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Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
I mostly agree with your point, but disagree with what "know" means, at least as it is used in English. If you "know" something, it just means that you believe it to be true and are fairly certain of that fact. You don't need to be correct, and you don't even need to have good reasons for your belief or your certainty.


eliminating the T criterion is certainly a novel solution to defining knowledge but i don't think it fits how we actually use the word. if we find out that a strongly-held belief of ours is incorrect, we're inclined to say that we thought we knew something but didn't, not that we knew something but now don't

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The problem of evil is, of course, serious and real. But it has to be kept in mind that an omnipotent being has infinite powers of compensation. It's hard to think of a realistically possible degree of suffering that could not be made worthwhile in some afterlife, whether by direct compensation with pleasure, or by restoration of loss, or by demonstration that the suffering served an overwhelmingly worthwhile purpose. If all the lost can live again, then every loss can be made good.


i suppose that's all very well if one believes in universal salvation

Originally Posted By: Redstart
Hello, just posting to see that everything's where it used to be on my profile. It's sort of weird to see the same discussion topics going on here as six years ago, and even weirder that some of the participants haven't changed either. Is this what you call nostalgia?

Also, hi, don't expect anyone would remember me, but *waves*


hey dude. i remember you being a pretty good poster although i don't remember the specific good posts you made

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Right. What I was trying to say was that theism implies belief, and Pascal's wager does not actually involve belief, so whatever it argues for, I would argue it's not theism.


well, pascal's position was that you could fake it till you made it: that acting like a christian and hanging around christians all the time stood a pretty good chance of making you into one, whether you started out sincere or not. modern psychology tells us that this actually works to some extent, which is why i try to avoid hanging around christians too much.
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Originally Posted By: Lilith
Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
I mostly agree with your point, but disagree with what "know" means, at least as it is used in English. If you "know" something, it just means that you believe it to be true and are fairly certain of that fact. You don't need to be correct, and you don't even need to have good reasons for your belief or your certainty.


eliminating the T criterion is certainly a novel solution to defining knowledge but i don't think it fits how we actually use the word. if we find out that a strongly-held belief of ours is incorrect, we're inclined to say that we thought we knew something but didn't, not that we knew something but now don't
I'm not eliminating the T criterion; I'm pointing out that our ability to judge T is restricted to our own faculties of judgement and that we are not omniscient.

We judge whether "know" is appropriate using our current beliefs, regardless of what tense we are using. (This is not actually restricted to "know", either.) Thus, I believe your example actually backs up what I am arguing.
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Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
We judge whether "know" is appropriate using our current beliefs, regardless of what tense we are using. (This is not actually restricted to "know", either.) Thus, I believe your example actually backs up what I am arguing.


so your point was just that it's possible to think we have knowledge and not actually have it? that's not a very exciting point
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Originally Posted By: Dantius
In all fairness, when comparing what are, IMO, the two strongest arguments for theism and atheism (Pascal's Wager and the Problem of Evil, respectively), atheism really has a much better case, especially when you take a second to realize all the little holes PW has in it, especially compared to how totally ironclad the PoE is.


Aside from the issues already stated with Pascal's Wager, I do not think that the Problem of Evil is as ironclad as you describe it. Personally, coming from an amoral background, I do not see specific actions or outcomes as good or evil, per se, but I understand consequences to be desirable or not for people based on their values. Do people experience things that are undesirable to them at the time? Yes, but, just as Alorael elucidated with his analogy about children not wanting vaccination or education, that which people may view as 'bad' or 'evil' does not have that intrinsic characteristic. What may be understood at one moment to be good is in the next evil, and vice versa; morality and its attendant terms like 'good' and 'evil' are unnecessary baggage in discussions about the nature of the world.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
My favourite hypothetical afterlife is what I call Kantian Hell. Each time you die you get to live your life over again, except that the personalities of those around you are based on what your personality was in the previous life.


Oh, that's an interesting twist on the concept of eternal recurrence. But personalities are so fluid over a lifetime, so how can it be so? Still, interesting thought!

