What can happen if there is no god?

Your preaching of that Spinozaesque concept of 'God' is merely your way of rationalising your shift from your former 'atheism' to an intellectual comfort zone for you. But since your 'intellect' chooses to be ignorant of philosophical and semantic issues with the concept of an anthropomorphic 'agency', you continuously need to keep reinforcing your position to yourself.

All I am trying to do is move people toward a conceptualization of God that isn't a strawman they can easily knock down. It is idiotic to defend God against atheists if they get to force a strawman as a thing you have to defend.

Spinoza's pantheism isn't something I totally understand, but I think it fails because it doesn't draw sufficient moral distinction between good and evil; i.e. it lumps everything together as God instead of acknowledging a bifurcation of the creation into good and evil, angels and demons (fallen angels), goodness and pride, etc. etc.

But the point I am making is that there's no reason to reject God if you are capable of realizing that it's just as much a leap of faith to look at a human brain and attribute agency to it as it is to look at any other mechanistic system and do the same.

The only reason we can realistically believe the human brain has consciousness and agency is because we experience it directly within our own brains. That makes it a little bit easier to assume it exists within (most) other humans, though we have more trouble sometimes because of things like ethnic/gender/class differences, disabilities, etc. We have more trouble recognizing consciousness and agency in animals, and if you go beyond animals with sensory organs similar to ours, it becomes so much of a stretch to imagine consciousness and agency that most people would simply scoff at any hippy who insists that plants or sponges or planets, stars, and galaxies also experience consciousness and agency.

Still, our human brains and terrestrial sense-organ arrays are just mechanistic structures that could evolve differently in different environments around the universe. Whatever the fundamental basis for consciousness and agency are, it is silly to imagine they would be limited to evolving and manifesting in only the ways that we recognize. There is something fundamentally conscious and intentional in the universe of matter-energy, and the question is how that latent potential could fail to manifest on the most complex level, not whether or not it does.

No. 'Intentionality' ascribed to aspects of the universe other than projects of humans is a simplistic anthropomorphism. It explains nothing especially when apologists for theism try to 'explain' disaters by evoking 'His Mysterious Ways'. A debateably better 'explanation' might be the Gaia hypothesis....at least that one incorporates 'systems theory' which transcends the lay concepts of 'causality' involved in your 'mechanisms'.
And since you have done no reading on 'Ethical Realism and Anti-realism' your discussion of 'good and evil' can be dismissed as uniformed verbiage. The same can be said for your use of the word 'consciousness', on which the literature runs to several thousand academic papers (Reference Chalmers).

What you need to admit is that you actually have a bit of a 'messiah complex' . Your post atheism pov now ascribes to your own consciousness a 'divine origin' which allows you to at last see the TRUH regarding 'good versus evil'. Hence the preaching mission.
Pearls before swine ?....but both the pearls and the swine are artificial !

Jesus is the messiah. All consciousness has divine origin.

What allows you to see the truth regarding good vs. evil is simply reflecting clearly on what is truly good and what isn't. Our minds are biased by our desires and will to agree with others, but if we recognize our biases, then it's possible to come to an awareness of what is good and what's not.

Think of it this way: you can think you know what's good and be wrong later, but when you recognize why something you previously thought was good is actually not, that adds support to your sense of distinction between right and wrong. If you continue this process, you should gradually hone a very strong moral compass, but of course you have to keep questioning your own biases. No one's perfect, though, and certainly not me.

....said the pseudo-messiah with 'divinely gifted clear thinking' giving access to 'truth' !

As far as ''desire' is concerned, all you are doing is to satisfy the desire to pacify that disparate committee you call 'self'. You don't need a mythical entity to work that out. (Read Hesse's 'Siddhartha'.....sorry I forgot....reading isn't on the committee's agenda!*) . Indeed evoking such an entity is considered by many to be an impediment to 'enlightenment' because it is a sign of the imprisonment of your committee members by their conditioning.
*
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2500

Why is it that even spiritual threads on A2K degrade into pissing contests. Maybe we're taking this "ask an expert" thing too literally. We can't all be experts on everything. Here's a site I ran into:

"I seem to be witnessing more and more intellectual pissing competitions these days. And it’s not just in planner-land, although that’s where I’ve witnessed some of the ‘best’ ones. I’ve seen a few good technical ones, and even designers seem to be getting in on the act.

So how do you spot when the transition between conversation/discussion and pissing match occurs? Typically the conversation will start to move from being a group thing to being dominated by 2/3 members of the group. These people will become the players."
http://www.crackunit.com/2008/02/22/pissing-contests/

Do you have to be a messiah to clearly see that 2+2=4? Do you have to be a messiah to see that it's better to do less violence than more? Really there are so many things you can see clearly if you just open your mind to recognizing when something is wrong and contemplating what might be better (more right).

There's a lot of Buddhist writing on this topic, i.e. 'right thinking,' 'right action,' etc.


Aren't you able to see, though, that pursuing desire sometimes leads toward more bad than good?

Intellectualising and pissing contests just don't work when it comes to spirituality. They're both just defenses.

Spirituality is a very fluid, unsubstantial thing and intellectualizing tends to solidify it, and it leads nowhere.

Ideas are not spiritual. Fundamentalists solidify with dogma, and atheists solidify with intellect, and they both miss the point. The problem is that if we defend our statements, then we get further and further away from spirituality. That's why pissing contests don't work.

I've cited this quote over and over again by Alan Watts: "Belief is holding onto and faith is letting go". Belief is solid and faith is fluid.

Not that 2+2=4 nonsense which ignores the context of the assumption of base greater than 4 ? Are you really too naive to understand that the word 'truth' has a different meaning in elementary school maths than it does elsewhere ?

And as for your final 'leading question' you surely don't expect a reply !

I think I have spent enough time trying to rouse you from your pit of platitudes. No doubt you will continue with the preaching...after all...a bit more 'word magic' adds to the reinforcement operation.

You are generally correct, but what you miss here is that my objection is to the verbiage per se of the preacher here, which is antithetical to the ineffability of the spirituality he claims to promote ...a point about which he is ignorant. Indeed that verbiage is nothing to do with any futile debate about 'existence of God', its about the abuse of forums like this as self reinforcement exercises for believers.

Well, I suppose we're all guilty of over-intellectualising. We do our darndest to express the ineffable in words, frustrating, even impossible as it is. I guess we all want to be poets or koan-spouting Zen buddhists.

Not me, too.

I gave up anthropomorphic spirits for lent.

Oddly enough, I don't think I ever believed in them.

Don't overcomplicate it. The fact is that you can assess the truth value of 2+2=4 because you simply understand the meaning of truth. It's just an example to illustrate a basic fact about truth being self-evident.


Really? How does the meaning change exactly, in your eyes?


Ok, bye.

I suggest that you read Alan Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" which was published by the London Mathematical Society in 1937. Not that you're likely to understand it, though.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

How do you know if a philosophy of truth is true?

God says so !

God doesn't exist, other than maybe being of some sort of advanced alien entity.

As per the forum title question:
then most of the world go into melt down, possibly resulting in the extinction of all humans. Because humans are for the most part basically that bigoted about these things.

Its beyond blatant and obvious that God, at least in the idea we perceive, is false. But for many of us we need that certain faith in a mythical being, particularly for our prosperous after-life hopeful experience that we will live in eternal happiness after death if we're good.

I personally wouldn't follow God of this world knowing how much suffering he/she/it has caused between religions and the sufferance of innocent lives especially children dying from natural diseases and such.

So I'm offended by anyone who is religious. Not that I feel bothered aka offended, unlike much of easily-offended western society.