Gingerbread Man on 13/1/2007 at 18:10
I'll just say that a huge chunk of Dawkins' (and several other ethologists') work deal specifically with genocentric explanations of "altruism" and leave it at that. Don't make me start patting your soft little head.
Martlet on 13/1/2007 at 18:14
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
I'll just say that a huge chunk of Dawkins' (and several other ethologists') work deal specifically with genocentric explanations of "altruism" and leave it at that. Don't make me start patting your soft little head.
ok
@ Strontium Dog God does not exist; he is eternal (Kierkegaard, perhaps try reading fully, not just the admittedly crap Bible, which is incidentally not the word of God, unlike the Koran, and a populist antagonistic book of semi-philosophy)
God did not come out of nowhere, he has always existed
Gingerbread Man on 13/1/2007 at 18:23
See, that's the only way the God hypothesis can work, and it does work in that way. Which is what I was trying to get at in my first post to this thread.
In order for the concept of the Omnipotent God Who Created Everything to work, then this God must be completely free from all the conditions of existence. Otherwise it wouldn't have been able to stand separate from all of existence and then create all of existence.
The trouble with it then becomes conceptual: What is there that can exist outside of the universe and all things in it (which includes pesky things like physics, cause-and-effect, time, dimensions, and everything else -- "universe" doesn't just mean stars and planets) or, failing that, how could there be a thing outside of it all and what conceptual mechanisms do we need to even begin to address this possibility?
And things really heat up if you drag the possibility that observers influence the reality of the observed, and that in order for something to be outside reality it must, by necessity, not be part of the set of Real Things.
In other words, the most direct route to explaining God's existence is to demonstrate the logical impossibility of God being real.
Martlet on 13/1/2007 at 18:26
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
See, that's the only way the God hypothesis
can work, and it does work in that way. Which is what I was trying to get at in my first post to this thread.
In order for the concept of the Omnipotent God Who Created Everything to work, then this God must be completely free from all the conditions of existence. Otherwise it wouldn't have been able to stand separate from all of existence and then create all of existence.
The trouble with it then becomes conceptual: What is there that can exist outside of the universe and all things in it (which includes pesky things like physics, cause-and-effect, time, dimensions, and everything else -- "universe" doesn't just mean stars and planets) or, failing that,
how could there be a thing outside of it all and what conceptual mechanisms do we need to even begin to address this possibility?
And things really heat up if you drag the possibility that observers influence the reality of the observed, and that in order for something to be outside reality it must, by necessity, not be part of the set of Real Things.
In other words, the most direct route to explaining God's existence is to demonstrate the logical impossibility of God being real.
exactly, and that is why attacks at the Bible, evolution ( it is undeniable) and all the paraphenalia are just ignorant, showing that the person has no capability of thinking beyond the material world.
Gingerbread Man on 13/1/2007 at 18:31
No, see... you've wandered off into some land of Bizarro-Conclusions where taffeta sheets of self-assuming premises keep roughly none of the rain off your assertions.
Spiritual thought and religious thought are very different things. It isn't impossible to give consideration to intangible and emotional / intellectual facets of life and simultaneously deny the likelihood of an overseeing God.
I care very deeply about my cat's mental well-being, but I don't for a second believe he has a cogent thought in his little head. Not anything I would label as a cogent thought, anyway. I project that shit onto him because that's the way *I* understand the world. Just like the Hebrew Elders projected up a load of their traits onto their cat. Except they also told everyone that their cat was invisible, everywhere, and was going to eat the Egyptians.
And if you didn't do what their cat wanted (luckily the Elders were well-able to divine the wishes and moods of their incomprehensible cat -- that's just the way things are with these sorts of set-ups) then when you die you have to live in a litterbox and eat nothing but salt.
Thirith on 13/1/2007 at 18:32
I believe in God. Why? For two reasons: 1) There are certain things that I don't see science explaining any time soon - these explanatory gaps can be filled by God, or a god. 2) I need to believe in God.
Point 1: I'll just give one example - the creation of existence. Having read Stephen Hawking, I can see how science can provide explanations of everything up to that point based on more or less empirical evidence. However, I keep returning to the question: What was before? I find the notion of "something out of nothing" rather difficult to swallow unless we introduce something that is outside, or above, the system we're looking at. (If this is theoretically/scientifically naive, and I'm sure it is, I'd be grateful for any pointers in the direction of 'God-less' answers to that question.)
