Why bother with God? (General)

by dhw, Friday, May 20, 2011, 15:45 (4934 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt has referred us to two lectures by Dennett, which have clearly revitalized his own scepticism.-It may take me a while to find the time to view these lectures, but in the meantime you have as usual come up with some stimulating (provocative?) statements:-"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!"-The belief that life is too complex to arrive by chance is based fairly and squarely on human experience: we do not know of any machine capable of even a fraction of our own faculties that has not been consciously designed. The conclusion that the life machine has been designed is therefore no more an act of dodging than the conclusion that chance must have done it. Your rephrasing is either totally inapplicable, or equally applicable to theists and atheists. In fact, I would say it's more suited to agnostics than the other two categories.-You go on: "Invoking a deity throws dirt on problems and calls them solved when clearly they're not."-What problems are you referring to here? I agree to the extent that invoking a deity creates a new set of problems (e.g. how did it come to exist, what is its nature?) ... and from that angle, there's no question that the atheist faith in chance is far simpler. However, it is still faith, which I for one cannot share. You are right that Dembski and Co reinterpret evidence, but so do Dawkins and Co. Atheists may take their reinterpretations to the lab, but so far they have come up with zilch, because no-one has yet succeeded in proving that chance can assemble the machinery of life and evolution. Our scientists can't even assemble it by conscious experimentation. If God is not the solution, nor is chance. That's why some of us remain agnostic.-You are heading towards rejecting consciousness as a last refuge for God: "I think it stands to reason that we've never witnessed a disembodied consciousness. A simple argument, but reasonable."-You have chosen the wrong pronoun. "We" needs to be replaced by "I". There are hundreds of thousands of people who swear that they have witnessed a disembodied consciousness ... in the form of paranormal experiences. No doubt some are fraudulent, some delusional, some explicable in material terms...but there are countless such experiences that remain unexplained. Your argument is only reasonable if you make the assumption that consciousness is completely and utterly dependent on the brain cells. However, even our greatest scientists remain baffled by this phenomenon, and so your assumption is as faith-based as that which attributes life to chance or to a creator.-You say: "A reinterpretation that can't be tested has no hope of ever being verified or falsified. Therefore it's ... as you once put it ... mental masturbation."-Do you believe we can test/verify/falsify the hypotheses that nothing existed before the big bang, there are/were universes beyond our own, chance assembled the mechanisms of life and evolution? I am not defending the God hypothesis. I am merely pointing out that atheism is just as blinkered as theism. I would also point out that the alternative to these unverifiable, unfalsifiable theories is to cry out: "We can't untangle the mess, so we might as well forget about it, it's above us!"