From: Robert Wasley (rpwasley@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun Jan 23 2000 - 11:47:20 MST
> > Max More wrote:
> > > If you are a nontheist, that means you lack theistic belief. An
atheist is
> > > someone who lacks theistic belief. ("a-" means without.) So, I would
say> > > you *are* an atheist.
Robert Wasley wrote:
> > Whether God exists or not is a
> > non-question, in the same way whether Zeus exists or not is a
non-question.> > This is not true of the atheist position as clearly evident
in recent> > postings.
Robert Owen wrote:
> Not at all. "God" exists and "Zeus" exists as words in the above
paragraph. There is ABSOLUTELY no way to prove by empirical induction or
logical
> analysis that the word "God" as the subject of a sentence has or does
> not have a real objective referent. ...... if you cannot demonstrate that
the proposition itself contains contradiction,
> or if you cannot rigorously derive from this proposition two statements
> which are mutually contradictory, then the proposition is TRUE. Only
> THEN, will I assert that the term "God" is equivalent to the phrase
"original
> cause", meaning I define the word "God" as "Original Cause, then I can
> substitute God in the proposition and it will remain true. Of course this
> only proves that "God" in this sense IS if the antecedents in the
conditional
> statement are granted.
Nice, but an appeal to propositional logic misses the point. Your can
"prove" anything provided your assertion fits the rules of form. On the same
level, taking the point further, perhapes a more profitable exercise would
be to adopt the tactic Einstein did when faced with the question of the
ether when writing the Special Theory of Relativity. What if we just
streamline our "calculations" of the world and simply leave out the God
equation. In terms of explaining phenomena generally (socially, physically,
and so forth) what holes in our ability to understand the world would
result? Maybe, like the ether, the God calculation cancels itself out, so
let us simplify things and just simply take it out?
This would be all fine and good, and easy for some of us, but the God
question is nevertheless a weighty emotional issue making it different than
whether Unicorns exist or not.
Robert Wasley
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