If there is going to be stuff that exists, isn't it simpler if everything exists?

Well, everything does exist. Everything that exists, exists that is.

Everything else that doesn't exist is merely an idea, so I don't think it would be easier if every idea was a reality since there are conflicting ideas and even impossible ideas.

rgb wrote: "If one defines God to be that which is self-sufficient existence, that which is for no reason but that it is, one is no better or worse off than if you call the Universe that which is self-sufficent existence, that which is for no reason but that it is...."

Except that people don't worship the Universe. ;)

Accepting on principle that if anything is possible, then god is possible, still isn't enough of a reason for me to believe in god. Through research and testing, should proof of god be revealed, that's different, but until then I don't care. The very idea of any god or god-like being is an ancient vestige of our development as a species. It may have served a purpose at one point in our development, but I suggest that the idea of god has outlived its usefulness (accepting that it ever was truly useful).

If anything, I think that hanging on to the idea of god, just because it is what we have been taught, can actually be a hindrance to scientific achievement, because god may always be a factor that taints otherwise reasonable observations.

Of course, I'd have a hard time making this case to RGB since he is waaaay smarter than I am, yet still holds on to the possibility of god.

Just to be clear, my thoughts are framed around the Western idea of God. But God is Universe is God still isn't really helpful. I just don't see any use for the term, nor the idea of, God.

This is all, by the way, in The Book of Lilith; it is a significant portion of what God as Innana communicates to Lilith in the first chapters of the story and consistently reveals as the rest unfolds.

Good! Because I just got your book and started reading it. I really like the set-up in the preface. Makes me wonder why we have not yet seen a modern-day Joseph Smith declare that he found some digital copies of some gold plates...

Except that people don't worship the Universe. ;)

They oughta!

Speaking of the universe ---- I was listening to a Center for Inquiry podcast yesterday and I heard something cool.

According to the guy that said it, it isn't a new idea, but I had never heard this before and thought it sounded cool.

He was quoting someone else and he said, "We are the universe becoming aware of its own existence."

That seemed cool to me.

I have heard that before and it may be an "old quote".

Jake, I don't know that I'm any smarter than anybody. I just make my living, in part, from thinking about stuff like this.

Note well that God as Everything is not a dualistic hairy thunderer. In particular I see no way it could care one way or the other about being worshipped. Do you care if the 1844234442th cell from the left in your big toe "worships" you?

This is where Hinduism splits (and for that matter, so does meditative atheism, that is to say, Buddhism). There is Hinduism "for the masses" -- social religion -- where worship and prayers asking for intervention and alteration of luck (as it were) still occur, Buddhism that "worships" the Buddha, either as a quasi-Hindu avatar of Vishnu or in a way very similar to the way Jesus is worshipped, as a presumptive perfect/enlightened human, or both. Asking the Universe for help and good fortune, in the guise of one or another of the devas or via "magic".

Then there is enlightment, high Vedic Hinduism as writted down in the Upanishads, which writes that Brahman is not that which sees but that by which we see, that Brahman is not the being that is worshipped by men. You are God. You can be a self-aware God, and behave as you yourself conceive that you as God should behave, or you can be an unaware God, God who has forgotten who and what he is, God stilled trapped in the web of Maya, illusion, that is what he (also) Is. Where I use "he" but mean anything that is, especially anything that is self-aware. What you cannot do is stop being God (although in Buddhism, perhaps you can stop being God in pieces).

Worship? What is that, anyway? An utterly dualistic concept, or an expression of narcissism and solipsism. We worship Other, not Self, but there is no such thing.

Similarly, disbelief in God carries no punishment, belief no reward. At worst one or the other is a mistake. It may alter your degree of satisfaction in life (either way), and of course if one has a philosophical bent one is likely to want to choose either one or the other and have reasons for that choice.

The one place where I can see a point where belief in God might matter is that if God exists and if the Universe is sufficiently complex and ordered that it forms a kind of trancendent intelligence, then it is at least plausible that our personal awarenesses are simultaneously part of the global awareness of God as all things. In this case being self aware of the connection at the very least without question alters the way you interpret everything (and thereby your actions) as would any belief true or false.

According to Hinduism and Buddhism (and Quakerism and Unitarianism and a few other theistic heresies) there are two direct benefits from maintaining a direct and perpetual awareness of this connection. One is a kind of spiritual contentment and peace; the other is a self-actualized sense of compassion. Both of these things make one suffer less and enjoy more, to obtain greater satisfaction from life. Not "God given" satisfaction, not good luck or victory over your enemies or wealth or lots of sex and many children, just an ongoing sense of wonder at the very cool Universe that you are (a part of) and the miracle of your own ability to perceive it and experience it from a time-bound point of view.

I personally wouldn't argue that this state of being "centered" is exclusively tied to belief or a "reward" of those that choose to believe. I would argue that bitterness or anger or excessive passion utterly rejecting God is moderately likely to make one less likely to achieve it, just as being overly zealous and passionate about insisting that God exists and is your own best friend probably makes one less likely to achieve it. If one takes Buddhism at face value, Buddha achieved it as an active anti-theist. If one takes the Upanishads at face value, so did a lot of other people both before and since achieve it as active theists, although those individuals did have to transcend the silly mysticism and magic they were brought up with and move past the socializing part of the theistic message to the underlying metaphysic itself.

The interesting thing is that nearly all worldview belief systems, theistic, atheistic, or any combination, tend to have a small cadre of individuals that are identified as having achieved this particular kind of Enlightenment, and it is usually portrayed as being of the highest value.

The idea of the Universe as God is not necessary for you to become and Enlightened soul and achieve the sort of inner peace that best arms you for existence in an amazing, yet dangerous world, filled with pleasures as well as suffering, where you are at once free and utterly bound by the laws of nature, where you act and are acted on in beautifully patterned ways. However, neither does it hurt, and there is some evidence that it might actually help. After all, what is sympathy and compassion but our minds identifying ourselves with others who are not-self. We feel their pain and share their joy, if we permit ourselves to do so. The vision of a all such souls being a part of a Universal God may make it just a bit simpler to transcend our evolutionary drive to succeed at all costs, where our greatest pleasures is to crush your enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women. Not essential, but perhaps useful. Almost certainly certainly comforting, if nothing else.

rgb

P.S. Shaitte. You might laugh, but I've had at least four people who've read the book so far (out of at most a few hundred total readers) write me to ask me where the scrolls are, and if they can have a copy.

It is scary, how easy it would be to become a Joseph Smith. If one talks a good, persuasive game, is loaded with charisma, appeals to the right hormonal subsystems, and know a little practical stage magic, it would be (and historically, obviously is) simplicity itself to start with nothing and end with a band of "followers" who hang on our every word. One can accomplish this without trying in good faith (drinking your own kool-ade) or by trying, especially if one is completely unscrupulous and use shills in the crowd and actual technology to rig your "miracles".

Both have occurred countless times in human history. Some, like Saint Francis (Assisi flavor) appear to have done so in utterly good faith, to have been extraordinarily good people who completely believed what they figured out and lived their lives accordingly. They convince us by their very sincerity and passion, even as our reason cries nay. Others, like Pat Robertson or Tammy Faye, are high-grade confidence artists that systematically rape their victims out of money and achieve a sort of "worship" of their own, which is also what they crave.

It is hard to know which sort Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith might have been. In the latter case "finding" utterly implausible gold plates bespeaks con artist. In the former two the many "miracles" could equally well have been mythologized insertions into an otherwise far more unremarkable story of a good man with at least a few good ideas, or they could have been the result of careful stagecraft by a small team of con artists. Or, of course, they could have done exactly what it is claimed that they did -- this simply seems to be the least plausible of the alternatives because miracles like that don't seem to happen every day in anything like an experimentally verifiable way.

And I hope you enjoy the book! If nothing else, a few parts of it might make you laugh.

rgb wrote: "...just an ongoing sense of wonder at the very cool Universe that you are (a part of) and the miracle of your own ability to perceive it and experience it from a time-bound point of view."


