Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 14:26 (5504 days ago) @ Frank Paris

First of all, many thanks for your patient and detailed response to my post. I appreciate the lengths you have gone to, and hope you will not take offence if I continue to probe. -We need to clear up a couple of things about my own approach and your attitude to it. I have explained that I don't believe that life and the codes for evolution could have come about by accident, and I don't believe in a designer (I prefer this to "God", which has too many associated attributes). You find my views incoherent. This can only be because you haven't understood the nature of agnosticism. Not believing is not the same as disbelieving. An agnostic simply can't believe one argument or the other. If I were able to come down on one side, I would have a belief and would no longer be an agnostic.-You have no trouble whatsoever believing "that life and the codes for evolution could have come about by accident." My scepticism (= non-belief) is, you say, "frankly, nonsense", and you have faith that science will explain how it all happened. One day our conscious, intelligent scientists may indeed work out how it happened, but the longer it takes, and the more complex the findings (the complexities grow greater not smaller with the advance of scientific research), and the more intelligence required to explain it, the less likely it seems to me that the process could have been accidental. You have no doubts, but I do, and you have neither the scientific nor the religious authority to call my scepticism nonsense, any more than I would have if I applied such a term to your faith in a loving God (and I would never do so).-However, the latter may possibly be the reason for your dismissive response to this issue. I have to tread carefully here, as I really don't want to cause offence and I'm aware of the constant danger that I may have misunderstood you. One of the greatest problems for conventional monotheists is to reconcile their concept of an omnipotent, all-good and benevolent God with the world's suffering and the existence of evil. By relieving God of omnipotence and the creation of life, at a stroke you can also relieve him of responsibility for evil and suffering, and can keep intact the image of a loving God. It's clear from your post that your faith in such a God is personal and inviolable, and you may be right that personal experience is the only "proof" that could persuade anybody. But this suggests that your theology follows on from your faith, and not the other way round. One might argue that if you don't need God to explain how life came into being, you only need him for your personal comfort, which of course is best served by a loving image. (Another slash by Occam?) I accept without question that your own belief itself is based on experience (I would love to know more about this), and not on wishful thinking. However, in your theological rationalization of this belief, I can't help wondering what underlies your apparent reluctance to accept the possibility that God might have been responsible for creating life.-I am further confused by another point in your post. You say: "The role of the divine is to provide the foundations of existence with the potential to evolve into conscious creatures that can know (and love!) God." Bearing in mind your insistence that the world is "exclusively physical", this seems to me to coincide precisely with the idea that God set up the initial mechanism of life and evolution, with its potential to produce human beings ... the very principle which you seem willing to dismiss. -With regard to mystical experiences, however, I have great sympathy with your arguments, though again I'm surprised that your world is only physical. Apart from my scepticism concerning the theory of abiogenesis, one reason why I'm unable to embrace atheism is the fact that I cannot account for consciousness, ideas, imagination, apparently "paranormal" acquisition of knowledge etc. If I've understood you correctly, these derive from the infinite consciousness you call God. I don't understand how this infinite consciousness (or indeed my finite consciousness) can be produced by an exclusively physical world. Does God have brain cells?-Finally (phew!), during my mystic journey to a universe beyond this universe, not only did mice (muridae cricetidae carnivorae) eat lions, but an alter Tony Blair admitted to having told lies, an alter George Bush jr. passed an intelligence test, and income tax forms were made of chocolate. Extensive research by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and the ghosts of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, has failed to bring forth a single shred of scientific evidence to refute my claim.