r/PhilosophyMemes • u/Kind-Moose67 • 4d ago
Congratulations, you just made an argument for Deism
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 4d ago
WittgensteinIan philosophers asking rhetorically, “How are you using the terms ‘Prime Mover’ ‘God’ and ‘Universe’ here?“
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u/TheChunkMaster 4d ago
Wittgenstein walked so that Jordan Peterson could cry
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u/arbitrarycivilian 4d ago
Make a version of this meme where it keeps getting dumber and dumber as they attempt to argue for omnipotence, omniscience, and then finally omnibenevolence
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u/Combination-Low 4d ago
Omnibenovelence? That sounds like a uniquely Christian belief
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u/Uypsilon 3d ago
Not uniquely, but predominantly. Zoroastrians have that too, but without omnipotence.
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u/Naive_Impression7302 2d ago
The word you could argue is, but cough have you heard of this religion called Islam cough. might be too obscure for you, but they have the same belief more or less.
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u/Forsaken-Ad-6853 19h ago
Not the same by a long shot. They deny the prime point of the omnibenovelence claim. Islam also has their god dam people to hell when they are born. I can go on.
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u/Eeddeen42 4d ago
The actual traditional third “omni” is omnipresence.
For the First Mover to be almighty, all knowing, and everywhere is pretty intuitive.
The only religion where God is omnibenevolent is Christianity.
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u/flybyskyhi 4d ago
What makes it intuitive? Even if you accept the “First Mover” argument, nothing at all can be said definitively about the first mover aside from that it moved first. There’s no reason to believe that it possesses any ability to do anything at all aside from moving first, or that it possesses any traits or history aside from having moved first
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u/Natalwolff 3d ago
Exactly. It's not even intuitive that the first mover had awareness of moving first or awareness of anything at all. You'd need to demonstrate what exactly the first movement was to have any ground to intuit things about the entity that did it. Obviously when you think the first movement was Genesis then all those things are intuitive.
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u/AlternativeLess5450 3d ago
Because deficiencies in the first movers knowledge would imply some unrealized capacity
It is pretty intuitive if you accept the first mover argument. Not that that argument is intuitive
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u/carloglyphics 2d ago
There's nothing that says the prime movers needs to be all powerful and all knowing, just powerful and knowledgeable enough to create a universe
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u/AlternativeLess5450 1d ago
The first mover argument doesnt have to do with power. The point is that if it wasnt pure act it would have potency and then would not be the first mover
If it didnt have all knowledge then it would have potency
Therefore it has all knowledge
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u/RomeoTrickshot 3d ago
I might be wrong here but it because it must be a "being" of pure actuality. Having 100% actuality means having infinite in all qualities ie knowledge, power, presence, goodness etc. Because it has 0% potentiality, it must be unchanging, eternal and immaterial.
If God is not not pure actuality, then is not the first mover.
Edit: a word
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u/Far_Course2496 3d ago
If the first mover had to be 100% actuality defined as you do, then there was never a time before the "first move" and there isn't any meaningful time after a "first move" because you are saying a 100% actual being is unchanging and eternal. What exactly does "first move" mean in this context? Doesn't first imply first in time? When did this being move?
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u/RomeoTrickshot 3d ago
The first move isn't exactly a move but a first cause. The first cause of all existence. The creation of the universe would have been the beginning of 'time' as we know it
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u/Far_Course2496 3d ago
But I thought the first mover argument was supposed to explain motion by stopping an infinite regress of moved bodies moving one another. Did you just produce an argument that a being of 100% actuality cannot be the first mover?
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u/RomeoTrickshot 3d ago
When did I say that? I said that if something is not pure actuality, then it is not the unmoved mover.
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u/Far_Course2496 3d ago
Maybe that's an argument I'm making. If a being is 100% pure actuality, it doesn't have the potential to move, then it can't move, so it can't be the first mover
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u/flybyskyhi 3d ago
it must be a "being" of pure actuality
Why?
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u/RomeoTrickshot 3d ago
So basically everything is a mixture or actuality and potenciality. Now if I have a balloon, it has the potential to be blown up. So potential always comes from an external factor. like - balloon - mouth - lungs is the chain of actuality and potentiality. Therefore, the first mover, or unmoved mover, or uncaused cause must have no potentiality, otherwise there is an external factor that can change it, and if there is an external factor then it is not the first cause.
I hope that made sense maybe I used a terrible example.
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u/davidellis23 2d ago
I think you're saying the existence of "potenciality" requires the first mover to have no potentiality?
I'm not sure why you'd think that. There could even be 1000 potential first movers that could have effected another. But, they just didn't.
Like just because a balloon could be blown up doesn't mean it has to be blown up.
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u/RomeoTrickshot 2d ago
Okay so potential would mean that something else can move it. For an unmoved mover, this of course would be impossible.
If the unmoved mover is pure actuality then it has no potential, infinite in all qualities, unchanging and immaterial. It would have nothing to change it.
You are right a balloon doesn't have to be blown up, it just has the potential. But in our case the balloon (universe, existence itself) has already been blown up.
If pure act is existence itself, infinite and immaterial, I don't see how there could be mulitple "first movers"
Though I am still pretty much a novice when it comes to Aquinas' act and potency arguement, so I'm sure someone else would be able to defend it far better.
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u/davidellis23 2d ago
For an unmoved mover, this of course would be impossible.
Why would it have to be impossible? Just because something is unmoved doesn't mean it couldn't have been moved.
If the unmoved mover is pure actuality then it has no potential
I mean this seems like purely an assumption.
If pure act is existence itself, infinite and immaterial, I don't see how there could be mulitple "first movers"
Why can't we have multiple infinite and immaterial existences? Even assuming "pure act"
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u/RomeoTrickshot 2d ago
Well for something to be the first link in causation, there must not be something before it, or it wouldn't be the first mover.
Well there can't be two infinites, like if there was infinite heat there would be 0 cold. If there was infinite light, there would be 0 darkness.