Point 2 is quite important, because it suggests that I am using the fiction of God as a crutch. Perhaps I am. I am very willing to accept that possibility. However, I also believe, and strongly at that, that we all have certain fictions we live by. Constructs that we share, but that have no basis in any empirical reason. These fictions may be as delusional as that of God - they may be examples of human denial more than anything else. (Love comes to mind.)
Would we be happier, better people if we jettisoned all of those fictions? Frankly, I doubt it. I do believe that we need certain fictions to survive - as individuals perhaps as much as societies. In my case, what do I get out of believing in God, fiction or not? A certain amount of strength and hope. An awareness of how much I can (and want to be) grateful for in my life. An admiration for the intangibles of life. I'm not saying that other people don't have any of these; what I am saying is simply that the crutch that is God for me has a positive effect. What would I gain if I chucked that crutch in favour of Dawkins' godless universe?
Also, I'd like to add that just as many Christians (probably the majority) has never put an ounce of thought into their faith or the Bible, a majority of atheists hasn't put an ounce of thought into their disbelief. Done properly, belief is not simple, and it does not exclude the possibility of doubt. There is such a thing as intellectual, intelligent faith, I'd say, that is critical of itself and keeps examining what it is based on. It may still be wrong in the end, but the same can be said for any intellectual activity.
(Then again, perhaps I'm also in delusion about this last bit because one of the fictions I need to uphold is that I'm not a brainless eejit. :p)
Martlet on 13/1/2007 at 18:37
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
No, see... you've wandered off into some land of Bizarro-Conclusions where taffeta sheets of self-assuming premises keep roughly none of the rain off your assertions.
Spiritual thought and religious thought are very different things. It isn't impossible to give consideration to intangible and emotional / intellectual facets of life and simultaneously deny the likelihood of an overseeing God.
I care very deeply about my cat's mental well-being, but I don't for a second believe he has a cogent thought in his little head. Not anything I would label as a cogent thought, anyway. I project that shit onto him because that's the way *I* understand the world. Just like the Hebrew Elders projected up a load of their traits onto their cat. Except they also told everyone that their cat was invisible, everywhere, and was going to eat the Egyptians.
yeah, tbh
you said far more cogently than i ever could in your post before this is what I was trying to say. What I meant was that attacks on the religion don't prove anything against the existence of God, especially when what is believed in that religion is determined by the believers, rather than by God
SD on 13/1/2007 at 18:40
Quote Posted by Thirith
1) There are certain things that I don't see science explaining any time soon - these explanatory gaps can be filled by God, or a god.
While science cannot (yet) explain some things, it's entirely fallacious to fill the gaps with God.
Quote:
2) I need to believe in God.
You really don't you know :erg:
mopgoblin on 13/1/2007 at 18:42
Quote Posted by Fingernail
Well not exactly, if you believe that God has given us the 10 commandments and teachings of Jesus which we are able to comprehend to live by.
Yeah, but if we can't know his will, then his true intentions could be anything. There might be secret commandments A through F that you're supposed to find, or figure out for yourself, and they could supersede and contradict the ones we were openly given (of course, even if you found something like that there could always be another hidden level negating it). A belief that following the commandments is good would therefore be no more (or less) valid than any other. I suppose that's fine for anyone who doesn't want to spread their beliefs around, but it certainly buggers up any claim to moral authority.
Quote Posted by paloalto
I have never bought the argument that higher levels of complexity and order can come from the bottom up from a grid of random events.Randomness and order are opposites.
You have to be careful when discussing order, randomness, and so on. The intuitive human notions don't necessarily agree with thermodynamics, and it's easy to forget, for example, that the Earth is not a closed system. There's also the danger of convincing yourself that simple rules and processes cannot produce complicated patterns. But consider the Mandelbrot set - it's defined by a simple iterative map (Z<sub>n+1</sub> = Z<sub>n</sub><sup>2</sup> + c) on the complex plane, and I could describe the process for approximating it to an arbitrary level of detail in a moderately long paragraph or a very small computer program, but it has infinite detail - there's always interesting stuff to see no matter how far down you go. There's nothing in the map or the algorithm that explicitly talks about dense periodic orbits, topological transitivity, sensitivity to initial conditions, or self-similarity, but they're what you get.
Thirith on 13/1/2007 at 18:42
Okay, Stronts. I'm finding it difficult to take you seriously if you don't do more than just pick out single phrases. Right now, you're basically doing the same as the guy whose answer to every point is: "Well, you just need to believe." Tell me why I'd be better off chucking the God delusion in favour of atheism, if there are positive effects I get from that delusion.
And can I go further and ask you the following: Would you say that you lead your life solely based on empirically verifiable truths?
