MikeNovack wrote: ↑Fri Jul 25, 2025 6:52 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Jul 25, 2025 6:18 pm
Because an invented God would be just human ruse to get away with tyrannizing others. Only the real God will do.
How do you distinguish between a real god or gods and invented ones? In an objective way.
Well, there’s a lot you can rule out very, very easily. First, and of those little “god” things that a) are said to have an origin, and b) are said to have a freshness date cannot possibly be the Supreme Being and First Cause, because they are contingent, perishable, limited beings. Whatever accounts for their existence would be more “supreme” than they are. So they couldn’t possibly be the Supreme being. So say goodbye to Loki, or Zeus, or any of the purely-local “spirit” beings that are said to inhabit trees, rocks, etc. They can all be eliminated before we start.
A little harder is the question of what to do about competing beings that fit the bill, though: beings said to be eternal, all-powerful, ultimate, and creatorial, for example. For there are a few of those.
But very quickly, you can eliminate some of them, too. For a start, if they have no means of self-revelation, then they cannot be of any interest to us. They’ve hit-and-quit. They arrived, created a universe, and left. They aren’t coming back. We know nothing about them, and anybody who says they does owes us an explanation of how he knows what nobody else can know. So gone is any talk of some “transcendent spirit” of unknown and unknowable nature; and gone is the “Abyss” of the Gnostics, and also even the Deist god. We can’t say for sure such never existed, but we can safely say that, since they’re unknowable, there’s no work for us to do in relation to them. They’re irrelevant at best, and fictional at worst.
This leaves us with some form of all-powerful, Supreme Being and First Cause, something capable of creating a universe and having some form of revelation to us that would make His existence relevant to what we are and what we do. We’re down to a small pool now.
But we are not without important evidence that needs still to be considered. For creation itself is a revelation of God. Just as a painting done by Picasso would bear his particular style, the manner of creation would encode evidence of the kind of God who created it. It is in this sense, I think, that Paul writes in Romans 1 that all men “know God” and are “without excuse” because "since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made…” (1:20)
Now, could God have gone beyond this? In other words, could there be a reason He created a world? Could He have intended something by creating us, and not just done it randomly? But if He did it randomly, then again, it’s of no concern to us; that god didn’t mean us to know Him, or to do anything, or to have any meaning or point. We were a kind of accident, maybe. But why should we care? On the other hand, if God intended to create us, and had a purpose in doing so, and had goals and purposes for us, then we have a new situation. But we certainly cannot afford to ignore Him then, and can start to ask, “Why am I here, and what am I supposed to be about?”
So it’s only if we have a particular kind of God that the existence of a god would make any difference. And then the question arises, which of the remaining plausible candidates is the kind of God that matters? And if He has given us any indication of His intentions, where is it to be found, beyond the basic intuition we all can get from creation that some God exists?
Now we have the essential question of revelation: has God spoken? If He has not, then again, we find the question irrelevant. We have no way of knowing anything about this God, His purposes, His intentions, His will for us; but if He has….then where?
This is where we examine the available candidates for ourselves. And my suggestion to you…well, I’ve done my search, and maybe you want to do yours without me forcing your hand. If so, I can commit that task to you. But I do believe that anybody who examines fairly and openly the possible sources of revelation of God will soon be in no doubt about the only serious candidate.
It is my observation that humans have believed in lots of different gods. Give me a reason why I should believe yours is any more real than some other person's.
Don’t consider one or the other because I do. Consider it for yourself, I suggest. I don’t think the evidence balances out, at all; but you’d have to see that for yourself.
But more specific to your statement, why do you seem to believe that the belief of this other person is a ruse? That they do not HONESTLY believe in this deity of theirs.
Honesty isn’t the point, obviously. One can easily be “honestly mistaken.” People are, all the time. What’s important is to believe what’s
true, obviously.
But all belief systems are exclusive. There are no genuinely inclusive ones. And a little thought will prove that to you. Even the most “open-minded” and “relativistic” person will still insist that exclusivists of various kinds are wrong, inferior, “closed-minded,” or at least would be better people if they were “open-minded” and “relativistic” like the subjectivist imagines himself to be. If believing your way is better than somebody else’s, then the relativist is a bigot about his “open-mindedness” — he fancies himself as morally-superior in no less Pharisaical a way than the most passionate zealot of some cult.
So whatever discomfort you feel with the thought that some people may be wrong, it’s pretty easy to get over: you quickly discover that the basic laws of logic prove that at least some HAVE to be wrong. There’s no other way it can logically be. Mutually-exclusive accounts of God cannot be simultaneously true. In fact, it must be the case that not just one or two of them, but MOST of them will turn out, to be wrong. And if we think even harder, we realize that ultimately, only one set of propositions can be true about God. So only one can be right, if any is.