I quite agree, and I’m not going to try to do any conversions by the sword. Nonetheless, I believe that valid beliefs are based on reason, and I believe atheism is unreasonable. Given that reason is something of a theme here, I thought I’d explore the arguments back and forth amongst the Austrian populace.
You are thinking about it wrong. The statement “there is a god” is a positive and unsupported claim.
Understood.
What makes Christianity reasonable? or Theism? or even Deism?
Agnosticism : humans can’t really figure out whether the universe is ethernal, or has been created, whether it is infinite…or something else, whether there’s a god or not, etc., etc.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to realize that reason has some limits…
IDigSluts, huh? Charming, Beavis.
In any case, I have tried to support it. You might not agree with my supports (if you’ve even read them), but theism is a natural option for answering the question, “How did we get here?”
If you want to engage in childish attacks and name calling, then that is your prerogative. My name is a play on words from Eugene Slutsky; a well known economist known for the Slutsky decomposition. It is an equation that decomposes the income and substitution effect.
Argument from design fails. It also begs the question of who created the creator?
The only correct answer is to the question “How did we get here”? “I do not know”. That is the honest and correct answer. To assume god is to be presumptious. Just because we don’t understand something, does not mean “god did it”. Your statement is nothing more than a God of the Gaps argument.
You are pulling my leg, of course. You are not really telling me you are serious about the name IDigSluts_ky (as in jelly?). I feel like a sucker just asking. Otherwise, you really need to reconsider that, no matter how much you like Mr. Slutsky.
Because you say so, right. Well, I disagree. In any case, since we can only scientifically observe physical reality, the necessity for causation can only be established for physical objects.
I’ll give you this much credit, oh digger of sluts. You at least aren’t coming out and saying you do know it came about by naturalistic processes. I still think it is a reasonable conclusion to say someone had to make all this, to think up its exquisite order. We can’t know for sure, of course, but on the other hand, I can’t actually know that you exist, either, or that any of us existed before this very moment. Nonetheless, we make such assumptions all the time, because otherwise the world becomes incoherent.
Relating this to economics, this is a Keynesian/NeoClassical arguement, someone has to run the economy, to think up it exquisite (dis)order. In Austrian Economics, the economy would spontaneously order itself, quite similar to how many Atheists would view how the word was made, spontaneous order (over a couple billion years).
In jelly? I am not following. I would suggest you either google “Eugene Slutsky” or the “Slutsky equation”. It is an equation that links Marshallian and Hicksian demands. My name is a play on words.
Complexity does not imply a creator. Why would it? It is being presumptuous. It also suffers from infinite regress.
Who made the creator? What god are you referring to? An Abrahamic god or countless other abstractions of god created throughout human history. God is man’s creation, not the other way around.
If you want to believe in god, then that is your right. I really don’t see this conversation going anywhere productive and I do not want to get into a long drawn out debate about this.
Only because it always has. In all cases where we can actually confirm the origin of ordered complexity in physical objects, we find a conscious actor. It’s inductive, sure, but so is the law of gravity.
A non-physical consciousness with the ability to produce the physical universe and guide it somewhat in its evolution.
True, it is my right. It is your right to disbelieve, that is, be wrong. Congratulations, we’re all within our rights. Any more superfluous statements or atheist slogans you’d like to spout? Or even maybe an actual argument or a justification of your position that “It also suffers from infinite regress”?
I think we have a keeper here.
Who created this “complex” creator? You are stating that all complexity is derived from a creator. This creator has to be complex. Hence, this creator needed a creator. Hence, infinite regress.
How does this creator guide the universe’s evolution?
I’m actually surprised there isn’t more mentions of Ignosticism; I used to be an Athiest (and before so, a Deist), but eventually felt Ignosticism had the more logically consistient argument.
In any case, I’m intriqued by this supposed evidence some in physics have proposed that gives creedence to a “creator”, but the concept of infinite regress seems to take out the hype.
Are you refering to 'Ignosticism is the theological position that every other theological position (including agnosticism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological concepts" ?
