[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Atheism does not allow for singular experiences. Atheism restricts knowledge to those concepts that are formed by comparing objects. For ex, the concept of ‘chair’ is formed from observing several very similar objects and tagging those objects with the word ‘chair’.
But then we run into difficulties with things like ‘justice’. Plato wrote a whole book trying to extract the concept from examples about cities (Republic).
God is a singular being. To know God is a singular event. If we restrict our knowledge to only those concepts attained by comparison, then that excludes God. But in my many years I’ve yet to see an acceptable argument for such exclusion.
That God has not chosen to speak to you, is sad.
God bless and Happy Hannukah![/quote]
It isn’t comparison that prevents knowledge of God so much as experience. Experience must precede the ability to make abstractions (by way of turning raw empirical “data” into socio-linguistic concepts, i.e. universals), and subsequently to recall and compare said concepts. I can claim that I don’t know God because I’ve never directly experienced any event in my life that I felt could be attributed to divine causes. All that I know of God and religion came from the anecdotal teachings of other humans. The trouble is that the humans who taught me all that I know about religion learned of the subject in precisely the same manner that I did from their own forbearers. Hence a vicious cycle is established which can only be broken by going back to the “original” Christians (or Jews or Hindu’s, what have you), who are claimed to have had direct experience with the divine.
And therein lies the rub, for there is absolutely no way for anyone alive today to verify the alleged direct experience of people who lived thousands of years ago. It is difficult enough as it is to verify the experience of someone living today in another part of the world. Yet, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, don’t they?
In any case, regardless of how much or how little “evidence” one relies on to form a conclusion about the existence of God, the fact of the matter is that one cannot “know” God until one has had direct experience with him. A strong certainty, even an overwhelming certainty based on supporting evidence, isn’t the same thing as empirical certainty, the latter capable of being derived only from direct experience. If someone else told you about “it”, you can’t claim to know “it” with empirical certainty. It doesn’t matter whether “it” is the present location of a certain submarine sandwich or the existence of God and likewise it doesn’t matter whether the person who told you about “it” was your mother, father, friend, or a complete stranger, and whether “it” purportedly happened 30 seconds or 3,000 years ago.
The ultimate logical endpoint of this line of reasoning, which I must articulate and defend if I am to be internally consistent, is that one cannot “know” anything that one has not directly experienced. Just to make my position clearly: This is exactly what I am proposing. This forms the basis of empirical nominalism, the epistemological worldview that I adhere to.
You might claim that there are people who have had direct experience with God, and perhaps you count yourself among them. Here our argument must terminate since I have no way of disproving that claim due to the separation of minds. However, I would simply point out that under this criterion, one can no more disprove the claims of believers of UFO’s and all sorts of esotericism (commonly described as lunacy). You would be equally hard-pressed to disprove the claims of any schizoid.
Moving on, we come to the “original” hypocrisy and self-contradictions inherent in all organized religions. I’m not referring to the contradictory passages that can be cherry picked from most holy texts, but something much more fundamental as it pertains to religion as a whole. You’ve heard of “original sin”, no doubt, well here is the “original lie” that every religion is founded on:
Religions demand faith. Belief over reason. Experience isn’t a prerequisite for belief. One can become a believer on the day he is born. Yet religion, as a mass movement and cultural meme, is spread through the relation of what is claimed to be a direct experience from one generation of humans to the next.
So, religion champions belief over direct experience in spite of the fact that religion is supposedly founded on the latter. This is an utterly hypocritical position from an epistemological standpoint.
It’s akin to witnessing some event that changes your entire worldview, and then leaving the scene and trying to indoctrinate others in your new-found system of thought without giving them access to the same experience that you used to form that very system.
People would rightfully claim that you were being “unfair” by not affording them the opportunity to share in your direct experience, and so it is with every religion, which is founded on the writings of individual humans who claimed at one time to have had direct experience with the divine, an experience that is categorically denied to their subsequent followers.
To summarize this position, if religious proselytism were consistent with religious dogma, there would be no need for the former at all. Since God represents “eternal truth” in every organized religion, there is no need to teach people about something which, on its face, should be self-evident!
A simple thought experiment for anyone who seriously toys with the notion of “a priori” knowledge in a religious context is as follows:
If people are born with knowledge of God, why is it necessary to teach children about religion?
If every single person with knowledge of an organized religion were removed from the planet or otherwise prevented from passing on that knowledge to the next generation, do you think that generation would have any knowledge of God in the same context as their forefathers?
It won’t suffice to state that they would “probably develop their own understanding of the divine.” That’s merely stating the obvious. But if Jesus or whomever you worship is “eternal” and “omnipresent”, how come I knew nothing of him until I either read a book written by other humans (who also had no empirical knowledge of God) or was told about him by a human who likewise had no direct experience?
It would be great if followers of mass religion could decide to be internally consistent for a change and to raise an entire generation without spreading their ideas - just to see if those very ideas would “survive” on their own, without conscious human effort.
And then comes the following question: If human effort and conscious will is required just to keep an idea “alive”, can it really be considered an “eternal truth”?
I don’t need anybody to teach me about gravity to know that gravity exists. I could have been born in a third world country, be illiterate, have never attended a physics class in my life and I’d still know all about gravity.
Gravity is as close to an “eternal truth” as we can get. Religion is not. That’s because the former is a belief shared by pretty much every person alive today in much the same form: namely, people from the world over agree that when dropped, objects tend to fall towards the ground. Organized religion doesn’t come stratospheres within achieving the same sort of mass consensus.
Something that isn’t directly observable by a single person on the planet cannot be called an “eternal truth” without a horrible act of deceit taking place.
If every single Christian died tomorrow, the theology of Christianity would instantly become extinct from this planet.
On the other hand, if every single believer in gravity died tomorrow, the theory would remain in nearly unaltered form since it is grounded on the direct experience of events that pertain to everyone on earth. Thus a new generation of “gravity believers” would be born who wouldn’t even be aware that their new “theory” had at one time been shared by every person on earth.
I hope these explanations and examples serve to illustrate my position.
Finally, your example using “justice” as an abstract concept isn’t sufficiently complex to warrant leaping to a theological explanation. Justice and similar concepts fundamentally describe types of relationships between humans, both individually and in groups.