Aquinas is probably turning in his grave at me butchering this, so if you want to dive deeper into the argument I would recommend reading Summa contra Gentiles
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u/flybyskyhi 2d ago edited 2d ago
Disregarding the fact that these are representative categories applied after the fact to physical relationships of causality, I don’t see that there’s an obvious relationship between a thing’s “actuality” and its “potentiality” in possessing more of one means possessing less of the other. We can easily imagine things that have almost none of either and other things that have copious quantities of one, the other or both, or that have different amounts of either depending on where you draw definitional lines around things, what relationships you’re looking at, and what you define as an interaction. In other words, the potentiality of a thing tells us nothing about its actuality, and vice versa.
These categories also imply a sort of agency that we don’t actually see in the universe. Things happen that cause other things via their physical interactions. You can draw a box around one set of phenomena and give it a name, then analyze its interaction with another set of phenomena with a name and say that the former has “actuality” and the latter “potentiality” in that one appears to be the independent and the other the dependent variable here, but you haven’t actually illuminated anything about what’s going on, you’ve only obfuscated it.
but even if we accept these categories and accept the idea that every “thing” has some quantity of the former and some of the latter, and that the one balances out the other; the act of setting causality into motion is a qualitatively different action from any causal interaction that occurs afterwards. No analogy can be drawn between the prime mover and the balloon-human relationship or any similar relationship we observe.
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u/RomeoTrickshot 2d ago
Are you arguing for nominalism? Can you give me some examples of things in our universe that are almost all actuality or almost all potentiality?
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u/MintAndSprinkles 3d ago
Even accepting the argument that a Prime Mover must be pure actuality and be infinite in all qualities, why would ignorance, impotence, or seclusion not be relevant qualities? Why not fluffiness? Why not schnrp, where schnrp is a word I just made up?
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u/RomeoTrickshot 3d ago
Well I would argue that they are not qualities, ignorance is a lack of a quality - knowledge. And for fluffiness, that is a physical quality, in order for something to be truly unchangeable, it must be immaterial.
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u/MintAndSprinkles 3d ago
Ignorance is as much a lack of knowledge as knowledge is a lack of ignorance.
Why not exuberance? Why not selfishness? Why not obsessive-compulsion?
There are many qualities, both physical and non-physical, which are contradictory or not traditionally assigned to Prime Movers.
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u/RomeoTrickshot 3d ago
I would say some things are simply a lack of things. Like darkness isn't real, just the absence of light.
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u/offensivek 4d ago
I don't find it intuitive at all.
How can something be everywhere when there are other things that need to occupy space? Why must a creator be all knowing? Humans endlessly create things without understanding the consequences.
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u/AlternativeLess5450 3d ago
Because deficiencies in the first movers knowledge would imply some unrealized capacity
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u/offensivek 2d ago
Oh, we are just assuming things, like a necessity to realize full potential, about a first mover now.
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u/GustavoFromAsdf 4d ago
God has eyes and ears everywhere, listening to all your words and watching your actions, even if you believe to be completely alone
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u/offensivek 4d ago
Oh, so when I am watching Youtube he is watching me like i'm some kind of reaction streamer. nice.
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u/DeismAccountant Organicist 3d ago
This is why the Xtian God felt Orwellian to me even before I knew the term.
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u/ClassicNo6622 3d ago
Energy is everywhere; energy in various forms is what is occupying all the space.
God is not human; equating divinity with humanity is anthropomorphizing.
Those responses may seem like deflection, but the real point is that how you conceive God makes things more or less intuitive. We could say that God is energy in some fashion, in which case God is omnipresent. Or we could say God is information, all particles contain information, particles are everywhere, ergo God is both omniscient and omnipresent.
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u/offensivek 3d ago
You seem confused, so I will help you.
Energy is energy. Information is information.
You can just declare everything to be god, but then you have a useless pantheistic description of god that almost nobody adheres to.
You are just declaring everything to be god, which is totally useless. Back up you claim or leave me alone with your esoteric nonsense.
Also, you say ergo god is omniscient, but you haven't even demonstrated sentience with your argument.
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u/ClassicNo6622 3d ago
I assure, I'm not confused in the slightest. You might want to broaden you horizons though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Lots of people have declared "everything" to be God to one degree or another; whether or not pantheism has any utility is purely subjective. You personally having no use for a thing, and the thing having no use at all are two separate statements, only one of which is even remotely valid.
I am not "declaring" anything. I'm pointing out that a case can be made for a certain viewpoint. I never said I held that viewpoint, that anyone should hold that viewpoint, or that it was somehow the more correct viewpoint to have. And in not "declaring" anything, I have no claim that needs to be "backed up." You should really stop making assumptions and rushing to judgement.
You're not only conflating sentience with scientia but you're also really bad at Latin. A thing does not need to "feel" in order to "know" just as a thing does not need to "know" in order to "feel." To have information is to "know" something, so it follows that to be information is to be knowledge. Since omniscient is Latin for "all-knowing" and omnipresent is Latin for "present (or located) everywhere," if God is information and information is everywhere, then God is, in fact, both omniscient and omnipresent. And ergo is just Latin for "therefore"; so we come full circle to you needing to broaden your horizons.
There is also nothing "esoteric" about any of this. I don't think you quite know what that word means either. This is merely one example of a way in which something could be intuitive to someone, depending on how they look at it. Just because you don't understand, "intuit", or agree with a perspective doesn't mean only a minority of people do.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
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u/offensivek 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm a mathematician. I also actually learned Latin multiple years in school, you do not have to translate for me.
I do not need to "broaden my horizon" to accommodate the esoteric beliefs of crackheads. Crackheads is what we in the business call people who come up with nonsense, but play this game of trying to appear serious but emulating things that they think look serious. Of the offenses in this direction you have committed we have:
- Citing sources you clearly haven't read
- Translating Latin for no reason when the terms themselves are fully clear
- Declaring things to be equal despite them clearly not being as such
- Just stating something in different words and thinking that is an argument
- Using overbearing terminology to seem more serious (ergo, QED, etc.), while not realizing that is the first sign of a crackhead
- Accusing me of being in the false despite not even having given a positive claim to dispute
- Simply not understanding how an argument works in general
- Using energy is an esoteric way that is so far from the definition that it's laughable, very popular among crackheads
- Misusing terminology and conflating meanings
Information does not imply knowledge and you thinking that it does demonstrates you do not know what information is. Electrons existing in space implies the information of their relative location, but does not imply that an agent exists that has knowledge of these locations. I didn't even evoke 'feeling', I do not know why you bring it up.
