My Beliefs- GDR

So how come you keep getting it wrong? Atheism is not hard to understand, it's simply a lack of belief in god. It has nothing to do with evolution or QM or string theory or any other scientific discovery. There were atheists before any of that stuff was known about. You need to think carefully about why that got to you. My statement that..... ....is absolutely factually correct. I was sat in church one day and I suddenly realised that what the priest was telling me was utter tripe. So I never went back. It wasn't a conclusion reached after years of careful study, it was a revelation of the Road to Damascus sort. It was suddenly ver obvious to me that the whole thing was made up, made no sense and was totally irrational.Have a think why that statement offended you so much, I didn't accuse you of being an idiot for believing what you belief, I simply said that I saw through those beliefs as a child.You took that as an implied insult - and I can see why you did and pretty much all real believers have a hard time accepting that most atheists think their belief are silly and childish - that's just a fact and I for one am not going to protect you from that fact.All believers take offense when their beliefs are confronted full on - from time to time, I lurk around the evolution fairy story forum - just to see how long it takes an atheist there to get banned - usually a few days or weeks is enough, no matter how carefully they tread.But most of us also separate the belief from the believer - to use another religious trope, we blame the sin not the sinner (usually). Trust me, we get just as frustrated and annoyed by the stuff that we're subjected to from them.You need to develop a thicker skin. You're one of the more reasonable believers here, if we actually thought you were an idiot we wouldn't be still discussing this stuff with you month after month.But you should be clear, I DO think that your beliefs are daft and I do think that the logic you use to support them is flawed so you're going to continue to get criticised fairly sharply for it - particularly when you fail to get simple stuff like what an atheist is wrong.

OK. Here is what I said. I was actually trying to paraphrase what Straggler and others have posted. Essentially I understood them to be saying that there is no objective evidence for any god(s) so they don’t believe in god(s). I was saying that atheism is a lack of belief in god, but giving the rationale for that lack of belief as I understood Straggler and others to have given. So my response was essentially how well thought out was that. In my teens I essentially dropped the idea of God as it didn’t seem relevant to me. I essentially remained an agnostic until my mid-thirties when I actually spent a fair bit of time figuring what I believed and why. Again, starting about 13 years ago I started reading extensively both sides of the issue to form my conclusions and over that period I have revised my views on many aspects of my faith.What I find difficult in your post is that you are rather egotistically saying that you figured out as a child that what I have spent hours studying from all aspects of the issue, and what people like Francis Collins, John Lennox highly intelligent and thoughtful people have come to believe as adults is nonsense. The hubris is breath-taking. I posted this a couple of posts back.

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I am told on this thread that my beliefs are irrational, ridiculous etc. Frankly it is my view that it is irrational and ridiculous to believe that consciousness that includes intelligence, emotions and morality can emerge from mindless non-dimensional or uni-dimensional particles. However I don’t normally see any need in saying that.

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We can disagree about these things but insulting each other doesn’t lead to a useful discussion and I’m not the least bit interesting in a slagging match.I certainly don’t need protection but on the other hand why would I have any interest in continuing a conversation with someone who continues a conversation with that sort of tone. I have had numerous discussions with Straggler who holds the same views as you and he doesn’t seem to need to be insulting.As I said, this has largely become a forum for atheists who largely seem to want to be patted ion the back for having been clever enough not to be duped into falling for all of this religious twaddle. As near as I can tell, there are very few theists left here. Actually, on this forum I don’t recall having seen a lot of atheists being told that their beliefs are childish fairy tales. I think that I have exhibited a pretty thick skin around here. But after the hours I have put in trying to explain what I believe and why I believe it, having it all characterised as something that children can understand as being daft does grate more than just a little. I have no problem with you disagreeing with my conclusions or my logic but it can be done without being insulting.However, all that being said I appreciate the tone of your last post.Cheers

