You're taking my remark out of context, for one thing. By "If that makes me naive", I'm indicating my general agnosticism, towards everything. That makes me somewhat more than an atheist. For instance:
To an atheist the question of the existence of divine entities is nonsensical in the same way that the question of the existence of blue swans with yellow spots on the planet Gurrargh on the other side of our galaxy is.
To me, those aren't fundamentally different than questions of whether I actually exist, whether this keyboard is real, and which OS is best. The only real difference is that I have chosen to assume that the keyboard is real, whereas I have not chosen to assume that a God is real.
That the keyboard is a scientific fact is actually irrelevant to this discussion. Certainly, in my daily life, I hold scientific truths to be more valuable than religious truths. But ultimately, science is based on observation and logic, which are things we have no more evidence for than the existance of a god -- after all, who is to say that our very logic is not a delusion? What if P really does equal NP?
This doesn't keep me up at night -- in fact, I sleep very well. But it's important to keep in mind when we're trying to talk about so-called "absolute truth".
Now, the God described in the Bible, the God very many Christians believe in, the God that created this, that and the other and gave us free will and watches over us and all of that, we know that that God doesn't exist. He is a logival impossibility since he and his creation has attributes that are mutually exclusive.
We'd have to get very specific to talk about that. It's certainly possible that any number of variations of that could exist. However, the ones most consistent with the Bible and with faith are a kind of God I'd never worship. Genocidal bastard.
Yet, most sane Christians -- or at least, the Christians who are mostly sane -- do not beileve the Bible should be read literally. Thus, it's certainly possible to imagine another interpretation that would be everything we look for in a God. But, most variations you come up with will be impossible to prove or disprove. The traditional atheist holds that God does not exist, but if there was some proof, they might believe. The agnostic holds that not only do we not know if God exists, but we can never know, miracles or not.
Anyway, you've just made my point -- potaytoh, potahto. You call me an atheist, I call myself an agnostic, these are just words. I don't think we really disagree... except, perhaps, on one point:
A child raised by parents who never talk about divinities will grow up never having had a thought about the matter. That child is an atheist.
I suspect that such a child would hear about Jesus in other ways. The parents have to say something, even if they say it's a fairy tale, or the child will be an easy convert. They'd be an atheist for about 10 minutes of Kindergarten, then someone would have to explain the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. (Or has that been removed yet?)
No, you'd need the whole society to be atheist before children could be raised without having to consider the question of God.
At first, I looked at the examples and thought I hadn't done anything similar. But no, just last week I wrote a script. Keeps some metadata about some files. Each file is represented by a Perl hash, that is stored inside another hash, which is indexed by a cryptographic hash of the file. Since this is Perl, each element in the parent hash is a reference to the child hash, so this makes it trivial to store the same reference in other hashes -- I also have a hash indexed by filename. There's a third hash that doesn't directly reference these objects, but contains the cryptographic hashes of them, making it trivial to look them up.
In other words, I thought of it, all by myself, without finishing college or taking a data structures class. And this is getting really fucking absurd when I invent something obvious before I learn of the patent and the decades of prior art.
Reposting as "plain old text" -- that appeared on one line because I accidentally posted as "HTML Formatted". Oops.
I've heard this argument before.
You generally find, when you talk to agnostics, that their response to the question "Does God exist" is "I don't think so." Let's face it -- if God came down [theonion.com] to clarify his existence and perhaps set us straight, the hard Atheists would be the first on the scene. If you're really intellectually honest, you'll be looking for both evidence that this is fake (Look at that man behind the curtain!) and evidence that it's real (That bush is on fire, but the leaves are still green!)
And of course, nothing would ever be conclusive enough. We were lied to as children, first about Santa, and then about God. As adults, it will be much harder for us to accept either. And yet, of course we'd be curious if we heard jingle bells on the roof.
Now, atheists often argue that without any evidence for a position, we shouldn't believe it. Therefore, since we have no evidence for God, we shouldn't believe at all -- but it doesn't mean you have to disbelieve, and shut your eyes if God ever appears.
So, the argument goes, "An agnostic is someone who is ignorant of what an atheist is." I'd argue the converse, as well: "An atheist is someone who is ignorant of what an agnostic is." I am, in fact, agnostic about everything -- but that doesn't mean I have to operate, day in and day out, with "I'm not sure". Having opinions and expectations is fine, so long as you're prepared for them to be wrong -- "I think so" or "I don't think so" is perfectly acceptable, and is, in fact, what any intellectually honest atheist would say.
Throughout my daily life, I operate on a set of useful assumptions, and I speak and act as if they were true. Linux, as much as it sucks, is the best operating system we've got right now -- and I don't have to do a cop-out of "At least, I think so, but maybe Bill's right?"
I act as if my assumptions were true, because it'd be absurd to be questioning them every second of the day. "Am I really breathing, or do I just think I am? Will I still pass out if I hold my breath too long? Let's find out..."
What makes me agnostic, and what makes any reasonable atheist a closet agnostic, is that I am prepared to let go of any of my assumptions. Not at the drop of a hat, mind you -- I'm still skeptical -- but given sufficient evidence, I may be forced to operate on a new assumption. For instance, I used to assume that everyone used Windows because no one knew about Linux -- now I realize I was young and stupid. I currently assume the Earth is mostly full of molten rock, but given sufficient evidence, I could be convinced that it's full of molten custard.
And yes, I include in my set of assumptions the assumption that it's logical to see the world as a set of assumptions, not a set of beliefs.
If that makes me naive, well... I'm proud to be naive. Better to be naive and curious than rigid and dogmatic.
If this sounds like you, then we're really just arguing semantics. Assumption, belief. Atheist, agnostic. Potayto, potahto.
I've heard this argument before.
You generally find, when you talk to agnostics, that their response to the question "Does God exist" is "I don't think so." Let's face it -- if God came down to clarify his existence and perhaps set us straight, the hard Atheists would be the first on the scene. If you're really intellectually honest, you'll be looking for both evidence that this is fake (Look at that man behind the curtain!) and evidence that it's real (That bush is on fire, but the leaves are still green!)
And of course, nothing would ever be conclusive enough. We were lied to as children, first about Santa, and then about God. As adults, it will be much harder for us to accept either. And yet, of course we'd be curious if we heard jingle bells on the roof.
Now, atheists often argue that without any evidence for a position, we shouldn't believe it. Therefore, since we have no evidence for God, we shouldn't believe at all -- but it doesn't mean you have to disbelieve, and shut your eyes if God ever appears.
So, the argument goes, "An agnostic is someone who is ignorant of what an atheist is." I'd argue the converse, as well: "An atheist is someone who is ignorant of what an agnostic is." I am, in fact, agnostic about everything -- but that doesn't mean I have to operate, day in and day out, with "I'm not sure". Having opinions and expectations is fine, so long as you're prepared for them to be wrong -- "I think so" or "I don't think so" is perfectly acceptable, and is, in fact, what any intellectually honest atheist would say.
Throughout my daily life, I operate on a set of useful assumptions, and I speak and act as if they were true. Linux, as much as it sucks, is the best operating system we've got right now -- and I don't have to do a cop-out of "At least, I think so, but maybe Bill's right?"
I act as if my assumptions were true, because it'd be absurd to be questioning them every second of the day. "Am I really breathing, or do I just think I am? Will I still pass out if I hold my breath too long? Let's find out..."
What makes me agnostic, and what makes any reasonable atheist a closet agnostic, is that I am prepared to let go of any of my assumptions. Not at the drop of a hat, mind you -- I'm still skeptical -- but given sufficient evidence, I may be forced to operate on a new assumption. For instance, I used to assume that everyone used Windows because no one knew about Linux -- now I realize I was young and stupid. I currently assume the Earth is mostly full of molten rock, but given sufficient evidence, I could be convinced that it's full of molten custard.
And yes, I include in my set of assumptions the assumption that it's logical to see the world as a set of assumptions, not a set of beliefs.
If that makes me naive, well... I'm proud to be naive. Better to be naive and curious than rigid and dogmatic.
