Philosophizing God

Better arguments needed to support deity.

If believing in god is enough to imagine him into existence, then god is equally diminished by the arguments against him. The seesaw effect, back and forth, god, no god, poof, there he is, then gone again. There is no advantage to believing because of a cleverly worded argument that can be dismantled by reason. The real existence of a god would be an irrevocable surety. It is not, therefore he is not.

If god were real, no argument would be needed. Take any of the popular arguments for god and at first glance—quite clever. But, that’s about as far as it goes. A genuine treatise shoehorning the existence of god would in fact, be evident without persuasion, manipulating word games, sermonic hormones, and overcoming doubt, which doubt in itself should be a red-enough flag.

The bottom line is this; Religion has the audacity to think it can outwit nature. Accepting this natural order takes the fear out of life and negates the threats of death with endless suffering posed by religion. It also restores the esteem to man taken by religion. Atrophy and decay is a normal part of this experience and getting that little fact takes the decision to fear from our hands and tosses it out—the decisions surrounding death is made for you. Indigenous types all over the world accepted it as the natural course of things. Even in men’s ignorance or brilliance it mattered not. It just is and is nothing to fear. Understanding that keeps one from getting suckered by religious threat and seekers of power.

Accepting the fact we don’t know what happened before this life or what happens after is truly the only thing that could possibly excite an infinite being like myself, infiltrated with all encompassing consciousness in his natural state.

Things have lived and died long before the Abrahamic visions of the monarchical boss. For millions of years species have came and went long before “the fall”, just as the earliest hominids lived and died out, so will we. So what? Oh those poor souls for all those years before Jesus.

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

67 thoughts on “Philosophizing God”

  1. Exactly. Imagination is what brings him into existence. If you don’t believe God exists, he doesn’t exist. It’s that simple. When you ask questions, the believers give you absurd answers and sometimes question our questions. If he really existed, there’s no need to make people believe in a certain way of worship. Forced conversions, seducing people into believing there’s a heaven waiting if you believe in a certain God wouldn’t happen.
    Just a matter of thought and doubt.

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    1. I liked something you said a while back about this. Something like if you believed it you wouldn’t be questioning your belief. Doubt should be our primary source on supernatural.

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      1. I agree. Doubt should be our primary source on supernatural. Isn’t it how we explore? Belief, for example, might have stemmed from a doubt. “Who’s responsible for Creation?” Don’t you think our ancestors had this doubt? I think this is how God was conceived. We don’t know how he came into existence. We’re just told that he just exists. We are ‘told’. We don’t know. We must doubt, we must find out.

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        2. What’s even worse is “God caused it!” “It was god’s plan.” and other such bullshit. God caused a woman to get pregnant, only to die in childbirth? Spare me!

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            4. You’re not a Hindu are you?😂
              See, these differences between religions, philosophies and concepts of birth and death are what made me stop believing. And as far as Dalits are concerned, it’s not the way they portray in movies and news. They are given special privileges such as reservation in education and jobs. I belong from the upper caste and no matter how hard I study, I still need to be in the top to get into premier government institutions. And they just have reservations to get admitted with little preparation.

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            5. I’m not Hindu. I simply practice observationism. Everything I post is merely thoughts I’ve had. I don’t believe any of it except a bit of pantheism without the god part. We are the experience and god we seek. The earth is a living organism that peoples from time to time, merely to entertain and observe itself from time to time

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            7. Yes, and I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe in karma. Karma suggests order on a cosmic scale, which necessitates some kind of god being or beings to implement it. Karma also talks to a known good or evil, or right and wrong, which again I do not subscribe to.(Just by-the-bye, I do not believe in soul partners either, though once I did.)
              Life consists for me of making your way through the chaos, while living in that chaos. Accidents are accidents, not karma or god-planned events. They happen. We who live through such accidents have to learn new ways of coping, there is no set way to do things. What matters is being responsible for your own life, and what you discover from doing so.

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            8. I dealt with this a few time too, the believer said he is a god of love and forgiveness then how can he hold something I have done in my past life against me and continue to make me suffer for it. Where’s the love? where the forgiveness?

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    2. It feels to me as though I exist in a dull reality. Not with Pod People exactly. Knowing that the majority of humanity thinks that a supernatural realm is a reasonable proposition is sobering.

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  3. The bottom line is this; Religion has the audacity to think it can outwit nature.

