God, a definition
Offline The notion of comparing God, to leprechauns, and Santa, has gained some currency among atheist circles, particularly the popular forms of it. And this has evolved into a weird sort of perception of God among unbelievers, that doesn't understand the distinction between a being like my neighbor next door, and god, or the distinction between saying Obama lives in the white house, and God exists.
What I'm going to do is to define God. What I'm not doing is advocating that he exists, nor am i defining it to suit a particular branch of theism, but one that applies to fundies, and the Anglicans alike. What I'm doing is defining God, along the lines of what the word means, and implies, and on what basis is it to say that "God exists".
Imagine you were walking one day, and you were hit in the head by a rock. Let's hit pause, and let's see what sort of "beliefs" are involved here. You believe, A) a rock hit you, and you believe B) in some sort of "force" that allowed the rock to hit you, regardless if it being the air, or a person with two arms, a black man , or a leprechaun.
What you believe is that a rock hit you, and "B" just logically follows from that belief.
"A" and "B" in some sense are not two separate beliefs, but two unified ones, you can't believe "a" without "b".
So now let's introduce "C". "C" is whatever specifications we give for "B", or whatever specifications we give for the force, like saying the "force" was a person, or the "air", or a white person, a person wearing two sneakers, green, short, and wearing a funny hat.
"A" is not dependent on the specifications (C). I can believe a rock hit me, without knowing how it happened, without knowing if a person threw the rock at me, or if the wind blew it.
A God belief is a belief in "A," and all that goes into believing in it (B), but it does not involve (C).
Example:
Bob believes like the Discovery Institute advocates, that the universe has a sense (or pattern) of intelligent design to it (A), and if you believe this, you believe in what logically follows from it as well, i.e an intelligent designer, i.e a creator (B)
Another name for "B" as the creator of life, is God. If we believe in "A", most of us would be deist. Notice the only charchateristic of God here, is "A". If we say "God exists" it 's only saying so by the mark of "A", sort of like saying a person was here solely by seeing a set of shoe prints in the dirt.
So if you were to ask this hypothetic deist why he believes God exists, he would say because of the pattern of intelligent design he see in the intricacies of the universe. It would be odd to argue with him sayings, "it's fine and dandy that the universe reveals a pattern of intelligent design behind it, but show me evidence for the existence of God", as if these belief are separable. It would also be odd, to say to this deist he's no different in believing that God (a creator) created the world, and a Leprechaun created the world.
What you would really be asking is not why doesn't he believe in an alternative to God (a creator), but a Leprechaun as that God. The difference here, is the one between saying a person knocked up Sue, and Tom was that person who knocked up Sue. Tom is not an alternative to person, but a specifications of that person, or a "C".
A person believing the universe was created by a leprechaun believes this: "I believe the universe was created by a creator (God), and that this creator (God) is green, and two feet tall, and wears a leather hat, and occasionally places gold at the end of the rainbow.
Compared to the deist who believes only: "I believe the earth was created, by a creator (god).
Now you can use this process with every portion of a theist belief.
Like: Bob believe what he prays for gets answered (A), which logically follows that he believe in the force that makes that possible (B) or in other words "God"
or another example: I believe in god, because I was miraculously cured of herpes..........you get the point.
All characteristics of God are accumulations of "A", in some sense you can say that God is defined by what he "does" or "did", or what he "gives" for the respective believer or groups of believers. What's common for atheist to do is elevate God beyond this, by requesting his social security card, and the exact location of his home, by a fault understanding of what the term means.
I thought about going into a lengthier discussion, about how this relates to the Christian belief that Jesus Christ is God, and the grounding for most forms of theism (outside of fundie circles) for whom god is not a mechanical sort of creator, but an aesthetic one, that rather than perceiving God in the supposed mechanics or science of life, he's perceived in the beauty of it.
But it's late, I'm tired, and I've decided to give it a rest for now. Hopefully at this point you understand the distinction between a belief in a leprechaun, and God, and the difference between saying Bill Clinton exists, and God exists.
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Perhaps for the same reason the atheist billboard ad here does?
http://lowcountryhumanists.org/billboard.jpg
But perhaps more out of habit, for the same reason I'm inclined to use the word "he" often in reference to groups that also contain female members. Some feminist might label me a sexist, but i don't think so.
