are you an atheist?

I just like that Mr. Sophist does not even consider the possibility of a spontaneously-arisen orbiting teapot.

I think his definition of God is pretty much the traditional definition from Christian theology, which is why the existence of evil is a problem for him. He pretty clearly wants to defend the possibility of that type of God existing- he doesn't seem to be making an effort to start purely from the evidence and try to come up with the best-guess model based on that.

xp

For me a better analogy is something like: Do right and wrong objectively exist? I.e., something that will probably never be resolved by science.

That would be a good analogy if he were arguing honestly

I don't really see how he's not arguing honestly. Like any philosopher he makes an argument and either it persuades you or it doesn't.

he comes from the William Lane Craig school of disingenuous arguing so fuck him

How is he "disingenuous"? Are you implying you have access to his private thoughts and he privately doesn't believe in the arguments he's making?

yes

It may be the accepted "traditional definition" but I'd be pretty surprised if the authors of the Bible agreed with it.

authors of the Bible oft didn't agree on anything....even the Synoptic gospels aren't that well aligned.

Even if true, I'd suspect he's hardly the first philosopher to use a convenient argument even if he's not personally 100% sure of its "truth". That's kind of neither here nor there as far as usual philosophical practice goes. The focus is usually on the arguments not on the state of mind of the person making them. xxp

Plantinga definitely isn't WLC awful. He knows his philosophy and he isn't marching it out just to mystify the reader. Still, it's hard to reconcile the Plantinga who gets anthologized in serious metaphysics collections with the Plantinga here who waltzes past dozens of objections while proving in three paragraphs that evolution leads to skepticism.

Do right and wrong objectively exist? I.e., something that will probably never be resolved by science.

Right and wrong objectively exist as multivariant ideas, not as single, whole and absolute platonic ideals.

xp Right, among other things, the "traditional" definition of God is not even coherent. So you're already starting from shaky ground if you're trying to argue that there's evidence that it doesn't exist.

I suspect that Plantinga's analysis of the content of belief vs. the neurological manifestation is somehow flawed, but it's an interesting problem. I'm always in favor of raising interesting problems.

a brilliant person who starts out wanting to prove god's existence can find a way. But I have yet to see a brilliant person actually start from neutral and arrive at god.

But I have yet to see a brilliant person actually start from neutral and arrive at god.

Lots of brilliant people have claimed to do this: Descartes, Pascal, etc. You can obviously argue how neutral their starting position really was.

Would you accept non-traditional definitions of God? Or do they have to prove the traditional God exists and nothing else can be tolerated?

Pascal's Wager is the classic example of not starting at neutral.

yeah was just gonna say. his bet-hedging started not just with an assumption of God, but an assumption of the Judeo-Christian one at that.

btw guys this movie will end all these arguments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjo5f9eiX8

final scene is Gary Gutting sobbing and tearing up his decades of publications.

I think there are plenty of decent argments for belief in god that are irrespective of any evidence of its existence.

I Think where most of this falls down is the supposition that an argument is needed in the first place.

that's the whole reason I don't get the apologetic movement. Well, I mean I 'get' it but I think it's the wrong angle. In the end, nobody's stance on religion is going to be wholly based on holistic data (shaky or not). I get that it's a response to the 'yay science' crowd but like, I have plenty of intelligent believer friends who present arguments that are internally sound (just not for me, personally).

anthony flew went from hardcore atheist to theist if we're still looking for examples

the fine tuning argument is p crazy, memorably dissed as being "like being amazed that the holes in a cat's fur line up perfectly with its eyes"

ha

kinda glossed over this part of Christianity, missed its hilarity amongst all the details/weirdness thrown at me since this basic one: God had a son! Where did he meet Ms God? Did he have any daughters? And aw man total bummer, he had to have him killed. If only he could create things or something...

First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.

In order for this thing we label to be a belief, it must be a belief. uh ok?

i think he's saying belief has to have two components - a neurophysiological property and the interpretive content. obv there aren't any proust neurons

both of those reside in the brain's structure/activity, idgi

i think what he's saying is that there is no theoretical technology that could distinguish between a proust is more subtle neuron and a fellini is more boring neuron - the neurons create a condition in which such beliefs can be framed but they exist in this more metaphysical dimension that aligns w/ neurology

a) that's a very simplistic way to view the brain, and b) yeah I see no reason to jump to the conclusion that their must be a metaphys dimension to them.

fwiw my belief in the singularity compels me to believe all brain data is ultimately upload-able. i don't think this is a problem re belief in god.

to me just sounds like more of the old "we don't quite understand how this all works exactly...so must be some ~magic~ involved"

the "god of gaps" as I heard a rabbi once describe it

i.e., "Now we know that the earth revolves around the sun, but we still don't understand X, so...GOD"

they'll just about always have the "yeah sure ok humans can explain the ins and out of things, but God put it all in motion"

"...that was before he decided to settle down and have a lil god of his very own..."

My main defense against the inerrancy crowd (which is shrinking) is the pure number of differing Christian sects. For a divinely inspired book (their words), it's a lil telling that several billion believers can't come to a consensus on some pretty significant things like WHETHER HELL IS REAL

In my mind atheism has a kind of "origin myth" of the moment when an early ocean traveler had been to enough different islands to realize that people believed a variety of different things equally fervently

i am starting to think that being an atheist is psychologically harder than having faith in some sort of spiritual something, especially vis a vis coping with loneliness and loss.

Def is for me

I have had this fascination for a while with the modern idea of "belief" as separate from knowledge, which seems to be the level on which a lot of "theistic scientists" (i.e. actual scientists who are religious, not intelligent design people) believe. I imagine there was a time when this kind of "belief" virtually did not exist, because if your religion was the only knowledge game in town, it was as literally true as anything else you knew to be literally true.

So today, perhaps to maintain the kinds of spiritual comforts that you're referring to, Treeship, we have this category of "belief" that exists outside of verifiable knowledge for the skeptical who still want religion. Yet I find sort of a paradox in that kind of belief for me, because for me to truly believe I feel like I have to let go of my skepticism, but I can't fully let go of my skepticism without some kind of empirical evidence. So even though I rationally understand the idea of accepting religion without taking it as literally true, I can't put myself into it. Also because that kind of "belief" requires you to choose a faith, but when all faiths seem equally untrue in the literal sense and true in the metaphysical sense, I have a hard time committing to one faith.

A.P.: The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship. They believe that there is such a person, but not because of the explanatory prowess of such belief. Or maybe there is something like Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Indeed, if theism is true, then very likely there is something like the sensus divinitatis. So claiming that the only sensible ground for belief in God is the explanatory quality of such belief is substantially equivalent to assuming atheism.

This is the line of argument that contends that since many cultures independently and almost without exception have created some concept of god or gods, there must be some validity to them? I just don't know how someone schooled in logic can arrive at this conclusion.

Many species all over the globe respond to their own reflections as though they were other creatures.

I dig the conceptual comforts of faith (I had it growing up) but damn if I don't feel like I'd have to lie to myself an awful lot to roll with it.

yeah that's basically what I was trying to say with my pretentious post, in many fewer words

ha I kinda forgot about this til now...being 11 and having a very religious best friend, going to his church a couple times due to sleepovers, then going bowling with him and his fam and testing out prayer by asking the Lord for a strike or 2. Didn't help my score at all, so that was the end of that.