacity to do so is in his nature, then he’s not perfectly good. He has evil within him, even if it’s never expressed.
Now we know why the Sophisticated Theologians have to mince words into meatballs …! 😀
I think there are two notions of ‘coherence’ operating here: Is ‘God’ meaningful? And: Is God an internally consistent concept?
Philosopher Ted Drange has a useful summary of arguments that the answer to the second question is ‘no.’
“Incompatible-Properties Arguments: A Survey”
At least the Anselmian God: omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect, and incorporeal, seems incoherent for many reasons, including the ones Drange gives. One of the most plausible is philosopher Wes Morriston’s argument that omnipotence and necessary moral perfection are incompatible, available for free here.
I thought the Anselmian god was simply ‘that of which nothing greater can be conceived to exist’?? The so-called argument of Anselm claims to rely only on that.
With respect to Swinburne the OT describes a God who is anything but “perfectly good” in any modern sense of the term.
I may be being simplistic but I side with Wittgenstein in keeping silent on questions which make no more than grammatical sense.
I’m not impressed.
He says: “For the stipulation that God is an incorporeal being annuls the very conditions for meaningfully applying psychological expressions to another entity . . .”
Does it? How do we know this? If this Almighty “spirit” is to be considered omnipotent and omniscient, then the “conditions” under which this or that can occur would seem to be, in principle, boundless.
The argument strikes me as equivilent to suggesting that miracles simply can’t happen because they violate the laws of nature. I think the faithful already know that any miracle must, ipso facto, violate the supposed “laws of nature”.
We atheists are right to remind the faithful that no credible evidence exists which supports any alledged miracle having actually occurred, but it is quite another thing to declare that miracles are unconditionally impossible, even for God. We have no right to make such a bold, and profoundly unscientific, claim.
I agree that incorporeality isn’t a showstopper, as anyone who’s seen the movie Ghost (or Ghostbusters) knows — we have reasonable criteria for determining the psychological states of incorporeal beings.
But that said, I think a significant problem for divine psychology is omnipotence and omniscience. Surely any being with those qualities would be so radically different from us as to have completely alien psychology. (Think about how much of human psychology is based on having needs, wants, and desires, and how much human interaction is based on imperfect knowledge.)
I was starting to agree with that, but then I thought how this vast being could set aside a subset of him/her/it/theirself and programme it to be vengeful, jealous, loving etc the better to empathise with us (rather as the Commodore 128 could give itself a lobotomy if you pressed Ctrl on startup, and turn into a C-64).
In fact isn’t that pretty much the Mystery of the Incarnation? Mean Nasty Ugly OT Yahweh made himself into a helpless baby, and saw what a time they had of it down in 1st century Palestine, and said “Oh, you poor things!” and turned into the relatively nicer God of the NT.
well, “we atheists” or at least this one, want to see any evidence at all that this god exists or could exist. Until that happens, I’m quite happy in saying that anything is impossible for it to do since something that is imaginary can’t do anything. The claim that something might maybe exist isn’t scientific at all. It’s wishful thinking and the burden of proof is on the believers.
Seems pretty incoherent to me. There have been a lot of times when apologists have compared the existence of concepts like logical rules to the existence of god, which really seems to be a symptom of simultaneously wanting god to be real and not wanting to give him a chance to be fake. I always laugh when they get to that point. Of course god is an idea, and that is all he is.
Yes — that’s what happens when you reify abstractions and think of them as noncorporeal essences.
In which class, abstraction or real, would you place a quantum field, e.g. the Higgs field, so that I might sound right up-to-date? Physicists would seem to regard the Higgs particle less real than the field, if anything. We could tediously work our way backwards form quarks to protons to atoms, etc. if you put both of the Higgs ‘notions’ above outside reality. To cut it short, at what point does your reality begin?
Philosophical questions of what a “real” reality is aside, a physicist will tell you that the Higgs Boson has a mass of roughly 125 Gev/c² and they’ll share with you the data that CERN has collected indicating that such is the case.
What is the mass of the God Bogon?
b&
Sastra hasn’t proffered an opinion, but I take it that the Higgs particle does exist for you. To be complete, tell me whether the Higgs field also does, or not, for you.
As with the asked-for sharp distinction between god and non-god asked for many times here by you, it would be nice to get a clearer idea, from a few people here with whom I’ve maybe argued a bit (or at least expressed caution about some bald assertions), where that sharp line in their minds is between actual existence and merely figments in the mathematical imaginations of various well-known scientists.
The (say, strange) quark might also be a good example, both particle and field, a bit different (though not so topical). But with what’s now called confinement, before about 1970, despite more than a decade of tremendous ‘success’, probably most particle physicists suspected it to be a ‘mathematical trick’.
I better answer you, since I’m asking for answers: there ain’t no god (I mean the negation of that of course, just using the USian slang!), so it follows that Bogon ain’t got no mass. This might devolve into a discussion of the topic of Krauss’ recent book—vacuum, nothing, empty, zero, ad nauseam. Anyway, I’m not saying that Bogon must travel at 300,000 roughly km/sec.
I think we have to be careful to distinguish between different interpretations of “ain’t got no mass”:
1. It has a zero mass.
2. It lacks mass as an attribute.
Btw, like all fundamental bosons (and fermions), Higgs is neither a particle nor a wave, it just looks more like one or the other in different circumstances.
You can’t think of it as having mass in the quotidian sense of a billiard ball having mass. As an illustration of how non-intuitive mass is at this level: In a proton or neutron, the majority of the mass is contributed by the [theoretically] massless gluons rather than the masses of the constituent quarks.
