From: andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: DOES GOD EXISTS?
Date: 10 Nov 92 04:52:21 GMT
Organization: Renaissance Technologies Corp., Setauket, NY.

In article <1992Nov7.053621.27333@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter) writes:
>andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt) writes:
>...
>>Personally, I believe that God exists,
>>but that we can't say much about what that means. Not that this is an
>>evasion, but more an acknowledgement of incapacity.
>Well, it may not be an evasion, but it's damned *inconvenient* for someone
>like me who wants to know what you (or anyone) means when they speak about
>God. You might mean it in an anthropomorphic sense, that God is a
>'person', a conscious being possessing intelligence, desires, etc;

You should expect to be disappointed, since I said I can't say much about
what follows from the existence of God. One of the reasons for this is that
it is possible to imagine many things about God, but in no wise should one
make the mistake of pretending that one is capable of delimiting God, or
measuring God in a strict sense. And, like all existence, the existence of
God requires a notion of existence a bit bent to the purpose.

The sad fact about existence is that the _word_ and the _event_ are not in
perfect agreement even in 'ordinary' cases. You can get all worked up over
what 'existence' refers to even when you're talking about the chair you're
sitting on. Most of it is empty space, whatever that is, and what's not
isn't really where it might be supposed to be. You can wonder about the fact
of your own existence and consciousness, and literal elaboration of, for
example, those things that rigorous discplines like relativistic quantum
mechanics inform you about this question are at some remove from the direct
perceptions. So if you ask whether God can exist like the chair you are sitting
on the answer is yes, but yes in such a way as more to reduce your confidence
in the chair than to solidify your idea of God.

God as a person? I suppose yes. But certainly not simply a person. No human
as we conventionally imagine them could fill the philosophical shoes we usually
cobble for God, although Schrodinger had a way out of that - he expanded the
idea of humans to fit. Often people make much out of the possibility of a
personal relationship with God. Well of course you _can_ have a personal
relationship with God, but you can quite easily have personal relationships
with lots of things. It is not hard for me to imagine people capable of having
a personal relationship with the vacuum field.

God has intelligence? God may very well have it without any surprising
consequences. Both Einstein and Schrodinger believed in God with intelligence
but in very different ways, and it is not clear that Schrodinger implied that
the intelligence of God was in any way additional to the intelligence of
humans, which he would have counted as intelligence of God.

Now you may very well complain that this is evasive _talking_ about God.
But that is not so much the point. _Belief in_ God is the issue here, and
that I do. It is not really of great importance to me what is the most
important _language_ to refer to God, nor the fact of belief/disbelief
in whatever terms it occurs. What turns out to be important is what action
results from the belief.

 
>or in
>another way, eg that there is a reason (the shorthand for which is 'God",
>under this interpretation) that existence itself exists. Or there might be
>some other meaning. Surely you have some conception of what you are
>refrring to when you say 'God'. Perhaps when you say 'we can't say much
>about what that means', you mean 'we can't know much about the
>implications of such a fact (God's existence).

The implications of the existence of God can be viewed in two ways.
One: 
Physical implications of the existence of God are what you would expect: the
physical universe. Inasmuch as we study this in the sciences, the sciences
inform us about these direct consequences of the existence of God. There is
a philosophical note in this direction - that God exists and that the universe
is a direct consequence of God means that there is some kind of point of view
which unifies or rationalizes the universe, although it may not necessarily
be even remotely accessible to humans. One might even ascribe some kind of
_intent_ to this universe, but it would be _deeply_ presumptious to pretend
that this is much accessible to humans in any detailed form. I will admit
to some presumption in this direction. I believe that the universe resulted
from God as a kind of response to a kind of intention, or in other words that
the universe has some kind of function. Given the motifs of conservation in
the understanding we have developed of the universe, I think persistence is
part of the plan, but for example Camus would not be convinced.

Two:
The belief in God is true.

>>One point to consider is who is the beneficiary of the decision to believe in
>>God. Obviously, not God. Belief in God is something you can _do_. The value and
>>importance of doing this is widely agreed to be not so much in the axiom that
>>God exists, but in the results you produce from it. These can be either positive
>>or negative, and in my opinion this is the real fulcrum of the debate over
>>God's existence.

>This leads me to think that you *do* have some clear idea of possible
>consequences of believing in God, which implies that you think we *can*
>draw various conclusions from God's (hypothetical) existence, which 
>either means that although you can't say much about God, you (somehow) can
>say something about the consequences of believing in God; or else I have
>completely misunderstood you.

It is impossible to have any understanding of human history, or even the
current distress of large fractions of the globe and not be convinced of
the conclusios that people draw from the existence of God. Drawing conclusions
from the existence of God is quite dangerous. I would prefer that we wondered
about what intention God summoned the world to serve rather than to replace
the true reason with our own preferences.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt
Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.meta:2534 sci.logic:2001