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Does God Lie 2?
Discussion 30080 • Reply 30978
What I don’t get it- God is not a normal thing in our life. We claim we could never know his Being and his motivations. So, if he were to lie to us- we would be completely helpless and ruined. How can we have the same relationship of love and trust with God when this is in the back of our minds?Of course we have to make a few theories when it comes to whether we think God is telling the truth or not- how else would we establish it one way or another?
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54 Replies
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Does God Lie 2?
updated 3 years, 2 months ago
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54
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Hopefully this response to your other question should suffice:
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Discussion 41784 • Reply 41939@faisalharoon
Maybe my hand is false. Maybe my chair is false. But my ‘self’, me, my soul- I cannot deny that. I think therefore I am. And the essence of existence must be truth, because if it was falsehood it could simply not exist. If something’s existence is based on falsehood then it does not exist. So ‘I’ am real. ‘I’ am true. And that means that the person who gave this ‘self’, and is maintaining it must be true. Because if he was even a little bit false then he would not be true and then my existence would be false which I cannot deny. And the giver of this ‘self’ must be true. Because it is the giver of all existence. And if his existence was based on falsehood then (existence based on falsehood means he can’t exist) nothing would exist since he is the source of all existence.
But this is only his existence. What about the things he says? Everything I know, my ability to even think is from him. My definition of truth is based upon what he says- he is the source of truth.
But what is the essence of communication and information? Is it truth? It seems that we can communicate information that is false. ‘I have one trillion pounds’. This is information based on falsehood. So who is to say that the being who’s the existence is based solely on truth cannot communicate ideas that are not in accordance with reality?
How can you say that falsehood is the absence of truth when it comes to information then? The analogy of light and darkness doesn’t work unless we are talking about existence
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If you say “I have a trillion dollars” it can either be true or false. The distinguishing factor is not your statement (the information). The distinguishing factor is whether or not you own a trillion dollars.
Falsehood doesn’t “come from” information. Information can either be true or false based on whether or not it pertains to an underlying truth. Falsehood is simply the absence of truth no matter how you look at it.
The point that I made in my earlier post was not that we can deductively prove that God can’t lie. The point was that God is the sheer source of our knowledge and truth and our ability to discern truth from falsehood. There’s no point in even evaluating what He has said is true or not. We believe in God on the basis of evidence. Once we do, we have no choice but to accept whatever He says as truth. In other words, we can’t escape our own existence and get higher than God in order to judge Him.
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The necessary corollary of us not being able to judge God’s truthfulness is the statement ‘we do not know for sure whether he is telling us the truth’. EG that would be in accordance to the ultimate reality. For our human reality it is truth because we have no other option. Because he defines truth itself. But then if we say that we will get heaven if we are good people and live up to the scale he has created would be a claim lacking evidence since we have no way to judge whether, in his realm, after we die and are brought back, it was true
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You’re stuck on a presumption that there’s some bigger reality than God. I think that given the constraints of our mode of communication I have done the best that I could to explain that such is not the case. God is that ultimate reality. He is the source of truth. He is the truth. Falsehood is nothing more than the absence of truth. Imagine the ultimate reality in your mind and the equate it with God. When we say God, that’s exactly what we refer to. There’s nothing beyond Him. That’s the reason why we can’t get higher than Him to judge Him. God lying to us is an oxymoron. The conclusion you’re drawing is called an absurdity in the study of logic. Until you understand this, I’m afraid that I won’t be able to help any further on this topic.
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Hmmm. That makes it clear. That seems to ruin and finish my argument. إن شاء الله I’ll contemplate on it further. جزاكم الله خيرا for your help so far
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This time you have to distribute the mithai because I’m not risking my heard earned money anymore! I’ve learnt my lesson well 😂😂
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😂😂
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Could you just clarify this thing then- in what terms is God the truth? In my messages above I tried to prove that he his the ultimate truth in terms of existence. What about him being the reality but lying about himself. Can someone who is true in existence not lie about themselves?
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@faisalharoon Am I still misunderstanding a fundamental point of your argument?
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I think that it’s the perspective, not a fundamental point. Consider it from a different angle. God is who created me. He lying to me makes no sense whatsoever. If He wanted me to act in a certain way He could have easily crafted my perception to His will.