    I LOVE this statement of truth, profound truth! Bravo Jim. 👏

    If modern Greek Christologists (Xians) spent more time learning and grasping tangible Natural Sciences or Earth Sciences, Cosmology and Astrophysics, Biology and Chemistry, Genetics and Paleoanthropology, Geology, Meteorology, and Oceanography, Advanced Mathematics and Logic, AI and Theoretical Linguistics, or Psychology and Sociology, and I could go on and on and on with all the connected, overlapping, interdisciplinary scientific fields… INSTEAD of praying, misleading/scamming gullible youth and naive adults, congregating to reinforce mythical, antiquated superstitions from 2-4 millenia ago, humanity, our species would be SO MUCH further advanced and much more peaceful and collaborative!!! (deep loud exhale!) But alas… 😞

    Now our own ignorance and fear to constantly question, ask why, test and retest until the same results occur 100 to the 100th power repeatedly happens has for too many millenia been horribly and detrimentally blocked by unfounded religious Superstitions! And now we face the very REAL reality of extinction in the next century or sooner, by our own mass ignorance to observe methodically and with wide-ranging peer-review our ecological environs and its health and our blatant denial or utter ignorance to trust the data/evidence and where it points/leads!!!! This DOES NOT make us the most intelligent or superior species on this one tiny Pale-blue rock, the ONLY little planet we have and that sustains all possible life!

    What’s worse is that the (fraudulent) Abrahamic Supreme monotheistic “God” has the most asinine, moronic foresight and forethought to make all of this (supposedly by their holy scriptures & teachings) a mysterious hidden game (gnosis via a Holy Spirit) to His creation and creatures simply for a sadistic climax. Hahahahahaha!!! And about half the world’s population actually and blindly believe it to be true, to be reality!!!

    Is it any wonder that if a superior intelligent alien species came to Earth, examined all living species of our planet… they would quickly choose to take all the Earth’s ants for their superior ability to be Eusocial and a Superorganism in order to survive—and have done it for millions of years more than Homo sapiens or ANY of our earliest ancestors!? HAH! Those aliens would say:

    “Hell NO we don’t want any of you humans! That’s a no brainer. Look what you’ve done to your perfect planet, to your own species over the last 100,000 years, and you do NOTHING intelligent to change your demise! That is NOT a sign of intelligence!”

    Great stuff Jim, as usual. 🙂

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    1. Thanks Boss. I dub you Royal Expositor. I just love the gnosis/holy spirit choice! What a con game as usual. How one comes to know this god can deepen by wordplay on human pride (which is the epitome of faith) and breeds personality types to nurture the worst parts of human nature. Sounds like god to me. Please, when everyone is getting in line for the greatest thing—watch out! The mass baptisms by brainwashing

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  4. Any god who ceases to exist when you stop believing in him is no god at all. But that’s what happens to this god of ours. There is no impact on your life or the world around you that is tied to your belief. If you stop believing, the world keeps on turning. Other people stop believing, the world keeps on turning. Nothing changes anywhere but in your mind. Anyone looking from the outside of religion would have no clue that anything happened when belief stopped and a god ceased to exist. Seems strange considering how powerful he is and how plain to see he is to everyone. A god who is supposedly so involved and cares so much should have something to say when we walk away, yet silence is all we can hear.

    Evangelism and apologetics are two huge red flags that the whole thing is made up. Neither would be necessary if a god existed who wanted to be known. Arguing for or against a god should not determine whether he lives or dies. They are just words.

    Nice post Jim.

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    1. All we REALLY have Ben is each other and our collaborative and combined wisdom to embrace what is in bluntly in front of use—the hardcore tangible data/evidence—and consider ALL possible improvements, adaptations, or absence (leave it alone!) in order to truly make our species suffer less as well as ALL this planet’s living species/organisms!!! They are all intimately interconnected and rely on each other! Is that REALLY rocket-science!!!????

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      2. “All we really have is each other. ”

        That’s all we need. Adding to that will only complicate things and take away from the beauty that is our collective wisdom and experiences. If God wants to come and join us, he’s going to have to sit in the back for awhile, keep quiet and just listen. It’s a little punishment for ignoring all of us for the entirety of our existence. I know it’s tough, but it’s the only way he’ll learn how to behave around people.

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    2. “ Evangelism and apologetics are two huge red flags. Apologetics is 1980’s used car sales. They no nothing about the product they’re selling, where it came from, but it’s going to be great I tell ya. But the home line is crap.

