Still waiting for any credible rebuttal.Pete, give it a rest man.
Religion, what's the point?
- Thread starter TheRedFlag
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I would count making Muhammad a prophet as intervening.
You did claim that Rex was wrong to believe that you don't have to be an expert to realise that a god who created the universe and that is the end of his involvement in his creation isn't supported within the main religions. Rex is right and you are wrong on that point. Quite clearly anyone who understands the broad major concepts of these religions can easily show that the god in those beliefs is not that type of creator. So why bother trying to deny it?
Hence I said following that.
Actually, if you read my post, it was more to do with trying to understand the nature of God. To make any assumption along the lines of 'God does this because of this' is wrong in the first place, because we simply don't know enough, or are too limited to understand. Like I said earlier, we can't really contextualise or rationalise God (as Stephen Fry attempts to do in the video).
If anything, you're wrong, because you've misread or misunderstood what I said.
Now onto the other point, following the last Messenger Muhammad (SAWS) and the Qu'ran... From that moment onwards, God will not send any more Prophets. Islam recognises the Prophet Muhammad (SAWS) as the final messenger i.e there will be no more after that point. So from my understanding of the question posed, God's intervention stops from that point on (until the End of Days, but that's another discussion, but even in that instance, we have indications of what is going to happen and how).
My own understanding of the question was does God intervene in the sense of books (Bible etc) or Prophets, miracles and what have you. That's what I thought of the question when it was posed.
Predestination itself-well, I don't know what's written for me, and I never will (until it actually happens). Is that intervention? I personally don't think it is.
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Yeah Bill, you're definitely wrong. Yeah, so maybe Allah did interfere here and there, but that doesn't even count, it was, like, totally ages ago. And he's not even gonna again do until we all die.
But if all of 'pre-Muhammad' history was also pre-determined, than it doesn't really count as God intervening either, does it? It was/is ALL part of God's pre-determined plan. So the answer (as I understand al-Ghazali would have answered it) is that while God does not, and has never intervened, the entire history and course of every aspect of our cosmos has already been decided by him.
Yep-and I agree with that. But, we can say that in retrospect, as al Ghazali did. But for believers at the time, when these events occurred this was considered as new revelation, with a new messenger, with a new book. But I take your point and I agree with you, even those events at that time were pre determined by God, but who would have known that apart from God?
I do, Muhammad was making it all up.
OK, now bear with me, I'm not going to ask you a 'why?' question since I have an idea of the type of answer I'll get from you.
But can you appreciate how weirdly frustrating it is for a non-Muslim to contemplate that God has already determined that he/she will NOT believe in him or his final prophet, yet still plans to punish him/her for all eternity for it?
Yep-and I've seen this conundrum posed to people many-a-time. But it brings me back to my original statement on rationalising God.
One way I've seen this question answered is that imagine we're at the birth of time and God has everyone who exists/has existed/will exist from the start of time to the end of time gathered. And He puts one group into Heaven and one group into Hell straight away. Remember, this is at the start of time, so no-one has really lived their life on Earth. It's just creation, then placement into Heaven or Hell.
It'd be natural for the group in Hell to ask and ponder why they've been put in Hell. They'd say 'how can you put us here without giving us a chance to show you that we deserve to be in Heaven?' which is fair. So, this life that we live in present day is that chance. So, when we all die and we're being judged, no one can really say they didn't have a chance.
(Edit: And again, I've had to contextualise the nature of God a bit here, which is something I usually avoid doing, but this is some inferences I've read by others of more knowledge.)
But, yea, I can see why a non-believer will be miffed if s/he was designed to be doomed. But I think at that point, they'll probably regret not believing in the time they did have alive.
Do you mind me asking-what religion are you? (I'm guessing you're Jewish?) If you are-I'd love to know what the Jewish perspective is on this type of situation.
But it's not up to us anyway, right?
Nah, I've no religion, but from a Catholic background.
I don't mean to pick on Islam in particular here either, it's just the only religion I've studied in any depth. I know as much about Judaism as I do about rocket science.
But it's not up to us anyway, right?
Yea, exactly but if God put all the people of Hell in Hell at the start of time etc.
We'll go round in circles ad infinitum.
