This is now a warning for you. Take it back to your thread and keep it out of this one. This thread is about opinions–which you’ve already made yours very clear about–not debating it.
I believe that if someone posits the existence of an entity–cats, atoms, a round earth, God, whatever–they should be able to clearly say what the entity is, and point to a compelling evidence based reason why a skeptic should believe that entity exists.
I don’t know. I used to believe that Hollywood would never run out of fresh new ideas.
I am not an atheist, but I think I can provide some perspective on where the gap here is in understanding. Let’s take a non-religious, well accepted American belief, all men are created equal. Ignoring the religious implications and the pockets of racists and other similar types, in general, theists and atheists alike will agree that everyone should have the same rights. This is analogous because it hasn’t always been a commonly shared idea, there’s even now places that don’t hold that belief. Also, there’s nothing inherently correct or incorrect about it; there’s no way to “prove” that this is right and, say, nobles deserving greater rights and privileges than commoners isn’t right. The difference here is that a religious person is likely to simply appeal to a belief in God and various teachings or commandments he’s given as justification for this belief, whereas an atheist will need to appeal to something else, but it’s not something that is inherently provably correct in the same way as, say, gravitation.
But personally, even though I believe in God, I look at the teachings as a launching off point. In the same way that we learn morality from our parents in how we’re raised, our parents can’t teach us the correct moral choice in every situation we’ll encounter in our lives, we’re responsible for sampling what we are taught and interpolating or clustering or whatever to figure out how to apply past lessons. A lot of religious people take the teachings as complete and don’t do that work to connect and reinforce the ideas with the consistency of their other beliefs.
But in the end, we all have beliefs of some sort, they’re what drive us to act. Science teaches us facts, but I’m not creating purpose in my life through collecting facts. Rather, I’m driven by a belief that the pursuit of knowledge has value. But as we’ve seen, even in this this thread, there are some people who don’t share that belief. Regardless of which way you go on that and how strongly you feel, there’s no objective single correct answer to what one should believe about it and it does drive how we act in our lives.
And that’s where I think the disconnect is. If forced to play the infinite why game, most theists, will eventually lead back to “because God…” where an atheist will presumably end up either not having really having a reason or some sort of dependent loop.
I believe if we ever find evidence of life on other planets, someone on Earth will find a way to deep-fry it.
Not it!
In a different thread I made this argument in a different form. Let’s say there’s no God or gods. Now without objective meaning, you can say this is agreeable and become apathetic.
Alternatively, you can say, but there’s subjective meaning and decide the relevant universe rotates around your subjective meaning. A lot of times this also leads to a lack of desire to improve the life of others.
So that’s my expansion on your comments.
I believe consciousness is a phenomenon traceable back to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, whereby any sufficiently complicated system of logic can be represented within the system itself and this leads to the statement of falsities that can be neither proven nor discredited and it’s this weird self referencial quality in the human mind that allows conscious thought. I have no explicit evidence of this, only a compelling argument. See: Godel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
You would have to make an argument that without God there is no objective meaning. There are atheists who believe there is objective meaning. One that I read a few years back argued that it was somehow part of the fabric of the universe. He then went on to argue that if you accepted that there was objective meaning then you could not consistently believe that it came from God.
I agreed with his latter argument, that “God” does not get us to objective meaning, but I don’t think I really buy the former argument.
In either case, my point remains that you are, once again, making broad statements about what atheists have to believe (ie, no objective meaning).
Who the hell doesn’t believe there is objective meaning?
I believe pchaos does - but he might be using a metaphor or some other definition of ‘objective’ that we don’t yet understand - being atheist and all.
There’s a few ways objective meaning can be interpreted, one being an objective meaning to life, another relating to objective morality, and another being related to objective reality.
I was referring more along the lines of objective morality.
If you mean objective meaning to life, as opposed to objectivity in science, I do not. The only meaning is what we decide for ourselves, which is thus always subjective.
This is another warning for you. Do not debate this in this thread, use your own topic for that.
Your posting privileges will be under discussion.
To everyone: Please take the pchaos discussion to the other thread in GD.
It soitenly is, Ollie… but quite a few people have expended their lives pondering what they don’t know. That’s something like making atheism a ‘practiced philosophy’ by thinking about it and its tenets and praxis all the time, which I don’t do. I also don’t spend much time on the imponderable “I don’t knows,” so my answer isn’t “I don’t know” except in the sense that I don’t know (or care, or care that I don’t care) what ScarJo is having for lunch right now.
I believe we’ve finished with him, actually.
Mmmmmm popplers!
I believe if we ever find evidence of life outside of Earth somone on Earth will find a way to fuck it.
“Oh, for gods’s sake, she’s DEAD, Jim!”
Just because it is specific to a person or a group of people doesn’t make it subjective. If I were to get what it is for you wrong that would be an objective mistake.
I’m an atheist and I believe nothing is sacred. My husband is a pantheist and believes everything is sacred. Oddly enough those beliefs result in pretty much the same actions and philosophical beliefs about everything else.