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Atheism/Existence of God Debates (Please Read OP)
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Fanny Cradock wrote: »I would have thought that the set of all events are contained within the universe, a temporal construct. Can you expand on what you mean?
All events would be considered within the universe, but we can analyse the properties of this set of all events as an atemporal structure. I will try and elaborate.
Imagine if every event is labelled with four numbers, (x,y,z,t). x,y,and z are a spatial co-ordinate, telling us where in space an event has occurred. t is a temporal co-ordinate telling us when an event occurred. If we start at some given event, (x',y',z',t'), and move along some path of increasing t (i.e. the future), we pass an ordered sequence of events. This is simply moving from past to future.
However, it is also possible to consider the structure of all events (all values of x,y,z, and t), and their relation to spactime as a whole. All events can be related by a mathematical object known as a metric.Wikipedia wrote:The metric captures all the geometric and causal structure of spacetime, being used to define notions such as distance, volume, curvature, angle, future and past.
The events, in other words, have an overarching structure that is not temporal, but instead defines how temporal and spatial are related. We discuss this structure, and ideally all relations revealed by the laws of physics, in an atemporal manner.
[edit to clarify]- - I should note that although we can discuss events from an atemporal perspective, this doesn't mean I believe they transcend any laws of physics. In my conversation with Wicknight, I said there must be a component of our will that transcends the laws of physics, and if we look at everything from an atemporal point of view, that is when we identify who is responsible for what.0 -
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Fanny Cradock wrote: »I would have thought that the set of all events are contained within the universe, a temporal construct. Can you expand on what you mean?
Science has some ideas (no evidence just ideas) of breaches in causality e.g. tachyons .
Bohm, David (1980), Wholeness and the Implicate Order,In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders
http://books.google.ie/books?id=Erp0kUhm_NwC&dq=The+Undivided+Universe,+L&source=gbs_navlinks_s
p.354 "implicate" vs "explicate" ~ deeper meanings0 -
Philosophy has moved on.
Yes, most philosphers are atheists now
http://bradleymonton.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/most-philosophers-are-atheists/0 -
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Yes, most philosphers are atheists now
That's maybe what you believe. In fact most people believe in something beyond physics. Billions of people believe in a single God. the mnotion that society is gradually becoming better by becoming more atheist or that science has the answer to everything is just simply nonsense.
In fact atheists constitute a tiny percent on people. they constitute less than half of people declaring "no religion" and nones themselves constitute between two and five percent of people in the "scientifically advanced" world.
Please don't slip into double standards.
i.e. If Galileo was correct and the other 99 per cent of philosophers were wrong then "the church is wrong"
but
If most people were atheist a religious believer is correct and the other 99 per cent of atheist philosophers were wrong then " most philosophers are atheist" is meant to be significant?
Finally you are suggesting society is better of if everyone was atheist than having say Christianity. Historically while Christianity maybe was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths atheistic regimes killed hundreds of millions.0 -
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CerebralCortex wrote: »But do you understand why he believes it? Well it's because philosophers are actually predominantly atheist.
Depends how one defines philosophers.Argumentum ad populum.
No. People are philosophers. Thats my point. "The majority of philosophy lecturers in universities ( unproven) are atheist so therefore the consensus of that majority is a superior argument " is the argument ad populum from you!Atheist countries do seem to have better societies. Denmark for example.
What makes you think Denmark is "atheist" and how is it "better"?You lost me after "nones"?
About half or less of nones are atheist. Nones are about 3-5 per cent of the population of the US or similar countries for example.But do you understand why he believes it? Well it's because philosophers are actually predominantly atheist.
What philosophers? University lecturers in philosophy? Philosophy teachers in high school? People with PhD's who teach philosophy or write about it?Argumentum ad populum.
Again you are claiming "predominantly atheist" what does "predominantly" mean if it isn't to do with the majority of a population?No, he is showing you the results of a survey of philosophers which I have also shown you in the past. It shows the majority of philosophers are trending towards atheism.
What constitutes a "philosopher" ? where are they defined?
Next you will be saying astrology works because of Gauquelin's survey?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_effect
But let us just go with the survey you offer
Taking the philosophy faculty i.e. the PhD s and lecturers in the faculty we get
Accept or lean toward: atheism 1257 / 1803 (69.7%)
Taking metaphilosophy repondents :
Accept or lean toward: atheism 60 / 103 (58.2%)
Of course your sourse cherry picks out the target faculty
Accept or lean toward: atheism 678 / 931 (72.8%)
In fact those involved in metaphilosophy are less likely than philosophy faculty to be atheist and PhDs in general are also less likely.
But are these 1800 people representative of anything?
http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/NONES_08.pdf
Nones have grown from 8 -15 per cent.
Figure 1.13 7 per cent of nones are atheist and this represents two per cent
of the US population.
