Does atheism eliminate the soul?

Terry,

Why not read up on the Santiago theory of cognition and come back with your comments?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_theory_of_cognition
http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/articles/capra.htm


BTW If you think you know what "consciousness" is here's a couple of thousand papers where they don't !

http://consc.net/online.html

BumbleBee / Rosborne,

I think that bumblebee was referring to the evaporation/explosion of a black hole rather than some gradual escape of particles. Some scientists do believe that black holes eventually evaporate, but I dont know what that would be like.

A key thing to consider is that the big bang is not just an explosion, it is an expansion of space that separates particles from each other, not an outward force like in an explosion -- and that expansion continues today. If it were the result of an old black hole that had evaporated, why would spacetime be expanding faster than the speed of light at the edges of our universe?

Evaporation of black holes refers to the assumed result of eons of Hawking Radiation reducing the gravitational component of a black hole to the point where the event horizon coincides with the singularity itself, resulting in ... who-knows-what.

Personally, I think they've stretched the math of their model beyond the breaking point but who am I to argue with Steven. If he says black holes leak for billions of years until they go poof, then maybe they do.

Uh....well, that would only make sense of the black hole was accumulating new mass at a rate slower than the rate mass was lost due to Hawking radiation. Doesn't that seem a bit of a dubious claim to you? I mean, new mass is accumulated at a very obvious macroscopic exponential rate...

A black hole is not a singularity anyway, that is only an idealization, it does have physical size and there is no magical difference between having an event horizon that is greater or smaller than its physical mass-radius, the only difference would be visibility...right? I mean, that's just basic physics.

Let me speculate further. As the black hole lost mass the event horizon would shrink and the mass size would also expand as the self gravitation lessened.

Due to the compression force we could expect the core mass to be a soup of particles not distinguished into individual atoms, and if the compression force was large enough perhaps it is even a quark soup but I do not see why this would cause any complications on uncompression -- yes, it would re-molecularize, fusion energy would be produced...but it would be contained

You would have to take Steven up on that. I'm just repeating what he claimed. I assumed he was describing a theoretical condition which would occur if the hole were not still accumulating matter.

Some black holes are theorized to have swept their vacinity clean of all infalling matter (or a vast majority of it), so maybe it can happen in reality. I'm not sure of the rate of Hawking radiation.


At the core of a black hole is a singularity. You're right, it's not magic. But it is meaningful to recognize that the event horizon is different from the singularity just as it's meaningful to know that there is an egg shell and a yolk, even though both are collectively called "An Egg".


I don't know. But once the singularity formed, I don't think the math which describes it would let it 'un-form'. A singularity is an infinity in the equation. There is no way to climb that slope.

Perhaps that is why when Hawking proposed an evaporation, he did not describe it as an explosion. Perhaps the black hole tunnels its way down into an infinitely small quantum state and vanishes. I don't know.


Singularities don't work that way. It's not just a compressed particle, it's a singularity. Lots of stuff online for you to research.

Stuh & Rosborne
Stuh & Rosborne, fascinating, but my 78 year old brain is in overdrive trying to understand even though I've read Hawkins and have a hard time with his string theory. I wish I had been able to take science classes when I was in high school.

Another dumb question: Is it possible that a giant black hole sucked up all stars existing at one time before the existance of our universe; then farted the debris out at the bottom of the black hole ala big bang and started the process all over again?

I keep asking this question because it appears that black holes are the only absorber of stars and their debris. If that is true, then is it possible that black holes are the source of big bangs?

Sorry guys.

BBB

Re: Stuh & Rosborne


Big Bang cannot be made plural. It describes the creation of the universe, which theoretically only happened once. It describes creation of the physical laws (like electricity, magnetism, gravity) as well as the creation of space and time.

What about the multiverse theory? The little I have heard of it sounds quite interesting.

Eh, it's not nearly as interesting as scientology...but if you think it would be fun to believe in it, go ahead and convince yourself of it!

Thanks for the blunt response...

If I had taken it any more seriously, I would not have conveyed how ludicrous I find the theory (which is, by the way, not a scientific theory). Ludicrous not because it is impossible, but because it's pure speculation raised to the power of infinity.

I just remembered Richard Dawkins - author of "the God delusion" - spoke so warmly of it. All though stressed the fact that there was no proof of the theory, he said there had been made some promising research on the subject.

I never got around to verify these claims, so I thought I'd vent the idea here.

The Ancient Greeks used the same word soul for 'alive' as for
'ensouled'. So the earliest surviving Western philosophical view might
suggest that the terms soul and aliveness.

Francis M. Cornford quotes Pindar in saying that the soul sleeps whilst
the limbs are active, but when man is sleeping, the soul is active and
reveals in many a dream "an award of joy or sorrow drawing near".

Plato, drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, considered the soul
as the essence of a person, being, that which decides how we behave. He
considered this essence as an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our
being. As bodies die the soul is continually reborn in subsequent
bodies.

The concept of soul has provided the basis for the major theories of
creationism, traducianism and pre-existence. According to creationism,
each individual soul is created directly by God, either at the moment of
conception, or some later time (identical twins arise several cell
divisions after conception, but no one would deny that they have whole
souls). According to traducianism, the soul comes from the parents by
natural generation. According to the pre-existence theory, which is not
widely held by Christians, the soul exists before the moment of
conception.

