Atheism (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Friday, August 22, 2008, 14:03 (5936 days ago) @ George Jelliss

I asked George if there was anything in Dawkins' explanation of atheism that he disagreed with. - George: Yes there is. Try inverting what Dawkins wrote. 
Sorry, George, but that still doesn't tell me which aspects don't apply to your kind of atheism. - I don't want to prolong this discussion if it causes you irritation, but although the rest of your posting is clear enough, I still can't see what you object to in Dawkins' list. Perhaps for the sake of clarification you could humour me and tell me which of these statements you disagree with: - An atheist believes: 
1) There is nothing beyond the natural, physical world.
2) There is no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe.
3) There is no soul that outlasts the body.
4) There are no miracles ... except in the sense of natural phenomena we don't understand.
5) If something appears to lie beyond the natural world, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. - Meanwhile, though, I'm very interested in the implications of your final paragraph, which incidentally seems to tie in with 1) and 5), but don't take that as a criticism! - You wrote: What does it mean to talk about something "beyond the natural, physical world"? If it is something we can sense in some way, perhaps using special hitherto undeveloped senses, then surely it must be natural or physical. - BBella has talked of sounds and vibrations within the universe, and of a NDE or OBE, and David has also done much research into the latter field. We know that animals sense things which are beyond our human perception. String theory suggests that there may be anything up to eleven dimensions. The implication of all this may be that experiences we cannot comprehend now ... e.g. ESP, OBEs etc. ... are nonetheless real, but only accessible to senses that have in some way been heightened. This does not, of course, in any way mean that every experience of the so-called supernatural is real, but it does mean that theoretically there is no limit to how far we might extend our concept of the natural world. Once again we need to be open-minded about these phenomena, although I agree with you when you say "methods of reason and experiment are the only reliable ways we know of for explaining anything."