Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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I think your description probably does match the actual baggage of the term in his mind, but he in fact did make something explicit, right in the previous sentence to one of the two I quoted: "Theism is the belief in a deity that also cares about the welfare of individual humans. "

You do not and can not know how what I was calling a Theity cares. It is itself a very primitive idea that the caring must manifest as heavyweight, visibly-obvious intervention into everyday life. I do not deny that this is certainly how many or most conceive of it but it should be pointed out that not all religions that contain Theities have this idea actually deeply embedded into them (as opposed to deeply embedded into the minds of the bulk of practitioners), but actually can still work with a relatively subtle Theity using the power of incomprehensibly vast intelligence to accomplish their goals through the smallest of possible changes, an elegant approach.

(Actually Kurzweil's characterization of religion is rather paper-thin, too: "Presumably, millions of those killed were theists, believing that their “theity” would “look out” for their welfare." I know that's not intended as an explanation of The Totality of Religion in one sentence, but I still shouldn't even have to describe how this does not match up with the contents of many religions, particularly including Christianity which promises persecution, explicitly, several times. I think many religions and many actual expressions of religious are rather more subtle than he is willing to give credit for.)

You do not and can not know how what I was calling a Theity cares. It is itself a very primitive idea that the caring must manifest as heavyweight, visibly-obvious intervention into everyday life.

It turns out my aside does address this. If a theity is said to "care about the welfare of individual humans", the caring must actually be something that humans would actually recognize as caring. Otherwise, you're using the word to connote something that it doesn't, in order to piggyback on the emotional resonance of what it actually does.

Saying God may be caring but we don't know what that looks like is exactly equivalent to saying we don't know anything about God. The entire point of theism is to claim that you do know something about God.

Ah, in this case I simply mean caring in the weak sense of "interested in", which I think is the most generous way to read Kurzweil's point. If you really get technical, no words have any particular meaning about any entity of this intelligence, but it would be at least reasonable to define some sense of "interested in" us as more than just an incidental detail of running a universe. From what I've seen Deists-but-not-Theists tend to mean an entity that literally does not care about us, may not even know we exist, would not care to know about the ignorance, and sometimes I even get a whiff of the self-loathing-human sense of "and if it did know we existed it wouldn't like it". Again, not necessarily always spelled out but I think it's pretty much as fair as your previous assessment of Theism, which is to say, a decent working definition of what is already out there.

Your side point I actually deliberately left addressed because it goes down a rabbit hole. A fun one, but not one I was trying to go down. :)

It is not a new idea in theology that we don't really know the mind of God and that the words and concepts we use are merely approximations. It does rapidly deteriorate into something unprovable. Unfortunately, where in science we can discard the unprovable and justifiably consider ourselves wise, I think the undisprovability and/or unprovability of all these questions is actually fundamental and unavoidable, inasmuch that observing that certain statements are unprovable doesn't affect their truth value.

You could define a concept of "human justice as the considered timespan approaches infinity", for instance, which may still be vague but is at least getting somewhere, sort of.

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