Very reasonable.

I think he's right about agnostic = atheist, but I'm not so sure about the last bit.

Just because someone thinks they'd fail Abraham's test of faith doesn't really mean they're an atheist. That's especially true if they explain it in terms of "I don't have a strong enough faith to be able to do that", or a more likely "I don't think God would ask that".

I agree that an unqualified "yes" answer would mean the person is dangerous.

As far as I'm concerned, an agnostic is a label someone gives themselves because they don't understand the true definition of what is an atheist.

Atheist's can't claim that they can be certain that there isn't a god, the same way that a theist can't ever claim with 100% certainty that there is. Atheism is just a lack of belief in a god because there isn't any evidence to say otherwise. It's the logical stance to take since the burden of proof is upon the theist, ie. it's not up to me to prove that there isn't a good because it's your notion that there is one.

I'm agnostic. I neither believe, nor disbelieve in the existence of a higher power. Of course I realize there is no proof either for, or against a God or Gods. I believe given enough time, say a few lifetimes, spent contemplating the issue I could come up with an answer for myself, I've just got better things to do. When it comes to the question do I believe in God, I have to pass. I haven't decided yet, and don't plan on giving the topic any thought any time soon. I just don't concern myself with it, hence I'm agnostic.

My problem with how he ends it, is the argument from a counterfactual. In the situation he describes evidence that previously did not exist (presumably against one's notion of God) suddenly presents itself. So, logically, one must update their belief in that situation. One could just as easily claim we are all theists because "if an all powerful being were suddenly to present itself, and convince you that it is all powerful, you would believe in it."

Further, the term atheist has taken on new meaning. It has come to mean, to many people, belief with conviction in the lack of existence of a deity. Now, by it's true definition, this is incorrect, but it's what it has come to mean. This is why there has been a push back to allow those of us not wishing to weigh in on the debate a less antagonistic label.

Now, to all the atheists, are you equally skeptical of string theory?

Most agnostics claim that they don't think humans are capable of understanding the existence of a god on a higher dimension. I think this should make them default to atheist, as they can't believe if they themselves know they can't even fathom a god's existence. If you can't fathom it, you can't believe in it. Just like a baby doesn't believe in atoms or electrons.

Then there's the ones that don't really know, like it doesn't really make sense that there's a god, buuuuut, they don't want to really do any thinking nor do they want to piss off any potential god...as if the simple cop out of being "agnostic" or "unknowing" to his existence would pacify his narcissism. I say, shit or get off the pot. You can even say "hey, as of now, I have not seen any evidence, but I am continually looking". I'll even accept "hey, the idea of god has really been engraved into my psyche but I'm currently going through an introspective journey whereas I question my blind faith".

...but the one I'll respect the most is "pffffffff god? HAHAHAHAHA...dude, it's 2009"

How about someone that simply adopts an arbitrary prior probability distribution over the space of possible alternatives?

There is no evidence one way or another. There is no default position one should be compelled to adopt.

Also, you didn't answer my question about string theory.

I don't really like that when it comes to the idea of religion/god(s), we nitpick about semantics in ways that are totally rejected in any other scenario. Ie., the whole "I can't 100% disprove the existence of any god, therefore I am an agnostic rather than an atheist." Yes, scientifically, rigorously, that sort of claim is correct -- nobody can 100% prove that any given god does not exist.

However, that is also true about leprechauns, invisible pink unicorns, Santa Claus, etc.; nobody can prove scientifically that they don't exist. But if you ask people if they really believe in Santa Claus or leprechauns, they generally don't split hairs and say "...well, I can't be 100% sure that they don't exist", they just say no. Nobody is agnostic about unicorns.

For me personally, I accept that I cannot completely disprove the existence of any religious god, or anything like dragons, fairies, unicorns, Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy. But, I think that all of those things are about equally likely to actually 'exist' in any way that we typically define that word. And, I think that likelihood is close enough to zero that I have no problem with saying straight up that I don't believe in the existence of any of them, without hedging my bets and prefacing it with a "...well, I can't be 100% sure".

I think the difference is with the generality of the word, and its importance, with whatever definition, to people.

My point, however, is that we don't apply your same demeaning ridicule to ideas like string theory. There is no more evidence for string theory than there is for God. The theory can be stretched to fit the data in as many ways as a concept like God. Yet, for whatever reason, string theory doesn't seem to get lumped into the same bucket with unicorns, leprechauns, or tooth fairies. Plenty of people's ideas about God are perfectly sane. Whether or not you choose to believe in any one of the myriad of definitions is up to you. I personally am agnostic, as you haven't even defined the terms you're asking me to reason about.

Plenty of scientists don't like string theory, it still has along way to go before it becomes fully accepted. It's still being worked on, tested, it's incomplete, yadda yadda. The whole theroy could be abandoned if strong contrary evidence comes to light. One does not "believe" in string theory as one might believe in unicorns or gods.

Does that answer your question, bmacs27?

Well, no. String theory has so many parameters, and there are so many variants, that it can fit just about any data set you throw at it. In my mind, that is no different than many people's impression of God, as that which was there before all else, or some form of universal consciousness. There is no reason such a concept of God is incompatible with the objectively observable universe. Unfortunately, as with string theory, the hypothesis does not make any predictions not already made by quantum mechanics, particle theory, relativity, etc...

The only grounds on which the theories are selected is based upon some undefinable concept of "simplicity" or "beauty". It's all a subjective mishmash of questionable inductive inference anyhow. So why then should a personally held, relatively benign, concept of a creator be like believing in unicorns, whereas pursuing a career of investigating similarly untestable scientific theories should be laudable?

Further, is someone that supposes that some concept of God is more likely than NO God really an atheist? Or would you call that more of an agnostic sort of thing?

What an idiot.. agnostic means you believe there is a god.. just don't know what it is..

Do you believe in a god. Atheists, no. Agnostics, yes.

What an idiot.

>> ^bmacs27:
String theory ... In my mind, that is no different than many people's impression of God ... There is no reason such a concept of God is incompatible with the objectively observable universe.

String "theory" is only a theory in the land of theoretical physics, it is not a scientific theory, it's barely a hypothesis. It could be correct, but nobody has any good reason to believe that it is at this point, it gets its share of ridicule, probably more than theism relative to its popularity.

So why then should a personally held, relatively benign, concept of a creator be like believing in unicorns, whereas pursuing a career of investigating similarly untestable scientific theories should be laudable?

For the same reason having a career as a priest is "laudable", which is somebody is willing to pay to have the job done. I don't see priests being ridden out of town on a rail, the consequences of pushing a nonsensical belief system for a living is being handled with kid gloves, and a rare dismissive glance, which is just about what you would expect for anybody who seems to honestly believe in unicorns.

String "theory", unlike theism, at least conforms to the existing data. It's makes predictions, they simply are not novel, that does not mean scientists hold string theorists in high regard. Theism on the other hand receives far less than its fair share of ridicule.

Further, is someone that supposes that some concept of God is more likely than NO God really an atheist? Or would you call that more of an agnostic sort of thing?

As pointed out in the video what is and what is believed are two different questions.

If "what is" was the question, then everybody would have to be the same thing regardless of belief, we would all be atheists if there is no god, we would all be theists if their is a god. If this were the issue, then theism would fail, we would all be atheists. The evidence against anything like the abrahamic god is considerable, and evidence for is conspicuously absent.

If belief is the question, then we can disagree, and not being able to say "this god exists" means you do not accept it to be true, so you don't believe it, and being without a god belief are 'not a theist' = atheist.

Sorry Joe, that's incorrect. Agnostics are just atheists without the balls (or knowledge) to label themselves correctly. If you do not believe in a specific God, you are an atheist. The term "atheist" recently took on the improper connotation that one specifically denies the possibility of the existence of a God, so people started using the word "agnostic" to mean "I don't know." This is a misuse of the words that will last as long as there is a stigma against people who are not religious.

bmacs27, if you can't see the difference between religion and string theory, let me just remind you that nobody has yet blown up a bus for string theory. Nor have they donated their children's inheritance to string theory. Nor have they committed suicide because string theory told them they had unnatural desires. Nor have they used string theory as an excuse to exterminate a culture. People investigate string theory because they want to know how the world works. People embrace religion because they are afraid of not knowing how the world works. It seems like a fine distinction, but the fear that is injected into every dangerous belief system on this planet is a huge part of what makes peace impossible. Religion is NOT benign. But it's perfectly fine to ignore the people arguing about string theory, because they're not going to kill each other and get you in the crossfire.

I have long thoughtful discussions with my wiener too, but I don't FILM IT.

>> ^Drax:
I have long thoughtful discussion with my wiener too, but I don't FILM IT.


But his ding-dong is doing the filming! It's MAGIC.

>> ^bmacs27:
My problem with how he ends it, is the argument from a counterfactual. In the situation he describes evidence that previously did not exist (presumably against one's notion of God) suddenly presents itself.

It depends on the nature of the evidence. It this a public address, or is it a voice in your head? Lots of people hear voices, from God and from others. If other people shared my observation then I would be more likely to accept it as objective evidence (or technological deception), but if I were the only one who heard it then I would take it as evidence of a psychological disorder.


are you equally skeptical of string theory?

