How many here are atheists?

[Caleb]

Thanks for sharing your experience, Dale.

When I was a young boy, my parents shared with me the thought that I was going to live forever, never die. Now, a six year old doesn't have much conception of death anyway, so it was fairly meaningless, except for the forever part. I thought that was fascinating. Forever. What does that mean? You start out imagining always living another day, to try to wrap your mind around it. Then at some point you realize you can imagine bigger chunks of time elapsing. Years. Decades. Centuries. But you never get to the end. How can that be a process, which has no end? I'm not even phrasing the question right. It panicked me. Not panicked in the sense of wanting to die. No, that's far too morbid, and I quite enjoy life. It's not that I wanted to die, it's just the thought of forever itself somehow made me panic. It feels like this attack on my brain. Forever, how dare you be so inexplicable!  I would sometimes get up at night, just because I couldn't stand to lay in bed and think about it anymore. Thus began my morbid fascination with infinity.

Then I would lay on the ground, looking up at the stars. All kids do that, and I suppose we all wonder how far they go. It made me dizzy. To this day, I still have a hard time looking up at the stars for any extended period of time, without getting dizzy. It's overwhelming. And I remember when I first learned about Einstein, and the thought that time and space aren't really so different as we think, well, I wasn't surprised. Makes sense to me, I get the same feeling inside when I think about them, this fascinating dread.

Time, though, was easier to conceptualize for me, so I did more thinking with it as I got older. I tried to determine just what, exactly, is the moment of "now". I mean, we talk about past, present, and future, right? So you have the past. That's all the presents that have ever happened. Then you have the future. That's all the presents that ever will happen. But what is the moment of now? I could always break it down smaller. A second can always be divided into two. Then you take that half second, and divide it. You can always keep dividing it, but you never get to the "now". Only past and future. But if the "now" doesn't exist, then neither does the past or the future, because they are only defined by their relation to the Now.

I kept playing games with time. Ok, take this moment right now and freeze it for a second. I can say that this moment of time is the culmination of all past history. All past history, in a sense, has led up to this fleeting moment. But if time was eternal, that means that the present moment is the culmination of all the multitude of infinite past moments. I have a hard time explaining this thought, but if you can sort through my explanation and make sense of it, it's just troubling. If time had a beginning, then you can conceive of time as a string of limited moments. That makes sense, that a certain limited number of moments have passed. (When I say it makes sense, I don't mean that it explains everything, only that I can visualize it in my mind.) But if time is infinite, that means that to arrive at this present moment, an infinite number of moments must have elapsed.  A lot of Christians are ecstatic when  you think about this, because they think it proves God. But how can it prove God? To me this proves that nothing can be infinite, including God. How can infinity be realized? How could an infinite number of moments have elapsed to arrive at this one? It doesn't make any sense at all.

I guess where I'm going with this is that I get dizzy just trying to sort through it, and I think it reduces to absurdity when we try to understand it. Trust me, I've had my own problems trying to sort through everything, and I agree with you, there's much that doesn't make sense. But I have that problem not just with God, but with existence itself.

Like I said, everything would make much more sense if there just wasn't anything that existed. That seems far more natural to me.

[FTL_Ian]

Great post Caleb.  This is a fun thread.  I love discussions like this.

What is existence?  What is consciousness? 

No need to answer, just fun to think about.

[Caleb]

Since I don't have TV right now, I have my coffee to YouTube. This was just posted yesterday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymHX8jYvFvs

That's funny. It reminds me of John Saffron (who is a hilarious atheist comedian) who created a video of himself going from door to door proselytizing atheism. The reactions of the people are hilarious.

[Caleb]

I think this is it:

[ReverendRyan]

Never heard of him before. I literally fell out of my chair laughing.

[dalebert]

I completely understand. In fact, I went through a similar perplexity as a child. Someone asked me when you drop something, how does it ever reach the ground? Can't remember who brought it up or why. But basically they took a book and held it at shoulder height and then moved it and said "It has to get halfway there before it can reach the ground right?"

