How many here are atheists?

[dalebert]

No atheism thread can be complete without CapnOAwesome.

Title: What I Believe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avl-MXbx2Nk

[Caleb]

It's not that I was angry, it just sort of hurt my feelings. Because I expect that sort of thing from Vitruvian. (I actually get a lot of pleasure from imagining Vitruvian in a conversation with William James or Immanuel Kant where he delivers his patronizing schtick "what would you think, Mr. Kant, of an adult who believed in the tooth fairy?" while these intellectual giants look on him with a bemused smile.)

But given the massive amount of time that I have spent engaging you in a respectful way, trying to answer every question you have both honestly and as completely as I am capable, it felt like a smack in the face to accuse me of evading your questions.

that having been said, when I get a little time, I will try to focus a little more on the specific question of God's supposed "incoherence" a little later on. I've got a friend coming to visit from Texas, so I don't have that much time right now.

[Vitruvian]

The Courtier's Reply

[Caleb]

To Nathan -

I can make this really quick I think. For one, you state that "religion hasn't worked." Religion doesn't exist. Religion is a catch-all term, where people throw a vast amount of competing and conflicting ideologies into one little group. Given that, it isn't possible that "religion" could possibly "work" because even if there was a part of it that did work, the part that assumed a completely different set of truth claims would serve as a non-functional counterbalance. Moreover, every person is really different, so there are about as many "religions" as there are people. Understood in that way, there are billions of religions that have worked, and billions of religions that have failed. I believe that if adopted universally, my form of religion would have a profoundly positive effect on the world.

You want to take away people's hope?    Yeah. Try that. That'll be fun. I don't suppose it has occurred to you that if you take away their hope, they're liable to grab at anything, and be willing prey to despots? Because that hasn't happened before. Oh wait. It has. It's the story of every totalitarian regime that has ever come to power.

[Caleb]

Well, since we're just cutting and posting links instead of having an intelligent discussion

http://notevenmodern.blogspot.com/2007/09/andrew-rilstone-on-courtiers-reply.html

If you think that you don't even need to know the main ideas of the great philosophers of the world, you are even more ignorant that I had previously assumed.

[Vitruvian]

Well, since we're just cutting and posting links instead of having an intelligent discussion

In case you hadn't noticed, I have asked you several questions that you have simply ignored or refused outright to answer.  I have watched and participated in this thread from the beginning and have observed your conversation with Dale.  I understand that you're more inclined to discuss such a touchy subject with him, being that the two of you have met face-to-face, but to say that you were engaging me in an intelligent discussion previously is quite inaccurate.

If you think that you don't even need to know the main ideas of the great philosophers of the world, you are even more ignorant that I had previously assumed.

Name-calling is hardly productive.

edit: This is the sort of intellectual contortion required to rationalize the "square circle."
edit #2: This part is especially good:

As a result, it began to be held that the safe and proper course was to believe literally BOTH statements; that in some mysterious manner God created the universe in six days, and yet brought it all into existence in a moment. In spite of the outcries of sundry great theologians, like Ephrem Syrus, that the universe was created in exactly six days of twenty-four hours each, this compromise was promoted by St. Athanasius and St. Basil in the East, and by St. Augustine and St. Hilary in the West.

[Russell Kanning]

Does Caleb have to answer your questions?
The thread doesn't say "Caleb anwers your questions about atheism"

[kola]

i shoulda listened to Lauren and made this a poll. 

Kola

[dalebert]

Understood, but you believe something about it. You express confidence in certain things about its nature. Vitruvian and I don't believe in it so from our point of view, we're trying to get at what is in your head. And when you claim inability to express your own thoughts with language, then it appears evasive. Sure, we can't know infinity. I get that, but we ought to be able to get to what it is that you believe about it.

The timing of this video is perfect.

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

[Nathan.Halcyon]

I can make this really quick I think.

No, you don't. You have proven by your adherence to your delusion, manufactured and demonstrably erroneous, that you do not think. I'll respond more appropriately, and entirely, tomorrow morning.

[Russell Kanning]

are you serious?

[Caleb]

I can make this really quick I think.

No, you don't. You have proven by your adherence to your delusion, manufactured and demonstrably erroneous, that you do not think. I'll respond more appropriately, and entirely, tomorrow morning.

I wouldn't waste your time. I've put you on ignore. From what I can tell of you, you came on this forum for one reason, and one reason only, to attack other people's beliefs and to be condescendingly hostile to other people's viewpoints. You have demonstrated that in both your squatting thread, and this one. (Ironically, I actually agree with you on the squatting thread, but it's a senseless waste of time to argue for that right here right now; you'll only alienate people that you need on your side.) You're like a really impolite Bill Grennon.

