Quote:
|
Your point (or hers, if that's what she was saying) is definitely true; however it's true of all knowledge (and thus meaningless). You might say it requires as much faith to believe in triangles as it does in God, or that it takes as much faith to believe in your existence as it does in his. It also removes the boundaries of truth: at that level it also takes as much faith to believe in Santa Claus or Leprechauns as it does in oranges and Dolly Parton.
|
for someone like kierkegaard, the extension of the argument for faith through all of knowledge is not possible--there is a difference in kind between god and objects of knowledge..the problem of thinking the infinite is the pivot. so you **could ** say that belief in god is like believing in a triangle--but that would mean that god is a comparable type of being: i traingle can be split into two halves--can god? so while you could say it, you would be wrong to do it. all you would show is that you have a compressed/limited understanding of the multiple possible meanings the notion of faith can have.
no matter how implausible i might find dolly parton to be--and i could go on at length about her hair alone--no matter how much difficulty i have getting my head around the existence of dolly parton, this fellow god is even more implausible. but when it gets down to it, i am more in line with kierkegaard and nietzsche on this: this god fellow you keep talking about seems to me but a name, a word, nothing more, nothing less. if the word refers to anything, how would you know? you could demonstrate the existence of the word. you could demonstrate the existence, for you, of a particular signified. but the referent? not a chance.
so far as debates like this one are concerned, i come across as atheist, simply because there is not a single argument for the existence of god that is to me compelling at all--but behind that is the fact that, for me at least, nominalists like pascal and kierkegaard have long been the most compelling variants on christianity--they care about the problem of god's existence and faith far more than i can imagine doing--and they dont know. but for them, the question of faith is paramount (a premise error from another viewpoint) so knowing does not matter.
but i do not care about the question of faith.
so i am ok with not knowing.