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Two points:
On the last bit, I think Matt Strassler has somewhat disputed with Sean Carroll not the main point there but rather how much comes from the gravitational potential energy and how much from the motion of the quarks. But that the sum of the rest masses of the quarks is tiny compared to that of the proton is not disputed.
More a question on your earlier statement, where I take your wave and my field as synonomous, are you saying that there is a way of detecting the field other than detecting the particle (the latter very indirect also it seems)? My understanding was ‘no’.
Actually my answer was supposed to be a third possibility:
3. It doesn’t exist, so neither 1. nor 2. is meaningful.
Well, your 3 is true, but really orthogonal to 1 & 2.
Gravitons are massless too, so the point stands.
No, “wave” isn’t synonymous with “field”, any more than “particle” is. The field sometimes expresses like one, sometimes like the other. There is no “the particle”; there is just particle-like behaviour.
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My misprint: I meant ‘strong force potential energy’ not “gravitational potential energy”, so that the reference was in other terms about the gluons.
Well, that makes more sense.
But the strong force is mediated by gluons, so I don’t see what the difference is in that case…
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peter wrote:
The line between physical reality and abstractions of physical reality is not sharp when we get into reductive world of particle physics. My point regarding the existence of God was that God is not placed (by believers or nonbelievers) in the same category as the Higgs bosun. It is intuitively placed in the same category as Beauty or Love.
GA Wells wrote that “Abstract ideas designate qualities which we recognize in things, but which do not exist independently.” When theists draw apologetic analogies like “love is real but we can’t see it under a microscope — like God” or “numbers are real but we can’t hold them in our hands — like God” they are desperately trying to mix up categories so that accepting a Cosmic Mind seems more reasonable.
God is real, of course. It’s an idea cobbled together from experience and other ideas. But sliding it from an idea to a real God is trying to reify — solidify — an abstraction.
Thanks, Sastra, for the reply.
When you went back from the particle to the god question, I was slightly surprised to read “god is real” from you, but may have misremembered or misunderstood earlier things. I take that quote as synonymous with “god exists”, but perhaps you can explain if it is not.
1. Most of us would agree that the English word “god” exists, but taken in the singular, it seems close to being an abstract object, so maybe some of you with strong anti-platonist leanings would disagree with a word existing in the abstract.
2. Of course the brain of most adult humans these days ‘has’ some sort of physical part that would correspond to their notion or notions, coherent or contradictory, existent to them or not, of god.
But does your “god is real” assert more than those?
Getting to the point of asking about particles versus fields, it seems that if discussion of existence of something fundamental (if there were such a something, in this case ‘god’) is being carried on, one should at least also look at what the scientists (those who really do claim to be attempting to discover what there really is in the universe, the particle physicists/cosmologists) have to say at this point of time. What they say seems to come very close to contradicting what (seem now to me to be rather naive, given the nature, and often non-existence, of replies) anti-platonists often entertainingly but glibly assert. That is, I get the impression that particle physicists now largely regard the field as being the more fundamental thing existing (*), rather than the particle, one individual of which can with effort be teased into being observable in order to test their theories. But that seems to me awfully close to asserting the existence of abstract objects. One need not say how that relates to neo-platonism.
(*) To expand slightly, a field could possibly exist with the corresponding particle being “impossible” in Ben’s somewhat bizarre sense of never actually occurring at any time past or future (and please be clear about it if you insist that something cannot ‘be’ if humans could not know about it). But the particle could not exist without the field.
So the antiplatonists should be ready to answer the question, not avoid it. There’s nothing evil or wrong with being in disagreement with many scientists, but be straightforward about it.
Aslo part of all this is being explicit and clear about the physical or material versus the abstract or mathematical, if as most people blithely assume, there really is a difference. (A follower of Tegmark’s musings would say there isn’t, so no problem.) Quite similar is my asking, without much hope of success, for something more clear about the word ‘exists’, and perhaps in your case at least, whether and how that differs from “is real”.
I’m not sure it makes sense to think of a field existing without a particle; “particle” just characterises some kinds of interactions.
… is the field is the particle is the wave…
It’s a kind of trinity.
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Sorry, Ant, but ‘photons (i.e. particles) may come and go, but the photon field (i.e. electromagnetic field) is forever’. Actually, the implication of ‘time’ in these phrases is inappropriate, since quantum field theory sticks these things into space-time, not just space. But that makes it even more clear that you can hardly regard the field and the particle as aspects of the same thing. There is one field, but 10 to a rather enormous number of photons. That’s just the most established example, but the same holds for the electron, the strange quark, etc. etc. down to the Higgs particle and field today.
I know we just use the word ‘horse’ to refer to the species of horses, and similarly they always refer to the electron (with even more justification) to refer to the species of electrons. But the electromagnetic field is itself not a species of anything, and the attempted interchangeability of particle and field is just as bad there.
So I don’t think your triple interchangeability between particles, waves and fields is anywhere close to accurate.
See further down regarding my claim that the field is not only different, but more fundamental than the particle.
Basically it’s mathematical language, not our English sentences about it, but below are a few quotes from Matt Strassler’s blog explaining to us laymen about Higgs, and not in the math language of quantum field theory.
—–
“…discovery of the Higgs particle is exciting because it confirms that the Higgs field really exists”
“the Higgs field, and how should we conceive of it? It is as invisible to us, and as unnoticed by us, as air is to a child, or water to a fish; in fact even more so, because although we learn, as we grow up, to become conscious of the flow of air over our bodies, as detected by our sense of touch, none of our senses provide us with any access to the Higgs field. Not only do we lack a means to detect it with our senses, it proves impossible to detect directly with scientific instruments”
“The least-intense possible wave that a field can have is called a “quantum” or a “particle”. It often behave in rough accordance with your intuitive notion of “particle”, moving in a straight line and bouncing indivisibly off of things, etc., which is why we give it that name.”