"Yeah"

Then they moved it halfway from there "and from there it has to get halfway there before it reaches the ground, right?"

You see where it's going. So that means we don't understand everything about the universe and probably never will. I can't make sense of that.

I'll be the first to say that if we don't know something we should admit that we don't know. Calling it magic or God or whatever is the opposite of admitting you don't know. It's claiming that you do know. It's a kind of desperation to understand. How can you fail to learn from the analogy of primitive people ascribing things they don't understand to gods, like volcanoes and lightning? If you have no idea how the universe can just exist, why aren't you perplexed about how a conscious entity capable of creating the universe can just exist (particularly the type I described that isn't conscious at all)? It doesn't resolve anything. How does ascribing consciousness to the unknown suddenly cause it to make sense? All you've done is add an extra contrived level of complexity.

The universe doesn't even seem anything like a conscious creation. It's vastly messy and random with a tiny little speck of order emerging after trillions of years. Even if some unknown specks of order are elsewhere, they're still that- specks in an unimaginably vast universe of mess and randomness. I'm doing my best to describe something that seems intuitively obvious to me, much like how I described how I intuitively couldn't fathom "God" as a conscious entity. I think in the same way that your gut told you that you were in touch with a higher power, my gut was telling me there was no conscious creator of the universe.

Have you considered that you are in fact in touch with a higher power (relatively speaking), just not the creator of the universe necessarily? What convinces you that it's the creator of the universe, something that pre-existed the universe, that you're in touch with? As you know, I'm a skeptic which just means I try to apply a healthy level of scrutiny to things, but if I were to accept that you're being guided by something, many more plausible thoughts come to mind than the creator of the universe, perhaps socially advanced telepathic aliens that are just so far away that the message is getting a little fuzzy along the way or something like that.

[Caleb]

Well, here's my best answer, while still trying to avoid a debate  :

Experiences are antecedent to knowledge. They just are. We experience them. Then we try to make sense of them. I think in the other thread last year, I said something to the effect of that perhaps I would be an atheist too, if I hadn't felt an experience of God. Now, I believe that a person ought to try to make sense of his world. It may be nonsense, but hey, let's try to make sense of it as best we can. For all my talk of attacking reason, I still want to understand my world as best I can. Our ability to reason does know limits. Fact. Reason can become non-sense when it attempts to make sense of concepts that are beyond human capacity to understand. Fact. But for all that, our minds are still our best asset in understanding the world, so long as our approach to it is not grandiose.

There are certain schools of existentialism that would simply accept my experience as a validating "final experience", requiring no further investigation. I don't accept that. Existentialism is honest at least. It says what others won't say: we all have to make a leap of faith. Not necessarily blind faith though. Earlier in this thread, I talked about epistemology being a fun branch of philosophy. So it is. It's also the most rigorous, and frankly it shares the odd position of being not only the most important branch of philosophy, but also the most dismissed. Take the positivists, for instance. Well, there aren't any more real positivists, that's because Michael Polanyi pretty much dealt them a fatal blow, right? Showed that it completely lacks any epistemological base (not to mention that it also has no metaphysics).  But his victory was empty. Granted, you won't find any professional philosophers advocating it. They just slip it through the back door and quietly assume it in our hallowed halls of science. That's a leap far greater than anyone in the Jasperian "final experience" crowd, who at least have the honesty to admit that they've taken a leap of faith.

Where was I going with all this?  Beats me, I can't remember.    Ok, well, my point is, that in order to make sense of things, I look to philosophy. I've bounced around quite a bit, trying to figure everything out. But I also am with Jacobus, and I think that consciousness is another unexplained facet of the universe. Existence and consciousness. The two great unexplained questions. Or at least, not definitively explained. So any philosophy needs to address that. It also needs to ring true with my experience of the world. Let's say, for instance, that you come up with a wonderfully perfect, rational, philosophy, internally consistent, elegant, concise, logical. A real winner, since most philosophies are messy affairs. Great. But if that philosophy then requires me to believe that, say, there is no free will, I will reject it based on my experience. The point being that there is a human element to this as well, it doesn't just need to look good "on paper," it needs to also be true to the human experience. In my searching, I have not found a philosophy that addresses every issue perfectly. The best, so far, has been my slightly modified version of process philosophy, which is, as it happens, a theistic philosophy.

