I will post whatever pisses me off on any certain day.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Why I have become a strong atheist.

To start off with I need to define what I mean, because strong atheist has this connotation that strong atheists can and have disproven god. What I mean by it is that I am certain there is no god, and its not because I think I can disprove god its because I think god is an incoherent concept and anything it tries to refer to cannot exist . In the following I will explain why I am certain at this time there is no god.

Now before we can talk about the existence of something that something must be meaningful. We can't say that an unie exists until we give it properties of what it is. I can't say to you that it is not a computer monitor and not a backpack and say thats it's properties. It's still meaningless because i haven't said what it is just what it isn't. It is ok to say what something is if and only if you have something called a "universe of discourse". As an example, you have a box within said box you have a pencil and a pen I ask you that I am thinking of something inside the box and that something is not the pen. Obviously that something is the pencil because it has the universe of discourse of the box, but if I give you no universe of discourse then unie becomes utterly meaningless. The term applies to too many things for it to actually exist as a separate entity.

Now lets apply this to god, how is god defined? What is god? I'll for the sake of argument use Yahweh aka the Abrahamic god as an example. Usually he is defined as Omnipotent, Omnieicent, Omnibenevolt. Are these actually positive attributes? lets see.

  • Omnipotent- All powerful
  • Omniscient- All knowing
  • Omnibenevolent- All loving
Thats what the common meanings are given of these in order to say they are postive attibutes, but heres what it is actually saying.

  • Omnipotent- without limits on power
  • Omniscient- without limits on knowledge
  • Omnibenevolent- not being able to hate
Notice these things when looked at their meaning actually are negative traits. They are saying that god basically has no limits. By saying something has no limits you define out of existence any kind of universe of discourse. Using my prior example of unie if i said a unie had no limits does this give any kind of positive attribute? does it describe what it is? Does it have a universe of discourse? I'm pretty sure it should be clear it does not and cannot because having no limits can not be compared to anything other then to have limits. So lets examine what it is to have limits and why having none becomes utterly meaningless as an attribute.

All things that we has humans know have limits. Humans have limits. Nature has limits. The universe even has limits. So how can we say that something has no limits if everything we know and can detect has limitations? We have nothing to compare it to. What other things have no limitations? Just god and nothing else. You can't say that withing a box i have something without limits because by definition the box has limits so everything within the box has limitations.

So in conclusion until someone is able to give me postive attributes of god


Please ask any questions or maybe tell me ways I can clarify this post.

6 Comments:

Blogger Atheism Sucks! sucks said...

Excellent blog, Zach!

The concept of God is very contradictory. I feel sorry for all the theists.

I hope to read more blogs. ;o)

3:57 PM

 
Blogger Atheism Sucks! sucks said...

You've been tagged! :o)

4:49 AM

 
Blogger Ian said...

You have fallen prey to the fallacy of "Judeo-Christian-ism". (Its not really a word, but I am defining it now). Jewish conceptions of G-d are very different from Christian concepts, as diverse as the Christian concepts are. There is very little in common between Jewish belief, thought and practice and that of Christianity, despite sharing some texts.

While the Christian conception of G-d is often all-loving & all-merciful, the Jewish conception is neither.

Lets back up a moment and look at the concepts of Justice and Mercy. If you are entirely merciful, you would forgive everyone for everything they did no matter why they did it. If you were entirely just, stupid things that children did (children are very good at being mean) could merit being punished for much of their life, and they would never be able to learn from their mistakes. But you can't be both extremely just and extremely merciful at the same time. So to the Jewish mind, G-d is balanced between these two attributes (and amongst the rest of G-d's attributes).

But to say that everything has limits is a bit of an overstatement, and a departure from the previous discussion of a universe of discourse. If what you are saying is that within your universe of discourse is only things with limits, then I would concur that your universe of discourse does not permit my conception of G-d. But this is a limitation on discourse - if I maintained that we are only going to allow items that are the color red into my universe of discourse, that does not suddenly mean that everything of another color does not exist.

To say that because everything we know if is finite, we have know way of knowing if something else is not finite would make large portions of mathematics invalid. We can know that a series of numbers is infinite without enumerating them. We can know that the Lambchop song continues forever (you know, "This is the song that never ends...") without singing it forever.

8:43 PM

 
Blogger Zach said...

So Ian can you define the jewish god for me?

9:10 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

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5:39 PM

 
Blogger Zach said...

@anonymous you did not leave your e-mail address

8:21 PM

 

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