Is Eternal Life Even Desireable?

[Hatshepsut]

Very few atheists I know of are philosophical materialists. Most are methodological materialists. What are these good reasons to believe in the divine you refer to?

Then I shan't accuse those methodologicals of placing unnecessary restrictions on epistemology. Or anything beyond "Just the facts, Maam" in Adam-12. Such an attitude is to be admired when you want to solve problems. Yet while no unwarranted assumptions of purpose should be laid on physical, biological, or cosmological processes in the course of analyzing them to obtain first principles, I find the leap from this to excluding the divine from our universe of possibility a bit long.

Even the handiwork of molecules and living things and galaxies itself seems too smart to allow me the mantra "pattern but no design or purpose." I can't prove existence of deity and doubt such an existence can be proved via application of an objective method. We don't even know how to define the category of "deity" properly and have wasted lots of time projecting our own social psychology onto our god concepts. Including our conflicts with other people and groups. Ideas of divine involvement, however, can arise when we ask questions like "Why are we conscious?" After all our brains can take input from our physical sense organs and compute behavioral outputs without any fluff of a subjective sense of being alive. Yet those roses are so red and the usual explanations proffered, awareness as epiphenomenon and awareness as consequence of the brain's complexity, so unsatisfying. We should by rights be androids doing all our stuff while dead as a doorknob inside.

Mother Nature doesn't invent epiphenomena: things which causally depend on other things but have no reciprocal influence in turn. Newton's 3rd law was action-reaction. If our consciousness is caused by our brains, then it must be able to kick back yet we see no signs of it doing so-always just the neuronal activity.

Emergence from complexity: A car is indeed more than a pile of auto parts, yet a car really doesn't possess any new properties its parts didn't have. Instead, a car possesses functional abilities: It can do things like drive that the parts can't do by themselves. While our brains are more than a pile of cells, we're imputing more than computational ability to brains: they have a new property of consciousness the cells didn't seem to have.

Finally, consciousness is completely private. We can't tell directly whether any other person or thing is conscious, or if we're walking around in a world of androids. We can't even rule out consciousness in rocks or bacteria for that matter. This cutting off of information from the rest of the universe like it went down a hairless black hole is suspicious. It leads me to believe reality includes more than just the physical universe we can study with science. And both physical and mental complexity suggest a designed thing with a reason for coming into existence, though I don't claim to understand this reason or think it has to be a traditional god which did this. Snowflakes and fractals aside, I think there's a limit to how much complexity can emerge from a small number of basic laws without design. Galaxies and brains aren't fractals or Lorentz attractors anyhow.

So, while I cannot say much about the nature of deity, I'm convinced that an intelligent consciousness is there, behind all the wonders we can see and feel.