What is all this stuff really about? It never ceases to amaze me how passionate atheists can be about nothing. I mean by that, atheism is supposed to be nothing more than an absence of belief, right? Yet so many times I see them full of fire and arrogance, blowing their little minds just because someone holds a view they don't like. Why? Consider this tirade by Arizona Atheist on Atheist Watch:
Arizona Atheist
Faith is bullshit. Your claiming it's "complex" does nothing to solve your problem. Theists have no evidence for their beliefs and that's that. All "arguments" are simply "god of the gaps" arguments and nothing more. Due to the tremendous lack of proof/evidence for all theistic claims it's all based on "blind faith." So, yes Loftus is correct. Faith is nonsense. Clearly outraged by belief, but why? The major thinkers in Western culture have been religious, only a tiny handful of great thinkers throughout history have been true atheists, yet to look at such comments (which are a dime a dozen) one would think that belief was the most idiotic thing anyone ever thought of. One of the things that really strikes me as absurd is their insistence that "there's no evidence at all..." This is bound to strike me the wrong way when I have 42 arguments for the existence of God (of course we all know the importance of the number 42). No evidence, except these 42 arguments! Why the histrionics? here I will argue two things: (1) The reason it seems that there is no evidence is because atheists value only the methods that give them the answers they want, they do not accept evdience for God because it has to come from the wrong methods, and they reject the methods becasue they are mining their data. (2) They are angered by the concept that other methods may be valid because would imply that they are only looking at the surface of the issues. Why that should I alarm them so I'm not sure. I think it's a cultural thing, the hate group derives some sense of superiority from deriding the target (according to the standard FBI model).
As I have pointed out numerous times, belief in God is not merely adding a fact to the universe. The question of God is not a question about just the existence of one more thing. It's a question of orientation to being as a whole, especially to one's own individual being. If God exists then all of reality is something other than we think it is. If God is real then I am more than myself I am a creature of God. Atheists and theists live in two different worlds. Thus no amount of empirical data is valid as an answer. So the kinds of answers that would count cannot be sought though scientific evidence alone. The atheist approach is to see this as a limitation or an indication that there is no God. That approach obviously fist what they want to see in the first place. Now many of them wills ay "I was a Christian for 20 years." None of them ever follow that up by saying "I scored real high on the M scale, i had mystical consciousness and union with Christ and Baptism of the Holy Spirit and then I realize it was all false and delusion and made up.The only people who come to this conclusion are those are didn't have it in the first place.
I'm not arguing that they weren't "saved" or they weren't "real Christians." Being a "real Christian" and having Baptism of the Holy Spirit, or "mystical experience" are three different things, they are not three different names for the same thing. Nor am I saying that strong Christians can't give up their faith. Bu strong Christians tend to give up their faith because they fall into sin, they outgrow their milieu and don't go on to higher understanding, or they suffer grave disappointment (such as death of a spouse) and never work through it. No one that I know of ever gave up belief in God just because some intellectual argument was hard to answer, or some body of work intimated that it wasn't true, and here I am speaking of those who had the advanced personal experiences. Those sorts of experiences indicate that it is real. These are such deep confirmations in the heart of hearts that they cannot be easily denied or given up. Of course atheists don't even value this form of knowledge. Deeply fearing the subjective, they just ascribe it to "psychology" and for them that term is as good as saying "lie."
The difference in these two ways of thinking is striking. But the atheists can offer no evidence or arguments to invalidate the phenomenological approach. Faith is an existential response to an phenomenological apprehension. This means that faith is personal individual response, not one formed by education or trained through opponent conditioning; it is a response of the individual although course cultural and learning and even genetics come into it. It is a response to the apprehension of sense data apart from the organizing principles imposed upon sense data by genetics, culture, trainnig, psychological pre disposition. It's a response to the suggestions made by the phenomena themselves as we apprehend them. By "existential" it is fundamental to our existence and within the moment of perception. What exactly is being perceived? That we can't know, but it varies from person to person. Or I should say the vehicle of it varies from person to person. One person may find that a full blown mystical experience is what brings them around, another may be exposed to just one phrase or one image and find that merely a pang of the heart is all that is needed.
Atheists draw such a hard and fast connection between science and the world. One could easily get the impression that the world comes with little labels on rocks and trees that say "naturalistic." If religion was true the labels would say "trees by God." But when I argue my Transcendental Signifier argument they will say that we are just imposing meaning. That's one tier standard response. Human brain sees pattern and imposes meaning upon pattern it's just ink blots. The world is a big ink blot. But they don't apply that to science. They seem to think scinece is just straight forward and literally true and unlimited in its ability to know all of reality that ever be. We derive the kind of certainty from scinece that we do because it's dealing mainly with things that can be observed. These are relatively easy questions. No one thinks a question like "where did the universe come form" is easy. Atheists seem to infer that it is easy and if challenges that sense of certainty they become irate. I often wonder why certainty is so important to them. But have totally obscured the truth of scinece, that it is culturally constructed and not absolute. Their ire is such that when I argued this on CARM once one of them said "you are scum!" Of course they pronounce the basis of knowledge (epistemology) to be 'bull shit" because it's philosophy, but they never try to undersatnd the philosophical basis to their empiricism. They take that as absolute proof beyond question.
