Strolling In Abstractions

I walked a mile with pleasure
She chatted all the way
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with sorrow
And never a word said she
But Oh! The things I learned from her
When sorrow walked with me.


Robert Browning Hamilton
"Along the Road"

God of the Question

If you give reasons for believing in God, you've just admitted that you believe in a higher God, a conceptual personally-applicable truth-determining God, an ultimate authority referenced to adjudicate the issue.

And you yourself are the god of what to believe about the evaluation. You function in the image of God.

So reason itself becomes the God that provides the method for determining whether or not God exists. And you make the final god-like decision about God.

Atheism imitates belief in God but without attributing psychic unity or personhood.

Both believer and atheist assume God-like rules for minds, and play the role of God in order to determine whether or not God exists.

Darwin Time for Atheism

One can discover God by doing a simple inventory of (1) the assumptions we use to recognize an object as a person and (2) the assumptions that the principles of thought are authoritative, ultimate, adequate, universal, objective, and relate crucially to persons.

These assumptions are treated as a single personal object because we apply them to persons (ourselves, for example), and because we must assume them as a comprehensive integral unit of ultimate ruling factors that arbitrate what is true and what is real.

We also assume an ideal of personhood in using that set of ultimate interrelated assumptions through which we think. And an ideal of personhood is an ideal person.

Unintended Consequences of Higher Education

"Are you jobless? Bored? Have a longboard or skateboard? Just so happens there's a pretty gradual slope though campus West to East, plenty of stairs and ledges. Also, by coincidence, most people sleep at night. Their loss is our triumph. Like rats, our kingdom is the unused."

--Skateboarder's Craiglist Ad

A Reminder for Atheism---By an Atheist

"People who believe something will always be stronger and more committed than people who believe nothing---which unfortunately describes the complacent passivity of most Western intellectuals these days."

Camille Paglia
"Obama's hit -- and big miss"
Salon, June 6, 2009

A Question For William Craig

I am developing an argument for the existence of God that I believe is more immediately verifiable by ordinary people and in my experience is far more persuasive than the cosmological and other arguments. It is what I call the Backdrop Argument or the Argument from Background Assumptions. I necessarily reference God-like construance rules that govern my thinking about the total reality. By inventorying these referential assumptions and cross-assuming them as a system, I in many ways am referencing an object that is indistinguishable from a single ultimate mind, the truths about whom are exceptionless, universal, ultimate, and make possible my functioning as a person and my ability to recognize other objects as persons, including that referenced object itself. One can discover God by comparing an inventory of the assumptions we use to recognize other persons with an inventory of the universals and ultimate domain of mind-ruling assumptions we use to think any thought.

Unlike the ontological argument, this argument does not depend on a set definition or idea of God, but only on already-implemented assumptions that either presuppose or are themselves tantamount to an ultimate personal being.

I'm interested in what you think of this argument.

Why I Believe In God

The existence of God is a prior tacit assumption. The conscious manifestation of God as a person is for the most part lacking in the normal interaction we experience, especially in common with other limited personhoods, and therefore usually viewed as a mere list of principles or axioms. But the god-like nature of this universal rule-set is a suppressed notion of rationalistic atheism.

I necessarily reference God-like mind objects in accessing my own awareness. The total irreducible integrated object set is an intuitively cross-assumed system, in many ways indistinguishable from a single mind.

The total set of assumptions we use to be aware of reality is treated as the God of mind. Reason communicates through the statements that make up its definition, assumptions, and implications.

We reference our ultimate ruling factors as a single interrelated and self-supporting system, and therefore God is a single being, in addition to the fact that it would be impossible to distinguish between two or more such ultimate beings because of the absence of positable differences.