Atheists delusional?

[IWantGod]

Before we get side tracked with the objective truth conversation,

There is no side tracking it. It’s just as important as anything else. The qeustion is, from a position of atheism, how do you decide whats important in life apart from your desire? Everything begins with desire including our pursuit of knowledge…

Belief in the unknown for what you want is not modeling your beliefs on what reality has presented to actually be the case.

You assume that metaphysical naturalism is a model of actual reality. The truth is, we don’t a-prior know what the ultimate nature of reality is. Thus if physical reality alone cannot provide someone a meaningful reason to exist, cannot provide them their desire for an objective moral value, purpose and meaning, then the unknown is all that one can hope for.

What you wish reality to be like in the future is irrelevant to what reality has actually demonstrated to be the case now.

What reality actually is hasn’t been actually demonstrated. Science is the measure of what can be measured. It isn’t a justification to say that this is all there is, as that would be a circular argument. And to say that you believe and hope only within the context of what can be measured is not a dictate of reason but rather it is a dictate of your preference in your approach to reality. There is no objective standard demanding that we must only hope for what is seen. That’s just your own made up subjective principle. If you wish to put that on a pedestal as a life principle, that’s up to you, but that’s just your own personal philosophy.

You seem to be indicating that it is bad that my understanding of my inevitable atomic decay is a preference over your culture or myths addressing the future.

It’s absurd only because you don’t know that atomic decay actually means the end of your conscious existence. It’s an unjustified assumption. It hasn’t actually been justified by science. That’s your philosophy. Please don’t confuse that with science. So all you have left as an atheist is what you think might be the ultimate truth or what you hope to be true. And since you cannot use what is seen as a frame of reference to determine what is ultimately true without being circular, you really have no justification to diss faith. And whats wrong with hoping something to be true? When faced with nihilism, why wouldn’t you hope that God exists? Why limit your possibilities based on an ideology that hasn’t been proven? You have a lot of unjustified beliefs. So why shouldn’t i think that your atheism isn’t just a matter of preference and desire?

When it comes to science i think agnosticism of the unknown is a valid principle in terms of method, but it’s not necessarily a valid life principle. It is rational to want to preserve your moral value and your existence, thus it is rational to hope for the unknown because the unknown allows for that possibility insofar as we do not know that it is an impossibility. .

 

[Russell_SA]

“The qeustion is, from a position of atheism, how do you decide whats important in life apart from your desire? Everything begins with desire including our pursuit of knowledge…”
Atheism is not actually a word that means anything. Atheist is though. Atheists is a single position to a single question. Are you convinced that the supernatural exists? No, no I am not. Just like how a jury member is not convinced by the prosecution’s presentation on why they should find the defendant guilty. Does it make sense to say that they have a “not guilty-ism” for their disbelief that the defendant is guilty? An atheist is just someone that is not convinced that the supernatural exists based on the theist’s presentation and what reality has presented. There is no tenants, dogma books, leaders, practices, etc. There are world views that tend to have more atheists in them, like skeptics, secular humanist, etc. But you can still believe in the supernatural and be a skepticism, secular humanist, republican, liberal, nihilist, cultural catholic, etc.

“Thus if physical reality alone cannot provide someone a meaningful reason to exist, cannot provide them their desire for an objective moral value, purpose and meaning, then the unknown is all that one can hope for.”
You can find meaning for yourself and that can be enough. Even if a deity exists, its imposed meaning for reality is not something we necessarily have to accept for ourselves or agree with. If you need someone else to tell you what meaning is for something, asking your deity is no different to me than just asking anyone else. Just like my car example, the purpose the maker of the car assigned to the car is irrelevant to the purpose I find in the car’s existence. Why have you dismissed the idea of a deity creating just for creation sake regardless of further meaning? AKA the clock-work deity.
The unknown is just to be discovered, but what we have discovered so far is what we can use to extrapolate meaning. Once you start imposing more to this than what reality has presented, you are just making up a reality that you would prefer it to be instead of what it has actually presented. That is something I fundamentally do not agree with since this leads people down the path of not dealing with our actual reality and our actual problems.

 

[Russell_SA]

“What reality actually is hasn’t been actually demonstrated.”
I’m not talking about absolute knowledge of reality, only what we have discovered and can justify so far about reality. Don’t know why I have to point this out, but okay.