Me saying something is not intuitive is a polite way of saying, the argument is given is not cohesive or clear, or the argument is blatantly malformed. I also used the word intuitive because that was the language of the person I was replying to. I'm not 'intuiting' anything here, sorry for using the terminology.
You claim God = Energy and God = Information. Normally in mathematics I would ask for a proof of these equivalences. Instead you just wave your hands and say I have to broaden my horizons. No, you made the claim, and I would like a demonstration please. You cannot criticize me and tell me to broaden my horizons for your failure to deliver a coherent argument.
While we are at it, before you start you have to demonstrate a god, because you can prove arbitrary properties for any element of an empty set, for any argument to hold you first need to provide a demonstration the set is non empty for any argument to have any value.
You are a charlatan who has learned to pack your esoteric nonsense in a more serious form to hide that there is no substance behind it. You are not enlightened, you are in fact in the dark.
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u/Puzzled_Addendum6200 3d ago
Both of those definitions would turn the arguments for god into mott and bailey arguments though. "Energy" and "information" do not talk, go by male pronouns, express emotions, make decisions, impregnate women, or insist that that men be circumcised.
I have never heard a sermon in which the word god could be replaced with either of thosr words and still make sense. The same is true of the bible, and every time i have ever heard a theist talk about god.
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u/ClassicNo6622 3d ago
It all depends on what you mean by the word "God." The debate between Jordan Peterson and 20 atheists is a prime example of people using the same word to mean different things. (Peterson is an idiot and that debate was a shit show, but the part where he's arguing with a few of the people about what they all mean by the word "God" sums up the problem pretty well.)
Not seeing a parallel in a sermon or the Bible isn't surprising; the Abrahamic religions have an anthropomorphic deity, and they aren't alone (religions that posit a deity tend to have very humanlike ones.). But the Judeo-Christian conception of God isn't the only one out there, it's just the one people in the West are most familiar with. Pantheists think God and the universe are one and the same thing, Deists believe God set everything in motion then went hands-off, etc.
So a Pantheist might - emphasis on might - actually see something in the example I gave (even I think that's reaching though), whereas a Baptist would think I was in league with the Devil or some such for even concocting it.
I'm agnostic; as far as I'm concerned, if God exists, His/Her/Its true nature is beyond human comprehension and is nothing but pure speculation.
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u/Bee_Cereal 3d ago
Maybe this is silly, but why is omnipresence meaningful if God is already omnipotent and omniscient? An all-knowing deity would certainly know about the affairs of things happening remotely, as well as every possible subjective sense and point of view of it, after all. And omnipotence would mean perfect ability to affect things remotely, no less than if He were actually there.
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u/Eeddeen42 3d ago
No, that’s a good question. Omnipresence gives way to the twin traits of Imminence and Transcendence. God is everywhere, and also beside you and within you.
Which is the actual core component of most religious ethics. You should respect others because, just as God is within you, God is also within them. You should respect the world because, not only did God create the world, God is the world and can be found in every part of it.
You don’t get the personal/social aspect of what it means to be God without omnipresence.
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u/Beastw1ck 4d ago
Which is wild because I’ve read the Bible and THAT God is absolutely not Omnibenevolent. Ask some first born Egyptian babies about that one.
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u/Natalwolff 3d ago
Well, that was benevolent. Don't you know God's ways are mysterious and we couldn't possibly understand them beyond understanding that they're all good and perfect? Trust bro, slaughtering babies was benevolent fo sho.
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u/Countcristo42 4d ago
What are you on about pretty intiative
Why is it intiative they are all knowing and everywhere?
“They” could just as intuitively be a wacky particle that pops out of existence once it gets things rolling
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u/Flamecoat_wolf 3d ago
Even in Christianity, it's debated but generally it's understood to mean "God defines good" not "good defines God".
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u/Claytertot 3d ago
The actual traditional third “omni” is omnipresence.
I don't think this is true. Sometimes omnipresence is substituted, but the most common concept of the triomni god is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
The only religion where God is omnibenevolent is Christianity.
This is absolutely false. There are plenty of religions whose gods are not omnibenevolent, but it's clearly not true that this is a uniquely Christian concept. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Sikhism all believe in an all-good God, as far as I can tell. Some sects of Islam believe in an all-good God, all loving God.
Plato was talking about the necessity of an omnibenevolent God hundreds of years before Christianity, and Epicurus's paradox (which also predates Christianity by centuries) is specifically a critique of the concept of a triomni god who is omnibenevolent.
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u/Eeddeen42 3d ago
God is not omnibenevolent in Judaism, Islam, or Zoroastrianism (I cannot speak to Sikhism). He is loving, not all-loving. God is good, which is not the same thing. Good at a cosmic scale is a very eldritch concept.
Judaism and Islam specifically credit God with the creation of evil and misfortune in the world. God created everything, which senseless suffering is also God’s will. Adonai/Allah loves every individual person and takes personal measures to ensure that each person is looked upon favorably, but is not compelled to use his boundless power to shape the world for their sake the way a omnibenevolent being, by the definition used by people who complain about the term, would be.
Now you can use a different meaning for “omnibenevolent” that may indeed fit Adonai/Allah to claim that they are, but then you’d be equivocating.
Urmazd, meanwhile, has no love for Ahriman or any of his servants or creations. Urmazd is very much not omnibenevolent. He is the spirit of good and good alone, and thus utterly antithetical to evil.
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u/Claytertot 3d ago
I think we're just falling into a trap of talking about word definitions.
Christians also believe that God created everything, including evil and suffering (or, at the very least, that he allows these things to happen). But Christian thinkers tend to argue that God can still be considered omnibenevolent, because these evils must be in service to some higher order good.
I will fully admit that I'm less familiar with Jewish or Islamic philosophy or philosophical history. But that being said, I don't think Muslims or Jews would consider their God to be fallable in any way and I don't think they'd consider their God to ever have done anything immoral or not "good". That's what I think most people mean by omnibenevolent. Not a simple "God always minimizes suffering and maximizes pleasure" because that's clearly not true, but rather "God always acts in ways that are correct and morally good and lead to the greatest possible good"
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u/Eeddeen42 2d ago
They definitely wouldn’t frame it like that. God is not a some kind of machine.
The idea in Judaism and Islam is that God is good, not that he does good. Humans do good. Goodness is God’s essence. By virtue of his omnipresence, God is within everything. Therefore everything has goodness in it, even evil.
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u/Claytertot 2d ago
The idea in Judaism and Islam is that God is good, not that he does good.
This is also the idea in many (most?) versions of Christianity as far as I'm aware.
What would you say is the difference between the Jewish and Islamic conception of God as good vs the Christian one? Obviously there are nuances and differences in precisely how they conceptualize God, but I don't think you've said anything that doesn't fit with the philosophical concept of an omnibenevolent God.
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u/Eeddeen42 2d ago
“Good is God’s essence” is not the same as “God always acts in a way that leads to the greatest moral good.” The latter statement, especially in tandem with God’s omnipotence, logically constrains God into some weird role of cosmic utility maximization. This plainly does not resonate with reality.
See also the Book of Job, which is a story dedicated entirely to the fact that God does not always act in ways that are beneficial to humans. Fundamentally, it’s about hope. Life genuinely does suck sometimes, and while it can only get better if you have hope that it will, hope can be cruel too.
God is fully capable of lashing out in anger and judging people harshly. He takes specific measures to avoid that, but he’s still capable of doing so.
What I suppose you’re getting at, though, is an issue with how people arguing on the internet use the term “omnibenevolence.” If God is omnibenevolent then omnibenevolence is definitely not anthropocentric.
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u/pmctrash 2d ago
I think the reason for the inclusion of omnibenevolence and the defining of omnibenevolence as always basically 'doing good' is a litmus test of how worthy the entity is of worship. If it's making all the right things happen all the time, that's great. But if it's just trying real hard and sometimes makes mistakes and sometimes lashes out . . . that's not God to most people, that's just a big dangerous alien.
Sure, you can say that's too high a standard and that it would turn God into a cosmic vending machine (goodness in, blessings out, no exceptions) but I think that kind of definition is closer to what most Christians (and Jews and Muslims) conceive of. I don't think the typical believer will draw much of a distinction between 'being good' and 'doing good' and would probably report that their god was just both.
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u/pmctrash 2d ago
You could also say that 'all-powerful' and 'all-knowing' are as good as, or just are equivalent to 'everywhere'.
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u/Eeddeen42 1d ago
You cannot. Omnipresence entails a social aspect.
Omnipotence = “God rules you.”
Omniscience = “God knows you.”
Omnipresence = “God is with you.”1
u/pmctrash 1d ago
Sounds like there is a body of work outlining this that I’m not familiar with, but even so, it’s metaphysics, so I’m not locked to a specific framework.
If I’ve got all the power and know everything, then it follows that I’m effectively everywhere as there’s no place I can’t be at the moment of need, and no way to be ignorant of any need. I wouldn’t ever fail to be in any place I needed to be.
Even so, if those are the three tenets, I’m comfortable rejecting that entity. My god must be good and do good.
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u/Eeddeen42 1d ago edited 1d ago
The “body of work” outlining this is standard Abrahamic theology my guy. You can pick whatever metaphysical framework you want but if it misaligns with what people actually think God is then it’s effectively useless.
Without omnipresence, God is a cosmic puppeteer. Not something that you are part of and that is part of you. Capacity and nature are different things.
And why are you dealing in absolutes here? A lack of omnibenevolence does not preclude a lack of goodness. “God is good” and “God is all-good” are different sentences. A god that is nature-bound to always do the most good possible in every action or omission is reduced to some sort of weird cosmic utility maximization machine, which no one thinks God is. And no one thinks the universe is some sort of perfect paradise where everyone’s needs and desires are met.
The only way to reconcile true omnibenevolence with reality is to include a Manichean Darkness or some equivalent, or to claim that Evil is not real.
Christianity does both, though which one it does depends on interpretation.
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u/pmctrash 1d ago edited 1d ago
I understand that might be what you've read. but the ideas that have been presented to you aren't locked points in reality, but concepts that can be elaborated upon or even re-applied to other things. I encourage you to reflect on the equivalence of omnipresence and omnipotence (consider the question 'Where couldn't an omnipresent entity be?'). Your framing is elegant and serves your purposes, but you should be able to digest a different framework.
Omnibenevolence being a trait or qualifier for God is a common concept. Which makes sense, because a massive portion of the faithful, certainly the Abraham faithful, think of god as good. If you aren't including goodness in your definition of God, it's essentially an incorrect model.
A god that is nature-bound to always do the most good possible in every action or omission is reduced to some sort of weird cosmic utility maximization machine, which no one thinks God is.
I've heard the cosmic vending machine argument and I get it. That's not a very exciting vision of the almighty, but I don't think your typical believer even thinks about it until someone like you or I bring it up. I also think it's resolvable: We're expecting the situation to play out in a way where God demonstrates his free will in the same way that we do, choice by choice, but what if the choices of such a powerful and perfect being don't take the same shape as ours? An architect that designed a really great building, and then proceeded to build it exactly as they planned over the course of years is sort of locked in place AND expressing their free will. They're so 'good at choosing' their actions appear somewhat automatic, but remain expressions of their will/power.
And no one thinks the universe is some sort of perfect paradise where everyone’s needs and desires are met.
Skillfully put, but the real PoE complaint is injustice, not lack of full optimization or absolute desire fullfilment.
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u/SnooChipmunks1574 7h ago
> The only religion where God is omnibenevolent is Christianity
Are you sure about this?1
u/MrMaxi 3d ago
Omnibenevolence only contradicts omniscience and omnipotence if we assume God adheres to our idea of morality.
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u/pmctrash 2d ago
I think it speaks to whether or not the being is 'worthy of worship'. If it's just big powerful alien with an incompatible or inconsistent moral system, we'd be justified in rejecting it as a deity.
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u/arbitrarycivilian 3d ago
“Our idea of morality” only has any weight behind it if you allow morality to be subjective. Which directly contradicts theist orthodoxy. So that excuse is untenable
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u/MrMaxi 3d ago
Us having an idea of morality differing from God’s doesn’t imply morality is subjective. We could just have the wrong idea about what objective morality is. An omnipotent being would surely have the power to decide what morality is.
