"Letting Go of God" - Page 8

Some presuppositions, however, are more gratuitous and leading than others.

The title of this thread is "Letting Go of God". If your argument against letting go of God starts with presupposing that God is the root of all knowledge and meaning, that's rather begging the question, wouldn't you say?

As far as I'm concerned, the inapplicability of your presuppositions to the issue under debate is a very large chink. Any internal coherence that your trinitarian argument might achieve, once wrapped in a safe bubble of numerous unquestioned presuppositions (I hardly think that God-based epistemology is the only presupposition going on here) is irrelevant to me.

I started to read what I could of Schaeffer's Escape from Reason online -- the teaser pages Amazon provides -- and from the start, he's blabbing on about Aquinas and "grace". As far as I'm concerned, grace is nothing more than a fictitious concept. An argument about the relationship between nature and grace is about as meaningful to me as kids arguing over whether Batman could beat up Superman.

In a quote from Schaeffer you provided earlier, Schaeffer says:

This is either a deliberate straw man, or Schaeffer simply doesn't know what he's supposed to be arguing against.

Who's aiming for "ultimate truth"? Most scientists view their approach to truth as tentative, provisional, and bound by human limitations of cognition. Sure, they hope that those limits aren't terribly limiting, and that we can come to learn a great deal and gain significant understanding of the world we live in, but most scientists are far too pragmatic in their thinking to worry about chimeras like "ultimate truth".

Further, how seriously can you take this inapt physical analogy about building infinite cantilever bridges? And what of the supposed terrible dilemma that for man there is "nothing toward which he can point with certainty"? So f*cking what! I say learn to live with uncertainty -- it's not like you don't have to anyway.

Your arguments appear not only to be based on gratuitous presuppositions, but to be driven by manufactured dilemmas.

It's not like I've pretended otherwise. Often the wisest thing you can say is "I don't know".

No, it's the reasoning that comes after your presuppositions which is tortured. The presuppositions are merely gratuitous, being more like convenient pre-conclusions than honest starting points.

Which is sort of like saying you're relatively thin... as sumo wrestlers go.

If interesting perspectives were trees and mental masturbation were grass, the entire world of philosophy would look an awful lot like a prairie. Solid philosophical conclusions would be the unicorns -- you know, all of those unicorns you typically see prancing about on a prairie.

So you keep asserting. And the measure of this success is what? Do you presuppose the measures of success as well?

Sounds like you've pre-constructed neat little conceptual boxes and will criticize any philosophy for being so rude as to not fit into the boxes you've provided.

Again, sufficient for what?

I hardly think my intellect is sufficient to proceed with supreme confidence in everything that I do, if that's what you mean. My intellect is what I have to work with, and I do with it what I can. I have presuppositions, but I try to keep them to a minimum. My animal drives for food and shelter and social interaction are going to force me to behave as if there's some sort of external reality which contains food and shelter and people to interact with anyway, well before my intellect gets involved in deciding what's "real" or not.

From my perspective, you've got nothing to go on but your own intellect as well, and your God looks like nothing more than an imaginary product of your intellect.

If you'd like me to get back to anything else you brought up, I can do so later, but I'd like to skip to this...

Do you believe animals believe in God? That without a divine epistemology, animals can't make it through their day-to-day lives? I suspect that's not part of your belief system.

So, look at us humans as just another kind of animal. Smarter than other animals, yes, at least by our own standards of such things. But animals nevertheless.

Non-human animals suffice, at least for their own self-perpetuating survival needs. When they fail to suffice as individuals, they die. When they fail to suffice as species, they go extinct. There are no guarantees.

Think of all of the things animals succeed at doing, without running into -- without even being capable of running into -- the metaphysical dilemmas you so worry about. Does a fish in a large school lose track of its piscine identity because it can't sort out the one/many problem? Does a bee need to resolve whether the flowers it found are only a private illusion before going back to the hive to communicate to its fellow bees where to find them? Does a wolf sharing a kill with its pack members need to evaluate the moral aspects of selfishness vs. generosity?

Before you perhaps misread where I'm going: Yes, one can imagine that these animals are creations of a God, and don't themselves need any knowledge of God to function. That's not my point.

My point is that all sorts of interactions with the world and with other creatures are possible with only instinct and/or rudimentary intelligence. Do you believe animal interactions are incoherent or inconsistent because these poor benighted creatures haven't worked out the metaphysical implications of their actions?

All of the things you insist are fraught with metaphysical implications -- taking action, communicating, social behavior, belief in a physical world outside of our minds, etc. -- can easily be explained by seeing the underlying utility in such behaviors for an evolved creature.

I can easily imagine a godless world generating animal life, animal life with complex behaviors. I can easily see everything that humans do -- even arguing about Kant and Sartre -- as an outgrowth of animal behaviors augmented by an evolved high level of intelligence. Now, unless you (your favorite deity forbid!) wish to turn this into an creation vs. evolution debate, at what point in my naturalistic perspective am I going to be forced to accept trinitarian doctrine for it to all make sense? Is there some extra-extra special thing you think humans do, or some special pedestal you think humans need to be placed upon, that requires a God?

