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The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist.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 ...
Given two or more agents of roughly equivalent intellectual capacity (a required mathematical qualification, but generally true for the human population at large), one can prove that an agent can optimize the benefit to themselves over the long run by trying the optimize the benefit they give to others through their interactions. In other words, the optimal behavior is to try to benefit others, as this will maximize the benefit you receive from the interactions as well. Cooperation in good faith is a utility maximizer for all involved parties.
Related to this, the optimal way for interacting with defectors is to employ retaliatory defection in like kind. Punishment or due consequences, in other words.
So to sum up the major mathematical consequences of IPD in more colloquial vernacular: Always cooperate and be fair to your fellow man by default. If those who you interact with abuse this for their own benefit, you must exact retaliatory consequences for their misbehavior.
(This is the problem with the gov't social welfare system at large. It is a clear violation of game theory for the purported results it is trying to achieve i.e. the system was designed in a fantasyland where mathematics doesn't apply. Our system does not deal with defectors appropriately at all, which generates a necessarily sub-optimal outcome.)
Thank you.
Now this "Charlie Chaplin Modern Times" kind of deity, running around flipping switches, pulling handles, turning dials, adjusting mixtures of chemicals, tweaking relationships, etc., may be just what it takes to generate a "stunningly improbable" universe. It seems that way to me, but I don't know. My personal opinion is that a universe where things just had to turn out this way, complete with life, consciousness, intelligence, and free will, is a far more elegant, even sublime creation, than a Rube Goldberg situation that requires constant attention.
I see the party's been moved to this thread!
PH, here's an interesting idea to reflect upon, from Dean Overman:
"If time and space came into existence with the Big Bang, the conclusion becomes invalid that the beginning of the universe in time would have been preceded by a time. But this implies that the very initial Big Bang itself was not a temporal event. This conclusion has profound implications for physical, metaphysical, and theological formulations. German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, who physicist Frank Tipler has credited with increasing his understanding of many physical concepts, has written: 'This suggests to theology a new formulation of the idea of creation: the divine act of creation does not occur in time -- rather, it constitutes an eternal act, contemporaneous with all time, that is, with the entire world process. Yet this world process has a temporal beginning, because it takes place in time. [Planck time -- the first 10^-43 second after the Big Bang -- is "t{ime}-zero".] In this sentence I assert that eternity itself is described by statements of time. With a music parable one might speak of eternity as the sounding together of all time in a sole present. Elsewhere I have developed the concept of eternity from the human experience of time, from the relativity of the distinction of past, present, and future corresponding to the relativity of the directions in space. In view of the relativity of the modes of time to the aspect of the human being experiencing time, this resulted in the assumption that all, time, if it could be, so to speak, surveyed from a "place" outside the course of time, would have to appear as contemporaneous [A-G -- this is what I imagine all of space-time would look like, if we could "get out of it" and take a perch in our hypothetical 5th time dimension].... Understood in the sense of the suggestions above, the concept of eternity comprehends all time and everything temporal in itself -- a conception of the relationship of time and eternity that goes back to Augustine and is connected to the Israelite understanding of eternity as unlimited duration throughout time. The world view of the theory of relativity also can be understood in the sense of a last contemporaneousness of all events that for us are partitioned into a temporal sequence.'" [Emphasis added]
[Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. I bought the book, and can't wait for it to arrive!]
Just try thinking that through, PH -- it is a most amazing insight.
BB, I'm an old science fiction buff. I'm very familiar with this concept, because it's used in many -- if not most -- time travel stories. The problem of writing such a story is that for your character to be dashing forward and backward in time, he needs some kind of "place outside the course of time" in which to function. This is where the "Time Patrol" has its headquarters. In Asimov's classic The End of Eternity, his time traveling cops, or agents, or whatever they were, lived somewhere -- it was never explained where -- from which they could observe all the centuries, and zip in wherever necessary to improve things, then return to their headquarters to observe the effects which would then ripple through the centuries -- while leaving the agents unaffected in their "neutral territory."
This is a great plot device. It's a plot necessity. Otherwise your lead character and his memory is going to get altered along with everything else when he makes some adjustment in history.
The problem is -- at least I see it as a problem -- there just ain't no such place. You're either in the universe, which means being in time, or you're nowhere. There are no priviliged reference frames. Except in science fiction novels.
Don't bother, most atheists would not deign to soil them selves with such an "erudite" suggestion.
Generations from now, Heinlein will be regarded as one of the most important writers of the 20th Century (in my always humble opinion).
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.I always wonder how supposedly bright people can seriously hold such grand contradictions. Surely they cause massive friction as the concepts rub & scrape against each other inside their brains? But I gradually came to understand that the ability to hold major contradictory thoughts is endemic to humans - though I still can't see why.
The only reason I can think of for why it should be a good thing, is because otherwise too many people would die of spontaneous combustion.
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