Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
So that leaves you with a God who only answers prayers where they don't expose his existence or one who doesn't answer prayers at all. Seems more likely that God would choose to be the third type rather than be handcuffed the way the second type is.
You are welcome to suppose whatever you want about God. If you think that God would reach that particular conclusion, so be it.
Basically, propositions of this nature move towards either the mechanization of God or a type of power play with God. Almost like in a seance, you're trying to force God to appear where and when you want him to. If you could force God to change coin flips for you whenever you wanted, it would flip the relationship around and make man the superior being.
I would assent that if you wanted to prove God's existence by such means, it's entirely reasonable to conclude he doesn't exist. This is because I would agree that if you were in search of a reductionist type of god (a god defined by simple causal relationships) that I don't think there's evidence for one and also that I just don't think you'll find one.
The comparison I would use is that this is some sort of mind-reading game. You can watch me perform an action, but you cannot determine my motivations from the action. I could tell you "My motivation for X was Y" but you wouldn't have any way of knowing whether my statement was true. In the same way, if you assert "God wouldn't do X because of Y" you're playing the same type of mind-reading game.
Incidentally, this type of reasoning is part of what moves part of the line of reasoning from a deism to theism. The reasoning (roughly) goes like this:
If there is a deistic god, then there's basically no chance of knowing anything more about it. You're stuck with no possibility of moving forward in increasing in knowledge about it. And if that's how the universe is, then so be it.
Ultimately, if you're looking at this type of question, you have to come to some sort of decision about whether to advance the conversation from here. My decision was that I would rather be found seeking an impossible to know god than not seeking a knowable god. This isn't a deductive argument. This is a decision.
So the "axiom" (I guess that's probably the best way to phrase how it operates) is that I would not care about a deistic god. If it's true, then it ends the inquiry and there's nothing to explain. In many ways, that would work similarly to the "goddidit" explanation. (Yes, none of this "proves" anything. That's not the point.)
Going back to some of the other topics touched on throughout the discussion, this is where I can recognize that different people would take different intellectual pathways and reach other conclusions that appear to be perfectly logical. I recognize that it creates a form of "bias" and the absence of things like a "neutral" starting point." I've often used a phrase like "What is rational is a function of what is assumed." All of these things are expressions that resulted from reflecting on trying to understand how I understand things.