Choosing a faith

quote:

---

Likely all of their traits have evolved naturally, however they know how to co-operate but I don't think that they are able to love or have free will.

---

And despite the fact that they do not follow your ideas of evolution at all it still works. That is the point. There IS evolutionary value in cooperation and your denials just caricature evolution.

First, because I'm rational I can't totally rule out something we might call a god (because we have no other words) creating the universe - which is a far more impressive creation life here on earth. The current estimate of solar systems with planets is 10 to the 24 - 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Why did your god make it that big if we are supposed to be the only purpose? Why didn't he just poof us into existence all at once like the bible? Why go to this extent?But I also know that we are accumulating evidence that indicates that the philosophical argument that there can't be something from nothing (hence "god") could be wrong; the universe may indeed spring from nothing.Second, life is quite likely to be an emergent property of the chemistry on our planet. Even if this god thing created its universe of 10 to the 24 star systems with planets, life here is more likely to be a bi-product, not an end product. If we are the intended outcome why the excess universe?Third. We know the mechanism that produced us humans is a natural process. No gods required. We don't know yet how life itself started but one day we might.Fourth. No supernatural entity or intervention has ever been found anywhere.Fifth. Nothing above says anything at all about your personal beliefs. There is no reason whatsoever to believe in any of the personal gods and religions that mankind has invented. I reject your Christian beliefs as totally irrational.So please return to the point I was actually making about non-equivalence.Although I can't rule out a deistic, non-interventionist kind of god that started something from nothing 13.7bn years ago I regard its probability as virtually zero. But more importantly, it's also irrelevant to our lives here. Such a thing is essentially unknowable and has no bearing on our lives so it's of academic interest only.As for theistic beliefs - religion - it's all made up nonsense. Primitive thinking; inherited beliefs from ancient times.So please, don't pretend that we differ only on the "degree of plausibility", I regard the plausibility of a deistic god as all but zero and also irrelevant and your particular god as total make-believe.
​
There is no equivalence.

Edited by Tangle, .

CS Lewis should have stayed with fantasy. I slogged through Mere Christianity. It is painful and logically fallacious. The arguments are just not good. I can see Lewis in all of GDR's attempts at an argument.

As I said a week or two ago, most everyone with insufficient or no evidence for their position eventually throws up obstacles to discussion. You're doing it now. This is not a serious response and ignores all that others have said about the natural origins for our moral sense. I hope you decide to try again.
​ You're postulating an origin for morality, namely gods, that has no evidence. You're further postulating, again without evidence, that morality can only come from gods, and that if gods don't exist then we must be the gods. But you've conceded there's no evidence of God or gods, and you're again ignoring a natural origin for morality. Morality is an instinct that we have, just as animals have instincts, i.e., behaviors that are inherent, built into their make up.
​ I'm trying to ferret out a consistent viewpoint from what you say. Sometimes you say atheists are gods, sometimes you say they're materialists, and I don't myself see a way to synthesize one consistent perspective from this. For instance, this is you in Message 291: There is one conclusion I can draw from what you say, and that's that you believe God exists and that atheists deny him and his rules.
​ If you believe in the God of the Bible then that is not the only rule. Some of the ten commandments are orthogonal to love or even anti-love. The first two want devotees to reject other gods and idols. The seventh is an admonition to not love. Keeping the sabbath has nothing to do with love.Religion isn't just about love. Nothing as complex as religion boils down to something so simple. Brevity and precision will always be at odds.--Percy

Wittgenstein. Paraphrasing, about that which one knows not one must remain silent. There's no evidence, so science is silent on God. Science does not proclaim itself atheistic or agnostic. Regarding God it is silent. Science is also silent on leprechauns and unicorns.By silence I don't mean science can't even say there's no evidence. It can certainly say that much. It can even add that there's no scientific definition, when that's the case. You misunderstand evolution. It has no direction. It is differential reproductive success that drives the course of evolution, which is in turn affected by factors like the environment, competition, and speed of adaptation. There's nothing suggestive of a designer anywhere within evolution. Uh, infectious, okay. I would have said that individuals are influenced by the moral codes of societies they come in contact with, either by living within them or visiting them or learning about them.As far as evolutionary changes to our inherent morality, the pace of evolution for creatures as long-lived as human beings is very slow, so we wouldn't expect any observable changes in inherent morality during historical times, i.e., the last ten thousand years or so.--Percy

Comenius? Did you mean consensus? To the extent the Golden Rule is common to all religions and no religions it is a reflection of our inherent morality. It certainly isn't a reflection of a consensus formed among all the world religions. There is no indication, historical or otherwise, that religions worked together toward forming any consensus on this.But my main point was the lack of evidence. Were there actual evidence of spiritual truths then the world's religions would have built consensuses around these truths. They haven't. Because there's no evidence. Which you keep forgetting by instead saying things like "information from the world," which is just evidence, which you don't have.
​ But this was about your changing religious views. Now it seems like you're saying there's only one timeless truth and that's the Golden Rule. But if there's only one timeless truth and you've already found it, then what are you seeking?--Percy

Percy makes a good point in Message 380Maybe you should start with a definition of god. That way we might at least have an idea of what you mean.

