Play Trap the Atheist (The atheist delusion)

by dhw, Friday, December 07, 2012, 19:50 (4150 days ago) @ hyjyljyj

This is another brilliant post with which I can only agree wholeheartedly. Your scientific background is something you share with David, and your arguments against chance (as opposed to arguments for a designer) ... like his own ... seem to me to be utterly convincing. In your response to David, on the subject of consciousness, again your argument chimes in with his: "I join those who cannot find a way to force themselves to believe in an inorganic universe sprouting consciousness. It just simply HAD to come from other consciousness; there's nothing else to make it out of." But if consciousness can only be made out of other consciousness, we are forced to ask what the "other consciousness" came from. That is why David goes back to Aristotle and Aquinas and the concept of a first cause, i.e. what you call "an uncaused, invisible, uncreated, infinite cause". (I would add "eternal", since a first cause could not have had a beginning.) And indeed that is not "an easy cop-out", because if you can believe in that, you may as well believe in a chance-caused human consciousness: indeed neither seems "even remotely reasonable". It is a pickle, but why must we decide now? To me, it's like the media filling their pages and screens with forecasts about tomorrow, as if no-one can wait till tomorrow. Some religions do of course demand an instant decision, but we do not need religion to teach us how to behave in this life (as a humanist, I reject many of its various teachings as thoroughly inhumane), and even though there's no denying that religion brings comfort to many and in some cases also encourages people to follow the same principles as humanists, that is no evidence of truth. So the only relevance a decision has to us non-believers (agnostics) - I would call atheists disbelievers - is to what may happen in an afterlife. 
 
Is there an afterlife? We've discussed the evidence in great detail on this forum (especially Near Death and Out of Body experiences), and I remain open-minded. I am, however, not desperate to find out! I shall know soon enough anyway if there is one, and of course if there isn't, my dreamless and eternal sleep is hardly going to bother me. No chance of knowing the absolute truth in this life, and just a possibility of finding out afterwards, so what's the pressure? The "third way" is to sit on the picket fence.-Why continue the quest, then? Well, we have had some amazingly fruitful discussions, and in my case, even though I remain as ignorant as before about all the fundamental questions, I have learned an enormous amount about our universe and our human world from folk like David, BBella, Matt, Tony and others, and that is an education and a pleasure in itself. I hope you will enjoy the same experience, both giving and receiving.