Killswitch
FH is my second home
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2004
- Messages
- 1,584
I know it's probably asking too much, but in the light of the apparent rise of the batshit-insane Religious Right in US politics and the ongoing debates about the teaching of creationism vs evolution recently fired-up by a certain Rick Perry, I'd like to try and start a decent debate on here. I'm 99% sure it'll degenerate into namecalling, trolling and long, rambling posts by Toht that are at best orthogonal to the subject.
I'll start with where I stand. I would imagine I'm as close to a full-blown Athiest as it's possible to get without discarding logic and reason completely. This would be a "6 leaning strongly towards 7" on the scale Richard Dawkins mentioned in The God Delusion. I would hope that if faced with compelling evidence of the existence of a deity, I'd be able to accept that and change my world-view based on it. I am uncomfortable with the term "Agnostic" though, as it seems to suggest almost a coin-flip of likelihood...an equivalence of probabilities of the existence of a god (which god is never really made clear).
There are several common arguments I hear regarding the existence of God with the most common being summed up by Stephen Jay Gould using the term Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). This is essentially the idea that Science (or reason/logic/experimentation) and Religion are two parallel lines which never cross. Essentially that they answer different questions; Science tells us "How" and Religion tells us "Why". I instinctively distrust this reasoning because assigning motives and will to inanimate objects is the very antithesis of Science and progress. This kind of anthropomorphisation dominated early critical thinking but acts as a barrier to further inquiry; if we say that a rock falls to the earth because that is it's correct place then that seems to be end of the discussion. Once this was challenged, it led (eventually) to Newton's Laws of Motion and the single-greatest advancement in our understanding of the universe.
"Why" attributes a purpose, a pursuit of an eventual goal but this seems to me very much like putting the cart before the horse. Religion claims to be the road to finding out the "Why" of existence, but the only reason anyone would even assume there IS a "Why" is if they are religious to begin with.
The other point that specifically interests me is what evidence I think I personally would need to see before I could believe in God. This is a tricky question for several reasons. The first reason is that no-one has defined what it means to be God (or a god, or god-like). Is it enough to be have been the Creator? The guy who flipped the "On" switch and then pursued other interests, an absentee landlord? At the other end of the scale, would God need to be present in all places at all times for eternity? Would his constant attention and will be required for all physical processes to continue? Somewhere in-between?
I like to postulate a thought-experiment at this point. The "Computer Simulation" experiment in fact. If this Universe and every sentient being in it was being run by a computer program (or even AS a computer program, computing some complex problem) would that make the guy running the program God? Which God? Would he be Allah or Yahweh or Zeus? Would he pass the "Fit and Proper Deity Test" of a Christian or Muslim"?
I think that's where I feel comfortable drawing my line in the sand as it were. It seems possible (it could be argued that it's very likely in fact) that we are in some kind of simulation or managed world, made by a Creator with a definite, fixed purpose. That person may or may not have the ability to influence everything great and small within our universe. They might have seeded life on our planet with the certainty that human life would evolve and argue endlessly about the origins of the Universe. I could accept that possibility. What I could not accept, however, is that this Creator could have appeared, fully-formed and all-powerful and willed our Universe into existence. Any creature capable of such a technological feat of creation would, like us, have evolved from the smallest possible form of life over billions of years. While they might have god-like powers (whatever that means) over their "Creation" and while they might have "Intelligently Designed" us and everything around us, that excludes them from being the Abrahamic God (or Zeus, Thor, Amon-Ra and all the other gods that believers conveniently choose to not believe it).
So I guess (after all that rambling) I'm an Atheist with a leaning towards a weird kind of techno-spiritualism. The idea something as awesome as the Universe could be created appeals to me on a technological level and the idea that a race could evolve to the point of technical prowess to be able to create/simulate an entire Universe doesn't seem impossible to me. These are people like me though, just smarter and more evolved.
To sum up; God is clearly a bedroom-dwelling IT nerd from the Deimos cell of Anonymous.
I'll start with where I stand. I would imagine I'm as close to a full-blown Athiest as it's possible to get without discarding logic and reason completely. This would be a "6 leaning strongly towards 7" on the scale Richard Dawkins mentioned in The God Delusion. I would hope that if faced with compelling evidence of the existence of a deity, I'd be able to accept that and change my world-view based on it. I am uncomfortable with the term "Agnostic" though, as it seems to suggest almost a coin-flip of likelihood...an equivalence of probabilities of the existence of a god (which god is never really made clear).
There are several common arguments I hear regarding the existence of God with the most common being summed up by Stephen Jay Gould using the term Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). This is essentially the idea that Science (or reason/logic/experimentation) and Religion are two parallel lines which never cross. Essentially that they answer different questions; Science tells us "How" and Religion tells us "Why". I instinctively distrust this reasoning because assigning motives and will to inanimate objects is the very antithesis of Science and progress. This kind of anthropomorphisation dominated early critical thinking but acts as a barrier to further inquiry; if we say that a rock falls to the earth because that is it's correct place then that seems to be end of the discussion. Once this was challenged, it led (eventually) to Newton's Laws of Motion and the single-greatest advancement in our understanding of the universe.
"Why" attributes a purpose, a pursuit of an eventual goal but this seems to me very much like putting the cart before the horse. Religion claims to be the road to finding out the "Why" of existence, but the only reason anyone would even assume there IS a "Why" is if they are religious to begin with.
The other point that specifically interests me is what evidence I think I personally would need to see before I could believe in God. This is a tricky question for several reasons. The first reason is that no-one has defined what it means to be God (or a god, or god-like). Is it enough to be have been the Creator? The guy who flipped the "On" switch and then pursued other interests, an absentee landlord? At the other end of the scale, would God need to be present in all places at all times for eternity? Would his constant attention and will be required for all physical processes to continue? Somewhere in-between?
I like to postulate a thought-experiment at this point. The "Computer Simulation" experiment in fact. If this Universe and every sentient being in it was being run by a computer program (or even AS a computer program, computing some complex problem) would that make the guy running the program God? Which God? Would he be Allah or Yahweh or Zeus? Would he pass the "Fit and Proper Deity Test" of a Christian or Muslim"?
I think that's where I feel comfortable drawing my line in the sand as it were. It seems possible (it could be argued that it's very likely in fact) that we are in some kind of simulation or managed world, made by a Creator with a definite, fixed purpose. That person may or may not have the ability to influence everything great and small within our universe. They might have seeded life on our planet with the certainty that human life would evolve and argue endlessly about the origins of the Universe. I could accept that possibility. What I could not accept, however, is that this Creator could have appeared, fully-formed and all-powerful and willed our Universe into existence. Any creature capable of such a technological feat of creation would, like us, have evolved from the smallest possible form of life over billions of years. While they might have god-like powers (whatever that means) over their "Creation" and while they might have "Intelligently Designed" us and everything around us, that excludes them from being the Abrahamic God (or Zeus, Thor, Amon-Ra and all the other gods that believers conveniently choose to not believe it).
So I guess (after all that rambling) I'm an Atheist with a leaning towards a weird kind of techno-spiritualism. The idea something as awesome as the Universe could be created appeals to me on a technological level and the idea that a race could evolve to the point of technical prowess to be able to create/simulate an entire Universe doesn't seem impossible to me. These are people like me though, just smarter and more evolved.
To sum up; God is clearly a bedroom-dwelling IT nerd from the Deimos cell of Anonymous.