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Naturalism and human faculties...
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God is spirit, not a man with gray hair sitting in the clouds. And we humans are body and spirit. OK?
The body has evolved but the spirit cannot evolve because it's not physical!
We are conceived and born and somewhere in that period, God "places" an immortal soul within our bodies.
You see, that is the problem in religion.
"Science doesn't have an answer, so you must believe my hogwash because the invisible sky fairy told me so".
Just because I don't have an answer doesn't mean I will blindly follow anyone because they say the do.0 -
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I recently read this book and it prompted me to have a chat with you guys.
I know you've commented in post #3 that you're not interested in a discussion on that book but just as an aside, alarm bells should go off just from reading the foreword alone. Someone who opens with Paul's exhortation to test everything from 1 Thessalonians 5:21 and then proceeds to list out a series of bible passages as if they are fact without testing them doesn't bode well for the book's reliability as a critical thinking tool. This is further compounded by the author's first two arguments against atheism being fine-tuning (more on that later) and the complexity of DNA. I'm a big believer in leading with your best argument but if that's all she's got I'm not sure that there's much utility in going through the rest of the book.Presumably the atheists among you would hold a naturalistic/materialistic worldview, meaning that all of reality consists of nothing but physical matter and energy. OK so far?
Well, not necessarily no. That's an assumption on your part which doesn't help to advance a debate. From your contributions on Christianity it would seem that, for all your protestation about atheist assumptions, you're not averse to making them yourself. Like this one from the apologetics thread:
"I think if you head over to the A&A forum and ask people how they lost their faith, assuming the ever had faith in the first place, you'll probably find they had question for which they couldn't find answers. Such as, how could a good God allow evil, or who created God etc. Lots of people have gone to pastors and priests with genuine questions and came away disappointed."
Perhaps a better opening for your posts might be to find out what people's position is rather than guessing. Just a suggestion.
With regard to matter and materialism, contrary to your assertion, materialism is a conclusion based on observation. You see, we know physical matter exists. We can see it, touch it, interact with it, measure it. We can do the same with energy. So we're not assuming matter to exist we can demonstrate it. By extension, we shouldn't assume something to exist until it can be demonstrated by some point of evidence (i.e. a fact or group of facts indicative of only one conclusion).- How can matter produce consciousness? Is the quark self-aware?
Well, the answer to this question will depend on the extent and nature of the knowledge that you have. We can go through this from a mathematical perspective dealing with network theory, we can go through this in basic, abstract biological principles or we can look at the specific examples like humans. However, it would be best if you clearly defined your terms and your understanding of the topic. What do you mean when you say consciousness? Do you mean intelligence, self-awareness, sentience, all of those, none of those? Where, for example, among living organism is the dividing line between consciousness and non-consciousness. I take it from your repeated statements in this thread of a belief in an immortal soul that you believe humans have consciousness. What about primates, do they have consciousness? Or maybe all mammals do, or all tetrapods, or all gnathostomes or all animals or all eukarya.
For the moment, let's focus on humans. Do only modern humans have souls? What about H.ergaster, H.neanderthalensis, H.habilis, H.erectus. You see our intelligence, our consciousness if you will has been constantly improving over the last several million years. Although we can't go back and give neanderthals IQ tests we can use certain metrics as an analogous guide, like cerebral blood flow:
This graph shows the approximate increase in intelligence over the course of human evolution. Sometime around the dawn of the Homo genus humans experienced a mutation which started to drastically improve our brain capacity and thus intelligence. You see, unlike gorillas and chimps we have pretty feeble bite strength. These apes have extremely strong masticatory muscles which we just don't have (we do have masticatory muscles but nowhere near as strong as other apes). Apes with this feature also have a pronounced bony ridge in the skull known as the sagittal crest, which acts as an anchor point for these incredibly powerful muscles. The cranial pressure determined by the sagittal crest means that there's a hard limit as to how much the brain can grow. But since humans lack the jaw muscle adaptation our brains were able to get much bigger. We have now identified the gene which is responsible for all this, MYH16. This gene is present in all primates including lemurs and monkeys. However, in humans the gene is non-functional, a vestigial relic of our primate ancestry.
