In determinism, everything is essentially luck.

But to be able to reward, we need to measure the amount of work that led up to the achievement. If you win the lottery, that's just pure luck based on the right time and place. But putting ten years of work into something, giving up pleasures and comforting sloth in order to reach a goal and then reach it, it is essentially also a form of luck by looking at the deterministic reasons for ending up at that goal, the genetics, the family you were born into, upbringing, the ability to go to school, get higher education, the makeup of your psychology/IQ, how that is utilized, being in the right time and place to be able to start working towards that goal etc. and then reach that goal.

The difference between the lottery ticket and that achievement is the level of work, the level of suffering in order to reach the goal. So in a sense, being rewarded should be measured according to how much suffering you went through. Suffering, not in the way of torture-like pain, hardship and so on (but in cases of them, yes), but how much you choose to give up in order to reach a goal. Even though that choice is determined, as always in determinism, it's the closest I can think of to measure when and when not to be awarded and praised for an achievement.

Example: Someone gives up having a family, gives up the pleasures of a balanced stable life (according to common norms), in order to invent something that makes a difference to the world. That is an achievement worth praise.
But if someone doesn't put effort into something, ends up with little to no effort outside of just normal evolution of events over that course of time, that is not something worthy of praise.

What would it be?

Would it be about achieving goals? Making progress morally and spiritually? Doing the will of a deity. Fulfilling an inbuilt teleology?
Hedonism? — Andrew4Handel

It cannot be, because there isn't any objective meaning. No argument can support any meaning of life without being biased to our own existence. We measure the meaning of life, based upon our own existence as humans, which makes the argument flawed. If we cannot present an objective meaning of life towards another lifeform, such as another form of intelligent life in the universe with another set of parameters for the meaning of life, then we cannot have an objective meaning. We can present an objective meaning of life, so long as it incorporates every possible life form in the universe, which makes it impossible for us to present it, as we are bound to the existence of being humans. Whenever you try to deduce the argument for an objective meaning of life, you will run into the answer that there isn't any objective meaning of life. If you create a subjective meaning of life, that is a set of maxims of your own, but never objective. Objective means it has been and will always be something, but since life wasn't created with any meaning in mind, but instead evolved out of dead matter evolving into organic matter through chemical processes, there is no objective meaning.

We exist and all notions of the mystery of our existence that fuels our sense of there being an objective meaning to our existence is false and based on lacking knowledge about how life evolved. The "hunt" for objective meaning is futile and out of desperation when faced with the meaningless nature of our existence. I would abandon all attempts at finding objective meaning and instead find a meaning that we invent for ourselves. If we are meaningless, we are free to create meaning, to create a reason for existing. If we can't create meaning, then we might as well kill ourselves. Trying to find an objective meaning of life is a distraction from either giving up life or creating meaning. But it's tempting to try and find an objective meaning. People tend to want an authority to govern them, it's a well-known function in psychology about how people behave. So most people want to find an external solid truth that can govern them and the idea of having no meaning, having nothing that guides us, frightens most people to death. But it's futile, there isn't any objective meaning, we simply are and that's it. The meaning needs to be created and if that's scary, it doesn't mean hiding from it makes it less true.

I think the most important test is EQ. Emotional Quota — Mattiesse

This has been a notion for many years but it's simplified and overused by people not knowledgable in psychology. It's like the Jung personality spectrum that some companies use when hiring, but most psychologists call bullshit methods. EQ has been abandoned as a spectrum of measurement because it's not measurable in any practical way. It also puts extroverts in an advantage over introverts, even though extroverts only excels at tasks that need social skills, when introverts excel at higher cognitive work and even leadership roles as strategists.

If you want a better working method for calculating a persons cognitive and behavioral function, use the Big-five measurement. It's what most psychologists use today to determine the personality and cognitive performance of a person. Combine it with an IQ measurement of that person and you get a pretty solid sum of that person's capabilities and weaknesses.

Is it speed, memory, adapting?

Is being average put you at odds with accomplishment in intellectual work?

Does mental illness have anything to do with intelligence?

What's the difference between 100, 120, and 140 IQ in practice? — Drek

IQ measures the ability to function in problem-solving. It also measures the ability to adapt. You can have low IQ and learn a lot of information, but not know how to utilize that information, only to recite. You can have a low IQ and learn repeating tasks and be an expert on it but not how to adapt when things change.

IQ can define what occupations you can handle. If there's a lot of repetition, a lot of "using stored information" and repeating mechanical tasks, you can have a very low IQ and still perform. Many with very low IQ even excels at these tasks since higher IQs might need other stimuli to function properly.
If you have a high IQ, you are best at jobs which features a lot of adapting situations. Where you need to use the knowledge that you have and connect the dots into a new form. That's why successful engineers and scientists rarely have low IQ, since their success comes out of learning the properties of something and solving the problem of how it works or what something is. You can't do that by repeating tasks and just storing information. Same goes for creative people who are successful; they know how to create something out of the information and inspirations they have.

So, to answer your questions. Being average is only at odds with the highest performance of intellectual work. Meaning the highest form of science, engineering etc. There are some good things about having an average IQ though (meaning around 100 - 110). At the most extreme ends of the spectrum, there are problems in balancing ideas. At the lower end, most run into the Dunning Kruger effect, in which they aren't intelligent enough to understand that they aren't intelligent, meaning they think they are smart when they aren't. At the high end of the spectrum (125-200), there are so few who challenge their intelligence that they can easily win any argument by rationalizing their point of view without any valid counter-arguments. This means that because they cannot be challenged by others, they tend to lack in challenging themselves and only present arguments in support of their own opinion or hypothesis. The lack of external challenge makes them bad at challenging themselves (there's a psychology term for this that I've forgotten at the time of writing).
So having an average IQ isn't the worst thing, it might even be beneficial in some forms, especially dialectics. I would argue that a good, high, but balanced IQ is around 110-125 for our modern age. Most occupations are moving into fields that require much higher cognitive functions. Which means there will be a problem for the lower end of IQs down the road.

