Search results

I mainly had in mind Aristotle's Material and Formal causes. Being sloppy in our treatment of time and without considering whether or not it provides a necessary background for coherent thought, we could think about a table which simply exists, unchanging, without a temporal dimension. In this...

Part of the trick in talking about the beginning - or more properly, I suppose, the origin - of time would be to use a notion of 'cause' which can operate outside of time, e.g. see Aristotle's four causes for a classical smorgasbord.

I'm not sure about this. In particular, if god is time but is also eternal then it makes no sense to speak about the beginning of time. Instead, time was always there and you still have to explain how everything else came to be. Likewise, if you wish to speak of a beginning of time you then also...

Sure, but this claim only amounts to something substantial if you can first provide some kind of positive theory of time. Time tends to be somewhat ineffable and so without such a description your equation is likely to be remain relatively meaningless. Personally I'm not a big fan of the...

P.S. <3. Your Queen of troll counter-trolling always pleases me greatly.

Analogy.

Hardly. The agnostic position is of importance in a great number of endeavours. To take a simple example: before undertaking a drug trial to assess the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product it is, in general, inappropriate to believe that a drug works or that it does not work - as either belief...

Only if you're not an agnostic.

Dignitatis Humanae

Ramen are far too slippery to achieve any firm grip on reality.

@ Teclis, Mirakon, I appreciate it but don't bother engaging with ad infinitum's more outrageous claims. He is just a subtle troll. Not quite - I targeted the views of Levinas as being oddball, though only insofar as they diverge significantly from common lay conceptions of god (his...

The point is that there is no one conception of god about which we can talk - there is a plurality of conceptions. Sure, I'm a Zeus atheist, but that is just one out of an infinite aray of conceptions of god. Historical gods with a personality and mythology attached are too easy to target -...

I am neither a diest nor a theist. I am sympathetic to naturalistic forms of pantheism which would look to equate god with the universe, though in such cases I recall 'a rose by any other name...' and so fail to feel that such pantheism has much to offer beyond positing an object of spiritual...

Quantum flux capacitors, etc.

Perhaps rightly. My aims in this thread are largely deconstructive. Moreover, I have lately become more sympathetic to metaphor - if language is holistic then stalwart analysis will always be unsatisfying. I <3 ambiguity. If you think a particular claim is bullshit or confused then you are...

So you think I ought to have a clear, unambiguous description of a divine being I don't believe in whose historical form is typically protean and often contradictory? Argue away.

Pro. Your multilingualism makes me jealous. I have resolved to start learning German at the end of semester (for fairly transparent reasons: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, etc...). I expect it to be arduous :S.

A query in response would be: what do you view the value of that question to be?

To be honest I don't have a definition of god. To me that question is somewhat like asking of Lewis Carroll's Alice - how tall do you think she is, 5"2, 5"5? Sure, I have encountered a number of definitions of god put forward in the history of religious thought (to pick some random categories...

I have numbered your paragraphs for convenience (and I should briefly note that I appreciate the time taken to cosntruct your response. While I disagree with you I can see that you are being thoughtful - a BoS rarity?): (1) That something is made from me, or arises from my creative force, does...