now the majority of people nowadays do no go by the hope of old times.
now the reason for this is important and goes beyond mere words.
our culture sees ethics especially national or civil politics as the rules and standards by which we guide ourselves.
Yes looter l have great difficulty trying to understand how ex believers can so quickly turn their backs on god and outright deny gods existence.
Think about how this would sound coming from a JW. "I have great difficulty trying to understand how ex believers can so quickly turn their backs on God's One True Organization and outright deny The Truth.
being back in college after leaving the borg, one of the required classes for a degree at my college is ethics.
after learning a few things, i am curious where morality and ethics is heading for the future of humanity.
i wish i could find the source again, but several weeks ago i recalled reading a transcript of a very old document that talked about when christianity was being spread in europe, it brought civility and community.
Those who don't believe in any God/accountability, what are you teaching your kids? Especially before they can understand what is right and wrong?
Let's take stealing for example. How would you teach a 3 or 4 year old not to steal, and in a way in which if they were not being watched and could get away with it, that their conscience would kick in?
Before a child is old enough to understand ethics, you use the same method as when you were religious--you just exchange one phrase for another. As a religious parent you might have said, "Don't take that, God doesn't like stealing." As a non-religious parent you might say, "Don't take that, stealing isn't nice. (or I don't like stealing)"
Before they're old enough to understand, they're just following the rules you give them. After they're old enough to understand, you still don't have to get right into Locke and Aristotle and Kierkegaard and Kant. A simple version of the Golden Rule (which predated Jesus by at least 500 years in other cultures) will suffice in most situations.
You're making the mistake of equating God and acocuntability. Even under a religious system, we're all accountable to our family, friends, and communities.
not sure how many here have watched this... but make a coffee and make the time to do so.... its edutainment ;) .
.
http://youtu.be/e2zhldbmfdg.
I think someone who's already an atheist would find it funny, in a preaching to the choir kind of way. I certainly wouldn't expect a believer to be swayed by it.
As mentioned, the Horus stuff has been refuted by reputable historians and Egyptologists for ages, and a bonehead mistake like this is just going to make them write the whole thing off as further persecution.
we should set 3 topics.
1. creation and evolution (origins of life).
2. religion.
Is this thread dead? I'm still reading the book, but if there isn't going to be a discussion I can read faster
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I don't have the patience to read the thread. Can someone just tell me if he's talked about lizard men yet?
we should set 3 topics.
1. creation and evolution (origins of life).
2. religion.
This isn't the thread for it, but we simply do not know enough about the universal constants to say what their possible ranges are. Some of the constants (some say all but one of them) may be derived from other constants, or a single foundational constant, and would therefore not have any possible value other than what they have.
I searched your linked articles for a reference to 10^120, and found only one that said it is that much smaller than it was predicted to be under a certain model. That's not addressing the available range for the cosmological or any other constant
we should set 3 topics.
1. creation and evolution (origins of life).
2. religion.
A finely tuned universe like our own to the order of 1/10^120
We cannot get this number without a denominator. We don't have one, so the odds are incalculable.
we should set 3 topics.
1. creation and evolution (origins of life).
2. religion.
[edit: sorry for the formatting. it keeps bolding the last part of my post.]
I tend to agree with ST's suspicion that Collins was indoctrinated more than he realizes as a child. That, or he just does a very bad job of explaining how he got from "Moral Law + Longing for Something Greater than Ourselves = Christian God with all the Baggage that Concept Carries." He doesn't explain why he rejected a deist or pantheist notion of God. Later he rejects secular, liberal interpretations of the Christian God, but gives no reason for doing so.
Unfortunately, he doesn't do much of a job explaining how a man with a scientific/empirical leaning accepts a God, and doesn't even attempt to explain how he got to the conservative Christian version. This is my biggest frustration with this section.
I have a post limit, so I'm going to combine a few thoughts (need to talk to Simon about getting my old account back):
Page 35 he starts rebutting the four main objections to the idea of God.
1) Isn't the idea of God just wish fulfillment?
He describes various numinous feelings, then asks if they, like the Moral Law, are, "an inkling of what lies beyond..." Well, he didn't establish how the Moral Law proved anything. After first asking if the numinous might also be an example, he seems to just assume it for the rest of the section.
p. 37 He explains that atheists view such longings as wishful thinking, not indications of the supernatural. He rebuts this by attacking a [crackpot] view from Freud that we creat God in the image of our fathers. I don't think anybody today accepts this notion. This is a straw man.
p. 38 He concludes by quoting Lewis (which he does 48,736 times in this section), saying the wishful-thinking inherent in everyone is proof that it was created in us. " Why would such a universal and uniquely human hunger exist, if it were not connected to some opportunity for fulfillment?"
I can't really argue with the quote, but it just seems like a baseless assertion to me. Can a theist help explain what's compelling about this argument?
2) What about all the harm done in the name of Religion?
He offers two main answers: 1) many great things have been done as well, and; 2) the Church is made up of fallen people.
pp. 41, 42. He makes the typical argument that atheist regimes are no better. My first reaction to this is, "So that's the feather in your cap: 'we might suck, but we're no worse than anybody else.'?"
