Hello @ayost!
As this is a forum, we can have more than two people posting on any given thread, so I thought I'd chime in.
Challenge accepted!
As far as I'm concerned, my atheism came about after looking at the world and concluding that, with or without the gods that people believe in, it would be the same. Mind you, I was basically a kid back then, in my early teens or so...
Allow me to elaborate.
Let's start with "looking at the world" and automatically being pragmatic and eliminating solipsism from the equation.
The world around us is pretty much as we see it. Instruments exist to aid us in seeing it in far greater detail or with different perspectives, so I'll consider these technical devices as extensions of our senses - what they see is the world as it is, whether its just a long exposure camera that allows us to see the far depths of the Universe, or a technique that lets us attribute an age to a particular rock sample, or a huge particle accelerator that lets us peer into the ultimate constituents of matter.
All these observations have allowed us to build a concept of the world which begins in what we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang somehow produced the basic elements and Physics is the tool we use to describe our observations of how they interact with other similar and dissimilar elements. These elements come together to form complex structures with larger scale behaviours - some of these we gather into Solid State Matter (for crystals mainly) and some of these we lump into the category of Chemistry.
There's a particular element, Carbon, which is abundant enough and "flexible" enough to interact with others in a huge number of ways... we call the branch of Chemistry that delves into the structures containing this particular element Organic Chemistry, because we've also noticed that living, or organic, things are mostly comprised of these structures. Organic chemistry gives you the building blocks of life and another field which we called Biology.
I'm pretty sure you're mostly aware of all these words, so I'll skip on defining them much further.
Observations in the Biology field have led us to postulate that life on this planet originated as simple microbial life which then evolved and evolved and evolved and scattered and evolved and scattered and evolved over millions and millions of years into the myriad lifeforms we see today, passing through some of the ones we find as fossils which no longer exist.
At some point along this chain of living organisms, our ancestors appeared. For hundreds of thousands of years, again according to observations of things left behind, these humans lived in what we call the Stone age - mostly nomads, hunters, gatherers, taking shelter where they could, using ever more sophisticated stone utensils. Eventually, other more specialized instruments were developed from different materials, copper, iron... and writing was invented.
With writing we nowadays can peer into the minds of those who lived long ago and it seems that, by this time, people already believed in the supernatural and the divine. The origins of the belief in the divine are barred from us. We can thus only make educated guesses into how mankind went from a tree dwelling ape (which we can assume had no conception of the divine, much like the apes we have nowadays), into the believers we see existing in the first writings.
One can point to some ancient structures and burial remains and infer that some were of some spiritual/religious nature. The earliest date for such artefacts is 50,000 BCE. At some point, after, say, one million BCE and before 50k BCE, mankind developed the notion of the divine and it has since stuck around. Why would it stick around? Probably because it provides an explanation to many questions which were unanswerable and allowed people to keep working towards the tribes' common goal, instead of delving into thought and contributing nothing. In many places, this notion probably became somewhat dominant, leading to a selection pressure for people that have an inherent tendency towards belief in the supernatural, possibly hijacking the sense of trust.
Perhaps this is what theists nowadays appropriate as the "sense of the divine", or something like that?
All this information can be gleamed (with a few educated guesses) through observation of the world around us.
Let's now say there is a god. What would be different about the unchronicled past? Would our observations and conclusions change? Perhaps they would if we would try to find out what happened in the far far unobservable and unevidenced past, that which happened prior to the Big Bang (if prior is a wor dthat can be used). How did that Big Bang come to be? Don't know. But, ever since it happened, things have progressed fine with no apparent need for any divine intervention.
The bible appears fairly late, in a population with an already rich history of conflicting and coexisting religious beliefs. While it carries some worthwhile tales of morality, it also has obviously many references to the divine entity and its alleged interactions with mankind. Worthy of note is the absence of this divine entity in any writings prior to anyone believing in it in that particular region of the world. If this divine entity does exist and is as interested in the affairs of mankind as one would be led to believe by the followers of the religion, I would expect it to have manifested itself in a much more obvious fashion and equally spread all over the world. As it is, it seems to be nothing more than an evolution of prior belief systems, with its also evolving clergy in a quest to control the populace in order to keep themselves in a position of power with little or no contribution to the affairs required for survival. I'll grant you the long standing psychological benefit of relief that believers can achieve, mostly when faced with mortality.
Do you think the outline provided above is inconsistent?
If yes, how?
"the belief system that is atheism".... how cute!
As the Grand Nudger told you, atheism pertains to simply not believing in the existence of a god.
There is an alternative definition that goes further and states that there are no gods at all and some people do follow this.
