Richard Dawkins is a remarkably intelligent and capable man. He is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals, and deservedly so, because unlike the tawdry and tiresome politicians who daily wear us out to no good end, he addresses things that matter, like the origins and progression of life, and the question of whether God exists. As I age, I find myself unable to muster anything like my youthful passion for matters political. Those things, and those people – well, they come and they go, and there is simply nothing new under the sun. By contrast, as I shuffle toward the great whatever, it seems increasingly to me that questions of the sort Dawkins raises seem the only ones genuinely worth bothering over.
But with age and experience has also come a certain humility. I concede my limitations. And I recognize yours . . . and ours, because they are all of a piece. And so, while Dawkins’ views exemplify a perspective that I find altogether disagreeable and destructive, I am perfectly willing to concede that they are serious. They are the product of a powerfully speculative intellect – and, given the nature of the subject matter, they cannot be proven, in any sense meaningful to science, wrong. Though they seem for a variety of reasons to be deeply incomplete and wrong-minded to me, his views are entitled to respect, and to respectful critique.
Why, then, can he and those like him not concede – in a fashion rooted in the same humility that governs his more responsible critics – anything like a similar respect for their opponents?
Dawkins has written a new book, which he has called “The God Delusion.” It has been the subject of a number of recent, and generally mixed, reviews. I’ll link to a few of them for a sense of scope: The New York Times; ; First Things (scroll down to the October 19 entry by Stephen Barr); and the London Review of Books. (The New Republic also recently published a particularly incisive review, though I believe it is subscription-only.) I have the book, and I am in mid-read. The substance of the thing is generally as described in the reviews, though, by way of summary here, Dawkins holds to the view that the logic of evolutionary biology conclusively disproves the existence of anything like the sort of God envisioned by traditional religions, most particularly Christianity. Dawkins’ evolutionary thesis is that belief in a traditional God is a sort of inherited weakness, a trait, expressed as a viral idea, that humanity has passed down in progressively weakening forms because it has served, at different times and in different ways, evolutionary ends. Dawkins regards this as a bad thing, but comforts himself with the belief that the engine of evolution is now working hard to cleanse humanity of this stain. The reviews do a better job of marshalling the many objections to this thesis than I could here.
What is of particular interest to me, though, is the extraordinary contempt that drips from Dawkins’ pages when he contemplates believers, current or historical, and even other “scientists” who admit the possibility of God. They are not his noble counterparts in a debate on the most important question man’s mind can entertain, and thus entitled to respect. They are fools. More than that, they are often malicious, black-hearted fools who are out to perpetuate fraud. The sooner the great purifying engine of natural selection weeds them out of our pool the better. Dawkins’ bilious indictment sweeps up virtually everyone who might, or has, entertained the notion of a God. They are, virtually without exception, either malevolent demagogues or useful idiots.
It is Dawkins’ open animosity and intellectual arrogance that I find astonishing. I understand Dawkins’ thesis. I find it unconvincing and unattractive in the extreme, but I understand it, and I can muster a grudging respect for it. But from the other side, Dawkins’ side, how can one simply backhand away 2,000 years (and more) of the most sophisticated and beautiful thought mankind has produced, and dismiss anyone in that great tradition, or anyone attracted to it, as either a shyster or a fool? How can someone like Dawkins – and those who rally behind his attacks – possibly presume to such arrogance? Where is their humility, their sense of their own fallibility and potential for error? Where is their sense of respect and mutual regard? Are these traits that have simply been selected out of the best and the brights? Are they anachronisms symptomatic of a now-outmoded and superseded way of being human, for which the Brave New Man, exemplified by Mr. Dawkins, simply has no continuing biological use? Is this the progressive's world of ideas?
Something specific?
(#4032)Some examples of the contempt and arrogance would be, I think, more compelling than the general description of them you have provided.
I'll second that
(#4043)Anything specific to give us some flavor?
Not having read it I certainly can't comment but I can understand why anyone who values science and scientific thought would have a problem with people in 2006 who still seek supranatural explanations.
This place is my vacation.
Fair Request . . .
(#4057)to which I cannot accede just now 'cause I don't have the book with me. Generally speaking, though, the thing bulges with gratuitous references to religious figures and religious thought as "simple-minded," "fuzzy," "shoddy," "sophomoric" and the like. And if he'd limited his snideness to particular individuals -- like, say, Pat Robertson -- it would be one thing. An ungracious thing, but one thing. But he extends his particular characterization beyond the Robertsons to include "religion" and "faith" generally, without any seeming recognition of the broad depth of thought and sophistication he's sweeping aside.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
A further request
(#4074)Mr Inigo,
Realizing that this is asking a lot, but in IMO it would be best to put this diary on hold or pull it until such time as you finish the book, then re-write and re-submit.
Your posts and diaries that I have read so far I have found to be generally well-written and reasoned. It could easily be excellent front page material if you take a little more time to prepare your own "review" of the book and have a chance to flesh out arguments and add to the ideas you've presented so far with some specific cites and details.
Is this even an option, technically speaking? Opinion from forvm tech team?
For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise - B. Franklin
I'm Indifferent
(#4087)My point was less to engage the merits of Dawkins' arguments from evolution -- which, as I said, are handled very capably in the cited reviews (particularly the TNR piece) -- than to express my perplexity at the remarkable hostility modern atheism expresses toward faith. I didn't intend the thing to be a full-blown, first-pagey thing with elaborate cites.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Hostility is explained
(#4177)by the fact that, unlike in the past, "modern man knows" in Nietzsche's phrase.
There is no excuse to continue for belief, except faith.
Manish Ghosh
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Freud wrote (more or less famously)
(#4035)that a belief in God was an infantile desire for wish fullfillment. Perhaps and perhaps not.
That said, I find strident atheists to be rather like angry adolescents determined to tear down for the sake of tearing down. If God is indeed our collective Father then a fervent denial of his existence is, well, Freudian.
Does God exist? As a matter of Reason, I gotta say, "I dunno" -- I believe so yet I cannot say I know so. And any strident assertion either way is entirely a matter of faith.
The proper balance between defense and welfare are the tectonic plates that lie beneath our political discourse.
I'd say the opposite
(#4098)And any strident assertion either way is entirely a matter of faith.
My armchair psychology tells me that the more strident someone is, the less secure they are about their beliefs or lifestyle. The stridency often is a blantant way of saying "look at me and confirm that being gay/evangelical/atheistic/whatever is OK with you." In extreme cases (like Michael Newdow) the believer demands that you alter your own behavior to recognize the validity and primacy of his beliefs.
Personal liefstyle choices and beliefs shouldn't require ratification by strangers unless the believer feels really insecure.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems scary and weird. It'll happen to you.—Abraham Simpson
To answer your final question
(#4036)Is this the progressive's world of ideas?
No.
The proper balance between defense and welfare are the tectonic plates that lie beneath our political discourse.
Agreed, there isn’t anything Progressive about it
(#4045)Richard Dawkins, Edward O Wilson, Stephen Pinker, Jared Diamond, and Frans de Waal are among the most influential modern thinkers who I look to for explanations of human origins and behavior. Their theories fit nicely with William Graham Sumner’s political theories, theories to which I mostly subscribe, and which are anything but Progressive. I haven’t read this particular book but the arrogance described amongst those who don’t believe in God is obvious in this day and age, and embarrassing. I say embarrassing because many of those who dismiss religion so readily exhibit the same behaviors of a dry drunk who has yet to deal with the dysfunctions that are at the root of his addictive behavior and just replaces alcohol with some other thing for him to obsess over. In this case white collars are replaced with white lab coats, but all the trappings and assurances of the fundamentalist remain, and the humility and understanding that comes with an open mind is absent.
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
Very well said
(#4048)A nit -- Jared Diamond strikes me as someone who does not need to pummel people on this point.
As for Dawkins, I believe the mother of his child arranged for a Catholic education against the father's (Dawkins) will and therefore there is a very real personal component here. Its a vague memory I have from reading some Dawkins stuff many years ago.
Anyway, can we discuss the "Brights" now?
The proper balance between defense and welfare are the tectonic plates that lie beneath our political discourse.
I'm on the Brights mailing list
(#4052)So I suppose they'd consider me one.
They're a little too earnest for my taste, but I respect what they're trying to do. It's right out of the oppressed group playbook, pick a new name and use it to try and remake the public image. We'll see if it works.
It's amazing how many people get upset by the Brights, try to denigrate them or make fun of them. Being a happy, upbeat, positive atheist seems to really challenge some people's worldviews.
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
A Group Of People. . .
(#4055). . .who are founded on the basis of not believing in God and who choose to label that grouping "brights" are pretty well asking to be mocked and derided as a response. *I'm* a non-believer and I think their group name is worth mocking and deriding.
The universe may well have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.
Why should they be mocked?
(#4060)Humans form groups. That's what we do. Why shouldn't people who eschew all forms of supernatural influence in the world group together to protect and promote their interests?
As for the name, it's just a name. Any name they picked would be similarly mocked and derided. That's just the way it is.
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
Oh, Come Now
(#4064)You really don't see how a group name that shouts "we're smarter than you are" isn't an invitation for abuse? I'm agnostic--I wouldn't have given the Brights a second thought if they were named something less provocative. I can certainly understand how people who are being implicitly insulted by the name would be even more inclined to bash them.
The universe may well have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.
Bright has several meanings
(#4071)But yes, it's a bit in your face.
For the record, they claim that Bright simply means a member of their group, free of any other definition. Do you object to homosexual men calling themselves "gay" because it means that we men who like women are all dull or sad. I mean, many of us are, but that's not the point.
Groups often have names that, if you take the antonym to refer to the rest of population, could be pretty offensive. My people often refer to themselves The Chosen People. That gets people's backs up from time to time, I can tell you.
Any name they picked was going to get pounded on, unless it was something negative (like atheist) or long-winded. What name would you have preferred?
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
atheis = negative?
(#4077)says who?
This just smacks of rebranding atheism because atheism is too well known. Hmm where did I see something similar to this... oh yeah, craetionism masquerading as intelligent design.
When I say negative
(#4085)I mean as in negating someting. Atheist means without God. Same thing with non-religious or non-believer. It would be like the NAACP calling themselves the coalition of non-white people. You want to pick a name that defines a positive value for your group, not something that defines your ideology as not those other guys.
And yes, it's rebranding and it happens all the time. Try calling an asian or black person oriental or negro and see how that works out for you.
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
point taken
(#4096)but still... a spade is a spade. And they are killing themselves with the name...for real. Sounds so stupid.
It's not a good name...
(#4222)...but not because it's in-your-face. It's because it's too short and has too many other general connotations.
Call themselves Illuminati or something; that'd have the same meaning but give the conspiracy theorists fits.
"In the very long run, we are all dead." -- John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes
Heh. NT
(#4235).
The K Codes explained HERE.
have to agree with M Scott
(#4075)The name is just asking to be ridiculed. It'rs pretty arrogant too. Their slogan might as well be "we're better than you"
Can we bronze these posts?
(#4088)Stuzzy and M Scott in agreement? This place seems to do that to people.
Anyway, I recall some "bright" or another suggesting that the "not brights" should be called "dims" which pretty much demonstrates M Scott's point.
The proper balance between defense and welfare are the tectonic plates that lie beneath our political discourse.
Not so sure about "dims"
(#4092)but "aBrights" would have a nice reciprocal ring to it.
Shame. Don't pick on Madeleine like that... :) NT
(#4113).
The K Codes explained HERE.
I'm with you
(#4230)100%. The 'Brights' name smacks of overcompensation. And overcompensation is always worth needling.
p.s. I was just lamenting, the other day, that I couldn't find my copy of the Silmarillion. The scene with Fingolfin is a favorite.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
The belief in absence...
(#4061)In this case white collars are replaced with white lab coats, but all the trappings and assurances of the fundamentalist remain, and the humility and understanding that comes with an open mind is absent.
A caution I raised on the previous site. One to remember when deciding what is and is not a religion and it's relation to secular culture and the specifics of the Establishment clause.
A belief in absence, is not an absence of belief...and the attendant baggage...
Whole heartedly agree
(#4073)Progressives who claim we have a responsibility to our fellow man, but who also claim to not believe in God, exhibit ten times more Christian behavior than people like myself. What I don’t get is why many of them are so uncomfortable with religion. I have no religious beliefs but I get along with religious people better than I do atheists. Believers tend to be much more capable debating rather than dismissing, and after debating the existence of God many believers say they will pray for my soul, which I find as a nice gesture. Atheists on the other hand take much more of a my way or the highway attitude, at least in my experience.
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
Spend more time with agnostics then...
(#4140)We don't have the high-horse mentality of atheists. Heck, I'll even pray with fundamentalist Christians who invite me to (knowing I am agnostic).
As I see it, there are five kinds of religious attitude, roughly:
1. Atheists: God doesn't exist, never existed, and won't exist and if you think he does you are an idiot, dishonest, or both, even though I have no actual proof he does not exist and never will because you can't prove a negative and only a sophistic idiot would ask me to try. Religion should be actively fought because it is unreasonable and perverse. Did I mention that if you don't agree with me you are a moron?
2. Agnostics: God may or may not exist and if (he, it, she) does exist we have no idea what (his, its, her) intentions and nature are, except that which we can more or less, with uncertainty, ascertain from scientific inquiry and logic, so for instance we are sure that a literal reading of the Bible's version of creation is wrong. However, we recognize that eternal uncertainty is not attractive, so if you need to have faith in God go ahead but don't impose it on us by sticking (your version of) God on civic institutions we all share, like the pledge or courthouses. We also feel free to adopt ethical standards from religions we like, while rejecting the doctrinal baggage.
3. Live and let live religious: I have faith in God according to my religion, but if you don't that's OK, but you really should because you would see the light and be happier, instead of having the poor, soul-crushing life you must have but which I think you have a right to have for true faith can be forced on no one. I see no reason the government can't help fund our organizations when they work for the common good even if the government is a faithless beast, but a bit of faith can't hurt can it?
4. Fire and brimstone religious: I have faith in God according to my religion, and if you don't you are an (infidel, godless commie, heretic, etc.) and will burn in hellfire for all time and while you are on Earth you are my enemy and I have the right to (kill, hurt, steal from, lie to) you in the name of God, amen. My nation cannot be divorced from God and so the legitimacy of my goverment must flow directly from God and if it doesn't then I have the duty to (kill, hurt, steal, lie) in order to topple it. I also have the obligation to (kill, hurt, steal from, lie to) sinners of my own religion. In fact I have the duty to (kill, hurt, steal, lie) for so many reasons it is quite a fearsome burden, but I humbly accept the good work the (Lord, Allah, etc.) has seen fit to assign to me.
5. Hypocrite religious: I don't have faith in anything. I don't really care either way. But in this (country, state, town, village, culture) you find the (business, girls, votes, social status) by looking religious so I play along and make a (big, subtle, wink & nod) show out of "my" religion which I don't believe in. One quick and easy way to do this is to raise an accusatory finger against the godless commie atheists and agnostics -whatever they are-, and those from other religions, which also deflects suspicions the true believers may have about me. But when nobody is watching I'll do business with them all and deny it later or hide it or both. One of my favored hiding spots is among the clergy, but I'm also likely to be a politician, by the way, or in sales.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
#5
(#4146)A lot of #5 where I came from--which is a big part of where my original disillusionment with religion came from.
Very nice post.
Brilliant.
(#4154)xxx
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
It is This Brilliance That Should Be Front Paged!
(#4165)...kinda agree with my opinion on this, eh, MA???....lol
Really good writing though...do you mind if I e-mail it to some religious friends, (my brother, etc)?
I may be agnositc, but I don't steal anything just in case there may be a God watching and ready to wag a scolding finger at me.
Best Wishes,
Traveller
Nice post ... My big issue is that I see one group as
(#4170)destructive and the other as worrisome the live and let live group is where I would be and might end up. In the mean time I find the agnostic view as my own zeitgeist at this time.. Still I agree this post fleshed out is the stuff of great from page material...
It reminds me of your plan for the middle east written long ago.. (One that has to many vested interests to come off but the most sensible solution I have ever read...
