"Curating Safe(r) Spaces In Comments"

[Tarvos]

Well then I don't really understand what you mean by theoretically able to. Are you theoretically able to build a time machine to check whether the beetle ever has existed? Or is that in fact non-falsifiable?

Theoretically, yes. It's a falsifiable statement because I could in principle, design an experiment to test it. The fact I cannot travel back in time to start the designed experiment (you'd start at t=0 beginning of universe) doesn't really matter as long as the experiment can theoretically be set up in a way that avoids building the time machine. The fact that if I started setting it up now and would have to build a time machine to do it doesn't matter. The point is, if I had started back then, we could have known, thus it's falsifiable.

You can't, but you can never prove anything, in the same way. The laws of probability need to be broken thoroughly enough to be convincing, which can happen.

Yeah but what are the odds for that to happen? I just gave an example with odds, of, say, 1:100.000. Think about how small those odds are, just for a second. Just think about it.

Now think about the probability about evolving life. How small is it? 1:1.000.000.000? Even if it's that low, think about how many planets exist in the universe and how many of them have potential for habitation. There would still, by our current estimates of planets, be like a million or a billion planets (give or take a few zeros) that would harbour life. The universe is staggeringly, amazingly big. Huge multiplied by enormous multiplied by gigantic is the type of concept. In view of that, evolution isn't such a terribly improbable idea.

God doesn't muck about with this - God requires an explanation for God!

But the entirety of your example is just one probabilistic anomaly. If we had 500% the normal number of people stricken by lightning, erupted volcanoes, and earthquakes, plus a pandemic that wiped out 10% of Earth's population all in the same year the Mayans predicted an apocalypse, I'd be a little scared all of a sudden. You'd be an idiot to rationalize that.

Easy: cosmic meteor strike would cause this. You're just describing something similar to the K-T extinction. I'm not fussed, even for that there's a sensible explanation. And the odds for an asteroid collision are tiny, but not tiny enough to rule out.

Face it: there's a fair explanation for anything that's better than positing God.

Agreed. But in the absence of a vivid demonstration of influence from "on high"/ outside the universe, don't rule out the possibility completely.

No one does. We discard it because it is unlikely, not because it's entirely possible to rule out. We don't think it is plausible, not that it's certain not to be true.

I see no problem with this. This terminal regression is only the same terminal regression you need to allow causality itself. Or, ya know, God could just be eternal. I've heard some people actually define God as love, which I think is kinda cool.

Nah, God can't be eternal if he created the universe - because he'd be outside it. Besides, does "outside the universe" even mean anything? If the universe is ALL THERE IS, then how can you be outside it? If there are multiple universes, why is God in one of them, or not the other? For that matter, if there are multiple universes, how is it we're only and one and not the other? For that matter, how did the rest of the universes get to be there in the first place? Did God make them too? Is he outside them as well then? But how, if there's nothing to be outside of?

It's just a really silly way of thinking. The universe has either existed all along and it's everything, or if there are multiple universes, then they have existed for all tme (this is excluding periodic contraction and expansion and whatever the fuck else is apparent about cosmology that I don't know a huge whole lot about). It just doesn't make any sense to posit a God outside a universe without allowing yourself such a bogus amount of probabilistic luxury.

Just think about the odds on these theories, and then the odds that I posited for evolution. We cannot rule it out completely, but do you get that in my view there's such a huge, monumental amount of explaining to do that I prefer evolution so strongly?

My consciousness is immaterial yet interacts materially. And it makes no sense to me how something material can create something immaterial.

I don't see consciousness as an immaterial thing. I see it as a biological phenomenon governed by our bodies in some way, dependent on hormones, neurological interactions and the like. How it works exactly, I don't know - I'm not a biologist either. I'm a chemist and that's my trade. but yeah, I am no expert

Only preferable, I think, because you can be done explaining at some point. You just stop explaining when you get done explaining evolution. But actually Chemistry is the God of Biology, Physics is the God of Chemistry, and so on... we have no idea why the laws of physics are the way they are, but there should be a explanation. And when we figure that out, well. You can see where this is going.

You're just positing why there is logic to begin with? My view is that it's always existed and it's the only sensible way to do things without allowing ourselves the dubious luxury of thinking about things using a different logical pattern. They could exist, but then you're going into the logic discussion Butterfree and opal were on about - and I'm squarely on Butterfree's side on that one, I don't flow with that idea.

This discussion is starting to get interesting!

I contest that an eternal God has to be in everything. What if God is an idea, like love, or a square. You could find God in certain things, but not everything, only things that contain squares. You cannot go back in time (or causality) endlessly until you find the first square, and say that is what created "square"; if causality regresses infinitely, as it logically must, you should always be able to find an earlier square. Square is eternal because mathematics is eternal. A more complex concept than square would be much harder to find, but there should still always have been something that fit the concept of "love" if you looked far and wide enough.

I don't really see love as an eternal concept, but that may be because I don't really believe in eternal love anyway.

Mathematics is simply mathematics - it is what it is, it works the way it does, and it will always work the way it's supposed to work, given the starting axioms.

Yes, I know this seems like fun logic with L, but as far as I can tell this makes sense.

Dang, that must have been frustrating. I think that's kinda stupid, personally. Why can't we have a tolerance for multiple ideas of things?

My idea wasn't good enough for charge separation for it to work out in eventually making solar cells. We needed a better way of making them - and we couldn't do it exploring using my theories. We needed other stuff. It's science. It's complex chemistry, so I don't want to talk about my thesis in that much detail anyway.

But, they are grateful, because now they know they can't pursue it and they need to look somewhere else. It's a normal scientific process we all go through and I am very sure my professor at the time is grateful for my contribution to science.

The point though is that Fred could still (rightfully) believe in the blue banana based only on his personal evidence.

He could, but he's got no reason to assume everyone else will, because he's got no evidence to show for it - and he needs to realise that that is the case.

See above? Of course not everyone will like calling an actual concept God, because, well, we already have a name for that concept. I guess it depends on what you want to posit God did. (You could very well call God chaos! XD)

I dislike it because it's just so superfluous. We've got a good word, why do we need another one?

What I'm saying is, not all religious people hold their religion as something they absolutely have to hold on to. They can unwittingly hold a lot of cognitive biases and never realize it, for example.

I know very few of these people. Most religious people I know are absurdly rigid about it, and it makes sense given the Church as an organisation. Those who don't tend to also abhor dogmatic doctrine - and then just believe in God without the Bible being a sacred foundation. I'm sure those people exist that you speak about - they are simply a tiny minority. Most religious people will be very rigid about it in my experience.

Wow, in Canada? I'm in Oklahoma, buckle of the Bible belt, and I know some people who are atheistic, and many more who just aren't religious. Maybe that's what 20 years does.

Yeah, 20 years ago everyone belonged to some sort of religion. It has changed, of course, also in Canada. Note we lived in Calgary, which was a big city, and cities are almost always more liberal than rural areas. Religious conversion or deconversion is a slow process. I do not think my parents decided either to just tell religion to fuck it. They just did, slowly, realising it as they grew up.

I wasn't told about religion as a child. It just wasn't mentioned. I was raised to read everything - and sadly for religion I got into evolution and dinosaurs at age four. Religion is barely a topic after that hah.

Yes, there is still lots of peer pressure where I come from.

Plus my parents have always been religious. My dad read the bible to us every night until like last year. And my parents wanted us to start reading the bible on our own then, but they kinda forgot to carry through with making us do that. My parents are from elsewhere in the US, but they met here at a private Christian college.

Last spring when we were cleaning out the garage, in a stack of books I found one called, "Children at Risk: Winning the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Your Children". There was still a bookmark in it 2/3rd's of the way through, so unlike most of the books in the garage, someone had actually read most of this one. I started reading it, and while many of its concerns seemed legitimate . . . I felt like I had been brainwashed.

I still haven't got around to reading the chapter on rock music.

I feel sorry for everyone who goes through this. I am very glad about my being raised the way I was, but I realise we don't all have that privilege of choice. Religion should always remain within the personal sphere - freedom of ideas and thought is a very good thing. One of the pernicious things about organized religion is how it tries to mind control people and that's why organized religion, to me, is something I can really get mad about.