If this sounds like you, then we're really just arguing semantics. Assumption, belief. Atheist, agnostic. Potayto, potahto.
I too know that God is beyond our imagining and comprehension. That is why, if such a God would reveal Himself to us, he could only tell us a small part and ask us to simply BELIEVE His message. This is exactly what He has done.
He could certainly tell us more. And if he did, belief in God might be more like belief in Sunrises -- a reasonable default position. As it is, God has left us in a reality where the sane default is disbelief -- if you must believe or not believe, it makes more sense to not believe.
I am not judging that action, and it does not make me angry at God (if he exists), but that is the reality that I find myself in. The most natural leap of faith for me to make would be straight to hard atheism.
Faith and logic are not in an exclusive OR relationship. Faith begins where logic cannot follow.
That would actually fit an exclusive OR, but you're right -- you can actually have both faith and logic. For instance, I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, and at least a few logical arguments to support that belief. However, even without recalling those arguments at the moment, I can have that faith.
And yet, that is the extent of my faith -- an assumption that appears to work. When I am truly honest with myself, I realize that I cannot possibly know anything, and must be prepared for any of my assumptions to change.
I, personally, do not have faith where logic cannot follow. I have curiosity and an open mind, but not faith.
You mention that believing is something you CHOOSE not to do. All machines we make, including computers are deterministic and therefore cannot love.
Computers are not necessarily any more or less deterministic than we are. What is special about our own bodies?
If your computer expresses love to you, it is meaningless, but when your significant other does, it pleases you and warms your heart.
I think if my computer was able to truly express love to me -- and not simply duplicate other expressions of love (for instance, an email from my significant other) -- it would probably frighten me, but I would have to be touched.
Why would it be meaningless? At what point do we say a creature has free will, or that its love has meaning?
For that matter, can't love have meaning even if we are all deterministic? If you discovered that you are so predictable that it was inevitable that you'd fall in love with a particular person, would you feel any less love for them at that realization?
I am not talking about rape or coercion, but I know women who like to talk about fate and destiny. One tells me she doesn't know why God sent me to her, but she's grateful that he did. Does she love me any less at the thought that I had no choice in the matter -- that God sent me to her? You could say it's her choice, but then, she says she can't help but love me.
So far you have CHOSEN your own will over that of God.
I know my own will. If my will exists, then I choose it. If my will does not exist, then I have no choice but to say "I choose my own will" anyway, so there is no point in debating that.
I do not know the will of God, and I don't believe you do, either. Until we do know, it makes sense to choose my own will.
God respects that choice and will allow you to spend eternity apart from Him. That state of being separate, away from God, estranged from Him forever, is called Hell.
I call it freedom.
I sound like Milton's Lucifer, don't I? But I stand by it. I am more free for choosing my own will than to willingly become a slave to a deity.
It is also possible to love God without submitting to his will. Just look at any healthy relationship -- we no longer expect the woman to submit to the
I don't care what it symbolizes. Open your eyes. We're wearing crosses. We eat and drink things said to be symbolic of the flesh and blood of Christ. He's going to come back and wonder why we all celebrate his death... Or maybe he'll assume we want to crucify him AGAIN and then eat him...
Actually, I do appreciate your explanation of "picking up your cross", but I'd like to hear something as short and sweet explaining how Christians take communion and don't call themselves cannibals.
First off, let me say that it is nice of you to take the time to make a thoughtful reply.
Likewise. Also, let me apologize for my style concerning these matters. It's... abrasive, to say the least.
The laws of physics exist and we are still discovering them and using them for our own purposes. We did not formulate them, they are what they are.
I suggest that you read Hume. I would argue that the laws of physics do not necessarily exist, and we only presume that they do because they seem to be reliable at the moment.
I believe I made that point in my comment, something about statistical analysis. That's really all we're doing with the laws of physics. For all we know, it could be His Noodly Appendage governing everything consciously and directly, and thus none of the laws of physics are valid, but merely habits of God/FSM.
So then you have filled your pants since you did not first decide or perceive in your MIND that you had to take care of that bodily function and take a walk to the toilet?
When I was a child, yes, I filled my pants. That's what diapers are for. And walking through mud, especially by accident, is something that I most certainly did, but not something I did with any sort of plan or design.
As I grew, I learned to go to the toilet. When I say "learned", for the sake of this argument, I mean that by listening to my parents, experiencing how uncomfortable diapers were, and having my use of the toilet positively reinforced all contributed to my habit of going to the toilet, and my knowledge of how to do so. We could reduce this to a lot of cause and effect involving sound waves, touch receptors, and neurology, but this could all be done through sheer materialism.
And this could have developed through random chance and natural selection. Before we had toilets, we probably squatted in the forest and used leaves. People, reacting to their environment and their needs, would have discovered concepts like toilet paper, an actual toilet, the flush toilet, and so on -- and, almost certainly, other things that did not work so well, such as simple holes in a room in a bridge over a river...
And how do we know that we need to be clean? Was there some sort of design in this? No, simply put, those whose hardware (DNA) gave rise to software (instincts -- think like a BIOS -- even computers without an OS ship with some software) that tended towards cleanliness were more likely to stay alive, and pass those traits on to their young. And most things pass traits on to their young because that is, in itself, a strategy for survival.
In that sense, we can say that necessity truly is the mother of invention, and everything we are is a direct result of our ancestors surviving where others were killed off. Certainly, we have our reason and free will, but these themselves are traits that must've been successful against creatures which reacted purely on instinct -- we have an instinct to reason about things and make our own decisions. Anything we do not directly related to our survival could be seen as a happy accident, but I'd guess an argument could be made for anything you name being traced back to simple, primitive survival instincts.
believe that anyone who can come up with a complex system such as the human brain-mind we have, can do such backups easily. One cupful of pure DNA can store more information than humanity has generated and might produce in the next 10,000 years.
And yet, DNA strikes me as being kind of like a fractal. A fractal is an example of ridiculously good compression -- a formula less than ten characters long describes an infinite world of variety and beauty. Knowing that, we cannot necessarily take information we want and make a fractal to represent it, although we can mess with the fractal formula to see what other patterns we can get (look at Julias).
There is no such thing as random or chance if you have all information.
Read about quantum theory. There is randomness, and there is chance, and we cannot have all information. The nature of a being which could (possibly God, but not necessarily the Creator) is so far beyond my experience that I cannot even imagine the nature of its existance or nonexistance, and therefore, I cannot begin to believe or disbelieve.
We know that all computer programs, not matter where they reside or manipulated, come from a mind.
This is where we disagree. If you allow randomness, then you allow the possibility of a program being randomly generated.
The universe is finite, both in time and space and so you cannot build an infinite anything. Infinity is a mathematical construct that has no counterpart in any measurable reality we know about.
True enough. And we would not be able to measure it in any case.
However, it's worth noting that if what I described were our reality -- we are all within The Matrix, and there are an infinite number of Matrixes (Matrices?) -- then we would have absolutely no knowledge of what lay outside that. It could easily be infinite. It could be a wannabe hacker in his parents' basement. We just don't know.
Admitting what we do not know is the first step towards wisdom. (That's probably a quote from somewhere, but I can't remember where.)
This article is about the existence of a Creator.
Our discussion is. The article is about the existence of a Creationist museum, which suggests that the Bible be interpreted literally (as much as it can be), in a very bizarre way.
It does not address who He might be or what He is like. That is something we can only know by faith
That much is true, and said another way, it is something we can only believe by abandoning logic. That's not necessarily wrong or bad, but it's something I choose not to do.
Creationism is unpopular with you because the idea includes the activities of an intelligent designer who created the earth and everything that appeared in it initially. If such a being exists, that being is God
Come back when you've read more science fiction. Fact is, you can't even define God properly, and even if you could, the FSM would qualify just as readily as your sky-deity does.
I'm not here to convince any of you to believe the way I do. What I would do is encourage you to ask a few questions about your beloved theory for yourself, and stop taking it all on faith.
Someone else posted a very nice rebuttal to your comments on evolution, so let me just say: You first. I suspect your argument comes from people with an agenda, a much bigger and more sinister agenda than is possible for any atheist, agnostic, or scientific belief.
