RE: Is atheism self-contradictory ?
June 27, 2017 at 11:43 am
(This post was last modified: June 27, 2017 at 11:46 am by Parsim0ny.)
(June 27, 2017 at 9:30 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: I see you're no exception to the rule that theists who come here wanting to know about atheism tell us what atheism is and what we must think. In fact, you're the second person with the 'question I stumbled upon concerning atheism' person we've had in the last week. Not very refreshing, but I did not have much of an expectation. At any rate, welcome to the forum, I hope you like it here.
I'm sorry I have to say this, but it seems to me that everybody has the right to insult and disregard any argument we make because they think they are too smart to answer. You are actually the second or third person to reply in this thread without directly neglecting the thread and attacking Muslim beliefs.
(June 27, 2017 at 9:30 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: It does not follow from the fact that a god cannot be proven with logic, that the mind itself can't be trusted. You seem to have skipped some steps in making that claim. But the claims are not necessarily false in their conclusions, they are unsound. That is, if there is a God, none of the arguments presented thus far successfully establish that. There's no 'proof' given by a scholar or philosopher that both contains no logical fallacies and rests on sound premises that any reasonable person would assent to.
If there is a God, who is by definition absolutely fair, he must make his creatures capable of knowing him and follow the right path. Therefore, I know my mind is reliable because God made it that way. Assuming no God exists, nothing tells me that my mind - as a product of long-term alterations of genome - is reliable enough to discover objective truths about life and the universe. Our minds can produce science, but science itself is merely cumulative experience and an endless trial-and-error process, and everything we know about the universe via scientific investigation can break down at any moment and become history. Producing science DOESN'T mean our brains are reliable, it only appears that way.
Also, I can't say for myself that I'm brilliant about anything. I can't claim that I have a good and natural voice unless someone else hears me singing and assures me of that. Humans cannot say about themselves that their minds possess any great ability without an "exterior consciousness" telling them that.
(June 27, 2017 at 9:30 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: You say therefore, but no argument preceded that conclusion. You're claiming not believing something is believing something, that's a strange claim to make. If you asked us what we think instead of telling us, you'd find that most of us just aren't sold on the deity you're trying to sell. There might be ghosts, but I don't believe in them. I'm not going to believe in literal ghosts (or Bigfoot, or alien abductions, or Amway) until I'm presented with sufficient evidence to convince me. Do you believe in things without sufficient evidence to convince you?
The initial variations in our genome are random within a certain range of possibilities, but which variations are conserved isn't random, evolution is (vastly oversimplifying here) a process of culling disadvantageous variations while conserving advantageous ones. I can reasonably infer that my brain has evolved to deal with the environment that actually exists, and while it may be imperfect, it does the job. And we've come up with science to help us with our blind spots (and there are many of them).
I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm simply requesting for a reasonable explanation about our minds being presumably reliable. This is, of course, not sufficient to summon any supernatural creator, but means that If our minds aren't the work of a consciousness, THEN they are not reliable. If this previous statement holds, then by contraposition : If our minds are reliable, it follows that they are the work of a concsiousness, regardless of its nature.
I should also repeat that selective alterations of the genomes aren't sufficient to resolve the issue, since we don't know whether we reached a mind sophisticated enough to demonstrate objective truths.
So here's a formal version of my argument you're requesting for :
(1) My mind isn't the work of a consciousness.
(2) No unconscious process can generate a reliable consciousness. A product can't have attributes superior to its designer.
It clearly follows from the two premises that our minds ARE NOT reliable as we claim they are.