Just pointing out, Buddhism says reality is an illusion, iirc. (And Inceptionism.)

Hah, you can make a religion out of everything. I don't believe Buddhism either, though. I like making things simple. I think this is why I am so at odds with religion - I just don't flow with all that imaginary stuff being real. I like it in fiction where you can tell people dreamed it up to make a good story out of things - but fiction stays in the fiction part with me. For me to believe something, there'd better be a good way to make it reasonably tangible in a way that makes sense when I, myself, can test it to be true.

Engineer's mindset? I guess so.

I think our reality is largely unobserved if we don't ever consider the vastness of the possibilities of our ontology. And I really don't think God is too unlikely. See below.

Reality is largely unobserved, God or no. It's called being a puny human. :)

 

[Butterfree]

But any hypothesis about something outside of our universe is a pretty useless hypothesis. That doesn't mean it's worthless. This is philosophy, not science. Empirically we know to little to commit to atheism or deism. So why choose?

Things don't become automatically useful or interesting by simply labeling them 'philosophy'. Philosophy can be fascinating, but "let's call the cause behind the universe God, without proposing that this 'cause' has any interesting properties beyond simply being the cause behind the universe" is so inane as to demean philosophy by even associating itself with it. It's semantic trickery, redefining a word that means something to people to mean something completely different and expecting it to still keep the associations people normally have with it. It is an insult to real, interesting philosophical ideas, about on the level of "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

As for why we should choose between atheism and deism? Because deism in the "cause-of-the-universe God is intelligent" sense (which is not the one you insinuated in the post I was replying to, by the way) makes a huge baseless assumption and atheism does not. Like I said in my last post, atheists don't believe in the nonexistence of God; we just don't believe in God, because there is no reason to. Much like scientists who accepted the older atomic models didn't have active faith that this particular model was all there was to it and would never need updating or refinement or correction; they just accepted it because it was the simplest, most logical way to explain the evidence so far. And the simplest, most logical way to explain the evidence so far is to assume God, in any sense a genuinely religious person would recognize as such, does not exist, just like the simplest, most logical way to explain the evidence so far is to assume unicorns don't exist either.

Well we agree that the universe needs a cause

Actually, we don't, but whatever.

A) The universe operates on completely natural laws; ... . And the cause of the universe had intelligent characteristics.

B) The universe operates on completely natural laws; ... . And the cause of the universe did not have intelligent characteristics.

We have so little evidence going either way that Occam's razor doesn't actually do much for us. On one hand something having intelligent characteristics is very rare, based on what we have inducted from our own universe. But then something as grandiose as the universe being created by something non-intelligent is not exactly mundane either.

The universe being grandiose isn't evidence that it was created by something intelligent. The diversity of life on Earth is far more grandiose than the universe, for one, and we know that it wasn't created by anything intelligent (or, more specifically, even if it were, we know that the mechanism of evolution by natural selection could have created something about as grandiose). Moreover, while the universe is big, it is actually tantalizingly simple; nothing about it even suggests intelligence must have been at work to the degree that life does.

Intelligence is inherently complex. It requires the ability to simulate possible outcomes of actions, perform mathematical calculations, remember previous actions, etc. etc. etc. - it needs oodles of parts interacting in just the right ways. Proposing something has intelligence is not equivalent in complexity to proposing it doesn't. And that, that intelligence is vastly more complex than nonintelligence and therefore far less likely in the absence of clear indicators of intelligence, is what most atheists are proposing - not that it definitely wasn't intelligent.

 

[Light]

Theoretically, yes. It's a falsifiable statement because I could in principle, design an experiment to test it. The fact I cannot travel back in time to start the designed experiment (you'd start at t=0 beginning of universe) doesn't really matter as long as the experiment can theoretically be set up in a way that avoids building the time machine. The fact that if I started setting it up now and would have to build a time machine to do it doesn't matter. The point is, if I had started back then, we could have known, thus it's falsifiable.

What if we started at t = -5 billion to see what caused the universe? If you define time as a sequence of causal events, you can do this, and deistic God becomes falsifiable. More on causality and the beginning of the universe below.

Yeah but what are the odds for that to happen? I just gave an example with odds, of, say, 1:100.000. Think about how small those odds are, just for a second. Just think about it.

Now think about the probability about evolving life. How small is it? 1:1.000.000.000? Even if it's that low, think about how many planets exist in the universe and how many of them have potential for habitation. There would still, by our current estimates of planets, be like a million or a billion planets (give or take a few zeros) that would harbour life. The universe is staggeringly, amazingly big. Huge multiplied by enormous multiplied by gigantic is the type of concept. In view of that, evolution isn't such a terribly improbable idea.

God doesn't muck about with this - God requires an explanation for God!

It is not so much anomalous events, but anomalous events which indicate purpose. See next paragraph.

Easy: cosmic meteor strike would cause this. You're just describing something similar to the K-T extinction. I'm not fussed, even for that there's a sensible explanation. And the odds for an asteroid collision are tiny, but not tiny enough to rule out.

The important part though is that hypothetically this happens the same year the Mayans predicted an apocalypse long ago. Then some kind of supernatural explanation for why the Mayans predicted this would not be un called for. That is what would rustle feathers.

Face it: there's a fair explanation for anything that's better than positing God.

Okay, any one thing. But when God explains a great many diverse things very nicely, that's better than coming up with a separate explanation for each anomalous phenomenon. Occam's razor.

Not saying it's happened, just saying God could be used elegantly.

No one does. We discard it because it is unlikely, not because it's entirely possible to rule out. We don't think it is plausible, not that it's certain not to be true.

How the heck is God not plausible? We're only giving God at least some intelligent properties, we're totally ruling out all the omni-qualities religious people assign to God. We are talking about a God of any kind; could be an amoeba like creature who isn't even sophisticated enough to understand us. (I am in fact suggesting that we don't even know enough about bacteria to decide whether they have a degree of consciousness. Now you might say they are no where near as complicated to our own neural circuitry, and surely consciousness must require at least most of that complexity, but then I would point out that millions of proteins flow through a single cell and control its behavior -- bacteria have mechanisms of "talking" to each other and somehow sperm cells know how to find their way to an egg. Also, I suggest that the subconscious mind displays signs of consciousness itself apart from our own).

Nah, God can't be eternal if he created the universe - because he'd be outside it. Besides, does "outside the universe" even mean anything? If the universe is ALL THERE IS, then how can you be outside it? If there are multiple universes, why is God in one of them, or not the other? For that matter, if there are multiple universes, how is it we're only and one and not the other? For that matter, how did the rest of the universes get to be there in the first place? Did God make them too? Is he outside them as well then? But how, if there's nothing to be outside of?

Thing is though, universe doesn't really mean "all there is" anymore. The way it's used in modern physics refers to our 3 dimensional space (4 including time). I don't know if you've read up on higher spatial dimensions, but the basic idea is that in the fourth dimension 3 dimensional structures are as 2 dimensional structures are to us. If in 4D space I start on one side of a 3D object that extends infinitely in all directions, this object divides 4D space, and I have to pass through the 3D object to get to the other side, like a 2D wall (a plane) in 3D space that has no boundaries. Now say we have a pair of 2D planes, and on plane A is 2nd dimensional life form Jim and on plane B is 2nd dimensional life form Bob. Jim and Bob can roam endlessly through their own space, but since they are on different planes they can never know of each other. (This is how physicists can speak of universes centimeters apart from our own, and this is how universes can be "parallel"). Both Bob and Jim have 4 degrees of freedom: up, down, forward and backward. They have no left/ right freedom as we do, since the mechanisms that move them are 2D and can only face 4 directions. Bob and Jim have no way of getting from one plane to the other; each is outside of the other's universe. In fiction, if something from a foreign euclidean 3 space finds its way into our own universe, it is from another universe. If it's world has a different number of axes, it is from a different dimension. (And you thought it was gibberish)

It's just a really silly way of thinking. The universe has either existed all along and it's everything, or if there are multiple universes, then they have existed for all tme (this is excluding periodic contraction and expansion and whatever the fuck else is apparent about cosmology that I don't know a huge whole lot about). It just doesn't make any sense to posit a God outside a universe without allowing yourself such a bogus amount of probabilistic luxury.

