Questions for Atheists and Agnostics

[Sair]

How do you define “divinity”? Is it compatible with physicalism?

Sacred. That which is to be cherished and respected. The all that is greater than any one of us.

Why would this be incompatible with physicalism?

 

[tonyrey]

How do you define “divinity”? Is it compatible with physicalism?

Sacred is an adjective which doesn’t explain why “the all” is greater than any one of us nor what “greater” actually signifies…

 

[tonyrey]

Sacred. That which is to be cherished and respected. The all that is greater than any one of us.

Why would this be incompatible with physicalism?

There is a brief analysis of atheism and pantheism online:

columbia.edu/cu/augustine/a/science_origin.html

1. 
   *]“Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms.”
   *]“The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures.”
   *]“Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man’s rationality as somehow sharing in God’s own rationality and in man’s condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man’s reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm.”
   *]“At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard against the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix.”
   
   “Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world.”
   
   Pantheism is therefore an obstacle to the development of science…

 

[Oreoracle]

Incapacity for holding beliefs, I suspect, does not qualify one to be an atheist - otherwise all of us could rightfully claim to have been born atheists!

Regardless, though, there would have been some point in everyone’s childhood in which their brains were developed enough to have beliefs (albeit simplistic ones) and they were not yet introduced to the notion of a deity’s existence. Like it or not, everyone was an atheist at one time or another.

I have certainly seen some discussion on other forums regarding the distinction between lack of belief in gods and belief in the nonexistence of gods. There are those who claim that atheism is simply the former, and for a while, I tended to agree; but I now rather think that this misses the point.

IMO atheism, to be worth its salt as a philosophical position and to stand up in the marketplace of ideas, ought to positively embrace the belief that the universe is godless.

I can’t speak for all atheists, but I don’t assert deities’ nonexistence because I simply don’t have a justification for it. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Now one might be compelled to claim gods don’t exist because the whole idea sounds absurd, but I’m not so sure it’s absurd. I would confront the proposition that, say, a horse is standing outside my house at this moment differently than I would approach the proposition that the Christian god exists. Both seem a bit farfetched to me, but I doubt the former claim because I know that horses are bred in other areas, and none would reside around here. However, I don’t know whether it’s plausible that a supernatural being could exist, because I’ve never observed anything outside the universe. I don’t know whether it’s more plausible for a god to have certain characteristics rather than others because I don’t really know how gods behave. I’ve never seen one, after all.

In other words, I can use observations to induce that a horse probably isn’t on my porch at the moment, but induction becomes impossible when discussing the supernatural or anything sufficiently obscure that it doesn’t relate to any of our everyday observations. I can’t induce, deduce, or otherwise demonstrate that a god doesn’t exist, so I don’t make the claim. I still don’t believe in any, though. That is to say, I see no reason to believe in one or believe there isn’t one.

 

[StrawberryJam]

As amusing as this thread has become, it never had a basis for being here to begin with. Serious discussion is not wanted on this topic on any sub forum here except for the back fence. Makes you think about water fountians that were labled for whites only if you are old enough to have had a parent tell you about that.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

I can’t speak for all atheists, but I don’t assert deities’ nonexistence because I simply don’t have a justification for it. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Likewise. I can’t assert that there are no deities any more than I can assert there is no other life outside our solar system or how much money is in some one else’s bank account. I’ve usually found the word “atheist” to be an unusable label though. Among other generalizations when some people hear the thoughts it seems to invoke are not thoughts that are descriptive of me or what I think (misotheistic or antitheistic better matches the thoughts that some of these people have). When answering those that ask I’ve found communication goes better when I drop the labels all together and just have a discussion on the state of our existence in this world and family history.

 

[fred_conty]

For what it’s worth.

Webster’s dictionary(1990):

Agnostic is one who believes it impossible to know if God exists.
Atheism is the belief that there is no God.
Pantheism is the doctrine that all forces, manifestations, etc. of the universe are God.
A 2nd definition of Pantheism is the worship of all gods.

 

[lemondiesel]

I honestly can’t even grasp the concept that we just so happen to be here; that there just so happens to be a watch in the first place.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/_...rchive/b/b5/20100108063328!Exploding-head.gif

 

[samiam1611]

Pantheism is the belief in ultimate unity, that nature and the divine are one and the same - that if we may contemplate divinity at all, then it is of the world, not separate from it. It is not a belief in an individual, personal deity that exists on some ‘higher’ plane, far removed from us. In that regard, it is much closer to atheism than to classical theism.

For me, pantheism came as the awareness of a profound sense of peace and belonging arising from the contemplation of myself as part of nature - but one part of a whole that has been long before me and will remain long after me. Science continues to demonstrate that this is so, in ways that no writer of ancient scripture imagined.

I was reading up on naturalistic pantheism and I liked what I read. Pandeism is interesting too.

Do you believe in an afterlife?

 

[ThinkingSapien]

For what it’s worth.

Webster’s dictionary(1990):

Agnostic is one who believes it impossible to know if God exists.
Atheism is the belief that there is no God.
Pantheism is the doctrine that all forces, manifestations, etc. of the universe are God.
A 2nd definition of Pantheism is the worship of all gods.

