Last night I had this dream where I was at this huge party my parents hosted at their house in Payson (Az), only their house was much larger than it actually is. Anyway it was a dinner party and after I got my food I preceded to sit at the table to which I was assigned. When I found my seat there was this gentleman making an argument about how God’s existence is irrelevant to being good person and so it doesn’t really matter if someone believes in God or not. I let him finish making his point before I chimed in.
“Assume for sake of argument,” I began, “that someone can be completely good with or without God’s existence. Assume further that God does exist and even though someone doesn’t believe He does exist he can do all the right actions and have all the right intentions in any circumstance whatever. Even if this is possible, it nevertheless is the case (if Theism is true) that God is the causal nexus of all existence other than Himself, in which case God is the cause of everything we see and everything we are, and He is the cause which holds all things together. But if God is how we just described we would have a duty to recognize that God is the cause of all things, and since God is a person we would have to turn our recognition of this fact into praise. The situation is analogous to, but in an even more severe than, the praise we owe an inventor for his invention. If we use the things to which the inventor invented without giving him credit we would be committing an ungrateful disservice. An inventor doesn’t even create anything new, she just rearranges in new ways things that where there all a long, things she never herself made. But in the case of God He not only arranged all things but caused all things too, in which case the disservice we would be doing to him by not recognizing these facts would be even more unvirtuous. So in the case where someone is good and doesn’t believe in God, if it turns out God does exist, not only is it the case that such a person is not being good in a certain respect (not giving credit where credit is due), in all other respects where she is a good person her disbelief in God severely trivializes such a status, since all her good deeds are derived and made possible by God’s existence. “
The same point can be made for an atheist too. Until an atheist knows with Cartesian certainty that she is correct, it will always be the case that she quite possibly owes God the recognition she has never given Him; in fact, the more she values her life and the things which comprise it the greater the possible debt becomes.
It’s also the same for the theist. Even if someone is a theist, it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t take for granted more than she realizes. All men, theists or not, must continually search the depths of their souls to the heights of the cosmos to recognize to what or whom, to anything or anyone, they owe their existence.
Monday, October 23, 2006
I had this dream…
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7 comments:
ok Mr. PC...not even PC, just plain feminist. ugh!
i liked your symposium-like-cartesian-dream-argument.
and the inventor analogy. terribly original.
"symposium-like-cartesian-dream-argument."
haha. I just realized that even if its in a dream a priori arguments still work...
why do you think that? if a priori arguments still work because a dream is not dependent on experience, that claim is dubious, as you say. can you really imagine yourself dreaming what you dream if you hadn't experienced some sort of analogous experience to base your dream on?
but, you know, in a Phil 101 kind of way, i like what you say.
a priori arguments 'still work in dreams' because what can be known a priori transcends perceptual experience. If in a dream, for instance, if I think to myself “2+3=5” or “no object can be red all over and green all over at the same time” I still know true propositions because none of my thoughts require perceptual evidence that could turn out false (which would be the case if I were dreaming). So in this way one could know things even if one were dreaming.
do you really think that in a dream you can realize that 2+3=5, or is it just that you remember having the experience or the thought that you believed 2+3=5 and so you reenacted that experience in a dream (but maybe this time you were in your underwear, or being chased by zombies).
i guess the question is how your mind functions dreaming. let's ask gogol. he knows something about dreaming.
the point is doing 2+3=5 is a mental experience and therefore the validity of such an argument and the truth of the conclusion can be had whether or not your sense perceptions are reliable. I don't see how the reenactment of the thought process in a dream would be any different than the orginal process you went through in reality, which is to say, I don't know the difference between a reenactment and recognition.
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