Now, if you want to persuade me otherwise, you would do well to present me with a philosophy that you believe better accounts for all the evidence, and harmonizes with my experience. Can't find one, write your own. But skepticism isn't a philosophy. It's an anti-philosophy. Sort of akin to the guy who says, "nuh uh". Don't get me wrong, there's a certain perverse appeal to nihilism. Hey. If you're going to be a skeptic, go all the way, right. 

And so that goes back, really, to the pointlessness of the debate. Unless you want to get into the particulars of every aspect of philosophy, a time consuming process to say the least that could easily take a lifetime, while I'd much rather sit back and watch Buffy. But is there really a whole lot to be gained here?

[Puke]

For me it's like this...
There is no real evidence of any sort of "higher power".
And if there was a god then I would hate him/it b/c that god would be ultimatley responsible for everything.

I never understood the guy that just fell off a boat and nearly drowns only to thank god that he is still alive. Didn't that same god just allow you to nearly drown?
Seems pretty silly to me.

[dalebert]

And so that goes back, really, to the pointlessness of the debate. Unless you want to get into the particulars of every aspect of philosophy, a time consuming process to say the least that could easily take a lifetime, while I'd much rather sit back and watch Buffy. But is there really a whole lot to be gained here?

OK, we've gone from something I can receive if I'm just receptive to it to "a time consuming process to say the least that could easily take a lifetime". That appears to be the ultimate response now that your statements have been challenged so I'll drop it, but I ask that you try very hard to remember this statement and the earlier statement that you are not trying to convert anyone. The next time you're thinking of doing a drive-by shooting, try to think back on those two statements.

It's startlingly similar to an atheism thread on anti-state.

Yes, I'm constantly being told that whatever arguments I'm currently reading barely touch on the best arguments theism has to offer, typically while I'm in the middle of refuting them. The elusive much better arguments are always forthcoming, and yet I never seem to encounter them. Maybe if I have faith in the better theistic arguments, they'll reveal themselves to me?

And my own response about it.

If it takes an entire book to say something "simple" then it's bullshit.

This. He keeps saying God is the simplest answer but then keeps telling us that we can't grasp this simplicity until we read these tomes of material he keeps pointing us to. And then what? Did reading these tomes yourself not prepare you to argue for the existence of God? If your arguments come across as particularly weak to us, why should we put much value in your taste in other people's arguments and waste our time on those?

[Jacobus]

I completely understand. In fact, I went through a similar perplexity as a child. Someone asked me when you drop something, how does it ever reach the ground? Can't remember who brought it up or why. But basically they took a book and held it at shoulder height and then moved it and said "It has to get halfway there before it can reach the ground right?"

"Yeah"

Then they moved it halfway from there "and from there it has to get halfway there before it reaches the ground, right?"

You see where it's going. So that means we don't understand everything about the universe and probably never will. I can't make sense of that.

This is a variant of Zeno's paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

It is my favorite paradox.  It makes you think about whether the world is continuous or discrete.  Or neither?  Can you keep splitting matter further and further down?  It seems like whenever physicists proclaim they've found the smallest possible unit, they discover a new world underlying that one.

[Dylboz]

But skepticism isn't a philosophy. It's an anti-philosophy. Sort of akin to the guy who says, "nuh uh". Don't get me wrong, there's a certain perverse appeal to nihilism. Hey. If you're going to be a skeptic, go all the way, right. 

