Why bother with God? (General)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, June 26, 2011, 16:52 (4709 days ago) @ David Turell


> > This dialogue seems to me so fundamental to many of our discussions that I'm opening a new thread for it. Matt's final question is: why even bother? If there's no God, or an indifferent God, I see no point either, apart from satisfying our intellectual curiosity about our own origins and the nature of the universe we live in.if there's no God or an indifferent God, that's fine with me. I live my life with no reference to or dependence on religious beliefs anyway, and I'm very happy without them.
> > 
> > The temptation, then, is to shrug one's shoulders and drop the subject altogether. But it won't go away, and not just because of the human compulsion to have answers to unsolved mysteries.
> 
> Now a College in California is offering a degree in Atheism! Most Bachelor degrees are an A.B. or a B.S. I'm sure the religious will favor BS. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman runs this new department, and has an agnostic/atheist website. I doubt this professor will offer odds for God during his course, as my previous entry showed (about 5 days ago). But will his students end up more secular or more religious? 
> 
> 
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704904604576333454244079630.html?mod=WSJ_... can't think of any religious people I know who would get a degree in atheism, but as for the "odds of God" as you say, most anyone who has had solid mathematical training sees the holes in the "odds" arguments left and right. I would go so far to say that ID proponents who have so far argued from mathematics, don't deserve their math degrees. That last author you posted in here didn't even make a mathematical argument. He made one that looked mathematical. Smoke and mirrors to further the cultural and nonscientific agenda of the Discovery Institute, to dupe nontechnical people into supporting a morally bankrupt cause. (Yeah, i figured out that he's funded by the DI.) What's more unsettling to me, is that I do not possess a PhD in mathematics, yet I have been able to cleave pretty quickly, any of the math-based arguments presented to me.-I'm still reading your book, but arguing from odds when you lack complete knowledge of a system isn't mathematical, its rhetorical. (Neil DeGrasse Tyson discusses similar odds frequently, but remains a stolid skeptic) Or better: speculative. And anyone grounded in propositional reasoning will never, ever accept a rhetorical claim in subjects like this. -Your earlier ask "why not, a fully formed cell?" My response to that is simply this: "Because that's called spontaneous generation." A creationist argument applies equally to you here: If life can come only from life, and we must assume that God is inorganic--you arrive at a similar precipice to the atheist fully believing in chance. If you can't demonstrate it, it isn't justifiable.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"