Topic: The problem with atheism. - page 38. (Read 38463 times)

Never thought about it this way, you may be right

I'll take quantum entanglement for ∞ please Alex...   

welp I always end up saying things i regret on religious debates.
Now I feel like a hypocrite...

Sorry, I cannot see what that has to do with atheism.

I rest my case.

On the contrary.
Atheists tend to reject the concept of sacrifice.
They want everything and the want it now before they die and rot in the ground.

Why would believing in God make you a better person? There is one answer: fear. Deep down, those who believe in God are afraid that their "bad" behavior is being observed and will be punished. It's the exact same relationship that young children have with their parents.

Rejecting God is the final stage of growing up. It represents your acceptance of full responsibility for your actions, independent of any reward or punishment from a higher power.

Great thread great answers.

About absolution, I'm no catholic i.e. no sins, no hell and not a helluva lot preoccupied with heaven i.e. European protestant.

Here, I fixed it:

Atheist: I don't believe in gods because no evidence supporting such hypothesis was presented to me.

Christian: There's only one true God, and a holy spirit and Jesus and they all are watching you masturbate and you're going to Hell, also a talking snake! And angels...

On the contrary, it looks more like this:

Weak Atheism: There probably is not a God
Strong Atheism: There is no God

Agnostic Theism: There probably is a God
Gnostic Theism: There is a God

So as we can see, claiming that there is no God or that there is a God as absolute certainty is always irrational, for we cannot know this.  OTOH, we can argue whether what's more likely, while keeping our doubts that either must be true.

The problem, then, is the fact that the big three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) are Gnostic religions, as they claim God created the world and space and everything in it.  If you will argue the existence of God at a rational level, I recommend taking a stance with Deism.

The burden of proof is on those making the positive claim.   If it isn't, then give me proof of why every other religion's God is false and yours is the true one.  And a book is not proof of anything, btw


Can't speak for other atheists but I have never committed a crime.  Don't screw around personally, but am fine with consenting adults doing whatever they want.   Treat other people the way I would like to be treated because that's the only fair thing to do.  We are all equal in this life and no-one is above anyone else.

It amuses me all this talk of ethics.  Anecdotal only, but personally, I have found the atheists in my life to be generally far more ethical than the Christians.  Perhaps it's because Christians assume they can absolve their sins every week in the confession box?

Atheist: there is no god
Christian: maybe there is no god

Which belief is the most rational? Believing in the "no god" is also faith.

Nothing in physics or evolutionary biology speaks against  the "God concept", but maybe I'm not the typical Christian.

Job didn't renounce God even if God tried to win a bet against the devil. In other words believing in a god does not require the existence of a god that makes sense to the follower. Faith does not require proof  as science doesn't require belief in a higher meaning or purpose. The are mutually complementary opposites.

Maybe monotheism is the pinnacle of abstraction for the primate with too much brain that over interpret patterns in nature where no patterns exist?

When the VMAP photo of the cosmic background radiation was published, some scientists saw some concentric ripples in the image suggesting quantum effects in the earliest universe still visible today. It took a statistical analysis of the image to settle the discussion; there were no ripples in the image. A lot of people seek meaning in science, looking for hints of a purpose with or explanation of human existence. We all fall for that, atheist or not.

I can't really tell if my faith is a product of my biology or cultural tradition, but I'm sure that institutionalised religion (churches) is the evolutionary result of a basic urge in humans for meaning in their personal life on an existential level.
If that is a projection of a primitive instinct in monkeys  that have discovered writing so be it, but even that doesn’t exclude the possibility of a god as a natural phenomenon, even if that phenomenon created itself!

Believing in God makes sense to me on many levels making me a better person in relation to others, which is good for my local community my family  and myself.

What I would like to hear from any atheist is not only an explanation to why they are right but what their faith gives them in terms of self conception, how they view others i.e. are atheists humanists in another way, do they feel the need to protect others integrity in general, do they do charity? Do they feel they have a responsibility for others in general as would any believer?

Do an atheist think about if their ethics of right or wrong is distinguishable from say Christians?

