True, I have a problem with that as well. But I’m not arguing for the literal truth of any specific religious dogma. I agree it is allegorical, I agree it is myth, but I disagree that it is delusional to feel and experience that there is more to existence in this world than meets the literal eye. I think there is a reason we have spiritual experiences and why we feel there is a greater something to existence. We simply express these experiences in our religious dogma in culturally constrained images.
Clause removed for clarity.
Would you care to elucidate? Why do you think the evolution of self-conscious beings is inconsistent with the rest of science?
First of all, thinks for dictating to us what we believe. I think all Christians believe that Jesus was a space alien, and if you object you are just in denial.
You don’t seem to understand the difference between belief and statement of fact. I can lack belief in any god (not just your God) and I can also believe that no Gods exist without claiming to know that no Gods exist - which is an absurd belief, given that there are so many possible gods, and even so many versions of the Western God.
What agnosticism really means has been stated. I’ve read Huxley, have you? In any case, your ignorance of the atheist position is very clear.
This. I can kind of understand why people might believe in some sort of amorphous “higher consciousness” or whatever, but an anthropomorphic god who concerns himself primarily with humankind is an idea so absurdly and baldly narcissistic that I can’t believe that anyone takes it seriously.
Words have no inherent meaning. None.
We attach meaning to them. There good examples of how words have evolved over time where a shared meaning can change and be somewhat ubiquitous; like “gay.” Even words like “nigger” can mean different things to different people. I would imagine that the word nigger in the mouth of David Duke would have a different meaning that from, say, Notorious B.I.G.
In any event, you are free to re-define atheism in any way you see fit, and attach any meaning you’d like.
Never mind the :dubious:
Thanks, if I may piggyback on this and say, in the ineffable lingo of internet, +1. Or eleventy.
The original post shows serious signs of non sequitur and sloppy “thinking”.
Roddy
Um… That’s great.
You take your own advice as well. 
I think that’s mostly the result of the structure of our brains and our own feeling that our lives need to be important and meaningful. I’m confused about where your views on atheism come from. “The notion that the world we exist in is infinit and essentially un-fathomable by us puny humans” is a better description of the appeal of religion than atheism, and it has nothing at all to do with the idea that one day we’ll know everything.
Why is it inconsistent? We know how big our observable universe is.
Once you really intuit how huge this place is… how many different galaxies there are, how many stars there are, how many planets exist… how many different ways you can arrange them, compose them, etc. It’s almost impossible to imagine that you WOULDN’T get other Earth-like planets undergoing similar processes of abiogenesis/evolution/etc.
In many cases, we discover plenty of Earth-like planets right here in our own galaxy. Even though they’re lightyears away, that’s peanuts compared to how massively VAST the universe is. We’ve only really been able to look at a glass of water when we’ve got an entire ocean to explore.
As for sentient beings being “determined” out of starting conditions of the universe, I see this as having no real relevance to the question of delusion.
Why are planets inconsistent with science? If there is one, why not lots? If planets got formed by purely natural processes, that is what you’d expect. If a God created our planet, then creating other ones would be wasteful.
Ditto for the development of intelligence. Intelligence seems to have evolutionary advantages, so somewhat more intelligent species get selected for. (The jury is still out on whether being as intelligent as we are is a dead end.) Given that, the rise of intelligence to the level of being self aware is perfectly plausible, if not inevitable.
If by religious beings you mean beings who believe in supernatural entities, that might be evolutionary advantageous also. But that beings believe in supernatural things doesn’t mean that supernatural things actually exist. Our ancestors believed in lots of stuff we know are false.
Wow, I quoted this before you changed the underlined atheism to agnosticism.
Look, if you were arguing with someone about the best sort of car to own, and they told you that all Toyota cars move by using thrust emitted by their mufflers, would you think that person can intelligently tell you anything about cars?
Because your inept ideas about atheism and agnosticism are as wrong as Toyotas using rocket thrust to drive. Feel free to start here. And in the future, try to learn about a subject before you tell other people they are wrong. It’s only polite.
Really? Because from what I know of science, my entire body is made up of carbon atoms that were created in stellar fusion. I feel much more a part of the universe than someone who was created by some all-powerful deity.
I’ll go one further and say it’s more likely people don’t want to admit that human reason is limited and that there are unknowns in the universe. Humans, after all, tend to fear the unknown.
This objection is also meaningless. I guess that’s kind of ironic. We come to a consensus on what words mean. If we didn’t, it would be impossible to communicate. The meanings of words change and people have disagreements about what words mean, and the meaning of a word is not inherent in its sound. But that doesn’t mean every word means anything you want it to. If you take that attitude, you’ll have a lot of trouble communicating with other people because they won’t know what you’re saying.
What you’re actually saying here is that context affects how people perceive what they’re hearing, and that’s true. But your basic point is wrong no matter how many excessive capitals you use.
Actually, it seems that pretty much everyone is in agreement about what the word “atheism” actually means. We did not re-define it, you did.
And using a really big font to say how “wrong” we all are does not seem to help your case.
No atheist I know of thinks we know everything about the universe.
Mind you, that religion just *pretends *to know answers, it doesn’t actually know anything supernatural at all. You can pretend a safe you found is full of diamonds, but that doesn’t change what is actually in there. Just like the nonsense lies of religion don’t actually change what happens to you after you die.
I meant the notion that the evolution of self-conscious being is a meaningless accident and could have just as easily not happened. If we believe that our physical laws are such as they are for the given starting conditions then you can’t very well argue that everything else that is in this Universe is just accidental. Everything relates back to the same starting conditions. Or, put another way: self-conscious beings exist in this Universe because that’s one of the properties of this Universe.
No, if you have a six sided die it doesn’t mean you must roll a 6. The universe just had to have the *possibility *for conscious life. If it didn’t we wouldn’t be talking about it. If could have had the possibility, but never had it happen.
Just like you can roll a 3 on that die, even though the possibility for a 6 is there.
You certainly can. I don’t think it would be possible to prove that the starting conditions of the universe had to produce any particular outcome, and the idea that they had to produce conscious beings reeks of inflated self-importance. Of course the universe could exist without us. There are enormous regions of space with essentially nothing in them, and I haven’t heard any complaints.
I’ve ready plenty of comments on this board which amount to “we might not know now but scientific advancement will allow us to know it sometime in the future”. I’ve yet to see any atheist admit that there are limits to human reasoning and that humans might (not even saying we will) not be able to understand or even know everything about the universe no matter how much time we’re afforded to do so and no matter how advanced we might become.
Yeah, I’ll shift the burden of proof a little and ask how you know this?
The only way to know what’s in the safe is to open it up. Have you opened up the proverbial “safe” and found that religion is a nonsense of lies?