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> I’d just like to take a second to point out how absurd all this is. This passage from CS Lewis's Mere Christianity seems appropriate: My argument against Go

> I’d just like to take a second to point out how absurd all this is. This passage from CS Lewis's Mere Christianity seems appropriate: My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: A fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: Just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

leereeves 7y ago
Why would a sense of justice need to come from God? Mere fear of death would naturally lead to a prohibition against murder. Desire to keep things for oneself would lead to private property and the prohibition of theft. Etc. And if our sense of justice does come from God, why does it develop over time? Modern people who read the whole Bible are usually struck by how unjust the God therein is.
- randomidiot123 7y ago
  That's the problem with interpreting the Bible literally. God represents something of psychological reality.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > Why would a sense of justice need to come from God? Is justice absolute or (culturally) relative? The Nazis† thought they were doing good: were they not? Were they "wrong" just because they lost WW2? If they had won, would they have written down that they were "right" and have history remember that 'fact'? If they were morally wrong, regardless of winning or losing, where did that 'objective' moral fact come from? You can certainly be an atheist and me moral and act justly. But where do you pin your morality to? If someone is an atheist, and probably a materialism (i.e., the only thing that exists is matter), where is justice in the scientific realm? What does a molecule of morality look like? † Let's just invoke Godwin's Law and go for the extreme case.
  - krapp 7y ago
    Here's the problem - God doesn't exist, and all morality is relative. The only absolute laws are the laws of physics. And yes, there is a universe in which the Nazis won and it's taken for granted that they were right all along. So now what?
    - throw0101a 7y ago
      > Here's the problem - God doesn't exist ... Aristotle would disagree: * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-background.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou... * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h... * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-lemmas-make-lemma.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l... * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-kahuna.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-... > The only absolute laws are the laws of physics. Then you're left with explaining the laws of physics and why they exist. Those laws are contingent after all. See Aquinas's "argument from contingency" (though not the general cosmological argument or Kalām variant, which are not very good) as well as Leibniz: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Argument_from_contingency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Argument... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason For a fuller treatment see Feser: * https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp/1621641333 https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp...
csomar 7y ago
This is just flexing words to confuse your brain and assert his idea about God. I don't know the author, but anyone advocating for a God or a religion is a person 1. with an agenda and 2. can has no scientific basis for his thesis. God, the one in Quran or Bible, doesn't exist. It's as simple as that. The same with morality; as dark as that thought is. We are just too weak to face the truth.
- Xcelerate 7y ago
  In response to your comment, I’ll quote the article itself: > We’re all very sure we’re right, and the other people are wrong, conveniently forgetting that we made up those things too.
  - csomar 7y ago
    > We’re all very sure we’re right I'm not. But I'm not sure why is anyone advocating for a particular God. I think he should speak for himself. If you are advocating for religion as a way to structure and control society, I can see sense in that.
  - wilg 7y ago
    That's the purpose of science, to determine as objectively as possible what and who is right and wrong. If you think that there is anything at all objective anywhere in the universe, then science is a good strategy for figuring that out.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >That's the purpose of science, to determine as objectively as possible what and who is right and wrong. And yet, that's not logically possible, as it's circular reasoning. You basically take a principle of faith (e.g. regarding induction), and you combine it with an empirical method.
      - wilg 7y ago
        I'm saying that if there are true things about the world to know, then science can help you figure out what they are. If you define "right" and "wrong" as "true" and "false" then you can understand them via science.
bambax 7y ago
This is a theory at least as old as Pascal (and probably much older): "tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais déjà trouvé" (you would not be looking for me if you hadn't already found me), but it has many holes. For one, it assumes that "God" should, by necessity, be on the side of "good". That's groundless. The world could certainly just as much have been created by a mean being, as a way to entertain himself, like a lonely kid would raise ants for the pleasure of crushing them. More importantly, it's a tautology. It's based on the premise that what one considers just IS just. But why? Morals is only an opinion that varies with time and place. There used to be many justifications of people oppressing people, just as there are today many justifications of people oppressing animals. The idea of right and wrong is historic. It changes. And finally, the big problem with trying to demonstrate the necessity of God is that it makes revelation unnecessary. God announced himself to creation because creation cannot infer his existence from the observable evidence, or by thinking about it. If God can be proved then he doesn't need to speak, which then results in a contradiction (since he (supposedly) did).
wilg 7y ago
Atheism doesn't say the universe has no meaning or is senseless, it says there is no reason to think that any of these stories about gods are real. Meaning is still here.
the_jeremy 7y ago
Justice can be meaningless on a cosmic scale, but appropriate and sensible at a local, tribal level. This is how most people think. The universe as a whole is probably meaningless / a simulation that doesn't care. We can still find meaning in a local level. The fact that these localized ideas do not generalize as we would like does not sound like an argument in favor of God, just that the societies that have evolved are by definition the stronger, more enduring ones. These societies have ideas about meaning and justice that are propagated by inhabitants of the society. Justice looks vastly different in different cultures.
AlexanderNull 7y ago
>If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: Just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. Completely incorrect conjecture. Let's take for instance the Flaxinrlent. Now, I've just made up this concept, but I can still define it. Let's say it is a 4th dimensional creature that takes up negative space made up entirely of marshmallows from 20,000 years ago. This concept, the Flaxinrlent, is now something we can roughly agree upon, we can devote our lives to searching for it, we can say that Flaxinrlent is what makes life worth living. But if we search long and hard enough we would probably start to realize that Flaxinrlent doesn't exist and probably couldn't exist knowing what we know about reality. Would it still be appropriate to state "If the whole universe has no Flaxinrlent, we should never have found out that it has no meaning"???

