Daisho Con

I agree for the most part, but it's based on true belief to a subconcious level, not just what you force yourself to believe, and it's based upon what you believe you deserve, not what you want. At least thats how I'd set it up were I a benevolent deity.

Being a physics major and a decent mathematician, I find it hard to believe that everything that we see in the world just came into existence by accident. The probabilities are hard for me to even wrap my head around. Though I hold no allegiance to any one religion, I strongly believe that life as we know it has been guided, directed, or nudged by something or someone, and I will believe so until I see strong, unbiased evidence to the contrary.

BMK wrote:don't you want there to be something after you die?

Certainly wanting something to be true doesn't make it true.

md wrote:Being a physics major and a decent mathematician, I find it hard to believe that everything that we see in the world just came into existence by accident. The probabilities are hard for me to even wrap my head around. Though I hold no allegiance to any one religion, I strongly believe that life as we know it has been guided, directed, or nudged by something or someone, and I will believe so until I see strong, unbiased evidence to the contrary.

Imagine an event that can only happen to a person with a probability of 1 in 1-billion chances. Even in this case, the idea that there are six billion people on the planet makes the repeat-occurrence of this event less absurd.

Considering the scope of the universe, I can't imagine how a mathematician can come to this conclusion. Given such a large amount of time, unimaginably large, certainly natural laws take care of the details. While a bundle of watch pieces and gizmos might not arrange themselves into a watch on their own, watches that bind functional pieces and survive based on adaptive pieces (like their genetic evolution equals) would.

Saying that things came into existence by "accident" doesn't seem like the appropriate term. "Accident" implies mistake. We don't claim that the grand canyon was designed, because we understand that water moving over the ground has eroded the land into a shape defined by physics of friction, gravity, and other natural intrinsic processes. There is simply no motivation to believe that the grand canyon, or the processes that created it, were designed by some higher being. The processes that developed the grand canyon are well understood.

With science already taking the lead, it seems that any notion of a higher being suffers the burden of proof. Even if, in this case, erosion were disproven, that wouldn't count as proof of a higher being!

Bah. This poll is biased against agnostics.

capitocapito wrote:

BMK wrote:don't you want there to be something after you die?

Certainly wanting something to be true doesn't make it true.

Your right, wishing for a god or an afterlife doesn't mean that there is going to be one when I die, but I can hope. It not like I'm compromising my morals by being part of a church or organized religion just to get into an hypothetical afterlife, I live life how I want to live it, not governed by other peoples view, opinions, and of course not some book, but if all you have to do is believe, nothing else, just believe, why not? what is the harm?

BMK wrote:But don't you want there to be something after you die?

No, I don't. An afterlife makes real life less significant.

I operate on the assumption that this life is all we get. Life is natural, beautiful and above all else finite. Believing in the afterlife cheapens the effect a little, as if life was about the destination and not the journey. Not having an afterlife spells it out pretty cleanly: this is it. This is your heaven and/or your hell, and you better make the most of it while you're here.

Everything else you nailed.

And Capito's right- if you want to go there, burden of proof is on those believing in a higher power.

Also, Boko's right that the poll's biased against agnostics. After all, they're the only group that is guaranteed to be correct.

BMK wrote:

capitocapito wrote:

BMK wrote:don't you want there to be something after you die?

Certainly wanting something to be true doesn't make it true.

Your right, wishing for a god or an afterlife doesn't mean that there is going to be one when I die, but I can hope. It not like I'm compromising my morals by being part of a church or organized religion just to get into an hypothetical afterlife, I live life how I want to live it, not governed by other peoples view, opinions, and of course not some book, but if all you have to do is believe, nothing else, just believe, why not? what is the harm?

Sounds a lot like Pascal's idea of a debate based purely not on whether something (god/afterlife/eternity) might exist, but whether one should believe in it. Pascal essentially says that there really isn't much harm in believing in said something. After all, the benefits of believing would definitely outweigh the risks, in the event that above something did indeed exist and belief in that something was a prerequisite to getting it.