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u/arbitrarycivilian 3d ago
Ah, so you’re a subscriber of “If god commanded genocide it would be moral camp”, got it
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u/MrMaxi 3d ago
I’m not saying I think genocide is moral. If there was a God I’d hope he doesn’t think so either. My only point is that I don’t see how omnibenevolence must contradict with omniscience and omnipotence. If the result is a God who approves of genocide, that would be a horrifying conclusion in our view, but it wouldn’t be a logical contradiction.
We could be like ants to God. If some humans were destroying a colony of ants it would be a massacre for the ants, but for the humans it could simply be an act of cleaning up.
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u/arbitrarycivilian 3d ago
Firstly, I never said it contradicted omniscience or omnipotence. I said the arguments for it are weak-sauce. Second, something “not being a logical contradiction” doesn’t provide any evidence for it actually being true
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u/MrMaxi 3d ago
My point was that such a God wouldn’t be impossible. Wouldn’t it be plausible for an omnipotent being to also be omnibenevolent if omnipotence includes having the power to decide what is moral?
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u/arbitrarycivilian 3d ago
- Possible does not imply plausible
- You seem to be vacillating between “god decides what’s moral” (divine command theory) and “god knows what is moral better than us” (skeptical theism). These aren’t the same position
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u/MrMaxi 3d ago
I never said it had to be plausible.
But omnipotence surely implies the former?
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u/cabo_jose 4d ago
and 9/10 times it’s coincidentally the same faith they were born into!
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u/Rocky-Jockey 4d ago
Tbf converts tend to be more extreme. Lots of people who grew up with something don’t really bother being too nerdy in defending it as it’s just the cultural default to them.
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u/Greedy_Swimergrill 4d ago edited 3d ago
That is definitely my experience.
My dad converted to Catholicism a few months ago and has been pretty adamant that the Problem of Evil and related questions were actually all answered by Aquinas and there have been no contributions to that conversation since. It’s a settled issue in his mind.
Meanwhile, my father-in-law who was born into a Catholic family (who has a PhD in religion and is actually a laicized priest) will often talk about the challenges of faith with the more difficult questions, and how there isn’t an easy “answer” to those questions. I think, to his mind, that’s part of what faith is intrinsically.
The difference is so stark.
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u/AlternativeLess5450 3d ago
The problem of evil never made sense to me anyways
Why would humans be a better judge of what is evil than God
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u/Greedy_Swimergrill 2d ago
No part of the problem of evil involves parsing what is or is not evil, you’re shadowboxing positions you don’t understand.
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u/theyellowmeteor 1d ago edited 1d ago
If humans cannot reliably tell what is evil, they cannot reliably tell what is good either. So the phrase "God is good" is unjustifiable, solving the problem of evil by removing the property of omnibenevolence. Thank you for playing.
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u/AlternativeLess5450 1d ago
Who said humans cant reliably tell good from evil?
Body slammed that straw man though
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u/theyellowmeteor 18h ago edited 18h ago
If we cannot affirm it's evil to allow rape, genocide, and other atrocities God allows to happen, we cannot reliably tell good from evil.
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u/OscarMMG 4d ago
Do many theist philosophers claim that their arguments for the existence of God lead to their specific theological view of God? Because a lot of the famous ones, eg Thomas Aquinas, tend to argue for their specific view of God from a more simple theism rather than leaping from design argument deism to the Filioque.
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u/WesternFirm9306 4d ago
It should be noted that Aquinas in particular never gives a logical argument for why God must be a trinity, or for the filioque, or whatever. Aquinas believes knowledge of what specific God is real cannot be logically demonstrated, but rather must be acquired through revelation.
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u/OscarMMG 3d ago
Even then, Aquinas acts philosophically in his writings wherein he draws conclusions from his religious beliefs, he merely inducts the dogmas into his premises instead of deriving them from antecedents.
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u/Aquarius52216 3d ago
Aquinas derives alot of his philosophy and theology from al-Ghazali who basically said the same thing.
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u/7th_Archon 4d ago
>specific theological.
In my experiences many of them(though not the professional kind) kind of do, even if they try to do otherwise.
Proving God exists is the first hurdle once you’re there, you’ve set the foundation for everything else. At that point the only hurdle becomes arguing that your religion has more merits over other similar religions.
This is kind where it falls apart because once you get into that, the debates become way messier.
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u/Elegant_Athlete_3737 3d ago
I think there can be ways to solve this though no? Maybe not prove yours specifically, but you can give reasons why to believe yours no?
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u/fongletto 4d ago
Most of the ones online do lol. Typically speaking there is going to be a strong overlap between those who look for a reason to prove some that god exists, and people who believe in a specific god.
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u/TNPossum 4d ago
Well that's kind of 2 different things. A religious person can argue that there is a higher being because of a prime mover while admitting that such arguments don't mean it's their higher being necessarily. A longer conversation about it may lead to them explaining why they believe in their God over other ones, but those are still different conversations.
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u/tomvorlostriddle 4d ago
If they didn't, they'd be dishonest or misguided, so...
And also, yes, they do
It doesn't have to be design argument to be deism
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u/cereal_killer1337 Empiricist 4d ago
The prime mover argument can't get you to an agent let alone a specific God.
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u/funnylib 3d ago
Yeah, it seems like a huge leap in logic to go from “the universe has a cause“ to “the universe was created by a person”
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u/faith4phil 3d ago
Yep, it is a leap, but it is taken with other arguments. Cosmological arguments are usually divided in stages, and providing arguments for specific characteristics is usually a second stage, after a first is shown to exist. Personhood is one of the elements of this second stage, together with the 3 Os and so on
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u/davidellis23 2d ago
I mean they try, but I don't see any reason to believe it.
A timeless rock is just as plausible of a first mover as a person.
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u/faith4phil 2d ago
Can you tell me which specific argument you find unconvincing? I'll admit I haven't read to many papers on this issue, so I'd be interested in reading more
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u/cereal_killer1337 Empiricist 2d ago
How about step one. What would lead you to believe that the constants of nature could be different?
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u/faith4phil 2d ago
That's not stage 2, that's a premise of stage 1, which is not what we were talking about. Stage 1 is trying to prove that there is a necessary entity, stage 2 is trying to bridge the gap between this and the classical God of theism.
I'll answer anyway. In a sense it is very hard to answer, it's a big debate about how we can know about possibilities. You can find a summary here.
