The God Treatise

[sathor]

In the midst of this time I stand in now, a movement long existing obtains greater numbers than ever before. It is the movement of atheism, a true plague on the spiritual world and something that we can never be rid of as a species. There will be those who believe that, even in all the complexity and amazement that goes on in our world, and even in the infinitesimally small role that we each individually play, they are somehow capable of a feat of presumption and divination they call "logic" and what was once called, "logical positivism" before its fall - the attempt to state that burdens of proof lie upon the claimant, although the wording is all wrong and not in their favor at all...every single claimant of any individual scientific theory has eventually proven to not have claimed the entirety of a given theory...and it is these theories themselves that are modified in changed over time. If rather we were to say it was that the burdens of proof lie upon the claimants, then again we would find ourselves in the same peculiar situation...as the claims of science have changed a great deal in even just our last century, or the past decade...having been added too and even taken away from more times than any one man could likely count or know simultaneously. But these are not the true issues working undermine the meaningfulness of the atheist's so-called "logical positivism." It is the mere fact that even with all of the information we as individuals can collect and verify through empirical means in a lifetime, and utilize to design and develop infinitely great wonders of technology and engineering that most men an age ago could not have dreamed of, we still can not disprove the postulation that God exists, in one divine, most penetratingly spiritual form or another.

And while there may be the claim that if a theory can not be disproven, or proven for that matter, it is not a valid theory...this is simply a claim, a theory in and of itself that won't find itself proven or disproven until the end of technological development and the limit of the absolute rules of the universe are discovered and documented completely. We need only look behind to see that there were "scientific", valuable theories of today concocted then, when the tools available at the time had not the capacity to validate or verify them.

I must, therefore, kindly disagree with the atheists. I may not know which church is right if any at all...nor do I know whether or not any religion is right or if they all are...but I do know that there will never be a way for my self or another man to determine or validate the existence of the divine absolute, because no one in the race of man are Gods themselves, because we are all mortal and infinitely small in the vastness of existence, because we are weak and simple minded when our minds are compared to what the limitations of reality are, and if after coming to know this we still believe we have the capacity to determine such an existence or nonexistence especially, then we are also without any humility whatsoever, we ourselves having a God complex and an incapacity to realize or comprehend even our own significant limitations.

Comments

[noximist.livejournal.com]

You seem to be making the following postulations:

1. The universe is an incredibly complex system, and we do not currently understand it.
2. Each individual human, and the human species as a whole, is insignificant when compared to that system.
3. Scientists constantly change their theories as new discoveries are made and old hypotheses are disproven.
4. The existence of God cannot be validated or disproven by humans.

These are all strong claims, but they don't form the argument you're trying to make; you don't draw your conclusion - that atheism is a misguided belief system - from the evidence you provide. I realize that part of your argument is also against formal logic itself, but there's really no way to have any sort of discussion if you're going to deny the underpinnings of all philosophy and rational thought, so I'm going to assume that we can operate within a logical framework.

The argument you lay out is that humans as a species do not understand the operation of the universe, and I agree wholeheartedly; we've only scratched the surface of understanding, and even that comprehension is subject to change. The basis of the scientific method is the creation and the testing of hypotheses: we observe a phenomenon, make a guess as to its cause, and then design experiments which might bear out that assumption. Given the massive complexity of the universe and the fact that we've only been making headway in this arena for at most a couple thousand years, our continuing ignorance and confusion is unsurprising.

However, those facts do not lead naturally to the conclusion that there must be a God. If I take a mixture of silicates, melt it down, blow it into a cup-like shape, and let it cool, I haven't done anything magical or strange; I've created a glass by exploiting well-known natural properties. But if I drop that glass over a mouse, it will have no idea what's going on, because the phenomenon is beyond its capacity to reason and understand. To the mouse, something incomprehensible has occurred. Does that elevate me or my glass to a higher standing? That is a small and silly example, but as far as anyone can tell, the universe works similarly: it has natural properties and obeys natural rules, but we don't understand them. The fact that they are complex beyond imagining has much to do with the fact that they have had billions of years to develop. I agree that it would be the height of hubris to assume that we should be able to understand something so much older and larger than us, but again, that idea does not require God. It says only that humans are small and the universe is vast.


As an aside: It is dangerous to fall back on the concept of an incomprehensible power when faced with such complexity; it engenders intellectual laziness. If we accept that we have an inherent inability to understand the universe, we encourage ourselves to stop pushing for comprehension. I recognize that many people are comfortable with this idea, but I am not. I'm glad we don't throw virgins into volcanos (very often) anymore, thanks to plate tectonics, and hope that further scientific exploration will replace more groundless beliefs with something asymptotically approaching knowledge. The universe is what it is, and it doesn't become any less amazing or special just because we understand more about what makes it tick...

[sathor.livejournal.com]

That's why I'm not claiming that there must be or is a God. Merely that atheism can be no more right than Theism.

