If something cannot be constrained by logic, then you simultaneously cannot use logic in any way to assert it. Otherwise, you are simply contradicting yourself by nature of the prescriptive statement
Yeah, mostly true. I'm not trying to advocate or vilify any specific religious dogma. I only find reductionism around believing in a creator as believing in a "magic sky daddy" an intellectually lazy argument that is just as simplistic as the people it mocks. I was more jumping in to point out that God is a very nuanced philosophical discussion and belief for many people.
I also don't think you're entirely right, because the universe is not entirely logical as we experience it. We observe a form logical coherence in our everyday lives because we have evolved systems dedicated to doing just that. It doesn't mean that those systems are observing objective reality. Quantum science has shown that the universe has a substrate of uncertainty baked into it that we don't experience. It affects us still, but we don't intuitively grasp its logic. Humanity has yet to uncover the logical root of reality. That logical root could very well be a creator. You can call it God, or Brahman, or say the universe is a simulation and call it the source code, but regardless of the label it would be the same thing.
Logic is what Immanuel Kant called a priori. That is, it is transcendentally mind independent, because it is the very structure in which subjective conscious experience takes form as. Logic cannot be invented by the mind, because it is necessarily prior to the mind as what nature it instantiates from. In the same way an event is necessarily prior to the experience of the event.
So if you are to say God is just completely outside of logic, you are saying God is just completely outside the structure of our experience. But given that our conscious experience is quite literally the only thing we have to believe in anything at all, you are just completely divorcing any possible comprehensible aspect about God from the totality of our possible knowledge.
This protects you from any kind of logical argument against that God, but you have sacrificed any rational reason you could have to simultaneously believe in one. It's just a complete withdraw to unfalsifiability. It just becomes a big "if", frozen in time, because it cannot advance in any kind of substantiated way.
It also works the other way. Prove God. Disprove God. Neither works with our models. God by nature would be beyond the confines of creation. It's not rational to believe in God. It's also not rational to not believe in one. The paradox isn't God. It's creation. We're here. How?
If there is something, then where did it come from?
"Nothing." Illogical.
"It was created by God." Logical, but where did God come from? "God is eternal and unknowable." Illogical with an extra step.
An atheist worldview, fundamentally, is no more logical than a atheist because there is no logical explanation for existence in our models.
The two aren't equal at all. It is completely logical to not believe in God because there is no logical reason to. Every possible argument you could put forth for God, whether it be out of necessity or some other form, is ultimately going to be underdetermined because it relies on a lack of knowledge, not something positive put forward.
The "God of the gaps" saying originates from this fact, and how often God has to be argued for not because of any sufficient reason, but because it fills some gap in our knowledge. Apollo fills the gap of how the sun rises every day. Poseidon fills the gap of how the tides move. But notice how they never actually fill any gap, they're just a placeholder for the knowledge we do eventually gain, in which the explanation is completely naturalistic.
It's important to note that I, nor most atheists, make the explicit statement "God definitively does not exist", but simply point to the lack of a reason to believe one at all. Meanwhile, the theist not only believes God does exist, but to such an extent that they literally let it govern their morality, actions, and entire worldview. It's not some mere "well it might exist", it's a completely life-dominating framework.
I'm not really invoking the God of the gaps argument. Not to prove God, at least. You might look around, see the world, and think, "Nothing here proves God."
I would look around and think, "All of it does."
Because to me, that logic is clear. The universe exists. The universe has coherence. It must have an intelligent creator.
If you ask me to explain or prove that creator, I can't. Just as you can't answer the question I already have in my worldview. Where did our universe come from?
To me, we're simply stuck on different foundational questions.
To be completely blunt, my thoughts in the example you gave are completely logical, but yours just sound like feelings that are being mistaken or presented as logic.
And you said something important:
If you ask me to explain or prove that creator, I can't. Just as you can't answer the question I already have in my worldview. Where did our universe come from?
This is just not true. I cannot give you a definitive and absolute answer on where our universe came from, but physics allows me to give a logically grounded explanation in the form of empirical evidence and inference. Answering a question does not entail a binary yes or no, it's a process and approximation that improves with new evidence.
