To act on nothing is to do something?

Nihilist Virus

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God is source of infinite possibility of "the rules" that can be expressed into any number of possible realities. I keep telling you that you can't cast the logic of the higher-level abstractions on the lower-level events, and you keep trying to force the conversation in the direction of the logic of the higher-level abstraction, insisting that there must be a continuum there... and that God must obey the same rules of logic that we do.

Why do you think that would be the case?

I never said that God must obey the same rules of logic that we do. I've allowed you to make the assumption that he can create a square circle. Or have you not been paying attention?

It's not a better or worse. In order to judge "better" you need some reference as to what you are claiming it to be better at. Naturalism is reductionist. It's great at chunking up the reality, describing it, and then measuring ratios of one sets of events to other sets of events. That methodology is good for describing consistent recurrences of reality in some reductionist setting, but it really can only work as a reductionist concept.

Religion deals with fundamental as it relates to our being. You can keep running pragmatic calculations, and correlating the brain function with perception, but you can't distill functional description consciousness out of that. It's a useless pursuit, because it's irreducible experience. So, there's some things that naturalism can't do, and claim that because it may in some future we should avoid millennia-long philosophical context for discussing fundamental nature of our reality and its source.... that would be more irrationally exuberant than religion could ever be.

We seem to be way off topic here.

Do you understand what apologetic is for? It's here to lay out MY framework that explains and defends as to why I believe what I do. I'm not attempting to reconcile naturalism with Christianity. And I'm not here to prove Christianity to you from a position of your naturalistic assumptions. I've said it many times, if you have something to bring to the table in which we can discuss some concepts on which both of us could improve our belief system... fine. But this sophomoric "you tell me your reasons and I will shoot it down" approach to discussing these issues is both unwarranted (since you never actually justified your beliefs to me), and unproductive.

It's unproductive to eliminate bad ideas?

Likewise, you seem to think that there's some monolithic "Christianity" and "religion" concept that you can argue against, when it's largely personal understanding derived through philosophical framework of certain narrative.

There are many versions of Christianity, but if someone lacks a belief in either the creation of the universe by God or in the death and resurrection of Christ, then that person simply is not a Christian. In regards to those two issues, Christianity is a monolith. Absolutely.

I can't take the above seriously for a couple of reasons:

1) You are abstracting the generic progression of humanity through its moral path, and you are pinning isolated historic narrative as "terrible crimes" that are committed by religion against humans in the past, etc, etc. While at the same time you are ignoring that it's been the case for generic progression of humanity. Tribal warfare and endless conflicts and conquest is how we progress to our peaceful state today with a millennia worth of experience.

2) You are ignoring that the fact that Christian narrative is a progression of human choice of rejecting God and progressing through the path of "trial and error". So...

Romans 1:24 Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity for the dishonoring of their bodies with one another.

would be the context for God honoring human choices, while at the same time setting limits and directing those towards some viable outcome.

So, yes, and no.



Because it would be like asking a .NET developer to write software by explicitly writing instructions at the level of the electric charge manipulation. It's too complex for any human to grasp. We generally have illusion of understanding, while all we have is our models.



Church is people, so you are talking about people torturing people. People are complex beings, and as such, their motivations are complex and driven by a wide range of factors. So, to say that their torturing ways was motivated purely by religious narrative is absurd!

Likewise, human rights are secured by contractual agreement among people in a civilized society to uphold ideals. Whenever you are dealing with ideals you are exiting materialistic context. You can't claim that we are just bunch of chemicals shuffling around, and at the same time we should have standards as to how these chemicals mix or move. If you merely appealing to your preferences... then it's just a tyrant of preferences that you enforce on those who disagree?

This is off topic, and I contributed enough to derail the thread. You can have the last word on it.

For your reading the story today... yes. It only exists as a reference narrative for us that communicates broader reality that we never see. But the ideals of that narrative structure our and direct our individual behavior towards these ideals.

Ok so Jesus didn't actually have to die on the cross, but he did so anyway. Despite pleading with God to find another way. Interesting.

You can take it as Christian existentialism as the base, and transcendent experience at most. In either case, it's a narrative first that structures a worldview.



