Questioning the question of God's existence

by DT 30 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  DT

  I am an atheist, but not one who blatantly asserts that God doesn't exist. Rather, I have considered the evidence and seen that there is not enough to convince me of a God. Most atheists think this same way.

  So I'd suggest you modify your first statement in your initial post here where it said atheists have a faith, just like theists do.

  Good point. I should have expressed myself more clearly. I only meant to suggest that some atheists have faith in the nonexistence of God. I have known some, but they're probably in the minority. I consider myself an agnostic because I can't prove that God doesn't exist. I realise that some people admit this, but consider themselves to be atheists. I'm an atheist when it comes to the God of the bible and similar gods, but feel I must remain agnostic about the bigger question. I tried to edit my post, but it was too late.

  Hey, this is my 100th post. Is everyone proud of me?
• 

  Qcmbr

  Maybe we can find a new angle by trying to define consciousness - since that is the tool through which we seem to experience and resolve life.
  
  I know that 'I' only exists during waking hours (what happens to 'me' during sleep is a very sobering contemplation) and that during sleep / illness / accident I am unconscious and therefore unable to interact with anything and therefore unable to be defined by my interactions and therefore - for a brief moment - cease to exist as an observer / interactor with this system. Now I also have the conscious feeling of continuity that suggests that 'I' am not a new 'me' every time I wake up (though some arguments of the fragmented self as a pastiche of experiences suggests this very idea) - I have a set of general behaviours, thoughts and experiences that I tap into to remind me of who I am - that makes me able to justly enjoy / suffer today the consequences of a thousand yesterdays.
  
  So somehow 'I' exist and I am not 'you' nor am 'I' two 'me' (at the same time) and yet who I am is a little different throughout time (the boy scared of monsters in the closet becomes the man scared of bank managers and mother in laws), at one moment caring and forgiving while another angry and lost. Even this cumulative experience based description of 'I' is fragile since so much of action and thought has been found to be made in the sub-consciousness before it even occurs to the conscious 'I' (brain scan of conscious finger tapping experiments) which then makes the concept of the choice making, brain driving 'me' a somewhat scary fallacy. Reminds me of the worlds shortest horror story.
  
  "The last person on Earth was alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…"-Fredrick Brown
  
  ..And yet I cannot deny that "Cogito ergo sum" or as I prefer it "Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum" ( I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.) Is my conscious self merely the final stage of processing actions, the gatekeeper that just flicks traffic lights on actions and thoughts queued up for appraisal by a monster called 'ID'? Is experiencing consciousness merely a nice delusional freebee thrown in to stop 'me' getting in the way of too many important decisions in a highly evolved gene machine? Well , maybe but then far too much common sense, common experience shouts no - the 'I' that is me and that 'everyone' experiences seems far too influential and far too darn inspirable to be a simple gatekeeper. How is it that someone's entire direction in life can be altered by that teacher at school or by a cheap book from Amazon or from a deathbed promise? The ability to change independent of external environmental pressures seems to define something specific about consciousness that is more than fancy genetics - it may well be an utter fallacy but self seems to be the irreduciably complex part of the human - in other words evolution and the ascent up Mount Improbable can give us Seagulls but I can't find any process that gives us Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. This forum exists as an impossibility for a truly mechanistic system experiencing entropy (no amount of energy input over eternity could ever create the thoughts, emotions and ideas generated on this board - this is better than a perpetual energy machine - this is the creation of information from almost nothing, the sum of this forum's parts far exceed its inputs and that is puzzling in an entropic system.) ..of course this mash of ill worded thoughts may well be so much chaotic noise to most!
  
  What am I grasping to say? That there is something special about you and me, not in an egotistical way (though if we are needed to collapse quantum dualities then..) but in a magnificent , artistic , blindingly pointless way that suggests that if one side of the universe coin is uncaused, blind chance and ordered chaos we are the other side of that coin, we are caused (take your pick of causers - God through laws of physics expressed in this locale of space), specific odds (anthropic principle)and chaotic order (free will, choice making biped driving 'selfs' that have children.)
  
  Much of science and thought has been about the struggle to place 'man' in some cosmic relation to everything else and that struggle has driven man from chosen created children of God in the centre of the universe around which all revolved to specks of mobile dna stardust in remarkably boring - certainly not central - one af trillions of locations where pretty much everything seems to be wanting to shift away from us rather than around us (with the exception of the Andromeda galaxy that will one day crash into us but that's another story). I contend something far better. If life exists in only one universe in a multi-verse, if life exists on only one planet in that universe and if only one species of life got conscious then hey baby - we are gods, we are the centre of the universe and its all our plaything. Now we are conscious there is nothing that can be concieved that cannot be done (with the exception of silly word paradoxes). With computational power we can create new worlds where magic happens and illness is eradicated (we may have to inhabit our Worlds of Warcraft and Second Lives ourselves but then our children will take over and so on forever and ever - this universe will fill with consciousness.) The computer is a wonderful example of an information processing form into which consciousness can inject itself and create experiences. This universe is a massive computational system in which we - consciousness inject ourselves and our offspring - we are the children of 'god', we are aquiring the knowledge and ability to become what we have consciously or subconsciously queued the thought about..
  
  God has always existed, from the very moment the first dna replication occured 'he's' been bursting to get out and get on with creating, experiencing and procreating. If we (mankind) are the furthest along the quest to express God then great - if not - then we aren't alone in this universe He is out there.
• 

  VoidEater

  Thank you DT, and QC in particular.

  "Everyone is special, everyone is ordinary."

  I think there is value in defining "consciousness". Consciousness to me is not just our thoughts and other mental activity. Consciousness is related to our awareness of existing, related to a felt sense, an experience of existing in the present eternal "now". Mental activity takes place in the past or in the future, but thoughts (as I conceive of them) do not happen in the real world nor are they connected to the present instant.

  I conclude I existed while I slept - I have memories of dreams. When meditating, where have I gone? Perhaps my "ordinary conscious mind" has switched off for a while, but a part of me has continued to observe the experience.

  Is a horse conscious? An amoeba? One of the cells in our body? Does each cell in my body have "consciousness", each cell its own "soul"?

  I have posed the question without an answer in the past: what roles is "God" supposed to fulfill? Is he a creator? A teacher? A ruler? What if "God" is really no more (and no less) than the "ground of consciousness" of us all? "That which perceives existence"?

  What if our individual consciousnesses all spring from a single source? This is what I experience when I meditate. Perhaps it's a nothing more than a wish fulfillment. If true, we are all highly related - we would share the same "soul".
• 

  VoidEater

  Welcome back to Nvr! Some folks around here had a funeral and everything...
• 

  Fadeout

  The primary reason the question is asked is basically, 'Hey, how can I cheat death?' Right?
  
  I mean, that's the reason for most religion throughout history... dying sucks, it's much better to believe that after death you actually just go to another realm and live on.
  
  A secondary reason is, of course, curiosity as to the WHY of the universe. Everything is governed by observable rules that apparently are never broken. Logic can explain everything around us... except why the hell it should even be here in the first place.
  
  There is no question that the creation of the universe required an awesome amount of power, and is a feat far beyond the capabilities of any life form we can hope to comprehend at this point. But is there an intelligence behind the creation of the universe? Certain facts seem to argue in the affirmative, such as the nature of matter itself and the precision of the rules that govern it.
  
  The facts also seem to indicate, however, that no powerful intelligence has intervened, at least on Earth, since its initial creation, ancient legends notwithstanding. This is the dilemma for any religion that believes in a "God" who cares about events on Earth.
  
  So "thinking people" (as Russell would say), if assuming that an intelligence is responsible for creation, are left with two primary options (with infinite others of subjective degrees of value), namely:
  A) "God", the powerful and intelligent "First Cause," created the universe and put laws in place such that it would be self-sustaining, and indeed, self-evolving, for a very long time.
  
  B) God created the universe and intended to continue interacting with it but tragically stepped in a bear trap and died of starvation 7 billion years ago. His remains can be seen to this day in the Pleiades.
• 

  blueviceroy

  I am not a local event dreaming of a universe , but am a universe experiencing a dream of locality.

  All that is , is within each of us.

  The question of a God is a rather moot one . WE are all that is provable and even our conception of that is incomplete and erroneous due to our lack of complete reception of all that is transmitted as information.

  We can't perceive ultra violet , only it's effects are measurable (IE: sunburn) We can't receive radio waves with our ears but they transmit information none the less.

  Our consciousness is the end result of spirit/energy reacting on a physical state, what does "God " have to do with that?

  We are an example of the greater in a lesser state, We are the infinite within a finite framework operating as an individual in an effort to experience this reality.

  What does God have to do with that?

  We are all part of "God" no separation is apparent to me
• 

  Must obey!

  If you allow for the possibility of God's existence but feel belief in God is not warranted because you don't consider there is enough evidence, then strictly speaking you are an agnostic, not a 'weak atheist'. An atheist is, by definition, some who feels the evidence clearly shows there is no God.
• 

  5go

  you don't consider there is enough evidence, then strictly speaking you are an agnostic,

  Sorry but being agnostic means you are a like a deist. You believe in god but do not think he is knowable. A true deist doesn't think god cares about human he just started things going.

  A weak athiest is not sure there is (are) no god(s) and can be convinced by evidence should some come forth to prove a theology.

  A strong atheist believes their is no god(s); and that all gods, and theology are made up by man hence wrong period.
• 

  Gringa

  The first post states that it is an important question - whether there is a God or not. I question that statement. I don't think it is important AT ALL....

  What makes the difference? Man has spent way too much time worrying about the future and the existance of God and not living today and using God as an excuse.

  Just listen to a little Pink Floyd and forget it all -

  Whether there is a God or not, does not affect me in any way..... why does it affect you? (or is that "effect"? I get those 2 mixed up - sorry)
• 

  Must obey!

  5go it doesn't necessarily mean you are a deist at all. It can mean you believe that knowledge of whether God exists or not is not ascertainble, not necessarily that you already believe in a God but that knowledge of him is unknowable. There is a diff. Actually there are different meanings for agnosticism. Here's some:

• A word first used by Professor Huxley, to indicate one who believes nothing which cannot be demonstrated by the senses.
  www.theosociety.org/pasadena/key/key-glos.htm

• An Agnostic [1] [noun] [OW] embraces a worldview in which the existence of deity is unknown or unknowable. Derives from the Greek agnostos, a = without, gnostos = known or knowledge. ...
  members.aol.com/porchnus/dict01.htm

• One who holds the theory that God is unknown or unknowable
  www.innvista.com/culture/religion/diction.htm

• Someone who claims that they do not know or are unable to know whether God exists.
  www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/guide/glossary.shtml

• someone who is doubtful or noncommittal about something
• of or pertaining to an agnostic or agnosticism
• uncertain of all claims to knowledge
• a person who claims that they cannot have true knowledge about the existence of God (but does not deny that God might exist)
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

• Agnosticism (from the Greek a, meaning "without", and Gnosticism or gnosis, meaning knowledge) means unknowable, and is the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims—particularly theological claims regarding metaphysics, afterlife or the existence of God, god(s), or deities ...
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic