Negative atheism? (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 12, 2014, 17:55 (3634 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Chance itself is a cause. In any case, if you accept cause and effect, you can hardly insist that our consciousness must have a cause whereas your God's has none.
DAVID: My God is a universal consciousness. And in theology/philosophy he is considered an uncaused cause. He is the one eternal item that brings all the rest, unless you want to go back to something from nothing, which makes no sense at all. Something started cause and effect. -I am painfully aware of this theological/philosophical juggling. We have agreed that the first cause may be energy, but that doesn't mean consciousness. It can be mindless energy endlessly transmuting itself into matter. If one can believe in consciousness always being there without a cause, one can believe in consciousness having evolved WITH a cause: the eternally changing state of matter. This is not something from nothing. The first scenario is certainly no more rational than the second.-dhw: Open-mindedness - a term you scrupulously avoid using - is in my view a positive and not a negative attribute. Living with open-mindedness is therefore a positive and not a negative situation, leading to a positive approach, even if the results remain neutral.
DAVID: That is fine for you. I don't need that approach anymore. In the 1980's, while on river rafting trips I started reading books on particle physics and then current cosmology. I was an agnostic with a very open mind. It took me about three years of delving into those current sciences and I was a believer. [...] I can make up my mind, and did. I found enough evidence.-That doesn't make open-mindedness a negative attribute. I began as a believer, became an atheist, read Darwin (himself an agnostic), and decided that neither theism nor atheism could as yet offer convincing answers to the questions thrown up by the complexities of life. I also found pots calling kettles black. Our philosophical biographies provide no justification for our beliefs or non-beliefs!-dhw: I take “supernatural” to mean phenomena for which we have no explanation.
DAVID: So do I.
dhw: Supposing consciousness were to be a form of energy that manipulates our brain cells instead of emerging out of them? We would have to change our concept of what is “natural”, and the ramifications could cover many phenomena which at present people would call “supernatural”.
DAVID: [edited for brevity] Looking at consciousness is a good choice for discussion. We don't know how it works, we don't know if it 'emerges' from brain cells, or brain cells act as a receiver for consciousness which arrives like radio waves from the quantum layer of each human person (the soul in religion). [...] At that level of our knowledge the boundary is very smudged. [...] Your brain and my brain are built differently. Perhaps it is my medical training which taught me to reach solutions to mysteries.-You wrote that the first cause had to be supernatural. I responded that we don't know what constitutes natural, and gave the example of consciousness. You are now repeating my example and my argument! I took it as far as psychic phenomena, whereas you take it further to include your God. You may be right. I remain open-minded. Our brains are not that different. I also come up with solutions to mysteries, and in this context I offer more than one - ah, the richly positive fecundity of agnosticism! I suspect there may be some people with medical training who have come up with a different solution from yours to this particular mystery.
 
dhw: ...as always, you assume that this sentience is enough to justify your claim that cells are automatons. But cells use their sentience, just as we do. They take decisions.
DAVID: Of course they do. That is what I have shown. But they do not have 'thinking ability' in any sense as we do. This is molecules responding to molecules, a truly amazing arrangement.-From conceding that we do not know the extent of the inventive mechanism's inventiveness (i.e. the autonomous “thinking” of the brain in the genome), you have now returned to your dogmatic insistence that cells were preprogrammed 3.7 billion years ago and have no form of autonomous intelligence. -dhw: Why make a choice (a) if you don't have to, and (b) if the alternatives seem equally unlikely?
DAVID: It all depends on 'unlikely' to whom?-Of course. These matters are totally subjective.-dhw: Why do you feel this need to make a judgement? You believe, atheists disbelieve, and agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve. Can't we leave it at that?

DAVID: I think we can leave it at that. I do feel I have done enough reasoning to make a judgment.-I was referring to your judgement of agnosticism as an “empty position” or “negative approach”. But we agnostics are used to all the hot air from the pots and kettles, and we go on dispensing tolerance and lovingkindness to those who know as little as we do but know it so much more decisively.