On 10 Dec 2016, at 22:43, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 12/10/2016 4:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 8:36 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/9/2016 2:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 2:22 AM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/8/2016 3:52 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 12:38 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
>
wrote:
On 12/8/2016 3:31 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
>
wrote:
On 12/8/2016 3:29 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 7:26 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
>
wrote:
On 12/5/2016 1:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 3:38 AM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/4/2016 10:45 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Dec 3, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]>
wrote:
and by doing so you drag in a lot of baggage. There was
a group
of
atheists in the Dallas area which for a time formed a
church and
claimed
to
be a religion for tax purposes. They defined "God" to be
whatever
was
good
in the world. The IRS disallowed their claim.
I assume that evoking the American IRS as a a scholarly
authority
on
such a matter is a joke, right?
But they are as good an authority as any. Unlike
theologians they
have
to
make decisions that have real consequences - not just mix
word
salad.
But this is not a discussion about theology, it's a
discussion about
the historical and cultural variations of concepts of god
-- it
falls
under anthropology and history.
OK, tell me about a historical or cultural variation in
which "god"
doesn't
not refer to a person/agent.
Anything pantheistic. Taoism, several gnostic cults, certain
native
Americans I think, sufi mysticism, certain denominations of
modern
judaism... Ah and the force in Star Wars.
But they don't use the word "god". It's an abuse of language
it say
that
"god" means "whatever one's religion worships". Paul Tillich
tried
that
maneuver in the '60s. He said "god" meant whatever one valued
most:
money,
fame, power,... If you cut a word lose from common usage
then, as the
Caterpillar said to Alice, you can make it mean anything you
want.
So you are saying that "god" is reserved for judaic-christian
style
deities.
It's not "reserved"; it, like any word, is defined by usage, and
the
usage
overwhelmingly denotes a being who is immortal, has supernatural
powers
and
knowledge and should be obeyed and worshipped or placated. It
includes
the
gods and godesses of Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, India,
Scandnavia,
Mayan,
Aztec,...
I hear people say stuff like "God for me is Nature" all the time.
Don't
you?
No, I don't. But if I did, I'd take it as metaphor, "I worship
nature." I
hear people say, "Time is money." and "Valentino Rossi is a
motorcycle god."
but I don't take them literally.
I was raised a catholic and had to go through 6 years of Sunday
school
until my father put an end to it (I'm forever grateful to him).
Even
there, I could tell that some people were more literalists while
others saw god as "more of a concept". I have the impression that
more
educated people had a more abstract and less interventionist
conception of god. Many did not believe in heaven or hell or
miracles.
Or that the universe as 6000 years old or any of that nonsense.
And some of those believed in a god, a deist god perhaps. But
those who
believed in an impersonal order or force didn't believe in a god -
because
"god" refers to a person. It's just a matter of not distorting
language.
Noun 1. God - the supernatural being conceived as the
perfect and
omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe;
the
object
of worship in monotheistic religions
2. god - any supernatural being worshipped as
controlling some
part
of the world or some aspect of life or who is the
personification of a
force
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/God
Well if you go here you get a different picture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God
It's not really different. It equivocates on "god" as "sometimes
described"
as abstract. But all the examples are of persons and agents.
I am not trying to cut the religious any slack, by the way. I
think we
agree on a lot of things.
But isn't it obvious to you that the concept of god was invented
as a
personalization of forces like storms and volcanoes and light.
That's why
early religions were animist; there was a deer spirit and a wind
spirit and
mountain spirit...
I agree that this is a very compelling hypothesis, and I would be
surprised if it didn't in fact play a large role in the origin or
religion.
I think however that this explanation misses the big picture. Yes,
the
"miracles" of nature are used as evidence that something transcendent
is happening, and if you can point at a specific "miracle" then maybe
you can convince other people you are particularly in tune with it,
and that you know what god wants and so on.
I think you have jumped over millenia of human experience to arrive
at industrial age angst. I wasn't referring to 'miracles' of
nature. Miracles can only exist in contrast to a mechanistic model
of un-miracleous nature. For thousands or even tens of thousands of
years, humans tried to see agency in nature because that was a way
of understanding it.
