andrewducker | More on God

More on God

Nice quote I've just stolen from here, where the author is inspired by the Onion AV story about God to translate Brecht:

Someone asked Mr K. whether there was a God. Mr K. said: "I advise you to reflect whether your behaviour would change depending on the answer to this question. In case it wouldn't change we can drop the question. If it would change I can help you in that way that I say that you have decided already: You need a God."

I short, people invent the God's they need. They feel that there must be something, and so they assume there is. I think I'll pass.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The thing is, I don't see any difference between being affected by two different causes if they affect you identically. If you told me about the car then that's a different effect to you just grabbing me out of the road. If you thought the car was going to hit me but it didn't, yet you acted as if it did and I knew no different than what you told me I'd be just as affected and changed with no relevance to if the car had hit me or not. The same with a belief in God. Essentially it doesn't matter if God exists or not, especially as so many concepts of God have him (whatever) not affecting people directly. There is no functional difference between someone believing in a non-existant God and a God who doesn't directly affect them. If I build a shrine and worship an idol there as a God and sacrafice people to it, what difference does it make if there is a God or not. A positivist view would say that the view of reality with a god in it and without a god in it would be equally valid (almost a small gods theory).

And to the car thing. If it affects me via you, that's still the car affecting me. I'm not saying that there wasn't a ball of energy with a certain projected vector of motion about to interact with another ball of energy and affect it heavily. What I am saying is that the whole facet of reality involving the words car, me, you, accident, fatality, pain, broken bones and anything else you mean when you write with words or in any way communicate or picture visually as a taxonomy of experience, is subjective. When you look out the window and point at the world, that is subjective. Not that it disappears when you turn your back, but that everything we think it is, is subjective.

If I build a shrine and worship an idol there as a God and sacrafice people to it, what difference does it make if there is a God or not.

None at all. However, if you believe that your worldview is specific to you, then you'll be a lot more openminded than someone who believes that their worldview is the Truth.

And to the car thing. If it affects me via you, that's still the car affecting me.

How do you know it did? The car didn't exist in your world, why would you believe that it exists in mine? If I just warn you "there's a car coming" and you reply "i cannot perceive the car, therefore it doesn't exist" and are then hit by the car, then you have been killed because you believed that your worldview was the only correct one.

Saying "I can't perceive it, therefore it doesn't exist" denies the possibility of future changes in your perception, errors in your perception, etc. It also denies the validity of other people's worldviews and of subjectivity. Certainly, two things affecting me now in identical ways are effectively identical now, but if I don't appreciate that they may affect me differently next time then I may be in for a nasty shock (or a nice one).

So, yes, our perceptions are all we have to go on, but to say "if we haven't perceived it it doesn't exist" or "I have perceived X, therefore X is the truth" is just asking for trouble.

Reality being subjective has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing or appreciating or not appreciating other people's world views. Your subjective reality includes your internal model of the world and your internal model of other people's internal models of how they perceive the world. It is all mediated by your senses and experiences and interactions with the world, which are subjective, and form your taxonomy and functional definitions of everything around you.
The way you react to a call of "car" or someone pushing you out of the road is based on how you view those experiences affecting you and your knowledge of the world around you, how can this not be subjective?

Yes, the majority of people would be able to understand the situation in a reasonably similar (subjectively speaking, because there is no objective similar) way. They would be able to understand the concept of broken bones and car wrecks, in some way based on experiences of their own. So that if you said "car wreck" they'd all remember a car wreck they were in or saw on TV or read about in the paper. All mediated by their perceptions, all subject to their experiences.
The same occurs with any taxonomy of day to day situations. Breaking down the world affecting us. Just because you can track the movement of the underlying world, which is the basis of your viewpoint, doesn't mean that car is somehow not a subjective term nor your mental image of a car nor your touching of a car nor any other interaction with it.
That the car might interact with you and break your leg is based in the underlying objective reality of energy states and energy state transitions, but everything above this level, everything we use for day to day behaviour by breaking the world down into pigeon holes we can deal with, is subjective.

I never said it wasn't subjective. All of our experiences definitely are.

but originally you said that because you believe there is a god then there _is_ a god. If you'd said because you believe there is a god then there might as well be a god then i'd have agreed with you.

And tell me the functional difference between one subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God and another subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God.

The first being some omnipotent force, the second being a collection of neurons in someone's head.
People define a lot of things as being God. The feeling that there's someone up there that loves them, the feeling they get when they see a beautiful day or a sky full of stars and wonder at the enormity of existence. How is this feeling any less God that an actual white bearded entity raining down thunderbolts (and/or love).

If you believe in a thing and project attributes onto it, then all you have done is taxonomise that thing into a pigeon hole. As this is what we do when we deal with experiences of cars and accidents how is it any different?

"And tell me the functional difference between one subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God and another subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God."

Because if I call something a flower and you call it an anti-tank missile, when I say i love smelling flowers, there's confusion.

These people aren't claiming that there is a God in their heads, they're claiming that there is an outside force who affects the universe. They aren't after a semantic quibble, they're claiming a force which moves throughout the universe causing effects.

If they want to say "I get a funny feeling when I think of flowers, and I call that feeling God" then fine, but they are actually claiming that there is an external God who causes funny feelings in them, which is not the same thing.

It's the difference between me saying that "Metallica is pleasure." and "Metallica makes me feel good." One is a fairly objective fact, one is a statement that other people can (and do) argue about constantly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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