The subtle difference in definitions seems to be the source of a lot of misunderstanding. Looking in the World English Disctionary the definition I find for atheism is “1. a person who does not believe in God or gods.” Most people that I know that use this label also use a definition compatible with this. Some other dictionaries use the word “deny” (and a belligerant interpretation of “deny” is popular in this context). That is descriptive of the disposition of some but not all people that don’t hold a belief in any deities.

Some use the “agnostic” label along side it to emphasize that they don’t feel they can never know with certainty. For some reason I see agnostic, atheistic and misotheistic conflated together. The context in which I see theistic it seems it is assumed to be synonymous with monotheistic (specifically Christian) and excludes my polytheistic friends.

I’ve also seen some one label himself as an Agnostic Christian.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

I honestly can’t even grasp the concept that we just so happen to be here; that there just so happens to be a watch in the first place.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/_...rchive/b/b5/20100108063328!Exploding-head.gif

im eating! for crying out loud!

 

[MindOverMatter2]

Regardless, though, there would have been some point in everyone’s childhood in which their brains were developed enough to have beliefs (albeit simplistic ones) and they were not yet introduced to the notion of a deity’s existence. Like it or not, everyone was an atheist at one time or another.

Atheism is not ignorance of the concept of God. It is a response largely based on epistemological limitations. Atheism is a conscious response to a belief in the existence of divine entities. In its intellectual form, Its an opinion about the nature of reality and what it is comprised of according to what we can know. A child who has no concept of God can hardly say, with any true meaning, that they are atheists in regards to his existence. Children are ignorant, but they are not atheists. Atheism has metaphysical consequences. For the true intellectual atheist/philosopher, not only is it a conscious disbelief, but it is also an act of embracing the consequences of that which would be true assuming the absence of God.

 

[greylorn]

Why is there so little discussion between atheists and agnostics here?

We have here atheists , anti-theists, and agnostics members.

I guess, there are clashes between them.

And yet they barely discuss their differences here.

How come?

They’ve tried, only to be piled on by dogmatists. If they thought that centuries-old medieval dogma was a useful tool for discovering truth, they’d not be atheists or agnostics.

 

[Sair]

“Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world.”

Pantheism is therefore an obstacle to the development of science…

Now we seem to have come full circle, in which the progress of science supports a pantheistic view of the universe. The pursuit of science is a means to better understanding what we are within the context of the universe, and it reveals how intimately we are all connected. By contrast, Christianity encourages us to consider ourselves separate from, and metaphysically superior to, the rest of nature. It interferes with science to the extent that it holds humans over and above all else - even when it comes to research that will ultimately benefit us and the world of which we are part.

The Incarnation and Redemption mean nothing to me other than as legends, stories that people tell. Why would it matter to me that a cyclic view of the world, of deterioration and renewal, of death and life, undermines ancient mythology?

 

[Sair]

I was reading up on naturalistic pantheism and I liked what I read. Pandeism is interesting too.

Do you believe in an afterlife?

Naturalistic pantheism is my bent, most certainly. My suspicion is that the ancient pantheism referred to as a hindrance to science was in part the inclination to see beings like ourselves as the inhabitants of natural phenomena - ultimately leading to the ideas of various ‘gods of’ these things - sun gods, water gods, air gods etc, etc, with the requisite names and personalities, who might be angered by the interference of ‘mere mortals’.

I don’t believe in an afterlife in the sense of some essence of ‘me’ going on after my body has died. The entity that I recognise and that others identify as me, I believe, will cease to exist. That which makes up this entity, the energy and matter of which my body now consists, will go on, perhaps eternally, and in time will go to form other entities. What those other entities may be I don’t know, but I feel a certain awe when considering that we are all made from the stuff of stars, and that we are privileged indeed to exist as conscious entities capable of considering such things.

 

[tonyrey]

• “Pantheism is invariably present when the eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails. The uniqueness of the Incarnation and Redemption dashed to pieces any possibility of the eternal and cyclic view; for if the world were cyclic, the once-and-for-all coming of Christ would be undermined. The uniqueness of Christ secures a linear view of history and makes Christianity more than just one among many historical factors influencing the world.”*

You mean that you have come full circle! You are trapped in a closed system which precludes insight into itself…

The pursuit of science is a means to better understanding what we are within the context of the universe, and it reveals how intimately we are all connected.

Science reveals nothing about persons…

By contrast, Christianity encourages us to consider ourselves separate from, and metaphysically superior to, the rest of nature.

Christianity encourages us to believe that we live in a **rational **universe which - unlike science - does not imply that we exist for no reason or purpose.

It interferes with science to the extent that it holds humans over and above all else - even when it comes to research that will ultimately benefit us and the world of which we are part.

Stanley Jaki has explained how modern science would not exist but for Christianity which justifies belief in the value of **all **life.

The Incarnation and Redemption mean nothing to me other than as legends, stories that people tell.

You prefer the legend of impersonal, mystical matter which explains nothing!

