Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[Jehanne]

What a bunch of dumbasses.  Life are molecules, all containing the element carbon, sometimes individual, often collective, that replicate, that is, make copies of themselves.  Given their differential reproduction ("sex is fun"), life is subject to Darwinian natural selection.  As the copying mechanism in DNA/RNA is imperfect, errors occur; most are benign and inconsequential, others are harmful ("flies born with no eyes"), but some are beneficial ("better metabolism," "disease resistance", etc., etc.); these latter organisms are more likely to survive, as compared to their peers, and hence, more likely to pass their genes down to the next generation, ad infinitum, in what is a very non-random process.   Evolution is not trial & error, but, error & trial.  In the history of life, critters evolved that had the ability to move, which we now call insects and animals; plants can move, but, not as much as animals can.  Plants came first, of course, with photosynthesis, the ability to synthesize sugars from sunlight, an involved chemical process.  Later critters evolved that could eat the plants, taking their energy from them; later, bigger critters evolved that could eat the other small critters, plus the plants, at least in some cases.  With penises and vaginas came even more variation and diversity, evolution in overdrive.  Eventually, nervous systems, eyes, brains, and even bigger brains, and eventually, Us, with technology, civilization, religion and science, etc.

To answer the guy in the video, why does life not emerge out of a jar of peanut butter?  That niche has been filled, for starters, hence, no chemical pathway exists in the jar of peanut butter for new life to emerge.  For one, the jar of peanut butter is already filled with microbial life, as well as oxygen, a nasty gas that breaks down ("oxidizes") organic compounds.  And, so, any new chemical molecules that could, by chance, arise in that jar of peanut butter will quickly be destroyed by the oxide compounds and other life forms that are already present in the jar.  Any new life could not simply compete with the life that is already present in the jar.

[The Grand Nudger]

On the contrary, I think inscrutability and mystery is likely the primeval perception of underlying cause of things.   The main human perceptive framework for inscrutability and mystery derived from social cognitive mechanism evolved to handle complex unpredictable behavior by fellow humans or closely associated animals.   So humans primevally and reflexively associate unpredictability of nature with inscrutability and mystery of capricious, but interactable, beings with whim and will. 


The split is recent, because for much of the time prior to the split there was no perception of the existence any such thing as a nature separate from whim and will of capricious beings that that is the underlying  motivators for things to happen.

Yeah, we see ourselves everywhere, in everything - but the idea that the concept of nature is new is wholly and completely wrong.  Gods were invented to bargain with sacred nature, which was our religious focus before we invented those gods for that purpose, and there have been atheists for at least as long as the written word who tend to comment on some variation of the theme "it's just nature, this shit is for the benefit of worldly priests".  

They found explanations for everything - we'd call them wrong - but, to them, the world they were trying to interact with wasn't mysterious or inscrutable, nor was a god.  They played by rules, they were subject to nature, they had a limited range of interests and influence.  They could be bound.  

Mystery and inscrutability popped up when the cults around gods had become so elaborate and divorced from their basis in life that the articles of belief could not be maintained.  Those two things stand in, in contemporary belief, for why their beliefs seem wrong on their face - but are still somehow right.

[R00tKiT]

If the theist shows there is only *one* uncaused cause, that the uncaused cause has a personality (and so *can* design), and, of course, that there is such an uncaused cause. ALL of those are in contention.

That's a lot to unpack.. As I mentioned before, there is no reason to multiply entities beyond what is absolutely necessary, as per Occam's razor. Besides, proving an omnipotent entity clearly makes any additional entity completely redundant -by the very definition of omnipotent.

Your use of the word "personality" is misplaced here, I think. Having a personality doesn't entail ability to design, I assume you're referring to the personal God. And yes, there are arguments for the latter. The most promising argument is that the observable state of affairs in our world is better explained as the product of an intentional/personal agent than not.

Intentions are not amenable to any kind of scientific explanation, if you intend to eat a cheeseburger, nothing about the workings of your digestive system or the cheeseburger's recipe informs me of your intention, an intention is a mental event that can't be analyzed and dissected in a laboratory. That's why the natural laws and technical niceties will always be an insufficient explanation of the universe, they are analogous to the digestive system and the recipe.

The argument above for a personal designer is of an inductive type -of course, which leaves room for the opponent to say that there is no necessary logical implication between our world and a designer agent. There are many things, however, that the opponent firmly believes in which don't meet these unreasonable epistemic demands: like an external world, or other minds, and even most scientific discoveries. An experiment proving the existence of electrons, for example (e.g. Cathode ray tube experiment), only points to electrons. Their existence is not rendered logically necessary by the experiment, they are merely the best explanation of what we observe during the experiment, nothing more. 

That deduction only holds if the laws of nature are such that it is the case. For example, with gravity, a 'splattering' of mass is far *less* likely than a spherical shape once the mass is large enough. So the conclusion in that case would be invalid.

Also, for example, evolution selects for adaptive structures, so the probability P((not T)& U & C) might be a LOT larger than you give credit for.

And that is part of the point: that you need to know P( (not T)&C&U) and P( (not T) & U) and the relative sizes of those compared to P( T&C&U) and P(T&U) to say which conditional probability is larger. Do you have any way to estimate the sizes of those?

