DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
To say that ‘Atheism is not a belief system’ is to ignore the implicit metaphysical claims of atheism.
Religion Religion, Secularism, and Morality
- Thread starter ShieldWife
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To say that ‘Atheism is not a belief system’ is to ignore the implicit metaphysical claims of atheism.
This is why the whole mess will just go round in circles; atheism is a 'religion' the same way baldness is a 'hair color'.
Communism and socialism are ideologies unto themselves; they are only 'atheistic' in that they do not look for metaphysical justification for their ideologies.
Communism and socialism are ideologies unto themselves; they are only 'atheistic' in that they do not look for metaphysical justification for their ideologies.
King Arts
Well-known member
You know when I first heard that the term was bald is a hairstyle which I thought but it is. If you go to a hair stylist and ask for your hair to be bald or shaved they can do that. So you had to change the original phrase that atheists used and keep moving the goal posts for it to make sense.
I said hair color, not hair style. The point however is the same.
Look, I'm an agnostic myself, and I understand where a lot of atheists are coming from.
The only way most atheists will change their mind is if they experience the power of the divine themelves and are open to recognizing it. That is something no amount of debate, discussion, and citation can substitute for.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
But there are no metaphysical claims necessarily associated with atheist, merely a lack of certain metaphysical claims: namely the existence of deities. I do admit, certain metaphysical claims are frequently made by atheists, but it’s not quite the same.
In this context, how would you define “metaphysical” and what metaphysical claims do you think are implicit to atheism?
I don’t know if there is a clear cut line between atheism and agnosticism. Both positions are unconvinced of the existence of deities, at some point on a spectrum of gods’ unlikelihood people stop calling themselves agnostics and start calling themselves atheists.
Personally, I think that deities are theoretically possible but highly unlikely.
Simonbob
Well-known member
The first thing an Atheist claims is an actual position, specifically, "There is no God." That's a statement, right there. The Agnostic says "I dunno.", and thus, is making no claims.
Following from said claims, the Atheist generally says "Thus, there is no Metaphysics." Do you consider spirits to be real, or karma? How about the Collective Unconscious? I don't.
But, as somewhat of a Philosopher, I've since come to the simple realisation, there is no justice inherent to the Universe. Only if there is something beyond it, can justice exist.
What was the quote?
A quote from Hogfather
Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of merc...
www.goodreads.com
Terry Pratchett.
I'm agnostic in that I believe there is a divine force in the universe, and that their is something beyond this life besides nothingness.
The exact nature of said divine and afterlife are where I am not convinced any religion represents or understands the totality of it. That there is life on our planet, and that we exist to even comprehend the universe around us, is the result of a long, long fucking streak of coincidence, luck, and fate.
I feel like a lot of the more naturalistic religions/faiths are probably closer to the divine that ones that focus on humans. Always felt closure to the divine in nature than in any house of worship.
King Arts
Well-known member
Then you are something like a deist.
There is entire book proving that marxism is religion wrote by polish soldier,monk and sovietolog Józef Bocheński,and atheists just belive that God do not exist,just like we christian belive that He exist.
I thought you were Christian
DocSolarisReich
Esoteric Spaceman
If you say there is no God, this is a metaphysical claim about reality.
If you say there might not or might not be a God, but we human beings cannot know the truth of the situation, this is also a metaphysical claim about reality.
To say that reality is entirely and completely physical and material, consisting only in that which can weighed and measured and counted by scientists, as many atheists do claim as they are also materialists, this is also a metaphysical claim about reality.
There is no escape from ultimate reality and what the nature of is is.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
The process was created by an intelligent designer to try to turn out useful data. It wasn't created to turn out nothing. It is then an intelligent being that interprets the usefulness of those results.
I did some numbers once, on what it would take to get a single chromosome. I took the entire mass of the Earth, assumed it was all CAGT proteins (I can never remember all their names. Guanine and Adenine I think are two of them), in conditions conducive to them joining together, gave a reaction rate of a million pairs forming per second, then calculated the odds based on it running for the entire duration of the Earth's estimated existence.
