I think you've missed a moral dimension. Robert seemed to want to name God as unjust.

It's not just a creator of the unacceptable human condition is producing a contradiction, it is unjust. God isn't just saying: "2+2=5" in an abstracted numbers game.The of creating humanity is forcing injustice on them all.

God isn't just a fool. God is, at best, culpably negligent. At worst, God is a sadistic monster, who deliberately gave humans their unacceptable (and unjust) condition.

I might put it like this: the trouble with God is one is always in the relationship for oneself. One loves God for what he does for you, rather than just because God is worthy or wonderful; the relationship is a validation of your own worth rather than just respect for other people.

It's the nature of the "salvation": belief and ritual are always a performance to rescued from their own ignomy.

Last weekend, I attended my father's baptism. He's been aligned with Christianity for about thirty years, but not felt in a position to fully commit to the faith until recently.

In the following sermon, the pastor was speaking about how people shouldn't be be giving charity or doing what's right to be seen by others, for a reward from other people. Yet, the sermon was also at pains to point out how, all along, God was seeing all the good works your are doing.

There a deep irony and inconsistency in the whole thing. Doing good works to be seen is not on... unless it happens to for the sight of God, to follow what God commands, to be seen to be Christian by God so one gets the reward of eternal life by God.

The very doctrine of Grace is entirely self-interested: one performs the act of accepting Jesus to become superior to any other sinner, to be seen by God to be better than others and gain the favour of God.

Christianity is not honest when it claims actions do not get you into heaven. There is, in fact, only one that does: accepting Jesus, the act of practicing Christianity.

We might say God does not understand love. In the face of the evil of sin, God doesn't just give forgiveness because he understands sinners are worthwhile, he demands a commitment (accepting Jesus) to supposedly show the life of a sinner really is worthwhile (as opposed those pagan sinners who lives aren't meaningful).

What God prescibes is a performance of hierarchy. We (supposedly) must take on the form of following Jesus, so that we are not worthless like everyone else (despite the fact they are no more or less inclined to be sinful). It's not about the worth of people even if they have sinned, it's about the worth of being a Christian as opposed to not.

Rather than loving the sinner, God loves themsleves ( "I'm the authority who makes some people worth while or not" and God's followers (as far as Grace goes) love that God rewards them if they perform the dance.

In this context, niether can see the others because they are ignorant of themselves: God does not realise his authority is the beginning and ending of meaning. His followers do not realise they are, of themselves, meaningful.

Most religions (and many philosophies) share this ignorance. Any postion which claims to rescue someone from "meaninglessness" does. Consumed by the desire to obtain meaning, people cannot see themselves, and in turn cannot see others. Love becomes lost in the obsession of rescuing oneself from their perceived meaninglessness.

The New Left is more or less the death of the religious myth (at least until is reforms in the illusion that practicing identity politics creates utopia), be it the traditional notion of God as saviour, notions of the technological, Communist utopia or the classical liberal myth of the free man. It turns attention to description of society and it relationship to our understanding of individuals.

Metaphysics turns from the constraint which defines us, to an expression of the world itself, where logical significance is a being of every state itself. Identity is recognised as hyperreal-- for any given state, there is no "original" which defines its meaning. Every atom, rock, very speck of dirt, every person, even experience, is its own. No matter how similar any states might be, they are all unique. "Final cause," essentialism, "human nature" are gradually abandoned (some contexts take longer than others, depending on the particular mythical prejudices of a thinker) in an understanding that meaning is an expression of the world itself.

It's also why The New Left inspires a lot of consternation amongst various people-- they literally tell there is no world to make perfect. In taking description seriously, they reveal all the stories of ideological salvation are false.

I'd say that's exactly what he's doing. The vision is of the abstracted idea of triangle. It has no geometry in a visual sense.

The idea of triangle is used to substitute for any visual image, for it is known a priori to signify a visual/pattern of a three cornered shape of three sides. It's this abstraction which is visualised-- not the visual, but a meaning of commonly expressed by many different visuals.

"Faith" is a misrepresentation of trust, belief, values, ethics and knowledge in this context. Every philosophy, outlook or world view shares these aspects: that's an understanding of the world, of what's important, of what's needed, of how to live.

