Okay Lola and Blatham...time to put up or shut up!

Fredjones and Watchmakers, thank you both for elevating the quality of this discussion.

The believe that god (or the some sort of higher spirit) is inherent in all living things. Maybe also inanimate objects, I forget...

JLNobody wrote:

Fredjones and Watchmakers, thank you both for elevating the quality of this discussion.

You are of course, most welcome. However I must confess to feeling miffed that Frank completely ignored my post. I thought that it had covered a few points which hadn't been in the thread elsewhere and I'd hoped to hear his response.

Frank, if you have a few moments I'd appreciate your thoughts on my earlier post.

sorry, Dog...I did write a reply to your post...and I thought I posted it at the same time as my reply to JL. In fact, I mentioned in that post that I was answering two people. But somehow, the second post never got here.

Now I have to take the time to read back......you guys have been busy here........

Frank,

Are we debating the "everyone has to be an agnostic because no one can ever know" premise?

Frank,

Here's my issue. You're playing word games.

Anyone of the meanest intelligence realises that their beliefs and knowledge have a margin of error. This doesn't prevent you from holding an opinion on a matter.

There are cases where it is otherwise, where ignorance is so total that you can't even venture an opinion. If someone asks me what football team will win the next grand final, I have to admit that I have no idea. My complete ignorance of football would mean any guess would simply be naming at random one of the few teams whose names I know. (though in and of itself that would give me a better than random chance of accuracy since fame and success are somewhat linked).

I'm an atheist. Do I know that there is no divine entities? Hell no. Never the less I hold an opinion. My belief, is also that YOU have an opinion, concious or unconcious, voiced or unvoiced. The problem is that you're playing wordgames and stating that you "don't know".

The thing is, no one (of any intelligence) is asking you what you know. They're asking you for your opinion, because that's all any of us have.

To claim agnositicism here, is to say that you know so little about the field that you can't even form an opinion which I find unrealistic in the environment of our religious culture.

Stop playing word games and join the rest of us in venturing to share our opinions, instincts and feelings. We're all agnostic. But that doesn't stop us from being atheists or theists, even if only mildly one way or the other.

Lola:-

Bingo.Tell me about the help you get on the stock market.Sod all that other stuff.Mammon is God and I'm a fundamentalist.What's your latest insider trading info.I love insider trading.

I have opinions on many matters. I have, in fact, an opinion on this one. I am of the opinion that there is not anywhere near enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction.

It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it. There's an infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do exist.

Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?

Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Those who embrace "intelligent design" -- the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible with the existence of God.

There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.

If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. There would be nothing worth checking, because we would know what is true. So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this.

We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

The freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away.

I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.