Classic. He can throw a mean curve ball. Just to be clear... I'm talking about God as Creator...not God in the flesh for 33 years. I was taught that He/It/She/Whatever is formless....in the OT Moses tells God he wants to see him, and God responds saying, "the best you can do is see where I've been as I move away." The Hellenized imagery of God (flowing robes and white hair - Zeus) isn't Biblical.
It is not arrogant at all. In the world of science there must be concrete proof or evidence to assert that something DOES exist. Until that happens the most open-minded view would be to assume that it doesn't. I guess maybe acknowledging the possibility that a deity exists is the most open-minded you can get, but in either case it is just as narrow-minded if not more to assert that a deity exists without any sort of evidence.
Yet. You can choose to fill that gap in human knowledge with God, if you like. I choose not to and just let the gap be a gap for now.
I like the theory that we are one universe in a sea of endless and infinite multiverses. Some that have "started" before us and some that have yet to start.
Usually the ones that believe in afterlives are the ones that belief in a deity. I personally don't believe in either.
I think the position that when you die that is it, there is nothing, is narrow minded. That is one of an infinite number of possibilities and there is way too much we don't know to say that. The position that there is no city of gold, or 76 virgins, seems a little more understandable. Hence the question.
Sure if you talk about inflation and all that, something happened before the big bang, but let's look at the different ways you can slice it. Time...either goes back infinitely or it has a beginning. If it goes back infinitely that creates a sort of paradox in that where the heck this all this stuff come from? Maybe it came from two colliding branes, but then, why did they collide and where did the branes come from? It's just endless and endless and that's quite irrational. If time has a beginning, than that implies that at somepoint, there was no space-time. Not just in our dimensions, but in any dimension. There was no change. Everything had to be static. If that's the case, and there was a static "something" than it begs the question - where did that something come from? So that gets us to the idea that there was nothing. Non-existence. At some point, no matter what you subscribe to that's not infinity, you have to have spontaneous generation from non-existence to existence. Problem with that is, non-existence is completely irrational as well. So a beginning makes no sense. And going back infinitely doesn't either. And the notion of a deity implies something that defies space, time, and existence. But if such a "deity" "decided" to create what we see, then that bounds that deity to space and time itself. So that's not plausible either. They point I am trying to make is that there is no rational explanation to existence. None. Even if you could make something up...it still would leave questions.
How is the description of a god who has conversations with people, makes decisions, and purportedly made man in his image not anthropomorphism?
good question...i meant solely that the God I understand through Christianity is not one who has a finite body...or is concrete in that way. making man in his image doesn't mean he made us to look like him...it means he made us with the same capacity for creating...it's honestly a poor way to translate what the Hebrew text says, but it's just stuck for a long time.
If God(s) really cares about us and want us as his followers, all he has to do is to stand in the sky of NY, Paris, London, whatever large cities he choose and proclaim he is the true god, and we will all believe in God. Apparently he use to do this long time ago, why not try it one more time?
This has always struck me as interesting. I'm no longer familiar enough with biblical Hebrew to know for sure, but isn't the word used distinct from the one used for procreation?
Maybe not 100% of the time, but human did not get to where we are today by being narrow minded. If we hope to advance as a race and maybe one day roam the galaxy, narrow minded is certain not the way to go.
I get annoyed when I'm casually associated with screaming, bearded men when someone at a diner in Arkansas asks me if I'm Muslim. But the resulting explanation and disclaimer lead to great conversation. That's just being a member of the human species and using social skills to get along with everyone. Hopefully better education discourages people from jumping to hasty assumptions about your beliefs or lack thereof and a mainstream theist.
Depends. If the "God done it." crowd asserts that idea with confidence then that's wrong. On the other hand, if they're like me who only believe without shoving it down people's throats, I don't think that's narrow-minded. Since we have such little information about pre-BB, believing in the kind of entity I described on the first page isn't narrow-minded. Often the answer is that this is irrelevant and superfluous. I understand, but that's not the focus of the poll. It's not as irrational as it's increasingly being thought to be for a person to make a guess about pre-Big Bang. Obviously most religious people go above and beyond that guess, but I'm not talking about them exactly. The poll asks whether the person who says they know for sure there is no deity isn't being as open-minded.
I disagree, though I'd like to amend the generalization I made. Out of the major physicists alive today, most seem to have a Kantian world view thanks to the implications of quantum mechanics (Schrödinger's Cat, the role of observer in creating reality, etc.). Some might believe like Einstein in a Spinozan kind of god in addition to Kant's POV, but as for Witten, Weinberg, Hooft, Penrose, and Dyson, I don't think that is the case though I haven't researched their specific attitudes. I think if you work with QM, Einstein's GR/SR, and more, then you by default have a Kantian perspective. I have to get back to work soon, but I'll borrow these paragraphs to give a brief difference between the two. Kant is, you know, a very complex philosopher so this does very little justice. "The Spinozistic solution is to think of humans as nothing more than a piece of the natural world. At the beginning of Book III of the Ethics, Spinoza denounces those who want to think of humanity as "an empire within an empire" -- as something distinct. Spinoza then goes on to use his theory of physics (how bodies affect other bodies) to develop a theory of the emotions, virtues, and vices. The Kantian solution is to think of humans as not merely outside of the natural world but also as (somehow) creating it. Space and time are "forms of intuition"; cause and substance are "categories of the understanding." The world as it is in itself -- including "the real us" -- is non-temporal, non-spatial, non-causal, and non-substantial -- and so entirely unknowable and yet thinkable (indeed, necessarily thinkable!). Thus, while Kant might concede to Spinoza that, with respect to knowledge, humans are only a bit of nature, nevertheless we also stand outside of the natural (=knowable) world. Kant shows how our capacity to stand outside of the knowable (=natural) world is deeply connected with our "spontaneity," i.e. our capacity to judge, to evaluate, and to think. So, on the one hand, a picture of human beings as nothing other than bits of nature and entirely knowable in those terms (Spinoza); on the other, a picture of human beings as standing outside of nature in some way that we can think but cannot know (Kant). " This is another page that illustrates where I'm coming from.
Ah, I was referring to the Spinozan outlook on god and the spiritual, which is (I'd argue) advocated by Einstein and, to a certain extent, Hawking. I'm not familiar enough with the philosophical attitudes of your other examples to comment on their take on the spiritual. In regards to Kant's perspective on humanity, I agree with you. But I thought the subject of the thread was atheism and really smart dudes...but maybe I'm misinterpreting your point above.