Most atheists, however, stick to the more intellectually honest position of simply not believing in the existence of gods.
As it turns out, the concept of god is sufficiently vague for reasonable doubt to exist about it s actual existence.
Care to explain how an atheist can live in a way that is inconsistent with atheism?
Does he not believe in god, but worships god? Is this what you observe?
Above, I outlined a scenario where this happened. I think it's a believable scenario. Do bear in mind that it wasn't something that happened overnight. It took many many generations and refinements to the concept of spirits. Some of the initial spiritual beliefs were probably animistic, where natural phenomena would take on some anthropomorphic features.
I think "God said, Let us make man in our image" is the ultimate subversion of how religious beliefs started and represents how the believers nowadays have the whole notion backwards.
Those are a lot of big words and high order traits that sound good, but...
Mankind is just another animal on this planet. Our ability to reason and philosophise has provided us with tools to ascertain long reaching consequences of our actions.
We generally judge actions that lead to less suffering as good and those that lead to more suffering than reasonable as bad. In between, there's a grey area where ignorance and practicality rule.
For example, when we started using Internal combustion engines (ICE), burning fuel drawn from pockets within the Earth, it seemed to be good to help make people move faster and connect with one another more efficiently. But things turned out somewhat different, so nowadays we are striving to do away with ICEs. Now we know better.
Christianity provides a series of rules that lead to a humanity that propagates itself indefinitely, while keeping the clergy class around. Clearly, this was a working set of rules for pre-industrial humanity, but we can foresee how it can fail in the face of worldwide overpopulation. Because of this, some of Christian morality is clearly not aiming to "the greater good" and is thus clearly not handed down from an external super powerful entity which would have foreseen this and provided much more specific rules.
This alone rules out the claim that the christian god is the one true god (if one exists at all).
As this is a forum, we can have more than two people posting on any given thread, so I thought I'd chime in.
(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: I am looking to challenge atheists as well as be challenged.
Challenge accepted!
As far as I'm concerned, my atheism came about after looking at the world and concluding that, with or without the gods that people believe in, it would be the same. Mind you, I was basically a kid back then, in my early teens or so...
Allow me to elaborate.
Let's start with "looking at the world" and automatically being pragmatic and eliminating solipsism from the equation.
The world around us is pretty much as we see it. Instruments exist to aid us in seeing it in far greater detail or with different perspectives, so I'll consider these technical devices as extensions of our senses - what they see is the world as it is, whether its just a long exposure camera that allows us to see the far depths of the Universe, or a technique that lets us attribute an age to a particular rock sample, or a huge particle accelerator that lets us peer into the ultimate constituents of matter.
All these observations have allowed us to build a concept of the world which begins in what we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang somehow produced the basic elements and Physics is the tool we use to describe our observations of how they interact with other similar and dissimilar elements. These elements come together to form complex structures with larger scale behaviours - some of these we gather into Solid State Matter (for crystals mainly) and some of these we lump into the category of Chemistry.
There's a particular element, Carbon, which is abundant enough and "flexible" enough to interact with others in a huge number of ways... we call the branch of Chemistry that delves into the structures containing this particular element Organic Chemistry, because we've also noticed that living, or organic, things are mostly comprised of these structures. Organic chemistry gives you the building blocks of life and another field which we called Biology.
I'm pretty sure you're mostly aware of all these words, so I'll skip on defining them much further.
Observations in the Biology field have led us to postulate that life on this planet originated as simple microbial life which then evolved and evolved and evolved and scattered and evolved and scattered and evolved over millions and millions of years into the myriad lifeforms we see today, passing through some of the ones we find as fossils which no longer exist.
At some point along this chain of living organisms, our ancestors appeared. For hundreds of thousands of years, again according to observations of things left behind, these humans lived in what we call the Stone age - mostly nomads, hunters, gatherers, taking shelter where they could, using ever more sophisticated stone utensils. Eventually, other more specialized instruments were developed from different materials, copper, iron... and writing was invented.
With writing we nowadays can peer into the minds of those who lived long ago and it seems that, by this time, people already believed in the supernatural and the divine. The origins of the belief in the divine are barred from us. We can thus only make educated guesses into how mankind went from a tree dwelling ape (which we can assume had no conception of the divine, much like the apes we have nowadays), into the believers we see existing in the first writings.
One can point to some ancient structures and burial remains and infer that some were of some spiritual/religious nature. The earliest date for such artefacts is 50,000 BCE. At some point, after, say, one million BCE and before 50k BCE, mankind developed the notion of the divine and it has since stuck around. Why would it stick around? Probably because it provides an explanation to many questions which were unanswerable and allowed people to keep working towards the tribes' common goal, instead of delving into thought and contributing nothing. In many places, this notion probably became somewhat dominant, leading to a selection pressure for people that have an inherent tendency towards belief in the supernatural, possibly hijacking the sense of trust.
