Deism in the Dock

I have recently found myself flirting with aspects of deism. This has come as quite a shock.Before I implode into a black hole of a pre-midlife existential angst under the sheer weight of deitilogical confusion I would like to ask a few questions.If any of the following offends you, - that is OK. It is my aim to offend everyone equally and indiscriminately.To Atheists
Is there really nothing out there. Are you really really sure? “There is no evidence” I hear you cry. You smug self-righteous bastards. Did everything really come from nothing? I mean really absolutely nothing. No space, no time, no other dimensions. No forces, no matter, no energy. No equation obeying abstract concepts. No laws. No rules. No . . consciousness? NOTHING. Really? And doesn’t quantum theory and it’s ”role of the conscious observer’ implications pose some fairly awkward questions? Come out from your faade of rationalism and admit it. The ultimate evidence is against you.To Deists
C’mon, what the fuck actually is deism? Surely it is just a debating tactic masquerading as a meaningful philosophy. After all how can one argue with someone who believes everything and nothing all at the same time?
What is the rational basis for deism? That which we do not know? That which we “cannot” know? It’s all based on our inability and lack of understanding regarding the most fundamental questions. Is deism at root just a belief in a glorified gOD of the ultimate gaps?To ”Rational’ Theists and Creationists (because you are both the same really)
Put you bibles/korans/torahs/etc/etc down for a second and think. Pretend your book of choice does not exist for just a moment if you can.
Look around you. Aren’t all those difficult theological questions about pain, death, suffering and evil much better answered by an uncaring and indifferent creator? The best evidence you have for God is the appearance of design and frankly there is nothing in that which suggests anything cares about you. Take away your book and all you have left are arguments for deism!!!!To Agnostics
Oh who cares what you guys think?In the unlikely event that this (slightly drunken) rant gets promoted I would like to hear from anyone who can imagine that they are wrong.Anyone else can stuff off elsewhere!Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

i don't think you know enough "rational theists". or maybe i'm an irrational theist.

Okay.- Well, if you're talking about gods and stuff, yeah, that's the way it seems to me.- About as sure as I am about anything, I guess.- Well, okay. Does anyone need any more reason?- As we've explained many times in the cosmology threads, this question doesn't even make sense.And at any rate, postulating a deity doesn't really resolve anything, either. It simply changes which thing came from nothing.- Maybe for the New Age woo-woo junkies. The rest of us realize there isn't a "role" for conscious observers in quantum mechanics.- Only if you think that a counts as "ultimate evidence".

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I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! -- Ned Flanders

I know the feeling. Believe it or not, I was supremely more akin to the cynics and skeptics than are with people of my current theological affiliations.The prospect is both terrifying and intriguing at the same time.To Atheists I'm secure in the knowledge that none of us know much of anything for 100% absolute certainty. There is always that element of faith in all of our lives. We just place out trust in different things, I suppose.To Deists I'm glad you made this post because I have been pining over making one myself but knew it would be long, so I dreaded it.My question to deists is this: If you believe in God.... Why? I ask why because I can't seem to understand a logical or faithful one to do so. Deists will say that God cannot be seen, heard, or felt by special revelation. So cross that avenue of knowing God out.They also allege that you can't see God working in nature, because He sort of lets the chips fall where they may (how they've logical deduced this is another good question). So cancel that avenue as well.And lastly, they say that there is no scriptural or revelatory basis for believing in God.How then have they surmised that a God exists then? Or as you alluded to, does it offer the best of both world's-- both of atheism and theism?To ”Rational’ Theists and Creationists A great question.Most people will say that all religion is basically the same, with minor variations as the only real difference between them. I contend that it is the exact opposite-- that they are all basically different, with a few threads of similarity running through them.Afterall, religions claim exclusivity, and indeed have to in order to remain coherent.As far as pain and suffering, the argument from evil is one of the greatest challenges facing apologists-- indeed, an enigma of sorts. I find that how reprehensible evil really is, its still the only way for 'good' to make a lick of sense. There is no light without darkness. There is no hot without cold. There is no good without bad. These contrasting elements are the only thing that distinguishes.To Agnostics I was an agnostic for many years, and even bear testimony to that fact immortalized underneath my integument.I think agnostics are really just glorified atheists who have chosen the safest path, relying on the illusion of open-mindedness. Or at worst, they are too lazy and indifferent to challenge their mind.For myself, I only opted for agnosticism because atheism seemed so definitive. And I couldn't very well deny a negative without coming to the inevitable conclusion that it is a lessen in futility.Great post.Hope my contribution makes it worth while.

