Religion and Logics

[basics]

It is written that, " There is a time to live and a time to die." and " Today is the day of salvation." Why wait till it is too late? With Jesus Christ you can have life. The choice is yours.

[DaVinci]

It is written that, " There is a time to live and a time to die." and " Today is the day of salvation." Why wait till it is too late? With Jesus Christ you can have life. The choice is yours.

Translated: What's more precious for feeling and thinking organisms (like fe. humans) than "life"? Answer: (Probably) Nothing is more precious.
Plus, what has more fear potential than the death? Answer: (Probably) Nothing is more fearful. Or, has more potential for fear, and hope for an afterlife. Thus creation (invention) of the afterlife (and more). Derived from, i call it know, naturereligions, of pre-monotheist times (which closes to what i initially wrote in this thread).

Deeper explanation: Brain research has long found out, that we function a lot by reward system. And additionally the info (but i guess you know), we are steered to a great part by hormons and messenger substances/neurotransmitters.

[basics]

DaVinci,

Yet what Jesus Christ offers is much better than what we experience on this planet for each one will pass on from this world onto one of two paths, the path to life or the path to eternal death. This temporary life is only an advert or trailer for what is to come for eternity so it comes down to what one would buy into to. As far as eternal life is concerned Jesus Christ bought and paid for that at the cross on behalf of all them that will know His path.

[Almogaver]

Great, I'm off to be baptised. Which one should I pick? Catholicism, christian orthodoxy or evangelicalism?

If the latter, which one? There are so many evangelical branches it defies logic! I think I'll go with catholicism, their saints are so cool. Which one of the 3 is loved the most by Jesus?

What about jehova's witnesses? They gave me a very nice leaflet the other day.

[conon394]

What about jehova's witnesses? They gave me a very nice leaflet the other day.

Even the LDS think they are a cult - I'd pass.

But if you making to make the which one(?) joke, you really should toss in Islam and Judaism since they are technically also people of the book. Personally I lean toward the Patron goddess of my favorite classical city, Athena.

Today is the day of salvation." Why wait till it is too late? With Jesus Christ you can have life. The choice is yours.

Salvation from what?

[Almogaver]

Even the LDS think they are a cult - I'd pass.

But if you making to make the which one(?) joke, you really should toss in Islam and Judaism since they are technically also people of the book.

No, Jesus Christ ist the one on offer here.

[basics]

Even the LDS think they are a cult - I'd pass.

But if you making to make the which one(?) joke, you really should toss in Islam and Judaism since they are technically also people of the book. Personally I lean toward the Patron goddess of my favorite classical city, Athena.

Salvation from what?

conon394,

Why, the very thing that separates you from God right now.

[Himster]

Why, the very thing that separates you from God right now.

Logic?

[basics]

Logic?

Himster,

Well if God be true and He is both to Himself and mankind then it is quite logical to want man to return to Him under no obligation but to believe on Him and the One He sent to make that possible. It's called Justification by Faith and that alone.

[MaximiIian]

God is not bound by determinism and causality (goes with being omnipotent, if you didn't realize that). God is the origin of everything. Isn't that your dogma?

Not necessarily. That might be the case in certain monotheistic religions, but that isn't the only theological/epistemological viewpoint. Many religions view their god or gods as having only come into being after the Universe/World started being a thing.

[basics]

Not necessarily. That might be the case in certain monotheistic religions, but that isn't the only theological/epistemological viewpoint. Many religions view their god or gods as having only come into being after the Universe/World started being a thing.

Maximilian,

Indeed they do and it would be correct to have that assumption since what they believed then and believe now is a corruption of what actually took place in the six days of creation and its consequences. As a result many years later God was to give to Moses ten commandments the second of which illustrated mans ability to create in his own mind the kind of god that he wanted to see and not the God Who created him. " Thou shalt not make unto thee......." any image graven or otherwise because you'll get it wrong as did happen. Notice God said " unto thee " and " not unto me " as His concern was not Whom He is rather what man would make as being Him.

[TheLeft]

Great, I'm off to be baptised. Which one should I pick? Catholicism, christian orthodoxy or evangelicalism?

If the latter, which one? There are so many evangelical branches it defies logic! I think I'll go with catholicism, their saints are so cool. Which one of the 3 is loved the most by Jesus?

What about jehova's witnesses? They gave me a very nice leaflet the other day.

If you absolutely HAVE to believe in a God. Go with Thor. He has a big hammer and is in the Avengers movies.

Plus unlike any other of the Deities mentioned here, you can read his new adventures every week in Marvel comics. That's where Jesus went wrong. I mean, the last update on Jesus's exploits was nearly 2000 years ago. The guy comes back from the dead, then disappears? Bad story telling and he doesn't have a weekly comics series. I imagine 'The New Adventures of Jesus' would be pretty popular and would certainly arrest the decline in chruch attendance figures...

