My Beliefs- GDR

Hi Faith, Admittedly, I've not been following all of this discussion, but I rather think that you have misinterpreted people here. It's not so much that people don't want God to punish sin, it's more that we'd prefer that he didn't punish innocents for other people's sins.Now you may think that a tornado in the face is a perfectly appropriate punishment for lying. Personally, I'd call it a bit of an over-reaction, but that's just me I guess. But let's assume that a lethal tornado is an ideal punishment for the sin of telling porkies; why should everyone else pay for the liar's sin? Why should nearby innocents die from that disaster? Why should children die? Why should Christians die? Why should animals die? I mean, you can't blame a woodchuck for humanity's sins, it's only a woodchuck. It's hardly fair to hold it responsible for the human misconduct.It seems clear to me that if God is using disasters as a punishment for sin, then he is either engaging in a particularly unpleasant form of collective punishment, or he just has really lousy aim.Mutate and Survive

Hi Oni,I hear you and, for the most part, I agree. It would be nice if God could treat us like adults and let us run our own affairs. He's apparently going to judge us after we die, so I don't see why he can't just leave it at that. To punish before and after death seems like gilding the lilly.On the other hand, if God did punish sinners - and by that I mean only punish sinners, as opposed to just anyone unlucky enough to get in the way - then at least that might provide us with a clearer perspective on things. After all, if the wages of sin really were death, then we might be more inclined to play along and sin less. It would send a clear and coherent message. As it is, natural disasters appear to be just that - natural. They affect everyone in their path, innocent and guilty alike. It seems to me like he's giving off mixed signals.Gotta hand it to Faith though, she makes it real easy to be an atheist. I really don't want to believe in Faith's God. For all the flaws in his argument, I like GDR's God much better.Mutate and Survive

Hi GDR, But somehow he isn't responsible for Downes Syndrome, Fragile X syndrome, progeria or any other of the countless birth defects that regularly blight the lives of innocent children. You don't seem to hold him responsible for that.I have told you in previous discussions that I think that you are creating your god through a mixture of cherry picking and projection; you read the Bible and label the bits you like as being divine, whilst labelling the nasty bits as being human misunderstandings, not really God at all. I see your argument here as a rather unpleasant manifestation of that tendency.When it comes to things you approve of - things like intelligence, morality, imagination, biological complexity - you give the credit to God the designer, by whose creative genius we are given these bounteous gifts.When it comes to the nasty side though, you change your tune. Terrible afflictions like spina bifida or fibrodysplasia are either not God's work or somehow beyond his capabilities to prevent. You never seem to think that anything good is beyond God's abilities, but you just give him a free pass with the bad stuff. Intelligence? No problem, he can create that. Imbuing us with morality? That's well within his capabilities. Designing the nervous system? Easy! But preventing kids from being born into suffering? Sorry, no can do. It just doesn't ring true. It sounds implausible, too much like a rationalisation.Essentially you're simply doing what you always do; projecting. You are a nice person, so your god is nice. You would never harm a child, so God must not be responsible for birth disorders. You would never commit a massacre, so biblical massacres must be human misinterpretations. Every time you're just taking what you would do and projecting onto God. Any inconsistencies or problems you just dismiss. Then, when challenged, you retreat into "Well this is just my subjective belief and you can't prove otherwise.", a tawdry defence if ever there was one.Ultimately this approach is mostly harmless, but in the specific case of children with birth defects, I think it's a little bit shameful. To suggest that these kids are the unfortunate side effects of God's plan for humanity, a sort of divine collateral damage, is patronising. I think that it belittles their suffering and I think that you're a better person that that. Mutate and Survive