Thanks again for all the work you have done in getting the new site up and running and I look forward to insightful posts such as the ones pointed out... Da...
Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to intense skeptical scrutiny. Be aware of human fallibility. Cherish your species and yo
Excellent MA
(#4176)But not categorized correctly in two places, one not so important, the other very I think.
First, I think many would claim #3 with big parts of #2. That is that they have a particular tradition that they think is most likely closest to what God wishes while recognizing that the search and quest to know God's mind is never ending and that it is in some way's a foolish quest as the very idea that God has a mind that we could in any way know, or that we would even call a mind, is reducing Him/Her/It/Non-Describable to human limits.
The more important distinction is #4, which clearly breaks into more specific categories. Those who are certain they are correct and you (and I) are going to Hell, but feel they have no right to force you in the name of God, and those who are certain and think they do have the right, and obligation to force you. I am using force in the physical violence sense. Not all fundies are the equivalent any more than all liberals are.
I'm trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I don't need to hear crap from a bunch of hippie freaks living in denial! Screw you guys, I'm going home!
Sigh. I'm an atheist and virtually everything you've written
(#4178)is wrong. I do know a very few who resemble all or part of that; most are showboats on a crusade who aren't too bright.
I know a great many more about like me. I don't think agnostics or believers are dishonest or are idiots. Many of them make a great deal of sense, I just don't agree with them.
I don't engage in arguments about it on the basis that my beliefs are no one else business and their beliefs are none of my business.
Religion should not be fought, it fulfills a need for many and in moderation is a force for good, everyone is entitled to their own belief structure and anyone who's arrogant enough to attempt to deny that is the idiot.
I'm sure there many atheists who fall between the two positions and they're entitled to their beliefs as well.
The K Codes explained HERE.
Exactly.
(#4181)I don't understand MA's #1.
I'm an atheist. I've mentioned that here several times over the years. But my respect for anyone else has absolutely nothing to do with what he or she believes. I simply cannot conceive of being concerned (or even inquiring after) another person's religious beliefs or lack thereof. That same attitude has been part of my family at least as far back as my Grandparents.
Now, I can most definitely lack respect for someone who happens to be religious, but it has never been based upon that. Not once.
One question...
(#4189)Are you sure God does not exist and has never existed and that the Universe and everything in it is the product of 100% random processes?
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Well,
(#4193)I'm as sure of that as I'm sure of anything. To riff on Dawkins just a bit, I'm as sure of it as I am that Thor does not exist, and that the earth does not rest on the back of a turtle.
I was with you until the last clause...
(#4202)Yertle will not be amused !!!
Nor will Nathan...
The K Codes explained HERE.
Isn't it a good idea
(#4198)to disambiguate the notion of a personal god and that of 'the god of the philosophers' (i.e. the prime mover, Deus sive Natura, etc.)? Being 'agnostic' about the latter is more like being 'agnostic' about, say, string theory than doubting whether Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and my willingness to own up to my own ignorance about the former doesn't commit me to throw up my hands, and say "Oh, we just can't know!" when confronted with the claims of some religion.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Heh.
(#4204)Great...thanks a lot. I was actually sorta pleased with my "back of a turtle" phrase, and then you had to post this right on top of it :-p
Yes...
(#4272)I think I was clear, but being agnostic is not having uncertainty about biblical details, but rather about the nature and existence of any type of god at all. Most agnostics see Christianity as a source of ethical and moral guidance but I don't think too many see the Old Testament (and a good deal of the "New") as anything more than an archeological artifact of our tribal past.
In my case I tend to suspect there is an intelligence of some kind behind life, the universe, and everything, but it would be a clearly non-human intelligence with a purpose and logic that may not even be possible for humans to understand. She, it or he does like math though. That seems quite clear.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Well
(#4185)It's obviously an agnostic's list. Non-agnostics are likely to feel a bit ill-used by it.
It is right clever and amusing, though, and really quite perceptive I think. 1 and 3-5 do not sound attractive, but they do sound like what aggressive adherents of those particular sets might think and act like.
True, just yanking M.A.s chain... NT
(#4197).
The K Codes explained HERE.
Okey-doke
(#4271)Just yanking yours by instinct. Daily reps, etc.
Heh!
(#4187)I'm an atheist and virtually everything you've written is wrong.
Heh, that sounds like a classic atheist right there.
Seriously though, these are stereotypes, rendered with some humor and exageration, which is not to say that individuals that represent precisely these views do not exist. They most unfortunately do, and their influence is felt.
By the way, are you certain that God does not exist? I seem to recall you leaving yourself some room over this, which would make you an agnostic. It is the absolute certainty of the true atheist that makes him similar to a religious zealot.
Many people who are in fact agnostics identify themselves as atheists because it is a much more commonly used term.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
So was mine - humor, that is, no real exaggeration.
(#4195)Yes, I'm certain. However, I accept that many believe in Gods of all types and that's okay with me; I respect their beliefs even if I don't share them, thus I do not go into the anti-god rant. Too lazy to be a zealot, that's too much like work.
Dunno where you picked up the idea otherwise; I may have been joking as I did last night about subscribing to Playboy, usually I put a smiley on those to annoy Catchy and others but sometimes, the smiley would ruin the effect.....
My wife is a strong if somewhat lapsed Southern Baptist; the four kids range from an occasional church goer to an agnostic to a waverer to an atheist. We gave 'em mild doses of religion and exposed them to different beliefs until they were 16 or so and then let them make their own choices. They don't go into the anti-god rant either and are nice to those who believe most everything except trying to convert them. My daughter is particularly hard on Mormons for some reason. One son relishes telling the Jehovah's Witness ladies he's an atheist, he says the looks are often priceless. Lacking conversion attempts, they're nice and polite to everyone. Me too...
We also have a Christmas Tree every year and I'll go out of my way to say Merry Christmas to those who've gone the PC "Happy Holidays" route.
All that not withstanding, I'm certain. Quite.
The K Codes explained HERE.
There are atheists and believers. Agnosticism is lame.
(#4404)Somewhat like the cold war and the somewhat ridiculous "non-aligned" movement.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Yes...
(#4412)There is a hospital food quality to it. Good for you but not compelling, from the gut, so to speak.
A challenging sell. But that's life.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Heh
(#4415)you must choose or you're a lame infidel.
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
He's either with us or he's against us! NT
(#4423).
The K Codes explained HERE.
Obviously
(#4425)I have to say I’m a bit surprised by your stance for this. I certainly don’t want to pry into your belief system, but I expected you (the others not so much) to be a bit more circumspect on something that is by its very definition unknowable.
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
I'm with Catchy, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny...
(#4451)Which is an attempt to be cute that isn't cute but it does have its merits in simplicity...
The real story is long and boring. Not worthy of time and pixels here.
I am, BTW, not nearly as circumspect personally as I appear to be while commenting here. My never ceasing effort to be nice, suffer fools with at least some grace and abide by the posting rules... :)
The K Codes explained HERE.
Wasn't being cute
(#4518)Was just responding to MA's:
_A true atheist is certain about something he cannot prove (that no god or conscious creator exists or has existed)..._
with the tooth fairy + Easter Bunny examples to show that we *all* are certain about the non-existence of creatures we can't *prove* don't exist.
No cuteness intended, especially no overall comparison of belief in God to belief in the tooth fairy. Rather just straightforward counter-examples to MA's flawed characterization.
Atheists aren't a special type of dogmatic personality. They just extend a certain sort of sensibility everyone has in trivial cases to a less trivial case.
Nay, not you being cute. Me - I was /trying/ to be cute using
(#4550)your very valid illustration. Didn't make that clear, Sorry.
I'm in agreement with most everything you've written in the thread. Also agree that M.A. seems to use flawed characterizations; partly in jest but partly serious -- he almost seems to be as zealous about his agnoxticism as he accuses Atheist of being... :)
How's the weather up there?
The K Codes explained HERE.
the tooth fairy, easter bunny and leprechaun
(#4619)analogies (as you used before) are really bad analogies to the god question. If there actually was a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow, then perhaps that analogy would make more sense. In that case, the leprechaun would explain an event lacking explanation
The onus is on believers
(#5121)to prove that something called a "God" exists.
Merely saying "God exists" is nonsense (in the strictest meaning of the word). It is similar to saying that "y exists". Existence, as Kant says, cannot be a predicate. There needs to be a clear statement of what the "y" is. Merely saying "y is a, b, c, d" where a, b, c, d are not defined either is recurring nonsense.
Atheists are not called upon to prove anything because they make no primary statement in the first place.
Agnostics aren't listening.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Heh. Got that right... NT
(#5124)The K Codes explained HERE.
Existence can't be a predicate?
(#5125)Why not?
If I say "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle existed, but Sherlock Holmes did not," is that just "nonsense?"
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Of course it can be.
(#5144)But it's only predicable, to stick with the jargon, synthetically and a posteriori.
(But then, I know you know that.)
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Your jargon sucks....
(#5158)....and is ruining this site.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Wow.
(#5177)No one's ever said that I, or anything of mine, suck(s) and am (is) ruining this site. I'm touched.
(Edit: My poor grammar sucks and is ruining my life.)
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
I don't
(#5187)know. That was a pretty impressive use of "sundering" up on #4985.
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
Aye.
(#5196)BTW, bkg207..at..stern..dot..nyu..dot..edu. Not sure what you thought I was going to ask K., but feel free to drop me an e-mail.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
location
(#5232)of audio book sites across the the webosphere? You know, those ones...Just a guess. If No, then who IS his broker?
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
Don't count on it.
(#5194)I was trained by a bunch of guys who rarely mentioned Kant, except to scoff at him.
One of my more...memorable...undergraduate moments was my attempted defense of the analytic/synthetic distinction in the face of Donald Davidson's scornful looks and ireful brow.
I never tried anything like that again.
As for *a priori* vs *a posteriori* - well, I never even dared to bring it up. Until I actually had to teach Kant, at Chicago, amongst a quite different bunch of characters (NOT in the philosophy dept) who treated any serious questioning of the master as heresy.
C'est. La. Vie.
Anyway: I have, from time to time, thought that I knew exactly what was meant by "synthetic a posteriori" and "analytic a priori" and possibly even "synthetic a priori."
But I rarely worry about it, now.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
I've met people
(#5202)who claim to understand what 'synthetic a priori' means. And they talk pretty convincingly about it. But I can't say I've ever quite been able to follow that argument.
(The funny thing, I guess, is that my undergraduate experience in philosophy sounds like it was exactly the opposite of yours [in terms of, ahem, 'tradition'], yet the disparagment of Kant sounds a lot alike.)
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
"The present King of France is bald".
(#5153)Russell's excellent example of a non-denoting statement. It seems to express a legitimate thought, while actually it is nonsense (as we can all work out).
The article On Denoting sets it out clearly.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Lord Russell was certainly a clever man...
(#5189)...but he all too often lacked even the *superficial* clarity of his empiricist predecessors.
In any case, (1) he's far from "state of the art" - *On Denoting* is now more than a hundred years old - and (2) you didn't answer my question.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
OK, I didn't answer the question as I thought
(#5198)"On Denoting" did it better than I could.
Lets analyse the sentence in the form of "Sherlock Holmes exists."
From a grammatical point of view, that appears, superficially, to be as valid as the statement "Sherlock Holmes does not exist".
From a logical point of view, however, to say Sherlock Holmes exists, using existence as a predicate, is nonsense - here the logical form of the sentence is concealed by the grammatical form.
The problem disappears in the sentence "Sherlock Holmes does not exist" exactly in the same way as it does in the sentence "the golden mountain does not exist."
The same situation arises in a statement like "computers exist, but 3-D videophones don't". If I want to explain to someone what a computer is, I would show him an iMac and say - "Look, there's a computer" or even point to it and say "Computer!". If however, I then carry on to say "and therefore you see that it exists" I would, strictly speaking, be talking nonsense.
The question of existence or non-existence of a non-denoted entity is nonsense.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
A non-denoted entity is nonsense
(#5207)only according to Mr Russell's frame of reference.
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
19th century thought was not always wrong.
(#5506)In the same way that neither Kant nor Spinoza or even Plato or Aristotle is necessarily obsolete. Many observations they made repay study.
I do not think either Einstein or Godel made any suggestions about denoted or non-denoted entities either.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Either I'm too drunk...
(#5209)...or I've studied too much philosophy. One way or the other, I just can't follow you here.
Is there, or is there not, an interesting and useful sense in which Arthur Conan Doyle existed and Sherlock Holmes didn't?
Sorry to be obtuse, but, well, that's me all over...
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Vinteuil, consider it a
(#5231)hoary bit of doggerel, and don't give it a second thought. It's a nice example 19th century "think". Ah..Absolutism. Too bad Einstein and Godel (and a few others) had to come along and spoil all the fun...
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
Ok I'll go into it again.
(#5501)An non-denoted statement, "Arthur Conan Doyle exists" is meaningless. You have to use some form of denoting - i.e. a time and place statement, at the very least. Similarly, "Sherlock Holmes exists" or "Sherlock Holmes exists" is equally meaningless. You have to have a denoting statement about him to give it sense.
It is analogous to saying "a square circle exists" or "karmanyabadhikaraste exists". One can make up non-denoted entities to fill up a whole Noah's ark, but it does not give them "existence".
The problem is the word "exists". It has a meaning only when attached to a predicate - in time or in space or attached to a descriptive category. So "grass is green" has sense, but "grass exists" does not. "Grass exists" has exactly the same sense as "a square circle exists". One has to denote something about the word "grass" to give it sense.
In using language normally, we conceal the implicit assumption among English speakers that the word "grass" denotes a green plant. If I say, for example, "ghash exists", you would not think that the sentence has sense, simply because I am using the word ghash which means grass in another language.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Well, let's try this question:
(#5520)How would *you* describe the difference between the...well, metaphysical status (?) of Doyle and that of Holmes?
In ordinary language, I take it we'd sum up that difference by saying that Doyle really existed and Holmes didn't.
If you're going to reject that account as meaningless or nonsensical, then you owe us a plausible alternative account.
But perhaps its better just to put this thread to bed.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
manish just to correct here
(#5545)you're giving a different account than Russell himself gives. Russell did not hold that statements such as 'Arthur Conan Doyle exists' are meaningless.
Russell 1905 believed that names are really disguised definite descriptions. 'a square circle exists' gets analyzed as:
There is an x such that both (i) x is square and (ii) x is a circle.
'The present King of France is bald' gets analyzed as (let 'KoFx' = 'is the present King of France' and Bx = 'is bald'):
'There is an x such that (i) Kx; (ii) and for all y, if Ky, then y=x; and (iii) Bx.
Both statements get the truth-value false on Russell's view and both statements are meaningful (all meaningul statements have a truth-value.)
'God does not exist' might also be meaningful and true on Russell's view because 'God' is not a logically proper name, but a collection of properties. The statement gets analyzed as:
There is no x such that x is omnipotent and x is the creator of the universe, etc.
One central point of Russell's 'On Denoting' was to give an account of how statements can be meaningful and have truth-values even if they contain non-denoting terms.
Well, the example that Russell himself gives
(#5752)is "Scott is the author of Waverley" which is similar to "Arthur Conan Doyle is the author of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes". And yes, my account of Russell's point is an updated one, where I have also followed Dummett's analysis which seems to me to be simpler and more logical.
The statement to be analysed is "God exists", rather than "God does not exist", since negative analysis can have a sense only after the positive statement. And this really comes back to the restatement of the ontological argument.
With regard to your point about the term "God" being used for a collection of properties. That the properties themselves say nothing about the entity itself is obvious, as if, for example, we substitute the terms green, fat and clever. In that case we can equally define an entity as the greenest, fattest and cleverest and call this entity "God".
To then go on to state that this entity exists, simply because it happens to be a collection of otherwise denoted entities is stretching the point further than it should be taken.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
And again. "Arthur Conan Doyle"
(#5518)is being used by yourself as a shorthand for a set of assumptions about shared knowledge of late 19th century English fiction writing between the commenters here on this blog. So in that way "Arthur Conan Doyle existed" has sense to you and me who share this public language, because we both know the reference to which you speak of.