The statistical probability you get as a result, is roughly one in ten to the two hundred and thirtieth power. That isn't 'all the mass of the oceans,' that's all the mass of the Earth. To get one Chromosome. And I allowed for an error rate of ten percent, which I'm reasonably sure would be fatal to an actual life form, though I don't hold a doctorate in genetics so I can't tell you the exact effects. Also note, this is assuming that this reaction process doesn't turn any of the Adenine et al into something not useful for the formation of DNA. Also, in optimizing the odds of DNA formation as much as possible, it also ignores the fact that as the rest of a cell isn't made up of these things, it's actually impossible for life to arise in these circumstances.
But the point of this thought experiment is to prove the absurdity of naturalistic abiogenesis, so we're giving the literal best possible odds for getting one of the essential aspects of life, so we'll keep going with it.
"But," some materialist atheists argued with me, "That's just the Earth, there's the entire universe of matter out there, and it only needed to happen once, and Earth is the result of that!"
Taken from Wikipedia, Earth masses 5.97237×10^24 kg. There's supposed to be ~10^90 atoms in the universe. I don't care to do the calculations of Kilograms to atoms right now, so let's forget about the fact I already was using the mass of the Earth, and just do some exponent subtraction, and take the ^90 right off of the ^230.
So now, if you take all the mass of the universe, (ignoring that most of it is in stars and Black Holes, not environments conducive to formation of any kind of life), you knock the probability down to ~1 in 10^140.
So much progress has been made.
To get a single Chromosome. Which is not enough to form life. Because you need either a fully functional cell, or you don't have actual life.
"But wait," the atheist says, "The Earth isn't as old as the universe!"
Okay, fair. Let's take the estimated age of the Earth (4.54 billion years), and increase to the estimated age of the Universe.
Which is 13.8 Billion years.
Oh, that's a bit of a problem. Not even an additional order of magnitude there; it's barely over three times more. Still, let's be generous and knock a whole order of magnitude off.
That gets us to a probability of 1 in 10^10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
Yes. This is less than a billion zeroes. But this is actually something much simpler to get than what Tour was talking about (being as this is just one of many components you need for life), and he's much more of a field specialist than I am, so I'm willing to accept that his numbers are probably closer to accurate than mine.
When you get down to it, the bottom line is always that the naturalist evolutionists do not have any argument that deals with the hard numbers. They try to side-step, distract, or claim that a new hypothesis, which conveniently hasn't been tested yet or is actually untestable, will prove that yes, Abiogenesis can work.
But it never actually pans out. Evolutionism started taking hold in Academia a hundred and fifty years ago. They still don't have answers for such basic questions that hold up to even basic scrutiny. It always gets kicked down the road again to the next theorem or hypothesis, and after that's proven to be bunk (like Embryology or Punctuated Equilibrium), they'll come up with a new one.
We can observe a pattern in real life. If we find a complex mechanism that performs a dedicated function, we will find out that someone designed and built it to fulfill that function.
This is considered acceptable for vehicles, clocks, toys, boats, aircraft, computers, radios, televisions, etc, but for some reason following the same pattern of logic is considered irrational for biological machines and life in general.
Why?
Well, to quote an evolutionist:
Richard Lewontin:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. "
The concept of a designer in nature and biology is not allowed, because of the prior commitment to purely material explanations. IE, Lewontin and those who follow the same school of thought have a conviction, one could say a religious conviction, that they 'cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.'
Because variation within a species is both a fundamentally different process than changing from a cat to a dog, and even more grossly different from life arising from inanimate matter?
To frame your question another way:
"If I can take a ball-peen hammer and chip a flake of stone off of a rock, why couldn't a man with a sledgehammer over time break down a mountain?"
He could, in fact, and in a specific case in India, he has.
But Abiogenesis is not a matter of mutation and/or adaptation. It isn't the same process just writ large. It is in fact a completely different thing. A better comparison would be:
"If I can take a ball-peen hammer and chip a flake of stone off of a rock, why couldn't a man with a hammer break down the Earth?"
Because while the Earth is big, and you can break a bit of rock from another rock, you aren't actually taking away part of the Earth. And even if you break down every bit of rock on the surface, then get an army of hammer-men that is arbitrarily large and hammer your way through the entire crust, going miles and miles deep, breaking it down into dust, do you know what your reward for that is?
Hitting the mantle. Which will melt and burn you and all that dust down into rock and volcanic gasses. And the Earth, quite frankly, doesn't notice even a single percentage change in its composition or structure.
