Why I am an athiest

No - you don't get it - as illustrated by the use of the word "unsubstantiated". My argument does not depend on the illusion of "self" even though such a view is problematic to theistic concepts of a psychological "self" as a potential "chooser of the correct path". My argument implies that words such as "unsubstantiated" are vacuous once "logic" and "evidence" have shown to be utilized equivocally in support of either theism or atheism. (ref: the catch all claim of theists about "knowledge" for example).

NB. My argument, I remind you, is that atheism can be justified socially rather than psychologically or intellectually.

Ignorance is the usual answer to that one...

The problem is that logic demands that an atheist believe in evolution, and evolution has been totally debunked.


The big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:



You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:



They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"


They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

We are in total agreement!

Much of what you've said... please don't take offence... seems to me to be complete rubbish and shows a total lack of understanding about the subject???!!!

Wait wait wait... The very idea of experience implies a subject experiencing. You can't say: "I experience x, y and z" without that leap of faith that assumes a "self", "mind" or "person" able to perceive other stuff and oneself, and aware that he/she is experiencing. So you operate from the same premises as the rest of us:  that you exist, that the world exists, that you can perceive the world and perceive your own perception. Aka from the premise that you are a conscience. 

The referent is what you are. And what we all are: a conscience. That's us, that's our mental world where we exist and whence we can't escape. You may be unable to define it precisely, and science may be unable to define it and replicate it, but that's no proof that it doesn't exist. 

That's where I find some atheists really dumb: their own thinking leads them to deny the existence of their own thinking, but somehow they don't see the contradiction... :-)

You said some post upthread that you practiced introspection to examine your own beliefs and "jettison" them. But that in itself assumes a lot: that you are somewhat transparent to yourself, even though it's a pretty well established fact that we tend to be blind to our own weaknesses. Moreover, that presupposes a self that can not only KNOW itself but CHANGE itself in the process. That is even less of a given, it's a naked belief. Your sense of knowledge and control about yourself may well be illusionary. At least in part.

Ergo you hold still many unproven beliefs... :-) It's unavoidable, really.

I think the problem we are hung up on are two separate issues. We must be aware of ourselves and the decisions we make as we "live." How that translates into existence is another aspect of our lives.

Humans are limited by our biology and environment on what we can "experience." We are also limited by the ability of our brains to comprehend truth, facts, faith, belief, perception, and reality.

It's not a matter of theism or atheism; it's about how we exist in the time-frame of human existence.

Rec'd and worth more than 2 cents. Theology is in fact anthropology. We can disagree till kingdom comes about the number of gods or the sex of angels but it's all baloony. Our reason may be able to fathom something relevant about THIS world but I seriously doubt it works BEYOND it... Yet theology and metaphisics are interesting in that they underwrite or butress our (individual, subjective) value systems. They say something about how to exist as human beings. They say something about what human beings are, for one thing.

It doesn't matter how "you" perceive gods or the sex of angels," because many on this planet have their gods/angels. It's not "baloony" to them.

I agree with Rosch. We know next to nothing about our own self from a scientific viewpoint, which is like this huge blind spot at the middle of our scientific world view. But it doesn't mean there's no such thing as a state of conscience, and a self experiencing such state. A subject that say I when writing on message boards or answering the phone.

And it doesn't mean it can't be replicated in a machine. I believe the brain is such a machine, evidently.



Are you an epiphenomenon too then? Are you coming here often, to chat with other epiphenomenum? Pardon me if I ask but I'm new here... I don't what two epiphenomenum speak of when they meet on a message board.

Would real, self-assumed human beings please stand up, so that I can at least talk to you guys out there?...

I mean: theological disputes are vain. Eg disputes between theism and atheism. But individual beliefs and mythologies are often very beautiful (mythologies are poetical, literary and artistic gold mines), very important individually as they define our take on and expectations of life, and often socially useful. Not always though. Religions easily outlive their social usefulness. They outlive whatever...

I'm not so sure about "socially useful." Can you identify what they are?

There is a plethora of literature on the impermanence of "self" which could render your request for "real selves" futile. From one point of view, for example, what's going on here is little more than "social dancing" between two interactive cognitive systems mutually triggering communicative postures. (Note the origin of personality from the Greek persona - actor's mask). On some occasions atheistic personae may beevoked by the ludicrous garb of clerics for example, yet on other occasions...funerals etc...such personae may not actively surface or may be repressed.

Of course, that facet of "self" which postulates these social aspects of atheism will cite communicative contexts as backcloth for "its" position. Yet seminal to that selectivity is the fact that your (systems) very request for discourse is axiomatically "social". Contrast that say with a meditational state of a cognitive system which has been called "egoless", in which "communicating selves" are as ephemeral as water waves.

I (or it) apologizes for this esoteric excursion which was triggered by simplistic statements about the nature of "self".

Imagine you're a neolithic chief, ruling over an (unrully) tribe of brutes and less brutish types of both genders.

As a Homo sapiens, you are painfully aware that a little more collaboration within the tribe, a little less rapin' n' killin' among the ranks, would do you good in your competition with other neolithic chiefs and tribes out there.

The rules to apply are almost self-evident and more or less the same in all cultures. Don't kill your neighbour, don't screw his wives, don't steal his cattle, etc. You decide to promulgate such a code, but how do you enforce it?

You can: 1) beat personally the sh!t out of anyone who breaks your code; 2) create a neolithic police force of sorts to beat up anyone disobeying your code; 3) tell your credulous bunch that if they don't follow your code, their dead parents are going to be very cross at them in the afterlife, and will curse them, and cause their doom, and beat the sh!t out of them once they die; 4) all of the above.

Solution 4 is both the cheapest and most effective. Judicious use of 1 and 3 lowers the cost of solution 2) considerably.

"Social utility" could be interpreted as regulating group behavior. In particular, many religions are obsessed with regulating sexual instincts, and such control often fails or becomes aberrent as in the recent publicity regarding Catholic priests.

A mask conceal something and reveal something else. Information is being exchanged through language, including on message boards. And postures are information too.

Finally, impermanence doesn't mean inexistence. A flame is impermanent, yet it can exist. Everything is impermanent in fact... The people who wrote this literature on the impermanence of self were themselves selves, if I may, and themselves and their ideas are impermanent.

So you don't believe in modern mathematics or probability theory...

Some reason why??

I believe there's a huge difference between "socially useful" and "social utility."

You have raised two major philosophical inextricable themes... ontology (the nature of existence)... and epistemology (the nature of knowledge). Allow me to suggest that this thread does not lend itself to an in depth exploration of such themes. As a hint regarding the quagmire that can ensue, allow me to point out that even the status of the word "information" as you have used it above, is disputed by some celebrated philosophers in the field. (See for example Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for an account of the issues). In short, issues of "atheism" are to ontology and epistemology as "my cat" is to zoology.

An example would help.