Currently watching the Atheism Tapes on Netflix streaming, and felt something I needed to express: The various absurd gods Apologists want us to believe in.The random god: Quite often, I've seen people define their god as being unpredictable in principle. The problem with this is that it makes it random: Science is very good for detecting patterns and making predictions. The only thing that should be unpredictable in principle would be something truly, truly random.
The impotent god: Another alternative depends on defining god as undetectable, which leads to the question of "how can he do anything at all?" We can't detect gravity directly, but we sure can detect (and predict) its influence on objects. Science is the best tool we have for understanding the invisible. It's done that for so many forces before. What makes the god force fundamentally different?
The arbitrary god: Often shows up with divine command theorists. They posit a baseless god as the foundation of morality: God exists without any previous basis, but for some reason is super-special-awesome to be the sole privileged entity to dictate morality. He has no previous basis to found his decisions on, and no reason to have this authority. Close relative to the random god.
1 comment:
We can't detect gravity directly, but we sure can detect (and predict) its influence on objects.
An even better example is dark energy. We have no idea what it is, but it must exist because it has observable effects of the galaxy. Divine intervention would be like dark energy in this regard. We wouldn't know what it was or what caused it, but we would be able to see it.
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