Meaning and Existence

[_Sethbag]

And as we can see, you have just stuck your foot in the very same trap you claim mine is wedged between, and the same trap Dawkins set and closed upon himself. All your doing here, over and over again, is, in essence saying "its all in your head too, neener, neener, neener. Now, if that's correct, and my theism is all in my head, then you and Dawkins have won the argument, which also (logical trap begins to close again) means that I have simultaneously won a significant part of mine (even if not the part about the existence of God as the alternative), which is that now, with God and teleology being nothing more than fictions within my own mind, we now live in a universe where people live with different fictions of meaning; each fictional, and each providing meaning in a cold, uncaring, random universe devoid of intelligence or purpose.

Fine, but that's the reality of the situation. The meaning is created by us humans, and I'm OK with that. Dawkins is too, and so is everyone else in this thread but you.

If I concede that God is imaginary, than at least I have won one major point, that being that if this is so, then your sense of value and meaning is likewise, imaginary, and hence, your very being here defending your position, meaningless.

It's not meaningless so long as their are humans around to ascribe to it meaning. That's the point.

Why therefore, like Dawkin's and Wise, do you bother to do it?

Because I'm not, and Dawkins isn't, and Runtu and the others in this thread aren't, unlike you, convinced that the only alternative to their being a God is to shoot ourselves in the head, or go around raping and pillaging. I actually rather like being around, and I intend to improve myself and do a better job of giving this life as much meaning as I can, and enjoying it, and being grateful for the opportunity that whatever it is that makes up "I" have had the chance to be here.

The atheists actually regard the meaning they create and decide for themselves to be substantive, at least to them and others they influence, which is all that really matters. By denying this meaning you are only setting yourself up for despair when you eventually realize that your imaginary friend and his cosmic, eternal, magic "meaning" aren't real.

Your statements here are, again, self negating and logically incoherent. How can meaning (a meaningless concept in a meaningless universe) be "substantive" (how can substantiveness inhere in that which is meaningless?) and then at the same time "matter"?[/quote]
I'll grant that my life doesn't have much meaning to whatever beings might occupy some planet circling around Alpha Centauri, much less any other chunk of rock out there in the universe. I'm OK with that. It has meaning to at least some of those who live on this rock. I'm OK with that too. In fact, it gives me a sense of comeraderie with my fellow man that I consider to be very profound.

What you fail to understand is that my life has meaning to me, and it has meaning to my family, and it has meaning in some small to a few others on this board, and some people elsewhere in the world whom you probably don't know, and that meaning is very real so long as we're in a situation where we can interact with each other as we do and share this life together. I'm convinced that probably nothing else in this universe gives a sh*t about me, and I'm OK with that.

You're stuck in this mode where the life that actually does, or could have meaning to you, ie: this one, that you've actually got here and now, has a lot less meaning than it could have because you've chosen to pin your hopes for happiness and meaning on something you can, by definition, never achieve during this lifetime, because it exists only in some imagined hereafter.

You point out yet again that my beliefs are imaginary, which if true, means that the meaning you create and decide for yourself is also, imaginary.

Thank you for substantiating some of the major points I've been trying to make since yesterday afternoon.

It's only imaginary if I'm imaginary. I don't think I am, so I don't concede your point.

If your point is that my life's meaning is not cosmic in scope, with creatures on the other side of the Alpha Quadrant potentially giving a shyte about me, without some God existing, then I'll grant you that. I don't think Dawkins or anyone else thinks differently. So long as we human beings exist, we have meaning to ourselves, and I'm 100% totally OK with that.

If in some future time we blow ourselves up, or the Sun goes nova and we all fry instantly, and there's nobody left on Earth to give themselves and our existence meaning, then you're right, our meaning will probably have come to an end.

We're OK with that, because if that's the way it is, that's the way it is, and it's our goal and design to make the most of this opportunity we have to mean something, if only to ourselves and each other. Since we do in fact exist, that meaning is very real.

