More atheism addressed.

This was my response to an atheist who believed that there was no God or the supernatural because:
"As far as we can determine:

* There is a physical universe apart from our perceptions
* It operates under natural laws, which are absolute"

I responded:

Quote :

I accept absolute natural law, but it can be traced back only to the Big Bang and no further. Beyond that we have no information at all nor any inkling of its cause. To specify, based on this total lack of information, that natural law must be derived from preceding natural law is illogical.

I think the beauty of this dead end is profound, and just maybe the whisper of design.

Until we can make sense of what preceded our universe, we should keep our minds open. Even God, if He exists, could be explicable--naturally.

There's not even any "proof" that there are natural "laws" or that they are "absolute". The "laws of nature" may in fact just be more like well worn in "habits of nature".

If they are well worn in, they've been beating the same path since the BB.

Like evolution and relativity, natural law stands on the strength of the massive amount of evidence for it (more so even than the other two), and without any credible evidence whatever against it. So yeah, not technically proven, just all but. I wouldn't bet a penny to a trillion dollars against it (them).

Yeah, let us know his reply

He would normally have responded by now, so I'm forced to assume that I left him a quivering mass of jello barely able to breath much less respond.

How many known natural laws are there any ways? I think it would be cool to list all the known natural laws as a Deist Ten Commandments. Thou shalt be conservation of energy! Thou shalt be gravity! Thou shalt be inertia! Thou shalt be electromagnetism! Thou shalt be an equal and opposite reaction to every action! Thou shalt be a cause preceding every effect! Thou shalt be the speed of light as the speed limit of the Universe! Maybe make a t-shirt and at the end of the list have ... to show that there is many more to still be discovered? Now that I thought about it I'm going to stop calling them natural laws and start calling them natural commandments to show my belief that it is obvious that laws have a law giver.

"OBEY GRAVITY! IT'S THE LAW!"

Hmmm, interesting tangent. We'd need probably 3 groups. The Objective Natural Law Commandments, The Moral Commandment, and The Subjective Commandments which each individual would have to reveal from God/Nature/the Ethos to him/herself and would apply only to him/herself.

We don't want to give the impression that we believe God is hard and cold and only deals in absolutes.

Paineful,

I get what you're saying but that would be some very fine print for a t-shirt.

My idea isn't to make a list of laws that people are suppose to follow like the real Ten Commandments and make it sound like God is cold or anything. It's just to make the point that since the universe has natural commandments it must have a lawgiver to give them and to show that Deism is a belief in God based on reason. It would just be a nerdy science shirt with the natural laws on them displayed as natural commandments. It don't even have to have the word Deism on it. It can just be called The Natural Commandments. The point of it would be to make people think and not to make some kind of Deist dogma. It's just something I think would be fun to make and I would love to make a shirt like that.

Anyway, I got the basic idea of what you're saying but please explain more.

Schizophretard wrote:

Paineful,

It's just to make the point that since the universe has natural commandments it must have a lawgiver to give them and to show that Deism is a belief in God based on reason.

Yes, God made the universe based on natural law and reason so that we could discern the one moral commandment--honor the rights of others to their life, liberty and property equally with your own. But God doesn't help us deduce it, and an atheist can deduce it and live by the same thing. That being the case, and given that the Big Bang might only have been spontaneous combustion, the moral commandment could be only the moral imperative.

IOW, any apparent breach in the firewall God has installed between us and Him, will likely be illusory. The hardest part of a reasoned approach to God is that we can't know that He exists.

I agree with your one moral commandment. It sounds like the golden rule but more specific. I disagree that God doesn't help us deduce it. The reason atheists can deduce it is because they live in the same universe and use the same God given gift of reason as we do. The same universe that was designed by God. The universe is the Deist Bible and atheists read it too. They just interpret some of the verses different. The only people that have trouble deducing it are people who give up their reason to believe other Bibles.

It's true that we can't know that he exists but we also can't even know if anyone other than ourselves exists. I don't know you exist. I just have absolute faith that you do. The only thing that I "know" exists is myself.

Quote :

God made the universe based on natural law and reason so that we could discern the one moral commandment--honor the rights of others to their life, liberty and property equally with your own.

Ah, so our God is libertarian.