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"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt

Nothing out there? Nothing could be farther from the truth. There's an incomprehensibly vast universe out there; it goes on and on, potentially without end, filled with galaxies and planets.And, indeed, a whole lot of nothing, too, but it's not all nothing. Who the hell knows? It's the same problem for the theists, though - stuff comes from nothing under their model, too. Indeed, much more so - because they have a God that comes from nothing, too. For theism, yeah. Surely you're familiar with quantum experiments where unobserved particles in eigenstates collapse as soon as observations are made?Well, look. If you can have an eigenstate at all, doesn't that mean that, at some point, you can actually have a particle that's not being observed?And doesn't that mean, therefore, that there's actually not a God who's out there observing everything at once, all the time? Since we've just proven that there are some things (many, in fact) that are not being observed by anybody at all? Including God?If there was an omnipotent, ever-watchful God, all particles would be constantly observed, and so it would be physically impossible to have particles in uncollapsed eigenstates. Yet, we do observe such particles - therefore that God does not exist. Well, before you decide that the issue is settled, do you think you could be bothered to present some of it?Because all you've done is said "I find atheism unbelievable." Well, no shit. That's not evidence that it's wrong, though. People believe in religion because they want to believe in it, it makes them feel better. You seem to have confused that with actual evidence.

Wait, what? No, you can always disprove a negative; that's the easiest thing in the world. One example of what is contended to be nonexistent is all you need to disprove a negative.In other words - any time you prove a positive, you're disproving a negative.

NJ, Atheism doesn't necessarily mean a belief that god doesn't exist. The correct derivation of the word is a-theism, or non-theism. I accept deities may exist & yet I'm an atheist. I don't accept the existence of god because there's no valid evidence, that doesn't rule it out.Agnosticism is the belief that no evidence can ever be available either way.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

WAHAHAHAHA. Beautiful.I'm so chuffed you wrote that and got away with it. No - I'm not being mean, because many atheists here aren't smug in the least, I could name atleast fifteen. But a few here deserve that, but they'd never admitt it, BECAUSE of it!But seriously Straggler, it's good to see you have an outburst. So many of us pretend we know it all and secretly hide these thoughts. We feel it is our duty to pretend we are omniscient, or our position isn't perfect. I could do with cutting out my logical-know-it-all horseshit.In a way you are very right about all of these positions, as a Theist I find myself becoming a theodicist, because of evil existing. Yes, the fact itself seems to diminish any justification - all I can say is that I choose to be Theist no matter how painful. It's all because of the human experience - animals don't have these problems. I think it's healthy that you're open-minded.I'd like to hear Crashfrog's excuse for the higgs boson.

Ignoring the insults...

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Is there really nothing out there. Are you really really sure?

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If you mean am I sure that there's no God, I'm as sure as I can be when dealing with something that is ill-defined and amorphous. [quote] Did everything really come from nothing? I mean really absolutely [b]nothing[\b]. No space, no time, no other dimensions. No forces, no matter, no energy. No equation obeying abstract concepts. No laws. No rules. No . . consciousness? NOTHING. Really? [/quote]I don't think so. And there's no reason why I as an atheist should think so. There's just no good reason to suppose that the basic level of reality - that which just exists - is anything we would consider a god.

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And doesn’t quantum theory and it’s ”role of the conscious observer’ implications pose some fairly awkward questions?