I agree. God and other gods name was nickname of what we don't
understand, like storms, suns, ... almost everything. This is still
reflected in many popular expressions, like "God knows" to say "I
don't know".
With the monist idea, which was mainly the line Pythagorus/Parmenides
----> Plato ---> neopythagoreanism (Moderatus of Gades, Plotinus),
comes the idea that we can't prove the existence of Reality, and the
one God becomes the nickname of the Ultimate Reason of things.
The serious inquirer, already in antiquity, intuited that such an
Ultimate Reason has to be transcendental, and this can be explained in
the context of mechanism, as all machine self-observing will get clues
that there is a reality which they cannot describe, and this is
consciousness + whatever can explain consciousness, with consciousness
becoming an instinctive belief in that transcendental realm.
The real theological debate will be: is the material/physical reality
around us the ultimate explanation or is the material reality itself a
second order emergent reality explainable in simpler term, with
simpler ontological hypothesis (like the "only numbers" of the
Pythagorean).
The question was not about the existence of God but about the
existence of (Aristotle's) primary matter (from which both physics and
physicalism will develop).
There was no division between science and religion and magic, they
were all just part of understanding and dealing with nature.
They were all part of understanding reality. At the start, Nature was
the thing to doubt about.
The shaman explained why the storm came because the North-sky God
was angry that you had not sacrificed part of the last kill to Him
(by giving it to the shaman). The shaman could make small objects
vanish and he could make elixirs that allowed you to see the gods.
Nobody worried about "the meaning of life". They worried about
finding enough to eat and having sex. Primitive religions usually
assume that ancestors linger about as spirits in some way. Have you
read Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind"?
No problem with this.
Note that numbers meant "numerous", although today we accept that 2, 1
and even 0 are numbers. To say that there is 0 gods, or 1 god, or 2
gods, ... are all theological proposition. Science per se is agnostic,
and even theology does not need any ontological commitment, as it is
better to work with theories-theorems-testing.
This is the mechanism, but
it is not the payoff. The payoff is two-fold: freeing people from
existential crises and enabling civilisation by resolving prisoner
dilemma scenarios (e.g. fear of hell).
Fear of hell is an invention of the priesthood. Primitive
religions, and even Judaism, don't teach punishment in an
afterlife. It seems to have been invented by Zoroaster; who at
least made the punishment limited.
I think you have the cause and effect backwards. Agriculture made
civilization possible - tribes didn't have to move and so could
build cities. Religion adapted by going from explaining nature to
explaining why the city had to be ordered around certain principles
of behavior and ownership, and why there was a leader who the gods
would favor in war with other cities.
People had no prisoner's dilemma when they lived in tribes. If you
didn't cooperate you'd be ejected from the tribe. Existential
crises result from questions about "meaning" and "purpose" which
were invented along with religions. All good marketers know that to
sell something you first create a demand for it.
The power in place always try to impose the fundamental science. This
makes it usually rather badly popularized, and even incorrigible when
the power use violence to impose "its" fundamental science. But that
does not change anything in the inquiry and the idea of research, even
if you get burn alive, or else, when trying to ask the questions.
People don't lose sleep at night because they don't know how the wind
works,
For millenia they lost sleep worrying about whether a storm would
kill their flock or blow away their tents.
they lose sleep because they feel that they are unimportant or
that their lives are meaningless.
Only since they became comfortable and secure from the wind.
If you can provide some solution for
this, that is what people will really mean by "god", not the
ridiculous wind-person itself. That is why anthropologists and other
social scientists argue that things like money and fame play the role
of god, are in fact "gods" in a deep cultural sense. In that sense
this is not just playing silly word games, it is an attempt at a
deeper understanding of what if really going on.
But this is just abuse of language. It's like Tillich trying to
redefine God to mean "Whatever gives you life meaning." Then
children are God, money is God, love is God, patriotism is God.
"The role of God" in society is varied.
John Lily did the same in his book on "the simulacrum of Gods". It is
bad theology, but there is an atom of truth. Killing a god leads to a
new God. Today, people use the God Matter to fake we have solved the
mind-body problem, but as you know or should know (I can explain
again) the God Matter (primary matter of course) is in logical
contradiction with Mechanism. It just cannot work: nothing at all can
select your consciousness from the infinities of arithmetical
relations which realize it. You need to give matter a non Turing-
emulable role to get that, a bit like the wave packet postulate needs
to make SWE false. Primary matter has to be an illusion explainable in
term of the first person account self-reference logic (and that works
very well till now).
Some people use God as weapon against their enemies (those godless
commies). Some people use God as an imaginary friend for solace.
Some people use God as an explanation for "what is really going on".
The idea that there is something real beyond our experience is
comforting, that is true. Comfort does not make the idea true, but it
does not make the idea false.
But ask yourself why this would work as an explanation?
... but is never an explanation per se. God, for the original creator
of "theology" was *the* object of research, not the answer. It becomes
a (fake) answer only when the religion become an instrument of power.
Isn't it because by conceiving the controller of the universe as a
person you can intuitively relate to events -
It is metaphorical, and is not taking seriously by educated
theologians, as opposed to agents of the power in place. I heard about
literalist in sects, but in Europa, most religious people keep neutral
on the question is God a willing person. Even the neoplatonists
discussed a lot that question, without getting a conclusion. And in
the theology of the machine, where God is played by the set of (Gödel
numbers) true arithmetical sentences, it is cute and easy to identify
God by a sort of knower: the one which knows that set. You can build
it as an Oracle (in Turing sense) or a divine being. For Plotinus, God
(the One) is not part of the ontology. Strictly speaking: it does not
exist, like the set of all natural numbers is not itself a number, or
like the collection of all sets is not a set, in most set theories.
it's just like seeing the storm as anger of the sky-god. People
experience anger, so they think they have understood the storm.
They don't understand fluid dynamics (at least until very recently).
I recall that such a type of belief does not work. The whole physics
prediction power is based on an identity link which does not work. We
know that the (non personal) God of the materialists simply put the
matter and mind problem under the rug. And with mechanism, that is
provable. Invoking the existence of a material reality obeying some
equations to explain first person prediction is ruled out. It uses a
mind-brain identity relation which simply cannot work when we assume
that we are Turing emulable.
Militant atheists, who are actively trying to free the world of
religion, need a non-fuzzy target to hit.
And the religionist, trying to keep their comfort and influence,
keep fuzzing up the target and spreading it out because it's center
keeps getting hit by facts.
Atheism is either agnostic, or is a religion: an ontological
commitment in something we have no evidence to explain away a
technical problem. The belief in 0 personal god together with the
belief in one impersonal God, (Primary matter) are religious
commitment, with the large sense of God.
Here many confuse the existing evidences for a physical reality with
the non existing evidence for a primary matter. That confusion is easy
to explain by evolution-pressure, but that does not make it true.
Science is born with the doubt that Matter is the explanation. God
exist by definition for a Platonist: it is what the fundamental
researcher is searching: the reality (which is transcendental, we
cannot prove it exists) but can try theories ("first principles" in
the antic terming).
So they get really annoyed
when one enters into such nuanced discussions of what people mean by
"god".
Listen to any preacher in any religion and tell me how often he says
God is to give meaning to your life...and that meaning is to serve
God. Even to write it out is to show how ridiculous it is.
It is as wrong to listen to a preacher than listen to a scientist
teacher unless you do the personal judgement from the evidences it
provides.
Preacher for institutionalized religion are a priori charlatan,
although some are not, because there too, some keep honesty *despite*
the affiliation. I discuss theology on many places, and doing that, it
is rather obvious that educated people can distinguish the metaphors
from the serious inquiry.