Getting back to the original point, our specific evolutionary journey is what lead to our development of consciousness. We were a band of apes who found themselves on the edge of the ever increasing African savanna and needed to adapt to an ecosystem which forced to venture ever further in search of food. This had far reaching implications for the set of skills (and by extension mutations) which we needed to survive. Among these skills included increased language development, alterations to our social groups and ultimately the benefit of intelligence.
Consciousness is ultimately a consequence of our particular evolutionary journey a management system for the ever increasing network of skills and abilities that humans acquired in order to survive in a changing environment.
Oh, and one final note. Bringing logical fallacies into a debate is never a good idea, like your self-aware quark notion, an example of the fallacy of division. Just because your neighbour's house is twice as big as yours doesn't mean that the doors and chairs and knives and forks are twice as big as well. Humans can have self-awareness without requiring all our basic components to have self-awareness too. You should look up what an emergent property is.- Where does the faculty of reason come from and how do we know we can trust it if it has a physical origin? So how do we know that chemical/electrical interactions produce coherent, logical, rational thoughts? Is our rationality an illusion?
- Do we have free-will or is it just a convincing illusion?
How do you guys deal with these questions?
Thanks.
I'm taking these points together because they speak to the heart of your overall question, in particular how someone, like me, who is an atheist deals with such questions. The short answer to your points about reason and free will is I don't know. The slightly less short answer is I don't know because nobody can know. It's like discussions on abiogenesis and the origins of life. We can theorise a multitude of possible explanations, each of which, in their own way are concordant with our current scientific understanding but, barring the invention of time travel, we're never going to be in a position to go back and determine which of those possibilities is actually the correct one. So the only honest response to the question is I don't know. Anything else is a form of self-delusion.
You ask how we deal with such questions. Well, personally I tend to agree with Richard Feynman when he said:
"You see, one thing, is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and then many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask, “Why we are here?” and what that question might mean. I might think about it a bit and then if I can’t figure it out then I go on to something else.
But I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t have to…i don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly. It doesn’t frighten me."
Similarly, with regard to this question and your eagerness to fill the gaps in our knowledge with God did it, I also like NeilDeGrasse Tyson's take on things:
"... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance."
Now, regarding some other points you've made:For Christianity in particular, the strongest evidence we have is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And many would claim that this evidence if far stronger that that for other faiths, making it the most plausible of the theistic religions.
But you don't have evidence for Jesus' resurrection. And it isn't far stronger than other religions. Take Mormonism, for example. The Book of Mormon bears eyewitness testimony from two separate groups, the three and the eight. The statement of the three is as follows:
"Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come: That we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, his brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken. And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seeen URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic"]sic[/URL the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shewn unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true. And it is marvellous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen."
Now, this is testimony from real historically verifiable people. That's not saying that this testimony proves that Joseph Smith was legit but it's way beyond anything Christianity is able to bring to the table. The only "evidence" for Jesus' resurrection is five accounts (1 Corinthians 15 plus the gospels). However, Paul's account is by someone who never met Jesus and is a second-hand unsubstantiated claim. Then you've got the four gospels, all written anonymously between 40 and 60 years after Jesus' death. Three of the gospels (the synoptics) are just revisions of each other. So you really only have two accounts, one attributed to Mark and the other, a composite work attributed to John.
We have no reason to take the gospels or much in the NT as reliable. Out of 27 books we only actually know who wrote 7 of them. The rest are either anonymous, like the gospels or pseudepigraphal, written by people pretending to be who they're not like the epistles of Peter, James and John. The gospels themselves aren't reliable because, apart from their anonymity there are factual errors, internal and external contradictions, fabricated, misquoted, misapplied and failed prophecies, fabricated stories including ones borrowed from Greek myth and literature, Egyptian myth and the Old Testament. Then there's the fact that the gospels aren't even written as historical accounts (although Luke tries to give his account the veneer of authority) but rather as fictional novels. Then you've got the fact that there are no contempraneous accounts of Jesus, no writings by Jesus and a collection of extrabiblical accounts which could only be very charitably described as weak and remarkable silences from historians of the era who we should have expected to report the goings on of Palestine at that time.
Now, if you'd like we could unpick this evidence in further detail on either the historicity of Jesus thread, which smacl linked to or the Michael Nugent vs. WLC thread (or a new one depending on the mods) which are both already home to a considerable number of posts on the topic.But there is evidence for God and I find it quite convincing. Examples:
- scientifically verified miracles e.g. Lourdes.
