[snip]
Well, we have suffering for some reason, and I guess it's useful? (I apologize, but I looked back a few posts, and I'm not exactly sure where I was going with this.)
I've long since tried to keep track of what I'm doing
. I suppose suffering
could be useful, but I can't for the life of me see what it does.
Yes, but we wouldn't consider them unselfish people. It would not be good if it were done for themselves.
Why not? They're still giving to the poor, aren't they? Does the intent with which they donate affect the outcome?
I didn't say there was no satisfaction in love. Mutual satisfaction is the idea, really. I'm just saying that self-satisfaction cannot be the aim. It's a paradoxical thread which runs throughout Christianity: the first will be last and vice versa, the least will be greatest and vice versa, "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." The only way to find and keep your self, is to lose your self.
The Trinity is love eternally, before creation. God sent the son to us as a gift of love, not because we had anything God needed. Christ is the God who washes the feet of His creatures (John 13). And this is why God does not compel himself upon men's minds - love does not insist on its own way; "love is not self-seeking" (1 Corinthians 13:5).
Which would be all very well and good, except for one very large thorn: Hell. I'd be quite happy with the idea of an unobtrusive love, one that accepts us if we come, and is content if we don't. But it's not just unobtrusive love: it's the only lifeline out of damnation. So it is very much intruding upon our lives. And in that regard, it seems like a dark perversion of love, than the genuine article.
God may not compel himself upon our minds, but, given the stakes, I'd rather he did.
If the universe is all there is, and there's nothing outside it to influence it, then every action has to attributable to the laws inside it, right? Everything would have to be pre-determined. The laws of physics and chemistry cannot be broken, and they would have to account for everything. No scientist could ever say "I just had a thought which was a true insight or inference about reality" because every thought would be a mere accidental product of the mindless reality itself.
That everything boils down to chemistry doesn't mean the universe is mindless. If we could explain how our minds work entirely naturally, that wouldn't negate the fact that our minds exist. It might raise questions about just how we can have 'thoughts' and genuine 'Aha!' moments, but hey still happen.
The idea which science depends on, is the same idea which undermines science. Science depends on an orderly universe, but if it is truly orderly, then it is "ordered" in every sense of the word; it is dictated from the beginning. Every landing of every butterfly, and every thought of every man, is a result of a previous movement of atoms, which in turn was caused by a previous movement of atoms, right back to the beginning. Only if there is an external God can science be true. If not, science is like a dog chasing its tail; science will never arrive at any truth because there is no truth.
How did you conclude that there is no truth? Just because everything, including our thoughts, is derived mathematically from the past, doesn't mean it's not true. The butterfly may land on the flower because its atoms are 'destined' to do that, but that doesn't change the fact that the butterfly
did land on the flower. That fact is still true, regardless of anything else.
What do we want? Happiness? Freedom? Both simultaneously?
I think that would be ideal. But, failing that, I'd prefer happiness over freedom. If I'm happy, why would I want to be free?
Note: I'm making a distinction between the freedom slaves enjoyed when they were emancipated, and the freedom I enjoy as a moral agent with free will. I'm talking about the latter, not the former.
Work like that does go on, and some people, like Simon Greenleaf, famously, look into the evidence and decide the evidence is sound. But I doubt you could ever get a scientific consensus that Christ is Lord.
Science would be ever so boring if everyone agreed on everything
. I find the best way to advance is through critique.
I'm not sure all animals' lives are as hard a work as you describe. Plenty of animals seem to have lots of leisure time. Some mammals hibernate almost half a year. If leisure time leads to philosophy, bears should have been the first philosophers!
Well, there's more to it than simply leisure time, I'll admit. We have to have the brains capable of taking advantage of that leisure time. While some animals live very comfortably indeed, it's a case of being both smart enough
and successful enough to start putting your brain to more philosophic pursuits.
The other Great Apes, while undoubtedly intelligent to a surprisingly high degree, are not particularly 'affluent'. Dolphins, on the other hand, are smart
and affluent. They even have individual names, and have recreational sex!
You're right about ancient animism, and you may be right about God being an amalgamation. In fact, Paul may have expressed the same idea in Athens, when he said he was declaring the "unknown God"; he could have been to talking to all of the ancient peoples that came before him. But still, it's beside the point. Animism itself needs explanation before you can use it to explain something else. You push the question back a step, but still beg the question: why did man invent spirits?
It's a good question. Seeing patterns where none exists? An explanation to the crazy things that go on that works so well it
must be true? I don't know.
Plus, you could say modern scientific theories are amalgamations of all previous scientific thought about the world, but that doesn't discredit the theories; actually it strengthens them.
Hah, true. But it does discredit the idea that a modern theory was there from the start: we know it's something new that was built on something old.
Okay, say the universe is void of life, and God wanted it that way...so what...what can we infer from that?
That God wants a universe void of life. And not one that is full of creatures which can chose to love him.
Here's a thought, and I'm not asserting it as fact, it's just a thought, but cosmic rays and things like neutrinos are interacting with Earth at every moment, in ways we don't fully understand. A lot of this stuff emanates from outside our solar system. It could be that, even the most distant bodies such as pulsars, quasars and such, or the entire interactive universe, might be working for the support of our little Goldilocks speck. Who knows? I mean atoms are a lot of empty space, and they do a fine job of "doing" reality, so how do I know the big empty universe isn't performing the job of "doing" reality for us humans?
