j33buscr1p3s
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2004
- Messages
- 328
Protovack beat me to it with the island analogy.
David said:Spinoza has a good argument on what God really is.
Oui, oui.Spinoza has a good argument on what God really is.
Prove it. And please give me a solid definiton of this ontological perfection.slyvan wanderer said:I need to go finish a paper, so I didn't read the rest of the thread to say if anyone figured it out, but I was taught this here it is.
1.Being real is a perfection
The fact of existence is the fact of actualised properties. You are getting mixed up between the fact and the properties themselves. The two are not, and never have been interchangable or equatable. This is an outright category error, and since it is definitional existence, is always assuming the conclusion and thus proving nothing.2.If you think of that-which-nothing-greater-can-be-conceived than it must be perfect.
3.If it didn't exist it wouldn't be perfect
Only if you accept highly fallacious reasoning and suspect, ambiguous definitions.4.Thus it must exist.
Well clearly something must exist uncaused, but no argument exists that successfully proves it was God.I personally find the "matter can't come from nothing" argument
Even if this argument makes sense (how do quantum vacuum fluctuations fit in with this simplistic idea of causality?), "supernatural" is in the terms of this argument, simply a form of cause that does not conform to that observed in our universe. It's a very long stretch to go from that to a loving, personal God.added to the fact that science is based on casue and effect and every effect is a cause and every cause is an effect to mean that some super-natural had to have been the first cause, and its super-natural because it isn't an effect.
It is a ridiculously bad argument. You can just as easily conceive similar bets that are in the atheist's favour, and the possibilities are actually infinite in terms of the odds being stacked against you anyway, as it is quite easy to conceive of gods that will damn you to hell over something trivial and arbitrary (like rational non-beliefslyvan wanderer said:Also for atheists, look into Pascal's Wager. Its a good one, helped me, and requires no faith what so ever in the begining.
skywise said:I don't know what sort of position you are in to make claims about "what God really is" but I will add that yes, Spinoza's system of metaphysics and "God" is one of the most logically consistent philosophical texts ever written. And that I am really enjoying reading about it at the moment. :D