If however, you were to say this to most people in the place where I live, your statement "Arthur Conan Doyle existed" would be meaningless, even though they may understand English in a general way. You would have to state your frames of reference, explain your covert assumptions, establish a historical and literary framework before your sentence carried meaning.
I do not say this merely to make a point of idle discussion. In the kind of work that I do, I have to translate and retranslate concepts between three languages, between three completely different cultures making sure that the actual concepts make both sense and reference in all the languages. This has made me more sympathetic to the necessity for understanding the logic of denoting sentences.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
*That* is a red herring.
(#5524)To say that a statement doesn't mean anything to a given audience (because they don't share the speaker's language etc.) is not to say that the statement is meaningless or nonsensical.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
a+b+c=Betrand Russel
(#5535)Russel was trying to apply the rules of Mathematics to the rules of language. Language by its very nature is different (between two languages) because it utilizes different words (and syntax) to describe objects, to express ideas etc. That is why science uses mathematics to describe theories. However, that does not mean as two english language speakers we cannot agree on the meaning of our words and the ideas implied.
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
By the way (OT)...
(#5538)...I hope (E.) that you've forgiven my premature endorsement of one of your sketches for the banner, and that we can all look forward to something even *more* fabulous in due course.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Certain atheists do make existence a predicate
(#5132)when they say for example that the universe exists only in the physical sense.
But on the other hand you're asking the right question. If you define God as "a chap" then you're going to have a hard time proving He was around before the physical universe was, etc. But what is y, in this case? All on its own, the universe produced thinking, in the form of consciousness. The universe thinks. Maybe y is no more than the realization that thought may not be an exclusively human property.
M Aurelius was probably right.
And the universe stinks, and the universe is a pretty woman
(#5145)just because the universe contains something doesn't mean it automatically takes on the characteristics of that something. If I stick a bunch of hammers in a sack, the sack doesn't "become" hammers.
I blame it all on the Internet
You know, I find that I really can't....
(#5159)....argue with that. Though the sack does take on some hammer-like characteristics at that point.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I'd say that the "universe" does not really "think".
(#5150)Certain parts of the universe (namely, rational human beings) indulge in a activity called thinking. This has the virtue of intersubjectivity, i.e. we can all understand when someone else says they are thinking.
Perhaps you mean that a galaxy can also "think" in an analogous manner to humans, in that they are also composed of smaller units (such as human cells) and may have a method of "thinking" involving certain energies. You may even conjecture that we humans may discover this process in a millenium and therefore this possibility should not be discounted.
This argument is valid (now I think of it, I think there is a SF short story by Robert Heinlein along these lines) and the possibility cannot be discounted. The point is, however, that this idea is an extension of what we know of as "thinking" on a larger scale. So, yes, you may imagine a "God", a "y", as having powers that are an enormous extension of human abilities (the a,b,c,d of the argument). Essentially, however, all you are doing is projecting known human abilities, a very wise and good Creator, for example.
However, you simply push the "god" question back to a higher order - of who created this Creator, and you are forced to posit this backwards ad infinitum. And as a result you end up multiplying non-existent entities, none of whom really need to "exist". All that really exists are the human abilities and attributes.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Of course, one can be an atheist and still have a religion.
(#5156)It's called Buddhism
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
Actually...
(#5224)That page you point to is perfect for an agnostic. The blessed on refuses to declare whether the cosmos is finite or infinite, or whether it is eternal or not eternal.
These things are not important to daily life or to living harmony with the world and with oneself. I love to speculate on them but my moral and ethical framework is independent.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Exactly my point.
(#5514)Are we arguing about whether this view is atheist (my view) or agnostic (yours)?
I'd say it was a-theist bcause no theos is proposed, you would (possibly) say it is a-gnostic because no gnosis is proposed. I think one can see look at it depending upon which glasses one wears.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
The problem...
(#5211)...in a nutshell, is that agnostics don't claim to know what the universe actually is, and atheists do. It is an indirect claim, but a claim nonetheless.
Namely, atheism only works if the universe is infinitely old and will last forever (and this condition implies and permits atheism but does not force it). If there is a starting point before which there was nothing, then a creation event is required that at least initially follows no law of physics whatsoever (i.e. a "miracle" or a moment of self-instantiation), since "nothing" can have no laws of any kind.
The claim that the universe is infinitely old is a strong claim. Atheists do not make the claim directly, but they make it nonetheless. So to prove that agnostics are in error, they must prove this primary statement about the universe. This has not been proven, and so long as it isn't, I shall remain agnostic about atheism.
Atheists and agnostics agree that conventional religions, with visions of God sitting on a throne or listening to prayer, or worse, listening to prayer only if said the right way, is logically untenable.
But when it comes to the big picture, atheists are ignoring the known facts about the universe.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Interesting. I do not claim to know what the universe
(#5215)is, nor do I particularly care what it is -- other than normal human curiousity about it. That has nothing to with my belief there is no god.
I doubt the universe is infinitely old; I doubt it will last forever. Nor am I concerned, other than idly curious, about either event...
I certainly do not have to prove anything about my beliefs or the universe to anyone, agnostic or otherwise. If I was concerned about what others believed, I might; I am not concerned. If I wished others to believe as I do, I might. I don't care what others believe. None of my business.
You have some odd perceptions about others...
The K Codes explained HERE.
Actually...
(#5223)If you believe there is no god, you are making a statement about the universe which defines in basic ways what it is.
You don't have to prove anything about your beliefs. I don't say people need to prove their beliefs. That's why they are beliefs. However, people who are certain of something go well beyond belief. If you "believe" something you are not required to test that belief in order to retain internal consistency. However if you hold a certainty and are unwilling to test it logically, it is fair to conclude that you are less than 100% confident.
You are an unusual atheist. The average atheist, certainly Dawkins and many on this thread, is quite bothered by what others believe in.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
A lot of people are bothered by what others believe in and
(#5225)atheism (or religion) is just one of many aspects in that excessive concern.
Coming from the Alfred E. Newman School of Life, I think everyone ought to be able to believe or not believe in anything without intrusion or help from others.
If by "test it logically" you mean to argue my corner as it were, I disagree. I dont have to do any such thing and if you wish to conclude that I'm "less than 100% confident" due to that, well, you've made a bunch of mistakes about me over the years so one more won't hurt. :)
I suggest I would "have" to argue my position with someone only if I were concerned that they understand my beliefs and accept the validity of them. I'm not concerned nor do I care what others think in that regard. Don't think they're anyone else's business in fact -- no more than their beliefs are any of my business.
There are those that argue for the sake of argument; there are those who like to discuss imponderables. There are those that like to indulge in rich philosophical speculation. Sorry, I don't really care to do any of those things; seems rather a waste to me. I'm incredibly lazy...
YMMV.
The K Codes explained HERE.
Heh!
(#5229)If by "test it logically" you mean to argue my corner as it were,
No, I don't mean that. I mean internally. Not everybody likes to argue their corner.
There are those that argue for the sake of argument; there are those who like to discuss imponderables. There are those that like to indulge in rich philosophical speculation. Sorry, I don't really care to do any of those things; seems rather a waste to me. I'm incredibly lazy...
Actually, it doesn't look that way. At least not here. You are one of the most active members of The Forvum and a prolific, informed, and tenacious writer.
You wouldn't be one of those characters who cares, but who would rather die than admit he cared, would you? That's something of a common trait for guys from your generation. Studied dispassionacy.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Studiously dispassionate - note that my arguments, even my
(#5230)participation, is somewhat topic limited.
Dispassionate -- or lazy... :)
The K Codes explained HERE.
Huh?
(#5216)Just because we don't know what caused the beginning of the universe doesn't mean that we won't be able to figure them out at some point in the future. We don't know how the universe started, so to claim anything about it is nothing but speculation. I t may have been created from nothing, or it may be a reconfiguration of something that existed before. The fact is that we simply don't know at this point, one way or another.
Atheism doesn't require anyting but a lack in belief of god. Now, one of the problems is that god is defined so many ways. Oh wait - that's not a problem for atheism, but for believers.
I blame it all on the Internet
You miss my point...
(#5220)or it may be a reconfiguration of something that existed before
If so, then that's not the beginning, is it? The beginning is the first time something appeard when there was nothing before. Hence, no rules or laws can be invoked to explain this first event. I submit that this is not a sustainable position for an atheist, therefore the atheist is in fact assuming that the universe (some version of it, not necesarily this one), has been around for all time.
The fact that God is defined in many ways is not a problem for agnostics. We claim no special wisdom as to the nature or existence of God. Atheists and believers do make such claims.
On the contrary, the multiple possibilities are a source of interest and rich philosophical speculation. We can freely speculate about nearly the entire range of possibilites. Believers are restricted to the canons of their particular faith, and atheists can't even get started.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
OK we can agree on some of what you say, but
(#5510)only some. I agree that atheists have a faith too. In what exactly we will examine in a minute. But before that, I'm making the point that agnosticism is lame because one cannot claim to believe in nothing. In that case they are making covert assumptions which they do not wish to be clear about.
A consistent atheist believes and has faith in the here and now, the past and future in terms of the present, in what can be understood by the human senses (which includes mental and intuitive senses as much as the physical).
It is true that there are infinitely more worlds out there, inaccessible to our current senses (the world of the bat or the dolphin or the amoeba, for example). With regard to the past and the future, the atheist will not join the agnostic in saying that they do not know - but will rather make the point that such knowledge is not possible.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
He is
(#5525)not saying he believes in nothing, he is saying that he regards it as unknown-Not the same thing.
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
Thanks. Exactly.
(#5568)nt
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Common response. Happens to a lot of guys. I used to hunt
(#5611)after Korea, I didn't bother -- and I only hunt prople when it's legal... :)
Seriously, he's got a lot of company and it isn't a problem. He probably doesn't need counselling. Whoever's pushing him to get it may. Some people, the majority, handle the stress well, a sizable minority do not. As nearly as I can determine, it's pretty much always been that way with perhaps a very slight increase in the "don't handle it" types today due to our increasing civilization -- or momization...
The K Codes explained HERE.
Nothing...
(#5567)I have yet to meet an agnostic who believed in nothing. In fact agnosticism allows many beliefs and belief systems.
I personally suspect the universe has an intent, though I'm pretty sure that such an intent is not directed at humans or any other particular species. It's just a suspicion, but a strong one. I don't claim to know it is so. Hence, I harbor uncertainty about creation. This is thee very definition of agnosticism.
My moral and ethical system borrows from a bunch of sources, but the long and the short of it is that I'm an old-fashioned progressive liberal most of the time, with some libertarian accents and more modern environmental and economic notions added in. Ultimately, I believe that life on Earth has intrinsic value and should be protected. This is a belief, but it is not dependent on whether the universe has a maker or not.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Depends on who you're selling to, I suppose.
(#4454)I can't bring myself plunk down one way or the other in the complete absence of evidence on a topic which, by its nature, denies the importance of evidence.
I'm agnostic, so I have no opinion on whether there is or is not some "god", but I generally have no faith beyond evidence. That is where the strong statement is made.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
You cannot be serious.
(#4188)So I won't bother with a serious reply. But why take up the bandwidth?
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Huh?
(#4192)I've rendered a caricature but within that style I am fairly serious. Certainly all five attitudes exist. Are you claiming they don't? Of course the real world presents more nuance, more variety, and various combinations of these attitudes. But as a discussion point I think I laid out some basic parameters which apply in enough cases.
Certainly, the famous War on Terror has a great deal to do with #4. Richard Dawkins is clearly a #1. I'm a #2 and we've got some #2s and #3s around here. If you want to see examples of #5 just turn on the tube long enough to catch some political ads.
If there is something here you found bizarre or offensive, please explain why. I do want to know. Seriously, I do.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Neither bizarre nor, particularly, offensive.
(#4214)I took it to be a caricature - and, as such, not serious (where, by 'serious', I mean taking a sustained interest in doing interpretive justice to the phenomenon under consideration). Indeed, Dawkins is well-described by #1; but is this the case in virtue of his atheism, as you seem to imply? Are there other 'kinds' of atheists (to the extent that what you describe is even, properly speaking, a 'kind')? Are there other kinds of religious believers? Agnostics? Is the only reason to publicly accomodate religion, despite personal disbelief, hypocrisy?
I'm not sure why you proffered that list, but it seems to me an arbitrary list among any number of possibilities, without organizing principle, or - no offense intended - any clear point.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
No offense taken...
(#4266)One point at a time. I have found many true atheists (as opposed to "soft" atheists who are simply misidentified agnostics), to be exceptionally fundamentalist in their approach. If you think about this, it's not surprising. A true atheist is certain about something he cannot prove (that no god or conscious creator exists or has existed) and doesn't understand any better than the rest of us (the origin and nature of the Universe).
It takes a special kind of character to have such a degree of certainty over unprovable knowledge. Further, the atheist by virtue of this certainty can only be apalled at what he perceives as the misguided beliefs of anybody else. The atheist therefore bears much in common with the religious zealot. Both find no point in common with those who do not share their belief, and both are likely to be compelled to be quite adamant in expressing their position if not to outright evangelize it as Dawkins does. It is not a mere coincidence that atheist communism was particularly easy to adopt by former Catholics. They exchanged one certainty for another, but did not have to give up the idea of certainty. It is easier to switch from the Pope to Stalin than from the Pope to nobody.
So yes, I do feel it is in virtue of, which is not to say it is impossible to be a tolerant atheist, but it is difficult since it requires what internally the atheist can only perceive as respect for fools.
No. It is not the only reason. In fact it is no reason at all. What I said is that hypocrisy is the result. The reason is that it facilitates obtaining "business, girls, votes, or social status".
There are many kinds of religious believers. However, it is not unfair to classify them all as belonging to one of two broad groups; those who tolerate other belief systems, and those who don't. This is not an arbitrary "organizing principle". It is actually the most relevant metric if one is trying to identify behavior prone to create conflict. Of my five stereotypes, I identified two prone to conflict an two who avoid it. The fifth is the wildcard, who will go with whatever he perceives is the strongest force. The fifth won't merely adopt a convenience religion. He will also adopt a convenience political party and ideology. He will be a Nazi under Hitler, a Republican in Texas, a leftist under Chavez and an environmentalist in California. His role in conflict will depend on his interests.
Conflictivity is my organizing principle here.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Really?
(#4292)_It takes a special kind of character to have such a degree of certainty over unprovable knowledge._
Anyone who doesn't believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, etc. has a degree of certainty about that which isn't provable. No special 'character' needed whatsoever.
As for the alleged dogma, there are good reasons, short of deductive proofs, to disbelieve that the origin of the universe is due to a conscious creator (to say nothing of disbelieving in Christ or Vishnu). An inductive generalization over past scientific discoveries is one such reason -- the history of science is replete with instances of dismantling that which was formerly thought to be supernatural.
Inductive generalizations aren't knockdown 'proofs', but they're undogmatic support for the position that the supernatural will disappear in this case, as it has before, from the realm of viable explanations of the origins of the universe.
Yes, really...
(#4317)This is a key to atheist thinking and it is flawed.
Simply put, science has eliminated supernatural explanations for various phenomena, but it has come no closer to explaining the ultimate origin of the universe than we have ever had. We now know a good deal about how it works, but we still have no clue where it came from, or if there are others.
More to the point, science has found a starting point, the Big Bang, which fits rather nicely with a religious worldview. Science found a moment of creation, and futhermore the Standard Model has nothing to say about time where t was less than 10-43 second, as the model breaks down. Worse, the energies and densities involved are such that experimental evidence, the sole means science has to select or discard logically credible theories, is not now nor will ever be available for time where t less than 0, before the big bang, the ultimate cause of which we completely ignore.
We have hit other walls, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the speed of light. Hence, there is certainly evidence available to plausibly infer that we may in fact never be able to reach any scientific conclusion whatsoever as to the ultimate origin of the universe.
Beyond this empirical problem. There are two logical fallacies to your argument. One is the old coin toss fallacy, the notion that past coin tosses tell you something about future ones. Past scientific achievement does not guarantee future results. There is no reason to assume we will not at some point hit a wall. We have limitations in mental capacity, culture lifetime, and instrumentation, which may be intrinsic to our very existence. No human science can exceed the duration of the civilization that supports it, so this places a limit on how much time we have to figure this out. Particle physics requires radically higher energies than currently or foreseably available in any accelerator built or projected on Earth. The human brain is finite. Perhaps some concepts will forever escape us.
The second logical fallacy is the assumption that scientific progress is answering questions in a net sense. Is it?. We now have more knowledge, but also more questions. Let's say that for every bit of knowlege x we also as a result obtain two bits (2x) worth of questions. In that case even constant and eternal scientific progress will only lead us further and further from the ultimate answer of the nature of the universe.
If, however, you solve this by positing that the complexity of the universe is finite and that therefore we will eventually hit the limit of complexity and answer more questions than we find, then you cannot at the same time credbily hold the view that human scientific progress is unbound. Hence if both the total knowledge possible about the universe is finite, and if the human capacity to learn this knowledge is also finite, there are two scenarios, and in one of them we eventually figure out the universe while in the other one we never do.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Incorrect
(#4318)quantum and relativity theorists are far closer to understanding the issues involved in the creation of the universe and the laws that it requires than they were 100 or even 50 years ago. You're still describing a god of the gaps and those gaps are still shrinking.
I blame it all on the Internet
No they aren't
(#4322)They are not closer. They know more. They also know more about what they don't know.
There are two ways to look at this. One is progress on a finite road, with a destination. That is your view but it is only a view.
The other view is that we are on a road trying to reach the horizon. We may never get there. Under brane theory, for instance, the Big Bang is the result of a collision between membranes in 11 dimensional space. There is no way to prove this, no explanation as to how the branes are are produced in the first place, or if there are an infinite number, and so on. This is today one of several plausible theories.
And I'm not describing a god of the gaps. I'm describing a god of the gap.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Well,
(#4329)knowing more and knowing what you don't know indicates a higher degree of knowledge than just guessing. Yes, there are many hypotheses and the experiments to prove or disprove them are becoming very subtle and require enormous amounts of energy, but I think it's incorrect to say that they are not making progress. They're still in the process of making the tools they will need to answer these questions, but to say that they'll never reach the destination is a matter of faith, noot reason. The history of science would indicate to me that I'm on the winning side of the bet.
I blame it all on the Internet
How so?
(#4332)The history of science would indicate to me that I'm on the winning side of the bet.
How so? The history of science has nothing at all to say about this. Science has never reached the destination. It can do so only once. It's like if you said the history of your life indicates that you will live forever, because every day you live more and more.
And yes they are making progress from the point of view of science. But from the point of view of the god question they are making no progress at all.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
But that's not something they are pursuing
(#4335)science is just asking questions and building on past knowledge. It will never address whether or not there is a god. I believe it will, however, be able to determine the requirements for a universe, why certain physical parameters are the way they are, and how to create another one if we so choose.
BTW, your analogy is very apt for someone arguing for a religious point of view, as I believe most Christian religions do indeed claim that you will live forever.
I blame it all on the Internet
Nonsense...
(#4364)Science was born precisely as a way to understand God, and the "ultimate answer" quality of the quest has never been abandoned. You know, 42, life, the universe, and everything. Einstein disliked quantum mechanics due to his theological viewpoint ("God does not play with dice"). The theme is pervasive in the history of science up to modern times.
If you look at the motivations of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Galileo, this could not be clearer. It was an explicit effort to understand the maker through his works, rather than through philosophically suspect nth-hand accounts. Hence the original term for scientists: "Natural Philosophers". They set the tone for that which would follow. Just in 1992, George Smoot, when talking about the discovery of fluctuations in the microwave cosmic background radiation said that "if you're religious, it's like seeing God." He did not mean that God's existence had been proven, of course, but his statement fits perfectly with the underlying character of the scientific search. Science, as a body, is defintely trying to answer this question even if few or no scientists attack the problem directly.
In other words, scientists don't spend all day thinking about it, because clearly the "big answer", if ever found, is quite far away. Over the horizon, one might say. But the question is there and scientists make an effort to deal with it on a philosphical level. Read Sagan or Feynman, they definitely make an effort to try to work out the compatibility or lack thereof between science and religion.
And of course cosmologists do speculate directly on the question. Opposition to the Big Bang was considerable at one point precisely because of the theological implications. It drove Fred Hoyle nuts; he never accepted it.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
M.A. is correct
(#4373)a more succinct way of stating his argument is this: there is always another why (and unusually solving one opens up an order of magnitude new whys?).
That’s this particular physicists view, and that’s why I'm somehwere near a 2 on his scale.
Science can't answer a final why, and religion is nothing but a bunch of conflicting and rather naive (IMO) attempts to answer the ultimate WHY.
I must admit, I tend to have a negative outlook on people pushing 4-5 on the list, because, as somone stated earlier, they tend to believe what they believe *because it is so written* and formulate unsustainable 'arguments' to make it morally or 'scientifically' justified.
and yes, Dawkins is a jerk.
Wants & Needs
(#4387)Ah, but quantim phenomena has revealed a universe that operates not as it has to, but one that operates as it needs to. Like the edge of a black hole...the methodology of Science begins to break down.
I think we simply disagree
(#4326)about whether withholding either assent or denial concerning the existence of the 'god of the philosophers' qualifies as agnosticism, so I don't want to belabor that particular point. But I will say that I find no contradiction in being 'agnostic' about that subject, while continuing to consider myself an atheist. I think insisting upon the conflation of the two kinds of gods (nature's god, and the god of revelation) fails to appreciate an essential difference - which difference, I think, is hinted at in the fact that it would be a little silly to worship the former god - but I don't think the stakes of convincing you are especially high.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
We don't disagree.
(#4331)I understand perfectly that the god of revelation is different from "nature's god".
If you do not deny the possiblity of a "nature's god" then you are then a weak or agnostic atheist. I am a weak agnostic. We are not that far appart. I take issue with strong atheists and theists. In other words, dogmatic believers.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
possibilities are too cheap
(#4339)Unless an atheist thinks that the notion of God is self-contradictory, no atheist is going to deny the _bare possibility_ that God exists anymore than she will deny the _bare possibility_ that the Universe is one big Chee-to.
Whaddya think of this alternate taxonomy?
Strong atheism =
Ignoring the bare possibility that most of our scientific knowledge is mistaken, there's no reason to seriously entertain the hypothesis that God exists.
A logical formulation
(#4365)Unless an atheist thinks that the notion of God is self-contradictory, no atheist is going to deny the _bare possibility_ that God exists anymore than she will deny the _bare possibility_ that the Universe is one big Chee-to.
Indeed this is a logical formulation. But strong atheists do indeed deny the bare possibiliy and hence they are not acting on logic but on faith. That's the whole problem.
The "no atheist" part of your phrase is simply wrong. There are many atheists who hold precisely this view.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
I don't know any strong atheists in your sense
(#4520)No historical figures --other than those who believe the concept of God is self-contradictory -- come to mind. And I know quite a few atheists.
It's not in my sense...
(#4552)You can check the definition of strong atheism in a number of places. Try Wikipedia.
I do know strong atheists. Dawkins, despite his statements otherwise, is in my view a strong atheist. He simply has too much arrogance and contempt of any kind of religious view to be able to credibly claim that he is not sure about the non-exitence of God.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
So you think Dawkins is a a
(#4595)So you think Dawkins is a a strong atheist because he has too much arrogance and contempt of any kind of religious view or because he feels confident that there is no god?
And do you think Dawkins if full or arrogance and contempt because he feels confident that there is no god?
Taking your argument that one can't with any absolute certainty state that there wasn't a god event responsible for kick-starting the big bang that produced this universe, of which we are not the center of, then what use does it serve to pray to any god?
Or one doesn't believe in any god .
Or one believes in a kick-start god, which still means that actually performing ceromonies, praying, worshipping would be ludicrous because the god in question couldn't give a hoot one way or another.
Or one believes in anyone of the god(dess)((e)s) which are either figments of imagination or are actuall the god described above. In which case actually believing or not believing, worshipping or not worshipping won't yield any benefits in this life or the next or the afterlife.
Well...
(#5213)You certainly aren't replying to me.
I'm an agnostic. I don't worship anything except nature itself. I certainly don't subscribe to any organized religion and never have. I don't pray, either.
But I look at nature and I do wonder if there is a mind behind the laws that make our universe possible, and I further wonder what the intentions of such a mind could be, and I further wonder whether, if those intentions actually exist, they could be comprehensible to us.
I think this curiosity is perfectly consistent with observation. Atheists are sure of something they simply have no way to be sure about.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
so it's the ol'
(#5243)if one can't proof that what is not there then it must be there kind of argument that you are using ?
By your logic one could argue that seeing as that nobody can be utterly and completely sure that the tooth-fairy isn't an actual entity one should support those that think she does exist.
Being curious about something must always be applauded. It is one of the things that has helped our species greatly. But there is a distinct difference about being curious and just being silly.
When a child looks at the toys brought by Santa Claus he
might wonder about how old Santa is and where Santa lives and how Santa knows if he was good or bad.....if however that child becomes a man and he still has the same questions...and thinks that anyone not believing in Santa is just ignoring the 'fact' that Santa could exist because one can't with absolute 100% certainty demostrate that he doesn't and there for thinks that because one can't prove the negative it therefor has to be as he thinks, is someone who needs help. If the person states the same about god...then suddenly logic goes out the door.
"Atheists are sure of something they simply have no way to be sure about."
By your own logic, rules and methodology you have to believe in everything and anything because you can't use anything to state otherwise that can't be used by an atheist to state that there is no god.
So you are sure that Santa exists as well as the tooth-fairy and the invisible purple unicorn and the FSM and everything else.
I have no problem with anyone needing to believe in some god . However that shouldn't lead to the situation that not believing at all should be held against somebody either.
By the way, nice to hear that you are not of the praying sort. If more people would stay of their knees and actually do things the world might just be around for our great grand children.
Some scorekeeping
(#4336)1. You’ve dropped the claim that atheists exemplify a special character trait in claiming to be certain of negative existential statements they can’t prove (viz. that God doesn’t exist). And well you should. Everyone is confident that leprichons, the tooth fairy, etc. don’t exist despite the fact that no one has any real proof either way.
2. “There are two logical fallacies to your argument. One is the old coin toss fallacy, the notion that past coin tosses tell you something about future ones. Past scientific achievement does not guarantee future results”
Nope. You’ve misattributed the gambler’s fallacy – that the odds of an independent event with a fixed probability space are affected by independent past events. I mean, c’mon, even if you don’t like my inductive generalization, it doesn't involve *a violation of the laws of probability*. Your mistake is in thinking that the event ‘the origins of the universe admit to scientific explanation’ has anything like the fixed probability space of a coin toss. It don’t and the Gambler’s Fallacy has nothing to do with this issue.
That’s catchy 2, MA zip.
But your central claim is not so easy to score-keep. It’s true that past scientific achievement does not “guarantee” future results in any strict demonstrative sense. But you might think they provide some support: supernatural causes were previously thought necessary to explain the origins of the Earth, of life, of humans, etc. All of these areas have admitted to at least partial scientific explanation. I classify the origin of the Universe along with these other origins.
You don’t and instead speak of *the* gap. Here things get hairy. It’s a notorious problem in probability theory that what class you place an event into affects one’s application of probability judgments and theorems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_problem
A word in favor of typing the origin of the universe as I do: as belonging to the class of origins including the origin of the Earth, life on Earth, humans, etc. Your main reason for typing the event as distinct is that we can’t know about the universe prior to time t 10-43.
But suppose you’re right. Then the central difference between the Universe’s origins and other origins is one of epistemic access. But our lack of epistemic access is clearly explainable in naturalistic terms and says as much about *us* as it does about the event itself.
So lack of access is no reason to think that the origin of the universe is a supernatural event, since what makes it distinctive is understandable in naturalistic terms. So I say one should classify the origin of the Universe event along with other origins
In sum, treating the origin of the Universe as a supernatural event is an approach with a dismal record and that is good reason to expect it to be inappropriate here as well.
Well done! nt
(#4337)I blame it all on the Internet
Nice Argument, I Even Understand It :>)) NT
(#4340)Traveller
To be fair...
(#4342)You"re still being a little "old School" to our dear MA.I don't think a modern cosmologist would ever say that we will be able to know everything about the origin of the universe or science will ever be without "gaps". This is not to say I don't think they should try or that God will be found within those "gaps'.
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
Didn't say we'd know everything
(#4344)Just said that any epistemic limits we encounter do not support postulating a supernatural event.
In fact, given past failures, we have _positive_ reason to disbelieve that a given gap is filled by God.
p.s. I thought all of your posts contained at least two '!!'. Are you trying to make a point about projecting past patterns onto future predictions or what?
Stalker!! nt
(#4422)xxxx
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
Bad score keeping...
(#4368)On #1 I dropped no claim whatsoever. I merely nuanced it to specify strong atheists (as opposed to weak atheists). Yes, I'll say it again: Strong atheists have character traits much like religious fundamentalists.
On #2 I simply used a loose analogy. I didn't even talk about probability in a mathematical or formal sense. The only point my analogy was meant to address is that past performance guarantees nothing about the future. I could use plenty of other analogies wherever people have erroneously engaged in linear projections of current trends.
So catchy zip, MA 2.
I classify the origin of the Universe along with these other origins.
Well, no. There is only one origin. The rest are merely phenomena within the universe, mutations in the expressions of existing matter and energy. The ability to explain phenomena which science has shown is considerable and it is certainly reasonable to assume that more phenomena will be better understood as time passes. However, science's track record for figuring out the causal origin of the universe is, so far, zero. The fact that we have found rules that explain the way matter and energy mutate their manifestation says absolutely nothing about our ability to determine where the rules themselves came from or for that matter, the matter and energy over which they operate. That is the origin question.
catchy -1
We do not know if science can answer it or not and nothing science has accomplished tells us if it can or not. Science has only shown that if humans can find the answer to this question, science has a better chance of being the tool used to do it than all other human intellectual frameworks put together. This is a useful answer, but it still doesn't tell us if science can do it or not.
You do have a slightly stronger point:
So lack of access is no reason to think that the origin of the universe is a supernatural event
True. It is no reason. There is no reason to think the universe is a supernatural event, but there are reasons to ponder the notion: Why does anything exist at all? Why are there comprehensible rules? Why isn't there simply nothingness? Why isn't there simply a grey goo of boring particles or radiation, and instead we have eagles flying over snow-capped mountains? Why do the rules allow such a sight to exist (anthropic principle)? These are all questions still in the court of the philosophers, which means science has achieved very little, if anything, in answering them. It has only made our questions far more precise. Rather than ask why an eagle can fly, we ask why are the fundamental constants what they are.
catchy -infinty, MA 0
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Natural v. Supernatural
(#4382)So lack of access is no reason to think that the origin of the universe is a supernatural event.
I'm not sure I understand why the distinction between the "natural" and the "supernatural" is quite so powerful in the context of this discussion. Doesn't our lack of catchy's "epistemic access" itself result in a breakdown in that distinction? And isn't your last full paragraph just another way of making that observation? For if we admit that there are deep elements to reality that we do not understand, and that by virtue of our epistemic limitations we may (or perhaps are certain to) never understand them, then doesn't this suggest that our grip on the "natural" -- that set of things about which we believe we have discovered immutable rules -- is a bit looser, or may well be a bit looser, than we like to think? Doesn't the very acknowledgement that we are, in fact, subject to epistemic limitations -- which perhaps limit us to simply the identification of limited, repeatable rules in the mysterious stuff around us (perhaps like a handicapped child obsessed with certain simple patterns because the rest of reality is too much to assimilate) -- necessitate a concession that the "natural" may well be suffused with the "supernatural" (like the magic of the eagle flying over the snow-capped mountain), which we perceive only dimly? And isn't this concession not unlike the concept of religious immanence?
