Voyager: I think I framed the declining incidence of miracles as a puzzle rather than a challenge: recall that I’m an agnostic. Yes, I would say that it’s an odd position: my take is that flashy Hollywood-style miracles emerged in the manner of modern urban legends.
Another meme was that since the concept of God occurred across lots of civilizations, it must reflect some kind of underlying reality.
Well, that’s not especially learned and papers over the divisions between polytheism, monotheism and Buddhism. Moreover, many of those who were raised as atheists (like groo) disprove the hypothesis that theism arises spontaneously.
I understand it is their position, not yours. I’m not sure about the urban legends, which are not spread because they benefit anyone. I rather think that those depending on belief would tend to expand the scope of the miracles of the past to be more convincing, in the same way that ancient kings would magnify the number of enemies they personally killed. It was something I wasn’t aware fundamentalists say - I have heard your second meme repeated many times.
Well… this was one guy I spoke with. He grew up in a fundamentalist sect; his Mom was religious, but he and his Dad were mere churchgoers. He had moved to NYC when I spoke to him and wasn’t currently enrolled in a church to my knowledge.
If there’s a point here, it’s that it’s understood that lots of miracles reportedly occurred a long time ago, but that today things are …different. I think he was rattling off an observation from the top of his head.
On the emergence of New Testament scripture, I trust that Diogenes The Cynic could provide more detail and accuracy than my brief take. And yes, self interest (and self-promotion) probably played a role.
I would say it is, for all but something that defies logic, which is what you’ll depend on in your search for answers. Something cannot come from nothing.
You once again mistakenly assume I have a particular notion of God in mind. And you once again feel the need to be insulting in the process. God can be your purple fucking spaghetti bunnicorn or whatever the fuck else you think generates guffaws amongst your brethren. Why believe in Him? Because it makes the most sense. It is the most logical explanation. Everything has a cause. Go back far enough and you have the first event, which, by definition, cannot have a cause. It is an non-natural event. Something had to be willed to happen. You can say that it was willed to happen by an alien from another dimension. Fine, then we’ll be in agreement.
I missed your post. I meant a tenet of physics. Science could not be done, beyond assigning mere correlation to events, if there was not an underlying premise that certain events cause certain other events to happen. And conversely, if an event occurs, something is responsible for its occurrence. Newton’s Laws of Motion are an example of this understanding of how the universe works.
The bunnies are actually more like Russell’s teapot than the IPU. The bunnies are not god or even close, they are just one of many things we don’t believe in without good evidence.
And no, I am not assuming any particular notion of god, except one that somehow is a prime mover. The lack of evidence for even a prime mover is what is up for discussion. Gods with particular characteristics have to be examined one by one.
I see later that you equate the “tenet” of cause with Newtonian physics. That’s an excellent analogy - they both make sense, seem to be true in our experience, yet are incorrect in extreme cases.
As for Sam, he said there is no evidence to require a god. You are saying that there is a lack of explanations for certain things, and that this requires a god. (Classic God of the Gaps argument.) They are two totally different things.
I do not see my argument as being a God of the Gaps argument. In that argument someone points to a specific (an eyeball) thing that seemingly cannot be explained, and attributes God to it. The evidence I offer for the existence of a Prime Mover is logic itself. This differs in that even if this universe was not created by God, but by some alien being from a neighboring universe, something had to have created him, and so on. If there is movement, there must have been a Prime Mover. Even if you are to posit that we are part of some multiverse that gives birth to universes every now and then, or routinely for that matter, something had to begin the process.
Not necessarily. That’s what I meant by causality being a strictly in-universe thing. The universe can just appear, uncaused. There is nothing in physics that prevents this, AFAIK.
The Prime Mover part is the cosmological argument. The we can’t explain how the universe got here yet, so it must be god, is the God of the Gaps argument.
Which brings up my favorite question: do you worship a generic creator god or some specific god? The deistic god is just a good explanation of the universe as any other, and it is pointless to worship him - he doesn’t care and is probably not listening. In fact he is a better explanation, since pretty all the Western god religions include specifics in how the world and universe were created, all of which turned out to be wrong. Anyone who is a Christian, Muslim or Jew because of the prime mover argument had better explain how you get from a general god to their specific god. For all we know god may be a personal one - but for some other world, where that god directly gave his people the true story in their Bible. We might be accidental even in a universe with a god.
ETA: Personally I don’t buy a Prime Mover at all, for the reasons MrDibble gave. My question assumes one, since I don’t think one helps the cause of any religion I know of.
Forget the universe. My argument id broader than that. Everything has a cause. The only thing that need not have a cause would be God.
Now, why would this be your favorite question, because it has nothing to do with the discussion? Becuase you think it’s some inescapable trap for your game of "Gotcha?And as a bonus you get to jab your finger in the eye of religionists? Why am I not surprised. :rolleyes:
To refresh the memory that God saw fit to give you a stingy serving of, I have never argued for any specific religion. I do not practice a religion. I’ve said, more than once in discussion to which you have been part that for all we know every religion ever known to man is 100% wrong. Religion is an act of faith. Period. For all we know this Prime Mover was building some really cool world someplace and we’re the detritus on the shop floor. So, unless you have another “favorite question” as titillating as your previous one, I think we’re done.
So, what you’re saying is that you worship the big bang?
The problem with the cosmological argument is that it says absolutely nothing about god. So, he was the unmoved mover. That doesn’t imply will and intelligence, let alone omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence, and other characteristics generally attributed to god.
Presumably, that which initiated the big bang could be a consciousness or a process. If it’s a consciousness, it could be a hacker, a hobbyist, a scientist, a zookeeper, a pet-owner, a parent or some combination of the above.
The consciousness is less likely to be internal to the system, since complexity has tended to rise since the big bang, not fall. Still, we can’t rule an internal first cause (eg, perhaps an entity at the end of the universe causes its beginning - it’s like a big circle!) [1].
If the initiator came from outside the big-bang, it could be either process or consciousness.
Furthermore, there could also be a God who is not a first cause.
That aside, what I’d really like to do is circle back to here:
There are 2 sources of anxiety here. One involves giving up cherished beliefs, beliefs taught from a very young age.
The other involves uncertainty. Mammals don’t handle uncertainty well. Laboratory mice receiving constant electric shocks are not exactly happy, but they are apparently less stressed than those receiving shocks at random. Or so I recall from introductory psychology.
So the relative bravery of the agnostic and strong atheist is unclear, since both receive comfort in some ways and stress in others.
[1] My understanding though is that the universe is not expected to end in a big crunch.
But, back when the argument was formed, there was thought to be no problem with the cause for everything in the universe - except for the cause of the universe itself. Certainly that is true for the Big Bang view. The flaw of God having no cause being somehow more plausible than the universe having no cause is so well known as to be not worth elaborating on.
Sigh. Notice I was not assuming anything about your religion or view of god. As far as I can tell from your answer, besides it making you feel good in some way, your actions are identical to those you’d do without faith in a Prime Mover.
For all I know the universe was created by some grad student in another universe, and his might have been created by yet another grad student, and so forth. It had to start somewhere, though. The point is, and you seem to agree with it, that besides the origin there is no evidence at all for a God in our universe, and certainly no reason to follow a given set of moral laws that are supposedly god given. That’s not something I can argue with.
Why do you need one? The stance is obvious - what is causality that it is paramount? causality is intimately linked to the arrow of time, as far as I ca tell. But we know that time begins with the Big Bang. so…before that, we can’t say anything about time. ergo, we can’t say anything about causali8ty. QED.