• Devolved
    8
    I've been re-formulating the argument for a while, but it goes:

    1) There's no viable means around Agrippa's Trilemma as means to justify our justifications apart from three possible scenarios.

    We either:
    a) Go into regression of justifying the justifications
    b) Resort to circularity
    c) Take an axiomatic exit and presuppose baseline justifications

    I would add the fourth one... "I don't know", which isn't really useful in most pragmatic scopes of human existence where we depend on some baseline assumptions.

    2) When we deconstruct our individual beliefs on the subject of origins we end up with some basic questions about reality, of which I would frame as two possible baseline categories of assumptions:

    A) Either the reality is arbitrary, in a sense that there is no inherent meaning in variables that allow such reality for what we would recognize as intelligent processes and be intelligible. It's merely incidental with existence of such reality. There's no inherent meaning apart from what we would contextually project to be meaningfull.

    Or

    B) The reality was arranged to be intelligent and intelligible by a being which by extension would be necessarily both intelligent and intelligible in a way which exceeds the complexity of the reality that such being would arrange.

    3) If we choose option A as an axiom, it would follow that there is no inherent meaning to reality beyond our subjective perception. Since our brain is a "meaning-seaking mechanism", it would follow that it's engaging in ultimately absurd enterprise of inventing contextual meaning where there is none.

    Inherently, there are no justifications for science, logic and reason, and morality apart from consensus that merely agrees on some subjective models that our brains project on reality with rather absurd implications.

    4) If we choose option B as an axiom, the implication would be that there is meaning to reality beyond our subjective perception. Thus, our brain operates in it's proper scope of operation of finding the intended meaning of reality where meaning is not arbitrary projection and contexts of reality are not accidental.

    Thus there are logical justifications for enterprise of science, logic and reason in context that our brain operates for its intended purpose of finding meaning where there is meaning.

    Thus, God concept in the very least is a pragmatic necessity for having a coherent model that doesn't devolve into absurdity after baseline presuppositions are made.
  • Relativist
    2.1k
    Consider a world identical to this one except it lacks intelligent life. Does "meaning" correspond to anything that exists in that world? "Meaning" refers to relations among elements of the mind. If there are no minds, there is no meaning.

    Does that make reality arbitrary? It probably makes the ontological foundation of reality arbitrary, in that it is a brute fact. What follows from the foundation is out of mathematical necessity - so that is not arbitrary.

    So your dilemma reduces to the foundation of existence. Isn't any foundation arbitrary -including God? Why is there a God, rather than not?
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