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
That's a confusion between metaphysics vs. epistemology
(#4525)_I'm not sure I understand why the distinction between the "natural" and the "supernatural" is quite so powerful in the context of this discussion. Doesn't our lack of catchy's "epistemic access" itself result in a breakdown in that distinction?_
No. What's natural vs. supernatural is a metaphysical thesis distinct from any epistemic access (direct or otherwise) to it.
What's natural is governed by law (probabilistic or determinstic). The supernatural is unconstrained.
The thought is that the origin of the universe is a natural, rule-governed, event. This may be so even if our epistemic access to that event is compromised.
IOW, our epistemic access to the event is a contingent feature of it. But its metaphysical character -- either rule-governed or lawless -- is essential to it.
My dear catchy,
(#4530)you speak in riddles. What's it?
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
sorry elagabalus
(#4532)pronoun-prolifierations syndrom!!
substitute 'the origin of the universe' for all instances of 'it'.
How about a natural divine being, constrained by laws,
(#4714)responsible for the origin of the universe? I think what Inigo was getting at is that we can be at least scientific enough to decide that whatever is, is necessarily 'natural,' and that the term supernatural can be retired as a mere pejorative for explanations that have fallen out of favor.
Put another way, it is very difficult if not impossible to imagine a concrete example of your definition of the supernatural: i.e. exists in the natural world yet is unconstrained by its laws. Is this not a paradox? If it exists, then we need to refine our understanding of the laws. If it doesn't exist, then it is merely imaginary, not supernatural.
M Aurelius was probably right.
You can't do that
(#4731)A natural being constrained by laws? Then where did the laws come from?
It has to be supernatural. Or "hypernatural", subject to its own laws, maker and product arising simultaneously, if that makes any sense. God as the universe itself.
Is this not a paradox?
No.
I'll go the geek route and give as an example a computer simulation. It can have laws, but the computer itself and the guy running it is not subject to them. A creator would be an externality. Either outside or before the universe as we know it. "Outside" might be a milimeter away, if you think multidimentionally. "Before" has no clear meaning if you are outside space-time. In a computer simulation, time is whatever we want it to be, but the simulated process would be completly unchanged if, say, we stopped it at some point to have a look, or to go to the bathroom. If the simulated process was self-aware, it would nonetheless be unable to perceive our freezing of time. It could not look back from the screen, so to speak.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Bad example.
(#4839)Both the geek at the computer and the computer itself are constrained by impaccable natural laws that were not determined by the creator (the programmer) such as the speed of flowing electrons for example. The programmer is using the laws to create his program but I would not say that he and the product/program are arising simultaneously.
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
The example...
(#4885)...was only intended to illustrate the "externality" idea. The simultaneity idea is a different question.
The example stands regardless of the flowing electrons, since a model simulated on a computer could equally be simulated on an abacus. It would just run a little slower, but to the model this makes no difference. The model is the rules, the electrons are a mere tool the geek uses given a particular technology and universe to run it in. He could use anything so long as he was capable of actually formulating the model algorithm. This should be possible in a variety of universes with different properties, so long as they allow conscious thought and the perception of three-dimentional space and one-dimentional time.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
The term 'natural' is strained to the breaking point here
(#4871)Whatever causes observable natural laws to come into being must be natural, no? Else we're not living in a scientifically valid universe.
I chose my words carefully: a divine creator who is subject to laws. Hypernatural (how about metanatural?) might be a better term for a naturalistic divinity: this idea chimes with the old talmudic/kabbalic/trinitarian idea that God and the Law (logos) are one and the same.
Your computer analogy is off, of course -- a mechanistic explanation sheds little to no light on what are basically ontological questions. Nor does it help our dilemma to imagine that the universe has an "outside" from which its basic programming can be changed.
No, we need to stick with the idea of a self-begotten universe, and then figure out what role if any the divine (which so far in this argument is equivalent to "conscious" or "intentional") has to play in its origin and ongoing function.
M Aurelius was probably right.
A good way to put it....
(#4884)No, we need to stick with the idea of a self-begotten universe, and then figure out what role if any the divine (which so far in this argument is equivalent to "conscious" or "intentional") has to play in its origin and ongoing function.
I can sign on to that. Very well put.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Intentionality is the real core of this issue IMO,
(#4901)which is why the discussion properly speaking should move from physics to philosophy of mind. Strict materialist scientists view intentionality (their own, that of other thinkers, that ascribed to divine entities in creation myths) as a form of error, something that needs to be purified from our understanding before the world can be perceived as it is. It is an odd obsession if you think about it. As if the intentional and the supernatural are one and the same.
Kant famously defined art as "purposiveness without purpose", i.e. the simulation of intent. Atheists reverse this formula and describe the universe as "purpose without purposiveness." It occurs to me that unless we want to think of ourselves as magical, supernatural beings, the universe produces our intellect spontaneously and naturally as a normal part of its functioning. And unless we are epiphenomenal, will-less automatons, we play a role in how that functioning takes place.
So it shouldn't be such a giant step to imagine that consciousness has been there and playing its peculiar role since the beginning. For my money at least, a purely mechanistic, materialist universe is simply too neat. Note this is not a defense of intelligent design (I purposively stopped using the word Creator for the moment since what I'm imagining is consciousness as a kind of passenger of the physical universe).
M Aurelius was probably right.
Good comment....
(#4961)You are right. I feel the same way. This indeed is the crux of the matter, and I truly believe that anybody who is certain that there is no intentionality to the universe simply isn't thinking things through.
I do not, by the way, consider a purely "mechanistic, materialist" unverse too neat. I consider it to be pointless. The universe may well be pointless, but there is no evidence either way, so I prefer to suspect there is a point to it.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
The Universe May Well. . .
(#4986). . .have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.
The universe may well have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.
Yes.
(#4988)If anthing, the lack of an original purpose should make it easier for us to apply one - or many.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Holy cow
(#4996)that's my agreement with Scott and Bernard for the month. This point, in my mind, is what makes humans so special, that we can create our own purpose rather than having to follow one laid down for us.
I blame it all on the Internet
I had no idea
(#5002)You were Hindu.
“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
I'm a "cafeteria" philosopher.
(#5005)but seriously, do you disagree with this?
I blame it all on the Internet
Yes I disagree!
(#5013)I don't think cows are holy. Only tasty.
(No offense to those who feel differently of course)
“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
I forgot
(#5014)that I have to be extremely literal when discussing things with you. Here goes:
Do you believe that there is a purpose in the universe that is imposed on human beings, or do you believe that human beings create their own purpose in life?
I blame it all on the Internet
False dilemma? But I have had religious
(#5018)experiences eating cow, most recently at an Argentinian steakhouse in the East Village. The Buenos Aires strip is worth a few reincarnation cycles.
M Aurelius was probably right.
I think two things
(#5019)1. Your humor meter is on the fritz
However, I'll give you number 2 anyway.
2. It is intuitively obvious that human beings have the gift of and/or innate facility of free will. Whether it is a gift or innate characteristic, it pretty much guarantees that humans create their own purpose in life.
“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
My humor meter works just fine
(#5040)but I do occasionally yearn for ... what was it again? ... oh yeah, "substantive comment". :)
I blame it all on the Internet
Behold!!!
(#5008)Bernard Guerrero! Moral Relativist! Welcome to the "DarkSide" Bernard! We always knew you'd come...
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
That's frustrating.
(#4998)I go and try to make a point couched in its classic philosophical expression (cf. my two Kant-based comments above), and here you & Scott make the same kind of point, without the (always-confusing) Kantian cant (Yes, yes, I've been waiting a long time to use that phrase). You guys suck. And yes, you ruin the site.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
It's funny
(#4991)(not funny 'hah hah' ...) that Jordan should've brought up Kant's Critique of Judgment, since your comments have consistently had that book in my mind. I take it, generally speaking, Kant's account of speculation about the createdness or uncreatedness of the world is that it's a misuse of reason; that the desire for non-pointlessness - itself a legitimate desire - that underlies the claim for createdness is, properly employed, a spur to moral reason and action; and that, while nothing prohibits you from thinking about the grand cosmological questions, it is a boon to thinking if you separate practical-moral from theoretical-speculative interests.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Critique of Judgment, sec. 10 ff.
(#4985)You're simply wrong, Jordan, when you accuse atheists of misunderstanding (or reversing) Kant. That there can be such a thing as "purposiveness without a purpose" - which is the form of beauty as such, on Kant's account, and not merely (or even primarily) art-objects - is a profoundly anti-teleological thought, since Kant thereby can account for the appearance of purposiveness, while sundering the inferential chain that links that (formal) appearance to existent, objective purpose. (For why this is so, suffice it to say Kant takes both teleological judgments and judgments of taste ['aesthetic' judgments] to be 'reflective' - i.e. to have their ground in the nature of the judging subject's faculties, rather than in the object.) In so doing, Kant cuts the proverbial legs out from under the teleological argument for the existence of god.
This argument also implies, by the way, that when you write "it shouldn't be such a giant step to imagine that consciousness has been there and playing its peculiar role since the beginning," you are, in fact, only making a claim about the nature of your imagination (and its relationship to the understanding), and saying nothing whatsoever about the world.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
I'm never simply wrong. I always
(#5007)venture off into mind-numbing (to me) complexity first. :)
In my defense I'm not, or not really, making a teleogical argument here. Instead I'm working bass-ackwards from naturalism to say that, since the universe produced "purposiveness" all on its own, should it not have been there in potential all along as simply another part of "nature"? This universe is one in which it is possible to make reflective teleological judgments (and if you're Kant at least, you believe those judgments can result in physical change in the universe, cut off at the knees from direct apprehension as they might be). It is the attempt to arrogate that capacity to the human sphere exclusively that is the error, to my way of thinking, and one of the implications of that error is that we are somehow supernatural beings.
M Aurelius was probably right.
Well.
(#5023)"Simply" was not the right word. You were, I should have said, complicatedly wrong. ;D
Anyway, when you write since the universe produced "purposiveness" all on its own, I think you're sneaking in the back door what Kant has denied entry via the front door. "Purposiveness," on his account, just is not a natural phenomena. Look, we might want to throw Kant out the window here, and naturalize those faculties and functions that he kept (for the sake of not deciding a thorny question, say) not-strictly natural; maybe that renders your point stronger, maybe the same kind of problems obtain. That is, it may be that this feature of Kant's philosophical system as a whole (to wit, reflective judgments and their extension) survives that naturalization, but I haven't thought about it enough to say.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Kant you see what I mean?
(#5070)"Purposiveness," on his account, just is not a natural phenomena.
Fine but think that through for a second. Happens in the natural world. Is not a natural phenomenon.
If you accept Kant's view then you're basically buying into an idea of consciousness as a supernatural realm, a separate universe unto itself, or some kind of epiphenomenal ether that exists as a magical exception to the physical world. Luminous beings are we. The idea that consciousness is a natural phenomenon doesn't render my point stronger, it is my point. Then the question becomes why assume it is an exclusive property of humanity or the human brain?
M Aurelius was probably right.
I made your job too easy.
(#5099)I've misstated Kant's views, with the result that he's much easier to characterize as holding a view according to which we are, qua rational beings, "luminous beings." Maybe this view of Kant is right anyway, but what I should have said (and did say, indirectly, previously) is that the perception of purposiveness is insufficient to infer objective purposes. (I'm not sure, contrariwise, that it's a necessary perception to infer objective purposes.) That relatively modest claim doesn't make it so easy for you to imply that in holding it, one is compelled to hold some strongly inflationary view on the separation of human mindedness from 'nature'.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
It did seem a little simplified
(#5123)and I don't think Kant would ever have agreed that reason is not a natural phenomenon -- I don't think the question bothered him much at all in fact.
But what do you think about my claim that the natural universe "thinks"?
M Aurelius was probably right.
What do I think?
(#5148)It's an interesting claim, but I'm not sure why the fact that 'there exist things in the universe that think' should lead me to infer that 'the universe thinks', any more than the existence of desiring things in the universe should lead me to think that the universe desires, or any more than the occurence of any activity in the universe should make me think the universe shares in, or also engages in, that activity.
Wait a minute ... are you some kind of Spinozist, you God-intoxicated man?
(p.s. I think the 2nd half of Kant's 3rd Critique shows he was, in fact, a bit bothered by the naturalness of reason. But that's a different story.)
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Is this obvious?
(#5034)Intentionality/consciousness is, like the "unmoved mover," tough to fit into "a purely mechanistic, materialist universe." But it's not entirely clear to me that it's tough in quite the same sort of way.
Intentionality/consciousness is, after all, as we experience it, something that takes time. But the "god of the philosophers" is supposed to create or explain or...uh...something...time itself, no?
Maybe we shouldn't be thinking of s/he/it as having beliefs and desires and experiences and values in any sense in which we understand such things.
At least, it's not obvious that we should.
.Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Entirely agree
(#5071)I was using 'intentionality' in a deliberately vague, non-personal way to suggest an active intellect of some basic kind. The mind-boggling paradoxes of a divine act of creation still remain: willfully separating itself from itself simultaneously creates time, law, and the possibility of objective knowledge, submits itself to its own law and makes independent will and evil possible within its own being.
M Aurelius was probably right.
Jordan,
(#5147)just excise the first two sentences from the second paragraph and you'll be fine. Poof! No more Kant. and seriously what rhetoric "purposiveness without purpose". Who needs that?
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
MA you're too much fun
(#4531)#1. You've got a crazy def. of 'strong atheist' that I think very few people actually hold. No one here believes in the tooth fairy. But I bet you could get most to admit the bare possibility that the tooth fairy *might* exist. That doesn't mean everyone here is only a 'weak' tooth-fairy disbeliever. It just means that it's okay to strongly disbelieve in entities even if you have no knock-down 'proof' re:their non-existence.
#2. It's poor form to accuse people who are making inductive generalizations you don't find persuasive of committing the Gambler's Fallacy. You are too loose a goose with your 'loose analogies'.
"However, science's track record for figuring out the causal origin of the universe is, so far, zero."
Of course that's been true for a host of other questions at different points in the history of science. Figuring out the origins of mental capacities, of life, etc. all had very poor track records until very recently.
Further, a track record of zero is no reason to think that the origin of the universe is of a fundamentally different character, namely supernatural, than other origin events.
But again I grant that it may be a contingent feature of finite creatures likeus that we will not be capable of describing the big bang or the very early universe in any systematic or precise way.
The question is, does that place supernatural speculation on equal footing with scientific hypothesizing? I say 'no'.
To all your questions: "Why isn't there simply a grey goo of boring particles or radiation, and instead we have eagles flying over snow-capped mountains? Why do the rules allow such a sight to exist (anthropic principle)?" , etc. we've flirted with postulating an intelligent + conscious being -- and in paticular a being who makes the rules rather than is governed by them -- to explain questions before.
So here's a slightly different inductive argument in favor of rejecting the hypothesis that God exists -- a reason which should toss you over into the atheist vs. agnostic camp. It's an induction over bad approaches to problems in the past.
Explaining thunder via an intelligent, conscious, (not to mention angry) god in the sky was a mistake. Explaining the origins of humans via a God of the gaps was a mistake. And it stinks today to give into such anthopomorphic tendencies to explain the origin of the universe.
The above argument is one positive reason for not postulating a mysterious and intelligent creature to do your explaining. It's persuasive and it entails atheism.
You are being obtuse
(#4569)Further, a track record of zero is no reason to think that the origin of the universe is of a fundamentally different character, namely supernatural, than other origin events.
You continue to draw equivalence between two fundamentally different classes of events. One class is the origin of the universe itself, and the other class includes all other so-called "origin" events which are actually transformations of existing matter and energy. You abuse the limitation of language (the common use of the word origin), to lump together fundamentally different concepts.
But I bet you could get most to admit the bare possibility that the tooth fairy *might* exist.
This is nonsensical. There is no fundamental question the tooth fairy can answer. There is no philosphical gap for the tooth fairy to fill. There is no particular set of coincidences (physical constants) that the tooth fairy would explain. It is a poor analogy for one who is so strict about analogies.