Which "humanistic-freedom motive" is that? A motive described in an unquoted previous paragraph which is as full of unwarranted assumptions as the paragraph you do quote?

Circles within circles. Self-dependent for what ?

I regard human personality as an emergent behavior of a complex natural system. It depends on many things other than itself, such as a supportive ecosystem to keep the brain and body alive which house said personality. For the thoughts that an individual personality entertains, it relies on sensory data from the world at large, and the transmitted culture it shares with fellow human personalities.

My own mind (if I may substitute "mind" for "personality") ultimately has to depend on itself to process incoming information, to form a picture of the external world, to make decisions on how to act within the external world, but this self-dependency is a self-limitation...

...not, as the above sentence would like to twist it, an assertive, conquering notion.

Would someone be so kind at to shoot the paragraph from which the above sentence was taken and put it out of its misery?

(1) Unfounded assertion of a desire or somehow unavoidable need to "dominate nature."
(2) Unfounded link between domination and determinism. (2a) One can obviously attempt to dominate a thing and in doing so expect only to increase the odds of a desired outcome. (2b) A desire for domination, like any other desire, can be placed within a debate over the existence of free will in a manner which is neutral to the outcome of that debate.
(3) Assumption that determinism is a "bad thing". The world may or may not be deterministic. Whether or not you find determinism appealing is a moot point in an objective search for meaning and truth.

I'd love to know exactly what it would mean for determinism to "envelop man". Would man find that it was difficult to breathe? Would he feel uncomfortable in warm weather?

Thus... bullshit!

Wow. The above is wonderful demonstration of how you can saddle an opposing viewpoint with your own overwrought assumptions, and then, with a bit of weak-to-non-existent logic, show that opposing viewpoint to be self-contradictory. Bravo!

Read: The straw man which I have just created and am preparing to gloriously strike down...

If Kant tried to limit science in order to make room for faith, that's not my mistake, and I care nothing nor take any responsibility for any pickle Mr. Kant might have gotten himself into doing so.

Again, what do I care about the dilemmas "consciousness-theologians" might find themselves in? How would you prove to me that their problems, as you see them, are mine too?

At any rate, I'm willing to go along with the idea that the human mind is sufficient unto itself to create its own "religious ideals", but only in the sense that I consider the human mind sufficient for creating the Tooth Fairy. If I invest these religious ideals with none of the baggage of Supreme Significance which you bring to the table, it doesn't take much self-sufficiency for the human mind to reach these so-called "ideals".

I'm presenting a descriptive approach of human nature as an extension of animal nature. Whether you are "likely to submit" has nothing to do with it.

Baggage, baggage, baggage! You carry so much baggage with you, and don't seem to know how to put it down, or that it's even there. On that subject, I'll have to return later.

What do I care? I'm not a "Barthist", I have no need to jump through any hoops to try to set aside a special place for gods or religion in my thinking.

Who being infallible about what? Why can't this poor, helpless concept escape... er... from whatever it needs to escape from... for whatever reason?

Semantics? I've seen nothing to hint that you've got anything more than very debatable semantics to back up your own claims.

Let's back up a bit and put your advocacy of your beloved trinitarianism in the broader context of this thread, and other threads where you've brought it up as well...

You always start off bullishly insistent that not only is your Trinitarian Theology the pinnacle of philosophical thought, but that anything else somehow falls into utter incoherence and contradiction. Further, in a dismissive tone towards anything non-TT, you express the view that the alleged flaws in all non-trinitarian philosophies are painfully obvious.

At the very least, however, it has become apparent that there is nothing at all "obvious" about anything you've claimed. Every justification you've put forward does little more than lead into a dense thicket of apologetics and philosophical critique. While I personally may have only scouted the edges of this thicket, it's fairly plain that even if I were the dive in and spend years plowing through endless tomes and treatises -- apparently what it would take to see the "obvious" -- that I, like many others, could easily emerge with quite different conclusions than you've arrived at.

This isn't math, and it isn't science. The games being played here with words and ideas have nothing like the clear, rigid logic of math, nor do the conclusions have any of the testability of science. Philosophy and theology might enlighten, they might persuade, they might help one explore a broader range of perspectives... but let's not pretend that you can spin intricate webs of words and ideas and by such means alone conclude much of anything. So far, however, you've acted as if your Trinitarianism drops out at the end of a long chain of apologetics (and a very generous granting of "presuppositions"), neatly and clearly proved, with all of the certainty of solving a quadratic equation.

I doubt that even 1% of practicing Christians would have the slightest idea of what you're going on about with Kant and Schaeffer and Barth and Van Til and Sartre, etc, etc, a circumstance which not only calls into question the supposedly "obvious" nature of what you profess, but even the applicability to what most practitioners of Christianity call Christianity.

