A lot of media attention (e.g. - here) has focused on the new American Religious Identification Survey of American's views on religion, which finds that 15% of Americans now say they have no religious affiliation, up from 8% in 1990.
Lack of religious affiliation doesn't necessarily imply atheism however. When asked whether they believe in God, only 2.3% of ARIS respondents said that "there is no such thing" as God. However, 5.7% said that they are "not sure," and 4.3% said that "there is no way to be sure." These two latter answers might be categorized as agnostic. Unfortunately, ARIS didn't ask this question in 1990, so we do not know whether the proportion of atheists and agnostics has increased since then.
The ARIS survey may underestimate the true prevalence of atheism. Because of widespread societal prejudice against atheists, some survey respondents might be hesitant to admit their atheism, even in an anonymous poll. We know from polls on other issues that survey respondents often hide their true beliefs when these conflict with perceived societal norms. I suspect that at least some of the people who gave agnostic responses are actually atheists.
The same may be true of some of the 12.1% who picked the answer stating that "There is a higher power, but no personal God." Ironically, this vague phrasing might be perfectly compatible with atheism, depending on how it is interpreted. Assuming that the "higher power" you believe in is not omnipotent, omniscient, or completely benevolent (the standard attributes of God as depicted by the major monotheistic religions), even the most convinced atheist could potentially choose this answer. For example, I consider myself an atheist in the sense that I believe that God as defined above almost certainly does not exist. However, I also think it's perfectly possible that there are extraterrestrial "higher powers" who are vastly more powerful than we are. UFO enthusiasts notwithstanding, I certainly don't believe that the existence of such superpowerful ETs has actually been demonstrated. But neither has anyone definitively proven that they don't exist.
UPDATE: Apparently, ARIS actually did give respondents the opportunity to identify themselves as "atheist" or "agnostic" on one of the other questions in the survey. Only 0.7% of respondents picked "atheist" and 0.9% chose "agnostic" (both numbers up slightly from 2001).
This result powerfully illuminates the social stigma attached to identifying as an atheist. More than two-thirds of the 2.3% of respondents who said that "there is no such thing" as God still didn't self-identify as atheist even though that is what they clearly are. Some of these people may simply be confused about the definition of the word "atheist;" but I doubt that is the main reason for the discrepancy between the two questions. Equally interesting, some 10% of respondents gave answers indicating that they are unsure about whether God exists or not, yet only 0.9% call themselves "agnostic." Here, respondent confusion may play a bigger role, since the term "agnostic" is probably less widely known than "atheist."
Related Posts (on one page):
- Is Atheist Activism Increasing?
- Americans Becoming Less Religious - But Not Necessarily Atheistic:
I don't know what to make of this. Is there a difference between your incredulity on the God question and your openmindedness on the extraterrestrials question? Both are possibilities, no?
If my God were immoral, I would not obey God.
I think the problem of evil (as well as several other arguments) constitutes powerful evidence against the existence of God. I haven't seen any comparably potent refutation of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials (at least ones that are not omnipotent, omniscient, and completely benevolent).
John Michael Greer's book "A World Full of Gods" demonstrates why the problem of evil isn't a substantive issue for polytheists.
Your writing seems to suggest you are open to polytheism and that you objections are limited to the idea of monotheism. Is this a fair statement?
...and just to make it more interesting, let's say the aliens actually created the human race. Would that change the answers? Do we have a duty to obey our Creator, even if it turns out our Creator is not who (or what) we thought it was?
Personally, I don't believe in "God." That doesn't mean I believe there is no God, but I am pretty powerfully convinced based on the historic evidence that there is no reason to think that one sect of humanity's conception of the almighty is any more likely to be correct than another sect's conception.
People who may have identified themselves as religious, may have been Catholic, and attended church regularly and believed in the whole kit and kaboodle. However, after the pedophilia scandals, these same people might still conisder themselves catholic, but to a much less enthusiastic degree. They have stopped going to church, they may stop listening to the Pope, they may no longer have the need or desire to confess sins or take communion. But on some level they believe they are still catholic, but just not 'religious' ones.
That's why I believe these people haven't moved to another religion or to atheism, because they still have the same or mostly same beliefs, but are just severely weakened in their enthusiasm. They may still be spiritual and pray when they feel the need, or talk to God, or say the rosary, but they just don't buy into the pope being infallible, or that the parish priest is always honest and good,and should be obeyed and never questioned.
You appear to be hung up on only considering what most people believe(as codified in a couple belief systems) as the set of possibilities to consider. "The problem of evil" may or may not prove that the God of one or both books of any versions of the Bible is impossible. But, it does not speak to the possibility that the Bible does not accurately portray God, for any number of reasons.