Not by the commonly assumed definition of universe. The epiverse is what must have existed all along, and of course that could not have been created. A bit more when I get to Butterfree.

I don't see consciousness as an immaterial thing. I see it as a biological phenomenon governed by our bodies in some way, dependent on hormones, neurological interactions and the like. How it works exactly, I don't know - I'm not a biologist either. I'm a chemist and that's my trade. but yeah, I am no expert

The problem though is that neuroscientists have no fucking idea why consciousness arises from material, mechanical parts. As soon as they figure that out, I'll be the first one to absolve myself of the possibility of some kind of soul. (Heck, that'd be the most interesting explanation of anything ever!)

Only preferable, I think, because you can be done explaining at some point. You just stop explaining when you get done explaining evolution. But actually Chemistry is the God of Biology, Physics is the God of Chemistry, and so on... we have no idea why the laws of physics are the way they are, but there should be a explanation. And when we figure that out, well. You can see where this is going.

You're just positing why there is logic to begin with? My view is that it's always existed and it's the only sensible way to do things without allowing ourselves the dubious luxury of thinking about things using a different logical pattern. They could exist, but then you're going into the logic discussion Butterfree and opal were on about - and I'm squarely on Butterfree's side on that one, I don't flow with that idea.

No, I'm squarely with Butterfree too. That's unrelated. I'm pointing out that we have no idea why e = mc^2, why an electron weighs 9.109 382 15(45) × 10^-31 kilograms, how particles attract or repel each other across empty space, but there should be an explanation for all this. String Theory is trying to explain it, but then, why are there strings (and other fundamental structures like planes) in the first place, as String Theory says?

I don't really see love as an eternal concept, but that may be because I don't really believe in eternal love anyway.

No no, that's not really it. Love is eternal because it is a concept, and concepts are eternal.

Mathematics is simply mathematics - it is what it is, it works the way it does, and it will always work the way it's supposed to work, given the starting axioms.

I am boldly suggesting that one day we will be able to describe all concepts mathematically.

Hah, you can make a religion out of everything. I don't believe Buddhism either, though.

I just wanted you to be careful about saying if we assume certain things "it is impossible to live our lives in a decent humane way".

I like making things simple. I think this is why I am so at odds with religion - I just don't flow with all that imaginary stuff being real. I like it in fiction where you can tell people dreamed it up to make a good story out of things - but fiction stays in the fiction part with me. For me to believe something, there'd better be a good way to make it reasonably tangible in a way that makes sense when I, myself, can test it to be true.Can't you seriously entertain something without believing it?

Engineer's mindset? I guess so.

Not me! I love to marvel in the possibilites! Uncertainty is psychological freedom. I get the impression that people are scared of going crazy from uncertainty. Keep your feet on the ground when your head's in the clouds, and stand in awe of reality for once!

Somehow I'm still a very logical person, mathematics and physics being my favorite disciplines. (I'm planning on being an architect, but theoretical physicist and neuroscientist are still somewhat in the running).

Things don't become automatically useful or interesting by simply labeling them 'philosophy'. Philosophy can be fascinating, but "let's call the cause behind the universe God, without proposing that this 'cause' has any interesting properties beyond simply being the cause behind the universe" is so inane as to demean philosophy by even associating itself with it. It's semantic trickery, redefining a word that means something to people to mean something completely different and expecting it to still keep the associations people normally have with it. It is an insult to real, interesting philosophical ideas, about on the level of "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Ok, fine. The cause of the universe can be called God if it displays any intelligent properties.

As for why we should choose between atheism and deism? Because deism in the "cause-of-the-universe God is intelligent" sense (which is not the one you insinuated in the post I was replying to, by the way) makes a huge baseless assumption and atheism does not. Like I said in my last post, atheists don't believe in the nonexistence of God; we just don't believe in God, because there is no reason to. Much like scientists who accepted the older atomic models didn't have active faith that this particular model was all there was to it and would never need updating or refinement or correction; they just accepted it because it was the simplest, most logical way to explain the evidence so far. And the simplest, most logical way to explain the evidence so far is to assume God, in any sense a genuinely religious person would recognize as such, does not exist, just like the simplest, most logical way to explain the evidence so far is to assume unicorns don't exist either.

I'm assuming you're comparing unicorns to a God who is all powerful, all knowing, and all these wonderful things religious people posit, and not the simple Deist God. Deists are no more religious than atheists. They see God as logical and no God as possible, which is the inverse of atheism.

Also, I can't claim atheism because I'm not atheistic. I welcome the idea of God -- that doesn't mean I believe it.

Actually, we don't, but whatever.

What? But you said

Religion isn't about just taking whatever it is that caused the universe (because it totally needs a cause, and whatever it is you call 'God' doesn't) and calling it God

Sarcasm totally not detected. (The second part of that parenthetical statement never did make sense). Yes, the universe needs a cause. The universe expanding out from a single point in the event of the Big Bang needs a cause. Logically something had to happen before t = 0 in the causality chain. A causal chain must be infinite in length. (The grand causal chain could loop, but that is one possibility I absolutely abhor with every ounce of my existance. And of course that would still count as infinite).

The universe being grandiose isn't evidence that it was created by something intelligent. The diversity of life on Earth is far more grandiose than the universe, for one, and we know that it wasn't created by anything intelligent (or, more specifically, even if it were, we know that the mechanism of evolution by natural selection could have created something about as grandiose). Moreover, while the universe is big, it is actually tantalizingly simple; nothing about it even suggests intelligence must have been at work to the degree that life does.

Intelligence is inherently complex. It requires the ability to simulate possible outcomes of actions, perform mathematical calculations, remember previous actions, etc. etc. etc. - it needs oodles of parts interacting in just the right ways. Proposing something has intelligence is not equivalent in complexity to proposing it doesn't. And that, that intelligence is vastly more complex than nonintelligence and therefore far less likely by default, is what atheists are proposing - not that it definitely wasn't intelligent.

Okay, but where I have a problem is when atheists go from "it probably wasn't intelligent" to "let's assume it wasn't intelligent". Furthermore, a concept can be an intelligent thing. Love will react only in certain ways for certain reasons. Chaos will react only in certain ways for certain reasons. We can assume some concept at work had a major role in the creation of the universe. Why can't God be a concept? Why can't I be nothing more than a concept?

 

[Butterfree]

I'm assuming you're comparing unicorns to a God who is all powerful, all knowing, and all these wonderful things religious people posit, and not the simple Deist God. Deists are no more religious than atheists. They see God as logical and no God as possible, which is the inverse of atheism.

The intelligent deist God is more equivalent to unicorns than the all-powerful, all-knowing one, actually; at least unicorns don't laugh in the face of physics.

We have no evidence to suggest the universe has an intelligent cause, much like we have no evidence to suggest there are unicorns. The complexity of saying something exists, in the absence of evidence that it does, is always far greater than the complexity of saying that thing does not exist. You can't just say "Well, I find God more logical than no God"; God isn't more logical than no God, especially if you're already (what with being a deist) accepting that there is no evidence available to you that could tell you God is there.

Or, to explain the concept better, let's make a parable. Alexandra the atheist and Dominic the deist are walking somewhere in the Icelandic countryside and discover what appears to be a deep crack leading to an underground cave. They don't have any climbing equipment, and it's dark and too deep to see the bottom, so they can't enter it or see its interior.

"Hey, cool, a cave," says Alexandra.

"I bet there's a laptop down in that cave," says Dominic.

"Huh, what?" says Alexandra. "Why do you think that?"

"I just think that's logical."

"How is that logical? Why would there be a laptop in some cave in Iceland?"

"Jeesh, I'm just welcoming the possibility of the laptop. I mean, how can you say there isn't one? You haven't been down there."

"Yeah, but... why would you come to the conclusion there's a laptop there in the first place?"

"It could happen. I mean, sometimes travelers bring their laptops with them, and someone could have dropped it. Plus, can't laptops just be concepts? Maybe love is a laptop."