My favorite hypothetical afterlife remains eternal recurrence, as described by Nietzsche. I live my life in a way that brings me pleasure, and I follow principles of life affirmation. So, it pleases me to have the idea of living it all over again.
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The problem with that point about the problem of evil is that most religions for which it is a concern (predominantly Christianity, but also various forms of the other Abrahamics, as well as other monotheistic systems, e.g. some forms of Neoplatonism) very much do not come from an "amoral background." The Bible, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, describes evil as a real thing that is not simply a matter of personal preference, social conditioning, or situation in life. Likewise good. Even those who subscribe to privatio boni and describe evil as a non-thing, an absence of being, still give it a set and definite place in their philosophical systems. So while the problem of evil may not be a philosophical quandary for you or me, it remains an internal inconsistency in many religious idea systems, and thus a reason to doubt their veracity.

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First off I want to appologize for not writing sooner. I see that this forum was busy since the last time I was on. I will try to offer my explanations and rebuttals as I'm able. There's quite a few things to talk about and close to 25 posts since my last one so let me pick a few and get to typing.

 

Originally Posted By: Erasmus
However, I don't see it as chance but rather as eventuality, given enough unwitting attempts, our type of life happened, and might happen or might have happened already or might will happen elsewhere.

 

p.s. I don't believe those are the only two solutions, I believe the vector could be longer wink

 

Most of life is built upon two choices; Live or die, get married or stay single, work or don't work, etc. I might get a little carried away with the choice thing sometimes but when looking at it head on this really is a choice of either one or the other. If I asked you if you believed, there's only two answers you can give me: yes or no!

You either believe or you don't. No matter why you do believe or no matter why you don't believe, there's only two choices. You can say that you don't believe because it doesn't make sense, but isn't that a choice you just made. You listened to the arguement, thought about it, and rejected it. Obviously the same can be said for the reverse, also.

 

 

this

 

that

 

 

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus
Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg
Originally Posted By: Alorael
So for atheists, it's really much more comforting not to believe!

 

Comforting! Living in fear of the tiniest chance that we might be right. So let me get this straight, you believe that the universe came into being by chance and that when you die, nothing happens (by nothing I mean spiritually). Is this correct?

 

I believe it would be a lot more comforting to be a believer. (I'm just stating my opinion)

As a Christian, do you live in fear of the tiniest chance that the Muslims might be right, and you are going to Hell?

 

Nope, not one bit!

 

Originally Posted By: Dantius
In all fairness, when comparing what are, IMO, the two strongest arguments for theism and atheism (Pascal's Wager and the Problem of Evil, respectively), atheism really has a much better case, especially when you take a second to realize all the little holes PW has in it, especially compared to how totally ironclad the PoE is.

 

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Right. What I was trying to say was that theism implies belief, and Pascal's wager does not actually involve belief, so whatever it argues for, I would argue it's not theism.

 

I've read a little about this on Wikipedia. In all honesty, I've never heard of this until now. He's saying "that even if the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a rational person should wager as though God exists" and for those who don't sincerely believe he tells them "to live as though they had faith, which may subvert their irrational passions and lead them to genuine belief."

What is this? The first part says that 'if' there's no solid evidence, then one must wager one of two ways; for or against the existence of God. Pascal tells us of the enormous benefit of betting in favor of God's existence. The second part (as said by Lilith) pretty much says 'that you could fake it till you made it.' That is about as far from Biblical teaching as one can get!

I do not think that Pascal's Wager should be someones arguement for Theism!

 

Post #539 cool

 

P.S. Sorry about the length.

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It's not at all clear to me that "the God of the Bible" operates eternal punishment. That's one traditional interpretation, but far from the only one. Even universal salvation is an ancient theory, often attributed to Paul (though the key text is a bit ambiguous).

 

Another common interpretation is that the few texts that can be read as promising eternal punishment are really referring simply to annihilation. That's eternal in the sense that the irredeemable soul is forever gone, not in the sense that anyone is eternally suffering.

