Ask the Atheist

[josiecoe]

Okay, I had gone to bed and had to respond (by waking and replying).

The “I” that you so eloquently described had me thinking … Take this scenario, I’ll only need two seconds:

The first second the neurons, in this partiular arrangment, as you discussed. Take the exact same structure in the very next second the “soul” is no longer available to the body. The following second it is no longer occupied and it has expired and yet it is exactly the same as it was only a second before.

I believe that you could (potentially) recreate the matter but never touch the soul … if it ain’t moving forward it ain’t movin’.

What has changed? is it the existance of God? … Has he called, and the body responded?

I look forward to your response.

Oh yeah, God bless

 

[PLP]

marty1818:

I have a question for PLP. Do you believe we have free will? Please explain your beliefs on this topic.

Another profound question!

There’s a trivial sense that we do have a will (desires, intentions, etc.) and we are generally happy when that will is “free”, i.e. not subject to outside coercion.

But I suspect you mean some sort of metaphysical exception from causality. In the metaphysical sense, “free will”, like “soul”, is one of those words with a very slippery definition.

Let me turn the question back on you: Suppose I were like a normal person is every respect, except that I personally, unlike everyone else, actually lacked free will; unlike everyone else, my thoughts, feelings, etc. were in fact physically caused. Could you tell the difference? Could I?

 

[PLP]

tomaskovarik:

Well, I think that you secretely believe in God, thats why you are here.

Well, if I do, it’s a secret even from myself!

So, I know, quite for sure (as a previous atheist myself), that you are pretty much on a great journey, which is starting now.
Keep your mind and heart open and…Bon Voyage!!!

Well, the journey has been ongoing for many decades, but this leg is indeed starting now. I do my best to always keep my mind and heart open.

 

[PLP]

Benedictus:

My question is pretty simple: What do you believe happens when we die? Is death the end of our existence, or is there something more?

I don’t know. Whatever does happen, the evidence (with some controversial exceptions ) shows that it’s one way and irreversible. I’ve not seen a plausible instance of anyone coming back to report on conditions.

I suppose I’ll find out for myself in due tiem.

 

[PLP]

josiecoe:

The first second the neurons, in this partiular arrangment, as you discussed. Take the exact same structure in the very next second the “soul” is no longer available to the body. The following second it is no longer occupied and it has expired and yet it is exactly the same as it was only a second before.

If this happened, would my physical body know? Would it keep saying and doing the same sort of things? Would an observer have any way of telling my “soul” had departed?

 

[Zachary]

What defines right and wrong?

Why are humans “here”? Why not is not an acceptable answer. What is the purpose of existence.

*“Starting and coming into being assume there is time for things to start in or in which to come into being. But time itself is something, not nothing, so where how did time come into being?” *Time is not the same something that could have originated anything, it is not something physical. Time is only a definition of a state of things not being still ie moving and changing. So, bogus. Try again.

 

[PLP]

Zachary:

What defines right and wrong?

We humans do.

Why are humans “here”? Why not is not an acceptable answer.

In terms of efficient causes, evolution.

What is the purpose of existence.

In terms of final or teleological causes, I don’t think there is an external teleological cause for the existence of humans.

Time is not the same something that could have originated anything, it is not something physical. Time is only a definition of a state of things not being still ie moving and changing. So, bogus. Try again.

I honestly don’t understand your objection. Whether time is physical or not, it is still something, and not nothing.

 

[Tantum_ergo]

How do we humans define “right” and 'wrong"? Why would we even have such ideas? Why, in the thousands and thousands of societies/groups that have existed do “right” and “wrong” seem so. . .so CONSTANT?

Ideas. . .concepts. . .abstractions. . .did humanity just somehow “come up” with things like “right”, “wrong”, “beauty”, “truth” etc. out of nowhere? And somehow manage to come up with pretty much the same things despite widely divergent circumstances, education, experiences, etc.?

Interesting that from a big bang and random particulate motion and from a primordial “soup” that “evolved” carbon based creatures somehow one particular group, homo sapiens sapiens, which is not all THAT different from chimpanzees, has come up with so many “rational” ideas. If the universe is totally random, why would “rationality” be even a thought among creatures of any kind?

 

[Tantum_ergo]

Time is as much a variable as is space, my friend. Space exists, time exists, matter exists. . .and therefore since they are part of the EXISTENCE, if you will, they cannot really be a CAUSE of the existence. One cannot say that because Time, or Space, IS, that existence itself is due to time, or to space. I don’t know if you see that you are really dancing around the question, but unless you wish to acknowledge that science, when it comes to answering HOW we got here, is just as THEORETICAL as RELIGION, you are really not being honest with yourself or others.

Science has not answered how the universe started. Beyond “the big bang” you HAVE to have something.

