Can you *know* there is no God?

[moralist]

Brant writes:

You're having a little problem with some "objective reality" of God.

What I know poses no problems in my life. On the contrary it's an advantage, because God created the moral laws which govern the objective reality of the consequences of my actions. So it helps me to be mindful of my own personal responsibility so as to act in harmony with objective reality rather than in opposition to it. Stubbornly acting in opposition to objective reality is how people get ground up and spit out...

...and they only do it to themselves.

"God" is purely a mental invention...

Of course you are speaking only for yourself from your own experience, just as I am speaking only for myself from my experience.

So we have each of us saying something totally opposite... and yet each of us is speaking from our own personal experience. My view allows for your view... because in my view it's God's job to reveal Himself to you, and not yours to try to believe...

...as long as you're not trying to deny the real God out of resentment for an imaginary god you blame (unjustly accuse) of being "unfair".

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

It's the God of Reality you speak of, not the God of Himself. To be commanded it/he must be obeyed. You object to this accurate formulation, which is secular, because faith is easier than a philosophy of reason--having to study it and all that.

Rand endorsed that commanded be obeyed stuff

--Brant

[moralist]

Brant writes:

It's the God of Reality you speak of, not the God of Himself.

It's the God greater than reality I speak of.

Reality obeys the laws He created... just as we do.

You're free to try to violate the law of gravity,

but you'll only destroy yourself.

Moral law operates exactly the same way.

Greg

[Wolf DeVoon]

On this particular thread, I'd rather not read or address the electrician. Still waiting for 'mpp' to define God.

[moralist]

Simply put me on ignore, Wolf... and I'll graciously acquiesce by disappearing from your God-exponged world forever.

Greg

[Wolf DeVoon]

Sorry, Greg. Pass. Waiting for thread originator 'mpp' to define God.

[Brant Gaede]

Brant writes:

It's the God of Reality you speak of, not the God of Himself.

It's the God greater than reality I speak of.

Reality obeys the laws He created... just as we do.

You're free to try to violate the law of gravity,

but you'll only destroy yourself.

Moral law operates exactly the same way.

Greg

Then God is not real.

--Brant

you're now officially off the rails

[Brant Gaede]

On this particular thread, I'd rather not read or address the electrician. Still waiting for 'mpp' to define God.

The thread was started last March. Mpp has been off line for over two months.

--Brant

[Wolf DeVoon]

On this particular thread, I'd rather not read or address the electrician. Still waiting for 'mpp' to define God.

The thread was started last March. Mpp has been off line for over two months.

--Brant

Oh, rats. I'll go back and read the rest of the thread, see if anyone else offered a definition of God.

-----

No definition anywhere. Hinted at, but nothing specific to comment on.

[Brant Gaede]

An old white guy up in the sky. The beard is not optional.

[Selene]

Wolf:

Did you see what I highlighted that Einstein had written?

In contrast to the “religious paradise” of his youth, Einstein wrote that he had come to find another kind of faith—in the “huge world… out yonder… which stands before us like a great riddle.”

This is quite close to Greg's perception and I thought it would work as a discussion/argument proposition.

Lol and you are waiting for the Virgin Prom Queen...

How about we work with that one.

A...

[Wolf DeVoon]

Wolf:

Did you see what I highlighted that Einstein had written?

In contrast to the “religious paradise” of his youth, Einstein wrote that he had come to find another kind of faith—in the “huge world… out yonder… which stands before us like a great riddle.”

This is quite close to Greg's perception and I thought it would work as a discussion/argument proposition.

Lol and you are waiting for the Virgin Prom Queen...

How about we work with that one.

A...

I'd like to, but have no idea what it means, 'a great riddle.' What riddle?

[Selene]

Wolf:

Did you see what I highlighted that Einstein had written?

In contrast to the “religious paradise” of his youth, Einstein wrote that he had come to find another kind of faith—in the “huge world… out yonder… which stands before us like a great riddle.”