Fair enough. The problem of evil has never bothered me much, but I can see how it might.
i think ilya admitted that when he defined god as meaning an always benevolent omnipotent being. If you are a polytheist-god is by definition not omnipotent
They might be less ignorant than you think. Even the most pious believers often have doubts. You might characterize the doubts of the believers are agnosticism, but they wouldn't describe themselves that way.
Epistemological limitations are the only certainties. I can't "know" that God exists any more than I can "know" that I'm trying at a computer. I wouldn't say limitations on my ability to "know" things makes me an agnostic on either issue.
Your writing seems to suggest you are open to polytheism and that you objections are limited to the idea of monotheism. Is this a fair statement?
It depends on what is meant by "polytheism." To the extent that polytheistic "gods" are not omnipotent or necessarily benevolent, the problem of evil doesn't apply to them. However, I don't see any proof that such beings actually exist. If they did exist, I don't believe that we would have an obligation to worship them or obey their commands.
Which begs the question--where does the obligation come from? If one is a rule utilitarian, one could construct a rule that said "if the gods are going to punish people who do not worship them, and we do not have the ability to stop them from doing so, we have a moral obligation to worship them just because doing so reduces suffering."
This position makes sense if you think that god exists, but don't think that god would ever bother to interfere with the human world -- or offer eternal life to people who worship them. As I've always told people who try to convert me, you must not just prove that god exists, but also that god cares. And I think the latter is much more difficult.
What if God doesn't even understand the concept of "good" as we define it?
It is bad if you suffer? Why? You only suffer for a short time, and the suffering is largely of your own making. Some of you like to suffer. Some of you like others to suffer. If someone suffers, what is the difference?
It is bad when you die? Why? It will just happen anyway. Today, tomorrow, it is just as well to die today as any other. If you will die anyway, what is the difference?
Do you think what you do down there matters? Why? Look, here is the world when you were born; here is the world when you died; here is the world a thousand years later. Where are you? Where is your contribution? Where are your accomplishments? What is the difference?
Am I to understand that you have been expecting me to care about what happens down there? That is clay; it is dirt; a bit of filth plucked from a mass of crude matter. Nothing "happens" there. It just is.
You see, now. Plucked from that existence, by the inevitability of death, there is the way it is. Look as I look, and see as I see. Good, evil, life, death... irrelevant. Immaterial. You could not see the forest for the trees. Do you see, now, that nothing has changed? You are dead, it is true, but look - there you are. There is your birth; and there, your death. Your death was there before your birth; your birth remains after your death. Nothing has changed. Nothing is different.
Yes, you are different, here, with me... but down there, nothing changed. Nothing changes. It is the same today as it was yesterday, and the day before, and on into the interminable past and future. And you see, don't you, just how silly your concerns there really were? What will happen to me, you used to wonder, and worry. What will happen? Why... nothing. Nothing happens. It is all the same. It has always been the same. It will always be the same. Because it is what it is; what, indeed, it must be. You called out to me, saying, change it. How can I? You see how it is; can it be any other way? What can be otherwise?
You said I had all power; I had none. You said I knew all; I knew nothing. You said I saw all; that, I did. But what use is that? Look. I do not play dice; I do not game your lives. That is your own doing. All your suffering, all your pleasures, all your successes and failures? I had no hand in them, I could have no hand in them. It was all your own. For every evil, I bear no blame; for every good, I take no credit. My hand is not on that world, nor has it ever been. Only my word.
And you did not listen.
Does the term 'atheist jew' not ring a bell?
It also doesn't necessarily imply becoming "less religious", as your title says.
The tales of the Nordic, Greek, and Egyptian gods, for instance, all include scenes of a god or goddess being deceived, beaten in combat, drunk or drugged, seduced, or otherwise subjected to rather fleshly limitations.
The Nordic sagas are explicit about this. Even the wisest of the gods, Odin, is not inherently all-knowing: Odin had to sacrifice one of his eyes in order to obtain his wisdom.
Of course, the similarity of the old gods to especially powerful aliens has been commented on before, in sources ranging from Von Daniken to Star Trek ....
The exact quote is:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (emphasis mine)
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)
But your point is still valid.
As an atheist, I believe there may well have been something that "created" this universe. Impressive as that may be - so what? He/she/it certainly hasn't shown any reason that worship is due it for that.
The characteristics of omniscience, omnipotence, and complete benevolence are attributed to God by even the "smart" versions of all three major monotheistic religions. The Catholic Church endorses them. So do nearly all Protestant and Jewish denominations.