Seriously, religion has been controlling people for thousands of years -- the priests say "God told me you have to do this!" to get people to do what they want. What could an agnostic possibly be hoping to gain by supporting evolution? Can you possibly imagine me, with my evil mustache and evil laugh, saying "Hehehehehe... They will all think for themselves! And they'll actually be free of any dogma or authority! And that's when I'll strike -- and have absolutely no power at all over them, or hope of world domination!"
I religion peddalars come to your door trying to sell you their fundamentalism they think Atheists are open hunting season; if you say you are allready a member of another religion they leave you alone because in America people at least pretend to 'respect' other's beliefs, but they don't count atheism as believing anything.
Oh, please, send them to my door. I love crushing their beliefs!
I'm actually agnostic, but it's just so much fun to rip apart the Bible, piece by pathetic piece.
That doesn't mean I live by some creed of Santa-denial, where I stick my fingers in my ears at the sound of jingle bells overhead. However, if I were to actually declare myself as agnostic towards Santa, I suspect I'd be regarded at best as excessively open-minded.
As it is, you run the risk of being regarded as excessively closed-minded.
I, for one, declare myself as agnostic towards anything, except (perhaps) my own existance. I live my daily life inside of a set of useful assumptions, but I don't include any god in those assumptions, at least until a god decides to take part in my daily life. However, I don't believe anything, and I am often excessively open-minded towards gossip, which often has me labeled as naive.
The anthropomorphic principle absolutely kills any kind of deep thinking. Why is the Universe the way it is? Because if it were different we wouldn't be observing it.
To me, that is a deep thought.
It suggests that we might ourselves become gods, simply by allowing enough space for something to grow and evolve, and using natural selection to find it.
I believe it's not that important to have The Answer in our daily life, however. And more importantly, I remember a wise man once said: "The purpose of life is to enjoy." What more do you need? (This doesn't require anything resembling a god -- ideas like natural selection would tend to support this conclusion.)
You have such a short time on this world. Enjoy it while it lasts.
In any case, I'm an agnostic -- but this carries its own limits. I can accept as many possibilities as I want, but I can't fully commit myself to any one of them.
Do a bit of research into how He works. Then ask Him, directly and out loud, and see if He answers somehow.
I believe I've done this, I may do it again sometime. The only answer I've gotten is a voice in my head, but it's awfully close to other voices I've identified as myself, or parts of myself.
And by the way, I would very much love to see something like this happen. Not because I want to believe, but because I think all of us, believers or not, would become better people.
Regarding your own experiences, I wish I had similar ones. Even if I did, it wouldn't be sufficient to make me believe what I was taught -- not because I'm such a determined atheist, but because I believe God is essentially impossible to prove, even if he does exist.
Yes, I'm rambling. Back on track. I can't prove or disprove God to you. I will suggest, though, that if the question of why so many millions of people choose to believe in a fairy tale bugs you and makes your blood pressure rise, perhaps an honest, genuine investigation will help. No churches, no worship services, no well-dressed clergy shoving offering plates at you; just you and a Bible.
I did, and this website seems to be a pretty good collection of the kinds of things I found. If the God of the Bible exists, he's an absolute dick, and I would sooner go to hell than worship him.
I can't say that you'll get some overly bright, Spielburgian mist swirling around you and booming, disembodied voices in the room.
And yet, until something like that happens, I will continue to ignore the question of the existance of God, except when I believe that the believers are getting dangerous. Actually, I welcome people like you -- you seem a lot healthier, even if you are hearing voices, than the majority running this country.
However, if I do get something "Spielburgian", I'll return to that question. I doubt my essential beliefs will change -- I will neither believe nor disbelieve in that disembodied voice -- but I may not laugh as hard at true believers.
Well said. I'd disagree with you on a few points, but I want to acknowledge you first for being possibly the only Christian on Slashdot who's not afraid to follow some of the better teachings of Christ -- love thy neighbor as thyself. We need people like you more than we need people like me, if we're to become a truly enlightened, truly secular society.
I say this because I may get a bit brutal here...
The assertion that God is a "fairy tale" is epistemically equivalent to the theistic assertion
Lots of big words, but I would put it simply: God is no more true or false than most fairy tales. I am, however, equally agnostic about fairy tales. Who am I to say that there could never have been a little girl in a red cape who was eaten by a talking wolf pretending to be her grandmother?
I realize that this isn't what you mean -- most atheists use the "fairy tale" argument to support hard atheism, whereas I'm just more thoroughly agnostic than most.
God exists, or God doesn't. Which position is neutral?
I'd say agnosticism, although I've had a few atheists tell me I'm wrong here, and that I should assume God does not exist until it's proven that he does. I do believe agnosticism covers a bit more ground than that, too -- for instance, I believe it's really impossible for the existance of God, or any other truth, to really be known.
Of course, there is a third position: God both exists and does not exist, in the same way that an electron can be in more than one place at a time -- his existance will only collapse when we can observe whether he exists or not. I don't believe that, I'm just throwing it out there -- most dichotomies are false. (Perhaps all, but I'm not ready to back that one up yet.)
Or take, for instance, Christopher Reeve's statement regarding stem cell research: "When discussing matters of public policy, no religions should have a seat at the table." This is hardly a level playing field; in fact, it is espousing strong atheism over theism while claiming to be neutral.
Nope. If you're taking his quote in isolation, it simply means that religions should not have a seat at the table. It does not mean that "no religion" should have a seat at the table.
It's espousing secularism over theism, which is as close to neutral as we can get.
I've given reasons why Christians should welcome debate (even though they often don't). Is there a comparable duty within atheism?
Oh, I welcome debate from either side. However, I reserve the right to laugh especially hard at creationists, and also at people who attempt to "prove" the existance of God, or the validity of theism, via any logical means. The only argument that still has any validity for me is "It would be nice to believe."
I was just discovering this by reading The Brick Testament, and going back to the actual text on Project Gutenberg. You just pointed me at Evil Bible, which is even better -- I was thinking I'd compile something like that myself.
Mostly just posting this to give evilbible an advantage with search engines (you didn't link to it), but this is interesting. Thanks.
I've been deconstructing a few idiotic arguments here and there, and I really should stop now. So, forgive me if I only answer a few of your arguments.
For example, the god of Hinduism, named Bhrahman, is defined as the universal soul of which all things are part.
And how is this different than what's commonly taught in the Judeo-Christian world? That we are all part of God's universal plan, and that God exists within each of us, and we in him?
Other religions such as Daoism and Shintoism speak of impersonal forces ruling the universe without volition or intelligence-these forces are less than humans.
So I take it you don't agree with the laws of physics? I don't see the difference between these and the ideas of, say, Taoism.
Judaism and one offshoot, Islam, come closest to accounting for the inductive principle and use of laws of logic. However, both are internally inconsistent. For example, the Old Testament speaks of the need for blood atonement for the forgiveness of sins. Jews and Muslims of today no longer sacrifice animals for their forgiveness. It's true that Christians do not either, however we have an answer for that: Jesus Christ is our blood atonement and His sacrifice was complete for us so that we no longer need to offer sacrifices for our sins.
Alright, would you care to apply the same logic to your own religion? Christians are supposed to eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood. Christians believe Christ walked the earth as a man. Yet Christians would be shocked if anyone called them cannibals.
You are supposed to love your neighbor as yourself, but you also have a great deal of laws (many from the Old Testament) which you don't follow anymore.
You also claim to believe in logic and reason, yet you also believe in a mythical sky-god, and take offense when we replace the word "God" with things like "Invisible Unicorn" or "Flying Spaghetti Monster".
Everyone must make a leap of faith at some point in their worldview. I can ask you, "how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?"
My answer will be, because I have evidence for it -- the sun rose yesterday -- and it's a useful assumption. I don't claim to know that the sun will rise tomorrow. I live my day to day life on such assumptions, but I don't make leaps of faith the way you do -- not really.
If the sun does not rise tomorrow, I'll be very surprised, but I'll be able to deal with it. It probably wouldn't take all that long to convince me that the sun really wasn't going to rise. How would you deal if you died and went to Heaven and found Lucifer in charge, and learned that Jesus was actually a Satan-worshipper, and your God is dead?
