Proper Basicality

[Lions_child]

What do you think: can the existence of God be considered properly basic? Anyone have thoughts on foundationalism?

 

[Blissman]

What do you think: can the existence of God be considered properly basic? Anyone have thoughts on foundationalism?

I am not sure that I understand your question. Do you mean, "Can the existance of God be proven"? If that was your question, I would have to say, by what standard of proof? To whom do you speak? And what do you mean when you say "God"? Aside from an establised religion's definition of 'God', there are also 'understandings', if you will, of God. For example, Albert Einstein had been asked, what do you believe God to be? Einstein had replied, "God is the Truth".
God, or a concept of God can be found in many scientists. There is a mistaken impression that scientists are aithiests, or anti-God. This is not true. While there are some aithiests whom are scientists, there are no more (by percent) more aithiests than non-scientists. Science has a way of discovering things that are often offensive to some faiths. The relationship between science and religion is interesting, for sceince changes religion. When Galileo had proposed that the earth revolved around the sun, and was but one of many planets, he was put on trial by the Church. It was
heresay - the universe, supposedly, revolved around man. Eventually, Galileo's vision became to be accepted. It did not destroy the church, rather it humbled man. There are countless discoveries in science which have had a profound influence on man and on church.

About 60 years ago, a group of scientists were sitting around pondering the origin of life on earth. The wanted to know, (I insert a biblical interpretation), what the earth was like after God had created the Heavens and the Universe, but before He had created life. They had considered the biochemistry, and had realized that the atmosphere, the land, and the seas, would not be the same as today. They hypothosed what it must have been. Since we don't have a time machine they tested their theory by creating in a lab, the atmosphere, and sea that they had thought. They created two tests. They took a beaker and using a vacume pump, had pumped out the air, and had added water, compounds and elements. They had a cork with two electrodes in it, and sealed the beaker. The electrodes went part way in to the beaker. The attached high voltage to the electrodes and drew an arc. They repeated the same experiment, except without the electrodes, and had placed the beaker in liquid helium, in a chamber to keep out light. They waited, and watched the beaker with the arc. Slowly, it became cloudy inside of the beaker. Then it became 'foggy'. Then the inside of the beaker began to become moist. Then small drops, then rivulets of a black liquid. The liquid that was in the beaker was now black, the color of crude oil. The scientists opened the beaker, and tested the liquid. There they had found the precursers to amino acids which make up protien. When they had examined the frozen beaker, the water inside had formed a small ice burg. At the top was a single, small drop of an unkown black liquid. In it, they had found adinosine, a nucleic acid - part of the protein which is in your finger and in mine, RNA, DNA, and without which, there is no life.

What came of this research?

The scientists had establish those elements that are required for there to be life as we know it. If you take a spectroscope and look at any life on earth, there will be these elements in each and every one. There may be some additional elements, but there is no life with one element less. We can use scientific instruments and scan the planet, scan the heavens. The same number and the same ratio of all of the elements exists the universe as it does on earth. It would be theoretically possible to map the heavens, looking for those elements needed for life, and conclude, that in this or that spot, there is no life, had been no life, nor will there ever be life. That assumption would be wrong. Nutrino's bombard the earth and space. If a nutrino reacts with an element of Boron (Boron11), the nuclear reaction will change that atom to one atom of Carbon12 and one atom of Nitrogen14. Both Carbon and Nitrogen are needed to make life. Should we not have observe both N or C when mapping the sky, we may have concluded that that in this or that region that is no life. If there were B, we could be wrong. There are thousands of nuclear reactions occuring in space.
From the horrors of death, the atom bomb, we had learned something about life. In the manufacture of a bomb, hugh quantities of highlt radioctive waste are create. Some are so dangerous that man can not go near the substance for over 10,000 years. The problem is, where do you store this? The answer is deep, deep underground, in a natural cavern, 2 miles below the surface. They dug a hole to obtain a core sample of the soil so as to determine what material they should use as a container until they had lowered it. Since there are a few viruses that attack some metals, they also looked for viruses. In the core sample, from the surface, along the way, and at the bottom, they found life. There were trillions upon trillions upon trillions of bacterium. Viruses, and microscopic life that had not been seen. If that sample is representitive of the planet, there is far more life below the surface of the earth, then there is on or near the surface of the earth. There would be so many times as much life below the surface, that such a number is hard to express.