The question is, does that place supernatural speculation on equal footing with scientific hypothesizing? I say 'no'.
No, that's not the question. Of course they are not on an equal footing. Nothing I said implies otherwise.
Explaining thunder via an intelligent, conscious, (not to mention angry) god in the sky was a mistake. Explaining the origins of humans via a God of the gaps was a mistake. And it stinks today to give into such anthopomorphic tendencies to explain the origin of the universe.
Well, for one thing I don't believe humans are the center or the purpose or the object of the universe and, if it has one, its maker. The anthropic principle, except for one particular version, does not generally state that the universe is about us. However, it does state that a remarkable set of conditions must present for us to exist, where "us" is meant in the general sense of life and complexity able to support it.
For another, it is simply not a persuasive argument, on two counts. The first is that while it is true that we don't need a God of the gaps to explain thunder, we don't really know that much about thunder. Namely, we have managed to find mathematical laws that describe the behavior of electrons and charges, but we don't really know what they are. We don't really know what an electron is. We just know how it behaves under a range of conditions, and we don't know how it behaves under other conditions. The inverse square law for forces is one example. It has the non-trivial problem of approaching infinity as distance approaches zero.
So our models have limits, and the stuff they describe is not truly known. We don't know what gravity is. We don't know why electrons exist.
The second problem with that argument is that it simultaneously praises science for our progress yet ignores scientific findings which point to, for instance, a moment of creation, such as the big bang, which is totally compatible with the existence of God. Note that science could have instead found the universe to be ageless and infinite in time. But it didn't. It found a point of origin and on top of that it finds that we cannot know anything about the universe before that time.
When we learned about thunder a god of the sky became completly superfluous. When we learned about the origin of the universe, however, a god of creation remained just as plausible as before.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Hammer & Tongs, Gentlemen, Hammer & Tongs...
(#4576)...you guys have been going at this for several valuable days, stating and back-filling, arguments and counter-arguments, flights of fancy and seriously deep thought.
Sometimes I'm swayed by MA, other times by Catchy.
A thought for the Tech Gentlemen...is there anyway to create a repository or archive for something like this? This all seems very valuable...
Hummmmm
I'll post this and then search God and Universe and see if it brings me back to here. In a month, in a year, I still want to be able to find this.
Best Wishes,
Traveller
MA is as good as they come for stimulating convo.
(#4580)on these internets and thanks for your kind comments.
fine-tunning + reference class assigning
(#4579)MA, I'm not purposefully trading on orthographic coincidences to bolster my position. I get that the origin of the universe is importantly different to you from other origins. You wouldn't taxonomize them together. I would. As I said, assigning reference classes is tricky -- and with issues like this things are hardly cut and dried. I respect your position, but reject it.
I already mentioned that I reject differentiating the big bang from other originations merely because we may have epistemic limitations w.r.t. the Big Bang.
But you think it's obvious that my examples of origins are merely "transformations of existing matter and energy" and thus shouldn't be lumped in with the origin of all matter and energy.
Fair enough, but still disagree. How life emerged from that which is not alive; how thought emerged from that which is unthinking -- these bear similarities to the question of how something might have emerged from nothing. All have inspired a recourse to the mystical. I type them together (and don't think the fact that they're all called 'origins' is some sort of linguistic 'limitation' -- orthography is a good indicator of taxonomy in this case).
And if my taxonomy is correct then the inductive generalization over past origins goes through.
Re: the toothfairy, I'm happy to retire it. Its purpose was merely to show that *everyone* strongly disbelieves in things they have no proof don't exist. Atheists aren't unique in that regard.
That doesn't mean that I accept your particular points of disanalogy, however: "There is no philosphical gap for the tooth fairy to fill. There is no particular set of coincidences (physical constants) that the tooth fairy would explain."
... Because I don't know that postulating a God really is an 'explanation'. Depending on your version, it may merely be another unknown that appears to explain, but yet is by definition beyond explanation. A 'designer' is often just a palce-holder for 'we have no idea'.
...You've somehow mistaken anthropic for anthropomorphic. My point was that we tend to explain events as caused by intelligent, conscious agents because we tend to anthropomorphize everything, including causes. We should get away from that in everything: from thunder to the origins of the universe.
I haven't addressed your comments re: the anthropic principle, or: "Note that science could have instead found the universe to be ageless and infinite in time. But it didn't. It found a point of origin and on top of that it finds that we cannot know anything about the universe before that time."
These are interesting issues. Much further discussion required. I note in passing that science *has* proffered up an independent many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that fits nicely with deflating 'the universe is finely tuned and must have been designed' arguments. For if there's a multi-verse and our own universe is but one among many, then our current world is not so improbable.
The hope is that you're enjoying corresponding? Just making sure my saucy score-keeping etc. was taken in good humor. You're very fun to correspond with.
One minor point to add
(#4584)is that we don't know if the "Big Bang" was the origin of all energy and matter as opposed to being a "transformation of existing matter and energy" since our current understanding breaks down a fraction of a second before we get to that point. We may indeed determine that our current universe is just a different form of matter and energy that existed before, just pushing the "original" creation further back.
I blame it all on the Internet
Well, Yes, Hank, That's What Crossed My Mind....
(#4593)....when I read MA's counter-arguments.
Of course what we don't know is staggering as is the thought that Plate Tectonics, which seem so self evident to me (now), apparently wasn't really an accepted theory until the 1970's.
We have lived in very scientifically exciting times...I also sense that there are some paranormal esp like phenomena that are real, though as of yet inexplicable.
In the end we may just find God (what a surprise, there he/she/it is, right in front of our noses)...or not. However, proving this question one way or another will be equally earth & psyche shaking.
Best wishes,
Traveller
I should be more precise...
(#4630)I am aware of course of a number of multiverse ideas. One is the "bubble" concept, where we are just in one bubble in a "foam" of universes.
The other idea is serial universes, one after the other, for all time. Previously this required a "Big Crunch", but now we know that expansion is accelerating, yet brane theory posits a mechanism that would lead to serial universes that never "crunch", but merely fly appart into nothingness.
The other concept is parallel universes, constantly multiplying upon every quantum event. In this view there are an infinite number of universes, one of which is exactly identical to this one except for a single quantum probability event having a different result, and so forth.
However, none of these ideas is testable. Which means they belong in the field of philosphical speculation rather than science. More precisely, some of these ideas can be reinforced through evidence (there is an indirect way of inferring the existence of other universes based on the properties of physical constants). However, there is no way to test these notions in a definitive way.
And, even if there were a way to test these, none explain the origin of the branes, the multiverse, or whatever it is they propose.
We are adding epicycles.
I have no way of knowing if we are stuck in this situation forever or if some kind of breakthrough will fix this. Which is why I don't rule out the idea that God does not exist and never has. But I'm pretty sure that in my lifetime and that of my children's children, we will not have a compelling solution to this problem.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
The multi-verse
(#4886)is only supposed to help with the Why *this*? question, not Why *anything*?
I don't care much about the latter question, but the former deserves some real discussion.
Re: non testability, one might take the fine-tuning itself as evidence for a multi-verse. Probability-wise since our universe is so improbable it stands to reason there should be others.
Actually...
(#4889)Re: non testability, one might take the fine-tuning itself as evidence for a multi-verse. Probability-wise since our universe is so improbable it stands to reason there should be others.
That right there points to a God testing strategy, or at least a uniqueness testing strategy. There are a range of values for each parameter which would yield acceptable universes. The range is narrow, but it contains an infinite number of values. Hence, a probabilistic analisys can be made to answer the question, does our universe have each value exactly in the center of the "good" range? Or do our physical constants look like a sample random universe, some fine tuned, but others near the edge of the range? The second answer implies (but does not prove) that this is one of a very large number of universes. The first answer points to a unique universe, a creator, or the notion that what we see as independent parameters may not be, but of course proves none of these things either.
I'm not certain, but I think the answer to this test apparently points to a multiverse, but I'm not sure how carefully this was worked out and by who. I'd have to look this one up.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Be careful with those infinities
(#4997)it's not clear yet whether the underlying structure of space and time is continuous or quantized. If it's the latter, then virtually all infinities become merely very large numbers. We also don't understand the interconnectedness of some of those values, as if charge on an electron, for exampel, is a function of the speed of light. So it's a little early to be doing probabalistic computations on what may be linked variables.
I blame it all on the Internet
Yes
(#5000)True. Which is probably why my recollection is fuzzy. Whatever calculations may have been done must be rather backish of the envelope.
On the other hand, now that you mention it, if the underlying structure of the universe is quantized, that in itself is philosphically interesting in many ways.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Are you kidding?
(#5004)try possibly the most important scientific discovery ever. It would, for starters, make the whole idea of "computability" of the physical universe, i.e, the idea that the universe is actually the running of a program, virtually certain. (It's very hard for this idea to make sense in a truly continuous universe). It means there is no "analog", that's just an artifact of our perception. It would undermine the very idea of the calculus. It would completely destroy the basic assumptions used in all modern scientific theories. And as I said earlier, it makes virtually all infinities disappear. It literally would change everything.
I blame it all on the Internet
I dunno...
(#5076)We already have quantum physics, except for gravity. The calculus will do fine. It's a mathematical idea, why would it be undermined? You can use derivatives on curves fitted to quantized data, and there are plenty of mathematical concepts with no known physical analogs. It doesn't make them go "poof" and dissapear.
It would completely destroy the basic assumptions used in all modern scientific theories.
It would? Why? It seems to me it would create a superset of knowledge instead, just like we still use newtonian physics for everyday calculations despite knowing about relativity.
The tie in to the notion that the universe is running a program is more interesting. But if the random nature of quantum effects remains, then such a computer would not be a Turing machine. The universe would be finite but non-mechanical. So quantization alone is only part of the story.
By the way, my money is on the universe being fundamentally quantized.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
To be clear
(#5085)yes, one could still use calculus as an approximation. However, the theoretical underpinning of "infinitesimals" would be fatally undermined. Yes, we could continue to use it as we use Newtonian mechanics as a "good enough" approximation, but it would destroy the underpinnings of both quantum mechanics and relativity, just as quantum theory undermined the idea of continuous energy levels and relativity destroyed the idea of "action at a distance".
I'm not an expert, but my guess is that the idea of the evolution of quantum wavefunctions would be affected dramatically, sine the wavefunction itself would be an approximation of an underlying "stepwise" function. In fact, all continuous functions would be approximations. I'm certain I don't know all the implications, but I'm certain they would be huge.
I blame it all on the Internet
Yes
(#4640)This is exactly true. Which is why I don't say that I know God exists and, even if I did, I would have little to say about the nature of God.
In fact, if there is a God, the issue you point out raises the bar on what it would mean to show that God exists. It is not enough for science to hit a wall or a dead end, since as you correctly pointed out earlier that may be due to our limitations, rather than inherent limits to the universe. Rather, we must both hit that wall and find positive evidence as well.
Intelligent Design advocates have attempted to find such evidence with the notion of complexity. Unfortunately their work lacks scientific rigor, to put it diplomatically. Today God could be found, in principle, by looking for an answer to the question of why the fundamental parameters of the universe are what they are. This is a non-trivial problem, and some scientific approach to it is possible, but for now it remains the realm of speculation.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Proclivity to conflict.
(#4324)Thanks, that helps make clear why you'd approached the subject matter as you had. I think the principle you chose is a bit fishy - that is, 'avoiding conflict' is an unqualified positive only if the competition between practical/moral truth claims in question is incapable of resolution. Which, coincidentally, is exactly the position the agnostic holds. (Also, again coincidentally, the position a liberal holds, too - points for consistency, at least.) But, in any case, I can at least see why you framed the positions as you did.
Incidentally, atheist though I may be, I do not think believers fools. And good thing I don't have to, either, lest I be committed to saying, e.g., Thomas Aquinas was a fool. (It may be the case that someone who believes that God has revealed himself is committed to thinking the agnostic, the atheist and/or the pagan are all fools, but I don't presume to speak for such a person.) I think those who believe in a god who is morally interested in, legislates, and punishes or rewards human affairs are wrong. And while it would be patronizing for me, as an atheist, to say I 'respect' such a person's belief (we could all do with a little less of such 'respect'), this is not to my mind the kind of subject about which we have proofs or neat, deductive inferences - so I wouldn't presume to insult or belittle their intellects.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Hah!
(#5163)He will also adopt a convenience political party and ideology. He will be a Nazi under Hitler, a Republican in Texas, a leftist under Chavez and an environmentalist in California. His role in conflict will depend on his interests.
Didn't I see Zelig posting here a little while ago?
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I'm a #1.5
(#4238)God doesn't exist, never existed, and won't exist. Nevertheless, I find your faith in him quaint and endearing and encourage you to continue coming up with these wonderfully creative stories. Sadly, I find myself unable to fully partake of this form of entertainment, due to my inability to fully suspend disbelief on this matter, but I can still appreciate it from an aesthetic standpoint.
Sorry, MA, you got it wrong
(#4255)#1 is a parody of an atheist, only applicable to the most extreme. I'm an atheist, that means I don't believe there is a god. It doesn't mean that I think it's impossible that there is a god, or that I think that believers are idiots (although I do think they are misguided), it just means that I do not believe. It's as simple as that.
I blame it all on the Internet
#6.
(#4455)I don't much believe and don't much care what others believe (so long as they're not bugging me about it or flying planes into buildings or what have you.) That said, it's great mind control for kids. Not having read Dawkins' book yet, I'm willing to guess that the evolutionary advantage is precisely that: a form of social control that acts even when the eyes of society are not on the individual, and that does not allow for unpunished cheating even if you aren't caught at that moment.
Presumably the above allows for less policing to catch free-riders, and so acts as a net gain for the group as a whole.
Free-thinker that I am, I hope my girls eventually mature to the point where their behavior will be guided by enlightened self-interest, but for anything as baldy self-interested (see Toddler Property Rights) and relatively short-sighted as a pre-teen, the Big Mommy and Daddy in the Sky appear to be a good way to keep 'em out of trouble.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Sounds like you've read Foucault, heh. -nt-
(#4474).
M Aurelius was probably right.
A bit.
(#5162)Though I don't believe he generally took a positive view of "micro-structures of power".
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Thinking about agnosticism
(#4485)as an agnostic. I always try to qualify my agnosticism; I'm "sort of an agnostic," or I'll string together a bunch of confusing words about some of the things that kind of attract me, like "I'm a pantheistic phenomenological ontologist, just looking around for a church home."
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm an agnostic because I have to be, not because I want to be. Agnosticism, of course, leaves open the possibility of the existence of a supreme being (or essence or whatever), and that of course leaves open the possibility that, as many religious persons believe, one's harmony with the supreme whateverness is the most important thing about life, the key to happiness and perhaps even eternal life or a better reincarnation or something.
And what if the only way to find and understand that supremiosity is to actively seek it out and attempt to connect with it? If that is so, then investing too heavily in one's own agnosticism can be really counter-productive.
Which is why, as an agnostic, I still feel drawn to spirituality. I meditate, think about god/X and the nature of god/X-hood. I want to feel the rhythms and vibrations of the universe, and I don't think that's going to happen unless I slow down and pay attention. And when I try to understand and connect with X I do what I can to assume for the time being that X exists and is in the room with me.
Of course, they are wrong
(#4590)The key to happiness is of course to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamenation of their women.
Disagree on Diamond
(#4119)UCLA professorship or not, he's got a hard-on for Western civilization and never misses a chance to claim that someone/where else coulda' been a contendah if only . . . He is not remotely qualified as a historian or sociologist, but you can be sure that "New Guinea Rules!"
I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems scary and weird. It'll happen to you.—Abraham Simpson
One of his early works
(#4402)called “the Third Chimpanzee” was what I had in mind, not his later works which advocate cultural relativity and environmentalism.
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
Me too Inigo, I picked it up the other day
(#4037)got about 20 pages in and circular filed it.
The tenor of his writing is all too familiar and all too unpleasant.
He's a wonderful example of Sowell's "Anointed."
I'm trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I don't need to hear crap from a bunch of hippie freaks living in denial! Screw you guys, I'm going home!
