For all those who asked questions about Deism, Brian "Humanistic" has answered them all. They’re posted here in the Just Ask! section for your reading pleasure. Be warned, I am not responsible for any work that is missed as a result of reading these :)
I’d like to thank Brian for all the time and effort he put into this. He really did a fine job so give him a pat on the back!
Now, if you see any technical issues with the questions/answers, please contact me so I can correct them. It’s a lot of work to get these up so I may have made a few little errors ;) As with all the posts now, you can print them by clicking the little "printer" icon next to the post title. In addition, you can email any post by clicking the little "email" icon.
Have fun and please share your thoughts and comments for each question!
Regards,
gasmonso
Related posts:
Deism is like the last dregs of hope for someone who has seen the idioty of religion and faith but just cannot accept the percieved emptiness of life without godly meaning.
Hello Naery,
Deists have rational reasons for believing in a God, but most understand that they cannot know much about the nature of God. For example, I don’t know or claim that God’s existence somehow gives extra meaning to human life. I don’t claim that we are the end purpose of creation. I don’t even claim that God is aware of our existence let alone care about us and our activities. Hell, I don’t even know if God has the capacity for caring or any other feeling.
In one sense, though, you are right, because many Deists hold out hope that some of those things are true. But the second part of your (somewhat insulting) statement is false. If someone somehow demonstrated the impossibility of God, then most Deists would cease being Deists because reason is more important to us than hope or faith. Life would still have meaning for us without God.
While deists tend to believe in less dogma than other religious people do, you still have no rational foundation but only wish for belief for what remains. To be unnice, your argument reminds of a drug addict saying “I can quit any time if I want to”.
Also, I don’t have to demonstrate that god is impossible (which is impossible for the general case, but trivially easy for every specific god image, but those proofs tend to not be accepted), but you have to prove that your god exists.
Hello yetanotheratheist,
You are correct. The onus of proof lies with those claiming existence. Otherwise, it would be like saying, “Elves exist, prove me wrong!” Yet we do have a rational basis for believing in God. My basis, (my apologies for those of you who have read this dozens of times from me already) is the modal cosmological argument. I am particularly fond of the Leibnizian statement of this argument. Since I have described this argument elsewhere, I’ll trust that you will read the link.
Oh, and Deists’ only dogma is reliance on reason and evidence. I can think of another human institution that has the very same dogma…
So then you believe in God, but you define “God” as, essentially, “whatever caused the universe to exist.” Am I getting that right?
Many Deists use a version of ID to conclude further things about God, such as it is intelligent and has a plan for the universe. This is something that I’ve been struggling with for awhile now. I know that the evangelicals’ version of ID is undoubtedly flawed since spontaneous complexity is readily observable in nature. But the fact that the constants of the universe are set perfectly to allow for the existence of life, and beyond that, self-reflecting life does beg an explanation. Many have invoked the anthropic principle(Wikipedia), but that reeks of not being falsifiable, just as the existence of God is.
This seems like a discussion that might have taken place elsewhere on the site, so sorry if I missed it, but … why does the existence of self-reflecting life beg an explanation? I read the Wikipedia link about the anthropic principle, and it seems like it’s basically just another version of the “Man, what are the odds?” argument. If the universe were organized differently, we wouldn’t be here to observe it. Would then the NON-existence of self-reflecting life beg an explanation? (Or, to go a different way, maybe there still would be self-reflecting life, but it would take a totally inconceivable form.)
The anthropic principle is what many physicists use to explain the unlikely configuration of constants (see the ‘weak’ version). The non-existence of self-reflecting life would beg an explanation (though there probably wouldn’t be much to explain it to).
What I was trying to point out (though, upon rereading my post, I didn’t do a very good job of it) is that the anthropic principle (both weak and strong) is no better at explaining the unlikeliest of a life-producing universe than the assumption of a designer. In fact, the anthropic principle really just begs the question. As the Wikipedia article points out, the anthropic principle has been used in defense of both ID and evolution.
Also, I cannot know if humans are the purpose of existence. As you point out, there could be another, totally inconceivable form of intelligence that has nothing to do with us even within our own universe. Come to think of it, contact with another intelligent race from elsewhere in the galaxy would definitively prove that God did not create the universe for us alone. What would religions do then?
Sorry for rambling. I just felt like typing.