I'm too dumb to be an atheist

[Jackalope]

This is a tangent, but I'm so confused right now, it's all too much. I feel like I'm an idiot, and that's I'm too dumb to be an atheist.

JL - give it time. If you haven't studied these subjects much before, it's a lot to take in.

I recall reading a book on cosmic inflationary theory by Alan Guth. The first few chapters I thought I could grasp, the next several were over my head, and the rest was way over my head. I simply didn't have the background to appreciate the significance of some key concepts at the time.

Keep it up.

[Bittersmart]

Starting out with Dawkins might be a bit much. If you don't have a decent scientific knowledge, some of that stuff will go right over your head.

Maybe something like this to start off with?

[thesummerqueen]

Despite all the ununderstandable scientific jibberish, Dawkins really just doesn't know how something could come from nothing.

Krauss does.

Your avatar lends this post an amount of smug that borderlines disturbing.

Quite true. He even says as much.

However, in the absence of such knowledge he does not infer God as an alternative.

You're right, but with all the learned people attesting to experiences with a god throught human history, it leaves it open for consideration.

Experiences with God are not evidence of God. They're anecdotes.






JL, I'm pretty shitty at maths and economics. My boyfriend, on the other hand, is a whiz at them. Meanwhile, I find it easy to parse out a story - movie or book. We trade off by discussing these subjects - math or literature - because taking a book about any of those topics piece by piece is a MUCH easier method than trying to cram it all in at once. Frequently I will read something out loud to him and then we will talk about it.

In your case, if you feel overwhelmed, perhaps you should divide the book into subheadings, mark off what you're struggling with, and do further research just on that one thing at a time, or enlist friends to help state the information in a different manner.

I know a lot of people who think Shakespeare is boring as shit and unreadable. That's until you get someone who really really loves The Bard in front of them who can put him in context, and 'translate' the Renaissance language into modern prose (even though you lose something then since a lot of Shakespeare is "punny"). I laugh at the number of people who think Clueless is a great 90's movie but think Jane Austen is 'boring'. It's all because the language puts them off. You might find the same problem with Dawkins and it will help to have someone "translate" it all.

[ThePinsir]

Krauss does.

Your avatar lends this post an amount of smug that borderlines disturbing.

Good :p

[Whateverist]

As for wondering how everything could come from nothing, I wonder if you've ever questioned what evidence you have for thinking that there was ever an absolute, total nothing before there was anything at all. Christians don't believe that. They think the means to everything was already there all along in the form of God. Physicists don't think that either. They think each successive state of the universe(s) were always preceded by the necessary pre-existing conditions. The only difference is the scientists don't begin by assuming they already know everything.

By definition everything had to originate from Nothing. The stumbling block is that it is very difficult to understand what Nothing is and what its properties are.

When the Earth was first formed did it have any dirt on it?

Not sure I follow. Do you mean each item in the cosmos, such as our Earth, had to have originated from nothing? Because that much we know is not true. The blob of debree whose gravitational field led to the formation of our solar system with the greatest mass of debree conscentrated in what was to become our sun. But owing to the rotation of the field about its center became stabilized in rotation rather than crowding into the center. One such ring became our planet.

I don't think this makes a good example of anything coming from nothing. The earth and our solar system arose following multiple generations of larger, less stable stars whose destruction created debree fields one of which, eventually, became ours. I find no "nothing" in this story.

There is a huge difference between saying before I was born the world was devoid of me versus saying before I was born there was absolutely nothing. Choose anything currently existing, sure there was a time before which it existed. But none of it sprang from nothing. Anything can always and only come from recycled and transformed states of what there was before. As proof I offer this entire bald assertion. QED

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You're right, but with all the learned people attesting to experiences with a god throught human history, it leaves it open for consideration.

Experiences with God are not evidence of God. They're anecdotes.

At the very least "experiences" of anything are first of all the product of the interface between our cognitive-perceptual capacities and whatever there may be out there. Some experiences are generated entirely on-board, such as dreams. They can feel real while you're dreaming and of course they are real - as dreams. They are "on-board" phenomena.

Anecdotes of interfacing with God are likewise on-board phenomenon. They are real as experience but there is no guarantee of linkage to anything out there in the world beyond us.

Remember learned people have been "attesting to dreams" too through all of human history. Some cultures believe there are real and important connections between dream time and waking time, and there probably are .. but there is no reason to posit a parallel universe for this. Our brains are able to generate it just fine.

Connecting experiences of God to the bible in a literal way is a clumsy and stupid way to understand ones experience of God. If you're really interested in God you should follow what you experience directly and not trade it in for the bible. If God is anything at all and you settle for the bible, He would be disappointed.

[Clueless Morgan]

Four pages of responses and JL hasn't turned up to talk about the thread he started.

I would call troll except that OP doesn't seem very trolly.

Maybe his parents found his copy of the God Delusion and he's locked in the basement or something...

[thesummerqueen]

Not everyone has copious amounts of time to spend on the forums.

[ThePinsir]

Four pages of responses and JL hasn't turned up to talk about the thread he started.

I would call troll except that OP doesn't seem very trolly.

Maybe his parents found his copy of the God Delusion and he's locked in the basement or something...

That's kinda funny...but sad. I can soooo see his parents burning the book and grounding him from the internet to protect his fragile, developing mind from the demons on atheistforums.org.

[Mister Agenda]

I had a book on Wicca when I was maybe 14. Straight into the trash can, and they went straight to our preacher about it. They decided against an intervention, thank goodness. That was in the seventies.

I didn't turn out to be a Wiccan, but I doubt my dad is much comforted.

[Fromper]

Understanding the Big Bang is a tough subject. I remember being confused by some of the common questions as a kid, and never really researching it enough to fully understand it, until recently. I started reading "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking just last week.

I'm only 3 chapters in, and I already know I'm going to want to read this book twice, because it's hard to take it all in on the first pass. I've learned a ton, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone with absolutely no science background. It's been a while since I was in school, but I was pretty good at the science stuff back then. I haven't read "The God Delusion", so I don't know how that compares.