Atheism

It's like squeegeeing the tide.

Or like saying "We did NOT evolve from monkeys. Why don't you listen?" to a creationist.

So annoying.

I will defend you not because I agree with you nor with the idea of a walking talking God, but because there is something to be said about the burden of proof that is not the straight forward old talk. While proving a negative it a failed endeavour it is also true that nothing is indeed proven if not within a cognitive bound threshold on which a set of concepts ideas do pragmatically function well enough within the adaptative process of natural selection and the phenomenal manifest image of the world.

The off-hand more interesting talk is that we don't need a God of all gods to be impressed. While ultimate Reality, the unmoved mover is intangible even for the most advanced AGI the Universe could build, and there is nothing you can say about it which makes sense within spacetime and our languaging needs. The "thing", Being, or "God", whatever you want to call it, is unsurmountable.
To the point, a demi-god AGI or whatever supper dupper CRISPER supper bio species, or even some organized energy "life" form/intellect, whatever might be closer, at the top of the food chain, in this Universe, intellectually speaking, would bow us to our knees and make us tremble like fools looking like microbes.
Such a demi-god is not only possible but statistically probable in the vastness of our Universe. I doubt we would even be able to recognize it or live in its time scale such that we could perceive its activity. For all we know this Universe itself could be an amusing park, a pet school programmed project of such being/beings and not even requiring a great huge leap of intellectual distance from us. Again, what is the probability that we are at the top of the food chain intellectually speaking in the Cosmos?

No "god" is not dead nor do we need to invoke the Beast of all beasts to get scared as hell. As for the unfathomable one, REASON itself, that shizz is so Alien, so freaky, so abstract, that I just direct myself to it as Nature and a brut fact. I don't bow because I am humble but I bow because I must. Funny enough neither one of us has any free will or say in the matter. Reality endures itself to eternity and back to zero, endlessly, ad nausea and extreme tedium.

All I can say is that installing a god into the equation arbitrarily with no reason for the expectation other than speculation or wishfulness is an exercise I can see no productive end to. It reminds me of Marvel inventing the Silver Surfer and then struggling for a meaningful script that makes the invention viable.

I didn't make an argument for "God", I don't like it, I don't want it, and I don't need to, I made an argument for our insignificance on the statistical probability, of we Humans, being at the top of the food chain intellectually speaking in the vastness of the Cosmos!

Hey Set, when I use the word ‘everybody', it includes everybody.

I respect your opinions even if I disagree with some of them. To me humans are not really at the top of the food chain anyway, though it temporarily may be seen that way. I honestly believe our ascendancy on the planet will become more limited if we survive very long and the if is big.

Yep. I look around at people and think how the only thing that keeps half of them from accidently killing themselves most days is that a few people put enough safeguards in place so that even the most stupid person won't die and take another dozen out with them.

Maybe snowflakes need to be like other snowflakes because they are all unique. Maybe they fear non-conformity because they feel really deeply different from all the other snowflakes.

This seems like an issue Disney could address in a Frozen sequel.

I know you do and so do I. I was not arguing with you just clarifying my point regarding the many sufficient meanings the word "god" can evocate.
Superior intelligence and control are enough to make the wording minimally meaningful, and again, statistically speaking there are probably things out there in the Cosmos, that for all practical purposes are probably better than the best of gods we could try to imagine with our monkey brains.
And if not, if we are alone, I would bet my neck we are indeed running inside a simulation of some sort.

I fervently believe there is other intelligence out there. Whether superior or not, I have no guesses. We might eventually contact some of it. Maybe send a generational spacecraft their way. Meeting face to face is a huge if.

Again I was just making a statistical remark on the scale of possible intelligence out there.
We don't know the range but getting the hyper loto of being on the top is just statistically highly unlikely. Not even in the top 10%.
And mind you any deviation even 2% up or down, given our examples here on Earth is sort of exponential on the outcomes.
Meeting Alien microbes can be bad enough for our Health...stomping on the sameish level of intellectual development, again a hyper loto, having an encounter with a species 2% above would be meeting a god that trumps our imagination of what "god" has been imagined to be in our History since we got to think about it...

You know, no one other than the religious nutbags claim that evolution says we evolved from monkeys. It's a useful catch-phrase to ramp up the hysteria among the bible thumpers. On the two occasions on which that has come up in real life, my comment has been: "Yes, I look at you and assume that you've not evolved at all. Ook ook."

The overwhelming majority of atheists who have been willing to respond to questionnaires, and those whom I have known, don't give a rat's ass about proving that there is no god. I don't know if there is a god, and I don't care.

Bullsh*t--I was not aware until now that you are so eager to smear someone with whom you disagree that you would resort to such a puerile and bonehead trick.

Anyway, such notions don't clash with what I have stated already.

That’s the biggest question about atheists of your sort I have.

You seem reasonable, so why wouldn’t you?

First, I don't buy Pascal's wager. As Hinge put it, rather elegantly and succinctly, there is no reason to assume "that we're special on a cosmic scale." So Pascal's wager is predicated on the "jealous god" trope. Am I really to believe that a being powerful enough to have created this cosmos is going to punish me for not buying that song and dance? It really is too silly to accept, and that is why I don't care.

If you would look at an individual neuron in the brain, it would look like it is separate from all the other neurons around it. Yes, each neuron would be stimulated by others around it, and its responses to those stimuli would in turn stimulate other neurons around it; but you wouldn't be able to recognize larger patterns in the neural communication network that add up to complex conscious experiences.

What makes you think it is any different with everything else that is interacting/communicating throughout the universe?


A simulation of what then? Itself?

Not what I mean.
I assumed you were rational enough to reject Pascal and those other religious tropes.
I mean just the rational possibility that there could be a 'God/creator' responsible for 'all this'. ( In the absence of a definitive scientific answer. )

I still don’t get it. Why wouldn’t a reasonable person care about the answer, even if the answer is 'there is no creator'.