[Caleb]

Vitruvian, I'm sorry for being insulting. There's no excuse for it, and I apologize.

I do want to let you know where I was coming from, though. The courtier's reply argument is basically saying that "I have no need to even familiarize myself with the philosophical arguments that have been put out there. I choose not to know, and yet to pass judgment on matters that I have deliberately avoided educating myself on." Can you at least understand why I have a contempt for that sort of thinking? Imagine trying to have a scientific discussion with a person who had a bumper sticker that said, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" and you'll have a  rough approximation of how enthused I feel about discussing philosophy with a person who has an obvious contempt for philosophy.

[Caleb]

One thing I've noticed as of late is that the use of the word `god' signifies not only an inability to reason but also a significant deficit in one's ability to understand the nature of words.  Those who use the term `god' seem wholly unaware that god is first and foremost a word. They also seem unaware that for a word to have meaning or to refer to an existing thing, that word must have a definition. They also seem completely unaware of what constitutes a definition, and will attempt to define a word through metaphor and other invalid methods. It seems to me that the god meme is some sort of nuero-linguistic virus which cripples ones ability to use and interpret words in a meaningful way. The inability to reason would seem to be merely symptomatic of a deeper problem related to linguistic confusion. To inoculate against the virus would require education not merely in logic but more importantly in basic linguistics.

C'mon Dale, you're not really going to bring in that weaksauce are you? Let's break it down, then let me give a little advice to my atheist friends.

First, this guy's snippet is only a few seconds long, so it's hard for me to really figure out where he's coming from. But several of his statements are just so jaw-droppingly simplistic that, whereas I wouldn't normally comment on a link, it just needs to be addressed. It seems to me that your source is the one who needs education "not merely in logic, but more importantly in basic linguistics."

First and foremost, god is not a word. I am positing that god is an ontological reality. If something is ontologically real, it is something that exists. So let's take an easy to understand word like "computer." Computer is not first and foremost a word. First and foremost it is a thing. The word "computer" is my attempt to tag it with a classification. I doubt your computer and my computer look exactly alike. They are different, perhaps radically so, not only in appearance but also in specifications and capabilities. So the word "computer" is a symbol. All words are symbols that represent things or ideas or actions, or else that clarify them. Words aren't magical. They are functions of our reason, they are functions of our attempt to make sense of our world, but they definitely aren't primary. That's the guy's first mistake. My ability or inability to define something is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to whether it is ontologically real or not. My abilities refer to me, whereas things are existent or not independent of me. So when I die, that won't effect things that are ontologically real, because they don't derive their existence from my conceptualization of them. That's the guy's second mistake, because he seems to presume that challenging my inabilities somehow makes the problem go away, as if the problem is somehow a linguistic one. Definitions are always tricky things, even for concepts that we can analyze. I, for one, wouldn't care to take a stab at defining "Dale". Would you? Even though I have some experience of you, even in some respects where I know that I could say things that are true about you, (eg, "Dale is a male") I shouldn't be so naive as to think that I could completely sum you up. What's more, I could probably not even do a very good job of defining Dale even if I knew you very well unless I knew what particular aspect of Dale someone was referring to. If someone wants to discuss Dale in the context of cartooning, then I can hazard a little bit better definition than I can if someone comes up to me in a contextual vacuum and says, "please define Dale for me". And those problems, stemming from complexity,  are with someone who I know personally and who, conceptually at least, I can wrap my mind around. I am trying to convey to you why this "define God" demand is so completely beyond what I am capable of doing. I can sometimes approach -- but to define? Sorry. That's just unrealistic.

Now ... God as virus? Laughable. This is more of Dawkin's simplistic, nonsensical philosophical meanderings that have embarrassed his fellow atheists. Michael Ruse, for instance, has said that Dawkins "makes me embarrassed to be an atheist." Here's a good article on Ruse. http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2005/08/06/ruse/index.html.