Mental illness has nothing to do with intelligence. A rain man-kind of person might be superhuman in math calculations but cannot use that ability for anything.

Here's a graph of occupations in relation to IQ levels.
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx

Antinatalism is the belief that birth should be morally wrong because it involves bringing into being a creature capable of suffering and that will suffer without its consent and that automatically makes it wrong no matter how much pleasure that creature experiences (because you have no right to create another human when THEY will be the ones to bear the consequences of your choices). — khaled

Antinatalism is like when you take a philosophical conviction and stand by its extreme form without challenging it. It's utilitarianism taken to the extreme in which any kind of human existence becomes irrelevant and the idea itself becomes absurd. It's the kind of idea that proves philosophical ideas to be flawed as a singular system or end in itself, and that a philosophical idea needs to evolve and change through dialectics rather than be the final answer to everything.

Is this fact evidence of our metaphorical nature? — Pelle

No, it's a misunderstanding of the actual biological science behind how our cells work.

And be careful taking everything Peterson says as any kind of truths. He's notorious for having argumentative flaws and fallacies. He has great insight into psychology, but he tends to move into philosophy with arguments that fall apart when picked apart.

Sure, Communism sought to destroy religion and commit genocide on an unimaginable scale, because it was religious in nature. Is the sort of absurd position people advocate — Inis

Are you saying that the mechanics of making Lenin and Stalin into deity-like figures, following hard doctrines and mantras to make enemies of those who think differently from the regime, isn’t religious in its mechanics? I hope you understand what it is I’m talking about here. Religious mechanics aren’t confined to faith in the supernatural, the mechanics are the mechanics of manipulation and humans ability to stick to answers when in positions of having no other answers.

You mention irrationality. If you know anything about the history of science, you will know that the big-bang was discovered by a Catholic priest, and that the entire atheist theoretical physics community sought to deny it. Let's not forget that Newton was deeply religious and according to the French, Lamarck discovered evolution, and was religious — Inis

This is in no way a counter argument to what I said. You take a section of history and decisions of people as an argument against the points I made. This is just a fallacy.

All in all, he presents a grotesque image of religion and he doesn't seem to be completely off the mark and that scares me. — TheMadFool

Why does that scare you? Because you are religious? Or because you fear the consequences of religion in our world? I think the latter has already been established throughout all of mankind's history.

For anyone who dives into the mechanics of religion, both in society and in terms of human psychology will agree with most of what he says. The last stand of religion against rational ideas is that it holds people under moral guidance that atheism doesn't have, which is only a true statement for apologists, not atheists. I seem to remember a study that showed that the number of crimes in more atheistic communities is less than in religious ones.

Religion is a very attractive source of answers about life and I would argue that if you aren't a person who's generally thinking about life and the world in any rational ways, you tend to lean against anything mystical and fantastical as your source of truth. In the end, it skews perception and there's a high risk of people taking advantage of this to fit their agendas. If you are susceptible to even accepting fantasy as truth you will most likely be very susceptible to manipulation, therefore any type of manipulation is easier done through the process of religious belief. Even in totalitarian societies that weren't built on a religious foundation, like Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, the mechanics of those societies are very much religious in nature.

Why didn't humans stop at atheism? What went wrong? — VoidDetector

People invent explanations when they can't explain things. Science and logical reasoning is a rather modern method and falsifiability was included in the scientific method as late as the first part of 1900's.

Humans have always been pattern-seeking animals who like to connect dots however possible to grasp what they don't know. If you don't have a method to exclude your own biases while trying to explain something you will most certainly include your own guesses and delusions into that explanation.

Nietzche's sister corrupted his unfinished work into a Nazi-supporting form.

The only way to get rid of beliefs is to train yourself to be a constant skeptic about your own ideas and convictions. You can't erase a specific belief, it's a set of mind that challenge all ideas and through that focus on the rational and logical reasoning rather than cognitive biases.

An important question though: does the ability to be skeptical about your own and others ideas require a certain level of IQ? Or a certain Big Five makeup? If so, it might be impossible for some people to be skeptical and instead jump between different sets of biases and beliefs rather than challenging them, regardless of motivation.

I would say so. Memory is nothing magical, it's a physical process of a biological mind that is interpreting data as it is playing back data. A computer that is playing back memory does it with perfect data recovery, but a human mind is scrambling everything and mixing it together with other memories. It's basically not a tool for playing back information, but playing back identity and the aspects of a human intellect. Memory is playing back data and mixing it with new information in order to further the development of that human intellect.

Compared to animals, who remember things as both memories and instinct, we have a far more advanced form of memory which is forming how we behave. We can interpret memory and make choices based on it. But it's still mixed with emotion that is changing how we remember things, which means we have memories to be able to function through our intellect, not just remember because we can. We remember something, just like other animals, but we can interpret it to change behavior in order to change outcomes in natural situations.

This means that we don't have memories to be able to record history and remember the actual truth about something, but to evolve behavior within a life instead of within lifetimes through changed instincts. The basic difference between us humans and other animals is that we have the ability to change within a life and not between generations. Biologically, it seems that we are the first species to be able to change before generational shifts or biological shifts. We control the biology of ourselves with how we adapt to reality.