I am skeptical of string theory in that I will gladly accept evidence against it. Theories don't have to be "true", they just have to accurately predict the behavior they describe. I would certainly make fun of anyone who thinks string theory is absolute truth, because it is simply an attempt to explain the relationship of various facts and observations.

Religion is different. It actively attempts to maintain itself in present form despite new evidence. Belief without evidence, and especially when contrary to evidence, is dangerous... otherwise known as "faith". No one should have "faith" in scientific theories. They should determine whether or not the theory accurately describes behavior and should always compare it to new facts and observations.

werd!

Ok, first of all, there needs to be a distinction drawn between participation in an organized religion, and personally held religious beliefs. There is a HUGE distinction there. I was referring specifically to the latter. I do believe in some sort of "universal consciousness". What I believe in does not fit neatly into any particular definition of God that anyone has presented to me, but it certainly is closer to a concept like God than a concept like NO God. Thus, I consider myself agnostic, rather than atheist. Such a belief, as with string theory, is completely consistent with the observable universe. Granted, it makes no unique predictions, but neither does string theory.

Psychologic, you mentioned voices in your head. How about consciousness? Do you guys believe that exists? What's your evidence? Is it voices in your head? Better yet, do you believe that anyone else has consciousness? Why isn't that like believing in unicorns?

P.S. If you are waiting for unique predictions made by string theory, you're going to have to wait until we can build particle accelerators the size of Pluto's orbit. If you can build that, there is a God.

P.P.S. With regards to the ridicule theism receives: As a scientist, I'd like to see the level of debate elevated on the side claiming to represent science. Further, as an agnostic, I'd appreciate it if you didn't shunt the movement by misrepresenting the beliefs of agnostics. You get nowhere by claiming we're all closet atheists. Instead you inspire me to rail back against your claims, and become a theist sympathizer.

-redacted. I need to read through the comments more thoroughly before posting. Drax beat me to it.

>> ^bmacs27:
Ok, first of all, there needs to be a distinction drawn between participation in an organized religion, and personally held religious beliefs.

"Religious" implies being part of a larger belief structure. Supernatural beliefs (ghosts, souls, universal consciousnesses) are not necessarily religious. I'm mainly concerned with what (if any) evidence is considered in forming a belief. Atheism is generally seen as applying to a belief in god(s), though I personally extend it to any belief which cannot be tested or observed. Believing something is possible is different than believing it is true.


Psychologic, you mentioned voices in your head. How about consciousness? Do you guys believe that exists? What's your evidence? Is it voices in your head? Better yet, do you believe that anyone else has consciousness? Why isn't that like believing in unicorns?

I will gladly answer this question, but given the nature of the question I must first ask you to define "consciousness". My answer will depend on your definition. I do not believe in "free will", if that helps any.


P.S. If you are waiting for unique predictions made by string theory, you're going to have to wait until we can build particle accelerators the size of Pluto's orbit. If you can build that, there is a God.

If it makes no predictions then I'm not sure what we would be testing. If it cannot be tested then I wouldn't elevate it to the level of relativity or quantum mechanics. Still, I'm not sure how a particle accelerator of that magnitude would prove the existed of god(s).

"Religious" implies being part of a larger belief structure. Supernatural beliefs (ghosts, souls, universal consciousnesses) are not necessarily religious. I'm mainly concerned with what (if any) evidence is considered in forming a belief. Atheism is generally seen as applying to a belief in god(s), though I personally extend it to any belief which cannot be tested or observed. Believing something is possible is different than believing it is true.

Likewise, believing somethings are more likely than others, is different than holding no belief at all. If anything, I'm probably closest to a Deist, or some such. You are right however, I should have used a term like personal "spiritual" beliefs.

I will gladly answer this question, but given the nature of the question I must first ask you to define "consciousness". My answer will depend on your definition. I do not believe in "free will", if that helps any.

And this is exactly my point about any deity. Until you define the term, I'm agnostic. There is a simple reason why, depending on how you define the term, my answer would change.

If it makes no predictions then I'm not sure what we would be testing. If it cannot be tested then I wouldn't elevate it to the level of relativity or quantum mechanics. Still, I'm not sure how a particle accelerator of that magnitude would prove the existed of god(s).

It can be tested, just with a particle accelerator a quadrillion times more energetic than the LHC. For all utilitarian purposes, it's untestable.

just had to weigh in here.

agnostic
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agnostic

atheism
http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atheism

You can actually be both if you believe
a) the existence of god is unprovable.
b) god does not exist.

I think I am more agnostic than atheist simply because I can't prove it.
For all I know Santa Claus is the champion of a gazillion gods and he rides
a unicorn that the strings of string theory come blasting out of its butt.

The point I am getting at is that everyone is so so different that even if they do believe in a god...
each persons version is different. So you can not pile attributes onto them simply because
they do or do not believe in something.

The question is not can you be both, it's can you be agnostic without being atheist. The magician talking to his wiener says no.

If we are talking gut level, I think its
"Do you WANT there to be a god"

In terms of faith, 'Want' happens before belief in a free society.

Im not so hot on Penn tbh.

*mouthbreather

>> ^bmacs27: I do believe in some sort of "universal consciousness".

So you are a theist, you don't lack a belief in a god, you simply don't have an english definition of what you claim to believe in.

Such a belief, as with string theory, is completely consistent with the observable universe. Granted, it makes no unique predictions, but neither does string theory.

Your belief clearly predicts that it must be possible, in a universe like ours, for thinking to take place without form. Information processing is a counter-entropic process, it requires energy, and stateful energy(matter) to consolidate referable information. These energetic events would be completely detectable by normal physical means. Theism,spiritualism, or any supernatural claims about disembodied entities contradict conservation of energy, and so can not be accurately described as "more likely than not" or "consistent with the observable universe".

How about consciousness? Do you guys believe that exists?

Only to the extent that red exists, things can be red, but there is no red, things can be conscious, but there is on consciousness.

What's your evidence? Is it voices in your head? Better yet, do you believe that anyone else has consciousness? Why isn't that like believing in unicorns?

The ability to respond to stimuli is an observable trait, consciousness is the attribute of possessing this trait to a greater or lesser extent. Some would, of course, refer to internal narrative, but we should be clear that internal narrative is, almost certainly, untrue and constructed after the fact. Based on what we know from studies about the reliability of internal narrative,I would be disinclined to trust it in addressing this question.

As a scientist, I'd like to see the level of debate elevated on the side claiming to represent science.

You can't elevate the level of a debate that is not taking place. Theists make assertions, some people point out how they are contradicted by the available evidence, theists move goal posts, lather, rinse, repeat. We have not had a real debate for a very long time, and as long as the goal post is still on the move, don't expect one.

Your belief clearly predicts that it must be possible, in a universe like ours, for thinking to take place without form. Information processing is a counter-entropic process, it requires energy, and stateful energy(matter) to consolidate referable information. These energetic events would be completely detectable by normal physical means. Theism,spiritualism, or any supernatural claims about disembodied entities contradict conservation of energy, and so can not be accurately described as "more likely than not" or "consistent with the observable universe".

I didn't say thinking. I said consciousness. For a living I model the human visual system with information theoretic models. So yes, I agree, "thinking" whatever the hell that means, is a counter-entropic process (at least in some squishy Gibbs sense, as there is no such thing as a "counter-entropic process"). In fact, it is exactly this which I believe imbues our consciousness with access to such an intricate experiential stream. The ability of our nervous system to transmit information about quantum phenomena at a distance with so little lost to noise is absolutely astonishing, and shouldn't be diminished. This doesn't give me any more reason to presume I should have this "experience", or "stream of consciousness", or whatever you want to call it. I just gives a reason for that particular pattern of stimulus-response.

The consciousness I presume to exist in a rock, for instance, would be deprived of this sort of access. It is likely more fragmented, and is only able to respond to very basic stimuli, such as proximal forces, temperature, etc. It would be a boring consciousness, but I presume it to be conscious all the same.

The ability to respond to stimuli is an observable trait, consciousness is the attribute of possessing this trait to a greater or lesser extent. Some would, of course, refer to internal narrative, but we should be clear that internal narrative is, almost certainly, untrue and constructed after the fact. Based on what we know from studies about the reliability of internal narrative,I would be disinclined to trust it in addressing this question.

So the billiard ball responding to the applied force is conscious? I agree!

You can't elevate the level of a debate that is not taking place. Theists make assertions, some people point out how they are contradicted by the available evidence, theists move goal posts, lather, rinse, repeat. We have not had a real debate for a very long time, and as long as the goal post is still on the move, don't expect one.

What available evidence am I contradicting?

Ok... not sure there's a God or not, but Penn's question is retarded.

God: "Kill your child, or be damned forever."
Me: "God, I sacrifice my eternal soul for my child. Go fuck yourself."

Just because I decided to disobey doesn't mean I don't believe.

Well, I thank God that I'm neither.

You scientists and philosophers seem to have things pretty well figured out. It's just that I've never received a satisfactory answer to what I believe is a very simple question.

Which scientific theory, current or to be concocted in the future, can explain any portion of creation without having to jump to supernatural origin? Big bang, string theory... Where did matter come from? What started time itself? Where did energy come from?

I don't believe there will ever be a theory that can jump the tracks to answer those questions. That's the paradox you live in.