If the Theory of Evolution as an origin of life and explanation for how it came to be as it is today is believed, it must have a mechanism for Abiogenesis. If Abiogenesis is not scientifically possible, then the theory is disproven. Just because it can accurately describe one thing (genetic variation within a species) does not mean that the theory as a whole is true.
That would be like me telling you that gravity is real, and it operates at ~9.81 m/sec^2 on the surface of Earth, then demanding that you believe that the Earth is flat because I was right about gravity pulling things 'down.' Related, but not remotely sufficient to justify the second claim.
Also, I'd like to see some of these intermediary steps between species. Because last I checked, the library of 'missing links' is still painfully hollow.
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Morphic Tide
Well-known member
But the useful data exists without the designer's input, they expect it but did not create it. This distinction is important, because it means creation does not require intelligence. If we can point at the reality of unintelligent design, processes that have no real awareness giving rise to useful results, where does the logical necessity of an intelligent First Cause arrive?
Why is it this unintelligent design cannot be used as proof there is no peculiar "animus" needed to originate complexity, given the things tend to take absurdly circuitous and brute-force approaches to "creating" and end up vastly more complicated than they started, just the same as the vast series of dice rolls behind abiogenisis? They are in fact specifically made to implement the theory of evolution.
Changing a single population of Wolves into every single European breed of dog is vastly more dramatic than the differences within many genii, and we see that most genii have some level of inter-species reproduction. Polar bears and grizzlies have full capacity of interbreeding. "Variation within a species", when it grows over time, becomes speciation, where two populations cease interbreeding fully and become distinct species.
"Life arising from inanimate matter" is ascribing some special status to "life" setting it apart from any other self-organizing chemical system. You're starting from the premise that there is an intelligent first cause, and that there is something truly special about life, when we've spent centuries desperately trying to find anything truly special about life, and just constantly find ever less uniqueness from any other vaguely related chemical process.
There's nothing actually excluding it, merely things making it very unlikely, and there's this one big catch to materialism that you seem to willfully ignore: The anthropic principal, which is essentially that the universe must be biased to have observers, because it does have observers. Literally that because humanity exists, the history of the universe must have given rise to us, no matter how unlikely, because that is what happened.
If it gets proven the odds are ridiculously astronomical? There's unlikely to be a counter-proof to come with it, merely a proof it is very extremely unlikely, and thus the extremely unlikely remains accepted because there is no more-likely answer because supernatural explanations cannot give positive odds of their truth, and almost always cannot be shown false.
Saying "Missing Links disprove evolution" is just another "nobody knows, therefore God" argument. It's not a contradiction of the logic. What follows this quote is a much more blatant "God in the Gaps" argument, where you're stating that evolution does adequately explain genetic variation, but because we cannot prove abiogenesis then there "obviously" must be a creator. Not simply a First Cause outside the remit of existing natural law, but an aware entity that shaped reality with specific goals.
You are not mentioning the middle-ground of an utterly unaware supernatural force, a mere event with no will, being the starting point of life. You are wholly focused on the "God in the Gaps" answer, taking the lack of satisfactory explanations to an extremely old mystery with vast numbers of extremely obtuse and esoteric functions involved as a suggestion that your specific religious framework is correct.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Because a simulation is by definition not an unintelligent design. Further, the data has no value known as 'useful' until some being comes along to impute it with that value.
To put it another way, you can build a computer, but if you do not put software on it, it will never do anything. If you put software on it, but never turn it on, it will never do anything. If you put software on it, and turn it on, it still will do nothing except perform the automated processes which the designers created and programmed it to do.
At no point will that computer say 'Good morning George, I'm glad to see you' spontaneously of its own volition.
Life does have a special status as a self-organizing chemical system. There are so many reasons for this that I don't know how to even begin to get into it all, and the fact that it's a point that even has to be made is bewildering to me.
Also, no, I'm not starting from the premise that there is an intelligent first cause. I'm demonstrating that it's the only reasonable conclusion.
And here we get to the crux of it. Here you demonstrate that you are, in fact, starting from the assumption there is no intelligent designer, and that the mere fact we exist is supposedly proof of the lack of need of one.
We are taking two possible explanations for reality as we experience and observe it:
1. That it arose through random chance.
2. That it arose as the result of an intelligent designer deliberately creating it to be so.
The question then becomes, 'Which of these possible explanations has better supporting evidence?'
