Ah, I see you aspire to cold, unfeeling, rationalism!? As I said elsewhere, theism is about relationship, atheism is about a world-view.
True, but irrelevant.
Pascal's Wager still a Longshot unless.....
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Now imagine an alternative ending to braveheart where Mel's demise is juxtaposed next to a servant throwing away the days kitchen water.
:shrug:
THere is no formula of reason based in experience which arrives at god. God is an irrational conclusion.
My ideas? None of these are my ideas. They are the ideas of various theists who all devotely "believe" that their idea and thier idea alone is the true idea of god, much like you. :crazy:
So god is duct tape? I thought that was the force?
You make a lot of vague unsubstanciated claims there. I think you are just making crap up to please yourself like every other godder.
Ah, one's teacher and mouth piece killed as an atheist, the other banished to exile for being an atheist.
Why do xtians need to rob the greeks if they have god?
Or finding the atheistic good life.
You should write the xtian roots in atheism.
Another nontheistic tradition.
No. Its about submitting to god and enduring untill you get to heaven, if the xtians are to be believed. The good life is a temptation from the life in heaven.
Or its the essesnce of theism minus the crap.
No. But you have some of the right words, depending on your flavor.
I like my heart unstabbed, thanks. You've got a new agey western feel good god going there, but that's not the traditional take or the one most of those people practice. Oh, the Jains aren't any more theistic than the Buddhists and the Toaists ahve a whole different spin on the gods thing when they go there.
I'm glad you bring up hinduism, I agree that Kali and JHVH have a lot in common.
Not to people who have experienced what they would call God...
So, what is irrational?
So, what is the god that you are rejecting like? I think he's probably a tyrant...
People don't waste time arguing on certainties. I doubt you would waste time arguing against the 'Flat Earth Society' - I wouldn't. Therefore, I assume you are arguing against some part of you that still believes (just as I am fighting my inner atheist). Take a long hard look at the god that you are fighting?
It's a worldview, like yours (and every other godder and anti-godder)! I'm saying there is an alternative (and I believe better) way of looking at things.
That is rewriting history!! :bugeye:
To get the best ideas, and use them!
What a strange idea of religion you have! Ever thought it might be wrong? That theists might believe something very different...
Religions come in many flavours - choose what suits you best! Sounds like Buddhism is the one for you...
LOL - I hadn't though of that! They are alike in their bipolar attitudes of creativity and destructiveness.
I was thinking more of the Gita and Upanishads etc. I think the Abrahamic religions can be seen as a form of Bhakti yoga... However, one man's deity is another man's demon!
Delluded people exprience all kinds of whack stuff. That doesn't make it rational.
Lot's of stuff, but in this case particularly believing things for which there is either no evidence or contrary evidence; and, drawing illogical and unsuported conclutions.
Can you say "begging the question?"
There isn't any god for me to reject, just empty and meaningless claims about god. Its a shame theists seem to have a brain defect which prevents them from understanding the difference between those two.
Broad assumptions about what people might not do are usually wrong.
Oh, life is bigger
It's bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no, I've said too much
--R.E.M - Losing My Religion
No, but that is a pretty standard cop out for theists who need to try and marginalize my motivations.
Do you not know the story of Socrates' and Aristotles' trials and what charges were brought upon them and the verdicts?
Its not mine, it comes straight from 2000 years of xtian writings. Your buddy Jesus is a really new concept in xtianity and one which a significant, if not a majority, or xtians do not follow. Have you done no serious reading in theology? Have you never listened to a good old fashion preacher going at it?
If I offered you a thousand flavors of a kick in the head, would you be eager to choose one? I don't practice Buddhism as a religion and have an equally low opinion of those who turn it into such.
Theists never look deeper than the candy coating.
So, how do YOU know what's deluded and what's rational? You could be deluded!
The evidence comes from people's lives, and experiences. What evidence have you for the existence of pain, or humour, or beauty - other than your own subjective experience?
So, why all the aggression about it?
I do! They were hardly martyrs for atheism! :bugeye:Do you not know the story of Socrates' and Aristotles' trials and what charges were brought upon them and the verdicts?
