Posted on 11/17/2003 6:02:20 AM PST by Tribune7
The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.
The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.
In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.
The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule they are commanded to do so the atheist does not.
In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.
Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
That worldview is not shared by many (if not most) physicists and mathematicians - the most epistemologically zealous of all the disciplines. It is also not shared by most philosophers and the general public.
Well said. I would add that the Materialist cultural filter is strong enough that whatever glimpse of the immaterial appears in nature, and such glipses do occur, is mocked, discredited or ignored by the High Priests of Secular Humanism. But they have only words.
I'm not sure of that. I could be wrong here, because I've never made any study of atheists' literature (published debates and such) but I think atheism comes in a few flavors:
1. Strong: I'm certain that there are no gods.I think you are mostly speaking about the first variety. Frankly I've rarely encountered that type. Most of the athesists who post around here are of the 2nd type. Maybe some are the 3d. Or so it seems to me.
2. Middle: I see no evidence, therefore I don't believe in gods.
3. Weak: I have no clue one way or the other. (Is this agnostic?)
That cultural filter is so strong that, in most cases, you couldn't pry it off with a crow bar. :^)
Sometimes I think that Darwin was right -- and that the adherents of materialist opinion/ideology are a separate line of human development, a new species altogether! :^) Unfortunately, I'm not sure that willfully self-imposed narrow-mindedness will translate as an increase in survival fitness in the long run....
But of course, Phaedrus -- I'm just joking....
Thanks so much for the ping!
WRT to the mocking there is more poison in the handle than the point.
I'm defining atheist as someone who rejects the possibility of forces that can't be measured while recognizing reality. This requires the atheist to believe the world around us came about solely through radom reactions between matter and energy. The probabilities of this occuring are low. So low, in fact, you need a faith much blinder than mine to accept them.
Now, you can make an argument that there is an undiscovered (measurable) force that will make this explanation sensisble. But that's faith, and it's faith based on nothing more than a deeply held belief that God can't exist. And a deeply held belief that something is impossible without evidence of it being impossible is irrational.
And I haven't even discussed the First Law of Thermodynamics or the axiomatic impossibilitiy of the spontaneous generation of life.
2. Middle: I see no evidence, therefore I don't believe in gods.
3. Weak: I have no clue one way or the other. (Is this agnostic?)
There are a few of the first category - but it translates more as a statement of defiance - "I will not serve" - a rebellion perhaps against something they once believed.
Ditto that.
IMHO, the metaphysical naturalist (atheist) claim to being rational rests on the worldview that: "all that there is" is all that exists in nature.
Well, "nature" really means that set of observed phenomena that have causes that are regular & predictable (at least in principle).
The atheist doesn't necessarily believe that there are no extra dimensions or different universes with different laws of nature or whatever operating. We believe there's no evidence of any "person" behind the existence of this universe. There has to be some evidence or good inferences that such things exist. IMNSHO :-) the belief that there's a person of some kind behind it all has no good evidence, and seems pretty obviously a case of anthropomorphism.
That worldview is not shared by many (if not most) physicists and mathematicians - the most epistemologically zealous of all the disciplines. It is also not shared by most philosophers and the general public.
OK, I'll have to bring in a physicist & some mathematicians on this. Guys, how would you characterize physicists & mathematicians in general WRT the existence of a supernatural world with a supernatural person governing our universe & lives?
<sigh> Unfortunately, whenever I hear a supernaturalist call an a-supernaturalist "narrow-minded", I think of the dictum: "Always keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."
If we're separate lines of human development, then maybe "Atheists are from Earth; Theists are from Atlantis"! ;-)
betty boop and I are on the Plato side with Godel, Penrose, Tegmark and others.
By extension, the debate goes to the issue of when to stop looking. For instance, Hawking is content when an experiment confirms the theory, but Penrose wants the theory to also make sense.
I am a Platonist - more like Penrose than Hawking. For instance, I perceive that geometry exists in reality and the mathematician comes along and discovers it, e.g. pi, Schwarzschild Geometry, Riemannian Geometry and so on. As a Platonist, I would ask Why pi? Why not something else?
It is important to know and/or pick a side because it has a lot to do with how this information (and other science information) will be understood. Here are the two sides:
According to the Aristotelian paradigm, physical reality is fundamental and mathematical language is merely a useful approximation. According to the Platonic paradigm, the mathematical structure is the true reality and observers perceive it imperfectly. In other words, the two paradigms disagree on which is more basic, the frog perspective of the observer or the bird perspective of the physical laws. The Aristotelian paradigm prefers the frog perspective, whereas the Platonic paradigm prefers the bird perspective....
A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime--the bird perspective--these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta--a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.
The Platonic paradigm raises the question of why the universe is the way it is. To an Aristotelian, this is a meaningless question: the universe just is. But a Platonist cannot help but wonder why it could not have been different. If the universe is inherently mathematical, then why was only one of the many mathematical structures singled out to describe a universe? A fundamental asymmetry appears to be built into the very heart of reality.
As a way out of this conundrum, I have suggested that complete mathematical symmetry holds: that all mathematical structures exist physically as well. Every mathematical structure corresponds to a parallel universe. The elements of this multiverse do not reside in the same space but exist outside of space and time. Most of them are probably devoid of observers. This hypothesis can be viewed as a form of radical Platonism, asserting that the mathematical structures in Plato's realm of ideas or the "mindscape" of mathematician Rudy Rucker of San Jose State University exist in a physical sense. It is akin to what cosmologist John D. Barrow of the University of Cambridge refers to as "pi in the sky," what the late Harvard University philosopher Robert Nozick called the principle of fecundity and what the late Princeton philosopher David K. Lewis called modal realism. Level IV brings closure to the hierarchy of multiverses, because any self-consistent fundamental physical theory can be phrased as some kind of mathematical structure.
The view [Platonism] as pointed out earlier is this: Mathematics exists. It transcends the human creative process, and is out there to be discovered. Pi as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is just as true and real here on Earth as it is on the other side of the galaxy. Hence the book's title Pi in the Sky. This is why it is thought that mathematics is the universal language of intelligent creatures everywhere....
Barrow goes on to discuss Platonic views in detail. The most interesting idea is what Platonist mathematics has to say about Artificial Intelligence (it does not think it is really possible). The final conclusion of Platonism is one of near mysticism. Barrow writes:
Do there exist mathematical theorems that our brains could never comprehend? If so, then Platonic mathematical realms may exist, if not then math is a human invention. We may as well ask, "Is there a God?" The answer for or against does not change our relationship to mathematics. Mathematics is something that we as humans can understand as far as we need...
Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow - Roger Penrose
9.2 Moreover, in the particular Gödelian arguments that are needed for Part 1 of Shadows, there is no need to consider as "unassailable", any mathematical proposition other than a P-sentence (or perhaps the negation of such a sentence). Even in the very weakest form of Platonism, the truth or falsity of P-sentences is an absolute matter. I should be surprised if even Moravec's robot could make much of a case for alternative attitudes with regard to P-sentences (though it is true that some strong intuitionists have troubles with unproved P-sentences). There is no problem of the type that Feferman is referring to, when he brings up the matter of whether, for example, Paul Cohen is or is not a Platonist. The issues that might raise doubts in the minds of people like Cohen - or Gödel, or Feferman, or myself, for that matter - have to do with questions as to the absolute nature of the truth of mathematical assertions which refer to large infinite sets. Such sets may be nebulously defined or have some other questionable aspect in relation to them. It is not very important to any of the arguments that are given in Shadows whether very large infinite sets of this nature actually exist or whether they do not or whether or not it is a conventional matter whether they exist or not. Feferman seems to be suggesting that the type of Platonism that I claimed for Cohen (or Gödel) would require that for no such set could its existence be a conventional matter. I am certainly not claiming that - at least my own form of Platonism does not demand that I need necessarily go to such extremes. (Incidentally, I was speaking to someone recently, who knows Cohen, and he told me that he would certainly describe him as a Platonist. I am not sure where that, in itself, would leave us; but it is my direct personal impression that the considerable majority of working mathematicians are at least "weak" Platonists - which is quite enough. I should also refer Feferman to the informal survey of mathematicians reported on by Davis and Hersch in their book The Mathematical Experience, 1982, which confirms this impression.)
Heh. "the axiomatic impossibility". Now there's a constructive argument.
Your can try to make up a language of your own to further your evangelical objectives, but in English an atheist is defined as. One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.
"This requires the atheist to believe the world around us came about solely through radom reactions between matter and energy."
No. Atheist do not believe that. Thats a misrepresentation promoted by those that seem so insecure in their faith that they need to misrepresent competing ideologies. From Is Evolution Random:
"As one Creationist put it, Random forces could not have produced a world of living things. Scientists agree. That is why the Theory of Evolution contains something which is not random. Darwin said that there was natural selection. And today, Evolution contains other kinds of selection. This is entirely different from saying that evolution is directed.Some parts of the history of life seem to be pretty random. Take, for example, the meteorite that killed all the dinosaurs. However, selection is different. It means that somehow, some individuals succeeded in leaving more descendants than other individuals did. And, it means that they succeeded for some reason. Reasons are not random. "
Pi isn't axiomatic, it is derivative. And the axioms it is derived from are arbitrary; they are only selected because they seem to have utility as such.
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