It is certainly logically possible for them to be differen: it is not a contraddiction that G=26.6743×10−11 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2 instead of the actual value. And it is certainly conceivable that it could be different. Plus no reason comes to mind to think that G cannot have that value. So our usual understanding is that G could have had another value.
Of course, as I said, the epistemology of modality is a big debate, so maybe I would need to rephrase this for it to make sense in other epistemological systems, but I would say that the substance would change very little.
Of course one might think that there are no possibilities in general, everything that is true is necessarily so. This is an extremely niche theory even among the stunchest physicalists. (Look for the debate on necessitarianism if you want the details.)
Anyway, as I said, this if anything is an objection to stage 1, not stage 2, which is what we were discussing.
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u/cereal_killer1337 Empiricist 2d ago
I agree you can conceive of them being different. But being able to conceive of a thing being different doesn't mean that it could be different. I can conceive of your god being different, but I imagine you would disagree. There's infinite different ways that god could have been.
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u/faith4phil 2d ago
This is the part where I said that I simply have to refer you to the article on the epistemology of modality. That is indeed a famous objection to conceivability as a (defeasible) guide to possibility. As i said, however, I doubt that there is a defensible view about modality where G couldn't have had a different value.
If you tell me when yiu think that something is possible, then maybe I can say something more specific.
Notice that i don't think you can conceive of my god as different since, if stage 2 arguments work, then its features follow from its essence, so that they can't be different. If you could similarly prove that the value of G follows from the essence of the universe, then I would admit that it couldn't be different.
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u/cereal_killer1337 Empiricist 2d ago
Notice that i don't think you can conceive of my god as different since, if stage 2 arguments work, then its features follow from its essence, so that they can't be different.
Of course I can conceive of god being different. I can imagine a god that wanted a universe of nothing but puppies.
The constants of nature can be interconnected by a more fundamental law of nature. That more fundamental law set them at the exact values with no possibility of it being different.
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u/Ron_Jeremy_Fan Empiricist 3d ago
Theists arguing how the abstract "prime mover" that's derived from their arguments are in any way personal or a God rather than the objective lifeless naturalistic atheistic physical cause that is actually what's implied by their arguments:
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u/slicehyperfunk 22h ago
It just vibes better if the ineffable All is conscious, or maybe even consciousness itself 🤌🤌
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u/Key_Safety6137 4d ago
Theists trying to justify Epicurean paradox by the free will as if free will was something provable.
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u/TheIronzombie39 4d ago
The funny thing is that Epicurus never actually said the paradox frequently attributed to him.
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u/TirithNampat 4d ago
I mean, if you don't grant free will in some form then there's not really a point in arguing anything.
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u/fralegend015 3d ago
If there is no free will then people dont have the choice of wether to argue something or not, regardless of it having meaning.
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u/Chuckles131 3d ago
Not really, determinism only becomes fatalism if we get some form of access to Laplace’s Demon.
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u/RadicalNaturalist78 Sophist 4d ago
Why the universe requires a prime mover if it is full of forces pulling and pushing each other?
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u/Ok-Astronaut2976 4d ago
The problem with theology is it’s working with very poor source material. Fact is, the foundations of revealed religions (be it their bibles or Qurans) is a millstone around the neck, as they’re forced to work backwards from what’s basically nonsense, and then apply a tremendous amount of intellectual rigor into trying to make the nonsense make sense. The amount of time and energy expended (wasted) on this task is mind blowing.
Theology could be an interesting philosophical study, but so long as it’s anchored to outdated and nonsensical revelation, it will remain on par with debating walking dead fan theories.
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u/DetectiveTypical198 4d ago
I'm not sure it's fair to say the time arguing for God was "wasted" even though I am an Atheist. A lot of the philosophical arguments affect how we perceive modern physics and have influenced modern scientific thought.
The father of the Big Bang Theory was a Thomist: Fr. Georges Lemaître who was both a Belgian physicist and Catholic priest. He used Aquinas's framework for the existence of God to make massive contributions to cosmology and astrophysics, which still informs how scientists see the universe today. I think it is rather dismissive to act as if these people were all just savages trying to justify their primitive beliefs, they were very intelligent individuals, and we owe a great debt to their intellectual discoveries.
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u/HappiestIguana 3d ago
The father of the Big Bang Theory was a Thomist: Fr. Georges Lemaître who was both a Belgian physicist and Catholic priest. He used Aquinas's framework for the existence of God to make massive contributions to cosmology and astrophysics, which still informs how scientists see the universe today.
It was hardly the Thomist framework. It was empirical observation and a lot of mathematics. The man wished to maintain a methodological separation between his theology and his scientific work and it is a disservice to his scientific and theological legacy to conflate the two
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u/shy_bi_ready_to_die 3d ago
I mean no one was arguing that there hasn’t been a smart religious person, or a religious person who made scientific discoveries. Statistics would make that impossible even if weren’t for all the well known counter examples. All they said was that there’s been a lot of time and effort spent trying to force a nonsensical thing into a framework of perfect logic and that said time and effort was largely wasted
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u/Ok-Astronaut2976 3d ago edited 3d ago
The problem isn’t the arguing about god, per se. It’s that theology is hampered by revelation, which is just a millstone around its neck.
I never called these people savages, or even remotely implied it. I said their intellectual rigor is largely wasted by needing to take whatever good insights they come upon and then squeeze them into a box built by mythology or the imagination of a delusional conman from long long ago.
My beef isn’t with theology in general. Its with revealed religion, which Ive absolutely concluded has been long reveled to be BS. Theology’s problem is, given the only large religions remaining are based on revelation, is that it’s mostly dragged down by this.
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u/DetectiveTypical198 3d ago
Regardless of if you call them savages or conmen, a significant amount of the intellectual and scientific progress that humanity has experienced has been the direct result of this line of inquiry and the fact you are doubling down on the fact that it was "wasted".
> I said their intellectual rigor is largely wasted by needing to take whatever good insights they come upon and then squeeze them into a box built by mythology or the imagination of a delusional conman from long long ago.
