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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: What we must accept if we accept evolution Part 2 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
robinrohan Inactive Member |
It's jerked out of context.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
There are 3 possible positions
1) The existence of death and suffering can be reconciled with the existence of the sort of God you are discussing. 2) The existence of death and suffering cannot be reconciled with this sort of God. 3) The existence of death and suffering can only be reconciled with this sort of God only if evolution is rejected. You are a fine logician, Paulk. More later.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
First, any belief in a supernatural being is basically an irrational, unprovable action. It is an act of Faith and not Science. Would you agree with that? I thought people believed in God because they thought they had a good reason to do so.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
I imagine that do think they have a good reason for their belief. What does that have to do with what I asked? "Faith" is not a good reason. There must be something that initiates the faith. If it's totally "irrational," why would anybody believe it?
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Why? Well, I've never been a believer, so I can't say for sure. But I had assumed that the way someone becomes religious is not by just saying to himself one day, "You know what? I think I will believe in God. I don't have any reason to particularly. I just feel like it. Maybe it'll make me feel better." I assume there would be more to it than that.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Firstly the idea that Nihilism can be adequately described as the notion that the human species has no formal purpose seems dubious. At the least it is a rarefied definition and to use it without specifying in the OP that this was the definition to be used is not. I thought it was a rather nifty definition myself. Your second sentence seems to be unfinished. Is not what? I did not specify it because we went on and on about "formal purpose" in another thread. I figured people would remember. More, my definition of nihilism makes perfect sense to me if in fact we were created by natural processes.
Secondly you cannot disprove the existence of anything simply by stating that you do not like the idea. Your dismissal of inconvenient God-concepts on this basis is thus not even a rational argument. It's not about liking or not liking. In fact, a weak God that's doing the best He can is very attractive to me. But it's not a reasonable description of the Creator.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Only the third position then can really support your case. The Fall is your only candidate for such an explanation. If it is inadequate then your argument fails. Let's say we are back before there was any idea about Darwinism. What did people say about the problem of pain? I'm not for certain, but whatever answers they came up with were probably not very satisfactory. So one might dismiss the idea of God long before the TOE. I agree with all this. I also agree that one does not necessarily need TOE to dismiss the idea of God. However, all of these ideas against the concept of God were purely philosophical and uncertain. Along comes TOE. TOE tells us that we evolved by a natural process. It also tells us that we evolved physically. It tells us that we did not spring out of dust and that we were not "special creations." It tells us that we evolved just like every other life form did. It tells us that our ancestor was a lizard, and before that a one-celled life form. It gives us scientific evidence to back all this up. It also tells us what Natural Selection is all about: it's about what survives and what doesn't; it's about the "war" in nature. This is all very powerful evidence against the idea of a Good, All-Powerful Creator, much more powerful than earlier atheistic philosophies. Why? Because it's scientific and because it explains our origins. 1. TOE gives a story about the naturalness of suffering.2. TOE gives us a story about the naturalness of our origins. Here's another idea (tentative on my part): I'm wondering how our origins were explained before ideas of evolution began to come about. The only explanation, I can see, would be special creation by God. So, despite the problem of pain, people found it almost impossible to dismiss the notion of God. How else could we have got here? So atheistic arguments were much less convincing.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
.e.
your definition is crafted to fit your argument, rather than to give an accurate impression of nihilism as it exists My definition was crafted long before I even thought of this topic.
