Lack of Questioning Leads to Atheism?

[Vera_Ljuba]

That is not at all what classical theism proposes, and it is the philosophical foundation they laid about an intelligible, rational universe operating on natural laws that laid the groundwork for the scientific method. This caricature of what the theist means in regards to God’s continual sustaining of the universe is just so off the mark as to be insulting.

Actually it does, but does not like to say it out loud.

It is the official teaching of the Catholic Church that the Christian God is NOT a deistic God, who started by creating the world, set up the laws of nature, and then sat back to enjoy the scenery. Maybe once in a blue moon he would interfere and perform a miracle, like stopping the Sun on the firmament, or sending a deluge to kill almost everyone.

Contrary to that, God is needed to sustain the world every second. If God would not “pay attention” to the world, it would simply flicker out of existence. So what is the “need” for studying nature? To predict what God will do next? The next miracle would show us the futility of this.

And for the “caricature” objection, remember that a well drawn caricature is much more revealing than a simple portrait. It is designed to cut to the jugular and expose the subject to what it is, even if he or she does not like what the “mirror” shows.

 

[Wesrock]

Actually it does, but does not like to say it out loud.

It is the official teaching of the Catholic Church that the Christian God is NOT a deistic God, who started by creating the world, set up the laws of nature, and then sat back to enjoy the scenery. Maybe once in a blue moon he would interfere and perform a miracle, like stopping the Sun on the firmament, or sending a deluge to kill almost everyone.

Contrary to that, God is needed to sustain the world every second. If God would not “pay attention” to the world, it would simply flicker out of existence. So what is the “need” for studying nature? To predict what God will do next? The next miracle would show us the futility of this.

And for the “caricature” objection, remember that a well drawn caricature is much more revealing than a simple portrait. It is designed to cut to the jugular and expose the subject to what it is, even if he or she does not like what the “mirror” shows.

I am very familiar with what Scholastic philosophy and the Church says about God’s action sustaining reality at all points in time. And, as I previously stated, your presented understanding of it is completely off the mark, absurd, and downright infantile, and is the equivalent to objecting to human evolution with the remark “then why do monkey’s still exist?” It demonstrates a complete ignorance of what you’re dismissing out-of-hand, case-in-point: what this very topic is about.

 

[Vera_Ljuba]

I am very familiar with what Scholastic philosophy and the Church says about God’s action sustaining reality at all points in time.

It just so happens that the church has NO official philosophy, so your objection in unfounded.

And, as I previously stated, your presented understanding of it is completely off the mark, absurd, and downright infantile, and is the equivalent to objecting to human evolution with the remark “then why do monkey’s still exist?” It demonstrates a complete ignorance of what you’re dismissing out-of-hand, case-in-point: what this very topic is about.

On the other hand, since you choose to use insulting and derogatory words I conclude that you have no rational arguments against what I said. Happens all the time. No argument? Let’s resort to insults.

 

[PRmerger]

It just so happens that the church has NO official philosophy, so your objection in unfounded.

There was no assertion that the Church had an official philosophy.

 

[PRmerger]

Well, the contingency of everything known (that it could “not have been”), the universal application of “from nothing, nothing comes” (without which science becomes irrelevant),

Indeed.

And it is, as Christopher HItchens, says, the “trump card of the theologian.”

True, dat.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

However, it led me to wonder if some atheists (or possibly a lot more than we think) actually refuse to believe in God because they stop questioning and put “blind faith” in things like Science or Nature. For instance, I ask an atheist how to explain, oh let’s say Miracles, and I myself question their existence, but immediately the atheist says “Well, there has to be some reason that this happens. It cannot be from a god or divine, all-powerful being.” And so he refuses to actually question properly and investigate, so to say.

I guess I just wanted to know your thought’s. Can atheism come from a lack of questioning?

It comes from a lack of questioning that is rooted in rebelliousness, the refusal to believe that anything is more worth believing in than your own divine ego as opposed to the great I AM.

Tear away the mask of egotism and one cannot help but see everywhere the Face of God.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

It just so happens that the church has NO official philosophy, so your objection in unfounded.

