Serious Problems with Atheism

[Minimalist]

BTW, welcome to the forum. I hope you get something from being here and that you make interesting contributions.

Slim chance of that.

[Cyberman]

Pulse, meet Little Rik:

You know, literally every time I look at that avatar all I see is this:



I honestly don't know why.

[LadyForCamus]

Yeah, being staunch about stuff probably isn't as good as knowing what you know and recognizing when you don't.  Staunch atheists are as brittle as staunch theists, and either can convert to the other for a myriad of reasons owing to their propensity for remaining resolutely certain.  But not all atheists are staunch.  Plenty are defacto atheists for whom the question of belief in a god is highly unlikely but not a point of faith.  Show me a good reason to believe in a god and I'll show you a new theist.  But fair warning: others have tried and none of the apologetics crap has moved me one iota.  Personal testimony - even less so.  

NDE's are either living brain phenomenon under extreme conditions or else literally tales from the other side.  Someone who has actually had the experience in question isn't necessarily any better informed than we are as which of those alternatives is correct.  They may truly believe they've been to the other side and be entirely mistaken.  They may be convinced but that doesn't mean we should be.  I can think of no way to convince you that NDE's have a mundane explanation, so I won't try.  But that is my working assumption and it is every bit as good as your own.  Agree to disagree?

Well when you have an EXTREMELY rare event of an actual Neurosurgeon having an NDE and changing his entire life because of his new belief system, and that still hasn't convinced you there's something to all this, then yeah, we agree to disagree.

Why on earth should ONE individual's experience be enough to convince you of anything as extraordinary as the existence of gods and an "afterlife"? That's just plain old gullibility.

[Pat Mustard]

Oh, the site is probably blocking you as spam or something. An admin here can probably help you out with that.

Yeah I think they are working on it, hopefully this one will work; Thank you all for replies, Just a thought about what Science is Really about these days;

Professor of Genetics, Richard Lewontin wrote; “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant 

promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It

 is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori 

adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, 

that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”  Billions and Billions of Demons, The New York Review, 9 January, 1997, p. 31.

Is this an objective search for truth?

And we come to the first, last and only refuge of the creatard, the lying quote mine. Here's the relevatnt passage from Lewpntin in full:

"With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn't even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity "in deep trouble." Two's company, but three's a crowd.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen."

Pulse, if you continue to act as a lying piece of shit you'll get called out as one.

[Mister Agenda]

There is much evidence of God for the open minded, for example using our logic to see that DNA could Never Code itself to Code itself to Replicate, it's an impossibly vicious circle. And experimentally proving prayer is like experimentally proving a son or daughter loves its parents. It's a relationship, and Prayer is a relationship, and if we pray to God just for a joke or to test Him, then He sees He is mocked, that doesn't bode well for a close relationship, with God, or with your spouse or child.

By 'the open-minded' you seem to mean 'those who want to believe'.

DNA is not a code. It is somewhat analogous to a code, it is somewhat analogous to a factory, it is somewhat analogous to a blueprint, but it is not actually any of these things. For instance, in a real code, the components are symbolic and arbitrary, you can use different symbols to mean the same thing by just declaring them to mean the same thing. We can stop saying 'bowling balls' is the code for 'get me some soda' and make it 'Bohemian Rhapsody' instead from now on. Try substituting some other chemical for thymine in DNA and watch the code analogy's shortcomings be demonstrated dramatically. And you might want to research the work in abiogenesis before you so blithely declare what is and isn't 'impossibly vicious'. Hint: abiogenesis doesn't require DNA to begin, there are multiple plausible hypotheses on the beginning of life, one is RNA-based life that was replaced with DNA/RNA/ribosome based life like us.

Have a lot of people pray for something, and a lot of people not pray for something, and a lot of people pray to a different god for something, and observe and compare the results. Easy. If you're not claiming that prayer actually accomplishes anything that can be measured, there's a good reason for that. Someone who really thought God will influence events because of prayer would totally expect detectable results. And the experiment can be done without any of the participants knowing, it's called a 'natural experiment'. There are groups of people all over praying, not praying, and praying to different gods. All we have to do is watch. And if God is going to all the trouble of making sure that our experiments always show that it doesn't matter who or what you pray to, the results are the same, how can we be held accountable for not believing in a deity that puts so much effort into being undetectable? What can be said by a follower of Jehovah in favor of the reality of Jehovah that can't be said by a follower of Vishnu for the reality of Vishnu? If you think there are no Hindus who liken their prayer and relationship to Vishnu to communing with their father, you need to meet more Hindus.

