Ask an atheist

[Flying Pig]

Ability to experience consciously.

Now it's a very moot point what exactly that means, and even then it's an even more moot point what it is that makes an animal certifiable conscious. It seems very arrogant, certainly, to assume that we're the only ones who do.

 

[Linkman226]

Now it's a very moot point what exactly that means, and even then it's an even more moot point what it is that makes an animal certifiable conscious. It seems very arrogant, certainly, to assume that we're the only ones who do.

When did I say we're the only ones to do so?

 

[Leoreth]

I'm sure "eating another" is considered universally rude by at the very least most mammals, to put it mildly.

Really? Which mammals?

Ability to experience consciously.

Which is impossible to determine from the outside. Just because plants don't emote doesn't mean they don't have conscience.

 

[Linkman226]

Really? Which mammals?

As in no mammal enjoys being eaten.

Which is impossible to determine from the outside. Just because plants don't emote doesn't mean they don't have conscience.

Conscience has a physical basis in intercellular communication, which in plants is lacking.

 

[Leoreth]

Conscience as we know it.

 

[Linkman226]

Hmmm... that'd odd. I thought I responded to your comment, "Which mammals?"

I meant that no mammal enjoys being eaten.

And consciousness as we know it is a good enough guideline for me.

 

[Agent Cooper]

Conscience has a physical basis in intercellular communication, which in plants is lacking.

I'm confused. Are we talking about conscience or consciousness?

If it's the concept of consciousness, we have plenty of models and theories but very little actual knowledge of what consciousness really is.

 

[Leoreth]

Sorry, yes, consciousness. Conscience was my fault, stupid English, do you have to derive everything from Latin?

 

[Agent Cooper]

Sorry, yes, consciousness. Conscience was my fault, stupid English, do you have to derive everything from Latin?

No problem

Actually, both concepts could be revelant in this discussion.

 

[El_Machinae]

Which is impossible to determine from the outside. Just because plants don't emote doesn't mean they don't have conscience.

The problem with being too onerous with your criteria is that you very quickly run into the problem of whether you can believe that other people are even conscious.

One of the major contributions of cognitive psychology was to just fricken agree that people are conscious, and then to study the process from there. There's no reason to think that animals aren't conscious, even with different gradients of consciousness.

"Plants could be conscious too!" is not really a counter-point, because while it's possibly true (in an abstractly theoretical way), it merely expands moral considerations. It doesn't restrict the moral considerations of human or animal consciousness.

 

[Leoreth]

My point was that every "threshold" you set is necessarily arbitrary (even on animals were we agree they're conscious the level of consciousness varies), and that you can't avoid setting a threshold for practical reasons.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

Here's something vaguely interesting that was brought to my attention: Alvin Plantinga's argument that naturalism and evolution are contradictory. Yeah, I know. Just read the quote first (from Plantinga's Wikipedia page).

Spoiler :

In Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, he argues that the truth of evolution is an epistemic defeater for naturalism (i.e. if evolution is true, it undermines naturalism). His basic argument is that if evolution and naturalism are both true, human cognitive faculties evolved to produce beliefs that have survival value (maximizing one's success at the four F's: "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing"), not necessarily to produce beliefs that are true. Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-cum-evolution model, there is reason to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.

The argument does not assume any necessary correlation (or uncorrelation) between true beliefs and survival. Making the contrary assumption—that there is in fact a relatively strong correlation between truth and survival—if human belief-forming apparatus evolved giving a survival advantage, then it ought to yield truth since true beliefs confer a survival advantage. Plantinga counters that, while there may be overlap between true beliefs and beliefs that contribute to survival, the two kinds of beliefs are not the same, and he gives the following example with a man named Paul:

“Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief... Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it... Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.[34]"

I'm not sure how this is supposed to make sense. I interpret that it boils down to: you can't trust your non-belief, so it's better to just believe. I don't think I need to explain that is a terrible argument, but maybe I'm missing something. Not only does this seem tautological, but it's a bit of a non sequitur as well. I don't know how you get from this argument to any available theistic belief. This doesn't help us decide which religion (if any) are true at all. Thoughts?

 

[Leoreth]

the four F's: "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing"

Never heard that one before

Now to address his point: his argument seems to consist of two points:

1. That evolved human thinking would lead to models that are suitable for survival and reproduction, not for accessing the truth and
2. That a "God-controlled" evolution (i.e. not naturalistic) can make sure our way of thinking would lead to models that are true.