I hear where you're coming from re: Brahman. And I know of the distinction - at least with Buddhism - between Buddhism for the Enlightened, and Buddhism for the superstitious rural folk. That hits you in the face every day in Thailand (if you're looking for it, that is).

Science has opened my eyes more to the wonderment of the incredible Universe than any religious or spiritual idea has, though. Every day I learn something new and awesome.

But you've made a reasonable case for 'god' still serving a useful purpose, if for nothing else it does, as you say, "make it just a bit simpler to transcend our evolutionary drive to succeed at all costs, where our greatest pleasures is to crush your enemies, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women.

I just wanted to clarify a couple of things from earlier...

rgb wrote “I do hope that Gregory doesn't go around asserting that we create reality quantum mechanically by observing things.”

He does not. As you say ‘the territory is not the map’, he is talking about the map. However, the map is all we have and can ever have, we build models of reality in our heads and this is all we see, in that sense it IS reality for us and it is very largely based on language.

rgb also said “Pure discontinuity. Physicists hate that. ”

Agreed, but I should point out I didn’t suggest that. I didn’t mean time started in the big bang, I meant time was ‘created’ in the big bang. This implies no start point and hence no discontinuity (as described in my previous post).

Also again I am not saying this is what I believe, just that it is a possibility.

Shaitte asked “"why is there something instead of Nothing?"

Why indeed! However, given the big bang (which we don’t know the origin of) then the rest follows. Many things could have existed but only that which does exist does exist! Highly unlikely but something has to exist. Any given bridge hand is highly unlikely but it happens. (Agreeing here with Nathan and RC).

Rgb redefines god as nature (or the universe). Why, for what point? The word god brings so much baggage with it that this re-definition is counterproductive. Why not just say the universe is amazing and awe inspiring and leave it at that?

Nathan quoted "We are the universe becoming aware of its own existence."

Lovely. I too have come across that before. In fact I actually use it in my book “Stardust: our Cosmic Origins”.

I always found it a nice thought that we are "made of stardust"...all the elements in us ...manufactured by stars.....etc....

Rgb redefines god as nature (or the universe). Why, for what point? The word god brings so much baggage with it that this re-definition is counterproductive. Why not just say the universe is amazing and awe inspiring and leave it at that?


Exactly. Someone on this board (I forget who) said something along these lines a long time ago that I really liked: There's nothing that can be said about God that can't also be said about the universe, so God is superfluous.

There's nothing that can be said about God that can't also be said about the universe, so God is superfluous.

That is cool. I wish I said that. However, I likely said instead, "Silly Christians, magic tricks are for kids." Of course, in a much more caustic way.

Why indeed! However, given the big bang (which we don’t know the origin of) then the rest follows. Many things could have existed but only that which does exist does exist! Highly unlikely but something has to exist. Any given bridge hand is highly unlikely but it happens. (Agreeing here with Nathan and RC).

"Given":"Follows" is another way of saying -- nothing. It is like saying "given that something exists, we should find it unsurprising that something exists and therefore we should find it unsurprising that this particular something exists." And of course the statement that "something has to exist" as if it were a conclusion of an argument or an assertion either one is incorrect -- it is merely a tautology, a restatement of your observation (with which I enthusiastically agree!) that something exists.

I, on the other hand, find it mildly (but pleasantly) surprising that something exists because it would have required so much less energy and trouble for nothing to exist, or for something to exist that is much simpler than what we observe. Where I mean energy literally -- that is a precise statement, not a use of common English. By trouble I mean "informational complexity". Simple seems more likely than complex, right? Occam's Razor, sort of.

There is a level of nothingness that is even more nothing than mere "empty space-time" -- a lack of even an empty space-time, not even a point-like Universe, but no Universe at all. The utter absence of existence. Not even the state with zero energy, no information -- no state at all, no fabric of being that can support a mere lack of energy, no "theory" of information. The void.

Such a non-state cannot persist, of course -- there is nowhere for it to be, and notime for it to (not) be in. It is difficult to even speak of the void in a language or in mathematics, as the most accurate description is the utter absence of anything to describe or symbols to describe it with. Yet it seems like the easiest, if manifestly incorrect, anti-answer to all questions, and find it difficult not to experience a certain degree of joy that it is not.

Your bridge metaphor is also very amusing (I used to love bridge but lack time and partners, alas). Any bridge hand is infinitely unlikely. The existence of a deck of cards -- try predicting that from the laws of physics, or looking for one to have emerged from the rocks on the surface of Ganymede! The existence of a set of utterly artificial rules for a game that is completely irrelevant to volutionary esurvival and that exists only in the improbable minds of improbable beings in an improbable society that could easily have developed in an entirely different way (or not at all) if a dragonfly had beaten its wings slightly differently back in the pre-cambrian (or whenever it was that dragonflies first emerged) -- that's what we are talking about, right?

Sure, sure, given all of that working out juuuust right, given a group of ludicrously unlikely people sitting down and playing a pointless game with cards that any sane person would have bet were nearly infinitely unlikely to ever exist given the laws of nature and any partial knowledge of initial conditions at the big bang whose origins we are unsure of but which appears to have happened anyway, at that point being dealt a cold slam is "merely improbable", but some hand has to happen on any particular deal and sure, sometimes it will turn out to be a run of eight spades with a few nice honors on the side and your partner's hand matches up perfectly.

Let me state the problem slightly differently. You hold an infinitely sharp razor. Before you is a piece of string exactly one unit long. Without looking, you slice down and cut the string (which is Acme string, infinitely thin and unstretchable, the kind of string used in physics problems:-). What is the probability that you cut the string into two rational pieces (pieces that have ratios that can be expressed as integers)?

Yes, the answer is "zero". The rationals are a set of measure zero on the real number line. Add up the length of all the rationals in any real number line of nonzero length, including one infinitely long, and you get a line of zero length.

Sure, sure, the line has to be cut somewhere, and whatever cut we get is the cut we get, almost certainly an irrational number (although another very, very interesting question is associated with how one might measure the two pieces to tell but measured or not some number, one that is infinitely unlikely but that turned up anyway).

But the really interesting thing isn't the probability of turning up a ratio of 0.93311172394892927398... it is that such an absurd and abstract question should be discussed between a number of minds that are themselves even more unlikely (once one opens the problem up by selecting a measure that permits a discussion of probability to occur at all).

I find it most curious that a mind capable of being "surprised" by something as simple as an unplanned birthday party or an unpleasant notice from the IRS could ever look out over the Universe and not be abso-lutely frickin' amazed at every single thing experienced every single moment. Sort of like Tony in The Tenth Kingdom after he is cursed with bad luck for breaking the mirror: "What are the odds of that happening..." time and time again.

Probability of rolling a six, given a fair roll of an existing unbiased die: 1 in 6, presuming that "fair" means the usual state of ignorance of microstate in the initial cast of the die and the surface you cast on.

Probablity that a die should exist to be rolled on any surface at all by beings that "bet" on the outcome, given the same presumptive state of ignorance of microstate in the initial "fair" cast of the Universe? What do you reckon that is?

Ultimately, what we're talking about is whether or not the bet was rigged. Not "created" -- what evidence we have is against creation of any sort. A rigged game is one where the appearance of chance is an illusion. The game might be played out just as if it were a fair game, with winners and losers, it might even be a reasonably likely outcome that they play to, but in a rigged game the deck is stacked cold and every card plays out accordingly.

The metaphor demonstrates the importance of ignorance -- entropy -- in assessments of probability. A fairly shuffled deck has its cards in some definite order. The particular order is by definition maximally unlikely -- all permutations or card order are equally, maximally unlikely in a fair shuffle -- but the cards are physically sitting there, and they have the order that they have. It isn't "likely" or "unlikely", it just is.

We exist in a state that is nearly entirely ignorance (maximum entropy), compared to the information content of the Universe. The Universe itself, however, is like the deck of cards; it has no intrinsic entropy at all. One part can be ignorant of another part but the whole is what it is.

Finally to Dan: I'm already argued the following. The Universe is all that is. I think we agree on that, and besides, it is "true by definition". One attribute associated with God by definition is that of omniscience, but what that means is that the information content of the Universe must be "inside" (represented within) God. Both by definition must contain the other (with the additional problem of the representation of the information if one postulates a Universe partitioned into God and not-God as Christians contradictorily do). Equating the two "perfectly" solves an important problem of consistency.

I actually agree about the baggage, but it's just the baggage of imperfect language and a lot of entropy. It pleases me to talk to the Universe in my head, even if what listens and replies is ultimately me.

rgb wrote: "There is a level of nothingness that is even more nothing than mere "empty space-time"..."

Where is this theorized? (I ask inquisitively.)

Speaking of Occam's Razor...

Many years ago, when I was in a transitional phase, a thought first occurred to me that there really should be no reason for something before nothing. The whole notion of something having to exist before nothing seemed obvious enough, but obvious in the same way as "God made it so" was obvious. My first big step in giving up God was also giving up on something before nothing, and accepting that nothing never was; there has always been something.

I tried explaining this thought futilely to some other thoughtful friends, and either wasn't articulating the idea very well, or was perceived as talking out of my ass. I sort of was, because I hadn't really anything to base it on. I hadn't read much in the way of philosophy in the academic sense. Well, actually, it would be fair to say that I had a lot of philosophical discussions with others, and maybe picked some things up along the way. I remember at the time being more interested in cosmology, as well as Chaos Theory. But the only philosophical books I had read about this time (not including the bible) were a couple by Richard Bach (JLS, and One).

So I've been at peace with this idea for about the last 20 years. It's the one that's always made the most sense to me, in an Occam's Razor sort of way.

There was always something. Everything ever needed to comprise all that has ever existed and will ever exist, has always existed. And the Big Bang - and all that followed - was just another expression of existence.

Ultimately though, this idea doesn't seem testable. No more so than God.

In Scott Adams' book God's Debris, the idea is floated that the Big Bang was God killing himself. It was the only thing he could find to do that was challenging to him, to see if he could destroy himself.

There was always something. Everything ever needed to comprise all that has ever existed and will ever exist, has always existed. And the Big Bang - and all that followed - was just another expression of existence.

We are in complete agreement. Nothing -- and I was describing the concept, which clearly you'd thought about as well, not quoting a theory -- is the logical contradiction of anything, except that it is a contradiction so complete that given nothing there is also no logic. Unless one subscribes to the idea that mathematical theorems and axioms float around in some sort of space of potential ideas in a network of unsubstantial potential truths based upon all possible formulated axioms in the absence of being. I personally have a hard time getting my head around that one; it's like saying "numbers are something".

However, all that we are both really observing is that something is a consistent choice out of the two possibilities. The existence of anything negates nothing, and since anything includes all time one can literally state that, given the observation of something, nothing has never existed (even if time is bounded this is still true, although that is an uncomfortable thing for time-bound beings to visualize. It is true even if the actual time boundary is five minutes ago and five minutes into your future and the actual space boundary is just out of your personal sight -- the entire tiny Universe simply happens to be organized in such a way that you think that the visible space-time continuum has been around for thirteen billion years.

Unlikely? Actually, it is more likely, if one were permitted to play the "lets compute the probability of the current state of being" game with a one-shot Universe. There is far less information required to produce a tiny pocket Universe that merely appears to be huge according to your erroneous memories than there is required to produce the real thing. To reject it you will have to appeal to exactly the same argument that you and RC seem to find unappealing -- you will have to prove that it is somehow unlikely or implausible, where in order to back up any such assertion of plausibility you will have to make assertions about the nature of Being that are indefensible logically and empirically; they are your articles of personal faith, as it were, what you believe for no reason so that you can reason. Your axioms.

So not-nothing is an ongoing empirical truth. It is literally impossible for a self-aware mind to assert nothing as anything but a bit of sophistry in a smartass bullshit semantic game. The negation of nothing as a personal experiential truth is one of the reasons why people assert the existence of an immortal soul. To me personally "death" or "unconsciousness" makes the Universe go away into "nothing" (where I've experienced the latter as a "hole in experiential time".

Time and space cease. Duration and location -- which I "know" only from and as a cusp that appears to be riding along on the leading edge of an advancing indicator of experience even when I also know that there is a point of view that I cannot directly experience from which the past and future are the same, where every moment I have experienced or will experience are static, where the Universe itself is a very large DVD -- an enormous pile of static information (know subject to some very broad axioms -- "the laws of physics as best we know them" plus assumptions that the Universe we appear to see is as we appear to see it and not just information.

I'm still not quite sure of what any of this has to do with giving up God. Consider the following:

a) Nothing and Something are two completely disjoint conditions we can define, although it is troublesome psychologically for a something-being to try to actually imagine nothing. At least for me. It's like trying not to think of the word "rhinoceros".

b) We are experiencing, therefore Something.

c) Given Something, we define Everything (the Universe). As Nathan and I have both observed, precisely everything has existed/exists/will exist.

d) We don't know what Everything is. In fact, "we" seem confined to a narrow window around a particular coordinate in space-time that is sweeping in one particular direction, with one part of our "knowing" being an ongoing sensory stream of information we associate with "Outside Everything" merging with an ongoing stream of information we associate with our "Self" -- our memories, thoughts, and the cusp of awareness that is both playing and enjoying the movie.

e) Entropy is abundant. Our experiencing quickly fades and most of the information flowing in instant to instant is simply lost. The entropy associated with the future is nearly infinite -- we have even less idea of what is about to be experienced than we do of what we just experienced; indeed, we differentiate "past", "now" and "future" on the basis of the intensity and quality of the asymmetric entropy.

f) As Nathan has also observed, the space of what is possible is enormous. Our imagination has no limit, and it itself is incredibly limited and slow compared to the permutation group of all possible non-self-contradictory states of being or even "interesting subgroups" such as ones that have the same general laws of nature as the one we seem to find ourselves in. Our "knowledge" of everything is derived from the tiny, entropy laden window and stored in truly pitiful little brains that do their apparently evolved best to abstract the most important patterns from their personal experiential stream.

g) There exists an arguably best methodology for using inference to transform this experiential stream (internal and external) into "knowledge", where knowledge is a particular pattern of mutually interconnected semantic assertions that seem to optimally minimize the entropy associated with our personal threads of being. Our "knowledge" permits compression of past experience for and provides a partial and approximate extrapolation of future experience. I'm pretty sure, for example, that in a few seconds (whatever that might mean, as it is a measure that constantly changes with my personal cusp) I will be typing (wait, now I AM typing) these very words, or words very similar to the ones that I was thinking of and waiting for my fingers to get around to typing back when I thought of and typed them just above.

Very odd indeed. But there you have it.

h) This best methodology is more than sufficient to reject hairy thunderer versions of God. Most of the ones proposed in theistic religions are openly contradicted by our experience or are logically self-contradictory collections of attributes. It is utterly inadequate to address the question of pantheistic or panentheistic God. The reason the question is "interesting" is the importance of step b) above in our own systematic exploration, together with our own psychological difficulty with imagining nothing.

i) It is interesting as a metaphysical question, not a physical one. To analyze it, one requires a metaphysical methology. However, our current state of knowledge has barely produced a coherent statement of our actual physical methodology alluded to in g), and that methodology cannot address the question at all as RC has so convincingly shown -- given our empirically singular subjective windows onto Something, our range of "vision" cannot be extrapolated to provide any sort of plausibility statement for metaphysical assertions, at least while we lack a "believable" metaphysical theory.

In the meantime, God can be neither accepted nor rejected in the same way one can accept the probable truth of a statement like: If I drop this penny, it will fall. We can agree that there is an enormous about of information, organized in a very intelligent way. And that's it.

...Any bridge hand is infinitely unlikely. The existence of a deck of cards -- try predicting that from the laws of physics, or looking for one to have emerged from the rocks on the surface of Ganymede! The existence of a set of utterly artificial rules for a game that is completely irrelevant to volutionary esurvival and that exists only in the improbable minds of improbable beings in an improbable society that could easily have developed in an entirely different way (or not at all) if a dragonfly had beaten its wings slightly differently back in the pre-cambrian (or whenever it was that dragonflies first emerged) -- that's what we are talking about, right?

I'm fond of saying (whenever some amazingly unlikely thing comes up), "Given a large enough statistical universe, anything that can happen will happen."

So, while a deck of cards existing at any particular point in space/time may be mind-numbingly unlikely, the Universe is also mind-numbingly huge. It may not be large enough to guarantee a deck of cards, but is more than large enough to make it and all the other attributes of the situation much more likely to exist inside the totality of space/time somewhere.

Unlikely? Actually, it is more likely, if one were permitted to play the "lets compute the probability of the current state of being" game with a one-shot Universe. There is far less information required to produce a tiny pocket Universe that merely appears to be huge according to your erroneous memories than there is required to produce the real thing.

Perhaps, but that requires a universe with both an immediate reality and an illusion of a more distant reality that is consistent with that immediate reality from the perspective of one (and only one?) of the universe's inhabitants. Essentially, a universe "designed" to simulate a larger universe. Isn't it much more likely that what seems to exist actually does exist rather than that it is part of some elaborate accidental cosmic hoax?

'm still not quite sure of what any of this has to do with giving up God.

By stating that God needs to be "given up," you imply that the default position is to believe in God (in some form), and one should only refrain from believing in God with sufficient evidential justification. I take the opposite view: the default should be to not believe in God, or any other purely hypothetical nonsense, until justification is produced.

rgb wrote: "In the meantime, God can be neither accepted nor rejected in the same way one can accept the probable truth of a statement like: If I drop this penny, it will fall. We can agree that there is an enormous about of information, organized in a very intelligent way. And that's it...."

Very well constructed argument, and I can agree with your conclusion. I suppose the way I am thinking about it these days, god is like a tachyon. Useful in certain equations, not useful in others. And not particularly provable or disprovable at this point.

Dan wrote: "I take the opposite view: the default should be to not believe in God, or any other purely hypothetical nonsense, until justification is produced...."

That's close to what I've been thinking, but failing to articulate. Now I wonder if it is possible to escape that default state of believing in god having been brought up that way.

RC, what do you think?

Now I wonder if it is possible to escape that default state of believing in god having been brought up that way.

I think many of the formerly religious atheists (like myself) on this board would attest that it is. For me, the most influential idea pushing me out of Catholicism and into atheism was that I had no reason to believe in God. My bumper sticker answer to questions of why I don't believe in God has always been "Why would I?" So I'd like to think that my default is to not believe absent proof, as opposed to not believing only after justifying abandoning belief.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.

Interesting thread. I took all the religion stuff really seriously as a kid, but gradually the more you read the more the contradictions become apparent. I like to say, "If you treated your children the way God treats his children, you'd be in jail for child abuse."

Anyway, I thought some of you might enjoy this little true anecdote. One of my kids who was listening from an upstairs window started laughing so hard she had to shut the window.

I was standing in my front yard minding my own business when who should pull up but a car load of Jehovah's Witnesses (or Seventh Day Adventists, I forget). Two men and two women piled out and I thought I might have a little fun so I decided to be friendly. They started telling me all about heaven and how heaven would be recreated on earth and parents would be united with their children, etc. So I asked them, "that's interesting, because we have 6 adopted children (true). Will they be reunited with their biological parents, some of whom abused the kids, or reunited with me and my wife?" Well that set them to thinking a little bit and I said, "You make this up as you go along, right?" Well they started getting a little uncomfortable, and then I said to one of the women,"doesn't it bother you that the Bible and the Church are so paternalistic, that you are expected to serve men?" And they came back with some bullshit about God being male and head of the house, etc. etc. So by this time I figured enough was enough and it was time to move on. I asked, "what actually makes the difference between male and female except differences in genitalia and what does God need a penis for unless he's out boinking the angels?" Well, that frosted things over and they left shortly thereafter.

I doubt if I converted anyone though.

Jake asked:


RC, what do you think?


To be honest, as I mentioned earlier, until someone identifies something that is testable, or a paradox, I am off the subject of comparing the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns.

Nice one Eric, I had to shut the window too...