Back to the argument at hand, you can point to what I've said as somehow supporting your notion that we humans don't have any cosmic "meaning" without a God existing. You still haven't, however, demonstrated with any kind of logic or argument that even if a God did exist that it would grant the kind of "meaning" we're talking about to human existence. You can't even demonstrate with any kind of logic other than throwing a "big word" out there to impress us all that a God who might exist himself has any "meaning". What if a God does exist, and he is, like us, just a result of the mechanial and chemical processes of the Universe, or whatever Universe he lives in?

[_CaliforniaKid]

Hello Analytics,

Here are some thoughts for you:

From the classical LDS paradigm as I understand it, the universe per se wasn’t created. Rather, it just is. Matter is neither created nor destroyed and all that. So from the reasoning you’ve laid out, the universe itself and the material within it as such have no meaning.

What God did was build a world out of matter unorganized. God is a conscious, intelligent, and powerful entity, and he came up with a plan for what to do with some of the stuff in the universe. He then implemented that plan. The meaning that stuff has isn’t intrinsic to the matter itself, but rather comes from the intentional act of being organized by God.

In other words, the universe could be divided into two groups: the organized matter, and the heretofore unorganized matter. The organized matter has meaning in the purpose for which it was organized, but the unorganized matter hasn’t yet been endowed with meaning.

If a Mormon believes this way, would you agree that he has a legitimate basis for finding genuine meaning in the universe?

These are excellent thoughts. Essentially what you are saying is that the position the finite and time/space-bounded LDS God finds himself in in the universe is precisely the same as the position the atheist find himself in in the universe. The atheist can only create subjective meaning, because the universe itself has no inherent meaning. Similarly, the LDS God can only create subjective meaning because the universe itself has no inherent meaning.

...
I think your argument implies some additional reasoning:

8. Inherent meaning exists.
9. Therefore, there is a creator.
10. Therefore, atheists are wrong.

This is where your reasoning breaks down. You have to provide a reason to accept premise #8 as factual....
-CK

I think what he's really doing is this:

8a. Assume we find meaning in our own lives
8b. Therefore inherent meaning exists *
9. Therefore there is a creator...

Atheists generally find meaning in their own lives, and hence are at least very sympathetic to assuming 8a. Coggins seems to think that if we concede 8a, then he's proven us wrong.

* If the universe and all phenomena within it have no purpose (being great cosmic accidents of nature), and hence, no meaning, then human existence has no meaning. By this, 8a, and Modus Tollens, inherent meaning exists.

There is no entailment here. You appealed to Modus tollens (by which I think you meant Modus ponens), but in order for that to apply we would have to add an extra premise to your above outline:

8a. If we find meaning in our lives, inherent meaning exists.
8b. We find meaning in our lives.
8c. Therefore, inherent meaning exists.
9. Therefore, there is a creator.

Premise 8a is where this crashes and burns. As Coggins said in the OP, there are two types of meaning: inherent meaning and subjective meaning. If one finds meaning in one's life, it could be subjective rather than inherent, so finding meaning does not imply the existence of inherent meaning. If you respond by defining "find" as referring to the discovery of what is already there, then I would object to premise 8b. There's no reason to believe that we "find" meaning in this sense as opposed to creating it. And so we find ourselves again at an impasse, having demonstrated nothing at all.

Coggins,

If you can show me how you arrive at premise #8-- inherent meaning exists-- then you will have made your case. Until then, there is a black hole in your logical demonstration that is going to suck this entire thread into itself.

-CK

[_Coggins7]

Coggins7 wrote:
And as we can see, you have just stuck your foot in the very same trap you claim mine is wedged between, and the same trap Dawkins set and closed upon himself. All your doing here, over and over again, is, in essence saying "its all in your head too, neener, neener, neener. Now, if that's correct, and my theism is all in my head, then you and Dawkins have won the argument, which also (logical trap begins to close again) means that I have simultaneously won a significant part of mine (even if not the part about the existence of God as the alternative), which is that now, with God and teleology being nothing more than fictions within my own mind, we now live in a universe where people live with different fictions of meaning; each fictional, and each providing meaning in a cold, uncaring, random universe devoid of intelligence or purpose.

