A Request Directed to Sciforums' "Atheists"

?? I could give you a list of 5 physical items - phlogiston, ether, evil humors, caloric and Higgs bosons - and you could test the first four, claiming them false. If you then concluded that none of them existed you would have made a significant error.

 

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I'm just going to be a bit picky here and say that the Higgs particle has not definitly been found. They have something that looks like the Higgs and may well be the Higgs. At least I think that's correct, imho.

But that's not fair to your point, which is a bit iffy: gods all belong to the same group which your examples do not.

 

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Except I haven't left any of them out.

 

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I think that I disagree pretty strongly with that.

Presumably, by their nature, gods are supernatural beings. Or if they are incarnated here in the physical world, their incarnations will presumably possess supernatural qualities. I would argue that supernatural beings and qualities are outside the scope of natural science, pretty much by definition.

 

The tack I've taken here is that that we don't need to worry about the impossibility of testing anything invisible. We reject the myths as fiction prima facie. We reject the gods they create as fiction for the same reason. Once we've examined each and every myth, and rejected each and every god they create, we conclude that no god exists. Therefore God does not exist.

 

Right! But it would surely be foolish to say that since hard-to-detect physical quantities often turn out to be false, then they are all false, and the Higgs Boson is provably false.

I don't think all gods belong to the same group. For example, some people worship Gaia, which is a deity that encompasses the entire Earth and is composed of the natural processes that run the planet. Others have worshiped people like Julius Caesar as gods. It would be foolish to claim "Caesar therefore didn't exist."

The only way to make a grouping such as you list above is to define "all gods" as "all gods that are false" - which is a tautology and not really worth discussing.

 

Have you tested the validity of all the gods? Every possible one? I doubt it.

 

Given that all gods are known from the myths that create them, what other god could possibly be overlooked?

 

I believe that Leopold said 'creator of the universe', or something like that. So for the sake of argument, let's define 'God' as 'the creator, source or first-cause of the entire universe'. How can natural science possibly answer questions about whether or not the physical universe has some further supernatural source? I'm inclined to think that natural science might be out of its depth when confronted with grand cosmological conundrums like that.

I'd prefer to say that it's seemingly very unlikely that Tiamat exists. I don't think that we can reduce the probability to zero.

The ancient Mesopotamians tended to think of water as symbolic of chaos. It's a substance, sure enough, but it's formless, it takes the shape of any container that it's put in. So water kind of represents the original stuff of the universe, before it acquired the multiplicity of forms that divide it up into discrete things.

The original state of the universe is fecund, it gives birth to things. The ancient Mesopotamians might have thought of procreation as the basic principle of cosmogenesis, as opposed to the more familiar Judaic-Christian-Islamic idea of a heavenly monarch speaking things into existence as a king commands laws into being.

A universe of discrete being does seem to be kind of antithetical to being conceived as formless and without internal distinction. The more distinctions there are, the less formless reality is.

This, btw, might have been the early context of the middle-eastern myth of the universal flood. It represented the universe reverting to its original formless state. The Mesopotamians were always a little afraid of that. Flood was the biggest natural danger in their river flood-plain and even rain tended to slowly dissolve their buildings, constructed of mud bricks. In the bible version, the older myth of reversion to chaos was incorporated into the Hebrews' own heavenly monarchy theory, so it was reinterpreted as a sign of their god's displeasure.

It's a cosmogonic story, one that dates from long before anything like abstract philosophy existed. The earlier ancients, before the time of the Greeks and their contemporaries in India and China, tended to express their beliefs in the form of stories.

Recognizing that this is an ancient cosmogonic story needn't imply that there isn't some original and fundamental undifferentiated state of the universe. (It's not water certainly, but perhaps something conceptually analogous to it, like an underlying quantum field or something.)

The personification thing is harder to justify. Nevertheless, it's just a fact of human nature that people tend to imagine abstractions as if they have at least some of the qualities of persons. (Especially the psychological qualities.) It's possible to speculate that whatever the original formless ground-state of being might be (let's call it 'Tiamat'), that it contains some procreative power within it that gives birth to everything else. It's also possible to speculate that it possesses some kind of purposiveness and intentionality. While we tend to reject that kind of more anthropomorphic personalization today, our idea that the universe embodies logic and natural law at its deepest levels still might be a faint modern echo of the kind of concepts that the ancient Mesopotamians were trying to get their heads around so long ago.

 

Well, I said I was being picky!

I think gods form a set of items, since they are all called god. I suppose you could look up the definition of god and find common elements in all of them. The other list was just a list of things which had been proved wrong, which is different from having a set of common characteristics. Imho.

 

it's almost a certainty that god, in some form, exists or existed.
keep in mind that this "god" might be something other than supernatural.

 

Atheists, please:

Can you all stop misrepresenting atheism as an insightful, thoughtful philosophy? I mean, holy Darwin.

 

Apparently, God is like pornography. You can't define it, but you'll know it when you see it.