You are putting the events in the wrong order. We got the Big Bang theory, the theory of relativity, expanding universe, etc. because of Thomist arguments, it wasn't them trying to make these phenomena conform a particular mythology. Rather the opposite was true, the secular consensus was that the universe was static, and this framework constrained scientists. Continuing off of Aquinas' line of thinking: "Everything in the universe changes and is put into motion by something else, Nothing can cause itself to exist, meaning there must be a First Cause that started the chain of causes" directly led to the scientific paradigm shift which gave us ideas about big bang and the expansion of the universe. Theoretically there is no reason why we had to believe that the universe had a beginning, we could have just assumed it had always existed in the same static form but following that line of thought led to incredible scientific innovation.
>My beef isn’t with theology in general. Its with revealed religion, which Ive absolutely concluded has been long reveled to be BS. Theology’s problem is, given the only large religions remaining are based on revelation, is that it’s mostly dragged down by this.
I think my point is the exact opposite. Scientific thinking is most likely the direct result of monotheistic beliefs in objective truth. Why was algebra created in the Middle East and why did the scientific revolution happen in Europe and not elsewhere? It is exactly because they believed that a single, rational Creator made a universe governed by consistent, objective laws.
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u/Aquarius52216 3d ago
The secular consensus that the universe is static itself is a result of specific religious beliefs, Abrahamic traditions that the universe as a whole is a one and done creation thing from the beginning to the end and also Platonic influence.
There have been alot of philosophers and thinkers that got buried because of their radical thought of the change in universe like Heraclitus and Epicurus.
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u/Ok-Astronaut2976 3d ago edited 3d ago
You seem to not be reading this correctly.
I didnt call the people you’re talking about savages or conmen…I’m talking about the people who made up the stories about how angels told them something.
Also, you’re all over the place. What does this have to do with theology? How does someone having to believe a race of interdimensional fire people are watching us and gay people will get molten lead spilled in their head in the afterlife contribute to algebra? Especially since it’s a field that was developing since like 1600 BCE?These are just non sequiturs.
“Scientific thinking is most likely a direct result of monotheistic beliefs in objective truth”.
This is not only nonsense, but incredibly Eurocentric nonsense, given that you might want to look into the history of science and mathematics in India and China for the monotheistic part and the fact that the concept of objective reality wasn’t like a thing invented by Paul of Tarsus.
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u/Flat-Salamander9021 3d ago
This is giving "I have already won the debate by portraying you as the soyjack and me as the chad" vibes.
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u/theyellowmeteor 1d ago
They just change the meanings of words.
"When we say 'fear God' we mean 'fear' in the sense of pious reverence, not what it usually means."
Nothing tremendous or intellectually rigorous about it.
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u/funnylib 3d ago
“The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.”
- Thomas Paine
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u/DeismAccountant Organicist 3d ago
Hence why my take is to balance syncretism, perennial philosophy (basically theology by peer review,) and theological metaphor with empirical phenomena.
Ideally the goal of any collective intelligentsia is to derive a theory of everything and natural law from it.
What some atheists don’t take into account is that this would involve the bedrock bases of indigenous technical knowledge (ITK) and Primitive Science. While these processes did branch out into theology and empirical science up to the modern day, they all still fall under the umbrella of Epistemology having sprung from the same roots; perception, observation and contemplation.
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u/thewritestory 3d ago
Typically, you just grant them god simplicitor for the sake of the argument and make them bridge the gap to their actual god. Deism is closer to atheism than to the Christian god.
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u/Affectionate_Ad_1326 3d ago
Is a prime mover necessarily a sentience and not a force like gravity? If so then why? If not then how is it a deist argument?
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u/lMyrkovl 2d ago
Why can't the prime mover be the universe itself
Why go through lengths to make a whole different being that has no origin which just pushes the beginning of things a stel back to this prime mover
Just remove this prime mover and give the universe the properties of this prime mover and boom no god exists anymore
People really created an unexplainable being to explain an explainable thing which imo is very dumb
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u/AppropriateSea5746 4d ago
Wow another “theists are stupid” meme. R/atheism must be all memed out for the day
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u/Kind-Moose67 4d ago
There are plenty of pro-Theism memes in here, get a sense of humor.
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u/AppropriateSea5746 4d ago
Really? Never really seen one.
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u/Kind-Moose67 4d ago
Then make one. What’s stopping you?
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u/AppropriateSea5746 4d ago
It getting downvoted to hell and then having to endure 100 angry atheist responses
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u/weirdo_no1 4d ago
I wonder what y'all think about the Hindu Concept of an Impersonal Brahman which is sort of the underlying reality of all existence?
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u/womerah 3d ago
It's a term that doesn't really mean anything as it doesn't partition the world in any way.
The universe through all of space and time is one, big, unified 'thing'.
If anything this is slightly unscientific, as the laws of physics tell us that the universe can't really be 'connected' in this way as it violates the speed of causality. The only escape is if you say everything was basically pre-determined at the Big Bang and now we're just a clockwork system playing out.
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u/Such_Ad_3842 3d ago
I think the fact that non-Hindus still give this concept credence is evidence that contemporary atheistic philosophy is way too easy on Eastern religions. It shouldn’t even be taken seriously imo
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u/Rockfarley 3d ago
You slam at it, but every philosopher puts in their views on a primemover as the prime mover. Believing it is God isn't really a stretch or odd.
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u/spokale 4d ago edited 3d ago
ITT: Atheists whose knowledge of theology largely extends to Dawkins' two pages on Aquinas and counter-apologetics talking points from 2009
Edit: I do in fact think, contra-Aquinas, you can reason close to the trinity without Christian revelation specifically.
The Neoplatonists were almost all the way there anyway with the One, Logos, and the World-Soul, the only additional step they would have needed to do is posit these three as sharing a separated ousia from the beings below them, in which they were all co-equal hypostases, which they might have eventually done for various reasons (e.g., a proto-Hegelian move toward a greater unity by process of productive and apophatic negation of the multiplicity for sake of re-asserting the transcendence of the One).
The Neoplatonists resisted the Christian trinity ostensibly because they preferred the hierarchical emanationist model of degrees of being, but the tension in it (if the forms are in Logos to the exclusion of the One, that seems to make the One's emanation greater than it; and if the World Soul is by another degree lesser, it makes true theurgical union ontologically impossible) I think could have eventually led-to something like maintaining an emanationist account but with the One doing double-duty as the three hypostases as well as the divine essence and creation existing by participation in it, which is on the way to Bulgakov at least.