Here's a challenge for you: I've claimed that I see no need for a God, triune or otherwise, and I see no terrible self-contradiction or "incoherence" arising from my position. Now forget about dead Germans and dead Frenchmen for the moment. Explain to me where I go wrong. Try to do so without putting me in a Kant box or a Sartre box or a Hume box, or whatever other boxes you have pre-packaged answers for. I've written plenty in this thread and many others that there's more than enough material for you to go after, and, as I'm a living being here and ready to respond to questions, I can elaborate or respond as needed.

Sounds like a matter of whether you do your mental masturbation with your left hand or your right hand. Fight it out with pfflam, if he even cares. It's not my concern. At any rate, I'm sure I could find plenty of "contest" out there if I looked for it.

Your presuppositions are numerous and far more baggage-laden than anything I'd consider a reasonable as a starting point for someone with any pretense of objectivity.

It seems to me that your sense of God is far more illusory than any "sense of culture."

I can feel passionately about moral issues without having any absolute certainty about what it even means to be "moral". That's not a disconnect -- that's just choosing to get on with life without letting the doubt and uncertainty I see behind everything get in the way of living. If my sense of culture is nothing but an illusion, so be it. Until such time as the illusion clears, it's the best I've got and I'll work with it.

At any rate, why should I see your God as anything more than a cultural product? Knowledge of your idea of God comes to me through my senses just like anything else I'm aware of, and sure looks to me an awful lot like a human idea, an idea designed by humans who wish to project their particular ideals and values on something which they can claim as superior and authoritative over all other humans, including those who don't believe as they do.

I've never asserted that "nothing truly matters". I submit that even trying to reach any certainty about what "truly" means, or what it means for something to "matter" or not, would send both of us, God or no God, down a bottomless semantic hole.

I determine what matters to me, and project upon the world what might matter to others, based on my own feelings and my own limited knowledge and understanding. Why do things "matter" to me? Probably because I'm wired that way as an evolved creature with a survival instinct. Simple, primitive drives, couple with evolved social behavior and intelligence, sound to me like a good recipe for the complex emergent behavior, and the thought patterns behind that behavior, which we call "morality".

Of course, being a complex thinking creature, I can attempt to think beyond my biological and cultural inclinations, and, for instance, ask myself, "Why not just do what I want, and the hell with everyone else? Why shouldn't I be clever, cunning, steer clear of bad consequences for myself, but otherwise take whatever I want?"

I can't give you a solid, irrefutable reason why you or I shouldn't think that way. All I can tell you is that I find such thinking repellent. I can't tell you that such selfishness is in any ultimate sense "wrong". It's merely "wrong" to me, and I can easily find a community of fellow humans that shares such sentiments. I can strongly assert such selfishness is wrong, not because I have any absolute authority for such an assertion, but because I can easily presume that I'm sharing such sentiments with like-minded humans.

Then again, in a certain sense of the word "selfish", I think that we're all ultimately selfish. The only difference between someone who is or is not "selfish" in the more typical sense of the word is the level of satisfaction one feels through concern for others, and the discomfort one feels from harming others or ignoring their welfare. Variations in morality between one person and another can be viewed as a matter of what provides each person with satisfaction, rather than a matter of the mere desire to seek satisfaction. We all seek satisfaction. (Even the most self-destructive person can be viewed as someone who gives into short-sighted desires to give into self-destructive behavior.)

I say that claiming that you've only got your own limited senses, knowledge, and reasoning to go on in this world is far from "asserting your own autonomy", and more like admitting to one's limitations.

I don't see much that I haven't "fessed up" to so far.

No way? The only thing you need to do to put "uncertainty into practice" is to not be smugly self-assured that every action you take is firmly grounded in Eternal Absolutes.

Admitting to the ultimate uncertainty of one's understanding of the world and one's moral philosophy has no bearing whatsoever on the "nowness" of how one relates to the world.

Sure there is... maybe no uncertainty that these things exist, but that they are well-constructed, that they have any basis in Eternal Absolutes, that they are anything other than ad hoc self-reinforcing systems and institutions deriving from evolved behavior can easily be debated.

What's your point? These things exist, so we might as well imagine that they're ultimately based on the Rule of God so we can feel better about what we're stuck living with and dealing with?

Or is there some long tortured argument which "proves" these things could only exist with God behind them?

You really like saying "at the end of the day", don't you?

If someone throws a rock at your head and you die, your death is quite real. It happens. It is definite. But the justness of the act of throwing the rock doesn't automatically gain any of the certainty of the result. The rock thrower might have even mistaken you for another person.

I'll admit that... some religions are more ridiculously dogmatic than others, for instance. Followers of some religions are less likely to try to impose the dogmatic peculiarities of their beliefs upon my life, and instead try to get along with others on the basis of rules which we can all derive together from a wider scope of human beliefs.

If you're suggesting that I have to admit that your Trinitarian Christianity holds some shining, special place of epistemological glory, compared to which everything else is "incoherent" no, I wouldn't have to admit that by far. None of your arguments for that seem to have impressed anyone here but yourself. Must be our sinful, willful ignorance and Satan causing this failure.