If I write a computer program, I could feed it false data for it to act in a certain way. But if I did that I would be a very lethargic programmer. An efficient programmer would write the program such that he wouldn’t have to manually massage the data before feeding it to his program. The program would do it for him.
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I used to deny this idea from this very angle. That what could God gain from lying to us? It satisfied me for a long time until I talked to an agnostic person who basically said that who are we to decide God’s motives or why he would be doing something?
How do we know he hasn’t actually shaped our perception in a certain way? We wouldn’t know if he did I guess
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We’re not deciding God’s motives. I’m simply pointing out in the above example that it’s illogical for God to lie to us. If He wanted us to have a false perception of reality, He had a much better way to do it.
How do we know He hasn’t actually shaped our perception in a certain way? If we doubt our own perception or our own ability to reason then we can’t go through our lives. All knowledge, every science, all our decisions could be based on falsehood. Our awareness of our own selves could become questionable. Those who raise this kind of doubts only do so in reference to God – they’re quite happy to lead their lives otherwise. The contraction is in their own reasoning and behavior, not with our concept of God.
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Think of it this way- you think it’s illogical- that’s exactly what the design is. You think he wouldn’t do it because he has no reason to, meaning that we are searching for his motives.
So what if all our knowledge goes to the bin? How are we to call something absolutely true or false or in existence or not? We just go in with our lives in a pragmatic way not knowing anything
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Maybe his motives are such that they would seem illogical to you or a motive that you could never understand
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Rather that “Does God Lie”, perhaps the title should be, “Does Allah not Tell Us Everything” and that will be true.
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My question is specifically that has God or does God tell us false information about himself?
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We’re not searching for God’s motives. Based on evidence we know that God is all powerful, that He has created us, and that He could have molded our perception as well as faculties of reason and rationality differently if He had so willed rather than lying to us. It’s very straightforward.
Those who raise this kind of doubts are not raising any doubts on God, but are in fact contradicting their own knowledge and behavior – in fact even their own existence. Knowledge is not based on speculative ideas or contradictions. When someone has any evidence to their argument, we’ll evaluate it then. Until such time the burden of proof lies squarely on their shoulders.
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He HAS molded our rationality though. He created it. Why did he create apples red rather than blue? No one has the answer except him. So for us to say ‘it doesn’t make sense that he didn’t choose the straightforward path’ is arbitrary since we don’t have the right to ask this questions. What evidence is that he tells the truth?
From what I have thought of from other discussions would be that we find justice in ourselves. And a bit of injustice means full injustice. So God has to be fully just. Then the question arises if then why is there injustice? The answer would be the principle that this creation and life is a test. It answers all the questions. Unless we had revelation to tell us this we could not know I guess. Because you can’t be just and unjust at the same time
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If it works for you that’s great. Personally, I would not take the discussion with any atheist this deep until they can explain their own argument without contradicting themselves.
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That is smart I guess. Do you think the argument holds up?
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I didn’t understand how you concluded that a bit of injustice means full injustice. One could be unjust in certain aspects while not the others. Besides what is justice anyway?
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Justice would be what humans deem it to be I guess.
And what I meant would apply in any dealing. So if he dealt with the creation of humans- it can’t be just and unjust at the same time- it’s only binary. And we know the dealing of our creation can’t be only injustice because we see a longing for justice in ourselves.
Please do let me know if you find any of this unreasonable
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But it comes back to what information is based on. That’s not binary I guess. The Quran can be truthful when it tells us history or that death will overtake us wherever we are. That’s true. But the. Other things could be false. We wouldn’t know. The labels of truthfulness and falsehood would just be arbitrary then
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The point that I’m trying to drive across is that if we doubt God then even our definition of justice is questionable. The very logic and reason that we’re using to make our arguments is questionable. Even our awareness of our own existence is in the line of fire. If it works for you then so be it, but I find no value in arguing from this angle.
The problem must be approached from the most fundamental level – epistemology. There must be some static basis of our argument, and I’m convinced that it’s the definition and the sources of our knowledge.
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Logic and the existence of everything would come under doubt yes. But the knowledge of the self. The knowledge the ‘I’ am can never come under scrutiny.
If doubting God was logically unreasonable I understand. But just because it constricts our level of ‘true’ knowledge doesn’t mean that it is incorrect. It just means that actual knowledge is very limited, and that we are just being pragmatic in the way of science etc
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Of course knowledge is relative. We did discuss this in a lot of detail earlier.
