Philo Sofee wrote: ↑Thu May 26, 2022 3:51 am
Yet my imagination is not in contrast to something "real" as if imagination is unreal. Again, I point to every single actual human invention ever produced. It was imagined first. Then it was built.
That you have an imagination is real. It's a real occurrence. That I agree with. But I can't swallow that whatever you imagine is real. Inventions start out as imaginative ideas, sure. But where do those ideas come from? Other previously invented things. Just because I can imagine a god that doesn't make him any more real, then someone imagining the Loch Ness Monster, or big foot or aliens. All of which could potentially be real. They are real in people's imaginations, apparently. But that doesn't put these items in the world where we can measure them, identify them, analyze their behaviors and their biology. Its silly to think whatever anyone imagines is real simply because people can imagine. Remember Sagan's dragon.
And it was improved on with someone else's further imagining of just how to "improve" it. But an "unreal" imagination produced veritable objective reality.
I'd imagine there are billions of more things imagined than invented. How that means whatever we imagine is real, is beyond me. I imagine right now, a 12 legged skunk who stinks worse than a real skunk and eats people, swims more adeptly than any marine animal, flies higher and faster than any bird. Can do calculus, dig holes like moles, and treats worms as God. Sure I can say I imagined it...and it's real, I'm mean, I imagined it. But, really, I can't say that thing is real simply because I imagined it and be rational.
To say the unreal produced the real is pure magic,
ALright I think you already have started reading the Bently Hart guy that Don recommended. Me too. I'm only about 150 pages into it. I'm finding his position, regurgitated from Tillich and others, well, problematic. I don't have a clue why he's condemning nearly everyone else in the world as completely stupid, as often as he does, then he posits a non-god which can never be anything at all as a necessary being and we simply can't question that thought (anyone who does is stupider than stupid, apparently). I'm feeling like, "Alright...I mean whatever. Have your imagined God who doesn't do anything and isn't found anywhere, basically doesn't exist at all, but really has to exist if anything exists and is better than anything we can describe because we can't see it or hear it or understand it." That seems to be nothing more than an imagined invisible dragon. It's calling nothing god and pretending nothing is everything, it seems to me.
Anyway, saying imagination is part of this world, is not saying the unreal produced the real. What it feels like he's saying, in part, is we can only make things we can imagine. If so, then everything first has to have someone imagining it to hold it in existence. I don't buy his presuppositions. I"m happy to finish reading. I"m just revealing some of my early impressions. Each time he makes these loud sounding dogmatic claims and says he's going to explain them, I get a bit excited, intently paying attention to his next lines and then he flops and just offers another assertion as if that supports his claim. I hope it gets better and it wraps up nicely. We'll see. When I'm done I'll give more impressions I think. If I'm convinced or find more merit in what he's pushing, that'll be cool. And I have no idea why Don, a Mormon, is pushing for this Hart guy's work. everything he says is an argument against Mormonism, it seems. Ah well. We'll see.
and yet, there it is! If the imagination is placed in the mere fantasy or unreal world, yet it can and does ALWAYS come first in order to actually produce "objective" reality, then imagination is the vastly more important realm than a putative "objective, real" world we live in.
Couldn't disagree more. If this were so then every religion, imagined and then invented by man, each contradicting each other in at least one way, would be purely more representative of reality than all others. That doesn't make sense, does it? Objective reality is far more important than whatever it is people imagine. That doesn't mean imagination is not important. It means imagination is unpredictable, is all too often proven to be a waste that is thrown away, and is far more garbage than it is useful. That doesn't mean imagination doesn't help. Or isn't a great thing or necessary part of our world. It simply means whatever we imagine is not real, simply because we imagine it. We don't imagine curing all disease and then all disease is cured. We imagine it, then work within reality to try and find cures.
Pick any invention you would care to, skyscrapers? Automobiles? plows? iphones? Super sonic ballistic missiles? computers? Dish washers? fences? green houses? books? the alphabet? curtains, tuxedos? chairs? hair conditioner? paint? air compressors? refrigerators? Interstates? tanks? airplanes? reading glasses? matches? tin cans?
I can't help but wonder how what you are saying isn't proving my point. There are perhaps billions of things imagined that exist nowhere at all, as far as we can tell. When the iphone was invented it was not imagined to be what it is now. That goes for everything you just mentioned. It is imagined based on other things that are seen and experienced. The iphone came about after cell phones, after computers, after gps, after cameras, after all phones. That a phone took a hundred something years to become an Iphone 13 max plus doesn't mean the first time a phone was imagined, it was the iphone. I like how Shades called out interstates. I mean the first path ever trod, started the invention of the interstate. It wasn't invented out of nothing. It was an evolved thing (I know that Hart dude hates that idea and finds it really really stupid, but I mean, I don't know what he means by that complaint.)
ALL began in imagination of someone first. That very subjectivity is the ground, the actual basis for getting to an "objective fact" of the thing in a real physical world. It didn't and it won't happen until it is first subjective in a human, then made objective. You cannot have one as real the other as unreal and phony and therefore to discard. I can't physically prove my imaginal world is real anymore than I can the spirit world. Yet I am comfortable in knowing that it is, in point of very fact, quite real.
Aright. Again, I couldn't disagree more. Because god is imagined doesn't make him real, no more than someone imagining bigfoot, or King Kong. We're not fleeing from a giant ape because someone imagined that happening. We're also not flying to distant galaxies because someone imagined it happening. I'm not a cartoon ball with pencil thin legs able to go from rolling to walking because I dreamed last night that I was. A tarantula is not going to eat me alive. I'm not going to swim to the bottom of the ocean without any aids. I'm not going to fit into my wife's pants because I imagine doing so. I'm not going to pick a bear up over my head and throw him across the lake. Ok. I'm overplaying my hand here. But hopefully we get the point.
I find Hart and Tillich largely academic. They quote Jewish and Christian scripture misapply it for modern philosophical reasons wrangle through the philosophy a bit more, claim there has to be a ground to all being and voila! there's god--nothing like the god imagined for millennia. "oh that's what they really meant this whole time". Arguing nothing is god is silly to me.
Hart's first 150 or so pages:
"God is real. He exists...But he doens't exist as you think of existing. He just exists as the only necessary being...But he's not really a being as you think of. He's just something that exists that has to exists if we exist. But not really exists exists. You see we exist, so he does. But we can't find him. I mean he's not somewhere. But he has to be. He's just not there, there. And even though we're just describing nothing when we describe god, he's really there anyway. Because anyone who can't find him is just really irrational and foolish. Those atheists...my god they don't know anything at all. This god, whose nothing, I mean, he's not nothing nothing, exists, but again, doesn't really exist, like we think of exists, but that god has to really exist because without him nothing could have ever existed. But he's a being...well not a being
but being. Without him we wouldn't exist...And again atheists are really stupid. Descartes and Aristotle and Avicenna, Aquinas, Anselm, Kant, that guy from India...I mean come on. God exists, but I mean, doesn't really exist exist...and you can't find him anyway, but he has to. We must have a ground of all being. And we can't just call that ground nothing or I don't know. He has to be intelligent. He has to be god."
Ok. I said too much. But come on, man. You have a show in which you go on for hours on. So...whatever. I'm just shooting from the hip so my foolish ideas can be taken down by the sharp people here and I can learn.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos