Skip to main content

need to distinguish/interrelate the epistemic and ontological ways in which one can relate God and creature

Upon hearing Bill Craig report on Unbelievable about his debate with Dawkins, it seemed to me that one needs to examine carefully how on is relating God in creature in statements like:

He initially asserts that if there is no God then there is no purpose in the universe.
From which he infers, seemingly invalidly,
that if there is a God then there is purpose in the universe.

One may rescue him by saying that he means "if and only if."  Or one might say that his inference is invalid.  One may also try to find a more basic claim that justifies both of his assertions.  The latter might be doable by distinguishing the order of knowing from the order of being. 

I'll try the third.
Let's take his original claim: if there is no God then there is no purpose in the universe.
This is the contrapositive of the following: if there is purpose in the universe, then there is a God who is the source of that purpose.

This statement, I believe, correctly conveys the order of knowing or discovery: it is BECAUSE we recognize order in the universe that we are able to infer that there is a God who gives that order.
The contrapositive mentioned by Craig is really the statement that created order is ILLUSORY if there is no God.  That's Craig's point.

He then states what seems to be an invalid inference: i.e., that if there is a God then there is purpose in the universe.
This hypothetical statement conveys the order of being, or more specifically, the order of CAUSATION.
But it is misleading as stated, for the mere fact that God exists is not sufficient to imply that the universe exists at all, let alone has order.  So it would need to be restated thus:
If there is a God, then that being is the source of whatever order may exist in the universe.
Or one might try to tie it to the question of illusion:
If there is a God, then some apparent (natural) purposiveness in the universe is NOT ILLUSORY.

But this is a sketch... must develop later.

Key to what I hope to develop is how recourse to the contrast between the descriptive/explanatory approaches to understanding may come into play in articulating the above stuff.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more