Memory as we define it seems to be pretty simply defined through biology, but corrupted by our ways of interpreting it as more magical and mysterious than it actually is. If we observe ourselves as a species through the lens of us being just another animal on this planet, we might more clearly see how our abilities as an animal are working. I think it's arrogant to believe that we are more advanced than we actually are, thinking our intelligence is the product of something mystical rather than accepting that the byproduct of our intelligence is trying to wrap our heads around that we are intelligent. Is the ouroboros of our intelligence.

The problem with memory is that we have other memories that are influencing our interpretation of the memory we want to decipher.

No memory is without a context of another memory, thus, all memory is not factual, but abstract and based on our interpretation before we speak it as fact. Memory is a false truth about past events and actual truths that gets corrupted by emotion and biological processes as a veil in front of the real truth.

Memory defines us as a person but is merely an illusion of the actual truth about us.

To add
Have you ever seen random chaos suddenly form into a shape that you perceive as order? So, is it then unreasonable to conclude that random events, chaos and entropy may at a certain point in a long period of time, evolve into something that resembles order? Can this order then continue to arrange into further order going through more chaos? This is exactly how life formed, this is how evolution brought our intelligence. If you have almost an infinite amount of time and you let chaos unfold through that time, something will form. Especially if there's causality involved. A time glass with sand will have pure chaos and random order for each rock falling through, but at the center they might go through one at a time, like if there was order to the stream.

Chaos and entropy as the cause for our existence and our perceived beauty of our existence is only unthinkable for those that cannot accept it. Science points to it being the truth, so why shoehorn in other explanations that have no reasonable or logical foundation just because it's hard to grasp the idea?

In engineering, a lot of designs have been shifting towards using random iterations based on thousands of trial and errors out of a purpose. Jet engines have been engineered for maximum performance not by designing it intentionally, but by setting a goal for maximum performance and letting random algorithms design it instead, in many iterations over a period of time. The final design can look super weird, but also not something that a human could ever design by pure thought. This is part of my own argument against any kind of designer or intelligence behind our existence. If science points to chaos as the creator of all that we know and engineering benefiting from the concept of randomness, then nothing points to intelligent design or intentionally designing anything would yield the result we perceive as beauty around us. It doesn't argue against a creator creating a simulation in which we popped into existence by pure luck in that creators experiment vial through random events, but that would then not be intentional and therefor, that creator might not even know we are here in their simulation. Therefor us as a result as intentional design does not become valid.

I have yet to see any counter argument to my argument about randomness as source of existence proving there are no intentional creator, other than assumptions based on subjective emotions and perception, both by individual and through us as a species. I think a lot of people don't even try to look past their own existence, they are stuck within their own perception so hard that they can't view things outside it and it's limiting the arguments to self-deluded assumptions instead of logic.

1.The beauty of the universe is improbable under atheism
2.The beauty of the universe is not improbable under theism.
3.If we have two hypotheses and some evidence is not improbable under the first hypothesis but is improbable under the second, then that evidence counts as evidence for the first hypothesis.
4.Therefore, the beauty in the universe counts as evidence for God’s existence (1,2,3 Modus Ponens) — Empedocles

You are right about the objections to this argument and I don't think you can counter it with "there also seems to be an objective quality" or "Furthermore, if beauty were completely subjective, it would be meaningless to describe something as beautiful."
You are trying to validate your invalid premiss with assuming there is objective quality or beauty because otherwise we can't have quality. There are so many flaws in this argument because you assume things based on your opinion and therefor trying to justify the conclusion of the original argument as true.

You assume that there is an objective beauty and because of this there must be a designer of the universe since beauty like this cannot be without it. There's nothing to back this conclusion at all. You ignore the psychology science of how we perceive the universe and that us humans are pattern seeking animals who perceive the world through senses that in turn gets processed by our brain with a type of biological algorithm that fills in the blanks. This means that we perceive balance, symmetry and so on as harmony and harmony in turn gives the notion of beauty. Our emotions are based upon survival instincts we evolved through the necessity to guard ourselves from complex dangers and guide our intellect while outsmarting preys or evading predators. What we perceive as beauty is rather just a byproduct of all these processes in our brain which change our chemistry within our body.
Therefor, you can't point to the universe having beauty as an objective statement since it's subjective, not for you as an individual, but through our perception as a species.

Further, we might perceive a specific thing as dull, grey, formless pile of shit with the senses that we have. If we actually look at a pile of manure, smell it's foul smell, see it's dull colors, the appalling concept of what it is etc. we point to it not being a thing of beauty. But if we weren't limited to the senses that we have, if we would see frequencies of light we normally don't see, like infrared, ultraviolet, gamma, radio etc; if we could smell more nuances of the complexities within that pile of shit, we might perceive it as the most beautiful thing we've ever seen. But our senses and our brains processing is limiting us from that, together with the programmed instincts that tells us that shit is not to be preceived as beauty.

Just as we could mix together two compounds of chemicals that react to each other with sparks and colors, like fireworks, it doesn't mean it is beautiful outside of human preception. A dog doesn't find fireworks to be anything other than pure terror.

In essence, you can't claim truth to a conclusion about a designer for the universe based on the perception through human emotions. In order to do that, you need to place humans as intrinsically valuable within the universe and there's nothing that points to us being valuable in the context of the scale of our universe. We are a fraction of existence within this universe and it can't give two cents about our existence. To put ourselves and mankind on that pedestal in front of the entire universe in order to claim what is beautiful or not, is a foolish point of view.

To elaborate further, our perception of our existence in the universe is coming from within the system that it perceives. We evolved emotions and perception to perceive life and value it based off our emotions.