Socrates may have been charged with impiety but his last words (according to Plato) in the Phaedo are to remind Crito to sacrifice a chicken to the god Asclepius. He also argues for the existence of an afterlife, based on the goodness of the gods.
Aristotle too was charged with impiety and fled from Athens, but that does not mean he was an atheist. It was Aristotle who deduced the existence of the "Unmoved Mover" aka God. He also wrote that theology was the subject "most worthy of honour". His exile was most likely on a trumped up charge for political reasons.
You should try "looking deeper than the candy coating" swarm!
I don't think so... Is there a verse in the Bible that says "The good life is a temptation from the life in heaven."?
That explains a lot. So, who gave you the 'kick in the head' that so impaired your reasoning? Must have hurt!
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I find out. Correlate my understanding against reality and the findings of others.
Tell me. Is there anything which would convince you against your belief in god? No? Then you are deluded.
There are things which would convince me of god. That is the big difference.
And is evidence of people, not god.
All of those have objective effects which are demonstrable and measurable.
What aggression?
I said they were tried as atheists. Do bother to read.
Socrates disputed the accusation that he was a "complete atheist," but given that atheism was punishable by death, is that surprising? Aristotle was at best a deist or more likely pantheist. But he could as likely be using the "unmoved mover" as a purely rhetorical device. In either case they were hardly theists.
He also loved irony and you are taking literal things which are probably figurative. The "chicken" is a way of saying his death was easier than he expected. Now Plato, seems far more likely the theist of the three.
You should ask the fire and brim stone types for your bible quotes.
Reading comprehension. Work on it.
Indeed, I am constantly amazed at how christians will call atheists closed-minded, but then happily say that there is absolutely nothing that could ever possibly convince them that their god does not exist.
I see you answer "No" for me! It rather undermines your first claim, about listening to others!! In fact you probably don't need me to reply at all... You could have the debate just talking to yourself!
What you are referring to was Anthony Flew's test of religious belief... it is interesting that he became a believer in the end. There are things that would convince me there was no God, for instance, if consciousness, and all religious experience could be explained in terms of current physical laws and the brain - that would convince me the materialist explanation was adequate.
A related point would be if the science ceased to raise more questions than it answers. In other words - if reality is reducible to finite understanding, I would concede that God (aka "Magnum Mysterium") was redundant.
Where else would you seek evidence than from experience? Empirical science is built on that very foundation!
Your 'delusion' is maintained by discounting all evidence (e.g. religious experience) that does not support your view. This is a very selective way to "correlate your understanding against reality and the findings of others". It can only result in prejudice, not a belief based in reality.
Such as? How do you demonstrate whether a fish experiences beauty?
LOL!
The charge of "impiety" was nothing to do with atheism, and they were not tried as atheists! Both Socrates and Aristotle could have refuted that charge easily. Try reading anything from Plato if you think Socrates was an atheist. Book 1 of "The Republic" opens with Socrates saying:
In Book III, he has Socrates say:
and...
and later...
These are not the words of an atheist. 'Impiety' (and "corrupting the youth of Athens") came about because Socrates went round asking too many awkward questions. This naturally upset some influential people!
OK, Here are a couple of quotes talking about the good life here and now:
...and I almost forgot - my favourite!
What admittedly can be confusing, is that Paul and others talk of remaining faithful and enduring suffering patiently now e.g. persecution (a pressing reality in his time), so that we might have the joy of enduring faith later. He also speaks of giving up addiction to pleasure, in exchange for the eternal joy of God. However, this is only like Plato's cave (Republic Book VII), where a prisoner in the cave, turns from believing in shadows (material existence), to climb up into the light.
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It was merely a rhetorical answer. No need to concern yourself if it isn't your choice.
I'll take Flew at the height of his capacity instead of Flew with his capacity spent. Also, even now you might examine what he is claiming to believe and why. Its not what the xtian apologists make it out to be.
If you want to examine if his current claims are sound you could start another thread. Frankly the old Flew would have ripped is current arguments to shreds.
Yay.