Both points suffer from the vague definition of "truth" in a scientific context, and argument (1) exploits this to set up a false dichotomy between "true understanding of things" and "false understanding that only furthers survival". That doesn't make much sense in my opinion. If there's any basis of judging the "truth" of an explanation for something, it's its usefulness, i.e. it's capability to predict something. This sounds like something inherently useful to me. So his premise is already rather shaky.

Argument (2) then goes on to contradict his very premise. He argues that the process of evolution increases the capabilities in the "fours F's" and together with (1), this doesn't necessarily lead to true conceptions about the world. But then, add God: instant true conceptions! (but it's still evolution.) This goes against his own definition of evolution and its consequences because in its own words, these "true beliefs" that are induced by God are neither created by the process of evolution nor do they increase the species' capabilities in survival or reproduction. So, it isn't really evolution anymore.

So, from his attempt to show "evolution and naturalism are not compatible" we follow "evolution and non-naturalism are not compatible". Oops.

Of course it's possible that I misunderstood something or important aspects got lost in that wikipedia summary, but that's my attempt at analyzing it.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

Yeah, I tried to get through his lecture on youtube, but his droning voice was putting me to sleep. I listened to a debate between Plantinga and Daniel Dennett a while back (also on youtube) but can't remember the particulars. Seek those out if you're adequately intrigued.

 

[sanabas]

Here's something vaguely interesting that was brought to my attention: Alvin Plantinga's argument that naturalism and evolution are contradictory. Yeah, I know. Just read the quote first (from Plantinga's Wikipedia page).



I'm not sure how this is supposed to make sense. I interpret that it boils down to: you can't trust your non-belief, so it's better to just believe. I don't think I need to explain that is a terrible argument, but maybe I'm missing something. Not only does this seem tautological, but it's a bit of a non sequitur as well. I don't know how you get from this argument to any available theistic belief. This doesn't help us decide which religion (if any) are true at all. Thoughts?

Bits of the argument are reasonable. Our willingness to believe stuff in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of conradictory evidence, does seem to be something that has evolved, that did help us spread. The fact that this propensity for belief has proved useful doesn't say anything about the truth value of those beliefs. Stuff isn't true just because lots of people believe it. Especially when you can see good evolutionary reasons for lots of people believing it. All absolutely correct.

Belief in a supreme being/beings of some kind is a great example. It's something that's been prevalent in every culture I can think of, both present & past, it's clearly something that's been useful, or it's a side effect of something that's been useful (such as the way we tell stories, which makes passing on knowledge much easier), but being useful says nothing about whether it's true.

As an argument against a particular belief system being true because it's widespread, it makes perfect sense. As an argument against evolution (or any other hard science arrived at with our well-tuned cognitive faculties), it's complete crap, for the fairly simple reason that evolution isn't a belief system. His argument is the equivalent of saying that if evolution were true, that'd be reason to doubt the veracity of Pythagoras' Theorem, because I can only prove Pythagoras' Theorem by using my cognitive faculties, which have been tuned for survival, not truth.

I did look at wiki a bit more, and went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism Where it talks about the conditional probability of R, given N & E, it's pretty much spot on. Our belief-generating faculties, our intuition, aren't actually that reliable in terms of delivering us true results. That's why there are so many scientific results that are counter-intuitive. That's why we use the scientific method in the first place. My intuition says I live somehwere flat, that I'm currently staionary, that I could travel 20,000 km around the world and I'd still be oriented the same way, with my head above my feet, that the sun moves across the sky everyday. From the point of view of surviving when there are tigers around, it doesn't matter that all those intuitive beliefs are wrong. When I'm safe from tigers, I don't have to just rely on my useful but false intuition, I can try and discover the actual truth, which is that I live on a big spheroid, that I'm only stationary relative to that spheroid, that if I travel 20,000 km I'll actually be oriented 180 degrees from the way I am now, and that I'm travelling around the sun, rather than the sun travelling across the sky.

Evolution has tuned intuition & belief to help with survival, not to be true. Therefore, intuition & beliefs aren't necessarily true. Which is why when we do science, evidence trumps what our advanced chimp brain intuitively believes.

 

[Ahovking]

First thing first i dont mean to be mean its just what i think

absence of evidence ?

Contrary to what many non-believers think, the Bible does not teach blind faith. In fact, the Bible actually tells believers to test everything, No other "holy" book tells its readers to actually put what it says to the test. And that In fact, the Bible says that the evidence for God's design of the universe is so strong that people are "without excuse" in rejecting God

If you look at

The Earth
Water
The human brain
The eye
The universe
The DNA code informs, programs a cell's behavior(oh yeah the explosion of energy and light was able to program cell's behavior)
uniform laws of nature
Evolution is Missing a Mathematical Formula
There is No Genetic Mechanism for Darwinian Evolution

from this this web site which explain much more
http://www.everystudent.com/features/isthere.html

you can see evolution is not proven its just a theory it hasn't been proven (like most theories that make sense at the moment if you look at history often theories end up being wrong.

