Are you saying that god either exists or he doesn’t and that there’s no middle ground ? In either case it would imply a high level of certainty from both the theist and the atheist.
The coherency and definition of god is not proof or disproof that he exists or not, that belongs to empiricism. In effect you’re removing the ability to doubt and sit on the fence when it comes to god, not just that but you’re also removing the ability to be sceptical of the atheist position. Poor agnostic’s deprived of doubt and scepticism.
Btw you haven’t mentioned Pascals Wager perhaps it’s irrelevant.
Paul Tillich was repeatedly accused of atheism by his theological critics precisely because he denied that God as ‘a being who exists’. Tillich’s formulation was deliberately provocative: “It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.” Accordingly Tillich was known for saying that to assert the existence of God is to deny him.
“Existence” refers to what is finite and fallen and cut of from its true being. Within the finite realm issues of conflict between, for example, autonomy (Greek: ‘autos’ - self, ‘nomos’ - law) and heteronomy (Greek: ‘heteros’ - other, ‘nomos’ - law) abound (there are also conflicts between the formal/emotional and static/dynamic). Resolution of these conflicts lies in the essential realm (the Ground of Meaning/the Ground of Being) which humans are cut off from yet also dependent upon (‘In existence man is that finite being who is aware both of his belonging to and separation from the infinite’ (Newport p.67f)). Therefore existence is estrangement. ~ From Paul Tillich, John. P. Newport.
The objection that such a conception is indistinguishable from atheism is therefore hardly new; it is one of the standard objections that apophatic theology has had to face.
But this is an affirmation of the significance of this perspective, not a refutation of it. The difficulty arises from a narrowing of the modern understanding of being, in which the paradigm cases of what is real are things that exist, together with logically or arithmetically valid propositions that can be grounded in respect of them. This is not quite positivism, but it has something in common with the positivist tendency to restrict meaningful claims to what can be established within a particular conception of reality. Given this background, to say that ‘God exists’ is necessarily to pick out some particular existent — presumably a super-being of cosmic scale. But that is the conception of God that classical theism rejects (or rather had not yet arrived at.)
It is not coincidental that some ‘conversion events’ are precipitated not by tidy philosophical arguments but by personal crises or losses that radically unsettle one’s assumptions about what is real. Religious insight is sometimes described in precisely these terms: as a sword (Matt 10:34) or lightning bolt that shatters established norms and overturns familiar ways of seeing. Such experiences do not constitute philosophical arguments, of course, but they can radically alter the horizon within which questions about reality are understood.
Sure. We might be clear that God either exists or doesn’t. There is no middle ground. But we might believe god exists, believe he doesn’t, or adopt the middle ground of not committing to either belief. That middle ground concerns belief, not ontology.
Ah I see what you mean now. You want ontological proof to his existence, and as there doesn’t appear to be such a proof therefore the default position is atheism. Understandable.
But this assumes precisely what is in dispute. “God either exists or doesn’t” presupposes that “God” successfully picks out an entity to which the predicate “exists” properly applies. Negative theology denies that God is an entity among other entities. The law of excluded middle does not establish the applicability of a predicate to its subject; it tells us what follows once a well-formed proposition has been admitted. So the claim that there is “no middle ground” simply begs the question against the classical conception.
This is in fact central to the epistemology—or gnoseology—of classical theology. Aquinas’s doctrine of analogical predication recognises that when we say “God exists” or “God is good”, we cannot mean these terms in precisely the same sense in which we apply them to finite things. Our concepts are formed within the order of finite experience and are therefore inadequate to what transcends that order. The task is not simply to acquire more propositions about God, but to undergo a transformation in the mode of understanding itself. In philosophical language this may be described as anagoge; in theological language, metanoia.
If we are committing to not using the words in our argument in the way that we usually use them, then by that very fact we are setting aside the capacity for rationality.
Now that’s fine, one can go right ahead and accept whatever it is that is being accepted, but one cannot say what that might be.
The by now familiar problem of talking about that about which we claim we cannot talk.
Cool, I’d say that those are amongst the arguments.
Most of the counterarguments boil down questioning either the numerator or denominator of the supposed low probability: we don’t know how many values the constants of nature can have (in fact they could be derived and therefore only have one possible value), we don’t know if there’s a multiverse, we don’t know if other permutations of the constants can host life etc etc
Another argument is just pointing out that it’s god of the gaps…and “god gaps” have been filled many times before.
Finally, it’s worth noting that fine-tuning was coined in the second half of the 20th century. Indeed it couldn’t have been invented much earlier as it rests on precise scientific findings.
So, if I were a theist, and fine-tuning was the key argument that convinced me, I would have a nagging doubt that the church chugged along for 2 millenia without a watertight argument.
Right, but we can ask what is ontologically fundamental for causal chains, and answer: spacetime (or extension where a cause can be followed by an effect).
If spacetime itself emerges from something more fundamental (e.g. “quantum-foam”), then the principle that everything must have a cause reaches its end.
The “principle” that everything must have a cause is at best a methodological conjecture. It might be fine to look for a cause, but to insist that there must be one is an overreach. Cause is a lot less helpful here than Aristotle supposed.
If everything has a cause, then God has a cause. If somethings do not have causes, then why only god? Why not spacetime?
Come on, Way. This thread is me not discussing God? We’ve agreed that if you retreat to full apophaticism, then nothing more can be said; it’s you who has argued that we can’t get to grips with god. The ring-fence is your own creation. I’m just pointing it out to you.
Pointing to something of which nothing can be said adequately is not the same as saying that nothing can be said about it whatever. And this matters for the other arguments in the OP as well. If classical theism is right that God cannot be understood simply as an existent among existents, then the problem is not confined to arguments that explicitly say “God exists”. It also bears upon the interpretation of cosmological, teleological, moral and modal arguments, since each of these are inclined to treat divine causality, goodness, purpose or necessity as though they were instances of the corresponding properties found among finite things. The question is framed entirely within the order of finite existents, and God is then treated as though he were one more, albeit extraordinarily powerful, existent within that order. But within those terms, the idea is indeed preposterous. Welcome to modernity!
