This is an appropriate video for Agnostic.com and it had its moments...
However, a great deal of reasoning slipped between the cracks, and too often the questions were softballs.
The convenience of continuing ones superstition is surely one of the worst arguments.
If we are asking the wrong question, what would be a better question?
If a god is unlikely to exist, or its existence has no effect on our own, is pursuit of the unknowable still a meaningful exercise, or a waste of time?
If a god did exist, given we can know nothing about it, how can it not be irrelevant?
The more I watched "Closer to Truth" the less I felt like we were getting closer to anything. After years of episodes and countless hours of discussions, it started to feel like the principle of infinite divisibility ... an endless halving of philosophical navel gazing.
Thanks for this informative video. I'm in near total alignment with R L Kuhn's credo regarding agnosticism except for his last statement in this video which asserts that "human beings should wonder whether god exists". I don't like the static permanence of that assertion. I think human beings should evolve beyond the concept of god.
Good episode. I like Kuhn, but he, like just about everyone, is still stuck in the notion that those are the only three options, and that we must choose one of them.
“If we are asking the wrong question, what would be a better question?”
If I understood the speaker correctly, we don’t yet know how to formulate that better question. And I agree with that, but a good preliminary question in the meantime would be... what is God’s nature? What exactly is this thing we are believing in or not believing in? And if we don’t even know if it exists, how can we be certain what its nature is?
“If a god is unlikely to exist, or its existence has no effect on our own, is pursuit of the unknowable still a meaningful exercise, or a waste of time?”
Given your conditions I’d say the latter. But there is room for discussion on those conditions.
“If a god did exist, given we can know nothing about it, how can it not be irrelevant?”
Again, your condition - that we can know nothing about it - leaves room for discussion, but if that were true... then we may as well consider it irrelevant, whether it is or not.
Yes could not agree with that, more. I noticed right at the start of the video, he gave out to his first collaborator a whole list of properties that he thought defined god, which seems to me to be quite the wrong way of going about it. If only because he is not really asking what are the benefits of being a theist, atheist or agnostic, but rather what are the benefits of those with regard to a very specific god.
Or to use their cutain analogy, he is already saying what he wishes to know is behind the curtain.