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Quantum theory doesn't require any special role for consciousness. That's just a rather dubious interpretation (and one that I don't believe). But if it did it'd be more of a problem for the monotheists - an omniscient and omnipresent being observes EVERYTHING so there's no room for the quantum weirdness that we actually observe. And maybe it would explain why we are here -perhaps, as soon as the wavefunction includes a possible state where conscious observers exist it is forced to collapse into that state. So even if it were true it could be quite convenient for atheists.I have a few comments on Deism, too. It's a philosophically appealing position because it allows for cosmological arguments for God, but avoids all the numerous problems of theism. Even the fine-tuning argument works better for deism than theism. You don't have to think about why a being capable of creating the universe would be so interested in us. Even dispensing with revelation is more of an advantage than a disadvantage from a philosophical perspective because it avoids dealing with the awkward question of distinguishing true from false.

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Afterall, religions claim exclusivity, and indeed have to in order to remain coherent.

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Anyone with any knowledge of comparative religion knows that this is not true.Buddhism is not really about Gods and can and does co-exist with other religions (Hinduism and Shinto to name two obvious examples).Polytheistic religions can and do combine (syncretism). To a large extent Hinduism is a complex of religions that have grown together.Religions need to claim some special knowledge, but they don't need to completely or even partially exclude all other religions.

I'd really like to not spend too much time on this, but disproving a negative is trying to prove that something doesn't exist. How can anyone do that?Example: Person 1 posits that purple flying elephants exist in the fifth dimension. Person 2 says, "No they don't." Person 1 says, "prove it." Person 2 says, "No, you prove it."Then there will be this stalemate situation where neither can empirically prove the existance or non-existance of the purple, flying elephants. IOW, how can you prove that something doesn't exist, if it doesn't exist? Edited by nemesis_juggernaut, : typos

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"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt

Since you address us atheists, I assume that by "is there nothing out there" you mean "is there no god out there". If so, then my answer is that I don't know, but that it seems unlikely, not only in the face of our claimed - and decried - absence of evidence, but also in the face of positive evidence in favour of alternatives. What's wrong with noting that there is no evidence? I am an atheist in the same way as I am an apinkunicornist. Yes, I say there is no evidence, but I say so quite composedly. If that's smug then so be it. Calculating back from current insights, everything seems to come from a singularity some twelve to fourteen billion years ago. We can only make an educated guess where the singularity itself came from, if such a notion is at all comprehensible. But I wouldn't go so far as to make up gods to fill the gaps in our knowledge, for that would be to make uneducated guesses. As far as I can see, consciousness is something that evolved, so I don't think it had anything to do with the start of the universe, when evolution was still far in the future. Of course they do. But since when does reality have to conform to human understanding? If our understanding of things leads to some very odd questions, then what do you suppose should change? Reality?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

It's these gaffes, NJ - these failures to comprehend what has been written in plain English and simple logic - that make it so hard for you to participate on this forum.Proving a negative is proving that something doesn't exist. Disproving a negative is proving that something does exist, and that's the easiest thing in the world - you just find an example of the thing that exists.If someone makes the negative contention that "there's no such thing as the Washington Monument", then it's sufficient to go to Washington DC and show it to them to disprove their negative contention.Get it? "Prove" and "disprove" aren't synonyms, they're antonyms; to prove one thing is to disprove it's opposite. I think maybe that's what you're getting hung up on. "Disprove a negative" doesn't mean "really prove a negative", like in the way most natural languages use a double negative to imply stronger negation; it means "prove a positive" because in logic, a double negative cancels itself out.

...wha?

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The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed, but plays a key role in explaining the origins of the mass of other elementary particles, in particular the difference between the massless photon and the relatively heavy W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson has an enormous effect on the world around us.

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As of 2007, no experiment has directly detected the existence of the Higgs boson, but there is indirect evidence for it.

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Oh, shit! You really got me there, Mike!What the hell are you talking about?