Not all atheists argue for atheism on the basis of evidence or science as Dawkins does in part. A different approach to the problem that I appreciate is from Raymond Tallis. He has no time for the idea that empirical evidence can decide the issue. At the same time he doesn't believe in reductive materialism either.
Origin of Life
by cofty 405 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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A Ha
But what is most amazing is that your materialist reductionism apparently blinds you to the fact that the same phenomenon can have different levels of interpretation. A river can be cold, it can be blue, it can be rough, it can be clean, it can be amazing, it can be ugly, it can be ancient, it can be artificial. What makes no sense whatsoever is to pit different kinds of descriptions against one another as if they are in competition.
This isn't what cofty (or anyone else) is doing. The descriptions you use depend on context, and are not mutually exclusive, as you say. However, to say life arose by naturalistic means, and also to say it arose by supernatural means are mutually exclusive. This isn't a "different level of interpretation," (a different focus, or scale), like saying the river is cold and the river is blue. It's like saying the river is blue and the river is red.
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Finkelstein
How do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?
The same way they treat all the past information from the various sciences, avoiding intellectual honest and critical evaluation .
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slimboyfat
Only if you think God cannot use natural means. The two are not mutually exclusive.
The distinction between natural and supernatural is itself problematic. I can't think why descriptions of God giving life, and life arising from non-life, cannot be used to describe the same phenomenon, in as much as life arising from non-life may be the means by which God gave life.
I can say I stopped the water in the sink from running. I don't need to go into the mechanics of how I turned the nozzle and how that prevented the water from flowing. "I stopped the water" and a technical explanation of the same thing are not in competition with one another. They are different levels of explanation.
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A Ha
Only if you think God cannot use natural means. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Yes they are. In your scenario it's a supernatural explanation.
To say some supernatural agent is "using" a natural mechanism is uninteresting. In that case, we can always insert some undetectable supernatural thing behind everything we see. Einstein's GR explains the orbits of planets naturally. We can accept curved space-time, then insert Planet Fairies that push the planets in their orbits, and I guess the naturalist cannot "prove" there aren't Planet Fairies. But again, that's an uninteresting claim. It takes advantage of how malleable the concept of God is.
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slimboyfat
Can you explain what you believe is the difference between a God doing something by "natural" means as opposed to "supernatural" means. I am not convinced this is a meaningful distinction.
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Landy
Only if you think God cannot use natural means. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Proving that life can come into existence through natural means does not prove God doesn't exist. It simply proves that a god is not necessary.
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Ruby456
just read your Raymond Tallis link sbf and this caught my eye
But this sense of the limitation of our knowledge and understanding makes me more, not less, happy in my atheism: I am not obliged to imprison a thrilling intuition of transcendent possibility arising out of my sense of the unknown, in a ragbag of confused, contradictory and often (but not always) malign beliefs, culminating in logical impossibilities. This nothwithstanding, we should be grateful for the monuments of art, architecture, ritual and thought that we atheists owe to others’ belief in God.
there are basic similarities between the above view and the standpoints that stem from substantial realism. By means of a thought experiment, Kurt Richardson via Daniel Dennett makes a strong case for considering that we are no more no less than the movement of a bunch of superstrings oscillating and vibrating in a stationary position. On this understanding we enrich our lives by supplying ourselves with rich metaphors - In this view science also uses metaphors just more realistic and more pared down ones. In paring them down and in aiming to stabilize their objects of study from the noise around these objects they aim for a substantial realism the basis of which at the end of the day may simply be the oscillations and vibrations of superstrings. Note that this is a thought experiment and is itself based on an hypothesis.
But the similarity here with Tallis' view is that this kind of atheism welcomes our meaning making while acknowledging what the realist basis of such may be. The ability to transcend and transform, as one would do in a chess game, makes life exciting and purposeful.
In your OP cofty you are adamant that there is no elan vital, no ghost in the machine - I agree - but there is push and pull in the electron or from the electron. Even Dennett talks about a pushing force in the idea of superstrings above and he argues this as being literal rather than metaphorical. Nick Lane captures this sense of push and pull very well in his descriptions of how life arose on earth. Darwin describes a struggle for life in his work. Recently I was reading about supple adaptation in evolution. This describes not just the capacity for supple adaptation but also the drive for the creative production of novelty when new challenges arise (Bedau, 1998). All these descriptions set animate life apart from inanimate organic matter at each end of the continuum I mentioned earlier in this thread. However there is always movement and potential in inorganic matter even in the most stationary objects.
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A Ha
SBF - Can you explain what you believe is the difference between a God doing something by "natural" means as opposed to "supernatural" means. I am not convinced this is a meaningful distinction.
When we ask for explanations in this context, it seems we're asking for the ultimate explanation--at least as far back as we can go.
To return to the Planet Fairies example, a culture believes that PFs are responsible for the motion of planets, then along comes Newton and gravitation, and the PF explanation is modified to "gravity is generated by PFs to guide the planets." Then Einstein refines our ideas and curved space-time fits the evidence better, so the PF explanation becomes "PFs curve space-time to guide the planets along their orbits." If people keep insisting that some supernatural explanation is the cause of the natural explanation, then they're keeping to a supernatural explanation. If others say "space-time is curved, full stop," that's a natural explanation.
If God is said to interact with the natural world, then eventually, the God explanation has to have some sort of natural component. Positing that some part of the equation involves nature doesn't blur the distinction between natural and supernatural.
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Ruby456
cofty - you know what - I get the feeling that you got beat black and blue as a Christian in your online discussions after you left and now you are reproducing that model in your own online discussions. I think its a real shame that you didn't meet nice people lke slimbyfat or at least an equal supply of nice people.
I think there is a nice guy who collects ancient coins in his spare time trying to come out - btw I am making these assumptions based on my recent discussions with you