Of course it is. To begin with, no one can demonstrate what this morality consists of and everyone interprets their god's morality differently. In the end, humans cannot avoid morality as an expression of personal preference. — Tom Storm
even if God exists and has handed down moral guidelines (via divine revelation/inspiration -> scripture, presumably), one could still ask whether these guidelines are right or correct. So even theism doesn't solve this issue, — busycuttingcrap
Besides, Andrew, why must reality as whole "make sense" to us when, in fact, we can make sense of tiny parts of reality, proximately, in order to survive and thrive in our daily lives? — 180 Proof
Can one of you explain what this means? I don't believe I fully understand and I'd like to. — David Lee Lemmert II
Atheists appear to be trying to make us just another senseless causal determined mechanism of brute nature in my opinion.
— Andrew4Handel
I think you're right. — T Clark
Is God something we know and understand, such that saying "God did X" adds to our understanding of how/why X occurs? Or is it simply kicking the explanatory can down the road? — busycuttingcrap
It is certainly seen as being where all roads begin, and like God, is not in need of, or lend itself to, further explanation. — Janus
In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is with respect to the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in general. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite, are not in themselves the same as our representations of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear; and that these, as phenomena, cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us. We know nothing more than our mode of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which, though not of necessity pertaining to every animated being, is so to the whole human race. With this alone we have to do. Space and time are the pure forms thereof; sensation the matter. The former alone can we cognize a priori , that is, antecedent to all actual perception; and for this reason such cognition is called pure intuition. The latter is that in our cognition which is called cognition a posteriori, that is, empirical intuition. The former appertain absolutely and necessarily to our sensibility, of whatsoever kind our sensations may be; the latter may be of very diversified character. — Kant - Critique of Pure Reason
"Norse gods" aren't depicted looking like "Yoruba gods" or "Aztec gods". "Egypyian gods" aren't depicted as looking like "Roman or Celtic gods". "Aboriginal gods" aren't depicted as looking like "Chinese gods". European "Christ" isn't depicted as looking like Judean "Yeshua" ... Just what you'd reasonably expect of man-made gods. (Read Feuerbach, the Greek Pre-Socratics, Mosaic prohibition on "graven images", etc.)They say gods are made in mans image. — Andrew4Handel
Questions are only begged by mysteries not answered. "Godidit" begs the question, "godsaidit" begs the question. Mysteries neither explain nor justify. "Gods" are mysteries, no? Thus, not even their adherents agree on them (e.g. schisms, heretics, heterodoxies, etc). "Faith in god" – self-abnegating worship – often amounts to little more than believing in the unbelievable in order to defend the indefensible; otherwise just superstitious conformity to a cultic tradition.I think you can defend gods and the esoteric as explaining these types of things ...
False dichotomy & category error fallacies, Andrew. :roll: Besides, Epicureanism (e.g.) "explains" far more about "meaning in language, concepts, desires and so on" than purely im-material "gods and esoterica" (i.e. magical thinking) which conspicuously do not explain anything at all.... purely materialist atoms banging together doesn't explain, like meaning in language, concepts, desires and so on.
"Appear" to whom? Which "atheists" are "appearing" so? Clearly, Andrew, you haven't the slightest comprehension of atheism (or, for that matter, that atomists such as Epicurus were not atheists because atomism does not entail the absence of gods.)Atheists appear to be trying to make us just another senseless causal determined mechanism of brute nature in my opinion.
Atheists appear to be trying to make us just another senseless causal determined mechanism of brute nature in my opinion.
"Appear" to whom? Which "atheists" are "appearing" so? Clearly, Andrew, you haven't the slightest comprehension of atheism — 180 Proof
God is conceived as being that to which all roads lead, and at which all roads end, so unlike other.less absolute, explanations, such as aliens, or computer simulations, it is not "kicking the explanatory can further down the road".Of course if one doesn't accept such a God then it won't be seen as any kind of explanation. — Janus
Its not even a question of whether one accepts that God exists or not; even supposing we do accept that God exists, if only purely for the sake of argument, theism is still not explanatory in at least one important sense i.e. analyzing something we don't understand in terms that we do understand. Which is a pretty important part of what explanations are supposed to do. — busycuttingcrap
They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." — Andrew4Handel
By the same criterion, the Big Bang hypothesis is not explanatory either. Both it and the God hypothesis posit creation ex nihilo, and we cannot understand how something could come from nothing. — Janus
The Big Bang is understood to be the origin of this universe at least, it is also causa sui, meaning that we must take it as such since, it it were caused, we have no way of knowing what the cause could have been. Even if we did know, it would only move the problem one step back, because then we would need to explain what caused the cause of the BB. — Janus
This isn't accurate; the part of the Big Bang model that is empirically corroborated and widely accepted posits an expanding and cooling universe from a hot dense prior state. — busycuttingcrap
I think we might agree on one thing, though; and that is that "God did it" is not any better. from the point of view of advancing physical theory than "it just happened"; but I don't think many would claim that 'God did it' is a physical theory. — Janus
God seems a particularly fragile and tendentious explanation primarily because theism itself remains obscure, and as far as I can tell, incoherent. — Tom Storm
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