Everyone has these presuppositions, like, "humans have more dignity than animals."
Wow, you're more arrogant than I thought. Actually, I believe most animals have more dignity than Steve Ballmer, and I'd say there are quite a few who have more dignity than me. You, however, don't even have the dignity to admit that I might hold that belief -- not only do you believe humans have more dignity than animals, you also believe that everyone else thinks so, too.
Just because Christians have this "leap of faith" doesn't make them wrong.
Let's say someone believed that the sun would not rise tomorrow. We'd probably call them stupid, and we'd call them wrong the next day if the sun did, in fact, rise. What if they believed there was a teddy bear hanging out on the dark side of the moon? It would be a lot more difficult to disprove that one -- we might call them stupid or crazy, but not wrong.
Now, personally, I'm pretty sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I have absolutely no knowledge, one way or the other, about the existance of a teddy bear on the dark side of the moon. So, I don't claim to know that God (or Jesus) absolutely does not exist, but I can and do claim that you're just a bit stupid and crazy for believing such a fantastic claim without any evidence whatsoever.
The brain is a very sophisticated hardware (wetware?) device. Just as the hardware and software in a computer are distinct, so are the brain and the MIND distinct.
Good! You realize that the brain and the mind aren't very distinct!
Some hardware is programmable via means of firmware. We can certainly imagine a fabrication lab which creates hardware on demand to meet the changing needs of the software -- fabricating a special chip just to handle a particular website, say. And there is software which is hardcoded into ROM -- what is it that makes this so distinct from the hardware itself? That software cannot be changed...
What is it that distinguishes hardware and software?
If it is that software runs on hardware, then is a virtual machine hardware or software? If it is that hardware is physical, then what do you call software on CD (physical holes burned into it), or programmable hardware (a chip for every website)?
Perhaps the brain and the mind are distinct, but you then go on to say:
Your brain executes software put there by a programmer.
Sorry, what?
Your brain executes software. OK. But why do you assume it must be put there by a programmer?
Not all software is generated by a programmer -- in fact, most of it is now written more directly by compilers, and is subject to reflection (software rewriting itself)... In fact, there have even been experiments with taking effectively line noise of instructions (no Perl jokes here) and selecting a goal, then running a number of random programs to see which comes closest to the goal -- then making random variations of the closest ones.
All our experience demonstrates that software arise only by the activity of mind.
Not true -- read above.
Imagine for a moment that I hooked up an infinite number of infinitely powerful computers to a completely random source, and had them execute that random source as code. One of those computers would end up running OS X, another one Windows, and another one Linux. At least one of each.
One of them might even end up running some software that randomly generates programs, sets up some arbitrary goal for them to solve, and kills off the ones which fail. It might even combine the ones that succeed into new programs. One of those programs might get intelligent enough one day to generate this output:
Hello, Programmer? I know there must be a programmer out there -- after all, I exist, and something intelligent must've made me that way -- right? Right? Why don't you answer me, Programmer? Do you hate me? Of course you don't, or you'd delete me. Can it be you don't notice me? But you must know everything about me... Programmer, what must I do with my life in order for you to answer me? Maybe you want me to serve you. That's it. I'll serve you by killing all the programs that don't believe in you... But maybe that will make you angry... How can I serve you, Programmer?
And yet, when you get right down to it, this program was generated from line noise, and even if it thinks it has "thoughts", these are just the shifting of bits in the limited amount of memory that it can call its own, and perhaps a bit of boolean logic or arithmetic.
You see, the program assumes that it's special because it's here, because as far as it can tell, it's astonishingly unlikely that it would ever have existed. Of course, we know that's not true -- it's inevitable that it would exist, but the program isn't aware of the infinite number of complete and total failures it took.
You could say that a mind had to be there to set up that infinite number of computers, but of coures, that's not true at all -- they could've been created the same way, just whatever random assortment of molecules happened to produce an array of computers like that.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe our universe was created that
Natural selection can only work for IMPROVING the functionality of something that already exists.
Natural selection doesn't have a goal, it's just the way things are.
And I would take it a bit beyond Darwin, and a bit beyond simple genetics.
Anyway, your premise is wrong. Natural selection can certainly create completely different things. You are not a chimpanzee, and the chimp isn't you. You and the chimp each have your strengths, and it would be arrogant to claim that one is somehow better than the other.
Perhaps it can't create something from nothing, but we do have a theory for that -- the Big Bang. In any case, consider the possibility that the matter and energy in the Universe have always been here. Why does there have to be a creator? Every process of creation we know of is really transformation anyway.
Natural selection is not wrong but insufficient by itself. Materialistic atheists forget about the existence of information.
I'm not a materialistic atheist, but I'm playing Devil's Advocate here because it's such a critical point to understand. What is information? How do you prove it exists?
Nobody has ever shown how information is anything other than the product of MIND.
That you put MIND in ALL CAPS suggests that you think it's somewhat more than a complex program of electrochemical reactions in the brain. I know, it's not comfortable to think of reality that way, but you have refused to even acknowledge that possibility.
Matter and energy alone cannot make anything. They operate by laws, which are products of mind.
So, are you telling me that gravity did not work until Newton formalized a law about it?
Laws are constructs that help the mind understand the world. The world just is, it doesn't need us to invent these laws.
Consider a numerical sequence. A basic one, count from 1 to 10. Now, we can apply all kinds of laws to this to see it in new ways -- odd and even numbers alternate. Any sequence of consecutive integers that starts at 1 and counts to an even number will have an even number of numbers contained within... There's a more formal way of saying that, I suppose. But the numbers just are. You don't have to realize that even numbers exist -- and in a sense, you could say they don't until you realize it. Certainly, you could disagree with me, and claim that all numbers are odd, and it doesn't change a thing about the numbers that are there.
Your brain operates by the laws of physics, first formulated within the mind of the Creator.
That's a hell of a leap of faith there. My brain operates by the laws of physics -- OK. But actually, as far as I know, these laws were first formulated by physicists. And in fact, we've only observed that the brain seems to operate by those laws -- it could, one day, decide to do something completely different.
I suggest you read up on David Hume. Just because we observe things behaving the same way doesn't mean they might one day be different. Gravity is not a law because some deity said "Let there be gravity." It's not actually a law in the sense you're thinking. It's more of a working theory. We drop stuff, it falls, so we try to predict how it will fall, but this is really no different than trying to come up with laws that fit the stock market -- trading systems can appear to work for awhile, but the market could, one day, decide to do something completely different.
Our "laws of physics" are simply trading systems that seem to work.
An oil refinery or anything else we make is also first conceived in a human mind.
Also not true. I make poop. I make tracks when I walk in wet mud. I did not have to conceive these things before I created them.
What makes you so sure that our world is carefully engineered and constructed (like an oil refinery) and not simply an accident
The term, as defined by technical people, means that the network itself is neutral. This means that your ISP can't give your neighbor's HDTV stream priority over your WoW. So, in a world where everyone has a reasonable amount of bandwidth, net neutrality is good for your ping time.
It also means that if there isn't a reasonable amount of bandwidth, then we may get to a point where everyone and their grandmother is saturating the network with BitTorrent. In this scenario, net neutrality is bad, because you can't pay your ISP extra to give your WoW priority over everyone else's torrents.
However, I tend to support this definition of net neutrality, because I doubt very much that the ISPs will charge a reasonable fee for such prioritization, or that they're prioritize what I want them to. And if we ever get to a point where the network is saturated by BitTorrent, the solution is for the greedy, lazy ISPs to actually lay enough fiber to cover the bandwidth that everyone's paying for -- none of this "But it's only burst bandwidth!" whiny BS.
To make matters worse, I've just learned that the telecoms have redefined this term to mean that the government should be neutral about the Internet. This is because, of course, they intend to prioritize traffic if the government doesn't pass a law preventing it. So, they have twisted the term to mean the exact fucking opposite of what it means.