"...What on Earth are you on about? We don't know a thing about what's down in that cave; we have no basis on which to assume there's even anything in it at all, let alone decide it must be a laptop. And what's 'maybe love is a laptop' even supposed to mean?"

"How could you just assume there isn't a laptop?!"


Ultimately, the question is, why a laptop? Why not something else? Is it just that Dominic would like there to be a laptop? That's wishful thinking; it doesn't make it any more likely to be true. Alexandra just thinks we shouldn't assume there's anything in the cave without evidence to support it; in particular, suggesting any one particular type of highly unusual object is bizarre.

Humans are predisposed towards the idea of an intelligent cause for the universe because of our history of explaining gaps in our knowledge with religion - but that doesn't make it so, and without that bias, there is no more reason to propose that the cause of the universe is intelligent - even an intelligent amoeba - than to propose that there's a laptop in the cave. If I propose that the cause of the universe has some random property far less complex than intelligence - say, that the cause of the universe makes a squeaking sound if I squeeze it - it will probably seem silly to you. But without that human predisposition towards thinking things are caused by intelligent beings, proposing the cause of the universe has intelligence is far sillier than that, because it's far more complex.

Also, I can't claim atheism because I'm not atheistic. I welcome the idea of God -- that doesn't mean I believe it.

I don't care what you identify as, so long as I understand what you mean by whatever you identify as and you understand what I mean when I identify as an atheist.

Yes, the universe needs a cause. The universe expanding out from a single point in the event of the Big Bang needs a cause. Logically something had to happen before t = 0 in the causality chain. A causal chain must be infinite in length. (The grand causal chain could loop, but that is one possibility I absolutely abhor with every ounce of my existance. And of course that would still count as infinite).

This argument is nonsense. We find it hard to imagine things having no cause because we live within the universe and evolved to understand things that happen on Earth, which do tend to have causes. We have no basis on which to assume that the same applies to the universe itself; just for a start, what does it even mean for one thing to cause another before time began? (Also, abhorring some possibility does not rule out that it could be true.)

Okay, but where I have a problem is when atheists go from "it probably wasn't intelligent" to "let's assume it wasn't intelligent".

It's not an assumption in the "The cause behind the universe wasn't intelligent" sense; it's an assumption in the "There's no reason to think it was intelligent, so I'm going to live out my life as if it weren't" sense. And we all do exactly that, all the time. You assume your friends are really your friends, even though they could be government spies sent to uncover all your secrets, for instance; you assume that what you read in your textbooks is true and treat it as such unless you discover otherwise; you assume that unicorns don't exist in the absence of evidence that they do. Would you fault Alexandra for saying she doesn't believe there was a laptop in that cave?

Furthermore, a concept can be an intelligent thing. Love will react only in certain ways for certain reasons. Chaos will react only in certain ways for certain reasons. We can assume some concept at work had a major role in the creation of the universe. Why can't God be a concept? Why can't I be nothing more than a concept?

What. No, concepts can't be intelligent things; love can't react to anything because it's a feeling felt in human brains and it's the humans that do the reacting; chaos can't react to anything because it's a way of describing things that lack apparent organization. God is a concept, because concepts exist within minds; they don't have some independent magical existence that could be intelligent. And you can't be nothing more than a concept because in order to use a computer and type that post, you must be part of physical reality. I can't tell if you're joking with this whole paragraph.

 

[Tarvos]

What if we started at t = -5 billion to see what caused the universe? If you define time as a sequence of causal events, you can do this, and deistic God becomes falsifiable. More on causality and the beginning of the universe below.

But it's pointless, because t=-2 million seconds doesn't mean anything. Universe starts at t=0. No earlier, no later.

It is not so much anomalous events, but anomalous events which indicate purpose. See next paragraph.

You can impute a purpose to everything. I can impute purpose to finding coal out in a desert (omg! the Tuaregs must have left it there!) or whatever I can think of.

Watchmaker arguments don't work. The universe is a blind watchmaker.

The important part though is that hypothetically this happens the same year the Mayans predicted an apocalypse long ago. Then some kind of supernatural explanation for why the Mayans predicted this would not be un called for. That is what would rustle feathers.

That's just lucky guesswork compared to an asteroid collision. Nope.

Okay, any one thing. But when God explains a great many diverse things very nicely, that's better than coming up with a separate explanation for each anomalous phenomenon. Occam's razor.

Evolution and physics explain the same damn things. Just BETTER. Also, it doesn't have to be. You still don't understand Occam's razor, do you?

Not saying it's happened, just saying God could be used elegantly.

He could, but I could also sprout antlers and prance around like a gazelle.

How the heck is God not plausible? We're only giving God at least some intelligent properties, we're totally ruling out all the omni-qualities religious people assign to God. We are talking about a God of any kind; could be an amoeba like creature who isn't even sophisticated enough to understand us. (I am in fact suggesting that we don't even know enough about bacteria to decide whether they have a degree of consciousness. Now you might say they are no where near as complicated to our own neural circuitry, and surely consciousness must require at least most of that complexity, but then I would point out that millions of proteins flow through a single cell and control its behavior -- bacteria have mechanisms of "talking" to each other and somehow sperm cells know how to find their way to an egg. Also, I suggest that the subconscious mind displays signs of consciousness itself apart from our own).

Biochemistry looks complex but it's fucking easy compared to being intelligent. I understand biochemistry a whole lot better. Really, because it's intuitively more complex doesn't mean it's actually complex or intelligent. God is not plausible because you're making him fuckloads more intelligent than he needs to be to explain anything about life. All this stupid intelligence is a burden. We don't need it, evolution did the same trick and evolution is so stupid it hurts (compared to your intelligent God). But we're still here talking thanks to it.

Saying God is plausible is like saying I will grow antlers before lunch.

What the fuck??????

Thing is though, universe doesn't really mean "all there is" anymore. The way it's used in modern physics refers to our 3 dimensional space (4 including time). I don't know if you've read up on higher spatial dimensions, but the basic idea is that in the fourth dimension 3 dimensional structures are as 2 dimensional structures are to us. If in 4D space I start on one side of a 3D object that extends infinitely in all directions, this object divides 4D space, and I have to pass through the 3D object to get to the other side, like a 2D wall (a plane) in 3D space that has no boundaries. Now say we have a pair of 2D planes, and on plane A is 2nd dimensional life form Jim and on plane B is 2nd dimensional life form Bob. Jim and Bob can roam endlessly through their own space, but since they are on different planes they can never know of each other. (This is how physicists can speak of universes centimeters apart from our own, and this is how universes can be "parallel"). Both Bob and Jim have 4 degrees of freedom: up, down, forward and backward. They have no left/ right freedom as we do, since the mechanisms that move them are 2D and can only face 4 directions. Bob and Jim have no way of getting from one plane to the other; each is outside of the other's universe. In fiction, if something from a foreign euclidean 3 space finds its way into our own universe, it is from another universe. If it's world has a different number of axes, it is from a different dimension. (And you thought it was gibberish)

Uh, yeah it does. The only thing you've done is tacked on some mathematical dimensions. Now I'm just gonna call the universe all those dimensions together since they're still in the material plane. This is not that hard to understand, right?

The problem though is that neuroscientists have no fucking idea why consciousness arises from material, mechanical parts. As soon as they figure that out, I'll be the first one to absolve myself of the possibility of some kind of soul. (Heck, that'd be the most interesting explanation of anything ever!)

I don't either, but that still won't mean I assume the Easter Bunny did it...

No, I'm squarely with Butterfree too. That's unrelated. I'm pointing out that we have no idea why e = mc^2, why an electron weighs 9.109 382 15(45) × 10^-31 kilograms, how particles attract or repel each other across empty space, but there should be an explanation for all this. String Theory is trying to explain it, but then, why are there strings (and other fundamental structures like planes) in the first place, as String Theory says?

We don't need to know why.

No no, that's not really it. Love is eternal because it is a concept, and concepts are eternal.

That's the stupidest, pseudo-Buddhistic intellectual crap I've ever heard. A concept is something you define to explain something, nothing more. Love is something we feel in the brain, and it's caused by hormones. It occurs everywhere because to this day all humans had hormones. There's nothing supernatural about love and I think we'd be much better off as a species if we'd stop treating it like special.

