Why bother with God? (General)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, May 30, 2011, 01:05 (4925 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,-When you discuss me thinking atheists "all being scientists," I spoke previously about atheism being pretty securely hinged upon the scientific method. As knee-jerks "god doesn't exist," but then the God that most atheists are talking about at all points is the Christian God and Christ on the cross--all of which neither you, David or I believe in. David has eschewed his Jewish God for one much more abstract, possibly distant. (Possibly not, soon I'll finish his book.) I could be mistaken, but I think you and I both agree with Atheists on that point. -The only point you're driving at in terms of atheists is an implicit (though sometimes explicit) belief in chance. But having spent time with those online communities, I didn't really get that sense. If anything else I think that most atheists are really not atheists but are agnostics who think they're atheists. At the same time--and I know where this comes from--there's a powerful sense of rebellion and revulsion to the Christian faith (but generalized to faith at large) and so it becomes psychologically impossible to accept anything even remotely faith-like. You pounced on chance, I pounced on a radical thought: It is metaphysically possible that man has been wrong about *everything* "God" except that it exists. -The important point above is this: Atheists are "atheist" about any God that has made its way into history, in a way that I tend to feel I share; I don't believe in Horus, God, Christ--any of that. None of it is compelling, though they're all great reads... and an absolutely excellent point they have is this: we've seen no evidence for any of these gods based on their holy texts. So we conclude that they don't exist. (We--at least I--agree with that.) David however jumps down a completely different rabbit hole when compared to these chaps, but David's arguments are doomed to be lost amid the strong voices of the right-wing socio-political group "The Discovery Institute" and Dawkins. And as long as ID advocates remain attached to political thinktanks, this situation will not improve in the United States. -Lets just put this discussion behind us, we're arguing over a group of people we don't belong with anyway, I don't know how I brought it up...-"During my cardiac arrest I had an extensive experience (...) and later I saw, apart from my deceased grandmother, a man who had looked at me lovingly, but whom I did not know. More than 10 years later, at my mother's deathbed, she confessed to me that I had been born out of an extramarital relationship, my father being a Jewish man who had been deported and killed during the second World War, and my mother showed me his picture. The unknown man that I had seen more than 10 years before during my NDE turned out to be my biological father."-I don't understand such experiences, but I am not prepared to call Pim van Lommel, his patients and his witnesses frauds, victims of delusion, or dreamers about inane futures... -In this particular case, I don't really find this compelling evidence. It's my uncle Joe in his truck accident all over again. There's 10 years between NDE and seeing that picture. WAAAAAAAAAAY too many variables to treat that as more than anecdote.-...Of what? They are not studying the hard question of chance v. design, but of how life originated.
-The question of chance vs. design is a false dilemma (as I've said before), you still can't answer it without solving abiogenesis. My greater point here was in countering the idea that there are some number of theists working in that area--they aren't. Shapiro (in his book Origins) enumerated many different scientists and in many instances discussed their various religious beliefs. Atheist popped up alot. Theist popped up--not at all. It was (and is) a very small area of research. If there are any theists researching abiogenesis, then they've certainly not expressed their religious thoughts publicly. I realize I'm in logically dangerous territory, so I close this with saying that the above paragraph is opinion after the first sentence.

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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.\"