Okay ATHEISTS <rolls sleaves>

I think it's just the way that thinkers have applied the theory that was criticised as such - the idea that every parallel universe is subtly different, as if human decisions are the only ones that matter.

My point is that science has a clear responsibility to be better than religion on these matters.

 

Ignatius

Im not here to win..
Im here to pass on anything i can to people who want to pick it up.
My social life has been a fukup.. maybe i can do any small thing to make my existance meaningfull.
I have one child and reside in the shadow of her brilliance.
maybe i did one thing right.
There are no winners.. there are just people.
Maybe.. just maybe .. what we learn in this life continues.
If that is not the case than no person can say a life is wasted learning.
If something continues.. then evolution AGAIN.. wins the day.
If there is nothing.. then we had existance freely given by reality.
The greatest gift of all.
And we used it to learn..For the betterment of all people..
,for that is what i think existance is for. No mater what the path.
Christian,logic,islamic,rational,hindu or buddhist.
All is only worth anything if it leads to purpose and happiness.

Occam

 

haha yes... thank you for the lovely analogy. i'm glad we're on the same page here...

 

Control

If i get you you are speaking of human perception/observation and the collapsing of quantum fuctions through 'our' superposition.
Humans are not the only observers.
Thus our 'superposition' is a 'lesserposition'..LOL
sometimes science is ful'o'crap.

Occam

 

And we ARE. on the same page.

 

Occam,

Thanks for responding, but I'm chuckling at the moment. I was referring to the original Occam, your namesake, and not you.

I'm not here to win either. I don't regard these discussions as smackdowns or ultimate fighting championships. They are discussions. Ideally, everyone learns something from them, and I certainly feel like I'm benefitting from this discussion, and I suspect others are as well.

My use of "for the win" was probably an ill-considered remark. I simply meant that we need Occam's razor again in order to find the most parsimonious explanation.

 

this is primo next post. have to sleep.

Occam

 

That is a great visual image. I'm getting a headache thinking about the Spinoza, however. It was hard enough the first time, please no mas, no mas.

 

Thanks for a lengthy and thoughtful response to my lengthy post. I may have to take this in installments. Before I get started, I'd just like to re-state my opening line, which I must not have gotten across. I wasn't trying to give logical arguments for believing in God. I was trying to explain why, in a situation of ambiguity, I've intuitively opted for a belief in God. In other words, I think your arguments make logical sense, in a left-brained way, but I don't find them plausible. To use an analogy, which I may have used before, in the movie The Matrix, the world as it seems to us is not the world as it is. How do we know reality isn't like that--a simulated illusion run for us by evil robots? Logically we don't, but I assume it isn't. A person of critical intellect could say I have no logical basis for doing so, and that would be correct. I'm going by hunch, a.k.a., intuition. Now, getting back to your arguments:

It's not simply the fact of existence that I find remarkable, but the congruence of so many features of existence that, to our knowledge, could have been incongruent. Saying that, well then we wouldn't know about it, doesn't really strike me as a satisfactory argument. I'll give you an alternative dichotomy: either there's something like a purpose behind all this, or it's a remarkably fortunate accident. Either way, I find it miraculous.

Yes, there could, just as there could be evil robots running the simulation program. But we don't know empirically that multiverses exist. Assuming them creates an all purpose explanation that can be invoked to explain any pattern that otherwise might seem to be improbable. I know, you could say the same thing about God, but at least acknowledge that one explanation is not obviously more compelling than the other.

You are correct. It doesn't imply a divine creator, but it does raise questions how it came to be. Because according to evolutionary theory based on natural selection, any trait that does not have survival value is highly vulnerable to extinction. It seems to me that this extra intelligence, and our consciousness, is not just any trait, like the ability of my dog to hear and smell things I can't, but something that I assign particular significance to, as central to our humanity. Our ability to acquire such a high level of scientific knowledge about the universe strikes me as amazing. Bach and Mozart strike me as simply amazing. And as I think I've said before, without consciousness, all of this wonderful stuff that naturalists like Carl Sagan wax ecstatic about, would be happening without an audience. What a wonderful accident! Or is it? The Darwinian explanation of this is that it our "extra" intelligence and our consciousness are either "epiphenomenal" (a fortuitous by product of natural selection or that they have some survival functions that haven't yet been discovered. This may be true, and to attribute them to God may be another instance of worshipping the "God of Gaps". But my life is short, and I don't expect science to answer these questions in my lifetime. As I see it, I have three choices: suspend judgment, assume that it's all blind and random, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, or entertain the tentative conclusion that there's some higher pattern or purpose to it. Optimisst that I am, I'm going with choice #3.

