Why bother with God? (General)

by dhw, Saturday, May 21, 2011, 12:30 (4934 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: "But for me the fallacy is based on deciding that we HAVE to judge."-As an agnostic, of course I prefer NOT to judge, but I'm not sure that people like David and George feel under a compulsion to do so. David has told us that he changed from being a Jew to being an agnostic to being a panentheist as a result of his research. I don't know about George's background, but I respect his views enough to assume that they are also based on his own studies. You yourself are constantly passing judgement, e.g. on the paranormal, and on David's design argument ... which you regard as "dodging", although for some reason you do not acknowledge that attributing life to chance is no more and no less of a cop-out. (Incidentally, one of the stupidest arguments is that of "bad" design, glanced at in David's post "Backwards retina". It proves nothing, and until humans have cracked all the codes and come up with an improved version, it's just about on a par with "yah boo!")-As for rolling up our sleeves and wrestling with the problems of abiogenesis and cosmology, the vast majority of us simply don't have the tools for such a task. We are forced to rely on the experts, and since they can't agree among themselves, I personally feel no compulsion to make a judgement either way. However, I see no difference between a theist scientist and an atheist scientist trying to unravel the mysteries of life and the universe: the one will claim to be studying how God did it, and the other how chance did it. They are still confronted with the same materials, and their findings will still be subject to the same scrutiny. The God versus Chance debate is (or should be) irrelevant to the scientific study of how life and the universe originated, although all too often our scientists allow their personal opinions to colour their utterances.-I wrote that our greatest scientists were "baffled" by the phenomenon of consciousness, but for some reason you thought I should have said "dismissive". You confine yourself to the single example of the USAF researcher. I can only quote David here: "When you can explain consciousness to me, then I will accept your statement". Although you remain an agnostic (albeit "a little cranky") your negative judgement on ALL matters relating to the paranormal ... including the acquisition of otherwise inaccessible knowledge during NDEs ... remains a puzzle for me.-I asked if you thought we could 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. Your answer is that the first two are not hypotheses, and the jury is out on the third. I don't care what you call them - my question is whether you dismiss them as "mental masturbation".-In your post under "The Odds for God" you have brilliantly ALMOST summed up my own brand of agnosticism. You wrote: "two equally logical claims coming from the same evidence simply points to the lack of a solution." In applying this to faith in Chance or God, I would only substitute "illogical": life with all its complexities is the "evidence". There is no logic behind the assumption that Chance could have created it, and there is no logic behind the assumption that an even more complex force created itself or has existed for ever. There is no solution ... hence agnosticism. Thank you for that!