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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Professor Wagstaff)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Logic based on different sets of assumptions (part 2 of 2)
Message-ID: <647@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-Mar-85 10:06:22 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.647
Posted: Mon Mar 11 10:06:22 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Mar-85 09:09:16 EST
References: <589@pyuxd.UUCP>, <4932@cbscc.UUCP> <4933@cbscc.UUCP> <1080@utastro.UUCP>
Organization: Huxley College
Lines: 31

>>    [DUBUC]                                            ...  You conlude
>>that belief that there is a God to be an assumption.  There is another
>>possibility: It is a proposition held to explain questions (often metaphyical)
>>that we encounter about our own existence and that of the world we live in.
>>In this sense I do not take God's existence to be axiomatic.  I offer it as a
>>consistent explanation of the world as I encounter it.  It may not be the
>>only one, but as far as *I* know it is the best for many things I consider.

> This is just a way of defining away things that you can't understand. The
> problem with this approach is that it contributes nothing to your
> understanding of the world around you. It fails to distinguish in quality
> between explanations such as a) the pot boils because it is on the stove,
> and, b) God made the water boil. The first is repeatable, the second
> relies on God's whim.  [PADRAIG]

I think the religious point of view is that both views have equal potential
validity, but they choose the latter.  However, when such people make claims
about the possibility of a deity's whim controlling the universe, they would
throw out the evidence of regularity and repeatability that we DO find.  Even
if there indeed IS a god, which we probably will never know, it would appear
that, if this god did create the universe (rather than being just a
consciousness within it), it designed it with "automatic mode" in mind:  if it
had to constantly break in and fine tune, it wouldn't have done a very good
design job.  Yet some people, to support beliefs that they hold that are
without real evidence, choose to say "well, it COULD have been a direct
interference from the will of god projected into the universe" without first
1) examining the veracity of their own claims and 2) showing such an example
of interference.
-- 
"Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?  I dunno."
				Rich Rosen 	ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr