Why bother with God? (General)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, May 20, 2011, 23:11 (4934 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,
> "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.
> -But for me the fallacy is based on deciding that we HAVE to judge. That's the way this battle has gone on since time immemorial... I'm still agnostic, mind you, only I'm getting a little cranky, lol. -It IS dodging. Because instead of rolling up your sleeves (not meaning you, personally, dhw) and directly attacking and wrestling with the problem of AI in your example, most of mankind simply latches on to the next, most convenient solution. Also in Dennett you'll hear him directly refer to evolution AS design... -> 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? -Abiogenesis. Cosmology. Just to name two. If the cause is Intelligent Design, it becomes socially and intellectually safe to hide behind its robes and not continue to attack these problems. The lack of laboratory output from Behe is one example. If he's right, he should be able to produce some results...-> 
> 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.
> -"Baffled" is probably the wrong word. Dismissive is the one you seek. The model posited by the USAF researcher--which ended up studying OBE, was that the brain is responsible for creating all of what we see. It *models* the world for us. This makes sense going back to what I discussed previously about our bodies & brains doing the work of rejecting most of the input we can receive in the world. The brain takes all the input it is receiving, and creates a picture for us; the subjects in the Air Force experiments reported walking behind--themselves. This lead the researcher to posit that the brain was processing the world incorrectly. (Either too quickly or too slowly--either of which could be falsified.) -> 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? -Not a hypothesis.
Neither is that one.
Jury is obviously still working on that one. For at least you and I.

--
\"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.\"