I am boldly suggesting that one day we will be able to describe all concepts mathematically.

Could happen - still not evidence in favour of God - only evidence of humans being good mathematicians

I just wanted you to be careful about saying if we assume certain things "it is impossible to live our lives in a decent humane way".

I ain't careful about saying it because all I need to do is look at religious societies and I can say "wow, that screwed up!"

In the meanwhile, I look at the countries with the highest proportion of non-religious people such as in Scandinavia and the Netherlands and they are the best countries to live in.

I think atheism is a lot more humane, just by looking at the world. Discussion for another time though.

Not me! I love to marvel in the possibilites! Uncertainty is psychological freedom. I get the impression that people are scared of going crazy from uncertainty. Keep your feet on the ground when your head's in the clouds, and stand in awe of reality for once!

Me too, but that still doesn't mean I will posit outlandish things just because I can imagine them.

 

[Light]

But it's pointless, because t=-2 million seconds doesn't mean anything. Universe starts at t=0. No earlier, no later.

Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

That's just lucky guesswork compared to an asteroid collision. Nope.

And if there were no traces of an asteroid collision?

Evolution and physics explain the same damn things. Just BETTER. Also, it doesn't have to be. You still don't understand Occam's razor, do you?

No, you don't understand my argument. Maybe you'll listen if Butterfree says it.

If you do propose that if God exists, we should see miracles, the Bible being perfectly consistent and scientifically accurate, people recovering from illness disproportionately often if they're prayed for, and so on - then your God hypothesis is falsifiable, in the sense that it does propose that if it is true we should see certain observations being true. Good for you!

This is all I'm trying to say.

Biochemistry looks complex but it's fucking easy compared to being intelligent. I understand biochemistry a whole lot better.

Really? Then can you please explain how molecules in a cell are trafficked so effectively from place to place so that they can carry out the right chemical reactions? For example, how does mRNA find its way from the nucleolus to the ribosomes? How does pyruvate find its way into the matrix of the mitochondria to carry out the Krebs cycle? Because when I asked my biology teachers they gave me the impression that scientists are still clueless about several aspects of cellular biochemistry.

Saying God is plausible is like saying I will grow antlers before lunch.

No, it's more like saying there might be a laptop in a cave, given the universe (or, to be more specific, our 3D plane) had to have a cause.

Uh, yeah it does. The only thing you've done is tacked on some mathematical dimensions. Now I'm just gonna call the universe all those dimensions together since they're still in the material plane. This is not that hard to understand, right?

Whatever, I still think my definitions are better, and more widely recognized, but fine, it's really pointless to argue about, so we'll use yours. (By the way, I'm not sure what you're referring to as the material plane, because scientists believe, based on special relativity, that time is a dimension in the same way as space. I'm not going to waste my time explaining it to you, so here).

If the universe includes all material dimensions, then our own 3 dimensional plane still needs a cause if it expanded out from a zero dimensional point in the big bang. And there could be other 3 dimensional planes outside our own that are just inches away.

The problem though is that neuroscientists have no fucking idea why consciousness arises from material, mechanical parts. As soon as they figure that out, I'll be the first one to absolve myself of the possibility of some kind of soul. (Heck, that'd be the most interesting explanation of anything ever!)

I don't either, but that still won't mean I assume the Easter Bunny did it...

So basically what you're saying is, we've come to a problem more intriguing than any other, so profound as to define our very existence, so difficult that despite all the time and effort we have put into its solution over the last century, we still have no idea even where to begin searching for the answer, and you're sure there is a perfectly mechanical explanation that incorporates no more than the elements we already know about the physical universe?

By the way, I am not assuming anything. If there is an explanation like that, great! Don't expect me to automatically assume there is.

We don't need to know why.

While I could go off on a big long rant about this, I will suffice it to say that is not the scientific mind of inquiry.

Anyway, that's totally beside the point. The point is there should be a reason why strings and things are there to begin with, whether we remain blissfully ignorant of that reason or not. And then that needs a reason too. I have no problem with terminal regressions; they're only logical.

That's the stupidest, pseudo-Buddhistic intellectual crap I've ever heard.

If you're dismissing my ideas because they sound like "pseudo-Buddhistic intellectual crap", you're close minded.

A concept is something you define to explain something, nothing more.

Your idea of concept is far too narrow for what I'm talking about. This is where I start talking about postmodern subjectivity and post-structuralism, but you dismiss postmodernism, so I'm not really interested in pursuing this line of inquiry with you.

In the meanwhile, I look at the countries with the highest proportion of non-religious people such as in Scandinavia and the Netherlands and they are the best countries to live in.

To me, this sounds like when religious people point out something like, "America was founded on Christian principles, and God's blessing has been on it ever since." Yeah no. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Me too, but that still doesn't mean I will posit outlandish things just because I can imagine them.

Kay then, we're different.

We have no evidence to suggest the universe has an intelligent cause, much like we have no evidence to suggest there are unicorns. The complexity of saying something exists, in the absence of evidence that it does, is always far greater than the complexity of saying that thing does not exist. You can't just say "Well, I find God more logical than no God"; God isn't more logical than no God, especially if you're already (what with being a deist) accepting that there is no evidence available to you that could tell you God is there.

But that's not what I said.

(what with being a deist)

What?? Based on everything I've said so far, it's clear I'm not a deist. I can see how you got that misconception, but you are effectively strawmanning me by categorizing me that way.

Or, to explain the concept better, let's make a parable. Alexandra the atheist and Dominic the deist are walking somewhere in the Icelandic countryside and discover what appears to be a deep crack leading to an underground cave. They don't have any climbing equipment, and it's dark and too deep to see the bottom, so they can't enter it or see its interior.

"Hey, cool, a cave," says Alexandra.

"I bet there's a laptop down in that cave," says Dominic.

"Huh, what?" says Alexandra. "Why do you think that?"

"I just think that's logical."

"How is that logical? Why would there be a laptop in some cave in Iceland?"

"Jeesh, I'm just welcoming the possibility of the laptop. I mean, how can you say there isn't one? You haven't been down there."

"Yeah, but... why would you come to the conclusion there's a laptop there in the first place?"

"It could happen. I mean, sometimes travelers bring their laptops with them, and someone could have dropped it. Plus, can't laptops just be concepts? Maybe love is a laptop."

"...What on Earth are you on about? We don't know a thing about what's down in that cave; we have no basis on which to assume there's even anything in it at all, let alone decide it must be a laptop. And what's 'maybe love is a laptop' even supposed to mean?"

"How could you just assume there isn't a laptop?!"

Polly chimes in. "Dominic, isn't it a bit ambitious to say, 'I bet there's a laptop in that cave'?"

"I just thought it made sense."

"Yeah, the way you explained how it got there does make sense. That doesn't mean we should believe it's there."

"So you're an alaptopist." Says Alexandra.

"Now you're the one being silly, Alexandra." Polly takes a glance into the chasm. "Maybe travelers have been through here. They could have dropped a map, or a compass maybe. Maybe there is an abandoned mine shaft in that cave."

"Maybe there's nothing at all," says Alexandra.

"Maybe there is," Polly admits. "Maybe there isn't. Maybe there are crystals growing down there! Or maybe bat-eating snakes waiting to leap out of the crevices."

"Maybe there's a boulder that fell in last thursday, or a rubber ducky that squeaks if I squeeze it," Alexandra says, satirically.

Unamused and completely uninterested, Polly just rolls her eyes and continues. "Maybe there are those cave lizards that have evolved to the point they don't have eyes. Or maybe there's an underground river that runs all the way to the ocean."

"Can we just get on with our walk? We don't need to know what's in the cave. We have no way of finding out what's in the cave. There's probably nothing in the cave." Alexandra walks off.

Dominic and Polly just look at each other. This was the most mysterious thing they had seen during their walk through the countryside.

I don't care what you identify as, so long as I understand what you mean by whatever you identify as and you understand what I mean when I identify as an atheist.

Does possibilian work?