“There is no objective standard demanding that we must only hope for what is seen.”
Okay, then santa and superman are fine to hope for. It is expected to hope for things that have been justified to fall within the realm of our reality from what reality has actually presented. How much of your life would have been wasted for the hope of superman to appear and solve your problems? For you to read the comics and see what events need to transpire for superman to appear and you go about making that happen instead of say, solving our problems ourselves instead of this absurd need for a savior to save us when we have it in us to save ourselves.

"It’s absurd only because you don’t know that atomic decay actually means the end of your conscious existence. "
Do you have any evidence of consciousness existing outside of a functioning brain? No one does so far, so yes, I have created an internal model of reality that matches what reality has actually presented so far as we can justify. Yes once we die, the brain stops functioning, and thus our observed reference of consciousness stops producing any data of consciousness. Show me one verifiable piece of evidence that is counter to this.
Again, how you wish reality to be has no bearing on what reality actually appears to be.
“And whats wrong with hoping something to be true?” nothing as long as that hope is grounded in reality. I hope it is true that I live a long full life. But what if I hope that it is true that superman shows up? Which one is to be taken seriously?

“It is rational to want to preserve your moral value and your existence, thus it is rational to hope for the unknown because the unknown allows for that possibility insofar as we do not know that it is an impossibility.”
Yes, this is why we have children to carry on our legacy, why we right books, to create something that survives beyond our limited time of existence so that we can leave a mark of our story behind and not be forgotten. So that our verse in this story continues on beyond us.

 

[IWantGod]

You can find meaning for yourself and that can be enough.

You mean the subjective fantasy you subscribe to?

That’s clearly not enough for everyone. People put their hope in the idea that God is real, not just a subjective fantasy that we use to get on in life and inform our self-esteem. At least there is a possibility that God exists, the atheist ought to know that their own subjective self anointed values are just a fantasy if metaphysical naturalism is true.

You can’t have it both ways.

 

[IWantGod]

Okay, then santa and superman are fine to hope for.

I know that we invented them and they do not inform my metaphysical value as a person. I don’t know that we invented the basic metaphysical concept of God, and God actually gives my existence objective moral value, purpose, and meaning. There is a clear difference.

 

[IWantGod]

Yes, this is why we have children to carry on our legacy,

Why would you bring children into a world where they have no objective value, meaning, or purpose, and knowing they are going to have to face the reality of ceasing to exist? You might not have a problem with that, but it is quite callous, selfish, and presumptuous to put that burden on a child. It’s absurd.

You obviously have not given your own atheism much thought at all.

 

[Russell_SA]

Okay, I don’t know what you mean by metaphysical naturalism. I go by methodological naturalism it seems. To only pursue paths to discover questions about reality by paths available on what reality has presented. That is why we look at chemical reaction in neurology to explain psychotic disorder instead of ghosts. Even though I can imagine ghost and imagine what powers my imagined ghost would have and then see how that imagined being would deal with our reality. Well if it can’t, then I’ll just imagine it to have the power to deal with that problem. Okay, now demonstrate that imagined being is actually part of reality. It may be logically consistent as well, but so is superman. Explain how this is not a subjective fantasy.

" At least there is a possibility that God exists, "
How can you know the possibility of something based on zero data of it? What’s the possibility of superman existing then?

 

[IWantGod]

Do you have any evidence of consciousness existing outside of a functioning brain?

It’s irrelevant because i don’t have any evidence that i cease to exist when my body dies. Lack of evidence either way is not proof of the other.

Scientifically speaking you are going to have to be agnostic on the matter.And others know that they can choose to have hope if they so desire it.

 

[Russell_SA]

“Why would you bring children into a world where they have no objective value, meaning, or purpose, and knowing they are going to have to face the reality of ceasing to exist? You might not have a problem with that, but it is quite callous, selfish, and presumptuous to put that burden on a child. It’s absurd.”

it’s actually what reality has presented. Would you prefer they live with a fantasy that does not match reality? Objective value, meaning, or purpose may not exist. What makes you think it does other than without it is a reality you would not prefer. What you prefer has no bearing on what reality has actually presented.

 

[IWantGod]

it’s actually what reality has presented.

No, metaphysical naturalism is not what reality has presented. And you can just choose not to subject other potentially existing minds to reality.

 

[Russell_SA]

“It’s irrelevant because i don’t have any evidence that i cease to exist when my body dies. Lack of evidence either way is not proof of the other.”