Fine, but that's the reality of the situation. The meaning is created by us humans, and I'm OK with that. Dawkins is too, and so is everyone else in this thread but you.

1. You continue to stubbornly commit the fallacy of Missing the Point. Any such meaning created by humans is an illusion; and has no intrinsic value. Therefore, it is worthless.

2. Upon what basis do you claim to know whether there is or is not a God, and whether there is or is not teleology in the universe?

It's not meaningless so long as their are humans around to ascribe to it meaning. That's the point.

Around and around the sugar bowl we go. Your meanings are illusions, phantasms that have no connection to the actual universe in which you are embedded.


Quote:
Why therefore, like Dawkin's and Wise, do you bother to do it?

Because I'm not, and Dawkins isn't, and Runtu and the others in this thread aren't, unlike you, convinced that the only alternative to their being a God is to shoot ourselves in the head, or go around raping and pillaging.

Nobody made this claim. The claim I make is that, as a famous author once said, without God, everything is permitted. That doesn't' mean that killing and rape and pillage are the only alternatives to belief in God. It does necessarily mean that without God, you have no template or reference frame through which to pass value judgments upon the value systems of others. Morality is an illusion, as it is just as much an epiphenomena of the cerebral cortex as the cerebral cortex is an accidental and random creation of natural selection. In your world, you may dislike me for killing and raping, and you may kill me or put me in prison in the name of self preservation, but you have no means by which you can make any value judgment regarding it. I may enjoy raping and killing. I may enjoy ethnic cleansing. But in Dawkin's universe, these are all just the activities of accidental biological creatures on some tiny speck in the spiral arm of an obscure galaxy. There is no innate, overarching value or meaning to my actions or to yours. Neither you nor Dawkins have any way out of this box canyon except one.

What you fail to understand is that my life has meaning to me, and it has meaning to my family, and it has meaning in some small to a few others on this board, and some people elsewhere in the world whom you probably don't know, and that meaning is very real so long as we're in a situation where we can interact with each other as we do and share this life together. I'm convinced that probably nothing else in this universe gives a sh*t about me, and I'm OK with that.

seth, in your universe, and according to your own philosphy, these meainings are illusions. They are the subjective fantasies of intelligent hominids that are tiny accidental blips in an accidental, mechanistic cosmos. Your meaning and the meaning of your loved ones don't matter in any intrinsic, substantive, or inherent way outside of your own mental universe. In other words, they don't matter within the universe, but only within your head.

You are endlessly pitting your subjective rationalizations against your own philosophy, which says that none of those rationalizations have any objective value.

If your point is that my life's meaning is not cosmic in scope, with creatures on the other side of the Alpha Quadrant potentially giving a shyte about me, without some God existing, then I'll grant you that. I don't think Dawkins or anyone else thinks differently. So long as we human beings exist, we have meaning to ourselves, and I'm 100% totally OK with that.

Fine, in which case both you and Dawkins need to be consistent and quite fretting about what people like Wise and myself think about what you think.

[_Coggins7]

My entire argument in the OP was not to demonstrate that God exists, or necessarily to prove God exists because teleology exists. These things tend to follow inferentially if one accepts the premises, but that wasn't' the thrust of the argument.

the entire post was intended to demonstrate that without Teleology (and, by extension, God), there is a radical split between inherent, intrinsic, or transcendent meaning to the universe, and our own subjective rationalized meanings we attach to our lives within the universe.

The entire Beckwith thread was really about how atheists have to run away from the implications of their own metaphysics only to collide with it head on every time they take a philosophical position on anything or make value judgments upon which ideas, behaviors, or manners of life are best.

Does God exist? The way to answer that for yourself and to your own satisfaction is through fasting, prayer, and the exercising of faith combined with a really deep desire to know. Beyond this, Premise 8 cannot be logically demonstrated. It is an axiom; a given. This does little to convince the atheist directly, but its the indirect consequences of accepting the alternative materialist view (which is also itself, a metaphysical assumption that cannot be confirmed or refuted) that is the point of all this.