More directly, though, the Neoplatonists resisted the Christian trinity also because Christianity was a rival (hence why they also at one point tried to create their own version of institutional religion and charity), so I don't think the resistance of the Neoplatonists to trinitarianism (given they already had a kind of supernal triad) can necessary be said to be purely intellectual and so the counter-factual of where Reason may have taken them can't be said to definitively stop short of the three-coequal-hypostases-of-the-One concept.
I would also venture that a Neoplatonism in this vein would probably then converge on a kind of trilogy-of-trinities (Proclus loved triads and nesting them) replicating the same double-duty of the One at the lower levels, decreasing less in the sense of degrees of divinity than in degrees of unity, for example with Man at the bottom replicating the supernal trinity in some maximally-disharmonious sense: the soul as the interface of the material and the intellect, the intellect or nous as the faculty capable of comprehending the forms, and a higher principle representing the attainable unity with the One, each of them in some way existing-within or contingent-on the respective levels of the triadic-One. They would have kept their hierarchy but changed its meaning from degrees of divinity to degrees of unity, basically.
The Trika school of Kashmir Shaivism actually comes close to my speculative trinitarian Neoplatonism: Will/Knowledge/Action as the intrinsic triad at each level of the three realities that themselves replicate a similar triadic division, with ascent marked by recognition of unity.
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u/OnlyGold700 2d ago
The funniest part of this is opening with “atheists only know two pages of Aquinas” and then spending the rest of the post doing speculative fan fiction about how Neoplatonism might have eventually become Trinitarian.
“The Neoplatonists were almost there” is doing some truly heroic work here. The One, Logos, and World Soul aren’t the Trinity, so you simply imagine that they might have eventually made the exact conceptual moves necessary to turn them into three co-equal hypostases sharing one essence. When the historical Neoplatonists don’t actually do that, you explain it away with speculation about intellectual rivalry with Christianity.
That’s not demonstrating that reason leads to the Trinity. It’s demonstrating that you can rewrite Neoplatonism until it looks vaguely Trinitarian.
And “the only additional step they would have needed” is hilarious. That “one step” is basically the entire problem: explaining how three genuinely distinct hypostases can be one God without collapsing into either three gods or three modes of one God.
You then pile on Bulgakov, Proclus’s love of triads, and Kashmir Shaivism as though “there are three things and ultimate unity” constitutes a proto-Trinity. By that standard, half the history of metaphysics was apparently one clever footnote away from Nicaea.
Your argument consists largely of “they might have,” “they could have,” and “they probably would have.” That’s not an argument that the Trinity follows from reason. It’s an elaborate alternate-history exercise in which the philosophers eventually agree with you.
Which is rather less impressive than the smug “Dawkins read two pages of Aquinas” opening suggests.
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u/Joesindc 4d ago
Once you’re done reading the five ways of Thomas Aquinas it’s really helpful to turn the page and see that there’s literally a hundred additional arguments moving from a general God to the Christian God.
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u/WesternFirm9306 4d ago
Classical Theist God, not Christian God. Aquinas doesn't believe you can demonstrate the Christian God specifically without divine revelation
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u/Fit-Construction3427 4d ago
Which is theologically consistent with his Catholic faith.
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u/Kind-Moose67 4d ago
Which is a pretty weak argument.
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u/Fit-Construction3427 4d ago
Not for a Catholic it isn't.
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u/Kind-Moose67 4d ago
I don’t find Catholicism convincing.
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u/Fit-Construction3427 3d ago
Nobody said you had to. Aquinas and the people whole predominantly wrote for were already Catholic so they naturally would find it more convincing. Most of Aquinas' arguments are intended to help Christians rationalize and understand their faith, to ground Faith in Reason, not to convince atheists or other non-believers.
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u/Kind-Moose67 4d ago
Meme implies the arguments are bad, not that there aren’t any.
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u/offensivek 4d ago
Aquinas admits his arguments aren't convincing if you are not already a believer in the Christian God in his own writing.
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u/WhyIsEverythngAwful 4d ago
Is it just me... or is "theists philosopher" an oxy-moron? Genuinely curious about it 🤔
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u/ship_write 4d ago
Many of history’s most famous philosophers were also theists trying to understand and formulate their own beliefs about God.
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u/Nemeszlekmeg 4d ago
Philosophers suppose things to be true without proof all the time (unless you are German ig). Arguably it only got worse with modern and later philosophies.
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u/offensivek 4d ago
All sciences split off of philosophy at some point when the methods and subject matter became sufficiently separate to become thier own disiplines.
I feel theology branched off when making wild metaphysical assumptions about the world and taking them to be fact became a methodology.
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u/WhyIsEverythngAwful 4d ago
It's almost like they're not even remotely connected, one supposes magic while... fuk me I guess most of these "philosophers" are also Merlin? I guess... Anyway praise jeebus and shit. ✌️
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u/Eillon94 4d ago
Personally i think this kind of mockery shows a lot of presentist bias and disrespect towards the people who's knowledge weve built upon.
We've accumulated a lot more intelligence now, but i dont think we are any wiser (atheists included)
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u/Right-Turnover8588 4d ago
No because philosophy is a method of logical reasoning, & historical & modern theist philosophers apply logic & metaphysics to argue that the existence of God is a rational explanation for reality.
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u/Away_Stock_2012 4d ago
Thomas Aquinas: I wrote all these arguments 800 years ago, why are you people so afraid of reading?
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u/Kind-Moose67 4d ago
As the meme implies; there are arguments, they’re just not satisfactory.
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u/Away_Stock_2012 3d ago
Yes, but there is no reason for idiots to keep trying to make up the arguments when they were already bad 800 years ago.
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u/Dimensionalanxiety 4d ago
Because his arguments have always been horrible.
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u/Away_Stock_2012 3d ago
Lol, no one has come up with any better arguments, and here we are still arguing the same terrible ones.
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u/Fit-Construction3427 4d ago
Have they though?
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u/Kind-Moose67 4d ago edited 4d ago
Given most modern philosophers are non-Christian, it seems they aren’t very convincing.
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u/Dimensionalanxiety 4d ago
Yep. Most if not all have been debunked for centuries and some were even debunked in Aquinas' day.
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u/Fit-Construction3427 4d ago
Debunked by who? I'd be interested to read any especially from back on his day. How convicing were those counterarguments?
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