I am a Norse Neopagan with strong Indo-Europeanist tendencies. Comparative studies have a strong place in my spiritual path. I have asked myself the same question as to what they gods are within the tradition and I have come to a different perspective.
I have concluded that the mythological system addresses spirituality from a very different perspective than monotheistic traditions. I have further concluded that the gods are somewhat meaningless when divorced from all vestiges of tradition, so they might not "exist" by your definition but they might mine.
When Odysseus asks Zeus for two omens, one in weather and one in speach, and he then receives both omens (thunderclouds, and overheard prayer for the suitors' messy end), does that mean Zeus exists? Or is it something more profound about the psychodynamics of the human condition well beyond our ordinary consciousness? I don't know that there is an answer. However, one can say that for practical purposes they gods might exist even if they don't from a literalist perspective.
Finally, my tradition has no sacred commandments and no tradition of servitude to our gods.
You sound like your viewpoint is remarkably similar to mine. Does that mean you consider me an atheist, albeit a very spiritual one?
You confuse "benevolence" with "providence". Benevolence is a human act similar to charity, while providence is divine. The argument for divine providence is simple: Man survives only by God's providence, since an infinite number of calamities could exterminate Man. Some examples follow: man survives only within a very narrow temperature range; couldn't some physical law beyond all physicists' imagination exist that would cause world temperatures to rise or drop by 50 degrees? Couldn't a physical law exist that would cause electromagnetic force to "mutate" thereby disintegrating all? Since the calamities that could befall Man are infinite and the permutations that permit His survival are few, our survival is caused by Divine Providence. Divine Providence doesn't pertain at all to Evil.
Predestination theology (predominant among Calvinistic Protestant strains) quite arguably does not even pretend to hold that God satisfies any human notion of fairness or universal "benevolence." They invoke specific biblical text to the effect that God may indeed "create people for destruction" if it pleases and glorifies him to do so. One may find this offensive, but that's not evidence for or against the possibility.
Conversely, free-will theologies (which the Catholic Church had shifted towards well pre-reformation) have their own reasoning to reconcile the problem of evil -- having to do with the "greatest good" being free will and thus He being constrained accordingly. (No sense getting into the "rock-so-heavy-he-can't-lift" fallacy...)
Dawkins' and Hitchens' books claim to show there's not God, but really they seem to argue that IF there's a God he's really really mean -- which is a very different argument (neither of which I endorse, as a believer myself).
I am an atheist, so I may not be qualified to address this question, but, if a believer believes on the basis of faith, as most believers do, then couldn't they acknowledge that "there is no way to be sure" without being agnostics? In other words, they may feel sure, but nevertheless admit that there is no way to be sure.
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are the Atheists who attribute the childish view of God to Christians. Having read "God Fallacy", clear to me is Dawkins as either deceptive, disingenuous or an idiot. Francis and Hitchens have not even tried to conceal their political associations and motives. For a more intelligent interpretation of Christianity, try reading Chris Hedges.
BTW, remind me how this connects to the topic of this thread again?
This still doesn't conflict with complete benevolence (in the sense of complete goodness). Rather, PD theology argues that God is justified in predestining certain people for damnation. It does not claim that his doing so is evil.
Just because I can, how about a bit of Spinoza?
It seems to me that the better case for the nonexistence of any gods is based on the absence of evidence where there should be evidence. Gods are generally conceived of as extremely powerful, concerned with human affairs, and responding to various prayers, rituals, and magic spells, but there is a remarkable absence of super-powerful beings showing up and intervening in human affairs. Rather, those who claim such things happen are forced into intellectual contortions to explain away the lack of evidence. Their god does respond to their prayers, but does so in ways that are oh-so-conveniently undetectable. Their god used to overtly interfere in human affairs, but stopped doing so several thousand years ago for its own mysterious reasons. Their invocations of divine power create real physical transmutations, but do so in a way that has no observable physical effects.
Of course, this doesn't rule out Deist-type gods that had some involvement in something like creating the world, but are wholly unconcerned with human affairs. I disbelieve in such things in much the same way as I disbelieve in Russell's teapot.
In other words, there's no need yet to give the Christians their own party.
Ummm.... whether or not they are agnostic does not resolve the question of whether or not you believe in god. Either you do or you don't. If you aren't sure that god exists, or think that it's impossible to know, then it's unlikely that you positively believe in a god.
