Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on March 27, 2011 at 1:44pm

The problem is that all these attributes did not originate in your head, nor the head of any single person - and neither did the entire body of science.  Mankind's god-concept evolved over thousands of years from imagining the mind of fire (or other important elements of the environment), to anthropomorphizing that mind to have a human-like body living up on the mountain, to pantheons of gods representing every aspect of our lives that could not be explained, to paring down that pantheon (with remaining gods accumulating the powers of omitted gods) in order to reflect more focussed political power, and finally taking the plunge to collate all powers into one god - first successfully attempted by the Assyrians.

 

Even after the Assyrians first imagined one 'all powerful god', that god was still very human-like.  Although the 'realm' of that god expanded over the centuries, by the middle ages we still had a view of 'god' that had him living in a dome over the earth that was delineated by the visible stars.  When that dome got shattered, the religious apologists at the time (like Kevin Harris) just expanded their concept of god to have him filling the entire cosmos.  The whole 'living outside of time' concept was just the apologist response to science's development of a concept of space time.

 

Don't think for one second that Galileo's religious peers had anywhere near the concept of god that religious society holds today.  This is solid evidence that the 'perfect being' is just our own projection of perfection as we understand it, seemingly in a perpetually imperfect way.  In fact, I think that I've just written a proof that our very concept of god is, if the observed trend holds, perpetually imperfect, thus refuting Descartes claim of imagining a perfect being.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Baker on March 27, 2011 at 2:11pm

Are you thinking I'm sticking up for Descartes? I'm definitely not. I was just pointing out to Loop Johnny that Descartes isn't exactly the best foundation for claims about reality.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Baker on March 27, 2011 at 12:40pm

Also, I thought the Matrix was stupid.

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Permalink Reply by Mo Trauen on March 26, 2011 at 6:41pm

Reason and science, however limited they may be, do not resort to supernatural explanations and do not pretend that their explanations are final and infallible.  There is no arrogance when you are simply looking for the truth and are willing to admit error and backtrack.

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Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on March 26, 2011 at 6:48pm

Well stated, Mo.  Thank you.

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Permalink Reply by Loop Johnny on March 26, 2011 at 7:38pm

I would like to point something out. The mind, that is pretty much the effect of the brain, when wants to explain something it first starts with the idea. That idea that you refer to as a 'construct' is what defines reality. The thing is, for the idea to be true you need to bring evidence that is induced from reality to make it a fact. If evidence is not present, then the idea has no connection to reality ( i.e. the idea is imaginary ). After all, reality is a concept that lives in our mind and it can look more or less like the real reality. That's why it is important to follow scientific views since those best match the universe as far as humans know.

 

Based on that, religion does not compare to other forms of 'ideas' since it has no connection to reality. It is just an imaginary construct ergo I wouldn't call it arrogant.

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Permalink Reply by Mo Trauen on March 27, 2011 at 7:56am

Loop,

 

I think you left off the last bit of your thought here.  I think you meant:

 

"It [religion] is just an imaginary construct, ergo I wouldn't call it arrogant to reject it."

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Permalink Reply by Mo Trauen on March 27, 2011 at 9:07am

Mike,

 

Maybe you didn't see the video recently posted by Monica:

 

http://www.thinkatheist.com/video/double-standards

 

Having lived with these prejudices and double standards for decades, I can assure you that we atheists are not the ones who are arrogant.  In fact, I am a bit put out that an atheist would even raise the question in the manner you did.

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Permalink Reply by David M on April 27, 2011 at 4:08pm

If we don't ask, then we run the risk of being just as bad as, or even worse then, those we oppose. Never fear a question, and never trust those that claim it is wrong to ask questions. They aren't always bad folks, but they provide a frighteningly safe haven for those that are bad people.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Baker on March 27, 2011 at 10:49am

I think I need to clarify what I'm getting at here. It's not that I think religious thought has validity and is comparable to reason and logic. I'm just becoming aware of a school of thought in theoretical quantum physics that completely alters the view of the world that I and most of you probably base our sense of reality on.

 

Just as the religious see their world as created by a being that remains in control with rules to follow and rituals to perform and supernatural explanations for things, we have an equally solid set of beliefs about the world. Our view is that it is empirical, it is three dimensional and our physical bodies are plopped into it. We are interacting with it as a mind created by brain chemistry through our senses. We believe the same world exists for everyone and we are all interacting with it in an actual physical space. We believe that time is a constant that we are all moving through together. We think that all things obey the laws of physics.

 

At the cutting edge of physics is a whole school of thought that that decimates this view of existence. It is science tackling questions that have previously only been dealt with in philosophy. The nature of consciousness, the structure of time, the sub atomic structures that combine to form matter and the processes that make that happen.

 

One school of thought (and pardon my clumsy description. I don't pretend to fully grasp these concepts.) sees the universe as waves of possibility that coalesce into matter by being acted upon by consciousness. In other words, consciousness (in a very large sense, not individual consciousness) constructs the universe. It's not a passive observer and not a product of brain activity, in fact it creates the brain. Again, this is probably a very clumsy description. The point is these theories are being reached by scientific inquiry into the behavior of matter on a sub atomic level that defies the known laws of physics and calls into question our currently held view of the nature of the three dimensional universe.

 

What I'm getting at and why I used the term arrogant is that I am still firmly of the current version of the world. Three dimensions, consciousness observing and resideing in the brain just like all or most of you. These quantum theories are very interesting to read about and have some validity with me, but have not been incorporated into my belief system. They do not yet alter my fundamental cosmology.

 

But what if they did? What if I became truly convinced that this model of the universe is correct? What would that process be like, to give up faith that the empirical universe exists in all the order I  ascribe to it? I simply can't imagine it. I have no idea what it would be like to live in a universe with completely different rules and structures. The very foundation of what I see as real would have to change completely. That's a pretty huge mental undertaking!

 

Are any of these physicists who are developing these theories convinced? Have they made the shift in their own sense of reality? If so, do they look at our cosmology as antiquated and primitive the same way we tend to look at religious cosmology? If they are in fact correct, isn't our cosmology just as fictitious as the religious cosmology?

 

Atheism was easy for me. I wasn't that strongly indoctrinated into religious belief and dismissed it at a pretty early age. To most of us it seems like just common sense to acknowledge the ludicrous nature of religious doctrine and move on. But when we ask a truly religious person to give it up, we're asking them to change their cosmology from an ordered one based on a creator and rules and rituals to one that they can't imagine. It's the same enourmous leap.

 

I'm just saying that my sense of the world is being challenged a bit by these things I'm exploring and I'm willing to admit that I'm no longer 100% sure my cosmology is correct. It seems a bit arrogant of me to be so disdainful of people for embracing a fictitious cosmology when my own may be fictitious also.

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Permalink Reply by Reggie on March 27, 2011 at 11:28am

A lot of hypotheses in quantum physics are certainly weird and challenging, but remember two things; 1) they are simply hypotheses and 2) quantum rules do not scale up to the macro world.  If some fundamental change to cosmology comes along, it will be accepted as the evidence requires.  But, a few interesting hypotheses are not enough to throw away the current model of cosmology that has been well established and very practical.

 

I'd caution anyone from drawing such world altering conclusions based on quantum physics, let alone untested quantum physics.  It would be premature to do so.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Baker on March 27, 2011 at 11:37am

Agreed. My point isn't really about which cosmology might be correct, but entertaining the possibility that mine might be incorrect and what it would actually take to significantly change it.

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