This argument is nonsense. We find it hard to imagine things having no cause because we live within the universe and evolved to understand things that happen on Earth, which do tend to have causes. We have no basis on which to assume that the same applies to the universe itself; just for a start, what does it even mean for one thing to cause another before time began?

No. It is nonsense to say, one moment the entire universe was compacted into a 0D point, and the next moment it burst out into 6 directions spontaneously, for no reason. An object in a perfectly stable state (a single point in this case) will stay stable, until it is destabilized. It cannot destabilize itself, or it is not perfectly stable. If you need me to explain why a zero-dimensional point must be stable, let me know.

Now, how do we define time? Time is a change, a sequence of events. We measure it by counting cycles of things. Now imagine we have a mass of substance X. It, unlike all the matter we have in the universe, is completely solid and perfectly rigid. Photons bounce off it when they get close, making it shine white, without altering the state of the object in any way. Likewise all electromagnetic forces are repelled by it, allowing us to hold and move it. Time passes around us, and cells in our body age and die, radioactive isotopes change composition, and life continues. But since that chunk of substance X has not changed in any way, no time has passed from its perspective, and it can be said t = 0. Now, say we have an equally alien substance Y that smashes into X and causes ripples to spread out from the impact point. Starting that moment, time begins to tick, and the waves make their way around its surface. Every time the first wave makes its way back around to the starting point, one unit of time has passed. Now, lets say the object is shaped such that after some initial clashing of waves as they make their way around to the other side of the object, the flow of the waves stabilizes in a looping manner. (Note the waves don't die down -- conservation of energy). If there is no change whatsoever from period 1 to period 2 of the wave loop, the waves will continue forever in the same pattern, until disturbed by some outside substance Y that is capable of altering it. So essentially, now substance X is once again stable, implying that no time is passing once more. This is true if we redefine X as a 4 dimensional object, the new dimension being time (the time it takes to complete one cycle). (Remember, time is the same kind of dimension as space, and space is the same kind of dimension as time. If you want I can use special relativity to explain how if you reach the speed of light, what you used to say was "in front" of you becomes your future, and what was "behind you" is your past, and now you look in front and behind you to see what lies in the future. I am not making this up.).

So, time flow is not the same from all perspectives, and something stable will remain stable until influenced. Questions?

(Also, abhorring some possibility does not rule out that it could be true.)

No dip. That's why it's so scary! Think about what that would imply: every trillion years or so I wake back up and live the exact same life, for eternity.

IWhat. No, concepts can't be intelligent things; love can't react to anything because it's a feeling felt in human brains and it's the humans that do the reacting; chaos can't react to anything because it's a way of describing things that lack apparent organization. God is a concept, because concepts exist within minds; they don't have some independent magical existence that could be intelligent. And you can't be nothing more than a concept because in order to use a computer and type that post, you must be part of physical reality. I can't tell if you're joking with this whole paragraph.

Look, there's a definite physical connection between the mind and the brain, right? Somehow the concepts in my mind interact with the physical world through me. Somehow, abstract representations of concepts are fed into my consciousness in qualia format, which I then use to process. It's as if my conscious mind is communicating with the concepts activated by my brain, interacting with each other however they fit together, forming new concepts which old concepts are part of, and ultimately influencing my behavior. A concept in my mind is just something that arises from my brain, like consciousness. It interacts with other concepts in my brain the same way my consciousness does. So why can't concepts themselves have some level of "consciousness"?

Please, don't just be close minded about this because it sounds wonky. I am suggesting this as a possibility.

 

[Butterfree]

What?? Based on everything I've said so far, it's clear I'm not a deist. I can see how you got that misconception, but you are effectively strawmanning me by categorizing me that way.

That, and the rest of the sentence it was part of, was using a general you and a hypothetical if: "If you have no evidence for God, which is the case if you're a deist since deists believe God doesn't interact with the universe (at least as I understand deism), then God isn't the logical conclusion for you to draw."

And I was arguing against deism because you brought it up. Arguing against your own example of a belief that supposedly is "no more religious than atheists" is not strawmanning; it is countering what you said. Strawmanning is when you (general you again) argue against a weaker version of the argument the opponent made, but you did make that argument; whether you are personally a deist does not change the fact that you advanced an argument for deism.

"Can we just get on with our walk? We don't need to know what's in the cave. We have no way of finding out what's in the cave. There's probably nothing in the cave." Alexandra walks off.

Dominic and Polly just look at each other. This was the most mysterious thing they had seen during their walk through the countryside.

But that's not what Alexandra believes. Alexandra does not have some specific belief about what would or would not be found in the cave if they did examine it. She is perfectly content to say she has no idea. The reason she is arguing against Dominic is not that she is convinced there is nothing in the cave: she is arguing against Dominic because his laptop idea is baseless and nonsensical. Any of Polly's ideas advanced on their own would also be baseless and nonsensical to a somewhat lesser degree, and yes, even "There is nothing whatsoever in the cave" would be pretty baseless and nonsensical, but she isn't advancing any of them. Her position is "We don't know anything about what is or isn't down there; we have no basis on which to even speculate at the moment, so why on Earth would you believe some specific thing is there?"

Alexandra would love to get climbing equipment and see what's in the cave for real - but they don't have that right now, so she's not going to make any assertions about what is or isn't in it until such a time that they do. Meanwhile, however, she does know that either way it's highly, highly unlikely to be a laptop.

I'm not sure Alexandra and Polly disagree at all about the cave, to be honest. Polly just keeps insisting on bringing up all the different theoretical possibilities, whereas Alexandra thinks that's pointless.

No. It is nonsense to say, one moment the entire universe was compacted into a 0D point, and the next moment it burst out into 6 directions spontaneously, for no reason. An object in a perfectly stable state (a single point in this case) will stay stable, until it is destabilized. It cannot destabilize itself, or it is not perfectly stable. If you need me to explain why a zero-dimensional point must be stable, let me know. ...

You're still using intuitive ideas (a point can't just suddenly expand for no reason, things stay stable until they're destabilized) to make assertions about something that isn't necessarily intuitive at all. Even within the universe, things are sometimes completely counterintuitive at the levels that are irrelevant to the macro level which we occupy in our daily lives; have you read about quantum physics experiments demonstrating that there is no such thing as one particular photon, for instance? The same intuition that tells you a point can't just suddenly expand for no reason also tells you that if you shoot two photons from two photon emitters and then detect a single photon it must be either the photon from the first photon emitter or the second one, but this is demonstrably not so. You can't trust intuition when it comes to things our intuition wasn't designed to operate on, and our intuition was most certainly not designed to operate on the universe as a zero-dimensional point before the beginning of time.

I'm not saying the universe didn't in some sense have a cause, but at that level you really can't assume anything on intuition alone. I'd be perfectly open to a physical argument saying the universe must have a cause - I'm no physicist, but if an actual physicist does say so and back it up with what seem to be actual physics, I'm not qualified to argue - but you're concluding that with intuition, not physics. (Specifically, not physics that would obviously apply outside of the universe itself.)

Look, there's a definite physical connection between the mind and the brain, right? Somehow the concepts in my mind interact with the physical world through me. Somehow, abstract representations of concepts are fed into my consciousness in qualia format, which I then use to process. It's as if my conscious mind is communicating with the concepts activated by my brain, interacting with each other however they fit together, forming new concepts which old concepts are part of, and ultimately influencing my behavior. A concept in my mind is just something that arises from my brain, like consciousness. It interacts with other concepts in my brain the same way my consciousness does. So why can't concepts themselves have some level of "consciousness"?

Your consciousness doesn't "interact with" concepts in your brain; the concepts in your brain are part of your consciousness, like variables that are set when a computer program is run. The variables themselves aren't independent computer programs with some mystical existence of their own.

 

[Light]

have you read about quantum physics experiments demonstrating that there is no such thing as one particular photon, for instance? The same intuition that tells you a point can't just suddenly expand for no reason also tells you that if you shoot two photons from two photon emitters and then detect a single photon it must be either the photon from the first photon emitter or the second one

Interesting. I've read about the one where they shoot one photon that has to pass through a sheet with two slits, and the photon passes through both slits. Where can I find the one you're talking about?

