What are the supposed differences between all these ridiculous names? Atheist, agnostic, ignostic, etc; AFAIC, they’re all the same thing.
In an earlier post, that is for some reason still pending moderation (I guess for including too many links? It’s a bit annoying…), I question the issue of many thinking Ignosticism/agnostic/athiesm/etc. are all the same. They are in fact fundamentally different.
[from the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism]
"Theodore Drange sees atheism and agnosticism as positions which accept “God exists” as a meaningful proposition; atheists judge it to be “false or probably false” and agnostics consider it to be inconclusive until further evidence is met. If Drange’s definitions are accepted, ignostics are neither atheists nor agnostics. An atheist would say, “I don’t believe God exists”; an agnostic would say, “I don’t know whether or not God exists”; and an ignostic would say, "I don’t know what you mean when you say, ‘God exists’ ".
Ignosticism is not to be confused with apatheism, a position of apathy toward the existence of God. An apatheist may see the statement “God exists” as meaningless, yet they may also see it as meaningful, and perhaps even true."
[from http://ignosticism.org]
“Ignosticism, a word coined by the late Rabbi Sherwin Wine, is the view that the question of whether or not God exists is inherently meaningless because (1) the notion of God has no consistent definition among the various religious factions, and (2) all definitions of God refer to words that do not point to anything verifiable or testable in the ‘real world’ but only to presupposed ‘attributes’ extracted through an arbitrary collection of other words.”
Additionaly, some compare Ignosticism with theological noncognitivism, although I think the term “Ignosticism” is relativley new, in comparison with some of the others above.
I think the religion vs. atheism is an overblown false dichotomy. I have been spiritual from an early age, but the experience has always been only personal. I have never had an interest in organized religion nor have I had any evangelical aspirations. So to me, talking about religion vs. atheism is pointless. At least, until someone wants to regulate other people’s lives based on religion or atheism.
I came to the conclusion that it is pointless when I realized the limitation of language. Words function only when we have a common reference point. We all know what the word ‘table’ refers to, since we have seen a table or can give a coherent description of a table to those who have not seen one. Words even work with some emotions, since they seem to be mostly comparable. But what about intensely personal experiences, like spirituality? I could try to explain my own experiences, but I would have to reduce them to common reference points. This would not convey them accurately nor coherently.
Ditto on the bold parts; the limitations of language is partially what made Athiesim less consistient to me.
Your argument is not for atheism but for a large pantheon in polytheism, even an animism. For markets may, as a whole, be undesigned, but are made up of a very large number of designed and conscious decisions. Therefore, your analogy fails to support atheism.
The watchmaker is an imprecise analogy, because the watchmaker has a body. Only ordered, physical bodies whose origins have been seen always have a designer. No one has seen the creation of a consciousness. No scientific data can thus be compiled, and no pattern shown. My statement that highly ordered complexity must have a designer is based on observations only of physical objects, and thus can only logically be extended over objects in that category. God, in not having an inherent physical form, is not bound by this rule. Only physical phenomena need a cause; you may guess that non-physical entities do as well, but there is no data to support that, and indeed, as you say, logic would tend to render such a need incoherent if the purely mental/spiritual is to have the meaning and purpose given here.
Bah, intellectual laziness. At least some aspects of the nature of God can be derived from the purpose and functions God would have to fulfill in order for this universe to have come about. God has a conscious mind. God has at least the power to create the initial conditions for the creation of the universe and provide some guidance during its development. God has no inherent physical form. God has desires, and therefore emotions.
Oh, but ISTM we already have a word for that - it’s “idiot”. Or “liar”, I suppose, depending on whether the person saying “I don’t know what you mean” really doesn’t or just pretends not to. (There is a third possibility: the person doesn’t understand English and only knows the phrase “I don’t know what you mean when you say …” and then repeats back whatever phrase he heard. This could also be a computer, or a well-trained parrot or something)
Gets my vote for cop out of the century.
So much for contributing to dialouge [:^)].
I agree that traditional religious authority lead me to prefer freedom. But what led me to libertarianism was actually the beliefs of Anton Lavey.
I prefer to see myself as god. Not that I can perform miracles, but that I am in control of my actions. And because of that, I can inflict harm on others, but i choose not too because it is social and philosophically wrong and counter productive. Liberty I see as being able to create your own enviroment without authority from others.
