Hey Gonners,
A world that looks exactly as I expect?
If there was no God at all?
That two questions, please explain.
The Christian God at least is supposed to be possessed of various omnis, yet we’re expected to believe that he made a largely uninhabitable home with a thin crust and horrible diseases for his special creation, that bad things are intended to happen to good people, that praying has no effect whatever when you look at meaningful sample sizes rather than personal anecdote, that the naturalistic process we increasingly uncover are all part a big plan despite the total absence of evidence for such a thing etc.
Assume no God for a moment – how would you then expect the world to look different?
Well I have known my problem for a long time ( the doc says stop scratching and it will clear up on its own ) I can't define God, what I can do is stand in awe at the whole shooting match, a brain that has more neurons than the whole milky way has stars, a Universe that works, and works very well, a planet which lives and breathes, laws that hold it all together, humans who can touch me at my deepest level, humans who play God, or our poor definition of what a God can do, life that strives at every level, it all wants to go on, humans, fish, plant life, bacteria, it all wants to go on, WHY!!
Well, I can stand in awe at all that too. Other than for an argument from personal incredulity (an error in reasoning) why though would you want to bring a “God” into it?
As for “why”, it’s a null question. Why not? To answer a why question you need to establish an intelligent “something” with the intent to decide on the why. “How” is legitimate; “why” isn’t until and unless you can demonstrate
first an agency to care about and decide on the why.
What does that mean, all I am saying is that Sweetpea has God in her life, like me, like billions of others.
It means that you asked someone to show that SP’s attribution of cause wasn’t what she thought it was. No-one can do that, any more than you could show that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist. What you
can do though is to show that her reasoning – in this case the
post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy – was false, as indeed it would be if I claimed that my event B (a tooth under the pillow) was caused by my event A (writing a note).
I know there are other explanations for Sweetpeas experience, but for Sweetpea it was God, her God, I do know your arguments for probability, you sent me on that journey but you still can't say it was not God, Sweetpeas God.
That’s right, and you can’t say that it wasn’t the Tooth Fairy either. As the material is all we know of that’s reliably accessible and testable though, the
a priori assumption should be that the cause of event B is a material one. If though you want to persist with a non-material option, then you have no choice but to allow too any
other non-material cause – Tooth Fairy included.
