Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 5:46 am
Not everyone is that smart and my point is there are still people who take the map as the real thing and are ignorant of the territory.
Of course. But I have not met people so foolish as to imagine God is a big man with a white beard. Maybe they exist, and maybe, as you say, they are "not smart." But that is not a fair representation of the average of Theism, for certain. It's a
reductio ad absurdum, at the very least;
ad hominem, possibly; and definitely not a reasonable claim to make about how even a moderately intelligent Theist thinks.
...their God is an empirical God who will make empirical deliverables.
Here's your amphiboly mistake again. We need to sort it out.
To say that someone "makes empirical deliverables" does not imply that
He Himself is "empirical," any more than to say that if a man builds a house, he IS the house.
Theism on the other hand relied heavily on faith, i.e. belief without proof nor reason.
I know that Dawkins and others of his ilk think this is what "faith" means. And they can even find a few pietist or mystical Theists who will accept that definition. But in the main, I would argue it's completely incorrect, even when a naive fideist accepts such a definition.
This is a big topic: but "faith," as Christians understand it, is a decision made based on evidence, where that evidence is strong and reasonable but not yet absolute. Science is also like that: for nobody has done all the experiments necessary to prove beyond ALL doubt even one scientific principle. There is always the chance, no matter how remote, that the next experiment will produce an anomaly that destroys a basic theory, or which forces a revision of that theory. So every scientist, in advancing any judgment he or she thinks is actually true, is exercising faith.
Or take the example of a man who thinks his wife loves him. He does not know for certain: all he has is little gestures, a smile, a gift, a promise, an various other signs of affection and attachment. But he can't know. Women do abandon their husbands, have affairs, or fake attachment to keep things level for the children. Maybe she's just a very good cheat. He's going to have to believe it based on the quality of her character and the sum of the available data; but he's never going to know absolutely. He's going to have to have some faith in her, or he will never have any confidence in her love.
In fact, there's nothing exclusively religious about the use of faith; you do it every day. You just have faith in different things, perhaps.
What is worse is theists take the biggest leap ever to arrive at the First Cause merely based on faith [i.e. belief without proof nor justifiable reason].
This also isn't true. There actually is an ironclad rational argument to First Cause, and every good philosopher of science knows it. It caused a major crisis in the scientific community, back in the '60s, in fact. That was when it was conclusively discovered that time is linear and time, space and the universe had to have a beginning (now called, "The Big Bang"). That makes absolutely rationally necessary some kind of First Cause, because of the infinite regress impossibility problem.
So Theism is actually in the driver's seat on this one. The obvious conclusions favour it. Now it's secularism that's back on its heels, reeling, and trying to come up with alternate scenarios to make the universe plausibly eternal again (see the Multiverse Theory, the Infinite Universes Theory, and so on). The problem is that all these theories are a) unempirical, b) purely theoretical, and c) conveniently permanently unprovable, by nature of their own terms.
So ironically, now who's reaching for desperate answers "without proof or justifiable reason"? However, in practice, most ordinary anti-Theistic people react a different way: by ignoring or denying the existence of the problem, so serious and so potentially destructive as it is to their worldview.
Kant has proven the idea of 'First Cause' is an illusion and an impossibility.
Kant was wrong about that. He didn't have 20th Century science.
Rather theists [being the majority in control] has been giving all sorts of excuses why God cannot resolve this human-based Problem of Evil.
It's a problem for both sides, actually.
In theology, it's called "The Theodicy Problem," and there's a lot of interesting Theistic thought and literature dealing with it. It's too much to tap here, without making this message prohibitively long, though.
But in secular thought, it's an
even more serious problem. For secularism doesn't even have a basis for posing the question. Lacking objective criteria for even determining what "evil" is, secularists cannot even rationally propose the question, let alone explain evil. In order to pose it, they're obliged to speak from a Theist's perspective, and say, "Well, you Theists believe in evil, so how do you explain...," whereas they themselves lack even that basic term to make the question cogent.
So far from having an
answer to evil, secularism does not even possess a rational
question. And if you've wondered why historically, so many secular regimes have so little strength to avoid evil, that is one major reason why. They don't even have stable terms for identifying it, so anything could potentially go. Good and evil will happen at the accident of circumstances, and be justified on nothing more than political propaganda, since nothing else exists in secularism to justify any particular moral assessments.
I don't see there is a serious ontological [transcendent] issue with consciousness from the perspective of Science.
Then you will need to read the literature. I highly recommend Jaegwon Kim's book
Essays on the Metaphysics of Mind. You won't find a better and more scholarly treatment of the issues than that, I think.
I have the proofs, it is Kantian and supported by various Eastern Philosophies.
Actually, neither does what you hope.
To grasp the proof you will have to read up Kant and Eastern philosophy very seriously to understand [not necessary to agree with] the proof.
It will be incremental knowledge to you to take up this challenge.
Done, actually.
I don't know whether by Eastern philosophy you're speaking of Buddhism (the Dhammapada, perhaps?) Hinduism (the Gita?), Taoism (the Tao?), or whatever, but I've read them all, and thought about them very carefully. But in short, the problem with Eastern philosophy as a whole is its anti-rationalism, its mysticism. It's certainly not a good bedfellow with Kant, who would surely have had no truck at all with it. He was far too rational and logical for that.
Kierkegaard [he was a famous theist philosopher] and his existential psychology...
You mean "Fear and Trembling"? (I see below that you do.) I've read it. I can see it on my shelf right now; what would you like to discuss? I know (and, for the most part, like Kierkegaard very well, actually. But he had his idea of faith only half right, I would say.
At present seemingly you are avoiding and totally disregarding the psychological perspective of yourself and humanity in relation with theism?
Not "avoiding." Asking you to justify your claims.
You have asked me to be short, so I can't grant myself enough space to ask all I would like to. But this much is quite fair: if you're going to insist that Theism is a "crutch," (by which presumably you intend to imply it's an unhealthy psychological dependency) you're going to have to justify your claim. It's not fair merely to throw out such blind pejoratives and walk away without showing one's hand now, is it?
But my main point is quite simple, actually: the "crutch" argument hurts your argument at least as much, and probably more, then it could ever hurt Theism, since it equally makes you a victim of your own "wish fulfillment."
I would suggest that rationally speaking, you'll probably not do well with that argument. I would suggest we should find a better one.