 

I personally cannot accept that any God worthy of respect would impose eternal punishment for finite offenses, so I go with annihilation as the alternative to salvation, and further hope that as few as possible will be annihilated — maybe even none. I don't consider this view of mine to be at all heretical or even unusual. And I have strong doubts that most people who think they believe in Hell really do; I think they simply haven't thought it through.

 

There are only a few places in the Bible where the problem of evil comes up, but there it is addressed directly, and I think, non-trivially. The Book of Job trots out the standard defenses of divine right by religious people, and shoots them all down. The only argument it does not dismiss, but rather attributes to God, is the one of incomprehensibility: "When have you commanded the morning?"

 

Jesus has two discussions of evil that I can think of. One is the parable of the wheat and tares, which though it begins with the completely question-begging premise that "an enemy" has put weeds in the wheatfield, then goes on to argue that the weeds can't be pulled up without damaging some wheat, and so the best plan is to let weeds and wheat mature together, and separate them only after harvesting. This says nothing whatever to me about unde malum, but it's a justification I can understand for why evil that has somehow appeared may then have to be tolerated. When good is eternal and evil only temporary, then it makes sense to maximize the amount of good without regard for how much evil occurs on the the way.

 

The other of Jesus's parables about evil is the (purported) healing of the man born blind, which is done precisely in answer to a question as to why that man had suffered such a calamity (presumably because it was hard to see what an infant could have done to deserve it). This one is a non-verbal parable, in which Jesus smears mud on the blind man's eyes and then sends him to wash it off. In the act of washing off the mud, he miraculously receives sight. The text never spells out any interpretation for this parable, but to me it seems to suggest that just as getting mud on your eyes is a small price to pay for receiving sight, so there can be other benefits for which even blindness is a small price to pay. So it's the infinite compensation theory.

 

These happen to be the best theistic arguments I know about evil, and they're the only ones I've found in the Bible. Of course, lots of people read the Bible differently from me. But if you assume the Bible says just what you gather from popular culture, you may miss some interesting ideas.

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Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg


Originally Posted By: Erasmus

p.s. I don't believe those are the only two solutions, I believe the vector could be longer wink


Most of life is built upon two choices; Live or die, get married or stay single, work or don't work, etc. I might get a little carried away with the choice thing sometimes but when looking at it head on this really is a choice of either one or the other. If I asked you if you believed, there's only two answers you can give me: yes or no!
You either believe or you don't. No matter why you do believe or no matter why you don't believe, there's only two choices. You can say that you don't believe because it doesn't make sense, but isn't that a choice you just made. You listened to the arguement, thought about it, and rejected it. Obviously the same can be said for the reverse, also.


I think you missed my meaning there:
In math a Space of N dimensions can be described by a set of N orthogonal ("perpendicular") vectors of length N. In that space any vector (or s"solution") can be described by a linear combination (I think that's the term, it's been about 3-4 years since I used it) of those vectors.

What I meant was that the two solutions you gave are not necessarily orthogonal (therefore more solutions may exist from different linear combinations of the base vectors from which your solution are made) and that the space of divinity and spirituality can be described in a higher order than the length of those two solutions.

So when you ask a 100 people do they believe in A, its true the only two meaningful responses are either yes or no, but if you, instead, ask each person to describe what he believes in you might get 100 different responses all based around the same basic ideas. (num. of divine beings from 0 to inf., what is each divinity's alignment, do ghosts exists, does the soul exist, is it immortal, do spirits exist, are some of them demons, are some of them angels, are some of them fairies, are some of them rabbits, was the universe created by the divinities or was it always there, what is the origin of each divinity, was man created by the divinities ir by the universe or by itself etc.. etc.. etc..)

That is why Pascal's wager fails, if there was only one dogma then the wager would have worked, however, because there is more than one dogma, some of which conflict, trying to fake your allegiance to only one might lead to a state where (especially if the opposite dogma was correct) you lost your soul.
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It doesn't, inherently. My comment addressed a much more specific issue: GoldenKing's point that because good and evil are not real things, or are unknowable, the problem of evil isn't actually that big a deal for religion. My response is that even if a given person doesn't consider good and evil real or knowable, many religions do, and many of these include an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. The problem of evil itself is the logical inconsistency, at least until someone provides a satisfactory solution for it. Whether anyone has done so is a matter of debate here and elsewhere.