The only sticking point, for me at least, is that I can't see myself believing in something simply for the sake of believing it (although I'm sure my personal past experiences factor in to the fact that I am, for the most part an agnostic who errs on the side of the atheist.) I also seem to have a personal problem with thinking that I know something that I obviously can't ever know in my current state of being. I don't believe in god, not because of the fact that I'm sure there isn't one, but because I refuse to pretend that I know there IS one.

Did that argument make any sense at all? I am typing this up at three in the morning after a long day. Hmm, perhaps I really should have just pulled out my old philosophy paper on the subject instead of simply rambling as I am now.

Kara kuro wrote:

BMK wrote:[...] if all you have to do is believe, nothing else, just believe, why not? what is the harm?

Sounds a lot like Pascal's idea[...]

Let me extend on Kara's idea:

Wikipedia wrote:Pascal's Wager (or Pascal's Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should "wager" as though God exists, because so living has everything to gain, and nothing to lose.

My problem with this wager is that it doesn't apply to our situation. You might not adhere to the defined aspects of Christianity, but it is clear to the bible that there is a set of rules you need to adhere to to acquire life after death. But, the same is true for other religions. There is a very specific set of rules you need to adhere to in order to gain life after death. How do you know which one to choose? It's a life-after-death and death choice, and the probability of believing in the wrong deity kind of shaves away the mathematical advantage of Pascal's wager.

It seems you choose to believe in one "generic" store-brand god, which adheres to good morals and well-being. You, I assume, have sided with the idea that you don't need to follow strict rules of organized religion, as long as kind-hearted humanist results are produced. Why not choose a different, stricter alternative? So living has everything to gain, and nothing to lose. I'm sure we can find some fundamentalists in every religious sect to tell you about every proof and historical document that acknowledges themselves as the one correct alternative.

On a semi-unrelated note: My biggest concern is that belief in a god will only lead one to appeal to that belief when dealing with scientific pursuits. This seems to be the case with evolution, where creationism seems to be an invading force that wants to disprove Darwin's theory. Even a little aspect of intelligent design, the idea of existence being nudged by a higher being, gets in the way of true scientific discovery about the origins of life. Science can, and should, be done without belief.

I believe this question has already been settled, but I will type out the text here just for funsies:

My proof comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the passage about the Babel fish

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching roof of the nonexistence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God,"for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man,"the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? IT could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you dont. QED."
"Oh dear,' says God,"I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore he goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.
----

I think that settles this poll quite effectively.

The more I think of it the more I feel that
I believe in an afterlife.
I believe in doing good things if for nothing else than just making me feel better.
It kinda makes me selfish, believing because I don't want there to be nothing. But the more I think of it, the things I believe in don't really require that I believe in a god or some other type of being. If i believe that there is an afterlife(but not god), there is nothing to disprove it since most of us haven't died. I can believe in that, and I can have faith in that, nothing else. My faith isn't really faith, its more like a hope, I hope people are good, I hope there is an afterlife, but I don't disagree with any scientific things like evolution or anything, that stuff is proven for the most part, how can I deny fact. With no fact about the afterlife, there is a possibility that it exists.

Now god, he doesn't have to exist.

So Capito you've at least changed me there, but your gonna have to try really hard if you want to make me lose everything else I believe in.

Question for all of you theological philosophers out there. Is doing selfless things to get to heaven a selfish goal? If you live your whole life selflessly but for the purpose of acquiring entrance to the kingdom so that you can then live it up without fear of karma or cosmic retribution, then do you truly deserve to go to heaven? Would, then, a truly selfless person give up heaven as a showing of their true intentions? I'll let you think about that for awhile.

This is probably a bit off topic, but I'm sticking it in here anyways since we're in the subject area.

capitocapito wrote: Imagine an event that can only happen to a person with a probability of 1 in 1-billion chances. Even in this case, the idea that there are six billion people on the planet makes the repeat-occurrence of this event less absurd.

