Archive for November, 2007

Intelligible Propositions and their Relation to Infants

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Propositions which cannot be subject to reason are categorically inappropriate; they should be dismissed. They’re sneaky, deceitful—and most people hardly even notice it! Since the question of God’s existence can neither be proved nor disproved by virtue of what it means to be nonexistent (as the atheist will claim) in the first place or as “beyond this world” (as the theist will claim), the question is horribly meaningless—it falls under that inappropriate category.

The question Does God exist? and its various forms Do you believe in God? Is God necessary for morality? How about free will? etc all bear hidden, implicit assumptions that the subject of the question is even intelligible in the first place. It is not.

You may as well ask, “Do you believe in this fancy neologism I’ve just invented?”

However!— by definition of what atheism is—categorically dismissing the question as too unintelligible to be responded to does qualify one as an atheist. You are not an atheist because you’ve bested the theist with the evidential problem of evil or omnipotence paradoxes. You simply reject his or her notion of whatever they say they believe in on the grounds that it is simply makes no sense. Seriously, your question bears content which I cannot say I sufficiently comprehend to provide a reply. Do not fall prey to requesting an epistemic investigation of belief or philosophical inquiry into the ontological status of this “god” figure—ask them to provide a goddamn definition!

Now they may wish to justify their beliefs with this or that, but nowhere does “God” enter the picture. All justification for a belief is a rationalization which is, by definition, not faith. Under a religious context, anything but faith is not faith.

Noam Chomsky replied tersely and effectively to the question of his belief in God: Questioner: “Do you believe in God?” Chomsky: “I don’t understand the question.”

Essentially, you’re paying tribute to our beloved Socrates by standing firm and declaring that the inquirer defines his or her terms. Don’t get caught in the trap of demanding that they prove it. If you do, you’ve taken their premise “God exists” as provisional. And if they’re savvy enough, as unconscious charlatans usually can be, they can take the argument anywhere they please or just waste your time. Of course, they’d be doing both.

It is true that atheism must presuppose a theism in order to object it—to even be conceived as an intelligible term at that! If there were no theism, there would be no atheism. Atheism does not exist without a corresponding theism.

I’m not sure how it follows that an infant not having a concrete, philosophical position would automatically qualify as a “theist.” In what sense exactly? Are the theists to domineer now, too, in the domain of general spirituality? Are we to suppose theism and spirituality are equivalent? Why do we bother with these terms in the first place if they can so easily blur into each other as if they held no distinctions in the first place? I suppose it is the consequence of this notion of religious plurality and “anything goes” mentality. Woe to this postmodern world. It aches with the feeling of a disturbing descent into a messy communication breakdown.

The concept of “God” by any theist carries certain complex ethical implications, intellectual feats of understanding, and grandiose tales of jealousy (human nature appended to the bearer of infinite wisdom; as if that were not a shiningly overt contradiction) and chosen peoples trekking deserts with divine stamina and resilience. Can we disassociate all of this from the idea of God that we have come to understand and say that it exists within the mind of a child? What is it exactly that exists in the mind of a child? How can we assume that because people have a spiritual feeling that that feeling is equivalent to the proposition “God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good!”?

Atheism can either be strong or weak (explicit or implicit, active or passive, etc). Strong is usually the philosophical stance that includes also the weak stance. The weak stance, if it can be called a stance, is simply by definition the “lack of a belief in God or Gods”. Properly understood, it means “lack of a belief in an idea”.

To assume that God is not an idea which must follow from a proposition first is to presuppose his existence as self-evident or true. But yet, we have to explain what it means to exist as self-evident but without discernible qualities. To say something is self-evident without elucidating the qualities of it that make it so is just an unjustified assertion. “God” could easily be replaced with “Blug!” But until we clarify what we mean and what constitutes “God,” the term is not intelligible. The idea is vacuous.

We must assume that God has qualities and things which distinguish it from other ideas, but it necessarily exists in the category of ideas. If God does not have discernible qualities which can only come forth through propositions, then we cannot say that the idea of God exists in anyone’s mind anymore than the feeling to have a bowel movement comes when one has fully digested their food. Therefore, if a child cannot comprehend or express a proposition of an idea of God, then it follows that “God” is not a concept in their minds. Thus, they lack the belief in the idea of God, and general “spirituality” is but a mere correlate that we wish to join too earnestly with our own ideas of God.

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Atheists: Free Will or Determinism

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Should Atheists have to tackle the Free will versus Determinism question?
I believe so, for atheism is only the rejection of a certain number of propositions for the existence of a deity. I do not think it follows that rejecting the existence of God necessarily rejects the ethical system of such that fall under the corresponding religion. To not be able to do this is to truly affirm the existence of a deity as being the foundation for the ethical system, in a very peculiar hypothetical sense. Surely our ancestors did not find this or that deity then derive an ethics from there. So we must presume that these ethical systems did not first posit that “God” exists and further went on to list the axioms of existence and morality. People formed rudimentary beliefs and built upon them with the ever-presence idea of some higher being in their minds. The name of the higher being actualized into a definite, signified entity which came to bear reverence after the system of belief was more or less fostered.

What I aim to suggest here is that categorically all propositions exist on the same level. The assertion: “God exists!” is no more important or higher-as-a-category than the assertion that “Free will exists!” However, people tend to be more emotively connected to the label because they wish to consider it as the entrance into the system itself. It’s quite easy to say “I believe in God” without truly understanding what “God” means. The proposition of God’s existence is no different categorically than that of the proposition that “Thou shalt not kill.” Therefore, the propositions can be picked apart and tackled independently from one another, and it must be done by the “atheist,” for the “atheist” is only challenging one proposition. That is, as a self-proclaimed atheist, from this title, they challenge or deny the argument of the existence of God, and consequently they must separately handle the determinism versus free will issue.

But I suppose if the only argument an atheist receives that proves God exists is the argument from free will, and if she were to reject or deny that argument, then she would not have to tackle the determinism versus free will issue. It could be implied by her rejection that she consents to determinism of some flavor. This is due to the fact that I see determinism and free will as antithetical. Perhaps against a personal God theory, the rejection of such is an implicit consent to determinism.

After that, we see that being an atheist is not a system of belief but only something which exists provisionally and only stands counter to some theism. Thus, a genuine, personal belief system should be created by the person who claims atheism, but their belief system will not be a reflection of the tenets of “atheism” itself. There can be no atheist bible or code of ethics or absolute philosophy of the atheist.

Does determinism require a determiner? To say this we must further question as to the nature of this determiner. And actually, does determinism require a determiner truly? Can it not be that things are all causally determined ad infinitum? I suppose that would qualify as a form of necessitarianism which is a more obscure form of determinism which people do not often comprehend easily.

But it is most certain that free will and determinism are not compatible for the sheer sake of future understanding and acquisition of knowledge. It is absurd to assert, “We are somewhat free and somewhat determined.” Where do we even begin to test this sort of hypothesis? We would have to understand all of nature, or the universe, to verify such a claim. The idea brushes unashamedly with philosophical uncertainty. Whatever you do, don’t hold me to a solid position! We are either determined or everything is absolutely free; the latter usually constitutes a form of chaos which is self-evidently not true. The universe has order necessarily, but more so at differing localities. For brevity, metaphysically, order is of the nature of the Universe; physically, it is distributed unevenly, or quite disorderly. Tame that Universe.

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