Delusion

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by usfan, Jan 3, 2019.

  1. yardmeat

    yardmeat Well-Known Member

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    I just provided a logical progression. Feel free to address it.

    Meaning and purpose are conscious thoughts about the relationship between a conscious being and the universe. The only thing required for such thoughts are consciousness and awareness of oneself and the universe. Your assertion that something additional required is not based on any kind of logic or reason. It is a bare assertion and blind faith.

    I've just shown how one can derive meaning, significance, and morality without God. People do it literally every day. For something supposedly impossible, it is a surprisingly common occurrence.

    Have you ever looked outside? Seriously. Plenty of things are larger than ourselves.

    We are conscious beings. Our sense of identity includes our consciousness. You are suggesting we deny our conscious existence. Now THAT is delusional.

    In reality, we have a conscious existence, as much as you want to pretend it isn't there. As beings who have consciousness as part of our identity, our identity is wrapped up in the contents and products of that consciousness. Pretend that isn't the case all you like, but if you do so then your entire "argument" consists of making bare assertions and shoving your head in the sand to avoid any facts that inconvenience those assertions.
     
  2. yardmeat

    yardmeat Well-Known Member

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    The same way that an intentless natural universe has the ability to create things. Not sure where I'm losing you.

    Plenty of traditions hold that there are impersonal supernatural powers: karma, the wyrd, the tao, qi. If you are unfamiliar will all of those, then you can find a fictitious example in the Force of Star Wars, which is based on the Chinese tao.

    Yes. They are. Which is why the impersonal supernatural force option doesn't fit within the God hypothesis.

    Yes. It would. Which is why a supernatural, impersonal force would not fall under the category of atheistic naturalism.
     
  3. usfan

    usfan Banned

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    We seem to be at an impass.. no point in repeating the same points over and over.
     
  4. yardmeat

    yardmeat Well-Known Member

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    Well, I've offered you evidence that your dichotomy is a false one. In return, you've offered only bare assertions that this isn't the case and haven't addressed the alternative offered. If we are at an impass, then your OP is a bust. It is based on assumptions that you have been unable to defend.
     
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  5. Swensson

    Swensson Devil's advocate

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    Well, in this case, we're discussing specifically the case in which there is no god, so presumably not that either.

    Equivocation. He's talking about two different things, which happen to have the same name, as if they're also the same thing.

    My point is that purpose doesn't need to be present, not that it couldn't be present.

    I don't have a problem with the idea of seeing something special in them. You would have to provide more of an argument to link that to the rest of post though.
     
  6. usfan

    usfan Banned

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    The IMPLICATIONS of belief, in a God/no God universe:

    Assume, for a moment, that there is, in fact, no God.

    Conclusion: All 'sense' of deities, morality, purpose, significance, etc, are human constructs.. made up because of fear, wishful thinking, manipulation, or whatever.

    The conclusion logically follows the assumption.

    Now the reverse. Assume there IS, indeed, a Higher Power, that created us for a purpose, with expectations for our behavior.

    THEN, this 'sense' is not a delusion, but was imbedded by the Creator, for unknown reasons.

    That is the simple dichotomy for us. We either live in a godless universe, devoid of purpose, significance, eternal destiny, soul, and morality, OR.. we live in a God made universe, with an imbedded sense of these things. They are either real, placed by a Higher Power, or they are delusions.

    Those are the only rational options, and conclusions, in this philosophical analysis. All other diversions and side show distractions are attempts to feed the delusion.. to pretend the delusions have a rational basis.
     
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  7. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    The substantive difference being...?
    On the contrary, life demands it.
    Maybe I can sit here generating arguments that might eventually satisfy you and maybe I can't; but doesn't matter, because I won't. If this is to go anywhere you're going to have to point to some deficiency in the argument I have made.
     
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  8. Giftedone

    Giftedone Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The big delusion you are engaging in is the idea that God cares
    The other big delusion you are engaging in is the idea that you have some clue what God is, or is not.
    The other big delusion you are engaging in is that the two possibilities you cite are the only two possibilities for the origin of life on earth.
    The other big delusion you are engaging in is that there is only one God.

    So you got at least one thing right in your post "Delusion is common" :)
     
  9. modernpaladin

    modernpaladin Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    They're not mutually exclusive.

    If Goddidit, then there exists a supernatural element to reality that we can't (yet) quantify. If Goddidit, He did it at least partially within this unquantifiable aspect of reality. Evolution could merely be the physical, measurable effects on our quantifiable reality of what Goddid unquantifiably.
     
  10. RiaRaeb

    RiaRaeb Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    If goddidit, what did god?
     