 

No, no, no, it is a feeling that ( my best Captain Kirk impression) something...somewhere...out there....is...watching...me...you...all...of us

 

Two questions come to mind:

1) How is it "almost a certainty" that God existed? What is the basis for this assertion?

2) If "god" is not supernatural, then why call it "god" at all?

 

You are such a rebel. You must be the one then that got Tiassa's shorts in a wad, not me.

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The "almost a certainty" criteria falls in the light of the evidence (artifacts of mythology).

There can't be any other god unless you state the myth that creates it. What you've said sounds more like adopting superstition as a means of scrambling to invent some other god just to cover the hole left behind after we conclude that god everybody keeps clamoring about does not actually exist.

 

leopold first asked me for "proof that god does not exist", or words to that effect. When I asked him which god, he said the God who created life and the universe. When I asked him "which creator-god" he was referring to, he didn't respond. I arbitrarily picked Tiamat from the Enum Elish epic. I think he seemed comfortable with my proof that Tiamat does not exist, based on the evidence that the myth is obviously fictional. But shortly after that he denied that I had proved that "god does not exist". I said I'd proved Tiamat does not exist, and would be happy to prove the non-existence of any other creator-god if he would only specify which one. Again he said "the god who created life and the universe". I said "which one" and he did not respond.

I think this Q&A illustrates the validity of the logic I'm using. It forces the person opposing my position to name the god who would otherwise be immune to testing by natural sciences as you point out. Once that god is named, we can find the myth that creates the god, glance at the myth, and summarily dismiss it as fiction. Very quickly it becomes obvious that no god can survive this.

Once we've discounted the text that creates her she no longer has a basis for existence. She can't live outside the myth, because that was what created her. She dies with it.

Since they are too far inland to worry about the chaos of being tempest tossed by storms at sea, and since they had established themselves for so long at the drainage basin for the snowmelt from Turkey, I can only assume that she represents chaos because of the hellish seasonal flooding they must have occasionally experienced. Slaying her would seem to send a message that the danger is over. But then later in the story (perhaps an addendum) the gods who ended up ruling over people decided to flood the world anyway. This might serve as an explanation for why floods still happened after she was killed off.

I think you're right about that. Things seem to just spring up out of thin air. And in one of the versions Tiamat gives birth to humans and animals alike.

Interesting. That idea hadn't occurred to me.

It stands to reason that the Mesopotamians felt "the wrath of God" stemming from a sort of paranoia that develops from relentless flooding. By contrast the Egyptians were in a safer zone on the lower Nile, where the spring melt from the higher Rift would cause the river to rise gently, irrigate the crops and leave fertile silt. And their gods are not vengeful.

I think that's what's so remarkable about Enuma Elish. It seems to have no precedent. They lay out a series of simple declarative statements, as if to be propounding evidence. Most remarkable is that, while they have a word that translates as 'god' it's hard to imagine what it really means. These are not yet personal gods, and some of them are still not fully emerged from their embryonic stage as animist forces of nature.

I see but aren't you slipping into that mode of presuming possible the thing proved false? Once we dismiss the account as myth, there is no other basis for saying that this water of quantum particles (or something) even exists, any more than to prefer the pictograph of a person crossed with a bull and reason that it might be foreshadowing evolution, or some similar exercise.

Anthropologist Franz Boas (I think in The Mind of Primitive Man) shed light on this generally. Here's a guy who around 1900 went off to study the last primitive peoples in regions of the Yukon and thereabouts--cultures which had not yet been contaminated by civilization. I looked for the passage but haven't yet found it: as I recall, he said that these people live in a state of constant fear of nature, that they recognize that their survival hinges on the slightest accident, injury or disease, and that they are under threat of constant attack from the most innocuous natural causes. They will walk through the world carefully, avoiding even to strip a leaf from a branch needlessly, fearing that the world strikes back at the slightest provocation. They were not given to ascribe any personas to these forces. They just believed that some force was flowing through all of nature which for some reason was prone to randomly attack and harm people, more so whenever they upset the balance. Enuma Elish reflects that to a degree, although it's organized into a causal chain with considerable effort given to relating events to each other. It seems to me that if the Native Americans who Boas studied were at that primitive stage of animism, then the early Mesopotamians were just step ahead of that, actually beginning to develop the idea of true gods out of those dangerous forces of nature.

 

OK. This is why we can't reject all definitions of god. If you define him as a ham sandwich or an elementary particle, then I would have to admit that god exists.

 

Aqueous Id

While I agree your conclusion is likely true, in science we should avoid the word "prove" as science cannot "prove" anything, it can only tell you the way it most likely is. Even saying that science proves the sun will rise in the East in the morning is subject to being true...until it isn't anymore. Some small Black Hole could zip by, disturbing orbits and the ensuing chaos could roll the Earth's poles over(look at Neptune). Not very likely, true. Probably more likely to happen than for Zeus to drop by for lunch, likely true.
About a god on the other side of the singularity, though, one just has to say "I don't know." I doubt it, but there's just no information to go on other than the whole "Let there be light" Big Bang thing.

Grumpy

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