Tag Archives: heaven

God Exists Because the Alternative Sucks?

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in My Story, The Questioning

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The other day I was going through some of my old notes from years ago when I found this gem that I had written back in 2007 (almost 6 years ago):

“The following is the closest that I can come to proving the existence of God. It’s good enough for me.

If there was no God and no heaven, there would be no true purpose or goal in life or the universe. If there was no God and no heaven, whether or not you live, die, or had never been born in the first place, would eventually make no difference to anyone or anything. It would mean that everything that exists isn’t just insignificant, but totally worthless as well.”

That reasoning “proved” to me that God exists. In fact, it satisfied me enough that I was able to put the question of God’s existence from my mind for some months at least.

I don’t remember if it occurred to me or not that I was making an assertion based only on how the alternative would make me feel. If it did occur to me, I guess I never realized how fallacious such reasoning is.

philosophy-professor

Perhaps deep down, I realized that this reasoning never actually proved anything about God, that it just made me feel a little better about unquestioningly accepting his existence. As time went on, I learned more about epistemology and the scientific method and it didn’t take me long to discard this reasoning as an embarrassment.

In the years since I wrote those words, I’ve found P to be false but luckily for me, I found “I will be sad” to be false too.

Just to be clear, there is a lot wrong with this kind of reasoning that I engaged in six years ago. The universe isn’t here just to make us happy and reality doesn’t magically reconfigure itself based on our emotions. The fact that you find a hypothesis to be emotionally inconceivable says nothing about the accuracy of that hypothesis.

Why Christians should be Killing Babies

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in My Philosophy, Religion

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Every once in a while I exercise my right to post something that most people find utterly repulsive. This is one of those posts.

Most Christians believe in a God that judges people for their sins and sends them to eternal heaven or hell based on his judgment. Let me show you how it logically follows from those beliefs, that we should kill all newborns.

To the Christian I ask, do you believe that a newborn goes to heaven if he or she dies? If not, then you cannot claim your God to be a benevolent God. What did a newborn ever do to deserve eternal hellfire?

I’m going to assume that you believe newborns go to heaven if they die. Here is the problem with that belief: Since living life beyond the newborn stage increases the chance that a person sins, thereby reducing the chance that he or she will get into heaven, shouldn’t you take it upon yourself to kill all newborns to ensure their eternal happiness? Sure you would go to hell for your troubles but wouldn’t it be the right thing to do? Wouldn’t it be better for one person to go to hell for killing thousands of babies than for half of those babies to grow up as sinners and go to hell when they die?

The beliefs that; 1) God is benevolent, 2) God is more likely to send grown people to hell than babies, and 3) One shouldn’t kill babies, is not a coherent set of beliefs. At least one of these beliefs must be wrong. If you disagree, please tell me where my reasoning is faulty.

Questioning Reality

31 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Metaphysics, My Philosophy

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What is reality? We assume that there is one objective reality and yet there is no way to prove that what we are experiencing is it.

What if this reality that we experience is a computer simulation being operated in the real reality? What if even that reality is merely a simulation running in a still more real reality?

What if I am dreaming? In this dream I might question the reality of my experiences. I might question the nature of reality itself. Then I wake up and realize that the experiences I dreamed were not real. Then I begin to question whether I’m still dreaming.

One time I wondered if I was dreaming. I pinched myself and upon feeling the pinch quite clearly, I concluded that I was not dreaming. At some later point, I awoke from this weird dream. Ever since then I am skeptical of reality. Am I still dreaming?

What if I’m trapped for eternity in nothing but dreams? Dreams inside of dreams. I wake up from one dream, not realizing that I’m still dreaming. No matter how hard I try, there’s no way to prove to myself that I’m not dreaming.

What if I died and went to heaven (not that I believe in heaven)? Would I question that reality too? Can I even conceive of a certain type of reality–one that I won’t question? The disconcerting answer is–No! If I died and went to this mythical heaven, no matter how perfect it might be, I would question its reality just like I question my reality now. The only conceivable universe or reality in which I would be content is one in which I did not have the ability to think.

All of the above bothered me for a long time. It doesn’t anymore. I have discovered (or decided) that reality is a subjective matter. Anything that experiences things will perceive those experiences as being real, it doesn’t matter if you’re dreaming or in a simulation. When I’m dreaming, that reality is just as real to me at the time as the reality that I experience after waking up. No longer is reality an objective state–it is relative.