'God' is Impossible

Sarkus,

Out of curiosity, when you describe god as a system, do you mean God is comprised of parts different to him/her/it?
By ''different'' I mean not the same as.

jan.

 

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If one describes God as a system, as the proof does, then I would say that it describes God as having constituent parts.

I'm not sure I could think of a case where one could say the individual consituent parts of a system are the system, and the constituent parts would therefore be different to the sum of those parts.

Please note that in all of this the proof is not mine. I merely tried to offer clarification, as you requested (iirc).

 

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Deeming things in terms of systems and their constituents doesn't allow it though, does it ....

I did

Its more that classifying things strictly in terms of systems and their constituents doesn't define things essentially above their constituents

gawd
yet another request to define things in strict accordance with reductionist thinking

its not so much the language but the context
IOW if you insist on defining things according to parts that make them up (and attribute any higher function of a said object as a consequence of those parts) you don't have a context that allows anything but reductionist thought

Well lets take god and the phenomenal world for example.

If the phenomenal world is attributed as contingent upon him, and if he (much like consciousness or life) is an irreducible component, its kind of ridiculous to launch into a discussion about how it "operates" or "what parts make it"

persons who insist on discussing things solely in terms of reductionist thought of course

I think its pretty clear to everyone that you can't define , explain or straight out have a system unless you have parts.

IOW bringing in "systems" is just another aspect of reductionism
:shrug:

 

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No probs.

jan.

 

Irrelevant to this request... what word would YOU use for things to separate them from matter? You complained of the use of "non-matter" so either provide an alternative of STFU!

Then argue how God is NOT bound by the concepts of the system/constituents and that the proof is inapplicable.
All you have so far done is go "ooh, the language is too limiting... it must be just another reductionist viewpoint and thus rubbish".

Take the blinkers off, LG. A request to explain your position is just that... use whatever terms you feel necessary - but refrain from just spouting complaints with no explanation behind them.

Then EXPLAIN how it is inappropriate, not just through saying that it is limiting, but by showing how the limit necessarily needs to be removed. If you can't do that then you're just blowing smoke.

So your entire argument is that, using the analogy of systems and consituent parts, God is defined/attributed as a system with no constituent parts, and thus the proof is not applicable.

Not too difficult, really.
So why is it so hard to get straight answers from you but instead have to drag them from you?
You are too quick to come in with the trite one-line comments and then never actually explain yourself unless hauled over the coals for it. If you indulge in the former then have the decency to provide the latter openly.

Not really - as you seem to define God as a constituentless system.

No - it is just another aspect of the language that we use that is not exactly blessed with a plethora of words for discussion of the non-material. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, but that leniency - even by you - should be given, rather than jumping in with the biased opinion that it must therefore be just "another reductionist viewpoint".

 

Then let's get back to the basics:
Why do you ask?
Why do you think "Why does God exist?" is a meaningful question?

I really want you to explain this!



No resorting to "Well, if you're not interested in philosophical inquiry ..."

 

If I understood him correctly, according to him, the source of all is nothing.

(This is the cue for that usual atheism logo which has been posted so often ...)

SciWriter isn't a monist/Advaitist.
He might be classified as close to the Sunyavadis.

The immediate use of God-arguments is, among other things, that this way, an absolute footing for justice is provided, otherwise we would have to settle for complete moral relativism.

 

I guess that there's a historical line of philosophical thinking that insists that if something is divisible into parts, then it can't be ontologically fundamental. That was what motivated ancient philosophy to posit the existence of unseen atoms (indivisibles).

The idea also appears in ancient arguments against materialism. Since matter appears to be spatially and temporally extended, and since any extension can in principle be divided into smaller segments, the argument was that material being can't be ontologically ultimate. That was one of the things that motivated Zeno to produce his reductio-ad-absurdem paradoxes of space and time.

The ancients thought in terms of primordial 'stuff' and its many 'forms'. That idea seems to have originally arisen thousands of years earlier in myths of primordial formlessness and chaos, and some divine law-giver who imposed order upon it, separating the earth from the heavens above and the waters below. We we that idea in Mesopotamian (and hints of it much later in Biblical) creation myths.

The Ionian Greek philosophers kind of secularized that sort of idea and turned it into a family of early philosophical theories. So we have Anaximander proposing some featureless primordial stuff that he called 'apeiron' (unbounded or undefined) that became the world of experience through the appearance of internal boundaries and divisions within it, breaking it up and turning it into discrete things.