More importantly, the charge is not accurate, according to historians and experts on the cultures used as examples. He says Marxist Russia and Maoist China were, "aiming to establish societies explicitly based upon atheism."
Actually, they wanted to establish totalitarian regimes, and worked to remove anything that would get in the way of that. Religion was just one of the obstacles. They did not work to set up an atheist government, just a godless one. North Korea is an example of an “atheist” state that far more closely resembles a theocracy than anything else.
3) Why would a loving God alow suffeing in the world?
This section really pissed me off.
p. 44. “Science reveals that the universe, our own planet, and life itself are engaged in an evolutionary process. The consequences of that can include the unpredictability of the weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or the misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at the beginning of time God chose to use these forces to create human beings, then the inevitability of these other painful consequences was also assured. Frequent miraculous interventions would be at least as chaotic in the physical realm as they would be in interfering with human acts of free will.”
So this omniscient God couldn't come up with a better way of creating us than a process that would cause us suffering and death later on? There were no othe forces available to the Creator of the Universe? Correct me if I'm wrong, but God didn't 'intend' for the rebellion in the Garden or The Fall. So he created us to be perfect, but his creation process was going to randomly kill a bunch of us for millions of years?
Maybe someone can explain the last sentence to me. Is he saying that God can't prevent earthquakes and tornadoes because that would violate our Free Will?
But this is where he really starts to lose me.
p. 46 After quoting Lewis again, he says,
"As much as we would like to avoid those experiences, without them would we not be shallow, self-centered creatures who would ultimately lose all sense of nobility or striving for the betterment of others?”
Earlier he said this nobility was innate in us, perhaps it was God speaking to us. Now the nobility is created or developed only through pain?
This is the clincher:
p. 46. He tells about how his daughter was raped, an event which traumatized her for years.
“In my case I can see, albeit dimly, that my daughter's rape was a challenge for me to try to learn the real meaning of forgiveness in a terribly wrenching circumstance. In complete honesty, I am still working on that. Perhaps this was also an opportunity for me to recognize that I could not truly protect my daughters from all pain and suffering; I had to learn to entrust them to God's loving care, knowing that this provided not an immunization from evil, but a reassurance that their suffering would not be in vain. Indeed, my daughter would say that this experience provided her with the opportunity and motivation to counsel and comfort others who have gone through the same kind of assault.”
I understand that there is sometimes a desparate need to find a silver lining to horrific events like this, but I just can't respect someone who uses this babyish reasoning. How does it ever enter your mind that God caused/allowed your daughter to go through this so you could learn forgiveness? Or perhaps you, a grown man with a grown daughter, hadn't yet quite realized that you can't completely protect her, so God caused/allowed her to be raped so you'd get this very important lesson.
God: "Hey Jesus, we've got a 45 year old man down there with a 20 year old daughter. He thinks he's able to protect her completely from any and all harm.
Jesus: "Where did he get that notion? Most of them figure that out before they ever reach adulthood. Is he slow in the head?"
God: "No, he's actually a very smart scientist, but he has been reading a lot of C.S. Lewis."
Jesus: "So, what do you want to do about it? Want to let him figure out on his own that he can't always protect her?"
God: "No, where's the fun in that?"
Jesus: "So... car accident?"
God: "No need to be cruel. Let's just rape her."
Jesus: "I'm on it."
And here's the part I love about these kinds of desperate rationalizations... he's still not sure what the message was! He's got a couple ideas, but he believes that God caused/allowed his daughter to be raped to teach him a lesson, and he's not sure he got the lesson.
I did not intend to read this book with the goal of finding every nit-picky objection I could. But at the same time, I was expecting more from a 'man of science' than the same braindead stuff you hear from other apologists.
4) How can a rational person believe in miracles?
He discusses Bayes Thorem. I think he's misusing it.
pp. 49-50. He seems to indicate that a "committed materialist" wil not recognize a miracle, no matte how unlikely the odds. But he gives examples that are actually very feasible in the real world. A 1:2407 or 1:10,000 event is not so astonishing that a materialist is just burying his head in the sand if he doesn't proclaim it an obvious miracle.
He goes to some length to credit himself personally with a healthy dose of skepticism, while being able to go where the math leads him, but he doesn't credit the naturalist with the same open-mindedness.
we should set 3 topics.
1. creation and evolution (origins of life).
2. religion.
I've just finished part I, which is more about the emotional journey, so I'm willing to give him a little leeway, assuming the hard scientific stuff will be tackled in the later parts.
In his defense, I'll note that he says early on that his book is aimed at believers, non-believers, and undecideds, so it's not unreasonable for him to make some emotional and faith-based arguments. But when he gets to the part that skeptics will be most interested in, he'd better come correct!
Side note: Part I is basically a tribute to C.S. Lewis. This is a bit annoying to me, because I find Lewis to be a hack.
we should set 3 topics.
1. creation and evolution (origins of life).
2. religion.
Meh, Dan Barker (former evangelist turned atheist) does much the same in his book, Godless. I found Barker's mini-bio (and contrasting it with the JW notion of gaining converts) pretty interesting. Collins' wasn't interesting, per se, but it wasn't a hardship to read.