This is extremely insulting. What kind of meaning does adding another consciousness, another layer of complexity to existence create? The existentialist dilemma remains. God does not speak to us and tell us what life means or why we are here. We have to figure that out, we have to create that meaning, ourselves. Your transcendent experience, what ever you make of it, happens inside your head (apologies to Dalebert) and is no more proof of a deity than it suggests you may have a brain tumor. Why a story about some dude in the clouds or a pervasive "presence," or the "Force," or whatever "god" is lately helps you or anyone, I do not know, but rejecting that story does not a nihilist make, nor does being skeptical about such claims. Atheists DO have values, most are the most introspective, morally aware persons I have ever known, since they must build their philosophy from the ground up rather than have it handed to them from the pulpit, and we are generally skeptical in the scientific sense, not in some paralyzing Cartesian "brain in a box" way that even rejects the evidence of the senses. We can test whether or not you have a brain tumor, but we can't ever hear the voice of God in your noggin. Well, yet, anyway. I suspect when we can, it'll look suspiciously like abnormal brain activity... of course the theist says "the lord moves in mysterious ways." And we're back where we started.

[srqrebel]

I completely understand. In fact, I went through a similar perplexity as a child. Someone asked me when you drop something, how does it ever reach the ground? Can't remember who brought it up or why. But basically they took a book and held it at shoulder height and then moved it and said "It has to get halfway there before it can reach the ground right?"

"Yeah"

Then they moved it halfway from there "and from there it has to get halfway there before it reaches the ground, right?"

You see where it's going. So that means we don't understand everything about the universe and probably never will. I can't make sense of that.

This is a variant of Zeno's paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

It is my favorite paradox.  It makes you think about whether the world is continuous or discrete.  Or neither?  Can you keep splitting matter further and further down?  It seems like whenever physicists proclaim they've found the smallest possible unit, they discover a new world underlying that one.

Indeed... both infinity and eternity are an integral part of existence. Existence exists -- infinitely and eternally. It cannot be any other way, unless one accepts the contradiction that "existence does not exist".

If one thinks about this, really thinks about it, it becomes obvious that the whole concept of a "Creator of all existence" not only adds a completely uneccessary layer of complexity -- it directly contradicts the axiom that existence exists.

If one concedes that the purported "Creator" did not actually create existence itself, but merely created certain manifestations of existence (i.e. our immediate universe), then the only thing separating Human beings from that mystical "Creator" by definition, is their current level of knowledge and resultant technology.

Again, consciousness is consciousness is consciousness... everything that can be rationally attributed to a Creator-God can just as surely be attributed to any one of us, given the corresponding level of knowledge. Any suggested attributes of a Creator-God that contradict the very nature of existence, are nothing but an insult to the very thing that makes it possible for us to fill the role of "Creator": Rational thinking itself.

[dalebert]

But skepticism isn't a philosophy. It's an anti-philosophy. Sort of akin to the guy who says, "nuh uh". Don't get me wrong, there's a certain perverse appeal to nihilism. Hey. If you're going to be a skeptic, go all the way, right. 

This is extremely insulting.

I almost wish you hadn't posted that because it clarified why these responses have me feeling insulted. What I said was quite a bit more significant than "nuh uh". I explained in straight forward terms, in a few paragraphs, what is logically inconsistent and intuitively unbelievable about a perfect, infinite being that pre-exists the universe and yet has human qualities like consciousness, free will, and ability to love, and the responses were nothing but obfuscation like you'd hear from a defense lawyer, totally unrelated to the points I made. Did I miss something that addressed my relatively simple and straight forward points that, unlike the response, don't actually require the reader to study philosophy for "perhaps a lifetime" to understand? It's condescending and dismissive. But whatever.

...happens inside your head (apologies to Dalebert)

Took me a moment to get that. 

[Vitruvian]

Did I miss something that addressed my relatively simple and straight forward points that, unlike the response, don't actually require the reader to study philosophy for "perhaps a lifetime" to understand?

If I'm not mistaken, this was the gist of Caleb's response (the trump card, ultimately, for every theist):

we all have to make a leap of faith

In other words, "I don't yet fully grasp the nature and causes of the universe, so I will believe anything that strikes my fancy."

[Cyro]

I'm not a regular here but...

Hi, my names Cyro and I'm a godless evil bastard.