All the argument is really saying is: "everyone's postion is an understanding of how the world works and, for each position, those who hold it stick to it."

Those of faith just misread this feature as "faith" because they cannot imagine understanding, ethics, trust, knowledge or a way of life could be without partaking in faith.

I'd say religion itself is heavily responsible for that response. In its hierarchal concens, it teaches people itself is only source of meaning. The sort of "Nihilism" people is only the underlying religious approach to the world, that it is horrible and without meaning, shorn of the saving force or entity.

We might say that philosophy and religion in general is posioned by the Nihilism, by the idea our world is meaningless, so that we must find the transcedent force which turns into something worthwhile. Most are unwilling to teach life, itself, is meaningful because then people wouldn't need their tradition to matter.

Any Muslim advocates for or performs terrorists attacks against Western societies until we ban pornography and gay marriage.

I think that question is a bit misplaced.

The reasoning behind takes the loss of death to mean life's not worth living, that if it's true one's going to die, then one might as well get on to it. In effect, the argument is: "If I don't get to live forever, being here wasn't worth my time," as if we were somehow haggling with someone about our lifetime.

I think it's postering most of the time. Does MU really think their life is a waste of time if he dies? I doubt it. More likely he just has to hear himself say that, to grant him the status of a person beyond death in his own mind, as it quells fear of his own end.

Subjectivities are objective-- it's true my states of experiences exist and cause other states (including of my own body).

There is no "dependency" because the aren't seperate at all. I do not, on one hand, have objective experiences and subjective experiences on the other. All my experiences are subjective (MY experience) and objective (existing) all at once.

An even more telling situation is presented by the mind which is not the body. If we take the non-reductive accounts of mind Wayfarer holds so dear, the presence of a mind which is not any particular instance of body, it can only form a causal relationship with the body to produce the placebo effect.

States of particular concious experiences, various beliefs, must be a material cause-- states of the world which bring about causal impact on others, on bodies.

In the context of non-reductive experience, the placebo effect isn't a problem for materialism, but rather a prime example of materialism in action. Experiences themselves are knowable states of the world which cause others.

Only is you believe or fear it is true. For anyone who's aware of the existence of minds, no such issue is present. We know truth is on our side. P-zombies are nothing more than a trivial category error to us.

Yes, it's possible an acting body without consciousness might be, but that doesn't tell us anything. An effectively infinite number of possible outcomes aren't ever day. In talking about whether minds exist, we aren't dealing with possibilities. To this question, what matters is that which is actual.

So are minds actual? Well, yes they are-- I know I am conscious. My mind is part of the world. It's unavoidable. To say a conscious person might be a p-zombie is incoherent.

The apparent strength of the p-zombie argument is an illusion founded on the substance dualist's claim of ignorance of consciousness. By saying: "We don't really know minds," the substance dualist feeds the reductionist and the p-zombie argument-- it puts the existence of minds beyond understanding, implying we can't really be sure if they are there or not on account of not really knowing anything about them. So much so that even you, a self-proclimed champion of the mind, is caught considering the p-zombie argument like it's relevant to discussing who we are.

Final cause isn't an empirical question, even though it masquerades as one. It's the misapplication of reasoning about causality to logic.

The "why" question is asking: "What is so that I may mean or have logical significance?" It's an attempt to describe a force which causes us to have one logical meaning or another. A lot of people want to treat our significance in ideas as if it were a predetermined outcome of a force of reality.

In our heads, it's​ way of eliminating what we fear. If I'm predetermined (by final cause) to follow God, then there is literally no possibility I will find myself without meaning or as a heathen who abandons the tradition of God.

So final cause has an identity crisis. On the one hand, it wants to be causal, to predetermine the world has one meaning rather than another, but because it deals with the infinites of logic and meaning, being any sort of causal state which changes is closed to it: it's proponents are left gesturing at a "mysterious force" without any wordly definition because the final cause is really only in their imagination.

