But that doesn't exist!....FAIL!

that was pretty damn funny!

I think Sapient just PWNED C.S. Lewis!

*Kicks pet furger-argorok into the closet and closes door*

Yeah!

We need to make furger-argorock t shirts!

In defense of C.S. Lewis (cause I like him and his stories) and 'conceivability to possibility' in the argument from reason; the Furger Argorock is a conception of existing things -toothlessness, flying, sharks, camel fur, appetites, rejuvenation methods.. these all exist. I would contend that this is the key point of the original arguments, that conception of things that have no existing referent isn't something we humans do, the caller was using it in ignorance, but in a curious coincidence I was just yesterday discussing something really similar to this question of conceivability here.

Anyhow, for the record when he said "but it doesn't exist" and Brian retorted "and I'm conceiving of it" I laughed so hard, that was a total pwning.

Well, okay. I concieve of the Shootle. The Shootle is gratooshed of spittacles, yumcore, lyhelm and aphostakoom.

So the Shootle is concieved of, and is barren of sensible qualities or definition. Thereby, according to Lewis, the Shootle exists! It must've revealed itself to me just now!

Quick, Rook; help me find them! I'll bet the yumcores it's gratooshed of will be a hot item on the commodities market!

EDIT: Yumcore is now my most favorite word.

That's cool, but it's still based on something which I can point out as <strike>conceivable</strike> sorry, existing - quasi-sensibly ordered syllables,  conveying the conceivability of meaningless words. ....meaninglessness exists.

And to make my point clearer it's perfectly within reason to suggest that such is all the reality which exists behind the things which are relating to god concepts, however, they might not be. In any case, there is a conception in what humans construct, conceptions refer to something real.

Okay. So we've established nonsensical concepts can exist as words, inescapably retaining the trait of meaninglessness (which is hardly a positive trait. )

So, where does this leave us now? At the same dead end, I'd argue.

'God' being able to at least exist as a word and be meaningless, in my opinion, doesn't exactly score big points for the deity.

Sorry I sort of skimmed this before,  but on second thought it deserves an answer.

I'd argue that we have a dead end and a road at this point. If theology is just a string of intentionally meaningless syllables, that is the dead end, it would be easy to just dismiss any and all Gods and God things the instant it's established that theology is just a clever ruse illustrating humanity's ability to cobble together random symbols for the sake of cobbling random symbols.

On the other hand if that's not what theology is, then it must instead be an exercise in constructing symbols in representation of something real. 

So it is one or the other, and either way there is clear value in identifying what that extant behind the conception exists as in more logically accessible terms.

That's definitely how it is generally interpreted and even how it might come off as originally written, but I think the best part of the argument is lost in the rush to prove God outright, which is a wasteful and foolish use of the careful logic that came before which is, in itself, enough to show that whether or not humans could have conceived of God out of thin air, we probably didn't.

Depends on what you mean by "thin air."

"God" as a concept evolved from mystery. That is, we knew nothing about thunder and lightening, or why some years brought drought, and others brought flood. We saw the effect of the mystery, but not the cause, and so God became the symbol for all that was "unknowable." These things of power -- thunder, lightening, flood, and so on -- became symbols of God in return.

So, no, God as a concept didn't just pop into being. One thing has always stood as a singular attribute of God: He has always stood in for ignorance, for the  bits of reality we don't understand completely. As we have learned about nature and reality, we have pushed the concept of God back from one who controls the weather and our health, to one who controls our destiny, to one who simply exists as quantum events or as everything that exists or some other indefinable entity.

God has always been a "God of the gaps." As a species, we seem to turn to God every time we're stumped. Rather than simply saying, "Beats me; let's find out," we say, "This is the purvue of God," or, "This is an aspect of God."

The conception of God is the conception of mystery; and mystery is nothing more than ignorance.

I will be the first to admit that I am not much of a philosopher, so forgive me if this question has an immediate answer which has not occurred to me:

What of the case where we can conceive of a thing which is impossible?  E.g., we can consider the idea for an equation to "square the circle", even though it has been proven to be impossible (i.e., it has been proven that no such solution can exist).  In this case, we have an existing referent (squares, circles, equations, etc.) for a process which has been proven to be impossible.  We can envision paradoxes and contradictions, even though the things which lead to them cannot exist, but we can consider for a moment that they do.  Does this qualify as envisioning something with no existing referent?

Dragons, vampires, ghosts, etc.

I see the point Eloise is making.  Even the furgerargerock doesn't fit the mould of something conceived that doesn't exist.  It's made up of and based on things that do exist.  The shark, teeth, flying creatures etc are all things that exist.  However, just as the furgerargerock is an amalgamation of things that actually do exist, so is any god I've had described to me. 

