Afterlife: Pinker's skeptical thought (Endings)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 31, 2020, 15:12 (1635 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: It makes no difference what theory you adhere to in relation to the beginning of this universe – you are still confronted with the same choice: an eternal conscious mind without a source, or eternal energy and matter without a source. Are the 100-200 thousand million galaxies of the present universe and was the potentially infinite number of galaxies in possible past universes all fine tuned by your God, or did our galaxy just happen to strike lucky as a one-off in eternity? I don’t know. Do you?

DAVID: The whole scenario ends with human consciousness. From natural causes is preposterous. Luck is just luck. I know there must be an eternal mind. You might let that sink in a little deeper. The mind does not have to named at all to be logical.

dhw: But according to you the whole scenario begins with consciousness, in the form of an eternal mind! It is just as preposterous to believe that an eternally conscious mind can simply have been there forever as to believe that a stroke of luck could have assembled matter into a form that would develop from single cell to multicellular and ultimately human consciousness, or to believe that all materials have a degree of consciousness (one form of panpsychism). Your logic is blinkered, and your “first cause” is no more logical and no more credible than the other two.

DAVID: So you believe there is no cause at all. Nothing was there and nothing forced nothing to finally create humans. Strange conclusion. If energy initially existed, as stated before, there had to some sort of force to cause progression. Can't have one without the other.

dhw: You seem never to have grasped the fact that I am an agnostic. I have shown you three possible first causes, and I find all of them equally difficult to believe. And so I have no belief. I remain open-minded. Maybe there is a God. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe it has all come about through chance. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe there is some form of consciousness in all matter. Maybe there isn’t. And this means I am wrong, because one or other of these first causes is correct (unless there’s another I can’t think of). But I’m also right, because two of them are incorrect. That, in a nutshell, is the agnostic’s situation.

Interesting. I clearly recognize your agnosticism. I also recognized it is fixed in stone. I just raised specific points about the progression of events from whatever had to be first to now. All I got was a non-answer. Why did you start the website? How to be a better agnostic? Everything that comes into being has to have a cause. This universe had a beginning. It has a cause.