That pretty much leaves you as an atheist. I know that some people define "atheist" as only those who actively assert that no god exists, but few atheists actually define the term that way, and, let's be honest: that definition exists almost purely to confuse and obfuscate the issue of belief. I'm a non-believer. I don't believe in a god. You'd probably call me an atheist... which then goes to show that you accept that non-believers are, in fact, atheists.
To be an absolute believer is a matter of pure faith....given it seems 'God' (should he/she actually exist) is inclined not to offer us mortals any 'proof' of his/her existence. Me, I'm from the Show Me state.....you can tell me anything, but if you want me to *BELIEVE* it, ya gotsta show me. Nothing gets, nor deserves, blind faith.
By contrast, being an absolute denier implies some form of omnipotence. And if there's anything I'm even more skeptical about than some form of the Tooth Fairy for adults, it's my own 'omnipotence'. Heck, I'm happy if I can 'know' what my girlfriend wants out of me at any moment in time. To claim I *KNOW* there is not, never has been, nor ever will be a 'god' would be the textbook definition of 'folly'.
I disagree. There is a big difference between saying "I do not have a belief in god" or saying "there is no god." It's big, but it's subtle too. And many people sloppily confuse the two unless they take a moment to think before speaking.
[B]eing an absolute denier implies some form of omnipotence. And if there's anything I'm even more skeptical about than some form of the Tooth Fairy for adults, it's my own 'omnipotence'.
I agree; to assert either the existence or the non-existence of God is an act of faith. But exactly the same is true with respect to the existence or non-existence of the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and unicorns. And, even though we cannot deny the possibility that the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and unicorns exist, no one takes seriously the possibility of their existence. As a practical matter, it makes little difference whether one asserts that the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and unicorns do not exist, or merely does not take seriously the possibility that they exist.
An atheist should be defined the same way: as someone who does not take seriously the possibility that God exists. If, as an act of faith, he denies the possibility that God exists, the only practical difference it will make is that he will not be in a position to criticize anyone for believing as an act of faith.
I'm sorry young man it's Turtles all the way down.
And the smart version more common than atheists admit.
Zarkov, as a computational physicist, I have to interject here.
First, there is no infinite regress, since each child universe (simulation) must necessarily have many many fewer degrees of freedom than the parent, or else it wouldn't be computable. At some point, the progeny universe will be too simple to support intelligent life (that actually explains a lot ...)
Second, if there is some finite regress, then it's simply a matter of deducing the physical rules of each parent universe on the way up to the top. Eventually, we have to get there.
Third, in my time doing computation, I've learned that it never pays to simulate any larger of a system than absolutely necessary to get the results you want. Things like the Hubble Deep Field (link), seem to suggest that either our "God" has far more computing power than he needs or he's after results entirely unrelated to this interesting sub-phenomenon of talking meat off in some corner of an unfashionable galaxy.
Very good. I see that I have to think this through in greater depth.
I mean, really. I am no more threatened by an old Ten Commandments monument than I am by the annual NORAD tracking of Santa Claus.
The issue isn't whether you are threatened. The issue is whether government officials, using our tax dollars, should violate the Constitution by attempting to proselytize their religion. Michael Newdow's case is even more important. There the issue is, in addition to respect for the law, whether government officials should make children who do not believe in God feel different from and inferior to their peers.
No doubt a heart cell would find the "problem of lactic acid" difficult to reconcile with a benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent (relative to the needs of the whole body) brain, yet were that body running a marathon, all would depend on that heart cell fulfilling its vocation.
Try explaining a marathon to a heart cell.
Which is to say you neglect the problem of transcendence, which is not to say that your atheism is groundless, but only that the alternatives are not either.
martinned,
Certainly there are more and less rigorous theologies, as there are more and less rigorous atheisms.
- Isaiah Berlin, from Historical Inevitability
There is a qualitative difference between a single cell and the entire organism. The cell exists to serve another end -- the organism is an end unto himself.
What if the technology improves so much that we can revive someone who has died of a heart attack, 5, 10, 20, or 50 hours after the event. Could we then just ask them if they encountered god, or visitied an afterlife? Could we even trust their answers? Or would it be all nonsense about a white light?
The argument from evil is targeted at an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity. I am none of the three, so your analogy is nowhere remotely near on point.
"And then we can just ask them if they encountered a god or entered the afterlife."
We won't need to ask them, for they will have. See Tipler's speculation on the Omega Point.
"There is a qualitative difference between a single cell and the entire organism. The cell exists to serve another end -- the organism is an end unto himself."
I'd imagine that the cell itself would dissent, and not be wrong in so doing, given its likely evolutionary origin as an organism in and of itself.
Then again...