- Scientific studies done on "near death experiences". e.g congenitally blind people being able to "see" during their NDE.
- The elegance of the laws of nature and the beauty of nature (general revelation)
- Philosophical arguments for God's existence e.g the Kalam cosmological argument. Or the mathematical argument that time can stretch infinitely into the past because actual infinities cannot exist, implying that the universe must have had a beginning.
- The philosophical argument from morality.
- Scientific arguments e.g (disputed) arguments for the impossibility of a past-eternal universe based on the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem.
- Fine-tuning of the universe and multiverse models.
- Apparent intelligence behind the design of the universe and biological life.
- The fact the every culture in history appear to have a strong need to find transcendent meaning in life.
There's an awful lot of points presented here in a very scattergun approach which is difficult to handle in a debate. Perhaps it would be better for you introduce each point individually and debate each one to its conclusion than launch into all of them at once. But just to take three of your examples in brief to show that they're not the silver bullets for atheism you imagine them to be.
Lourdes
The Lourdes Medical Bureau which officially recognises the "miracles" performed at Lourdes have acknowledged 67 miracles since its inception in 1883. Currently, Lourdes gets about 5 million visitors per year. So being really generous to your side of the argument let's suppose that the visitor numbers have grown exponentially in the last few years and that since 1883 the total number of visitors is let's say 100 million. So that's 67 out of 100 million, which is 0.000067%. By contrast, spontaneous remission of cancer, where cancer goes away on its own with no intervention is about 1 in 100,000 or almost 7 times more common than a Lourdes miracle.
Secondly, and much more importantly, 67 cases have had unexplained cures. That's all, unexplained. We don't know what caused those cures and because we don't know you shouldn't claim that you do know.
Fine-tuning
Just like Nancy Pearcey whose book you plugged in the OP you seem to have completely misinterpreted what fine-tuning actually is. Fine-tuning is a commentary on the standard model. It isn't a theological argument. As Morbert explained on the last fine-tuning thread:
"The constants the standard model that require "tuning" are empirical values set so that the model produces accurate predictions. They are not ontological statements about some metaphysical set of dials that are literally tuned.
"The fine tuning argument, when it is presented in an intellectually honest way, amounts to the following: "Why does this life-permitting universe exist, as opposed to some other conceivable, but unrealised universe?" which is a more specific version of the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The answer, of course, is that we don't know.
But this is where your side goes spectacularly wrong. You insist an explanation must be tendered for materialism to be a valid position, but have no answer to the equivalent question "Why is there a God, rather than nothing?"
See, at the most fundamental level, a self-contained explanation for the universe might simply not exist. The universe is not obliged to be something that can be fully understood, just as God would not be obliged to be something that can be fully understood."
"Statements about 'fine tuning' are statements about the standard model. They are not statements about the universe itself. The constants that can be tuned are features of the model, and do not reflect real degrees of freedom to be tweaked by some supernatural agency.
Furthermore, even if they did have some metaphysical reality, it doesn't permit us to draw any form of probability or likelihood of them having the values they do.
A case for God cannot be made based on such "fine tuning"."
I've also detailed the numerous problems with fine-tuning as a religious argument here and here.
Kalam
Kalam is one of those arguments that just confuses me. Not the argument itself but why so many people think it's a powerful argument for God when it really isn't. The problem with Kalam is like this.
The basic structure of Kalam is that:
1. Everything which begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause (which is called God)
There are two problems here.
Firstly, the first premise states that everything which begins to exist has a cause. This, logically means that there are two categories of things, those which begin to exist (BE) and those which don't (NBE). So, for the first premise to have any meaning the group NBE cannot be empty. Otherwise, everything begins to exist including your God. Also, if God is the only element of the set NBE then the argument just becomes an appeal to special pleading. So there must be other uncaused things for the argument to hold. This undermines the conclusion that God must necessarily be the cause of the universe.