Creationist and atheist are very similar (in that they are just theory)

But to me Creationist believe they must protect life all life old and young for they are all Gods creatures make more sense than a theory about The weak die out and the strong survive.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

What a load of bollocks.

Did you have a question?

 

[El_Machinae]

And that In fact, the Bible says that the evidence for God's design of the universe is so strong that people are "without excuse" in rejecting God

That's Paul's writing, iirc. It's a powerful statement, but Paul was extremely misinformed regarding the nature of the universe and natural history. This belief that it was 'obvious' was generated while in a deluded state of how things worked.

He cannot make an argument from authority, because he was wrong about how things were. We cannot hold it against him, obviously, he was working with what he had. But his conclusions are demonstrably false

 

[peter grimes]

The Earth
Water
The human brain
The eye
The universe
The DNA code informs, programs a cell's behavior(oh yeah the explosion of energy and light was able to program cell's behavior)
uniform laws of nature
Evolution is Missing a Mathematical Formula
There is No Genetic Mechanism for Darwinian Evolution

Earth: Can you point to some evidence [*not* from that website!! It's simply chock full of wrong!!!] of anything but natural processes at work? If not, then where do gods fit in here?

An Atheist would say that if there's no reason to invoke gods to explain something, then there's no reason to invoke gods to explain something. Yes, you read that correctly


Water: It's been long known that water derives its characteristics from its substituent elements: namely, 1 oxygens and 2 hydrogen. The way these 3 atoms interact is explained by the Strong Force, the ElectroMagnetic Force, and some Quantum Dynamics (please correct me if I'm messing this up, uppi!). There is nothing magical about water. It's all just chemistry. And all chemistry is just physics. And all physics is, well..... [link]

An atheist sees no evidence of gods meddling around here, therefore no reason to suppose that gods have anything at all to do with water.


The human brain: I'm not sure why you think this is evidence of gods. But so far, the more we learn about the brain (and other animal brains), the less room there is for gods to interact or influence it. For a long time people thought that consciousness must be something unique to humans, but there is less and less reason to think so. It was also mistakenly believed that consciousness was something related to neurological processes, yet somehow distinct from them. There is no very little reason to think this is the case. The more neurologists learn about how the brain works, the more we find that neurological processes - which are fundamentally electro-chemical events - explain the full range of brain states. In other words, there's nothing at all in our heads beyond wet chemistry.

An atheist sees nothing but chemistry, evolutionary biology, and (perhaps) psychology. No need to invoke gods to explain what we see.


The eye is the saddest most time-worn argument against special creation out there. I'll provide you with a link, and simply remind you that the eye is built backwards. No amateur biologist would ever design a photonic sensor like our eye: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxsnqamvl0Y

An atheist sees the form of the human eye is evidence against gods. You might want to strike that one from your list.


The universe: I'm assuming you mean that the entire universe is evidence that gods exist. Fair enough - there's not much to say about that. But if your gods need a whole universe to make themselves known, without being able to interfere with the elements of that universe - let alone interact with a few self-important primates on a silica-rich stone in the suburbs of an entirely middling galaxy in a nowhere corner of that vast creation, well... why bother to believe in it?

An atheist doesn't see the universe as evidence for gods. But many will also say 'yeah, ok, there might be gods outside our universe - but anything outside our universe by definition is not able to have any effect within the universe. So it's moot."


The DNA code informs, programs a cell's behavior(oh yeah the explosion of energy and light was able to program cell's behavior)
This is indeed a load of bollocks.
I assume you mean that DNA is the molecular code that contains the rules for building and operating a particular cell. This is, for the most part, correct. But there's no evidence of gods having had anything at all to do with this. It's true that evolutionary biologists don't yet know how DNA came to dominate the genetic coding world (which came first - the protein to make the DNA or the DNA that says how to make the protein that makes the DNA? ). But just because we don't yet know something is no reason to assume that gods must be behind it.

Every single thing that humans have ever come to know in the history of science have turned out NOT to have gods behind them.

As for the explosion of energy and light I think you might be talking about the big bang, which has nothing at all to do with DNA. It would be as if you're trying to find out how a car's engine works and you're hung up on how chloroplasts store the energy captured from photons. These things are not related at all.