To give evidence to #2, I demonstrate the immense improbability of #1. So implausible that the human mind cannot wrap itself around how improbable it is. Bigger numbers than the federal budget, than the distance between stars, literally larger than all the sand on the seashores, and all the stars in the sky combined.
And your response is "Well, regardless how improbable it is, we exist, therefore #1 must be true."
All that argument does, is show that you never considered #2 to be possible in the first place. If our existence is, to you, proof positive that #1 happened, that means that to you, #1 was the only possible explanation there ever was.
#2 wasn't something you treated viable in the first place. Nor was some hypothetical 3, 4, or any other number, because if any of these were under consideration, our existence would not be treated as proof simply based on assumption. If I recall correctly, this logical fallacy is described as 'after this, therefore, because of this,' or 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc.' Except it's worse, because you're assuming the 'this' with no observational evidence that it happened.
Just as Lewontin in the earlier quote was honest enough to state openly, you appear to be demonstrating an a priori commitment to materialism. That is not a position reasonable or scientific, but dogmatic.
Because evolution is the religious dogma of materialistic atheists.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
What is the logical requirement that the operations of life actually have such value? What is the positive evidence in favor of intelligent design, instead of just ranting about the statistical implausibility of abiogenisis within the bounds of known chemistry alongside how complexity absolutely must arise from intelligence?
...Seriously, have you never dug into entropy? Like, it's a huge thing in physics that reality seemingly naturally tends towards things getting harder to describe. No need for a designer, the ashes and smoke after a fire are provably more complex than the wood that burned. It does not "serve a purpose", but the intricacy of the structures has increased, and indeed perpetually increases as the smoke diffuses and the heat of the ash conducts into surrounding material.
Rule out unintelligent vital force for me, then. Explain to me how it cannot be that there is a yet-unmeasured aspect of existence pressuring for the formation of life that is purely a form of energy rather than an intelligent actor. And that there cannot be insentient "Ideal Forms" imposing improbabilities on the universe.
There's plenty of supernatural origins besides intelligent design. "It Just Happened" is a perfectly valid axiom for the foundation of existence. Indeed, the entire concept of First Cause rests on dismissing infinite regress.
And an insentient First Cause handily removes the issues regarding how purpose requiring a creator invites regress in where the purpose of the Original Creator's aspects arose, or contradictions regarding the Original Creator somehow having reason and emotion without those things having purpose yet it's not logically valid to say human reason and emotion could have arisen without purpose.
No, it's "No matter how improbable, we must exist". Nothing more, nothing less, it does not include an assumption of the particular cause. Going with abiogenisis is a matter of "After ruling out everything else, what's left, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth" (to roughly paraphrase from memory).
Your own position has been nothing but "We don't know, therefor God". You are not giving positive evidence for intelligent design, you are casting doubt on abiogenisis with mere improbability. You are even declining to cast doubt on evolution of existing life after its origin.
Find me a positive suggestion. Give me something pointing towards Intelligent Design in particular, instead of just things pointing away from abiogenisis.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
...Someone has been lying to you about what Entropy is. There's two different descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics that I've seen used.
1. "The level of disorder in a system will either remain the same, or increase."
2. "The level of usable energy in a system will either remain the same, or decrease."
For obvious reasons, the second has become more popular with atheists, but let's leave that aside for the time being.
The direct aftermath of a fire is less complex, not more. The fact that after the various elements that comprise wood, coal, oil, charcoal, or whatever else you're burning start intermixing with other things in the environment after they've been expelled by the combustion reaction does not change the fact that you're taking extremely complex organic fibers, and breaking them down into primarily ash (carbon) and steam, while other trace elements are largely vented into the atmosphere.
Sure, you can take those rendered-down components and turn them into something else, but claiming it's more complex, is no different than saying that if you melt down a car, the mass of slag you get afterwards is more complex than the car was.
Could there be an as-yet unmeasured aspect of existence causing a naturalistic mechanism that results in life? Sure, there could be.
But we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there is, and on top of that, the more and more we understand about how complex life is, the less and less plausible it is that such an unknown mechanism exists.
To take a scientific approach to the matter, is to try to draw the most viable conclusion based on the evidence currently available. (Yes, sometimes the most viable conclusion is 'too little information' but properly following that concept would have prevented evolution from becoming academic canon in the first place, not reinforced it.) Refusing to draw a conclusion because you do not like where the evidence points is exactly the kind of motivated reasoning and philosophical bias that demonstrates the frailty of the human condition, and that the weak point of science as a discipline is the scientists who practice it.