Elitist "most experts agree God doesn't exist" unsupported appeals to fudged sample opinion polls don't change the fact that a tiny amount of people are atheist. Nor will it prove atheism is good for society. every time it was tries is resulted in countless dead. sorry I'm wrong we can count them - hundreds of millions of bodies!
According to Eurobarometer Survey 2005
http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_225_report_en.pdf
page 9
25 % of of Danes said that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit,
god, or life force".
ergo: Denmark is NOT an Atheist state!
In case when it suits you of course you will try to change "atheist" into "secular"
Ireland by the way got 4% for this
Ireland is secular not atheist.0 -
Ah, so you're choosing to ignore all the surveys that show atheists to be a minority in Denmark, and choose to believe the one study that states the combined number of atheists and agnostics may be as low as 43% or as high as 80% (very precise).
And that makes Denmark an "atheist country"? :pac:
Now, what I really want to know is this: Did you just not bother reading your link properly, or did you think we wouldn't notice how you distorted and misrepresented it?
He is a fundamentalist atheist. he wants to believe that Denmark is atheist and no logic reason or statistics will part him from his belief. More double standards. 0 -
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Twas not I introduced the suggestion that "most philosophers are atheist" and a trend towards atheism as if that was somehow better for society.
LOL. Including theistic scientists? And your "atheistic utopia" is somehow improving ? Everytime it was tried it resulted in mayhem and death.
Again the argument that society is getting better or worse is irrelevant to whether philosophers are increasingly atheists.I find it ironic that you talk about moral philosophers "justifying" a belief when you have or propose no objective standard by which to justify anything unlike both agnostic and theist believers in "natural law".
One does not need an objective standard to justify a belief. They merely need a justification that is satisfactory to those they are attempting to justify said belief too. Increasingly "God did it" is found to be an unsatisfactory explanation to philosophers and scientists alike.Society did better under Christianity than under atheistic regimes which dealt out wholesale slaughter.
Really? regimes that don't execute a huge percentage of the population are better than ones that do?
I'm not sure how to process your radical and shocking conclusionsBut if it is irrelevant don't blame me for bringing up off topic issues since I didn't introduce the idea of more atheistic philosophers making for a better society.
I'm blaming you for nothing other than going off on a tangent.
Do you accept that philosophy has moved on from theism, even if you think this will bring doom and destruction to the world?0 -
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Again the argument that society is getting better or worse is irrelevant to whether philosophers are increasingly atheists.
then why did YOU bring it up?
I statedMiddle Age/ ancient logical problems of God creating rocks he can't lift belong there. Philosophy has moved on.To which you replied "yes [i.e. yes it has moved on]. Most philosophers are atheist.
Which links P" society moving on" to the suggestion that
Q " most philosophers are atheist"
If society has moved on because Q dose it not suggest that the change in society and atheism are linked?One does not need an objective standard to justify a belief. They merely need a justification that is satisfactory to those they are attempting to justify said belief too. Increasingly "God did it" is found to be an unsatisfactory explanation to philosophers and scientists alike.
And why is that? Because "God did it " in itself does not offer objective claims falsifiable by objectively agreed empirical evidence?
i.e. because it is subjective?Really? regimes that don't execute a huge percentage of the population are better than ones that do?
Chinese Russian atheistic regimes regimes killed hundreds of millions. atheism central to their philosophy. Pol pot ...Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a population of around 8 million
http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_cambodia1.html
That is enforced atheism for you!
"An atheist, Pol Pot suppressed Cambodia’s Buddhist religion:
monks were defrocked; temples and artifacts, including statues of
Buddha, were destroyed; and people praying or expressing
other religious sentiments were often killed.
...the government emptied the cities through mass evacuations
and sent people to the countryside. Cambodians were overworked
and underfed on collective farms, often succumbing to disease or
starvation as a result. Spouses were separated and family meals
prohibited in order to steer loyalties toward the state
instead of the family.
About 1.7 million Cambodians, or about 20 percent of the population,
were worked, starved, or beaten to death under Pol Pot’s regime."
- http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761579038/pol_pot.html
http://countrystudies.us/cambodia/29.htm
Article 20 of the 1976 Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea guaranteed religious freedom, but it also declared that "all reactionary religions that are detrimental to Democratic Kampuchea and the Kampuchean People are strictly forbidden." About 85 percent of the population follows the Theravada school of Buddhism. Before 1975 the Khmer Rouge tolerated the activities of the community of Buddhist monks, or sangha, in the liberated areas in order to win popular support. This changed abruptly after the fall of Phnom Penh. The country's 40,000 to 60,000 Buddhist monks, regarded by the regime as social parasites, were defrocked and forced into labor brigades. Many monks were executed; temples and pagodas were destroyed or turned into storehouses or jails. Images of the Buddha were defaced and dumped into rivers and lakes. People who were discovered praying or expressing religious sentiments in other ways were often killed. The Christian and Muslim communities also were persecuted. The Roman Catholic cathedral of Phnom Penh was completely razed. The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat pork, which they regard as an abomination. Many of those who refused were killed. Christian clergy and Muslim leaders were executed.I'm not sure how to process your radical and shocking conclusions
Try reading the facts. History verified by objective varied sources.I'm blaming you for nothing other than going off on a tangent.