You are inclined to make a singular male god, but not any more than that, or any different types?
That is a very specific inclination.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Well, I'm sure if i lived in a society where God was referred to as "she", and was always spelled in the plural and in lower case. I would then be inclined to say "gods" and refer to "gods" as she.
But you are arguing for a specific type of singular god, not just the existence of gods when you specify it to that degree.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Regardless of what you call yourself, or what you believe, the problem still remains: you are listing some attributes, calling it "god" and then stepping back to admire your work.
I get that you are trying to come up with a social explanation for what people call god, but that is not a definition. A definition defines something. "A statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or symbol (dictionary definitions); A statement expressing the essential nature of something;..."
I don't mean to get all semantical on your ass, but. IMO, what you are doing is perpetuating a ridiculous notion that you can define something without having an actual referent - that you can define the essential nature of something which, "by definition", has no essential nature.
I am not trying to comment on your essential nature - just your essential argument. You started the pissing match.
If YOU re-read your post again you will see that you are offering nothing more than a prosaic opinion of a social phenomena; you aren't "defining" anything, but vaguely waving your hand around an issue in an effort to find some common ground, or some basis for an explanation.
Hey, after you define God, why not define Beauty while your at it, and tell us what it is... whether you believe in Beauty or not.
Edit: BTW, what you are proposing is very similar to a New Age conception of god, or a mythical concpetion of god as Campbell, Iliade and Levi-Strauss put forward. Your description of the social phenomena is more closley related to Campbell's "Hero's Journey". As much as I appreciate the scholarship and intellect of the afore mentioned people, they are NOT defining God - and really don't try to - other than a socialogical sense. I am less bothered by your attempt to talk about gods, than I am of the broader implication that there is warrant to suggest that a definition of God can be created.
There simply isn't a referent. Sorry to hammer on this fact, but that is what makes it vastly different than Beauty (troublesome in it's own right). In fact, "god" is more like "soul" or "qi" or "supernatural" or "subnatural".... It's nonsense.
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
Isaac Asimov
We'll start here:
This shouldn't be too hard to figure out what's wrong with the above. Negativity bias is not how much attention we pay to something, but to how much attention we pay to a "particular" something, something we perceive as "negative"/something threatening. We have to identify the "fire alarm" see it as a characteristic for something negative, rather than compared to the sound of an ice cream truck, for something threatening, and we do have a faster automatic processing for such. It's the faster automatic processing of negative events that's been selected for (Gazzaniga).
But what's actually negative is decided by our everyday experiences. The features and characteristic of negative events are learned by our everyday life.
And this leads us to this conclusion of yours here:
Really, babies have no experiences of the world? I'm guessing you're not a father, and never really played much with babies? So babies have no experiences of being held by their mothers, or fathers, of being fed, of laughter, of faces, of uncomfortability, etc...etc..
And It's a huge leap in logic to conclude from a child being startled by a stop and go moving box that it's because he inherently understands that people move but objects to do not.
This is just hooey, please explain to me why I should assume that this child is startled because he inherently understands that objects don't move, is to be seen as distinct from this child being startled by his father here: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=11320262.
I'm going to cut and paste something I wrote somewhere else, that deals with another example from one of the articles you gave me:
"Children are born into a world where they have no acquired sense of the "useless". They have not engaged in the adult activity of spring cleaning, where we sort out and rid ourselves of items that we no longer have any purpose for. Their interactive world is primarily their home, and in close proximity of their parents. They're fed in a bowl, a bowl for the purpose of placing their food in, a spoon, to transport the food in small quantities they can consume.
Walking with my one year old niece, Kaitlyn, the other day, she attempts to pick up a cup that fell out of overfilled trash can and attempts to drink out of it, she has become accustom to seeing cups designed for the purpose of drinking, but not cups that are now out of use, reserved for trash, to be labeled as junk, as no longer usable, as no longer serving a purpose.
"When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. "It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were 'for' a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion," says Kelemen."
