God dealt it, so God is real

I haven’t listened to Matt in a while, but I had some time to kill. I’ll skip past the part where he talks about epistemology, picking up where he gets to a convincing argument about how we can smell and identify things like natural gas in our home, but we can’t smell God.

Having destroyed his imaginary interlocutor, he guesses they would move on to the argument that we can’t know anything with certainty, that anything is possible. And, if they do, that’s how you know you’ve won the argument.

That’s great, but really, it just means you both walk away feeling you have won. I’ve hit this point with a lot of people, and pointed out they had nothing but a thousands years old philosophical point, not anything that can be built on. Then they’ll go back to saying the earth is flat, or whatever.

Matt has gotten around to just about everything, maybe he’ll address how to handle that someday. I think in the past he said that he has no response to hard solipsism.

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he has giving his statements but still more things are needed he has giving good satements, but still is to know the center of it all. I would show another video pointing out more details he does not know.

Did I lose something in translation? Do you have this video, or are you suggesting someone else should us more?

I went to Madison, WI to see Matt speak at a convention, and it was there that I discovered Richard Carrier. Matt refers to him sometimes, but I wish he would do so a little more. Coincidentally, Richard just put something out about using “natural facts” to determine what is moral. It’s a very similar line of reasoning to this video.

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/19647

Matt usually responds to an argument for god in some way. Richard has developed a whole philosophy of meaning that doesn’t need to address that. Everything he talks about leads to the irrelevance of god, so in a sense you could say he has “disproved” it, but he will even say, it doesn’t matter. Even if there is a god, we don’t interact with it like we interact with the physical world, we come to our choice of religion with the same logic faculties that Hawking used to discover radiation from black holes.

It’s a long piece, and I can break some of it down, but anyway, it’s there.

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What do you mean by that?

Richard Carrier makes more sense to me than many others.

Almost the only useful thing Wielenberg does say is that, if there is no God, then “it is in some sense an accident that we have the moral properties that we do,” but “that they are accidental in origin does not make these moral properties unreal or unimportant.”

That is entirely true, and theists do need to hear it.

It would not matter why you ought to behave a certain way if it is nevertheless true that you ought to behave that way—because it’s still the case that you ought to behave that way; so “accidental” moral facts would not be any less obligating. …

Regardless of how rights are properties of people, we need more than just some way “human rights” are an inevitable configurable property of people.
We need grounds to give a shit that it is.
Otherwise, we have no grounds to give a shit that it is .
And that’s what perplexes Moreland and Craig. That’s what they are asking the likes of Wielenberg to produce.

Oh that goes on and on.
It’s interesting for a while, but then you think, well God is a creation of our own mind, so what are we going on and on about?

Discuss morality in relation to revolving communities of creatures or something, but enough with God already. Unless we start attaching the disclaimer “(manmade)God” every time he’s brought up.
Of course, manmade, brings it back to human generations and there you are, right back to an evolutionary perspective.

I completely concur of course. But. No intellectually honest de-the-ist, Goddist, including wannabees like me, would ever say ‘God dealt it’. Starting with Kierkegaard. Nothing about being requires God. But I submit that it can nonetheless be logically posited that it does.

The title of the thread is, I think, what is called a logical fallocy.

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yeah, Matt is subtle with the joke about “god’s farts”. He’s making the point about there being no evidence for God. It’s in response to anyone who has said that creation itself is evidence of a creator. There are a variety of ways to present that.

I’m not sure what martin is saying, but I guess I can agree that something that is made requires a maker. However, getting from that logical statement to inserting what that maker is, requires evidence, demonstrations of causality. So far, we have not detected any conscious beings in that line of causality.

Aye, there is no whiff of a God fart, I like it.

Sorry for my perpetual lack of clarity lausten. I agree, of course, that causality does not require intention, meaning, God. They are not necessary at all. But what if they were? God or no, nothing has ever changed, causality has always begun, there is no backstop in metachronos, the time dimension of the multiverse in my idiolect. Causality is always from the bottom up, vertical not horizontal; orthogonal, at right angles to time, from quantum perturbations in nihilo, in absolutely nothing; if the perturbation has sufficient energy it will form a universe. Surely it’s possible to posit that that requires intent. Will. Infinitely more complexity admittedly, another layer, or superset on an already infinite set. Reality is so strange that a bit more is permissible? But why bother? Desire. Not good enough. No way near good enough to give the posit the time of day. Not without a really Excessional (à la Ian M. Banks’ masterpiece) claim. The Jesus Mystery is the only candidate. With a whiff.

Causality is what it is or is the effect of what was. Is it necessary to look for a cause or just be with the result, what is? So, what if? Sounds like something an actuarial might try to answer, but speaking from the afterlife, OB1 would probably give some vague answer that depended on your point of view. But there is no extra point in life, you get what you get, you make it to the end zone, or the end zone makes it to you. It may be more than I can imagine, but I can imagine quite a lot.

“And if you can’t make it to my final highway rest stop, stick a harmonica out the window of a vehicle moving at high speed, the wind is a speed reader.” (C. R. Avery)

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Could you explain what the Jesus Mystery is, for those of us who don’t know.

The Mystery of Jesus.

The claim of Incarnation, the life, death - above all - and resurrection of God the human, as a posit. What is known in the trade as the hypostatic union. That God intersected inextricably with a human. As a thought experiment.

As a thought experiment, so that makes it sounds like Jesus is something like Schrödinger’s cat, or Einstein riding a light beam?

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Oh what imaginative active minds we humans have.

But that simply highlights the dog-chasing-tail aspect of religiosity, once one recognizes that these notions are all human constructs to begin with -
Because, we humans are in reality born out of Earth’s processes, driven only by unthinking physical (natural) processes -
it takes all the air out of this supernatural Jesus, (and his God, be it one or three in one oil.)

Thinking is an emergent biological property (biological processes being emergent properties of physical processes), that don’t not exist out there in the heavens, so far only on this fantastical planet does everything come together to perfection.

Yep. I know of a lot large texts about Jesus, but very few people read them. They point to them. They talk like they know the evidence and logic, unless you ask a simple question

He maybe speaking gnosticism.

lol Isn’t all religion a thought experiment or maybe even a thought control experiment.

Hey, it might be. lol