Science has not answered how humanity became rational beings. Evolution is a byproduct, if you will, not an answer. There is no way that science can, working backward, find the spot where some protozoa, some vertebrate, even some species of primate, “evolved” into a human being by developing the gene structure or whatever posits “rational” thought. Sure, it is entirely possible that man “evolved” from a primate species, but it is NOT THE EVOLUTION that “made” man. Without something which science cannot explain–a “soul”, a capacity for reason–evolution explains nothing about the “why” or “how” mankind exists.

Therefore, scientific “theories” about the origin of humanity, the planets, the universe etc. are interesting POSSIBLE explanations but are very INCOMPLETE, simply because one cannot explain something from nothing using the data available. Since we do not have any data about how matter can come into existence from nothing, all we can do is make guesses about what the matter does AFTER it is in existence, not about what existed BEFORE–scientifically speaking–and so all these theories are incomplete.

Take the extinction of the dinosaurs. We KNOW dinosaurs existed on earth once. We KNOW they do not NOW. But while science has offered more than one THEORY on how they became extinct, science cannot give us total assurance as to which theory is absolutely correct. And this is regarding an event which took place in earth history not all THAT long ago, and certainly well beyond the “big bang”.

If science cannot even speak authoritatively about events in which they HAVE all the relevant data available (this is not a case of “something from nothing”), then why do some appear to have (excuse the term) a religious “belief” in scientific theories such that they can’t seem to even imagine that what their pet scientist said about X event could have any other interpretation?

After all, over the thousands of years of humanity’s existence, there have been all SORTS of scientific theories. And (I know you are aware of this) the great majority of these theories have been widely held, sometimes for many centuries, and then “overturned” due to “new evidence” etc., or “reinterpreted”, etc. The jury is still out on what exactly evolution is, was, or remains to be seen, but humanity is not an effect from evolution’s CAUSE. Both humanity and evolution are effects from something “bigger”.

 

[SpiritIsWilling]

Hey there PLP. I have a few questions for you:

What do you believe about creation/evolution? Do you sincerely think that, by some cosmic roll of the dice, we went from bacteria to beings capable of making heavier than air objects fly, atomics, science, medicine? Do you honestly believe it was all by chance, that the entire universe happened without any deisgn?

Secondly, do you think that in our everyday life we’re totally alone? There’s no one watching out for us, that every event that occurs is all based on probabilty, on some mathematical chance?

That is the very essence of God, PLP. He is beyond any of our understanding, any of our comprehension. You can’t prove him mathematically or scientifically. Those who attempt to are egotistical morons who think that THEY are the gods, they control where the world goes and what it does. You must take it on faith, that’s the basis of religion.

I’ll pray for you my friend.

PS - It’s nice to see that you’re obviously educated and open to ideas and not here to refute everything we say without thinking.

 

[marty1818]

PLP:

Another profound question!

There’s a trivial sense that we do have a will (desires, intentions, etc.) and we are generally happy when that will is “free”, i.e. not subject to outside coercion.

But I suspect you mean some sort of metaphysical exception from causality. In the metaphysical sense, “free will”, like “soul”, is one of those words with a very slippery definition.

Let me turn the question back on you: Suppose I were like a normal person is every respect, except that I personally, unlike everyone else, actually lacked free will; unlike everyone else, my thoughts, feelings, etc. were in fact physically caused. Could you tell the difference? Could I?

I myself believe we have free will. If we did not have free will things like punishments and awards make no sense. This is something that Aquinas notes and it’s a good point. If everything we do is not our own choice then how can we be held responsible for it? I’m still waiting for your response on my original question.

Matt

 

[BlindSheep]

Do you prefer eggnog or mulled cider?

http://www.eggnog.net/shared/recipe_images/EggNog_Cookies.jpg

 

[Little_Mary]

Read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

 

[PLP]

Tantum ergo:

How do we humans define “right” and 'wrong"?

There seems to be two general ways that certain elements get defined as right and wrong: Elements that are physically and psychologically beneficial to the people in a society and things that not. It should be no surprise that elements that are generally beneficial get preserved in social codes of ethics.

The only mystery are ethical elements that are not generally beneficial, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Why would we even have such ideas?

Why shouldn’t we? We can certainly tell the difference between pleasure and pain, between happiness and sadness. We evolved from social animals; is it such a surprise that we should have a social morality? All that’s required to naturalistically explain social ethics are that we can make these distinctions and that we can project these feelings onto others. It doesn’t seem to require anything supernatural to come to the belief that you have feelings similar in character to my own.

Why, in the thousands and thousands of societies/groups that have existed do “right” and “wrong” seem so. . .so CONSTANT?