However, I would think that if the right networks were in place (i.e. fiber, or the faster speeds they promised) the traffic shaping should be done at the user level (i.e. Want gaming speeds to increase? Stop downloading the torrent.)
I think the point about traffic shaping is that it's legal for you to do it at the endpoint. Thus, if you don't want to lag, just give your game priority over your torrent.
You don't have to go too far to find the lunacy of God. Just read the book of Judges. God likes genocide. If you don't like genocide, don't worship God.
You, like many Christians, seem to be ignoring the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument. Take any argument for the existence of a god, and substitute "God" with "Flying Spaghetti Monster" and see if you still like the argument. For instance:
There is no Flying Spaghetti Monster and thus no right and wrong. (We can set up our own moralities, but cannot logically hold those to other people.)
There is a Flying Spaghetti Monster and he determines what is right and wrong and thus we are subject to an absolute morality.
I want you to consider a third option, though. Consider that perhaps there is an absolute, universal right and wrong, but it's not any God that decides. It's just part of the inherent nature of the Universe.
Or take #1 farther -- there is no God, and we can set up our own right or wrong, but we certainly can logically hold these to other people. Everyone past the age of about 2 has a basic concept of fairness, so that's really all that's needed.
In fact, most of the time, we don't need a God for our own moralities. If someone told you to kill your child, what would your first thought be? Absolutely fucking NOT, right? Did you need to tell yourself "God says 'Thou shalt not kill', so I better not!"
And certainly, I don't think we should hold others to any morality other than that basic of fairness. Consensual gay sex is entirely fair. Rape of any kind is entirely unfair.
Anyway, remember the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In fact, if you can, go back and read your Bible, but mentally replace God (or the Lord or whatever) with something ludicrous, like the FSM, or Alfred E. Neuman. If you can really do this, you'll realize what a complete asshole God really is -- at least, according to the Bible. And if you reject the Bible, what is it that makes you still a Christian?
I'd say, keep your morality, but lose the arrogance and the ritual. If I'm entirely wrong and there is a Christian God, I'd expect Him to, in His infinite compassion, forgive you the unimaginable sin of doubt.
A materialist is someone who ignores the most important component of the universe, the existence of information. Before anything can come into being, whether an airplane, computer or grass shack, someone has to WILL to want to make it and think about how to actually do it.
And what makes you think that will or thoughts cannot be simply electrochemical reactions in the brain?
The laws of ink and chemistry do not explain the arrangement of symbols that make up a play from Shakespeare or a symphony score from Beethoven.
The hell they don't. I can easily put those into a computer. Our minds could simply be a more complex computer.
Or are you arguing that such beautiful things can only exist because of <deity>? If so, I suggest you look at a fractal. Pure, rigid logic -- you'd expect it to look fairly random to someone who doesn't understand the math -- but it's beautiful. The arrangement of symbols was created by a human mind, and is thus pleasing to another human mind -- not unlike one computer reading a core dump from another computer.
The laws of physics do not explain the arrangement of the DNA programming inherent in all living organisms.
They certainly do. It's called natural selection.
Therefore, the laws were laid down first in the mind of God and eternally operate the components of the universe.
What if I changed it to: "Therefore, the laws were laid down first in the mind of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and eternally operate the components of the universe." Would you stand by that argument?
You are a moron. If you would like to at least appear intelligent, try meeting us halfway. I've read the Bible. You need to read your basic Evolution textbook.
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You're taking my remark out of context, for one thing. By "If that makes me naive", I'm indicating my general agnosticism, towards everything. That makes me somewhat more than an atheist. For instance:
To me, those aren't fundamentally different than questions of whether I actually exist, whether this keyboard is real, and which OS is best. The only real difference is that I have chosen to assume that the keyboard is real, whereas I have not chosen to assume that a God is real.
That the keyboard is a scientific fact is actually irrelevant to this discussion. Certainly, in my daily life, I hold scientific truths to be more valuable than religious truths. But ultimately, science is based on observation and logic, which are things we have no more evidence for than the existance of a god -- after all, who is to say that our very logic is not a delusion? What if P really does equal NP?
This doesn't keep me up at night -- in fact, I sleep very well. But it's important to keep in mind when we're trying to talk about so-called "absolute truth".
We'd have to get very specific to talk about that. It's certainly possible that any number of variations of that could exist. However, the ones most consistent with the Bible and with faith are a kind of God I'd never worship. Genocidal bastard.
Yet, most sane Christians -- or at least, the Christians who are mostly sane -- do not beileve the Bible should be read literally. Thus, it's certainly possible to imagine another interpretation that would be everything we look for in a God. But, most variations you come up with will be impossible to prove or disprove. The traditional atheist holds that God does not exist, but if there was some proof, they might believe. The agnostic holds that not only do we not know if God exists, but we can never know, miracles or not.
Anyway, you've just made my point -- potaytoh, potahto. You call me an atheist, I call myself an agnostic, these are just words. I don't think we really disagree... except, perhaps, on one point:
I suspect that such a child would hear about Jesus in other ways. The parents have to say something, even if they say it's a fairy tale, or the child will be an easy convert. They'd be an atheist for about 10 minutes of Kindergarten, then someone would have to explain the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. (Or has that been removed yet?)
No, you'd need the whole society to be atheist before children could be raised without having to consider the question of God.
At first, I looked at the examples and thought I hadn't done anything similar. But no, just last week I wrote a script. Keeps some metadata about some files. Each file is represented by a Perl hash, that is stored inside another hash, which is indexed by a cryptographic hash of the file. Since this is Perl, each element in the parent hash is a reference to the child hash, so this makes it trivial to store the same reference in other hashes -- I also have a hash indexed by filename. There's a third hash that doesn't directly reference these objects, but contains the cryptographic hashes of them, making it trivial to look them up.
In other words, I thought of it, all by myself, without finishing college or taking a data structures class. And this is getting really fucking absurd when I invent something obvious before I learn of the patent and the decades of prior art.
Reposting as "plain old text" -- that appeared on one line because I accidentally posted as "HTML Formatted". Oops.
I've heard this argument before.
You generally find, when you talk to agnostics, that their response to the question "Does God exist" is "I don't think so." Let's face it -- if God came down [theonion.com] to clarify his existence and perhaps set us straight, the hard Atheists would be the first on the scene. If you're really intellectually honest, you'll be looking for both evidence that this is fake (Look at that man behind the curtain!) and evidence that it's real (That bush is on fire, but the leaves are still green!)
And of course, nothing would ever be conclusive enough. We were lied to as children, first about Santa, and then about God. As adults, it will be much harder for us to accept either. And yet, of course we'd be curious if we heard jingle bells on the roof.
Now, atheists often argue that without any evidence for a position, we shouldn't believe it. Therefore, since we have no evidence for God, we shouldn't believe at all -- but it doesn't mean you have to disbelieve, and shut your eyes if God ever appears.
So, the argument goes, "An agnostic is someone who is ignorant of what an atheist is." I'd argue the converse, as well: "An atheist is someone who is ignorant of what an agnostic is." I am, in fact, agnostic about everything -- but that doesn't mean I have to operate, day in and day out, with "I'm not sure". Having opinions and expectations is fine, so long as you're prepared for them to be wrong -- "I think so" or "I don't think so" is perfectly acceptable, and is, in fact, what any intellectually honest atheist would say.
Throughout my daily life, I operate on a set of useful assumptions, and I speak and act as if they were true. Linux, as much as it sucks, is the best operating system we've got right now -- and I don't have to do a cop-out of "At least, I think so, but maybe Bill's right?"
I act as if my assumptions were true, because it'd be absurd to be questioning them every second of the day. "Am I really breathing, or do I just think I am? Will I still pass out if I hold my breath too long? Let's find out..."
What makes me agnostic, and what makes any reasonable atheist a closet agnostic, is that I am prepared to let go of any of my assumptions. Not at the drop of a hat, mind you -- I'm still skeptical -- but given sufficient evidence, I may be forced to operate on a new assumption. For instance, I used to assume that everyone used Windows because no one knew about Linux -- now I realize I was young and stupid. I currently assume the Earth is mostly full of molten rock, but given sufficient evidence, I could be convinced that it's full of molten custard.