Considering the scope of the universe, I can't imagine how a mathematician can come to this conclusion. Given such a large amount of time, unimaginably large, certainly natural laws take care of the details. While a bundle of watch pieces and gizmos might not arrange themselves into a watch on their own, watches that bind functional pieces and survive based on adaptive pieces (like their genetic evolution equals) would.

I don't deny the fact that over massive periods of time low probabilities become possibilities. However, this exact set of circumstances, with all the patterns and nuances inherent in it, seems like an odd answer to the equation of life. Also, over such vast periods of time why aren't there more circumstances such as ours that have been observable as of yet? Such discoveries would go a long way to swaying my current beliefs. In any case, the possibility is out there that all of this is coincidental, through natural processes. However, the beauty that I find in physics, math, and the world itself will always lean me, at least partially, towards the conclusion of a higher power.

capitocapito wrote:Science can, and should, be done without belief.

I believe that wholeheartedly. Science, at its best, needs to be done with no assumptions. We can't always do that, but we try our best.

Granolaman wrote:Question for all of you theological philosophers out there. Is doing selfless things to get to heaven a selfish goal? If you live your whole life selflessly but for the purpose of acquiring entrance to the kingdom so that you can then live it up without fear of karma or cosmic retribution, then do you truly deserve to go to heaven? Would, then, a truly selfless person give up heaven as a showing of their true intentions? I'll let you think about that for awhile.

I do believe that it is a selfish goal. For most people, without something selfish tied on they have no motive for being "selfless".

md wrote:I don't deny the fact that over massive periods of time low probabilities become possibilities. However, this exact set of circumstances, with all the patterns and nuances inherent in it, seems like an odd answer to the equation of life. Also, over such vast periods of time why aren't there more circumstances such as ours that have been observable as of yet? Such discoveries would go a long way to swaying my current beliefs. In any case, the possibility is out there that all of this is coincidental, through natural processes. However, the beauty that I find in physics, math, and the world itself will always lean me, at least partially, towards the conclusion of a higher power.

The exact set of circumstances for life is not complicated. Water+grass+air = organisms - which over billions of years evolved to life forms.


Why haven't any other circumstances like ours been observed? It seems like you're not grasping the full range of the universe

We can't even make clear observations about happenings within our own galaxy! Surely you must realize that there are millions and millions of galaxies that make up the universe right? The chances of earth being the only life-inhabited planet in the entire universe are slim-to-none. The reason we don't/can't observe is that the human race will likely die-off before we are ever able to even grasp at the straws of technology that would let us travel to other galaxies.

Then again, who knows? They may come to us, or there may be some other breakthrough. In my opinion, even if one believes in a god, it is futile to base that belief on the fact that a higher power is the only way we are able to exist.

No but a belief in Beauty is the single best reason to believe in god. The idea is that the universe is a perfect watch, not just good but perfect. That requires a master clockmaker to create something that Beautiful. And belief in god is never futile, futile claims uselessness. If belief creates motivation, comfort, happiness, etc it isn't futile.
It doesn't matter what your motivations are for helping people, they are almost always selfish. There was an episode of friends on it. Humans are generically selfish. We help people to feel good, to get into heaven, to get money, to get laid, etc. We still helped people, and made someones life better.

Aminar wrote:No but a belief in Beauty is the single best reason to believe in god. The idea is that the universe is a perfect watch, not just good but perfect. That requires a master clockmaker to create something that Beautiful. And belief in god is never futile, futile claims uselessness. If belief creates motivation, comfort, happiness, etc it isn't futile.
It doesn't matter what your motivations are for helping people, they are almost always selfish. There was an episode of friends on it. Humans are generically selfish. We help people to feel good, to get into heaven, to get money, to get laid, etc. We still helped people, and made someones life better.

I almost think random beauty is one of the most amazing things in the world. Even, or perhaps because of, being an artist myself, someone who consciously works towards the creation of 'beautiful' things, I can't help but feel just as inclined, if not more inclined, towards random aesthetics: a colourful paint splatter, the way a blanket drapes over a banister when thrown, the pattern stones make when tossed carelessly from a child's hand. Who's to say that beauty can only be found through the intent to create?