A Conversation Among the Four Horsemen

[_marg]

Thanks for quoting my words Dart in your sig line..it is much more honest than taking an ad hom line someone makes against me. You are improving at least.

[_marg]

Don't worry about what people think. I'm certain people already know what you're all about, so there is nothing you can do about it. I'm just the guy who says what everyone else is thinking; there is nothing to "poison" here.

Kevin you can not assume to know what others are thinking. If you were honest, which I've discovered so far is not the case, and you truly believed that what I write speaks for itself then you wouldn't need to focus on ad hominals in reply, You wouldn't need to include in your sig a derogatory comment from another. You would simply let the words of another speak for that person. You wouldn't attempt to poison the well with little derogatory remarks peppered in your replies even when you are not engaging the person you want to belittle.

[_marg]

All I did was say atheism was a meme the same as religious belief.

You did more than that, you opposed another poster's explanaton of atheism.

With any discussion/argument it is typical to have sub-arguments and in particular over the meaning of words used in the argument.

Adn by the way this is why the word "atheism' ws relevant to the meme discussion.


Chap had said "Given the obvious dependence of all known religious belief systems on social (mainly family) transmission between generations in order to propagate themselves under normal circumstances, it is not surprising to find that a child whose family is indifferent to religion will usually not end up believing in any religion.

To say that this is because they have picked up an atheist 'meme' from their family is as pointless as to say that they have picked up a 'non-cannibal' meme because they were not brought up to eat people, or a 'non-scientologist' meme because they do not spend their time crouched over E-meters, or a 'non-alien abduction' meme because ... but I think I have made my point, and can spare my readers further scrolling down the screen."


From my personal observation Chap is correct. I am an atheist not because the idea of being an atheist was discussed in my family and it had a stickiness factor (from Tipping Point book)in my memory. I am an atheist because there was lack of religious indoctrination and I was little exposed to indoctrination by the outside world. Whatever exposure there was didn't stick.

With your limited definition of atheism as applied to meme theory, I would have had to have been indoctrinated with repeated discussion from my family that I shouldn't become a theist. for it to be considered a successful meme.

[_marg]

And Kevin, in rsponse to the sig line you quoted from me.."logically everyone is an atheist" I'll use the Catholic Encyclopedia and you will note that it points out that to the pagans early Christians were atheists.

"Since its first coming into use the term atheism has been very vaguely employed, generally as an epithet of accusation against any system that called in question the popular gods of the day. Thus while Socrates was accused of atheism (Plato, Apol., 26,c.) and Diagoras called an atheist by Cicero (Nat. Deor., I, 23), Democritus and Epicurus were styled in the same sense impious (without respect for the gods) on account of their trend of their new atomistic philosophy. In this sense too, the early Christians were known to the pagans as atheists, because they denied the heathen gods;

[_Some Schmo]

Incidentally, I essentially played the same role at MADB. I said what everyone was thinking. You two can't stand me for the same reasons the TBMs at MADB couldn't stand me.

Oh look... more self-congratulatory talk, mixed with some persecution complex. darte's whining and bragging at the same time again. What a shock!

Dude, you spend more time holding your own dick that doing anything else, don't ya? You actually think you're dialed in to what others are thinking? I can't decide who's more self-deluded between you and charity. It must be hard for you to walk with your head shoved so far up your ass.

Oh wait, I know... it's your god that's telling you this, right? I forgot that you think you're a conduit to the cosmic truth.

*rolls eyes* What a laughable dipstick. Too funny.

Incidentally, if you'd like me to quit laughing at you, quit being such an easy punch line. It's not such a difficult concept to grasp, even for an intellectual parasite like you.

[_EAllusion]

EA, I haven't read through all of Deepak Chopra's seven point response to Dawkins. If what you just said is true, then I would disagree with what he said. I simply threw it out there as an example of respondents who, whether you agree with them or not, are offering their own "reasoning" for a belief in God.

Chopra's argument, though, mimics what you said. He lists a series of things he charges science can't explain and argues the existence of God resolves them, therefore God. He's really just making a series of arguments from ignorance. Chopra adds an extra level of frustration when he does this, because he often is talking about things that science already does easily explain. The entropy argument in your link was the most egregious one since it is a very, very tired creationist argument, which is why I singled it out. You called Deepak's piece, a piece you apparently didn't even fully read, "impressive," as opposed to the more apt, "moronic". He's the Benny Hinn of the newagers. You could've done better.

In making his case against Dawkins and for a pantheistic God he said, " If God is going to become viable again, he will have to be a God who solves some key mysteries in the virtual domain:

--What separates life from inert matter?
--What part does the observer play in creating reality?
--How does the infinite quantum field organize and govern every event in the universe?
--How does chaos relate to order? Are they enemies or secret allies?
--How did evolution overcome entropy, the ceaseless march of the physical universe toward chaos and the deep freezer of "heat death"?
--Why is the universe so amazingly hospitable to human life?

This last question is the most pressing one, for both believers and non-believers. To claim that the swirling, chaotic quantum soup that erupted from the Big Bang evolved into human life by random chance is only believable because science has no urgent need to find a credible alternative."

You said, "The existence of God explains everything science can't...There is ample reason to believe God exists."

That's why I connected your comment to his.

[_dartagnan]

Chopra's argument, though, mimics what you said. He lists a series of things he charges science can't explain and argues the existence of God resolves them, therefore God.

But apparently what he has said - and I still haven't read it all - isn't exactly the same thing. He doesn't use the same examples, does he? I provided Chopra as a quick and accessible resource for an apologetic perspective, I was impressed with the detail in the seven part series but I didn't bother clicking on the other six. I didn't even finish reading the first part. I assumed it was merely the same stuff found in most books. Nobody here seems to be interested in reading books, or else I would have recommended Varghese, Flew or Swinburne.