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at with the rest of this section, but the point I'm getting at is that science points to a supernatural cause, one capable of creating complete functional biological systems (IE an intelligent one). Arguing about the nature of that creative force is the next step, and getting involved in it before the current issue is established would be getting ahead of ourselves.
Probability is a positive suggestion.
If you bought one Powerball ticket a week for four weeks, and won the entire jackpot, you'd think something screwy was up.
If you were put against a wall in front of a firing squad equipped with machine guns, and every one of them emptied 200-round box magazines, but not one hit, and instead a perfect outline of you was shot into the wall, you'd say it's more than just random chance.
If you took a supposedly fair coin and flipped it a thousand times, and it came up heads every single time, you wouldn't believe it was a fair coin anymore.
If you worked at a machine shop where scrap metal was all piled into a box in the corner of the shop, and one day you looked into the box and found a complete and functional jet engine, you wouldn't say 'A, someone must have shaken the scrap until it assembled into an engine,' you would say 'someone must have built this and then put it here for a reason I don't understaand.'
Intelligent Design is a reasonable conclusion, not a 'god of the gaps' position that is abandoning the search for further understanding (though some do use it that way) like atheists so often like to claim. Saying 'someone built this' is considered a reasonable conclusion for:
1. Cars.
2. Comptuers.
3. Toys.
4. Airplanes.
5. Houses.
6. Chairs.
7. Tools.
Why is it not a reasonable conclusion for the staggeringly more complex machines we see are necessary for organic life?
Because motivated reasoning requires that it be rejected, is why. The philosophical consequences of admitting that another human being built a device are not profound to anyone except for a solipsist. The philosophical consequences to admitting that organic life could not reasonably have come about via any means except intelligent design are profound and wide-reaching.
Going with abiogenesis is the exact opposite of "After ruling out everything else, what's left, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth." It is in fact ruling the possibility of Intelligent Design out before the analysis or argument even begins, and then grasping at straws to try to find something else.
You claim that you aren't going with an assumption about the cause, but that's not true. You are going in with the assumption that the cause must be materialistic, and that is something that is taken on faith, not proven via scientific support.
Believing in the intelligent design (or the supernatural in general) isn't unscientific, it's un-atheistic, and while many atheists have spent a century or more trying to conflate atheism with science, the two are not one and the same. They are, in fact, opposed to each other, as our increasing understanding of the complexity of life demonstrates.
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What's the sitch?
Well-known member
Another thing that gets me is how atheists believe in the big bang as the ultimate source/origin, which is, paraphrased "in the beginning there was nothing(or super condensed into a single point) and it exploded into everything that was and ever will be".
To a person that believes in a creator God/gods it sure sounds a lot like a divine creation story. Why jump through all these hoops to deny the existence of God/a god(s)?
To a person that believes in a creator God/gods it sure sounds a lot like a divine creation story. Why jump through all these hoops to deny the existence of God/a god(s)?
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Well, if you read the Big Bang by Simon Singh, that actually was a big point of contention. Many scientists who opposed the "Big Bang" theory did so from religious beliefs - namely, that there was no God and that the universe was eternal. Big Bang meanwhile sounded too much like a creation story, so they went to great lengths and jumped through a lot of hoops attempting to deny it.
When I was still religious I often read into the Big Bang Theory from that angle, as well as evolution being the way that God was able to create all life in a single "day" by creating the simplest form of unicellular life and letting it do its thing from there, or even perhaps guiding it along. This is part of why I've never really gotten creationists, particularly not the young Earth variety.
Well one thing to consider is that recent astronomical and quantum physics findings seem to suggest we may not be the first, or only, universe to exist.
That doesn't disprove anything related to the divine, as the divine is not something that can be falsified by the scientific method, but it does have implications/theories that can be tested and/or harnessed for actual results.
Personally I'm convinced there is something divine beyond this life, just not convinced any religion represents the totality of it, and think there might have been a divine hand in the Big Bang(s).
I think it's interesting to think about what forms the divine would take among alien species, and how it would relate to their morality/societies evolution. Constraining the divine to only human morality and understand is drastically limiting what it means to be 'divine'.