And yes, I include in my set of assumptions the assumption that it's logical to see the world as a set of assumptions, not a set of beliefs.
If that makes me naive, well... I'm proud to be naive. Better to be naive and curious than rigid and dogmatic.
If this sounds like you, then we're really just arguing semantics. Assumption, belief. Atheist, agnostic. Potayto, potahto.
I've heard this argument before. You generally find, when you talk to agnostics, that their response to the question "Does God exist" is "I don't think so." Let's face it -- if God came down to clarify his existence and perhaps set us straight, the hard Atheists would be the first on the scene. If you're really intellectually honest, you'll be looking for both evidence that this is fake (Look at that man behind the curtain!) and evidence that it's real (That bush is on fire, but the leaves are still green!) And of course, nothing would ever be conclusive enough. We were lied to as children, first about Santa, and then about God. As adults, it will be much harder for us to accept either. And yet, of course we'd be curious if we heard jingle bells on the roof. Now, atheists often argue that without any evidence for a position, we shouldn't believe it. Therefore, since we have no evidence for God, we shouldn't believe at all -- but it doesn't mean you have to disbelieve, and shut your eyes if God ever appears. So, the argument goes, "An agnostic is someone who is ignorant of what an atheist is." I'd argue the converse, as well: "An atheist is someone who is ignorant of what an agnostic is." I am, in fact, agnostic about everything -- but that doesn't mean I have to operate, day in and day out, with "I'm not sure". Having opinions and expectations is fine, so long as you're prepared for them to be wrong -- "I think so" or "I don't think so" is perfectly acceptable, and is, in fact, what any intellectually honest atheist would say. Throughout my daily life, I operate on a set of useful assumptions, and I speak and act as if they were true. Linux, as much as it sucks, is the best operating system we've got right now -- and I don't have to do a cop-out of "At least, I think so, but maybe Bill's right?" I act as if my assumptions were true, because it'd be absurd to be questioning them every second of the day. "Am I really breathing, or do I just think I am? Will I still pass out if I hold my breath too long? Let's find out..." What makes me agnostic, and what makes any reasonable atheist a closet agnostic, is that I am prepared to let go of any of my assumptions. Not at the drop of a hat, mind you -- I'm still skeptical -- but given sufficient evidence, I may be forced to operate on a new assumption. For instance, I used to assume that everyone used Windows because no one knew about Linux -- now I realize I was young and stupid. I currently assume the Earth is mostly full of molten rock, but given sufficient evidence, I could be convinced that it's full of molten custard. And yes, I include in my set of assumptions the assumption that it's logical to see the world as a set of assumptions, not a set of beliefs. If that makes me naive, well... I'm proud to be naive. Better to be naive and curious than rigid and dogmatic. If this sounds like you, then we're really just arguing semantics. Assumption, belief. Atheist, agnostic. Potayto, potahto.
He could certainly tell us more. And if he did, belief in God might be more like belief in Sunrises -- a reasonable default position. As it is, God has left us in a reality where the sane default is disbelief -- if you must believe or not believe, it makes more sense to not believe.
I am not judging that action, and it does not make me angry at God (if he exists), but that is the reality that I find myself in. The most natural leap of faith for me to make would be straight to hard atheism.
That would actually fit an exclusive OR, but you're right -- you can actually have both faith and logic. For instance, I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, and at least a few logical arguments to support that belief. However, even without recalling those arguments at the moment, I can have that faith.
And yet, that is the extent of my faith -- an assumption that appears to work. When I am truly honest with myself, I realize that I cannot possibly know anything, and must be prepared for any of my assumptions to change.
I, personally, do not have faith where logic cannot follow. I have curiosity and an open mind, but not faith.
Computers are not necessarily any more or less deterministic than we are. What is special about our own bodies?
I think if my computer was able to truly express love to me -- and not simply duplicate other expressions of love (for instance, an email from my significant other) -- it would probably frighten me, but I would have to be touched.
Why would it be meaningless? At what point do we say a creature has free will, or that its love has meaning?
For that matter, can't love have meaning even if we are all deterministic? If you discovered that you are so predictable that it was inevitable that you'd fall in love with a particular person, would you feel any less love for them at that realization?
I am not talking about rape or coercion, but I know women who like to talk about fate and destiny. One tells me she doesn't know why God sent me to her, but she's grateful that he did. Does she love me any less at the thought that I had no choice in the matter -- that God sent me to her? You could say it's her choice, but then, she says she can't help but love me.
I know my own will. If my will exists, then I choose it. If my will does not exist, then I have no choice but to say "I choose my own will" anyway, so there is no point in debating that.
I do not know the will of God, and I don't believe you do, either. Until we do know, it makes sense to choose my own will.
I call it freedom.
I sound like Milton's Lucifer, don't I? But I stand by it. I am more free for choosing my own will than to willingly become a slave to a deity.
It is also possible to love God without submitting to his will. Just look at any healthy relationship -- we no longer expect the woman to submit to the
I don't care what it symbolizes. Open your eyes. We're wearing crosses. We eat and drink things said to be symbolic of the flesh and blood of Christ. He's going to come back and wonder why we all celebrate his death... Or maybe he'll assume we want to crucify him AGAIN and then eat him...
Actually, I do appreciate your explanation of "picking up your cross", but I'd like to hear something as short and sweet explaining how Christians take communion and don't call themselves cannibals.
Likewise. Also, let me apologize for my style concerning these matters. It's... abrasive, to say the least.
I suggest that you read Hume. I would argue that the laws of physics do not necessarily exist, and we only presume that they do because they seem to be reliable at the moment.
I believe I made that point in my comment, something about statistical analysis. That's really all we're doing with the laws of physics. For all we know, it could be His Noodly Appendage governing everything consciously and directly, and thus none of the laws of physics are valid, but merely habits of God/FSM.
When I was a child, yes, I filled my pants. That's what diapers are for. And walking through mud, especially by accident, is something that I most certainly did, but not something I did with any sort of plan or design.
As I grew, I learned to go to the toilet. When I say "learned", for the sake of this argument, I mean that by listening to my parents, experiencing how uncomfortable diapers were, and having my use of the toilet positively reinforced all contributed to my habit of going to the toilet, and my knowledge of how to do so. We could reduce this to a lot of cause and effect involving sound waves, touch receptors, and neurology, but this could all be done through sheer materialism.
And this could have developed through random chance and natural selection. Before we had toilets, we probably squatted in the forest and used leaves. People, reacting to their environment and their needs, would have discovered concepts like toilet paper, an actual toilet, the flush toilet, and so on -- and, almost certainly, other things that did not work so well, such as simple holes in a room in a bridge over a river...
And how do we know that we need to be clean? Was there some sort of design in this? No, simply put, those whose hardware (DNA) gave rise to software (instincts -- think like a BIOS -- even computers without an OS ship with some software) that tended towards cleanliness were more likely to stay alive, and pass those traits on to their young. And most things pass traits on to their young because that is, in itself, a strategy for survival.
In that sense, we can say that necessity truly is the mother of invention, and everything we are is a direct result of our ancestors surviving where others were killed off. Certainly, we have our reason and free will, but these themselves are traits that must've been successful against creatures which reacted purely on instinct -- we have an instinct to reason about things and make our own decisions. Anything we do not directly related to our survival could be seen as a happy accident, but I'd guess an argument could be made for anything you name being traced back to simple, primitive survival instincts.
And yet, DNA strikes me as being kind of like a fractal. A fractal is an example of ridiculously good compression -- a formula less than ten characters long describes an infinite world of variety and beauty. Knowing that, we cannot necessarily take information we want and make a fractal to represent it, although we can mess with the fractal formula to see what other patterns we can get (look at Julias).
Read about quantum theory. There is randomness, and there is chance, and we cannot have all information. The nature of a being which could (possibly God, but not necessarily the Creator) is so far beyond my experience that I cannot even imagine the nature of its existance or nonexistance, and therefore, I cannot begin to believe or disbelieve.
This is where we disagree. If you allow randomness, then you allow the possibility of a program being randomly generated.
True enough. And we would not be able to measure it in any case.
However, it's worth noting that if what I described were our reality -- we are all within The Matrix, and there are an infinite number of Matrixes (Matrices?) -- then we would have absolutely no knowledge of what lay outside that. It could easily be infinite. It could be a wannabe hacker in his parents' basement. We just don't know.
Admitting what we do not know is the first step towards wisdom. (That's probably a quote from somewhere, but I can't remember where.)
Our discussion is. The article is about the existence of a Creationist museum, which suggests that the Bible be interpreted literally (as much as it can be), in a very bizarre way.
That much is true, and said another way, it is something we can only believe by abandoning logic. That's not necessarily wrong or bad, but it's something I choose not to do.
Come back when you've read more science fiction. Fact is, you can't even define God properly, and even if you could, the FSM would qualify just as readily as your sky-deity does.
Someone else posted a very nice rebuttal to your comments on evolution, so let me just say: You first. I suspect your argument comes from people with an agenda, a much bigger and more sinister agenda than is possible for any atheist, agnostic, or scientific belief.
Seriously, religion has been controlling people for thousands of years -- the priests say "God told me you have to do this!" to get people to do what they want. What could an agnostic possibly be hoping to gain by supporting evolution? Can you possibly imagine me, with my evil mustache and evil laugh, saying "Hehehehehe... They will all think for themselves! And they'll actually be free of any dogma or authority! And that's when I'll strike -- and have absolutely no power at all over them, or hope of world domination!"
Funny, the bible itself disagrees with you. Feel free to confirm that with a non-Lego source, if you wish.
Oh, please, send them to my door. I love crushing their beliefs!
I'm actually agnostic, but it's just so much fun to rip apart the Bible, piece by pathetic piece.
As it is, you run the risk of being regarded as excessively closed-minded.
I, for one, declare myself as agnostic towards anything, except (perhaps) my own existance. I live my daily life inside of a set of useful assumptions, but I don't include any god in those assumptions, at least until a god decides to take part in my daily life. However, I don't believe anything, and I am often excessively open-minded towards gossip, which often has me labeled as naive.
You know what? I'm proud of my naivete.
To me, that is a deep thought.
It suggests that we might ourselves become gods, simply by allowing enough space for something to grow and evolve, and using natural selection to find it.
I believe it's not that important to have The Answer in our daily life, however. And more importantly, I remember a wise man once said: "The purpose of life is to enjoy." What more do you need? (This doesn't require anything resembling a god -- ideas like natural selection would tend to support this conclusion.)
You have such a short time on this world. Enjoy it while it lasts.
In any case, I'm an agnostic -- but this carries its own limits. I can accept as many possibilities as I want, but I can't fully commit myself to any one of them.
I believe I've done this, I may do it again sometime. The only answer I've gotten is a voice in my head, but it's awfully close to other voices I've identified as myself, or parts of myself.
And by the way, I would very much love to see something like this happen. Not because I want to believe, but because I think all of us, believers or not, would become better people.
Regarding your own experiences, I wish I had similar ones. Even if I did, it wouldn't be sufficient to make me believe what I was taught -- not because I'm such a determined atheist, but because I believe God is essentially impossible to prove, even if he does exist.
I did, and this website seems to be a pretty good collection of the kinds of things I found. If the God of the Bible exists, he's an absolute dick, and I would sooner go to hell than worship him.
And yet, until something like that happens, I will continue to ignore the question of the existance of God, except when I believe that the believers are getting dangerous. Actually, I welcome people like you -- you seem a lot healthier, even if you are hearing voices, than the majority running this country.
However, if I do get something "Spielburgian", I'll return to that question. I doubt my essential beliefs will change -- I will neither believe nor disbelieve in that disembodied voice -- but I may not laugh as hard at true believers.
Well said. I'd disagree with you on a few points, but I want to acknowledge you first for being possibly the only Christian on Slashdot who's not afraid to follow some of the better teachings of Christ -- love thy neighbor as thyself. We need people like you more than we need people like me, if we're to become a truly enlightened, truly secular society.
I say this because I may get a bit brutal here...
Lots of big words, but I would put it simply: God is no more true or false than most fairy tales. I am, however, equally agnostic about fairy tales. Who am I to say that there could never have been a little girl in a red cape who was eaten by a talking wolf pretending to be her grandmother?
I realize that this isn't what you mean -- most atheists use the "fairy tale" argument to support hard atheism, whereas I'm just more thoroughly agnostic than most.
I'd say agnosticism, although I've had a few atheists tell me I'm wrong here, and that I should assume God does not exist until it's proven that he does. I do believe agnosticism covers a bit more ground than that, too -- for instance, I believe it's really impossible for the existance of God, or any other truth, to really be known.
Of course, there is a third position: God both exists and does not exist, in the same way that an electron can be in more than one place at a time -- his existance will only collapse when we can observe whether he exists or not. I don't believe that, I'm just throwing it out there -- most dichotomies are false. (Perhaps all, but I'm not ready to back that one up yet.)
Nope. If you're taking his quote in isolation, it simply means that religions should not have a seat at the table. It does not mean that "no religion" should have a seat at the table.
It's espousing secularism over theism, which is as close to neutral as we can get.
Oh, I welcome debate from either side. However, I reserve the right to laugh especially hard at creationists, and also at people who attempt to "prove" the existance of God, or the validity of theism, via any logical means. The only argument that still has any validity for me is "It would be nice to believe."
I was just discovering this by reading The Brick Testament, and going back to the actual text on Project Gutenberg. You just pointed me at Evil Bible, which is even better -- I was thinking I'd compile something like that myself.
Mostly just posting this to give evilbible an advantage with search engines (you didn't link to it), but this is interesting. Thanks.
I've been deconstructing a few idiotic arguments here and there, and I really should stop now. So, forgive me if I only answer a few of your arguments.
And how is this different than what's commonly taught in the Judeo-Christian world? That we are all part of God's universal plan, and that God exists within each of us, and we in him?
So I take it you don't agree with the laws of physics? I don't see the difference between these and the ideas of, say, Taoism.
Alright, would you care to apply the same logic to your own religion? Christians are supposed to eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood. Christians believe Christ walked the earth as a man. Yet Christians would be shocked if anyone called them cannibals.
You are supposed to love your neighbor as yourself, but you also have a great deal of laws (many from the Old Testament) which you don't follow anymore.
You also claim to believe in logic and reason, yet you also believe in a mythical sky-god, and take offense when we replace the word "God" with things like "Invisible Unicorn" or "Flying Spaghetti Monster".
My answer will be, because I have evidence for it -- the sun rose yesterday -- and it's a useful assumption. I don't claim to know that the sun will rise tomorrow. I live my day to day life on such assumptions, but I don't make leaps of faith the way you do -- not really.
If the sun does not rise tomorrow, I'll be very surprised, but I'll be able to deal with it. It probably wouldn't take all that long to convince me that the sun really wasn't going to rise. How would you deal if you died and went to Heaven and found Lucifer in charge, and learned that Jesus was actually a Satan-worshipper, and your God is dead?
Wow, you're more arrogant than I thought. Actually, I believe most animals have more dignity than Steve Ballmer, and I'd say there are quite a few who have more dignity than me. You, however, don't even have the dignity to admit that I might hold that belief -- not only do you believe humans have more dignity than animals, you also believe that everyone else thinks so, too.
Let's say someone believed that the sun would not rise tomorrow. We'd probably call them stupid, and we'd call them wrong the next day if the sun did, in fact, rise. What if they believed there was a teddy bear hanging out on the dark side of the moon? It would be a lot more difficult to disprove that one -- we might call them stupid or crazy, but not wrong.
Now, personally, I'm pretty sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I have absolutely no knowledge, one way or the other, about the existance of a teddy bear on the dark side of the moon. So, I don't claim to know that God (or Jesus) absolutely does not exist, but I can and do claim that you're just a bit stupid and crazy for believing such a fantastic claim without any evidence whatsoever.
Good! You realize that the brain and the mind aren't very distinct!
Some hardware is programmable via means of firmware. We can certainly imagine a fabrication lab which creates hardware on demand to meet the changing needs of the software -- fabricating a special chip just to handle a particular website, say. And there is software which is hardcoded into ROM -- what is it that makes this so distinct from the hardware itself? That software cannot be changed...
What is it that distinguishes hardware and software?
If it is that software runs on hardware, then is a virtual machine hardware or software? If it is that hardware is physical, then what do you call software on CD (physical holes burned into it), or programmable hardware (a chip for every website)?
Perhaps the brain and the mind are distinct, but you then go on to say:
Sorry, what?
Your brain executes software. OK. But why do you assume it must be put there by a programmer?
Not all software is generated by a programmer -- in fact, most of it is now written more directly by compilers, and is subject to reflection (software rewriting itself)... In fact, there have even been experiments with taking effectively line noise of instructions (no Perl jokes here) and selecting a goal, then running a number of random programs to see which comes closest to the goal -- then making random variations of the closest ones.
Not true -- read above.
Imagine for a moment that I hooked up an infinite number of infinitely powerful computers to a completely random source, and had them execute that random source as code. One of those computers would end up running OS X, another one Windows, and another one Linux. At least one of each.
One of them might even end up running some software that randomly generates programs, sets up some arbitrary goal for them to solve, and kills off the ones which fail. It might even combine the ones that succeed into new programs. One of those programs might get intelligent enough one day to generate this output:
And yet, when you get right down to it, this program was generated from line noise, and even if it thinks it has "thoughts", these are just the shifting of bits in the limited amount of memory that it can call its own, and perhaps a bit of boolean logic or arithmetic.
You see, the program assumes that it's special because it's here, because as far as it can tell, it's astonishingly unlikely that it would ever have existed. Of course, we know that's not true -- it's inevitable that it would exist, but the program isn't aware of the infinite number of complete and total failures it took.
You could say that a mind had to be there to set up that infinite number of computers, but of coures, that's not true at all -- they could've been created the same way, just whatever random assortment of molecules happened to produce an array of computers like that.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe our universe was created that
Natural selection doesn't have a goal, it's just the way things are.
And I would take it a bit beyond Darwin, and a bit beyond simple genetics.
Anyway, your premise is wrong. Natural selection can certainly create completely different things. You are not a chimpanzee, and the chimp isn't you. You and the chimp each have your strengths, and it would be arrogant to claim that one is somehow better than the other.
Perhaps it can't create something from nothing, but we do have a theory for that -- the Big Bang. In any case, consider the possibility that the matter and energy in the Universe have always been here. Why does there have to be a creator? Every process of creation we know of is really transformation anyway.
I'm not a materialistic atheist, but I'm playing Devil's Advocate here because it's such a critical point to understand. What is information? How do you prove it exists?
That you put MIND in ALL CAPS suggests that you think it's somewhat more than a complex program of electrochemical reactions in the brain. I know, it's not comfortable to think of reality that way, but you have refused to even acknowledge that possibility.
So, are you telling me that gravity did not work until Newton formalized a law about it?
Laws are constructs that help the mind understand the world. The world just is, it doesn't need us to invent these laws.
Consider a numerical sequence. A basic one, count from 1 to 10. Now, we can apply all kinds of laws to this to see it in new ways -- odd and even numbers alternate. Any sequence of consecutive integers that starts at 1 and counts to an even number will have an even number of numbers contained within... There's a more formal way of saying that, I suppose. But the numbers just are. You don't have to realize that even numbers exist -- and in a sense, you could say they don't until you realize it. Certainly, you could disagree with me, and claim that all numbers are odd, and it doesn't change a thing about the numbers that are there.
That's a hell of a leap of faith there. My brain operates by the laws of physics -- OK. But actually, as far as I know, these laws were first formulated by physicists. And in fact, we've only observed that the brain seems to operate by those laws -- it could, one day, decide to do something completely different.
I suggest you read up on David Hume. Just because we observe things behaving the same way doesn't mean they might one day be different. Gravity is not a law because some deity said "Let there be gravity." It's not actually a law in the sense you're thinking. It's more of a working theory. We drop stuff, it falls, so we try to predict how it will fall, but this is really no different than trying to come up with laws that fit the stock market -- trading systems can appear to work for awhile, but the market could, one day, decide to do something completely different.
Our "laws of physics" are simply trading systems that seem to work.
Also not true. I make poop. I make tracks when I walk in wet mud. I did not have to conceive these things before I created them.
What makes you so sure that our world is carefully engineered and constructed (like an oil refinery) and not simply an accident
The term, as defined by technical people, means that the network itself is neutral. This means that your ISP can't give your neighbor's HDTV stream priority over your WoW. So, in a world where everyone has a reasonable amount of bandwidth, net neutrality is good for your ping time.
It also means that if there isn't a reasonable amount of bandwidth, then we may get to a point where everyone and their grandmother is saturating the network with BitTorrent. In this scenario, net neutrality is bad, because you can't pay your ISP extra to give your WoW priority over everyone else's torrents.
However, I tend to support this definition of net neutrality, because I doubt very much that the ISPs will charge a reasonable fee for such prioritization, or that they're prioritize what I want them to. And if we ever get to a point where the network is saturated by BitTorrent, the solution is for the greedy, lazy ISPs to actually lay enough fiber to cover the bandwidth that everyone's paying for -- none of this "But it's only burst bandwidth!" whiny BS.
To make matters worse, I've just learned that the telecoms have redefined this term to mean that the government should be neutral about the Internet. This is because, of course, they intend to prioritize traffic if the government doesn't pass a law preventing it. So, they have twisted the term to mean the exact fucking opposite of what it means.
I think the point about traffic shaping is that it's legal for you to do it at the endpoint. Thus, if you don't want to lag, just give your game priority over your torrent.
You don't have to go too far to find the lunacy of God. Just read the book of Judges. God likes genocide. If you don't like genocide, don't worship God.
You, like many Christians, seem to be ignoring the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument. Take any argument for the existence of a god, and substitute "God" with "Flying Spaghetti Monster" and see if you still like the argument. For instance:
I want you to consider a third option, though. Consider that perhaps there is an absolute, universal right and wrong, but it's not any God that decides. It's just part of the inherent nature of the Universe.
Or take #1 farther -- there is no God, and we can set up our own right or wrong, but we certainly can logically hold these to other people. Everyone past the age of about 2 has a basic concept of fairness, so that's really all that's needed.
In fact, most of the time, we don't need a God for our own moralities. If someone told you to kill your child, what would your first thought be? Absolutely fucking NOT, right? Did you need to tell yourself "God says 'Thou shalt not kill', so I better not!"
And certainly, I don't think we should hold others to any morality other than that basic of fairness. Consensual gay sex is entirely fair. Rape of any kind is entirely unfair.
Anyway, remember the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In fact, if you can, go back and read your Bible, but mentally replace God (or the Lord or whatever) with something ludicrous, like the FSM, or Alfred E. Neuman. If you can really do this, you'll realize what a complete asshole God really is -- at least, according to the Bible. And if you reject the Bible, what is it that makes you still a Christian?
I'd say, keep your morality, but lose the arrogance and the ritual. If I'm entirely wrong and there is a Christian God, I'd expect Him to, in His infinite compassion, forgive you the unimaginable sin of doubt.
And what makes you think that will or thoughts cannot be simply electrochemical reactions in the brain?
The hell they don't. I can easily put those into a computer. Our minds could simply be a more complex computer.
Or are you arguing that such beautiful things can only exist because of <deity>? If so, I suggest you look at a fractal. Pure, rigid logic -- you'd expect it to look fairly random to someone who doesn't understand the math -- but it's beautiful. The arrangement of symbols was created by a human mind, and is thus pleasing to another human mind -- not unlike one computer reading a core dump from another computer.
They certainly do. It's called natural selection.
What if I changed it to: "Therefore, the laws were laid down first in the mind of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and eternally operate the components of the universe." Would you stand by that argument?
You are a moron. If you would like to at least appear intelligent, try meeting us halfway. I've read the Bible. You need to read your basic Evolution textbook.