Posted on 04/21/2016 12:30:08 PM PDT by Heartlander
Aristotle believed dirty rags generated live mice. you believe in an invisible friend that lives in the sky who grant favors.
I don’t think logic is your strong suit.
This is ignorance – pure and simple. It reveals a total lack of knowledge on your part. As a reminder :
And with your ignorance, you have insulted a vast majority on this website – including its founder. I would suggest you take some time and reflect on your own superstition.
Now, you believe your brain ultimately came from mindlessness – here’s what others of superior intellect have to say about your belief :
The neural circuits in our brain manage the beautifully coordinated and smoothly appropriate behavior of our body. They also produce the entrancing introspective illusion that thoughts really are about stuff in the world. This powerful illusion has been with humanity since language kicked in, as we’ll see. It is the source of at least two other profound myths: that we have purposes that give our actions and lives meaning and that there is a person “in there” steering the body, so to speak.
[A.Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide To Reality, Ch.9]
“Since we are creatures of natural selection, we cannot totally trust our senses. Evolution only passes on traits that help a species survive, and not concerned with preserving traits that tell a species what is actually true about life.”
Richard Dawkins – quoted from “The God Delusion”
“Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.”
- Steven Pinker
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter”.
J. B. S. Haldane
“One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.”
—C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry (aka the Argument from Reason)
[The denial of consciousness] “is surely the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought.” [It shows] “that the power of human credulity is unlimited, that the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith, is truly unbounded.” [It reveals] “the deepest irrationality of the human mind.”
- Galen Strawson
You seem unable to debate with your own thoughts and need to cite authorities. Not me, but I will cite one authority; William of Occham.
Your logic is that complexity requires a designer but at the final application, some sort of miracle happens and extreme complexity does not require a designer. That’s a fairly convoluted use of “logic”.
My logic is straight forward. If the supposition is that complexity is evidence of a designer, them, inescapably, the designer requires a designer, ad infinitum; a reducation to absurdity.
Your “logic” requires a shave with Occham’s razor. You simply cannot escape the obvious fact that your thinking fails a basic test of logic. Plead your faith if you want but don’t try to support your bronze-age mythology with logic. You haven’t successfully done so yet and don’t show any signs of doing so.
1. A known designer is not required by Intelligent Design - you don't need to know who designed the designer when you discover an arrow - you know it was designed. (Can be applied the the fine tuned universe, DNA, rare earth, consciousness, etc...)
2. We know the universe had a beginning (Big Bang) and if there was an infinite past we would never arrive at the present. As I have pointed out, logical reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the initial cause of motion must be something that is not, itself, in motion—an unmoved mover – the Prime Mover. If every cause is the result of a previous cause, or, if everything is caused by something else, then we have an "infinite regress" of causes which is logically incoherent (who designed the designer). Furthermore, natural processes cannot create natural processes (circulus in probando). So we are logically left with ‘creation’ from outside of nature. You have not addressed this...
3. From a theological Judeo-Christian standpoint, your question becomes "who made God" - that means you are reduced to thinking about created gods. I don't know any Christian who believes God was created. It just becomes an absurd question you might hear a child ask.
4. In order to explain the fine tuned universe, the multiverse has been postulated - an infinite amount of universes and we live in one of the lucky ones. But theoretically with infinite universes, ironically you could have a universe with god-like beings and even an universe with you as a televangelist. But ultimately it is all meaningless... This is where I would appropriately refer to the theologian friar William of Ockham
Now the question of 'who designed the designer' is most famously put forth by Dawkins in his book The God Delusion which Michael Ruse reviewed and stated, "would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing". Which brings me back to your belief that your brain ultimately came from mindlessness and where this leads. Here is a Dawkins interview from October 2006:
Dawkins:….What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don’t feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, “Oh well he couldn’t help doing it, he was determined by his molecules.” Maybe we should… I sometimes… Um… You probably remember many of you would have seen Fawlty Towers. The episode where Basil where his car won’t start and he gives it fair warning, counts up to three, and then gets out of the car and picks up a tree branch and thrashes it within an edge of his life. Maybe that’s what we all ought to… Maybe the way we laugh at Basil Fawlty, we ought to laugh in the same way at people who blame humans. I mean when we punish people for doing the most horrible murders, maybe the attitude we should take is “Oh they were just determined by their molecules.” It’s stupid to punish them. What we should do is say “This unit has a faulty motherboard which needs to be replaced.” I can’t bring myself to do that. I actually do respond in an emotional way and I blame people, I give people credit, or I might be more charitable and say this individual who has committed murders or child abuse of whatever it is was really abused in his own childhood. ….Manzari: But do you personally see that as an inconsistency in your views?
