Having spent 8 years at Cal at Berkeley, I suppose it’s just intellectual arrogance. Let’s face it most of us believe we’re near the top of the evolutionary scale. We are highly intelligent beings. It is difficult to believe that we evolved from pure randomness. It’s much easier to believe that our Creator had some foresight.
Also, if we came from pure randomness, isn’t it more likely that we would continue to have that random nature…in which case our thoughts would continue to be pretty much random.
You spent 8 years at Cal at Berkeley, and you came away thinking that an atheist is just someone who is mad at God? Did you not talk to anyone the entire time you were there?
Do you bother to read the threads you post in and if so, do you retain any of the information given to you? You have been told many times that randomness, pure or otherwise, isn’t what evolution is all about. Why is this not sinking in?
Yes I did…lol. Now, I’m starting to feel like part of the gang here.
Of course, there were atheists at the University, but they were a fringe group. I hung around with the “lefties” back then. We thought the atheists were apolitical so we didn’t bother to try and indoctrinate them.
Cal was big for “experimental” living environments. So people were experimenting with Co-Ed apartments, usually 4 people with mixed genders. The left-wingers were into “living together” and such. I did have a girl-friend that admitted to being agnostic. But I didn’t have any close friends admitting to be atheists.
That’s a loaded question if I ever saw one. I’ll take a shot at it anyway.
First, I believe that I’m not smart enough to know what is absolutely true. There’s just too much information for me to absorb and too many unknowns about what will be discovered in the future.
Second, only interested in the truth that will let me deal with my present life better.
To me, it’s much more difficult to believe that God or the gods were involved, to be honest. After all, as has been pointed out, everything you’d need to make a planet such as this, all of the stuff that makes life possible, is all up there…it’s everywhere in the universe. To me, that pretty much nails it down…if all the materials and building blocks of life are out there scattered throughout the universe then you don’t need a magical mystical God or gods to create the universe. Such beliefs were for primitive man who had no idea what organic compounds were, out orbital mechanics work, could conceive of how a planet or star COULD form, or all the other myriad things that we know today that they didn’t know before.
You are still free to believe what you like, and as I said you could focus on sort of a God of first action (SOMETHING had to kick start it all at the moment of the Big Bang…call it God if you like), but to me it seems more reasonable.
What does ‘have that random nature’ mean to you? There are certainly a lot of random elements to life on this planet. An asteroid smashes down on the Yucatan 65 million years ago, and the dinosaurs are toast as a main evolutionary branch of life. A small shrew like rodent survives and flourishes to become the ancestor of all the mammals today, including us. Along that chain there are myriad random events causing this species to flourish for a time, while that one goes extinct, random mutations that cause a small population to become more competitive with changing environmental conditions while the ancestor species they derived from remain static, or go extinct…and this is constantly happening up to this day. So, yeah…the randomness is part of life.
You’re the one who framed it that way: “It is difficult to believe that we evolved from pure randomness. It’s much easier to believe that our Creator had some foresight.” I’m just pointing out that the truth of an idea is independent of how easy it is to believe, how comforting it is, or other such concerns.
Perfect understanding is impossible, sure. But don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. We should do the best we can to get at the truth, not stop trying because it’s difficult.
Well, there you are then. You only want to believe things that comfort you or confirm what you already believe. Please try and be aware of this bias in future discussions.
ETA: We all have biases and irrational impulses. I am not rational about the United States, for instance. It’s highly beneficial to be congnizant of your biases.
You spent 8 years at Cal at Berkeley, and not only do you not know what an atheist is, you don’t even know the definition of “truth”. I’m not finding this to be very probable.
People become atheists for all sorts of reasons, but it’s about coming to the conclusion that gods and religion don’t make sense to you - not about anger. The sadistic god’ discussion has been about how atheists look at the Biblical god.
How do you decide something isn’t real because you’re mad at it?
If you are mad at your brother, is your reaction to stop believing in his existence? Do you even think about this stuff?
What the hell did you major in? When my daughter went to Berkeley her senior year of high school she joined the Atheist chapter. Not exactly football but hardly marginalized. It is not like Cal is a hotbed of fundamentalism, after all.
When were you there? People were experimenting with co-ed dorms when I was in college 40 years ago. Now it is the norm. I can see atheist being a fringe 40 years ago.
Nice use of language. Do you admit to being a christian? Perhaps non-believers avoid discussing it because they do not dwell on the issue the way believers do. What you may perceive as an “admission” is probably something more like “I’d rather not get involved in talking about this. Like, you know, ever.”