So you are willing to believe things that you can not demonstrate that actually match reality. That is fundamentally not how we learn about reality. Whether its true or not is irrelevant to you. You are willing to make up any model of reality you want regardless of how reality actually is.

 

[IWantGod]

So you are willing to believe things that you can not demonstrate that actually match reality.

When faced with the possibility of nihilism, I am willing to put my hope in the possibility that metaphysical naturalism is not true.

There is nothing unreasonable about that.

 

[Russell_SA]

can you explain what you mean by metaphysical naturalism?

 

[KindredSoul]

Belief is verifiable and demonstrable. Faith is the excuse you use when you can not verify and demonstrate this in reality.

When belief is verified and demonstrated, it wont be belief anymore, it will be established fact. By your own logic, and the antagonistic spirit by which you call faith an excuse, “belief” isn’t any better, since it’s still believing in what YOU have not verified and demonstrated. IF faith is an “excuse” (it’s not) then “belief” as you use it is laziness. You cannot attack faith so sharply on the basis of being empirically (emphasis deliberate) unverifiable/undemonstrable, then defend “belief” in things supposedly empirically verifiable (and claimed by OTHERS to be verified) but STILL not verified by the individual himself.

After all, you “believe” things experts claim to have verified. Things you haven’t verified with your own eyes as true, and likely haven’t even truly tested as possible. Whether you think you COULD personally verify it is irrelevant if you DON’T. Because until you do, you’re essentially (almost certainly) basing tons of your everyday beliefs on previously accepted premises that you haven’t actually verified, based on trusting the word of those who claim they have. Many of your basic assumptions about the world–including what even HAS been verified “possible”–spring from the claims of people who are dead or otherwise inaccessible to you.

Well guess what? Our religious beliefs, too, are based in the words of those who claimed they HAD verified, with their own eyes or whatever else, the claims upon which our faith rests. What we have not verified for ourselves, they claimed to have verified.

Face it, unless you are cripplingly agnostic, you almost certainly cannot say that you have verified the reality or possibility of every little thing you believe to be real or possible. Which means you’re trusting the testimony of others who claim THEY have verified things. That sort of trust IS faith as we Christians use the term. Welcome to the club.

You can try to talk your way out of this commonality, you can (and probably will) come up with “excuses” (as long as we’re using that word) for why it’s fundamentally different when you do it, but at the end of the day, that’s all they are: Excuses.

 

[Russell_SA]

“When belief is verified and demonstrated, it wont be belief anymore, it will be established fact.”
Belief is the claim of the most likely event to occur and will continue to occur every time that experiment is run. Such as believing my pen will fall when I let it go based on the fact that there is no demonstration to the contrary of this. It is a well tested experiment. So I believe/predict this will continue to be the case until the laws of physics are suspended. So far they have not been. So my internal model of reality is actually consistent with what reality has actually presented.

“By your own logic, and the antagonistic spirit by which you call faith an excuse, “belief” isn’t any better, since it’s still believing in what YOU have not verified and demonstrated.”
Everything my model of reality is based on can be recreated by others. It is written down for you to try and break their results to see if they got it wrong or right. We have a pathway to the truth of their claims and a way to demonstrate what they claim about reality. Religious claims and faith claims do not. They are just pronouncements of how they would wish reality to be and not what reality has actually presented. I can take claims about this reality at face value from the experts in those fields because they are not claiming anything about this reality that is beyond what we can verify and test to see if it matches reality or not. We can actually run the experiment and the tests. That is validation, that is justification. Same old point of believing someone has a pet dog since we have experienced dogs in our reality, but the religious claims are the equivalent of claiming to have a pet dragon.
Burn all the physics books and in 200 years time, we will have recreated them. Burn all the religious texts and you will not recreate your religion as it is now.
Demonstrate any supernatural claim is any different from wishing it to be then you might have more substance than the empty sack supernatural appears to be.

“Well guess what? Our religious beliefs, too, are based in the words of those who claimed they HAD verified, with their own eyes or whatever else, the claims upon which our faith rests. What we have not verified for ourselves, they claimed to have verified.”
So we should believe aliens are abducting our cows, Nessie in Loch Ness is real, Fairies exist in British gardens, Borrowers are living under our floor boards, Big Foot, the earth is flat, etc. These have all been verified by eye witness accounts as well and you can actually go and talk to these people now.

 

[KindredSoul]

Burn all the physics books and in 200 years time, we will have recreated them. Burn all the religious texts and you will not recreate your religion as it is now.