So it's kind of implicit in the idea of the apeiron that it contains all possibilities within it, without any internal division at all.

I think that's probably how the ancients would have addressed this 'systems' argument. They would have looked at being in terms of 'Everything', absolutely simple and unitary, kind of breaking up and fragmenting into the world of diversity and flux that we perceive.

In other words, the observed complexity and multiplicity of the phenomenal world wouldn't be, as the systems argument might have it, the work of something that's necessarily even more complex and internally divided than its product. The ancients might have been more likely to interpret the complexity and multiplicity of the world of experience as flowing out of a primordial unity like a rainbow from out of a prism. They would see it as the result of a timeless 'Everything' kind of fragmenting into the spatial-temporal universe of countless discrete and transitory objects.

 

This is similar to some understandings of sunyata - the nothingness or voidness pertains to the non-differentiatedness.

What conception of time did those ancients you describe here work with - linear or cyclical or something else?

 

SciWriter -

I ask you to justify the existence of imperatives, according to your system of thought.
According to you, where do imperatives come from, how relevant are they, in relation to what do they obtain their relevance?

 

The OP is written in plain language. If some can't address it then it is because they don’t want to, which makes my other point of ‘neglect’ obvious.

The self-contradiction of the notion of God in the OP is the straight-out proof and evidence of no God being possible.


And there is no supposition and assuming that God is larger, etc., because God hasn't been proved and so one cannot use that towards His proof or against my disproof.

"La, la, la" does not get one off the hook, either, from addressing the OP, so I must remind again that OP hasn't been refuted.

And, yes, existence from nothing as its only source would be yet another proof of no God, for nothing is even the opposite of God, but we are still [not] addressing the first proof. In light of this scientific forum, magic is not admissible and perhaps that is the stumbling block, as always, believers wanting what they want no matter what.

And there are even more disproofs of God coming… eventually, as well as explanations of the nature of erroneous belief.

I realize that some may not like it and will go to any length of avoidance and neglect, and so that is also a side study for this discussion.

 

In other words, you don't want to answer the question I asked you.

 

I said he was talking about reductionist thought.

You said he was talking about systems.

I said that is still well within the purview of reductionist thought.

You come around after 3 or 4 posts.

Whose fault is that?
:shrug:

 

the only obvious being neglected is that you framed the question completely within the parameters of reductionist thought .... a ploy more commonly known as a loaded question ...
:shrug:

 

The irrefutable OP, remember, not the subsequent notes of no refutation. (Avoidance obvious.)

"By definition" holds no water, plus the definition is self-contradictory. No go on magic.

He talks about God being not being able to be so, defeating the notion.

That would be 'nothing', the simplest state, and unitary as the eternal and infinite prime mover of existence. ‘Nothing’ is not a Being, nor anything else but nonexistence.


And no one can answer Rav's or Sarkus’s points either.

 

Again, proving the meaninglessness of the question the OP itself poses....

 

The OP of the 1st disproof has not been undone, and yet there are more disproofs of the notion of God in the works.

The elaboration of nothing as the only source of existence will constitute the 2nd disproof, for nothing is not God. No one can state another source of existence over nothing.

The 3rd disproof will be built upon the necessity of the one and only possible ground-state basis having to be eternal, thus admitting of no creation of itself and thus no Creator.

The 4th will show that the Cosmos can only be the way it is.

The 5th will only apply to the theistic God of the three main religions, the most common type of stated God who is also said to run and control everything that He created. It will not apply to a Deity, the type of God who just left everything alone after He created it. This disproof provides nothing above any of the others, but it does dispense with any claimed non natural happenings.

The 6th may be a review of others disproofs that work.

Finally, we will explain the human mammal tendency to identify imagination as representing reality and thereby even become resistant to any contrary discussion or employing diversion and avoidance.

 

I think your final disproof undoes the first six

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Care to try to re-iterate all that in English?

Seriously, I don't follow you at all throughout all of that.

The OP is fatally flawed, as has been recognized by numerous philosophers throughout history: it's a Category Mistake par excellence. The concept "god" is neither possible nor impossible, due to it's very nature....

 

Typical sunyavadi maneuvre.
They say something that disturbs people, and then put on a quizzical look and play innocent.

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