Which is precisely the problem I mentioned earlier:

I agree that lumping all religions together isn’t entirely fair, but I think they all have a feature which allows us to reason about them collectively. That feature is: lack of a well defined epistemic method for testing their claims.

 

[Vera_Ljuba]

Which is precisely the problem I mentioned earlier:

And you were 100% correct. Without an objective epistemological method there is no way to separate the “correct” answers from the “incorrect” ones. Christians say: “angels and demons exist”. Skeptics ask: “can you present an objective epistemological method to test these claims?”. Apologists have no answer.

 

[RCinMT]

Contrary to that, God is needed to sustain the world every second. If God would not “pay attention” to the world, it would simply flicker out of existence. So what is the “need” for studying nature? To predict what God will do next? The next miracle would show us the futility of this.
.

I would say that the creation of this universe and the sustaining of life, low entropy, etc. is incomprehensibley miraculous physical proof of God. Penrose calculated the odds at 1 in 10^10^123.

Is that proof? No, not concrete, physical proof. But it’s a pretty good jumping off point without regard to the assertions of the Judeo-Christian God.

 

[Wesrock]

I am very familiar with what Scholastic philosophy and the Church says about God’s action sustaining reality at all points in time. And, as I previously stated, your presented understanding of it is completely off the mark, absurd, and downright infantile, and is the equivalent to objecting to human evolution with the remark “then why do monkey’s still exist?” It demonstrates a complete ignorance of what you’re dismissing out-of-hand, case-in-point: what this very topic is about.

To expand on this point, the philosophical demonstrations of classical theists are aimed at showing that it is necessary for there to be a God in order for reality to be rational and intelligible, in order for any sciences to be conducted. The flip side of these demonstrations is that a reality without God is necessarily unintelligible. You would have a reality in which there is no sufficient reason for a thing to be instead of not being, a reality in which an effect requires no cause, a reality in which the sun could be replaced by a bouquet of giant daises, or which could stop existing at any moment for no reason, a reality in which an oak acorn could grow into a clown, and another acorn into a tiger. In other words, the demonstrations were not only to demonstrate the existence of God, but also the irrationality of atheism.

Again, one might not agree with those demonstrations, but to characterize it as making science pointless is just completely off the mark of what these philosophers worked to demonstrate.

The example of angels and demons is conflating natural theology with divine revelation. While natural theology has offered ontological explanations on what angels are IF they exist, it doesn’t try to demonstrate that they do exist (unlike with God, to which the demonstrations aim to show God’s necessity in a world in which any epistemology is possible). The existence of angels is just a claim of divine revelation. You shouldn’t confuse the two, and treat the question of angels and demons as being in the same field of study as God.

 

[Wesrock]

It just so happens that the church has NO official philosophy, so your objection in unfounded.

I quite clearly stated scholastic philosophy and church theology on God as an eternal cause as separate fields.

On the other hand, since you choose to use insulting and derogatory words I conclude that you have no rational arguments against what I said. Happens all the time. No argument? Let’s resort to insults.

Targeted at the baseless mischaracterizations you had written and the strawman you were pummeling because you either don’t actually care or are ignorant of the actual positions you were mocking.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

To expand on this point, the philosophical demonstrations of classical theists are aimed at showing that it is necessary for there to be a God in order for reality to be rational and intelligible, in order for any sciences to be conducted. The flip side of these demonstrations is that a reality without God is necessarily unintelligible. You would have a reality in which there is no sufficient reason for a thing to be instead of not being, a reality in which an effect requires no cause, a reality in which the sun could be replaced by a bouquet of giant daises, or which could stop existing at any moment for no reason, a reality in which an oak acorn could grow into a clown, and another acorn into a tiger. In other words, the demonstrations were not only to demonstrate the existence of God, but also the irrationality of atheism.

One big issue with this characterization is: who decides what reason is sufficient? For example, lets suppose that a state where nothing whatsoever exists is a-priori logically impossible. If that is the case, then a-priori logic tells us that something must exist. Now, what is stopping us from invoking that as an explanation for why the universe exists?

I can say:

1. “This universe exists because something must exist.”

You will no doubt say: “Well because that is an insufficient reason! It doesn’t explain why the universe has the features that it does!”

