Posted on 02/27/2011 12:52:38 PM PST by SeanG200
My son (a believer) and one of his childhood friends (an atheist and extreme liberal) are taking a philosophy 101 class at the local college here in town and they are debating the Euthyphro Dilemma. There are two audio files in this post that DESTROY the atheists argument in regards to this position, not to mention that this is in fact NOT a dilemma: [QUOTE] ...While Plato was dealing with polytheism and a form of monism, this argument as dealt with herein is response to the challenges presented to theism. However, his use of a third option is what we present here as well… making this dilemma mute. What was Plato’s solution?
“You split the horns of the dilemmas by formulating a third alternative, namely, God is the good. The good is the moral nature of God Himself. That is to say, God is necessarily holy, loving, kind, just, and so on. These attributes of God comprise the good. God’s moral character expresses itself toward us in the form of certain commandments, which became for us our moral duties.
Hence, God’s commandments are not arbitrary but necessarily flow from His own nature. They are necessary expression of the way God is.One of the most important notes to mention is that once there is a third alternative, there is no longer a dilemma. [/QUOTE]
People will believe what they want to believe. Just because they believe doesn't mean it's true. So, Protagoras was right: the buck stops with man. It all comes down to what we believe is right or wrong.
Much like the dialogue which is the subject of this thread, I am just trying to learn. "-)
For Plato, this God Beyond is Absolute Mind and Absolute Eternal Being. You need absolute being before you can derive, not only the truths of the moral order, but creaturely existence itself.
And this Absolute Being has the "nature" of: the Good, Truth, Beauty, Justice, and Love — all of which are the very foundations, not only of the laws of nature, but of the moral law as well.
Are you talking about the collective WE, as in what we believe, in general, as a society, or the We individualized into each person? As you know, they are different. The social WE becomes what we call our culture. Individuals in a culture differ widely. This thread is a good example in that the culture of this thread is Christianity but there are many opinions about it. The majority are in general agreement but you differ.
The majority here agree with your view of the Scientific Method and its place and importance in society. No one is doubting you there and no one disagrees with you. We are simply saying there is more to it than that. You seem to stop at Newtonian Laws and Mechanics and they continue on to Einsteinian Physics (will you ladies please clean that up for me?) where they see laws much more far reaching.
You can stay at the depot where you stopped or you can get back on the train and continue the journey. We are simply saying there is an exciting journey ahead and it extends far beyond where you got off.
Betty Boop and Alamo Girl wrote a book titled Don't Let The Science Get You Down TIMOTHY which I highly recommend to you. They do an excellent job of spanning those two worlds.
I am sure whoever invites you to these threads does so hoping that something will resonate with you. They have only your interest at heart. They don't earn a commission from God for each soul reached. If that is too bothersome to you, you can simply not RSVP.
And, primarily, the book is about God.
No, so far I have not known two individuals who believed in exactly the same thing.
The rest of your post is nonsequitur, but I will address it via PM.
In discussing something which I have already stated is unprovable how can it be any other way?
For you to presume that I got off long before some imaginary desitnation is just pretentious BS on your part.
Is that nonsequiter? Seems to be to me. However, I don't insist that all conversation be a provable statement.
As for Newtonian physics, that’s what we live in. That’s our reality. The rest is theory.
Hasn't the rest, this stuff that is theory, led us to more scientific progress? Isn't that your Gold Standard, that it just works, that you can "do things with it?" Doesn't that theory stuff meet that standard? What about E=MC₂? Did anything ever come of that?
How do you prove happiness, beauty, wonder, glee, peace, serenity, security, sensuousness, loneliness, sorrow, magnificence, and all those other emotions that are a constant part of life? Do you deny they exist because of the inability to prove them? How does one appraise poetry, art, sculpture or music? Aren't they part of life? Yes, they are. They are part of the spiritual side of existence. Many would say that they are what life is all about.
You say love and beauty and the rest are not the same as God, that God and Spirituality are entirely different? How? Each is unprovable. Each has to be experienced to be real. Each is wonderful in its own way. Is it too big a reach to say that one undergirds the rest? Why don't you prove it doesn't?