Except they don’t seem constant. Even in our own Western civilization, there are any number of huge issues in which our moral and ethical evaluations have changed over as short a period as a millennium: slavery, torture, monarchy and politcal authoritarianism, the subjugation of women, racism, wars of aggression; all of these activities used to be condoned or even required; today they are condemned. Sexual morality in Western civilization seems to swing from liberalism to conservatism every generation or two. And that’s just one civilization! Study anthropology, and you see that the moral beliefs of differing societies are very much different.

It should be no surprise that ethical beliefs which are generally beneficial to human beings tend to be common. We are all basically similar, with similar physical and psychological needs. Elements of ethical systems which tend to fulfill these needs will persist; systems which block or prohibit these needs tend to be selected against.

The only apparent mystery is in the elements of ethical systems which do not directly fulfill natural human needs. But it is precisely in those systems where we see the largest variation, and they can be explained by an evolutionary explanatory framework: Random variation and natural selection. For various reasons, we invent a lot of arbitrary ethical elements, and some survive and some do not. The mechanisms are probably much different from those found in biological evolution, but the whole concept of random variation and natural selection can prove fruitful, I think, to a study of ethical and social evolution.

Ideas. . .concepts. . .abstractions. . .did humanity just somehow “come up” with things like “right”, “wrong”, “beauty”, “truth” etc. out of nowhere?

Out of nowhere? No. We have these big brains, and they’re always thinking. It’s not as if any of these ideas appeared overnight. Our species has been fully human for at least 100,000 years, and we’ve been big-brained for close to a million. That’s a lot of time think, experiment, and see what works. Furthermore we’ve have an evolutionary history of a couple of billion years, with a hundred million years or more as mammals; there’s a lot of our brains that evolved during that time.

And somehow manage to come up with pretty much the same things despite widely divergent circumstances, education, experiences, etc.?

I think you’re overstating the commonalities, and ignoring that no small amount of commonality is due to the fact that societies have been communicating vigorously for thousands of years.

Interesting that from a big bang and random particulate motion and from a primordial “soup” that “evolved” carbon based creatures somehow one particular group, homo sapiens sapiens, which is not all THAT different from chimpanzees, has come up with so many “rational” ideas. If the universe is totally random, why would “rationality” be even a thought among creatures of any kind?

Well, the universe is definitely not totally random. It seems very clear that there are definite natural laws, from gravity to thermodynamics, quantum mechanics to biological evolution. It should be no surprise that our brains have evolved to have ideas which are rational, since the universe itself appears to have rational natural laws.

 

[BlueRain]

PLP:

I don’t find that the idea of a creator really “explains” anything. Why did the creator create this creation and not some other? Why did the creator create anything at all? An explanation, in my view, ought to show that what we see logically follows from the explanation, logically precludes what we don’t see.

Welcome PLP

I’d like to ask why do we as humans like to create as well? Art, movies, pyramids,stories etc.

Not everything we create is out of need, like tools. Even Neanderthals created primitive tools. But unlike us, they never created art or painted on caves and they didn’t need it to survive. Creating is totally unique to us. I believe since God made us in His image, we have certain aspects that are like Him, like the desire to create. Why not create?

How has the desire and joy from creating things benefitted us in an evolutionary sense. I’m talking about creating things, not problem solving.

 

[CatholicCid]

Hi PLP, great to see you posting…

Was just wondering what your thoughts are on Miracles, or situations where science has no answers to say a patient cured of cancer or a person recieving the stigmata…

When these things happen, are we just to unadvanced medically and scientifically to understand how these happen? Are they just plain hoaxes?
What are your thoughts on the matter?

Have a great day,

CC

 

[PLP]

Tantum ergo:

Time is as much a variable as is space, my friend. Space exists, time exists, matter exists. . .and therefore since they are part of the EXISTENCE, if you will, they cannot really be a CAUSE of the existence. One cannot say that because Time, or Space, IS, that existence itself is due to time, or to space.

Good points. I definitely don’t think that “existence” is due to time or space. It seems clear that time and space (or spacetime) are relationships. If we skip all the meta levels, there’s nothing for everything that exists (whatever that is) to have a spacial or temporal relationship with something else, since by definition there is nothing else for everything to have a relationship to.

This is why I object to questions such as: How did everything that exists (whatever that is) come to be or begin? These questions implicitly assume that there is something else for everything that exists to have a temporal relationship to, which is logically impossible.

I don’t know if you see that you are really dancing around the question, but unless you wish to acknowledge that science, when it comes to answering HOW we got here, is just as THEORETICAL as RELIGION, you are really not being honest with yourself or others.

I’m not sure what you mean by “theoretical”. If you mean not absolutely certain, I would definitely agree with you. Part of the naturalistic, scientific mindset includes the idea that anything we think we know could be proven wrong tomorrow. I do not hold any belief with absolute certainty, not even my atheism.