[noximist.livejournal.com]

That's not what you claim here, though; if that were your point, I wouldn't necessarily have agreed, but I wouldn't have had a problem with your argument. Your stated thesis wasn't that "atheism can be no more right than theism;" it was that atheism is "a true plague on the spiritual world and something that we can never be rid of as a species" and that the human concept of logic is "a feat of presumption and divination." I wasn't going to touch the second half of that, and my rebuttal concerned the first. I laid out what I took to be your postulations because I found the writing a bit convoluted and I wanted to make sure I was understanding your points; it would seem I didn't manage that, but what you're saying now wasn't in the original writing at all. :/

[sathor.livejournal.com]

And let me address further what you are putting forth...

I've made no attempt to say that anything in reality is magical at all, merely that you don't know whether it is or it isn't and any attempt to claim that one knows is just as much an assumption as theism is. Just because things obey laws and rules or at least appear too under given circumstances that often change vastly depending especially on scale in the microcosmic/macrocosmic realms does not mean that these rules represent or support an atheistic paradigm at all, it could just as easily represent a spiritualistic paradigm that manifests itself in the world in the way that it does, just as you have so explained it. We know gravity exists and we've determined to the best of our ability why it exists, but we do not know why the rule as it is exists as it is, if that rule was made, and if not, whether or not it truly arises from the material realm or whether it manifests out of a realm we have no ability to perceive, or do not yet have the ability to perceive. We determine to the best of our faculties but there will always be the issue of what /is not/ detected, there will always be unknowns.

We do not understand the operation of the universe and even if we decide one day in the far future that we have learned everything that we conceivably can at that time, there very well could be further unknowns we are not even aware of.

It is not dangerous to understand the equally large lapse in reasoning accompanying either absolute stance, it is especially not dangerous to accept that neither the atheist nor the theist at this moment in time has valid empirical evidence supporting their given paradigm.

You are appealing to emotions in your final paragraph, generalizing and making a claim based purely on belief filled with bias, as if there have been no intellectuals who were religious men and could never be - as if you were to say, alas, they must have been stricken with laziness, we must not take seriously a thing they say. The state was equally brutal as religions in our past, in some cases it is still equally brutal, and mankind itself brutal with or without religion.

We /have/ an inherent inability to understand the whole of the universe and its width and depth and height, the seen and the unseen. I ask anyone who thinks we do not to provide proof of that as well...I think they will be hard pressed to do so.

[noximist.livejournal.com]

Atheism and theism are both based on assumptions, true; however, they are not equivalent assumptions. Theism is the idea that something we cannot see, measure, or experience directly must still exist, whereas atheism is the idea that there is no reason to believe in such things without evidence. Whether you prefer one over the other depends on what matters to you; however, from the perspective of logic and science, a belief system that requires reliance on unobservable properties is not as sound as one which is based on observable properties.

You are absolutely correct that gravity and other phenomena could be based on "spiritualistic paradigms" rather than purely physical ones, and that we have no way of knowing. Given that it seems to be impossible to tell, though, why would you support one explanation and dismiss those who don't? Why is atheism a plague? And why does being an atheist rather than a theist require a "large lapse in reasoning?" The act of reasoning is drawing inferences and conclusions based on evidence, and again, you're talking about a paradigm which by its very nature has no evidence.

You're right, I did appeal to emotions in my final paragraph; that's why it was an aside, rather than part of my actual argument. There have been many great thinkers who have also been religious, although I don't think we have had many in the last hundred years or so. My argument wasn't that religious people don't pursue the truth; it is that reductionist arguments like "God did it" can limit that pursuit. I also don't believe that theists are any more cruel than atheists, although that's actually because I think both groups act badly for much the same reasons, just explained differently. Human nature can be brutal, whether you explain it in spiritual terms or evolutionary ones.

On what do you base your idea that we have an inherent inability to understand the universe? I cannot prove that we don't, because you cannot prove a negative (just as one can't prove God does not exist), but I don't see any reason not to think that with enough time and enough development, humanity's comprehension of the world around might have no upper bound. We haven't hit a wall yet, and we're just getting started...

[sathor.livejournal.com]

Devoting oneself to either completely and blindly requires a lapse in reasoning, because it is a denial of the possibility of being wrong...in the case of atheism one can never know whether one is right or not...in the case of theism there is still the possibility of finding out.

I don't support one explanation and dismiss the opposite. Atheism is a plague because it hides itself under the guise of science and teaches its followers to believe they are somehow more right, with more supporting evidence than a theist. It is not a plague for any other reason. A scientist is a scientist regardless of his beliefs, and I find the continued oppression of theism, the act of devaluing it in my generation abhorrent. People hardly study it anymore - they don't have any right to speak of it unless they've put the time in, same as if a lay man were to tell an astrophysicist he were wrong about something he had been researching and considering his or her entire life. Religion is the same - I don't make any claims about being able to perform miracles or having seen them, although I've seen some rather intriguing phenomena and experienced some rather interesting things, but I have certainly come to a different place spiritually because of my studies, and I do recall more than one psychologist I've known telling me that expanding my mind beyond is in fact, good for it, not intellectual laziness.