Would you mind
(#4049)clarifying something for me, since I haven't read the book yet? I find your first statement unproblematic:
Dawkins holds to the view that the logic of evolutionary biology conclusively disproves the existence of anything like the sort of God envisioned by traditional religions, most particularly Christianity.
I think a scientist cannot help but come to that conclusion. I know a number of scientists who 'believe in God', but none who call themselves Christians. This second sentiment you share, however, is significantly broader:
the extraordinary contempt that drips from Dawkins’ pages when he contemplates believers, current or historical, and even other “scientists” who admit the possibility of God
Which is it? The former I share, the latter I disdain, both on the application of the scientific method. The latter I would agree with you, would be unjustified and distasteful.
To me, those positions are miles apart.
"There are sneakers that cost more than an iPod." -Steve Jobs
I Disagree
(#4069)that they necessarily are different things, and this is part of where Dawkins himself goes off-track. He seems to picture the God of Christianity as a particular thing having something like the characteristics of personhood (as the reviewer for the London Review of Books put it, as a "chap"). He mercilessly lampoons this notion (using the principles of evolution as his tool), and presumes that anyone who admits the possibility of the divine (like Stephen Jay Gould, who he attacks in the book) either adopts this conception of God, or simply isn't religious in any identifiable way. But his error, at least in terms of Christianity, is in presuming that the "chap" God he lampoons resembles anything like the God of Christianity.
So, in answer to your question, Dawkins attacks both -- but largely because he mistakenly caricatures the God of traditional religion, then presumes that anyone who might acknowledge the divine is looking to worship his caricature.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Well I find Stephen Jay Gould worthy of attack
(#4084)but not over admitting the existence of God (in case you didn’t know there was more between these two than just that).
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
SJG? Attack
(#4175)in what sense/ Do you mean his science?
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
“Science for the People”
(#4401)demonstrated that Gould was incapable of separating science and politics, so his science as such should be read with a critical eye.
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
That is true of all scientists.
(#5117)No one is immune from politics.
literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it
We agree on that
(#5378)therefore I find SJG science worthy of attack because his politics and mine differ.
"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta
Hey, Synchronicity!
(#4066)I was just thinking about Richard Dawkins. It also goes back to MA's thread about what "the forvm" is all about so it's slightly OT. I think this site questions everyone even those who want to be held in high esteem. If Mr. Dawkins were to visit our little site I'm sure he would get a multitude of well thought critiques of his theory. If he lasted that long without throwing a hissy and violating the posting rules by calling us a bunch of fools.
Inigo don't take it to personal I hear that Galileo was the same way. There's something really odd about people telling you to question authority all the while presenting themselves AS an authority and then becoming pissed when you question them.
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
I promoted this...
(#4068)Since people want a more active front page, I promoted this interesting piece. Which does not mean we won't soon move to a more dynamic model. A poll is forthcoming.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
You know
(#4094)I would consider myself an agnostic, though I am awfully close to being an atheist (I just can't consider myself certain that there is no God or gods). And I also find Dawkins very interesting and thought provoking, and agree with much of what he says.
I'll also agree that his tone can be somewhat distasteful, even if I agree with the general premise. I grew up Catholic and had many religious friends growing up. I guess my parents taught me to be respectful, because as much as I don't believe, I respect other's beliefs enough not to trample on them. In other words, in a given argument I can argue against the idea of God or religion, but I would do so without denigrating the person's beliefs. I don't think anyone is crazy or foolish to believe in God, even if I think they are wrong. I may not understand it, but I can respect it, and it does have a pretty long and respectable (though sometimes not so respectable, but that's true of most things) history.
I'm glad this is going to the front page. Should provoke some interesting commentary.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so. - Bertrand Russell
Bingo
(#4097)Or "Yahtzee!" as Harley used to say in a different time and place. Your comment goes to one of the things that is most interesting to me about this -- where faith and religious instincts have been pushed aside, do virtues like respect, civility and humility go with them? In an atheistic world in which the only motive force is evolution, what role might something like respect for one's intellectual opponent possibly play?
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
ya know
(#4099)those virtues don't exactly go hand in hand with religous instincts either.
Like anyhthing, you have bad apples on both sides. Doesn't make it all bad.
The Absence
(#4108)of those virtues among Christians confirms that they are poor Christians. What is it when the virtues are absent among atheists?
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
That they're rude people? -nt
(#4111)Comment field is required!
And, In
(#4125)a purely evolutionary world, that is a bad thing?
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Yes it is
(#4128)Being able to get along harmoniously in a group is a positive trait which can garner you many evolutionary benefits; food, shelter, access to high value females and avoiding being the one thrown to the sabre-tooth tiger so that the rest of the tribe can escape.
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
Not sure what you mean
(#4135)Evolution cannot teach us what we should do. Dawkins, at least in what I've read of him, is very clear on this point. Evolution just describes how species.. well... evolve. It can explain why we get certain moral emotions in response to various actions. But it can't tell us whether these emotions are right or wrong. Evolution may explain why we get angry and jealous over a cheating spouse-- but if you look to evolution for guidance on what to do with these emotions, you won't find any answers.
Replacing religious ethics with evolution is nonsensical, as the latter is not an ethical theory. But to answer your question, in secular ethics, being rude and disrespectful is usually a bad thing.
Apologies. I Should Have Been Clearer
(#4147)about the meaning of "bad" in my question. Yes, my point is that in a purely evolutionary world, where meaning attaches to conduct only insofar as it advances or retards propagation of the species, I have difficulty understanding why "rudeness" -- as a moral judgment about conduct -- has any place. I have difficulty understanding how moral judgments can be made at all -- other than in the course of simply conflating "morality" and evolutionary usefulness.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
you mean in fantasy land?
(#4149)...
I still don't understand
(#4166)Yes, my point is that in a purely evolutionary world, where meaning attaches to conduct only insofar as it advances or retards propagation of the species, I have difficulty understanding why "rudeness" -- as a moral judgment about conduct -- has any place.
If you're asking why it's evolutionarily advantageous to have a basic respect for others, the answer is probably that a lack of respect is more likely to escalate into violence and an early death. Of course, there's also evolutionary benefits for aggression-- namely that it makes it alot easier to take what one wants from the more passive (with often disasterous results when one encounters another aggressive individual). In a given population, game theory says that there's a certain "magic number" proportion of each type, that will fluctuate within a range but naturally remain stable overall.
Is that what you were asking?
A question, Inigo.
(#4179)I don't want to attribute a position to you that is stronger than the one you actually hold, so I thought it circumspect to ask: by "purely evolutionary world," do you mean any world in which both the claims that 'there is no [personal] god' and 'evolution accurately describes the development of life'? Or do you take that phrase to imply a bolder version of that latter claim, whereby all human relationships are grounded in, and reducible (salve veritate) to the mechanisms of evolution?
(To sketch a preemptive response, I do not see why the first set of claims implies a rejection of moral claims, and I do not see why the second isn't an illict inflation of the claims of evolutionary science.)
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
An Appropriate Check
(#4301)You're right -- evolutionary theorists like Dawkins don't contend that morality, as such, has somehow been displaced by our having come to understand the mechanics of evolution. I don't either -- indeed, the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the claims of some critics, generally maintains a form of detente with evolutionary theory, yet obviously doesn't consider it to have supplanted morality. So I wouldn't mischaracterize someone like Dawkins in that way, though my language was loose. A "purely evolutionary world" is a poor phrase. But Dawkins does contend that our understanding of evolution renders a belief in a creator God -- including, necessarily, that creator's role as a source for moral guidance, as explained by traditional religions -- obsolete. So my question, more precisely put, is this -- given that Dawkins would banish God (with evolutionary theory as his tool), from what source do he and others firm in their belief that there is no God (and not simply no Christian God) derive their ethics?
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Delayed Response (Inigo)
(#4728)from what source do he and others firm in their belief that there is no God (and not simply no Christian God) derive their ethics?
As an empirical question, I haven't a clue. The possibilities, of course, are many and varied; the history of philosophy is chock-full of answers to meta-ethical problems. While I'm sure some of those answers are not consistent with evolutionary theory, at least some of the canonical answers seem, prima facie, to be not-inconsistent.
I'm sure I'm not saying anything that hadn't occurred to you, though, so I have to assume I'm missing the force of your question.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
In a purely gravitational world,
(#4196)...is it wrong to push people off cliffs?
In a purely gravitational world,
(#4200)we'd have leveled those cliffs eons ago :-)
A much pithier way
(#4279)of putting the question I tried, largely unsuccessfully, to formulate below. Nicely put.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Without God,
(#4302)maybe not.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
And in a purely religious one?
(#4348)What if God commands that they be pushed off cliffs?
I do understand the uneasyness of the religiously inclined regarding the question of what compels us to act moraly in the absence of the threat of eternal damnation or the promise of salvation. I really don't think they need to worry though.
I mean, I take it that you are religious. What makes you greet your neighbours politely or donate to a charity? Is it because God wants you to? Is it because you feel you will be rewarded in the afterlife for it? Are these really your motivations or do you suspect that others require these motivations?
Moral behaviour is in our nature. It is broadly and on average to our advantage as individuals. All that is left is to define "Moral" and there religion offers nothing above and beyond what is offered by secular ethics, except perhaps a little less flexibility to redefine things as events evolve. That could be a good or a bad thing (whatever good and bad are)
Are we still subject to evolution?
(#4180)With the rise of modern medicine, isn't it true that many humans who would have died from medical conditions prior to being able to procreate now are able to survive and procreate and thus pass on traits that would have, a thousand years ago, selected them for extinction?
Any biology studs among us?
I'm trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I don't need to hear crap from a bunch of hippie freaks living in denial! Screw you guys, I'm going home!
Of course we are
(#4319)evolution is just the constant modification of organisms to improve their reproductive success in a given environment. Our environment may have changed greatly in the past few thousand years, but evolution operates at all times on all organisms, unless they are in a truly static environment.
I blame it all on the Internet
Not sure I agree
(#4330)At least practically speaking. In other words, I'm sure that evolution is going on with humans, but it's not just a small factor in the human process of change, I see it as being so small as to approach the disappearing point.
For one thing, our mating preferences act as a kind of selection, and while standard preferences may change somewhat over time, during the time that a certain preference is extant and popular it is most likely selecting characteristics at a much swifter pace than does evolution, which often relies on differences in death/reproductive rates that are statistically very small and take a long, long time to make a noticeable change in the makeup of the population at large. When mating preferences remain relatively stabilized over a longer period of time, the species can physically change through genetic selection over a period of time as short as centuries.
I admit I'm making this up, but it seems pretty clear to me that the math on this favors the selection over a shorter or greater time period of certain desired traits, and really it's hard for me to see how it doesn't outpace Darwinian evolution.
These changes will not necessarily be based on factors related to propagation of the species. Obviously one constant factor in mating preferences is physical attractiveness. While standards for attractiveness certainly change over time, it seems hard to deny that some near-universally-admired traits like regular features and clear skin will be selected. Other factors might fluctuate, but intelligence and other abilities that allow social success--at the time--will be selected.
Even more importantly, the real measure of the impact of a human in the modern world is not the size or shape of the human's body but rather the technology at the human's fingertips. Medical technologies, including knowledge of nutrition and fitness, actually changes our bodies, making us larger, stronger, healthier, and longer-lived. We don't use our arms and hands to interact with the environment so much as we employ tools of ever-increasing flexibility and power. Our abilities to physically change the world, to travel through it, to bring life and death to its inhabitants, change systematically at a pace that makes Darwinian evolution's infinitesimally gradual changes to our bodies insignificant to the point of total irrelevance.
From where we are right now, in the time it would take a significant Darwinian change to occur to the species, we could easily figure out what was changing and much more likely than not come up with a way to counter-act the change if we chose to do so--all while continuing to rapidly change in the ways I've just hinted at here.
Sexual selection....
(#4333)our mating preferences act as a kind of selection
They do. It is called sexual selection and it is an integral part of Darwinian evolution.
In any case, the point is now nearly moot. Within 50 years we will be manipulating our gene code on a massive scale (a small, wealthy part of the world population is already doing so in baby steps by not using fertilized eggs with undesired genes, or even through abortion).
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Something we agree on, MA - nt.
(#4622)"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I'm not arguing
(#4334)that humans by their actions aren't affecting the development of the species, or that there may not be other forces (such as direct genetic manipulation) that would swamp the effect of evolution, I'm just saying that evolution is constantly working away in the background.
I also think you overestimate the effects of things like fads. They're just short term noise in the long term process. I also think there's a deeper reason: people tend to overestimate the power of their intellect when it comes to certain actions and decisions in life. Call it the subconscious, call it hormones, ncall it biochemistry, but to paraphrase the Firesign Theater, your brain is not always the boss. When people do things in relationships that you know are mistakes and they know are mistakes but they keep doing them, what's the reason? I don't think the answer is in the realm of conscious thought.
I blame it all on the Internet
Interesting Question
(#4104)In an atheistic world in which the only motive force is evolution, what role might something like respect for one's intellectual opponent possibly play?
I have the feeling that I would be eaten alive in that world. At the same time that I like my respectful nature, it can be a negative in competitive or argumentative environments. In fact, it can actually stifle my argument, as I don't want to ruffle too many feathers.
As I get older, though, I have come to care less if I ruffle those feathers. I don't want to ever lose that core of civility and respectfulness though. I just have grown to say what I think, while not insulting the person I am disagreeing with.
I think it is possible to have morals and respect and civility without religion, but the term atheistic world conjures up the same feeling I get from religious dictatorships.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so. - Bertrand Russell
Dawkins' attitude problem
(#4102)If I can play armchair psychologist for a second, I think a good part of Dawkins' bitterness is probably reactive. His specialty is the front line of fundamentalist attacks on science. Fundamentalist attacks that have been so successful, by the way, that half the country doesn't even believe in the very field to which he's devoted his life.
It's got to be frustrating to deal with people on a daily basis who reject his work, not because of methodological flaws or mistakes he's made, but because the science of evolution happens to contradict the literal interpretation of one of hundreds of early man's creation stories.
Not that it justifies his tone. Although I haven't read the book, I have read other books of his, as well as listened to him discuss the topic of religion. He can be harsh, arrogant, and condescending. But he does sincerely believe that religion is more dangerous than good-- and I wouldn't be suprised if that belief stems from his somewhat central role in this century's ongoing appeal of the Scopes trial.
I wouldn't disagree with much of that (nt)
(#4105)Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so. - Bertrand Russell
I must pick that up
(#4114)I would be very interested to see how he supports this:
"but comforts himself with the belief that the engine of evolution is now working hard to cleanse humanity of this stain."
Science might be conclusively replacing the "How things work/came to be" aspect of religion, and an existentialist outlook on life might provide something to replace the comfort of religion to those who believe in a life after death (though not much I suspect). The moral guidance aspect of religion has been and can no doubt be replaced with a non religious moral code that will be observed just about as well; but the aspect of belief, group belief, tribal belonging; be it inspired by religion, anti semitism, communism, racism, or any other excuse that sets one group aside from the others and demands of them that they do terrible things in search of some noble goal. That seems to be well hardwired into the human psyche, and sadly I am not sure it is an evolutionary disadvantage to those who posess it.
Footnote: Lest anyone might think that I am saying that religion is the same as anti semitism or racism, I am not. I am saying that some aspects of religiously inspired behaviour have been about as ugly as those inspired by racism. Those who throw around "islamofascist" all the time will no doubt agree.
Great diary -- this is unfortunately
(#4116)a fairly widespread attitude in the academic world, in the humanities as well as the sciences, in my experience. I find this contemptuous attitude just as narrow-minded and loathsome as religious bigotry, maybe more so since the individuals in question call themselves "open minded" whereas nobody expects a fundamentalist to be anything of the kind.
I consider myself to be a "true" agnostic, in that a being like God is precisely unknowable in empirical terms, and even the very question of whether God "exists" should be meaningless in scientific terms. (Do beliefs exist? Do they exist in the same way as a photon?) So at bottom the ultimate questions of religion - is there a God, how would such a being shape our lives, what are the implications for our own mortality - are none of science's business.
