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The Social Construction of Truth

This is a series of philosophical meditations attempting to tell the story about how 'truth' (general term) is a socially constructed phenomenon.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Atheism 

I found the following article listed on the Arts & Letters Daily web-site:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=315976

It's an interesting example of the confusion of some philosophers about what constitutes "evidence" of God's existence. I see this particularly in light of my previous entry's observations about the symbolic nature of things. I.e. the complexity of DNA says absolutely nothing about the existence of a God or intelligent being just as the symbols "%^&^%&*^%*&^" are incredibly complex (except from the perspective of a human being) but say nothing about anything unless I interpret them to mean something--I could make it say "God exists" by saying that '%^&^%&' is the name of God and that '*^%*&^' is the third-person form of the verb to exist in some crazy language.

Or...suppose we found these symbols inscribed on some rock or something in a cave. We could justifiably account for these by saying that humans made these symbols and so say..."people were here!" But we cannot use the same argument to argue from complex non-natural-looking phenomena to the existence of an Absolute Being. (Well, we can but not without assuming a whole load of stuff that has nothing to do with the symbols themselves.) Why can't we do this? Well, first off, arguing for humans having been in the cave is ok because we have independent knowledge that humans exist at all. We have no independant experience confirming even the possibility of an Absolute Being.

So far this is mostly ranting and raving, but i hope to elucidate the ideas further...they would require a whole fucking book to do that. Note: I am not an atheist, just a concerned theist.

posted by pennedav  # 2:55 PM
Comments:
so i have a question--do we have any reasonable basis to expect nature to be complex of itself? does the complexity of DNA have a natural explanation?
actually, i don't really care--but i'm not seeing why the complexity of nature can't form a basis for postulating the supernatural.
 
yeah...and i can't see why the complexity of nature necessitates the postulation of an all powerful god. I mean lets keep it close to home if all we've got to go on is the complexity of the world. the complexity of nature seems like it can only be explained by such a god in the hind-sight of already presupposing there is a god. the philosopher in the article was just submitting to a sort of personal revelation, maybe. But there's nothing like a proof of god's existence in it.
 
doesn't the existence of the natural universe require us to postulate a non-natural explanation? and if you concede that--and i bet you won't--doesn't the complexity of nature indicate that the supernatural is not merely random (that it has a mind)?

i'm honestly asking--i have no training about this stuff...
AO
 
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