chart via https://www.facebook.com/NonbelieverNation
This is a powerful flowchart of refutation against the modern “christian” authoritarian rationalization. It is practical and I commend its creator.
Have other nonbelievers ever considered what a “god” that is not all powerful could look like? It clearly escapes the clutches of this chart; omnipotency has always seemed self-contradictory anyway.
I am about to say things that the vast majority of you will misunderstand. Have you ever experienced the “sacred” or “numinous” ? Have you reached the understanding that consciousness is a representation? Do you appreciate that technological development is accelerating exponentially? What’s your understanding of the relationship of the three preceding questions?
Here’s what has to happen in order for there to be a god:
The first necessary but insufficient condition is that the proposed god must not be self-contradictory. If it’s self-contradictory, then I don’t need any evidence at all: It doesn’t exist. This rules out all omnipotent gods, all omnipresent gods, all omniscient gods, all omnibenevolent gods, any gods that “ever” “exist” “outside of” space or time, and all gods who led King Hitler the 14th of Japan to victory over the Scientologists in 13BC at the battle of Waterloo.
The second necessary but insufficient condition is that it must be explicable. If it took the time to explain itself to me, it would help. Perhaps it is a remainder in the fundamental constants of the big bang taken sentience, which somehow allows it to selectively manipulate spacetime and the forces to achieve its miracles, in a process that can be described by physics and experimentally verified. If after learning about a phenomenon the phenomenon is still MYSTERIOUS, then we don’t yet understand the phenomenon well enough to conclude it an act of god rather than an act of David Blane.
The third necessary but insufficient condition is that it must be demonstrable. That is, despite being possible, and explicable, it must yet turn out to actually occur. At some point, the god has to actually show up and offer to buy me a drink, or have an effect on the world which is different from how the world should be expected to progress if it were absent, which can be distinguished and verified. It must not be merely a fiction written by a creative person with a plausible explanation of how god could be.
The fourth necessary but insufficient condition is that it must be deific. My shoe is demonstrable, is self-consistent, and explicable, but it is hardly a god. The entity proposed must be capable of doing something that will by some mechanism be forever beyond the ability of humans to duplicate. This is the difference between a god and a Kryptonian. Perhaps as in the above example the god is “made” of a self-propagating remainder in physics. Humans will never have access to such materials as generate such a force to build with, and so cannot replicate the god. The god must also be in some way sentient, if not an actual personality that can be talked to. This excludes the mundane and the universe itself from being god.
Fail any one of these, and I am not convinced. Succeed in all, and I will believe in it. And then, if it turns out to be responsible for all the suffering of humanity by having shoddily created the universe in a premeditated act it foresaw the consequences of, I will attempt to murder it.
Do you have anything to say about my final paragraph? I was fishing for a conversation about those questions.
My main point is that there are coherent ways to understand divinity.
http://thinkahol.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/on-new-age-spirituality-consciousness-and-reality/
http://thinkahol.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/how-god-can-make-sense-says-atheist/
I think to worship a “weak god” like it’s as exterior as the common conception of the judeo-christian god would be equally unjustifiable and pointless. But I increasingly think that too many in the atheist community have never subjectively experienced “the sacred” or the “numinous” and so don’t understand the state of consciousness that they’ve missed out on.
You’re basically right, calling something “god” seems to be confusing to most people.
The Alan Watts video linked already in a separate comment, and this sam harris lecture are good glimpses of what many are missing out on .. .
Alan Watts – Jesus, His Religion
Reblogged this on peyami.
Ray Kurzweil – “The Sensory Effect”