“In the case of the electric field, its particles are called “photons” ”
“Why do particle physicists care so much about the Higgs particle?
Well, actually, they don’t. What they really care about is the Higgs field, because it is so important.”
“However there are many things we don’t know. For instance:
There might be one Higgs field, or there might be several of them, each with its own type of particle (all collectively referred to as “Higgs particles”.)
Or the Higgs field may in fact be an agglomeration or “composite” of several other fields. We have examples of such things in nature already — for example, just as a proton is a composite object made from quarks, antiquarks and gluons, the proton field is a composite field made from quark, antiquark and gluon fields — and we don’t know whether the Higgs is an elementary field, as is the electric field, or a composite of more elementary fields, as is the proton field.”
“I hear the Higgs particle decays rapidly, so how can it create or support the Higgs field? What I have read seems to imply that there is this sea of Higgs particles and this somehow sets up the Higgs field. That wouldn’t work if the Higgs particle existed for just an instant.
The Higgs field doesn’t have to be created by a process; it is just *there*, the way the electric field of nature is just there, always and everywhere.”
—-
A number of these certainly seem to reinforce my unoriginal contention that the field is more fundamental than the particles. But here’s a different reference recommendation: Read page 13 and onward somewhat, which begins the theory in the well-regarded text of Peskin and Schroeder, that section entitled “The Necessity of the Field Viewpoint”. I won’t be even more boring with an extensive quote, but just a brief excerpt:
“…one might ask why we must study the quantization of fields. Why can’t we just quantize relativistic particles the way we quantized non-relativistic particles?”
Dig it up for the answer!
Well, my “trinity” comment was deliberately glib, but I don’t think any of those quotes of Strassler’s is inconsistent with what I’d said. To say that a field can exist without a particle is to say that their cannot be a “least-intense” wave.
To say the field is more “fundamental” than the particle suggests a lower order structure, whereas particles (eg photons) are just manifestations of a field (eg the electromagnetic field) in some interactions. There’s no discontinuity between field, wave, and particle.
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There will not be a least intense wave if there is no wave at all.
“The Higgs bosun” would make a great Gary Larson cartoon.
He keeps the crew of fermions in order through heavy seas…
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I maintain that I am as powerful as Yahweh, can do all that he can do, and that often he gets credit for my actions while many of his actions are maliciously cruel.
I have yet to see a convincing argument against this hypothesis.
Sue the bastard. You have plenty of options for choice of law since God has houses in every State. I hear Texan damages are quite exemplary.
“In the first centuries of our era, Christians renovated the prefix omni, formerly reserved for adjectives concerned with nature or with Jupiter, and supplied the words omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, which make God into a respectable chaos of unimaginable superlatives.”
– Borges, From Someone to No One
It is certainly true that if we allow God all the superlatives that believers apply to the word “God”, that you end up with with a completely incoherent mess. Any possible God can not be all the things believers claim for God. That is not to say that the very idea of a powerful being that could fit into, say, the Old Testament narratives of God… something that created the heavens and the earth, that intervenes in human affairs, etc. is inherently incoherent. Only that such a thing can not simultaneously have all the properties that believers through the ages have wanted to ascribe to it.
Of course, there is no evidence for such an entity. But it is not hard to imagine evidence that would at least alert us to a powerful intelligent actor in the universe (Finding a complete copy of the KJV Bible on human chromosome 1, or any readable text actually, would have gotten my attention, for example.. physics examples can be imagined, as well as routine intervention in the world). Most such evidence would merely engender a debate about whether the entity was merely a powerful being, an alien perhaps, or even an alien from a parallel universe, or whether such a being was more like the popular (Western) conception of God as the ground of all being. That is, whether such an entity is necessary or contingent. I can’t imagine how we could possibly affirm whether such an entity was necessary, the ground of being, and not merely a contingent entity like ourselves only much more powerful. From our perspective, that is. From it’s perspective it might know that it’s a socially outcast geek running a simulation on some alien super computer, but we might have no access to that information. So while something God-like could leave evidence, even evidence to identify itself with the Bible God, evidence that it substantially has the powers to fill in the stories in the Bible, evidence that it can raise the dead and is something to be reckoned with, we’d still be left to wonder about the true nature of this powerful entity.
Curiously enough, even such an entity wouldn’t itself be able to tell whether or not it really was the n’est plus ultra or if it were itself but a figment of Alice’s Red King’s dream…
…which answers your question right there as to whether or not it “really” could possibly be the ground of all being. If it can’t even answer that question for itself, of what sense does it make to claim that it could be?
Cheers,
b&
Indeed, I’d think it couldn’t know. I think such a claim would always unknowable, even if you were “God” making the claim about yourself.
Do the essential claims of religion require an answer to this question? I suppose it depends on who you ask, but I do not recall anything in the Bible that requires it. Even when I was a Christian I thought the Biblical case for a God with all of these crazy properties was slim. The God-character in the Bible is powerful, but seems clearly to have limits, and doesn’t really make these kinds of abstract claims about himself. El Shaddai, for example, is conventionally rendered in English as God Almighty, but there is nothing of this all-encompassing quality justifiable from translation. As best anyone can tell, El is a name of another deity appropriated and eventually diluted into a generic word for “god”, and Shaddi comes from roots meaning “destroyer” or merely to be strong. A “god the strong” or “god the destroyer” is a far cry from God Almighty.