Science had once again, had proven to man, that we should be humble.

Are some scientific discoveries dangerous?
Probobly.
Man is essentially curious. It is our nature to be curious. We make decisions, every day. We do not know where they will lead us, including, defining life itself.

Lastly, an odd thought. Suppose that you were at ground zero of a nuclear bomb. You would be torn asunder, converted in to energy and particles. Your particles might later be part of a germ for a planet, or on it, life.

 

[Lions_child]

I’ve been busy most of this week with little access to the computer so I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to writing here and explaining foundationsalism and properly basic belief. Obviously I didn’t explain myself at all, I wondered if some people would know about foundationalism. You said some interesting things Blissman, but what my question centers on is very specific regarding proving God’s existence, in fact, it’s not necessarily about proving the existence of God, but more I wondered if people knew anything about foundationalism and proper basicality. If you are someone who knows about what I’m talking about and you see that I didn’t describe something correctly, don’t hesitate to let me know – these are hard concepts for me to grasp.

Foundationalists subscribe to a view that there are foundations: things that are absolutes and things which we can base all argument on. In foundationalism there are basics, things that are as described by them (a)self-evident (b)empirical (evident to the senses) or (c)incorrigible. Those are the starting blocks after which we can argue other things because those are supposedly absolute values. Foundationalism is a very popular philosophy.

If you have heard of Alvin Plantinga, he has written about foundationalism and classical foundationalism and what he thinks about whether God can be included in the genre of things that are “properly basic” – things that cannot be argued because they are (a)self-evident (b)empirical (evident to the senses) or (c)incorrigible. Alvin Plantinga says that God can be included even though his existence is arguably not properly basic.

Do a search for "Foundationalism" on the web. There are some interesting sites out there.

 

[Philosoft]

Plantinga's reasoning has always just escaped me. God is not self-evident or strongly empirical, and I don't really know how to evaluate "incorrigibility." Frankly, his thought process is downright inaccessible.

 

[Received]

Haha, well, God can be self-evident, strongly empirical, and incorrigible, though we may not be conscious directly of ascribing the semantic term "God" to those things that describe or constitute His existence. Then again, the entire reality behind His contingent existence may be a simple illusion; thus, the argument is pointless -- though it does reveal that strong atheism is just as silly as the sort of stern fundamentalism that claims that the evidence for God is clearly seen even in a cognitive sense. The claims of Plantinga are really quite interesting...though in a sense he is creating things out of thin air. He really seems to be saying -- in my opinion -- that an omnipresent deity may exist within our grasp, though it is impossible to determine whether we are the ones who have not as of yet grasped Him, or whether He does not exist at all -- which is really the oldest and most painstaking problem in the book: does red exist in itself, or only through our perception? The frustration of the problem should be undoubtedly obvious: that there will be those people noble in intellect and spirit of searching that have not yet perceived this deity that others of such a different perspective have -- if indeed He does exist --; hence, a possible sense of pseudo-superiority may arise, though this is just as elementary as any basic fallacy.

But yes, the argument from God's existence being absolute and ourselves who cannot grasp it is the simplest response to strong atheism on the market.

The simple truth is there is no "proof" for God, other than that which is understood existentially, and those arguments which are debunked that would otherwise obscure us from accepting that which would make this existential revelation obvious (Russell's critique of the cosmological argument by adhering to the possibility of an infinite regress of past causes comes to mind). Read the last one-hundred pages of Anna Karenina.