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ritesign:
i am confused.
i smell a straw man.
in your post above (the response to pigglet)
(a) on what basis do you assume the omniverse is either finite or not--it seems arbitrary.
(b) what you are talking about when you ask for a "proof" concerning a material object (grain of sand, elephant, it doesn't matter)--unless you are working with a deductive approach to the world--if you are then there really is no debate.
(c) why, once you call for a "proof," you then proceed to impose a criterion of completeness on what amounts to an account of the history of a material object.
(d) and even less why you imagine the world to be an accumulation of objects. there are lots of problems that arise with this, but rather than twaddle on about them all, i'll leave it here for the moment. see what happens.
(e) your next-to-last paragraph doesn't follow ("if you concede....")
why would you take a position on this question?
why is it interesting, except perhaps as a psychological indicator, a bit of infotainment concerning the approach that you, for whatever reason, find compelling?
at any rate, the paragraph seems little more set-up for a version of pascal's wager.
more generally:
i'll say it:
this "god" entity is first and foremost a name.
its effects are the filling-in of semantic content.
the differing human communities that have constructed themselves around that name function to stylize the contents attributed to it.
there is no way to pose fundamental questions across communities that does not also involve dragging a host of other assumptions (ways of arguing, starting points, defintions of proofs, criteria for fashioning judgments, etc etc)
a deductive approach to thinking cosmological questions (the universe is infinte, the universe is finite--even that the universe is single, which seems itself to be an effect of a name) is eminently christian and is not worth the trouble to argue against---simply because taken out of that context, the approach really cannot get started.
within these communities, social feedback loops substitute for demonstrations of fundamental principles. the demonstrations that come out of these communities presuppose these loops but work to substitute arguments for them. these arguments are invariably rickety in themselves, but are held to regardless, perhaps because they resonate with the social reinforcement patterns that they are really about. but without that resonance, the arguments dont work. they aren;t compelling. this because in the end, what they are about is faith and they originate with faith--they do not structure faith, they do not demonstrate anything about it, the simply map it from one register onto another.
you aren't going to "explain" anything about the world on the basis of statements involving god as a first principle. what you do manage is to outline something of your ideological framework. which can be of ethnographic interest, but that's about it.
and (back to ritesign) you dont get to wave your hands around and exclude arguments by doing so: the semantic effect claim is bothersome for those who believe, but there is no way around it: it cannot be proven or disproven from within a set of assumptions that assumes this god fellow is other than a name--but that is simply a circular problem particular to these belief systems and has nothing to do with judgements about the arguments themselves, who is making them, why they are making them and even less about whether they are accurate.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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