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
Well, I thank God that I'm neither.
You scientists and philosophers seem to have things pretty well figured out. It's just that I've never received a satisfactory answer to what I believe is a very simple question.
Which scientific theory, current or to be concocted in the future, can explain any portion of creation without having to jump to supernatural origin? Big bang, string theory... Where did matter come from? What started time itself? Where did energy come from?


Yeah? And the bible spends so much time explaining the intricate workings of the universe, lol!

Agnostics are the people that realise how dumb religions are but don't want to face up to the fact that after death there is nothing.

Pussys.

>> ^bmacs27: I didn't say thinking. I said consciousness.

Yes you SAID that, but if you MEANT something by it, it would be useful to state what. You say that consciousness ≠ thinking, but you maintain vagary on what it is, not defining your terms does not strengthen your position.

So the billiard ball responding to the applied force is conscious? I agree!

You know full well the ball is not "responding", it is effected, objects which don't have the capacity to act don't have the capacity to react. You are just avoiding the consequences of the obvious by conflating terms.

Agnostics are just pussy atheist. They are like "there probably is no God, but I will believe just in case!"

Agnostic is the guy you see who always can't make up his own mind, who lets the girl decide where to take her, who never takes risks.

If you're a true man you will be able to choose between black and white. Make your choice now!

^acidSpine:

You're jumping ahead of the argument and dodging my question. How can any scientific theory on the origin of the universe get around a supernatural source based on the questions I posed?

You just skipped straight to attacking my Bible. Your criteria is that it doesn't fill in every minutia detail you feel you need before it's worthy of belief. We can debate faith another time.

Before you deconstruct what my religion says, the argument I'm putting forward as asking about YOUR religion. No matter how advanced or far-reaching your scientific theories, how do you get around the necessity of supernatural origin in the creation of matter, time, and energy itself?

Yes you SAID that, but if you MEANT something by it, it would be useful to state what. You say that consciousness ≠ thinking, but you maintain vagary on what it is, not defining your terms does not strengthen your position.

Likewise when you claim I am theist, without defining the deity, you undermine your own argument. That's why I'm an agnostic. I can't make claims about undefined terms.

From wikipedia:

The term hard problem of consciousness, coined by David Chalmers[1], refers to the difficult problem of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomenon. Hard problems are distinct from this set because they "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained".

"Thinking", would fall under the easy problem of consciousness. Consciousness is a concept that is difficult to put into words, but I've found most humans share this sense. That is, we experience coherent unitary stream of multi-modal sensation. There is no physical reason for that. There are only physical correlates of aspects of these experiences. There is no unitary locus. It's the equivalent of saying that your graphics card is conscious because the registers contain an internal representation of whatever is being displayed. It's nonsensical unless you posit consciousness in the first place.

You know full well the ball is not "responding", it is effected, objects which don't have the capacity to act don't have the capacity to react. You are just avoiding the consequences of the obvious by conflating terms.


I respectfully disagree. Before I can explain further, I'd need to know what you mean by act. Am I "acting" if a series of billiard balls bounce off each other in my head leading to my hand moving? Obviously, the process is much more complicated involving semi-permeable membranes, electro-chemical gradients, allosteric processes involving ion-channel gating, sensory transduction, passive and active cable properties attenuating electrical signals, neurotransmitters, resonating macro-circuitry, etc... In the end, however, it's still billiard balls. Granted, I'm able to overcome much larger energy barriers than a single billiard ball, but I'm still running down the free-energy hill, as all physical processes are.

Agnostics are the people that realise how dumb religions are but don't want to face up to the fact that after death there is nothing.

Actually, after death comes decomposition. If you claim there is "nothing", then you probably appeal to this sense of "conscious experience" that I'm talking about. The matter doesn't go anywhere.

Pussys.
All this talk about "having balls". As far as I'm concerned, balls is what got us into this mess. Show me the yoni.

Oh goodie, all sorts of interesting discussions going on here.

Agnostics make no claims to know anything, they say "I do not/cannot know X". The celestial teapot is the oldie counter for that - in principle we have to be agnostic about it, but in actuality we're not. We are all a-teapotists. Atheism is the same way. You can say that you believe in the celestial teapot, but with no evidence, you're not going to convince anyone.

The Hard Problem of consciousness is extremely interesting. An intricate part of consciousness is free will, I believe. Do I believe that we indeed have free will; yes, as much as we can. Byt that I mean that in theory we are merely state machines defined by universal laws that define how our molecules and atoms move, which then cause us to act as we do. The brain is an enormous parallel computer, which executes 'code' based on chemical and electrical reactions. Because I believe (on what available evidence I have) that the universe is deterministic and materialistic, then this must be so. I have yet to encounter anything that defies that that theory.

While the universe (and therefore us) is deterministic, we can never predict everything, because we would need to make a prediction that had no effect on the universe, otherwise our prediction is broken by itself. (If I know I will die when I cross some street at X time, I'll just not cross it - problem solved.) So, in practice we do have 'free will', because we act as if we do have free will. The same with consciousness as a whole, I think that I do have it, but that may easily be an illusion caused by my brain. I assume that other people have the same or at least similar experience I do, even if I can't really know they're not P-zombies. In a way, I think everyone is a p-zombie, depending on how you define it.

Oh goodie, all sorts of interesting discussions going on here.

Yay, somebody that wants to respectfully debate, rather than call me a pussy. If I were you, I'd ask your camp to show a little more respect. Not that it's always returned by the proselytizers, but I hardly feel I'm being disrespectful to your beliefs. I wish your comrades would show the same courtesy.

Agnostics make no claims to know anything, they say "I do not/cannot know X". The celestial teapot is the oldie counter for that - in principle we have to be agnostic about it, but in actuality we're not. We are all a-teapotists. Atheism is the same way. You can say that you believe in the celestial teapot, but with no evidence, you're not going to convince anyone.

Yes, but we are not all a-consciousness. Nor are we all a-string theorists. This comes down to basic inference. One adopts an arbitrary prior probability over the space of alternatives. This is the rational Bayesian thing to do. Putting any sort of constraints on that process is completely a subjective process. For instance, people typically cite 'simplicity', or 'elegance', as properties that should be more highly weighted. There is no more evidence for that then there is for God, at least as far as the 'truthfulness' of the claims is concerned. Now, I remain agnostic as I'd rather not make the claim, because as you've correctly pointed out I shouldn't expect to be able to convince anybody else. That doesn't mean that I consider the lack of existence of a deity as more likely than the existence.

As for determinism, what about quantum mechanics? When I look at that evidence I see randomness, not determinism. Some people, such as Roger Penrose, have thought that the key to the hard problem might dwell at the quantum level. I'm not prepared to jump into the "micro-tubule" camp, but the existence of quantum mechanics does leave the door open for a less deterministic reality.

[edit] If you are interested in this idea of consciousness as an illusion, you should read "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretranders.

Atheist -- I don't think there is a God. I don't believe in anything you can't observe/prove/ requires belief with no supporting facts or evidence

Agnostic -- I think there might be a god. I don't believe it in something just for the sake of believing in it.

Religious nutjobs -- I believe in something with my whole being in spite of no evidence. I am sure that my belief is correct and exclusive because of my special book / teachings. Sure my special book is similar to special books that came before and after but mine is 100% correct. I believe in the supernatural stories and fables that have been passed down as oral traditions since the beginnings of human agrarian civilization as historically accurate.

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
You're jumping ahead of the argument and dodging my question. How can any scientific theory on the origin of the universe get around a supernatural source based on the questions I posed?
.. No matter how advanced or far-reaching your scientific theories, how do you get around the necessity of supernatural origin in the creation of matter, time, and energy itself?


You are clueless about science and don't even understand the most basic third grade definition of science. Science doesn't have to explain something to compete with your creation myths. Science is a way to model and explain the physical world. Science doesn't ever claim to have THE answer or even fully explain something. There are models and theories to explain our world and they are tested and updated and validated or invalidated. Our assumptions held to be true for decades might be replaced with a more complete theory or explanation.

This origin of the universe question is pretty lame. Personally I think it is mostly unknowable, the physics inside a black hole or if singularities and what really exist or what quantum effect occur as you approach the concept of a singularity.
You do know that matter and energy are the same thing? And that time doesn't even really exist at the speed of light. From a relativistic view, time came into existence when the universe was created.

Idiot "God is the only answer" people say, but how can there be a time before time existed? They would also say that how can time not be a constant like gravity. We used to think the everyone experienced time as the same thing, but it isn't true, it is relative, just like you can move through 3D space, you can move through time-space.

Anyways, to answer you simplistic "gotcha" question.. One explanation that is perfectly satisfactory is that the universe is a cycle of contraction all the way down to a singularity.. then an explosion and expansion period and then it all contracts again back to a singularity, etc. ad infinitium. That is one possible explanation.

Anyways, to answer you simplistic "gotcha" question.. One explanation that is perfectly satisfactory is that the universe is a cycle of contraction all the way down to a singularity.. then an explosion and expansion period and then it all contracts again back to a singularity, etc. ad infinitium. That is one possible explanation.


It's one possibility, but it doesn't jive very well with the relatively recent evidence indicating that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

^JoeDirt

Your arguments were impressive, but fell well short of what I was hoping for.