It’s from this point of view that I think evidence for the God-of-the-Bible is possible, even if the God-of-most-believers is not, because so far as I am aware the actual Bible doesn’t make the grandly incoherent claims for God that believers have come to ascribe to him.
Of course, I’m aware of no evidence for such an entity.
There could have been evidence for a Biblical YHWH, but we now know from the evidence that YHWH is every bit as fictional as Harry Potter.
YHWH is nobody if he didn’t drown the planet. The planet was never drowned; ergo, YHWH is nobody.
b&
Definitely. No disagreement here.
“but seems clearly to have limits” — Iron chariots!
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My favorite! Thanks to Ben G., I will always have it available:
Judges 4:13-16
Oooh…I do not think this is the correct passage! Hmmmmm back to work.
Judges 1:19
Velikovsky and von Daniken, among others, have offered (more-or-less) “naturalistic” accounts of alleged Biblical miracles. I’d argue that it is far more rational to believe them than to believe that the events were the product of a supernatural being.
In fact, it was von Däniken who started me on the road to atheism (from weak, non-church-going Catholicism) in my early teens. I fairly quickly realised it was nonsense, but never felt any need to go back to supernaturalist nonsense.
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The case against God by George Smith offers a down to earth and quite convincing explanation about God’s incoherence.
I think Philipse’s argument here is weak since the “common sense dualism” which separates the mind from the body will place listening, loving, communicating thoughts through ESP, and performing actions through PK into the “mind” category. Psychological expressions refer to states of mind, not the behavior of the body.
The problem isn’t that dualism is incoherent or incapable of being imagined: the problem is that it is wrong. We began to discover it was wrong the moment some of the early natural philosophers noted empirically that the brain’s role in our anatomy wasn’t to cool the blood.
Where God falls into internal contradiction and incoherence is with the ‘omnis.’ Since I came from a “spiritual but not religious” tradition — with God as some sort of Higher Consciousness transcending and yet interacting with the material world (in the same way that we feel as if our minds transcend and yet interact with the material body) — I’ve never thought any of the omni characteristics intrinsic to a ‘proper’ definition of God. They look like odd embellishments, hyperbole thrown on to make God look more impressive and important. God is the ghost in the universe the way we are the ghost in the machine. That’s all the analogy needs.
So anyone who gets fancy and hitches their belief in God to God being ALL powerful, knowing, and loving is screwed. You can defeat the hypothesis without anything but a lot of thought experiments. But of course belief in God runs on two tracks: the version which is familiar enough to relate to (God the Father who loves us) and the version which is for show (numinous!) The ability to believe in two opposite things at once is either madness, hypnosis, or religion.
Well said.
As gluonspring mentioned, well said. I especially like your last sentence. I am very tempted to appropriate it.
Of course it’s well said, it’s Sastra.
The gods of Greek and Norse mythologies didn’t have all the properties attributed to the monotheistic god (nor did the god of the Old Testament), which makes their existence less incoherent. In fact, it’s easy to see that the God Christians actually worship doesn’t satisfy the criteria either.
I think we sell our understanding of science short if we think that any conceivable miracle could be the result of suitably advanced aliens. We have good reason to think that things like time travel and teleportation are physically impossible, so any being demonstrating such capabilities to skeptical observers with adequate instrumentation ought to be tentatively regarded as godlike.
At the very least a visitor with detailed and reliable information about the future should be treated with the greatest respect, and if possible kept secret — there’s money to be made!
Who cares if the superstitious’s concepts of ‘gods’ et al are coherent? That is a problem for the religious.
Are these concepts laughable silly?
Yes, and we can safely ridicule such concepts.
More importantly, do the context makes testable claims on magical agents? I.e. agents breaking energy conservation by their actions or existence?
Yes, and we can safely reject such claims. (Except perhaps on the outstanding question about the current choice of parameters in physical laws.)
There is really no tension between these two areas of handling superstitions.
The very notion of omniscience seems to be contradictory to me. Even if you’ve never come across anything that you didn’t already know, how could you possibly be justified in saying that you’re 100% sure you know everything? No one can possibly know that they know everything, and therefore omniscience is impossible.
Well, by definition, that’s how a Supernatural Being (SB) knows that he knows everything..he’s an SB, and thus “omniscient” or he would not be “S”.
Dept of Musing & Rumination:
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Information may not have three physical dimensions, but it still occupies the dimension of time. Potentially, the sum amount of information could expand to a point where the information on the event horizon is impossible to access anymore, because time to get there is insufficient. Thus “omniscience” is lost.
Can an omniscient being know everything about itself? What every one of its own neurons is doing at every nanosecond? (But wait, as an incorporeal being it doesn’t have neurons. Well, whatever it thinks and knows with.) Then what does it do that knowing and thinking about itself with, such that it knows the state of every one of the knowing-the-stateons too?
While some notions of “God” are clearly incoherent, not all are. Richard M. Gale’s _On the Nature and Existence of God_ looks at the flaws in arguments from Swinburne and others, and then tries to spell out what kinds of gods don’t fall afoul of logical difficulties.
Do tell.
How about:
A Personal Being who created the universe, who oversees it’s laws and who can manipulate or intervene in those laws in ways none of us within the universe can (miracles). And this creator is interested in mankind, and can read our thoughts, answer our prayers to Him. He can even provide an afterlife for us (some substrate in which our consciousness continues to operate after the death of our bodies).
And this is the ONLY such Being in existence – the only Personal creator of a universe.
This all sounds quite God-like to me, it’s not internally incoherent, and in principle this God could provide evidence for itself.
