A Growing Problem for Materialists

by Sea Breeze 70 Replies latest social current

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  Mr.Finkelstein

  25 questions to ask theists or spiritualists ......

  1. The question “Why is there something rather than nothing” presupposes “nothing” as being the normal state of affairs. Why believe that? Why can’t we flip the question on its head? In other words, why can’t it be the case that the normal state of affairs is for things to actually exist and nothingness itself would be weird? (HT: Thy Kingdom Come (Undone))
  2. Given that the universe has a finite age, why did the universe begin with time rather than in time?
  3. Why is so much of our universe intelligible without any appeal to supernatural agency? Why does the history of science contains numerous examples of naturalistic explanations replacing supernatural ones and no examples of supernatural explanations replacing naturalistic ones?
  4. Why is the physical universe so unimaginably large?
  5. If you believe that visual beauty is evidence of God, why isn’t the universe saturated with auditory, tactile, or other non-visual types of sensory beauty?
  6. If you believe the universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life, why isn’t our universe teeming with life, including life much more impressive than human life?
  7. Why would God use biological evolution as a method for creation? Do you have any answer that is independent of the scientific evidence for evolution?
  8. Why would God desire to create embodied moral agents, as opposed to unembodied minds (such as souls, spirits, or ghosts)? Why is the human mind dependent on the physical brain?
  9. Did Australopithecus have a soul? What about homo habilis? Homo erectus? Neanderthals? Why or why not? (HT: Keith Parsons)
  10. How do souls interact with physical matter? Do you have any answer that is not tantamount to “I don’t know?” (HT: Keith Parsons)
  11. If you believe humans have free will, why would humans have free will if God exists? Why are we able to exercise free will in some situations but not others?
  12. Why are pain and pleasure so connected to the biological goals of survival and reproduction, but morally random? Is there some greater good that logically requires (or logically requires risking) that suffering be used to motivate animals to pursue the biological goal of self-preservation? Does some moral end make it desirable for suffering to continue even when it serves no biological purpose? For example, why do sentient beings, including animals which are not moral agents, experience pain or pleasure that we do not know to be biologically useful?
  13. Why do only a fraction of living things, including the majority of sentient beings, thrive? In other words, why do very few living things have an adequate supply of food and water, are able to reproduce, avoid predators, and remain healthy? Why would God create a world in which all sentient beings savagely compete with one another for survival? Why do an even smaller fraction of organisms thrive for most of their lives? Why do almost no organisms thrive for all of their lives?
  14. Why is there social evil, i.e., instances of pain or suffering that results from the game-theoretic interactions of many individuals?
  15. Why does God allow horrific suffering (and relatively little glorious pleasure)?
  16. Why does horrific suffering often destroy a person, at least psychologically, and prevent them from growing morally, spiritually, and intellectually?
  17. Why is there nonculpable (reasonable) nonbelief in God? Why are there former believers, i.e., people who, from the perspective of theism, were on the right path when they lost belief? Why are there so many people who gave their lives to God only to discover there is no God? Why are there lifelong seekers? Why are there converts to nontheistic religions and especially nonresistant believers who arrive as a result of honest inquiry at nontheistic experiences and beliefs? Why are there isolated nontheists, i.e., people who have never so much as had the idea of God?
  18. Why do some believers feel there is evidence for God’s existence on which they may rely, but in which God is not felt as directly present to her experience, and may indeed feel absent?
  19. Why are there such striking geographic differences in the incidence of theistic belief? Why does theistic belief vary dramatically with cultural and national boundaries? For example, why does a population of millions of non-theists persist in Thailand but not in Saudi Arabia? And why has the global incidence of theistic belief varied dramatically over time, i.e., during the existence of the human species?
  20. Why do only some people have religious experiences? In particular, why is it that most of the people who do have religious experiences almost always have a prior belief in God or extensive exposure to a theistic religion?
  21. For those people who do have religious experiences, why do they pursue a variety of radically different religious paths, none of which bears abundantly more moral fruit than all of the others?
  22. Why do so many people report not experiencing God’s comforting presence in the face of tragedies?
  23. Why does the the relatively new discipline of cognitive science of religion support the claim that we have a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), which causes human beings to naturally form beliefs about invisible agents? Considering HADD’s poor track record of producing true beliefs about invisible agents in general, why should we trust it when it produces a belief about one invisible agent, the God of theism?
  24. Why does God allow such confusion or disagreement among people, including theists, about what is morally good or bad and morally right or wrong?
  25. Why should we believe that, of the innumerable deities worshipped by human beings over the ages, yours is the one that really exists? Why believe in Yahweh rather than Zeus, Odin, Marduk, Ishtar, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Madame Pele, Ahura-Mazda, etc., etc., etc.? (HT: Keith Parsons)
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  stavro

  You can make a theist or spiritualist spin their heard around by asking them to define a god through information.

