RE: God: No magic required
January 27, 2014 at 4:22 pm
(This post was last modified: January 27, 2014 at 5:12 pm by lweisenthal.)
I like having discussions like this with people in different time zones. The conversations tend to be more slow motion and thoughtful, which is not how they are when they are real time/back and forth, where there is too much in the way of emotional reaction. I do thank the several of you who are continuing this discussion with me.
Firstly, let's dispense with the straw men.
I don't believe in Santa Claus, because he doesn't meet the test of plausibility. We have Google Earth images of the North Pole. No sign of human or reindeer habitation there. There is no evidence that mammals have ever had the ability to levitate and fly. And so on.
I also don't believe in physical miracles, including such things as faith healing of cancer. I don't reject the possibility completely; I'm an open-minded scientist (medical and research oncologist). I'm always open to reading the sorts of anecdotes which are used to support the canonization of Popes and what not. To date, I am not persuaded, but perhaps one day I shall be.
On the other hand, it is beyond challenge that prayers for beneficial alteration of sentient consciousness are routinely answered, for literally billions of people: courage, solace, liberation from substance abuse, companionship (yes, it's decidedly possible for a lonely person to experience a sense of companionship with a higher order of consciousness), perseverance, determination, improved ethics and morality, and so forth.
Now, I know that you'll bring up placebo effect, but that's a very high class problem to have. A believer experiences the myriad benefits of prayer, which are completely real to said believer (e.g. yours truly), but the precise mechanism of these benefits is elusive, from the standpoint of "proof."
The reason that you guys can't convince believers to disbelieve, on the basis of the sorts of arguments you throw out, is that their (our) own personal experience trumps the arguments which you find to be so logical.
Max gives me the courtesy of seriously considering my answer to the question of what interest God would have in us dull, uninteresting humans and states the following:
"What does a cat, dog, goldfish think? Well probably not alot (hungry, horny, tired, WALK etc.) and certainly nothing that would hold your interest for long. Surely that is the point. A universe creating deity would have less in common with us than does an ant.
"What's God doing if he's (!) not following us? OK - logical problem here - God is infinite. God existed for an infinite amount of time before he "invented" the universe. What was he doing then? Or, the universe is 13.72 billion years old - we are 200,000 years old. What was he doing for the 13.72 billion years prior to our arrival?"
My answer:
Well, firstly, this is another straw man. I don't know that God is infinite or that God existed for an infinite amount of time. For example, current theories from cosmological physics postulate the existence of an infinite number of universes in an infinite multiverse. Within our own universe, 95% of the physical reality is dark energy and dark matter. Human consciousness is simply organized biolectrical energy. Common matter is organized into very complex, sophisticated structures. We know that organized patterns of wired energy can produce sentience. None of you guys can begin to prove that organized patterns of wireless dark energy can't also produce sentience -- on an incalculable scale. Which is, parenthetically, why atheism is a "belief," while agnosticism is rational skepticism.
Getting back to the current straw man:
The higher order sentience, existing in the dark energy/matter/higher dimensions of our universe would not necessarily have existed for an infinite amount of time. Our universe is postulated to have existed for less than 15 billion years. Therefore the "God" of our universe could have arisen from the coalescence of dark energy, in the same way that the stars originated from the coalescence of ordinary matter. The God whom I believe answers my own prayers may, therefore, be a product of spontaneous evolution of dark energy, who/which may or may not be a creator in his/its own right.
Or perhaps God arose from the exotic energy in another universe in our multiverse.
What did God do to occupy his time before the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago? There are 500 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars and doubtless trillions of planets. That's only in our universe, one of possibly an infinite number of universes in the multiverse.
You don't care to believe in this; that's fine. But you can't begin to offer the beginning of any proof at all that it's not plausible, much less offer proof that it's not true. An agnostic would have the intellectual honesty to say that it's plausible, but doesn't rise to the level of believability, at the level of said agnostic. But an atheist has to assert that it's not only implausible, but actually impossible. As I said originally, certitude is poison. I believe that God exists and that God answers prayers, but I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong and that it's all placebo effect, albeit a powerful and very beneficial placebo. You guys have the certitude to believe that you have sufficient understanding of the nature of the multiverse to reject all possibility of God.