Perhaps this is what theists nowadays appropriate as the "sense of the divine", or something like that?
All this information can be gleamed (with a few educated guesses) through observation of the world around us.
Let's now say there is a god. What would be different about the unchronicled past? Would our observations and conclusions change? Perhaps they would if we would try to find out what happened in the far far unobservable and unevidenced past, that which happened prior to the Big Bang (if prior is a wor dthat can be used). How did that Big Bang come to be? Don't know. But, ever since it happened, things have progressed fine with no apparent need for any divine intervention.
The bible appears fairly late, in a population with an already rich history of conflicting and coexisting religious beliefs. While it carries some worthwhile tales of morality, it also has obviously many references to the divine entity and its alleged interactions with mankind. Worthy of note is the absence of this divine entity in any writings prior to anyone believing in it in that particular region of the world. If this divine entity does exist and is as interested in the affairs of mankind as one would be led to believe by the followers of the religion, I would expect it to have manifested itself in a much more obvious fashion and equally spread all over the world. As it is, it seems to be nothing more than an evolution of prior belief systems, with its also evolving clergy in a quest to control the populace in order to keep themselves in a position of power with little or no contribution to the affairs required for survival. I'll grant you the long standing psychological benefit of relief that believers can achieve, mostly when faced with mortality.
(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: I am not hiding my thoughts on atheism. I think atheism is inconsistent and absurd and I think no atheist lives consistently with atheism.
Do you think the outline provided above is inconsistent?
If yes, how?
(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: When I say atheism is inconsistent and absurd that isn't an insult to the people, that's a comment on the belief system that is atheism.
"the belief system that is atheism".... how cute!
As the Grand Nudger told you, atheism pertains to simply not believing in the existence of a god.
There is an alternative definition that goes further and states that there are no gods at all and some people do follow this.
Most atheists, however, stick to the more intellectually honest position of simply not believing in the existence of gods.
As it turns out, the concept of god is sufficiently vague for reasonable doubt to exist about it s actual existence.
(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: When I say no atheist lives consistently with atheism, that is a comment on the people, sort of like your comment on Christians. Not an insult, just an observation.
Care to explain how an atheist can live in a way that is inconsistent with atheism?
Does he not believe in god, but worships god? Is this what you observe?
(September 24, 2021 at 1:25 pm)ayost Wrote: Ok, so it feels like your first statement is assuming that there was a time or people or civilization that had no concept of God and then all of the sudden theists started making up gods to explain things. Fine hypothesis, I guess, only I would challenge you to show me the people or culture or time where there was no God and then someone made it up. That's a strong assumption you can't prove. In fact, all of the evidence seems to point in the other direction: that man has always had a relationship with God, even though that relationship can get messed up.
Above, I outlined a scenario where this happened. I think it's a believable scenario. Do bear in mind that it wasn't something that happened overnight. It took many many generations and refinements to the concept of spirits. Some of the initial spiritual beliefs were probably animistic, where natural phenomena would take on some anthropomorphic features.
I think "God said, Let us make man in our image" is the ultimate subversion of how religious beliefs started and represents how the believers nowadays have the whole notion backwards.
(September 24, 2021 at 2:22 pm)ayost Wrote: Are you a humanist? Meaning without theism or other supernatural beliefs, man has the ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good?
Those are a lot of big words and high order traits that sound good, but...
Mankind is just another animal on this planet. Our ability to reason and philosophise has provided us with tools to ascertain long reaching consequences of our actions.
We generally judge actions that lead to less suffering as good and those that lead to more suffering than reasonable as bad. In between, there's a grey area where ignorance and practicality rule.
For example, when we started using Internal combustion engines (ICE), burning fuel drawn from pockets within the Earth, it seemed to be good to help make people move faster and connect with one another more efficiently. But things turned out somewhat different, so nowadays we are striving to do away with ICEs. Now we know better.
Christianity provides a series of rules that lead to a humanity that propagates itself indefinitely, while keeping the clergy class around. Clearly, this was a working set of rules for pre-industrial humanity, but we can foresee how it can fail in the face of worldwide overpopulation. Because of this, some of Christian morality is clearly not aiming to "the greater good" and is thus clearly not handed down from an external super powerful entity which would have foreseen this and provided much more specific rules.
This alone rules out the claim that the christian god is the one true god (if one exists at all).