What do people think about this http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ckank/FultonsLair/013/nock/earning_immortality.html
It’s a little piece from Mr. Nock about spirituality.
That’s one of the definitions, but I was more referring to the following:
"…The first view is that a coherent definition of God must be presented before the question of the existence of God can be meaningfully discussed. Furthermore, if that definition cannot be falsified, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God (per that definition) is meaningless. In this case, the concept of God is not considered meaningless; the term “God” is considered meaningless.
The second view is synonymous with theological noncognitivism, and skips the step of first asking “What is meant by God?” before proclaiming the original question “Does God exist?” meaningless."
And the later:
“…abstractions, taken singly or in combination, cannot be said to be false; rather, they are muddled, self-contradictory, linguistically empty, or perhaps poetic. Hence, one cannot meaningfully expound on the existence or nonexistence of God.”
I’m mainly just simply curious that Ignosticism doesn’t seem to come up though, although that could be due to misconceptions that equate Ignosticism as either synomous with apatheism or agnosticism, or that it’s simply a mis-spelling of agnosticism.
What do you think?
Funny; I get the opposite impression - I never encounter anyone who’s genuinely religious in real life, AFAICT (I only know of one woman, a friend of my mother; some people go to church on occasion, etc., but just as a social thing). Online, they seem to be everywhere, and among libertarians there seem to be a disproportionate number of the really crazy ones.
What does that mean? The statement that “there is no God” is as (un)supportable as the statement that “there is no hunk of Swiss cheese orbiting Alpha Centauri” - while there’s certainly no way to prove there isn’t such a hunk of cheese, there’s no reason at all to think there might be - to take the position that there is one, or even might be one, is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
First, define what you mean by “consciousness”.
I’ll take the Jaynesian position: consciousness is a learned phenomenon, and requires language. Calculators, lightning and rocks don’t have language and can’t learn consciousness…
Your position doesn’t even attempt to solve the “problem”; you just hand-wave over it. The existence of a watchmaker, in the literal sense, requires the existence of the watchmaker’s parents…and their parents, and so on and so forth. You’re putting the watchmaker in the position of the watch and saying there must be some “god” who made the man, but that’s just raising the same question: where did the god come from? If you have an answer to that question - any answer at all - you can use the same answer for the man and dispense with the need for the god!
There are a few things that were touched on in this thread that sparked my interest.
Firstly, I think that the notion of spontaneous order may very well apply at the meta or universal level. That is, I think that both creationists, intelligent design proponents and the vast majority of secularists and scientists alike are wrong in the assumption that the universe had to have been created from a central point or plan. I believe that the big bang theory contains some of the exact same fundamental flaws that creationism does in that the big bag theory is merely a secularized creation theory that still assumes that there had to be a “first cause”. Furthermore, it makes little sense to me how someone can reject that our earthly existance requires a human planner yet somehow still cling to the idea that it requires a divine central planner to function in an orderly manner. And the inverse is true as well, I.E. I think that consistancy would force someone who rejects the notion of a divine central planner to apply the concept to earthly or human matters. So I see a certain synergy between atheism and anarchism in that both of them ultimately deny the need for a central planner, anarchism being in earthly terms and atheism in more metaphysical terms.
Secondly, it has always struck be that both the “god as watchmaker” notion and the secularized versions of the same thing have fatalistic implications that inherently make it incompatible with any notion of free will (or compatibalism). The notion that god created some central “divine plan” that essentially makes your entire life function as if you were merely god’s sock puppet runs entirely against the notion that you have any degree of control over yourself and the world around you whatsoever. It cannot be both fatalistic and free at once, although it can be deterministic and free at once (determinism may only imply deterministic factors while fatalism is more of a hyper-determinism that leaves no head room at all for the individual to be a causal agent themselves). I’ve struggled with the free will vs. determinism debate for a while and it seems to me at this point that compatibalism makes the most sense (ironically, I used to attack compatibalism more than I did incompatibalism).