You replied "yes [i.e. yes it has moved on]. Most philosophers are atheist." see above.Do you accept that philosophy has moved on from theism, even if you think this will bring doom and destruction to the world?
Moved on from " how many angles on the head of a pin" type arguments. Not moved on to a "BETTER WORLD BECAUSE MOST PHILOSOPHERS ARE ATHEISTS."0 -
This is my first post on this thread, and hopefully my last. I feel I had to weigh in on things in order to highlight the third side of this argument. It's a sad fact that most usually the two obvious, visible sides that assemble against each other in an ideological conflict on an issue are both the wrong sides, and even at heart part of the same substance.
Let me first summarise the significance of the crisis of recent times as regards to the beliefs of mankind:
A man wanted to be free, and for whom a life of freedom could only spell ruin.
We see today the inevitability of this self-destruction that mankind has committed himself to, the chipping away at himself and everything that once stood as 'good' simply because it is older than himself [and some of it actually was good]. This self-annihilation stems directly from the negation of the supports that once lay above and below him - from a god / hierarchical society - without actually seeking to replace that god in some way or another. He has found out that it is a terrible thing to be alone with ones own freedom, because the sentiments that it breeds will not fail to destroy a man unless he destroys them first. A well-known line from Nietzsche rings true:
"killed God, wasn't that perhaps to grand of us? Shouldn't we have become gods in order to be worthy of it?"
Theism versus Atheism debating is boring, pointless and results in a stagnation of the production of basic values and intellectualism. Nowadays man is incapable of producing any values, except for purely material ones, and so he has succumbed to mere 'slave-moralities', he is incapable of growth, of self-betterment, intellectually stagnant, quite happy in a society with no social-political dissent, robbed of his identity, where the personality of man is strictly an economic one. Such are the fruits of these two systems (which operate under one common system).
"Master of all, he is not the master of himself.' - Jose Ortega y Gasset.
Neither Theism or Atheism will uplift man to a greater level of nobility, they being the fruit of the deterioration and massification of both genuine science and the sacral, combined with an egalitarianism that reduces every single idea to a nominal level, effectively rendering them equally valuable/valueless. How can two or more ideas be the same?!
The fact that humankind, and Western-mankind especially, is on a path of great decline is irrefutable, despite talk of the much-vaunted 'progress' and 'the one human civilisation'. This is a major part of it, man's estrangement from his metaphysical, impersonal self. His refusal to recognise or even imagine a superior source, to which can measure himself against so that it may be a source of help in times of despair and weakness. His inability to prove himself through nobility.
What benefits have either modern organised 'religion' or pop-science atheism brought to people, nations and cultures? One goes about searching for physical/personal evidence of how an entity existences, and fails - the other shouts 'we are free!' from the hilltops, celebrating the the demise of fake-religion via material measurements, which are nothing more than subjective applications to environments [this is useful of course, but that's beside the point] that then become 'information and fact'; "conquerors of God and of nothingness!" has never been more true.
And are we better for all this exchanges of personal testimonies and evidences of these two cults? To quote Zarathustra:
"You call yourself free? Let me hear your ruling thoughts, and not that you have escaped bondage. Are you the one you deserved to escape from it? There were many who throw away their only worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? Why should Zarathustra care? Your eyes should answer plainly: free for what?.. Now show us the nobility of your nature.."
Similarly Christ proclaims:
“Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.” [Matthew 12:33-35]
It's time for us to abandon these petty beliefs. Admittedly, the world of traditional religion, which one finds arguably from the mid-Medieval times backwards was quite helpful for solving the existential problem, allowing man to forge his higher meaning and his life's calling - but at this point it is impossible to revert to this mindset, and this is also a great opportunity in itself. We must move beyond both theism and atheism while recognising that both the traditional religious and secular teachers have something to offer by way of advice, meaning and valuable systems of developing internal ethnics and character.
Kirilov, Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky:
"I don't want to believe. I know that God does not exist, I am God.. To recognise that there is no God is an absurdity and an incongruity, because otherwise one would not fail to kill oneself."
Now we either proceed with collective suicide or we can pick ourselves up from the ground and ascend the mountain of enlightenment! Your choice.
Perfection through effort. An immensely simple concept.
While I do not agree with everything this man says on other topics, his words ring true on this subject, truth is truth, no matter who the speaker:
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