Amoral Inaction

[thesummerqueen]

Any time dear, though I don't know I can offer much.

Mostly I'm just interested in learning the details that separate different philosophies. I try doing it with Christians too, which sometimes gets hairy.

Believe it or not, a few years ago I actually wondered why I couldn't be a "normal atheist". This phase lasted about two weeks where I seriously wondered what was "wrong with me". The skeptical side (agnostic side) of my brain is well aware that I can't prove the existence of God to anyone else's satisfaction. I'm not even sure what might constitute solid evidence for the claim. And yet I can't honestly adopt the label "atheist" because I'm so instinctively convinced. Ever seen the end of the movie "Contact"?

I went through the opposite all up till about 2 years ago when I met my current boyfriend and a guy he went to college with. I spent from about the time of my bat mitzvah till then wondering why I couldn't be a "normal Jew." Someone made the unfortunate mistake of exposing me to Spinoza when I was around 13-14 and that made it worse. At 10 I had already figured if there was a god, he wasn't listening in on the world. I started giving people a definition of belief that pretty much belonged to pantheism all up until those two guys were like "relax...you're an atheist. You're not weird, and you're not a bad person." I just can't bring myself to believe in a god.

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[Captain Scarlet]

On a macro level it can give the appearance of design. On the micro as well.

agreed but on the nano, reality is a scary chaotic and unpredictable place

but can you describe what would a disordered universe would look like? Something that would cause you to doubt the existence of an ordering, creative force when you look through the telescope or microscope?

I probably wouldn't be around to see it, or if I was, unable to rationally evaluate it.

Really? You are going to have to let me press you on this a little. If you perceive the universe as in someway ordered (thus implying an intelligence behind it), you have an idea of what order is, and that it is strong enough to imply design. So you must have an idea of what disorder looks like that would cause you to question your beliefs on the universe? I suppose this is a how do you falsify deism question.

The more we understand the universe, the less design there really appears to be. A universe seemingly created out-of-chaos, where stars explode devasting million of light years of space; the 99.9999etc% of space hostile to us; galaxies colliding; black holes hoovering up space, matter and time; destined to a death (probably entropic); where particles pop in and out of existence and exist in more than one place simultaneously. None of this implies order to me and even if it did the strength of the analogy to other form of known design is incredibly weak. Ultimately are we not bound to see the universe as ordered if we evolved within it as pattern seekling mammals? Thus leaving nothing to explain in the first place. There is no reason to suppose that deism is more likely than atheism.

Wasn't Mr Spock an atheist?
Was his philosophy ever determined in any episode? I ask because I don't know. I'm not as much an expert on Star Trek as other nerds might be.

Haven't a clue, I don't think it was ever made explicit...but he was a methodoligical naturalist in a show that regularly showed its disdain for organised religion.

[Cinjin]

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