Please don't back-peddle, your response was to feel insulted because you thought I had implied that you are an imbecile. When I had actually said this: I don't think that you're an imbecile but I do think you've been duped. CS Lewis has a lot to answer for.(Just as a by-the-by, it doesn't matter how many supposedly clever people believe something - if it's wrong, it's wrong. History is full of wrong clever people. And please don't assume that just because I understood that the god thing was an error before I'd spent an age studying science and philosophy that I haven't since done so.) You won't find anything in what I've said that could possibly be seen as a slanging match and if you examine the mote in your own eye you'll find that in your last post you called me egotistical and think that my hubris is breathtaking. Am I bothered? Nope - because my hubris is breathtaking. I simply use more direct and less flowery language.I will continue to call the dafter of your beliefs daft, simply because they are, but I do not mean to infer that you are an imbecile. People seem to be able to believe the weirdest things, but I think that your heart is in the right place.

I’m not . You are essentially saying that you were able to figure out as a child what I and others came to believe as adults was nonsense. The imbecile comment was meant as a generalization of how theists get treated around here and wasn’t specifically aimed at your post. I wasn’t using the fact that because clever people are Christian that makes it right. It is simply to point out that there are many rational, intelligent and highly educated rational people who are Christian, and claiming that their views are irrational is a bit much. I used those terms in application to your views as I am attempting to show where the problem lies. There are very clever people who are theists and very clever people who are atheists. I have read books by clever people on both sides of the discussion and it seems that both consider the other point of view as completely wrong headed. I actually find it amazing how the two camps of people who have virtually the same basic knowledge and education can come to such diametrically opposed views.The point is that both sides view the other position as being daft. In other threads I have been accused of thinking myself as being egotistically important because of my faith. What I fervently believe gets labelled as nonsense. My logic is considered daft. The thing is that theists who have really thought this thing through feel the same way about atheistic beliefs and that is the point I was trying to make. Normally I don’t say things like that although I’m sure I slip once in a while, and I guess in hind sight I shouldn’t have done it then either and made my point in another fashion. In light of that, I apologise. I’m curious as to how and why you rejected a theistic world view as an adult.

1. Because the world's religions have let themselves down so badly that they have shown themselves to be debased and corrupt and are so obviously man made to the extent that thoughtful and sane believers like you have had to abandon pretty much every traditional belief in order to continue to have any belief at all.2. Because, as has been said over and over here - there is absolutely no evidence FOR a god. That's NONE. Simply saying that because we're conscious there must be a god, or that some clever people think that there is a god, or because we can't prove that there is no god, or because we can't understand how what you call 'mindless' processes could create a universe or any other such stuff is simply not evidence for a God.3. Because of much more that has been cycled and recycled on these forums and others like it for years.

I went to wiki to see how they would define, and elaborate on, just what constitutes a religion.It starts out this way.

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Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to the supernatural, and to spirituality.[note 1] Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred histories that are intended to explain the meaning of life and/or to explain the origin of life or the Universe. From their beliefs about the cosmos and human nature, they tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle. According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions in the world.

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Firstly, I don’t agree that religions have let us down but certainly their followers have in many cases, but that is true of people of faith and no faith. The wiki article starts out by mentioning that religion is organized making it an organization. Organizations are manmade. We know that if there are 4200 religions in the world that the vast majority of them at least are off the mark completely and that the likelihood that any one of them has a lock on all the truth about a deity, (if a deity exists), is remote.I know that in my own Christian faith my views vary quite considerably from the Faith’s views. So even within those 4200 religions there are numerous variations in the beliefs of individuals. The fact that religions as organizations are manmade does not in itself tell us anything about whether or not a deity actually exists. In my made it is suggestive that one does as so many people are trying to sort out the nature of a deity and what it means to our lives. There is no doubt though that many religions have been formed by individuals and groups have very earthly goal, usually a search for earthly power.In the end that it is hard to be critical of your distaste for religion, I don’t see why that should be a cause to reject a deity.As for myself I don’t see that I have had to abandon pretty much every traditional belief. I’d suggest that all that I have abandoned are some of the beliefs that have been added to the basic Christian faith over the years. Again, I have two fundamental beliefs. One is that God is good and that He is just and we are to reflect that in our own lives, and secondly I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, which confirms the message that Jesus espoused. So yes, I certainly believe more than that but my other beliefs are more open to interpretation and understanding.I consider my view is roughly the same as what Jesus espoused in the Gospels, Paul in the Epistles, and on through Augustine to Lewis and currently N T Wright. Bottom line is I don’t think that I have had to abandon much of anything. I would just say that I have rejected a bunch of stuff that has been tacked on and caused a great deal of division within the church. I agree that none of that is evidence at you use the term. However, as we can’t prove that there is a god or that there is no god we can if we like just ignore the whole question. On the other hand we can look at the world and our individual life and come to a conclusion about what we perceive and experience suggests to us. It is my contention that consciousness, intelligence and morality is suggestive that there is more to our existence than mindless processes responsible for our existence. I’m fine with you saying that isn’t evidence but if we are going to attempt to form our own conclusions about whether or not an intelligent planner exists then that is as good a place to start as any.Cheers