So far this is proceeding without major obstacles. At what point does it become sufficient? Or is this one of those things where you claim it would work, but then set the point of acceptance forever out of reach? - check in progress here
No offense, but most people misuse "materialist" (turning it into a synonym for material reductionist) and on top of that most theists haven't the least clue what materialist or material reductionist actually means.
I would guess the more general naturalism or more precisely metaphysical naturalism would be more accurate here: nature is all that exists and [naturalism] assumes that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes, and that supernatural causes are not possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_naturalism
Materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter [which in the modern era includes matter, energy and forces]; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
And then reductionism is yet a third claim, namely that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism
While the three can over lap, they don't necessarily overlap. Fodor for example is a non-reductive materialist. Also naturalism makes no necessary claims about what or what number of "things" constitute the natural world whereas materialism is traditionally a monist position (though that is becoming arguable).
In short while both deny the supernatural, naturalism is about the scope of reality and materialism is about the composition of reality. I'm not pushing for a materialist position here.
I don't see the connection here, but its fairly moot since questions are trivial to generate and answers need constant refinement. - big check on this one.
How is reducible to god any different??? But at any rate I'm not a reductionist so you should look else where for reductionist arguments.
Science is built on experience, shared, of actual objects. Empty "experience," like that of "god," is not proof of anything except at best an over active imagination. But you can fix that by merely producing the god you claim to experience.
You are mistaken. I don't discount religious experience. I merely do no accept unsupported existential claims. If you can use your experience to produce the object which you claim to be experiencing just like one would expect of any other person making and existential claim based on experience, we would be copacetic. Until then I have to discount your claims the way I would any other ravings be they aliens, unicorns, fairies or whatever.
By noting their preferential mating habits have produced attractive species and that many of these standards seem to be inherent in most neuron using species and by noting that a few species do not self select to produce attractive species, having other standards which they base their mating on, but these exceptions are few and far between. In particular beauty seems mainly driven by photo sensitive organs. No big surprise, but the real surprise is how much universal agreement there is on what is beautiful across species and even reoccurring themes, like how to mark that you are poisonous (bright contrasting colors but black and yellow especially is common).
Even species which lack neurons have ended up getting forced into beautiful patterns from their interactions with sighted species, like how insects have influenced the evolution of flowers.
You are welcome to that opinion but this is drifting far afield. Perhaps the "good life" thread?
The bible is so self contradictory that you can find quotes for just about anything, but the main thrust is definitely not the good life and this is obvious not only in reading it, but also in its main philosophers, apologists, its history and its antagonism against those who seek the good life through out that history.
If you personally are trying to incorporate a more conciliatory tone I applaud your efforts, but I wouldn't try selling it to a southern baptist.
When it explains how I can know the taste of strawberries, or the colour blue.
Thanks for the Wiki-lecture swarm! Very good...
So, suppose "super-natural" causes are only "natural" causes we haven't yet got an explanation for? Would you still deny them?
So, if you are not pushing for a materialist position: Do you believe reality comprises anything other than physical stuff? Are you a dualist perhaps or an idealist?
The wonder of the Universe is that every question we find an answer to, raises more questions. We will never (I believe) reach a 'final answer'. The mystery is infinite. God is about these sort of infinities.
"God" is just a label for something totally outside our concepts - the mystery of the whole of existence of which we are a part. It's not reductionism, because it is not assuming God is just the sum of any parts.
Why do you say 'empty' for experience?
Some experiences can be presumed as referring to "shared" external objects, others are directly known states of mind (e.g. pain). Where is your justification to make one real and the other "empty"? Many thousands of people have had direct religious experiences. So, in one sense these experiences are also shared, and more real than any object to those who have them.
If you are going to be a true skeptic, then you must doubt the existence of objects and people as existing outside yourself. The only evidence for them are the experiences in your mind.
So, how do you know that a fish experiences beauty? All you have said above can be explained as 'instinct', and a product of natural selection. You can get a computer to set off the burgler alarm, when it detects red and black stripes!!
The Bible is a confusing book. However, there is an expanding thread running through it which is about living well, and virtuously.