Actually there's much to be said for that. There are certainly a lot worse commandments. But I would add a very subtle distinctin is that God made the universe on natural law and reason so that the evolution of sentient life could eventually lead a sentient being to logically discern the meaning of life and its implications, in the form of a statement such as that.

I think God made the universe because he was bored, kinda like a halfassed craft project that is now sitting on his great cosmic shelf gathering dust and slowly degrading.

If god is concerned with the rights of others to their life, liberty, and property than why did he create earthquakes, disease, mental illness, black widow spiders, Grizzly Bears, and great white sharks?

We humans take ourselves so seriously, and without any reasonable claim for doing it other than our own anthropocentric generalizations about a universe we are largely ignorant of.

Well that's interesting, Uriah.

It's kind of another position.

Kinda like inbetween atheism and deism.

And that is ....

That there is a god.

But we're inconsequential.

We're like the carrier pigeon.

Or the wooly mammoth.

I mean what the hell will the carrier pigeon and the wooly mammoth have contributed to existence when all is said and done?????

I don't discount that Uriah.

And I don't think, in the end, we're any more consequential than them.

Or do I?

But if there's any key, it may be in sentience. Ever evolving sentience.

So I'm not saying that we're important.

But I'm saying that ever evolving sentience might be a key.

Might not.

We may be an accident.

But if ever evolving sentience is ...

A) just an accident ...

or

B) just an unintendted byproduct of a bored God.

Then, my friend, you will ultimately be right.

Joke was on us all the time.

My friend, I've known far too many humans to believe in "sentience".

Sentience is a superhero.

You do not believe in sentience.

That is, self authored action.

Is that an illusion.

Humans at this moment could very easily cause the sixth mass extinction. I'm sure PA's right. We wouldn't succeed. But we have ethe power. WE could, if we cooperated, set up nukes at strategic spots, and really, I think, create a sixth mass extinction, the likes that only calamotous meteors or massive world wide volcanic activity has previously caused. There are no animals with this capability. This requires such purposeful action, all self driven, that to deny "sentience" behind such actions is to beg for another reasonable explanation.

And that explanation would be?

If not sentience, what is the quality that allows to not only contemplate it, but to carry it out??????

Sentience is just used as a term to describe that we are self aware. That we realize we exist, and have separated our feelings from our perceptions and thoughts.

Most people, probably 99 out of every 100 I've ever met make no distinction between feeling - instinctual emotion - and reasoned perception, or abstract thought.

In the end, I see sentience as a nice power word that is casually tossed about when attempting legitimize out anthropocentric view of the universe and our place in it, a kind of simplistic circular syllogism:
We are self aware
We are the only animal that is self aware
Therefore we must be special

In actuality, most people are not self aware, they look to a myriad forms of authority and dogma to tell them who they are, what they think, and what they should do.


Sentience is a superhero - an archetype that is a metaphor for what we are capable of, but not a factual representation of what we are.

Quote :

In actuality, most people are not self aware, they look to a myriad forms of authority and dogma to tell them who they are, what they think, and what they should do.

A theory to be disproven, only needs one example. Is that not correct. You cannot make a theory "on probably 99 out of every 100."

You cannot use the argument of, what is it again, beer, bread and circuses.

Because those arguments do not explain Plato, Einstein, Hawking.

It also doesn't answer or give any reasonable explanation of the seemingly increasing complexity of life which is reasonably suggested by the fossil record.

At best, you've only proven that sentience can most certainly be latent.

I think this forum is an example of its flowring

Helium wrote:

Quote :

In actuality, most people are not self aware, they look to a myriad forms of authority and dogma to tell them who they are, what they think, and what they should do.

A theory to be disproven, only needs one example. Is that not correct. You cannot make a theory "on probably 99 out of every 100."

You cannot use the argument of, what is it again, beer, bread and circuses.

I'm merely making an argument based on a reasonable interpretation of all available evidence, the same as you. There's no certainty in any argument.

Helium wrote:

Because those arguments do not explain Plato, Einstein, Hawking.

In actuality my position better supports the idea that only a scant few individuals will demonstrate true sentience, while the vast quotidian mass goes on oblivious the reason, imagination, and thought, than an argument that every person could be as smart, or learned, as Plato, Einstein, or Hawking if just they applied themselves, worked harder, and awoke their latent sentience.

Helium wrote:

It also doesn't answer or give any reasonable explanation of the seemingly increasing complexity of life which is reasonably suggested by the fossil record.

Um, I don't know... evolution?

Helium wrote:

At best, you've only proven that sentience can most certainly be latent.

I said quite the opposite.

Helium wrote:

I think this forum is an example of its flowring

If that be the case, then why does this forum have only 46 registered members, of which only 4 or 5 post regularly, yet wrestlingforum.com has 176,087 regular members?

This forum proves that we are the exception, not the rule.

Uriah,

You asked," If god is concerned with the rights of others to their life, liberty, and property than why did he create earthquakes, disease, mental illness, black widow spiders, Grizzly Bears, and great white sharks?"

The evolution of our species was driven by our ancestors overcoming natural evils such as these. So, if natural evils never existed then natural goods like human life wouldn't either. You can't have good without evil, light without darkness, and love without hate.

Yes, you're right Schizo, however my point was that because so many humans have died such tragic, meaningless, unfair deaths at the hands of God's created natural world, and since it has required an organic adaptation to our environment then it must follow logically that this God had no special intention for us whatsoever.

If that was the case then we would have been created, in the Biblical fashion, ex nihilo and in a pristine, perfected form. Evolution, and the ever increasing complexity of life on Earth tells us that we, right now - the human animal - is but a flyspeck on the windshield of the universe.

Sometime, 100 million years from now, the new sentient masters of the earth will look up at the sky and ponder these very same questions we are, perhaps they will reach one tentacle up and stroke their brow, or carapace, or jelly-sac, or whatever, you get my drift. And they will say, "We are alone in this Universe! Surely our God must have made it for us!" Then they will build great sea-temples, concoct intricate and dramatic rites, and create a culture around the story of the Great-Squid-In-The-Sky.

And we humans will be lucky to have left a fossilized leg bone as our legacy.

Quote :

If that be the case, then why does this forum have only 46 registered members, of which only 4 or 5 post regularly, yet wrestlingforum.com has 176,087 regular members?

This forum proves that we are the exception, not the rule.

Ah ya got me there.

Just one point. I don't think there's any dispute among anyone here that we are indeed just a part of nature, no more no less. I don't think anyone has a contrary view, so proving that humans are in fact nothing special may be quite controversial, say in a christian or muslim forum.

But 'round these parts it's a given. You don't have to prove it.

We accept it.

Painefull Truth wrote:

God made the universe based on natural law and reason so that we could discern the one moral commandment--honor the rights of others to their life, liberty and property equally with your own.

Well, I was originally responding to painefull's quote above.

My point being we don't know anything about God, what this God wants, or even that the universe is ultimately based on what we perceive as natural law.

Even still, there is just as much reason behind my position as there is behind his. Ultimately, none of us knows diddly-squat.

Uriah wrote:

Painefull Truth wrote:

God made the universe based on natural law and reason so that we could discern the one moral commandment--honor the rights of others to their life, liberty and property equally with your own.

Well, I was originally responding to painefull's quote above.

My point being we don't know anything about God, what this God wants, or even that the universe is ultimately based on what we perceive as natural law.

Even still, there is just as much reason behind my position as there is behind his. Ultimately, none of us knows diddly-squat.

We have over 13 billion years worth of evidence for natural law, and no evidence against it.

We may not know whether God exists or not, but we can deduce from this massive amount of evidence some reasonable idea of what God would want--the first thing that we need to determine (without His help) is how to choose good over evil.

My point is that all of our evidence is limited to one infinitesimally small sector of the universe: Earth and our small sphere of operation.

We are already discovering that Gravity operates very differently in deep, interstellar, space than it does on Earth or in our Solar System.

Study of quantum mechanics shows us that those immutable laws of nature do not apply to the sub-atomic level.

When we take what we observe here on Earth, and by rote apply it as a universal law we are being quite short-sighted. There is no reason to assume that what goes on in the tiny bubble of a solar system is not simply an evolving phenomenon itself. What we call immutable laws, are immutable because we've never witnessed them behaving differently, but I find it a little arrogant on our part to think that because we've observed the universe for a few hundred years, we can declare anything with certainty.