They get annoyed because they think that such understanding of
human nature is of secondary importance compared to the more urgent
goal of ridding the world of silly bronze-age superstitions that are
impeding progress. The irony of the situation is that they are
thinking in exactly the same way that priesthood classes always did:
what people need is to take the correct actions, the rest is not that
important. If they need to believe that the statue of the dog-god of
Alpha Centauri bleeds from the eyes every full moon, let them. If
this
is what they need to not choose "defect" when confronted with
prisoner
dilemmas, it's not a high price to pay. Militant atheists play the
same game with culture.
How so? The atheists I know are all of Hume's opinion, "Belief
should be proportioned to the evidence."
That is why you can qualify the computationalist position, the
machine's position, as super-atheism. We are skeptical on the two
Aristotelian Gods: the creator and the creation.
mechanism go toward a universal dreamer which get amnesic from time to
time and lost itself in a (highly structured) labyrinth of dreams.
Note that when we assume computationalism, alias digital mechanism, we
can prove the existence of that web of dreams, but we cannot prove the
existence of a non Turing emulable selector.
It is why I like to sum up with Sri Aurobindo cute poem:
<<
What, you ask, was the beginning of it all?
And it is this ...
Existence that multiplied itself
For sheer delight of being
And plunged into numberless trillions of forms
So that it might
Find
Itself
Innumerably (Aurobindo)
>>
Are you saying that human nature demands fairy tales? I don't think
so and I know a lot of humans to prove it.
We need rational explanation, but today we know that in between the
rational and the irrational, there is an annulus of surrational: what
is true but cannot be proved by us. For the self-referentially correct
machine, the surrational is highly structured, notably at the
propositional level by the logics G* minus G, and its intensional
variants.
This is all human nature and I don't find it particularly
important. I
was a militant atheist myself, until I managed to forgive organised
religion for intellectually bullying me when I was a kid. I guess it
just became a bit boring to hate them. Will I resist if they try to
force me or others to live a certain way? Of course.
But will you resist them spreading beliefs that imply you should
live a certain way? The authors of the Holy Inquisition were quite
rational and humane. Given the terrible torture that awaited anyone
who died in unbelief it was perfectly justified to burn heretics at
the stake less they spread false beliefs.
They were working for their own benefits, and they would be rational
and believer in they type of God, they would have trusted him for the
advertizing. Lao-Tseu is close to the canonical (and testable) machine
theology: those who approach God, or are tune with the Tao (to take a
different metaphore) will stay mute, and the fool is the one which
talk. This is related to the fact that the surrational (G* minus G)
structure the propositions which are true but not provable.
What I won't do is pretend that religion was not evolutionarily
selected *because it helps the species survive*.
Certainly at the level of civilization it helped some cities prevail
over others. I don't see how you can maintain the religion of
Australian aborigines or Aztecs or ISIS helps humans survive as a
species.
Nor could USSR Lyssenko genetics help the Soviets to survive. False
theory of the reality kicks back.
Of course, as long as theology is abandoned by the rationalists, the
fake theory will continue to be exploited by the unscrupulous.
The problem with militant non agnosic atheists is that they keep
insisting on the statu quo, and instead of fighting clericalism, they
build their own one, and behave as much pseudo-religiously than the
Church Powers. Non agnostic atheists keeps firmly the two main dogma
of Aristotle theology: Prmary Matter exists, and the God of the Bible
is the only genuine notion of God. In science, we don't hesitate to
change our concept to fit the experience, but the strong-atheists
refuse this attitude in theology. De facto, they are accomplices of
the fundamentalist in the religious filed.
We still have the
same fundamental problems to solve that we always had, even now that
wind gods and dog gods are dead: meaning and cooperation.
You've bought into the myth of religionists that without God we will
be at one another's throats - yet that is exactly where religion
puts us. As Voltaire said, "Man will cease to commit atrocities
only when he ceases to believe absurdities."
But why keeping the term "God" in its most absurd childish sense, then?
We are
possibly witnessing the early stages of collapse of western
civilisation because too many people find no meaning in their lives,
no sense of belonging to anything at all and no reason to cooperate.