leereeves 7y ago

Why would a sense of justice need to come from God? Mere fear of death would naturally lead to a prohibition against murder. Desire to keep things for oneself would lead to private property and the prohibition of theft. Etc. And if our sense of justice does come from God, why does it develop over time? Modern people who read the whole Bible are usually struck by how unjust the God therein is.

randomidiot123 7y ago
That's the problem with interpreting the Bible literally. God represents something of psychological reality.
throw0101a 7y ago
> Why would a sense of justice need to come from God? Is justice absolute or (culturally) relative? The Nazis† thought they were doing good: were they not? Were they "wrong" just because they lost WW2? If they had won, would they have written down that they were "right" and have history remember that 'fact'? If they were morally wrong, regardless of winning or losing, where did that 'objective' moral fact come from? You can certainly be an atheist and me moral and act justly. But where do you pin your morality to? If someone is an atheist, and probably a materialism (i.e., the only thing that exists is matter), where is justice in the scientific realm? What does a molecule of morality look like? † Let's just invoke Godwin's Law and go for the extreme case.
- krapp 7y ago
  Here's the problem - God doesn't exist, and all morality is relative. The only absolute laws are the laws of physics. And yes, there is a universe in which the Nazis won and it's taken for granted that they were right all along. So now what?
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    > Here's the problem - God doesn't exist ... Aristotle would disagree: * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-background.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou... * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h... * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-lemmas-make-lemma.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l... * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-kahuna.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-... > The only absolute laws are the laws of physics. Then you're left with explaining the laws of physics and why they exist. Those laws are contingent after all. See Aquinas's "argument from contingency" (though not the general cosmological argument or Kalām variant, which are not very good) as well as Leibniz: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Argument_from_contingency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Argument... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason For a fuller treatment see Feser: * https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp/1621641333 https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp...

csomar 7y ago

This is just flexing words to confuse your brain and assert his idea about God. I don't know the author, but anyone advocating for a God or a religion is a person 1. with an agenda and 2. can has no scientific basis for his thesis. God, the one in Quran or Bible, doesn't exist. It's as simple as that. The same with morality; as dark as that thought is. We are just too weak to face the truth.

Xcelerate 7y ago
In response to your comment, I’ll quote the article itself: > We’re all very sure we’re right, and the other people are wrong, conveniently forgetting that we made up those things too.
- csomar 7y ago
  > We’re all very sure we’re right I'm not. But I'm not sure why is anyone advocating for a particular God. I think he should speak for himself. If you are advocating for religion as a way to structure and control society, I can see sense in that.
- wilg 7y ago
  That's the purpose of science, to determine as objectively as possible what and who is right and wrong. If you think that there is anything at all objective anywhere in the universe, then science is a good strategy for figuring that out.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >That's the purpose of science, to determine as objectively as possible what and who is right and wrong. And yet, that's not logically possible, as it's circular reasoning. You basically take a principle of faith (e.g. regarding induction), and you combine it with an empirical method.
    - wilg 7y ago
      I'm saying that if there are true things about the world to know, then science can help you figure out what they are. If you define "right" and "wrong" as "true" and "false" then you can understand them via science.

bambax 7y ago

This is a theory at least as old as Pascal (and probably much older): "tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais déjà trouvé" (you would not be looking for me if you hadn't already found me), but it has many holes. For one, it assumes that "God" should, by necessity, be on the side of "good". That's groundless. The world could certainly just as much have been created by a mean being, as a way to entertain himself, like a lonely kid would raise ants for the pleasure of crushing them. More importantly, it's a tautology. It's based on the premise that what one considers just IS just. But why? Morals is only an opinion that varies with time and place. There used to be many justifications of people oppressing people, just as there are today many justifications of people oppressing animals. The idea of right and wrong is historic. It changes. And finally, the big problem with trying to demonstrate the necessity of God is that it makes revelation unnecessary. God announced himself to creation because creation cannot infer his existence from the observable evidence, or by thinking about it. If God can be proved then he doesn't need to speak, which then results in a contradiction (since he (supposedly) did).

wilg 7y ago

Atheism doesn't say the universe has no meaning or is senseless, it says there is no reason to think that any of these stories about gods are real. Meaning is still here.

the_jeremy 7y ago

Justice can be meaningless on a cosmic scale, but appropriate and sensible at a local, tribal level. This is how most people think. The universe as a whole is probably meaningless / a simulation that doesn't care. We can still find meaning in a local level. The fact that these localized ideas do not generalize as we would like does not sound like an argument in favor of God, just that the societies that have evolved are by definition the stronger, more enduring ones. These societies have ideas about meaning and justice that are propagated by inhabitants of the society. Justice looks vastly different in different cultures.

AlexanderNull 7y ago

>If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: Just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. Completely incorrect conjecture. Let's take for instance the Flaxinrlent. Now, I've just made up this concept, but I can still define it. Let's say it is a 4th dimensional creature that takes up negative space made up entirely of marshmallows from 20,000 years ago. This concept, the Flaxinrlent, is now something we can roughly agree upon, we can devote our lives to searching for it, we can say that Flaxinrlent is what makes life worth living. But if we search long and hard enough we would probably start to realize that Flaxinrlent doesn't exist and probably couldn't exist knowing what we know about reality. Would it still be appropriate to state "If the whole universe has no Flaxinrlent, we should never have found out that it has no meaning"???