A few questions

[bennyboy]

I'd have to ask you the same question the other guys are asking the Deist. How do you/can you know this for sure? Specifically, how do you know for sure that there is not a higher power which mediates or modulates mood, injects at least some ideas or feelings into a human organism?

Because a thinking, acting nothingness is nonsensical?

I think the universe seems to be largely nonsensical. I mean, it seems either to have always existed, or to have magically been created by something which always existed, or to be part of a chain of infinite co-existence; fuck-- none of those options makes any sense. But I do know that it includes consiousness, and so without knowing absolutely why any chain of events occurs, one of the possibilities (even if slim) is that consciousness is injected somewhere along that chain.

It depends how you look at it. On the one hand, it seems of all the things we know about, only a very small % of "stuff" involves anything we'd call thinking. On the other hand, 100% of that "stuff" is known to us only through a thinking mind-- absolutely nothing is known to exist that we are not conscious of. And 100% is a statistic worth carefully considering when drawing philosophical inferences.

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"How do you know that there isn't" is a textbook shifting of the burden of proof.

Yes, it is.