Taking the fight to the real issue

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Eh, honestly, I am not much concerned.

1) There are questions on whether Christianity actually supports creation ex nihilo, which if it does not, is damaging, if not fatal, to efforts to use cosmological arguments. There is a lot of scholarly argument that Christianity does not support creation ex nihilo. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... demic.html

2) Honestly, I think that there is a lot of room for alternative theories of the beginning of reality. As it stands, I kind of agree with Dennett's skepticism towards creation speculation, as I do see it as crazy advanced cosmology. Not only that, but I also hold that the universe always existed, in that I regard space-time as something like a 4 dimensional block.

Well this kind of puts a new spin on the idea that religious people are the ones that don't accept science.

No, it doesn't. The origins of the universe and abiogenesis are both places where scientists will say, 'we don't have enough information to know the truth, YET; there is room for multiple hypotheses.'
Deists will look at the very same places and say, 'God did it, we can stop looking.'
Fundamentalists look at everything and say, 'Your data is false, God did it, stop looking and forget what you've already found.'

"The origins of the universe and abiogenesis are both places where scientists will say, 'we don't have enough information to know the truth, YET; there is room for multiple hypotheses.' "

I will agree, real scientists will so say. I do not doubt some do so say. Would that they all would. But I have met and long dealt with too many who where the scientist's badge and do the Green Monkey on anyone who utters a hypothesis which is not on the bouncer's list.

Wane of the gods topic

Congrats on your sobriety, Lee. (I thought I would comment long before I had finished reading this entire thread.) I feel the same about being smoke free for thirty years (though your sobriety is much more difficult to maintain, as any systemic substance abuser would say).

Some of us need that higher power, and some, like me, do not. I look for answers within myself, and I have found many, as I have faith in my ability to overcome adversity. Right now, I am battling problems of a private nature not involving a systemic substance abuse, but I have no need of a "higher power" defined as god, though this is clearly best for you.

A rational, levelheaded approach is what I have relied upon for many years. Random changes can also assist, though of course these are not certain. However, I persevere, and things do get better over time. If the problem does not get entirely solved, then the journey was certainly worth it. Would I do it again differently, one might ask. My answer, after careful consideration, is no, as this problem might present itself entirely differently, and so a different appproach might be needed.

The founders of AA had a good approach for the sort of problem that alcoholism is, but a different approach was undertaken for the families of those affected by alcohol abuse. AA was also founded at a time when religion was still factor in the average lives of citizens.
AA can be adapted to different religions, and by extension to no religion. "Higher power" could be redefined to let the individual affected to see beyond his own suffering and problems, to understand humanity with compassion and empathy.

I grew up in an alcoholic home, and have never abused alcohol myself. Just seeing what it did to my family turned me off any substance that would cloud my conciousness, and affect others. I also understand that not everyone can adopt the approach that I did, and continue to practice, and this is my point: Find the approach that works, whether it be god, some other religion, some higher power outside oneself, however solving problems works for you.

Now I will go back and finish reading the thread.

Not really, I regard the 4 dimensional block as scientific.

Even further, cosmology is relatively speculative as a science, particularly in comparison to most other scientific fields. It is not bizarre to find it more questionable. Especially given that the conclusion of the Kalam cosmological argument isn't scientific.

I was not disputing your position on the 4 dimensional block. Rather I was taking issue with your advocating that the universe has always existed. The latter position has been totally discredited by science, not in theory but in observable fact. The Kalam argument based on science, you have said yourself that religion should not try and prove God in the scientific journals, that this would be pseudoscience. I agree, but philosophy can still be convincing if it is based in fact and taken to a conclusion through logic.

In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin proved that any universe that is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have an absolute beginning. Their proof holds regardless of the physical description of the very early universe, which still eludes scientists, and applies even to any wider multiverse of which our universe might be thought to be a part. Vilenkin pulls no punches:

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. (Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 176.)

If you hold to a position that is clearly contradictory to modern science, how can you justify your supposition that atheism is based on pure reason?

Sewing the seeds of god topic

God It!
No god in the melon, though there's one in the toast,
No god in the rockface, yet belief in the Host.
A god swings on the gallows, to some it's a ghost.
No god in the mountains, yet seen on the coast.

A choice.

Not so. If the GPS system were run without the relativistic corrections locations would be in error by dozens of kilometers at the end of the 24 hour clock period. The relativistic corrects from both special and general relativity must be used with the GPS to keep it honest.

ruveyn

The concept that this universe must have a beginning depends critically on the concept that the term "universe" is extremely limited to what we observe in our current environment. Two obvious proposals on the nature of a larger universe than we have discovered so far is one, that our four dimensional universe is merely a cross section of a larger matrix of, perhaps, eleven dimensions which we find not available for observation. This would include alternate paths for our consciousness as indicated in the uncertainty principle. Viewed from a five dimensional perspective this multiverse is a solid tapestry of variations. of our four dimensional continuum. A second possibility is that our particular multiverse exists in an ecology of many universes unconnected except as to their original budding off points from other complex different universes and this original nexus is what we view as the big bang - a kind of network of "sausages" with no interconnections but the twist of time and space at the initial point. There is, of course, no sausage manufacturer,or God, necessary in this concept. These are only two primitive ideas and there must be many, many more for anybody with even a crumb of reasonable imagination.

"Not so. If the GPS system were run without the relativistic corrections locations would be in error by dozens of kilometers at the end of the 24 hour clock period. The relativistic corrects from both special and general relativity must be used with the GPS to keep it honest."

Not denying in any way, but to be fair, you could cut some slack for those backward populations - like me - for whom the GPS system is not part of everyday life.

I still look to see what side of the car the sun is on. Which is pretty much pre-Newtonian.

By 'day-to-day life,' I meant the functioning of a human brain keeping its body alive from day to day, not relatively high technology. One could up the ante by referring to string theory as easily. The point is that what appears simple to human perceptions - such as the progression of time - is not always so as one goes deeper and deeper into reality. When you go deeper, time is a vector.

My experience with atheism and many other forms of non-believers has been confirmed in this discussion thread. There are two sorts of people in this world, those who do want to believe and those who clearly don’t. The first group is open minded and can be convinced by rational argument, the second group cannot. They will engage in conversation on the topic, but do not have any interest in listening. Some from this second group are outright hostile and those people can be seen here too.

Those who do not believe will do the kinds of things we have seen here, they will demand a level of evidence only to be found in mathematics in all mattes of your argument and have a level of scepticism that is so low that they will deny mathematical truths in order to not be proven wrong. They will defy logic and reason. Many of the so called new atheists even seem to take pleasure in not being convinced; as if even the most compelling case is just a challenge to their predispositions. Peter Hitchens is right when he states that: “new atheists are much more likely to be suddenly ambushed in the heart by poetry, than they ever are likely to be converted by reasoned argument. I tell the story because this is very much how I regard the new atheists ... self satisfied, arrogant, intolerant (and) completely resistant to any kind of outside argument and contemptuous of it.”

Intolerant, self-satisfied, arrogant and resistant to outside argument; isn’t that how you try to portray religion. Are you not exactly what you hate? What have you gained by not believing?

All I can say is that faith does not have to be like this, you can love discovery, god and humanity all at the same time. One must not just two of those three. As you draw closer to God, he will draw closer to you. As it stands at the moment, many here have just closed their hearts and gained nothing.

Rational people do not want to believe anything. They have to be convinced to believe over all objections. Then they can place some trust in their understandings. People who want to believe are gullible.

Umm.... I am not really sure that you can actually argue that "the universe always existing" has been disproven, particularly given that the possibilities are probably endless. Like I said, I don't trust the outcomes of cosmology.



Honestly, I am not even sure I really hold that position. I haven't checked, but I doubt that I've been that strong of an advocate of it. I probably "promoted it" under the guise of promoting a skepticism towards a major premise of the Kalam. I don't really know. I don't really care. I just don't really regard the Kalam as that plausible. I'd just take the infinite universe idea BEFORE the Kalam. Now, you can say that this is "unscientific", but the problem is a question of greater coherence. It could be that all of our answers are on their face implausible.

That being said, I would have to guess that any disproof of a multiverse would have to be contingent upon a mathematical model of it. These models can always be disputed on various grounds. However, really, my position is probably more that the Kalam is not correct than that any particular other model is correct.

You know, I am glad that you have considered yourself one of the "rational people".

Now, 91, I think I've pointed out a major problem to you in the past, that problem is the problem of evil. I don't think you've ever really shown this to be false. Now the issue is that if one argues from the viewpoint of coherence, then even if you have a good argument on one end, if there is a lot of better arguments standing against it on the other end, then one should side with the better arguments against. What I am going to say is that the abstract elements of cosmology really don't strike me as more convincing than my own experiences of a world that I consider to be grossly less than optimal, even though I believe the supposed being you hold to strikes me as incompatible with the details of this, for many reasons.

As for the issue of mathematics, honestly, what I really distrust might distrust is metaphysical philosophical argumentation. This is not new. Hume is noted for holding that all argumentation of this form should be cast into the flames. The basic reasoning being that the kind of argumentation is often found later to be false. It is difficult to use to make sense of reality in a substantive manner. It really isn't as mathematical as it thinks it is, but really most of these arguments rely on our conceptions, and that fact that our conceptions are so flexible on these issues is a major reason why these arguments are later deemed false or uninteresting. So... I really don't see myself as INCREDIBLY dishonest here. A lot of what I am doing, at the core of it, is engaging in skepticism against most of your arguments, while finding arguments against the existence of God to be implausible. Now, I suppose that one could hold to skeptical theism against my claim, but... the problem is that I am skeptical towards skeptical theism.

Now, I am not sure where you are going to identify me as dishonest. I am not saying I am utterly honest, however, I do consider you to have your own flaws in this. You seem to have gotten better since spending more time on the forum, but still, outright claiming superiority seems pretty questionable. Even further, if I *really* think that the evidence favors a world without a god, then I can't both favor discovery and God. Now, you might say that my position on the imperfections of the universe is absurd, but the issue is that I really don't think this world has the Christians that the Bible claims there ought to be (a moderate change in charitable giving is really a drop in the bucket compared to what really ought to be seen given the scriptures), I don't think the evils of the world are what a perfectly loving God would have accepted or allowed (if one accepts compatibilism, then I see absolutely no reason why God couldn't have prevented all of these bad things, as after all, determinism gives God *great* leeway in manipulating what happens in reality, to the point of being handpuppets. However, in general, I think classical theism leads to hand-puppetry simply because God's knowledge is such that any creation he creates, he knows he is creating to have a particular outcome, it is not a question of "more or less control" but rather whether God wants a good existence or a bad one. Honestly, even though I've kind of defended atheistic ethics(note: I did so more on the grounds that my personal beliefs are separate from what atheism entails), I really deep-down have abiding skepticism towards the nature of human beings lending itself to a substantive conception of ethics in the first place. Y'see, I don't believe in selves, and this is both a matter of research and personal experience. People who experience their own minds breaking down can end up having deep questions about their commonsense ontology, as they also see it breaking down. (I don't take this place in argumentation because it isn't likely to get anywhere, people find the idea that they do not exist, to be too implausible on the surface, their experiences point to that, but mine, which I regard as more informed, tell me that it works the other way. Note: I also know that language seems to require that in practice the term "I" is used. Ways around that are unknown, as even though it would be nice to use this in a more anti-realist sense, the term "I' is usually taken to mean the Cartesian self, the man inside your head looking out. You might regard this as absurd, but I regard it as what the psychological science tells us. (which also causes me to be skeptical towards "basic mind", as God, whatever it is, is radically unlike anything that exists in seen reality. Even we, ourselves, are not really as personal as we think we are.)

PS: Finally, you also have to note that even if you reject to the behavior of some people in a group, you are still likely performing an act of poor comparison, sort of like the New Atheist-pop Christian book comparison suggested in I think another thread. Even if some atheists are bad at this, it is not as if Christians are necessarily better as a group in the population. They really don't seem to be by most atheist's judgments, which sometimes leads those atheists to the same kind of remarks. I mean, you have to recognize that I've even regarded you as seeming to be dishonest at points.