We may not have had many great theists in the past hundred years (arguable because I'm pretty certain a great number of scientists are indeed theists just not subscribing to any given theology) but the liberal arts hasn't been very active either, at least not in my opinion. The greats are all long dead and I'm not a scientist, I'm an artist and a thinker and a writer and a musician. It's not a reductionist argument that I think the whole of this reality is divine manifestation, that it came into being as a direct result of a divine act, and will be taken out of existence the same way...it doesn't make me want to understand any of this any less. If there are those who it does that too, that is most unfortunate, but that is a result of their own selves and not a result of theism itself...correlation not causation I would say, I am sure there are incredibly lazy atheists as well, quite a number I imagine in fact - I know a few.

We have an inherent limitation with regards to the universe, it is vast, we are tiny, there is far more information obtainable, far more observations to be made than any man could make individually in their lifetime, and there is already more than enough words on pages than any one man could read in a lifetime, hence yes, we do have an inherent inability to understand the universe. We are not omniscient, that is the realm of divinity. That doesn't lessen the value of trying to achieve our utmost, it is simply a limitation that I believe we need to come to terms with, especially in the case of whether or not there is a God.

[sathor.livejournal.com]

Excuse me? The limitations are there even with regards to the species as a whole, kthx.

Basis for assuming the species has a specific limitation?

[pun-theory.livejournal.com]

Hi, I have a question:

Q: What is the basis for assuming that the species has a specific limit?

If that is an article of faith, and we can agree to disagree, that's cool.

But if you want to make it not an article of faith, there seems to be a rather large assumption in the statement

"...but I do know that there will never be a way for my self or another man to determine or validate the existence of the divine absolute...because we are weak and simple minded when our minds are compared to what the limitations of reality are"

It seems very similar to the famous (fallacious) proof of the existence of god by Descartes.

(good summary of the argument):
http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=79245

Basically this all hinges on the assumption that one cannot conceive of something 'more perfect' than one's self. I would present heroic fiction as a counterargument.

Re: Basis for assuming the species has a specific limitation?

[sathor.livejournal.com]

Well if you're disagreeing with Descartes that's one thing, I've got my quibbles with him but since he's essentially the father of solipsism I do appreciate his work. If you are disagreeing with me then let me make an attempt to clarify and answer your question to the best of my ability, although it is rather flattering to be compared to a famous philosopher - happens rather frequently. I want to make a note however that I am not familiar enough with his work to have plagiarized it, and I am getting rather tired of finding my ideas and writings compared to individuals in some cases I have never heard of and in others I know better than to have stolen from.

All proofs of God are fallacious, that's not in question here. If you as a human being have limitations then we must also assume that the species as a whole has limitations, especially so if these limitations are a part of each human being. I can concede to a degree - I don't know where evolution might take us in the future necessarily. But if we keep forms that have not diverged much from our current one, I think I can safely say we do indeed have limitations as a species when considering the many things in this world we can not perceive or experience, like electromagnetic radiation or what is through a black hole, if anything. We can't, for instance, place ourselves in the vacuum of space without artificial atmosphere and pressurized chambers or we will perish nearly immediately. These are physical limitations and the tools we utilize are also intermediaries between us and reality, just as if I were staring at my reflection in a fogged mirror, I do not perceive the actual picture but rather a reconstruction and one that can not be empirically determined to be a perfect representation or not.

I don't think my statement hinges at all on ones ability to conceive of something more perfect than myself...the simple fact I am a theist invalidates that argument because the God(s) that I believe in is/are absolutely perfect and infinitely more so than my self.

My statement is that no one and no species can invalidate or for that matter validate the existence of a divine entity...I would add that it is also impossible that we will ever determine how the whole fabric of reality came into being or if it always was, as we have no method of ever perceiving such things and at best we will only be able to draw inferences which are not verifiable. What was before the big bang? And eventually, maybe we will figure that out - but how will we ever be certain? And will there not be another hypothetical causal event prior to it, ad infinitum?

Science may have determined with relative certainty how all matter came into existence, but again I say, what of the /fabric of reality/ - what contains existence, and where did this come from?

And to answer the root question you are asking, "What is the basis for assuming that the species has a specific limit"? I must ask you a question as well, "What is the basis for assuming that the species does not have a specific limit?" Where is the evidence in contrary to my postulation? And you have asked myself the same. We live in a world of limitations, this in fact is one of them. Some questions can't be answered - one might say that we have no limit, another might say that we do, neither of us will live to see whether or not the other is correct, nor can either of us determine what exactly the "limit" is or isn't, and I presume that event will repeat itself until the light of human existence is snuffed out in the near or distant future.

I can say simply this: If time is infinite, if the fabric of existence stretches infinitely in all directions from any given number of infinite points, and if we are indeed creatures with finite proportions, our brains finite in capacity, our tools finite in that they are made of the same matter that we are, then we are most definitely limited relative to the vastness that is the infinite existence, experience, time and space.