Your consciousness doesn't "interact with" concepts in your brain; the concepts in your brain are part of your consciousness, like variables that are set when a computer program is run. The variables themselves aren't independent computer programs with some mystical existence of their own.

I like your analogy. Actually I think concepts are more like methods. There's so many if-else, calculations, and referencing going on with concepts. (I mean, I guess some simplistic concepts are more like primitive data types). But in that way our consciousness does call on concepts to help sort out data (which frequently call on each other), and we can't possibly follow all that logic consciously. So much logic goes on in our brain, most of what we get is just a return value. Our brain runs so much for us, giving rise to the phenomenon of intuition. Now that I think about it, concepts are more like objects than methods. Each has it's own properties or variables, there are so many things you can do with a concept, giving rise to a vast number of methods contained in each concept, and concepts fit nicely into a hierarchy framework.

 

[Butterfree]

Interesting. I've read about the one where they shoot one photon that has to pass through a sheet with two slits, and the photon passes through both slits. Where can I find the one you're talking about?

I was thinking of this one (although I slightly misremembered how it was set up; point is, the result it demonstrates is the same, that at the fundamental level the universe makes no distinction between one photon and another). I read about it here; that post probably won't make much sense on its own, but it is part of a very interesting, non-mysterious explanation of quantum mechanics that I highly recommend if you're interested. (It also goes into how the universe runs on complex numbers.)

I like your analogy. Actually I think concepts are more like methods. There's so many if-else, calculations, and referencing going on with concepts. (I mean, I guess some simplistic concepts are more like primitive data types). But in that way our consciousness does call on concepts to help sort out data (which frequently call on each other), and we can't possibly follow all that logic consciously. So much logic goes on in our brain, most of what we get is just a return value. Our brain runs so much for us, giving rise to the phenomenon of intuition. Now that I think about it, concepts are more like objects than methods. Each has it's own properties or variables, there are so many things you can do with a concept, giving rise to a vast number of methods contained in each concept, and concepts fit nicely into a hierarchy framework.

I'm pretty much with you there. Point is, concepts exist within our brains; if God is "just a concept", that means God only exists as an idea within human brains, and thus can't have created the universe or otherwise done anything gods are usually credited with.

 

[Light]

I'm pretty much with you there. Point is, concepts exist within our brains; if God is "just a concept", that means God only exists as an idea within human brains, and thus can't have created the universe or otherwise done anything gods are usually credited with.

Okay, but what if God is a concept that exists within the mind of the universe?

I guess this is getting a little redundant, but it might be a more precise way to define God, if we can describe the concept by saying it is like "love" or "chaos".

 

[opaltiger]

Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

Time (as we know it) literally started with the Big Bang. 'Before' the Big Bang is just a linguistic device because we have no other way of imagining what the state of the universe could possibly have been at that point. At the very least, even if there was a timeframe before the Big Bang, anything that happened in it can have absolutely no effect on the current timeframe, and thus it is convenient to treat 'our' time as beginning with the Big Bang.

 

[Tarvos]

Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

Yeaaaaaaah. I don't go for this - beginning of universe of beginning of universe. Saying it's before the beginning of time just doesn't mean anything.

And if there were no traces of an asteroid collision?

Then we'd be getting deeper into wtf territory, but I'm pretty sure something could come out of the internal geology of the Earth, or something happening to the Sun, and so on and so forth. Really, mass extinction has happened multiple times on earth. It's not that big of a deal. It just sucks to be in it, but since those events happen once every tens of millions of years, most people are just lucky bastards they never run into it. If we do - well - then I will never understand why dear old God sent the apocalypse raining down on us. Maybe he is a malign little bitch after all? Who knows. What I do know, though, is that an asshole God like that sure shouldn't be the same one as the Christians like to believe in the Bible, unless their idea was that everyone should randomly be killed. (And how is God going to tell who is Christian and worthy of entering heaven during the apocalypse exactly???)

It just doesn't make any goddamn sense to presuppose it. You could, but you'd just be wasting time.

No, you don't understand my argument. Maybe you'll listen if Butterfree says it.

This is all I'm trying to say.

Yeah, I understand that, and it is POSSIBLE, but just REALLY DAMN UNLIKELY. Which is why I'm not giving it the time of day as a serious argument for why we're here. I don't care whether it's possible, I care whether it's a plausible explanation, and it isn't. The fact that you could attribute all these events to God (why is a mystery to me, but let's assume we can) just means that if you witnessed all of that, it could mean God existed! (Not necessarily, there could still be another explanation).

Just because it could happen doesn't mean it will or is in any way relevant to our daily lives. I could sprout antlers, but I'm not counting on it. That's my point. I'm Alexandra, you're Polly. It's not a fruitful discussion to me.

Really? Then can you please explain how molecules in a cell are trafficked so effectively from place to place so that they can carry out the right chemical reactions? For example, how does mRNA find its way from the nucleolus to the ribosomes? How does pyruvate find its way into the matrix of the mitochondria to carry out the Krebs cycle? Because when I asked my biology teachers they gave me the impression that scientists are still clueless about several aspects of cellular biochemistry.

Most molecules diffuse through the cellular fluid. Some are transported through other means (like through the proton pump gradient). Some aspects of biochemistry we indeed know less about, you are correct about this. But my point is that compared to the things we know for sure about intelligence, it's a whole lot more. Biochemistry, is still chemistry, and it's far more predictable than intelligence will ever be. So congratulations, you've proven I don't know everything! I knew that too, I'm not a biochemist, though I studied some of it (and some of your questions lend themselves to a good scan of Lehninger).

No, it's more like saying there might be a laptop in a cave, given the universe (or, to be more specific, our 3D plane) had to have a cause.

Yeah, and you know I take Alexandra's position. Fuck it, there could be a laptop, there could be a giant dancing turtle, I have no idea. But it's pointless to assume there's anything more in there than a lot of rocks, some water, and if you're unlucky, a bat or a bear. Now that, I'd put money on.

Whatever, I still think my definitions are better, and more widely recognized, but fine, it's really pointless to argue about, so we'll use yours. (By the way, I'm not sure what you're referring to as the material plane, because scientists believe, based on special relativity, that time is a dimension in the same way as space. I'm not going to waste my time explaining it to you, so here).

If the universe includes all material dimensions, then our own 3 dimensional plane still needs a cause if it expanded out from a zero dimensional point in the big bang. And there could be other 3 dimensional planes outside our own that are just inches away.

I don't buy this, but it's a discussion I don't want to get into because these deep matters of physics aren't my forte. So I'm just going to refer to your discussion with Butterfree on this one and say that your theory doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

What I meant, anyway, is that what you and I say is the same universe, you just expand the boundaries a little. That's fine, but whether there's one 3D or 4D universe, or 20 of them - they're all, eventually, encompassed within a grander thing we call the universe. And that's always existed, multiverse, multiplanes or no. It doesn't matter what scientists use to describe it and frankly I don't care, as long as it covers the entire material universe(s) we know.

So basically what you're saying is, we've come to a problem more intriguing than any other, so profound as to define our very existence, so difficult that despite all the time and effort we have put into its solution over the last century, we still have no idea even where to begin searching for the answer, and you're sure there is a perfectly mechanical explanation that incorporates no more than the elements we already know about the physical universe?

It could incorporate some physics we've yet to discover, but I think that, eventually, there's a decent explanation for the universe in terms of physics that's relatively simple and easy to comprehend compared to some God, yes.

My view is this: we're just a bunch of cells unfortunately stuck together on a big great lump of rock. We happen to be able to understand this and have fun doing it. We might as well! Yeah, that's a cold view of our existence. But you know I find it liberating. Why? Because it means I don't have to give a fuck about anything at all and I can be awesome and do awesome things that I feel like giving a fuck about. It's a very positive, healthy way of looking at things.

By the way, I am not assuming anything. If there is an explanation like that, great! Don't expect me to automatically assume there is.

I don't care what the hell you assume! Do you really think I find that so important! I only assume I do because hell, it's what I think makes sense! You need to be free to assume whatever you want, or not assume at all and stay in vague generalities if that is what you prefer.