It's possible, but it seems a bit of a stretch to me. It's like saying all the atoms in a key make it a key, and if you take away a single atom, it won't be a key any more.
Obviously, he's considered theistic claims, and he's formed a belief about them - he believes the claims are wrong. I don't see any doubt to give him the benefit of. Everyone knows what Richard Dawkins believes (or affirms, or thinks, or feels, or supposes, or whatever other word you might substitute).
I'm not comfortable taking something as true just because it's 'obviously' true. In my experience, it's often wrong. Dawkins states that he is not a strong atheist, and I give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, what really do we have to suggest that he is a strong atheist? His vehement opposition to religion?
You're right about that. I did misspeak. I meant to say we should respect people's right to believe what they believe. I hope Dawkins agrees with you and I on this, but I really don't know. When he talks about how children should be raised (children other than his own) he comes pretty close to going over the line I think.
Parents are not the sole guardians of their children. The State also has a responsibility to take care of them, even if it means superseding the wishes of the parents. I think that all children need at least minimal public schooling, that a child can receive medical treatment against the parent's wishes, etc. So, in that regard, I agree with Dawkins, to an extent.
Why is that? Coming from an atheist, that seems to bring up a conundrum: if there is no Truth with a capital "T", why not believe whatever makes you feel good? Kind of like masturbation, there'd be no effect, it wouldn't matter, but the net result is, you'd feel good. Why does an atheist want to be an atheist? Most of us think it's okay to lie to children about Santa Claus and such because it adds happiness to childhood. So why not lie to yourself, and make your life happier?
Because it doesn't always make life happier, and it certainly doesn't make life happier for other people. People convincing themselves of lies lead to the Holocaust, to 9/11, etc. I'd
like to fly, but acting on the belief that I can actually fly would quickly lead to my painful death.
Consider the Douglas Adams quote: "Isnt it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" But remove the fairies, and a thoughtful, honest person will not see any beauty. An honest person will see a transitory accident which natural selection has programmed the vision interpreter in his brain to attach the arbitrary emotional response "this is beautiful".
That doesn't me we stop percieving beauty. I may understand how the garden works and where it all came from, and how my brain processes it and makes me feel the 'it's beautiful' emotion, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the garden exists, and that it
is beautiful. If anything, my understanding makes it
more beautiful.
Humans instinctively know that beauty is only beautiful because we perceive that there is meaning underlying it. We want truth, and there is no truth in beauty apart from meaning, because if the natural course of evolution had tweaked the course of events slightly differently, we would see some ugly things as beautiful, and vice versa. If our brains were wired slightly differently, we could perceive clanging metal pots dropped on the floor as music.
Beauty
is in the eye of the holder. Does the fact that we appreciate music and aesthetics means that beauty has an objective existence?
Apart from religion (specifically the idea that there actually exists a Way, or Tao), no I can't justify the idea. Neither philosophy nor biological science are capable of telling me why what I know is true, even though I and everyone else knows it's true.
I doubt everyone knows its true. Some people are quite vocal about the idea that fairness and equality are not the way to go.
Every atheist on CF is eager to tell me that they are a good person without God. Why? Why are they so eager to have it known that they obey some meaningless biological conditioning which is actually an abstract concept, and which does not even benefit themselves, if and when they can get away with disobeying it?
Because Christians are just as eager to tell us that, without God, we atheists are immoral Nazis who babies.
It's almost as if they were walking in the woods and came upon a tree that had fallen over, and said "I'll walk in the direction this tree is pointing" as if there were some meaning or intention behind the tree's position. The tree fell the way it did naturally, and the same goes for the selection of genes which result in human consciousness, human morality and human societies.
Without an external basis of morality, none of us are under any obligation to obey any emotional impulse, neither for society nor posterity. In fact I'd say that one would be foolish to obey anything other than one's own will.
Which begs the question: why is it we will? What is it we want to do? Most people want to be compassionate to their fellow man, rather than rape, murder, and pillage.
Just because someone believes their sense of morality is basically an evolved instinct, doesn't change the fact that they still have a sense of morality. I believe moral codes, including my own, are arbitrary and relative, but that doesn't change the fact they they exist. I still have a moral code, even if I believe it to be ultimately baseless.
I agree, that's right that we trust logic because it's never failed, but we do have the separate idea that logic cannot fail (and I think you extend that to include in any possible world, which I don't necessarily).
A few days ago in your other thread, you told me a thing cannot be both illogical and true. But the idea in quantum mechanics that a single thing can physically be in two places at once is fundamentally illogical, isn't it? How can that illogical observation be true then?
It can't: it isn't illogical, but it does go against our naive understanding of how things should behave. In the middle-ages, a man accidentally discovered how to make waterproof clothing. The result? He was burnt as a witch. To some people, some things are so unbelievable that they conclude it
must be magic or witchery.
If our perception of reality is fully controlled by evolution, it can't be right or wrong since there is no right or wrong.
Why?
It's absolutely unreliable because whatever you think is right is merely a perception. If you tell me, as a Christian, that my perception that there exists a real morality is mere illusion, I can in turn say the same thing of your perception that there exists a real logic.
The truth of logic is independant of our perception. 1 + 1 = 2, regardless of anything else. Morality, on the other hand, is inextricably linked with the real world: someone can't be immoral if the evil actions you accuse them of never actually happened.