This is quite close to Greg's perception and I thought it would work as a discussion/argument proposition.

Lol and you are waiting for the Virgin Prom Queen...

How about we work with that one.

A...

I'd like to, but have no idea what it means, 'a great riddle.' What riddle?

That would be the universal laws that control reality would be my guess...

I sat on a beach all night in St. John's V.I. and pondered that riddle...Cinnamon Bay...

[Wolf DeVoon]

universal laws that control reality

 

Are these in dispute? Not trying to be cute, just puzzled. And has nothing to do with God, right?

[Selene]

Let's stick to Einstein since that was why I resurrected this thread.

Have you read the link?

[Wolf DeVoon]

Let's stick to Einstein since that was why I resurrected this thread.

Have you read the link?

I found this: "For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition."

Didn't see a direct link to the great riddle. Any idea what he may have meant by it?

[moralist]

Wolf writes:

Sorry, Greg. Pass. Waiting for thread originator 'mpp' to define God.

Putting me on ignore has no effect on anyone else's posts... only on what you don't want to see.

Greg

[Selene]

In response to a question letter, from a schoolgirl in 1936, that asked if scientists "pray?"

Albert Einstein endeavored to express his view of God as forthrightly as possible to a public eager to know where he stood in the popular conflict between science and religion. In 1936, a sixth-grade girl named Phyllis wrote him a letter on behalf of her Sunday School class. “We have brought up the question,” she wrote, “Do scientists pray? It began by asking whether we could believe in both science and religion.” Einstein’s reply is somewhat equivocal. He is clear enough in stating that a scientific fidelity to the “laws of nature” means that “a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish.” This would seem to settle the question. However, he goes on to invoke the philosopher Spinoza’s god and distinguish between intellectual humility and wonder, on the one hand, and a more popular, supernatural faith on the other.

However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.

But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/do_scientists_pray_einstein_responds.html

[Wolf DeVoon]

Thanks for highlighting the bit you found interesting. 100% opaque to me, what Einstein meant about 'spirit'.

everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe ... In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling

Pursuit of science leads to religion? -- fail. I suspect that Einstein was politically constrained from giving an honest reply to the Sunday School kid. Typical of all evil, a prevarication.

(later)

Not said to belittle anyone who enjoys life or experiences a sense of awe apprehending big stuff like oceans, volcanic eruptions, mountaintops, starry night skies, heavy equipment, explosions, motor racing, or photos from space, although I'd rather not revisit the mental grease trap about The Sublime. Maybe I've had too much adventure. A cosy fire, a bowl of soup and a warm bed are fine this time of year, with a stupid dog waking me at 3 a.m. with an urgent report: "Hey! The cat wants to come in!" Okay, okay. I'll get up. Sit. Stay.

Locals say they live in God's country. It's very pleasant. Rugged and decent and cheerful, superior in every way to Chicago or Los Angeles -- or Yemen http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/sudan-saudi-arabia-war-yemen-houthi-economy.html#

I live on the human scale. There's a gun rack near the front door, a shed full of tools, and an old 4x4 parked outside. Last thing I want to do is bump shoulders on a crowded subway or gallop a stallion on the beach again.

[Brant Gaede]

Let's stick to Einstein since that was why I resurrected this thread.

Have you read the link?

I found this: "For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition."

Didn't see a direct link to the great riddle. Any idea what he may have meant by it?

He hadn't got his brain around the totality of it all. No one has--yet--and maybe no one ever will. Einstein spent his life after his reputational work trying to, as with finding one theory to tie it all together. The more we find out about reality--one physicist or astrophysicist said--the weirder (and more complicated) it seems. The statement paraphrase attributed to Einstein is just a variation of Newton's being on the beach occasionally finding a little more something new with the massiveness of the yet un-identified all around him.