Dawkins: I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable. But it has nothing to do with my views on religion it is an entirely separate issue.
This is the absurd logic you are left to live with...
did you just say that a man who can make an arrow doesn’t need a designer? Yes you did. I’m glad you finally see my position. I’m not a Christian so the intellectual limitations and blinders that have hobbled them for centuries do not trouble me.
Okay, you assert that a creator needs consciousness and willful intent to create our universe. Consciousness may be as primitive a feature as respiration to a creative force that can create a universe. The creative force may be totally unlike us in every respect including our notions of will, consciousness or purpose. if that’s unclear, sadly I cannot make it any clearer.
Hate to tell you but atheists are not smart, not even in the running.
The fact is your kind did not exist as such prior to 1950s when British professor Antony Flew wrote over thirty philosophical works which established the foundations for atheism for half a century.
His 1950 paper “Theology and Falsification” was the most reprinted philosophical publication of the 20th century. This is the man without whose ideas the various Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dennett, Wolpert, Stenger, (not to mention Christopher Hitchens and Pat Condell) et al, none of whom is a philosopher, would not have had rational arguments to support their faith: atheism.
Fact is pretty much every scientific discipline we have was founded by believers. So you have nothing to be smug about.
You are obviously not a Christian because you believe your brain comes from mindlessness - and your brain is just another organ supplied by evolution for survival - like your liver or anus.
To paraphrase CS Lewis, if your mind is a product of the irrational (mindlessness) then why trust your mind when it tells you about anything? - free will, morality, and consciousness become your myths.
And your explanation is:
Consciousness may be as primitive a feature as respiration to a creative force that can create a universe. The creative force may be totally unlike us in every respect including our notions of will, consciousness or purpose. if that’s unclear, sadly I cannot make it any clearer.
Conscious
: awake and able to understand what is happening around you: having knowledge of something; aware.
You will need to try to be clearer because what you said is absolute gibberish
Actually - I suggest you walk away and save yourself from anymore embarrassment.
I suffer no embarrassment, just a bit of boredom with an illogical dilitabts who thinks quoting others will support his lack of actual reasoning. Aristotle, Aquinas and you have all failed you prove, logically, the existence of a Supreme being. Like those others you begin with logic but then make a special pleading to give yourself the right to abandon logic.
Cling to your bronze age mythology but don’t do so with a pretend logical base. Call it faith and be done with it. ERV’S irrefutably prove that chimps and humans had a common ancestor thus demonstrating undeniably that we are the product of evolution. If you would try to deny that, you must again abandon logic.
I have explained it to you but I can’t understand it for you. Try harder.
You assert there were no atheists before the 1950s and still make a claim of being able to think. I guess that sort of nonsensical assertion passes for thinking in your little wotld.
You explained nothing - again, try not to project your insecurities on others...
“Consider the following propositions, selected from the naturalistic creed or deduced from it: (i.) My beliefs, insofar as they are the result of reasoning at all, are founded on premises produced in the last resort by the collision of atoms. (ii.) Atoms, having no prejudices in favour of truth, are as likely to turn out wrong premises as right ones; nay, more likely, inasmuch as truth is single and error manifold. (iii.) My premises, therefore, in the first place, and my conclusions in the second, are certainly untrustworthy, and probably false. Their falsity, moreover, is of a kind which cannot be remedied; since any attempt to correct it must start from premises not suffering under the same defect. But no such premises exist. (iv.) Therefore, again, my opinion about the original causes which produced my premises, as it is an inference from them, partakes of their weakness; so that I cannot either securely doubt my own certainties or be certain about my own doubts. This is scepticism indeed; scepticism which is forced by its own inner nature to be sceptical even about itself;,,,
-Arthur Balfour, The Foundations of Belief
There have always been deniers, even in Jesus’s time. They were considered mental ill tho. Had no coherency no foundation, Just denying.
I’m not insecure; I’m not the one who depends on invisible friends.
read up on the quantum nature of reality and relativity and then explain to me how existence must conform to your stone age mythology. The universe is not only stranger than you imagine but it’s really stranger than you can imagine.
Again, idiocy culled from other idiots isn’t research and it’s not supporting logic where there is none.
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