On 27 Nov 2013, at 20:04, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
> If you are able to conceive a god without afterlife
I can conceive of a afterlife without God too.
> it means you can conceive a non Christian God,
Yes.
> which is nice
Certainly nicer than the Christian God who is the most unpleasant
character in all of fiction.
It really depends on which Christians, which can be very different
from one culture to another.
But I can relate with your feeling. Some "christian God" are very
antipathetic, like the one who promise hell if you just don't love
him, which I think makes it impossible to be loved.
> but contradicts the main atheist statements you already did in
preceding conversations.
I don't see how. I can conceive of Harry Potter too but that doesn't
mean I think it likely he exists, although the probability that Mr.
Potter really exists would be far greater than the probability the
Christian God exists.
> We might try to decide on a definition of "atheism", as that
notion is very unclear,
The only reason its unclear is that your meaning of the word G-O-D
is very very unclear; and the reason for that is you've fallen in
love with the English word G-O-D even though you've abandoned the
idea behind it.
Already Plato used it in two different sense, which are hard to
relate. The God of the Timaeus is quite different from the God of the
Parmenides.
I use God for any transcendental reality, which implies some
experience, and some faith, if only in our sanity.
For some reason that I don't fully understand you just want to make
the following sound with your mouth "I believe in God" and it
doesn't matter what the sound means.
You can replace the term "God" by the term "Reality" or "Truth". The
problem is that most people take a reality fro granted, but in the
comp theory that is probably a sort of illusion. To believe in a
reality is akin to believe in its own consistency, and this asks for a
cautious type of act of faith.
Machines' theology is very close to Plotinus or Proclus theology, and
I am just using the same word, which is rather standard in the
scholars writing, and among the non-confessional philosophers.
> I use "God" in the greek sense of Truth
The Greeks believed it was true that Poseidon existed and was the
brother of Zeus. I don't.
It is the fate of theories: to be wrong. It is not a reason to abandon
an idea, but it is a reason to attempt to correct it. And the greeks
already corrected their own theory many times.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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