https://able2know.org/topic/569320-1

"In dark times, many people seek refuge in religion. They hold fast to their faith.

"My older son, Rex, is one of them. He’s studying for his bar mitzvah, but he doesn’t believe in God. He told me that one day, when we were taking a walk.

“'Why not?” I asked.

“'God is supposed to care about us,” Rex said. “That doesn’t seem like something you’d let happen if you cared — and could stop it.”

"This is the “problem of evil.” It’s an old philosophical question...And if you think about God (who’s supposed to be all-powerful and endlessly empathetic), the existence of evil poses a serious puzzle: Why does God let us suffer?

***

"And some say that’s why God allows evil in the world. He doesn’t care about pleasure and pain. He cares about what pleasure and pain make possible — compassion, redemption and heroic acts, like Tony mending my back. To get those goods, though, God has to give us free will. And once we have it, some of us abuse it.

***

"Some believers feel the force of these arguments, but maintain their faith nonetheless. Marilyn McCord Adams, a philosopher and Episcopal priest, doubted that we could explain the existence of evil. But that didn’t bother her. A 2-year-old child, she explained, might not understand why his mother would permit him to have painful surgery. Nevertheless, he could be convinced of his mother’s love by her “intimate care and presence” through the painful experience.

"For those who feel the presence of God or have faith that they will feel it later, I think Ms. Adams’s attitude makes some sense. But if I’m honest, it sounds too optimistic to me.

***

"But when Rex was 4, he reframed my view of religion. One night, I was cooking dinner, and he asked, “Is God real?”

“'What do you think?” I asked.

“'I think that for real God is pretend and for pretend God is real,” Rex announced.

"I was stunned. That’s a big thought for a 4-year-old. It’s a big thought for a 40-year-old. I asked Rex to explain what he meant.

“'God isn’t real,” he said. “But when we pretend, he is.”

"Philosophers have a name for this sort of view. They call it “fictionalism.” Suppose I say, “Dumbledore teaches at Hogwarts.” If that was a claim about this world, it would be false. But they do exist in a different world — the fictional world that Harry Potter lives in. The sentence “Dumbledore teaches at Hogwarts” is true in that fiction.

"At the new synagogue, we sing a lot of the same songs and say a lot of the same prayers. But we say many more of them in English. And I find that almost intolerable. It turns out, I like my religion inscrutable.

"I just don’t believe the stories that we tell.

"Still, I pretend. And I don’t plan to stop. Because pretending makes the world a better place. I learned that from my kids too — Rex and his younger brother, Hank.

"Pretending blurs the boundaries between this world and the ones we imagine. It breathes life into stories, letting them shape the world we live in. Just think of the delight kids take in Santa Claus, even those who know, deep down, that he’s not real. Or the way they lose themselves in play. Pretending makes the world more magical and meaningful. And it’s not just for kids.

"When it feels like the world is falling apart, I seek refuge in religious rituals — but not because I believe my prayers will be answered. The prayers we say in synagogue remind me that evil has always been with us but that people persevere, survive and even thrive. I take my kids so that they feel connected to that tradition, so that they know the world has been falling apart from the start — and that there’s beauty in trying to put it back together.

"Soon, Rex will stand before our congregation and pray to a God he can’t quite believe in. It will be a magical morning, and for that moment, at least, we’ll transcend the troubles of the world."

"Scott Hershovitz (@shershovitz) is a professor of law and a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy With My Kids,” from which this essay is adapted."

Comment: dhw is wiser. Hershovitz should be agnostic if he recognized design

I personally would prefer to get the Ig Nobel prize.

Good ‘un! Delighted to hear from you again!

I personally would prefer to get the Ig Nobel prize.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atheism-is-inconsistent-with-the-scientific-...

Marcelo Gleiser, a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College and prolific science popularizer, has won this year’s Templeton Prize.

DAVID: For dhw to enjoy.

Many thanks. Much enjoyed and admired. And great credit should be given to the Templeton judges for awarding the prize to an agnostic.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atheism-is-inconsistent-with-the-scientific-...

"Marcelo Gleiser, a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College and prolific science popularizer, has won this year’s Templeton Prize.

***

'To me, science is one way of connecting with the mystery of existence. And if you think of it that way, the mystery of existence is something that we have wondered about ever since people began asking questions about who we are and where we come from. So while those questions are now part of scientific research, they are much, much older than science. I’m not talking about the science of materials, or high-temperature superconductivity, which is awesome and super important, but that’s not the kind of science I’m doing. I’m talking about science as part of a much grander and older sort of questioning about who we are in the big picture of the universe. To me, as a theoretical physicist and also someone who spends time out in the mountains, this sort of questioning offers a deeply spiritual connection with the world, through my mind and through my body. Einstein would have said the same thing, I think, with his cosmic religious feeling.

"I believe we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge, in the sense that if you look carefully at the way science works, you’ll see that yes, it is wonderful — magnificent! — but it has limits. And we have to understand and respect those limits. And by doing that, by understanding how science advances, science really becomes a deeply spiritual conversation with the mysterious, about all the things we don’t know. So that’s one answer to your question. And that has nothing to do with organized religion, obviously, but it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic.

"I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on.

"You know, I’m a “Rare Earth” kind of guy. I think our situation may be rather special, on a planetary or even galactic scale. So when people talk about Copernicus and Copernicanism—the ‘principle of mediocrity’ that states we should expect to be average and typical, I say, “You know what? It’s time to get beyond that.” When you look out there at the other planets (and the exoplanets that we can make some sense of), when you look at the history of life on Earth, you will realize this place called Earth is absolutely amazing. And maybe, yes, there are others out there, possibly—who knows, we certainly expect so—but right now what we know is that we have this world, and we are these amazing molecular machines capable of self-awareness, and all that makes us very special indeed. And we know for a fact that there will be no other humans in the universe; there may be some humanoids somewhere out there, but we are unique products of our single, small planet’s long history.

"The point is, to understand modern science within this framework is to put humanity back into kind of a moral center of the universe, in which we have the moral duty to preserve this planet and its life with everything that we’ve got, because we understand how rare this whole game is and that for all practical purposes we are alone.

***

"But to be honest with you, the formative experience was that I lost my mom. I was six years old, and that loss was absolutely devastating. It put me in contact with the notion of time from a very early age. And obviously religion was the thing that came immediately, because I’m Jewish, but I became very disillusioned with the Old Testament when I was a teenager, and then I found Einstein. That was when I realized, you can actually ask questions about the nature of time and space and nature itself using science. That just blew me away. And so I think it was a very early sense of loss that made me curious about existence. And if you are curious about existence, physics becomes a wonderful portal, because it brings you close to the nature of the fundamental questions: space, time, origins. And I’ve been happy ever since."

Comment: For dhw to enjoy

QUOTE: I suggest that the agentive cosmopsychist postulate a basic disposition of the Universe to represent the complete potential consequences of each of its possible actions. In a sense, this is a simple postulation, but it cannot be denied that the complexity involved in these mental representations detracts from the parsimony of the view. However, this commitment is arguably less profligate than the postulations of the theist or the multiverse theorist. The theist postulates a supernatural agent while the agentive cosmopsychist postulates a natural agent.

DAVID’s comment: Sounds like God to me. His only complaint about God is the problem of evil, which comes from religion and its assumption God is entirely benevolent. We don't know that about God. He could easily be conceived of as 'tough love'. Very long. Worth reading all.

I cheered on reading your comment. Absolutely right. I don't have time to read the whole thing, but judging by your edited version (for which many thanks), he has confused theism with religion. A universal consciousness is God, even if you call it agentive cosmopsychism, and the different postulations of different religions are irrelevant. The last sentence of the quote suggests that he is a pantheist.

https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life?u...

"The two standard explanations of the fine-tuning are theism and the multiverse hypothesis. Theists postulate an all-powerful and perfectly good supernatural creator of the Universe, and then explain the fine-tuning in terms of the good intentions of this creator. Life is something of great objective value; God in Her goodness wanted to bring about this great value, and hence created laws with constants compatible with its physical possibility. The multiverse hypothesis postulates an enormous, perhaps infinite, number of physical universes other than our own, in which many different values of the constants are realised. Given a sufficient number of universes realising a sufficient range of the constants, it is not so improbable that there will be at least one universe with fine-tuned laws.

"Both of these theories are able to explain the fine-tuning. The problem is that, on the face of it, they also make false predictions. For the theist, the false prediction arises from the problem of evil.

***

"Roger Penrose has calculated that in the kind of multiverse most favoured by contemporary physicists – based on inflationary cosmology and string theory – for every observer who observes a smooth, orderly universe as big as ours, there are 10 to the power of 10123 who observe a smooth, orderly universe that is just 10 times smaller...If Penrose is right, then the odds of an observer in the multiverse theory finding itself in a large, ordered universe are astronomically small. And hence the fact that we are ourselves such observers is powerful evidence against the multiverse theory.

***

"Eddington argued that the only thing we really know about the nature of matter is that some of it has consciousness; we know this because we are directly aware of the consciousness of our own brains:
We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our own consciousness; it is only our own ends of the fibres that we actually know; from those ends, we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint.

"We have no direct access to the nature of matter outside of brains. But the most reasonable speculation, according to Eddington, is that the nature of matter outside of brains is continuous with the nature of matter inside of brains.

***

"If we combine holism with panpsychism, we get cosmopsychism: the view that the Universe is conscious, and that the consciousness of humans and animals is derived not from the consciousness of fundamental particles, but from the consciousness of the Universe itself. This is the view I ultimately defend in Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

***

"Firstly, we need to suppose that the Universe acts through a basic capacity to recognise and respond to considerations of value. This is very different from how we normally think about things, but it is consistent with everything we observe. The Scottish philosopher David Hume long ago noted that all we can really observe is how things behave – the underlying forces that give rise to those behaviours are invisible to us. We standardly assume that the Universe is powered by a number of non-rational causal capacities, but it is also possible that it is powered by the capacity of the Universe to respond to considerations of value.

***

"This is the second modification: I suggest that the agentive cosmopsychist postulate a basic disposition of the Universe to represent the complete potential consequences of each of its possible actions. In a sense, this is a simple postulation, but it cannot be denied that the complexity involved in these mental representations detracts from the parsimony of the view. However, this commitment is arguably less profligate than the postulations of the theist or the multiverse theorist. The theist postulates a supernatural agent while the agentive cosmopsychist postulates a natural agent. The multiverse theorist postulates an enormous number of distinct, unobservable entities: the many universes. The agentive cosmopsychist merely adds to an entity that we already believe in: the physical Universe. And most importantly, agentive cosmopsychism avoids the false predictions of its two rivals."

Comment: Sounds like God to me. His only complaint about God is the problem of evil, which comes from religion and its assumption God is entirely benevolent. We don't know that about God. He could easily be conceived of as 'tough love'. Very long. Worth reading all.


> > > Rom: Regarding dark energy (and dark matter for that matter, also the flatness of the universe in general ... I am agnostic. But I must admit I have a certain predilection for a perfectly flat universe ... in that it conserves the first law of thermodynamics on a cosmic scale.
> > 
> > David: Fair enough. I agree. Everything points to flat.
> 
> Rom: And this is in accord with a zero energy universe.-But a sum of zero. Plus and minus balances out. But all of this is not nothing.


> > Rom: Regarding dark energy (and dark matter for that matter, also the flatness of the universe in general ... I am agnostic. But I must admit I have a certain predilection for a perfectly flat universe ... in that it conserves the first law of thermodynamics on a cosmic scale.
> 
> Fair enough. I agree. Everything points to flat.-And this is in accord with a zero energy universe.


> Rom: Regarding dark energy (and dark matter for that matter, also the flatness of the universe in general ... I am agnostic. But I must admit I have a certain predilection for a perfectly flat universe ... in that it conserves the first law of thermodynamics on a cosmic scale.-
Fair enough. I agree. Everything points to flat.

Rom: It is how we account for energy ... by convention gravitational energy is negative compared to matter.-I know that. What are you driving at? And what do you want to do with dark energy, which is proposed to exist, I assume opposite to gravity?


> > Rom: This brings us back to Krauss and how much energy the universe contains. Whether it is zero or not is interesting, but regardless there is much less than we might assume at first blush.
> And your proof of this assertion if you think there is one?-It is how we account for energy ... by convention gravitational energy is negative compared to matter.


> Rom: This brings us back to Krauss and how much energy the universe contains. Whether it is zero or not is interesting, but regardless there is much less than we might assume at first blush.-
And your proof of this assertion if you think there is one?


> > Rom:So the question becomes what is that something? 
> > 
> > Is it simply the universe and its various facets, seen and perhaps unseen?
> 
> Since the universe is energy and energy in the form of matter, the eternal something is energy, which somehow formed into the universe. Of course from my viewpoint, that energy is God.-This brings us back to Krauss and how much energy the universe contains. Whether it is zero or not is interesting, but regardless there is much less than we might assume at first blush.

dhw Sorry, but it's not. I accept that many of our problems are caused by the inadequacy of language, so we often need definitions, but these are a means to an end.
Sorry to hear that. I don't think the problem in this case is caused by the inadequacy of language, but more to an attachment to a concept.-My question remains ... is the commonly accepted definition of weak atheism, which also goes by [negative, soft, implicit] atheism ... a lack of belief in god or gods?-If not please provide a reference ... because a quick google search
https://www.google.ca/search?q=weak+atheism+definition&gws_rd=cr&ei=LaixVOGaFcX3oASAhoGADg
seems to suggest it is. I am not ignoring your definitions nor am I discussing them. The original title of this thread was Negative Atheism? -Having said all this, what is your definition of negative atheism?


> Rom:So the question becomes what is that something? 
> 
> Is it simply the universe and its various facets, seen and perhaps unseen?-Since the universe is energy and energy in the form of matter, the eternal something is energy, which somehow formed into the universe. Of course from my viewpoint, that energy is God.