Going from Atheist to Agnostic

I agree, that chart seems a bit too simplified. Especially gnosticism is hard to define in one short fitting description.

 

Science is great,fascinating.I love it.Also technology can be fantastic when it's not misused.But science can be just another head-clamp;it's just one interpretation of the world.I'm not hurting anyone by being into my weird mystic shit,and if it turns out to be a load of baloney at the end of the day,then so what - I had great time.Mysticism has produced a lot of great art,music and literature.It's part of the human story.Science also evolved from alchemy and many early scientists such as Issac Newton were alchemists and occultists.( "Occult" Just meaning "That which is hidden"...Not necessarily "Satanic".)

 

When I say that I am an agnostic atheist what I mean is that my rejection of the idea that a god exists is tentative and subject to revision in the light of new evidence and interpretations. I don't think that there is anything illogical about that.

However, I have never been able to understand or relate to the 'feeling' that people get that there 'must be something more'. I look around this amazing world and note that: I see in color, I am a machine made by little squiggles of chemicals for the purpose of making more machines to carry little squiggles that make more machines, I am standing on a rock orbiting a giant nuclear furnace 30,000 light years from galactic central point, I can be moved by art, I can know the joy of sharing time with other beings, I can laugh. After considering all that I think, what more do I need than this, and what could it even mean for there to be 'more than this'?

I could imagine there being in fact much less than this. And the idea that I get to take part for 80 years with luck and then I am obliterated completely I find to be exhilarating and to make my silly little life even more precious.

 

How did a machine made by squiggles get into asking such questions? How did a universe made by whatever get to be so cool? Why do you find your existence as a machine made by squiggles so exhilarating?

 

I cannot even fathom how there is anything instead of nothing (I think there should be no world and no lack of a world either) so I can't answer your first question (but I can say that the concept of God does nothing to alleviate the lack of understanding, and only further confounds the problem).

Can't answer the second question either (and I think anyone who claims to know is being intellectually dishonest).

As for the last question I guess I would have to say that if you don't know you'll never know (and he who feels it, that's the one who knows it). To me the exhilaration of seeing in color, of being a replication machine, of standing on a rock orbiting a nuclear furnace, is self evident. I can not elaborate on it further. Every page of my science text books blow my mind, and every detail of this ultimately pointless existence (existence has no purpose, but I find my own purpose) is thrilling in and of itself.

 

"And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

 

:cheers2:

 

In other words, you believe in god as much as you believe in unicorns, Medusa, fairies, dragons, and the fact that Elvis is still alive.

Sounds veeeery reasonable.

 

When I mentioned to a Christian coworker of mine that I was going from Atheist to Agnostic, she goes,
"Do you believe in love!?" in an accusing voice....
"sure..." I say.
"do you love your husband? your cat? your neighbors? your patients?"
"Sure..."
"is God Love?"
"Um, I guess you could define God as love or love as god...."
"Aha! You believe in god!"
"sure, if you mean some vague omnipotent higher power..... I just don't believe in the Old Testament, Judaic patriarchal figure up in a cloud telling us what we can and cannot do."

 

The flaw in that is that god is not just love, it is also everything else besides love. So she might as well ask "Do you believe in fungal toenails" and then reason the same way that there is a god.

 

Hey,neither do I. In fact I disbelieve in that figure. I also don't believe in an afterlife and miracles. But I do believe in a vague Higher Power--not necessarily an omnipotent one. Does that make me an agnostic theist or what? Maybe agnostic theist/deist would be a better term.

 

Sure, make it as vague as possible.

God is nothing, does nothing, has no traits; exactly like love. It's a fashionable intermediary step for those who still need to attach to something other than themselves.

 

Actually, real science seems to be corroborating the remarkably integrated complexity of physical reality. Explaining it lies outside the realm of science--in the metaphysical realm of cosmology. Science as practiced in the academies today rests on a mountain of assumptions--empiricism, reductionism, risk of Type 2 errors, etc., that necessarily make its findings tentative and impossible to characterize in terms of probabilities. The paradigm shift bought about by relativity theory and QM caught the materialists of the day by surprise. Most of them would have been quite confident about a 99.9999% probability for their worldview--until the revolution. Today, God's main competition seems to come from M theory, for which there is no empirical evidence at all. In which case, the probability would seem to be 50-50.

I agree that science is the most reliable method we have for finding facts. And as such, it's been invaluable in challenging superstitions such as Young Earth Creationism, which is clearly untenable. The Bible was never intended as a science textbook. I wouldn't expect science to be of much use in finding meaning or moral guidance, which isn't what it was intended to do.

I think our beliefs should be consistent with science and reason. So I have no use for believers who reject evolution or think the earth was created 6,000 years ago. I think it's also important to have a rational basis for beliefs, if only probable cause. But given the fact that science isn't likely to address the main issues of my life in terms of meaning and morals, I see no problem in making an educated bet--even if the odds are 50-50.

Unreasonable...
Delusional...[/QUOTE]

 

[/QUOTE]

Great post, well done. Science is great, I love and support science, but we haven't figured out everything just yet, and like with the String Theory and Quantum Physics, we're seeing the world is in fact made of energy and vibrations, and more....

 

^
Two cases in point.

