James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Friday, July 10, 2009, 12:35 (5403 days ago) @ John Clinch

John has once more explained his monist materialist pantheist theist atheist form of agnosticism. - The above may sound ironic, but in fact I find myself very much in sympathy with most of your views. We are all nagged by the need for an explanation, and many of us lean in different directions at the same time. When you say that "there is nothing in our experience of Nature which should lead us to any particular conclusion", I agree with you completely, though probably beyond the bounds of what you would like me to agree to. I'll come back to this. And like yourself, I do not believe in Yahweh, Ra, Baal etc. or any of the gods worshipped by the many civilizations of the past and present. - However, it seems to me that unlike myself you have come to certain conclusions, and these become apparent through your challenging my use of "faith" when I talk of "atheist faith in unknown natural laws". Let's get one definition out of the way first: I don't accept your distinction between strong and weak atheism. Every definition of atheism that I can find entails disbelief, not lack of belief, in God. (Agnostics lack belief in God.) It doesn't matter if we disagree on this, but that is the sense in which I use the word in the above expression. - Even you say that such atheism "is a statement concerning metaphysics and is a faith statement". However, the context in which I make my claim is that of the origin of life, and despite the objections of Matt and BBella, I consider this to come down to a battle between chance and design. I prefer 'designer' to 'God', but I'm sure you will accept that what you call the strong atheist rejects the concept of a designer. This means that he believes chance (or unknown laws) to be the originator of life. - You are right that there is a difference between belief and faith. In religious terms, faith is a strong belief that a particular conscious power is responsible for our existence, although there is no logical or scientific proof of this. It's the latter circumstance which in my view turns belief into faith. The atheist has a strong belief that chance (or unknown natural laws) can produce life from non-life and establish a mechanism to produce hitherto unknown organs and faculties. There is no logical or scientific proof of this. I'm not even sure that this belief is falsifiable (there is no limit on the time of experimentation), but in any case that is irrelevant: we are dealing with the atheist's belief under present conditions of knowledge. So let me repeat your statement: "There is nothing in our experience of Nature which should lead us to any particular conclusion... All we have is the fact that we exist and the vastness of a pitiless Universe." But atheists have come to a conclusion which has no logical or scientific basis. For that reason I call it faith and put it on a par with religious faith. - "All phenomena of nature are natural and therefore the province of science." I don't think anyone could possibly disagree that phenomena of nature are natural, but we don't know the boundaries of nature. Again I agree with you completely that "it would be a fool who declares that there can be no unknown "laws", or processes or phenomena, of nature." But an atheist has already concluded that those unknown laws will confirm his view of the world. I think you have too. For instance you have concluded that all the phenomena we have subsumed under the heading of "paranormal" are as "ridiculous" as the concept of a transcendent being. But if there are unknown laws, processes, phenomena of nature, why have you concluded that they will not confirm the existence of, say, forms of communication or even of being, beyond what we now consider normal? How do you know the boundaries of nature? - In our discussions so far, you have frequently fallen back on a formula which you repeat in your final sentence: "I think dhw is looking for God in the wrong place." I am not looking for God. Like you, I am nagged by the need for explanations, and in my own quest for some kind of truth I too find no grounds for any particular conclusion. This keeps me open-minded (within reason) towards all kinds of human experiences and towards a variety of explanations. But because you have drawn conclusions, perhaps you are unable to see that it is your own approach that is prejudiced and not mine.