You said that Krauss's claim of plausibility implied that other ideas must also be plausible. Tangle and I both assumed you were implying that it was your own ideas that must also be plausible, but you're saying that we were wrong to assume that.So now let's be very clear about what you claim you were saying. When you said that Krauss's claim of plausibility implied that other ideas must also be plausible, you were not in any way implying that it made your own ideas plausible.But since it's your ideas we're discussing, how is this in any way relevant? It isn't, of course, and so I don't believe you. You were clearly implying it was your own ideas that Krauss's claim rendered plausible.You're just continuing your strategy of trying to sneak in a wording that grants your ideas validity but that we won't object to, and you're doing this by being obfuscative. It won't work. The reason we can't see it is because you have no evidence (you don't have information from the world, either). There must be very few here who would find plausible something that had no evidence.--Percy

Making observations of the world around us is just another way of saying that you're gathering evidence. If philosophical evidence if just making observations of the world around us then philosophical evidence is just plain old ordinary evidence. Which you don't have. And what is the accumulation of evidence that brought about this consensus? Is this a universal truth, or are there exceptions, such as being engaged in armed conflict, or being the executioner at a prison, or being the victim of a violent crime? Is there any statistical data objectively showing that love and kindness bring about better outcomes than other approaches?Realize that I'm not questioning the Golden Rule, at least not now. I'm questioning your claim to have evidence of its efficacy, and that that's the reason a consensus developed around it.I submit that it's widely accepted because it expresses ideals of fairness and equality and appeals to our good nature, and not because of any analytical process based upon evidence. This is way over-simplistic. There are no reliable guidelines for how to balance one's own self-interest against the interests of others.--Percy

What happened to philosophical evidence and "observing the world around"?--Percy

Concerning health care as having Christian roots, Hippocrates lived in the 4th century BC, and he was by no means the only pre-Christian physician.Concerning education as having Christian roots, the Greeks had general education by the 5th century BC. The Roman system was loosely based on the Greek. Slavery was defended by practically every Southern minister and condemned by nearly every northern minister. Apparently Christian conclusions about slavery varied according to where you live. (As an aside, it's worth mentioning that Wilberforce's son Samuel had that famous dustup with Huxley at Oxford about evolution.) Since the beginning of time the sincerely religious have been taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. It isn't just the religious wars where the ruling class would recruit the devout to punish the sinners in some other country, or even just in some other political party. More recently, back in the 1980s Christianity in the US had a golden era of televangelists just raking in the cash, like Jim Bakker (fraud, did jail time) and Jimmy Swaggart (solicitation of prostitution).Can the constant victimization of the devout be laid at religion's door? After thousands of years you'd think every religion would have "How not to be victimized" classes, but that would mean providing tools of skepticism which might cause them to lose members, so this will never happen. So yes, of course religion can be blamed for religious wars. Oh, please. Everyone has the sense that things were better in the good old days but forget that those are the good old days of Jim Crow, the KKK, world wars, the Holocaust and McCarthyism. It's a false sense. Most people know that. You're saying that while religion has done bad things, science has done bad things, too, but that doesn't help you with the fact that science is based on reality while religion, as far as anyone has been able to demonstrate so far, is not. People whose lives are affected by science, whether positively (medical science) or negatively (nuclear bomb), it is by something tangible, something with evidence. But when people's lives are affected by religion, again, whether positively (a church wedding) or negatively (killed by Islamic terrorism), there is no evidence that God, the being behind it all, is actually real. Nothing's black or white, all good or all bad, but that's not the point. The point is that there's no evidence behind your claims, while our claims do have evidence, in many cases a great deal of evidence.--Percy

I don't think that describes the feeling that murder is wrong.--Percy

God is the spackle in the gaps.

Why? In humans, if a feeling, an emotion, is not a conscious value judgement then what is it? If our definition of what constitutes murder, what is and is not punishable, is not a conscious value judgement then what is it?

Instinctual. I think even young children, once they know what death is and before they've had a chance to absorb much from their surrounding culture, understand that making someone dead on purpose is a bad thing.--Percy