A religion IS its followers (and leaders). Remove them and there's nothing left exept empty buildings and a bookshelf full of whatever scribbles they have made.Religions of all sorts across the world have been shown to be parochial, power grabbing, self interested, corrupt institutions for generations. Popes had empires and armies. Christian kill Muslim, Sh'ia Muslim kills Sunni Muslim. Jews kill Muslims. Whole countries are segregated along religious devisions. New religions are invented to exploit the gullible. Sects are subdivided in smaller sects. Preists abuse children and evangelists extort from those can least afford it.You could write several books on the failure of organised religions. Please don't just shrug all this off as human failing - of course it's human failing - it's human failing because organised religion are human inventions. I find that hard to believe. If you accept that all the major institutions that preach and teach the ways of God are errant and corrupt why would that not lead to a conclusion that the deity that they do it all for is either non-existant, corrupt itself or could give damn?Three things can happens to those that discover their religion is a lie or that it doesn't believe the things they want to believe:1. They shrug and carry on, going through the motions for apearances sake
2. They abandon it
3. They change their religion or create a new one.3. Is why there are gazillions of religions and even more divisions within them. Basically they have to keep making up new stuff in order to continue believing in anything.I chose 2. Henry VIII chose 3. Its not my term; it's what evidence actually IS.[Q]However, as we can’t prove that there is a god or that there is no god we can if we like just ignore the whole question. [/Qs]But if there is no evidence for a god - which there isn't, not a scrap - then of course we can ignore it, we have to ignore it because there's no reason to consider it beyond minor philosophical speculation in accademia. We can safely ignore it until there IS evidence. And after you start, where do you go next? You have no evidence that can take you anywhere so the likes of CS Lewis and thousands of others churn out works of imaginative fiction instead and have done for thousands of years, without making any progress at all.

OK. At the quantum level this is true. It's actually quite different. Because 'macro-evolution' is little more than a term made-up by creationists whilst entropy is very real and very relevant to macroscopic phenomena in a way that it isn't at the quantum level. Which is macroscopic and thus subject to entropy. No. You've got the wrong end of the stick. Entropy is very real. You try creating a perpetual motion machine and then tell me otherwise...... Then you would be simply wrong. The reason perpetual motion machines don't exist is not because of consciousness. In a word - Entropy. I suggest you read the rest of cavediver's post Message 59

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What then creates this great disparity between the macroscopic view and the microscopic view? Principally the same macroscopic thing that gives rise to the idea of time: entropy.

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When the cup falls and smashes, it takes one path through the space of all possibilites to end up in the smashed state. One path out of a gazillion possible paths. And where just about every one of those gazillion paths ends up in a macroscopically identical state: cup smahed into thousands of shards and scattered over the floor, each piece having come to rest by interacting with elements of the floor and passing over the kinetic energy.

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It is completely possible for each element of the floor to interact with a neighbouring shard of cup, to impart just the right amount of kinetic energy to make each shard leap together to form a perfectly formed cup - the energy being sufficient to re-create all the chemical bonds that were brokern in the fall, and being sufficient to lift the cup back into the air back into our hand.

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How possible? Just about as equally probable as it was for the cup to fall and smash in the way it did! One in a gazillion.

