What do we need a deity for? (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, August 06, 2011, 11:11 (4837 days ago) @ whateverist

Whateverist: I think we agree on much more than we don't. -I think so too. I have the impression from your posts that you are an agnostic with atheist leanings, as opposed to being an outright atheist (which entails the categorical rejection of any concept of a deity, with all the attendant intellectual consequences). Maybe seven out of ten, while I sit firmly on the fence at five out of ten?-Whateverist: The biggest difference I find is that you, I sense, feel that whatever is necessary for explaining our subjective world of experience must or may have to also be called on to explain the natural world. I'm not sure why allowing something like mythology when it comes to understanding our unconscious should lead to a similar approach to understanding the natural world.-For me mythology doesn't come into it, if by that you are referring to books like the Bible and the Koran. I find most religious concepts of God horribly unconvincing, and squirm when I go to a religious ceremony (weddings, funerals) and hear preachers extolling the good, ignoring the bad, and expressing God's thoughts and wishes as if they knew him/her/it personally. But if I did believe in a God, there is no way that I could separate it from the natural world, and you have already explained why:-"Admittedly, our inner world of experience arises, so far as any one knows, only in minds which are to be found only in brains which only occur in physical bodies. So in a sense, the processes of the mind do fairly belong in a fuller accounting of the natural world."-In order to create life, a designer would also have had to create the conditions for life. As regards the subjective world of experience, if we were created by a conscious intelligence, it would seem totally logical to me that our own conscious intelligence would be a kind of reflection of its own. I do not think it could create something that was totally alien to itself. And so if God made man in his image, it follows that we reflect him and he reflects us. (I like Voltaire's variation on this, though: "If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment.")
 
Whateverist: I'm just not sure there is or ever will be a way to objectively observe some phenomena like dreams or inspiration, even though there has been progress in objectively observing emotions. Of course the problem isn't even exclusively an inter-personal one. There is difficulty enough in observing these phenomena accurately even within ourselves which will lead some to conclude it is all just random noise within the system or something of the kind.-You may be right. Scientists have unravelled many of the electrical processes that accompany our various brain activities, but what governs those processes, how the cells produce the thoughts, the awareness, the memory, the will, is one of the great mysteries. Maybe it's all chemicals. Maybe it's some unknown form of energy that both shapes and is shaped by our physical selves. I dunno.