Researchers, most notably Ian Stevenson and Brian Weiss have studied
reports of children talking about past-life experiences. Any evidence
that these experiences were in fact real would require a change in
scientific understanding of the mind or would support some notions of
the soul.

In recent decades, much research has been done in near-death
experiences, which are held by many as evidence for the existence of a
soul and afterlife. Visit any good book shop and you will find a
good number of books dealing with rebirth cases.

Acceptance of the concept of soul amounts to acceptance of other beliefs
associated with them. This makes the atheists to reject the concept
of soul.

"Modern biologists, unlike the ancient makers of myths, know that all
the phenomena of living systems can be reduced to physical and chemical
terms. They have no evidence of any 'vital force' or mystical spirit
and no need to seek for such. They recognize the fully alive body and
the newly dead body to be but two arbitrary points along a continuum of
decreasing organization".

http://www.atheists.org/Atheism/mind.html

In his book Consilience, E. O. Wilson took note that sociology has
identified belief in a soul as one of the universal human cultural
elements. Wilson suggested that biologists need to investigate how
human genes predispose people to believe in a soul.

Daniel Dennett has championed the idea that the human survival strategy
depends heavily on adoption of the intentional stance, a behavioral
strategy that predicts the actions of others based on the expectation
that they have a mind like one's own. Mirror neurons in brain regions
such as Broca's area may facilitate this behavioral strategy. The
intentional stance, Dennett suggests, has proven so successful that
people tend to apply it to all aspects of human experience, thus leading
to animism and to other conceptualizations of soul.

A counterargument (from Keith Sutherland, among others) points out that
just because the brain has regions that deal with colour and other
aspects of vision, one does not argue that the genes produce an area to
promote the illusion of a blue sky. By analogy, if there is a 'God
sense' just as there is a sense of vision, it seems to argue for the
objective existence of an extra-mundane reality.

This is not a coherent sentence in English. Apart from the fact that you are peddling your personal, idiosyncratic "spiritual" drivel, you are going to lose your audience right away when you can't make it through two sentences without lapsing into babble.

I suspect that this was a copy and paste job, although, of course, you could have copied and pasted your own drivel from another site. You end it with this delightful example of gobbledygook:

By analogy, if there is a 'God sense' just as there is a sense of vision, it seems to argue for the objective existence of an extra-mundane reality.

The analogy is flawed because "the sky is blue" is not an objective statement, it is an extremely subjective statement. One can speak with a certain degree of objectivity (in naive realist terms) about the scattering of radiation in our atmosphere, and how that produces the illusion of "blue." But you don't even have that shaky underpinning for your hilarious thesis. "If there is a god sense" begs the question, because your contention about "objective existence of an extra-mundane reality" is predicated upon an assumption that there were a deity--if you can't establish that, the conclusions you base upon it are fairy tales.

I think VSPrasad is googling for "coherent + response" to reply with

I wish him or her luck.

"the earliest surviving Western philosophical view might
suggest that the terms soul and aliveness are synonymous"
- I am an old man, and I missed a few words while typing.

Mr. Setanta wrote that objective existence of an
extra-mundane reality is predicated upon an assumption that
there were a deity - if you can't establish that, the
conclusions you base upon it are fairy tales.

During 1800s, Anthropologists had a problem as to how to
classify human beings. One researcher proposed the
expression "intelligent animal". After advanced studies on
monkeys, it was dropped. Another researcher proposed "tool
using animal". After observing some animals making wooden
tools and sharpening them with knife like stones, it was
dropped. Another researcher proposed "weapon using animal".
A decade ago, a rare film was shot by an amateur in an
African forest. One short monkey was hit very badly by a big
monkey. The short monkey prepared a wooden knife using
stones and hid it on the top of a tree. After some days,
when the big monkey came to attack the short monkey, it ran
up to the tree for the weapon it has hid and killed the big
monkey. The one thing that the anthropologists found with
any group of human beings, even if they did not have
contacts with the out side world for thousands of years, is
spirituality with some form of religion. So, man is a
"spiritual animal" if you want to call him that way.

The Upanishads say that "Manush" (human) was so named
because he has "Manas" a mind higher than that of the
animals which realizes the divinity in creation. It was
present since the creation of human beings. Religion is the
characteristic feature of most of the human beings. It was
not attained through reasoning using mind. Illiterate tribes
located in inaccessible forests also have religion. It is as
eternal and and as unchanging as the Almighty. Disbelief by
a few will not affect it.

"The percentage of atheists in the world is less than 5%"

http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c48a.htm

"Atheists are all scientists" ?

http://www.non-religious.com/statistics.html

Go to Anthropology department of a university near you and
ask them if they have found any society in the world that
did not have a religion in its known history.

Then ask them if the religion were organic, or if were imposed upon them from without.

The "point" you are trying to make is meaningless, though. At one time, everyone believed the earth was a flat disc, over which the sun and moon moved from horizon to horizon each day. That didn't make it true. Mass delusion is hardly a prescription for finding the "truth."