Sometimes the talking leads to the killing.
I was unclear. I didn’t intend to imply a dichotomy, but the end points of a spectrum.
It is if you should be seeing evidence. If on Monday you say Godzilla stomped along the 50 yard line of the Superbowl, the absence of evidence for this (not on TV) is definitely evidence of the absence of Godzilla. The lack of evidence for a worldwide flood 5,000 years ago or so is good evidence of the absence of this flood.
However in this case we might say that neither a nail or a screw is there, and the things are connectorized and snap together. In other words, while we can understand that some people are interested in the “why” question, it is not proven that there is a why to be interested in.
The Null Hypothesis must be that there is no creator. If not, you must give me a specific instance of a creator to be the default. Why would the western god be more reasonable than the Greek god or the Egyptian god or the Aztec god or my favorite, a grad student in some lab in another brane? To falsify the null hypothesis, you’d have to present some evidence. As far as I can tell, all predictions from creator god hypotheses have been proven to be false. Maybe there is a god somewhere in the universe who got it right, but he sure doesn’t seem to have visited us.
Or the first noble truth of Buddhism, “Life is suffering.” It’s a reality none of us can escape. It doesn’t say that suffering must therefore be good, only that we can’t find a satisfactory answer to the meaning of life without addressing the problem of suffering.
Evidence of what? The only claim I’ve made is:
“God is inherently unknowable” is a non-falsifiable statement. Falsifiable states like “Godzilla stomped along the 50 yard line of the Superbowl” or “a worldwide flood 5,000 years ago” are not pertinent to this discussion.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Are you denying that people have unanswerable questions? Because that’s what the screw in my analogy is. Can you restate?
Thank you for that wonderful analogy; I feel seen.
Why do you need a sentient creator to explain the purposeful functionality of things? What can’t things just be? Or evolve to gain functionality?
I was speaking generically. Lots of people use “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” but that is not correct in certain situations. And atheists are considering the question of god’s existence. If there is no evidence a particular instance of god exists we don’t have to worry about whether he is knowable.
And of course many theists on one hand say god is unknowable and on the other claim to know exactly what he thinks about or sex lives.
“What’s the difference between a duck?” Unanswerable question, but absurd. Maybe why questions are absurd to, viewed from a certain perspective. That’s not to say worrying about why is stupid or anything like that, just that there is a valid position that the question is meaningless for a certain view of reality. Why kind of presupposes there is a conscious creator. If there is an entity controlling the world why did that flood happen makes sense. If not, it just happened. We can find the physical causes, but we’re not going to find anyone who set it off for some kind of purpose.
That’s one of my objections to the concept of an omnibenevolent god. Why did that flood happen? It maximizes good in some way because a baby who was drowned might grow up to be a dictator. Yech. Or, for a non-omnibenevolent god, why not? We’re lower than ants to him. Also yech.
They can. The specific term “purpose” implies intention, though.
Perhaps, but not necessarily. It may be the intention of water to cut through rock to join with the next body of water, but that does not mean it requires a supreme being to direct it. Maybe that’s just what water does.
[quote=“crowmanyclouds, post:625, topic:962965”]
Which is interesting since Christianity answers that question from both Jesus and, far more importantly, Paul, there are no good people.
[/quote]But certainly there are better people. A child that suffers and dies from leukemia is better than a child molester that is never caught and lives to a ripe old age.
It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to explain why a God would allow worse things to happen to better people. Atheism does not answer the why, but it makes the question moot. It’s no longer why, but how.
Does one get into heaven while the other doesn’t?
If so, which is which?
I have never heard water described as having “intention”, except maybe poetically. Intent is not something inanimate objects have.
I sometimes heard such figurative speech from teachers and profs explaining physical processes, for instance a prof explained to us “Current isn’t dumb. It wants to follow the path of lowest resistance”. We all knew of course that he didn’t mean it literally.
Some religions view the question as meaningless, too. The why of existence is not a priority in many Buddhist circles (I venture to say most, but I’m not an expert on Buddhist philosophy), and there is an old story where the student asks, “Is there a God?” And the Buddha replies, “If you were shot with an arrow, what would be more important? Figuring out who made the arrow, or removing it from your body?”
One of the reasons I was drawn to Zen Buddhism in particular is that it’s so freakin’ practical and irreverent. After a chilldhood spent as an obsessively devout Christian, I didn’t want any kind of dogma to obsess over. Sit down here? Pay attention to my breathing? Got it.
I think you’ve hit on the explanation for gods. We impute intentionality to everything. We say “my car doesn’t want to start.” We yell at our computers. It is hard to talk about evolution without slipping into terms like “the giraffe grew a long neck in order to eat higher branches.”
If we understand these areas we can catch ourselves, but doing this is very human.
Or, more accurately, hypersensitive agency detection.
Thank you for the concise description. (You’d do better with another sample question, because “between a duck” is not well constructed English. Your intent is clear and we don’t need a language hijack, so let’s go with what you have.)
I think we’re pretty much in agreement, but on different tracks. You’re in the second track, while I’m in the third.
Is the “animate” vs “inanimate” distinction supported by the scientific method? On one hand, there’s the stream of water slowly cutting through rock, which is called “inanimate” because it’s just a bunch of fundamental particles mechanically following the laws of physics. On the other hand, we have a specimen of H. sapiens ordering a ham sandwich, which is “animate” even though it’s it’s just a bunch of fundamental particles mechanically following the laws of physics. I think calling something “animate” is a quirk of the way we try to comprehend things and isn’t supportable by science.
But it’s okay: I believe in God and you* believe in animate collections of particles. We’re both using something other than the scientific method when trying to understand what’s around us.
I also don’t think that “intent” is something that can be supported by the scientific method. If one limits oneself to only what can be determined by science, every “why” question must be answered by “how”.
*Me too.
It’s a joke line from the 1930s or something (yes, I’m old) so I’m not about to defend it grammatically.
Milton Berle had nothing on me.
Reminds me of Chico Marx’s line about “why a duck.”