It starts with the story of God creating the earth which he declared 'good', and with man in the near perfect garden of Eden. After the "fall", things go wrong, and most of the rest of the book is about finding that near-perfect state again. However, later God brings the Isrealites out of slavery, finds them the promised land, gives them laws, and helps get rid of their enemies. There are proverbs on leading a good life, and books like Job, questioning suffering and finally the NT and Jesus etc. who is all about finding the "Kingdom of Heaven" within you i.e. the good life.
I am not keen on Southern Baptists either. Perhaps that's something we do agree on.
I realise I gave a rather flippant response to your point about materialism and reductionism being different - and it deserves a proper response swarm. So, here goes....
I realise there are a number of people who claim to be non-reductive materialists (e.g. emergentists) on the mind body problem. However, I don't believe such a stance is sustainable: Non reductive materialism falls into the same problem as substance dualism i.e. how does "mind" cause physical brain state changes?
Jaegwon Kim in ("Physicalism, or Something Near Enough") gives a detailed argument as to why ALL materialist stances on the mind body problem MUST be reductive. His argument is based on the causal closure laws which apply to physical causation but not mental causation. So, if mind states (e.g. moods) are caused by physical brain states, a change in brain state MUST be the result of physical causation, you cannot then also attribute the cause to something mental.
So, if I feel a pain, and that makes me angry, in a materialist account, the physical brain state underlying my anger is caused by the physical brain state underlying my pain, it is NOT caused by the mental sensation of pain. Thus materialism is necessarily reductive on the hard problem.
And Qui-gon Jinn says "The ability to speak does not make you intelligent."
Sorry - just had to mention it as the name you raised was just far too similar to let it pass unmentioned.
Done. You can look up the gory details if you wish concerning how sensing the external world works if you wish.
Just trying to have us on the same starting page. Too often theist/non theist discussions are just people using the same words to mean different things without ever making the effort to reach an understanding. I'm fine with other sources as long as they are reasonably neutral.
Then they are unknown natural causes instead of supernatural ones. Supernatural has distinct non natural implications.
supernatural adj.
1. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.
3. Of or relating to a deity.
4. Of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power; miraculous.
5. Of or relating to the miraculous.
Look no wiki
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English LanguageI find material monism / material reductionism has some definite issues accounting for reality, like the definition of "material" and emergent properties to name a couple.
You could think of me as a soft dualist and material pluralist, but naturalist is easier to say. So there are things like complex patterns found in living matter and possibly machines, which seems to have a seeming presence as a distinct source of causality and a certain degree of abstraction, while being wholly comprised of a physical substrate and I'm not convinced "material" is a single substance.
So that means you don't believe in god, per your original statement?
But not without regularities. I.e. the universe is not "anything goes."
So we are down to the god of the gaps? What is the point of worshiping ignorance???
Because there is a lack of substance to it.
Unlike pain or rocks you have not yet shown there is any actual object beyond the bare concept of god.
I've had more than a few my self and while interesting there is still no object nor is it necessary to burden the experience with the god preconception.
I'm not a radical skeptic. Skepticism is a tool, not an end.
The posit is self defeating. Non existent people can't ask me to doubt their existence. Therefor in making the ask, you demonstrate your existence. Now I may have misapprehended the exact nature of that existence, but you have sufficiently demonstrated your existence just as doors demonstrate their existence by being in the way.
You are mistaken. My knowledge of their existence is in my mind, but the evidence is from our interactions. There are things in my mind which I am unable to interact with, like unicorns and gods.
Because they have chosen beautiful mates and not all fish choose appearance as a factor and you can tell by how they look. Certain patterns seem to result in preferred selection with animals capable of sight.
I did not say that at all. Natural selection is "blind." It is strictly based on surviving to reproduction. With the advent of neurons there is a secondary selection process which works within natural selection. It is called "personal preference" and as neural nets increase in complexity it becomes more significant.