I'm interested in what is, and what I can reliably predict to happen in the future. I'm not interested in crystal gazing and speculations because the odds are I'll be wrong anyway. I'm letting the rest come as it is. The universe is gonna stay as far as I know and I'm gonna be here, enjoying it, keeping my earth alive for my friends and fellow countrymen as long as I've got the possibility to do such a thing.

While I could go off on a big long rant about this, I will suffice it to say that is not the scientific mind of inquiry.

The scientific mind of inquiry prefers to keep itself concerned with things it can actually prove. It doesn't really ever want to say anything about God because that's not what science is about. The only gods you can disprove are the ones having an active, tangible effect on the universe that you can measure. If they don't, it's irrelevant to talk about them anyway.

Anyway, that's totally beside the point. The point is there should be a reason why strings and things are there to begin with, whether we remain blissfully ignorant of that reason or not. And then that needs a reason too. I have no problem with terminal regressions; they're only logical.[/QUOTE]

Why does there need to be a reason? And if there is, why can't it be any normal reason of physics? The problem is not that the terminal regression exists, the problem is the terminal regression makes God more unlikely than a good old-fashioned explanation provided through physics. However unlikely that is, God is more unlikely (because you need to postulate something to explain God). If you posit something must have caused those strings to be there, then you need an explanation for that cause as well.

If you're dismissing my ideas because they sound like "pseudo-Buddhistic intellectual crap", you're close minded.

I am close minded then, I accepted this long ago. I don't accept fairytales for theories, and if that makes me close minded because it could potentially be an explanation in another parallel universe with odds smaller than me turning into a kangaroo steak, yeah sure. Call me close-minded, I call it rational. I'm still, for better or worse, gonna go with the ideas that at least make proven, complete sense. This vague talk isn't a part of that in my brain.

This is a debate people can hold forever. But I'm firmly on the side of being close-minded because I feel all the evidence points the other way. Like I said - a good, nice, plausible argument for God would neatly do the trick. But I can appear close-minded precisely because every time this argument of religion gets brought up, people fail to do exactly such a thing. They don't realise how vague and bewildering their ideas are, how far OUT THERE it is. To me all the things you talk about souls and Gods and possibilities of concepts like chaos being eternal - it all sounds completely bizarre. My whole view of the world is etched into something so much simpler than that, a quiet logical way of doing it which makes a whole lot more sense with what I can see and do - that it just makes ten times more sense for me to do it this way. And for me to accept God as an explanation for anything, it should be able to fit that test that it could work using those human rules of thumb.

Do you understand this - it's not the possibility God could exist I reject. I just reject the fact that it's being based on such a blatant load of bizarre out there stories and ideas that are completely illogical and ungraspable (for those same reasons) that I reject it. It's just so hugely monumentally unlikely that it makes zero sense to me. That's why I reject it, that's why I call whining about souls pseudo-intellectual garbage, and that's why it appears close minded - because to me, what you're saying, is complete abracadabra and my brain doesn't work in theological ways. My brain can use maths or physics or linguistics, but theology is not part of the vocab. It doesn't, intrinsically, mean anything to me to talk about God or a soul.

What you're trying to do here is fit a square peg in a round hole. I understand enough of what you say to be able to tell that it's a whole lot more complex and unlikely than any theory I have about the world, even though my theories are not complete and not entirely formed. But that's ok, malleability is a pro.

Just assume I work this way: the laptop could be there, but you're not entering a productive discussion about it because the laptop can be substituted for anything else that's an equally silly postulation. It's just pointless to talk about. If you wanted me to admit the laptop could be there, I did so a long time ago. If you want me to admit I think it's likely, forget about it.

Your idea of concept is far too narrow for what I'm talking about. This is where I start talking about postmodern subjectivity and post-structuralism, but you dismiss postmodernism, so I'm not really interested in pursuing this line of inquiry with you.

Yeah, I don't fly with it. I like tangible things. My philosophy is to let philosophy go and do away with itself. I don't want to be a sociopath, I want to be someone who uses good common sense and is nice to people when they deserve it, and when they don't I just leave them the hell alone. A concept I think of is "love" when I think of how much people do to be together. Chaos if there's a cluttered way of being. Order if there is a possible mathematical description of a pattern. Death if we lose consciousness and vital functions permanently. And so on and so forth. Mysticism, solipsism, the whole shebang - it just doesn't mean anything to say it and it's all vague destructured ideas about things that aren't really fun to think about and don't get you anywhere in life.

The concept of a soul, for example, is one I simply don't find exhilarating. It doesn't mean anything to me. It just means you're talking nonsensical crap to me because to me it's pseudo-philosophical vague whateverness.

To me, this sounds like when religious people point out something like, "America was founded on Christian principles, and God's blessing has been on it ever since." Yeah no. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

But it's not. It's systematic. The higher the proportion of atheists, the less crime, the more welfare. If you look at what the poorest continent is - Africa - it is also insanely religious. Europe and east Asia are the most well off nations on earth - and they are overwhelmingly more secular. Somehow, I doubt I'm off when I'm saying apparently the secularists have a better moral compass?

When have you seen atheists fight a war in the name of religion? That's right, they haven't, because they wouldn't go to war over it. Wars are fought for three reasons

1) religion
2) resources/greed
3) patriotism


Atheists may be in wars, but they're not initiating them because they feel atheism needs to dominate the earth at all cost. The most atheist countries are notoriously pacifist and keep their noses out of most wars. Why? Because most atheists care too much about this planet to want to ravage it with guns and military expenditures. What the hell do atheists want to fight a war for?

Just ask yourself that question. Think about it: why is Sweden or Iceland or Norway such a good place to live? Because they've got a good distribution of wealth and they've got a practical separation of church and state. Those people trust in each other, in what they do. They don't want to fight a war, they want to live and be prosperous, and they can't have religious infighting destroying that.

I love humanity too much to want them to go and kill each other just for the goddamn sake of it. Every time I do as much as my postman's round, I am amazed at people's hospitality. And I don't think this charity is all a religious front for being nice to me. I think people are just generally nicer when they know what they're doing and they're comfortable with themselves.

This is why I am fine living where I do. Because if it's a hot day, people will be kind enough to open the door for me and offer me water. In fact, some people will be so kind as to fill me up a sports bottle and particularly ask me to keep it and NOT RETURN THE BOTTLE WHEN I AM DONE. No matter that they could possibly need it in the future, no matter that they won't have that resource - they ask me not to return it. (Of course, I returned it, and they accepted it - but mentioning that I did never have to do this). They will buy me pastries for new years. They will offer me soft drinks on hot days. All of this - this absolute kindness - is why I want to live in a sane country where people think this common sense of being kind is a normal way of living.

That's why I love my country. That's why I think I can live in a secular society, because I can still go around a village and do this. I don't have to fear Muslim terrorists or Christians handing out salvation papers scaring me. Whenever I come through town, those same people that offer me water will greet me on the street and they might ask me for directions if they need them.

This is also why I loved the Icelanders when I was there. This mentality of live, let live, and helping a friend in need, is why I do love people. That's what's really important to me. The fact people would take care of my belongings while I was out hiking in the wilderness. The fact that the rules for a wild traveller like me were broken, and we did get hot water to make our soup and eat our dinner. The fact that even though I horribly lost the key, the Blue Lagoon employee let me get off with a warning. The fact that when you ask about the specific cuisine of Iceland, people bring you back hangikjöt to try. The fact that when you don't know someone's language and you still try to say something in it, they smile back at you, ask you where you are from, and say something in yours (this happened to me in Prague).

That is a much more beautiful sense of belonging and philosophy than any mysticism can ever give me, and that's what I can experience every day with my family, my friends and my surroundings. And I fight and stand up for my beliefs because when I think about the religious I see this taken away from people every day. All the time.

Religions have blood on their hands. They have always had this. It's not hard to scour history for the evidence on this. I don't want to live in a society where this tension can flare up. Where you have to pick sides. Where you are asked if you are a Protestant or a Catholic atheist.

Kay then, we're different.

Yeah, I'd observed this a while ago, haha...

 

[hello]

I believe our attitude should be this: Marginalisation is wrong, and if you disagree, shut up and go away.

I'm pretty sure this is the example sentence they use in the dictionary for the entry "hypocrisy."