Science is a relative cultural construct. It is not absolute knowledge, it is not progress based upon cumulative effects. It works by paradigm shifts, with each shift the whole ground changes. Every time it changes we start over. It is not linear or progressive.
Example: Top down causality in brain mind.
top down means something above the brain is directing causal states in brain function: the mind is not reduced to the brain because its directing the brain. Top down causlity is a scientific fact, it was proven log ago, but because it disproves the reductionist ideology it is ignored as though its not true:
Quote: Rosenberg (from journal of conscientiousness studies)
"Take the matter of 'downward causation' to which Harman gives some attention. Why should this be an issue in brain dynamics? As Erich Harth points out in Chapter 44, connections between higher and lower centers of the brain are reciprocal. They go both ways, up and down. The evidence (the scientific evidence) for downward causation was established decades ago by the celebrated Spanish histologist Ramon y Cajal, yet the discussion goes on. Why? The answer seems clear: If brains work like machines, they are easier to understand. The facts be damned!"[Miller quoting Rosenberg, Journal of Consciousness Studies, op. cit.]
e.Consciousness as a basic property of nature.
JCS, 3 (1), 1996, pp.33-35
Naturalism loses its ground.
This is a probabilistic justification argument; It does not seek to directly prove that God exists, but that it is rational to believe in God and that there are good reasons to. In a nut shell the argument says that the concept of materialism has been changing over the years. It has now incorporated so many idea that were once lumped in with magic, supernatural, or generally "unscientific" categories that the old concept of materialism as an objection to God belief and a refutation of religion is now obsolete. Essentially there are 10 areas:
(1) Quantum Theory (no need for cause/effect)
(2) Big bang Cosmology (realm beyond the natural)
(3) Medicine (healing)
(4) Consciousness (invites concept of dualism)
(6) Maslow's Archetypes (universal ideas)
(7) Miracles (empirical evidence)
(8) Near Death Experiences (scientific evidence)
(9) Esp Research (the fact that they do it)
(10) Validity of religious experience (Shrinks no longer assume pathology)
The argument turns on the basic historical fact that atheists have lost the ground upon which they dismissed God from science in the first place. In their book Lindberg and Numbers demonstrate that the moment at which this happened was when La Place said "I have no need of that hypothesis," meaning the idea that God created the universe. What he meant was that God was not needed as an explanation because we now have naturalistic cause and effect, which explains everything. But the atheist has cashed in cause and effect to over come the Big Bang.
Naturalists are now willing to consider ideas like the self caused universe, Hawkings unbounded condition which removes cause completely as a consideration; or based upon quantum theory they are willing to accept the notion that causality is an illusion, that the universe could just pop up out of nothing. With that commitment they lose the ground upon which they first removed God from consideration. Now, perhaps they still do not need God as a causal explanation, but in the Religious a pirori argument, and in the innate religious instinct argument I say that belief was never predicated upon a need for explanation in the first place.
Nevertheless, the fact still remains, the reason for dismissing God was the sufficiency of natural causation as explainable, with that gone there is no longer any grounds for dismissing consideration of God from the universe.I will argue that more than that is going. There is a paradigm shift underway which demonstrates a total change in scientific thinking in many areas and over many disciplines. That change demonstrates that the materialist concept is wrong; there is more to reality than just the material world. There are other aspects to the material world wich are non-deterministic, non-mechanistic, and which call into question the whole presupposition of excluding the supernatural from consideration.
9 comments:
What he meant was that God was not needed as an explanation because we now have naturalistic cause and effect, which explains everything. But the atheist has cashed in cause and effect to over come the Big Bang.
So you are basing the whole of atheism on the pronouncement of a guy who died in 1827?
Back in the real world, modern science accepts that at the quantum level - and possibly the Big Bang - you can have an effect with no cause, and atheists are perfectly happy with that.
There is a paradigm shift underway which demonstrates a total change in scientific thinking in many areas and over many disciplines. That change demonstrates that the materialist concept is wrong; there is more to reality than just the material world.
It will be interesting to see where you go with that. Strictly, materialism says that everything is due to material objects, and that has long been discarded. Again, QM shows that that is not the case. I assume, therefore, you mean philosophical naturalism (and I will note that consciousness as an emergent property is perfectly compatible with that). I have not seen anything to suggest any disciple is about to embrace the supernatural.
