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Post by unkleE on Jun 17, 2008 13:54:49 GMT
Peter
My heartfelt compliments to you! Thank you for your generous reply and your apology. I appreciate that, not because my feelings were hurt, but because I think discussions of this nature need generosity or they end up in acrimonious dead ends.
I would be interested to hear further what you believe and how you arrived there, not for the purpose of arguing, but to compare notes.
Best wishes
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Petersean
Clerk
A page of history is worth a volume of logic.
Posts: 36
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Post by Petersean on Jun 17, 2008 14:42:50 GMT
Peter aka Elephant,
For what it's worth, I initially wrote off your post as the effort of a "troll" because of the use of the word "delusion."
There are obviously tropes and phrases that signal that a post is more about taunting than about discussion, and the use of the word "delusion" in the context of "religion" is one of those in my experience.
To address your question, I am not aware of any effort to stifle the free speech rights of atheists. In fact, when we can see the Canadian Human Rights Commission penalize a Christian pastor for expressing traditional Christian views about homosexuality in a letter to the editor, we may fairly conclude that atheism is more congenial to the modern secular "naked public square" than Christian views.
Obviously, there was a time when this was not the case. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke reasonably argued that tolerance not be extended to two groups - atheists and Catholics. Catholics because of their allegiance to a foreign power and atheists because of his doubt that they could take and respect oaths of allegiance.
I will leave up to you to conclude how much progress we've made (at least here in America) from the 17th Century. ;D
I am not much of a proselytizer, but I understand the purpose of proselytization to be about "sharing the good." St. Thomas Aquinas referred to the notion that "the good is self distributive." Goodness wants to be shared. Insofar as theists believe that they have a good, there purpose in proselytization is to share that good thing.
Obviously, human nature being what it is, atheists must also be motivated by their desire to share their perceived good. But I wonder what that is?
The good cannot be a message of hope, because for atheists there can ultimately be no hope. We are the result of an accumulation of improbable events that live a short time and disappear to be forgotten.
Presumably, the good is "truth" but atheism can't really guarantee truth. The best it can say is that we don't have evidence for the theistic proposition and that depends on what gets counted as evidence and is subjec to revision in the light of further evidence.
"Rationality" is not an exclusive good of atheism. There are a lot of atheists who are not particularly rational, and I challenge anyone to really read Aquinas and not find a high order of rationality.
What then motivates the atheist to proselytize?
We come back to your term about "delusion." The modern atheist has to find something intrinsically wrong in religion or he lacks any reason to rank his good - which in a reality where the only "meaning" and "value" are those that individual's subjectively assign to their life - as a better good than possessed by other people.
This is perhaps why have a spate of books that tendentiously claim that "religion poisons everything" and describe religion as the "God Delusion."
In other words, for atheism to be a good that is self-distributive, it has to be a good that applies to everyone. Since atheism denies an objective and universal good, it can advance only by making religion a universal "bad."
Needless to say, this strategy is not welcomed by those who don't find religion to be any such thing.
What say you?
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Post by elephantchang51 on Jun 18, 2008 7:43:36 GMT
Dear Peter, A couple of quick points about your post,you will appreciate I seem to somewhat outnumbered here and trying to respond to 2 or 3 topics at once. 1]When I mentioned efforts to deny free speech to atheists,I qualified this by saying 'worldwide',including the Muslim world.You must also be aware of Christian groups in the west who are similiarly intolerant. 2]The good thing atheists have to share,in so much as there has to be a point to everything,is the mental stimulation to be gained thru discussion and debate,learning for its own sake.But this is not a reason for atheism just a by product.My reason is simply the extreme improbability of the theistic proposition.This is just one of countless things I disbelieve,based on the proponderance of the evidence. I hope I have at least answered some of your points, Yours,Peter.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Jun 18, 2008 8:41:04 GMT
My reason is simply the extreme improbability of the theistic proposition.This is just one of countless things I disbelieve,based on the proponderance of the evidence. Hi Peter I'll take up this point if I may. The existence of a supernatural creative force behind the universe does seem on the face of it to be inherently ridiculous, at least it does to me anyway. The problem is that we are brought up in a culture of scientism in which we learn to distrust anything that cannot be scientifically verified. We also take a hell of a lot of things for granted, a good example being that matter seems to follow mathematical laws or symmetrys. The universe we observe is not a chaotic random mess, but a harmonious and well ordered system, which appears to be fine tuned for the existence of life. The existence of this universe is highly improbable. We might attempt to explain this away with an infinite multiverse as some cosmologists have done (Susskind, Tegmark, Rees), but this comes at a very high price as you are essentially saying the 'everything that can exist does exist'. If I came up to you and said 'Peter, there is a universe out there in which Elvis is still alive and sharing a bedsit with Hitler and George Orwell' you would rightly say I was off my rocker', yet this is precisely the consequence of multiverse theory. www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/01/16/ecelvis116.xmlSo we could chuck out the multiverse as being a bit silly, but then we are just left with the mysterious fine tuning, and that requires an explanation. Lets take another example of something you probably take for granted. According to Francis Crick "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules" In other words, you are nothing more than the workings of physics and chemistry. But at the same time you think you are more than that, you probably think you are a concious being with free will to chose your actions. But if you are nothing more than a deterministic system, blindly programmed for survival by genetic instructions, then according to the standard materialistic interpretation, you are at bottom a glorified robot, albeit quite a complicated one. I find this interpretation highly improbable, I believe I that it is a brute fact I am concious and have free will and that this is better explained by a theistic interpretation. I could go on at length but I think I should probably conclude by saying that to believe in nothing, you have to believe in something. In other words to believe in a non theistic explanation on grounds other than an argument from personal incredulity you need to have an alternative cosmology and a materialist account of the universe and everything in it. The things I have to believe in to believe in nothing are unacceptable and lack intellectual merit. Therefore I choose to believe in something. H