More specifically, you seem to think that the laws of nature cannot themselves push towards complexity and structure even though we know many examples of exactly that.

I still insist that the laws of nature have absolutely no bearing on these probabilities. If they are descriptive, then they have no independent existence or special status, you should simply picture them as man made labels that describe the universe. The latter displays aspects of design, fine-tuning, etc. all of which demand explanation that is independent of these descriptive labels. 

If you want to argue for not-T, you first have to provide good grounds for rejecting causality outside of our spacetime - and I am not trying to shift the burden of proof, I still think that the default position is that things don't pop into existence uncaused, the principle of causality is of course a huge subject that was discussed by many eminent philosophers, it's unfair to half-ass this stuff in a few sentences. AFAIK however, Kant considers causality to be an a priori concept (more precisely, a synthetic a priori) that doesn't come from experience. You can't do anything without presupposing causality, you don't wait for your computer to turn on by itself, for example. We use this principle everywhere and everytime,, it's kind of hypocritical to suspend it only when it comes to the cause of the universe.

As for the probabilities P(not T & U & C) and their close variants, it's not necessary to calculate them independently, we know that the probabilties of all possible events in a given probability space add up to 1, so giving arguments that are in favor of P(T&U&C) increase its value and thereby automatically reduce the value of P(not-T&U&C). 

As I explained in the thread, arguments against theism are really, really bad, so bad that you can use them to refute anything. To take one example, the problem of evil in its logical form is considered to have been decisively solved by Plantinga,

Quote : "it is fair to say that Plantinga has solved this problem. That is, he has argued convincingly for the consistency of God and evil".
Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga%27s_free-will_defense#cite_ref-FOOTNOTEHoward-SnyderO'Leary-Hawthorne19981_18-0

I noticed that this recent development in the philosophy of religion is largely ignored by many atheist activists today, who keep trying the argument mindlessly as if they were still in the 14th century. Besides, we don't even need much philosophy to dismiss the argument as weak, it's a textbook argument from ignorance, if one can't see the reason for an instance of evil, this doesn't mean there is no good reason for it. And given the infinite gap between God's knowledge and our own, the problem of evil just fails completely.

A common response one gets is "God surely could've made his reasons clearer", which kind of moves the same problem one step further. The answer will simply be: He surely has good reasons for not making his reasons clearer, ad infinitum. Those who hate the mystery card are simply too fond of logical fallacies. If one is not omniscient, there has to be mystery somewhere, which they should accept.

Well, clearly to test our ideas observationally requires that we do observation.

But we have found through long experience that logic alone is a very poor judge of what is actually possible or even what actually occurs.

For example, Aristotle thought it logically necessary that heavy things fall faster than light things. But, the simple fact is that they do not. And the reason is that Aristotles axioms, which he thought were logically necessary, are in fact wrong.

I can give other examples. Kant thought that geometry was a type of synthetic a priori. He thought that because he couldn't image anything other than Euclidean geometry. of course, it was later discovered that there are MANY types of non-Euclidean geometries and that what Kant *thought* was necessary was actually not so.

In particular, there is very good reason to believe that the notion of causality simply is not applicable 'outside the universe' or even to the universe as a whole (all of spacetime). The reason is that causality is always *within* the universe, so the idea of a cause for the universe is against all observation and logic.

Why do you think that "always observing X within the universe" is a very good reason to reject X outside the universe ??? Causality - in the sense of a necessary link between an effect and a cause- is a basic building block of any kind of coherent thought of what might be there outside the universe. You simply accept it as a universal a priori (which you kind of do in real life) or reject it, in which case you should provide good reasons to accept causality a posteriori within the universe. As far as I know, nobody managed to do that, including the major figures in western philosophy from Hume to Kant - but I might be wrong. Surely there is someone here who knows about Kantian philosophy more than I do, they are welcome to clarify this issue.

[The Grand Nudger]

Do you intend to argue for causes, or for gods?

[R00tKiT]

Do you intend to argue for causes, or for gods?

It's necessary to settle the issue of causality first. I don't think any further argument for God can be made without it.

[Silver]

There may never be an answer to the first cause, and I'm fine with that, but I'm not fine with accepting theistic answers with zero evidence to back them.

[R00tKiT]

There may never be an answer to the first cause, and I'm fine with that, but I'm not fine with accepting theistic answers with zero evidence to back them.

What do you mean by evidence exactly. Do you mean a repeatable experiment? a theorem? directly sensing the deity's presence for example?

[The Grand Nudger]

Do you intend to argue for causes, or for gods?

It's necessary to settle the issue of causality first. I don't think any further argument for God can be made without it.

I guess god's in some pretty deep shit, then? When's the last time you had to argue the issue of causality to establish your mothers existence?

[R00tKiT]

It's necessary to settle the issue of causality first. I don't think any further argument for God can be made without it.

I guess god's in some pretty deep shit, then?  When's the last time you had to argue the issue of causality to establish your mothers existence?

Causality is not an issue for me. But since some people here don't seem to accept it as an a priori concept, we simply can't make progress.

[Jehanne]

I guess god's in some pretty deep shit, then?  When's the last time you had to argue the issue of causality to establish your mothers existence?

Causality is not an issue for me. But since some people here don't seem to accept it as an a priori concept, we simply can't make progress.

What causes an alpha particle to be emitted from a U238 atom?