And I will say: “Yes it does. If the universe had different features, it wouldn’t be this universe, and 1 only explains why this universe exists, not why any or every universe exists.”

And you will say: “But that is still an insufficient reason! You could invoke a similar explanation for any possible universe, there is nothing special about our universe that makes it uniquely fit into that explanation.”

And I will say “So what? You don’t get to arbitrarily decide the explanation is insufficient. The fact that other existing things could invoke a similar explanation doesn’t mean the explanation fails to explain our universe. That is equivalent to demanding an explanation for why other universes do not exist, and you have not proved that it is actually the case that other universes do not exist. Indeed, I would level a ‘tu quoque’ accusation at you and say that the ‘God did it’ explanation is similarly promiscuous.”

 

[Wesrock]

My only goal here was to respond to the assertion that God’s continual sustaining of the universe means the pursuit of science is futile, as if the universe is somehow being alleged to be the subject of whims instead of natural “laws”. It is an insulting, inaccurate caricature, and demonstrates a lack of knowledge (willful or not) of what is even being claimed by such philosophers.

I would like to do a topic on the PSR at some point. It seems like all my posts have to be crammed into brief moments of freedom from other things.

 

[Vera_Ljuba]

My only goal here was to respond to the assertion that God’s continual sustaining of the universe means the pursuit of science is futile, as if the universe is somehow being alleged to be the subject of whims instead of natural “laws”.

The analysis is quite short and simple. There are three possible scenarios:

1. There is no God (or gods), the universe simply exists, the laws of nature are what they are, and we try to discover them. No “sustaining cause is needed or stipulated”. Science attempts to discover these laws, and makes very good headways into this endeavor. There is no reason to assume any supernatural interference.
2. God is “somewhat” of a deistic God, who created the world, designed and implemented the laws of nature. From that moment onwards there is no need to interfere with the world, since it runs as a well designed and well “oiled” machine. Once in a while God interferes in the form of some miracle, for his own inscrutable purposes. But otherwise the laws of nature “rule”, and we have a grand old time to discover them. There is no need for moment-to-moment “sustenance” from God.
3. God designed the world and implemented it. But he cannot leave it to its own devices, it needs to be sustained every second… because otherwise the universe would collapse into chaos, or nonexistence. There are no self-sustaining “laws”. If there were, there would be no need to sustain the world. So, yes, what we call “science” is just a futile endeavor to predict God’s next whim, invalidated by the next miracle.

It is an insulting, inaccurate caricature, and demonstrates a lack of knowledge (willful or not) of what is even being claimed by such philosophers.

If you find simple logic to be “insulting”, you certainly have a serious problem.

I would like to do a topic on the PSR at some point. It seems like all my posts have to be crammed into brief moments of freedom from other things.

The “principle of sufficient reason” is not “absolute”. You always need a starting point which is NOT subject to it, otherwise you run into an infinite descent.

 

[inocente]

I would say that the creation of this universe and the sustaining of life, low entropy, etc. is incomprehensibley miraculous physical proof of God. Penrose calculated the odds at 1 in 10^10^123.

Penrose actually thinks the odds of this universe existing is a sure-fire safe bet. The number you gave is his back of the envelope technical calculation about phase spaces. He uses it in his eternal cyclic universe theory, which dispenses entirely with any need for God (Penrose is a staunch humanist). But any scientist will tell you his theory is not even wrong.

 

[Gorgias]

But what I have discovered is that no claim referencing the supernatural has at any time, by anybody come anywhere close to being shown to be anywhere near an approximation of being true.

Now you might claim that I either haven’t looked hard enough or long enough or maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places.

No. I’m just asking what the applicable standard for ‘evidence’ is. The game isn’t in the results… it’s in the way the game is defined. If the definition of the game rule out even the possibility of success, then the rules are flawed.

So… what are the rules? What’s the appropriate standard of ‘proof’?

 

[Gorgias]

And you were 100% correct. Without an objective epistemological method there is no way to separate the “correct” answers from the “incorrect” ones. Christians say: “angels and demons exist”. Skeptics ask: “can you present an objective epistemological method to test these claims?”. Apologists have no answer.

