[HN Gopher] "Is There a God?" By Bertrand Russell
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"Is There a God?" By Bertrand Russell
Author : thunderbong
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-08-30 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.personal.kent.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.personal.kent.edu)
| mgh2 wrote:
| Maybe: https://medium.com/p/2978dacc8c22
| __loam wrote:
| Of course there isn't
| chimineycricket wrote:
| Why "of course"?
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| for Christianity, at any rate, hard omnipotence is clearly ruled
| out by the Crucifixion
| sashenka wrote:
| [dead]
| joelshep wrote:
| If God is omnipotent, surely that would include the ability to
| do things that we mere mortals would construe as harmful or
| self-defeating, wouldn't it?
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| certainly, but Christ specifically prayed _not_ to have to
| through with it (or the ordeal in the garden, depending on
| your interpretation), when He prayed:
|
| >Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me:
| nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.
|
| And there is further the question of our own suffering: if
| we're supposed to get some "good" out of it, why not just
| wave a wand and give us the good without the bad?
|
| I conclude that God lives in a world with rules like you and
| me, though they are likely quite different.
| akomtu wrote:
| Such disputes should be resolved in an octagon cage: a heavy-
| weight theologian vs a logician.
| rednerrus wrote:
| I'm gonna kick myself later for this.
|
| Why?
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| don't worry, I already got my dose of theo-argument out of
| twitter the other day.
|
| To your question, I basically agree with Russell's argument
| that a truly omnipotent God can just skip means and go
| straight to ends. But there are multiple instances of Christ
| facing _something_ unwanted--- the most memorable being the
| Crucifixion. If all-powerful, why go through with it? And if
| any good thing came of it, why not just omnipotence that
| thing into existence and skip the hard stuff?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I believe in the divinity, and supremacy,
| of Christ, and I believe Christ when He said that "all things
| are possible to him that believeth". But hard omnipotence,
| transcending even logic, seems pretty conclusively ruled out
| to me.
|
| I hope you don't kick yourself!
| paradox242 wrote:
| Glad to see the problem of Theodicy mentioned in this work. All
| by itself it illustrates the logical inconsistency of at least
| the monotheistic religions which claim for their diety
| benevolence, omnipotence and omniscience.
|
| When trying to resolve the question of where the source of evil
| lies in this paradigm it quickly becomes a "pick any two"
| situation. They can't do this of course, because once you give
| even an inch you have lost everything.
|
| Oh, your power is not unlimited? Oh, there are forces acting
| against you of which you have no knowledge, or perhaps you
| actually don't know what you are doing with all this creation
| business? Oh, you actually are also the source of all evil?
|
| It much less a compelling argument for many humans to worship a
| fallible, ignorant, or evil being as the sole power and creator
| of the universe, as this reminds us too much of ourselves, which
| is the very state of being one wishes to escape when seeking the
| divine.
| aradox66 wrote:
| This always strikes me as sort of a straw man. Any serious
| theological works, even very old ones, deal with these
| questions. This kind of thing feels to me like a very
| superficial engagement.
| zer8k wrote:
| It is a strawman. And typically, this strawman wears a
| fedora. It's the classic "haha see I used your beliefs
| against you can you tell how superior I am?" argument you see
| from pseudo-intellectuals. In fact the argument presented by
| the previous poster is basically a textbook copy of the tired
| Euthyphro Dilemma.
|
| Godel's incompleteness theorem might be a better approach to
| applying logic to faith. You can't prove the existence of God
| because we have no system above God from which to prove him
| with. You would think a famous logician like Bertrand Russell
| would understand this. Though, he did waste a large portion
| of his career trying to solve the crisis of foundation in
| mathematics. One would think this experience alone would
| provide some enlightenment on what faith actually is. Perhaps
| even geniuses aren't infallible.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| It's hard for me to fathom the idea that this deep and profound
| shared experience we're all having was not intentional and
| designed and it seems like it would take a lot of effort and
| mental gymnastics to surgically remove the raw wonder and meaning
| and significance from so many aspects of reality, to strip
| everything down, and conclude there is no God.