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne
I hear that Charybdis is a bitch - might want to check your rudder...
I suppose, although I think many people identify as Christians, and generally believe in God, but aren't actually certain, and when asked to admit doubts are willing to do so. That person isn't really an agnostic.
These kinds of questions - like a lot of polls on public opinion - end up reflecting more certainty than most people really have. There are a small minority of people who are really committed to the idea that there is no God, and there's also a larger minority of people who are certain that there is one. But I suspect most of the country is in a squishy and vague area in between, and those are the people most suseptable to either social pressure or the manipulation of the question.
Also note that many of the people who say that there is no such thing as God, but do not identify themselves as atheists, may be Buddhists or spritual but not religious new agey types.
The problem is not limited to human suffering in this life, and goes to the whole theology of sin and grace.
Nicene Christianity tends to hold that humans are unworthy abominations in God's eyes and saved through a unilateral, undeserved gift (grace) from God through Christ. The idea is that somehow we deserve infinite punishment and torment for some sort of finite sin.
So here we are left with the paradox of an omnibenevolant, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent god who creates something that is rightly seen by Him as a despicable abomination. This only works if the attributes described at the beginning of this paragraph dont actually mean anything. If "Omnibenevolant" is compatible with this theology, I don't see how, unless it is an oversight of failing in some other way.
Now, the Bible contains a generally overlooked solution to this problem but this solution is at odds with Christian thought (though to an extent more closely aligned with Jewish thought, though imperfectly). This is found in the STRUCTURE of the myth of the fall from Eden. I hyperlinked to my discussion on another forum rather than to copy and paste the (long) analysis here.
The short version is that one can see a sin-less version of the Eden myth inherent in the structure of it. Instead one can see it, through a mythological analysis, as providing a template for adolescence and a passage into the rights and responsibilities of adulthood (and later parenthood), and thus the FULFILLMENT rather than the ABANDONEMENT of commandment.
A meaningful poll would measure civil religiosity. It is the ridiculous number such a poll would produce that explains the unbelievably low atheism number in the poll at hand and that also explains why the US polity is as cretinously taboo-bound and bigoted as it is.
I'd also suggest that the US's extraordinarly high levels of ostentatious religiosity and ostentatious patriotism are more than merely correlated; and that they correlate inversely with goodness and sense.
Buddhism is a separate category on one of the other questions on the survey, and only 0.5% of respondents identified themselves as Buddhist (and presumably far from all of them also said that there is no such thing as God).
I disagree. I don't think there is any problem with evil at all,or if there is, it's fairly rare. Query most anyone and ask them, who do they think is evil?
liberals will say W and Dick Cheney. Conservatives will say ted Kennedy and John Kerry. Some will say that the Wall street bankers are evil, but they would disagree.
In other words, evil is subjective. One person's evil is another's saintliness. Ask any person *you* think is evil, and that person will likely be surprised and say they are trying to do the *right* thing. I don't even think Hitler believed he was himself evil,but rather the opposite. He thought he was doing something very good for the German people. And he had millions of people telling him how right he was.
The guys who flew the planes into the twin towers believed they were doing God's work. We think they were evil, but they thought they were saints. Who is right? Who decides? Most people think their neighbor is evil, which means that your neighbor thinks you are evil. are you? You would undoubtedly say no.
I do believe evil exists, but I think it is far more rare than anyone believes, so rare, we really don't have to worry about it. I worry far more about the guy who thinks he's doing God's work.
It's an error of composition to say that a single cell in my body evolved from a single cell organism. The collection of cells evolved together to propagate their genetic code collectively. Unlike a bacterium (or yeast or even virus) my heart cell isn't out create more of itself. It doesn't just multiply without bound and invade the spleen looking for food either.
On the other hand, it sure does make cancer sound noble! Cell Dissent! Off with Organismic Oppression! Give me Malignancy or Give me Death!
Forgive the ignorance of this question (I'm not a computational physicist) but can't you always posit a universe with more degrees of freedom? Can't you always go "+1" for the next universe up? (Again, if this is horribly ignorant, I apologize... I just read Neal Stepheson's Anathem).
I don't know about this. There could be aesthetic or recreational reasons for doing so.
In any case, "God" can probably save a lot of computing power by not simulating the portions of the universe we're not looking at at the moment, and just simulating their effects. Which is exactly what most computer games do anyway.
I'm tempted to say something about quantum mechanics, but I'm already in over my head.
Um, no, it isn't. No tax dollars were spent on or current government officials involved with, for example, the Texas Capitol monument, donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1961 . . . at least until the stupid lawsuit was filed. In terms of proselytizing effect, it's going to promote Christianity just as effectively as statues of the Roman goddess Justitia promote paganism. De minimis non curat lex, and neither should sane adults.
As for Newdow and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the incident I had in mind at the moment was their recent effort to get an injunction against Obama saying "So help me God." That was so ridiculous, I'm starting to think these people are agents provocateurs for, say, the Southern Baptist Convention. You want to talk about an effort to make atheists "feel different from and inferior to their peers" . . .
Whenever I dream my brain seems to do a pretty good job of simulating a new world. I've even had dreams within dreams and had to wake up two levels to get back to normal life. Usually the dream world is to some extent defective, and I've had dreams where I knew I was dreaming because somehow the physics wasn't right in the and I wake up. So every time a parent spawns as child in a nested dream sequence something gets lost.
At this point I don't see why we can't get an infinite expansion in one direction where the parent world get more and more complex. But I still get the feeling that you might be right in that the increasing complexity of the parent worlds must somehow be limited. I need to sleep on this. Perhaps I'll dream the solution.
If we put aside the de minimis aspect, then this would make a good law school hypothetical. If Newdow is referring to "So help me God" in the swearing in, then I might argue that the fact that "So help me God" is not required by law makes it the president-elect's personal speech, not government speech. At the time he says it, he is not yet a government official, although the Chief Justice, of course, is.) If Newdow is referring to the President's using the phrase in carrying out his presidential duties, then it is a closer question. Does it matter whether it is the state of the union speech, given that that speech is mandated by Article II, section 3?
Just like I gave props to the guy quoting Cicero, I have to say I admire the use of Erasumus' first name as your screen name. That said, "atheisms", plural? As noted in this thread before, one could argue there are two: "I don't believe in God" and "I believe there is no God." Which one is the right answer depends on which question is being asked. (Generally, I prefer the former.) But from your remark it sounds as if you're imagining more atheisms still. I'm not sure how you imagine that...
An entity which would consign people to infinite punishment for finite transgressions is evil :-)
I should have added that so is an entity which CREATES humans in order to damn them (the Calvanist perspective) is EVEN MORE EVIL.
My problem is that as long as one does not allow special pleadings, the Christian concept of God is evil.
As one of my favorite people in the world is a batavian Martin, your screen name kindles good feelings as well.
"But from your remark it sounds as if you're imagining more atheisms still. I'm not sure how you imagine that..."
It was a gentle rebuke to your musing about the relevance of the merit of those (plural) who advance an argument to the merit of the argument itself, which, if in fact relevant, would also apply to the counterargument, with deleterious effects for that counterargument, I would surmise.
In other words, best to pick on someone one's own size - if one wishes to make the best counterargument, take on the best argument.
Eden can also be understood as a local maximum, but not a global one, which does not conflict with your adolescence interpretation.
Oren,
"Unlike a bacterium (or yeast or even virus) my heart cell isn't out create more of itself. It doesn't just multiply without bound and invade the spleen looking for food either."
Nor do I to my fellow "cells", oddly enough. Morality scales!
"I'm already in over my head."
We all are. Such is (a)theology.
Generally, people like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens don't have much of a problem with people who believe in the flying teapot version of God. (There is a section in The God Delusion that argues that such a God, too, is extremely improbable. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. How would one assign a probability to the existence of God? I even started a thread about it on Richard Dawkins' official website, but the question has never been resolved entirely to my satisfaction.) They're just fed up with all those fundamentalists distorting their work. ("Evolution is just a theory!" "Yes, so is Gravity, which, unlike evolution, has actually been disproven since it was originally proposed by Newton.")
So my criticism of such authors is limited to the fact that they could be more careful and explicit in their choice of targets. But then, it is exactly the lack of nuance that makes their books such a good read...
I think that applicable here.
I do think that evil is rarer than we conventionally think.
I don't believe that Bush, Cheney, Ted Kennedy,Wall Street bankers--even Madoff-- or my neighbors are evil. But there is plenty of evil in the world: Hitler and his gang, Stalin and his gang, Mao and his gang, Pol Pot, Al Qaida, probably Iran and its catspaws Hamas and Hezbollah. Hugo Chavez, for example, even though I strongly disagree with him, is notevil--simply misguided.
But I believe that evil includes people who murder and terrorize other people in the name of God. I can't accept that Hitler wasn't evil because he and millions of Germans and other Europeans sincerely thought he was doing the right thing even (probably, in God's name). "In the name of God" makes it even more evil.