You’ve verified these two claims/predictions, I trust?

 

[Russell_SA]

Recreating physics books is the exact same process we use now to peer review someone else’s work. They rerun the experiment that someone took from a question they had about reality.

Recreating religious books is like recreating your english story assignment after your computer has crashed and someone else attempts to recreate it. We can all recreate superheros but their stories will not be the same.

 

[KindredSoul]

Recreating physics books is the exact same process we use now to peer review someone else’s work. They rerun the experiment that someone took from a question they had about reality.

And you’ve done this? For every truth claim you believe? Verified it by running the experiment for yourself, I mean? You’re certain you’re not simply taking for granted the honesty of all those who supposedly “time and again” have? You’re certain you’re not taking for granted falsehoods that, though you could verify them, others are counting on people just like you NOT to bother to verify? Any group of people could say “There’s a dragon in China, and you can see it yourself!” and count on the general public to assume it must be true since it’s supposedly verifiable. In fact con-artists, for example, often pull the “You can prove it for yourself!” ploy, counting on victims to take that as a sign of honesty, and NOT verify it for themselves. You’ve verified, in everything you believe, you’re not falling for such a gambit? Do you do that with everything you ever believe?

Recreating religious books is like recreating your english story assignment after your computer has crashed and someone else attempts to recreate it.

Well I’m certain you haven’t verified, at all, that “recreating” Catholicism is like that. Unless you’ve managed to witness the universal destruction of Catholicism’s texts and of everyone who ever could pass it on from memory, and you’ve seen the rise of a different religion in its place, after a time gap, claiming to be Catholicism, different because no one received anew the same revelation as before. You’ve really verified this? You believe it’s readily testable? Really? As you claim to believe in only what is either verified or verifiably/accessibly testable/repeatable, I’m interested in what experiment you propose to test this hypothesis about Catholicism in particular disappearing forever if every single ounce of current knowledge of its teachings was wiped out. Surely, you won’t try to appeal to some dead religions for your case: You did say “your religion” and unlike people, dogs, etc, religions are not verifiable as “fundamentally the same” so surely you’re not venturing to posit the unverifiable–that our religion is no different from those that HAVE died. So again, how have you verified your claim? And how do you intend to test it for me? How do you propose I can test it?

 

[Russell_SA]

The reference points of recreating science is based on the reality we all have access to.
The reference points of every claim of the supernatural is the human imagination.
Go write a book about algebra based on adding 2 more apples to a group of apples, from the experiment you ran yourself.
Now go write a book about someone else’s imagined reality.
Which one will be more accurate?
Fair minded readers, do I really have to point this out?

 

[KindredSoul]

Go write a book about algebra based on adding 2 more apples to a group of apples.

Yes, but if we should only believe in what we know can be verified by ourselves–and the only way to verify that something definitely CAN be verified by your own self is to verify it–then no one who hasn’t yet done this should believe it. So again, have you done this with everything you believe? You’ve personally verified it?

Now go write a book about someone else’s imagined reality.

So you’ve verified that it’s an imagined reality? You’ve proven it was made up, not merely inaccessible? Or alternatively, you’ve verified that whatever is inaccessible (to the immediate senses) is definitely untrue? After all, unless “imagined reality” was just a contentious jab, I assume you believe it IS imagined. So I await the verification.

Which one will be more accurate?

Your implication here depends, utterly depends, on the latter certainly being imagined. Otherwise what applies to a random imagined story can’t be verified to apply equally to a religion: You’re assuming the religion IS imaginary like the “imagined reality.” If it isn’t, then IF all current knowledge of it was wiped out, God would make a way, and indeed the rebuilding would at some point happen. The only way to verify your presumption (that it definitely IS imagined and that therefore no God exists Who would intervene and enlighten another prophet were all the current knowledge erased) is to test it by destroying all knowledge of that particular religion and having no prophet ever successfully recreate it.

You haven’t done this, nor provided any valid means of it. Yet you believe, with some level of apparent conviction, it is imaginary. You’ve proceeded from merely withholding conclusions to making a positive claim: Not “I don’t know if it’s true, so I have no beliefs on the matter” but “I believe it IS imaginary.” Since on the other hand you claim one should withhold believing anything that is not or cannot be verified, you are in violation of your own standard, unless you have or can verify that, if all knowledge of Catholicism disappeared, no prophet would ever, ever rise to whom God gave the knowledge necessary to resurrect the religion with all its core dogma intact.