I think the distinction between the worm theorist and stage theorist is suspect. The crashing of the Titanic happened over a finite duration. If we stick to the distinction strictly, the so called stage theroist who isolates a crashing Titanic is effectively posing a worm when we examine just how many finite instances are involved with the accident-- the hitting the iceberg, beginning to sink, and so on, to give a simple example.

If we are to have an account which fits, the worm and stage must be complementary rather than opposed. The Titanic has to be both a stage (not crashed, crashing, after the crash) and a worm (a particular object with a past and future). Otherwise, we cannot say it is the Titanic which was steaming along unhindered, only to change to make contact with an iceberg, and then alter again into a sinking wreck.

In other words: a worm must be a function of many stages, an expression which not any particular stage or moment, given across many stages which are never each other. (e.g. Titanic steaming along, crashing Titanic, wrecked Titanic).

I think the question is ill formed. By definition, there cannot be the iceberg which takes out the Titanic in 2017-- neither the Titanic nor the object it hits are present in that moment.

In the reasoning you are giving here, you are only accounting for identity in terms of the past. We realise the particular iceberg exists in 1912. But it doesn't consider the change of the future. Instead of realising any iceberg after the Titanic is a different state, a new moment, which the Titanic does not hit, you are still thinking of it as the same state and moment of the crashing Titanic.

It's not. The iceberg in question ceased to be at the end of the Titanic's crash. (and not because it broke apart or anything like that, but rather because it is a different state of time).

So what are you saying? You're not saying that the only sort of thing you experience is being on a computer. You're not saying that all you're experiencing now is this. What other construal of your claim can there be? — The Great Whatever

Identity. The experience of bring on the computer is not any other thing. What matters here is not the limit of you, the world or something else or even a moment in time, it's the identity of a particular thing. For any experience (or state), the extent of it is itself. For anyone, for any moment or lifetime, to have an experience of the computer is only that, no matter what else might happen or what changes might occur.

The eternalist shouldn't be afraid of the present tense. It's actually what defines their position in the end. Since any present state is only itself, time functions as a deterministic block, where any moment may be understood from any point in time.

In terms of identity, any state or experience is always the same, whether it has happened, is present or is past. Regardless of time, by its own presence, the experience of sitting at a computer is just that, no matter how many lifetimes have yet to pass (including the one of sitting at a computer!!), are present at a moment or have wilted away.

We might say relativity is absolute. God can "turn the clock back," destroy the present states and reorder the world in a way similar to what was four hours ago. But what does this mean? It doesn't undo what has already happened. All it does is wipe out certain states (or viewpoints) in favour of others.

The presence of an objective state means relativity: this state rather than any other, here rather than over there, the present rather than the future, etc. To even think or speak: "the world as four hours ago (past) rather than as it is now (present)" is relativistic in its definition-- viewpoints in relation to each other.

I'm not calling out the Church on its own moral terms. My point is a description of what was done when Christian tradition dominated society.

Wayfarer's argument is based on the premise that our society has become worse with respect to seeking profit, destroying other people, damaging the environment since Christian tradition was abandoned, as if Christian tradition prevent these excesses. By what's happened, this is clearly a falsehood.

The point is not that someone is being hypocritical or immoral where others are not, it is that Christian tradition did not have the protective effect Wayfarer ascribes to it. The way he thinks it's better in this respect is nothing more than an illusion.

It's not the tradition that matters. Greed and power act regardless of tradition. It's always a question of our actions, not whether we are Christians or materialists. In short, the concepts and actions Wayfarer ascribes (and doesn't ascribe) to Christianity aren't just Christian.

It's a total red herring. Materialism (whatever that's meant to mean) isn't at fault. The West's pillaging of the world by didn't begin the 20th century.

The Christians had been doing it for hundreds of years before, often with business interests in mind-- colonisation, slave trade, dispossession and genocide of indigenous people, environmental degradation for profit, etc.

Here one is not talking about materialism, but rather greed, power and use of technology, to which the much vaunted Christian spirit was no barrier.

I would say it's​ religion or the transcedent itself which is the problem, a self-inflicted wound of one's own expectations. To be "bigger than politics" (or bigger than recreation. Or bigger than your own wisdom) was a lie all along.

We are only finite. Nothing about our lives has the desired stability because it always being replaced, even when the new is similar. Our world is emergence or creation, not tradition.

So I would say it is mistake to equivocate politics or any other thing people might care about with religion. On some occasions, I these approach religion: the Modernist who thinks are technology utopia is inevitable, a Marxist who thinks we are destined to have economic justice, the free market advocates who imagine Capitalism gives us a world without problems, etc., but most of the time, someone caring about something or considering some idea or practice critical doesn't amount to thinking there must to infinite progress or presence.

Spirituality is bigger than politics, recreation, science, wisdom and even ethics. That's is why it dies in knowledge. Knowledge precludes being "bigger"-- what is known can only be itself: the state of existence or what someone understands.

Absolutely. I even like Sartre's earlier work with it's absence of value. It's a great account of power, responsibility in the context of radical contingency.

Rightly, it removes the excuse from responsibility. Coercion can be properly understood as not an act which determines what someone does, but as an imposition on a free agent. No more denying what one has done nor how it is an act which impacts on others. His early philosophy is sort of where the idea of understanding people's impacts on each other begins.

Most ethical philosophy denies this dimension. It tends to be squabbling over which authoritarian value or foundation tells us what to do-- "Follow God", "No, it's the CI which shows us," "You ignorant fools, maximising happiness is moral foundation," etc. They are all abstracted rather than understood as an expression of living states that matter.

"Intrinsic" value or meaning sort of isn't too far wrong, at least in description. States and things have meaning, express value of themsleves, which is how people are morally obligated to act in ways they don't approve.

I ought not run-up and hit you. Such a state has an immoral expression. As you are person who matters, it's unacceptable for me to enact power in this way, even if I want to. You (and I) express a meaning, value or significance that no amount of desperation on my part can take away.

It's just "intrinsic value" tends to be used in abstraction, usually to deny the very possiblity​ of acting, thinking of being otherwise (e.g. human nature, "It's BIOLOGY", God's will, etc.).

Which is where Hegel falls back into fantasy of unity. In the face of meaninglessness, he went back to the fiction of outside nature, again returning to the fiction that power (and helplessness) and freedom are outside of man.

He didn't realise it is not commonality which defines meaning, but individuality. It is not that there is a common animal/emotional foundation, but rather we are individual animals with emotions, which expresses partcular ethical significance. By our individuality, we are objective and social.

We've been the radically free agents all along, but it simply doesn't give us the power we like to imagine. We have to deal with others, our bodily limits, the world in which we live, our ethical obligations. Radical freedom is not the ability to do anything and create a world without problem or challenge.

With regards to "meaning," it's both. It applies to either logical truths which expesses meaning outside someone's experience or to existing objects.

Meaning of real, physical objects is related to mental construction because if we are to be aware of an existing object, we must have the appropriate mental construction.

If there's is a bookshelf in front of me and my brain gives me the experience of a spoon, I won't know about the bookshelf at all.

So if an object is to exist, then it must express meaning which may be known (i.e. mentally constructed), else it is not defined. Given the existence of things other than myself, expression of meanings must extend beyond myself. Meanings must be more than just what I think, feel or perceive.

In reducing the world to mental construction and choice, Sartre's metaphysic denies the expression of meaning in objects themselves. Supposedly, it cannot be true that the bookshelf exists and means of it's own accord. Without me, without my choice, there can be no such meaning expressed.

It's more a logical analysis of his work than a specific claim he makes.

In his earlier philosophy it's most obvious, but he also struggles with the metaphysical move pretty much all the way through.

He treats meaning like it is a human creation, not just in the sense of we always have freedom of meaning because it is a production of ourselves (which is true), but also in the sense there is no meaning present or produced prior to us or outside someone's experience.

It's why he has such a difficult time with justifying ethics. Without someone making a choice, there effectively can't be an ethic to speak of. The ethical meaning simply cannot be expessed yet.

When presented with an ethical dilemma, what am I to do? No doubt I have already chosen (to have the dilemma) and must make a choice (my eventually response), but there is no meaning or significance to guide me. I cannot say: "Well, X matters, so I am obligated do Y rather than Z. In the end (speaking of his early philosophy) Sartre just goes with the cop out of: "There is only what is chosen."

Sartre gives a great account of power. No matter what reasoning I give, I am the one doing it. It's bad faith for me to say: "I must because..." for it denies my responsibility in causing events. Even if I am behaving ethically (e.g. X matters), I'm the one doing it. I choose to make that world rather than it being a necessary outcome of whatever ethic (e.g God's authority, social demands, that X matters, etc.) is expessed.

In terms of value or ethics though, it's all but empty. Sure, it's true what happens will only be my choice, but that's no better than saying, "tomorrow, something will happen." It doesn't help with anything. If I'm dealing with value or ethics, I want to know what is important , so I can make a better choice about my actions. To say, "Well, there is nothing to say on the matter, there is only what is chosen" is only to miss and ignore the point entirely.

Feuerbach is talking about the distinction of ourselves as the authority over nature.

A person (or God) is distinct from the rest of the world, is the one with the power, who could choose to do anything, to control the world to the image of their liking.

The distinction which the understanding of our (or God's) ideas or fantasies as power or control over the world. Man (or God) is the creator. They can do whatever they might conceive, no matter how difficult, destructive, unethical or even (to the distinction in question) impossible-- Utopia is ours, Man (or God) only has to imagine it (and it costs nothing, for lowly Nature has no authority, value or impact on the acts of Man (or God). Even is it is all destroyed, nothing has been lost).

That nihilism, and the thinkers who circle around, mistake meaning or value for states of the world.

Sartre, for example, treats meaning as if it's​ a human creation. Rather than understanding meaning or value is an infinite expressed by a state itself, Sartre treats it like it's nothing more than a human whim.

Hegel's point is nihilism, "subjectivism" and maybe even scepticism amount to a rejection of meaning as expessed by things-in-themselves. These positions either consider the meaning of others (and everything else) is only them or has no presence at all.

For the artist (or philosopher!), who is dedicated to creating things of meaning outside of themsleves (e.g. for others to see, to record meaning in an object beyond themsleves, etc.), it is a deeply ironic postion to hold.

Lewis then explains that every event in nature, including our very thoughts, must be of the first type if physicalism is true. If this is the case, then when we ask "Why do you think this?", the actual answer must always begin with a Cause-Effect style 'because' - i.e. we think so and so, because our neuronal patterns are configured thus — Ignignot

The trouble with this sort of account is it only accepts "cause and effect" style reasoning. Infinite of definition are misread as a function of prior states of forms (e.g. if A=B and B=C then A=C) rather than grasped of themselves. In this respect, it is reductionism, only repeated in logic, as if its truths were brought about ones before it.

Logic is not an "if, and then" form of reasoning. It is a being or living rather than a state brought about be what preceded it. Such truths have nothing to do with cause and effect. They are true irrespective of it. Physicalism or materialism, that it is to say, cause and effect being the only sort of event in nature, can't touch any logic truths-- to say "the world is only cause and effect" does not bring any logical truth into question or result in any contradiction.

Lewis is wrong (and using a reasoning similar to the reductive materialist) because he's already reduced logic to nature in the first instance. Instead of realising logic is true over and above (or perhaps without) nature (i.e. state of the world), he confuses himself be thinking it must be equivalent to nature, that logical meaning must somehow not be present if existing states are only a matter of cause and effect. He's failed to take into account there is always reasoning other than the world of cause and effect.

The trouble is that Kant isn't paying attention. For it is not just bare experience which amounts to a category of understanding, but also the absence of experience too. Kant's boogeyman of a world without sense (and our experiences) is literally impossible.

If there are no experiences, then there is also something which belongs to a category of understanding. The presence of experiences does not function as an account of everything that belongs to a category of understanding.

All Kant's objection really shows is that, when experiences exist, then there must be experiences at those moments, something that was never in question with respect to our knowledge being experientially mediated.

Which means that all scientific explanation reduces to description. Predictive success is a fluke, without reason, as are all conjoined events. It's just one damned thing after another.

I think the reduction of explanation to description is indicative that Hume's reasoning was flawed. Either he was wrong that we don't perceive causation, or he was wrong in excluding inference as a source of knowledge. — Marchesk

Does he exclude inference as a source of knowledge? I mean, is the claim that, if we rely on inference as a method, we cannot know the sun will rise tomorrow?

Clearly not. We do that every day and it turns out we are right. Inference of what happens in the word amounts to knowledge of causation all the time. I know hitting the post button will put this message up for the rest of you to see. What's more, I've seen it happen too-- that hitting post then means other people on the site read and respond to me (as opposed to cancelling a post, where they do not).

Hume's argument for radical contingency doesn't deny inference can be a source of knowledge or that we can perceive cause and effect. If it did, he would be literally claiming we couldn't know that one event caused another and that we never experienced such phenomena.

What the argument for radical contingency denies, and something Hume never quite got his head around, is reasons.

Since there is only one event after another, all causation is reduced to a matter of a given state that causes another. Causality is defined only by states themselves. There is no deductive knowledge, no rule that can tell us that, given a particular state, that only some other state can occur afterwards. Possibility can never be closed down such that there is only one necessary outcome.

In radical contingency, one only loses deduction. Knowledge, perception and even certainty are still granted through our experiences. Despite knowing, for example, that the sun might not rise tomorrow, I can know it will, be certain about it (i.e. sure it possible other events might happen, but I'm aware the sun rising will be actual) and perceive it happening.

You're still expecting design. Nilhism is formed out of the expectation there is an underlying force which forms a destiny to be powerful and capable of anything we want. Inequality is thought to be incomprehensible, as if a force necessitated otherwise.

So much so, that the "absolute meaningless (i.e. not being designed and necessitated as being able to do everyday)," is thought to amount the ultimate failure of life, as if the whim of (in)equality meant no-one really lived or meant at all.The argument you are making is the ultimate fear if inequality, of being without design, of the "meaninglessness" of contingent whim.

Faced with the true of someone who is impaired or restricted, you cannot accept the truth, cannot allow them a space to be themselves and live a fulfilling live, even if that's what they happen to enjoy.The dark truth is not "absolute meaninglessness, but suffering itself and that there is no designing force which can eliminate its possiblity.

I think the tension is between the idea of the "absolute" and being a living human. One cannot escape being culturally or environmentally mediated. It's not a question of whether any instance of experience is specifically caused by culture, but more than one is inseperable from their own history.

Even in a pure moment of inspiration, I am still a result of the states which came before me. Without them, I would not be as I am. Not because in a different set of circumstances somoeone couldn't result in a similar experience of inspiration, but rather due to the such a person would not be me.

Whatever knowledge or experience I have, it cannot help be be culturally or environmentally mediated because I cannot be without my past.

I'm tempted to claim it as commentary on food and sugar industries putting the truth of profit above the health of the community, but it would be both approprative and a confusion of mass with density.

Our existence, the actions we take, the understanding we hold, which expesses power. Life isn't just an argument, true or otherwise. The world always has more going on as we speak and act.

Strictly speaking, it is not so much beyond any grammar, logic and experience-- I am talking about its truth now-- but rather beyond the particular grammar, logic and experience of the argument.

Even for me, for as I make this argument for Foucault, there is an unstated (in my argument about what Foucault says) expression of power. When I defend Foucault's method, I am not just speaking a truth, but taking a stand in what we ought to think and do.

When someone tells a truth (or falsehood), there is always more going on in the world than them just saying what is true (or false).

Foucault's method is an understanding and observation about the relationship of our ideas to social structure and impact of culture on people's lives.

On the contrary, it is public policy where it matters most. If we consider Islam to be incompatible with our values, in the sense of Islamic identity, then the only choice we have is genocide-- any presence of Islamic identity amounts to an existential threat to our society. To avoid destruction of our community we must kill or remove any Muslim.

The naunce of what people believe as compared what some tradtion might say is critical. Else we equivocate any Muslim with a monster who just wants to destroy our society-- effectively that all Muslims are a members of ISIS. We lose all sight they are people.

