I appeal to Occam. The simplest explanation is the one that requires the fewest entities. People are known to exist and to be capable of making things up. Adding an existing God increases the number of entities, hence the complexity. The people are there whether or not you add God to the mix.
Wasnât Occam a Christian? Why do you think he believed in God?
How is his Christianity relevant here? Is a principle invented by a Christian valid only in defense of approved claims?
I donât know why he believed in God. Do you?
You are the one who appealed to him. So appeal to him you are.
What does that mean?
Because he had to to prevent being burning at the stake for not believing in the God that the Catholic Church mandated.
Then why was he a friar? He didnât have to be.
For education and something other than a life of poverty. It was the Dark Ages where the Catholic Church controlled Europe and right before the plague killed a quarter of the population. Not a good time to be a freethinking atheist.
I certainly hope youâre not being serious because we have evidence that Occam wasnât afraid to stand up to the pope when Pope John XXII attacked the Rule of Saint Francis, another thing that would have led to him being burned at the stake had he not escaped to Holy Roman Empire.
Add to that all of his writings on theology.
How is a prexistent, sovereign God a more complicated âideaâ (sic) than a falsely imagined one?
The first simply IS, the other simply ISNâT.
We must come to terms with God as a living âPerson,â rather than just something abstract.
Even the topicâs heading, âWhere does God Come From,â is a non-sequitur, being, as He is, the Creator of space and time, and fully existing independent of those dimensions.
The only even slightly responsive answer can be, âeverywhereâ --because God is both immanent and transcendent.
I think that this discussion gets headed in the wrong direction when we ask âwhere did God come fromâ. It assumes that God is simply another contingent being, from which we can hypothesize his existence through unexplained phenomena.
I wrong strongly encourage everyone here to read the articles in this roundup by Edward Feser. It deals with the cosmological argument for Gods existence (no, not the Kalam), but also touches on a lot of misconceptions that people have when discussing God (both theists and atheists). It shouldnât take too much time out of your life, and I believe that it will increase your understanding of the subject immensely
Cheers and have a good day
Weâre not talking about how God was created or something like that.
Weâre talking about how idea of God came to be.
But, nice find.
Because a falsely imagined God requires only the existence of entities we know exist, i.e. people, while the pre-existent, sovereign God requires the existence of an additional entity, i.e. the pre-existent, sovereign God as well as the people. And itâs an entity we donât actually see.
No, itâs just the âideaâ which might, in your mind, be simpler, but without a transcendent God, youâre living a one-shot, ultimately meaningless life in a truly meaningful universe which reveals His glory. Fair warning to the wise! Maybe take a moment and walk outside?
What, proselytizing again? This seems to have nothing to do with what weâre talking about. I looked outside, but it was cloudy. Are you talking about stars? Giant exploding balls of hydrogen scattered in clumps across a vast and mostly empty universe? Comparatively simple objects that form naturally, exist for a while (sometimes untold billions of years), and perish with bangs or whimpers? Yeah, thatâs meaningful. Sorry, but I find my meanings closer to home, and I donât need God for it.
Nope. Trying hard to get you to see past your own nose. Glad you find âmeaningâ in knowing the entire universe will end in meaninglessness, someday.
Now, go read some Carl Sagan to come up with better answers for your own kind of âproselytizing.â He really did try harder to make the futility more palatable.
In the meantime, all the best!
No, that isnât where I find meaning. You seem to be edging into borderline insulting.
Ok, well then if you tact on the argument piece then the idea that God is a mental construct would fall flat
Hey, Iâm a Christian. Not a very good one, but a Christian. Iâm not arguing that God is a mental construct.
Neither am I. Tact is in the eye of the beholder.