Subject: RE: [extropy-chat] God vs. no-God discussions advance not one inch

From: Ned Late <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 08:57:02 -0800 (PST)

As a matter of fact they still do. And intellectuals still debate the existence of God in ways little changed since 1968, or 1868, or 1768, or 1668.

>The interesting question is if anything has changed. Do the scouts still
>discuss this? Do they still pull all the same cruel gags?

---------------------------------
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday! 
 Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web 

_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
[email-masked]
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat

---

From: Gokhan San <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:37:23 +0200

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 08:57:02 -0800 (PST)
Ned Late <[email-masked]> wrote:

NL> As a matter of fact they still do. And intellectuals still debate the existence of God in ways little changed since 1968, or 1868, or 1768, or 1668.
NL> 

I disagree in some aspects, and agree in some others...

Through these eras, understanding of Man evolved first. Then God evolved
to a being that is qualified to dominate that Man. And finally in the
last century, our methods of thinking followed them, including the
concept of "proof". "God" is minimized to method of personal relief from
an undeniable fact of nature, as Man highly understood what "fact" is.
Despite the incompleteness theorem, Tractatus or whatever, we still have
formal methods of thinking which are much more extensive than previous
eras.

Of course, this doesn't mean that discussing God isn't fun anymore, but
we now know that we are not doing it seriously...

I think that the essence of serious discussions about the existence of
God is actually efforts to communicate methods of thinking - which is
a challenge.

NL> If we knew what we were talking about we would be God
NL> ourselves, wouldn't we?

Not strictly, and, probably not. Also, one can still put a definition
that validates the existence of God. But, what i was trying to stress
was that the definitions in front of us are either unnecessary (like
saying "God is the Universe"), invalid, or invalides the proposition.

-- 

Gokhan San

... Hoping to goodness is not theologically sound. - Peanuts