That's fair enough. I love talking and debating this type of stuff, so please feel free to debate with me more (even though I don't feel as if you've picked on Islam in any way). I still need to get back to your post in the Palestine/Israel thread.
So belief in god is ipso facto irrational.
Nope-that's not what I'm saying.
We can't rationalise God simply because we are too limited as humans to do so. That doesn't equate to God being irrational.
A baby trying to rationalise life outside of a womb-they wouldn't be able to do so because they don't know enough. But it doesn't make the world outside irrational.
Edit: I know it's not the best example but it's the best I can come up with at 8.15am.
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That's exactly what you're saying: my rational statement of the problem of evil doesn't apply because rationality doesn't apply to god.
That's an interesting question. Ye' old predestination vs free will conundrum. If god has predestined you to commit murder and go to hell, who are you to defy him? If you don't commit murder, you are defying him and contradicting his omnipotence and predestination. If you do commit murder, you never had a chance to save yourself in the first place. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I see what you're saying but we've all been given a free reign over our lives. Some chose to follow a religion, some chose to not. We're not going to know if we're in heaven and hell until we're there. So I live my life with the end goal of trying to get to heaven. Having said that-when I do die and if I do get to Heaven I could be happy that it was predetermined. But I can only make that assertion when I die.
What statement of evil? I don't know what you're talking about. Someone quoted a list you put up earlier but I never read it. Do you mean that?
Going back to God-I've said talking about the nature of God i.e. Why does God do the things God does (in a broad sense), is something I don't do as we're trying to comprehend something we're simply too limited to understand. That doesn't make God Himself irrational. It simply makes Him too great for human comprehension. Not knowing something doesn't make it irrational.
I see where you're coming from. Claiming that something that is not rational is therefore irrational is like saying something that is not up is therefore down. The absence of rationality can also be arationality - outside the domain of reason.
Nope (see OED).
Rational: Based on or derived from reason or reasoning, esp. as opposed to emotion, intuition, instinct, etc.
Irrational: Contrary to or not in accordance with reason; unreasonable, utterly illogical, absurd.
Arrational:
No dictionary entries found for ‘arrational’.
You do realise you're contradicting yourself, right?
I quoted the OED English usage. The US coinage 'arational' is but an unnecessary synonym for irrational.
I think what bish is saying that like morality it can be thought of as moral and immoral but also amoral.
It can't, there isn't a third position. You're either in the domain of reason/logic (rational) or you're not (irrational/arational).
Maybe the Americans have invented a valid third option due to stupidity. Just as moral/immoral imply a conscious choice of good or bad while amoral requires the childlike state of a total abscence of morals, maybe the Americans have come up with a viable third alternative where one can be too stupid to understand reason therefore are arational rather than irrational
If we don't know anything how can we assume one position over the other?
We do know things. We proceed in the domain of reason for the most part. We don't worship the sun (more rational than worship of the JCI god btw) any more because we know it is an inanimate star.
You're claiming that not being something is the same as being the opposite of something. There are some cases where that is plainly not true - 'left' is not the same as 'down', but neither is it 'up'. Rationality may well be a case where all things must be one or the other, so I'm happy to hear the arguments. Instinctively it feels wrong though.
Irrational as per your OED quote and the way you've used it before is used the slightly pejorative sense of rejecting or eschewing logic or reason. The diametric opposite of rational you might say. However not all human thinking seems to fit that bill.
Human intuition, for example, is neither rational nor irrational. It doesn't use facts or reason to guide us to making decisions, and certainly doesn't do so conciously. But neither does it fit the description you gave of being "utterly illogical, absurd, etc", the diametric opposite of rational. Its an important and desirable aspect of human thinking. I suppose I would call that position non-rational rather than arational, but the point remains that you don't need to be in either camp.
But that's just the human mind of course. My cat is neither rational nor irrational. It's 'thinking' is not governed by reason. Whatever rudimentary learning and decision making processes it has, it (afaik) fails to meet criteria for either rational or irrational. Its decisions are arational, made in the absence of logic or reason.
I can see why people don't like irrational since it has (not unsurprisingly) picked up pejorative overtones. Intuition can be either rational (just a quick decision made largely on prior experience) or irrational (feeling/hunch/wish fulfilment). Your cat is a red herring.