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      1. At least a 1980’s used car salesman would let you look under the hood if you asked. Ask to look under the hood in religion and you are looked at as “ye of little faith.”

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        1. Ah, but to the unsuspecting, uneducated buyer what’s under the hood is never discussed. I remember my aunt getting a car from some prick and it never made it home. Now we have lemon laws, once again the secular law that trumps the buyer beware of religious slight of hand. Hope makes nothing run.

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          1. Quite right. One would have to know that what is under the hood is important before asking to see it. If all someone cares about is whether or not it runs, long term performance isn’t a concern.

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  5. Looking at it like that, it is pretty amazing how we can put so much “faith” in, and bet our lives on not only the existence of something, but our in-depth knowledge of that something for which no supporting evidence of it’s real existence has even been experienced. It is indeed better to accept what is evident and to doubt what is not.

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    1. Yes Bill! And now today we have the technology—and sometimes scholarly peer-review, hopefully—to check our own biases and cultural ignorances to address and embrace what the hardcore, tangible, scientific data/evidence tells, shows, and factualizes! It seems the major problem with our species is the fear or ignorance to always examine, scrutinize, critically analyze, ask questions repeatedly, and then test it all by a LARGE panel/group of peer-reviewed experts/scholars!

      If it were NOT for bold drummers marching to their own beat (non-conformists), women would still not be able to vote, non-Caucasian people would still be treated as monkeys, and Earth would be the center of the Universe!

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      1. I wonder what percentage don’t know the meaning of ‘peer-reviewed’? Depending on where one looks in the world, gender and racial rights are trashed, and astrophysics is fake news. But thanks for the great comment.

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    2. And how much progress could we make if we focused on learning vs already having then”god did it” answer? I know I gave up on a lot of exploration (even if my own mind) because I already had the truth. Thank you kindly sir

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  6. The Abrahamic concept of a god today owes as much to Greek and Persian ideas as it does to anything the Jews came up with on their own. If you remember the Problem of Evil and the argument of Democritus relating to it, that came centuries before Christianity existed. The ones that came up with the idea of an all good god with a divine plan for everything were the Greek(and Hellenized) philosophers. The Stoics and those following Plato in particular believed in an omnibenevolent and perfect god of some sort(whether Demiurge, universal spirit, or cosmic logos) ultimately running everything. And unlike the Abrahamic idea, this god concept was not tied to any past religion or culture at all, it was entirely abstract and intellectual. You can see a good summary of these ideas and their critics in Cicero’s works.

    One of the biggest reasons why Biblical texts don’t match up with Christian dogma much of the time is that many outside ideas were shoehorned in starting in the period of Greek influence. Omnibenevolent, formless, immutable, unchanging, omnipresent, perfectly rational, omniscient, and so on. Those were not concepts that the Jews(or most others) originally cared about. The earliest Jewish texts that we have and all the other evidence shows a polytheistic ethnic religion, not a prophetic book religion.

    This did not happen with just the Old Testament either. These new ideas were forced to fit into Homer’s poems as well, I have read several examples of this. One of these works is a defense of Homer against critics by a writer called Heraclitus. The methods that writer used were very similar to those used by Christians a bit later. The result was that his (vaguely Stoic) ideas could be put into Homer, or even shown to have been “prefigured” by Homer.

    Many of the problems we see the theologians grapple with today were only caused in the first place by philosophical assumptions.

    For example, the philosophers believed that everything up there from the moon and beyond was perfect and immutable. Aristotle thought this, as did many others. Heaven was literally up there, and the point of the new religious ideas usually had something to do with escaping this corrupt material world into a spiritual one. This is why Paul promised his followers that they would be “caught up to meet the Lord in the air” when the big event came.

    You may have seen “first mover” type arguments from Christians before. That is from Aristotle, but it is evident that most Christians don’t understand what it means. Our cosmological assumptions are not the same as Aristotle’s, or even those of most Christians until the 16th-17th centuries. Aristotle’s Movers referred to the entities responsible for the (apparent) motion of the heavens that we can all observe. The assumption that everything up there was eternal and immutable meant to Aristotle that it must have been turning forever as well. And the assumption that there must be a Mover or Movers came from Aristotle’s physics. He stated that an object only remains in motion as long as force is continually applied. For the heavens to maintain their motion, there must be some continual cause. And this cause must be eternal, because he already assumed the heavens to be eternal. The First Unmoved Mover referred to the Mover beyond the “fixed stars” at the top level of the layered cosmological model, which would put it outside of the cosmos. There would have been lower Movers for the planetary spheres down to the moon. It gets a bit strange when he goes into how this whole system of motion works. These Movers in Aristotle are perfect minds that contemplate thinking(or something) in the same unchanging state for eternity. They are so rarified that they don’t physically move the heavenly spheres, they inspire the heavens to turn through a desire(on the heavenly spheres’ part) to imitate the Movers. All this somehow has something to do with motion down here in the realm of mortality and change.

