The same is true of Marxism btw, and that's not a coincidence. — frank

But I share your concern about grand ontological projects gliding past large gaps in our understanding[. That is exactly what I was warning you about with your hierarchy theory. — frank

Jesus H Christ on a bendy bus you're being snide.

But yes. Edit: there's always problems in everything.

You and I seem to have very different histories of our atheism, and given the religious demographics I suspect most peoples' is more like mine than yours. — Pfhorrest

The religious demographics are such that most atheists don't live in the US and don't have backgrounds similar to yours. But more to the point, I believe that even among those who were raised in a religious environment, most people don't become atheists through systematic, bottom-up construction of a comprehensive philosophical system, while setting aside their background beliefs for later reevaluation.

Allow me to go on a little digression. Textbook presentation of science is sometimes faulted for being sanitized and divorced of its historical context. Ideas are presented not in the order and the form in which they were originally introduced; justifications and relationships between ideas have been restructured in light of a more modern understanding. The end result is a "rational-communicative artifice" () that is thought to be - and most likely is - more pedagogically appropriate. But science has the advantage of having a fairly objective external standard of empirical evidence, of which we can avail ourselves at all times. (You can, of course, attack that standard in various ways, but you can't deny that there is a standard.) We are not constrained, once and for all, to reproduce the same historical approach: we can restructure our ideas and proceed to test them against empirical observations without any loss of legitimacy.

Philosophy doesn't have such a standard. You can judge parts of a system (and I am using the word "system" loosely here) against the background of the rest of the system, but the system as a whole is without anything like an objective foundation. (Any standard that you might propose, such as absence of contradictions, empirical soundness, etc. would itself be philosophical, and thus internal to the system.) Thus lacking an objective foundation, philosophy is something that just grows out of the soil of your temperament, life experiences, socialization, intellectual exploration. Having or not having religious experiences and an attitude or a position on the God question, which for most people predates having articulated philosophical ideas, is not an insignificant constituent of that soil. Nor is it something that you can easily shut off or compartmentalize while you cogitate on your philosophy. It will bleed through one way or another into the way you think and the choices you make.

Stop arguing. — Terrapin Station

I don't understand. Do you mean you want me to stop arguing as in...

to speak angrily to someone, telling that person that you disagree with them: ]

...in which case you'd need to point me in the direction of the part of my comment which seemed angry, or...

to give the reasons for your opinion, idea, belief, etc.:

...in which case I'm not sure how else you imagine disagreements being discussed here.

Reductive explanations don't work very well in cases where the studied phenomena are difficult (ontically/ontologically or epistemically) to completely specify. Try to explain why a photon takes a particular path in a double slit experiment in terms of the particular photon and the slits and you get nonsense. Try to explain why one Vietnam vet becomes mentally ill and another does not based upon their shared experiences and background differences and you don't get a complete picture due to the available information (and randomness in life). Try to study whether a butterfly flapping its wings 1 day ago caused a tropical storm now and the system itself pulls apart arbitrarily close causal histories - rendering the question askable but moot. — fdrake

Are you making a distinction between reducible in principle and reducible in practice?

Are you making a distinction between reducible in principle and reducible in practice? — bert1

I try not to think about explanations that are merely possible or might exist?

I am not religious yet intuitively perceive the natural order as coherent. The concept that the structure of matter/energy and its affinity for organizing itself into an isomorphic, evolving system which eventually becomes aware of itself, as the result of a random or chaotic process... is absurd.

When I come across and organized system/structure, it is easier to accept the system was constructed under and intelligent process than to believe it to be the result of random and disorderly interactions. So naturally I extend that line of thought over any processes that appear organized in some way, such as the universe I live in and the environment that I evolved from.

It is not a belief that makes me go to church or join a cult, but I admit that believing in a "creator of the order" is not something I can get away from when trying to wrap my mind around the meaning of existence.

I try not to think about explanations that are merely possible or might exist? — fdrake

OK

Would you guys like a split thread about this? ('experience of...') It seems like an interesting conversation.

Yeah if you can split that out of this thread that’d be great thanks.

Yeah, that'd be great, thanks.

OK. I've tried to do a split without totally messing up the flow of the thread, but some things may still be a bit messy. If there's anything that seems out of place, let me know.

New thread on 'what it is like' is here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6895/what-it-is-like-to-experience-x/p3

:up:

When I come across and organized system/structure, it is easier to accept the system was constructed under and intelligent process than to believe it to be the result of random and disorderly interactions — staticphoton

But why set up such a dichotomy: either chaos or human-like agency (aka "intelligent design")? Aren't you missing the simplest, most obvious alternative: structure? "Structure" not as a house or a bridge, but in a more general sense, as a closed system subject to fixed constraints - what is conventionally called "laws of nature."

But why set up such a dichotomy: either chaos or human-like agency (aka "intelligent design")? Aren't you missing the simplest, most obvious alternative: structure? "Structure" not as a house or a bridge, but in a more general sense, as a closed system subject to fixed constraints - what is conventionally called "laws of nature." — SophistiCat

By Intelligence I don't imply human-like in any way or form, even though this natural order, or laws of nature, curiously parallel human reasoning to a degree that it allows the use of logic and mathematics to formulate its workings, to an approximate degree anyway. I can't help but wonder whether such properties as beginnings, endings, causality, etc. which apply to cosmological components may also apply to the whole.
And "a closed system subject to fixed constraints" like you refer to, does not preclude the possibility that the universe was formulated through a conscious, deliberate process.

By Intelligence I don't imply human-like in any way or form — staticphoton

The only intelligence that we know is human-like (or animal-like, if you want to broaden the notion a bit). This is where the word gets its meaning. If you are talking about an intelligence that is not human-like "in any way or form," then either you are talking about something else entirely and "intelligence" is a misnomer, or you don't even know what you are talking about and are using "intelligence" as a wildcard. But I suspect that the picture in your mind is nothing more than the bog-standard anthropomorphic deity, only slightly updated for modern secular sensibilities from its traditional archetype.

And "a closed system subject to fixed constraints" like you refer to, does not preclude the possibility that the universe was formulated through a conscious, deliberate process. — staticphoton

Well, nothing can preclude that possibility, seeing as it is left completely unspecified, so this isn't saying much. But wouldn't it be more parsimonious to say that the world just happens to be orderly, rather than that our universe just happens to have been made orderly by some Intelligence, which just happened to be there? If I am to take seriously the attempt at distancing from the traditional divine creation narrative, then I just can't see any attraction in this overcomplicated account.

If I am to take seriously the attempt at distancing from the traditional divine creation narrative, then I just can't see any attraction in this overcomplicated account — SophistiCat

If your primary goal is to distance yourself from the possibility of a creative process as the origin of the universe, then absolutely, no need to bark at this tree. But if you were sincere about understanding what really is, you would remain open to possibilities.

I am open to possibilities, but possibilities are endless, and without a shred of justification there is no reason to take any particular possibility seriously.

I am open to possibilities, but possibilities are endless, and without a shred of justification there is no reason to take any particular possibility seriously — SophistiCat

Understood. I as well work towards that which makes sense to me.

As an egoist, atheism is a core principle because having something or someone above yourself putting laws or tenets that could rule your most precious property - yourself - is an agression against your individual. "The only god that exists is yourself"

That is an interesting point of view because it seems to derive an “is” from an “ought”: there ought not be any ruler, therefore there is no god. Do I take it that you mean not so much to say that any particular thing or other does or doesn’t exist, per se, as to say that whatever it is that may or may not exist, none of those things deserves the title of “god” and fhe normative implications of a right to rule that would come with that?

Yes, you precisely took the point.

I'm curious, do poll threads get bumped when people vote in them, or just when people comment in them?

I find that kind of strange a focus because in philosophy I've always focused principally on what seem to be broader questions (like what do we even mean when we ask things like "what is real?" or "what is moral?", what criteria would we use to judge answers to those questions, what methods could we use to apply those criteria, what faculties do we need to employ those methods, who should be in charge of doing so, and why does any of it matter) and answers to questions like "does God exist?" just fall out as a consequence of answers to those questions, rather than as a principal focus. — Pfhorrest

I agree. There are concepts more fundamental than the existence of God. What does "existence" mean? What does "definition" mean? What principles do we use to prove/disprove existence? What does "proof" mean? How crucial is logic to all of this? Etc. etc.

However, people seem to consider such questions as already answered when person X claims "god(s) exist(s)". X means that there is a being who created this universe and intervenes in its affairs on occasion. Then it becomes necessary, if we're to be convinced of such a being, to ask for evidence or proof. We needn't delve too deep into the meaning of "proof" or "evidence" to make sense of the atheist who's making the request. Simply remind X of how he forms beliefs on other matters. Surely he doesn't believe everything he hears or sees. Hasn't he ever been lied to? This basic proof-requirement is all atheists need appeal to when conversing with a theist.

Why was agnosticism left out of the questionnaire? It's quite central to my philosophy.

If the whole question right from the start is about belief, why on Earth the juxtaposition between existence and non-existence of a Deity that isn't and never has been about proof and logic?

I would have voted agnostic had the choice been offered. I am open to either possibility, in the absence of conclusive evidence either way.
edit: didn't even check the end of the thread, I see ssu has similar ideas.

Yeah, I took umbrage with that too and was given a crappy argument about how agnosticism doesn’t exist while the word was being used to claim the concept doesn’t really exist. Idiocy.

It’s like those students in first year college who say they are there to “disprove religion” at which point the professor inevitably just asks “so religions don’t exist is your claim?”

If anything agnosticism is far more sensible than atheism. If something doesn't exist why bother taking a philosophical stance on it? Atheism as an argument is really anti-theism, isn't it.

Whether theism or anti theism, either way one seems to claim a knowing of the answer, or in the least knowing enough to give an answer.

For those of us with a high standard for the criteria of what knowledge is, neither camp really deserves faith which seems to be central to both.

Agnosticism does this too, it however is just faith in the truth of the statement “I don’t know anything.”

Don't get me wrong. I respect faith. One cannot know everything and sometimes one is forced to enact values that possibly can't be justified in any other way. As long as one's enacted values match one's espoused values I feel that faith can be perfectly coherent in some cases.