Actually that's wrong. Intuition is linked to instinct which is linked to something being innate. It doesn't require a prior experience.
I don't agree but I don't want to have a discussion about the nature of intuition right now, it's tangential to the argument (interesting though it may be). Not to bash the bish but it's typical of him to diverge an argument with poor analogies (intuition, cat psychology etc) and not focus on the issue at hand.
Good ol pete. When the going gets tough...
What we can say then is that if you and Uzz have different definitions of irrational you're working from, then its going to be hard to agree whether god itself, or an individual's belief in god, is irrational. You do seem to agree that its not rational though, which is something.
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So god gave us free will, but if I come to conclusion that god doesn't exist using my free will, I will go to hell?
Moreover, god knows what decision we'll make, therefore he knows if we'll go to heaven or hell in the first place, before we even existed, and all the results are pre-determined anyways, so this "test" is ultimately pointless.
What about plenty of people who didn't have a chance to hear of the abrahamic god before they died? Do they go to hell just because they were born in a different part of the world in a different circumstance?
No they go to heaven (according to Islam, not sure about the other faiths).
Succintly put. This is why hard determinism is such a challenging concept for religions. One way or another free will is at the heart of religions. If there is no free will it could be argued that god is just creating souls for the sake of sending them to hell.
I'd be interested to hear from @Uzz whether determinism is a typicaly viewpoint within Islam or just a personal take on it.
Yup-in Islam predestination is one of the most important parts of belief. I think some scholars say it is the most important thing. And following on from that, we believe in free will as well. But we view free will as being hand in hand with predestination, as oppose to contravening predestination as a few other posters have alluded to on this thread.
On a side note, the Arabic root word is very similar (Qada (free will) and Qadr (predestination/will of God)). There's no relevance to that, but I just think it's cool.
I'll go into a little more depth about it later tonight, because I owe tom bombadil a response.
More important question would be, how so? How can we reconcile such (seemingly) contradictory ideas?
And again, if God predestined us to go to heaven or hell before we even came into existence, what's the point of this test in the first place?
Seems quite simple to me. Uzz says god is not subject to the rational (and hence is not rational) and therefore belief in god is not rational. QED.
Uzz
Above is the start of this part of the thread.
Pete responds with this
You responded
Then rex to you
Then you to Rex.
I think it was clear that we were discussing the idea that a god could have created the universe and then had nothing to do with it, hence Pete's absent land lord comment because this negates the argument about the nature of evil and the logic that follows. IE that the god most religions have at the root of their faith logically can't exist.
Now I don't know whether you haven't followed the discussion or whether you really think that you have to be a scholar in order to understand that the absentee landlord creator isn't the god of the main faiths but it must be quite clear by your own admission that the Islamic Faiths god isn't that type of god. Not the we agree about what type of god exists or doesn't, because we won't ever agree on that, but just for the sake of the logic in the argument.
So no you don't have to be a scholar in order to understand this point.
Above is the start of this part of the thread.
Pete responds with this
You responded
Then rex to you
Then you to Rex.
I think it was clear that we were discussing the idea that a god could have created the universe and then had nothing to do with it, hence Pete's absent land lord comment because this negates the argument about the nature of evil and the logic that follows. IE that the god most religions have at the root of their faith logically can't exist.
Now I don't know whether you haven't followed the discussion or whether you really think that you have to be a scholar in order to understand that the absentee landlord creator isn't the god of the main faiths but it must be quite clear by your own admission that the Islamic Faiths god isn't that type of god. Not the we agree about what type of god exists or doesn't, because we won't ever agree on that, but just for the sake of the logic in the argument.
So no you don't have to be a scholar in order to understand this point.
When people talk about humans not being able to understand the mind of god and then go on to give an example of a creature which doesn't have concious thought, as a starting point for comparison, they are making a mistake. Humans do have conscious thought and whether the mind of god is on some other level or not doesn't negate our logic just as a greater understanding of maths doesn't negate existing proofs.A benevolent all powerful god is at odds with the world around us. The way we act in the rest of our lives when no evidence exists for something is the sensible approach to take.
The way religions struggle to with the bigger questions gods existence would raise show how fallible they are because they are all human constructs.
The way religions struggle to with the bigger questions gods existence would raise show how fallible they are because they are all human constructs.