Posted on 01/22/2006 6:22:25 AM PST by Pharmboy
Aw, c'mon this is from the NYT, fer gosh sakes. Meaningless tripe.
see #14
sorry, #17
Yeah...but...Solomon's questions were pretty good. She didn't toss up softballs...he even went after her a few times.
Exactly. Specifically, what is the scientific basis for the biological "abnormality" atheism?
Dennett is a very influential philosopher at Tufts. He and his buddy Richard Dawkins spearhead the materialist point of view today. They've done more to make atheism respectable than any of their likeminded predecessors, and the religious should take serious heed of the challenge they represent.
Dontcha think Dennett looks a wee bit like Santa Claus??
Just for that, you're gettin' a lump of coal. ;')
Great tagline, Sheik Yamani used it in an interview about four or five years ago. :')
IMHO, atheism is a religion.
I haven't seen anyone answer the actual and deep question itself, "Why is the sky blue". Except perhaps by poets and songwriters who say it is to match "your baby blue eyes" -- and that is a version of the anthropic princible. To whit that the universe is "just-so" so that we can be here to appreciate it.
However the anthropic principle has two versions. One -- the one that makes sense -- is that the universe is just-so for us for a purpose. And Two -- held when one's depth of understanding stops at some level before the full, exhausting and terrifying depth is reached -- that the universe is just-so because of nothing, That it, it just happened to be that way.
It is understandable why people -- very smart ones too -- hold the second view of the anthropic princible. But at least they DO acknowledge that there is something special about the universe being so exacted tailored for us! How do we know that they do think it is special? Because, one, they gave it a name "the anthropic principle" and, two, they wax on and on in long treatises about how it is *nothing of meaning*, but chance alone for it to be just so. One example is with the "too complex to explain" multiverse theories. (They are too complex to explain because they are not real, btw, if I may cut to the chase -- Occam's Razor and all.) For example to a anthropic mulitverser, we are in this particular universe because it is the one where we are exactly just so, yet there are a infinite number of alternative univerese where we are not, and some where we are, but different.
Such fantasies are wonderful intellectual exercises as well, a potent imagination is a wonderful gift, and all should seek to develop their own.
Yet to track down that "why?" in full one ends up never ending, so to speak, until one arrives back at the primally obvious. That we are here for a reason, that all this creation in its wonderous complexity and "just-so"-ness is for us, about us, for a purpose.
So then, even Occam, himself, looked up at the blue sky and enjoyed the beautiful and comforting expanse blue sky above.
Sorry, pharmboy, I engaged in a cheap shop. My apologies. Thanks for correcting me and defending your post.
Hard to square that with the assumption of a place "before" the beginning, outside the bounds of time.
bump
But thanks for you remarks...much appreciated.
Thanks for the ping. Interesting thread, but it's not for the evolution list. Maybe junior will want to archive it anyway.
'Zackly--this was for your own interest.
To be an atheist, you must be able to prove a "universal negative" - you would have to be in all places, at the same time, to prove that nowhere in the entire universe something exists. Biblically, this man is a fool - Psalm 14:1 "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no god.'"
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