And the concept of God(s) is so varied, even among members of the same religions, that it seems odd to me to say only some faction is allowed to engage in conceptualizing a God. Why, for instance, would only a certain set of Christians conception of ‘God’ be ruled the only one?
Vaal
What does it mean to “oversee” the laws of the universe? What work does that stipulation do that’s not already being done by the “creator” and “miracles” clauses? How would the Being provide evidence that such (non-creative, non-miraculous) “oversight” is necessary?
The uniqueness requirement seems out of place, since it makes godhood a property not of the Being itself, but of a universe with exactly one such Being. Again, what evidence could the Being provide of such uniqueness?
As for providing “some substrate in which our consciousness continues”, we’ll probably be able to do that ourselves in a few centuries, since all the evidence indicates that consciousness is a physical phenomenon with nothing supernatural about it.
“What does it mean to “oversee” the laws of the universe? “
Hell, I dunno. It’s not prima facie contradictory or incoherent though. Like “Associate Producer” in movies, it’s a job description and we just because we don’t know exactly what is involved in the task doesn’t equate to incoherence or contradiction 😉
I don’t quite get your point about the uniqueness of God. This just happens to be a mono-theist God. Only one of ’em. Nothing contradictory or incoherent about that.
As for a substrate for our consciousness, yes that’s the point: I’m not attributing seemingly nonsense concepts like “incorporeal” in terms of how this God operates.
Vaal.
In my book, a definition that includes phrases to which no coherent meaning can be assigned counts as incoherent.
You claimed your Being can provide evidence of its Godhood. If uniqueness is a necessary requirement of Godhood, then I want to know what evidence it can offer in support of its uniqueness.
Gregory,
There are any number of logically possible ways we could say this God “oversees” or “sustains” the workings of this universe. For instance, the universe may exist only insofar as this God continues to desire it exists, and God may supply some form of energy necessary for it to continue to exist. This may involve physics currently unknown to us (hardly an incoherent notion, since physicists presume this is likely the case that there is more to discover about physics and cosmology).
Again, this imparts neither an incoherent nor a logically contradictory attribute to this God.
And in principle this God could give us demonstrations of these more fundamental physical processes that support the premise that God supplies this necessary process for the universe.
BTW, if you will continue to find “oversees the laws of the universe” incoherent, then drop it from the description. It’s not necessary.
So now what is incoherent about the God I’ve described?
Vaal
“I’m not attributing seemingly nonsense concepts like “incorporeal” in terms of how this God operates.”
But how can this God be corporeal if He created the universe? Where did/does that body exist? If in some meta-universe*, how did He get into this one to “read our thoughts, answer our prayers to Him” and “provide an afterlife for us (some substrate in which our consciousness continues to operate after the death of our bodies)”?
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* Who created the meta-universe?
Ant,
You seem to be confusing epistemological questions with issues of coherency.
If I say that superman can fly and see through walls these are not logically contradictory or incoherent claims. To ask “But can you tell me HOW superman would be able to do such fantastical things?” doesn’t
entail these powers are incoherent, it only says “We don’t know how it’s done.” Science typically starts with observations of a phenomenon before it has the explanation for how the phenomenon occurs. If our descriptions of a phenomenon were rendered logically contradictory or incoherent on the grounds we haven’t explained how it worked, there would be no science.
So when I say that a God created this universe and you demand to know “how,” that doesn’t entail anything about it’s incoherence or logically contradictory nature.
As for a direction I’d take in answering your question: I’m not using the term “universe” to mean “everything that possibly exists.” I’m using it in the more standard “the visible universe” – the one we live in that started with the Big Bang. There is no logical necessity saying that this universe is “all that exists.” Hence a corporeal God could exist in his own corporeal realm or state, and the nature of the physics involved entails that He can interact with the universe He created (the universe may exist within God’s own realm…whatever).
The coherence of these ideas no more demands I have to give you the exact physics of this any more than I’d have to explain the exact physics of how superman would be able to fly.
Vaal
I’d certainly expect the concept of “God” to cohere with reality.
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“I’d certainly expect the concept of “God” to cohere with reality.”
Ant, you are still mixing up the internal coherence of a premise with the question of whether the premise is “real” or “true.”
A concept can be coherent and lacking contradiction whether it’s true or not.
There is nothing incoherent about the statement: “Mitt Romney was elected President Of The United States.” It’s just the case that it’s not true. In fact, it is BECAUSE it is a coherent concept that you can refute it and marshal evidence against it.
Similarly, the statement “Aliens far more intelligent than humans with more powerful technology exist in this universe” isn’t something we know to be “true” or “real” or “false.” It may be “not true/real.” That doesn’t entail the concept is incoherent.
If that were the case, all fiction would be incoherent.
Vaal
Something need not be real to cohere with reality. Much if not all mainstream fiction coheres with reality; fantasy and sf … not so much.
But, really, if you’re concerned about the concept of a “God” that could only exist in fiction, what’s the point?
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I’ll keep this short since we’re at the margin.
Vaal, it seems to me that in your effort to make your God-concept coherent, you’ve shorn it of its divinity. Your God has been reduced to a physical being existing within the multiverse, with powers derived from physics unknown to us. You’re basically redefining “God” to be synonymous with “technologically advanced space alien”.
This approach does not seem to address Jerry’s question of whether supernatural concepts of God are coherent.
Gregory,
Note that I responding not to Jerry in particular, but to Jim Lippard’s claim: “While some notions of “God” are clearly incoherent, not all are” and gbjames’ request for an example concept. This is what I have tried to supply.