    In the older view, there was not too much worry over “where it call came from”. All sorts of variants were passed around. In the Rig Veda’s Nasadiya Sukta, doubt is expressed over whether or not the world was created and if the gods or highest god even know where it all began. The ancient Egyptians had several creation stories. Typically creation stories begin with primordial chaos, then something happens, and then things start forming and so on down the line to humans. There was not a lot of worry about “reason” or “purpose” or “the meaning of it all”, the beginning was considered mysterious. The real importance of creation myths was in the establishment of order that humans can live within, and continually guarding against the encroachment of primordial chaos that would make life impossible.

    The Problem of Evil did not exist until the philosophers made the assumption that there must be a first cause or Maker that is all-good and perfectly rational. And their definitions of good were usually anthropocentric ones. You can find in Greek philosophers and in Cicero the idea that everything was made for man, man is the measure of all things. In the older view, the problem of evil would have been non-existent. The Babylonian texts have no problem telling us that things like mortality, disease, and natural disasters were put here by the Mesopotamian gods, with the stamp of approval from the father of them all, Anu himself. This was done to keep the population in check, and to express divine anger on occasion. Yahweh in the Old Testament sends good and evil as his mood and whim suits, and there is nothing in the texts about the world ever being “perfect”. He curses Adam and Eve with childbearing pains and having to work to eat, there is nothing there about him changing anything other than those things. There are many examples to make this point. Divine omnibenevolence was not the assumption.

    In Plato’s Republic, there are explicit attacks on the older view of the gods. Plato criticizes the image in Homer of the two jars of Zeus, one with blessings and one with ills. Homer (or Achilles in the poem) said that when a life comes into the world, they get some things distributed from each jar by Zeus in accordance with fate. Plato promoted a newer idea of an omnibenevolent god, and wanted to censor the poets wherever they said anything that conflicted with this idea. As I see it, Homer based that image on how things are in the world we perceive, while Plato was coming up with things that suited his own ideas/fantasies and trying to impose them. Plato said that evil must always be sourced somewhere other than the divine. This naturally leads to all sorts of problems if you also assume divine omnipotence as the philosophers often did. The Christian idea of Satan and the idea that demons rule the world have their source in the theodicy that divine omnibenevolence led to and in certain astrological ideas.

    http://www.bibleorigins.net/presuppositions.html
    http://www.bibleorigins.net/Demons.html
    https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2019/08/17/the-structure-of-heaven-and-earth-how-ancient-cosmology-shaped-everyones-theology/

    A good example of the philosophical mashup of the time.
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/numenius/

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    1. This is a veritable gold mine of insight K. Apologists love to tell us we are misinterpreting scripture. Religion has twisted the meaning and origins of concepts to dig a hole from whence they can’t climb. Stellar comment! I’ll check the links in the a.m. I always wondered in my unscholarly way what in earth did they have to invent this all perfect god when what we see isn’t that way at all. At least the Greeks were smart enough to make them capricious, as is what we see on a daily basis.

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      1. The introduction of geometry and astrology from the east(Egypt and Babylon) changed Greek thought. Philosophers wanted to understand everything in terms of those things. They are predictable and safe. The reason why things on the ground are not as predictable as the heavens and as neat as some geometrical diagram must be because something is wrong down here. This is the origin of the notions of original sin, corrupt materiality, and other ideas associated with Christian thought now.

        The Jews contributed their genocidal ideas, apocalypticism, and fanatical intolerance to the mix, so I do not pin all the blame on Hellenism. Christianity became the dominant new sect because it was more ruthless and because it wormed its way into state power. The sect that got power(Catholic) was also the one that emphasized organization and obedience. Look at many early Christian writings, and you will see many times where followers are ordered to obey their priests and bishops as they would Christ, on pain of damnation. It took centuries of coercion and persecution for Christianity to become dominant. Even the in the 6th century the Eastern Roman Empire was still trying to smash paganism(anything not Christian or Jewish).

