IUBio

Deities cannot exist because of their consciousness

keith keithj43 at yahoo.com
Fri Dec 26 01:01:20 EST 2003


"Wolf Kirchmeir" <wwolfkir at sympatico.can> wrote in message news:<jbysxveflzcngvpbpna.hqclry1.pminews at news1.sympatico.ca>...
> On 18 Dec 2003 08:32:23 -0800, keith wrote:
> 
> >You say we can't prove an event was supernaturally
> >caused, which requires a clarification of what it means to *prove* a
> >claim. 
> 
> The OP was using claims about natural entities (brains) and their behaviour
> (consciousness) to prove that the supernatural (god) couldn't exist. That's
> an invalid argument or proof, because claims about the supernatural cannot be
> based on knowledge (=experience) of the natural - logically, it's a category
> error.
> 
> Since we are natural creatures, we can experience the supernatural only if it
> intersects the natural -...

This doesn't follow; it seems to be a mere assertion. Why couldn't a
natural creature experience the supernatural directly/ What doesn
experiencing the supernatural vs. experiencing the natural even mean?
AFAICS, all we can do is have experiences; whether those experiences
have natural causes or supernatural causes is something we can
discuss, what is meant by supernatural v.s natural is something we
could discuss. But I can't see how your assertion above is amything
more than a slogan of sorts.


> and that intersection will be natural. This claim
> implies that the supernatural contains the natural, which IIRC was one of
> Augustine's points -- it is after all an implication of the Christian claim
> that Jesus is/was God incarnate, ie, the intersection of the supernatural and
> the natural. BTW, the arguments about the "true nature" of Jesus are really
> arguments about the whether or not the natural and the supernatural can have
> any real (= knowable by a natural creature) relationship.


IMO, the natural is simply one form of God's decree. let there be
light, let there be garvity that is proportional to the square of the
distance etc. In that sense, there is no natural; only supernatural,
I'd say.
> 
> The rest of your post about proof is an exposition of radical skepticism,
> which I reject, since it's self-contradictory (Socrates' point IIRC - and
> since you are a Christian, you may have encountered the proof in C S Lewis,
> too.)

What my post showed was the logical necessity of accepting some things
on faithh. It *doesn't* support radical skepticism; on teh contrary it
rejects it.
> 
> My position on the existence of god is that "God exists" and "God does exist"
> are axioms.

For some people, that;s true. For others "God exists" or "God doesn't"
are the theorems that follow from *other* things they accept as
axioms. The point of my post was that whatever your view, your beliefs
include things you hold as axioms.

Keith



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