On Wed, 23 Jun 1999, Harold Lehmann wrote:
> Kathy writes
> >
> >First is the problem of defining God. This is a tough problem, because it
> >seems to me that by definition, if you can define it, it isn't God. In
> >other words, to me God is that which lies beyond definition.
>
> This is Maimonides' definition. AJ Heschel said that religion is the
> interstices between words. As *we* strive to get everything down in black
> and white, it does behoove us to consider that our personal needs to
> intellectualize is only one response to our world, and we may be missing
> the true mass of the universe by simpy focusing that which we can label.
>
This is specious.
1) God as defined in public discourse (especially in the US, the Islamic
world, and observant catholics) has a very clear meaning, being an
anthropomorphic, omnipotent parent-surrogate. If you mean something else
(e.g., "nature", "that which communicated to me in a hallucination", "that
which I cannot define", or some such), then don't confuse the issue by
calling that something else 'God'.
Doing otherwise is like calling a bush a tree in the middle of a
discussion about tree botany. ("When I say 'tree', I really mean the small
kind, that others maybe call 'bushes'.") It serves no useful purpose.
2) If you can't define it, then you can't talk about it in clear terms,
and to paraphrase Wittgenstein, you should not use about bandwidth spewing
about it :-) ("There's this thing I call 'glosboss' that I think exists,
and is very important to me personally, but no, I can't tell you what I
mean by the term. Isn't this profound? Shouldn't we talk about it at
length?")
As a final note, setting priors on the existence of God is, within broad
limits, easy, and no different from what practicing scientists do all the
time. To within an order of magnitude or so, it's the same prior
probability as any other *potential* natural phenomenon, a probability
that in particular applies to superstitions like tooth fairies and
werewolves. If you don't set this prior low, then how can you justifiably
scorn the notion of cold fusion, to use one example?
David Wolpert
The first - oh so small - step to insight is complete and utter
doubt of subjective "truths".
