I had thought the poster had just assumed the monicker as a way to honor Quentin Smith (no middle S, at least in any published work that I’ve seen). And it’s a good choice. Smith is one of the foremost materialist philosophers of our age. He writes prolifically, and he writes well. He has done groundbreaking work on the philosophies of time, metaphysics, and ethics.
His ethics is especially interesting. He is the first philosopher I’ve seen that argues against the existence of God via an examination of moral realism and infinite spacetime. In a stunning paper, he draws the conclusion, from three premises, that moral nihilism is true (but contingently, not necessarily). It is as profound as Peano’s axiomatic creation of arithmetic.
If this is indeed the Quentin Smith, then we have been greatly honored. Smith joining us to discuss philosophy is the equivalent of Richard Dawkins joining us to discuss evolution. As a very busy author (writing far more than he publishes) and full time professor and researcher, he is being exceedingly generous with his time.
My apologies to you as well, Dr. Smith. I’ll be looking forward to your contributions in some threads I have in mind, especially concerning your opinions that Big Bang theory is based on invalid rules of inference and false metaphysical premises.
Fact is that atheists get gun shy. There are threads on this board asking why don’t atheists just shut up. I do not suppose the christians understand that this board is practically the only place an atheist can be confrontational. If you mention your atheism at work it can hurt your career. There was a HBO program last year that showed a pro basketball player who got frozen off teams for saying he was an atheist. Those hypocritical bastards having endless children out of wedlock. getting in frequent bar fights , had the nerve to judge him.
If you say you are an atheist you are unelectable in America. Mention it at the wrong kind of party and you will get browbeaten. They will follow you around quoting scripture like it actually has meaning and logic.
Yet even here there are those who do not want their silly belief in god and their acceptance of childhood programming to be discussed.
On average, the background culture of most of the posters here is a monotheistic tradition for God, regardless of whether or not they personally believe in proof that he does or does not exist.
A common thread among monotheistic traditions (Jew, Christian/LDS, Muslim etc) includes some variation of negative consequence that results from not believing in God. While there may be no negative consequence to disbelief in the Tooth Fairy, most monotheistic traditions teach some type of negative consequence for actually rejecting God (somewhere on a spectrum of eternal damnation to just living without God as your buddy).
The psychology which drives an unwillingness to be an outright atheist is this: If there is a non-zero chance I am wrong about God, I expose myself to a negative consequence unnecessarily by an outright denial. Safer to believe; no harm no foul.
The result of all this is that non-atheists are essentially non-persuadable.
There are indeed, a lot of skeptics here and elsewhere, but when the chances you’ll change someone’s opinion are close to zero, the effort of posting arguments which have been endlessly tossed about elsewhere without effect isn’t worth it.
No apologies necessary, I was amused to read the theories that were developping about my identity. Are people here always this suspicious?
Perhaps I should change my name to R. Tilson Thomas (QSS + 1)?
Anyway, let me just say that I love the Kronos quartet’s performance of your string quartet ( http://www.kronosquartet.org/VM/prog7.html ). I am honored that a composer of your stature would be posting here.
You were engaging my sympathy right up to that last sentence. It’s different over here. When politicians this side of the pond make a big public declaration of faith it’s viewed as a slight public embarrassment; we find Americans’ cross-waving somewhat suspect; there are very few occasions when religion gets mentioned at work. So I admit that I’m unused to the harassment of atheists that you describe, and I forget to allow for it, and I read your statement above and see that you have a case…
And then you go and infantilise my beliefs. :dubious:
Thank you for the welcome. It seems you spent quite a bit of time yesterday dissecting my posts in the effort to prove me the doppelganger of the departed atheist poster you bought off? Or did I misunderstand your intent? No, I am not “prr+1”. The reason I mention this is because, in your careful analysis, I am surprised you missed the post where I said that my real name is not Quentin Smith, and I am this famous philosopher, whose name became familiar to me, as I said before, through a book of his poetry.
In addition to what gonzomax said about atheists having a hard time in this country, here is an interesting opinion poll I saw yesterday. One of the conclusions: “An atheist would seem to have the hardest time getting elected president, as a majority of Americans (53%) say they would not vote for a presidential candidate who was an atheist.”
I thought you meant that were the philosopher, but that your real name is Quentin S Smith, and that publishers had left it out, which was why I mentioned the middle “S” specifically. At any rate, are you a fan? Would you care to defend any of his work in a debate?
You’re on, both of you. I disagreewithyou. Prayer works just fine for some of us. By all means, prove otherwise.
a) I’m not a Christian or in any way Bible-based, so don’t bother tailoring your response around Christian or Biblical precepts. In fact, I’m fully willing to have this discussion with no reference to any other conventionally theological or theistic terms, if you so prefer.
b) You don’t get to define beforehand how I should be attempting to use prayer or what I should believe about prayer and/or God. Now, if you want to try to establish that I’m using the term “prayer” to mean something unrecognizably different from what pretty much any other person who believes in prayer uses that word to mean, that’s valid, but simply demonstrating that the loudest and most annoying tract-weilding zealots haranguing subway-riders tend to promise or declare things about prayer that I do not isn’t quite the same thing.
AHunter, I’m guessing that what they mean is that they can prove these things empirically — much like the bumbling effort one might put forth to prove that one plus one does not equal three by counting things. For example, he might pray that God immediately change his ashtray into an aardvark. After a few seconds, he will conclude that prayer does not work.
I would also guess that your approach to this argument would be from the point of view of psychology. If so, the conflict will center around what it means for prayer to work, rather than whether prayer does work. It may be an unnecessary struggle altogether because their very premise — that anything is provable by empirical techniques — is false.
Well to be fair it was just something I noticed and then Liberal picked it up too. I don’t think people are usually that suspicious here, but That Thread a few days back was just surreal. Also, I was bored.
Ha ha, very good.
Hey, you should be even more honored that I rose from the dead after ten years just to say hello to you!
It’s an example of the bigger problem with the whole debate: they believe, with ironclad certainty, that what theistic people believe in pertains to empirical objects or entities, and that we harbor those beliefs (with ironclad certainty) despite the complete lack of any empirical evidence attesting to the existence of those empirical objects or entities, and it annoys the starch out of them.
It’s rather like someone claiming that they have a good subconscious intuitive sense of a person from little things and that they have fun reading a Tarot hand, using the cards as a sort of jumping-off point in combo with how they feel about the person, personality, things they’ve told them, how they sit, facial expression, and other things they aren’t even conscious of, and that the “readings” they come up with are therefore chock-full of valid insights and predictions about the person and the person’s life; and the person to whom the Tarot-card reader makes these claims persists in believing that in order for a Tarot card reading to have any validity, the Tarot card reader or the cards themselves would have to possess some kind of supernatural glow-in-the-dark impossible powers, so, since that’s out, the Tarot-card reader is either a charlatan or a deluded person, end of story.
Why don’t you define exactly what you mean by prayer? You’ve disassociated yourself from the traditional definitions, which it would appear were the ones being challenged, and then not specified what you are actually defending.
