Why do Athiests require 'proof' that God exists?

[genkaus]

To my mind, most of the examples you provided still represent functional shifts. Self-initiated motion? Within the materialist paradigm there are only chains of cause and effect. These do not require subjective experience, like shocking the nerves of a dead frog causing its leg to twitch. Reproduction describes the various states and actions of physical matter, a functional property derived from other functional properties.

And how is subjective experience any different? They'd be functional properties of the brain, derived from the functioning of the neurons underneath.

To my mind that’s not a good example. Software doesn’t emerge from anything. Software instructions impose order on the hardware as it (the hardware) does its physical operations. Punch cards trip switches to make dials register in various positions. The directions encoded in the cards and the calculated results are meaningless to the computer itself.

The point is, software is something qualitatively different from the hardware. It is something intangible and invisible unless the gears, so to speak, are in motion. And it is meaningless to the computer only because there isn't a self-awareness software designed yet.

I did exaggerate for rhetorical effect, but I think the concept still holds. What you describe sounds analogous to Morse Code. The clicks are meaningless in themselves. A higher scale of reality, human intelligence, is required to interpret them. What is the higher level of reality that interprets neural clicks? That’s really not a fair question, but you get the idea.

Not exactly. One click does not depend on the other in the Morse code. Think of it as a sort of very complicated domino effect where the dominoes stand up after the show is over. There are separate patterns of dominoes and each domino in one pattern is connected to another domino in another pattern. Once one pattern is activated, all others are activated as well.

Not sure I fully understand what you’re saying. I know electronic neural nets can be trained for facial recognition, for example. Is that what you mean by perception? Otherwise I’ve always considered perception a more complex construct of sensations, something I may need to reconsider.

A rather simplistic type pf perception, but yes, perception nevertheless. Perception refers to organization, identification and interpretation of sensory inputs. Now, consider a security system consisting of cameras, pressure gauges and temperature gauges. Those are its "sensors" and provide sensory input. All this input, presumably, is being continuously fed to a software which is constantly analyzing the data. It has records of all the allowed personnel, so facial recognition will pick anyone unknown. By temperature and pressure sensitivity, it can figure out other things such as who is where. All this is perception. The machine may not be conscious of what it is doing, but it is perceiving nonetheless.