[basics]

If you absolutely HAVE to believe in a God. Go with Thor. He has a big hammer and is in the Avengers movies.

Plus unlike any other of the Deities mentioned here, you can read his new adventures every week in Marvel comics. That's where Jesus went wrong. I mean, the last update on Jesus's exploits was nearly 2000 years ago. The guy comes back from the dead, then disappears? Bad story telling and he doesn't have a weekly comics series. I imagine 'The New Adventures of Jesus' would be pretty popular and would certainly arrest the decline in chruch attendance figures...

TheLeft,

Strange enough the new adventures of Jesus are going on in parts of the world where His name was not allowed until now. And, unlike Thor people are actually seeing miracles before their very eyes as they come to know Him. So no, the last updates on Jesus can be found in the numbers who are experiencing Him of which many can be viewed on youtube.

[TheLeft]

TheLeft,

Strange enough the new adventures of Jesus are going on in parts of the world where His name was not allowed until now. And, unlike Thor people are actually seeing miracles before their very eyes as they come to know Him. So no, the last updates on Jesus can be found in the numbers who are experiencing Him of which many can be viewed on youtube.

So you can only tune in to Jesus's new adventures if you hear voices in your head? Bit rubbish really. What happens if I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic and don't hear voices? Perhaps someone should write all these 'miracles' down and put them in a book, we could call it 'The Even Newer Testament'!

[basics]

So you can only tune in to Jesus's new adventures if you hear voices in your head? Bit rubbish really. What happens if I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic and don't hear voices? Perhaps someone should write all these 'miracles' down and put them in a book, we could call it 'The Even Newer Testament'!

TheLeft,

Who said anything about hearing voices in their heads? So, all you have left is the usual that always comes from those on the outside who never get to see in. Concerning the New Testament, perhaps you should try reading it.

[TheLeft]

TheLeft,

Who said anything about hearing voices in their heads? So, all you have left is the usual that always comes from those on the outside who never get to see in. Concerning the New Testament, perhaps you should try reading it.

The guy (Jesus) is invisible, of course these people are just hearing voices in their heads! The fact that they are publically displaying their psychosis on YouTube isn't helpful to anyone apart from the various mental health organisations who will be able to identify and treat these poor people.

As for reading the New Testament? Nah, read it before, its nowhere near as good as the Old Testament. No talking snakes or apocalyptic 'I'll kill all life on earth because a few humans won't worship me' style hissy fits in that one. The Lord of the Rings is a better read if you like fantasy books.

[basics]

TheLeft,

Oh well, I guess the spin off Lord of the Rings would be more pleasing to some from the original still running story of good verses evil as it takes away your responsibility to God. One day though you will have to accept your part in it, the original that is, and all those that you denounce will see your reaction then which won't be the same I suspect.

[conon394]

conon394,

Why, the very thing that separates you from God right now.

Just not feeling it. Overall the NT has too many inconsistencies even allowing ignoring the OT. A lot of people have spent a of time trying to iron all those out ... but. Faith in the Bible has led to both great and evil things. I'm sure you will say the evil was the result of false faith and/or manipulation. but there it is in all its historical or current glory. To be honest even though I'm pretty much past the middle of the shuffle of the mortal coil, I'm still not convinced. And I am not afraid. Certainty not of the petulant and irrational toddler that is the god of the Bible.

[TheLeft]

TheLeft,

Oh well, I guess the spin off Lord of the Rings would be more pleasing to some from the original still running story of good verses evil as it takes away your responsibility to God. One day though you will have to accept your part in it, the original that is, and all those that you denounce will see your reaction then which won't be the same I suspect.

I highly doubt that. People worship thousands of different gods across the globe. What makes you think that your particular flavour is the right one? Because it says so in an ancient text? Or because you heard voices in your head saying it was so? Arguing over who has the baddest and best invisible friend is illogical in the extreme. You are better off with the default scientific position in which it doesn't exist until it proven so.

[Iskar]

I had a sneaking suspicion my last post would pose an irresistible temptation

I need to split my responses to you into a few groups, because I think there is a general level of discussion to be had here and an examination of the specifics as well.

In the first place, I would not characterize my argument as "proof" that God does not exist. The proof - such as it is - rests on some very particular premises. I would not ordinarily trot out an argument like this without those premises having been fairly well established and agreed upon before hand. The key premises:

1) We are dealing with at least an informally rigorous use of standard logic.
2) The subject (in this case, the God of organized religion, e.g., Christianity) sits entirely within the universe of our consideration, that is, the domain of objects upon which we have agreed to exercise the logical rigor stipulated in (1).

and finally:
3) We are working with definition of God that is sufficiently specific to yield an interesting discussion. In this case, the "transcendent" definition that God is the aggregation (and more!) of all that exists.