Secondly, the concept of God(s) is so multifarious – even any single revealed religion can not come to consensus on the nature of their God – that one can hardly be quick to reject a concept of God as “not really being God” because it doesn’t fit some incoherent concept of God. This smacks of the No True Scotsman fallacy: “All true concepts of God are incoherent.” “Really, here’s a coherent concept of God.” “That can’t qualify as true God concept, because no true concept of God is coherent.”
I think there is more leeway in reasonable concepts of a God than you allow. (In fact I could add even more characteristics and actions to this God bringing it in line with the God of revealed religions, while not producing contradictory attributes).
Finally, concerning his own position, Jerry wrote: “I’ve maintained that there can indeed be evidence that would provisionally convince at least me of the existence of a divine being.” But “divine” essentially means things like “of or pertaining to a god,” and “proceeding from God or a god” “godlike; characteristic of or befitting a deity.” Essentially: a being with the qualities of a God. That leaves on the table what exactly those qualities are – the subject of this discussion. It does not of necessity speak to “omni” characteristics or certain incoherencies attributed to certain God concepts. If you assume incoherent concepts into your definition of “God” that would be begging the question under debate.
Vaal.
But if you allow enough leeway to include powerful but natural entities that seem godlike to us, then you’ve also granted us God-status with respect to our own technologically unsophisticated ancestors. I don’t think that comports with most people’s notions of God.
Gregory,
Depending on the particular concept of God held by certain human ancestors, we may indeed meet their concept of a God (have *become* Gods over time, with powers that a God would have). But if their concepts (as they likely do) contain really specific attributes we don’t actually posses – e.g. their God’s powers are intrinsic and not born of contrivance, or living in the clouds, etc – then we would not fulfill their concept of their “God.”
As for other concepts, I think a single transcendent (in the sense of not being bound within this universe), Personal Being who created the universe to ultimately engage in a loving relationship with human beings, who can read our thoughts, answer our prayers, perform miracles, knows the future, manifested himself in human form on earth to show us how to live and explain what He expects of us, give us moral guidance, who promises a realm in which our consciousness continues and guides us with his rules for attaining that realm, and who may later show up in a “rapture” like scenario bringing everyone there and rendering judgement etc….(the Being could even be unique and “necessary” in the logical sense argued by some theists. While I don’t see God as logically necessary, I could be wrong and there is no incoherence in logical necessity).
All that sounds a hell of a lot to me like
a “God” and like the God many people believe in. And there is no incoherence or internal contradiction within it. We just have no evidence for it.
It seems to me at some point it becomes a subjective issue of what you or I will accept “Ok, yeah, I’d call that being a God.”
But I don’t see a knock-down argument for why I *ought not* think of such an entity as a God.
Vaal
Meta-comment: You can posit a coherent partial description of God, but attempts to logically complete that description will create an incoherence.
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Saying there are laws to the universe while claiming that Mr. Big can violate them does not make sense. It is an incoherent claim.
gbjames,
That’s a strange objection, as it seems to make the same mistake we decry theists make when they say “the laws of nature require a law maker.” We point out that the “laws of nature” are not some legalistic form: they are simply the regularities we observe in nature.
Same with the “laws” I mentioned. They are the same regularities that we sometimes call “laws of nature.” There is nothing incoherent or contradictory about a God being able to tweak, amend, interfere with, suspend or whatever some portion of the system that He created.
(In fact, even sticking with the legalistic notion you seem to imply, it wouldn’t be incoherent. I’m subject to laws that a police officer is not – I can’t carry a gun in public, for instance. There would be nothing incoherent about a God making a separate set of laws for his creation. But, again, this is not the legalistic “law” I was assuming in the word).
Vaal
We have this thing we call the Law of Gravity, stating that objects in the universe relate to one another in ways defined in the law. It is a law because it always is this way. If it is always this way then it can’t be some other way if Mr. Big sez it needs to be tonight at 8:00.
Again…scientifically “laws” only refer to observed regularities. It’s not like our calling them “laws” puts some eternal constraint on the universe. We are always ready to revise our observations, or to amend them. If our descriptions constrained reality, science would never have made any new discoveries or amended the description of any phenomenon. So any “law” amounts to “from what we can tell thus far, this is how this phenomenon seems to operate.”
So our inferences from what we observe do not constrain how the universe works. In contrast, I’m positing a God, a creator of the universe who DOES have the power to alter
how things work.
There is nothing incoherent in that at all.
Vaal.
What is a “Personal Being”? How is this different from an Impersonal Being?
“Being” is a broad concept and can mean essentially the same as “entity.” Something that exists. “Personal” just helps identify that we are talking about a being with personal attributes we tend to associate with “persons,” like desires, beliefs…
though not necessarily sharing the rest of the attributes of “persons” (human beings) we usually interact with.
But if you understand “Being” to entail personal characteristics, then no problem. We can drop the “personal” as unnecessary.
Not sure what this has to do with the conversation, though.
Vaal.
It has to do with the conversation because it is a central element of your earlier comment and Being Capitalized seems to indicate Particular Importance.
Personally, it seems unlikely that someone trying to define “God” (or even “god”) would need to emphasize that we weren’t talking about chairs or grapefruits.
“Personal God” (aka “Personal Being”) is clearly just a projection of a Big Human. Desires. Beliefs. Dripping nostrils, I suppose.(Why not?)
To argue that a so-defined entity, violating the law of gravity at whim, performing miracles, might be considered a coherent idea seems a bit peculiar to this simple fellow.
Thanks guys. I’m outta here for now.
Til next thread…
Vaal
Forgot to add, since you asked for an example: in the broad sense of “being” a chair or grapefruit would be an impersonal “being.” So would something like a physical particle. Theists often use the term “Personal Being” as the cause of the universe to clarify they are conceiving of a being with personal characteristics, vs some non-personal being (entity/cause), such as particles arising from quantum fluctuations or whatever.
Vaal
It’s pretty clear from how theists talk about their God, that “Personal Being” means it’s anthropomorphic at the mental level: it has consciousness, emotions, will, etc., and therefore it can love us, and it can be meaningful for us to love it. (While theists say “Him” it seems absurd to assign it a gender.)
It’s very hard to imagine how it might do that and still pervade the entire universe (and be meaniningfully loving every other human on earth, etc. etc.)
But I am having a lot of trouble in thinking about this being as relating to us in anything like the way another human might, when even its senses would be so unimaginably different. Being invisible and eyeless and having no visible effect on light, or any position in space, there is no way it could “see” in anything like the way we do, but would instead have some kind of all pervasive perception. Likewise sound and hearing. Likewise all its interactions with the material world, its use of energy in performing miracles, etc. etc.
And of course to all of this the believers can say, as they always do, “He just does. He’s much too vast for us to understand. Drop your doubts and just have Faith.”
Assuming you can think about being loved, spoken to, etc. as neurological experiences, then surely you can get around Philipse’s objection by requiring an incorporeal God to love and speak to us directly in our minds rather than through the usual method of communicating these things through our visual system, which does indeed require corporeal behavior?
In short, an incorporeal God could presumably create mental experiences in our minds that, to us, seem perfectly real?
See my comment @ #1.
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I think the word for that is “hallucination”.
We know how those are caused… physical processes… brain chemistry.
No gods required.
Maybe the worldly God manifested itself on our planet via a tiny big bang 2000 years ago which erupted within our universe, and that tiny big bang had physical characteristics that inflated it exactly into the person of Jesus. It then deflated in less than 40 years when he left. I think this could have been a form of intelligent design and an example of how a non-corporeal body could conceivably enter a physical world. May need string theory to prove it up.
Meantine I feel a new religon coming on – the Church of Cosmology.
I appreciate that this is contrary to the scenario predicted by the world’s physicists, which is that the inflation of a new universe within a universe would destroy the old universe, but there are some parallels.
That’s my issue with the coherence of God summed up. The use of a naturalistic ontology to speak of a non-naturalistic entity is at best a means of causing confusion, and more realistically sneaks in intuitively-meaningful concepts for something thst is not at all meaningful.
That God seems to make sense is nothing but a projection of our language.
I too share the view that God, as defined by most believers, is logically impossible. Even the “sophisticated” theologians were forced to wrestle with the omnipotence paradox (can God create a rock so heavy that even he can’t lift it?) and the best they could do was claim that God can’t violate logical laws (which he created). However, the simple fact remains that if impossibilities exist, then there are inviolable laws, and you can’t have inviolable laws and a God who can violate them. Therefore, God can’t have supernatural powers, and in that neutered form, why call him God? In other words, “supernatural” is a synonym for “impossible,” so an omnipotent God is impossible by definition, no?
Omnipotence is incoherent for the same reason that the phrase, “there’s an exception to every rule” can’t be true.
As always much too late to the party.
My first thought is that what Philipse writes comes across very much like hindsight bias. Why do we consider the idea of an immaterial person ludicrous? Because science has never produced evidence that that would be remotely possible. In other words, traditional notions of god are incompatible with present scientific knowledge. Well, duh.
But the crux is that that is not the same as the idea being incoherent. Two thousand years ago, would we have known enough to say with any confidence that something like an immaterial person is impossible? Heck, we didn’t even understand how diseases work. It could have been that science found support for many things claimed by religions, it just didn’t.
Claiming that a god is omnipotent, now that is simply logically incoherent a priori. But that immaterial persons are impossible is an insight based on our accumulated, empirically derived knowledge about how the world works.
You are making this too hard on yourself.
If you disprove Jehovah of the old/new testament you have eliminated god for the Christian. No other god counts. If you disprove Allah of the Qur’an, you have eliminated god for the Musilm.
However, they will still cling to their nutty beliefs just as strongly. They were not argued into belief, so you can’t argue them out of it.
These are people who have been massively abused, threatened and tortured to burn these nutty beliefs in. Logic is a tepid tool to heal the wounds.
I had nightmares for months after reading the Qur’an, and all I did was read it once.
I don’t think there is any reason we need to simply accept this assertion. Conversation about the absurdity of religious belief has moved many a believer to disbelief.
There is one famous example of a 19th century Christian being moved by logic, a Christian asked the navigator of the ship he was on if navigation depended on the assumption of a spherical earth. The navigator said “Yes” and that was it.
However I think most defections come more from emotions — cruel behaviour of believers, peer pressure from new friends, “abandonment” by god, and sometimes just by a slow erosion of beliefs. Look at the process going the other way, usually triggered by hypnosis, music, wild promises and desperation, rarely by logic.
I think you are just plain wrong. Go check out Dawkin’s “Convert’s Coener”. If you took a poll of atheist commenters on this site you’d find a great many who escaped religion because it makes no intellectual sense.
> Go check out Dawkin’s “Convert’s Corner”. If you took a poll of atheist commenters on this site you’d find a great many who escaped religion because it makes no intellectual sense.
These are a very unusual group, and worth plugging away for. However, they are far from typical. I suggest having a read of various emails at http://mindprod.com/feedback/god.html to see what I have found is more the more usual reaction. Christians have to already have some pretty serious doubts before they voluntarily expose themselves to the “devil”, Richard Dawkins. It gets comical watching the silliness they will profess to avoid admitting the obvious error and inconsistency in the bible.