An atheist is confused by this question.


uniform laws of nature Well, how else could it be? If the laws of nature were not uniform I have a hard time imagining how we'd ever come to find out anything about how the world works. For that matter, if the laws weren't uniform, I don't think the universe would even get to the point of solid matter condensing out of the big bang, let alone star formation. And without stars, there's no us. Every atom in your body was forged in the tremendous conflagration of the death of a star.

Isn't that truly amazing?!

An atheist isn't surprised by the uniform laws of nature - they may invoke some form of the anthropic principle.


Evolution is Missing a Mathematical Formula
No it's not. Not at all, in any way shape or form. Mathematics describes the underlying relationships between events. This applies to genetic and evolutionary events as well as molecular or planetary or subatomic events. There is a broad range of mathematical equations that allow evolutionary theory to make predictions. Just to find one, I googled evolutionary + population + dynamics. I clicked on the first paper listed in the Public Library of Science, and here's what I get:
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000601#s2

That's an equation they use to calculate the relative frequency and fitness of different gene variants in a population.

An atheist sees no term in the equations representing gods. j/k

An atheist familiar with even 6th grade biology know that evolutionary processes can be expressed by mathematical formulae.

There is No Genetic Mechanism for Darwinian Evolution
False. Though it's true that when Darwin wrote his On The Origin of Species he was unaware of a mechanism for heredity, Gregor Mendel was conducting his research on pea plants at about the same time! However, Mendel's work went undiscovered by the rest of the scientific community for a long time. When it was rediscovered, it caused quite a stir because it added support to Darwin's idea of evolution via natural selection.

So it's just wrong for you to claim this.

An atheist familiar with the rudiments of biology sees the error in your statement, and tries to show you the truth.

In fact, the Bible actually tells believers to test everything

Wow! I never knew the bible said that. That's great - you should! This is also one of the tenets of the scientific method. I support this approach whole-heartedly. Because if you do honestly investigate the world around you, you won't find any evidence of any gods anywhere. But you have to investigate honestly.

Creationist and atheist are very similar (in that they are just theory)

Atheism isn't a theory (nor is creationism). Atheism isn't any more of a theory than 'non-unicornism' is a theory. Atheism is nothing more than the stance that there aren't any gods, and there never were.

Creationism isn't a theory, either. A theory is a framework that explains a group of observations and generates models to make predictions, which are then tested - and the theory will be modified based on the observed results. Creationists hold a certain view on the origin of the Universe, the Earth, and Homo Sapiens, which directly contradicts to all the scientific evidence. There is not a single bit of scientific evidence that agrees with Creationism. Creationism makes no predictions, is not subject to falsification or modification, and is simply so far from right it's beyond wrong.

But to me Creationist believe they must protect life all life old and young for they are all Gods creatures make more sense than a theory about The weak die out and the strong survive.

I'm sure you will find many Creationists who disagree with you on the 'protect all life' thing. Did you catch the republican debates in the US lately? Many creationists in the audience, no doubt. They cheered and applauded when Rick Perry's abhorrent record on State Sponsored Executions was brought up, they booed a gay soldier NOT because he's in the business of killing foreigners overseas, but because he's not heterosexual, and they cheered when told of the tragic circumstances of Ron Paul's friend's untimely death. The sanctity of life is clearly not a central tenet of a Creationist world view. And this is just some off-the-cuff observations of the view of Human life - the so-called 'Culture of Life's' record on ecological stewardship (you know, all the rest of life that's non-human) is dismal.

But I find your last statement even more curious... Do you think that 'the weak die out and the strong survive' is not actually happening right now all over the planet to all types of living organisms? Also, why on earth would you choose to apply an observed aspect of differential survival to the realm of human ethics or morality? That's just sick.

 

[Traitorfish]

Contrary to what many non-believers think, the Bible does not teach blind faith. In fact, the Bible actually tells believers to test everything, No other "holy" book tells its readers to actually put what it says to the test.

Do you have any particular citations for both the claim of Biblical encouragment of scepticism (preferably both the passages and a source offering an interpretation to this effect), and of the claim of the absence of similar scepticism in all other religious scriptures?

(I'd also enquire as to the exact delineation of "Holy Book"; there's presumably a line somewhere between the Qur'an and the Poetic Eddas, but it's not exactly clear at this point.)

But to me Creationist believe they must protect life all life old and young for they are all Gods creatures make more sense than a theory about The weak die out and the strong survive.

How did you make the jump from the theory of natural selection to the question of the morality of abortion, exactly?