How would a thought virus work? I mean, c'mon Dale. This is pretty laughable stuff coming from a camp that prides itself on slavish devotion to evidence. Where is the evidence for thought viruses? Can I look at one under a microscope? Maybe I need a really, really high powered microscope, that just hasn't been invented yet. How is this virus spread? Through words? Hey, we can get rid of it then. Just burn all the books and have a 30 minute worldwide moment of silence. Oh wait, there's no need to go to that extreme. Thankfully, we've been put on notice that there is a cure for this thought virus: education in the form of atheist propaganda and some linguistic books. How wonderful. Now, we can take Anthony Flew a cup of chicken soup to help him get better from his virus, along with some Noam Chomsky and a signed copy of Sam Harris' "The End of Faith." That'll help him get better real quick, and get over this nasty virus. Although one wonders that since he already had a pretty high level of education, one wonders why he wasn't successfully inoculated against this god virus already. Maybe the education inoculation isn't 100% effective. Well, scientists will just have to keep up the work finding a cure for this devastating worldwide pandemic. It needs to be a high level national health priority, no doubt the CDC will want to get involved and need some pretty impressive government funding to combat this virus. Meanwhile, it's nice to know that we have at least one somewhat effective remedy. It's so nice that education is the key to curing this virus. That's really great. A little unprecedented, of course. Usually the influenza virus or the HIV virus don't respond to a little light reading, but thankfully this is a thought virus, and since words are the vector, it only stands to reason that words are the cure. It's like Dawkin's own little brand of homeopathy. The virus and the cure are the same thing.

My advice to atheists is to get over this worship of Dawkins. His philosophical rigor is astoundingly poor. There are far more competent atheistic philosophers to work off of. If you can ignore the fact that Anthony Flew doesn't even buy his own work anymore, it is otherwise pretty good. Hell, Voltaire and Hume (I know that neither really qualifies as a pure atheist in the modern sense, but still, they are about a thousand times better than Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens.) Daniel Dennett is actually alright. I disagree with his crazy views on mind, but at least he's cogent. Better yet, spend your time reading ideas that are contrary to your own. (And I'm not talking about reading atheistic criticisms of these thinkers, I'm talking about actually reading the people themselves.) There's nothing to broaden your horizons more than reading ideas that are different than your own. You only read people who are preaching to the choir, and eventually your ideas get to be a little stale.

[Caleb]

Ok, Dale, I said I would try to address your thoughts on the supposed incoherence of God one more time. I think that this idea of "infinite" that you have is tripping you up. And to be honest, it's probably tripped me up as well, because I don't suppose that my conceptualization of God is uniform. A lot of times, I do conceptualize it probably the same way as you are trying to conceptualize it, and that ends up bringing about some problems in understanding it.

Let's get away, just for the moment, of a concept of God that is "personal", because I said before in my earlier post on the topic that I don't see that my "god", even with personality and will, differs much from a god that doesn't have those attributes. Imagine an impersonal God. If you are trying to define this overarching infinite as infinite in the sense that it is everything that is (ignore for a moment that I did give a little tacit nod at one point to precisely that sort of conception - as I've said before, I don't try to define God, so my own thoughts about God I conceive as my own little idol, not that it speaks to what God really is.) At any rate, if you are trying to conceive of God as "THE ALL", in the sense that he is everything, then it isn't just personality, or thoughts, or being, that he couldn't have. If you actually extrapolate it out, then even if all you do is conceive of this overarching infinite as an impersonal, "the force" or whatever else is helpful to you, you still have a major problem: How do you explain that anything OTHER THAN this ... what is it? thing? being? entity? ... how can anything other than this thing exist? It seems to me that there is an insuperable problem with conceiving of the infinite in the way that you are conceiving of it as.

I want to use an analogy here, that will hopefully prove helpful. Let's look at mathematical sets. There are an infinite number of infinite sets. You could picture the infinite numerically as every single number that could possibly be, real or imagined, whole or otherwise. That would be an infinite set. But there is also a infinite set of the integers. There's also an infinite set of the even numbers. And so on. Even zero is an infinite of sorts. (Which is what I said, previously, that your conception of the infinite seemed to me to be pretty close to, because it couldn't exactly do anything. There are an infinite amount of infinities to choose from, and I think the one that you are conceptualizing is a wrong one.

So I think that it all goes back to a faulty conception of the infinite. Personal or otherwise, I think your conception of infinite isn't really a helpful one. It isn't one that has any explanatory power, and thus is superfluous, (except for the fact that some being, at least temporally, must be infinite.) Infinite is just a symbol that people use to try to conceptualize that which isn't finite, and nothing in our experience fits that mold. So we are at a loss.

There are other sorts of infinites. One is a conceptual infinite called a "potential infinite". The characteristic of these infinites is that they don't really exist, they only exist as a concept in man's mind. They are defined as being the summation of an infinite string of finite numbers. The easiest way to picture this in your head is to imagine trying to count <to> forever. You can't count to forever. You could count forever, but you couldn't count <to> forever, because there would always be one more finite number that you could add. This is the problem of "crossing the infinite", which refers specifically only to infinite sets of finite principles - in other words, "potential infinites".