(BTW I'm a practicing Roman Catholic and do not intend to bash religion in saying that)
The problem of evil is a great problem for those of us who believe in an omnipotent and beneficent God. We don't ignore the problem--we believe in spite of the problem. The best comment on this I ever heard: A Catholic priestpreaching ab out the problem of evil turned and pointed to the Crucifix behind him, saying something like: "I think that God knows about and even suffers from the evil in this world: Look at his Son hanging on the Cross!"
If you accept Dawkins' view of genetics, then heart cells do exactly that. They are kept in control only by the self interests of other cells.
Or the story from 2 Samuel 24 in which David concludes that he "sinned greatly" for no obvious reason after following God's command to take a census. In response, God gives him a choice of punishments: famine for seven days, plague for three days, or three months of being pursued by his enemies. David picks the plague, and God follow up by sending a plague that kills 70,000 people, David not included. Why God would kill large numbers of people as a punishment for somebody else's wrongdoing is left wholly unexplained; perhaps God agrees with David's view that "These [people] are but sheep." (2 Samuel 24:17)
This may be beyond the bounds of good taste here, but it is worth noting that the the word "Holocaust" derives from a Greek term denoting a specific kind of animal sacrifice (usually involving black sheep). Holocaust sacrifices were generally reserved for the dead, and the distinctive feature is that the flesh of the sacrificed animal was not consumed at all but rather burned on the fire. Walter Burkert's "Greek Religion" and Daniel Ogden's "Necromancy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds" go into this in a fair bit of detail.
However, if we accept that this is effectively a whole-body sacrifice of the people as sheep, then it seems proper to categorize it as a holocaust.
The Four Stages of Life:
1) You believe in Santa Claus.
2) You realize Santa Claus is a myth.
3) You start playing Santa Claus.
4) You look like Santa Claus.
I am sure there are stranger things in the universe than we know or have ever dreamed of--science keeps discovering more of them here on Earth, so presumably there are more elsewhere as well. But why we would ever take seriously the possibility that any such things bear any resemblance to a "god" is wholly beyond me.
There are some recent attempts to revive Newton's concepts of gravity in light of new relativity-supporting discoveries. It might premature to consider it disproven, as there may be some certain elements of field theory which may be able to explain the same things that relativity can.
(1) Forgiven.
(2) A computer (which is a subset of the universe) cannot simulate a more powerful computer. It can't even perform the computations that the more powerful computer could itself perform, nevermind simulating all the mechanics of it. You can think of it (loosely) in terms of information storage -- you can't store the information that describes a more complicated universe in this one -- you simply don't have anything with which to represent the result.
The same applies to processing -- you can't simulate a computer that can process faster than the host computer. Otherwise, you'd have an infinite amount of computer power.
Sure, but then he's not really a scientist running a simulation.
We have reason to believe that's not the case, as the mechanics of faraway galaxies seem to follow the rules of physics.
In computer games, you notice that when you go over the "horizon" to a new area, the detail is filled in in a matter inconsistent with how you last saw it (drive around GTA, for instance).
And yet bacteria continue to reproduce with no thought of how this effects others.
"They're just fed up with all those fundamentalists distorting their work. ("Evolution is just a theory!" "Yes, so is Gravity, which, unlike evolution, has actually been disproven since it was originally proposed by Newton.")"
How much headway have those fundamentalists made, lately? Given how little impact those "distortions" (Sorry, Evolution is just a theory. Perhaps theories wouldn't be so underrated were they not abused in the service of ideology so frequently. Fertile opportunity for common ground there, if anyone ever tires of the pissing contest.) have had on the scientists, in contrast to the impact the reductionistic views of those scientists have had on various societies in the century past, I find "fed up" to be on the generous side in characterizing the motives of our present day evangelical atheists.
No doubt the medieval church was often "fed up" with the nascent science of its day.
"So my criticism of such authors is limited to the fact that they could be more careful and explicit in their choice of targets. But then, it is exactly the lack of nuance that makes their books such a good read..."
Hitchens would be a good read were he to write a phone book, and he's conflicted against himself on the question in many ways, producing an appealing tension.
To anyone with any serious background in religion or theology, Dawkins' anti-religion sections are embarrassingly shallow departures from what is otherwise a consistently astonishing originality. The fact that he apparently feels no need to craft original arguments against religion gives a hint of the true balance of power presently.
Harris is a bully crowing his dominance. He's as much a good read as the comfortably boneheaded bishops whose vapid condemnations of Darwin were all the rage back in the day, and he he will soon join them in well-earned obscurity.
I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure how it answers the question of why there can't always be a bigger universe?