In your final paragraph above, you make the point that these three premises - particularly (2) - would not find agreement among many believers, and I think that's clear. Many religious folk would immediately balk at the idea that any rigorous logical "definition" of God is possible, at least to the human mind. In the context of this discussion, at that point we'd pretty much throw in the towel and say that here religion and logic part ways - God is simply not in the domain. However, you may note that was not the route Dr. Legend chose to take.

This is also my overall position on this topic - certain aspects of religious belief simply must be shielded from examination by logic; otherwise we end up with a doubly bad combination of logical inconsistencies and a puncturing of the religious experience. So really, the answer is the two are compatible only up to a certain point - on the whole and in their entirety, they are not.

On the second point - the vagueness of Dr. Legend's source - I think it's worded carelessly, but the concept here is certainly not novel, nor is it radically bad. Precursors of the notion of a transcendent divinity can certainly be found in Plato (the mini-narrative of Diotima from The Symposium comes to mind), and some of the high points of the Confessions clearly appropriate that Platonic notion of transcendence and reorganize it in a scriptural context (the man was a rhetorical genius). If anything, the good doctor's source is undermined by his resentment at the plebeian interpretation of his religion and fails to convey the sublime beauty of his vision. Who would have thought that the grace of humility and shedding of ego would become elusive in the presence of overweening pride and pretensions of superiority? Oh right, that same guy would.

So those are my opening remarks. I do still owe you a detailed answer as to my appropriation of Russell's paradox, how I use the notion of existence, the zero analogy, and particulars regarding logical entailment.

_____

So here is how I have been thinking about concept of existence in propositional logic:

In my own simple-minded apprehension of mathematics (as it was taught to me), the notion of existence is really the atomic primitive descriptor. For instance KP or ZF axioms for the most part consist of rules that govern how one can construct or derive new sets from existing sets, and then include at least one axiom that asserts the existence of a set (I like KP because it's clear how one assumes the existence of the empty set and then builds everything up from that). From these foundations the entirety of standard mathematics is then constructed.

However, none of the axioms explicitly define what this existence descriptor really means. It's not even formally defined, much less given any interpretive meaning. One might speculate that the intent is to form a representational analog to objective existence, but the approach is entirely formal, and proceeds from such abstract rudiments that it's just as clearly intended to stand on its own as the basis of a representational construct - e.g., mathematics.

It could be argued that some meaning is inherited via the semantics of predicate logic, but in this case I'm not using predicates, I'm just dealing in propositions. And even in predicate logic, existence as a descriptor is still not assigned meaning. Much as in set theory, it's a primitive state that is assumed to have propositional requirements. Much care is taken to ensure the universal and existential quantifiers operate to conform to the principle of non-contradiction, and to transfer existence safely (by inference) from one collection of objects to another, but existence itself is not assigned any meaning beyond its formal position in the semantics of predicate logic.

So in practice what we see is that existence is a primitive, undefined property that our entire axiomatic system is expressly designed to transfer safely from a small (defined or axiomatically stipulated) collection of primitives to other derived objects. As such it has no intrinsic meaning - it only serves to transfer a status from one collection of objects to others, to enable the construction of a contingent model. (If A exists, then so must B, and so on.) The governing rule is that existence must be propositional and non-contradictory: if we derive a state of affairs where an object both exists and does not exist, we have a paradox and have fallen into error. I am inclined to think every object of consideration must also have an existential status, but I'm not sure about that.

Now I know that in some philosophical contexts, there is an assumption of existence that accompanies an assertion. So, for instance, if I say consider all X, there may be an implicit assumption that there exists at least one X. In mathematical logic this is generally not the case, which gives rise to vacuously true implications.

We could clarify things by explicitly stating what the universe of consideration is. But even if we explicitly state that we want to consider a universe only of things that can be said to exist, it's clear we don't restrict ourselves only to contemplation of objects that exist in the practice of mathematical reasoning. Even though existence appears to be one of our central characteristics, the one characteristic of objects we most care - almost obsessively - about, some of our most cherished proofs spend a considerable amount of effort contemplating, defining, manipulating, and triumphantly discarding objects that we joyously conclude do not exist. Cantor's diagonal proof and the proof that the diagonal length of the unit square is not rational are two proofs that come easily to mind. And these are not obscure proofs, but rather some of the most celebrated, canonical proofs in the foundations of set theory and analysis.

So the "domain of contemplation" must quite prominently feature objects our contemplation itself informs us cannot exist, unless we want to toss proof by contradiction out the window. Sometimes it may even be the case that the proof would be impossible without contemplation of the non-existent. Now that would put us in a truly absurd situation: I could prove to you that this thing does not exist if only I were allowed to contemplate it.

