The Seven Types of Atheism

[wil]

I'm sorry. Sounds like hand-waving to me ...

Barely refrains from posting preachers, popes, and televangelists waving in gifs

Settles on, its turtles all the way down.

Just because we don't know an answer doesn't ran the answer is God

 

[RJM]

Barely refrains from posting preachers, popes, and televangelists waving in gifs

Settles on, its turtles all the way down.

Just because we don't know an answer doesn't ran the answer is God

That's insulting. Typical, when presented with a difficult argument, attack the person making it.

Stick your preachers and televangelists and popes and turtles, ok?

I never said the answer has to be God. The Kalam argument says that because nothing ever comes from nothing, the Universe has a cause. The cause is open.

Can you show that something ever comes from nothing?

 

[wil]

If the cause is open....we have no disagreement

 

[wil]

It is ONLY when you use the Jamal argument to attempt to prove God, that I disagree.

Are you denying that was the case all along?

 

[RJM]

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_first_cause

Virtual particles[edit]
Another counterexample is the spontaneous generation of virtual particles, which randomly appear even in complete vacuum. These particles are responsible for the Casimir effect and Hawking radiation. The release of such radiation comes in the form of gamma rays, which we now know from experiment are simply a very energetic form of light at the extreme end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Consequently, as long as there has been vacuum, there has been light, even if it's not the light that our eyes are equipped to see. What this means is that long before God is ever purported to have said "Let there be light!", the universe was already filled with light, and God is rendered quite the Johnny-come-lately. Furthermore, this phenomenon is subject to the same objection as radioactive decay.

I've been waiting for this one. Wondering why it didn't come up sooner.

The vacuum is spacetime, and subject to the force of gravity, etc. It's not nothingness.

Radioactive decay is the spontaneous decay of the atom. How does this rubbish get passed off on the public?

In fact, this whole stupid wiki article should be removed, imo ...

 

[RJM]

It is ONLY when you use the Jamal argument to attempt to prove God, that I disagree.

Are you denying that was the case all along?

Yes. No, I've said it clearly several times.

To disprove God, first you must disprove the Kalam argument by showing one of its propositions is false.

In fact scientific materialists insist that everything has a natural cause. But at a singularity (the BB) nature ceases to exist. Along with mathematics, time, space, gravity and everything else. So what exists outside of nature? Call it anything you want. It's not only unknown in the sense that 'one day we'll know' but it's unknowable.

 

[wil]

To disprove God, first you must disprove the Kalam argument by showing one of its propositions is false.

So you are saying God is self evident?

Otherwise why would anyone have to disprove God?

 

[RJM]

So you are saying God is self evident?

The opposite. God is spirit. Spirit is 'outside' nature. Outside is the wrong word. Spirit contains and surrounds and permeates nature. Spirit is not dependent on nature. It's the other way around: spirit 'weaves' nature.

God won't dance to satisfy the curiosity of smug new atheists. But the touch of God is unmistakable and never forgotten. Michelangelo's painting of creation happening at the touch of the finger of God represents that. IMO

Otherwise why would anyone have to disprove God?

Most modern 'star' science personalities, who parade on You Tube and write books like 'The God Delusion'.

 

[Thomas]

... when presented with a difficult argument, attack the person making it.

As an aside, I think this is the New Atheist position, the bad science position, and equally the bad theology position, because its claims are aimed at a populist audience, and the acceptance of such claims are proportionate to the degree of hyperbole. (It's why Plato disliked and discredited rhetoric as a discipline.)

What's annoying is a scientist, say, or a theologian, ignores the rules of her/his discipline when making populist claims — they sell books by the lorryload so delight publishers, but they make claims which wouldn't last five minutes in a scholarly, peer-review environment.

It becomes hypocrisy when the critic does not hold themselves to the rule they hold others to.

The worst of it is, in a pseudo-egalitarian culture in an access-all-media age, there is an assumption that anyone's opinion is worth as much as any other's, that all opinions are equal.

