From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent:
Saturday, May 01, 2004 7:13 PM
To: Gary Kirkland
Subject:
RE: god
The dictionary quotes you cited define a narrow, Judeo-Christian-Muslim
view of god.
False. They do not even assume monotheism,
let alone the tri-omni deity of the Abrahamic monotheist tradition. Those
definitions clearly encompass polytheistic and animistic conceptions of
godhood.
As an empiricist I will not accept anything as true or real without
evidence. I know of no acceptable evidence of supernatural
anything.
Nor do I. But take care to
avoid the facile mistake of defining the supernatural out of
existence.
Cause and effect is not a phenomenon
I never said it was. (I said
breathing was a phenomenon.)
What to call this, god or cause and effect, is a symantical argument and
not worth the effort.
You're wise to avoid the effort,
because it's simply not tenable to claim that 'god' and 'causality' are
synonyms in any community of native speakers of English.
Cause and effect is the "god" of science because to be a modern scientist
one must believe in cause and effect.
Again: just because a principle --
like causality or parsimony or non-contradiction -- is essential to a worldview
does not make it a "god" of that worldview.
What others have expounded about this issue is not
germane.
If you think that the extant body of
Western philosophical thought is not germane to such basic philosophical
questions as this, then that will make it all the more easy to correct your
mishandling of those questions simply by paraphrasing the standard
philosophical analyses of them.