Miracles and Anti-supernaturalism

[Esquilax]

I understand your position. But I urge you to look beyond the facts to their meaning. Most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point at food on the floor, and they sniff your finger. A finger is a finger to them, and nothing more--all facts, no meaning. Similarly, love produces within us physical reactions, such as flutters in the stomach. But we know the meaning of the flutters because we have inside information--we know what love feels like. Science will not tell you what love feels like.

Well, science can't tell you about the subjective qualities of love, because science concerns itself with objective measurements, or as close as it can come to that. However, science can show you the objective qualities of love, how your body reacts to the emotion, the physical, quantifiable portions of it. It can even tell you whether you're in love or not, based on readings of your brain, and what elements of your body become active in the presence of your beloved.

So, science can't tell you exactly how love feels to each individual person, but then, nobody can. But it can give you a fairly good approximation, same as anyone else.

It is information like this that causes us to imagine what greater meanings there could be. When you request that I "bring something convincing to the table" I get the hunch that the "something" you are looking for are facts. I like that we are both writers. Use your ardent imagination. Make it your business to be convinced by meaning, and not merely facts.

If we were discussing a subjective thing you'd have a fair point here. But the concept of a first cause is an objective, existential position; either that first causes exists, or it does not. There's no possible way that this first cause can exist for you, and not exist for me; whether it does or it doesn't, belief won't change that. Therefore, what we can imagine has no bearing on the truth of the matter; however hard you feel it's true, it's either true or not, regardless.

Note what it is your gut tells you, and work backwards. If you start at evolution, you force facts into a theory designed to accept every fact--a theory which changes, depending on the facts. Ask yourself what doesn't change. Ask yourself if there is anything more important than survival.

This part's kind of a non sequitur; accepting factual things is just the way the world works. It's the way rational beings must work. Your beliefs on objective things has no bearing; they remain factual anyway. I'm sorry if these ideas are uncomfortable to you,, but that doesn't change their truth value. Evolution is a fact: we've observed it happening, we've reproduced it under laboratory conditions. It's a done deal. Accepting it as such is exactly the same thing as accepting the sky is blue.

My reason is that I can continue my research and confirm the first cause with other evidence/arguments.

That's precisely the same thing I and the other atheists are doing, we just don't see a reason to accept the first cause claim as true before we've confirmed it. To me, what you're doing seems to be leading the evidence toward your preferred conclusion, rather than the true one.

Analogy:
A murder has two possible suspects. The first one, Dave, is in custody. The other, John Doe, was blown up by a grenade, identification and all. Both are possibilities. But police will pursue Dave because they can find more information about him. He isn’t a dead end.

Yes, but if the evidence shows that Dave couldn't have committed the murder, the police don't go on to arrest him because he's the only one still alive.

I’m not sure if you’re being serious, but this scenario makes some assumptions. First, that God, or anyone, could feed on emotional states. Second, that humans are actually capable of raising the net energy in the universe.

Well, I wasn't being serious, I was just pointing out that you're making your own assumptions about what god can or can't do, and even what god has and has not done, based on the same lack of evidence that I have. My point is that neither of us should be making assumptions.

I referred to “selfless love”. In other words, love that doesn’t serve the lover. Such as loving one’s enemies. Do you deny that this kind of love exists?

I'm not going to deny anything. What I will say is that we're not perfect biological machines in any respect. We're cobbled together from a million million evolutionary changes and behavioural tics developed through the operation of this imperfect software and hardware. We're allowed to be irrational or selfless without recourse to a god.