Negative atheism? (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 13, 2014, 12:12 (3633 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Saturday, December 13, 2014, 12:30

dhw: 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.
DAVID: Formless energy, a plasma of potential particles does not appear to be a source of organized matter following laws of development such as this universe demonstrates. We agree on energy as the probably first cause, but after that our divergence is enormous.-We had a long discussion on this subject under “Light and Matter”, in which initially I asked for clarification. I have delved back into the files. On May 23 at 05.46 you wrote: ”Basically everything is energy. Matter is a form of energy. Energy is all there really is.” I don't know if you are now contradicting your earlier statement or, with expressions like “potential particles” and “organized matter”,simply trying to fudge the issue. May I take it that you accept the irrationality of BOTH hypotheses, and that the hypothesis of consciousness evolving from ever changing matter is not something from nothing?-dhw: Our brains are not that different. [...] I suspect there may be some people with medical training who have come up with a different solution from yours to this particular mystery.
DAVID: Our brains are the same in one attribute: stubbornness. About 40%of doctors are believers.-Our stubbornness is what keeps us going! If my maths is correct, the above statistic suggests that 60% of doctors are agnostics or atheists, which in turn suggests that your scientific approach via your medical studies cannot be cited as a reason for a non-scientist like myself to trust your judgement on matters outside medicine!-dhw: 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.
DAVID: I still mull. I think an IM may well exist, but its degrees of freedom are limited. it is the limits that I do not know. You want few limits. I want many.-Thank you for continuing to mull. I do not “want few limits”. I have an open mind, but have proposed autonomy as a logical explanation for the higgledy-piggledy course of evolution (whether started by God or not). You, however, do want many limits, because you regard an autonomous mechanism as a threat to your anthropocentric interpretation of your God's approach to evolution.
 
dhw: ...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.
DAVID: Understood. Know-nothingism is well recognized.-But frequently only in relation to those whose beliefs differ from one's own.