Pix
It's a question of orientation to being as a whole ... Thus no amount of empirical data is valid as an answer. So the kinds of answers that would count cannot be sought though scientific evidence alone.
- This is how theists define it. It's based on your a priori presumption that there is more than what is available to scientific investigation. But it means that you have to abandon any reasonable epistemology to accept the existence of something for which there is no evidence.
That approach obviously fist what they want to see in the first place.
- Projection. The naturalistic approach is evidence-based. Religionism is wishful thinking.
No one that I know of ever gave up belief in God just because some intellectual argument was hard to answer
- Strong faith tends to be deeply ingrained, and based on emotion and other non-rational kinds of appeal. It tends to resist rational argument. But if you read de-conversion accounts, you will see that loss of faith comes from questioning the wild claims and illogical aspects of religious beliefs, while naturalism is arrived at through evidence and reason.
But the atheists can offer no evidence or arguments to invalidate the phenomenological approach.
- And the theists can offer no evidence so support it, and their logical arguments are never sound.
One could easily get the impression that the world comes with little labels on rocks and trees that say "naturalistic."
- Again, this is projection. From observing theists, one gets the impression that the world comes with little labels on rocks and trees that say "made by God." But that's not what the evidence tell us.
Of course they pronounce the basis of knowledge (epistemology) to be 'bull shit" because it's philosophy, but they never try to understand the philosophical basis to their empiricism.
- You are totally wrong about this. Empiricism is the best-established and highly regarded epistemology, strongly based in long-standing philosophical foundations. Religious epistemologies are lame attempts to create a philosophical basis for what can't be justified through logic and reason.
Science is a relative cultural construct. It is not absolute knowledge, it is not progress based upon cumulative effects. It works by paradigm shifts, with each shift the whole ground changes. Every time it changes we start over. It is not linear or progressive.
- You don't understand science at all. While there have been some paradigm shifts, they always build upon existing foundations. When taken as a whole, scientific knowledge is a large interconnected web, where the pieces fit together, and they reinforce one another across many different disciplines. And don't try to pretend that religion isn't a cultural construct, or hasn't been subject to paradigm shifts.
Top down causlity is a scientific fact, it was proven log ago, but because it disproves the reductionist ideology it is ignored as though its not true
- It is not a scientific fact. Causality itself is not what religionists think it is. Scientists recognize that the linear view (a causes b, b causes c, etc.) is much too simplistic. That goes for both top-dawn and bottom-up views of causality. The reality (at macro level) is that the whole state of affairs at one moment leads to the state of affairs at the next moment. Everything is intertwined.
they are willing to accept the notion that causality is an illusion, that the universe could just pop up out of nothing. With that commitment they lose the ground upon which they first removed God from consideration.
- Science has always been evidence-based. Belief is justified by observation. And that something religionists just can't say (without lying).
i don't always agree with you and your views(or with the other comments on this and many other cases), but from time to time you make a post that i find quite enjoyable to read. good job.
who are you talking to?
Answering Pixie
Anonymous said...
What he meant was that God was not needed as an explanation because we now have naturalistic cause and effect, which explains everything. But the atheist has cashed in cause and effect to over come the Big Bang.
So you are basing the whole of atheism on the pronouncement of a guy who died in 1827?
they don't say much that's new
Back in the real world, modern science accepts that at the quantum level - and possibly the Big Bang - you can have an effect with no cause, and atheists are perfectly happy with that.
That is not really true. No scientist anywhere ever says "Ok there is no reason for existence, don't worry about it." they all keep trying to explain it. You can't apply QM to rule out cause and effect. It's only a special sense in which its meaningful.
There is a paradigm shift underway which demonstrates a total change in scientific thinking in many areas and over many disciplines. That change demonstrates that the materialist concept is wrong; there is more to reality than just the material world.
Great and it will probably wind up with God. In the meantime why can't we have God, and/or ultimate reality and agree to differ?
It will be interesting to see where you go with that. Strictly, materialism says that everything is due to material objects, and that has long been discarded. Again, QM shows that that is not the case. I assume, therefore, you mean philosophical naturalism (and I will note that consciousness as an emergent property is perfectly compatible with that). I have not seen anything to suggest any disciple is about to embrace the supernatural.
First they have to learn what it is. they keep rejecting the wrong thing, there are plenty of arrogant scientists who rule out God because they want to take his place.
im-skeptical said...
It's a question of orientation to being as a whole ... Thus no amount of empirical data is valid as an answer. So the kinds of answers that would count cannot be sought though scientific evidence alone.