That said, the Christian tradition, like all religious traditions, is replete with empirical claims that are easily disproved by even the most casual scientific inquiry: the world is 6,000 years old; the mammals were made before the fishes; woman was made from a man's rib; God is a "chap" with omniscient powers who sometimes steps in and changes the course of history; the dead are restored to life; various other supernatural claims. At that point you do what the Catholic Church began to do in the 4th century, which is to peel off particular fact claims in scripture and read them as metaphoric, delphic statements that now have meaning only in context of the faith. (The apple story in Genesis remains to this day one of the most powerful mythic explanations for why human understanding of the world is so effed up.) The modern generation of biblical literalists are destined to have their hearts broken if they can't learn to accept these millennia-old precepts of theology.
So I'd love to read Dawkins' book just to see his "proof" of the nonexistance of God. I'd be willing to bet he starts out by asking the wrong question.
M Aurelius was probably right.
Salon published an interview with Dawkins a couple weeks back
(#4122)They cover most of the topcs we're discussiong. It's here if you'd like to look it over.
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
Great link, thanks. I don't have time to fisk
(#4392)but it looks like Dawkins makes the same argument I was making earlier: faith is dangerous when it takes the form of absolute truth claims about how the world is (or worse, how it should be). He flat out states the existence of God can't be disproven, and although he poo-poos the idea of a personal God, he agrees with Einstein that there are mysteries in the universe that may well remain beyond the reach of science forever.
So other than his supercilious attitude toward believers and his dismissive attitude towards those who take comfort in scripture, I agree with his thinking.
I would love to see him debate the intelligence=atheism formula with someone - Aquinas, for example - who would promptly hand him his own thinly sliced ass on a platter: carpassio! Although I imagine if pressed he'd also admit folks like Aquinas into the ranks of first-rate intellect.
Basically, he's just hurling thunderbolts against the literalists, fanatics, fundamentalists, etc.: all those who take dangerous ideas and make them real.
M Aurelius was probably right.
Very Well Put . . .
(#4123)though I'm not sure the Catholic Church has reduced everything to metaphor. The reality of the resurrection is still a pretty big deal. :]
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Point well taken, although not all the clergy is on board
(#4371)as to where exactly the literal ends and the symbolic begins. Baptism for example is a very symbolic "rebirth" analagous at least by implication to the resurrection, and Christ dying and being "reborn" as the Church has always been one level of the exegesis. More precisely, the exegetes often held that several levels of meaning could apply simultaneously: literal, figural (prefiguring Christ or the Church), moral (prefiguring the life of the soul), anagogic (historical homology), etc.
M Aurelius was probably right.
All True
(#4384)The meaning of the resurrection, and its symbolic reenactment in the life of the Church is varied, rich and multi-level. But the Church has not backed away, and never could back away, from the proposition that the resurrection itself was a thing that actually occurred, in history, in the way described in the Gospels.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Really nice post. (nt)
(#4124)Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so. - Bertrand Russell
Respect and Rationality
(#4134)There are few, if any, human rights more important than the right to choose and follow one's own religion, or alternatively to choose not to be religious, or to choose to be religious in some idiosyncratic way. It's as basic as the right to choose what one likes, or how to be happy.
I was "saved" and "born again" in my youth and spent a year or two of my late teens planning to become a minister. I awoke every morning with a sense of certainty and calm purpose, and those days were certainly among the happiest and fullest of my life. I envy anyone in a similar situation and not only support every person's right to seek such a state in his or her own way but urge everyone to search for it.
However, the "born again" state I was in at that time is founded in belief. I don't believe Christian doctrine anymore, and that is putting it lightly, which means I simply don't have the option to return to that frame of mind.
Although I haven't forgotten or forsaken everything that is a part of Christianity, I look at the world from a very different framework these days. I try to steer my course by making rational decisions about life, recognizing that personal rationality includes essaying to understand and honor one's own emotions and intuitions. I believe even more strongly that our government and society should be shaped by rationality.
Religions, however, tend to declare that X is right and Y is wrong not because X leads to good ends and Y to bad ends but because it is written so. Such thinking is arational and at times it is effectively anti-rational. I find the intrusion of this arational thought into the public policy arena, and even more pervasively into the definitions of socially accepted behavior, extremely frustrating. It makes me want to vent on those who bring it in--but I respect the right of the religious to remain religious too much to vent in their direction. I save the venting for having a beer with my buddies, most of whom are some shade of agnostic.
I'm not totally sure how right that choice not to vent at the religious is. It's not honest, and it helps to perpetuate the intrusion that I find distasteful. As much as I want individuals to find any route through this vale of tears to happiness, whatever that route may be, I think putting religion into a special don't-snark-on-me box is problematic. After all, isn't the point of free discourse that the truth is best developed through the sharing of as many free ideas as possible?
Maybe this is the question: do those of us who believe that religion influences our lives too heavily, and detrimentally, have a duty to act to attempt to reduce that influence? If not, why not? If so, then what kind of action is appropriate?
I can relate to this.
(#4138)Great post, you bring up alot of issues with which I can sympathize. After some though, I'm of the opinion that athiests should challenge thiests, and vice versa, in cases where one side's actions are likely to impede the other side in some way. A reactive approach is best, IMO-- I usually find proactive crusading, on either side, distasteful.
I have no problem with atheists...
(#4172)so long as they don't try to impose their atheism on others.
Where I stand
Law by metaphor
(#4183)It's one of those things the Supreme Court tends to do. The SC wants to resolve the case and make the legal principle, but when it must announce an important legal principle it likes to keep it as vague as possible. That way the actual details of what does and doesn't meet the SC's vague standard get threshed out over time by the district courts and circuit courts, and if the SC thinks the lower courts have hashed it up--or sometimes because they think the lower courts have gotten the details right and should get an approval stamp--they'll agree to hear a case on the interpretation of the original vague standard.
Since the SC wants a vague standard to start with, what better than a metaphor! That way they get to be vague, scholarly and literate all at the same time, which is basically like sex for an appellate justice.
So it's a common problem. In the end it leads to good law if the courts are good, but in the meanwhile it tortures a lot of lawyers and judges trying to litigate reality in the lower courts. Que sera.
In this particular case, I don't think lower courts actually spend time puzzling out whether "a wall of separation" exists between church and state, but rather whether (1) the government has established an official religion, or (2) whether the government has favored one religion over another (or religion over non-religion). That's a much easier proposition for legal analysis.
As for the brief implication in the article that the real wall was supposed to be between the state and the feds rather than between church and state, that's a pretty pre-14th amendment interpretation. The court has ruled that the Establishment Clause is one of the parts of the Bill of Rights incorporated into the 14th Amendment and thus made applicable to the states.
Finally, I don't find atheists to have quite the impact on the society I live in as do Christians. I don't recall having ever detected an atheist belief being imposed on me by any element of government.
When has a Christian
(#4320)been forced to disavow their religion? Or to publicly state that there is no God? I'm not sure which country you live in, but it can't be the US.
I blame it all on the Internet
It's terrible how those darn
(#6289)It's terrible how those darn scientists and atheists are always trying to impose what can be taught in religious studies, ban hetrosexual marriage marriages, interfere in family decisions regarding life support, refuse medication based on athiest convictions, etc etc etc...
I will never understand why christians feel so persecuted simply because someone reverses the age old deluded argument on them.
I can't say that I know
(#4182)quite what reviews of the Guesthouse Inn and Suites in Aberdeen, VA have to do with Dawkins, but for those interested, the New York Times review is here.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
Yikes.
(#4270)Now that's funny. Guess I screwed up the link, eh?
I'm going steelhead fishing this weekend on a river over on the Olympic Peninsula, and was looking for a place to stay with my boys. Musta messed up the copy/paste. Sorry.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
No worries.
(#4278)Just be sure to add your own review when you get back.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
I like Dawkins ...
(#4191)... I have a copy of The selfish gene and the Blind Watchmaker.
But I have to agree with you on this point. Even though I'll willingly concede that he's completely right on religion, and I'm an atheist myself, I just can't muster his kind of contempt for religion. Religions of all types are one of the great sources of artistic inspiration for humanity, and I fear it would be a dull and dry world that was populated entirely by atheists. Without religion, there would be no Mozart's 'Requiem', no Sistine Chapel, no mythology of any kind, no ghost stories, no Halloween, no Christmas carols, and no occultists (I think I'd miss the occultists the most).
I think much of Dawkins animosity is really personal though, having spent decade fighting creationists on the issue of evolution, so I'm not going to condemn him for it.
I
(#4231)don't think I'm against Dawkins because he is an atheist, agnostic or whatever. I'm just kinda' anti-d@#%head!
I had discovered a great secret. That everyone loves themselves more than they love anybody else. And if I wanted them to love me, I better be like THEM!... Ken Nordine
Ill drink to that! NT
(#4234).
The K Codes explained HERE.
I'll Tell You
(#4303)when I stop trying to think those big thoughts that are just above my raisin' anyways, that's pretty much where I end up too.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Edit/Link Fix -- Technical Point
(#4280)In response to Hobbesist's having pointed out a link error that I'd made when I initially posted this (see his comment #4182), I went into the "edit" function to fix it. When I hit "submit," it reposted it, but as a diary, rather than on the front page (where MA had moved it). I certainly don't feel strongly about its location, but I thought the technical folks might like to know that that's how it ended up back in diaryland.
That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Same thing happened to me
(#4290)When I made a small edit on the "Roll Call!" thread. It became non-sticky and one of the mods had to re-sticky it.
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
That's because you guys didn't use the magic word! nt
(#4321)I blame it all on the Internet
And what is...the MAGIC word...
(#4351)...Doctor Venkman.
Guard, protect and cherish your land, for there is no afterlife for a place that started out as Heaven.
I collect molds, spores and fungus.
(#4379)- Egon
Another side point to add ...
(#4589)I can understand where Dawkins is coming from. In truth, I suspect there are many scientists and "agnostics" who merely admit the possibility of God out of fear of the social repercussions of stating what they really think. This is why I consider myself an atheist and not an agnostic. If I called myself an agnostic, I'd know it was a lie, because I really don't have any significant doubt on the matter, and I'd know I was only doing it to avoid offending/antagonizing religious believers. I'd know that I was being a coward, just for the sake of avoiding social disapproval, and I couldn't stand that.
I suspect Dawkins is in a similar position. Not only has he been out in front arguing against religion, he's also behind the 'Selfish Gene', which has come in for it's own share of attacks. He's gone out on a limb fighting creationists, and suffered public attacks from all sorts of directions, where others have been cowed into hiding in the ivory tower (so-to-speak). Basically, he's out there fighting the good fight while others are busy currying favor with his opponents, which makes them kind of traitors to him. Or at least, I think he feels somewhat betrayed by other scientists that he feels are privately atheists, but are too afraid to come out of the closet. (This of how "out" gays feel, or used to feel, about closeted gays for analogy - there's a similar kind of contempt there).
Well...
(#4643)...this is certainly not my case.
As a child I used to be an atheist. Then as my knowledge of astronomy and physics grew, I became an agnostic around age 11 or so. The last thing I was concerned with was winning a popularity contest. Atheism simply didn't square anymore. Once I learned of the Big Bang and the implications of any solution to the problem (open, closed, repeating, or whatever), I could no longer be certain a creator did not exist. The knowlege I have gathered since has reinforced this view.
I am certain, and I make no secret of it, that the Bible, while being a key historical artifact of western civilization, is most definitely not the word of God. If God exists, no human knows what it is or its motivations. Though, in my view, if anybody has even an approximate and partial notion about God, it's the Buhdists. It certainly isn't the Christians, Jews, or Muslims.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
What do you mean by "a creator"?
(#4657)The thing is, if there is "something" out there, it needent be an intelligent being that resembles, even remotely, the being called "God" in most religions. Most importantly, there still is no need for an afterlife with a judgement of right and wrong, and no reason to think it listens to our prayers. In which case, why should we care whether this creator exists or not?
While the Taoists might seem closer to the truth, they only seem closer because of the vagueness inherent in an inability to define what the heck they are talking about.
Why should I care about anything?
(#4695)Why should I care about whether God exists or not? Why should I care about quarks and neutrinos? If all I cared about was stuff with direct consequence to me, I wouldn't even be talking to you.
I do, however. I don't know why. Though I wonder about that too:
I wonder why, I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why.
I wonder why, I wonder why.
-- R P Feynman
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Quit wondering.
(#4775)Your ancestors couldn't be sure what sort of berries/roots/game or whatnot was over the next hillock, but the answer was often enough "better ones than in this used up valley". The ones that wondered, went.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Those might be your ancestors...
(#4820)Mine looked at the sky, wondered about it for a long time, studied it. Got "you are wasting your time while we gather berries" looks from the others, figured out the seasons, and went on to make agriculture possible.
Forget the berries. They were never where the action was.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Heh.
(#4826)Even better. Either way, though, I don't think wondering about stuff, even stuff that isn't obviously of immediate value, is strange or difficult to explain. If the payoff shows up often enough, the behavior is adaptive. Given that the status quo was usually a Malthusian equilibrium of expansion to existing resources followed by a die-off, better the devil you don't know.
"Unfortunately the universe doesn't agree with me. We'll see which one of us is still standing when this is over." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I'll rephrase that ..
(#5092)... it would be interesting to know what caused the universe to exist from the standpoint of curiosity or science, but I'm not going to pray to it or arrange my life around what someone says are its rules.
Well...
(#5254)Neither am I.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Well ...
(#5282)... I'm just trying to point out what Dawkin's perspective is here. He'd probably be nearly annoyed by position, although I won't call myself an agnostic, I'm not exactly arguing against religion either.
From his point of view, you are giving aid and comfort to people who think you *should* pray to and obey the "whatever" that may or may not have created the universe, and would probably force you to if they had the power.
Personally, I don't think that the religious right is nearly as powerful as it's made out to be, so I see no particular need to take a strong anti-religious stance. I suspect Dawkins feels that religion is a lot more insidious than I do, and that the scientific establishment has a moral obligation to combat it.
I think religion can be...
(#5287)...pretty insidious too.
But, religion serves a number of purposes and fulfills basic human needs both as a social insitution and for individuals who require handholding to go through life. Such an edifice cannot be demolished based on smug, simplistic tooth fairy analogies. You've got to first position yourself in terms of the needs of the species and work from there.
And yes, I said species. Religion is a pervasive product of the human experience. I'm not a fan of it but it is there for a reason, and so I cannot advocate removing it unless I'm good and ready to come up with a replacement.
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
I generally agree with you ...
(#5291)... though I don't just think it's good for moderating society, I think it's an enriching aspect of human culture - all those rituals, myths, icons, churches, etc. etc. There's something about belief that seems to produce lots and lots of beautiful things. Of course, Nietzche produced 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', which is a thing of beauty too (IMO), so atheism isn't totally devoid of the potential for artistic inspiration, but still.
Nevertheless, I dont doubt that there are a lot of closeted atheists out there who just pretend to be agnostic to avoid facing uncomfortable social situations, and maybe that makes it harder to get around to the process of finding a replacement for religion.
Or maybe not, hey, maybe keeping a low profile and letting society evolve on it's own is the best bet.
Closet atheists...
(#5296)...don't hide in agnosticism. We are not popular with the religiously inclined, or accepted, even mentioned, in polite company. You are either a believer, a lapsed believer, or an atheist. However, the notion of a permanently uncertain person is hard to fit into a neat category.
So, closet atheists hide in religion. Where else?
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Yes they do ...
(#5298)... I've known too many closet atheists, I guess.
It's a lot easier to fake doubt than to fake belief.
I'll take your word for it....
(#5350)But I must say, every time I see a televangelist asking for money, I think: "Well, there's an atheist hiding in plain sight right there..."
I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.
Aid and Comfort
(#5356)The doctrine that you should denounce every belief held by your enemies, simply because it is their belief, is itself a dangerous and tragically limiting way to approach life.
M Aurelius was probably right.
It would seem so to me... NT
(#5358)The K Codes explained HERE.