Yes, it is silliness. It is incumbent on us to point out the silliness. Some will come to recognize the silliness and others will not. The fact that some will not is not a reasonable argument for not speaking up clearly and bluntly about how silly it is. There are a great many “fence-sitters” out there who will be moved to rationality even when the direct faith-driven participant is too stuck to move.
Trying to define god is like trying to pin Jello to a wall. The notion of a general ill-defined god is a debating trick to make Jehova, Allah… harder to discount. It is an irrelevant philosophical honey pot to entrap intellectuals. Christians don’t care about the existence of god in general. Whether Shiva exists or not is of no interest. In that matter, they are atheist. They only care about Jehovah, and then Jehovah only as described in the King James bible. Jehovah is a much softer target than a generic god. Jehovah is ludicrous, wicked, callous, cruel. There is nothing in the least subtle about him. He is a primitive, standard-issue, bronze age tyrant god, without a single redeeming virtue. He could play the rôle of devil without a single change to his character.
Spinoza held that the universe is one aspect of God. You and I are part of God, like the earth, like the sun. He didn’t think it made much sense to worship such a thing.
The Greek and Norse pantheons didn’t include a devil, possibly because the gods themselves misbehaved so often. There’s no devil in the Old Testament; Satan in Job and elsewhere is either an agent of God and acts only with His permission or at His direction.
Suddenly in the gospels Satan and the devil are synonymous, without explanation, as though everyone took it for granted. (It’s been suggested that it was an infection from Zoroastrianism.) The devil, of course, is incompatible with omnipotence and omnibenevolence, but what isn’t? Whoever edited the gospels ought to be fired.
And the devil knows that he is up against a perfect being and is thus doomed to fail.
Talk about a dead-end job.
I always say, when pressed, “tell me what you believe, and I’ll address the specific claims you have.”
Christopher Hitchens did this exact thing once during a radio interview with some mush-headed liberal Christian. She accused him of that old trope; that atheists paint all Christians with a broad brush as literal-minded fools. “That’s not what I believe,” she insisted. So the Hitch asked her to explain her beliefs, for example did she believe in the Resurrection? “No”, she said. She also did not appear to believe in Jesus, much of the Bible, and was not even sure that God existed. Hitch asked, quite reasonably, in what sense was she a Christian?
As she was actually articulating her “beliefs” out loud, possibly for the first time in her life, she seemed to realize as she was talking how incoherent she was sounding!
Two other small points:
1. If you eliminate every comment here, and every discussion of ‘god’ anywhere, which implicitly involves time separately from him, her or it, (for example reference to a creation in the past tense), you’d come pretty close to the empty set of discussions. Why eliminate? Otherwise either that god did not create time, or time does not exist, and in both cases the discussion of god as a supposed creator of all is meaningless.
2. If the word “coherent” in the title of this refers to non-contradiction in the logical sense (and many here, perhaps most, think it does), it seems it might be a 2-sided sword if the result is meant as a polemic against the god-botherers. One can hear them say: ‘Well then, all we must do is alter our definition of god enough to make it logically consistent, and then those guys have no case against us!’
Or even worse, they could dig up a quote from Penrose’s “Road to Reality”, pp. 656-657:
“…QFT in its present form …. this magnificent, profound, difficult, sometimes phenomenologically accurate, yet often tantalizingly inconsistent scheme of things.”
I rattled on about QFT above at sleep-inducing length, since existence there seems pretty fundamental (and at least not the pile of crap theologians produce). But now the god-botherers might say they needn’t even bother with consistency, since apparently the particle physicists don’t.
Of course neither of these bits of verbal-worming is valid, but I’m asking about rhetoric not logic.
In a chapter of his 1936 book Language, Truth, and Logic, A. J. Ayer argued that one could not speak of God’s existence, or even the probability of God’s existence, since the concept itself was unverifiable and thus nonsensical. Ayer wrote that this ruled out atheism and agnosticism as well as theism because all three positions assume that the sentence “God exists” is meaningful.
This seemingly never-ending talk about whether one could proof or disproof God reminds me of the behavior of a severe obsessive-compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and untying his shoestrings – because he never gets it quite right.
I agree that all gods that are immeasurable are incoherent. Any real god would need to be distinguishable from a demon, and a mythological god, and a schizophrenic delusion, and a super advanced alien, and an imaginary being, and an invisible penguin,and a magaical fairy, and an immaterial flower. Without measurable properites, how can you distinguish a god from such things? How could one “know” anything about such a thing– much less that it “wanted” people to “believe in it”? Why should I think a god is more likely to exist than a gremlin?
Although I think god is an incoherent concept I also note that any real gods could tweak things however they wanted to if having me “believe in them” was important to them –so whether I know what sort of evidence would convince me that some god is real is irrelevant, because a real god would. Of course, this could also be true of trickster demons and advanced aliens who wanted me to believe THEY were god.
Even if I decided to call the hypothetical uncaused cause of the big bang “god”, I can’t conceive of it having consciousness, much less desiring of my “belief” in it. There just doesn’t seem to be a logical way to get from a hypothetical uncaused cause to the god with assorted attributes that most people believe in.
I think most people hang on to god beliefs because in the backof their mind they fear the possibility of eternal torment for non-belief. But the argument that says that god is incoherent, is the same argument for the incoherence of immortal souls. What could consciousness be without a “brain” or organs for inputting and interpreting data?
In order to show that he was truthful,Jesus used miracles.
The gospel was preached with miracles and the manifest presence of God.However,miracles are not enough to turn people into believers,unless there is a deep seated sincerity.For those kind of people ,all that is needed is the evidence of the supernatural.The supernatural does exist and can be investigated provided, that you really mean it.
A troll walks into the room.