Secondly, we don't need God to explain how the universe came about. We already have a naturalistic explanation which fits within our current scientific knowledge and has evidence (albeit preliminary) to support it. It's called conformal cyclic cosmology. The simple explanation is like this:
Right now we are in the stelliferous era of the universe, the age of stars. Once stars such as our sun begin to burn out, the universe will eventually only consist of white dwarfs, brown dwarfs and black holes. At this point we will enter the degenerate era. During this time white dwarfs will assimilate dark matter and proton decay will begin leaving only black holes. Then we enter the black hole era. Over time, the black holes themselves, due to Hawking radiation, will evaporate. At this point the universe will only consist of massless particles travelling at the speed of light. This dark era will stretch on for eternity, as the temperature of the universe cools to zero, and the density approaches zero. But if you are travelling at the speed of light, an eternity is no different from an instant. Time, as a scale of duration, becomes meaningless. This is the heat death of the universe. At this point, the infinite eternity of one universe is no different, scientifically speaking, from the singularity beginning of the next universe. It is possible, and plausible, that the universe may exist in an infinite series of cycles with the death of each universe being the big bang of the next.
For more basic explanations of this hypothesis you can read more here:
The Five Ages of the Universe
Heat death of the Universe
Conformal cyclic cosmology
There are also books on the subject, one dealing specifically with the hypothesis above:
Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe
I haven't had time to deal with each and every one of your posts because time is limited at the moment but hopefully, if nothing else it may cause you to realise that the atheist position is a little better thought out than the creationist propaganda book you linked to in the OP would lead you to believe.0 -
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That's an impressive post oldrnwisr! Thanks for taking the time. It's going to take me while to respond, you've made so many points. Having said that, one of the mistakes in debates, I think, is not dealing with one point at a time.
[Edit: thanks to everyone who took the time to post
] 0 -
And that's the last we see of them...That's an impressive post oldrnwisr! Thanks for taking the time. It's going to take me while to respond, you've made so many points. Having said that, one of the mistakes in debates, I think, is not dealing with one point at a time.
[Edit: thanks to everyone who took the time to post ]0 -
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ok, let's break this down a bit.
1. Do you accept that actual infinities e.g. infinite time can exist?
2. Are you undecided on the beginning of the universe question? What's your best guess? Does the BGV theorem argument not sway you?
Just a note on this idea.
1. Yes, actual infinities are possible. Space and time are good examples of this. You see, most people's understanding of science is limited and they glean the knowledge they do have from popular sources which often leads to misconceptions. Now sometimes the scientists themselves who try to break down advanced concepts are responsible for these misconceptions. For example, I've seen people before trying to explain inflation on a cosmic scale by using a balloon with two points on it to show the expansion of the universe. However, in my own experience this leads people to imagine that there must be some kind of substrate to the universe, something for space to expand into. A better explanation would be to imagine the universe as a spoon of flour (or any other powder). If you throw this flour into the air it creates a cloud. The individual particles in the cloud begin to move away from each other and the cloud gets bigger. But the cloud's size and shape is defined by the particles that comprise it. It doesn't have a shape of its own outside that like the warp bubble universe from TNG.
Anyway, back to the point. In our inflationary universe space, at least on a practical level is infinite. There's nothing to suggest that, even if you could travel fast enough that you would come crashing into some magical barrier that would prevent you from going any further.
Similarly with time, while the universe may, in its current state, be finite in the past, there's no reason to suggest that time is finite in the future. The universe will essentially be empty following the heat death of the universe with nothing but massless particles but time won't actually stop (at least it's not a requirement of the model).
2. Why would the BGV get such special treatment? It's not the smoking gun that WLC thinks it is because like other sources he has grossly misrepresented it. As smacl points out in his post, the BGV paper doesn't actually say what Craig says it does. The biggest problems with Craig's view is that the science and BGV don't support the idea of nothingness before the Big Bang and the idea of a temporal beginning doesn't imply or necessitate a God to get everything started.
You see, we can only look back so far in time. The furthest science will allow us to go is Planck time (10^-43s) after the Big Bang because this is the point at which gravity becomes distinct from the other fundamental forces. However, there's no reason to suggest that there was nothing before the big bang as Craig would like us to believe. It's perfectly possible that the hot dense energy state that preceded the Big Bang is eternal that the energy of the universe is eternal but that it undergoes a change of state every so often. Think of it like this:
In the video, supercooled water experiences a nucleation event precipitated by, in this case, physical impact. Similarly it's possible as BGV point out that the boundary of our universe is a quantum nucleation event, a quantum event which caused matter to precipitate out from this hot dense energy state.0 -
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