In a child's world, their everyday objects are designed for a purpose, their toys to entertain them, melodic sounds to soothe them, the rags to wipe after their spills. The notion of "purposeless" is foreign to them, not as common enough in their world to be familiar. It's not out of a biological inclination to perceive purpose in pointy rocks, but rather out of the product of living, the everyday interaction that color their world that render to them "familiarity".
The reason why children are highly resistant to counter-suggestion, suggestions of purposelessness, is because the concept is as bewildering as hearing a foreign language. The child is some sense is saying to the questioner "everything in my world has been designed for a purpose, i been fed, clothed, cleaned, entertained, soothed, now you're trying to tell me that some things are not? Get this crazy mother fucker out of here, and give me my damn cookie!" "
Well, its not how familiar we are with the intelligent creation of the universe, but how familiar we are with intelligent creations in general such as a "watch".
Now, I don't buy Paley's Watchmaker argument, and it's a good thing atheist who attempt to refute this argument don't take advice from your handbook and go "There is no way we could know what a designed universe would look like, end of argument, goodbye". Richard Dawkins splendid refute, works exactly because it understands the logic and reasoning behind why people like Paley would deduce this.
Here's paley argument:
1.The complex inner workings of a watch necessitate an intelligent designer.
If it wasn't for the ToE, very few us, wouldn't find this argument persuasive, most of us would at least be a minimal sort of deist by such thinking. When i was younger I never had an issue with accepting the ToE, but I didn't know much about it, but it was counter-intuitive to me to see all the complexity we see in life, and not infer an intelligence behind it.
Because life resembled in some sense the complexity of a watch, with its own sets of gears, and movements that allowed it to sustain itself, sun and moon, water, and air, land, plants, and animals, were sort of like gears that allowed human life to flourish. So it wasn't hard to reason when i was younger that like a watch, that there was some sort of divine craftsmen behind all of this..
We comprehend or perceive intelligently created things out of our cumulative experiences of such things. When we perceive features or characteristics being shared in common with something else, we assume that that this something else was also intelligently designed
To quote Paley:Quote:
Well, what you don't get is this. Cause and effect are a form of pattern recognition. I play a game with my little niece where I blow up cheeks, and at first i guide her hand to my cheeks and make a funny noise upon touch, she pretty quickly picks up on the fact, and on her own repeats touching my cheeks, to elicit the same effect from me. She understands the pattern associated with x happening when y happens, and that x is the cause for y, even though she's barely 1.
Well, we can "reasonably" believe that intelligence was behind the design of something, based on our knowledge of what intelligent designed things look like, such as a watch, a perception of the features and characteristics of designed things, and based on our knowledge of previous experiences.
But just keep in mind, that sometimes we can make reasonable assumptions, but that doesn't mean they are right. There is nothing unreasonable about Paley's assumption, given the time in which it was written--prior to Darwin. And you'll have quite a difficult time making the case that it wasn't a reasonable view for the time.
Well, first of all I'm not listing some attributes and calling it god, I'm giving examples of attributes, and not claiming that every particular sort of believer accepts these attributes or not.
Beauty: a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aestheticsenses, esp. the sight
And your point here was?
Uhm? I'm guessing you're joking? I mean i gave examples of beliefs of an evangelical theist, but some how you derived that i'm give you a new age conception of God? Thats a pretty huge leap in logic there buddy, care to draw this picture out for me.
SO you're saying you can't define what supernatural is? Or even what a soul is in a particular religious tradition? Of course defining them doesn't mean you believe in them yourself?
I'm sorry, correct me if I'm wrong (I've been out of this thread for a little while) but didn't you say before that we didn't have a proclivity towards seeking patterns, only a negativity bias? This would seem to contradict that directly, no? Also, the way I read this supports Michael's point that children with no experience of the world (because, despite having been held and played with by their parents, they don't) are able to identify patterns at early ages.
This has nothing to do with your attempt at a definition of god though, so sorry for derailing the discussion.
Also, another thought: If you don't support the Watchmaker argument (which seems to be paraphrased in your OP), then what is the structure or meat of your argument. To me it kinda sounds like you're saying "X is intricate and therefore warrants design. Only I don't agree with that argument, so disregard that."
Again, sorry if I totally missed the boat on this one, I kinda forgot about it for a while.
"Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven. Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads. And recks not his own rede."