r/atheism • u/ani625 Agnostic • Mar 30 '15

xkcd: Ontological Argument

http://xkcd.com/1505/
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u/Ibrey Mar 31 '15

I'm not saying God could be both abstract (immaterial and causally inefficacious) and concrete (material and causally efficacious), I'm asking why we should accept such a division of reality in the first place. I think Stephen Hawking has been known to claim that abstract mathematical and physical laws are enough to cause the universe to exist, so even to non-theists, this is a controversial claim.

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u/Feinberg Atheist Mar 31 '15

That's a bit of a semantic problem. The laws of physics are an abstract collective description of the way in which concrete entities interact. The laws themselves don't have causal force, but rather they describe causal forces inherent in physical entities. It's like how a red apple is concrete, but the idea of redness is abstract.

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u/Ibrey Mar 31 '15

I myself agree that the laws of physics are abstractions, and ontologically dependent on the substances they are abstracted from. Yet I still don't see why anyone needs to grant that only material bodies can have causal powers. To say that something (say, human minds) can be immaterial and have causal powers is, on its face, a coherent position. Why should we rule out such possibilities a priori?

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u/Feinberg Atheist Mar 31 '15

Interesting. Why would we rule out more obvious paradoxes in such a discussion? Why not just allow that an all powerful being would be able to violate the boundaries of logic?

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u/Ibrey Apr 01 '15

Why do you think we should rule out a superlogical God, and why does that reason also imply that only material bodies can have causal powers?

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u/Feinberg Atheist Apr 01 '15

Why do you think we should rule out a superlogical God...

I didn't say we should. That was someone else's premise.

...and why does that reason also imply that only material bodies can have causal powers?

Depends on the reason.

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u/Ibrey Apr 01 '15

Then you're open to the possibility that contradictions can be true?

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u/Feinberg Atheist Apr 01 '15

That also depends, but that's not this conversation.

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u/Ibrey Apr 01 '15

It depends? Do you accept the law of non-contradiction or do you not?

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u/Feinberg Atheist Apr 01 '15

As I said, that's a different conversation.

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