Not true. You just reject the answer, or require that non-physical beings be measured physically. That’s not a reasonable answer.

 

[Gorgias]

Science is an objective epistemic method; it is a means to separate true claims from false ones.

I agree that lumping all religions together isn’t entirely fair, but I think they all have a feature which allows us to reason about them collectively. That feature is: lack of a well defined epistemic method for testing their claims.

I think you’re mischaracterizing the problem, albeit unintentionally, perhaps.

It’s not that a method doesn’t exist; it’s that, outside the hard sciences, one cannot rely on a “test and measure and conclude” approach. The scientific method works brilliantly in an empirical context; but it fails miserably outside of that context. In fact, this method has worked so mind-bogglingly well in its own context, that moderns tend to raise it up as a sort of deity in itself: all things are measured against it. If something doesn’t conform to it, then that thing, not the method itself, is construed to be deficient.

Do we have methods for dating texts? Yes. Do we have methods for analyzing texts? Yes. Do we have methods for ascertaining reliability of authors? Yes.

The problem here, though, isn’t a lack of objectivity or epistemic method; it’s that you’re playing apples and oranges, and asking one method to be applied to a question outside of its sandbox. Newman wrote about the various methods through which we ‘prove’ things. He pointed out that some admit of theorem, others of deductive reasoning, and still others of experimentation. However, some require what he called the ‘illative sense.’ (I’ll let you do the research. ) In short, some things require an individual to assent to a conclusion, given evidence presented. Some will assent easily, some after great deliberation, and some (by definition) never at all. This does not speak to the evidence, per se, so much as the individual’s interaction with it and his willingness to accept it. This, my friend, is a ‘method’… but it admits that different individuals will approach it in different ways – and some will refuse to approach it at all! Nevertheless, it is the kind of ‘method’ for which you seek.

 

[RCinMT]

Penrose actually thinks the odds of this universe existing is a sure-fire safe bet. The number you gave is his back of the envelope technical calculation about phase spaces.

Which explains the low entropy conditions of this universe which is the only way in which life can be sustained based on our known laws of physics.

He uses it in his eternal cyclic universe theory, which dispenses entirely with any need for God (Penrose is a staunch humanist).

To the best of my understanding–and it’s VERY limited–there are several issues with cyclic universe theories. One of which is that by, I believe, another Penrose calculation, the odds of membranes contracting, bouncing, expanding and forming this universe is 1:10^10^60…

But any scientist will tell you his theory is not even wrong.

Are you implying that every scientist agrees that Penrose’s theory is correct or are you saying that any given scientist will not say this his or her own theory is wrong>

 

[Vera_Ljuba]

Not true. You just reject the answer, or require that non-physical beings be measured physically. That’s not a reasonable answer.

You err in two respects:

1. I never said anything about physically measuring angels and demons - but we can measure what they allegedly do. You are the ones, who say that these beings physically interact with the physical universe - so there is a physical action involved. And that is exactly what science is about. So the scientific method is wonderfully adequate to test the supernatural / transcendent claims. The trouble is that result is always negative.

Demons allegedly infiltrate humans and there are exorcists who claim that they are able to expel them. The process is exactly the same as the one that science uses. The exorcist uses some physical method to decide if a demon is present. (what method?) Then he uses some other physical methods to expel that demon. (how does it work?) And finally, he uses some more physical methods to ascertain if the exorcism process was successful. (where did it go?) That is the exact replica of the empirical, scientifc method.

The same applies to the experiments about the efficacy of intercessory prayers. The petitioner asks for some concrete results, and waits for it to happen. He always adds “Insh’Allah” (God willing). If something positive happens, he asserts that the prayer “worked”. If nothing happens, he says: “Mash’Allah”, it was not God’s will, and shrugs it off. And that is bad science. It is also called “hedging the bets”.

1. No empiricist would demand empirical methods for the proof in deductive systems. Of course these systems are based upon axioms. The theological claims are not based upon axioms - unless of course God’s existence is accepted as an axiom.

I would not reject any answer which I could copy and use and receive the same results. Of course I reject the “this is what the church teaches” type of answers.

BTW, every time you ask for something in the form of a supplicatory or intercessory prayer, you use God as a vending machine.