[Whateverist]

Well when you have an EXTREMELY rare event of an actual Neurosurgeon having an NDE and changing his entire life because of his new belief system, and that still hasn't convinced you there's something to all this, then yeah, we agree to disagree.

Why on earth should ONE individual's experience be enough to convince you of anything as extraordinary as the existence of gods and an "afterlife"?  That's just plain old gullibility.  

Pretty hard to see how the person allegedly experiencing the NDE is in any position to verify that he truly had been dead and resurrected.  All his example brings to the table is that someone with some science cred underwent an experience which left him convinced that he had. Alas this is just one of many distinctions Pulse appears not to understand.  Or maybe he does but is just really adept at handling the cognitive dissonance?  Then there is always the possibility that he is really a lying sack of shit, but I'd rather not go there.

[Mister Agenda]

And regarding your statements that Atheism has been misunderstood by me, I can assure you Atheism affects all aspects of our lives and can be discussed from various angles.

Neither atheism nor theism are properly capitalized, since they are not proper nouns. Just saying, you can capitalize them if you want to of course, it's a relatively free forum.

---

Well when you have an EXTREMELY rare event of an actual Neurosurgeon having an NDE and changing his entire life because of his new belief system, and that still hasn't convinced you there's something to all this, then yeah, we agree to disagree.

So if a neurosurgeon who was a staunch Christian had an NDE that convinced him Islam it true, you'd convert to Islam? If not, why not?

[Whateverist]

Yeah, science is obsessed with things you can actually measure and test. How naive.

ROFL

This whole "science can't explain everything" attitude kills me. "Science can't explain everything, therefore god" - is basically the argument.

I suppose this really speaks to the whole supernatural vs. natural worldview thing. Nature encompasses all that exists.. so if something is beyond nature, that means it is fantasy.

Religious folks will speak about god being "outside of our dimension" as if they have total understanding of what they're saying and yet will, in the same breath, tell you that carbon dating is bullshit. Jesus fucking Christ these people drive me up a wall sometimes.

I agree with all of this but am always dumbfounded by the sense of entitlement the part I bolded represents.  It is as if there was some general agreement that everything in the world should be comprehensible to our species.  The universe owes us answers so where attempts to actually discover what they are fall short assuming whatever you like becomes reasonable.  Well, it isn't reasonable to reasonable people.

[Autolite]

Neither atheism nor theism are properly capitalized, since they are not proper nouns. Just saying, you can capitalize them if you want to of course, it's a relatively free forum.

.

My computer will not allow me to type 'Atheism' with a lower case 'A', nor will it allow me to type 'christian' with an upper case 'c'. I'm thinkin' that maybe Satan has possessed my auto-correct spell checker...

[Asmodee]

Oh, the site is probably blocking you as spam or something. An admin here can probably help you out with that.

Yeah I think they are working on it, hopefully this one will work; Thank you all for replies, Just a thought about what Science is Really about these days;

Professor of Genetics, Richard Lewontin wrote; “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant 

promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It

 is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori 

adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, 

that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”  Billions and Billions of Demons, The New York Review, 9 January, 1997, p. 31.

Is this an objective search for truth?

This is a common mistake.  Science isn't a "search for truth".  No scientific idea is ever considered to be "true".  Science is a search for understanding.  The underlying theories do not have to be "true" for them to give us understanding.  For instance, the theory of gravity predicts the existence of something called the graviton, being the cause of gravity.  This particle has never been detected.  We don't know if that's right or not.  But we can still use the theory of gravity to calculate the proper speed and trajectory to enter the orbit of a body in space.  The theory isn't "true", but it does give us "understanding".  It doesn't matter if it's true or not, as long as it's useful.

How else can we continue to discuss atheism if we leave science out of it? Atheists constantly say there's no evidence for God, isn't that a scientific statement?

Atheism and science are not even remotely related.  The two have nothing in common.  Most atheists accept most science, but one can both be atheistic and deny all science.

God gives meaning to our lives by His very existence; with God existing, we have a chance at Eternal Life and Love, those are the Only things that give meaning to our otherwise pointless lives that end either in a hole in the ground or cremation oven.

For you.  I disagree.  My children give my life meaning.  Each person decides for him or her self what meaning their life has.  It is not assigned to us.