Varghese lists five phenomena that "can only be explained in terms of the existence of God."

1. The rationality implicit in all our experience of the physical world.
2. Life, the capacity to act autonomously.
3. Consciousness, the ability to be aware
4. Conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding meaningful symbols such as are embedded in language.
5. The human self, the 'center' of consciousness, thought and action.


"In considering our immediate experience, let us perform a thought experiment. Think for a minute of a marble table in front of you. Do you think that, given a trillion years or infinite time, this table could suddenly or gradually become conscious, aware of its surrounding, aware of its identity the way you are? It is simply inconceivable that this would or could happen. And the same goes for any kind of matter. Once you understand the nature of matter, of mass-energy, you realize that, by its very nature, it could never become 'aware, never 'think,' never say 'I.'

But the atheist position is that, at some point in the history of the universes, the impossible and the inconceivable took place. Undifferentiated matter(here we include energy), at some point, became 'alive,' then conscious, then conceptually proficient, then an 'I.' But returning to our table, we see why this is simply laughable. The table has none of the properties of being conscious and, given infinite time, it cannot 'acquire' such properties. Even if one subscribes to some far-fetched scenario of the origin of life, one would have take leave of one's senses to suggest that, given certain conditions, a piece of marble could produce concepts. And, at the subatomic lavel, what holds for the table holds for all the other matter in the universe.

Over the last three hundred years, empirical science has uncovered immeasurably more data about the physical world than could ever have been imagined by our ancestors. This includes a comprehensive understanding of the genetic and nueral networks that underlie life, consciousness, thought, and the self. But beyond saying that these four phenomena operate with a physical infrastructure that is better understood than ever before, science cannot say anything about the nature or origin of the phenomena themselves. Although individual scientists have tried to explain them as manifestations of matter, there is no way possible to demonstrate that my understanding of this sentence is nothing but a specific neural transaction. Granted, there are nueral transactions that accompany my thoughts - and modern neuroscience has pinpointed the regions of the brain that support different kinds of mental activity. But to say that a given thought is one specific neural transaction set is as inane as suggesting that the idea of justice is nothing but certain marks of ink on paper. It is incoherent, then, to suggest that consciousness and thought are simply and solely physical transactions."

Roy Abraham Varghese, The "New Atheism": A Critical Appraisal of Dawkins, Dennett, Wolpert, Harris and Stenger as found in Appendix A of Antony Flew's, There is a God.

[_GoodK]

[
But the atheist position is that, at some point in the history of the universes, the impossible and the inconceivable took place.

I believe you are misrepresenting the atheist position.

The atheist position is, "I have heard the argument for your God, evaluated your evidence and or Holy books, and decided it's bogus."

We don't have to explain how the universe happened, how tables become aware of themselves, or even offer a hypothesis in order to reject creation myths.

It seems like you are saying that in order for someone to not believe in God, they have to explain the creation of the cosmos and its contents.

[_Ren]

"In considering our immediate experience, let us perform a thought experiment. Think for a minute of a marble table in front of you. Do you think that, given a trillion years or infinite time, this table could suddenly or gradually become conscious, aware of its surrounding, aware of its identity the way you are? It is simply inconceivable that this would or could happen. And the same goes for any kind of matter. Once you understand the nature of matter, of mass-energy, you realize that, by its very nature, it could never become 'aware, never 'think,' never say 'I.'

The table which is being referred to here isn't self-replicating. Therefore, 'future generations' of the table cannot change and adapt to their environment.
That is why the table (or anything like it) will never 'become conscious'. There is no mystery in that.

The only thing worthy of the title 'mystery' is how the first self-replicating molecules first came into existence. Once you have self-replicating molecules, then everything else is perfectly explainable .via the solid science of evolution.
And of course, that is a much simpler 'beginning' than a massively complex 'God-being' (often forcibly removed from 'the rational realm' entirely, thereby conveniently 'side-stepping' the need to explain how such complexity arose).

[_dartagnan]

I believe you are misrepresenting the atheist position.

I was quoting Varghese, who has considerable experience debating the atheist position, so I highly doubt he is misrepresenting it.

The atheist position is, "I have heard the argument for your God, evaluated your evidence and or Holy books, and decided it's bogus."

That's just another atheistic creedal statement that avoids having to deal with evidence that challenges one's asumptions. The evidence is illustrated in the analogy above, which I believe is referring to matter that existed before the big bang. According to the general atheistic assumption, "In the beginning" there was matter. That's all science can prove, so that is all they accept. Matter existed, nothing else. As the theory goes, for some reason or another, matter became so dense and hot that a massive explosion took place, which created the universe we see around us. All planets, moons, galaxies, stars etc., exploded from the same clunk of matter that existed "in the beginning." Thus, I think the marble table is analogous to this event.

We know there is evidence for the Big Bang (expanding universe) but there still is no reason to believe life would create itself anymore than there is reason to believe life could sprout from a marble table.

We don't have to explain how the universe happened, how tables become aware of themselves, or even offer a hypothesis in order to reject creation myths.

I'm not talking about creation myths. I'm talking about evidence for God via inference; by realizing the impossibility of the alternative explanation.

It seems like you are saying that in order for someone to not believe in God, they have to explain the creation of the cosmos and its contents.

I've said nothing of the sort. As far as I'm concerned, you don't have to explain anything. I can tolerate disbelief, even if atheists here cannot tolerate belief. But if you want to keep pounding me with these gauntlet challenges to prove something, there is nothing wrong with me poiting out that science cannot prove the atheistic assumptions either.