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Originally Posted By: FnordCola
It doesn't, inherently. My comment addressed a much more specific issue: GoldenKing's point that because good and evil are not real things, or are unknowable, the problem of evil isn't actually that big a deal for religion. My response is that even if a given person doesn't consider good and evil real or knowable, many religions do, and many of these include an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. The problem of evil itself is the logical inconsistency, at least until someone provides a satisfactory solution for it. Whether anyone has done so is a matter of debate here and elsewhere.


Even where religions come from moralistic backgrounds, as is obvious, that still does not necessarily entail the problem of evil as ironclad. The age-old deflection still stands true, that "God moves in mysterious ways." As I stated before, what may now be understood to be evil may in fact be a piece of a greater good, for you, a larger community, or both. In a limited capacity to understand, due to mortality, we cannot know the full situation and all of its consequences.
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Originally Posted By: Goldenking
Even where religions come from moralistic backgrounds, as is obvious, that still does not necessarily entail the problem of evil as ironclad. The age-old deflection still stands true, that "God moves in mysterious ways." As I stated before, what may now be understood to be evil may in fact be a piece of a greater good, for you, a larger community, or both. In a limited capacity to understand, due to mortality, we cannot know the full situation and all of its consequences.


Ever read Candide? Because to me, you seem to be really close to espousing "tout est au mieux dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles".
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Originally Posted By: Dantius
Ever read Candide? Because to me, you seem to be really close to espousing "tout est au mieux dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles".


Your French is a little off, but I know to what you are referring, even if I do not believe in it personally. My arguments about the nature of the problem of evil, as I would tackle them from the religious side, are meant as didactic of a differing view point. As an agnostic, I'm merely offering up food for thought.
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Originally Posted By: Goldenking
My arguments about the nature of the problem of evil, as I would tackle them from the religious side, are meant as didactic of a differing view point. As an agnostic, I'm merely offering up food for thought.


So you're playing devil's advocate by arguing for religion? tongue
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True. I think this raises its own problems, though. In particular, if God created human nature, and all aspects of human nature exist to further some future good, I don't see any room for moral responsibility. This is an issue that comes up a lot in discussion of Judas Iscariot, since the former is causally responsible for the salvation of humanity. Evil intent still exists, but if evil intent is responsible for good to the same extent that good intent is, the distinction loses a great deal of its meaning.

 

Granted, the possible refutation of moral responsibility is an idea less deleterious to most religious people's worldviews than the possible refutation of God's existence. Nevertheless, it seems to undermine the ethical systems of the Abrahamic religions pretty seriously, and the doctrine of heaven and hell in particular becomes essentially arbitrary.

 

I also agree with Dantius that it comes across as the sort of Panglossian optimism that doesn't correspond at all to human experience. This doesn't make it wrong; after all, perceptually we experience the world as a flat plane, to which the actual shape of the world doesn't correspond. Still, it's something to consider, since one of the main purposes of religion is to explain and give meaning to human experience.

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My answer to why world has misery: God is an artist, and everyone knows true art is tragic. What, you say that doesn't make sense? Well, it's not supposed to, cause everyone knows true art is supposed to be incomprehensible as well.

 

I don't consider problem of evil to be strongest case for atheism, because it's not a problem at all if God (or gods) are even a little less than all-knowing, all-powerful and all-benevolent.

 

(Also, "atheism while admitting gods exists" is accurately called misotheism (hatred of gods), apatheism (apathy towards gods) or dystheism. )

 

(Also also, true art is offensive and sticks it to the man, which explains why there's people hating god.)

