(September 15, 2019 at 1:22 pm)Inqwizitor Wrote: Atheism is an amorphous description of a lack of belief in a god or gods. It could mean that someone has no faith in a religious idea about what a god or gods means, or it could be a philosophical conviction of some kind.
Something I'm curious about is why deism is virtually non-existent nowadays. There are arguments for the existence of "God", that actually, in the end, don't amount to much more than a hypothetical Prime Mover, or "something" — we don't know what — that is the source of reason, volition and material phenomena.
Is deism pointless or even dishonest, because it's asserting something as knowledge that we cannot know? Did you ever seriously consider it instead of atheism? Or is there any practical difference?
Yeah I have seriously considered it. In fact, I was a deist for quite a while after leaving the Christian faith because at the time I still found plausibility in standard arguments for God that had nothing to do with Christianity specifically. Then after further reading and discussions with atheists, I came to realize that my belief in the deist God was nothing more than a legacy of my faith in the Christian God, and that I could instead easily hold to a view that is completely naturalistic without any appeal to the divine and whereby all the phenomena I needed my previous God to explain were more satisfactorily explained by the positing of naturalism. So I came to believe that the cosmos necessarily exists, that modal realism better addresses the questions of apparent fine-tuning and the questions of necessity vs. contingency, that the modal ontological argument is just an empty argument if you don't assume the existence of God in the first place, that morality is easily explicable without any logical need for God, and that even the deist concept of God suffers logical problems that naturalism does away with easily.
As for reason and volition, these are products of the nervous system and need not be explained by any sort of phenomena external to the human biology. We have very good explanations for how we come to produce reasoned responses, and we can appeal to computer AIs as good analogies to the human mind (except perhaps for the awareness part, which still has naturalistic explanations anyway ... such as panpsychism which I'm still not really sure about but it's there as an option).