At one point red footed boobies and blue footed boobies had feet neither red nor blue and were the same species. As they spread across the oceans, the ones in certain areas preferred mating with bluer footed mates and the others liked redder footed mates. Now the blue footed boobies have very blue feet and the red footed boobies have very red feet. Does foot color have anything to do with surviving to reproduction? Not at all. It is just a personal preference which the boobies have self selected for.
Is it a coincidence that the colors they chose are appealing to use too? I doubt it. We share a lot of genetic material with them.
The key point here is you have to get it to do X. It is just a mindless extension of us at the moment. When the programming umbilical cord it cut and it decides when is a good time to sound the alarm, then we can talk.
The bible is about worthless. There are many threads in it. So?
While there is some talk about living virtuously and some talk about living well, the two are often seen at odds and often living well is held up as sinful. Take up your cross of suffering and all that sort of thing. Also its advice is often haphazard and counter productive.
Please, I'm familiar with the stories. I've read it and studied it and am not impressed. If you were to consider it objectively you wouldn't be so quick to hype it.
If fact since you seem more of a pantheist or deist, why are you lugging that dead weight around any way? It would seem diametrically opposed to where you seem to be headed.
You would seem better server seeking fresher myths more aligned with your belief structure.
Ah, that is why it is non reductive. There isn't any apparent "how" from the reductionist stance.
First bear in mind that "mind" is a pattern on the physical brain. While sloppy, it is reasonable to think of it like an operating system. We know there are preferred harmonic firing patterns which the neurons create and maintain and which they store and can retrieve. This pattern keeps about a day's worth of information which is then sorted and some of it stored more permanently while we sleep. You can actually watch the neurons recreate the personality from permanent storage in some one who has undergone electroshock therapy.
What we don't know is how that "mind" initiates novel non random activity. Such is one of the current obstacles in making true AI. But there has been some progress in modeling it even though we done understand it using artificial neurons. Again leading to an emergent property of self organizing structures.
The difference between this and your god would be the discrete physical substructure (a brain) and the direct interaction with surrounding reality (the person doing things).
Yes, material reductionists do feel that way, but then that is why they are material reductionists.
Consider, it is possible to boot a computer, interact with it, and reboot it so that the underlying physical structure is completely unchanged. You are interacting with a pattern through the physical substructure. That pattern cannot be predicted from just the physical substructure itself because it is dynamically created in the moment from interactions with other patterns.
Unfortunately strict determinism, which is the hand maiden of material reductionism, can't explain the activity of intelligent organisms. It has other issues as well, indeterminable quantum events like radioactive decay.
They exist as physical brain states, but they aren't wholly determined by physical brain states as we currently understand things. They are self modifying and effected by environmental context. Sufficiently muddy?
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From a strick determinist stance there is no way to explain why a hungry person in a room uneffected by external forces chooses to sit in the chair but not eat the cookie on the table.
"It's not mine" doesn't reduce to physics at this time and niether does an object moving without first being hit by an external force.
"It's not mine" doesn't reduce to physics at this time and niether does an object moving without first being hit by an external force.
A neurobiologist would probably say that "It's not mine" does indeed come down to deterministic physics and chemistry taking place within the person's brain.
Can you actually demonstrate that the mind can cause physical changes in the brain? Because there is a great deal of experimental evidence that it's really physical changes in the brain that cause changes to the "mind," not the other way around.
For example, there is experimental evidence that the brain (and other parts of the body) actually begins to respond to an emotion or thought before the person perceives that they are having the emotion/thought. Meaning the rest of the brain and body aren't really responding to the thought; rather, what they perceive as the "thought" is the "mind's" response to the body's reaction. It might seem to you, for example, that you get scared in your mind and as a result you have physical changes in your body (like, say, a release of adrenaline). But in fact it is the other way around - your body was already responding to the scary threat before your mind perceived it.
Which would also hold true for you while you are 'thinking this through'. While you 'decided' to write this series of assertions, in fact it was already 'written' so speak and utterly determined by your body. What seems like consideration, evaluation on your part is actually a late side effect of a completely determined set of actions by your body. Your body was determined to write this and your mind's impression that it could be objective about it was also determined. The way you will react to my post is already utterly determined also.