We cooperate because if I help you and you help me we can both
achieve more of goals than if we each acted alone. Of course that
assumed we have goals beyond just cooperating or serving someone
else (however divine). As George Carlin quipped, "If we're here to
serve other people, what are those other people here for?"
It seems to turn out that a society can't run on money- and status-
seeking alone. We are so smart that we figured out that the gods are
bullshit, but unfortunately not smart enough to solve that one...
You may think you need God to give your life meaning,
Like a (first-order logical) theory need a Model to be consistent.
Without believing in a Reality, we would not even been able to go out
of the bed.
Note that the Outer-God is not a person, in neoplatonism (as I said
above the early theologians takes this as a complex open problem), but
sill can have personal aspect, with the Inner-God. This makes all self-
referentially correct machines into God themselves, but they cannot
assert this with becoming inconsistent. No paradox occurs (nor
blaspheme), because the we can never be sure we are self-referentially
correct.
but ask yourself what that meaning would be? If it's not your
meaning then what use is it? Would it give your life meaning to
satisfy my demands? To say one gives one's life meaning by serving
God is like giving oneself style by donning the Emperor's new
clothes. It's abdictating responsibility while assuming moral
superiority.
We are just skeptical on some notion of gods, like the aristotelian
"creator" (which actually does not do a lot, as Aristotle conceived
it, like Newton in some places, as a first mover, almost like initial
conditions. But I insist that even that light notion of God is
inconsistent with Mechanism.
Concerning morality, the Plato idea is that you need his notion of God
(truth). That is: justice needs truth, which is pretty obvious.
Nothing more.
Then the Mechanist are skeptical about that second God: Matter. (with
a big "M" for primart matter).
If people want a real attempt to progress in any field, be it on
genetics, cancer or god, we need to just forget the exploitation made
by the people motivated by personal profits (notoriety, money, hate of
the others, whatever).
If you are a real atheists like me, and if you really wat to fight
against the pseudo-religion and the absurd theology, there is no best
way than to get the field back at the academy of science. If not, the
academy itself becomes pseudo-religious, and some academies indeed
felt in that authoritative trap. genuine honest academic research is
the only means available to get rid of the Churches, Temples and other
sectarian obscurantist institutions.
Have you a problem with Spinoza's notion of God, or Descartes, or
Malebranche. Among the "moderns" they are close to the original
science created by Plato. Of course, they got problem with the social
clubs of their time, like I got myself problem with a minority (but
highly influent) self-called atheists but true extreme conservative of
the catholic dogma. Strong atheism is only strong catholicism in a
vocabulary disguise. They believe in the same impersonal god (the
*primary* physical reality), and in the same conception of the
personal god, and refuse by all means the original very deep lasting
(one millennium) research done by the scientists in that quite fertile
field (it gave birth do math and physics).
Bruno
Brent
As civilization developed it seemed that humans were
superior and dominant over all animals and even over some of
inanimate
nature - so the concept of god shifted to a great, superhuman
person, a
great leader and law giver - especially one who led his
worshippers to
victory in war. And of course there must be one greatest leader
(who
happens to be the one we believe in). It is only because science
in the
broadest sense has shown these ideas to be parochial and
contradictory and
incoherent that theologians have been forced to retreat into
abstractions
and poetic circumlocutions; while still currying support from the
hoi polloi
with images of a stern father or loving mother god. As Bertrand
Russell
notes they don't want to speak plainly of an abstract order, which
might as
well be Noether's theorem, because their prestige and influence
depends on
the idea of a personal god, a concept that people can understand
because
He's like them. He's vain, He loves worship and He gets angry and
He
demands good behavior and He saves them from death. So the modern
theologians use of the word "god" is basically dishonest. They
are using it
as a diversion and they know it. If someone wants to study or
speculate
about the foundation of the world or morals or purpose; that's
great. But
if they can't show it has personal, human attributes, it's just
fraud to
refer to it as "god".
I highly recommend the little book, "The Religion Virus" by Craig
A. James.
Brent
You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it
turns out
that God hates all the same people you do.
- Anne Lamott
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