I don't know, and I don't really think we can know. Just like we can't know the fundamental structure of reality. Again, that's like asking .NET developer to write a software in machine code. They wouldn't have a clue. We operate at the higher level of perception of reality. We've never observed a single electron. All of our "observations" relevant to subatomic processes are circular feedback of instruments that were built with assumptions that are driven by chunking aggregate into ratios that line up. But, because we can correlate ratios to events doesn't mean that our picture of reality is accurate.

Hence, I don't really care what God acted on to create this reality. We can go with Eastern idea and think that everything is God's dream, and God is dreaming a billion dreams for each of us. Or we can go with Western thought, and think that God spun up and maintains events that manifest as reality running on "God machine"... as per Whitehead, for example. I have no idea, but that's not really relevant as to the vastly diverging perspective that our conscious experience is a byproduct of expansion of eternal matter that happened to localize and assemble into you and I....

If you don't care about what God acted on in creating the universe, then this thread is not for you. That is the central question and you're telling me you aren't even interested. So there's nothing left to discuss.

That would be an appeal to magic. A conscious mind creating reality as it imagines it... is something we do every night.

But at any rate, how could we ever know that, given the subjective limitations of our being?



Again, we don't have a "better explanation". Before you get to "better" we have to agree on parameters of making these judgements. If the parameters are structured from vastly different frameworks, then you screaming "Mine is better" is merely a preference.

And I'm man enough to admit that mine is a preference driven by necessity for my worldview to be coherent. Again, it stems from a simple fact that self-assembled chemicals observing themselves and structuring intentional .... seems incoherent as a worldview.



But you don't get to do that here. I've given you multiple reasons for why I hold my worldview. You don't get to sit and shoot them down and then claim that these are wrong because these are not living up to the preference of your satisfactory philosophical standards.

First prove to me your worldview as a standard, or at least let's agree on some common ground from which you can make these claims. Otherwise, you are like a 7 year old claiming that anything that they don't understand is boring and stupid. If that's the case, then go play computer games or something and stop wasting my time.



You didn't answer my question. I'm aware of this problem, and that's why I'm pointing that each of us gets to set a fundamental assumptions to create coherent models of reality.

You seem to think that accidental explosions of some uniform matter can produce complex variations with various distinct properties that eventually result in some localized parts of that matter assembling into entities having a capacity of subjective thought and creativity. And you don't seem to find a need to explain that fact before you accept it as a default.

So, you assume that whatever we observe validates this position, and you raise yourself in some intellectual high-horse where I have to launch ideas at you that you get to either accept or reject.

Care to validate your own assumptions?

I see you're asking me questions here. I see the question marks but I'm not reading the questions. Not if you came to this thread in bad faith. It's a waste of my time to respond. You go ahead and make a thread to discuss your topic. I won't discuss your topic here.
 
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devolved

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I never said that God must obey the same rules of logic that we do. I've allowed you to make the assumption that he can create a square circle. Or have you not been paying attention?

I wasn't replying to your OP, if you haven't been paying attention. It was a progressive discussion about the nature of "rules" that apply to God.

I've made an analogy to QM realm in which classical physical rules that we observe here and now don't apply to the QM realm. To which you replied:

But even the quantum world has rules. For example, there's the uncertainty principle. The exclusion principle. Are there any rules that apply to God? Because if there are, then my question isn't "absolutely incoherent." If there aren't, then your analogy fails.

I've pointed out that there are infinite possibility of rules that express themselves into some creative output of reality, hence God isn't really bound by any set of rules, because God would exist in a context where all of the possible rules can be expressed in some viable reality. So, no I'm not ignoring OP. I'm answering the subsequent questions you have.

We seem to be way off topic here.

Why is it off topic? You continually bring up the concepts of "good" and "bad". I want to know where you get these concepts in your worldview. You seem to mistakenly think that all of us agree with your subjective preferences.

It's unproductive to eliminate bad ideas?

Again... see the above.

There are many versions of Christianity, but if someone lacks a belief in either the creation of the universe by God or in the death and resurrection of Christ, then that person simply is not a Christian. In regards to those two issues, Christianity is a monolith. Absolutely.

