BigBallinStalin wrote:daddy1gringo wrote:Now here's my point: Even when I try to be unbiased and treat our conclusions equally, I still come up with that we both look at the same facts and draw a conclusion that is in accord with our preference. You that there is no (G)god and people made up the stories, and I that there is one and he is communicating. Frankly, I think any decent detective would have to choose mine as making more sense: if there is a commonality to the stories, it is because there is something to them, and specifically something to the parts they have in common.
This is where we come to a standstill.
Here's a correlation. You posit, "god did it," which can't be falsified. (It could equally be possible that Flying Gnomes did it, so it depends on how one wishes to define "God", which is why I'll give deists a break).
What's more likely is that humans did it. We're ingrained with a desire to know and to understand, so we'll come up with explanations. When some of the explanations are placed into the realm of the unfalsiable, they can't be countered. God did it, Flying Gnomes did--there's no way to know which did which.
What is incorrect about stating that humans created the idea of "God"? Humans have written the books and have created the oral stories. That's evident--it can be seen and tested. If you posit, "god guided their hands," then that can't be shown--that's just faith talking.
OK, here’s how I see our impasse. You initially posit your model of people making of the stories about God as something compatible with there being a (G)god behind the stories. I could probably agree with that. Once you come to your conclusions though, you shift that model over to one of people creating the stories and the concept of God itself,
as opposed to there being an actually existing (G)god, which is not the same thing, and which I can no longer agree with.
Another problem is that you group all “stories about (G)god” together, so if God is behind people creating the stories, they would have to be equally true. For example:
BigBallinStalin wrote:[the production process] can even take the "ultimate god input" as given. The pattern which you should recognize is that nearly all religious texts are always backed by the "divine inspiration" claim; however, the religious good differs. The outcomes are not the same, so the religions contradict each other (even if god is the ultimate cause). Doesn't that strike you as strange? Are you beginning to see how this pattern unfolds?
As I said. my (unfalsifiable) position is that the God who actually exists has expressed who he is and what his desire and plan is, more or less clearly and specifically in Jesus, who is God himself, a spirit, in human flesh, and in the New Testament which he had written about what Jesus did and said, and written to instruct the body of believers that he planted. He has also communicated various things about himself in nature and in the desires of our hearts, (this would correspond with the needs you talk about in your model). Without the specific revelations of the truth, the people in every culture who are sensitive to such things make their best guesses. This model not only has no problem with the similarities and differences in different religious traditions, it is a better predictor of just what those will be.
For example, it has been pointed out that the concept of resurrection from the dead is not unique to Christianity; Dionysus, Mithras and Tammuz, among many others were, according to their stories, killed and brought back from the dead. A spiritually, or metaphysically minded individual from any culture is likely to see this concept in creation. The seemingly dead trees of winter sprout to life again in the spring. The fruit falls to the ground and begins to decompose , but new life springs from the seeds contained in them. The caterpillar goes into a form that looks like an inanimate object, but emerges as something not only alive, but more beautiful, ethereal and reproductive.
So our local shaman or prophet is going to see resurrection in the nature and plan of whatever diety(ies) he believes in. The perceptions from nature are also coupled with the desire in us to survive death, and the hope that our loved ones who have died are not lost to us forever (as you describe). Resurrection, and an eternal life after this one are going to be a part of a great many “stories”, and so they are. Our shaman or prophet has to guess at the particulars, where that resurrection fits into the plan and what that afterlife is like. Some of those guesses will be better than others, but none is likely to hit the nail on the head of how God himself explains it. Many will no doubt feel or claim that their insight was given to them by inspiration from (G)od, but as you never tire of saying, just because someone thinks or claims that, doesn’t mean it is true. There we have the common threads but different details which you claim I should “find strange”.
Obviously it would seem to you arrogant to claim that the one I believe in is true while the others are not, and why I feel that claim is justified is a whole ‘nother subject. My point is that in what you said, you completely ignored the possibility of doing so, and it’s central to my view.
So to answer the last part of your post:
What is incorrect about stating that humans created the idea of "God"? Humans have written the books and have created the oral stories.
Because it doesn’t follow from the evidence you are using. People write about lots of things; some of them actually exist and some do not. People write about flowers and sea turtles. They write science books of the facts about them, and children’s stories where they talk. But flowers and sea turtles are things that actually exist: the authors did not “create the idea of” them. Now I realize that flowers and sea turtles are falsifiable; it can be objectively proven that they exist while the same is not necessarily true of God, but for my analogy it had to be something that we agree does indeed exist.
For the best I could come up with to solve that problem, I looked up the Wiki article on quarks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkGell-Mann and Zweig could be said to have “created the idea of” quarks, but quarks are something that actually exists; they did not invent them. The physics community wasn’t convinced of the quark model’s validity until some other guys discovered the third of six types of quark. (“History” section, paragraph 7) In the decade in between, and probably before, physicists believed because of certain evidences that the particles of which protons and neutrons are made up did exist and had various names for them and various theories of their nature, qualities, and behavior. However, Gell-Mann and Zweig had the correct and accurate one. Does this sound familiar?
Once again, I realize that quarks would probably be considered something falsifiable: something that we can prove exists, or not -- now. But if we put ourselves in that decade in between, quarks are something that actually exists, though perhaps some people don’t think so; people have different stories about them that agree in certain respects and conflict in others; one group has the true story about it; not everybody knows that yet. Does this sound familiar?
So your assertion that, because the stories people tell about (G)god(s) meet certain emotional/spiritual needs, and because there are a great variety of those stories which agree in certain points and conflict in others, that gives us good reason to believe that God is made up by those people, just doesn’t hold. My model accounts for the situation at least as well.
Your protestations about the relative falsifiability don’t work because you keep shifting the nature of your proposition: from one that simply says that people wrote the stories, which is consistent with an actually existing God, and which I do agree is falsifiable, to an entirely different one that because the stories are written by people, that necessarily means that they invented the thing about which they were written, which is not falsifiable.
I’m tired. And the rest of my family wants to get some time on the computer.
The right answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer to the real question.