I don't see why, since you don't believe in a general theistic deity, but rather a specific Christian one. That's not what you're doing at all.What you're doing is taking Christianity and paring bits away as they become untenable.You're doing a classic God of the Gaps, where your God is forced to retreat into the edges of scientific knowledge - your scientific knowledge that is, not the actual limits of scientific knowledge. So where God was once held responsible for creating the universe, the world, all life, you have retreated into making a much more modest claim, that he merely influenced human evolution.You're doing a similar thing with the Bible; you take all the nasty bits and pare them away, leaving a more palatable work that's a better fit for our modern sensibilities.You are not building from the ground up. Instead you are simply taking Christianity and snipping out the bits you don't like, either because they have been disproved or because they are morally repugnant. That's why I find this "Tom" business so silly; you're not starting with the evidence and seeing where it leads you, you're merely taking the Christian God and stripping him of his traditional attributes until you find him palatable enough to believe in. Well quite. Happy co-incidence then that God seems to agree with you about... well everything actually.Don't you find that a bit suspicious? The god you believe to exist is exactly the god you would choose. To me that sounds like a sign that he is inside your head. So please be specific; what part does the suffering of a child born with fibrodyslasia play in God's big plan? How is this necessary? How is it helpful? So children are born into pain and suffering so that we can learn to be kind? That's sick! Sick and evil! These kids are not props that others can use for self-improvement, they're people. Only a monster would use them for such purposes. That is all there is. This is 100% rationalisation. You're certainly not basing any of this nonsense on evidence. You're just rationalising away the messed-up implications of your beliefs. ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY I WOULD, and so should anyone who considers themselves to be moral.If the price of my existence is that innocents suffer and die, then I don't want to exist, not on those terms.If the price of my existence is that I have to kill just one child, then I don't want it.If that is the price but God makes the choice for me, then that's even more repugnant.If God couldn't create humanity without causing billions of children to suffer and die, then he should have held off with his grand project until he had ironed out such problems. If that wasn't possible, he should never have bothered.You might not have a problem with God callously using these children as sacrificial lambs, but I do. Only a monster would behave in such a way. That doesn't actually make it any better though does it? I mean, if I were to come round to your place and set fire to your house, it wouldn't make you feel much better if I told you that I'd set fire to my own house as well. How touching. It's based on anything though. It's just mindless optimism and projection again.The real truth is that in the scenario you present, God cannot make it right. Nothing can make the deliberate torture of billions of innocents right. It is inconceivable. The god who does this has passed over the moral event horizon. He does not deserve your devotion.Just as well then that you made him up.Mutate and Survive

Sorry for the tardiness of the reply GDR. Since I know that you're having trouble with all these replies, feel free to take your time should you choose to respond. I don't think that makes a shred of sense. You can't claim belief in a general deity if you believe in a specific version of the Christian one. Just because you're not the only one doing it doesn't mean that you're not engaging in Cafeteria Christianity. Frankly, the whole Christian faith seems to me to exist as a Cafeteria version of Judaism in the first place.The evolution of our understanding of GHod as Wright describes it is nothing more than a gradual erosion of ideas as they became untenable. The history of religious belief has followed this pattern of downscaling. First the countless vague spirits of animism gave way to more discrete multiple Gods, then they gradually merged into a single all-powerful God, then a rather more distant God. Now that God is being stripped of his traditional responsibilities. Where once he was believed to have created humanity, now he merely oversees it.What you and Wright see as an evolution and refinement of our understanding of God, I see as a simple process of ignorance and superstition being pushed back as societies advance. First many gods, then one then none. I don't think that you're doing that though. The bit that I think you're deifying is yourself. All you're really doing is filtering Christian teachings through your own moral framework and calling the results "God". But it's not God. It's just you. Thus handily allowing you to disassociate yourself from the more traditional Christian belief that God created the visible universe and the world. A textbook God-of-the-Gaps climbdown. A textbook gap in our scientific understanding in which a weakened and outdated concept can find refuge. Classic God-of-the-Gaps stuff. And it is only the fact that we still lack a complete understanding how conciousness arises from our brains that allows you to place your god into this gap. That is completely counter to the known facts. The gap here exists only in your mind.The whole point of evolutionary theory is that evolution is inevitable. It has to happen and can't not happen. If you have life reproducing with imperfect heredity and in competition for scare resources, then you have necessarily have evolution. Any notion of evolution being somehow "kick-started" is an absurdity, totally counter to what we already know. I understand what you're trying to achieve in this exercise. I just don't think that it in any way mirrors the way you have actually arrived at your beliefs. I suspect that in actual fact you, like most theists, simply inherited most of your religious beliefs from your parents and have been trying to rationalise them ever since. Here's an example of that rationalisation in play. Of course your view of God has changed; you've changed as you have grown as a person. Naturally your internal god-model will change to accommodate this.Again I ask you; Have you ever disagreed with God about anything? I'm not talking about your gradually evolving beliefs about his nature. I'm asking if there is anything that you think God favours that you personally favour. Is there anything upon which GDR's god and GDR fundamentally disagree?If not, you have to admit that it's a little... suspicious. You're contradicting yourself. You can't have that both ways. Either suffering is necessary or it is not.If suffering is not necessary, then why would it exist?If suffering is necessary, then what is it necessary for? What purpose does it serve? How is it helping?You say that you do not believe that suffering is here to teach the rest of us kindness, so what is it there for?Now I know what you're going to say; you don't know why. But can you even conceive of a hypothetical reason that would make sense? What possible reason could there be that would justify millions of innocents being born into agony? Note that none of that depends on God in the slightest bit. That's wrong-headed. A truly moral being does not do evil unto someone and then do good to try and make up for it. A truly moral being would simply do good in the first place.A further concern is that the suffering is indisputably real, whereas this reward you speak of is 100% non-evidenced and gives every sign of being imaginary. Again, it is a rationalisation that you have put in place to counter the problem of suffering. I didn't really imagine that you did, but I do think that some explanation of that sort is a necessary logical consequence of your contention that suffering is necessary to God's plan. If it is necessary, then it has to be necessary for something. What exactly?I don't think that any excuse could be sufficient to justify the extremes of suffering that exist. I think that any contract that included such suffering as a clause is one that we should reject. That your God did not reject this contract is, I think, morally repugnant. And yet you somehow imagine that they are, despite being unable to imagine how that might function. Absurd! I do. I know.It's "No reason."Bad things happen to good people because there is no central organising intelligence to make it otherwise. The only moral agents that we know of that are qualified to improve upon our amoral universe are humans. Inventing supernatural entities of dubious morality only serves as a distraction from this reality. No. Its only real necessity is to dig you out from the theological sand trap you've got into. If you weren't insistent on believing that a good God takes credit for our biology, then you wouldn't need to invent excuses for him when it comes to the dark side of that biology.Mutate and Survive

Hi Ned,I think that the phrase "Science of the Gaps" is a poor one. Science is not an answer to anything, only a means to an answer. Say rather "Materialism of the Gaps".It's still a flawed analogy though. The whole point about GotG is that God is only supposed to take a role where there is a gap in our understanding, i.e. a material explanation cannot be found. As more and more materialist explanations are foud for phenomena previously ascribed to deities, the Gap God is gradually forced to retreat into fewer and fewer gaps.This is not the case for materialism. For materialism there is no need to retreat, simply because every time that we've found an explanation for a phenomenon we've found it to be... not magic.Every single thing that humanity has ever successfully explained about the universe has turned out to explicable in purely materialist terms. No need for retreat. No need to hide. And where there are gaps in our understanding it seems reasonable to look for materialist explanations first, because that's exactly what worked every other time.If even a single phenomenon had ever been successfully explained by non-materialist forces, then GDR might have a point. Until that happens though, there is no scientific/materialist argument that could be considered equivalent to the God of the Gaps.Mutate and Survive

Hi GDR, I don't have much time, but I have to just ask one question.If we see an apple lying under an apple tree, can we safely assumed that it dropped on its own, or ought we wonder if God came down from heaven and plucked it?Mutate and Survive

So there are some natural processes that are completely natural and material in their causes. Good. At least that saves us from absurd positions like Dawn's.I can't help but wonder though, how you were able to discount the possibility of God's involvement. What criteria did you use to reach this conclusion? So what is different about the origin of life exactly? You say that you're not using the GotG argument, so by what criteria do you judge this event divine where you call other events mundane?Mutate and Survive

AKA making it up as you go along. I could not find that satisfying. Making things up is fun, but it is not an acceptable means of finding truths about the world. Belief is not evidence, except for crazy people. But Wait! You immediately contradict yourself! Here you seem to be claiming some sort of evidence from the natural world. This is not belief. This is empiricism.So I have to ask you, if you have some kind of evidence from the natural world, what is it? How would it apply to the dropped apple? Upthread you were claiming that we couldn't tell if God is involved in natural events or not, now you say you can, so how do you tell except for an ad hoc, feels good whim?The truth is that you are not working from observation of the natural world, or else you wouldn't ignore the evidence we discussed earlier in the thread that God tortures and murders children. You have all the evidence anyone could need on that topic, yet you ignore it. That is an argument from incredulity.Pointing out the logical fallacy you're committing doesn't stop it from being bad logic. Makes it worse even, since you know you're being irrational, but refuse to change. No, Paley did not have a point. He claimed that because he could not imagine how the eye evolved, then it could not have evolved. What arrogant piffle! He failed to consider the real answer to his question; that William Paley just wasn't bright enough to reach the correct answer.Are you so arrogant that you imagine yourself to be able to come up with the correct explanation every time? No matter how complex? And do so even when you don't understand the field of study in question? Really What a monstrous ego you must have!Of course, I don't really think you arrogant, I just think that you've failed to think through what the argument from incredulity is really saying. A grotesque abuse of the razor. Occam's Razor tells us not to add unnecessary entities to an argument. You are invoking an invisible magic man, before even trying to engage with the science. This is an especially bad example of how to misapply the Razor. Why bother propping up the notion with such awful arguments then? Just drop it if it's not necessary, because you sure as heck haven't provided a logical argument for divine creation of life. What you have given us so far is;1) I believe it because I want to believe it,
2) I believe it because of personal incredulity regarding subjects that I do not personally understand,
3) I believe it because I have misapplied Occam's Razor.I could not find that satisfying myself.Mutate and Survive