If by “theoretical” you mean “logically, sensibly and parsimoniously explanatory,” then I would have to object and say that religion does not really explain in the same sense that scientific theories explain: Scientific theories construct systems where what we observed is logically entailed by the system.

Science has not answered how the universe started. Beyond “the big bang” you HAVE to have something.

Well… perhaps, perhaps not. There seems to be some scientific speculation that the observable universe is not everything that exists. But that’s a question for physicists. Let’s assume that the observable universe really is everything that exists, or at least everything natural that exists. Why then do we have to have something beyond the Big Bang? The BB is just a point in spacetime we can’t see around, at least not from where we sit now.

If the Big Bang must have an explanation (and that explanation presumably must be God) then it would seem pure special pleading to insist that God need not have an explanation. Contrawise, if it is possible for something to not need an explanation, why couldn’t that something be the Big Bang?

Science has not answered how humanity became rational beings.

I’m no biologist, but IIRC we developed big brains initially because of a mutation which caused us to preserve a juvenile body development plan longer; juvenile primates have a larger head to body ratio. Suddenly we had considerably more neurons to work with.

Other than having improved hardware, the only real improvement in our brains is another layer of self-reference: We can think about our own thoughts. This is not a particularly supernatural feature; we have the same sort of feature in computer programs with pointers to pointers to pointers ad infinitum.

Evolution is a byproduct, if you will, not an answer. There is no way that science can, working backward, find the spot where some protozoa, some vertebrate, even some species of primate, “evolved” into a human being by developing the gene structure or whatever posits “rational” thought.

Well, I don’t know that science has yet done so. But I don’t think that it cannot in princple be done. We have a big honkin’ clue: The brain. If we didn’t have a brain, with billions (tens of billions?) of neurons busily firing away, I wouldn’t be so optimistic. But we do. Unless and until we can decisively rule out physical brain activity as what intelligence, consciousness and rational thought physically is, I don’t think we’re justified in turning to supernaturalism.

Sure, it is entirely possible that man “evolved” from a primate species, but it is NOT THE EVOLUTION that “made” man. Without something which science cannot explain–a “soul”, a capacity for reason–evolution explains nothing about the “why” or “how” mankind exists.

How do you know it’s not the evolution? How do you know science cannot explain our intelligence and consciousness? We’ve barely just developed the tools, both technological and theoretical to even begin to crack the problem. I’m not anywhere near ready to give up on science.

(continued)

 

[PLP]

Tantum ergo:

Therefore, scientific “theories” about the origin of humanity, the planets, the universe etc. are interesting POSSIBLE explanations but are very INCOMPLETE, simply because one cannot explain something from nothing using the data available.

I don’t think the question, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” can be answered. I don’t think that even, “I don’t know” is justified. At some level, we are forced to say, something just is. We can push that something around, we can dress it up in fancy language, but ultimately we have to say that something just is. I say it’s everything natural that exists, you say it’s God. I think we’re both saying exactly the same thing, but in different ways.

Take the extinction of the dinosaurs. We KNOW dinosaurs existed on earth once. We KNOW they do not NOW. But while science has offered more than one THEORY on how they became extinct, science cannot give us total assurance as to which theory is absolutely correct. And this is regarding an event which took place in earth history not all THAT long ago, and certainly well beyond the “big bang”.

True indeed. Science can never give us certainty. I don’t see certainty as being of any value.

If science cannot even speak authoritatively about events in which they HAVE all the relevant data available (this is not a case of “something from nothing”), then why do some appear to have (excuse the term) a religious “belief” in scientific theories such that they can’t seem to even imagine that what their pet scientist said about X event could have any other interpretation?

I have no idea. I don’t think this way, and I don’t know anyone who does.

After all, over the thousands of years of humanity’s existence, there have been all SORTS of scientific theories. And (I know you are aware of this) the great majority of these theories have been widely held, sometimes for many centuries, and then “overturned” due to “new evidence” etc., or “reinterpreted”, etc.

I most definitely agree! We learn more all the time! This is a good thing, IMHO.

The jury is still out on what exactly evolution is, was, or remains to be seen, but humanity is not an effect from evolution’s CAUSE. Both humanity and evolution are effects from something “bigger”.

Well, I do disagree with you on this. It’s logically possible that you’re right, but I’ve seen no evidence which would persuade me that there is indeed anything “bigger” other than the general natural laws of the universe.

 

[PLP]

marty1818:

I’m still waiting for your response on my original question.

Could you repeat the question please?

 

[Detroit_Sue]

PLP, did you grow up with any kind of faith, or religious belief? If so, what caused you to turn away from that belief?