So what I've been trying to tell you is that it is your conception of the God as infinite that is tripping you up here. And the problem is that I can't help much, because I am unwilling (unable) to define God specifically. The reason for this is that, although I can use certain words, I cannot understand what that means. For instance, I use the word "atemporal" -  but what does it mean to be outside time? I am uncomfortable dwelling on that when I try to picture it in my head. It makes my head hurt. God is nonspatial. What does that mean? Hell if I know. When I was younger, dad tried to explain to me how "big" God was, and I asked him how that could be? I thought that size was not a very helpful thought when it came to God. God might as well be really, really small (infinitely small?) as big. I think that, even as a child, I was trying to understand what it means to be non-spatial. And I still can't wrap my mind around it. God is transcendent. Ok, what does that mean? It means that he is not what I am. I exist in dimensions of time and space, my nature is matter and energy. That isn't God. It doesn't really tell me what God is. It tells me what God is not. It's just about as helpful of a description of God as if I told you that God was not crispety, crunchety, peanut buttery. Ok. That's nice. But helpful?

God is omniscient? Omnipotent? Those I don't even buy into. Not that I preclude it in the same way that you preclude God himself. I'm not saying that I have any sort of positive proof that God isn't omniscient, for instance. I'm just saying that I can't conceptualize a God who could know everything and still leave me free. If God knows everything, then that means that he knows what I will do five minutes from now. But if he knows what I will do five minutes from now, then that means that on some level, that reality must be, and it is thus not my decision. I have no choice but to follow that reality. Since I believe that the freedom that I experience is genuine, I don't believe that it is determined, and hence don't conceive of God as omniscient. But that might just be my idol. There might be a way of reconciling the two ideas - freedom and omniscience - that I just haven't thought of.

To meet the requirements of the cosmological argument (validly argued, as I did earlier, because there are invalid constructions of the argument,) you need to produce a nonspatial, non-temporal construct capable of causation. Your philosophy will need to produce that as much as mine is. The other alternative is to attack one of the premises of the (validly argued) cosmological argument. If you want to do that, be my guest (you will essentially be arguing for a world that is so totally unlike the one that both of us know that I think it will be way more speculative than my philosophy.) Some people have tried to attack the premises, but I am convinced that the argument is at least sound. It doesn't necessarily lead to God, for there could be other explanations, but it at least produces the above described entity: nonspatial, non-temporal, capable of causation. We know of a few things that are non-spatial and non-temporal. Like mathematical concepts, for instance. Yes, the number 18 doesn't exist in space or time, it's only a concept. But the number 18 doesn't exactly cause anything either. The only thing known to man that fits these criteria is mind. So what I'm saying is that if God isn't the answer, then ultimately the answer is unknowable.

But you see, you have another paradox. Consciousness. You have been trying to show it as emergent. I haven't been buying it. Because at first, it appears that you are doing a magic trick and producing consciousness from unconscious material. But the more that I talk with you, the more it seems to me that you aren't doing anything of the sort. You are actually reducing and eliminating consciousness. At least that's the direction that I've seen you going in, particularly with your most recent postings on the topic. If you acknowledge consciousness in the fullness that you experience it, you have an inexplicable riddle. You've got the "hard problem" of consciousness, but you also have the "soft problems" which I think are just as unsolvable. Ok, the difference between the two (I'm avoiding saying "David Chalmers" so you don't accuse me of throwing names out anymore), but the difference between the two is that the "hard problems" are problems that are conceptually inexplicable. In other words, there is no way to explain them given the framework. The "soft problems" are not necessarily easy problems or problems that we have any clue what the answer is, but they are the problems that, at least in theory, could be addressed within the framework. But I think the soft problems turn into hard problems when the hypothetical solutions exceed the capacity of the organism to meet them. The example of that which I gave you was the cell, which doesn't have the hardware necessary to produce a computer program of sufficient complexity to allow it the ability to coordinate its systems as it is observed to do. This might differ from the human mind, which theoretically at least, might have the capacity to produce a sufficiently complex computer program to explain human behavior. In this respect, I agree with Chalmers that many of the problems of human consciousness are soft problems, (though I think at some point they become hard problems once the alternative proffered solutions meet with failure.) But the cell? He's a hard problem. And if we are to assume uniformity of life, then his hard problem is my hard problem. But I digress.

At any rate, my point is that your explanation leaves me with two unsolvable riddles: Finite existence itself (because you still haven't explained to me what causes the finite to become separated from the infinite forms that you are proposing, such that they would have to strive for reconciliation with the infinite,) and consciousness. My hypothesis takes care of both of those riddles. And Occam chops your theory away, because any explanation that you care to give will necessarily be more complex than mine. :-) (Do you see why I dislike resorting to Occam? The person who has had Occam used to chop away their ideas almost always feels that the razor has been incorrectly used in their case; and I can't really say that I disagree. As a tool for choosing between differing beliefs, Occam is always problematic and usually completely useless.)