Look, I don't mean to be rude, but when I asked you what you based your belief upon, you replied "Belief". You can't expect to come out with a statement like that and not get called out for your circular reasoning.As for how you came to your beliefs, you claim to base your beliefs upon evidence from the natural world. You said; But when I ask you for specifics, you seem unable to provide them.I ask you why you're so sure that the fallen apple is a wholly natural event and you don't seem to be able to give a reason.I ask you why you're so sure that the origins of life require divine intervention and all you seem able to show me is an appeal to incredulity.All I can conclude is that you simply believe whatever you want to believe. As does any sensible empiricist. None of that changes the claim that you base your beliefs upon observation of the natural world. But when pressed for examples, you can only offer "feels right" emotional thinking and fallacies. If that is the case then you have no basis upon which to judge one event natural and another divine. Well, none except for wishful thinking. I know that I do keep making those accusations, but that's only because I honestly think that you are committing those fallacies. You are free to believe whatever you like, but if you're going to hold your beliefs up for examination, you have to expect to have such things pointed out. In my view, if your argument requires logical fallacies, then it's a bad argument and you ought not make it. But you have admitted that you cannot tell whether God has intervened or not. On that basis you have no standing to make any such judgement.It's simple; either you can draw evidence about God from the natural world or you cannot. if you cannot, you have no basis to claim that your belief in a good God is based upon observation. If you can make such observations, then you must judge God for the bad as well as the good. You can't just cherry-pick, or assume the conclusion. Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. Indeed. The Golden Rule is embraced by many secular humanists, a fact that rather neatly demonstrates how little connection morality actually has to do with religion. He's equivocating. Those of us who criticise religion do not do so because we are opposed to "love and compassion". What we oppose are the false claims and shoddy logic of religion.If the Dalai Lama wants to tell us that we should love one another, then great, I have no argument with him. It's when he claims to be the reincarnation of the previous thirteen Dalai Lamas that I have to take issue with him. Similarly, when you tell me "to love kindness", I have no argument with you. But when you tell me that God tells me to love kindness, or that God intervened in human evolution, then I have to disagree. I'm sorry, but that entire sentence is a horrendous mess of circular reasoning. No you don't. You could just as easily conclude that God kick-started the world and then left the scene forever, completely oblivious to our suffering. You could conclude that God loves suffering and regards it as jolly entertainment. You could conclude that suffering is the point of existence and that joy is an unfortunate side-effect, a regrettable necessity in God's greater plan to achieve the maximum degree of pain and horror.The only reason you don't reach these conclusions is because you don't want to believe that. I'm sorry, but the world just doesn't work that way. I think that would still be true even if there really is a good God. Even if your conclusions turn out to be correct, the means by which you've arrived at them seem too shaky to fully justify your beliefs. Except that I'm not arguing that. I base my atheism more upon lack of positive evidence in favour of gods.There is a further point of difference; you accuse me of incredulity, but even if that is the case, I am only incredulous toward a position for which no positive evidence exists. You are incredulous of (for example) the naturalistic evolution of morality, even in the face of supporting evidence for the same. I think that puts us on rather different footings. That's not true. We need not refer back all the way back to some first cause to study something specific, such as the evolution of morality. We can study that just as satisfactorily in a divinely created universe as we can in a naturalistic one. We don't need to know what started the Big bang to study evolution, yet you want to drag us into a first cause argument, merely to introduce an element of doubt; a Gap where your Gap God can reside.Mutate and Survive

Yes. Life is thought to have emerged within about a billion years of the Earth's formation. Life has existed for over four times as long as that.I believe that the usual explanation for this apparent paradox is that the presence of pre-existing life would preclude the emergence of a second biota. The existing life would out-compete the simpler organic molecules to the point where they would not have the opportunity to undergo the complex chemistry that led to the previous emergence of life. In short, the first life gobbled up the primordial soup until there was none left for second helpings.Saying that, there's no reason why it absolutely could not have happened, in some remote ecosystem, like a cave. Scientists are always on the look out for the possibility. I hope they succeed. Seeing a completely unrelated form of life would be amazing!Mutate and Survive