You realize that there's a diverging views on what God is, and how it created our reality, and nature of Jesus as either historical figure, or merely inspirational story structured by God to communicate ideals. There are historical efforts to institutionalize and formalize individual understanding, but that's not what Christianity frames as a tradition of people who each understand and express the central premise of the Christian story in their environment.

So no. Christianity is as much of a monolith as car companies around the world are monoliths because "they are all building cars".
 
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devolved

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This is off topic, and I contributed enough to derail the thread. You can have the last word on it.

Again, you bring this topic up, and I reply to it :). You asked the question and I answered it. If you want "on topic" replies, then ask on-topic questions instead of jumping to playing into the typical objection of historical "slavery and ills of religion".

Ok so Jesus didn't actually have to die on the cross, but he did so anyway. Despite pleading with God to find another way. Interesting.

Could Dr. Strange see any other possibility than Tony Stark dying to save the universe? Just trying to speak the language that you may understand :).

There may have been other ways, but the Christian axiom is that these wouldn't result in the best outcomes for this reality.


If you don't care about what God acted on in creating the universe, then this thread is not for you. That is the central question and you're telling me you aren't even interested. So there's nothing left to discuss.

I didn't lead with "I don't care", and I wasn't being flippant about it. I don't care, because I don't see how that question can be answered. I don't see a way in which a gaming character in a gaming world could figure out the model of the motherboard that the game is running on, even if given sentient abilities. The characters can only exist because of the constraints that structure the world - the very same constraints that abstract the software itself.


I see you're asking me questions here. I see the question marks but I'm not reading the questions. Not if you came to this thread in bad faith. It's a waste of my time to respond. You go ahead and make a thread to discuss your topic. I won't discuss your topic here.

I'm only asking these questions because I's unclear to me whether you are not merely an atheist equivalent of Kent Hovind.

I suffered through this one recently:


And it was painful to listen to. So, I really hope that you are not merely acting as "anti-version" of Kent Hovind, blabbering about logical inconsistencies and switching the topic anytime it doesn't fit into your expected answers or picture of the Christianity you'd like to paint.
 
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devolved

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I tend to agree with what you wrote about higher and lower level concepts, the purpose of Christianity, and man's undeniable connection with narratives. But in light of all that, there doesn't seem to be much room for Christianity to be literally "true" in the sense that the word is normally used. If this is your view, do you identify as a deist? Because your response seems to go "God is the ultimate reality to which we anchor all our rational beliefs, but the Bible and its many narratives are just poetic expressions of deeper truths about the human condition (and other philosophical musings) as articulated by ancient civilizations."

I wouldn't say that I'm a deist. First of all, I don't think that religion is static in its narrative. IMO Both science and religion is a puzzle that's humanity is solving, but coming from two different modes of our perception.

Science is solving the external context as it relates to regularities of perception "out there". Religion/Philosophy attempts to solve the puzzle of the "internal perception" as it relates to the fundamental nature of what we are, and how we relate to the external world and to each other.

Both should inform our model of reality, both internal and external.

So, with the above, I'm not a deist. I think I'm closer to Christian existentialism in a sense that I have to pick a framework to cast and organize the "absurd" of reality, but it doesn't mean that such framework would be an absolute fit in reguards to my personal experience of the subject matter. Hence, all of us get to contribute and progress in shaping that narrative and solving the puzzle, and I have some wild ideas about how it works under the hood, but I think my best guess would be closer to something like:


Than to a traditional Christian view in the way it's formulated through the lens of institutionalized Christianity.

If you don't have the patience to watch the video, then the generic idea is that what we call God is the "ultimate conscious awareness" that's uniform and is aware of all of the possibility that can ever be conceived of. So, what our reality is that awareness "focusing" on exploring certain coherent lines of that possibility, as it tracing it though multi-leveled experience of reality from various subjective perspectives.

We can discuss this further if you'd like, but I don't want to impose on the thread, since I've been accused of that enough :)
 
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zippy2006

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So you have problems with me asserting things, then cap it off with "God can do it, end of story."

If it doesn't constitute a logical contradiction then what reason do we have to call it impossible for God?