God is just a person, another human, with attributes observed through human lifetimes. Invisibility is just being unseen, like children getting gifts from relatives they have never met. Children think their parents are omniscient because the parents have so much more experience, and omnipotent as their experience makes them excellent providers. Omnibenevolence is a loving parent. The power to create is a child seeing new tools fashioned in ways he or she does not yet understand.

So, god is on the same level as dragons, vampires, ghosts, Furger Argorocks, and Shootles.

Nah, I gotta voice a similar take to Nigel's on this one. The God-concept doesn't come out of thin-air, and it's not humanity conceiving of that which had existed in no form or idea previously. It's really very, very simple.

It's fear.

The origin of the god-concept is fear, and the parent. Our parents take care of us. They protect us. They protect us from animals, from strangers, from the dangers we learn to see and hear and understand.

But it's a BIG world, especially at night, and it's scary, and there's all those things I don't understand out there. Maybe if I ask the biggest thing I don't understand for help, it'll protect me. Maybe if I do what it says, like I did my parents, it'll keep me safe from the big scary unknown out there.

That, in some form, maybe the origins of the 'god' concept. First you get the 'parent/protector' concept, then you mix it with the scary unknown to produce the 'spirits' concept and then 'spirit protector' concept, and then you just keep reassuring yourself that YOUR patron that protects you from the unknown is stronger than that OTHER guy's, cuz if HIS spirit is stronger, then he might be able to take your stuff!

Really, it's all based on pre-existing concepts. You don't get 'God' until it's snowballed through a few levels and gained complexity.

A)I believe you mean MPD/DID sufferers. Schizophrenics generally have chemical conditions in the brain that slowly drive a wedge between their reality and their ability to coherently interact with it.

B)Even in cases of MPD/DID, there's usually an influencing factor outside the individual's control, be it a hormonal or chemical condition, or a severe developmental or emotional trauma. Either way, the vast majority of these people would very much like to be able to assume control and responsibility for the 'other', but are unable to do so.

And frankly, while some theists may use their theism as an escape from personal responsibility, far more that I have known have used it as a way to personify or anthropomorphise their obligation to shoulder that responsibility. Instead of a nebulous, hard to really grasp obligation to 'society', there is a distinct 'other' that holds the obligation, and who will hold them to it, preventing any chance of 'getting away with it' which might exist in society's purview.

Finally, especially in response to Eloise, who in her posts here has never shown any inclination to use her beliefs in any respect as a method to dodge personal responsibility, and with regard to the mentally ill, that kind of assinine and obnoxious contention is both insulting, which I expect it was intended to be, and completely uncalled for. That's right up there with 'God sent Sept 11 to punish us for tolerating gays'-level bullshit.

For shame, sir.

I agree but I think one can add another component as well.  In Freudian terms god can also be a replacement father (or mother) figure  As a child you take for granted the all protecting, all providing, all loving, can do no wrong figure of your father.  But, as disillusion sets in bit by bit and dad turns out to be a drunken, womanizing lout, or whatever, his place is taken by an idealized version...i.e. god.  Just as you asked your father for things, and got them if you had been good, so with god...except "asking is called "praying".   

Okay, well, to start by saying 'don't fully understand the implications' I was referring to full ontological implications, basic results can still be inferred from the information, for example in this part:

a. If naturalism, then it would seem nonsense to talk of one bit of matter being true about another bit of matter since it should easily be taken for granted that they are each as true as each other.

The implications of this are easy to infer put simply, both thoughts and things are understood as arbitrary points in a field of interacting matter, a thought can only appear in a field therefore has a true value in the field, it must, because a false value is equivalent to no thought. Thoughts as interactions of matter are always as true as the matter with which they interact. From this you can infer that we aren't likely to find the existence of baseless thoughts because a baseless thought is a thought without a field, this would prove interaction untrue in some place in the natural world. The chance that naturalism can be true while there is some place in the natural world that interaction just ends and existence continues = virtually nil. So although we can't be sure what it means for all thoughts to be true, we can at least infer that it doesn't mean that there is some place in the natural world where matter stops interacting.

And for this:

b. if intentionality, then there are facts of the matter about what someone's thought is about - ie there is meaning.

The implications of this were the basis of Lewis's and Tolkien's discussion on 'God Thoughts' if we simply say that thoughts are intentional ie directed at some matter, then who or what is doing the focusing.  The good thing is that this might be explainable by combining naturalism with intentionality but failing that you have a dualism where direction is given to thought outside of natural processes. However, regardless of what the implication might be found to be you can, again at least infer that we are unlikely to find teleologically directed thought directed at nothing. In an additional note, as much as I like Lewis and Tolkien, I think they chased rainbows in vain with this conjecture.

