Why bother with God? (General)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, May 19, 2011, 22:47 (4935 days ago) @ dhw

Again dhw cuts incisively to the point:-> This dialogue seems to me so fundamental to many of our discussions that I'm opening a new thread for it. Matt's final question is: why even bother? If there's no God, or an indifferent God, I see no point either, apart from satisfying our intellectual curiosity about our own origins and the nature of the universe we live in. Whether there has to be a point is another matter which I'll return to later. Matt is also quite right, though, about the emotional satisfaction that most religious people seem to derive from reading various attributes into their God's mind. From my position on the fence, I can see no evidence for any of them ... beneficence, omniscience, omnipotence, as listed by David ... since the world as I see it could just as easily reflect the opposite. And so if there's no God or an indifferent God, that's fine with me. I live my life with no reference to or dependence on religious beliefs anyway, and I'm very happy without them.
> -There's very little to comment on in your post... well-spoken as usual. As I've continued to ponder, many of my original points back from when I first came on board are coming back into light. This may seem OT at first... but it will come back. -I recently watched a pair of lectures that Dennett gave, which completely revised my view of his work and his position, and injected new life into my overall skepticism. I once said that a last refuge for God resided in the consciousness... I find this less and less true. -The lectures I watched were in dealing with the topic of Free Will. Something that we've spent some time on in the past few months. He completely eliminated determinism as a viable option; while on the physical level cells behave as determined automatons, it turns out that this is inconsequential regarding the question of free will. (I can post the lectures for those interested...)-Suddenly... about 40% of my usual arguments to support free will simply vanish... this is a mathematician's dream, to be able to simplify while gaining more insight. So this returns to a common criticism I've had involving God talks:-Why invoke what we stated we can't fathom? Nietzsche said (and I've quoted before) "Man should not reach beyond his creating will!" It seems to me that all attempts at invoking creators are attempts to dodge the act of actually trying to solve hard problems. Most of David's points have been "Life is too complex to arrive by chance..." Which can be rephrased as "We can't untangle the mess, so we might as well forget about it, it's above us!" Invoking a deity throws dirt on problems and calls them solved when clearly--they're not. For a few examples: All approaches to Intelligent Design to date have not resulted in anything that can be empirically tested--nor have such tests been proposed via thought experiments. What utility is an explanation that you can't subject to correlation and causation? I posit none. When you read Dembski and Behe... you have reinterpretations of evidence, but nothing you can take to a lab. What use is a reinterpretation that doesn't allow you to advance?

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"