What do we need a deity for? (Introduction)

by broken_cynic , Saturday, August 13, 2011, 01:06 (4852 days ago) @ dhw

I'm not going to respond to all of this at the moment. It is running aground at the same points that the abiogenesis discussion is and I'm not going to keep either line up until I finish and post my own baseline so that you have a better idea where I'm coming from and why some of these sticking points are so significant to me.-I do apologize again for over-generalizing. You may have to continue to call me out on that for a while. It is a bad habit acquired through much argument with people who see the world in entirely black and white terms and who make little effort to follow their arguments through to any kind of conclusion (primarily evangelical christians.) I will make an effort to double check my posts for 'always' and 'never' and the like and make sure that if they are there, that it is really what I intend.-Without getting too deep into it, I may be over-estimating the 'religious' nature of your position. In brief my take is that I don't see any origin for any hypothesis of a higher power/intelligence/energy outside of walking old religious claims back until they conflict as little as possible with what we understand of reality. The only claim of that type that doesn't conflict at all is a pure deist position... which I would have reason to argue with.-With regard to the rest I will simply say that I have indeed read your original abiogenesis post, a number of times over by now, and while you seem convinced that I am ignoring it, to me it simply does not answer the questions I am trying to pose. -I am working on an effort to build my case from the ground up (well, revamping an existing effort which Matt has already seen) rather than just jumping into the arguments already in progress and trying to move the world without a place to put my lever.