Well, why can’t we have rational folks who lack an immortal soul infused by god? Isn’t that the religious belief? At some point god stuck an immortal soul in a guy and called him Adam? Then everyone is happy. Creationists and biblical literalists can p(name removed by moderator)oint Adam’s birthday where they need it, and the rest of us can investigate the history of humanity.
Because that’s what the purpose of the soul is - to give rationality. You can’t explain rationality and consciousness through physical means alone. You can make a computer which imitates a living being as perfectly as possible, but you can’t give it consciousness.
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In case you were wondering how atheists can correctly respond to this- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
Sure it is. It is impossible to explain consciousness through physical means, therefore there must be a spiritual component to it.
Behaviorism is laughed at by the modern psychological community, by the way. It’s a rather outdated curiosity that pyschology gave up on, like Freud.
Can you demonstrate it is impossible to explain consciousness through physical means?
Because it is not a physical phenomenon, and the effect cannot be greater than the cause. What-it-feels-like-to-be-conscious (what analytic philosophy calls the qualia of consciousness) is simply nothing remotely similar to quantifiable, physical things. It is not possible to describe consciousness - you must be conscious in order to know what it is. And no physical description can be you.
How do you know it is not a physical phenomenon? To assert that, one would have to know what consciousness is. What is it, and how did you determine what it is?
Because it can’t be observed or quantified.
Thank you for your reply, it was a great help. I just don´t understand why atheist who said the Abrahamic religion was invented after paganism didn’t reply to this. go figure.
My mind is simpler and I don’t tend to see these enormously complicated questions in the light of science.
To date that is true, but there is no reason to presume that into the future.
Saying that the universe was compressed to a single point is kind of an analogy to help us understand it. The Big Bang was an explosion from everywhere to everywhere. There was nothing “outside” the universe. We can’t really imagine what this must have been like. Since the universe is finite, I think that when you move in one direction for long enough you would have ended up back where you started - like going around the circumference of a globe. (This is the geometry of the universe today - spacetime doesn’t have a Euclidean geometry.) But there is no extra dimension where either the “outside” or the “center” of the universe are to be found. We simply can’t visualize non-Euclidean geometry, even though we know that (mathematically) the universe follows this pattern. We’re bound in our imaginations by that restriction (as Kant taught us in his philosophy; he was wrong in saying that we would be unable to discover if the universe were any other way, however).My mind is simpler and I don’t tend to see these enormously complicated questions in the light of science.
Yet when science takes the time to explain things so that even I can understand them,- I observe what is there to be seen.
If the Universe was (allegedly) at one time compressed to a single point, the size of a “bb” or smaller… in my mind (pardon the simplistic view) there is something “outside” of that point!
It doesn’t matter if you call it dark matter, anti-matter, nothingness, void or timeless/spaceless emptiness!!
Outside of that point there exists…something. Or is it just that we can’t imagin anything beyond the point of origin?
Sorry everyone, I told you it was simplistic.
We all know what consciousness is. We all experience it. And what I mean by “consciousness” - the qualia of the state of being conscious - is something that makes no sense to try to “measure” or “quantify”. If you know what I am talking about when I say “consciousness”, then you wouldn’t even try to observe it. It is too intimate to you to observe - you might almost say that it IS you in a sense. When consciousness permanently ceases, you are dead.
We all know what we experience. However, our opinion about our own experience is no reason to claim it is impossible to explain consciousness through physical means. I’d suggest we would need much more information in order to make that claim.
Cats act conscious, so I’d be extremely surprised if I found out that it weren’t.
Earlier you told us, " It is impossible to explain consciousness through physical means, therefore there must be a spiritual component to it."
Its soul.
Spiritual in this case does not mean rational, however; but all living things have souls. Animals souls are not “spiritual” in the same way that ours are, but they aren’t something physical that you can measure - they’re just “bound up” with matter, so to speak, and don’t exist on their own as a separate substance.