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The difference is that the particular path that leads to the cup resurrection is surrounded by a gazillion paths that look nothing like a cup resurrection, where-as the path that our cup took on its fall was surrounded by a gazillion other paths that all looked essentially the same - a cup falling and smashing.

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It's basically statistics of a sort that cannot be applied to individual particles. The only context in which a cause for "Tom" is demanded is when theists state that everything requires a cause and then invoke "Tom" as an uncaused entity. Evidentially speaking the "cause" of "Tom" is the same as the "cause" of Immaterial Unicorns. Namely the demonstrable ability of humans to invent things which don't actually exist. That is where the evidence regarding the concept that is "Tom", and the "cause" of said concept, leads us. There is no evidential basis for invoking "Tom" at all. Except that we do know for sure that making subjective conclusions like this (along with talk about "purpose") is a feature of human psychology and invariably leads to conclusions which are neither reliable nor accurate.In short we know that conclusions borne from such thinking are almost certainly wrong.

No. If your argument here rests on decreasing entropy then you really have no argument at all.

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The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

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If abiogenesis required the second law of thermodynamics to be violated I think someone might have noticed this......Life on Earth depends on energy from the Sun, geothermal energy and other such sources. Life isn't a closed system. No. It's not at all what cavediver is talking about. You have completely got the wrong end of the stick regarding this time reversability stuff. Why is that reasonable?It's about entropy. You can't just ignore the actual science and insert some mystical notion of "consciousness" in it's place.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

It’s bad news that gets the press. You could also write books about the positive things done by those who identify with various religions. Yes, religious differences have precipitated all sorts of evils as well though. Any organization is vulnerable to abuse. We are by instinct a tribal people. Someone else wrote on this forum that the fundamental Christian message is that we are all one tribe.Of course organized religion is a human invention as are all organizations, but that doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not Tom exists.Here is a quote from Gandhi.

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I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

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He had a point. Christianity is supposed to be about following Christ, but individual Christians who make up the Christian Religion constantly fail. Hopefully however we’ll keep on trying. There are also those of course who align themselves with a particular religion as a route to power. I don’t want to point fingers but if you follow the politics in the US candidates essentially have to declare their Christian faith in order to get elected. In some cases it almost doesn’t matter how they behave as long as they make the right noises. It is no wonder that religions get a bad name. Interestingly enough Jesus says this in the Gospel of Matthew:

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On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

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You see, the religious ones are the sinners. But again, the fact that there are numerous sinners that are religious still tells us nothing about whether or not Tom exists.I would also point out that we are extremely tribal by nature. If all religions disappeared tomorrow do you really think that we wouldn’t find something else to divide us? I worked for a company that merged with another one and it just about destroyed both companies due to the animosity between the two groups who were from the same country, racially mixed the same way and in the same business. For one thing there is one common thread throughout all major world religions. It is the Golden RuleAll religions call us to that but all religious people fail to live up to it. Religions should be organizations that tie to people together in order to communally put the Golden Rule into practice. They are often highly successful in doing that but that seldom makes the news. Pedophile priests make headlines. When religions fail to reach out to people of other faiths, and non-faiths for that matter, and instead wind up at war that too makes headlines. Unfortunately it is the power hungry ones who use religion as a tool and are the ones with the guns.So, in the end if we lump all religions together the message is that we are to love others as we love ourselves, or another way of putting it is that we always to want the best for others. Certainly different religions have different views on various things but they are secondary to the one consistent message. Well, there are those like myself that find that they are convinced that their religion is the truth, while essentially understanding that you won’t always be in agreement with many others who are adherents of the same religion. As Paul says, we see through a glass or mirror darkly. There is ambiguity. There is no certainty.It is not a matter of making things up, at least for those who actually put thought into it, but of a search for truth, knowing that you aren’t going to have a perfect understanding. I have no doubt that some things I believe are wrong but the problem is of course that I don’t know which things they are. (I realize that you can solve that for me but telling that everything I believe is wrong. ) I understand that is your POV, but either Tom in one form or another exists or he doesn’t. Just because there is no concrete evidence does not mean that the question isn’t worth considering. Who says we aren’t making progress. In the countries where the Judeo-Christian religions were instrumental in forming the culture we have done away with slavery; eliminated torture and death as a form of public entertainment; established hospitals, established charitable foundations etc.

This implies that you believe either:a). The intelligent planner does not have the attributes that suggest intelligent planning to you (consciousness, intelligence and morality) or:b) The intelligent planner does have those attributes, suggesting to you that the intelligent planner was itself planned.Which is it?

You don't know which things that you believe are right or wrong because you have no evidence for any of them except what you personally feel. You can't search for 'truth' without evidence. What you've done is real all the apoligetica that you can find and agree with it. Philosophy, logic and literary criticism can't solve the problem of whether Tom exists or not - it's been trying for thousands of years and it's failed. It not a common thread of religion, it's a common thread of mankind. Religions merely grasp it for their own. We've given you explanations for this that does not require a Tom. It's been considered for thousands of years by billions of people and no answers have been found. None. there's a reason for that and the reason is that you can't just think out an answer to it. Everything we actually know about anything comes from testing reality - you can't test the idea of a god all you can do is make stuff up about him from your 'heart' and try to get others to agree with you. I do. But I didn't mean that society hasn't made progress, it's made prgress through its secular institutions - education, medicine, law, science and so on - as soon as societies throw away superstitions and organise themselves, they make progress. When I said that religious thinkers aren't making progress, I mean that they are no closer now to demonstrating the existence of a Tom than they were 4,000 years ago. Meanwhile, secular man just gets on with improving our lives for the short time that he has avialable to him.

I don’t want to get into this too deep as my knowledge of QM is extremely shallow to say the least. I just want to say this. Cavediver tells us that at the quantum level, or in other words the particle level, cause and effect are time reversible. Everything that we know of is made up of particles. To partially quote Brian Greene; the known laws of physics actually declare — contrary to our lifetime of experiences — that the glass cavediver was talking about should be able to reform itself to what it was before it fell.However of course it doesn’t and that is the result that we are subject to entropy. However, if we are going to have to do away with cause, whether it be mindless or intelligent, there would have had to be in a time where we went from a high entropic state to a low entropic one in order for life to form in an entropic environment. If there was a period of negative entropy then in that sense life doesn’t require a cause but still one could ask the question of what caused the period of negative entropy. If we forget about causes though we still have to consider whether it is more reasonable to suggest that intelligence, emotions and morality have evolved from a totally mindless non-moral source or whether those attributes have evolved with some intelligent moral conditioning. We have come to opposite conclusions. There is no evidential basis for invoking nothing but endless natural processes. Whether they are reliable or accurate or not is a subjective conclusion.Sorry to be so slow getting back to you. I have been really pressed for time.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that dS>0 - The change in entropy is always positive. So I have no idea what period of negative entropy you are talking about. The scientific evidence tells us that the basis for the evolution of these things is the same as the the evolution of any other evolved attributes you can name. Namely that they facilitated gene propagation in the ancestral environment.I realise you subjectively consider these particular things too special to have arisen in the same way as everything else. But your subjective incredulity is really neither here nor there. I'm not invoking "endless natural processes". I'm saying that commonsense notions of cause and effect do not apply to the existence/origins of the universe. The causal chain stops at that which is objecrtively evidenced. The turtles stop at that which is objectively evidenced. Categorically wrong. We know which epistemological techniques work and which ones don't. We know that evidentially baseless subjective notions about what exists have a track record of abject failure and we know that objective evidence and the methods of science lead to the most accurate and reliable conclusions available.In short we know that conclusions borne from the sort of thinking that you are applying are almost certainly wrong.Edited by Straggler, : Spelling.

Neither, and I have already gone through that with Straggler. Straggler made the point by quoting cavediver that there is no need for a first cause of our universe because of time reversal at the quantum level. If we can see that there is no need for first cause of the universe then there is no need for a first cause of an intelligent planner.My understanding of QM is that we experience time in only one direction because of entropy. A non-entropic existence would allow for more that one dimension of time and presumably with three time dimensions we could move around infinitely in time as we move around infinitely in our 3 spatial dimensions.