Do they catch themselves, once in a while, urging for meaning or is life just a crazy party on top of a burning building?

Do atheists screw around more, as from a biological viewpoint being a guy, multiple female partners makes more sense than trying to raise a few children and working hard on transferring your values onto them? Do atheists disregard ideologies to a greater extent and how do they defend their values because if you are living in the western world a lot of ethics and social norms are rooted in Christian tradition, so do they need to find other arguments for say civil rights?

For me, atheism is not a choice about philosophy. It is simply that there is no evidence of Gods. I am an atheist for the same reason I do not believe in unicorns.

May the Allahcoin be with you, always.

I see no need for a higher power in the universe.
In fact if it excisted, the universe would be pretty diffrent from the one we have since there would be a "higher power" that could change the law of nature by answering prayers or just having a bad day.
Yes there might be more evolved life than man kind out there, but so far there is no prof of it.
They don't affect me in daily life so I don't see the need to "beleave" in them untill we find them and can prove that they excist.
As for a God. I cant see any reason for one to excist. I can see far more reasons for one not to excist.
When I'm dead, I'm dead. for me there is no afterlife, reincarnation or whatever.
I have one shot at life and will try to make the best of it.
Live forever sounds horrible and eternal bliss will get pretty boring after a few decades.

At this point Bobby has taken in new information that he didn't have before and so the choice may be different, depending on how Bobby is "programmed".  In this case, you say if he learns of the prediction he will do the opposite.  But if he doesn't learn of it then he won't.  Therefore, it's still deterministic.   You are talking of two different situations with different inputs.  The first is one where Bobby does not have knowledge of the prediction.  And the second is one where he does.

Just because something is impossible to predict doesn't mean it isn't deterministic.  It just means that there is inadequate information to make an accurate prediction.  Which will likely always be the case.  If you think about all the information that has to be gathered in one moment of time in order to accurately predict the next moment or any future moment it will probably always be impossible.  Maybe not, who knows, but certainly impossible at this current moment in time.  

We can predict large macro things, like where a planet will be at any given moment but even that may not be correct if some (also deterministic) galactic event disrupts it.   It's all about information and the ability to gather it.

No.

The simple (and unsatisfying) answer is we're dealing with infinities:

"The halting problem is theoretically decidable for linear bounded automata (LBAs) or deterministic machines with finite memory. A machine with finite memory has a finite number of states, and thus any deterministic program on it must eventually either halt or repeat a previous state..." --wikip

The longer (and equally unsatisfying) answer is: Godel's incompleteness theorems.

A curt (insulting and unsatisfying) answer is:  The question is no more interesting than a strange loop, "This statement is false."

A possibly more satisfying, though pretty meh answer is:

"if universal causation is true, -> there are no uncaused events -> all events are caused -> Bobby's choice to type "cat" was caused, Q.E.D."

Except you are dead wrong.  Let me give you an example.  You are a really smart person, just like you are today. (I'm not being facetious)  You live in an age before microscopes, and you see flies and beetles arise from horse manure.  You have examined horse manure, and found there was nothing alive in it - and then, suddenly, from that pile of horse manure, things come alive.  

You are RATIONAL and LOGICAL to conclude that spontaneous creation occurs.

That is only one example, but you get my point...

Basically the moral of this story is that mechanistic 19th century philosophical atheism is really a joke.  Kind of like math before chaos theory.  I can talk circles around it just for fun.  Frankly it's smarter to start with a blank sheet of paper.

You ignore the second part of my post, which deals with the need to acknowledge the likelihood of smarter-than-man intelligence and higher levels of consciousness in the universe, whether as a broad standard, or in the past, present or future.  This is the 'general case', someone could of course extend it to include 'the supreme being' if they wanted.

The contrary view is a curious one in which the universe revolves around man on earth, the only known and verifiable conscious thinking beings.  

Sort of like it did before Galileo, but only repeated today in the opposite context.  But who then, are now the high priests?

well if something is deterministic you should be able to predict its outcome shouldn't you?

4real or just contrarian?