And I’ve read that there exists a space between action and thought so that we really don’t have free will. But the fact that I can refuse to do something proves free will existst. I have power, hence if there is a god, and no free will, then (a I am stronger than god. or (b there is no god. I prefer B as a more plausible answer
I define god as one who has power over free will
That’s an interesting answer.
When asked about my religious beliefs, I usually say, “We are each our own God”.
It can only be your own statement you refer to, which is a fairly bizzare self-referential thing, but be that as it may…
How about instead of just denigrating my argument, you try to answer it. If it be so ridiculous as you imply, then it should be easily demolished. But then, I’ve only seen one atheist here who has actually offered even a poor defense of his position.
Bwah hah hah! Hail SATAN! Szandor the lion-tamer and his little black book.
Ahem, anyway, I have some sympathy for your position. I’ve come to see the antinomean position as a fairly childish one, though. I have no problem with the man as god paradigm, either, as my own faith has the goal of apotheosis.
There’s nothing there to answer.
I love how those argueing for a god tend to remove every single piece of criteria for logic and evidence one by one as a way to “prove” it. If god is not subject to logic and the laws of the universe, is this not the same thing as non-existance? At least according to our perception and currently existing scientific knowledge, something that exists “outside of time and space” is the same thing as something that doesn’t exist. The natural universe is all that we are capable of percieving. Something that is outside of it must be assumed to either not exist or at least be impercievable.
Anyways, I believe what Paul was talking about is the infinite regress that both the formal concept of a god and the big bang theory run into: what created the creator or what caused the first cause? This leads to a paradox because the moment that one points to an “origin of the origin”, the same logic applies and you end up with an infinite regress and paradox. The only way out of the paradox is either (1) to posit infinity, which is unprovable or (2) some notion of spontaneous order. Many people try to avoid this paradox by simply declaring god to be immune from the laws of the universe and logic and hence removing such criteria altogether, which seems rather absurd and like a cop-out.
The laws of the universe, I guess you could say so. But nothing I said violates pure logic. Indeed, I believe God to be bound by logic, but that trying to apply the laws of cause and effect, something not necessitated by pure logic but only by our observations of the physical world, would be fallacious. I am almost surprised at the lack of logical precision being shown here.
As for things that people think exist but cannot prove directly, there are a number of postulated substances and objects in physics which said to exist not on the basis of direct observation, but based on the observations of their effects. Now, I don’t necessarily buy that all those postulates are true, but those that do dominate the physics establishment. Similarly, while you are correct in saying we cannot directly observe a God (or any!) consciousness because it is outside of space (I never said it was outside of time, mind is fairly meaningless without time, but explain what and why time is!), we can nonetheless see that the universe, really from first to last, needed a designer, and that logically that designer must preexist the designed, since the universe is physical and thus bound by cause and effect.
I don’t see how it logically follows that order needs a single designer or planner. Why can’t the universe be like a free market, with no real central plan? Why does human interpersonal relations not require a designer, but our existential character does? But in either case, even if we accept your assumption that the universe needed a designer, this does nothing to address the paradox of where that designer comes from. The laws of logic would require that the designer had a designer too, and once again this leads to an infinite regress. The only way to resolve the paradox is to question its assumptions or to essentially remove the question from the criteria of logic altogether at some point. Logic does not allow paradoxes to objectively exist because logic is a method for weeding out contradictions. If something contains contradictions, logic resolves it. So long as the formal concept of a god contains inconsistancies, it must be considered illogical to that extent. And things that are illogical don’t exist in any objective sense.
We don’t have free will in a fundamental sense, only a perception of free will. Everything I’ve read about physics and quantum mechanics points to predictability. Even the more erratic elements of quantum mechanics are ultimately predictable, if my understanding is correct. This makes us sophisticated reactive information processors in a universal chain reaction.
But this is such a fine point that it is essentially useless. Even if it is true, it is merely a philosophical realization with no actual application.
By the way, I love how atheists cling to the same tired deflections (infinite regression) to try to explain away the necessity of a designer, without ever actually demonstrating or even suggesting a method whereby the order of the universe could have come about.
A watch, really, is too complicated to effectively make the point. If you come to the beach and see three pieces of driftwood and a piece of seaweed, there is of course nothing special there. If the drifwood is arranged so it stands as a little pyramid, held together at the top with a loose wrap of seaweed, you can be virtually certain a person was involved. Why? Because nature does not do that sort of thing on its own, putting things in higher-energy, higher-order states than is necessary. Nature’s tendency is to decay order, not create it.