From a philosophical perspective, I think the existence property forms a nice bridge between the conceptual realm and contexts of application. In the most stupidly obvious way I can, I pay tribute to Descartes in as much as, whatever idea pops into my head, can certainly be said to exist as an idea I just had. Whether that existence can be properly transferred to another context is the more relevant question, and this is where the semantics of representational logic come into play.

In the context of the current discussion, if I have a working, purportedly well-formed definition of God that states God contains "all that exists" and on top of that claims to be consistent with propositional logic, then the notion of "all that exists" must be well defined, as must be the notion of containment. Even if, as in the examples above, I intend to show that "all that exists" cannot itself exist, I should be allowed to contemplate it, and even formulate it as a logical proposition. Despite the possibility there might be some philosophical objection to doing so, given that the body of working mathematicians appear to be comfortable with the contemplation of objects they intend to show do not exist, I think that's a high enough bar.

I've been labouring with the reply for some time now, as there is a lot in this that I needed to sort out in my head before being able to write it down in orderly fashion without hopping to and fro between different points.

I don't really like zebra'ing replies, so I'll put it in a couple of paragraphs, which I think you'll easily link back to the (excellent) points you made above.

Existence in mathematics/basic logics:
I might weigh in here from my practical(!) experiences as pure mathematician to shed some light on what mathematicians "mean" when they use the notion of existence. A recurring issue in linking mathematical and non-mathematical discourses is that mathematicians tend to take words from everyday vocabulary, assign to them an abstract definition and forget about what other people would associate with the words. While the philosophical notion of existence (which we're largely discussing here) is certainly the historical root of the mathematical notion, the latter is basically stripped of the semantic meaning of the former: When we say "existence" we can mean either of two (not mutually exclusive) concepts:
a) Constructive Existence: One explicitly writes down an object in formal language and shows that the definition is free of contradictions. [(Very trivial) example: To prove the existence of a non-linear polynomial we just write down the expression x².]
b) Non-Constructive Existence: One can write down a well-defined set (i.e. no logical contradictions in the definition, or point a) applied to that set) and prove that it is non-empty, thus proving the existence of a member of that set, although said member may not be explicitly nameable. [Example: Transcendent equations like e^x = x² + 2 do not have algebraically determinable solutions, but the Intermediate Value Theorem implies that a solution does in fact exist.]

So if some "object" exists in the mathematical sense this just means that it can be talked about without running into logical contradictions, or in other words, this is a syntactical sense of existence, not a semantical one.
A proof by contradiction does not really show that a "given" object lacks the property of existence, but rather that a sequence of signs you have written down cannot be entertained as a consistent logical object, or that an indeed well-defined object does not have a desired other property.
As a side note regarding the two examples you brought up:
Cantor's second diagonal argument, which shows that the reals are not enumerable by integers, does not take an enumeration of the reals and shows that it lacks the existence property, it rather takes any map from the integers to the reals and shows that it must miss some numbers, so it cannot be an enumeration.
The proof about the irrationality of the square's diagonal does not deal in existence at all, but just shows that said number sqrt(2) does not have the "rational" property.

Existence in philosophy/everyday life:
In order to avoid the trappings of ontology, I'd use "A exists" as a shorthand for "It has been discursively established that one can reasonably talk about A as a persistent, consistent material or immaterial object." For everyday objects this coincides with the naive/pre-philosophical notion of existence, and for abstracta it coincides with the mathematical/logical one. Notice that although something might not be a valid object of consideration (like the set of all sets that do not contain themselves) the notion of it/the words describing it may still (and usually will) exist. Quite obviously the idea of "the set of all sets that do not contain themselves" exists, as I can write it down, but those words do not reference a valid object - in contrast both the word "apple" and the referenced apple itself exist as objects of consideration. Questions that seem to be about whether A has the property of existence are thus easily resolved into the question of whether the notion "A" is logically consistent and/or can persistently be linked to an empiric phenomenon.



To get back to the original(?) argument about the attempted definition of God as the ultimately transcendent and ultimately real, I think what you did prove*, was that this notion is not logically consistent, so while this notion does arguably exist, it does not refer to a valid object of consideration.

Closing, I would still, as you rightly pointed out, hold that the Christian God is not within the realm of valid objects for human logics. We can logically talk about aspects of the faith in him, like what is written in scripture, what his supposed creation (the universe) looks like, whether church doctrine itself is logically consistent, whether believers act coherently, even earthly measurable events as claimed by scripture can be examined and lastly the person of Christ, by doctrine vere deus, but also vere homo, falls by the latter under the sway of logics - a part of God remains always beyond it, though.


*I reviewed the argument: While there was a minor mistake in the inference from the "set of all sets that contain themselves" to those that don't, the actual proof can be made to work, by the earlier point of God as the all-set, from which the s.o.a.s.t.d.n.c.t. can be inferred, leading to a contradiction.