Water could not be anything else than water in order to put context into what water is. We are humans that perceive ourselves, we see value in us because we cannot see value outside of ourselves since we are humans and not anything else. The only thing that could put a value on us would be another species that could perceive mankind objectively in context of the entire universe.

Beauty is an illusion. We can't deny beauty, but we can't use it for objective facts and truths since it is subjective, not to the individual, but to our species way of perceiving the world and universe around us. If we didn't perceive things like symmetry as beautiful, we would view the world as rather ugly.

However you try and turn this argument, it all comes down to the values that mankind puts on things in the universe and those values doesn't prove a single thing.

Well, why not? Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event? — Banno

So far we know that the universe is deterministic, our known universe has a set axis of time. However, it seem to be based on the properties of probability. The larger the object or space, the more probable the consequences of causes becomes. The smaller you go, down to the quantum level, the less probable it gets. Now, by "large objects" I don't mean suns and galaxies, but even ourselves. You need to go down to extreme small scales before the quantum behaviour breaks down things.

But here lies a contradiction of sorts. If the universe is deterministic, how do we know that the quantum randomness aren't causes in a chain reaction of events? If you could predict every particle in the universe, that would mean you could predict all outcomes of all movements and states, but because you cannot predict quantum level events, since they are random, how then do we know that the consequences aren't affected by randomization on the quantum level?

If a large object in space, say, an astroid, speeds through space, it gets attracted and accelerated in different directions throughout it's journey, changing it's path slightly but so much that further down the line it's changed course by millions of light years. If random events on a quantum level change that asteroid's trajectory by a margin that is almost not measurable, it would still have changed the location billions of light years of travel later.

Now, I'm pulling hypotheses from educated guess work here since I'm not a theoretical physicist. Maybe the quantum level is random but cannot change the deterministic nature of the larger world since the only way for it to truly change the course of the asteroid is by expanding the randomness into observation, into levels of probability in which the randomness becomes so high in probable conclusions that it won't change the trajectory. Maybe the randomness and low probability of the quantum level through the process of going from 0% probable to 99,999999999999999999999999% (infinite decimals) probable, is part of how causality and entropy works and therefor the deterministic universe is still solid. If the randomness on the quantum level cannot effect movement of mass, it won't move particles of mass, but only charge their state.

So, as said, hypothetical guess-work here. I still don't know enough of things like Higgs fields and particles and there's also that little thing called unification theory that we haven't solved. However, while it's chaos on the quantum level it doesn't effect us on the larger scale. The general laws of the universe starts breaking down at a quantum level, but the laws prevents things to move backwards in time on any scale larger. I mean, we could also talk about the state of light, in which the speed of light makes only us experience light. Light in itself does not have a concept of time, since it's the speed of light, so at the start of it's journey it has already reached it's destination at the same in "it's own perspective". Because everything else is slower than the speed of light, we witness things going slower, but if you were speeding at the speed of light, you would be at the start and end of the destination at the same time, since time stops at that speed and would have been like that since the dawn of our universal laws.

Both at the quantum level and at the speed of light or at the maximum gravitational force exceeding lights speed, things break down and our laws of the universe cease to work in the way we perceive it. The big question is; if we had the means, could we make us perceive things outside of the perception we are slaves under now? Or are we forced to only understand as far as our perception goes? Even if we prove things like tachyons, would we fully understand them? Or would all the data get scrambled into a mess since we have no framework existing in our universe to even explain the basics of them?
If we live on a scale, at a slower speed than light and under normal gravitational conditions, the probability of events going against the laws of the universe are 99,9999% with infinite decimals. If there was a slim chance of a consequence causing a cause, that seem to never be, because infinitely unlikely that it will happen. It's that mind boggling thing in math where there is a chance of something, but a version of "infinite" makes it infinitely unlikely, even if it is likely.

But I'd rather point to a theoretical physicist on all of this, I can barely calculate basic math :sweat:

Yet :wink:

And it doesn't mean the cosmological argument is invalid, it's just not an argument for the existence of god, but an argument that is very interesting for scientists. How do we tackle this mystery of what started the deterministic universe, the mind blowing conclusion of the argument is more interesting than any kind of claim that it proves the existence of god.

you - I/others disagree with the cosmological argument therefor you are unreasonable
me - that fails - i hold to my premise — Rank Amateur

The cosmological argument does not have any valid conclusion in favour of the existence of god. It's not about disagreement, there's no logical conclusion, case closed. What you write here just points to you ignoring the inconsistencies about the argument in support of a god. Nothing binds the conclusion of the cosmological argument to the conclusion that god exists, that's just a wild connection with no basis in logic. The first mover is not god, there's nothing to bind those together, case closed (and has been for a long time).

This has not been able to be done in a few hundred years, and not from lack of effort. So you have quite a task ahead of you.
— Rank Amateur

If, as you state, you are a believe in reason, this last part should give you pause. — Rank Amateur

The argument has ben flawed for a few hundred years, it's not that it hasn't been able to be disproved, it's not proven anything else than a "first mover" to begin with. Attributing the cosmological argument to anything more than what it is, is ignoring the hundreds of years it hasn't been able to prove anything of what theists propose. If it hade been able to prove the existence of god through logic, it would have been a done deal. It's like saying that the cosmological argument proved the existence of god, but people are just too stupid to realize it. No, people just don't see the logic behind combining that conclusion with the notion that any god exist and theists haven't provided any answer to combine the conclusion of the argument the the conclusion that god exists. It's nonsense really.