If God acted on nothing, what did he do?

He created out of nothing, bringing the matter itself into existence from non-existence. Beyond that, I've never heard anyone say that "God acted on nothing." That is a strawman phrasing from the start.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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Ok, so you're in the camp that says God cannot create a square circle. That's fine. But can you explain why creatio ex nihilo does not belong in that category? You might've seen the conversation I was having with Moral Orel. Er, I mean Nicholas Deka. Thoughts?

Truthfully, I don't know and I've never really been too concerned with it, NV. Instead, I just like to read about theoretical Fields and Higgs Bosons and how those entities may, like men and women, commingle in quantum fashion. And I just leave it all at that, somewhere behind the door of the unknown. Maybe God has something to do with that and maybe He doesn't.

... I've heard that the nature of the biblical creation supposedly has something to do with the Hebrew meaning of whether or not a bear poops in the woods, but I'm not sure what knowing that would really tell us about how and through what (logical?) process God does His handiwork. :rolleyes:

Or maybe it has something to do with our own Subjective decision to either follow along with Aristotle or instead someone like Maimonides, or just a simplistic, incomplete reading of the Bible's writers when any of us decide to try to conceptualize the nature of God. I for one lean more toward the latter, and thereby, on the following issue of creatio ex nihilo, I just dump it into Schrödinger's box and hope that the cat won't mind, assuming it's still alive. :sorry:
 
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Nihilist Virus

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If it doesn't constitute a logical contradiction then what reason do we have to call it impossible for God?

Contradictions are not the only possible thing that could plague a logical statement. A statement must also be well-defined. If you try to express causality into a logical framework, you will see that input is required. So for us to have a conversation that is in any way meaningful, creatio ex nihilo has to be left at the door.

He created out of nothing, bringing the matter itself into existence from non-existence. Beyond that, I've never heard anyone say that "God acted on nothing." That is a strawman phrasing from the start.

How are you defining causality? How is it that one could do something without acting on something?

If you have no real answer to any of this, then you're compelled to admit that God does not solve the problem of existence.
 
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Truthfully, I don't know and I've never really been too concerned with it, NV. Instead, I just like to read about theoretical Fields and Higgs Bosons and how those entities may, like men and women, commingle in quantum fashion. And I just leave it all at that, somewhere behind the door of the unknown. Maybe God has something to do with that and maybe He doesn't.

... I've heard that the nature of the biblical creation supposedly to has something to do with the Hebrew meaning of whether or not a bear poops in the woods, but I'm not sure what knowing that would really tell us about how and through what (logical?) process God does His handiwork. :rolleyes:

Or maybe it has something to do with our own Subjective decision to either follow along with Aristotle or instead someone like Maimonides, or just a simplistic, incomplete reading of the Bible's writers when any of us decide to try to conceptualize the nature of God. I for one lean more toward the latter, and thereby, on the following issue of creatio ex nihilo, I just dump it into Schrödinger's box and hope that the cat won't mind, assuming it's still alive. :sorry:

So it doesn't bother you that God doesn't solve the problem of existence, despite the fact that man invented gods for that very purpose?
 
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zippy2006

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Contradictions are not the only possible thing that could plague a logical statement. A statement must also be well-defined. If you try to express causality into a logical framework, you will see that input is required. So for us to have a conversation that is in any way meaningful, creatio ex nihilo has to be left at the door.

A revealed doctrine need not be fully comprehensible to the human mind, especially at the time of revelation. You can't show that the doctrine is contradictory so you have fallen back on the idea that it isn't well defined or fully comprehensible. It doesn't need to be fully comprehensible. If it did, it needn't be revealed.

All you're doing, in one way or another, is continually claiming that all causes require a material cause. Why? It simply isn't the case with God. God does not need matter to create. Are you claiming that the idea that God can create matter is inherently contradictory or problematic?

How are you defining causality? How is it that one could do something without acting on something?

How is it that one could not do something without acting on something? As I said in my first post, creation is a sui generis category. God is the only one who per se creates. All other "creation" is really a kind of transformation.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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So it doesn't bother you that God doesn't solve the problem of existence, despite the fact that man invented gods for that very purpose?