Yes, we can't simulate a universe more complex than our own. But for any universe of complexity n, can't there be higher-order universe of complexity n+1, which contains the next lower universe?
Sorry, but it'd be impossible to know if it were the case - that's the whole point. If the universe were a giant simulation, the programmers don't actually have to literally run everything, they just have to make it work as though everything were there. Now sure, the closer you look, the more detail they need to simulate.
Take the desk I'm sitting at right now. They don't actually have to simulate every molecule in it, until someone looks at it with an electron microscope. They can just simulate it as an atomistic piece of wood.
Similarly, the entire night-time sky (ie, the universe) would only have to have been simulated as a series of points of light until people started looking at it with higher power telescopes. Ie, Mars and Jupiter just exist as two points in a database, and not entire planets.
If your question is just an infinite regress of simulated universes, I can't answer that except to say that it's hard to believe that there isn't ultimately a real universe at the very top. Now, from a positivist perspective, you might never know that you've gotten all the way to the top, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
So far so good. Now, let two weeks pass and observe it again. If the simulation is "cheating", you won't find Mars and Jupiter in the positions you expect them -- they will have been re-instantiated somewhere else.
If the simulation wants to preserve the state information and laws of physics between observations, it has to store and process the dynamics -- which is equivalent to just simulating the whole thing.
In GTA if you drive up a street and then leave the "area" and drive back, you find that the car identities and positions have been re-randomized.
I would take that further: ancient stargazing and sky mapping was relatively sophisticated quite early. The daily motion would be noticeable for Mars or Venus. In some cases, it might be noticeable over a few hours, or where you have occultations from these planets observed, the motion would have to be simulated not as points of light but as spherical objects.
So I don't buy that simplistic logic.
What I'm trying to say is that you never actually have to simulate the entire universe, you just have to simulate the observer's perceptions of the universe - albeit consistently.
For example, they don't have to actually simulate the complex fusion reactions going on billions of stars - just figure out what the stars should be outputting, and program them to do that. Once you design a few classes of stars, or a general star sub-program, you can use that as a template for all the stars.
In the Mars and Jupiter case, sure, they'd have them programmed as if they were actually planets in concentric orbits to the Earth. That doesn't mean they're actually simulating a 6.4×10^23 kilogram rock with active dust storms and complex geological history.
Until the inhabitants of the simulation actually get close enough to look at certain stuff. At that point, if the programmers have to play catch-up, they can always pause the simulation and figure out "ok, so this thing is supposed to a multi-billion year old planet... let's simulate a history for it now that we need one."
Also there are efforts to revive the limeniferous aether theory in another guise in order to treat matter as knots for matter/energy conversions (energy as waves, matter as knots).
In both of the above cases, a slightly modified version of an old disproven theory seems to work remarkably well.
My point is asking if you would take my views as being "atheist" highlights the problem with attributing the atheist label to every case where it seems to apply. Neopagan religions are growing, for example, and there may be many who may dismiss the idea of God as classical Monotheism might define the concept but might not be atheists either.
It seems premature to suggest that this difference is entirely due to the alleged stigma of being an atheist.
Seconding your point and adding a clarification of my earlier claim vis-a-vis the large number of functional atheists - they might more accurately be called nontheists, harking back to the unpatriotic/nonpatriotic distinction that came up on a past thread.
Theism is just not a live question to lots of folks - they have more important things (in their estimation) to think about.
But of course, Dawkins was _explicitly_ not writing for "anyone with any serious background in religion or theology".
Which in any event begs a different question. Perhaps the man so shocked by the evangelical (sic) atheists can explain how is a "serious background in theology" differs from a "serious background in astrology" or a "serious background in pyramidology"?
Your arrogance reeks of death and decline. The great minds of the past, especially the scientists, had time too short and character too large to indulge in such petty ignorance. They, and their discoveries, spoke to all mankind and down through the ages, not to some narrow in-crowd, constrained by time and fashion.
I'm not shocked by the evangelical atheists, their likes are legion in every era - the post-Constantinian monks stamping out paganism, Bolshevik thugs going after the Kulaks, the in-crowd hangers-on bullying the scapegoat in a desperate attempt to get made.
Your particular cultural dominance will pass, but the dull-witted bullies like yourself drawn to such dominance are ever with us...
I think this is a very apt statement in regards to Christianity, or any other religion. Christianity appears to be in decline in the west, but will probably be replaced by some new idiocy.
That's entirely possible. I just rue the Enlightenment and its would-be defenders following in its wake by settling for knee-jerk reaction rather than charting our own, affirmative, course.