byrnema comments on Atheist or Agnostic? - Less Wrong

4 Post author: byrnema 18 April 2009 09:25PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (32)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 19 April 2009 06:36:01PM *  0 points [-]

Beyond the problem of complete acceptance, I have yet to find a definition of God that is not:

  1. Obviously empirically false (e.g. omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and nothing else) or
  2. Incoherent - (e.g. omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and some fourth property that we cannot possibly fathom that supercedes the other thre, i.e. we literally have no idea what He is)

Most definitions of god involve a lot of hand-waving, to the point at which you don't actually know what you mean when you say "I believe in God."

This is the main reason I do not associate atheism with an affirmative belief in non-existence. "I do not believe bleggs exist" is not a reasonable statement unless you can reasonably define bleggs.

"Any agent with supernatural powers who is responsible for the creation of the universe and/or mankind, who is ontologically superior to mankind" seems like a fairly catch-all definition of God (as opposed to god(s), which could be somewhat different). Admittedly, there's some hand-waving in "ontologically superior," but I think this definition is pretty effective. Admittedly I know little about Eastern religion, so I may be missing something big. I'm not attached to that definition at all and would love to see a better one if someone has one.

Comment author: byrnema 19 April 2009 06:44:10PM 0 points [-]

Just to make sure I'm up to date, is the evidence against (1) largely (roughly) that there is evil?

Comment author: Psychohistorian 19 April 2009 09:45:26PM *  0 points [-]

Basically. If you had a god that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good/benevolent, and has absolutely no other characteristics governing his behaviour, you'd expect to live in a much, much nicer world than you actually do.

Most of the responses to this problem postulate that god has some other set of goals in addition to these four, i.e. he wants to reward the faithful, or he wants to ensure free will, or something like that. These responses generally succeed only by making the concept of god so muddy that you don't know what you believe in, i.e. He's all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, except for whenever he's not. More explicit point here.