Musings about different types of atheist!

by Seraphim23 304 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  scotoma

  Snare and a Racket:

  There is a broad area that you missed in your education.

  Look at it this way. Tie a simple slip knot in a rope. Now tell me what that knot is. Is it the rope? It isnt the rope. You can slide the knot to the end of the rope until it disappears. The rope is still there.

  The knot was information. It added no weight to the rope because when you slide the knot to the end of the rope the rope still weighs the same. Information is weightless but nevertheless is functional and makes a difference.

  Life is emergent. Is that really a new Idea for you? It's the centerpiece of evolution.
• 

  Fernando

  Personally I sometimes quite enjoy musings, but what to do about that pesky rule 13 below that expressly bans them?

  There is also the real danger of open-minded and friendly exchanges resulting from the heresy of musing.
• 

  prologos

  latin thunder, rather than thinking TIME, a precious commodity for atheists and believers alike,

  think MOVEMENT through time.

  as mentioned, your rate of going through time depends on your speed through space. go fast and your time travel slows. Come near some serious gravity and you will go slower in time too. go as fast as light and you stop going through time, come near, into a black hole's gravity space warp, and you stop going through time, so dont worry about it.

  energy, matter contained in the newly fashioned space started to travel through time at the beginning of going through time or big bang. hard to stop now.

  Musing what the different types of atheists make of that?
• 

  tootired2care

  @Seraphim

  Regarding the your point about the futilty of everything in light of universe that will eventually go cold, I still think we lack a great deal of data on that, and at this point drawing conclusions from that is probably premature. As others have already mentioned we can use the logic and the facts of what is happening in our observable realm now. The facts of the reality that we have observed for mellenia (endless suffering etc.) make it pretty plain that this idea of a personal and moral god of the bible is just not true. For the sake of argument though; even if some powerful supernatural force did start all of this, that all powerful force doesn't resemble the god of the bible for many reasons. I'm not going to delve deep into this, as it has already been dicussed on many other threads.

  What that means though, is that whatever good morals you may have gleaned from the bible are derived from men who came to a consensus on what was good, and credited it to their superstitious notions of an almighty being in their bronze aged ignorance. I would submit that the morals you speak of, and say that atheists don't have, is simply not true because these ideas of good and bad are ultimately derived from the consensus of men anyways. Many of the things that the bible considers to be good and moral are no longer good or accepted practices (e.g slavery), showing that the bibles timeless principals to large extent are myth.

  Mankinds morals are borne out through common sense, experience, and consensus.
• 

  Captain Obvious

  One day I'll come up with an idea for a thread that has an OP with a pile of flawed arguments and assumptions. All I have to do is completely ignore the fact that my OP has been picked apart and tell the posters that they are ignoring my points.

  6 pages in 20 hours... Nice work
• 

  Mr Fool

  http://atheistempire.com/reference/stats/ some info
• 

  Seraphim23

  tootired2care its probably my fault for not making my points clearly enough. I’m not saying that atheists don’t have morals, in fact in the past I have said they probably do better at general morality than those who believe in God. I was talking about a particular type of atheist who basically thinks this universe is all there is without any metaphysical framework.

  Such a framework I was trying to point out is logically necessary for morality to have objective and real meaning as opposed to a completely relative one which in the long run will mean nothing and thus also wouldn’t mean much now as a result. Some atheists do see the sense in a metaphysical framework for the universe to be within because of the implications of thermal dynamics for one. They normally don’t apply this logic to consciousness however, although a few do. The problem is God seems to loom ever larger to more one gets into metaphysics, which is probably why there is so much resistance to the idea that more than the universe exists. More intelligent atheists don’t see God as a requirement to a metaphysical system, or a metaphysical system as evidence of God, which is fine by me because that wasn’t the point of this thread anyway. It would have been enough for me to get the logic over that shows that an infinite metaphysical system is required for existence.

  As for the God of the bible, I don’t believe it exists if one takes the bible literally. I do believe in God however but that is not the point of this thread.
• 

  cofty

  You still have all your work still to do to show that an infinite system of any kind is required for existance.
• 

  Seraphim23

  The energy for the universe came from somewhere that wasn’t the universe, considering the implications of Einstein. Entropy wouldn’t be a fact of the universe if it was a completely open system, so it must be at least partly closed, shown to be the case by the expansion of the universe of Edwin Hubble. Closed from what is the question? Plus the whole logical argument that something must always have been for something to be here now plays its part. Also the other logical argument that if the universe ends, which all closed systems must do, for everything that has a beginning has and end, and there is nothing else other than the universe, the two nothingness’s from the before and after the universe, if that was the case, have to be fundamentally different from one another by virtue of the universe having been in existence in between. The fact that the universe existed, must still exist in the nothing that comes after the universe dies. So one nothing is different from the nothing before the universe was born in this respect except that two nothings cannot be logically different from one another. The only viable alternative is that there is an eternal/infinite metaphysical system, that if taken as a whole is infinite but also separates itself into semi finite systems like this universe. Logic makes this inescapable. The final problem is the difference between infinity and finity. This requires some third element in order to explain it but there is clear need for it unless my premises are wrong. Logic and science provide evidence for this although it is not proof as you rightly say that only works with mathematics. Your work can now begin Cofty!
• 

  cantleave

  The energy for the universe came from somewhere

  According to quantum theory, it is possible for an electron and a positron (a matter antimatter pair) to materialize from the vacuum, then disappear. These vacuum fluctuations only last for only about 10 -21 seconds but they show that matter can arise from a vacuum. Once there is mass according E=MC2 there is energy.