and BTW it is bad form to assume that everyone follows every thread - if you use an idiosyncratic definition you should really say so, certainly when it is a major point). OK. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-02-2006 04:23 PM
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
If your definitio of nihilism was not crafted to support this sort of argument, why did you praise it for suitability for that task and seem so uninterested in whether it accurately captures the usage of the word I wasn't praising it for suitability to a task: I just thought it was neat and clear. I think one possible definition of "nihilism" is that life has no meaning, no purpose, that morals are arbitrary, etc. I think my definition fits within the range of that broad definition. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-02-2006 05:10 PM
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
That is not at all what I said. What I said is that it is the only way we can know something, verify it. If it cannot be verified, it is but personal belief, nothing more. I think what Iano is saying is that the process of verification itself is ungrounded, which is true. We just have to assume that induction is valid. Our logic becomes especially questionable if our world is completely physical. That would mean our thoughts are physically caused. Evolution tells us that our world is completely physical.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
What is questionable about that? We are near the end of the second thread on this topic, and you still haven't explained it. I have explained it on various occasions. Let us examine the two senses of the word "because." One can mean it in a causal sense, or one can mean it in a logical sense (ground/consequent). He died of cancer because he smoked cigarettes. (causal) He must be the murderer, because, as we have already proved, he was the only one in the victim's room that night. (ground/consequent) These different senses do not go together. "'You hold that belief because you are a man,' said the woman tartly." The woman is saying that the man's beliefs are CAUSED (by male hormones, say), and therefore his conclusion was not arrived at logically and can be dismissed. His belief could only be true accidentally. It is not derived from a logical progession, but was caused. All our beliefs are physically caused, since there is nothing but the physical; therefore, they are true only accidentally. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-04-2006 04:22 PM This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-04-2006 04:23 PM
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
I think I get the logical point, but I can't imagine something being true "only accidentally" -- if it's true it's true. It's like the conclusion of a syllogism, which might be true but not valid: All fathers are males.George W. Bush is a male. Therefore, George W. Bush is a father. Goerge W. Bush is in fact a father, but the logic of the syllogism is invalid. The conclusion is true accidentally.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
A self is not possible without incorporeality. No self, no thinking. Just automatic physical reactions to stimuli. Water does not freeze at 32 degrees Farenheit as a result of a logical process.
Abstractions such as the #5 do not exist. You never see the #5 lying around in the yard or walking down the road. You can't cut up the brain and find #5 in there anywhere. You can't find our thoughts because our thoughts don't exist except in the sense of an electro-chemical impulse in the brain. This brain evolved. Our ancestors had no brains. The physical can only produce the physical. Therefore, we have no minds. Evolution explains our origins naturalistically. Before evolutionary ideas came along, there was no way to explain the creatures of the earth being here except by invoking gods. There is now no logical need for god. Evolution, being a very cruel process, tells us that no good, all-powerful God would operate in this fashion. You can talk about the "greater good" all you like--and then imagine some particularly gruesome birth defect--and ask yourself if there can be any greater good that would justify that. An indifferent god is a cruel god. A cruel or weak god is inconceivable. That's why nobody believes in such a being. Other entities, demi-gods and such, are really just Aliens, since they sprang out of nature and are thus natural creatures. To speak of aliens solves nothing; it just removes the question to another step in the evolutionary process. Darwinism is ultimately a nihilistic idea. We are here for no reason. We just happen to be here. All subjective purposes we might come up with are ultimately arbitrary. There's no reason to choose one purpose over another. There's no ground for any purpose. There's no ground for any moral system. There's no ground for logic. TOE is not an innocuous liitle idea about population changes: it is an idea that shakes the foundations of the traditional concept of humanity. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-05-2006 10:04 AM This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-05-2006 10:56 AM
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Back in my twenties I called myself an "aesthete," but then I decided that "aesthete" sounded rather effeminate, remindful of Oscar Wilde and that ilk, so I changed the label to "nihilist," which has a rugged masculine ring to it. I figured that fit me better.
But the two ideas, despite the different labels, are really the same in my view. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-05-2006 10:22 AM
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
I looked up "nihilism". The answers are all over the map. None of them seemed to have much of a relation to "aesthete". An aesthetic approach to life is quite reasonable if one accepts the idea that life has no purpose. The aesthete goes about his life looking for interesting experiences. There's no reason to do this, of course, other than that it's fun. He wants to make a "work of art" of his life. What does this mean? Oh, just whatever he decides--some kind of pattern. There have been aesthetes (such as Edgar Allan Poe) who believed that God himself was an aesthete--that is to say, an artist. God created the world for aesthetic rather than moral reasons. So God created the tiger because the tiger is beautiful, and even more beautiful in the fact that the tiger is ferocious. If the tiger were not dangerous, it would be a less beautiful creature. ABE: The aesthete also tends to believe that most people are closet aesthetes rather than moralists. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-05-2006 02:03 PM This message has been edited by robinrohan, 02-05-2006 02:14 PM
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