Actually a load of gibberish, selective pickings and embellishments that reinforce his conditioned beliefs.
'science explains complexity lies outside science'...
What a load! No real physicist would say that, quantum or otherwise. Science does quite the opposite. 90% of physicists are atheists. Atheism is growing is the scientific world exponentially. Only the misguided and ill-informed think quantum theories suggest anything supernatural. There's tons of "Bad Science" for theists to hide behind, such as the poorly named "quantum teleportation", which is not teleportation at all. An entangled particle simply acts as a solution key, producing a predicted state. Information will NEVER be transferred faster than light through this trick.

What is more complex; static noise or a radio program? The radio program of course. It is the patterns that emerge from random energy that is complexity. Complexity occurs over time due to basic intrinsic natural physical laws. To infer that the random vacuum energy of space holds some ultra complex transcendent super consciousness is completely unfounded, pure fantasy, and completely backwards from all REAL scientific KNOWLEDGE and LOGIC. Divine consciousness is about as likely as a brain surviving in a blender. The cycling/violent nature of the universe is not compatible with an "all consciousness".

To convince yourself that the possibility of this fantasy is anywhere near 50% is DELUSIONAL!
Especially when religious claims are continuously being debunked.
Especially when these fantasies can all be explained through the nature of the human psyche.
Especially when this supposed super complexity would answer nothing of the question "Why".

 

While I agree that assigning probabilities to the existence of god (whatever a god might even be, I have no idea) is absurd I would have to say: If our existence is exceptionally improbable then how much more improbable is it that a being exists that created us? It seems that postulating god is explaining away one improbability with another.

 

I dunno. It seems to me that anything as extraordinary as us must have an extraordianry explanation. Otherwise, we'd expect business as usual. And it's not just that we're extraordinary. It's that we're complex and integrated. There are only two ways we know of by which such integrated complexity can come about: intelligent design and natural selection. Smolin offers an intriguing cosmological theory incorporating natural selection into M theory. So far, its "only a theory".

 

By that same logic the 'extraordinary explanation' would require an extraordinary explanation, which would require yet another extraordinary explanation ad infinitum. That is one of my main reasons for rejecting the god hypothesis. It explains complexity with an even greater complexity (just as the potter is more complex than the pot, the universe maker would be more complex than the universe), and by the logic used to arrive at the conclusion that the universe must have a creator we must conclude that the universe creator had a creator, and this leads to an infinite regress.

 

Yes, infinite regression is a problem any way we slice it. We notice the universe seems to be an interesting place with a high degree of integrated complexity and laws. Do we stop there, or try to explain how it got that way? Some put forward cosmological theories, which raise more questions. Was there something before the Big Bang? Can something come from nothing? etc. These are questions which challenge our best scientific minds, and are quite beyond my own limited intellectual ability. The best I can do is draw on my experience, intuition, learning, and reasoning to make life choices, subject to change if new evidence comes in. The notion that our existence is exceptionally improbable seems to be consistent with science. My point in mentioning it is that a previous post suggested that in light of the probabilities we can regard extremely improbable outcomes as impossible, and consider people who believe in them irrational. You might note that never have I said that there is proof for a god. I think physicist Paul Davies makes a compelling case that intelligent agency is a plausible explanation for the integrated complexity in question, in comparison with the leading rival cosmologicalbut even he never says that this is proof of god. He says its mostly a matter of taste. My taste, which I prefer to call intuition, seems to coincide with his.

I've never regarded religion as primarily an explanatory hypothesis about the nature or origins of the universe. Religion has absolutely zero to teach us here; the ordered complexity of reality bolsters a conviction that there is Something Big Out There, but that in itself is only part of the picture. I was drawn to religion more by the disorder and nastiness that I was seeing in political, social and economic relations than anything I encountered in the physical universe. From my perspective, the cultural relativism and determinism that Cherea extols seemed to be having unfortunate effects in the workplace and in daily life--impersonal treatment by employers and physicians, idolizing of the corporate "wealth creators" who would beggar their mothers if it got them ahead, an "anything goes" morality inflicted on us by the mass entertainment media, and reductionist attituds that persuade humans to regard themselves as "nothing but" self-replicators driven by their selfish genes. On the other hand, I've been even more appalled by the Latter Day Pharisees on the Religious Right, with their talking snakes, anti-scientific outlook, judgmental morals, and right -wing political agenda.

After my "moment of clarity" in which I adopted Progressive Christianity as my guiding orientation, I've become, in my estimate, a better person. Religion for me is a source of meaning and morality as a guide to conducting my daily life. Religion gives me a set of metaphors, symbols and allegories for encountering reality and making sense of it. This is right-brained thinking, that people who are mostly left-hemisphere dominant might find difficult to understand. The test of its "truth" for me is pragmatic: does it work well in my life; i.e., does it seem to make me a more effective person than I'd be without it. I'm sure a large chunk of the population would see no need for a set of metaphors, symbols and allegories. Religion doesn't "work" for them, but it works for me.

Isn't this relativism? Not exactly. Jesus gave us a test for telling the false prophets from the true ones: we know them by their fruits. I think religious fundamentalism has made Christianity a mind crippling disease--bitter fruit. On the other hand, I think secularism untempered by humanism leads to unfortunate social and human consequences. What would society be like if most or all members followed the teachings of Max Stirner and refused to accept legal or moral restrictions on our impulses? I'd call it hell. Beliefs have consequences.