There was certainly a time when your ancestors would have felt they had sufficient understanding of the nature of the planet earth to reject all possibility of Skype.
- Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
Firstly, let's dispense with the straw men.
I don't believe in Santa Claus, because he doesn't meet the test of plausibility. We have Google Earth images of the North Pole. No sign of human or reindeer habitation there. There is no evidence that mammals have ever had the ability to levitate and fly. And so on.
I also don't believe in physical miracles, including such things as faith healing of cancer. I don't reject the possibility completely; I'm an open-minded scientist (medical and research oncologist). I'm always open to reading the sorts of anecdotes which are used to support the canonization of Popes and what not. To date, I am not persuaded, but perhaps one day I shall be.
On the other hand, it is beyond challenge that prayers for beneficial alteration of sentient consciousness are routinely answered, for literally billions of people: courage, solace, liberation from substance abuse, companionship (yes, it's decidedly possible for a lonely person to experience a sense of companionship with a higher order of consciousness), perseverance, determination, improved ethics and morality, and so forth.
Now, I know that you'll bring up placebo effect, but that's a very high class problem to have. A believer experiences the myriad benefits of prayer, which are completely real to said believer (e.g. yours truly), but the precise mechanism of these benefits is elusive, from the standpoint of "proof."
The reason that you guys can't convince believers to disbelieve, on the basis of the sorts of arguments you throw out, is that their (our) own personal experience trumps the arguments which you find to be so logical.
Max gives me the courtesy of seriously considering my answer to the question of what interest God would have in us dull, uninteresting humans and states the following:
"What does a cat, dog, goldfish think? Well probably not alot (hungry, horny, tired, WALK etc.) and certainly nothing that would hold your interest for long. Surely that is the point. A universe creating deity would have less in common with us than does an ant.
"What's God doing if he's (!) not following us? OK - logical problem here - God is infinite. God existed for an infinite amount of time before he "invented" the universe. What was he doing then? Or, the universe is 13.72 billion years old - we are 200,000 years old. What was he doing for the 13.72 billion years prior to our arrival?"
My answer:
Well, firstly, this is another straw man. I don't know that God is infinite or that God existed for an infinite amount of time. For example, current theories from cosmological physics postulate the existence of an infinite number of universes in an infinite multiverse. Within our own universe, 95% of the physical reality is dark energy and dark matter. Human consciousness is simply organized biolectrical energy. Common matter is organized into very complex, sophisticated structures. We know that organized patterns of wired energy can produce sentience. None of you guys can begin to prove that organized patterns of wireless dark energy can't also produce sentience -- on an incalculable scale. Which is, parenthetically, why atheism is a "belief," while agnosticism is rational skepticism.
Getting back to the current straw man:
The higher order sentience, existing in the dark energy/matter/higher dimensions of our universe would not necessarily have existed for an infinite amount of time. Our universe is postulated to have existed for less than 15 billion years. Therefore the "God" of our universe could have arisen from the coalescence of dark energy, in the same way that the stars originated from the coalescence of ordinary matter. The God whom I believe answers my own prayers may, therefore, be a product of spontaneous evolution of dark energy, who/which may or may not be a creator in his/its own right.
Or perhaps God arose from the exotic energy in another universe in our multiverse.
What did God do to occupy his time before the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago? There are 500 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars and doubtless trillions of planets. That's only in our universe, one of possibly an infinite number of universes in the multiverse.
You don't care to believe in this; that's fine. But you can't begin to offer the beginning of any proof at all that it's not plausible, much less offer proof that it's not true. An agnostic would have the intellectual honesty to say that it's plausible, but doesn't rise to the level of believability, at the level of said agnostic. But an atheist has to assert that it's not only implausible, but actually impossible. As I said originally, certitude is poison. I believe that God exists and that God answers prayers, but I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong and that it's all placebo effect, albeit a powerful and very beneficial placebo. You guys have the certitude to believe that you have sufficient understanding of the nature of the multiverse to reject all possibility of God.
There was certainly a time when your ancestors would have felt they had sufficient understanding of the nature of the planet earth to reject all possibility of Skype.
- Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
