Last week I went to the debate between Richard Foley (MU Philosopher) vs Grant Sterling (EIU Philospher). They debated the cosmological argument of whether God exists.
The debate from my point of view.
Packed parking lots.
Packed auditorium.
PC problems.
Big words I couldn’t understand.
Grant Sterling took 20 minutes to say “god exist because there is a reason for god to exist”
Richard Foley took 20 minutes to say “there is no god until proved otherwise”
Christians in the audience trying to convince self proclaimed atheist Richard Foley that god exists.
Foley responding by saying “the only thing that would make me change my mind is valid miracles, but that probably couldn’t even do it.“
More statements by Christians trying to convince Foley.
Walked with a hurting brain.
No related posts.
For some pretty good stuff related to this, listen to the allan watts podcast, or do a search on him in youtube.
I come from the Jungian school which.. more or less believes that religion is a project of the collective unconscious, which is basically instinct, though a little more complex. Modern neuroscience seems to support this idea.
Basically God is a symbol: it’s like the meaning of anything has to do with how it relates to its context… The ratio of the world of the known to the world of the unknown is about 1 to infinity, so what’s the ultimate context of anything? So God is basically a personification of this… it’s the world of the unknown supporting the world of the known.
One of the problems with trying to argue if God exists or not comes down to the definition of God.. Does God exist or not depends heavily on the definition.. so that I often think atheists are atheists because they know a literal reading of symbology is a little strange..
Our urge to read things literally is a relatively modern development.. its sorta an existential thing: What’s your ideal? On the one hand you have a first person commitment of, say, Christ.. who dies on the cross out of a commitment.. lets say to truth.. on the other hand you have science which is.. a kind of detached 3rd person objectivity thing.. where you don’t die on a cross just cause someone says you’re wrong about the earth revolving around the sun.. you have a scientific process inside of which this gets fought out.. so the objectivity of a literal reading of symbology has everything to do with the latter category, and nothing to do with the earlier.
Another way I’ve been thinking about it is.. the collective unconscious is sorta like a Flinstones cartoon… you got an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.. there’s a symbolic truth that’s rendered in this way of looking at life which gets at certain truths that science might have a harder time with.
I mean since Freud, Marx, and Darwin.. you find your self looking for a materialistic answer to all questions.. and things like Love, human compassion, and what not.. become harder to understand.. are nearly rendered as myth! Of course then you can turn to sociobiology, or something like that, and see something new along these lines..
So a certain amount of our understanding of these things is limited by modern science.. and what not.
Oh, the thing I forgot to say about the definition problem with God is.. that a part of the problem is God is supposed to be beyond definitions.. definitions merely point. This is sorta a Kantian problem.. reality is beyond our ideas of reality.. and the way language breaks up reality into boxes obscures reality…
anyway, so those are some random thoughts on the subject.
These always cause brain aching with me too. Debates are interesting to watch in that the only potential (and I stress “potential“) beneficiary is the spectator. There’s no chance that either of the two participants would ever be swayed in their mindset.
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