On 27 Jan 2014, at 23:38, LizR wrote:
On 28 January 2014 09:21, Jason Resch <[email protected]> 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" ?)
That would be like attributing importance to a name, at a place where
precisely we should not attribute any importance. I would use "tao",
that would make the results looking new-age. Use any another name,
people will add more connotations than with the concept of god, and
its quasi-name God for the monist or monotheist big unique being or
beyond being entity.
Bruno
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