  
  

  Logos, (Greek: “word,” “reason,” or “plan”) plural logoi, in ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian theology, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning. Although the concept is also found in Indian, Egyptian, and Persian philosophical and theological systems, it became particularly significant in Christian writings and doctrines as a vehicle for conceiving the role of Jesus Christ as the principle of God active in the creation and the continuous structuring of the cosmos and in revealing the divine plan of salvation to human beings. It thus underlies the basic Christian doctrine of the preexistence of Jesus.

  https://www.britannica.com/topic/logos
  
  
• 

  Mr.Finkelstein

  Spiritualists fight for their ideological beliefs of a eternal god creator for sociological reasons such as their own self empowerment, redemption of their sins, their own eternal existence after they die etc. etc.
  

  Scientists and their varying studies have none these psychological connections, rather they strive for objective truth to understanding how this universe came to be by studying physical evidence .

  Unfortunately scientific discoveries do not connect or support all the appealing aspects of which spiritualism can offer in spite of getting closer to the truth of how, why and what.
  
• 

  stavro

  love is worth fighting for Finkelstein. Some would even say it is the best weapon to use against hate. Both are abstract concepts which inform real world behaviour.

  Science is very effective in explaining how things work. When it come to questions of existence, why anything such as information or laws exist in the first place? its explanatory tools break down.
• 

  TD

  Seabreeze,

  But with all due respect, there is no such thing as a primitive form of life. A single cell has thousand of functions, parts.....

  In the context of the questions you posed (i.e. "Where does information come from if not from a mind??" and "In whose mind did the information originate?") coupled with your observation about cats, my use of the word, primitive was meant strictly in the sense of sentience.

  I think this is a good example of how slippery and imperfect a communication medium language can be sometimes and why it's important to qualify terms like "primitive" and "information" so that other people know exactly what we're talking about.
  

  I'm still not sure if we're talking about information in the sense of data, which does not require an intelligent mind or in the sense of communication which does.
  
• 

  Sea Breeze

  I think I get what you are saying TD. Quantum stuff is pretty weird and hard to speak about.

  Once this is understood though, it will be the Rosetta Stone for the theory of everything, and not just patio beer talk. Noble Prize winner Richard Feynman called it the "central mystery" of quantum physics.

  What is new is how scientists are increasingly starting to view the collapsing waves and particles as information manifestations dependent upon context, making the universe triune in nature.

  Tim Malden's 2019 thoughts on Quantum Theory published by Princeton discusses "quantum information theory" in which physical changes in a system can occur based on "what someone believes about the system." On the first page of his book he asks, "What is matter?" Malden says, "The best theory of matter presently available is quantum theory.

  Yet, most quantum scientists feel that something big is missing in their understanding. Could it be because information itself isn't a material thing they they haven't been able to successfully test for what causes a wave to collapse into a particle , even after 100 years of trying ? Information existing as conceptual non-physical values would explain a lot.

  Renowned physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008), a strong advocate of information theory, coined the terms "black hole" and "wormhole", collaborated with Einstein, Bohr, & students Everett, Thorne, and Feynman. Wheeler described his career, and hence, his growing understanding of the universe, in three stages. First, "Everything is Particles." Second, "Everything is Fields." And finally, "Everything is Information."
  
  
  
• 

  waton

  1. Given that the universe has a finite age, why did the universe begin with time rather than in time? MFs

  who says so? The universe started at a point in time and has been expanding, moving into the future ever since. That point in time is surrounded by infinite time, the first dimension of the 4.

  we live in spacetime. before that was timespace

  The interesting thing about all information now is, that it always arrived from the past, but we send it into the future. Thus,

  we really do not know what is going on, because we see, hear everything as it was some time ago. Much information we receive about stars far away, we see it now, but they do not exist any more.

  the universe might even absorb energy, information from the realm that it expands into, timespace, that existed before our beginning and always will.
• 

  stavro

  I think I get what you are saying TD. Quantum stuff is pretty weird and hard to speak about.
  Once this is understood though, it will be the Rosetta Stone for the theory of everything, and not just patio beer talk. Noble Prize winner Richard Feynman called it the "central mystery" of quantum physics.

  Stephen Hawking described the problem as follows.

  “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?”
  
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  waton

  Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?” st:

  with the theory, of everything, that would be at the core of all natural laws, would have to come the power, energy the theatre to enact it.

  In some form, the energy that was used to make the material universe must have carried instruction how ro shape it with it., or at least the limitation

  You quoted Hawking. an earlier great authoritative thinker, A.E. at least in his allegaries talked as if " Der Alte" the "ancient one" was the source of the laws he tried to define. The laws, or preferably THE law, that govern the universe.

  May be he gave up on that, or challenged a believer, when he wrote in 1915: "Where is the old Jehovah?", reacting to the carnage in the trenches. but

  here we are being governed by these laws,
  
  
• 

  cofty

  I'm still not sure if we're talking about information in the sense of data, which does not require an intelligent mind or in the sense of communication which does. - TD

  Neither is Sea Breeze which is the problem.