When discussing things with you, when constantly dealing with your inconsistencies, an old admonition keeps popping into my mine. You probably remember it. It is the one about wrestling with a pig. However, since I am already this muddy, I will close with wishing you well. I encourage you to grab onto to your spiritual nothingness, to embrace it, to love it, to become one with it, to squeeze it hard into even more nothingness. Perhaps, like squeezing a lump of coal, you will come up with a diamond of emptiness.
I meant to ping you ladies to number 27.
As for me - unless I am compelled in the Spirit otherwise, I decline to engage posters who insist on controlling the rules of engagement, including the dictionary and what constitutes proof.
I think I have finally reached that level. I am a slow learner. I was reluctant to leave a lost soul lying in the ditch but the ditch is where some seem to prefer. The constant repetition of the same old thing finally wore me down. I mistakenly thought that sooner or later being hit in the head with a 2X4 would have the desired effect.
I am currently reading a series of essays by Dr. Thomas Sowell and a couple of them seem to fit his situation. He is talking about Progressives, well more accurately he is talking about Useful Idiots, and the difficulty in reaching them with common sense. He posits that they feel they are on the side of idealism and that they stick doggedly to their world view regardless of any facts which show the error of their ways. He says they prefer the idealized view of the Progressives because it allows them to feel superior to the rest of us. They care more than we do, in their eyes, so they are superior by default and that is more important to them than any real world facts.
I see this situation only slightly different in that kosta50 feels superior to us because of his devotion to "science and reality." Nothing will shake that because it would require him to relinquish his position of superiority.
No, kosta50, I can't prove that but like Rhett Butler, "Frankly, I don't give a damn!"
It appears the most common line of anti-God attack these days is to define "belief" and "knowledge" as mutually exclusive. And once the correspondent has acquiesced to the definition, I suspect in the hopes of actually communicating, the attack continues that for lack of "proof" all beliefs as equally valid. Thereafter, God is mocked and equated to pink unicorns and flying spaghetti monsters.
It is reminiscent of the common line of anti-God attack on the old crevo threads. There the attacker would define "creationism" to mean "Young Earth Creationism" and then argue against those beliefs all the while his correspondents would be patiently trying to explain that "creationism" means a belief in Creation not a particular theological interpretation of Scripture.
In both cases, it was anti-God, and more specifically anti-Christ, activism.
Then Mind-numbed Robot, you replied: Are you talking about the collective WE, as in what we believe, in general, as a society, or the We individualized into each person? As you know, they are different.
The majority here agree with your view of the Scientific Method and its place and importance in society. No one is doubting you there and no one disagrees with you. We are simply saying there is more to it than that. You seem to stop at Newtonian Laws and Mechanics and they continue on to Einsteinian Physics (will you ladies please clean that up for me?) where they see laws much more far reaching.Great observation dear MNR re: the distinction between "the collective WE, as in what we believe, in general, as a society," and "the We individualized into each person? As you know, they are different." My impression is that kosta50 utterly rejects the former in principle. I guess that leaves him with the latter.
Which seems to express the idea of man as "atomized ego," a concept that is blind to the idea of man as a "social animal." Indeed, an "atomized ego" looks antisocial on its face. But it is only a pure abstraction anyway, a "formalist reduction" of human nature that answers well to the classical Newtonian observational methods....
Hence, human nature has been transformed from the "biological" to the "mechanical." For some strange reason, this conceptualization of things seems to make kosta feel happy....