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Originally Posted By: FnordCola
Granted, the possible refutation of moral responsibility is an idea less deleterious to most religious people's worldviews than the possible refutation of God's existence. Nevertheless, it seems to undermine the ethical systems of the Abrahamic religions pretty seriously, and the doctrine of heaven and hell in particular becomes essentially arbitrary.


i dunno, the calvinists seem okay with the idea

edit: to be serious for a moment, my main objection to the idea of an afterlife has less to do with morality and more to do with how closely associated mental processes are with the physical state of the brain. when there are people with degenerative brain conditions who have essentially ceased to exist as people long before they've actually died, it stretches my credulity to believe that there are people who will continue to exist after they've died
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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
I personally cannot accept that any God worthy of respect would impose eternal punishment for finite offenses

I don't if it's safe to assume that a human can reason about an omniscient, omnipotent creator. We greatly misunderstand people of other cultures. We wouldn't understand alien customs if we ever met an alien.

Now a god, that would be something else. Not only foreign in origin, but also thinking on a completely different scope. Before we finish the sentence "It's unreasonable for God to think that..." there are a few things we need to prove.
1) God thinks
2) God thinks like a human
3) God thinks like a human who desires respect
4) The reasoning of God can be comprehended by a rational human

I don't know which human first spread the rumor that gods can be comprehended (I personally blame Plato), but I think we need to reevaluate whether that's a safe assumption to make. Maybe minor deities like those in the Egyptian or Greek pantheons can be described with human personalities and thoughts, but this is no ordinary god.

You might say "God made man in His own image; we do not assume God thinks like us, but rather God told us that we think like Him." However, I have never heard that passage of the Bible interpreted as such. And if I had, I would ask why it was interpreted specifically as it was. The language certainly does not indicate that that's what was meant. Using that passage would feel to me like post-facto retconning.
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one can go a bit overboard when talking about the incomprehensibility of God. take it far enough and you raise the question of why anyone should expect worshipping such a being to have any positive effect. i think most religious people would like to at least be able to believe that they're capable of distinguishing God from Cthulhu

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God's consciousness is described in human terms all the time in the Bible. Random example among many: "Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God." -Exodus 34:14, NIV. Jealousy is a human emotion, herein ascribed to God. Are these descriptions metaphorical, using human attributes to describe similar but less comprehensible divine attributes? Quite possibly. That's one reading, while another is that God has human-like qualities. Neither is objectively right or wrong.

 

And I'll second what Lilith says: a great many Christians, Muslims, and Jews worship a personal God that has definite attributes. There's a substantial difference between a wholly incomprehensible philosopher's God and the God said to have firebombed Sodom and Gomorrah, resurrected Lazarus, and conveyed the Decalogue to Moses. Even philosophers deeply involved in negative theology like Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, and Pseudo-Dionysius still describe God as comprehensible in some significant ways. A truly incomprehensible and alien God is an interesting idea, but it's only very rarely what people mean when they use the term "God."

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Re Cthulhu: This IS a basic problem, since in principle the point is not to invent a God whom you can comfortably distinguish from Cthulhu, but to try to guess what the real God, if there is one, is like. And given the size and complexity of the universe, it's pretty clear by now that the mind of a Creator could not be all that much like one of our minds.

 

The best I find I can do is to try to work from analogy. For instance, even very intelligent parents are delighted when their babies learn to roll over. Granted, that parental experience is probably heavily subsidized by endorphins or instincts or something. The cause of the experience is not part of the analogy; the nature of it is what I consider.

 

On the other hand, children don't like immunization or being made to go to bed on time. So the prospect of higher purposes that we don't understand is unpleasant but familiar. The tough trick in loving God is finding some way to decide that the nice things one experiences are fair representations of God's intentions, like Mommy giving us hugs and milk and cookies, while the nasty things are regretted concessions to higher purpose, like the same Mommy holding us while the doctor jabs in the needle. I don't make this as a glib argument, or indeed as an argument at all. I say it's a tough trick. But it seems to me to be the essential trick; if you work on it, it's the one big issue in life.

 

Re surviving death: Despite a lot of hellenistic stuff about souls, the Jewish tradition represented in the Bible and most Christian traditions is not incorporeal persistence, but resurrection. The concept is that God remembers you, and recreates your body, or creates you a new one, perhaps in an entirely new universe. Kind of elaborate, I know; substance dualism would in some ways be simpler. But given the premise of God, it's on the table anyway, so in that sense it's economical.