In case of doubting God even the knowledge of our own selves must be scrutinized. Do we really exist or we’re only a thought in someone else’s head? Even if we do exist, all our experiences could be just virtual reality. How do I know that you exist? Perhaps you’re just my false perception. Even if you do exist, are you really a rational being like me or a carefully crafted robot? There’s no end to speculation in this line of thinking. The sad part is that after spending years of effort, one can’t conclude anything. Why? Because they failed to understand the bounds of human knowledge.
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Exactly. My physical being may be false. That much is clear. But this ‘self’, not my body, not my experiences- the thing that says ‘I am’ cannot be doubted. Because I think therefore I am. Now whether this is as a physical body or a brain in a vat we have no way to know.
That is the bound of human knowledge it seems. That we can’t know anything for certain except this thing- that ‘I’ am.
So we don’t really ‘know’ anything. It’s just a bunch of probabilities.
This wouldn’t affect my daily life though because I use the other ‘knowledge’ in a pragmatic way. I don’t have to believe that an apple physically exists to enjoy its taste- it may just be a part of a virtual simulation for all I know.
The issue is that God is not something as simple and arbitrary as an apple. His justice or truthfulness is paramount to my existence. And it seems that most people just assume he would be speaking the truth about himself and his dealing when there’s really no way to test this.
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the thing that says ‘I am’ cannot be doubted
Personally I agree, but there are plenty of philosophers that do not.
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I think it’s important to clarify my position. I’m not saying that the Quran is false أعوذ بالله من الشيىطان الرجيم . I’m not making that claim. I’m simply asking for the proof of the claim that would lead us to reasonably believe that it is true
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Falsehood doesn’t “come from” information. Information can either be true or false based on whether or not it pertains to an underlying truth. Falsehood is simply the absence of truth no matter how you look at it.Could you elaborate on how falsehood is just the absence of truth? Why?
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I don’t know if this helps but if you’re looking for empirical evidence of the truthfulness of God, then simply look at how He fulfilled his promises of rewards and punishments for the addressees of His rasools (messengers). He promised rewards to the believers and history witnessed how it happened with so much grace and marvel. He warned the deniers of a dreadful fate and we know, purely from evidence, that it came for them. The last time this divine practice happened was in the 7th century!! This is my empirical evidence of how God stands true to His words. Where’s the evidence that contradicts this?
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Ok now this will be stretching it and I’m just going to say it for the purpose of discussion and further learning. So please feel free to attack it from all directions.
How do you know that happened? It’s God telling you right? All your knowledge comes from him surely. So how do you know that that event actually happened and you’re not being tricked into it.
This is what I think would be the limits of human knowledge that I hinted at above. We can’t actually be sure of anything except our ‘selves’. Even I can’t be sure about you. I can only be sure about ‘me’.
That’s one reply.
The other would be that how do you not know that all of these events haven’t been tailored for you to think that God is just and true? And that in reality it’s all a joke? Can we really deny this possibility? I don’t think we can prove nor disprove it. We simply don’t have the faculties to do so. Our human reasoning cannot pierce that realm of certainty and knowledge it seems
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We know this from established history, not from God. That Muhammad began with a few companions in the face of persecution and that he read Quran wherein God promised rewards to the believers, and warned the deniers, and that Islam came to dominate Arabian Peninsula, then Iraq, the Roman and Persian Empires is established history, accepted by literally everyone!!!
It is the same way we know Karl Marx wrote Das Capital. Did you see him writing it? No. But such a overwhelming vast amount of humanity reported that event, that it is impossible for you to deny this. If all of them are lying, then i don’t know if there’s anything true in this world. That’s why I believe in evidence instead of merely speculating what if.
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The same way I can doubt whether this whole world exists and I’m not just a brain in a vat, I can speculate whether the universe was just created five minutes ago. This is where human knowledge fails. There no way to disprove that proposition.
The same way, established history can be scrutinised when we look at knowledge from this higher plane rather than assuming that our human rationality or senses are true- because that is, in fact, an assumption it seems
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What do you believe in? Evidence or speculations?
I am sorry, but this line of reasoning that our human faculties cannot lead us to any kind of truth or certain knowledge at all is nothing but mere fantasies of philosophers who had nothing valuable to say. It has no meaning whatsoever!! Just think about it what does it even mean. If we cannot know anything to be true or real, what is your evidence for that?