No, it doesn't really bother me. But I don't think we can say that we 'know' that all the gods among mankind have been mere inventions.
 
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Nihilist Virus

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A revealed doctrine need not be fully comprehensible to the human mind, especially at the time of revelation. You can't show that the doctrine is contradictory so you have fallen back on the idea that it isn't well defined or fully comprehensible. It doesn't need to be fully comprehensible. If it did, it needn't be revealed.

It's not a matter of comprehension. Division by zero, for example, is not undefined because we don't understand what would happen. It's undefined because we do understand it would not be well-defined.

All you're doing, in one way or another, is continually claiming that all causes require a material cause. Why?

I already answered that question. Again, encode this into the formal language and see for yourself.

It simply isn't the case with God. God does not need matter to create. Are you claiming that the idea that God can create matter is inherently contradictory or problematic?

Please read. I'm not appealing to a contradiction. I'm saying that creatio ex nihilo is not well defined. See for yourself. Try to define it formally.

How is it that one could not do something without acting on something? As I said in my first post, creation is a sui generis category. God is the only one who per se creates. All other "creation" is really a kind of transformation.

See above.
 
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2PhiloVoid

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We know at least some of them were.

...well, then, if we know this is the case, then so much the better for Pascal's Wager, ay? ;)

By the way, I'd like to qualify the response I made in my posts just above about the extent to which I care about whether or not God solves the problem of existence: Depending upon the exact nuance of the 'problem' we're talking about, I'd have to say, in Pascalian fashion, that it is most appropriate to care about one's own existence and potential non-existence (i.e. death), and in that sense, I do care about God's role in the possible solving of 'my' existence, as it is all Subjectively lived and pondered by me, myself and I.

But I don't care much about how the conceptual structures we concoct to describe a 'god figure' play into our attempts to explain the existence of the universe as a whole. No, not so much, at least not in a direct sense. However, I do very much enjoy objectively contemplating it all and then afterward I usually find myself being aesthetically drawn to the idea that the biblical view of God could be the antidote I'm looking for over some other possible antidote, or multi-antidotes.
 
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gaara4158

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I wouldn't say that I'm a deist. First of all, I don't think that religion is static in its narrative. IMO Both science and religion is a puzzle that's humanity is solving, but coming from two different modes of our perception.

Science is solving the external context as it relates to regularities of perception "out there". Religion/Philosophy attempts to solve the puzzle of the "internal perception" as it relates to the fundamental nature of what we are, and how we relate to the external world and to each other.

Both should inform our model of reality, both internal and external.

So, with the above, I'm not a deist. I think I'm closer to Christian existentialism in a sense that I have to pick a framework to cast and organize the "absurd" of reality, but it doesn't mean that such framework would be an absolute fit in reguards to my personal experience of the subject matter. Hence, all of us get to contribute and progress in shaping that narrative and solving the puzzle, and I have some wild ideas about how it works under the hood, but I think my best guess would be closer to something like:


Than to a traditional Christian view in the way it's formulated through the lens of institutionalized Christianity.

If you don't have the patience to watch the video, then the generic idea is that what we call God is the "ultimate conscious awareness" that's uniform and is aware of all of the possibility that can ever be conceived of. So, what our reality is that awareness "focusing" on exploring certain coherent lines of that possibility, as it tracing it though multi-leveled experience of reality from various subjective perspectives.

We can discuss this further if you'd like, but I don't want to impose on the thread, since I've been accused of that enough :)
It's interesting you would label that Christian existentialism. None of what you described strikes me as particularly Christian as opposed to other variations of classical theism, but maybe that's because you left those elements out (or maybe it's in the video you rightly predicted I might not have the patience to watch). I find it very difficult to disagree with classical theists on virtually all points with regards to Christian fundamentalism, but they completely lose me when they get into the reasons why they break theist rather than atheist. I'm interested in hearing more about your position, but if you're truly worried about imposing on the thread we can save it for another time.
 
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Chriliman

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Contradictions are not the only possible thing that could plague a logical statement. A statement must also be well-defined. If you try to express causality into a logical framework, you will see that input is required. So for us to have a conversation that is in any way meaningful, creatio ex nihilo has to be left at the door.