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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
Re surviving death: Despite a lot of hellenistic stuff about souls, the Jewish tradition represented in the Bible and most Christian traditions is not incorporeal persistence, but resurrection. The concept is that God remembers you, and recreates your body, or creates you a new one, perhaps in an entirely new universe. Kind of elaborate, I know; substance dualism would in some ways be simpler. But given the premise of God, it's on the table anyway, so in that sense it's economical.


at the risk of getting into a derail about the meaning of personal identity, from a philosophical perspective I'm not at all convinced that perfectly recreating a duplicate of my body after my death would be sufficient for that person to count as "me", since I find the arguments against the principle of identity of indiscernibles persuasive
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Originally Posted By: Lilith
edit: to be serious for a moment, my main objection to the idea of an afterlife has less to do with morality and more to do with how closely associated mental processes are with the physical state of the brain. when there are people with degenerative brain conditions who have essentially ceased to exist as people long before they've actually died, it stretches my credulity to believe that there are people who will continue to exist after they've died
Easy peasy. All you have to do is say that life after death exists in some form that we can't detect right now -- "on a spiritual plane" or whatever -- and that's easy enough since, after all, we _can't_ detect life after death right now. Then, the physical state of the brain is necessary for us to exist and to control our bodies, but there is some other way of that happening after death.

I also think it would be easy to make the argument that not all of our personal identity is really essentially us, that a lot of things are indeed tied to the physical state of the brain and get lost with our bodies, but that some essential things hang out with consciousness instead.

I guess this is the objection I've always had to dismissing souls. Okay, they don't make any sense scientifically, but there is no reasonable scientific explanation for why I'm conscious. What's so special about the physical state of the brain that creates "me" and allows me to experience my brain and everything attached to it as an entity, that doesn't also apply to the physical state of the coffee I'm drinking or the computer I'm typing on?
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Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES
Easy peasy. All you have to do is say that life after death exists in some form that we can't detect right now -- "on a spiritual plane" or whatever -- and that's easy enough since, after all, we _can't_ detect life after death right now. Then, the physical state of the brain is necessary for us to exist and to control our bodies, but there is some other way of that happening after death.


okay maybe our souls are somehow operating our bodies from the outside from an inaccessible higher dimension and maybe our bodies are currently the only conduit through which our souls are able to receive or process any kind of information and maybe some other conduit will open itself up after our bodies have served whatever purpose they serve. that's an awful lot of maybes with zero supporting evidence though

Quote:

I also think it would be easy to make the argument that not all of our personal identity is really essentially us, that a lot of things are indeed tied to the physical state of the brain and get lost with our bodies, but that some essential things hang out with consciousness instead.


honestly this just seems like wishful thinking to me. how do we pick and choose what parts of us are really us and what parts aren't?

Quote:
I guess this is the objection I've always had to dismissing souls. Okay, they don't make any sense scientifically, but there is no reasonable scientific explanation for why I'm conscious. What's so special about the physical state of the brain that creates "me" and allows me to experience my brain and everything attached to it as an entity, that doesn't also apply to the physical state of the coffee I'm drinking or the computer I'm typing on?


well, if you're going to make that argument, i'd frankly find panpsychism to be less of a violation of parsimony than assuming the existence of immaterial souls that are somehow assigned on a one-to-one basis to every conscious being, capable of controlling the actions of said beings, and reclaimed intact after death, without any of this being physically demonstrable
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Originally Posted By: Metatron
Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
I personally cannot accept that any God worthy of respect would impose eternal punishment for finite offenses

I don't if it's safe to assume that a human can reason about an omniscient, omnipotent creator. We greatly misunderstand people of other cultures. We wouldn't understand alien customs if we ever met an alien.

But our moral systems are at least supposed to function absolutely. If we do not understand a god but he's doing what is, ultimately and from an omniscient perspective, good, then he's good. But infinite punishment for finite offenses? Well, I'm not omniscient, but that seems to be a much harder problem to resolve than temporal ills as well as temporal good.