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What evidence? The ones that we, with our assumptions (that our senses are reliable) think of and discover?
The meaning is simply that humans cannot know certain knowledge. Everything is a pragmatic use of knowledge. I have never experienced the floor to fall out from under me but I have no way to disprove that it’s actually just a virtual reality simulator.
In terms of human knowledge- a hypothesis requires evidence for it to be true. The hypothesis that history occurred or that the world physically exists is made. The evidence for which is our senses. But what is the intrinsic value of our senses?
The above reasoning is what makes you think that we can’t know anything for certain.
Maybe my logic itself is flawed. Maybe our creator locked off some specific realities or experiences or parts of reason required to access an ultimate understanding.
Until then, I don’t think any of our knowledge is certain.
Just prove to me the universe wasn’t created 5 minutes ago and all your memories aren’t just faked. I don’t think you can
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There is no doubt that the “Creator locked off some specific realities or experiences or parts of reason required to access an ultimate understanding.”
Humans cannot know certain knowledge”. How do you know this?
“The intrinsic value of our senses”. How do you argue that our senses are inadequate or unreal or whatever?
As for the floor part, I hit my head in the floor, it hurts me. I know it’s there. 😂
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I do not know whether I am a brain in a vat. If I was I wouldn’t know I was. Therefore I can’t be certain that I am in a real physical world.
When you are in a dream you do not know you are until you wake up. Until then, everything is real. How do you know you are not dreaming right now and will wake up in some other reality?
Maybe that was just the programming of the coder who put a brain in a vat.
The possibilities are endless, and the evidences are sparse to make any of them believable with certainty
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That’s QUITE a huge assumption that the dream experience is exactly similar to that of reality when one is awake.
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That’s why I’m not making any claims. I’m simply saying you cannot say it is a dream or that it isn’t
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At this point, perhaps it would help to think more about what, according to you, is real or certain, or ultimate.
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The ‘self’ and only ‘my’ self. By extension the one who created me. For more details you can read this Discussion 41806 • Reply 42978
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You know what’s the irony in the statement that you shared. You say that you think therefore “you” are real and and the “giver” of your self is also true because if he isn’t true then you are false. But whether the rest of us are true or false, you don’t know. Now, what would be your response when that giver of your self comes in front of you? Would you tell him, no I do not know whether you are real or not?
See, the problem with this line of thinking is that then, for anything to be real or true, it has to be “you”. But you concluded earlier that there is someone else who gave you your self. Then, how is it possible that “you” cannot be “him” and yet he still exists.
That for anything to be real or true, it doesn’t have to be “you”, that’s my point.
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I’m assuming a giver of my ‘self’ here because of other reasons. I guess their existence wouldn’t be necessary.
But still you haven’t proven to me that the world didn’t start five minutes ago 😅
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So, all this while, you are assuming, guessing and speculating, while asking me to prove! Very nice! 😂
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😂😂
I’m just trying to prove that you can’t prove it 😂😂
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But by your own definition you cannot prove anything 😂 😂 😂
That’s the premise of everything you’ve been saying throughout this thread 😂
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Challo let’s say demonstrate to not mix up the terms
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But even if the terms are being mixed my overall point still stands that we have no reason to rely on our senses. Perhaps even not our logic
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I totally agree with everyone, but Shoaib. Shoaib has the liberty to imagine anything, but others have to prove. Using the same rules now, I can prove that Shoaib can’t prove to me that he is real. If he could prove it to me, I will give him a everything I own.
He can never prove it, because there are no rules, no moderator and I can keep assuming and putting burden on Shoaib to prove till eternity.
🤣
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That’s why I didn’t make any claims except exactly what you said. I can’t prove to you that I am real.
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I think that is why the discussion has no meaning or purpose. On the other hand, I would be afraid using harsh words or wrong assumption about Allah. This is a short life and we will find out the truth soon. Out mental limitation leaves us with no option in some matter but to accept as-is what we have been told or not told.
I would state what Quran states…”what if it is all true” Believing in Allah and not doing bad things is a very small premium to pay for assurance that we do not get in trouble in the after life.
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https://keystotheunseen.com/2018/10/08/god-does-not-signify-lies/amp/
This is the only argument that seems to make sense to me
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