In order to do so, you will need to prove with fact or reason that the premise are wrong or the conclusion does not follow. — Rank Amateur

You seem to miss the fact that no atheist is disapproving the conclusion of the first mover based on the logic and evidence at hand. It's the assertion that the "first mover" and "god" is the same thing that isn't proven. It's like me saying that the cosmological argument proves that the teapot in space created everything in the first place, that the teapot is the first mover. There is nothing to bind the concept of god to the "first mover" of the cosmological argument so there is nothing to disprove. No one is arguing against the first mover since we don't have enough data to disprove that logic, but saying "it is god" is a claim with no facts to back it up.

You cannot attach one argument and combine it to another conclusion just because you want to. The claim that god exists has nothing to do with the conclusion of the cosmological argument.

In what way is the "first mover", the initial cause of all causality, "god"? Explain that before claiming the cosmological argument to prove any existence of god. I see no correlation between the conclusion of god existing with the actual conclusion of there being a "first mover". There isn't any correlation here, please point it out.

Religions basically do give answers how to live, what is good and what is bad. And religions rely on deities for this. Is this logic so difficult to understand? — ssu

Like morals about slavery and such? Religion is just a vessel for basic morals and ethics established long before the religions you give credit for these. You also assume that morals cannot be established by non-religious people, which is a prejudice against any kind of moral system that doesn't rely on religious belief.

This is the usual "atheists are immoral" argument that fails over and over.

They try to find and do find objective truths. Not normative statements. (In philosophy, normative statements make claims about how things should or ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, and which actions are right or wrong.) — ssu

You are dividing the two, too definitively. Right and wrong can be asserted through what is true about human psychology but I agree philosophy is key to figuring out morals. However none of these has anything to do with god or religion, which claims moral truths without foundation for those claims. Philosophy and science try to find a foundation that is valid instead, which is more rational than claims based on belief in a system just because of the belief itself.

I know a flat earther who is an atheist. — DingoJones

Then, that person is not an atheist. Not in the sense of following evidence and logic to the truth. Sure, in the sense of denying the existence of a god, but being a flat-earther has nothing to do with being an atheist. Atheism doesn't have to do with belief, which means it demands proof, which means it cares for truth. The foundation of atheism becomes pretty clear.

Aquinas would not approve of your interpretation.

The cosmological argument, that I am referencing, has a conclusion that there is a non- contingent or necessary being - whose existence in not contingent on anything, and whose existence is necessary for everything - me and Aquinas, millions of others, call this being God. — Rank Amateur

Aquinas is dead and didn't go through both the renaissance nor the enlightenment period. It's still making a claim that the first cause, the one necessary for everything we know, is "god". There is nothing about the god that exists within any of our definitions that can be asserted to being that first cause of everything. Making that connection is projecting your own ideas about god on top of an abstract concept of the first mover in a deterministic universe. That is not an argument with any validity and any claim that it proves the existence of god is a failure to understand the difference between a true conclusion and a conclusion that is converted into a cognitive bias.

A "first mover" is not god by any definition we have, it's only proof that there has too be something at the beginning of cause and effect... nothing more... nothing less.... any claim otherwise is not supported by logic or reason. This is why the cosmological argument hasn't been able to prove the existence of god. If it had, the argument would have been over. But theists doesn't care about this, they just demand this argument to have a valid conclusion, which is delusional.

I think you have missed my point. Science is objective, it explains how the World is, not how it should be. Ethics is subjective. We can agree or disagree in ethics, and we can make our case by trying to reason it. This I understand totally. But when you make the argument that your reasoning on a scientific basis, for me that is different. Too many times people fall into this trap: that they argue their subjective, normative views are somehow deductible from science and hence superior to others. — ssu

I don't see any logic here? You are mixing subjective ethics into the argument about the existence for god? I attribute atheism to have a foundation close to the process of science, meaning that it demands evidence for any claims about life, the world and universe. That is not a claim, it's a demand for proving claims. Demanding proof for a claim is not a claim in itself.

Are our ethics indeed invented by the necessity of survival? Really?

Perhaps we had those basic morals and ethics for the survival of our family and clan, but typically not for anyone else. Typically animals and packs of animals have their owb territories and defend them out of necessity of survival. Our own species has been the most successfull in basically turning everythin in the World (except the deep oceans) to our own territory. And most likely our species wasn't at all benevolent and peaceful with all the other hominid relatives of ours that are now extinct. The idea of getting rid of your competitors is totally logical for survival. Science indeed can show this kind of behaviour even in other animals. Yet I see it far from being a basis for ethics. — ssu

I would suggest looking into the findings about how we humans evolved. There is theories in psychology and sociology about how groups of people function, that we have problems to function as a group when we reach over 12 people in a group. This is where people started to get rid of competitors, when we started doing crimes against the group to survive or become better off than others in the group. This is also my point; that when we grew larger than 12, those smaller groups, we needed systems to govern society and that is were our morals and ethics came to be. That these morals and ethics were corrupted by those in power is a later historical entry.

Of course. And science basically does the similar thing on a broader level: it explains how everything has ended up as it as and as we can now observe from our surroundings. Similarly, it doesn't give validity to our normative ideas on what to do. — ssu

You mean that neuroscience, psychology, socialogy and sciences that investigate current states does not find truths based in evidence of the present? You mean that Einstein's theoretical physics were false? Since things like gravitational waves wasn't proved until this year? Science is more than experiments proving, it's also about logic proving. Mathematical logic in line of Russel has to do with a logic that can be drawn on a whiteboard and still be as valid as experimental proof since the logic itself is solid. 2 + 2 is 4; if you demand evidence of it, you ignore the logic of that math and that math is as basic as nature itself.

I believe the cosmological argument is a reasonable argument. — Rank Amateur

The cosmological argument only points to a first cause of the line of consequences in a deterministic universe, it does not point to a god. Asserting that the first cause is god is a wild conclusion that does not care for the conclusion of the actual argument. The actual argument only points to a first cause that we don't know about and it is valid in the sense that it points to that unknown, no atheist would deny that. However, theists points to this unknown and say it's god. That is not the definition of god that theists in other cases describe god as, hence, the argument does not support theists claims of a god. The argument is only valid as pointer to the unknown start of events for the universe, nothing more, nothing less. We haven't proved this first cause or how it happened, which doesn't mean it's god or anything like it. The argument is a good one, just not for any kind of god, which is an assertion dislocated from the argument and a claim by theists that does not have any relation to the argument or line of thinking about determinism.

Contrasting "faith in god" with "faith in the truth" already seems to embody an implicit claim that "god" isn't "truth" (or that a proposition asserting God's existence isn't T) or something. — yazata

That god isn't truth demands that someone claims that god is truth. To claim that god is truth demands that the claim that god exists is true. The line of claims ends up at the theist claim that is unsupported by facts, which means that you cannot end up with god being or not being truth if you haven't solved the validity of god in the first place.

Except that oftentimes we can't be sure that our evidence and our arguments will produce a particular conclusion, at least not without introducing a bunch of poorly justified auxiliary assumptions. It only gets more circular when we start questioning the foundations of logic and logical inference. So oftentimes, even when the subject has nothing to do with religion, there's still to be a bit of a 'leap of faith', however small we think it is. — yazata

Yet, even that is not any argument against atheists, since atheists follows the truth were it may lead. What you speak of is close to agnosticism, but agnosticism is sometimes a non-argument in favour of an existing god, meaning they us the lack of knowledge to support the possibility of the existence of god being true, which is still a kind of cop-out. Atheism will accept the existence of god if it's proven, atheists will never claim that god doesn't exist if the proof is presented. That kind of malleable viewpoint seems to only exist within atheism and that standpoint itself shows it's vastly different from theism.

That's a strong assertion, if you want to insist that atheists make no claims. — yazata

If you can show what isn't logical about that, go ahead. Atheists claim things that have proof or logic, if you can show what isn't logic I will change the claim. This is the key difference between theists and atheists. Atheists does not claim anything that doesn't have logic or evidence and will change if challenge with better logic or evidence.

P3 - God is - is supported by reason — Rank Amateur

How is this a valid premiss?

traditional Atheist conclusion - There is no God — Rank Amateur

...is not a claim since such a claim demands that the previous claim had proof supporting it. There is not a teapot in space is a nonsense claim, since no one supported such nonsense. Same goes for god. Theists claim there is a god, atheists ask for evidence for it, theists don't give a shit.

Atheists do not make claims since claims demand a previous claim. Claiming god doesn't exist demands that we have agreed there is a god before claiming it isn't. If theists can't prove their claim true, there's nothing to argue against. Atheists do not claim anything if they do not have facts to support it and so far burden of proof is on theists to start the argument, which they can't. Atheists do not have any burden of proof, because demanding that is as nonsense as demanding proof there isn't a teapot between us and the sun.

Ok I will amend the argument:

P1 - God is, is not a fact
P2 - God is not - is not a fact
P3 - Theism - a claim that God is - is supported by reason
P4 - Chrisoffer is not making any claim about anything

Conclusion - neither God is or whatever Chrisoffer believes is a superior position

Tell me which proposition is false and why , or how the conclusion does not follow. — Rank Amateur

I laughed at this, it was very funny, truly :smile:
But you are mixing together claims and facts. A claim demands facts, the claim itself isn't a fact. Claiming there's a teapot in space needs support by evidence, claiming there isn't a teapot in space is a nonsense claim since there's no proof of any teapot in space. Therefor you can't say that atheists claim there isn't a teapot in space since they haven't even gotten to the point of hearing a reasonable argument for a teapot in space. Atheists does not make claims that aren't proved by facts, if they see a claim, they want proof of that claims, that is what burden of proof is about.

If I claimed there's a rabbit under your bed and you said to me that I need to prove it, if I were a theist I would not care to give any proof. If I were an atheists I would not claim there to be or not be a rabbit under your bed because any claim would be ridiculous without evidence of there being one. If you look under your bed and say I was lying about there being a rabbit under your bed, an atheist would say that they didn't even make the claim, since they didn't make any claim about neither, but a theist would say; "well you don't know if it ran away", "you don't know if it's an invisible one", "you cannot prove that it wasn't there".

Atheists demand proof of claims that doesn't have proof. They do not make claims. Theists makes claims that doesn't have proof and demand proof of the opposite and without any, they accept their claim as truth. This is a fundamental fallacy in how to reach a rational conclusion in any form under any situation. Atheists are still waiting for the argument to start, given the lack of evidence from theists, atheists are really asking the question, why bother with religion? The argument that atheists cannot value emotion and beautify because of this, is in any sense of the matter, bullshit (referring to earlier posts on this)

Depends wether you work under a jury system or not. A jury system might not grasp many things, since philosophers tend to be very esoteric. However, if you are a defense lawyer and there is little hope of defense for the defendant, then a philosopher on hard determinism would be a good last resort. Someone that would talk about how no choice is acted out of nothing, that the choices made are always made because of causes, that the effects, the consequence is the result of many things; that they may not be in the control of their actions based on the situation they were given. In todays legal system, it's a very slim chance for defense, but it's a valid viewpoint and if that viewpoint is combined with the idea that if the defendant were given the chance to reprogram the reasons crimes are committed by them, they will function much better in the future, not just be doomed criminals. Only those who were given a chance to view their actions as the result of superficial causes they learned through life, tend to turn their backs to crime. Many view it as the hand they were given, but if given hope, they would rebuild the deterministic reasons to crimes that they've acted on their entire life.

Hope of changing our lives comes from seeing the reasons for our actions in a new light, comes from an open door to an alternative. If the defendant has this door closed, they will continue doing crimes and any punishment will be a waste of time.

I made no such proposition - — Rank Amateur

Then

if you disagree and believe the atheist claim is superior — Rank Amateur

This is why it's confusing. You say "atheist's claim" then saying that your proposition about atheists making claims isn't something you do.

If atheists doesn't make a claim, then there is no claim to be superior. You are balancing theists making claims to atheists making claims. Making a claim demands a statement. Atheist do not claim anything since there is nothing to claim against. The teapot flying around the sun is an example of this. Anyone could claim anything and then demand proof that it isn't, but that is not how burden of proof works. Atheists claims are always based on facts, meaning if an atheist claims anything that isn't supporting by facts, then they aren't really atheists anymore. This is key to understanding the position atheists are in. And even if an atheist makes a claim with supported proof and new proof prove that claim to be wrong, the atheist won't argue against, they would accept the newly proven claim to be the truth. Atheism never makes claims against facts this way and do not stand by a certain dogma or viewpoint outside of facts. Therefor you cannot pit theist claims against atheist claims since there are no claims from atheists. Atheists only demand to prove the claims given, that is not a claim, that is a demand for truth, which theists does not provide yet. When they do, then atheists either have counter-proofs with counter arguments or if the evidence is clearly pointing to the existence of god, atheists will accept it.

Difference here is that theists do not work under facts and proof, only belief. If atheists, or rather scientists provide a claim with proof, many theists still deny it. Proof does not matter for theists when presented. The difference between the two are fundamentally so different that you can't really put them in an argument against each other. Atheists haven't made any claims, at. all.

By the mere reason that you are in a philosophy forum shows that you have an open mind to philosophical dialectics about ethics, which means you are above most practitioners of law. That is in any sense of things, a very good thing :smile:

The proposition that atheism makes a claim is false, that is what the problem is. If atheists makes a claim, then theism and atheism is in opposition, but a claim needs to be supported. Theists claim the existence of god, provides proof. Proof is accepted and the general truth is that god exist, atheists claim that god doesn't exist, cannot provide proof, then atheists are wrong in their claim. Problem is that theists claims aren't proved, so the argument haven't even gotten to the point of arguments for or against, so atheism cannot be blamed for making any claim since theists claims demand the burden of proof before a counter-claim can be made.

Atheists however, do not make such claims. If theists prove the existence of god with the same level of truth as Einsteins theories, then no atheist would claim otherwise, since atheism is built upon following the truth where it is. If theists prove the existence of god, all atheists would say, "ok" then this is the truth then.

So there is no claims made from atheists, this is the truth that theists ignore in their arguments.

God does not exist is not a claim since it demands that God exist.
God exist, is a claim, which demands proof to be valid.
Atheists does not claim god does not exist since they cannot claim something that isn't a valid claim.
Atheists does not claim anything, they demand proof of the claim.

Conclusion, atheists does not claim anything and any argument that criticise atheists making claims is based on a false premiss.

The word 'faith' seems to me to be ambiguous. — yazata

Yes, there's a huge difference between faith in god and faith in the truth. Faith in the truth only means faith in what is a coming conclusion, whatever it might be, faith in god is faith in a claim that has no direct correlation with any facts or logic, only the claim itself. Therefor, because faith is so connected to the ideas of religion I am careful to use the term as "faith in the truth". It confuses the argument. Faith in this dialectic is for me meant to represent faith in god, faith int he supernatural, the unexplained without the need for reason or valid evidence. I have faith in the truth, but I do not know the truth of something I do not have the evidence for. The difference is night and day.

if both the theist, or the atheist can make valid claims that their beliefs are reasonable — Rank Amateur

Atheism isn't about belief or faith, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of atheism that needs to be abandoned before any argument is done about atheism. Atheism doesn't believe in anything, it is a process of thinking and reasoning about the world, it is not a claim.

I do not think there is a teapot between us and the sun until someone has proven there to be. Theists say that atheists need to disprove that there isn't a teapot. Atheists does not claim or assert anything without evidence, it is therefor and cannot be anything other than the process of reaching truth, not a claim or belief in anything. Until theists understand this simple concept, the arguments against atheism will continue to be founded on a flawed foundational premiss.

Theism vs. atheism is just a contest between two competing authorities, neither of which has been proven qualified to usefully address the questions of vast scale being considered. — Jake

This is just untrue and you are totally ignoring history here. Religion has never explained anything that comes close to anything true about the universe. Atheism has not done that either since it has never claimed anything at all, it's just a process. You are thinking about science vs religion and within that, science has a pretty solid track record of providing answers to questions earlier defined as "too vast to be explained". The very reason you are able to write on your computer or phone and talk about these things is a result of scientific discovery and theories proven. Name one thing that religion has ever done in this regard? Both science and atheism also works under the principle of them being a process and line of thinking, they themselves does not claim a single thing. Theists on the other hand claim things that are then asked to be proved, which they don't... because "faith reasons".

Your entire line of criticism against atheism relies on the premiss that it claims specific things, same goes for science. They do not do this, they act under a process of thinking and testing the world around us and ourselves in order to find truths that we can build upon. If none of those things that this process produced were true you would for instance not be able to use GPS since Einsteins theories was crucial in order to even have satellites working with it. Atheism and science has no authority behind them and therefor your argument falls flat as a comparison to theism, which all it does is making claims that doesn't need to be proved because of "faith". I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what atheism is and what science does and that misunderstanding is the foundation of the argument. The premisses of your argument cannot be based on an misunderstanding. You cannot demand that atheism is governed by authority or that it makes claims, it simply doesn't, so the argument falls flat.