  11. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    This is really a good thread. It appears everyone has really thought about these topics...and there are many, many concealed doctrines in both epistemological (knowing) arguments and ontological arguments (being) in dealing with cosmology, theology, ontology, epistemology and ontology.

    It has been generally acknowledged that the philosopher/theologian Immanuel Kant has defeated the Argument from Intelligent Design, or the Teleological Argument found in his "Critique of Pure Reason." In it Kant “presents four logical puzzles that he calls “antinomies” to establish the natural dialectical illusions that our reason inevitably encounters when it engages metaphysical questions about cosmology in an open-minded fashion.” Antinomy is basically two arguments with the same premises that each gives contradictory conclusions.

    Positivistic science only gives us a scientifically ordered world so the language of science is inappropriate for analyzing normative questions of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. The materialist tautology is “Everything is material; therefore, everything is material. Science and language-in-general is designed only for application to the world of experience—not the metaphysical. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein accepted the metaphysical, but not metaphysics. This isn’t an original position and can be traced back to a co-contemporary Neo-Kantian philosopher, Alois Riehl (1844-1924) who argued the same position. But both Wittgenstein and Riehl agree that metaphysical assumptions cannot be avoided in science itself.

    The inevitability of metaphysical assumptions really comes center stage when Wittgenstein denies that logical necessity (A is not non-A) has any existential reality—that it is just a stipulation, a verbal agreement, a principle of organization, and nothing more “corresponding” in the world.By denying that logical necessity has any connection to the world, Wittgenstein paradoxically ends up putting Logic and Mathematics in the same metaphysical doghouse that Religion, Ethics, and Aesthetics were put in by the gradual dominance of scientific logical positivism.

    However, the Argument from Design suffered a mortal injury by a severe critique from the Skeptical Empiricist, David Hume, in his posthumous work, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.”(1779). “Natural Religion” means a theology in which knowledge of God can be obtained by examining Nature and the use of human reason in contrast to religious knowledge gained by divine revelation. The book’s character, Cleanthes, presents the Argument from Design as proof of God’s existence. In response the character Philo, who represents most closely Hume’s views, counters Cleanthes’ arguments as being anthropomorphic and based on false analogies.

    Hume’s empiricism greatly influenced the Christian Theologian, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who agreed that the traditional theological and cosmological proofs for the existence of God were fallacious. Kant didn’t accept either agnosticism or atheism, but instead attempted to place Christian theism on a new foundation. Kant’s strategy was to define the limits of Reason in order to draw the boundary where Faith begins. In his famous philosophical work, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant asked the question of whether metaphysical reasoning could give us certain knowledge of the existence of God, of human freedom, and of the immortal spiritual soul. And in order to answer these questions, Kant had to explain the role experience and ideas have in achieving knowledge; he had to resolve the most difficult epistemological issues of his time, and define Reason itself. Not a small challenge.

    This post cannot go into full detail of Kantian epistemology since our interest is with the Argument from Design. Kant does an analysis of Theological, Cosmological, and Ontological arguments for God’s existence in the Critique’s second division entitled, “Transcendental Dialectic.” Understand ‘transcendental’ here as contrasted to ‘empirical’ and as the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience (Space and Time are examples of transcendental ideals). Kant also defines a transcendental ideal as a regulative ideal, an ideal goal, or a heuristic principle that will be explained below. The term ‘dialectic’ means for Kant false reasoning so that the transcendental dialectic is a critique of reasoning that claims to provide knowledge of realities beyond our senses, or experience—in other words, dialectic is the logic of dogmatic illusion. This is not the historical meaning of dialectic, but is what Kant thought the Greeks meant by dialectic—sophistic argumentation.

    In Kant’s work “Dreams of a Ghost-seer explained by Dreams of Metaphysics” (1766), he claimed the law of cause and effect only applies to the realm of sense experience. Jesuit historian, Frederick Copleston, explained Kant’s rejection of metaphysical theory as knowledge.
    The Physico-Theological Argument (Purposiveness of Nature)

    Kant delimits Reason to the realm of experience only, to the phenomenal world of sense experience. When Reason is applied beyond the realm of possible experience and claims to be scientific knowledge, we are then engaging in metaphysical speculation and is a misuse of Reason which produces only illusory knowledge which is impossible in principle. However, Kant has another meaning of metaphysical as a natural anthropological tendency, or disposition of the mind to seek an unconditioned principle of unity of experience. This tendency cannot be avoided for the mind wants to unify all objects of experience into a single synthesized all encompassing transcendental idea. This is an important characteristic of human Reason and is even desirable.
    Kant is saying that the laws of cause and effect, and synthetic (factual) knowledge are only applicable to experience, or possible experience. Such laws and empirical knowledge are meaningless when applied to some supersensible, or transcendent realm (note that ‘transcendent’ here means beyond the realm of human experience). The physico-theological argument has four minor propositions that move from the perceived order of Nature to its ultimate cause.
    Philosopher William Paley (1743 –1805) formulated a different version of the teleological argument, which John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) attacked as an argument from analogy just as Kant and Hume counter-argued against the Design argument. Arguments from analogy are not deductive, but rather they are rhetorical fallacies.
     
