Negative atheism? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, December 12, 2014, 19:43 (3423 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: We have agreed that the first cause may be energy, but that doesn't mean consciousness. It can be mindless energy endlessly transmuting itself into matter. If one can believe in consciousness always being there without a cause, one can believe in consciousness having evolved WITH a cause: the eternally changing state of matter. This is not something from nothing. The first scenario is certainly no more rational than the second.-Formless energy, a plasma of potential particles does not appear to be a source of organized matter following laws of development such as this universe demonstrates. We agree on energy as the probably first cause, but after that our divergence is enormous.
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> dhw: That doesn't make open-mindedness a negative attribute. I began as a believer, became an atheist, read Darwin (himself an agnostic), and decided that neither theism nor atheism could as yet offer convincing answers to the questions thrown up by the complexities of life. Our philosophical biographies provide no justification for our beliefs or non-beliefs!-But they do. We started at the same point but our personal philosophic differences separated our conclusions after due study.-> dhw: Our brains are not that different. I also come up with solutions to mysteries, and in this context I offer more than one - ah, the richly positive fecundity of agnosticism! I suspect there may be some people with medical training who have come up with a different solution from yours to this particular mystery.-Our brains are the same in one attribute: stubbornness. About 40%of doctors are believers.-> dhw: From conceding that we do not know the extent of the inventive mechanism's inventiveness (i.e. the autonomous “thinking” of the brain in the genome), you have now returned to your dogmatic insistence that cells were preprogrammed 3.7 billion years ago and have no form of autonomous intelligence.-I still mull. I think an IM may well exist, but its degrees of freedom are limited. it is the limits that I do not know. You want few limits. I want many. 
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> dhw: we agnostics are used to all the hot air from the pots and kettles, and we go on dispensing tolerance and lovingkindness to those who know as little as we do but know it so much more decisively.-Understood. Know-nothingism is well recognized.