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Post by elephantchang51 on Jun 18, 2008 9:22:33 GMT
Dear H, You say you choose to believe in something-a theistic interpretation-but how do you begin to discriminate between the innumerable theistic belief systems available,and any that you or I might choose to start?Just because I cannot provide an alternative cosmology and a materialist account of the universe,does not I believe justify believing something just to provide an answer.Is it possible the answers to these enormous questions are unknowable? This might be an uncomfortable idea,because humans like to have answers,to see patterns,to feel we are special. What say you? Yours as always,Peter.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Jun 18, 2008 10:34:54 GMT
You say you choose to believe in something-a theistic interpretation-but how do you begin to discriminate between the innumerable theistic belief systems available,and any that you or I might choose to start?Just because I cannot provide an alternative cosmology and a materialist account of the universe,does not I believe justify believing something just to provide an answer.Is it possible the answers to these enormous questions are unknowable? This might be an uncomfortable idea,because humans like to have answers,to see patterns,to feel we are special. Hi Peter Thankyou for raising some very important questions. Firstly, how do you discriminate between innumerable theistic belief systems?. The truth is that I haven't done this myself so I am unable to advise you on this. Although it is interesting that Christian theology posits a lawful universe, creation 'from nothing', the sinful nature of humanity and a metaphysic which gave birth to modern science. I am forced to admit that, despite being an atheist for most of my life, my system of ethics which I hold dear is ultimately the product of the Christian society I have been brought up in. Whether these details constitute another grounds for plunging into Christian belief is an open question. What I do feel when I observe the universe however is a deep sense of transcendence and the feeling that, to echo Freeman Dyson's comment 'The universe in some sense knew we were coming'. That hasn't yet translated into any particular religious belief system. Are the answers to these questions unknowable?. It is possible that the universe is a complete absurdity. If this is the case that there would be no reason to embark on the scientific endeavour in the first place because there would be no reason to conclude that we could obtain meaningful facts from the universe. Furthermore, as Einstein said 'The great mystery about the universe is that it is intelligible'. Human brains evolved to operate in hunter gather groups on the earth's surface. That they also seem to be able to untangle quantum theory and understand the mathematical structure of the universe is surely significant. If the universe has been proved so far to run to a coherent scheme I see no reason to conclude that its origins will not prove to be similarly coherent. If this is the case then ulitmate questions have validity. You say that humans like to think they are special. Actually I don't think this is the case at all, I think we take an almost pathological delight in revelling in our insignificance. Before Copernicus we believed that the earth was the centre of the universe, not because we were arrogant but because we thought the sinful, cracked and broken earth did not deserve to be part of the heavens. Then, having joined the heavens we revelled in the fact that we are an insignificant speck in the universe, despite the fact that a smaller universe would not last long enough for life to form. Our brain is the most complex entity in the known universe and yet we decry any notion of progress in evolution and rejoice in the fact that our fragile body's depend on the co-operation of bacteria for our survival. Even our concept of heaven is a realm where we grovel before an almighty being. If we were arrogant it would be more like Mount Olympus. Final point. You might be loathe to supply an alternative cosmology, or to subscribe to a materialist view of the universe that rules out the need for a creator, however, this evidential route only gets you as far as agnosticism. You can go beyond this and be an atheist, but this position will based on faith rather than evidence. I think there is far more faith on show at Richarddawkins.net than there is at the average Anglican church.
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Post by unkleE on Jun 18, 2008 12:55:28 GMT
Peter At the risk of overwhelming you (sorry!) I wanted to offer my thoughts on alternative theistic belief systems. I believe God is a more reasonable explanation of the evidence we have in a similar way to that described so well by Humphrey. Once I do, those same arguments give some very good clues about the characteristics of that God, or, in other words, which of the many possible gods may be the true one. Thus: - If the existence of the universe, and such a fine tuned universe, point to God existing, he/she must be powerful and creative, and exist outside of space-time.
- If humanity (free will, consciousness, reason, ethics, etc) points to a god, then that god must logically have those qualities.
- If human experience of healing, personal contact with God, etc points to the possibility of a god, then that god must be personal, benevolent and interested in being in contact with us.
Now when you examine the multitude of theistic beliefs, very few actually meet these requirements: - in most polytheistic religions, the gods did not create the universe, but live within it
- in most eastern religions, god is distant, impersonal, and doesn't have the above characteristics
- you really end up with a choice of about 6 beliefs - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Baha'i, deism and maybe Zoroastrianism or Sikhism, which isn't too many to examine.
Finally, if you look at the conclusions of the historians, you can see whether there is reasonable evidence that each religion's founder was a historical figure, and whether there is reason to believe them. I won't go into details, but I think that evidence is sufficient to point to christianity being the most believable (as former atheist philosopher Antony Flew has argued). I realise this brief summary only scratches the surface, and I'd be happy to discuss things in greater detail, but I hope that provides an outline of how one can approach this matter. Thus I really believe the multitude of religions is not a barrier to intelligent theistic belief. Thanks, and best wishes.
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