{"id":4433,"date":"2014-04-26T20:54:28","date_gmt":"2014-04-26T19:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/?p=4433"},"modified":"2014-05-23T03:36:27","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T02:36:27","slug":"god-and-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/god-and-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"God and Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

When is the YEC God no longer the YEC God?\u00a0 That question came up in my recent thread on methodological naturalism and accommodationism<\/a>.\u00a0 In that thread I argued that science falsifies the YEC God, because it shows definitively that the earth is about a million times older than the YECs believe.\u00a0 If the earth is old, then the YEC God doesn\u2019t exist. There might still be a God, but not the YEC<\/i> God, because the YEC God necessarily created the earth a short time ago.\u00a0 Otherwise, it wouldn\u2019t be \u201cthe YEC God\u201d at all!<\/p>\n

Robin and Petrushka objected because they didn\u2019t see \u201cthe YEC God\u201d as being essentially YEC.\u00a0 In other words, they saw \u201cthe YEC God\u201d as referring to a God who would still be the same God even if it turned out that he hadn\u2019t created the universe several thousand years ago.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In short, I saw \u201cthe YEC God\u201d as equivalent to \u201ca God having YEC characteristics\u201d, and they saw it as equivalent to \u201cthe God of the YECs, who might or might not have YEC characteristics\u201d.<\/p>\n

Of course, neither interpretation is correct in an absolute sense.\u00a0 Language is a convention, and\u00a0 \u201cthe YEC God\u201d can plausibly be interpreted either way.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, I argued that in the context of the thread, it was clear how \u201cthe YEC God\u201d was being used:<\/p>\n

…I thought that readers would notice that I used the unusual phrase \u201cthe YEC God\u201d instead of \u201cGod\u201d or \u201cthe Christian God\u201d or \u201cYahweh\u201d. Since I took the trouble of adding the qualifier \u201cYEC\u201d, they would infer that there must be some significance to it. There was; I added it to indicate that my argument was confined to YEC Gods. What is the characteristic of a YEC God that distinguishes him from an OEC God or other Gods? The clue is in the qualifier \u201cYEC\u201d. He must have created the earth a (relatively) short time ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This leads to a counterintuitive realization: the entity we refer to as \u201cthe YEC God\u201d is not necessarily the same as the entity that YECs refer to as \u201cGod\u201d!<\/p>\n

How can we resolve this apparent paradox?\u00a0 I think the key is to recognize that within our minds, \u201cthe YEC God\u201d doesn\u2019t really refer to a single possible entity.\u00a0 It refers to an entire set of possible entities, any of which would qualify as \u201cthe YEC God\u201d.\u00a0 Likewise with \u201cGod\u201d.<\/p>\n

The set of possible entities encompassed by the word \u201cGod\u201d, when spoken by a YEC, is larger than the set encompassed by the phrase \u201cthe YEC God\u201d as used in the other thread.\u00a0 The latter is a subset of the former.\u00a0 Since they are not coextensive, they don\u2019t mean the same thing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much more to be said about this, particularly about how God\u2019s status as a fictional (or at best unknown) entity affects all of this, but I\u2019ll leave that to the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When is the YEC God no longer the YEC God?\u00a0 That question came up in my recent thread on methodological naturalism and accommodationism.\u00a0 In that thread I argued that science falsifies the YEC God, because it shows definitively that the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,49,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphysics","category-philosophy","category-theism-and-atheism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}