Sorry ... back to Kalaam ...

 

[Thomas]

ASIDE:

The God Delusion. Richard Dawkin's Argument for atheism.
496 pages, Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,534 in Books
10th Anniversary Edition

God Is Not A Delusion. Thomas Crean (short and succinct) dismantling of Dawkin's argument.
159 pages. Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 730,052 in Books
Out of print

Says volumes to me ...

 

[Cino]

I'm sorry. Sounds like hand-waving to me ...

EDIT: Please, no personal offence

Not offended, but I feel with you wrt hand-waving, only about the "but what was before time" part.

 

[RJM]

Not offended, but I feel with you wrt hand-waving, only about the "but what was before time" part.

What was before time, then?

 

[Arif Ghamiq]

There was no was or before - these words indicate time - seems to be an ineffable reality and I think both “god” and atheism are impossible to prove.

Either you believe the universe has a source or you do not.

Isn’t there a theory that the singularity was produced by membranes rubbing together ?

 

[RJM]

... Isn’t there a theory that the singularity was produced by membranes rubbing together ?

Yes. It's suggested by 11 dimensional M-Theory/String Theory. But there is to date no evidence, or even the possibility of evidence, without building a collider more powerful than the LHC in the quest to find the SUZY particles that string theory requires.

It's a nice hypothesis: Time space and all the 'standard model' particles and forces are located upon these membranes -- like independent universes -- but gravity operates between them and free of them?

Note question mark ...

In a way it's kicking the can down the road though?

 

[wil]

Says volumes to me ...

What do the volumes say?

 

[powessy]

Powessy,

Congrats on the length of the last two messages!

I am unsure how to take your reply I felt I answered these questions properly?

 

[Ahanu]

ASIDE:

The God Delusion. Richard Dawkin's Argument for atheism.
496 pages, Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,534 in Books
10th Anniversary Edition

God Is Not A Delusion. Thomas Crean (short and succinct) dismantling of Dawkin's argument.
159 pages. Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 730,052 in Books
Out of print

Says volumes to me ...

Paperback data from Amazon US. . .

The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,756 in Books

The Case for a Creator. Lee Strobel.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,037 in Books

I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Norman Geisler.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,103 in Books

Mere Christianity. C.S. Lewis.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #832 in Books

Jesus Among Secular Gods. Ravi Zacharias.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,154 in Book

God Is Not Great. Christopher Hitchens.
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,315 in Books​

 

[Ahanu]

That's a very general question. Can you narrow it down, as I think I'd enjoy discussing this?

Is the mind entirely physical in nature? Is consciousness an elaborate illusion? Nothing but a bag of tricks as the atheist Dan Dennett would like us to believe?

 

[Ahanu]

There's a good explanation of the hard problem of consciousness in the video below. Unlike David Chalmers, Daniel Bennett believes there isn't really a "hard" problem since it is an illusion. If you can explain the illusion, the so-called hard problem vanishes, allowing materialists to explain consciousness according to a materialist worldview.

Brief overview of Chalmer's view of consciousness from Wikipedia:

"Chalmers is best known for formulating what he calls the hard problem of consciousness, in both his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. He makes a distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the dominant strategy in the philosophy of mind: physicalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist. Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states are caused by physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. This view could also be characterized by more traditional formulations such as property dualism.

In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, importantly, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies.[13] These zombies, unlike the zombie of popular fiction, are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone; the facts about them are further facts. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties,[14] and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries. According to Chalmers, his arguments are similar to a line of thought that goes back to Leibniz's 1714 "mill" argument; the first substantial use of philosophical "zombie" terminology may be Robert Kirk's 1974 "Zombies vs. Materialists""

 

[RJM]

There was no was or before - these words indicate time

Sorry:

Yet time clearly came into existence 13.8 billion years ago. Space too. 'Before' the BB there was no when and no where. A state in fact of nothingness? Or at least outside of nature?