Of course, this approach strips out anything about man and the human condition that does not conform with the Newtonian paradigm:
This is the fundamental and yet perennially astonishing hypothesis which stands at the heart of the scientific Weltanschauung: the concept of bifurcation (to use Whitehead's term). More explicitly, what is being bifurcated or cut asunder are the so-called primary and secondary qualities: the things that can be described in mathematical terms, and the things that cannot. Logically speaking, the bifurcation postulate is tantamount to the identification of the so-called physical universe (the world as conceived by the physicist) with the real world per se, through the device of relegating all else (all that does not fit this conception) to an ontological limbo, situated outside the world of objectively existing things. The postulate thus eliminates at one stroke precisely those aspects of the world which prove to be recalcitrant to mathematical description: all elements, that is, which cannot be reduced to extension and number. — Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and TranscendenceExamples of "excludable elements":
At the level of common sense, it is evident that human beings have experiences other than sensory perceptions, and it is equally evident that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle explored reality on the basis of experiences far removed from perception. The Socratic "Look and see if this is not the case" does not invite one to survey public opinion but asks one to descend into the psyche, that is, to search reflective consciousness. Moreover. it is evident that the primary nonsensory modes of experience address dimensions of human experience superior in rank and worth to those sensory perception does: experiences of the good, beautiful, and just, of love, friendship, and truth, of all human virtue and vice, and of divine reality.... Experience of "things" is modeled on the subject–object dichotomy of perception in which the consciousness intends the object of cognition. But such a model of experience and knowing is ultimately insufficient to explain the operations of consciousness with respect to the nonphenomenal reality men approach in moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences. Inasmuch as such nonsensory experiences are constitutive of what is distinctive about human existence itself — and of what is most precious to mankind — a purported science of man unable to take account of them is egregiously defective. — Ellis SandozI've run on long, and before getting to a final point I'd wanted to make, which gets us back to the Einsteinian vs. Newtonian view of things and their relative "adequacy" in making trustworthy descriptions of the universe. I'd love to get to it, but can only give a brief sketch here.
Think of the world in terms of a hierarchy: macrocosm, mesocosm, microcosm. In the macrocosm (the universe at large, in its totality), relativity theory dominates. In the mesocosm (where man lives and experiences), the classical Newtonian laws come into the fore. In the microworld, we are in the world of quantum physics, with all its "uncertainty," a/k/a "indeterminacy."
The point here is that Newtonian physics "break down" in the macroworld. The very laws of causality break down in the quantum microworld. To say that the full truth of reality is or can be conveyed by Newtonian physics/mechanics is simply nonsense to me, on the foregoing grounds.
Thank you ever so much, dear Mind-Numbed Robot, for your outstanding, insightful, delightful essay/post!
You got to the root of the argument. Plato is talking about the GREEK gods as a basis for morality, rather than the Judeo-Christian God.
Indeed, dearest sister in Christ! I suppose the Antichrist and his party must "define" belief and knowledge as mutually exclusive. But they never show the reasoning behind this ultimate presupposition of theirs.
A rational person will ask them to do this, before engaging them further.
You aren't going to get anywhere with a person who mocks God and equates Him to "pink unicorns and flying spaghetti monsters" anyway. Such a person would appear quite irrational to me.... Unserious at best.
Plus the idea of "proof" properly belongs to mathematics and logic. There's nothing in the phenomenal world that can be "proved" in this sense — not since Planck's constant, and Gödel's Incompleteness principle became topical.
JMHO FWIW
Thank you ever so much for your wonderful observations, dearest sister in Christ!
If one can be convinced to believe in nothing, then one can be convinced to believe in anything. That is exactly why I encouraged kosta to embrace his "nothingness" and to hold it close and squeeze it, for that is all he will ever have.
Also, as we earlier said, the aggressive anti-God attacks are coming from the Marxists/Communists, believers in Dialectical Materialism. The very foundation of DM is a denial of God, a total rejection of God. God is the enemy. In addition, knowledge is class-based. The Proletariat has a different perception of reality than the Bourgeoisie and each reality is true for each group. Then there are the elites who are the only ones that know the 'true truth" and are therefore destined to rule the others. (Talk about a screwed up philosophy! I think we could sell the idea of an Easter Bunny easier than we could convince people of that! Yet, look how many believe it.)
So, naturally, these are the people who would be attempting to obfuscate the issues linguistically.
Inasmuch as such nonsensory experiences are constitutive of what is distinctive about human existence itself — and of what is most precious to mankind — a purported science of man unable to take account of them is egregiously defective. — Ellis Sandoz
Yeah, just like I said. Didn't I say that? If I didn't I sure did mean to. :-)
The importance of that statement relative to what I just said, not what Sandoz said but what I actually said, is that Communism is always soulless, totally lacking in joy and creativity. It is remarkable they had the Bolshoi Ballet. That results from eliminating from life that which makes life worthwhile.
As an add-on - even the Bolshoi Ballet is joyless. It is mechanical rather than artistic.
While looking for something else I was reminded of the prayer with which I try to start each day. I don’t remember when or where I got it.
Dear God,
Since you are all of experience and are the comprehensive and unfailing Law of the Universe, You have given me all I need to handle all problems and events and have assured me of Your unfailing reliability to continue to do so.
Yours is the Glory, Yours is the Wisdom, and I have absolute faith and trust in You. I worship you with awe, thanks, love and rejoicing.
Amen
Exactly, PapaBear3625!
Socrates was condemned by a jury of 500 of his fellow citizens (by a margin of some 27 votes) for "corrupting the youth of Athens." So, how did he corrupt them? One gathers he suggested that the Olympians were not good models of morality, or even of reality. The Olympians were just as flawed, just as "disordered" as man. Through this recognition, Socrates "pioneered" monotheism — to the understanding that the order of the Cosmos could not have been established by the Olympians, although supposedly they were responsible for maintaining it. To Socrates/Plato, this clearly pointed to the One God "Beyond" the Cosmos.... That is, to a god who utterly transcends the Cosmos of his making.
Looking back over the whole stretch of human history, this is the second time the concept of monotheism arose. The first was of ancient Egypt and the pharaoh known as Akhnaton, or the Son of the Sun, or Son of the god Aten. He acceded to the throne in 1383 B.C., but didn't rule very long. There is suspicion that he was poisoned. But of course, he had really ticked off the priestly class, what with his insistence on "one" god, rather than the plurality of gods served by the Priests of Thebes.
Anyhoot, this first approximation to "montheism" did not long survive the death of Akhnaton. Egyptian religion and spiritual practice reverted to the "status quo ante" of a pantheon of multiple gods....
Roughly four hundred years before the Incarnation of Christ, it seems Socrates/Plato found the "one God" again. And this time, the concept did not die out.
Indeed, as St. Justin Martyr has told us, the Incarnation of Christ was the "fulfillment" of Greek (classical) philosophy just as much as it was a fulfillment of the Israelite prophecies and history....
Anyhoot, dear PapaBear3625, you are so right (IMHO): The Euthyphro should not be read as a detraction of monotheism or Christianity. It is a "squabble" about the human downside of polytheism.
Thank you ever so much for writing!
I don't understand the point of your question. Even alchemy led to more progress. Trials and errors are a learning curve.
How do you prove happiness, beauty, wonder, glee, peace, serenity, security, sensuousness, loneliness, sorrow, magnificence, and all those other emotions that are a constant part of life? Do you deny they exist because of the inability to prove them?
They "exist" as states, just as fatigue, anxiety, etc. They are anecdotal narratives of out psychological state. And no, here is no "happiness" per say, but many feelings that people call 'happiness" that share similar but not necessarily the same characteristics. There is no agreement what success is, happiness, love, etc. is, or even what or who God is.
How does one appraise poetry, art, sculpture or music? Aren't they part of life? Yes, they are. They are part of the spiritual side of existence. Many would say that they are what life is all about.
Sure, in as many meanings and mental forms as there are people. What is art to you may not be art to me. What is love to you may be nothing to me. What is poetry to you may be garbage to me, etc.
You say love and beauty and the rest are not the same as God, that God and Spirituality are entirely different?
When did I say that? And since you are on the subject, what is God?
Each is unprovable. Each has to be experienced to be real. Each is wonderful in its own way. Is it too big a reach to say that one undergirds the rest? Why don't you prove it doesn't?
How do you know you are experiencing God?
I will close with wishing you well. I encourage you to grab onto to your spiritual nothingness, to embrace it, to love it, to become one with it, to squeeze it hard into even more nothingness. Perhaps, like squeezing a lump of coal, you will come up with a diamond of emptiness.
You are so bitter and presumptuous while trying to be sweet. I feel for you.
Dear brother in Christ, of course Communism is always soulless; for it is an ideological machine....
What a wonderful essay/post you have written, dear brother in Christ! Thank you, oh so very much!
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