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Why would a reasonable person believe in God?

angelo said:
Isn't it amazing that this omnipotent god needs to speak through others, why can't he speak directly to each one of us leaving no doubt of his/hers existence!
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Because it doesn't work. Ask any apologist.

Many theists claim that irrefutable evidence of God would leave us as robots without free will.
Of course, their own sourcebook claims that you can participate in a miracle so overwhelming as crossing the Red Sea on foot and still have the free will to jettison a real god and go to worship a golden calf. So irrefutable proof still doesn't seem to work...
 
Keith&Co. said:
angelo said:
Isn't it amazing that this omnipotent god needs to speak through others, why can't he speak directly to each one of us leaving no doubt of his/hers existence!
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Because it doesn't work. Ask any apologist.

Many theists claim that irrefutable evidence of God would leave us as robots without free will.
Of course, their own sourcebook claims that you can participate in a miracle so overwhelming as crossing the Red Sea on foot and still have the free will to jettison a real god and go to worship a golden calf. So irrefutable proof still doesn't seem to work...
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Just like all other apologetic arguments it collapses at the first poke.
 
No Robots, how about starting your own threat about panpsychism? This thread is getting a bit derailed
 
angelo said:
DrZoidberg said:
No Robots, how about starting your own threat about panpsychism? This thread is getting a bit derailed
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Threat? We will never succumb to any threats! :D
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He'll better make his own thread or I'll go UN on his ass. Write a slightly less polite letter than I otherwise would. Not offer him his favourite drink at my party. Perhaps even not fill it all the way up. MUahahahaha.... I feel evil now.
 
I suppose one could start a new thread about reason and belief. But why would a reasonable man with heaps of money marry a blonde bimbo with big tits and quarter his age? Isn't it the same as why would a reasonable man believe in gods?
 
angelo said:
I suppose one could start a new thread about reason and belief. But why would a reasonable man with heaps of money marry a blonde bimbo with big tits and quarter his age? Isn't it the same as why would a reasonable man believe in gods?
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You'll got to walk me through the logic on this one. Is it about fulfilling an emotional need?
 
My point was simply that Jahve is best understood as panpsychism, in which all reasonable people believe.
 
DrZoidberg said:
Keith&Co. said:
Because it doesn't work. Ask any apologist.

Many theists claim that irrefutable evidence of God would leave us as robots without free will.
Of course, their own sourcebook claims that you can participate in a miracle so overwhelming as crossing the Red Sea on foot and still have the free will to jettison a real god and go to worship a golden calf. So irrefutable proof still doesn't seem to work...
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Just like all other apologetic arguments it collapses at the first poke.
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Poke, bright light, basic math.... Spellcheck...
 
Tom Sawyer said:
angelo said:
When praying you're talking to god, if god answers you, you're schizophrenic.
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Especially if he answers you through your dog and tells you to burn things.
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That's never happened to me, although one time a dog spoke through God and told me not to burn steaks. It was good advice, although the part about giving all the steak to the dog aroused my suspicions as to who was speaking through whom.
 
Reasonable people tend to consider the available evidence before forming a conviction. 'Evidence' not being something that happens to be claimed to be true in a book, 'Holy Books' included.
 
Juma said:
No Robots said:
My point was simply that Jahve is best understood as panpsychism, in which all reasonable people believe.
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Reasonable persons believe in empiri. Where is empiri fir panosychism?
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Philosophical models for understanding the world is just that. They're models. Metaphors to make the world more understandable. There's a lot of human communication that is tacit. There's a lot of thinking that is subconscious. It can be argued that it's helpful to think of the world in panpsychic terms to make sense of it. This does not require assuming the supernatural or magic. Granted that most panpsychics do. But it's not mandatory (as I understand it). So far so good.

You don't need to study trends or the fashion industry long to see subconscious spontaneously organised patterns emerging from a collective. The collective unconscious clearly is a thing. But I personally don't subscribe to the panpsychic explanation model. I don't think it's helpful in describing human thinking. Not at all. Only acts to confuse matters. My main criticism is that it's untestable and impossible to separate it from woo IMHO. Which is why it's a magnet for chrystal healers and pyramid power idiots.

But I'm not going to say panpsychism is wrong. I don't think it is. It's just that there are better models to use imho.
 
Panpsychism might not be the best term for what I'm talking about. Perhaps hyzlozoism is better. In any event, it is essentially Spinoza's doctrine of the attributes, and especially Constantin Brunner's elaboration thereof. I have an unpublished English translation of Brunner's work on this topic available here.
 
No Robots said:
Panpsychism might not be the best term for what I'm talking about. Perhaps hyzlozoism is better. In any event, it is essentially Spinoza's doctrine of the attributes, and especially Constantin Brunner's elaboration thereof. I have an unpublished English translation of Brunner's work on this topic available here.
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Now I've made some effort to understand Constantin Brunner and hylozoism. My problem with it is the vagaries. I'm not sure what he means. The Wikipedia article wasn't much help. He seems to have sorted human behaviours into a set of qualitative hierarchies. But I'm not sure what the difference between them is? And superstition is a weasel word. A word used to describe something to inform the reader what opinion they're supposed to hold about it before they know what it means. It makes me uneasy. He also seems to imply a bunch of stuff in religion, reason, metaphysics and so on, which I suspect is a slightly different version to the general definition?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Brunner

I don't mind hylozoism. The border between alive and dead is arbitrary anyway. So why not do away with the distinction all together? But you do agree that saying that everything is alive is the same thing as saying that everything is dead?

And I'm a naturalistic monist. So maybe I'm on team Brunner. Maybe not. I'm not sure? I don't understand what he's saying well enough.
 
The border between lots of things is arbitrary, but they are no less distinct in their extremes. Baldness, for example.

And "alive" is a far cry from "conscious" anyway.
 
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