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August 21, 2006
Is the Possibility of God Logical?
Some of the best thinking on this subject was done by Carneades, the second-century BCE Greek Skeptic. Here are some quotes from Sextus Empiricus' later account of Carneades' reasoning:
If the Divine exists, it is certainly...both virtuous and happy.... But it does not possess all the virtues unless it possesses both continence and fortitude. And it does not possess these virtues unless there are certain things which are hard for God to abstain from and hard to endure.... For it is the man who holds firm when he is being cut and burned that shows fortitude, and not the man who is drinking sweet wine. There will, then, exist certain things which are hard for God to endure and hard to abstain from... But if so, God is receptive of vexation and of change for the worse, and hence of decay also. So that if God exists, he is perishable....
This is an arguments that flaws are needed for virtues, and therefore that gods, which don't have flaws, can't have many of the virtues.
If the Divine is all-virtuous and possesses wisdom, it possesses sound-deliberation.... And if it deliberates, there is something which is non-evident to it.... It is impossible that...anything...should...be non-evident to God.... From which it follows that he does not exist at all.
Posted by Mitchell Stephens at August 21, 2006 10:09 PM
Comments
"But it does not possess all the virtues unless it possesses both continence and fortitude"
No foundation for this statement and it is mearly a guess at best!
"And it does not possess these virtues unless there are certain things which are hard for God to abstain from and hard to endure"
Another blanket statement not backed by any fact or reason. I always find it interesting when those that DON'T beleive in God try to define or tell us what God is or is not.
Posted by: mark at August 22, 2006 3:40 PM
One of my skin cells has a better chance of understanding me than I do of understanding an infinitely small part of anything.
God is a word that means nothing/everything.
It is not only amusing that people who do not believe in God try to define the term, it is more amusing that almost everyone does. How funny is that! It would almost lead one to think humans think they are the end of evolution.
This is the story of my encounter with God:
Out of the Blue, God says to me (I am paraphrasing because the communication did not use language), "Everything ever said about me or anything to do with me is a lie, including this. That is all." And I have never heard from God again.
Discussing God is not logical. That would include the possiblity of God and God's hair length.
Posted by: Jay Saul at August 22, 2006 6:31 PM
No. Belief in a God requires faith, by definition, for the very fact that the existence of a God (or Gods, to be fair) is not a logical idea. (Maybe only for us dumb humans, but I'm at peace with that.)
I also agree that it's neither here nor there how we define 'the God' in question - it's all the same issue, and we aren't privy to the evidence.
Posted by: Lisa at August 22, 2006 10:40 PM
"But it does not possess all the virtues unless it possesses both continence and fortitude"No foundation for this statement and it is mearly a guess at best!
"And it does not possess these virtues unless there are certain things which are hard for God to abstain from and hard to endure"
Mark Twain once funnily remarked that (*not verbatim*) "George Washington said that he cannot tell a lie. Well, I can and I don't."
The idea is that in order to be truly moral (or virtuous) one has to have certain inclinations or desires and act in lieu of these desires.
Kant wrote (in)famously in the Groundwork to Metaphysics of Morals that if you were some cheery and nice person by disposition and naturally desired to help people, your helpful behavior would not really be "moral". (It wouldn't be immoral either.) Since you want to behave that way anyway, you are not acting from a sense of duty.
However, if you were some wretched misanthrope who hated everyone and helped the people around you from a sense of duty, then you were being moral. According to Kant, one must act (a)against one's inclinations from a sense of duty and (b)in harmony with the supreme principle of morality in order to be virtuous.
However, Kant on the other hand envisaged God as this supreme being who would, just by virtue of his constitution, always act morally. In other words, God cannot help but be moral.
Two questions:
(1)If God cannot help but be moral, is there something that he cannot do (i.e. be immoral) and therefore lacking omnipotence?
(2)If God cannot help but be moral, does he not fail in fulfilling (a)?(The topic of this post)
For (2), I don't think Gods would need to be virtuous in the way humans need to be. I think if a God existed and could not help but act in accordance with reason, I think such a God would still be virtuous.
Needless to say, seeing this notorious world as it is, as far as God is not acting, he is not in accordance with reason. As far as he is acting and this world is the product of his acts, his acts are not reasonable.
Posted by: Cihan Baran at August 23, 2006 3:09 AM
