Posted by thor (63.249.67.160) on March 06, 2002 at 01:03:51:
In Reply to: Re: Question of the Week posted by Jim on March 05, 2002 at 11:39:08:
-now wait a minute. when i made my argument i wasn't limiting my term "God" to mean only the in-his-own-image variety. Concerning religions where the deities are more vague and the sacred texts are fewer, where worship and spirituality blend, i have some things to say.
-Certainly these religions are more difficult to refute because they slither and change in the critic's hands: always agreeing, always suggesting a truth that cannot be known in the formal western sense.
-don't the miracles of life and existence, the beauty of physics and natural order within chaos indicate that there is something behind it all, some driving force? some vague thing that we will call god though we are too ignorant of its nature to truly know what it is?
-if by "god", one means the beauties and mysteries of this world, then i would agree that there is god in that sense. but what we have come to is a semantic problem because you have manufactured a concept that is very sensible, but labeled it with the term "god" in all its spiritual connotation. if you play with language thus, you can easily say that god is everywhere, within us, whatever, and i will agree with everything except the misnomer.
-as soon as you expand your definition of god to include anything that contradicts reality or that is beyond the scope of human experience, i must then disagree. you can say i am too closeminded to accept some kinds of evidence and that god is of a form so vague i am not capable of comprehending it, but then you raise doubts in me that wonder if your idea of god is even comprehendable to you.
-to rebut on the empiricism remark, i didn't mean to equate it with atheism, i meant to exclude atheists who are not empirical. Any atheist who is ABSOLUTELY certain there is no god is not an empiricist (though he is a fool) because there is no way he could have such certainty. As an empirical atheist, i admit the possibility that there is "god" (whatever that should mean) by reason that human knowledge is limited and imperfect. That is all i mean. You can call this reluctant agnosticism if you will, but i don't think it is.
-lastly, i don't think my logic is as biased as you say. i have restrictions on things i'll accept and i make certain assumptions about reality. this excludes much but i don't think anything sensible will be lost.
-thor