First: Your main answer to my "gotcha" question was that we don't know and what I'm looking for is probably unknowable. I appreciate the primer on current scientific theory, but I was indulging in skipping to the end. I'm sure there will be mind blowing theories and constructs out there before I die, but I guarantee you NONE will be able to explain what "force" brought the earliest point of origin into being. The whole "we're experiencing an infinite repetitive loop" doesn't get you there. Something had to make this little sandbox our universe is spinning in.

Second: You did manage to provide me one answer I was looking for. By your own words, there is a lot we don't know on the basis of science alone, and what we do know is subject to revision and update. Given that, I don't see how any legitimate self-respecting scientist could adamantly conclude that there is no God. Where is the concrete evidence for that conclusion? In this day and age, I see SCIENCE = RELIGION in its own right. I've encountered religious nuts in your corner way further out on a limb than I am with my dusty old Bible.

To everyone else. Can you honestly take in the astounding sights, sounds, and wonders of the world around us and not at least consider the possibility that this was not all the result of ridiculously improbable chaos? The order and certainty, which I thank Science for demonstrating, in the laws of physics and gravity...you can honestly say "gee, neat that it all just came together like that?" Our planet alone would have had to have been to result of 10,000,000 lottery odds occurrences all happening in concert. Nothing was behind that?

You science guys have far more faith than I!

To everyone else. Can you honestly take in the astounding sights, sounds, and wonders of the world around us and not at least consider the possibility that this was not all the result of ridiculously improbable chaos? The order and certainty, which I thank Science for demonstrating, in the laws of physics and gravity...you can honestly say "gee, neat that it all just came together like that?" Our planet alone would have had to have been to result of 10,000,000 lottery odds occurrences all happening in concert. Nothing was behind that?


The classic response to that one is the old argument that there are a narrow band of universes in which we could have evolved. Thus, given that we are, there is a relatively narrow set of possible universes.

In general though, I agree, I believe the atheists have become, like the republicans, too headstrong for their own good. Their side should be that of respect for unorthodox beliefs which have not been disconfirmed. It should not be an insistence on a particular mode of thought, or logical conclusion, given the available evidence.

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
^JoeDirt
To everyone else. Can you honestly take in the astounding sights, sounds, and wonders of the world around us and not at least consider the possibility that this was not all the result of ridiculously improbable chaos? The order and certainty, which I thank Science for demonstrating, in the laws of physics and gravity...you can honestly say "gee, neat that it all just came together like that?" Our planet alone would have had to have been to result of 10,000,000 lottery odds occurrences all happening in concert. Nothing was behind that?


Id just like to point out that those sights, sounds and wonders you speak of which you find amazing, and yes there are many in this world, are the result of your brain's chemical reactions to those three things. Like when you buy something really nice and shiny you've been saving up for and wanting for so long, that giddy rush you get while walking out of the store? Same thing (and be careful, it's addictive... mmm.. WoW Expansion Collector's Editions... =0~~ )

I know that sounds dry and soulless, but it's not. Something that is amazing IS amazing (to you).. but we're just creatures reacting to these things in the same way a cat purrs when you pet it.

And about the other thing.. the odds argument. What are the odds that we could live in a place with so many intricate and amazing systems, like the tides, and the sun rising and setting, and the seasons.. etc, etc...??

Because.. Where Ever That System Develops in this Humongous Universe We Live In.. THAT Is Where Life Is Going to -Form- (us). We are a -part- of that system, just like the purring cat, or the sand on the beach. We are a component of the universe, and we're at a really amazing stage where we're self aware of all of this. Id like to think we're going to continue to evolve further into aspects of the universe we're unable to understand at all currently.

What exists outside the realm of what our current senses cover? After all, we're currently adapted to this planet.. not the whole universe itself... hopefully.

*puts bong down*

Wait... what was I just talking about?

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
^JoeDirt
Your arguments were impressive, but fell well short of what I was hoping for.
First: Your main answer to my "gotcha" question was that we don't know and what I'm looking for is probably unknowable. I appreciate the primer on current scientific theory, but I was indulging in skipping to the end. I'm sure there will be mind blowing theories and constructs out there before I die, but I guarantee you NONE will be able to explain what "force" brought the earliest point of origin into being. The whole "we're experiencing an infinite repetitive loop" doesn't get you there. Something had to make this little sandbox our universe is spinning in.
Second: You did manage to provide me one answer I was looking for. By your own words, there is a lot we don't know on the basis of science alone, and what we do know is subject to revision and update. Given that, I don't see how any legitimate self-respecting scientist could adamantly conclude that there is no God. Where is the concrete evidence for that conclusion? In this day and age, I see SCIENCE = RELIGION in its own right. I've encountered religious nuts in your corner way further out on a limb than I am with my dusty old Bible.

Evidence based conclusions. As long as no one can conclude that there is a god, the evidence shows that there is no god.

To everyone else. Can you honestly take in the astounding sights, sounds, and wonders of the world around us and not at least consider the possibility that this was not all the result of ridiculously improbable chaos? The order and certainty, which I thank Science for demonstrating, in the laws of physics and gravity...you can honestly say "gee, neat that it all just came together like that?" Our planet alone would have had to have been to result of 10,000,000 lottery odds occurrences all happening in concert. Nothing was behind that?
You science guys have far more faith than I!


That's just a damn lie. Scientists have NO FAITH. Chances have nothing to do with how the universe is put together. If I roll a million dice in a row, I will get a certain order of 1-6; what are the chances of getting exactly that result? 1.000.000^6 (or is it 6^1.000.000?) in any case, astronomical, but nonetheless I got the result I did. You cannot retroactively apply a theoretical chance. The chance that I did get what I did is 100% because I did get it.

It came together the way it did, because it did. Anthropic principle covers it.

Bmacs27: I'll get back to you when I'm not as drunk as now, but for now I recommend Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained.

>> ^bmacs27: without defining the deity, you undermine your own argument. That's why I'm an agnostic. I can't make claims about undefined terms.

But you have made a claim, that for some particular X, P(X) > P(!X). On the basis of that statement, and the assumption that you are rational, I draw the conclusion that you have some concept of what X is, or at least what its consequences are, otherwise you are making a non-sequitur claim.

That is, we experience coherent unitary stream of multi-modal sensation. There is no physical reason for that.

We claim to have this experience, I consider it highly dubious to claim, as a consequence, that it actually has some basis in fact. As for reason, I'm not sure I know what you mean. If you mean no apparatus, I don't think that it can be said with any certainty, given our current working models of the brain, that we lack the hardware. If you mean need, there are many possible reason why we, or any complex organism, might need to be able to act as if it has consciousness, it might be required for, or an artifact of, predictive thought.

Before I can explain further, I'd need to know what you mean by act.

The ability to act is the capacity to intermittently convert one type of energy into another on the basis of some trigger other than the application of convertible energy. For instance, a simple example is an internal combustion engine. If the ignition is engaged, then the engine begins to generate force by converting its fuel into kinetic energy. The engine even responds to its ignition switch, or its fuel tank being empty, and could arguably be said to be "conscious" of these things. I would not venture to suggest that the engine has any apparatus to make decisions, or to attach meaning to its simple senses, but it does, as a system, respond to stimuli in a manner distinct from that of its component parts. Each of the parts is still a billiard ball, the whole does something different, but we are not want to say that this is the consequence of some unseen force or entity.

Granted, I'm able to overcome much larger energy barriers than a single billiard ball, but I'm still running down the free-energy hill, as all physical processes are.

I disagree, you, as a system, are running pulleys and shoots to move things around, you are sinking energy to get both thinking and physical actions done in ways that individual components of you could not.

There is no free energy hill. We don't live in a free energy universe. And we are constantly applying energy against the entropic tendency of our universe. We can apply force to billiard balls to facilitate this process, but billiard balls are not a member of the class of systems which do this themselves.

Bmacs27: I'll get back to you when I'm not as drunk as now, but for now I recommend Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained.

It's sitting on the bookshelf in the conference room my journal club meets in. It caught my eye a couple times. I'll pick it up.

@ ghandi...

I'm going to plead the gwizz here. Let me sober up, and I'll get back to you. I know the gist of my argument will be something like, why should I assume a maximum entropy bound for conscious experience? Are individuals with downs' syndrome conscious? How about amoebas that can solve mazes?[citation]

What an idiot.. agnostic means you believe there is a god.. just don't know what it is..
Do you believe in a god. Atheists, no. Agnostics, yes.
What an idiot. - joedirt

What if you don't care if there's a god (or gods) or not? Agnostic means you CAN NOT know if a god (or gods) exists or not. Agnostics can chose weather or not they believe in god (or gods), just admit it's unprovable.

Agnostics are just atheists without the balls (or knowledge) to label themselves correctly. -MaxWilder

Again, what if you DON'T CARE if there's a god (or gods) or not? Athiests choose not to believe, agnostics can either believe, or disbelieve. Or neither.

It's not weather I believe in a god (or gods) or not, or even weather there is a god (or gods), as an agnostic I believe you can't prove god (or gods) at all, and personally don't care, at all. I'll live my life the same either way.

Technically agnostic means you don't, or cannot know if a god (or gods) exist. Well this includes everyone ever. Even Moses and Jesus and Abraham had to hope that it was God, and not some hallucination telling them what to do. That's why Christianity, and most (if not all) religions are called faiths. You have faith God exists, knowing it is unknowable.

I take agnostic, in common parlance, to mean that I neither believe, nor disbelieve in the existence of a higher power. Technically, I would also be an ignostic, or theological noncognit. I don't believe talk about a god (or gods) is worth two shits until you convince me of what a god (or gods) actually consists of.

To quote Wikipedia: In a chapter of his 1936 book Language, Truth, and Logic, A. J. Ayer argued that one could not speak of God's existence, or even the probability of God's existence, since the concept itself was unverifiable and thus nonsensical. Ayer wrote that this ruled out atheism and agnosticism as well as theism because all three positions assume that the sentence "God exists" is meaningful. Given the meaninglessness of theistic claims, Ayer opined that there was "no logical ground for antagonism between religion and natural science", as theism alone does not entail any propositions which the scientific method can falsify.

"An atheist would say, 'I don't believe God exists'; an agnostic would say, 'I don't know whether or not God exists'; and an ignostic would say, 'I don't know what you mean when you say, "God exists" '." -Theodore Drange

So yes, technically I'm not just agnostic, I'm also ignostic. But it's hard enough to explain to people what agnostic means, and that's a word people have at least heard of.

If you asked, "Do I believe in God?," I would answer, "What is 'God'?"

If you don't care about the possible existence of a god, then you are an atheist. It's a very broad category.

Theist - A person who operates under the assumption that a specific God exists.

Atheist - Everybody else:
* People who admit that they don't believe in a specific God.
* People who are afraid to admit they don't believe in God, and pretend to believe.
* People who don't care whether there is a God or not.
* People who say "I don't know one way or the other", but in practical terms operate under the assumption that a judgmental God is highly unlikely to exist.
* People who say "How can you believe in something that cannot be defined?"
* People who have a concrete belief that there is no such thing as God. (Contrary to what crazy theists claim, this is a very small category.)

Gnostic - People who claim it is possible to have first hand knowledge of God, revealed by the divine being himself.

Agnostic - People who don't think revealed knowledge is reliable as evidence.

As you might notice by the above definitions, all agnostics are atheists, since all religions are based on revealed knowledge.

Deists are a very strange category. These are people who really like the idea of an all powerful conscious being, but don't like any of the definitions given by religions. Still, the entire concept is derived from religions, so I tend to lump deists into the theist category. They are, however, just a breath away from admitting they have no idea what their definition of God really is, and falling into the atheist category.

But as joedirt insists on reminding us, the common usage of the terms is that agnostics "don't know if there's a God" and atheists "know there is no God". The problem here is that using the terms in this way is divisive. The current political climate of the United States is such that everybody who does not practice a particular faith would be better served if we could all come together under the correct label so that we might be counted correctly in surveys. The larger our group appears, the easier it will be for more people to admit to themselves and others that they don't believe, and that they will start thinking for themselves rather than simply do as they are told.

Perhaps instead of arguing about agnostic vs. atheist, we can simply call ourselves Free Thinkers.

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
"... I guarantee you NONE will be able to explain what 'force' brought the earliest point of origin into being. ... Something had to make this little sandbox our universe is spinning in."

Science has made amazing strides in explaining the known universe in just the last few hundred years. There is no reason to believe that everything you are talking about couldn't be explained in the (hopefully) many millions of years to come.


"... I don't see how any legitimate self-respecting scientist could adamantly conclude that there is no God. Where is the concrete evidence for that conclusion? In this day and age, I see SCIENCE = RELIGION in its own right. I've encountered religious nuts in your corner way further out on a limb than I am with my dusty old Bible."

The adamant scientists of which you speak are probably speaking strongly against the Judeo-Christian God. There is no scientific evidence to support such a being, and many internal logical and philosophical contradictions which point to the non-existence of such a being. Any rational scientist would strongly conclude that there is no Judeo-Christian God, but not discount the possibility that some other type of "supreme" being may exist.

Admittedly, there are some freaks who are adamant that there is no possibility of any kind of higher level being, but those people are not practicing good science. You cannot disprove the existence of something simply by lack of evidence, however strongly that may be indicated.

If you see science = religion, then you don't have a good grasp on the definitions. With the proper understanding of science, you will be able to identify when people are not practicing good science by it's relative similarity to religion.


"... To everyone else. Can you honestly take in the astounding sights, sounds, and wonders of the world around us and not at least consider the possibility that this was not all the result of ridiculously improbable chaos? The order and certainty, which I thank Science for demonstrating, in the laws of physics and gravity...you can honestly say "gee, neat that it all just came together like that?" Our planet alone would have had to have been to result of 10,000,000 lottery odds occurrences all happening in concert. Nothing was behind that?
You science guys have far more faith than I!"

This is the classic argument from ignorance. Just because we don't yet know exactly how the universe came to be as it is, that doesn't mean Jesus Christ's daddy made it in six days. And the fact that you seem to think there was a large amount of "chance" that factored into our current existence shows how ignorant you are of current science. We are here because of selective forces, not random chance. There is a huge difference, and you look like a fool to anyone who understands that difference.

And again, even if you label that selective force as "God", you still can't tie that God into the Judeo-Christian mythology in any meaningful way.

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
The order and certainty, which I thank Science for demonstrating, in the laws of physics and gravity...you can honestly say "gee, neat that it all just came together like that?" Our planet alone would have had to have been to result of 10,000,000 lottery odds occurrences all happening in concert. Nothing was behind that?
You science guys have far more faith than I!


This is the laziest argument based out of complete lack of understanding of science. A Judeo-Christian God is the ONLY explanation for a carbon-based watery sacks of organic lifeforms that depend on oxygen and a specific temperature region.. It must have been God!

Did you ever think there is a 100% chance that we live on a planet that happens to support liquid water and an oxygen rich gaseous atmosphere? And that it isn't a random fluke our planet just happens to inhabit a narrow band of distance from a certain size star? And that the moon provides tidal forces on a mostly water planet? The reasonable explanation is that life developed to suit its environment and NOT that some mystical being created a world for us to inhabit.

You do realize there is life that developed at the bottom of the oceans in high pressure, high temperature thermal vents that uses methane for energy?! Or even silicon based thingys in some volcanic places.

Why would a horrible, inconsistent, editted, poorly translated, politicized book like the Bible be the best (or even good) explanation of anything?
You do realize half of your Bible is a bunch of oral traditions from hunter gather tribes that were adopted and put into writing to make a book that is more akin to a Boyscout Manual then anything else.

If there was a God that inspired a book, why is the Bible so flawed? Why are there so many contradictions and even what we now consider nonsense? Why do you pick and choose what parts of this holy scripture to follow? Why are you not out there stoning people to death as your God commands you to?

>> ^dgandhi:

But you have made a claim, that for some particular X, P(X) > P(!X). On the basis of that statement, and the assumption that you are rational, I draw the conclusion that you have some concept of what X is, or at least what its consequences are, otherwise you are making a non-sequitur claim.


I like this.. some people have chosen
P(Jesus) > P(no God)
P(Bible being true) > P(Quran, etc)
P(Noah, zombie Jesus, Moses) > P(unicorns farting rainbows that created the universe)

There is no reason to believe these things, people are going on feelings of what they want to believe and have faith in.

>> ^bmacs27: Let me sober up, and I'll get back to you. I know the gist of my argument will be something like, why should I assume a maximum entropy bound for conscious experience?

Because it requires both information recall and comparison, processes which require energy. Additionally it is only observable in situations where information processing is known to be taking place, and we have no reason to believe that internal narrative is anything but a special case of thinking.

Are individuals with downs' syndrome conscious? How about amoebas that can solve mazes?

Since I'm willing to consider that an engine with a power switch is probably at the bottom of the scale, the human clearly qualifies.

The "amoeba", which is actually a slime mold, does not, because it is responding only to the supply and transport of food, its "maze solving" is a probabilistic event, not an action.

Ants use a similar system to find paths to food, but they use a chemical marker system as a collective memory, here they leverage the same probabilistic event, shorter paths have higher throughput for energy used, but keep track of it in a manner distinct from the source of food itself. Their path finding system is "intelligent" in a way the ants individually are not, but I am not willing to arbitrarily imbue the chemtrail or the probabilistic event with any sort of special quality as a result.

Ok... I still see this line as completely arbitrary. How are our actions not "probabilistic events?" The amoeba is operating off the same basic principals. It's exerting energy to maintain certain ion concentrations. It's moving matter in order to seek out food, and even flexing its pseudopods along the shortest path between food sources in proportion to their delivery frequency. There is even a paper showing that it will respond to periodic stimuli (such as cold shocks at particular intervals) with predictive changes of behavior. How is that any different?

Further, comparison and recall? Why is memory necessary for experience? For the successful completion of certain cognitive tasks, sure, but I keep needing to remind you that isn't what we're talking about here. As for comparison, it's happening everywhere all the time. Electrons are "comparing" electric fields when they settle into a state, otherwise they couldn't obey their physical laws. I think the problem here is that your thinking is boxed into the human sensory modalities. As far as I'm concerned an electron is sensing an electrical field in the same way I am sensing visual band EM. It just can't image it as well, and thus can't respond to complex patterns at much distance. Again, not to diminish that extraordinary decrease in entropy, but I don't know why it should be so fundamental.

Also, to be clear, I've never claimed that what I'm looking for is something immaterial. I just believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter. Being matter, and conscious, I have no reason to think otherwise. Again, this consciousness is distinct from "thinking". It's the sheer fact that there is a phenomenal experience, not the particular nature of those phenomena. You've presented me no evidence that I should only expect phenomenal experience in a complex organism, as you have no test for phenomenal experience. This is why Chalmers, and others, have argued that consciousness is not necessarily best studied by traditional english empiricism. It's wholly inadequate to investigate the phenomenon. A better solution might draw on Eastern traditions of meditation, for instance. Many monks, including the Dali Llama have been interested in cooperating.

But you have made a claim, that for some particular X, P(X) > P(!X). On the basis of that statement, and the assumption that you are rational, I draw the conclusion that you have some concept of what X is, or at least what its consequences are, otherwise you are making a non-sequitur claim.

I do have some very general concept of what x is, but not such a certain idea that I would ever make a claim like P(X) > P(!X). That is, unless you toe a hard Bayesian line, and accept that my claim is completely a subjective degree of belief. Otherwise, my claim was something like "I believe that P(X) > P(!X)". Something you shouldn't really care to contest, but I'll defend my priors against your priors till you're blue in the face. I won't be bullied by the tyranny of some arbitrary model selection criteria.

>> ^bmacs27: How are our actions not "probabilistic events?" The amoeba is operating off the same basic principals.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

It's moving matter in order to seek out food, and even flexing its pseudopods along the shortest path between food sources in proportion to their delivery frequency.

You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Why is memory necessary for experience?

Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

Electrons are "comparing" electric fields when they settle into a state, otherwise they couldn't obey their physical laws.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

As far as I'm concerned an electron is sensing an electrical field in the same way I am sensing visual band EM.

I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

I just believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter.

You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

It's the sheer fact that there is a phenomenal experience, not the particular nature of those phenomena.

Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

You've presented me no evidence that I should only expect phenomenal experience in a complex organism, as you have no test for phenomenal experience.

And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

"I believe that P(X) > P(!X)". Something you shouldn't really care to contest,

You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

>> ^dgandhi:

Electrons are "comparing" electric fields when they settle into a state, otherwise they couldn't obey their physical laws.
Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.


Wow.. just wow. Let's just say you shouldn't have started with the electron as an example of deterministic or comparison to Newtonian physics....

Since you are so sure of your deterministic world.. then promise me you'll never ever use a quantum computer in your lifetime. Because it might involve elections sensing and comparing themselves to others.. And it also might involve random non-deterministic events.

>> ^joedirt: Wow.. just wow. Let's just say you shouldn't have started with the electron as an example of deterministic or comparison to Newtonian physics.

Electrons are not quarks, and yes Heisenberg does put serious limits on our ability to catalog their movement, but supercolliders and electronics work because electrons function deterministically. Electrons don't just "decide" what to do, and when to do it. I may not know exactly where they are, or how they are moving, but they produce effects consistent with doing so in an orderly fashion.

The fact that the smallest detectable structures in our universe are chaotic in no way implies that structures made of them are chaotic, there are a number of technological examples of determinism derived from chaos.

For example your computer works deterministically, I can put a scope on it and show you all the noise and interference running through it. I can, through subtle measurement, measure the chaos in the system, but the system is still deterministic, as evidenced by the fact the you are reading this right now.

Wow. I'm accused of making lazy arguments, when some of the best you guys can throw at me is that we have 100% odds of living on the planet we live on under the conditions that currently exist. That's not lazy?

"Well, we're here, so how we got here is irrelevant."

I take no offense to you cutting directly to an attack on my Bible. The premise of my argument did the same thing with science, so that's fair play.

I do take exception to how off-handedly dismiss the Bible, though. The Bible has been validated through historical accuracy of events depicted, is a unique document in all of human history, and is validated through the fulfillment of prophecy over time.

The lazy argument probably on the tip of your tongue is that the Bible has been altered a bazillion times to make it look like it got the story right. You've got quite a steep slope to climb to make that argument. The Bible includes 40 authors, 3 languages, 3 continents, and a authorship span of 1500 years. Studies have verified that the transcripts have held up without material alteration according to the earliest known records.

The type of forgery necessary to corrupt the Bible we know today is a feat I doubt would be possible even in this day and age. You'd have to destroy every prior copy and convincingly alter remnant copies, all the while leaving no historical footprint to tell the tale.

I posed a scientific question to see how entrenched you all were about the notion that God could not exist. I'm still not impressed with the answers.

If you want to get into a theological debate on whether my Bible is rubbish...I ask a similar question. Why would Jesus' disciples subject themselves to being cultural outcasts and ultimately suffer fates of excile and execution if they didn't truly believe in the message? Wouldn't at least one of them, seeing their reflection in the executioner's sword, yell out "Just kidding!" unless they passionately knew theirs was the most important message of all time?

>> ^Jesus_Freak:The Bible has been validated through historical accuracy of events depicted

Are you joking, or are you insane?

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
"Well, we're here, so how we got here is irrelevant."

That's what I mean about lazy.. you just don't want to get it. It's like looking at a river valley and saying.. "it's a good thing these hills come together to form a perfect vessel for this mountain snow melt." It is that simple. The river runs there because it is the lowest point. The valley is formed because the river runs there and makes the valley deeper.

That's exactly why humans use oxygen. It's why some people from northern climates are really pale and people from really sunny places have lots of pigment. God didn't make some people black and some people white. They all "started out in his image". Or is that microevolution.

The garden of eden and Noah's flood are simply oral traditions from nomadic tribes that got assimilated into modern culture. Your Bible has been arbitrarily modified for thousands of years. It's been a political device capriciously modified and edited as the ruling powers saw fit.

I do take exception to how off-handedly dismiss the Bible, though. The Bible has been validated through historical accuracy of events depicted, is a unique document in all of human history, and is validated through the fulfillment of prophecy over time.

Studies have verified that the transcripts have held up without material alteration according to the earliest known records.
The type of forgery necessary to corrupt the Bible we know today is a feat I doubt would be possible even in this day and age. You'd have to destroy every prior copy and convincingly alter remnant copies, all the while leaving no historical footprint to tell the tale.
I posed a scientific question to see how entrenched you all were about the notion that God could not exist. I'm still not impressed with the answers.


You obviously don't know much history about your religion. You can't honestly believe that what we call the Bible was just a filtered set of gospels. And then even certain aspects of those were shaped, such that original Christian sects allowed women to hold honored positions, and even preach. All references to such things were removed by non-holy means.

How can you say there is no alteration? Really old greek, latin.. always interpreted. Heck, wasn't there usually margin notes up until the King James which has it's own history. Aren't there like four or five "King James" Versions.. The wording is different in them all.

You really can't be serious. "Studies have shown"... ok.. "It's been proven that".

---------------
You are not impressed because it's your job to think for yourself. It's not anyone else job to make you believe something. Making someone believe is childish. You have to want to discover new information, think for yourself, be open to new ideas. You refuse to look and even try to see the other side.

If you had tangible, observable, logical evidence in your ideas, people would listen. But you don't have anything to bring to the table. You only have a belief and faith. There is not competing idea, just this never ending game religion plays where they find an area of human understanding that is lacking, and say God did it. Thousands of years ago it was rain, lightning and crop yields... Now it is before the big bang, and primordial ooze. Since it is hard to "prove" or demonstrate millions of years of time and natural forces, religion jumps in there and say, "you have to teach both sides".

They don't have another side or theory or evidence or progress. Intelligent Design should be bringing scientific discovery and break throughs and new inventions. Especially since they have God and prayer and holy water and host wafers. Shit, I forgot about all the prophecies. Certainly that would be a HUGE advantage!

Can you not even concede that Christianity declared the world flat and sun went around the Earth. These were equivalent to the modern Creationist meddling with a competing theory. But instead of proof or science... Religion just demands equal treatment, just because. Just because they have faith they must be right. How many years of scientific progress was stiffle or murdered over the Sun going around the Earth based on measurements and THEORIES. Do you really think the theory of planetary orbit is any different from the theory of natural selection?

Sorry it took so long to respond, I had a busy weekend.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

I'm going to need a definition of "decide" I suppose. It seems like you are dancing around these squishy intuitive concepts instead of having a specific physical distinction to point out. The amoeboid is composed of a lipid bilayer membrane riddled with intricate protein micro-machines that detect changes in the environment, and behaviorally compensate. To discount the intricacy of the mechanisms of genetic expression and chemical signaling that exist even in the simplest of eukaryotic organism is foolish IMHO. Many of the modern models of genetic expression, and compensation for environmental factors look strikingly similar to the connectionist network models of the brain. The computations are similar in the abstract.


You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Well, more likely I'm moldopomorphizing us. What goals do we have that are ultimately distinct from survival, reproduction, and the general continuity of our species? Even something as seemingly unrelated as making music, or art could be cast as some sort of mating ritual. When you somehow separate our behavior from the rest of life on Earth it's as though you want to draw a barrier between us and them. You want to somehow separate us from the natural order. I hate to break it to you, but it just isn't so. We are just demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of the second law of thermodynamics.


Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

I experience the moment. In fact, that's all I'm ever experiencing, although my sensation of it may run a little behind. I never experience my memory, I merely compare my experience to memory. Further, what I'm suggesting is not entirely distinct from any experience we claim to have. Some autistic individuals, for instance, report an extremely chaotic existence, in which causal models can't be formed as sensory modalities are not unified in the same way as ours. They are experienced as independent inputs, not reflective of a coherent physical world. Still, they experience it.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

Things can not be enforced without an enforcer. Further, as you've conceded the determinism of our brains, again, how are we not passively allowing the laws of nature to push us around? What exactly are we deciding?


I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

No, I believe that by some other physical mechanism, likely involving quarks and particle physics that I admittedly have a poor understanding of, the electron receives information from not immediately proximal locations, and physically displaces itself to a location with more desirable properties given its current energy state. I don't see how that's different than cuddling up to a warm fire.


You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

Something like that , although I still don't like the word decide. I don't necessarily think they do come to a consensus. It's just that, as with an attractor network, or similar guaranteed convergence dynamical systems, certain macroscopic states are just more likely than others, despite chaos at the subordinate level. The reason I'd rather drop the word decide is because I don't necessarily want to open the door to something like free will. To cast it in a "God" metaphor, I imagine more of an omniscient God, than an omnipotent God.


Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

I can't other than to refer you to what I presume you to have. I could suggest focussing on your breathing, or what have you. I can point you towards literature showing that people that claim to focus on their consciousness can perform physical feats not previous considered possible (for instance monks rewriting the books on the physical tolerance of the human body to cold). Otherwise, I can't. I will say this, however, I take it to be the atomic element of inductive reason. The natural "laws" you are taking as primary are secondary. There is a simple reason for this as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out. If suddenly we were to observe all bits of matter floating away from one another, and were to confirm we were not hallucinating, and perhaps have the experience corroborated by our colleagues, it would not be the experience which was wrong, it would be the laws of nature. Experience has primacy. Matter is merely the logical consequence of applying induction to our particular set of shared experiences.


And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

I told you, in the best english I can, what X is. It's the qualia of phenomenal experience. Now I can't provide you with direct evidence for it, but I can tell you that nearly everyone I talk to has some sense of what I mean.


You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

I take the Bayesian sense of the word. All probabilities are subjective degrees of belief. I adopt this degree of belief based on anecdotal experience and generalizations therein. None of this would be accepted as evidence by any reviewer, nor should it, and thus I wouldn't want to risk my credibility by asserting it as fact. I can believe some hypotheses to be more likely than others on the basis of no evidence, and in fact do all the time. That's how I, and all other scientists, decide what experiment to run next. I should not, however, expect you to believe me a priori, as you may operate on different axioms, and draw from different anecdotal experience. Thus, I would not feel compelled to assert my beliefs as fact, other than in so far as they are, in fact, my beliefs.

>> ^bmacs27: Things can not be enforced without an enforcer.

The universe does not really have rules, it has limits and structures, no enforcer is needed, because nobody can break rules which can not be broken.

I don't see, at this point, how what you posit is not simply a poetic view of physics. What is the difference between consciousness and existence? Is consciousness simply the attribute of being beholden to physics?

I don't see how that's different than cuddling up to a warm fire.

Heisenberg makes this entirely unrelateable to cuddling up to a fire, which is the main reason I consider this thesis incoherent.

I can't other than to refer you to what I presume you to have. I could suggest focussing on your breathing, or what have you.

I generate a coherent narrative, but you seem to be suggesting something else entirely. Something which has no context or meaning. Something which we share which is not a narrative, but is an experience in the absence of a narrative. And though it is common in my culture to claim otherwise, I don't see how this resembles anything I have.

Matter is merely the logical consequence of applying induction to our particular set of shared experiences.

We start in the middle, with experience. Then we build the tertiary structure, our theory. The theory points to the primary system, matter/energy/universe which gives rise to the systems which allow the theory to be created.

If we are under the spell of an evil genius, then you are right, matter follows from observation, but it is of no consequence, since observation is completely suspect, and in all likelihood meaningless. If the universe is instead how it appears, then our theory is almost certainly correct in pointing out that we, and our ability to create the theory, are consequences of the physical system the theory describes.

I told you, in the best english I can, what X is. It's the qualia of phenomenal experience. Now I can't provide you with direct evidence for it, but I can tell you that nearly everyone I talk to has some sense of what I mean.

I think the vagueness contributes to the ease with which you find agreement, but what you have described seems much more specific, and very different from the "phenomenal experience" most people claim. Just as an example: what is the "qualia of phenomenal experience" while you are dreamlessly sleeping? Many people would claim that they have none, but you suggest that small bits of matter are eternally having phenomenal experience. Are we also consistently conscious? If so why don't we remember sleep, but do remember our waking time? Is our awareness/thinking/memory completely distinct from this phenomenal experience?

>> ^Jesus_Freak:
Wow. I'm accused of making lazy arguments, when some of the best you guys can throw at me is that we have 100% odds of living on the planet we live on under the conditions that currently exist. That's not lazy?
"Well, we're here, so how we got here is irrelevant."

Let's be clear about this. No scientist has ever or would ever say that "how" we got here is irrelevant. Why do you think so many people are fighting to make sure natural selection and the theory of evolution are taught in schools?

No, what's irrelevant is the "odds" against life developing. As with an earlier example that you seem to have ignored (big surprise), imagine you roll a die a thousand times and write down the numbers you get in order. Now show that list to someone and say "What are the odds against rolling those numbers in that exact order?" The odds against it would be enormous! But that doesn't mean God made those numbers happen, it happened because the die was rolled and there was a record. It doesn't matter what the odds against doing it again are, because it already happened. It took an estimated 13.7 billion years for life to develop to this point. A whole lot of crazy shit can happen in that amount of time, with an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars and who knows how many planets and moons around each star?

So what are the odds against you having rolled that sequence of numbers on the die? Zero. It happened. There are no odds against it. The odds against it happening again may be huge, but it happened once and there's no wagering against that. So the odds against life developing on Earth? Zero. It happened. Pick something else to base your silly arguments on.


"I do take exception to how off-handedly dismiss the Bible, though. The Bible has been validated through historical accuracy of events depicted, is a unique document in all of human history, and is validated through the fulfillment of prophecy over time."

There are massive and glaring historical inaccuracies, or at the very least, completely uncorroborated by contemporary historians. There is no evidence of Herod's Massacre of the Innocents, no evidence that a "city" named Nazareth existed at that time, no evidence that there was a tradition of letting a prisoner go free (when the crowd supposedly chose Barabbas instead of Jesus), no record of a disruption in the temple during passover (when Jesus drove out the money changers), no record of a prophet who had thousands of people going to listen to him.

There were a number of good writers in those times, many of whom wrote on the events of the times. Nobody mentioned a person resembling Jesus at all until many decades after his supposed death.


"The lazy argument probably on the tip of your tongue is that the Bible has been altered a bazillion times to make it look like it got the story right. You've got quite a steep slope to climb to make that argument. The Bible includes 40 authors, 3 languages, 3 continents, and a authorship span of 1500 years. Studies have verified that the transcripts have held up without material alteration according to the earliest known records."

You are off your rocker. All you have to do is look at a few passages from a few different translations to know that is complete bunk. Consider for instance the most famous of the ten commandments: Thou shalt not kill - King James Version. That is also translated as "You shall not murder." (New International Version) Consider the difference between killing someone and murdering someone. Killing can be self defense, or what a soldier does in war. So making a new translation that uses the word "murder" instead will allow priests the justification to let people go become soldiers, or perhaps use the death penalty ("It's not murder, it's justice.") Huge difference in just that one translation, and you think that doesn't happen all over the bible? You know nothing. And religion depends on you remaining ignorant and pliant. Why do you think it took so long to translate the bible into English? Because before that happened, the priests had complete and utter control over the interpretation. Now they have to twist the words around and create convoluted justifications for weird stories there. It's not as easy, and fewer people are buying their bullshit every day.


"I'm still not impressed with the answers."

You won't be impressed with anything that anyone has to tell you about the truth behind religion until you stop holding on to the idea that blind faith is a good thing. Faith in something without any evidence is never considered a good thing by anybody, with the sole exception of religion.

If you want to be impressed, start looking for real evidence that what you believe about God is true. And when you find that there is none, anywhere, except for the dubious scribblings of some unknown authors many centuries ago, maybe then you'll be impressed. But I suspect your head is just too far under the sand for that to happen.


"If you want to get into a theological debate on whether my Bible is rubbish...I ask a similar question. Why would Jesus' disciples subject themselves to being cultural outcasts and ultimately suffer fates of excile and execution if they didn't truly believe in the message? Wouldn't at least one of them, seeing their reflection in the executioner's sword, yell out "Just kidding!" unless they passionately knew theirs was the most important message of all time?"

You don't know the bible at all do you? "And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly." Who knows how many others abandoned their belief after supposedly being in the presence of the Christ himself, and we are all asked to devote our lives to him without even having met the guy? Again I call bullshit. If God wants me to believe in him, he can come tell me why himself.

But the messages I'm getting lately are quite the opposite. Just a few years ago I discovered there is no evidence outside of the bible that the person we call Jesus even existed.

"The Bible depicts Herod, the Ruler of Jewish Palestine under Rome as sending out men to search and kill the infant Jesus, yet nothing in history supports such a story. Pontius Pilate supposedly performed as judge in the trial and execution of Jesus, yet no Roman record mentions such a trial. The gospels portray a multitude of believers throughout the land spreading tales of a teacher, prophet, and healer, yet nobody in Jesus' life time or several decades after, ever records such a human figure. The lack of a historical Jesus in the known historical record speaks for itself."

- Jim Walker, nobeliefs.com

At dg: First of all let me say this conversation has been fun. Few people obviously well versed in these issues are willing to engage in this dialogue. I haven't given you your due as someone willing to engage in respectful debate.


The universe does not really have rules, it has limits and structures, no enforcer is needed, because nobody can break rules which can not be broken.

I don't see, at this point, how what you posit is not simply a poetic view of physics. What is the difference between consciousness and existence? Is consciousness simply the attribute of being beholden to physics?

I'm not sure there is a difference between consciousness and existence. And you may be right, it might just be a poetic view of physics. My contention is this, physics, science, and philosophy all exist in order to explain in some precisely predictable manner the nature and causation of our common experience. This includes all aspects of that experience. Thus far it has done a remarkable job at explaining certain aspects of it, but it has come short of explaining experience itself. As I keep saying to you, there is nothing to suggest we should experience anything at all, just as you do not suspect your car engine experiences your depression of the pedals. To me, this begs for inquiry.


Heisenberg makes this entirely unrelateable to cuddling up to a fire, which is the main reason I consider this thesis incoherent.

I'm unclear on what you mean here.


I generate a coherent narrative, but you seem to be suggesting something else entirely. Something which has no context or meaning. Something which we share which is not a narrative, but is an experience in the absence of a narrative. And though it is common in my culture to claim otherwise, I don't see how this resembles anything I have.

What is it that "hears" the narrative? Do you understand the distinction? Why doesn't the narrative simply update synaptic weights, or activate ion channels, or whatever is physically happening, why doesn't that just happen without being experienced? To understand the distinction you'd probably have to refer to how you imagine internal states being recorded, presumably (under your presumptions) without experience. For instance, these words are internally represented by bits being set low and high in registers throughout my computer, but you don't seem to suggest that anything is "experiencing" those registers getting set. It just happens, the way physics always happens. Yet when you consider OUR experience, for some reason we are different. We "decide." We are "counter-entropic." You use these things to explain without evidence why I have experience, yet the computer does not. I, on the other, prefer to posit experience as the atomic element of existence.


We start in the middle, with experience. Then we build the tertiary structure, our theory. The theory points to the primary system, matter/energy/universe which gives rise to the systems which allow the theory to be created.

If we are under the spell of an evil genius, then you are right, matter follows from observation, but it is of no consequence, since observation is completely suspect, and in all likelihood meaningless. If the universe is instead how it appears, then our theory is almost certainly correct in pointing out that we, and our ability to create the theory, are consequences of the physical system the theory describes.

I don't understand why observation is "in all likelihood meaningless". Again, I'm not trying to separate us, or anything from physics. I'm simply trying to pull this final aspect of experience, experience itself, into the fold of physics. This, ultimately, is the goal of science. To describe existence as we know it. As of yet we have no physical description, or causation underlying experience, yet this is certainly part of existence as we know it.


I think the vagueness contributes to the ease with which you find agreement, but what you have described seems much more specific, and very different from the "phenomenal experience" most people claim. Just as an example: what is the "qualia of phenomenal experience" while you are dreamlessly sleeping? Many people would claim that they have none, but you suggest that small bits of matter are eternally having phenomenal experience. Are we also consistently conscious? If so why don't we remember sleep, but do remember our waking time? Is our awareness/thinking/memory completely distinct from this phenomenal experience?

Well, the question becomes "can you experience oblivion?" IMHO, yes. In fact, I believe this to be the state that many in your culture aim to attain. It requires practice, however, as quieting the unrelenting, driving signal of sensory input, and ending the maintenance of internal states is against the tendency of the system. When it is achieved, however, I think it helps one to understand the nature of experience itself, as divorced from the sensory input you're so conditioned to associate it with.

^MaxWilder

1) Who rolled the dice, where did the die come from? How did the die come to have impact? Reiterate the statistical argument to me however you want, you can't get around a supernatural origin an point zero. Just because "science may never be able to prove or disprove" that point, my belief that God fills in the blank is no less valid in my own beliefs.

2) The writers of the New Testament were Jews. If you read carefully the account of Jesus' life, its events are not exactly high on the priority list to jot down for those who did not believe. Those who rejected Christ at the time thought Him irrelevant at best, scandalous at worst. Do you seriously think there should be a police blotter in Jerusalem at the time recording the temporary disruption of money changers and vendors at the temple? Do you not see a motive for non-believing Jews to conveniently omit him? "Yeah, there was this man of God going around and healing folks, but then we killed him. Let's write down the first part, but not the second."

3) The "Thou Shalt Not Kill/Murder" argument against the Bible is an old standby. I posted on a different video the distinction made in Romans 13 that God empowers governments to, among other things, "bring punishment to the wrongdoer." The 10 commandments, and Jesus' subsequent teachings are clearly applicable on a personal/individual level. It would be a sin for me to go to war with the express purpose of working out my own desires of hatred or revenge. According to Jesus, even having the hatred in the first place is the same sin as murder.

4) You accuse me of knowing little about the Bible, when you use convenient shreds of it to build your own arguments. Peter's denial of Christ had a very definite place and purpose. Christ bore the suffering of the cross completely on His own, even suffering separation from God the Father as He bore the sins of the world. If you bother reading any further, Peter is reconciled to Christ and given a mission to establish the Church and watch after Jesus' sheep, the sting of the previous betrayal now fueling conviction he didn't have before. By all accounts, each of the 12 (save John) met a violent end. You have not refuted my argument.

My whole purpose in this thread is to better understand why it is so important for you science-minded atheists to deconstruct religion, Christianity in particular. Why are we such a nuisance to you? Does your keen intellect not allow you to ignore our "ignorance?" Are your feelings hurt when we believe in a heaven and a hell, separated by belief in Christ? Do the actions of a few of our outlying members truly outweigh the collective good of the movement? Are you focusing on what you perceive as hypocrisy?

I find it ironic that I am the one most often accused of intolerance.

1) Here's one of the big distinctions between science and religion. The start of the big bang is still a big question mark. Physics as we understand it breaks down the closer we get to defining the first microseconds of the universe. We just don't know how it worked. Yet. And that's ok! There are people working their asses off trying to define how the big bang happened, and people on your side of the argument seem to want them to drop their pencils and give up! Just because we don't have it figured out yet doesn't mean it's supernatural! It used to be common knowledge that the movements of the sun, moon, and stars were all caused by gods as they went about their daily business, but we know better now. We've figured out why all that stuff happens. It didn't need gods with golden sky chariots, it needed Newton's discoveries so that we could understand. The same thing applies to the beginning of our universe. You keep insisting that since we can't define how the big bang happened that it must be supernatural, and your brand of supernatural as well. Your belief that your god fills the blank is completely unjustified. Why is it so hard for you to just accept that it is currently unknown?

2) It is patently absurd to suspect a conspiracy to wipe out all information about Jesus to be suppressed during his lifetime. Anyone who believed he was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies would have become a follower, and anyone who didn't believe would have noticed him as an effective rabble-rouser. Jesus supposedly had thousands of people going to listen to him when he spoke, and greeted him at the gates of the city with palm fronds. He was a superstar of his time! And you have no problem thinking contemporary historians just overlooked him? Or worse, recognized him as the Christ, the son of the one true God, and instead of following him treated him like a threat to what they now know is their own false religion?

3) That was simply one glaring example of how translations differ and the effect that can have on interpretation.

4) I can't refute a nonsensical argument. Just because 12 people were stupid enough (supposedly, since we only have the bible as evidence) to believe strongly enough to die for something, doesn't make it true. Just look at the Heaven's Gate cult. 39 people dead for their crazy beliefs, that doesn't make it true.

5) It's very simple why people like me keep pushing our arguments. Theists keep trying to push theirs on us. The big one is Creationism in public schools. Others, like the anti-abortionists, contribute to the poisoning and dumbing-down of what was once a fairly honorable political party. But the worst part is the precedent that religion sets. It provides a warm blanket of lies, where all you have to do is believe what you are told, and you don't have to do any thinking for yourself. After all, there's not much difference between believing what your preacher tells you about the afterlife and what he tells you to believe about politics. Or about history. Or about foreigners. Their ignorance has an impact on my life, and it sickens me. Yes, I'm intolerant. Of ignorance. Specifically stubborn ignorance, like the kind that says it's ok to accept something without evidence as true, and to base your life on it. The kind that says it's ok to turn away from facts that disagree with what you already believe. The kind that says it's ok to waste this life in service to a lie, because the next life will be your reward. That shit is not ok, and I don't want to live in a world where people think it is. That's why I keep speaking up.

http://atheistexperience.blogspot.com/2009/09/leprechauns.html

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