How to decide is there a deity (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 08, 2009, 09:43 (5605 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George joined the group because he got the impression that it was a "creationist site", and his intention was to counter creationist claims. - Let me say straight away that I'm delighted you joined, and even more delighted that you stayed. There were several scathing reviews on atheist sites when this one opened, all giving the same impression. The reason, I suppose, was that the Brief Guide began with an attack on Dawkins, and the fundamentalists seem unable to grasp that an attack on one set of beliefs does not automatically mean that you espouse the opposite set. It was therefore a genuine boost when you joined in, pointing me in the direction of a number of very interesting sites, and putting the atheist case generally without the emotional ranting that mars fundamentalism of all shades. You have gone on doing so, often with good humour, and this has always made for stimulating discussion, which is the whole purpose of the forum. - Nevertheless, you continue to misunderstand the nature of my scepticism as well as (let me goad you) the nature of your own faith. I do not have "an aversion to chance", and that is a blanket dismissal which helps to cover up what I see as a degree of irrationality on your part. Life is massively influenced by chance, and that helps to make it all the more exciting. Almost every turning point in my own life has come about through chance, and indeed the very combination of genes that make me what I am is a matter of luck. But that is a long way from believing in the ability of chance to create a working, self-replicating, infinitely adaptable machine. (David argues the case far more competently than I can.) You don't even need the complications of the Boeing 747 or the monkey at the typewriter. If you found a wine glass in the desert, would you/could you believe it had spontaneously created itself out of wind, sand and sun? That is the area of my scepticism about chance, but it is a non-belief and nothing more. Agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve in chance, and we neither believe nor disbelieve in a designer. And we do not tell believers that they are wrong. You dismiss the arguments against chance as "pseudoscience", but you know as well as I do that every experiment to produce spontaneous generation (a neat paradox) has failed ... and those experiments have been carried out by brilliantly intelligent, scientific minds. I have no problem when you say: "I find chance perfectly adequate." I only have a problem if you deny that this = faith, or if you argue that your faith is based on science. - The origin of life is one area on which I remain open-minded. Here is a second. You say: "There is such a thing as having a mind that is too open, to the influence of charlatans and anecdotalists and dreamers and propagandists and the simply deluded." You are right. But if you are saying there is no such thing as OBEs, NDEs, ESP, psychic phenomena ... in other words, if you dismiss every single experience, throughout thousands of years of human history, as coming under one of those five categories ... then I would point out to you that there is also such a thing as having a mind that is too closed. In fact, I would say that it takes a great deal of faith to close one's mind that tightly.