        Also, if you read what is left of certain Stoic writers(like Musonius Rufus, Seneca, and Epictetus) you will find that idea that everything in creation has a function and doing something differently is going against the cosmic order. The idea that sex is for the purpose of reproduction alone(anything else is bad) can be found in these non-Christian writers too. Suicide being a great sin(or possibly being one at least) is found in several pagan philosophers, including Plato. The idea that in the bad afterlife there are specific and fitting punishments for different sins can be found in Virgil and other pagan writers like Plato and Plutarch. If you ever wondered where Christians got these things(they are not found in the Bible), they came from contemporary ideas, and got hardened into doctrines by the later Church.

        The combination of Jewish legalism and their scriptures’ repeated emphasis on failure to follow the regulations and Hellenistic notions of astral demons and a corrupt world combined with philosophical moralism make for a great combination to induce guilt complexes.

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  7. Brilliant post Jim, I would like to believe in something or someone bigger and better than us with a nice big easy-chair for us to relax into with a fishing rod and a cold beer when our ‘Natural’ life is up. But sadly, there is no evidence of existence of an all seeing, all knowing Omnipotent power. I think religion is merely a comfort blanket for those who look for a way out, or a meaning to suffering.

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  8. The real existence of a god would be an irrevocable surety.

    Yep. Odd how one can define an omnipotent god into existence but fail to explain why an omnipotent god can’t just say “Hello”.

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    1. Defined out of existence and also usefulness. Trying to make their god untouchable and oh, so perfect—The blinders handwaved the earliest of contradictions.

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      1. Same for me. The other thing was the fact that “God’s people” all lived in ways that thoroughly denied most of the teachings found in the gospels and the writing of the major and minor prophets of the Old Testament. My conclusion was that they had no relationship with God as far as obedience went but they went through the motions so as to have their cake and eat it too. They had no intention of living a life of discipleship, but were convinced that they could con Jesus into “saving them by grace through faith.” No need to exert yourself, just pray, sing and buy your way in. The trick was to “get in.” What came next didn’t matter.

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  10. “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

    “But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

    “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

    ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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  11. This is brilliant!
    No argument is needed for the sun or the moon because they are self evident. 1000 arguments have been made for gods and they all fail at the evidence stage

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    1. There are a few comments in this thread that are quite amazing as well. By gods own definition is these things prove he exists he contradicts himself and doesn’t exist.

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  12. The concept of a god that cannot be detected in the natural world by natural and verifiable means is no different than a God who doesn’t exist in the natural world at all. And they wonder why we don’t believe them. SMH

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  13. And no, I’m not atheist. But I’m def not a Christian or believer in the judeo Christian biblical God. Doesn’t exist outside of the pages of the bible

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    1. When the default god in our society is the Abrahamic form of god, yes I am an atheist. If I could be nudged in any direction it would be this; whatever it is, it is so fundamental to us we could never recognize that it is not inherently us. There is no difference between the spiritual and the physical perception. This whole ordeal is one happening that we cannot separate ourselves from nor recognize it as separate from us, although we try for ego on a daily basis. The guru types and medative enlightened know this little gem. It’s all connected and neither is one without the other. Indigenous shaman from all over the world knew this, that the earth is a living thing and we are merely manifestations of the whole thing.

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    1. When I lived in Panama I put a term in the urban dictionary—mujembre. A mix of mujer (woman) and hombre (man) god is mujembre. There ya go! I fixed it

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  15. If believing in god is enough to imagine him into existence, then god is equally diminished by the arguments against him.

    The most salient point made by author Terry Pratchett in his novel Small Gods.

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    1. I think it quite telling what one can conclude by ignoring the expert commentary and take a moment to think things through without someone breathing down your neck telling you what it all means. We’ve all been accused of being Ehrman and Dawkins disciples, but most of us have never read them and come to the same conclusions. Linking me to Terry Pratchett is a like in my book because I’ve never read it.
      In religion we’re constantly told what the real meaning is and we’re flooded with experts and miles of commentary. Take a break and look around. We need no “new atheist” leaders if everyone would take a moment to look around.

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      1. The church never encouraged the layman to think with regard anything theological.
        When people did begin to think and were not under the threat of being murdered by the church the Security Blanket began to unravel. All we have to do is keep pulling the thread.
        I think you will enjoy Small Gods. Pratchett was an astute man.

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