Why would it matter to me that a cyclic view of the world, of deterioration and renewal, of death and life, undermines ancient mythology?

It undermines the modern worship of science as the **sole **explanation of rational existence because science doesn’t recognise the reality of persons, values, freedom or purpose…

 

[Sair]

You mean that you have come full circle! You are trapped in a closed system which precludes insight into itself…

In what sense?

Science reveals nothing about persons…

Science began as ‘natural philosophy’, a discipline based upon observation of the world and the attempt to explain it according to our perceptions. If persons are not included in nature, then science can tell us nothing about them. It seems you would have us believe ‘persons’ are mystical entities independent of nature; science is continuing to reveal the invalidity of such a position.

Christianity encourages us to believe that we live in a **rational **universe which - unlike science - does not imply that we exist for no reason or purpose.

Yet it discourages the independent pursuit of knowledge and purpose, free of dogma.

Stanley Jaki has explained how modern science would not exist but for Christianity which justifies belief in the value of **all **life.

Christianity does not justify belief in the value of all life (I seem to recall reading about Jesus’ mass slaughter of pigs in order to remove demons from an epileptic man, and also him cursing a tree for not fruiting out of season), but only exalts human life.

You prefer the legend of impersonal, mystical matter which explains nothing!

You’d like it to explain nothing, but you only hold this position because you are reluctant to give up the exalted position granted you by Christian dogma. You see it as a diminution to recognise your fundamental kinship with all other life, even with all matter. I do not.

It undermines the modern worship of science as the **sole **explanation of rational existence because science doesn’t recognise the reality of persons, values, freedom or purpose…

Who said anything about worshipping science? Science is but the method for pursuing understanding. It is understanding that gives rise to reverence for that which is better understood.

 

[Perplexity]

hmm, I guess I’m not particularly interested in agnosticism. It doesn’t seem to have any arguments you can sink your teeth into. Although, it seems like the more radical of the options.

Theism just says God’s existence is more than probable (> .5), Atheism says God’s existence is less than probable (<.5), while Agnostics insist it is neither probable nor improbable (.5).

Agnostics can either say the arguments for and against God’s existence are equally bad, or equally good. That seems radical to me. The way our priors and posteriors work, with our background knowledge etc. it seems we must be more inclined towards one or the other. That’s why the arguments from evil seem prevalent amongst “noob” atheists, they’re ad nauseeum arguments.

So, idk, theism seems far more interesting to me than agnosticism. It consistently produces arguments for its position and critiques of its detractors. Can’t say the same of agnosticism.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Theism just says God’s existence is more than probable (> .5),

I’d like to suggest that be changed to “Theism just says a god’s existence is more than probable” given that theism can be divided into monotheist and polytheism. Or the word “theism” could be changed to “monotheism” so that its known that polytheists are not being considered in that statement.

 

[tonyrey]

You mean that you have come full circle! You are trapped in a closed system which precludes insight into itself…

“The eternal and cyclic view of the cosmos prevails…”

Science reveals nothing about persons…

Science began as ‘natural philosophy’, a discipline based upon observation of the world and the attempt to explain it according to our perceptions. If persons are not included in nature, then science can tell us nothing about them. It seems you would have us believe ‘persons’ are mystical entities independent of nature; science is continuing to reveal the invalidity of such a position.

The Gospel according to scientists reduces scientists to the phenomena they perceive! Doesn’t anything strike you as odd or inadequate about that hypothesis? How exactly does science explain itself?

Christianity encourages us to believe that we live in a rational universe which - unlike science - does not imply that we exist for no reason or purpose.
Yet it discourages the independent pursuit of knowledge and purpose, free of dogma.

You obviously haven’t bothered to read anything by Stanley Jaki. Without Christianity modern science wouldn’t even exist.

Stanley Jaki has explained how modern science would not exist but for Christianity which justifies belief in the value of all life.

Christianity does not justify belief in the value of all life (I seem to recall reading about Jesus’ mass slaughter of pigs in order to remove demons from an epileptic man, and also him cursing a tree for not fruiting out of season), but only exalts human life.

Snippets from the Bible can be used to prove anything! Vanity of vanity and all is vanity… but then there are the lilies and King Solomon…

You prefer the legend of impersonal, mystical matter which explains nothing!

You’d like it to explain nothing, but you only hold this position because you are reluctant to give up the exalted position granted you by Christian dogma.

You are reluctant to give up the exalted position granted you by your rejection of Christian dogma.** You **alone decide how you should live, what you can do with your body and are answerable to no one but yourself. In your scientific scheme of things man - or woman - is the measure of **all **things.

It undermines the modern worship of science as the sole explanation of rational existence because science doesn’t recognise the reality of persons, values, freedom or purpose…

Who said anything about worshipping science?

For you it is the supreme source of knowledge, enlightenment and independence.

Science is but the method for pursuing understanding. It is understanding that gives rise to reverence for that which is better understood.

Understanding that we are animals which exist by chance for no reason or purpose gives rise to reverence? Sparks in the dark - if one is consistent - give rise to indifference. Do you revere meaningless accidents?