- This is how theists define it. It's based on your a priori presumption that there is more than what is available to scientific investigation. But it means that you have to abandon any reasonable epistemology to accept the existence of something for which there is no evidence.
When you say "reasonable epistemology" you really mean "my party line." I really don't believe you know jack shit about epistemology.
That approach obviously fist what they want to see in the first place.
- Projection. The naturalistic approach is evidence-based. Religionism is wishful thinking.
BS! You refuse to even consider rhymes of pro God evidence such as the clear and obvious science that favors mystical experience and proves it's good for you..the fact that it is good for you demonstrates a reality since that's too big a coincidence, that totally escapes you.
No one that I know of ever gave up belief in God just because some intellectual argument was hard to answer\
- Strong faith tends to be deeply ingrained, and based on emotion and other non-rational kinds of appeal. It tends to resist rational argument. But if you read de-conversion accounts, you will see that loss of faith comes from questioning the wild claims and illogical aspects of religious beliefs, while naturalism is arrived at through evidence and reason.
Deconversion bull shit proves one thing only, they did not know God. no one who knew God would give up a relationship with the king of the universe for the kindof ignorant bull crap atheists spout!
But the atheists can offer no evidence or arguments to invalidate the phenomenological approach.
- And the theists can offer no evidence so support it, and their logical arguments are never sound.
The fact that it is phenomenological is backing, that is the support, genius.
One could easily get the impression that the world comes with little labels on rocks and trees that say "naturalistic."
- Again, this is projection. From observing theists, one gets the impression that the world comes with little labels on rocks and trees that say "made by God." But that's not what the evidence tell us.
Well it does! try looking harder.
Of course they pronounce the basis of knowledge (epistemology) to be 'bull shit" because it's philosophy, but they never try to understand the philosophical basis to their empiricism.
- You are totally wrong about this. Empiricism is the best-established and highly regarded epistemology, strongly based in long-standing philosophical foundations.
You just confirmed what I said above about your "knowledge" of epistemology. There's more to it than just lining up assertions with causes.
Religious epistemologies are lame attempts to create a philosophical basis for what can't be justified through logic and reason.
You think any form of knowing is epistemology, That is wrong. I know how to screw in a light bulb. That doesn't mean I've mastered the epistemology of light. There are no actual religious epistemologies accept that one applies basic epistemic understanding to to the topic.
Science is a relative cultural construct. It is not absolute knowledge, it is not progress based upon cumulative effects. It works by paradigm shifts, with each shift the whole ground changes. Every time it changes we start over. It is not linear or progressive.
- You don't understand science at all.
I don't have to to understand more than you. There is a difference in understanding and mouthing the accepted opinion,
part 2
While there have been some paradigm shifts, they always build upon existing foundations.
You just Kuhn 101. while there have been some paradigm shifts. He writes a paper on Newton he says while there has been some gravity...Anyone will agree to a p sift here and there. The thing makes Kuhn's theory a theory is he says ordinary science works by Pshifts. Building on existing foundations is irrelevant makes me wonder what you think paradigms are?
When taken as a whole, scientific knowledge is a large interconnected web, where the pieces fit together, and they reinforce one another across many different disciplines. And don't try to pretend that religion isn't a cultural construct, or hasn't been subject to paradigm shifts.
You don't know what cultural constructs are. You don't know what religion is. Religion can be a Cultural construct and God be real.
Top down causality is a scientific fact, it was proven long ago, but because it disproves the reductionist ideology it is ignored as though its not true
- It is not a scientific fact.
That was an over statement. It's not a fact in the conventional sense but it is is not unscientific nor is it supernatural, nor intrinsically religion. An atheist could support such a concept and stay an atheist.
Causality itself is not what religionists think it is.
Scientists recognize that the linear view (a causes b, b causes c, etc.) is much too simplistic. That goes for both top-dawn and bottom-up views of causality. The reality (at macro level) is that the whole state of affairs at one moment leads to the state of affairs at the next moment. Everything is intertwined.
they are willing to accept the notion that causality is an illusion, that the universe could just pop up out of nothing. With that commitment they lose the ground upon which they first removed God from consideration.
That is a frank admission that their rejection of God is entirely ego involved. It's absurdly absurd to be willing to accept the universe popped out of noting for no reason and that causality is an illusion; which would mean science is an illusion. But they are still not willing to consider God. so their rejection of God is not based upon facts or logic but upon ego.
- Science has always been evidence-based.
According to what you just said evidence is an illusion,
Belief is justified by observation. And that something religionists just can't say (without lying).
My belief is based upon empirical observations. My sense of God's presence were physical and the changes it wright in my belief were transformative. I was knocked standing up out of a chair by the power of God which at the time I did not believe in and was seeking.
Behold ibcongruity
that should say was not seeking
mostly you. but those two other guys who commented before me too.
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