Ugh, that only sticks to the loop of reductionism.

This goes back to the question of "What is an electron?" Like the materialist reductionists, the substance dualist and advocates of "mystery" consider thing to be defined by something else, to be reduced that idea.

For someone it say: "well, it's an electron" is considered somehow inadequate. Supposedly, to be talked about, the election must be reduced to something else, whether that be "properties" or "mystery."

The truth is, all along, "it's an electron" was a perfectly fine account. Sure it doesn't tell us what the electron does or how it interacts with other things, but that was never the point-- here we are interested in self-definition, in how an electron is an electron.

Reductionism is the scourge which doesn't allow us to recognise that we talk about other things, which proclaims anything must really be something else or defined by something else. As such it is an act common to both elimative materialism and substance dualists. Neither understand every state has its own being, and so cannot be reduced to properties, ideas or "mystery."

Supernatural phenomena are really only natural phenomena we don't expect. In any case, the reason for rejecting a (super) natural phenomena is because of a lack of evidence/falsification.

When we ask: "how does the chicken soup do that?", a testable hypothesis needs to be defined before we can approach the question. To just speculate "magic" fails to do this. We can't even progress to whether or not a (super) natural cause is in effect because no (super) natural cause has been proposed. Someone has just seen chicken soup and said "magic".

They are, in fact, saying there is nothing further to investigate about how the chicken soup worked. Magic has not been defined as a testable actor. As presented, it is not suggesting any sort of answer to how the chicken soup works, so it's rightly dismissed for failing to even define a hypothesis.

To say theism is "useful" is more the argument of an atheist-- where theistic belief is registered as a balm for the world (e.g. giving hope to those who can't find it without God, building cultures, giving a moral framework to a society, etc. ).

For the theist, their belief is more than useful. It's an insight, a form of knowledge, understanding and experience, to how existence works and why.

That doesn't wash because atheists have plenty of hopes and fears too.Yet, they are not compelled to be theists. The possiblity of death and fear of loss doesn't tip the scales to theism for them.

Insofar as theism is a manifestation of hope or fear, it's more specific than the presence of such a emotion or expectation. It a sort of negatively termed approach to hope-- that there is no hope in the absence of God.

I don't think that question has much to do with it. The world is human shaped (humans are part of it) and not human shaped (other parts of it are not human). Moreover, we don't get one without the others-- I am never the whole world.

To merely be human shaped would take away everything around me that defines life, whether we are talking my current life or a future afterlife-- our lives and florush are defined by what is NOT us as much as it is by us.

The whole question of being human shaped or not and "the problem of meaning" are incohrent, red herrings introduced by ignorance of oneself and the world.

It's what happens when people try to reduce life to the infinte or eternity, to deny possibilities of the world and reduce reality or life to a single image of desire (e.g. eternal life, justice, purpose, etc. )

Regardless of religion, mystic tradition, politics or ideology, this is true. The "saviour" claim of any of them is just a comforting myth (in the case of loss) or hierarchal bullshit (to cause people to take up one idea rather than another).

It's about loss, possibility and how that interacts with our own self-image.

Arguments about the fear of death, for example, don't get to the heart of the question. Many atheists are afraid of death too. No doubt many atheists would love to have an afterlife, even if they believe no such event will occur.

The difference is the atheist can accept a world where they might lose. Life doesn't become unbearable if it's possible (even likely) if they encounter loss.

For the theist, the opposite is true. To them loss is incomprehensible, to a point where they cannot function unless it's very possibly is eliminated. For life to be meaningful and worthwhile, they cannot loss (e.g. there must be an afterlife) and the world must be just (e.g. God enacts a final judgment, so good people get rewarded and bad people don't get away with it), so they form beliefs and actions which take away the possibility of such loss-- hence the must believe, for it will mean being saved from loss and meaninglessness.

You should get on with Hawking swimmingly-- that statement is failed naturalism, in the similar way to the "God" did it argument.

Instead of dealing with the world as it exists, the approach attempts to reduce everything to a single force which enacts meaning where there was none. Hawking doesn't have professional jeleousy here, he's just upset you demand a different God to his own.