God is what "God" explains that we can't and we can't understand anyway so it's all in His head and we are stuck with secular modesty (correct) or secular immodesty (incorrect), but if we defer to Him we help avoid the trap of immodesty and the trap of unproductive modesty as God kicks ass for we are made in His image and if He be great we'd better be too--that is, greatly do-good human (and obey the patriarch).

God is all allegory which is the only way to logically say he's more than reality itself (God is made in Man's image who in turn is the man behind the curtain [that's what the Pope is all about]).

God is as God does (what's he doing--that is, what is man doing?).

Man is God and God is Man--both are ideas, but metaphysically there are only people as referents.

--Brant

godly I yam

[Guyau]

.

Wunderbar!

Is the law of identity a creation of God or coexistent with It? If the former, then God had no identity, e.g. no perfection nor power, until Its creation of the law of identity. Anyone accepting Rand’s principle Existence is identity, without equivocation, would rightly say such a pre-creation thing as It therefore does not exist. It has to possess power or not possess power, and whichever of those It would be is an identity. So turn to the option that the law of identity is coexistent with God; the deity does not create it. But if It does not dictate that It has identity (such as being an existent having creative power) and does not dictate that Existence is identity, then it also does not dictate that noncontradiction is a right principle of thought. Then it does not dictate the simultaneity constraint on that principle of thought, nor the temporality of existence or thought. As time requires no such dictation, so spacetime of which time is a slice and so light and matter and their lawful relations to spacetime require no such dictation, no cosmic It with a dictating mind.

The ultimate whole is Existence. It and its identities and its laws and symmetries stand alone. That is all and plenty.*

[Selene]

FYI all...

Here is the translation of that last letter to the philosopher Gutkind, in response to his book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt.

Translated Transcript

Princeton, 3. 1. 1954

Dear Mr Gutkind,

Inspired by Brouwer's repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me. What struck me was this: with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element. This unites us as having an "unAmerican attitude."

Still, without Brouwer's suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and whose thinking I have a deep affinity for, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual "props" and "rationalization" in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

Yours,

A. Einstein

A...

[moralist]

Wolf writes:

Pursuit of science leads to religion? -- fail.

He actually said "leads to a religious feeling"... not "leads to religion".

Consider what science does. It can only discover the pre-existing order of laws. It cannot create those laws. The only reason anything exists is because of the order of laws making its existence possible. So the deeper scientists investigate, the more infinitely intricate subtleties of law they continue to discover.

This is what inspires awe.

Greg

[moralist]

Adam writes:

In response to a question letter, from a schoolgirl in 1936, that asked if scientists "pray?"

Yes they do... they pray for government funding.

Greg

[Selene]

From a letter to Murray W. Gross, Apr. 26, 1947, Einstein Archive, reel 33-324, Jammer, p. 138 - 139:

When question about God and religion on behalf of an aged Talmudic scholar, Einstein replied:

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropomorphic concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near to those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem — the most important of all human problems.

This is a site that is devoted to just Spinoza and Einstein and I was led to it from two comments on one of the prior links...

Eisenstein came to this conclusion after discussion in regard the observer effect in quantum physics. There is, in fact, a spirit, but it is not outside of men, it is within men. It is the consciousness; that which separates all people, giving them each a sense of “I am”. It has begun to make more logical sense to conclude that the very fundamental essence of nature (this formless thing we call energy) IS consciousness. Lending credence to the idea that most religious works may not have been so “naive” in and of themselves, but rather completely misinterpreted simply by thinking GOD is outside yourself.

And the above one which is in harmony with PDS' comment on oneness...

@Hanoch: My commentary on Einstein’s view has nothing to do with my own biases, be they what they are. In matters of “faith,” Einstein hewed closely to the views of Baruch Spinoza, who defined God as Nature or the laws of nature, and whom

Einstein read as a determinist with no belief in supernatural beings. That’s the allusion he’s making in his letter. This site explains his views more thoroughly: http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/spinoza2.html

http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/spinoza2.html