Quote:
Originally posted by chavos
And? If the human mind has a propensity to sense moral, ethical and metaphysical things, they cannot be "true?" simply becuase you can't physically prove that it's there?
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Why do people keep comparing God to concepts?
Concepts exist as soon as they are defined.
We can "define" God, so he can exist as a concept. But that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not he
actually exists.
Suppose we are to compare the feeling of "Love" with God.
Some people believe in a magical, metaphysical, profound "force" called Love, I don't, but the disagreement is purely academic. With God it is a different matter.
Suppose we accept that Love (capital L) exists, as does God.
The powerful Love force causes itself to manifest feelings inside the human brain, called love (lowercase l). We experience love as a result of Love.
Similarly we can say that God causes us to experience "spiritual feelings", or belief.
We can see the effects of both of these things in the empirical world, by seeing how people behave.
Love -> love -> behaviour.
God -> belief -> behaviour.
Now we can tell that both love and belief exist. But we have to ask what caused them. Some would point to the system above.
I would claim that since Love has no effect on anything, except to cause love, then we can dispense with it. Ultimately it is an erroneous concept. Although we may use Love metaphorically, to try and describe our awesome experience of love, ultimately it remains, nothing more than an idea, with no "actual" existence.
But the point is, that it makes no difference if we take away Love, as the expression (Love -> love) could be regarded as a "single term".
So we can keep Love, or lose love. Ultimately it makes not one bit of difference to our outlook on life, except maybe one would result in more poetry.
Now if we try to do the same with God. We could claim that belief is caused by God, or that it is not caused by God. This time however it makes a difference, as God is not just supposed to be some abstract concept. He is supposed to
exist.
In other words (God -> belief) is a fundamentally different thing to (belief).
Since belief is a model that works perfectly well without God, then we cannot claim that the belief could be used as evidence for the existence of God.
You can pretty much replace love with all the abstarct concepts you want, but it doesn't effect the argument at hand.