12 January 2008

Battleground...?

I don't get it, but I suppose I'll pass it on and see if anyone else does. I found it through the friendly atheist. It's a test of the internal consistency of your beliefs (or lack thereof) about "God." I put it in quotes, because it's clear that there's a Judeo-Christian bias. However:

You took zero direct hits and you bit zero bullets. The average player of this activity to date takes 1.39 hits and bites 1.11 bullets. 402077 people have so far undertaken this activity.


and

Congratulations!

You have been awarded the TPM medal of honour! This is our highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity neither being hit nor biting a bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and very well thought out.


There's a link to another odd quiz at the site: the do-it-yourself-deity. I got a score of 0.8, where 0.0 is completely inconsistent with both itself and the universe and 1.0 is perfectly consistent. But they've made some odd assumptions. For instance:
"The laws of physics do not seem to require that the universe has anything outside of itself to continue to exist. Therefore, they can't quite see what kind of evidence it would be possible to point to in order to come to the belief that God is required for the universe to continue."
.

Uh, who said that this deity had to be separate from the universe? That in itself is a contradiction, imo. *shrugs*

2 comments:

John said...

I also took zero hits and bit zero bullets on that first test. I obviously chose 'false' for 'God exists' and also 'false' for any statements about attributes God must necessarily have.

I scored a 1.0 on the second test. I left all of the boxes unchecked. I don't believe any of those things are necessary attributes of a god, which I don't believe exists anyway. I suppose it depends how you define 'god'

Qalmlea said...

I selected false for most of the attributes on the first one, iirc. I selected "true" for exists, under the rubric of "generic deity" rather than "traditional Judeo-Christian God."

But as soon as you posit a God separate from the universe, you cannot claim that this "God" is the greatest thing in existence, since God is strictly contained in {God, Universe}, so such a God cannot ever be the greatest thing. This is why I consider any conception of a god as separate from the universe to be nonsense.