|
| And oddly enough I think a majority of the things people often
| cite as reasons they can't or won't believe in God actually stem
| from oversimplifying aspects of life that just under the surface
| would make God quite obvious. The common theme seems to be that
| of a complaint, some form of "God can't be real because the
| nature of things isn't what I would have done" or "there are
| aspects of this experience that I don't prefer".
|
| In my opinion it takes a lot of mental effort to explain our way
| out of the obvious, and ironically many consider what I see as
| "obvious" to be primitive and superstitious, due to the very fact
| that it took so much work to discard it!
|
| The body of work that is our collective intelligence is
| celebrated as some kind of breakthrough or progress if it
| discards the spiritual or metaphysical when it could very well be
| the opposite, perhaps it took a lot of work because "explaining
| reality away" is not an easy task?
|
| Not sure how else to describe it, but there has been significant
| effort in studying things like human psychology, but the idea
| that by analyzing and categorizing and filtering down human
| thinking and behavior into neat little packages somehow brings us
| out of it so we can now stand on the other side saying "look how
| stupid we once were before we knew about (things we made up)"
| seems almost like a cheap parlor trick that started with "cover
| your eyes and hold out your hand".
|
| It's like we are somehow too self-important in the ways we try
| and convince ourselves that we are not important?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| So roughly, God exists because of course everything is too
| beautiful and complex to be explained any other way?
|
| IDK I think eternal matter, billions of years, gravity, and a
| few other fundamentals make emergent life a lot more likely
| than some all powerful sociopathic entity.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| If the existence of a deity or deities is important to you to
| resolve, here are some philosophical arguments that might be of
| help:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist%27s_wager
| meepmorp wrote:
| Pascal's wager kind of falls apart if you consider possibility
| that you might not be worshipping the right god. If you pick
| YHVH but find yourself before the scale of Maat, you're going
| to have a bad time.
| zabzonk wrote:
| an uninteresting question (and undecidable, too). how much time
| has been wasted on this?
| shaftoe444 wrote:
| TLDR is there or isn't there?
| bradley13 wrote:
| Define "god". If we are in a simulation, are the simulators gods?
|
| Seriously, though, this is literally unknowable. We do not know -
| and possibly cannot know - where the universe came from. However,
| looking at the sheer size of the universe, supposing that we have
| any special place in it is sheerest hubris.
|
| If there is a "god", we are still nothing special, just more
| stardust...
| minkzilla wrote:
| Why is it unknowable? Just because we do not know yet doesn't
| seem to me to be conclusive evidence that it is unknowable.
|
| I also think some would argue that being omniscient god has the
| "bandwidth" to care about everything and everyone. So in one
| sense everyone is special, which of course means no one is
| special but does not mean that our actions would be
| inconsequential.
| mbivert wrote:
| It's definitely a core issue in all those discussions; such a
| notion, and others like "first cause", "good/bad", "free will",
| etc. are subtle and rarely come without more or less hidden
| assumptions.
|
| Furthermore, our perception is fantastically limited, and this
| isn't hidden to us: we're certainly aware, or should be, that
| what we know of reality is negligible, in comparison to what's
| actually happening out there right now / what has happened in
| the past.
|
| It reminds me of a story of a family acquaintance, who was in
| Algeria a few decades ago (I think this was during the Algerian
| War[0]): she was in a bus and realized she forgot to take
| something (guess this generally qualifies as a "bad" thing);
| while she was outside of the bus, it exploded, killing its
| passengers ("good" thing for her, but hardly feels like a
| "good" thing overall).
|
| > this is literally unknowable
|
| This, I disagree: for example, direct experience (really
| direct, not sign interpretation) could very well be one may to
| know for sure. The problem is, even if we agree that such cases
| exist, and are genuine (why not), it seems that sharing the
| certainty of such experiences with others is indeed impossible,
| unless perhaps to others hit by the same storm.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War
| JohnFen wrote:
| This "what is god" problem is why I consider myself an Ignostic
| (aka "incompetent atheism").
|
| I can't tell you whether or not I believe in god until you can
| tell me exactly what you mean by "god".
| derbOac wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism
|
| Finding a term for that was a cathartic experience for me.
| Before then I thought I was the only one who had that
| perspective.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Big bang is the god(so far)
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