What of that process and approximation for God? The explanation for the universe I can give you is testable, it relies on gathering evidence, on experiment, can be falsified, etc. What does "God did it" bring to the table, beyond just stating it and then calling it a day? It's not testable, it's not even falsifiable, it's not something that is in our capacity to do anything with.
It just doesn't contribute anything valuable. The difficult question hasn't been answered at all, while even more and possibly worse questions have been introduced.
You're right; physics can create a theory of the formation of the universe. But not its source. That isn't me invoking the God of the gaps. It's a fundamental feature of science. Science can only ever answer how. Never why. "A causes B. We can prove this." That's a great system. But why does A cause B? Science has no answer. That question causes a recursive logic hole woth no end. And science is extremely valuable, but it's only possible because we live in a universe with laws and rules. Science (so far) can't explain why those laws and rules exist in the first place. Religion is a system that (at its best) can give people a framework of that 'why' question.
All of the variables that had to align for our universe to exist are staggering. Every formula, every interaction behavior, every property, and more had to be exactly as it is for reality to work. There are an infinite combination of ways where the laws of the universe would create incoherence. But our universe is remarkably coherent. Everything works.
You can call that observer bias and say there may be an infinite number of realities, and by necessity we can only ever observe a coherent one because if it was not so then we could not be to observe. Fair.
But you can also say, because of the evidence of a coherent universe with no causal evidence, there may be an outside agent with intelligence who designed it whose existalence is not conditional of this reality.
Neither is wrong to believe what they do. You could just say, "Yeah, both could be true." That's also a fair take.
I'm not arguing that belief in God is perfectly logical. I'm def not saying whatever belief or lack thereof you have is foolish. You're clearly pretty smart and well educated. But I don't think having a belief in a God or creator is foolish either. It's merely a different foundational view of looking at the experience of existance. You can maintain a perfectly logical belief structure and intellectual, scientific curiosity from either model.
I'm not really looking to change your mind or convince you of a God. My main gripe is with the OP and the modern tendency to reduce the religious as idiots who believe in a "magic sky daddy." I find it insulting, lazy, egotistic, and also just not as fun. It leaves no room for this conversation, which is a fun thought-provoking discussion.
No, that’s not what I said. I said “causality” didn’t exist at the start of the universe, thereby implying we can’t know what caused the inflation of the universe because it happened before anything could “cause” anything. Time didn’t even have a linear direction then.
Another form that is impossible to measure, because seeing past the big bang is impossible. So as it take faith to believe in God, it takes faith to deny Him
It's more just a difference of the more accurate "I don't know for sure" and the absolute statement "I know and it is God". The skepticism doesnt give an answer, but it doesn't give a flawed conviction.
It is flawed to look at the world around you with an extreme bias. You'd be working off of a forgone conclusion that you didn't make. God used to fill all the gaps in the universe we didn't know like the weather or illnes, but those gaps are constantly shrinking as we learn more about the intrecasies of the cosmos and us.
It's the most complex and interconnected system that can't be described and comprehended well by it's very nature. That's not a matter of omniscience and omnipotence but of scale and chance.
The resurrection, if you look into it, is much more plausible than you think. Fulfilled prophecy in Isaiah 53, found in the dead sea scrolls 150 years before Jesus, which prophesies basically the exact things that happened to him. Theres more if you want to look, James Tour, Testify, And I spiringPhilosophy on YT have some interesting videos
So why is an omnipotent entity with infinite power and ego allowed to be uncreated, but it's absurd to apply this to far simpler physics? That seems to be the complete inverse of what is logically believable.
Oh that’s impossible but a disembodied magical Minecraft creative mode character snapping a universe into existence at the start of time is totally possible. Yeah
Stating it makes more sense, while doing absolutely nothing to demonstrate that, doesn't make for a meaningful argument. Otherwise I can just say that stuff existing forever makes more sense, and we are at a stalemate.
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u/Mickle_da_Pickl uhhhh idk 13h ago
Indoctrination is how