And that brings us to the combination -

thought is direct true reference and meaning is direct true reference and they can be combined in direct true reference.

So here we are saying that the 'lens' of intentionality is a naturalistic entity formed over interactions and we can have, in this stance, human conception in the manner that we would portray human conception exists as; a level of interaction contained within itself in a large bed of more interaction on a different level.

Aside:It is this that looks most like real human thought in my estimation.

Now consider this to be the analogue of thought being contained by polarising lens, a naturalistic entity somewhat equal to the physical brain, which allows only true values at a certain angle to enter the internal field. In this case the thought is in a partially isolated field of interaction, thus it can exist as long as it is a true value in the 'lens' even if it is not directly true in the field of the bed of matter that the lens is interacting with.  Now the implications of this aren't too dramatic, they are basically reassurance that we are living in the empirical universe we think we are living in. However, we must also notice that although a thought does not need a direct referent in the big bed of matter interaction, the lens does, from this we can infer the most clear likelyhood that all human conception has a referent in the real world, one, in point of fact, which returns a true value to the lens (before it can rotate it out of view).

Huh? sorry you may have to point out what sentence you mean because I don't know that I've said anything of the sort.

I just skimmed through one of Tod's articles that Hamby linked to in one of his threads.  So, my question is, doesn't inductive logic base itself, in part, on probabilities? i.e., infer probability?

Eloise, your post is rather esoterically written so I must admit that, without sharing your enthusiasm for "consider this ..." or "let's take it that ..." kind of arguments, I conclude from the logic within it that you are saying that human thought, when  focused on an intention, leads to conception.

Well, um, yes it does. It also leads to perception, misconception, misperception and a whole host of other internal visualisations of the "empirical universe", none of which - no matter how hard I try - can I bring to bear on the probability of god existing, or something similar. I've read Lewis, and I've read about Lewis, and I've found all his writings predicated on a subjective belief in deity. Anyone can construct a set of hypotheses that lead comfortably to a subjective belief, but it is quite another thing to construct a set of logical deductions that arrive at an objective finding. Lewis didn't do that, and he was rightly criticised by theologians in his day when he embarked on such follies - they were in the business of trying to produce convincingly portrayed pseudo-rational lines of logic pointing to the existence of a universal governor (they often hedged their bets on the god label), while he was justifying his cosy view of a benign hairy man in the sky.

But back to your post. Calling this intention a "lens" and then running away with the analogy so that by the end of your post it has assumed almost solid form and is merrily swivelling around on a metaphysical axis simply adds an extra layer of esotericism to your essay, so I am afraid that is yet another point where I, as a person who tries to think rationally, tend to jump off.

The sentence in your previous post was

which to me makes two whopping great suppositions (who says "intentionality" or "naturalism" are good descriptors for what followed in each case? And why?), and then proceeds to combine the two in order to produce no great insight at all. What is wrong with describing thought simply as a function of the human brain? It is a process that to some degree can be controlled, to another degree occurs without conscious control since it is simply what the organ does, and in no way lends itself as a process to be described with any definition that includes the word "true". Truth has nothing to do with it. Survival of the animal has, I would suggest, much more.

I feel you're trying to ascribe a value equating to cosmic worth to a rather mundane function. And I wonder why?

But conceiving of something isn't just about the parts involved. It's also about the specific intended interplay between those parts. Does an architect design simply by thinking of the list of materials and that's it?

See how many theists would be willing to pay to go for a ride on a furger-argorok. Just tell them we don't know when it will come to be ridden but we know it will someday - just like Jesus returning.

Thank you, sir. I stand corrected (well I'm sitting actually, but who's to know?)

The brain actually depends quite a bit on chemical imbalances to function, well, poorly or indifferently, but I take your point.

In fact I have been trying to iterate more or less the same point as yourself in my posts directed to Eloise. The brain, as you say, is just another organ and everything it produces by way of product - be it called thought, feeling or memory - has a mundane reason for existing, albeit many exciting applications to which it can be put (the excitement, of course, being one of the feelings mundanely manufactured by the same thought processes). People whose brains manage to produce a stream of thoughts in which it is imagined that the reason for their thinking emanates from a cosmic source are simply doing that other thing the brain is eminently capable of achieving, namely getting things wrong.

Science and rationality are both, in their ways, attempts to counter this tendency by imposing rigid logic and a dependency on empirical evidence on the brain's functionality. If, after applying this methodology, one finds one still favours the "cosmic creator" type of belief then one must choose whether it means the creator exists or one has simply applied logic poorly. I favour the latter explanation - it makes more logical sense.