Thought for the day

[kerravonsen]

It is foolish to weld one's Faith to the knowledge of mankind, because man's knowledge is finite and fickle. It is also foolish to weld one's Faith to the ignorance of mankind, because the boundaries of ignorance are always changing.

Corollory:
Be wary of a chain of deduction that goes like this:
1) God is perfect.
2) Perfection has property X.
3) Therefore God has property X.

The flaw is in step 2, because it is based upon man's ideas of what perfection is like.

Comments

[lizamanynames.livejournal.com]

I like that. I really, really like that.

[kerravonsen]

8-)

[pammalamma.livejournal.com]

I agree. A lot of times, when you hear atheists talk, they do that sort of thing: throw the rattle out of the pram anytime God does something people don't like.

I think a related problem is when the Bible doesn't seem palatable to the current culture, sometimes people say the Bible must be mistaken, simply because people don't like what it says. I prefer to side with the Bible in those cases.

[kerravonsen]

The irony is that it isn't only atheists who do this. I was actually thinking more of Christians when I wrote the above. Examples:

1) The whole Galileo thing happened when the Church assumed (along with the rest of the world) that the solar system revolved around the Earth. A heliocentric system was assumed to be anti-Biblical, because the Bible said that the sun rose and set, not that the Earth turned. Also, they didn't like the idea of ellipses, because circles were perfect, therefore God would have used circles.

2) Intelligent Design theory depends on man's ignorance, because it basically says "We don't understand how X could have happened, therefore ...".

2a) Any theory which is a "God of the gaps" theory runs into the problem of the bounds of ignorance.

3) I have disagreements with Calvinism because it welds its ideas of perfection onto its understanding of the nature of God. It then feeds back this understanding into its interpretation of the Bible. For example: God is perfect; Perfection is unchanging; therefore God is unchanging; therefore God never changes his mind. And then they go and say that every example of God changing his mind in the Bible (from Abraham on) is an illusion, because God can't change his mind, because he is Perfect.

I have no patience for that kind of Biblical interpretation.

[pammalamma.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree on 1.

On 3, I think that might actually be because of this verse:

The meaning of Numbers 23:19 could not be more clear, “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change His mind. Does He speak and then not act? Does He promise and not fulfill?”

(I got this from http://www.gotquestions.org, whom melchecicada is a writer for.)

[kerravonsen]

Yeah, but that's "change his mind" as in "be faithful", not "change his mind" as in "change his mind" (for example, when he decided not to destroy Ninevah after Jonah had told them they were going to be destroyed).

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Much better to base it on women's ideas of perfection. ;-)

[kerravonsen]

8-P

[temeres.livejournal.com]

The flaw is in step 2, because it is based upon man's ideas of what perfection is like.

That is not actually stated. It merely says that perfection on its own has property X, implying that perfection is an objective quality independent of human ideas of what perfection might actually be. If perfection does exist in this obective state, then God, being perfect, must have property X.

Conversely, if perfection is dependent on a human definition of what is perfect, God cannot be perfect ...

Yes, I'm back, and every bit as picky as ever:)

[kerravonsen]

Conversely, if perfection is dependent on a human definition of what is perfect, God cannot be perfect ...

Eh? That makes no sense.

[temeres.livejournal.com]

If perfection is defined solely by human criteria, then there is no such thing as perfection in any objective sense (independent of said human criteria). Perfection does not exist. Therefore God cannot be perfect, and neither can anything else.

If, however, there is such a thing as perfection independent of any qualities we might assign, then God may be perfect through coincidence.

[kerravonsen]

That still doesn't make sense to me. I don't think you trying to explain it further is going to help.