Our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our loves, our greatest longings, mean utterly and absolutely nothing. They never have and they never will. Within our illusory thought worlds, they may. Within the cosmos within which our conscious experience takes place, they do not.

When one shunts aside his rationalizations and confronts the existential situation; the situation in which morality and ethics are a mirage, and in which the cosmos appears as a great and cruel cosmic joke played upon mortal beings who have no intrinsic value or worth, but who have the capacity to hope and dream for eternal life, love, and endless becoming, then the question of God becomes a live one.

[_Runtu]

1. You continue to stubbornly commit the fallacy of Missing the Point. Any such meaning created by humans is an illusion; and has no intrinsic value. Therefore, it is worthless.

Cogs, "meaning" created by an external God is not inherently more or less meaningful than meaning assigned by humans.

[_Chap]

Coggins:

I won't tell you how I know what I know to be true because, if you know anything at all about LDS theology, then you know very well how I know, and you know what I'm going to tell you, and I'm well aware of all the sophistries and rationalizations that can be brought to bear against it.

I love this stuff. Somehow when I read it and realise I am free of all that kind of nonsense nowadays it really gives meaning to my life!

Thanks, Coggins. You've helped!

[_Sethbag]

seth, in your universe, and according to your own philosphy, these meainings are illusions. They are the subjective fantasies of intelligent hominids that are tiny accidental blips in an accidental, mechanistic cosmos. Your meaning and the meaning of your loved ones don't matter in any intrinsic, substantive, or inherent way outside of your own mental universe. In other words, they don't matter within the universe, but only within your head.

And so are yours. You just don't know it yet. What you do, or don't do, in your life, going to Church each week, paying your tithing, overcoming masturbation, etc. is all completely meaningless outside of about 100km higher than the surface of this planet, and probably no deeper than a mile down inside of it. Cosmically speaking, the sphere of existence in which any of that stuff you do or don't do has any meaning is infinitesimally small. Within that sphere, however, live all the creatures in the universe to whom you do, in fact, matter. Learn to embrace that and enjoy being a part of the human race, and not just a part of some clique of a few million of us.

[_CaliforniaKid]

My entire argument in the OP was not to demonstrate that God exists, or necessarily to prove God exists because teleology exists. These things tend to follow inferentially if one accepts the premises, but that wasn't' the thrust of the argument.

OK, but as I demonstrated in my posts above, these things simply don't follow inferentially unless one accepts premise 8 (which atheists do not). So all you have demonstrated is that from an atheist perspective, inherent meaning does not exist. And again, I ask you: so what?

I presume this is your answer:

...atheists have to run away from the implications of their own metaphysics only to collide with it head on every time they take a philosophical position on anything or make value judgments upon which ideas, behaviors, or manners of life are best.

However, I don't see atheists running away from anything. Most atheists accept a utilitarian ethic that maximizes well-being for all parties involved. This is similar to "social contract" political theory: a mutual agreement that benefits all parties by permitting them the greatest freedom to create their own meaning but also imposing certain limitations to avoid the encroachment of one man's freedom on another's.

-CK

[_Coggins7]

Cogs, "meaning" created by an external God is not inherently more or less meaningful than meaning assigned by humans.

Here is your primary problem Runtu: I have never claimed, and the Church has never taught, that God created meaning in the universe, nor morality, not good, nor evil, or the contrasts between them

[Dr. Sunstoned]

And so are yours. You just don't know it yet. What you do, or don't do, in your life, going to Church each week, paying your tithing, overcoming masturbation, etc. is all completely meaningless outside of about 100km higher than the surface of this planet, and probably no deeper than a mile down inside of it. Cosmically speaking, the sphere of existence in which any of that stuff you do or don't do has any meaning is infinitesimally small. Within that sphere, however, live all the creatures in the universe to whom you do, in fact, matter. Learn to embrace that and enjoy being a part of the human race, and not just a part of some clique of a few million of us.

Your not dialoging with me philosophically Sethbag, this is just more "neener, neener, neener". Upon what criteria can you claim that the teachings of the Church are all in my head?