Why do you have faith in the ability of reason to meaningfully analyze the largest of questions (scope of god claims), when there is no proof of such an ability? — Jake

I don't, I am looking at the process of reasoning and with facts proving hypotheses into theories and using facts to deduct into logical conclusions as a process that has been going on and there is nothing that says it will not continue going forward. If you frame progress within the framework that we have reached the final conclusions, you are missing the point that this isn't about faith, it's a prediction of probability about the process. Faith is believing something without any rational thing pointing to it, the process points in a certain direction, the end is unclear and not something I have any faith about, but claiming to know the end point is what religion does, therefor religion is about faith, atheism and science is not.

All I'm asking you to do is apply the very same challenge procedure you reasonably apply to theism to atheism as well. — Jake

That demands a claim to be said in order for me to question as I question claims by theists. Atheism does not have a claim, it's a process of reasoning, not a claim that can be analyzed, since the process is what it is, i.e facts determine what we know, it's not much more strange than that. Any scientific method that do not adhere to facts cannot determine anything, i.e the process is true. I claim the process to be true in pursuit of knowledge and truth within the framework we exist in, the process so far has determined this to be a true claim. Does the process of facts proving claims into truth not exist you mean? In absolute objectivity, sure, but we cannot exist in that state and the fact that humans have conquered forming the world as we have done is based on the process being true within our concept of reality, within practical objectivity. Does the process atheism is based on, not exist? Is that what you mean?

Is the infinite ability of reason proven? No, atheism declined. — Jake

You are turning the burden of proof into nonsense here. You are ignoring the basics of the process, i.e facts defining truth. Is the red apple in the white room? The process predicts probability, the process does not equal infinite ability of reason, it predicts that the process will answer more complex questions. Atheism does not say it knows the truth, atheism points out that you can only know what can be proven, god isn't proven. It's the same process that we used to understand the world as we know it, the process itself is proof that it's true in understanding the universe within itself. The process does predict things outside of human perception. Is the red apple in the white room? Yes, probability demands it, low probability denies it. A cosmic scale entity cannot exist under low probability, because low probability is random and random isn't proof of existence.

Do not simplify things into nonsense. The quote above is a straw man of what I've been saying.

A person who walks away from theism is not automatically an atheist, for they may reject the chosen authority of the atheist as well. — Jake

Atheism is not authority, the process of thinking about life, the world and universe is not a claim, is not authority or solid, it's a malleable process of truth-seeking, do not mix atheism with dogma, that is a theist invention about atheism. A person who walks away from theism is an atheist if he/she is using the process to form knowledge. If that person use unproven claims or any kind of faith, they are not, it's simple as that. There are no claims in atheism, atheism is a process of thinking about knowledge that forms knowledge, ever evolving. Theism is static, atheism is even changing, that is the key difference and the process itself cannot be analyzed and "disproven", since it's a process of truth seeking by questioning what is. It doesn't make sense to question atheism as if it were acting out of the same principles as theism, since it doesn't.

Please prove the qualifications of human reason to credibly analyze the very largest of questions about all of reality, a realm we can't define in even the most basic manner (size, shape etc).

If we apply atheist principles to atheism itself, atheism collapses. Reason is of course still proven useful in countless cases on human scale — Jake

This is nonsense. You are trying to disprove a method that has been giving results by it's reasoning and logic since it was first ever used. Theists claim something without proof, atheist doesn't claim anything without proof. You cannot ask for proof about how our reasoning is valid without first claiming that proof we have right now about the world is false and that all the things we have proven isn't existing. The process and the results of that process has already given results that prove the process works. And without claiming anything without proof you can't apply anything against atheism the way you propose, it makes no sense. What you are doing is an argument that propose a premise that theism works under the same principles as atheism when they are nothing alike.

Faith is understanding something spiritually, when one cannot explain, and precisely delineate how they know it. Reason is the process by which we make sense of things, or attempt delineation. It could be said that nearly everything is known in a faith way, and we are always attempting to picture, or capture it with reason. This is what philosophy has always been about, in my view, but this got complicated with the rise of reason, and distrust. Things needed to be public, physical, repeatable, or don't bother me with it. Things taken on faith are things we have no clear definitions of, or explanations for, but still accept as true, and worthy of attempting to do that. Like consciousness, health, justice, beauty.

Reason is the process of framing faith. Or making explicit the implicit... but if I just adopt and repeat popular framings, so that you cannot even tell the difference between me, and a million others, because we just present the precise same model, explanation, reason, as everyone else, then I don't think that one is demonstrating faith or reason, just memory, and allegiance. — All sight

Like how our evolution of images representing reality has been evolving. Starting out as cave paintings, we have evolved our ability to capture truth right down to capturing the light of the world onto frames of photography. But even then we've continued evolving it. 3D virtual reality captures of the world starts to chop of the framed nature of images and soon we will be standing within the captured world as if we were perfectly there, only difference is the perception forming the experience. Reasoning is much like that, faith is the abstract concept of something that we can never claim to be true, like an abstract image in our mind of something we saw. The more we reason, the more clear it becomes, the more tools, like deductive reasoning, facts, mathematical logic, physical experiments in the world and so on, the easier it becomes to frame those abstractions into truths, like all the tools we started using to capture images; paintings, sculptures, photochemistry, light field technology, VR technology and so on. The more we work on it, the less abstract it gets, the less faith it becomes and more true it becomes. At some point, we will not see the difference between the abstraction and the truth because we have then found the tools to explain the abstraction as objective truth without contamination of the abstraction.