How are you defining causality? How is it that one could do something without acting on something?

If you have no real answer to any of this, then you're compelled to admit that God does not solve the problem of existence.

I tend to agree with the majority of your argument, however, I’d like clarification on what you mean by ‘problem of existence’. If existence is all there ever was and all there ever will be, then what’s the problem?

Also, what if God acted on ‘nothing’ as defined by science i.e. the ‘quantum field’?
 
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I tend to agree with the majority of your argument, however, I’d like clarification on what you mean by ‘problem of existence’. If existence is all there ever was and all there ever will be, then what’s the problem?

"The problem of existence" is not my phrase. It's just a reference to the age-old question, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Some say that perhaps "nothing" cannot even exist, with or without God. Others propose that God is the only solution to the "problem."

Also, what if God acted on ‘nothing’ as defined by science i.e. the ‘quantum field’?

The quantum field is far from nothing. If we're given that as a starting point, God is absolutely unnecessary. But I don't think it's legitimate to assume the quantum field is the irreducible starting point.
 
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devolved

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It's interesting you would label that Christian existentialism. None of what you described strikes me as particularly Christian as opposed to other variations of classical theism, but maybe that's because you left those elements out (or maybe it's in the video you rightly predicted I might not have the patience to watch).

I didn't really name these "Christian existentialism". I think I share a lot in common in regards to necessity of axiomatic structure that gives us grounds to formulate everything else in relation to these assumptions. Again, lately I don't really have time to write online essays few people may be interesting reading :). So, the best I can do is perhaps inject a few points here and there, and point out how certain views may fit in a framework of thought from a more nuanced view of the subject matter.

I find it very difficult to disagree with classical theists on virtually all points with regards to Christian fundamentalism, but they completely lose me when they get into the reasons why they break theist rather than atheist.

I think it's rather simple for me. If we exclude any type of theism from conversation about reality, then we are left with the magical properties of matter (or whatever equivalent there is in modern physics these days) to achieve self-aware being through mere re-shuffling and recombining of these chunks of that matter. So, you have to progressively re-combine matter in order to achieve consciousness, which I think is a far less coherent view than beginning with consciousness as the starting point.

Likewise, with "scientific explanation" of this subject matter, there's a narrative that wraps the VERY SAME narrative into contextual blanket of "materialism" narrative, and then offers the very same narrative as "the obvious proof" of why we should object to the alternatives.

For example, think about the fundamental assumptions that go into the formulation of the big bang theory. We begin with a uniform chunk of something. Not sure that it qualifies as "matter" yet, since it has no other properties than "existence" and "really small and dense". Some postulate that something already occupying the space the size of a tip of a pin, some formulate a more vacuous non-spacial and non-time concept, but then, this uniform something expands into time and space and progressively takes on a wide variety of attributes that then subsequently direct the "rules" by which these different variations of something coalesce to form larger chunks, that end up cooking up more variation .... that after a few billion years cook up conscious beings that are able to reflect about the nature of existence, experience emotional states, and have intentional actions or at least awareness of certain intent.

For me, it's not a coherent story. I don't see how we can get from A to B without already having some form of B all along, especially in respect to conscious experience. Claiming that materialism is viable, and that there's a provisional promise that it will some day explain consciousness as functional mechanism of matter... is a form of "religious" trust in a baseline assumption... which I don't find coherent.

And I really don't see how atheism can exist in non-materialistic context, or how it can exist as a standalone assumption that is meaningful apart from some framework that would include lack of God.

I'm interested in hearing more about your position, but if you're truly worried about imposing on the thread we can save it for another time.

I'll do so in a separate post, since I don't have much time to do so today.
 
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Caliban

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This quote is is actually false in the case for the supernatural. A person does not choose to not believe in fairies as if it were an intellectual choice. Without compelling evidence non-belief is the default, intellectually honest position. I don't choose to not believe in unicorns, I just withheld belief because there is no evidence. A choice involves at least two possible and viable outcomes or propositions. This quote has the effect of trying to either shift the burden of proof or legitimize non-rational choices by making a false equivalency between two things.
 
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