    Last edited: Jan 8, 2019
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  12. Gelecski7238

    Gelecski7238 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    3. Insecurity, i.e. an individual's concern about self-interests. Meaning/purpose provides the individual with a sense of self-value. It is a byproduct of individuation. Individuation is the opposite of unification but is the beginning of going in that direction. Likewise simplicity vs. complexity. Hence advancing towards #1, but Source is not necessarily a Being.
     
  13. Swensson

    Swensson Devil's advocate

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    Well, the substantive difference is that life demands one and not the other.

    I don't know what you're referring to. I made arguments against usfan's arguments, not yours. You responded to me, I have merely answered your questions about my posts.
     
  14. usfan

    usfan Banned

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    Insecurity as an explanation is still a delusion. It is the same as fear, wishful thinking, manipulation, or some other human construct. The actual feeling of 'meaning' is still a delusion. The source is not a being if we assume a godless universe, but a made up feeling.. a human construct. It is still a delusion.
     
  15. usfan

    usfan Banned

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    This was a really long post, and I'd like to reply to every point, but i just Kant...

    ;)
     
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  16. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Humans occupy a niche that involves huge investment in brains. That niche succeeds when there is serious cooperation.

    The fact that humans developed a god concept, ideas of ethical behavior and morality, an appreciation for objectives even more important than individual survival, etc. should be no surprise.

    Most likely, a god concept was a prerequisite for homo sapien success.
     
  17. usfan

    usfan Banned

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    ..seems far fetched, even as a theory. But it does not detract from the fact that this 'thinking' is nothing but a delusion, IF.. in fact, this is a godless universe.

    If there is no God, then any belief in God is a delusion.

    And the reverse is true.

    If there is, actually, God, then disbelief is a delusion.

    The only common denominator is the propensity of humans to delude themselves. How do you exempt yourself from that, if you are, indeed, human? If delusion is so commonplace in the human experience, how do you know your beliefs are not merely delusions?
     
  18. Market Junkie

    Market Junkie Banned

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    "Intelligent Design" :roflol: :roflol: :roflol:



    Hey, thanks for that belly laugh, man... :thumbsup:
     
  19. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I like the humility in that last sentence.

    We need to keep that in mind before using personal beliefs to override solid evidence of how our universe works, for example.
     
  20. Kyklos

    Kyklos Well-Known Member Donor

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    The problem with the above statement is that it assumes an inferior view of subjectivity (feelings) and a superior view of objectivity. But then how does on come about to getting an objective standard as opposed to subjective consciousness? Isn't establishing objectivity an abstract subjective project in itself? When I sense (sense perception, or sense impression is the empiricist relation to the object, or thing--John Locke, David Hume) the color red, this fact form a state of mind (seeing red as sense datum) which is a subjective state. And, are the truths of Logic and Mathematics subjective or objective?

    Insecurity is a state of mind just as real as a traffic jam. In fact, the emotion of insecurity, and fear are principles of human survival. Wishful thinking allows humans to project goals like building society or travel in space. Manipulation is the essence of technology. And logic and mathematics are strictly human constructs, including the categories of space and time.

    Belief in immortality and a theistic g-d are not necessary for Christianity. Theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher said, “...no world without a God, no God without a world." And yet, closely as the world and God are related, they must not be thought of in a pantheistic fashion, or, as if they were identical. Both ideas represent the same “ground of being” through emotion. Schleiermacher noted that there can be no question either of primacy or of subordination but is simply a matter of the interpretation, definition, and classification of the facts of consciousness, as we find them in the evolution of human history.

    Did you mean, "I Kant; therefore, I am?"
     
    Last edited: Jan 8, 2019
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  21. Gelecski7238

    Gelecski7238 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Calling a troubling angst a delusion does not seem to alleviate it. Neither does relegating perception/feeling to the status of delusions, unless the premise of Godlessness somehow does that. Similarly, I don't know if proclaiming existence to be a delusion/illusion helps. Consider anchoring with I think therefore I am or drift aimlessly.
     

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