A phrase that leaps out at me is "For all we know". It might be so, for all we know, but then again, it might not. You are correct that there are other mechanisms besides natural selection driving evolution: sexual selection (which you mnetioned), migration, genetic drift, symbiogenesis, etc. It's always possible that others may be discovered "for all we know". I won't close the door prematurely to those possibilities, but in the meantime, I see no reason to assume that what seems to me to be the remarkable fact of our existence is just ho hum accident or inevitable result of blind natural forces.

But carbon-based life forms are all we know, and science really hasn't been able to explain how they, let alone other life forms, originated.

If the competitors are parallel universes and Superstring, I don't understand why the God hypothesis is less parsimonious or plausible.

Or perhaps not.

Or it might not.

I'm familiar with the article and his book. I don't think it's necessarily more eloquent or better than what you've written. It draws on multiverses and the vastness of the universe we have to argue probabalistically that it could all have happened by chance or natural causes. I agree, from a stricly logical standpoint. But intuitively, I reject if for the reasons stated above. I'm not changing my bet. May I be excused? My brain is drained.

 

Okie

Agree

Occam

 

Thank you for the thoughtful discussion and debate. It was enjoyable and enlightening, and a good exercise too.

Of course. Stand firm. You'll either maintain it or find another path yourself. It's not likely that any one person or thing is going to influence you enough to make you do a 180. You may still be betting on the same horse 80 years from now, and that's fine.

None of us has access to "the" answer to which viewpoint is best. What's best is what's best for you.

Hell yeah. I was hoping this would end soon, as the discussion was beginning to repeat itself in places, and it has likely run its course for now, at least. I'm pretty drained too.

 

Ignatius there is such a thing that will influence you enought to do a 180 and that is psychedelics. If you take enough at once you will never see reality the same, thats what happened to me, i went from an atheist to a Buddhist aka spiritual atheist.

 

Isn't that basically saying "I saw some stuff that wasn't there and now I believe in things"?

As a humanist, I don't understand why the existence of Heaven, Hell, nirvana or karma should change the way anyone behaves.

 

No, you really just see things from a new perspective and realize it's all the same.

As a free thinker, I don't see why anyone believes in anything. everything is merely a model, and nothing should be elevated to Truth. for what reason should we feel the need to narrow our view?

 

In order to live our day to day lives, I guess. We need to believe that the floor is different from jelly, and that will continue to support our weight, otherwise we'd be afraid to get out of bed in the morning.

I've heard a lot about this stuff, but it seems somewhat regressive. It's worth knowing that all things are part of an endlessly fluid, dynamic whole, but realistically, one needs to believe that certain things are unchanging - and thus "True" - in order to function beyond the level of a toddler. That's my "belief", anyway; I'm not willing to be drawn into slating all of human achievement, which seems to be the logical conclusion of postulating the absence of or need for Truth.

 

SelfControl

I'd be inclined to say 'unchanging' as of this time.
For ~ 10 thousand tears.. or the bulk of human history.
It seems to have been unchanging.
Things fall to the floor at 32 ft per sec/per sec.

If we are lucky, it might stay that way.

occam

 

Gents, both of you are great posters, keep it up.
You make philosophy and religion worh posting on.

Occam

 

Well yeah. We were learning about Deleuze and Guttari at uni, and I never fully established whether this was what they were on about, but they seemed to be implying that such things exist in a state of potential for change. It seemed like a needlessly intricate way of describing something very obvious - that gravity might stop working, but so far it hasn't, so don't worry about it.

But I mean, if the speed of light changes, and changes everywhere to the same different speed at the same time, would we even be capable of noticing?

 

I really like and agree with what you say about coming to a profound realization from a different perspective. I'm with you. I, too, have learned that viewing things from a radically different perspective, seeing through new eyes so to speak, can profoundly affect how one views everything. It can be a metaphysical experience, and an ontological and epistemological one as well. At least it can be for a thoughtful, introspective thinker. Casually and mindlessly altering one's perception without giving it much thought before or after isn't likely to lead to any profound realizations.

Once you go there with a certain degree of awareness, you are likely to have changed your perspective indelibly, at least somewhat. Those who have not done so usually cannot understand or relate.

Furthermore, my professional experiences have given me some insight into how each of us perceives the same events and occurrences differently, from our own unique vantage point. Ten persons can witness the same event and give ten very different accounts of it later, even with each of them being truthful in their accounts as they understand them. In addition, and perhaps even more dramatic is that our memories are remarkably fallible and plastic. A realization of just how fallible and plastic memory is can be rather unsettling. It can cause one to question just how much one "knows," versus how much information one carries in his head which has become altered, planted, or even invented in our own minds over time.

The everything is a model idea is profound and interesting, and in a sense true. We perceive the world outside our own thoughts only through our senses, and thus we only have access to a kind of map of the world. We never truly know or interact with things directly.

On a practical level, I think most of us do operate as if we are directly interacting with other things, however. It's a pragmatic and intuitive way of thinking.

 

Thanks for your kind words, Occam.

I certainly agree with your assessment of Okiefreak.