On 28 January 2014 09:21, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote: > But Jason I want to ask you a direct question, and this isn't rhetorical >> I'd really like an answer: If there is no all encompassing purpose or a >> goal to existence and if the unknown principle responsible for the >> existence of the universe is not intelligent and is not conscious and is >> not a being then do you think it adds to clarity to call that principle >> "God"? >> >
> I consider this question equivalent to asking "If there is no elan vital > found within organisms, does it still make sense to call those organisms > life?" Asking this question illustrates the attitude of holding the word in > higher esteem than the idea, which to me seems little different from a kind > of "ancestor worship" (which you are also opposed to). I think there is a > common kernel of idea behind the word God, which is common across many > religions, though each religion also adds various additional things on top > of and beyond what is contained in that kernel. If our theories lead us to > conclude God has or doesn't have these attributes, that is progress, and > our definitions ought to update accordingly, just as we did not throw out > the word "life" when we discovered it is just matter arranged in certain > ways. Similarly, even if we were to determine God is not "omnipotent", or > not "conscious", should we abandon that word and come up with something > else? Should we do this every time we learn some knew fact about some > thing? If we did, it seems to me that any old text would have an > incomprehensible vocabulary, as scientific progress forced us to adopt knew > words each time we learned something new. > > Nevertheless, might there not be a threshold beyond which it seems ridiculous to drag a word and its associated baggage? Hence we *could *say the planets move in epicycles, but we prefer to call them orbits, since that word doesn't carry the baggage of a discredited theory. Similarly, we don't talk about the aether, but space-time; we don't talk about elan vital, but DNA....I'm sure you can think of a few similar examples. I think "God" has enough baggage that the answer to John's question should be "no". Although given the unconscious reification of various things (matter, maths, minds...) we might still want a relatively neutral term for "the (possibly unknowable) principle behind the universe". (Assuming most people on this list are Westerners, I suppose we could try "Tao" ... or maybe "Ylem" ?) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