For immortality, think of physical bodies as lenses through which some spiritual entity is focused into the material world. If the brain gets damaged, you have a poor lens and an inaccurate or wholly absent representation of the spiritual person. That person can still exist on its spiritual plane, though. There are problems with the analogy because of how a lens is clearly separate from the light passing through it, but I can conceive of an existence like that.

—Alorael, who also hopes that in such a case warped, evil people are not spiritually evil but just distorted in their projection into physical reality. Post-mortem, everyone else should be consoling them on getting terrible lenses, not blaming them for being terrible people.
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Re: Jealousy being a "human" emotion:

 

So what?

 

Animals have been proven to be capable of many emotions previously thought to be solely human. Many of them are even ubiquitous. Yet still, reasons why some (even familiar) animals act like they do eludes us.

 

You might as well say sight is a human quality. There are many other creatures that see, yet they remain mysterious.

 

Just because part of a whole is familiar, doesn't mean the whole is familiar. To an extent, God of abrahamic faiths makes himself and his will known in their religious texts. It's still easy in the light of his purported qualities to say we don't, and can't, know why he acts the way he does.

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Originally Posted By: Lilith
you know, i've sometimes thought that the only truly just afterlife would be successive reincarnation as every conscious being throughout the history of the universe. it's kind of rawlsian when you think about it
So, not only is all the world a stage, but there's a performance every night, and we actors get to play a different part each time. Curious, though I would like to know a bit more, in order to avoid a few faux pas. For instance, while waiting backstage for your turn to go on, what's the correct way of complementing a fellow actor on his performance as Hitler the previous night?
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Originally Posted By: FnordCola
God's consciousness is described in human terms all the time in the Bible. Random example among many: "Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God." -Exodus 34:14, NIV. Jealousy is a human emotion, herein ascribed to God. Are these descriptions metaphorical, using human attributes to describe similar but less comprehensible divine attributes? Quite possibly. That's one reading, while another is that God has human-like qualities. Neither is objectively right or wrong.


Attributes normally ascribed to humans, but also ascribed to God are called anthroprmorphisms. We are made in God's image, is it any wonder that we are handed down some of God's attributes. We cannot really comprehend what God's attributes are really like so we discribe them with the attributes that we, ourselves, experience. In reality, what we call man's attributes seen in God, is really God's attributes seen in man. The attributes we experience are to some lesser degree than God's.

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Originally Posted By: Lilith
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I guess this is the objection I've always had to dismissing souls. Okay, they don't make any sense scientifically, but there is no reasonable scientific explanation for why I'm conscious. What's so special about the physical state of the brain that creates "me" and allows me to experience my brain and everything attached to it as an entity, that doesn't also apply to the physical state of the coffee I'm drinking or the computer I'm typing on?


well, if you're going to make that argument, i'd frankly find panpsychism to be less of a violation of parsimony than assuming the existence of immaterial souls that are somehow assigned on a one-to-one basis to every conscious being, capable of controlling the actions of said beings, and reclaimed intact after death, without any of this being physically demonstrable
Okay, sure -- except that panpsychism fails to explain why I am conscious of my body but not the cup of coffee, or the air around me. What's so special about those borders? The answer is obviously "nerve endings attached to the brain" but that brings us back to the question of what's so special about the brain and its chemistry, that it generates (or attracts, or whatever) consciousness that is *separate* from the rest of the world? Panpsychism can't answer that. The soul provides a simple answer to this question of boundaries. It's not a deep answer, it doesn't provide any satisying explanations, but it is at least an answer.
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Originally Posted By: Lilith
Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
Re surviving death: Despite a lot of hellenistic stuff about souls, the Jewish tradition represented in the Bible and most Christian traditions is not incorporeal persistence, but resurrection. The concept is that God remembers you, and recreates your body, or creates you a new one, perhaps in an entirely new universe. Kind of elaborate, I know; substance dualism would in some ways be simpler. But given the premise of God, it's on the table anyway, so in that sense it's economical.


at the risk of getting into a derail about the meaning of personal identity, from a philosophical perspective I'm not at all convinced that perfectly recreating a duplicate of my body after my death would be sufficient for that person to count as "me", since I find the arguments against the principle of identity of indiscernibles persuasive


But this seems perverse to me, since it hardly seems to be the case that exact continuity of my physical body is necessary for me to remain me. My atoms are indistinguishable from other atoms. If I stub my toe I lose some of them. Supposing I had surgery to remove a brain tumor, I would lose some presumably more important ones. I'd still be me.

In other words, I am not exactly a pattern, but a class of patterns. But this is redundant, because that's what all patterns are.
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The point is that jealousy is an emotion explicable in human terms. I don't think anyone would argue that animals are ineffable, yet that's what you're saying about God. The God described in the Bible acts in ways a human would; I would argue (and others have) that this God acts in ways consonant with a being with a human mind that happens to possess great amounts of power and a very long/infinite lifespan. Inasmuch as we don't need ineffability to explain the motivations of the biblical God, parsimony favors thinking of that God as possessing a basically human psychology. If we proceed from the assumption that God is omni-_____, we'll of course dismiss the idea of God as thinking in human terms, but that's just begging the question.

 

@Alorael... Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your consideration: the pineal gland.

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Nope. I'm saying God is a mystery, for many of the same reasons several animal behaviours are a mystery - our ability to understand them based on what we know is constrained by what we don't know.

 

Consider how several animals see a broader spectrum of colors than humans do. An animal might react completely differently towards two objects that are outwardly similar to humans based on information only it knows or notices. Its emotions might be describeable in human terms - its mannerism might reflect love or hatred, for example - but the reason why is lost to the human observer.

 

In a way, I am arguing animals are ineffable, to an extent. We can't put into words stuff the we aren't aware of. For ages, humans have operated on wholly mistaken conceptions of several species, due to unknown factors they didn't even have means to know.

 

It should be obvious how this reflects to an omniscient god, or any other superhuman being, really. Just because it has the same basic psychology as you doesn't mean you'll be on the ball of everything it's going to do and why. Otherwise, what would be the point in poker?

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Originally Posted By: FnordCola
So...animals, and even other humans are also ineffable? In that case, why is divine ineffability a distinctive or meaningful quality?


As an atheist, it isn't. However, playing the devil's advacate (heh), it'd distinctive because it's divine, and therefore not mortal? We can't understand other people, but we at least know the limits of what we can't understand, because they're comparable to us. It's like we know what it is we don't know. With a divine being, we've nothing to compare with.

Addit: Even after posting, I can immediately spot several cracks in this argument, which is possibly why I don't usually venture into discussions of this sort (as well as the fact that I don't believe in any gods at all). tongue
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Originally Posted By: Impudent Strumpet!
As an atheist, it isn't. However, playing the devil's advacate (heh), it'd distinctive because it's divine, and therefore not mortal? We can't understand other people, but we at least know the limits of what we can't understand, because they're comparable to us. It's like we know what it is we don't know. With a divine being, we've nothing to compare with.


Now, hold on. We don't just gain understanding by making comparison of things that are the same. To the contrary, it is through contrasting of unlike things that we learn a lot about things. 'Hot', for instance, is meaningless if we compare only amongst things that are of the same temperature; it is only when we add in the element of cold that the concept of 'hot' gains any meaning. We have to know the other in order to know the same.

Cross-applying this to divinity, while there are things that we surely do not have any comparison to that we can directly observe in nature, we can compare a deity to ourselves, because we know that it is different. We have no record of any actual immortals, but in understanding a god to differ from us in terms of death, we learn more about that divine being even though there is nothing else that matches that.

In short, we learn just as much by contrasting as we do by comparing.
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Originally Posted By: Goldenking
We don't just gain understanding by making comparison of things that are the same. To the contrary, it is through contrasting of unlike things that we learn a lot about things.
What is this, George Bernard Shaw does Sesame Street?

Sometimes, Goldenking, it's like you're Tygra all over again, except in the form of one of TM's philosophizing rakshasi. tongue
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