Clarifying or restating the case for atheism

If you don't allow a definition of "God," then the conversation is a waste of time, just as any philosophy is a waste of time if one of the participants refuses a definition.
My view is that there might be "superman" types out there in space, who can work wonders and who would seem gods to us -- not unlike the Greek pantheon, but they are not "God."
I also think there might be a force or presence in the universe that makes sentience and so on possible, but forces and presences are not God either.  This is just avoiding admitting that you don't really believe in God either.  Some honesty in the discussion is necessary.
The deity in question does not have to be the Abrahamic God -- heaven help us if he is as this God seems rather evil -- he could be Brahma or Zeus as many of the ancient philosophers perceived him -- the key is the word "omnipotent."  The thing is if he is not omnipotent he is not God, but superman, if he is God he is irrational because omnipotence, as even the Scholastics understood, leads to self-referential logical contradictions -- otherwise known as reductio ad absurdum proofs that the premise is false.
Now the "standard" resolution offered for this is the assertion that God is omnipotent -- he can do anything -- except things which he cannot do.  The problem with this is that this limitation applies to every motivated being.  Indeed, I am omnipotent if you allow such an exception -- I can do anything except what I cannot do.
This is what is behind the assertion that God is irrational.  There is also the clear evidence we live on an earth where life is dominated by the principle of natural selection, and natural selection implies constant fear and suffering and disease and death.  To me this is the "problem of suffering" and rules out any deity with good intentions.  A de fiat creation would have been kinder than God using this method to create life.
It is fairly obvious to me that these arguments are not understood by some of the participants here, since the responses are not to the point.  All I can say is that if you don't understand the arguments about God, you have no business having opinions on the subject.  
Regarding Buddhism, the Buddha was (if he existed historically) pretty much an atheist in the sense that he did not think there was a god, but he didn't care much -- he said our problems are the same as those of the gods if they exist -- the problems of existence and karma and suffering -- so gods are not relevant.  As Buddhism evolved it accepted existing rituals and deities of the areas it entered, as part of its generalized notion of tolerance that goes beyond just getting along but includes allowing "worship" of extraneous deities in temple by those so inclined and the withholding of criticism or question by the monks, who are trained better, of what those untrained may do.  I think this historical practice has been wise, but it does have its problems.

Reductionism was a fad of the 1920s and few nowadays think it more than sophomoric and a line of maybe teenagers who just now had it occur to them.  Materialism is impossible since what you would have to have now is something sometimes called "physicality-ism", as we now know matter is only a form of energy and energy is pretty much hard to pin down, and may end up being an illusion of vibrations of fundamental strings or some sort of gyrations of space-time and space-time seems to be doing outrageous things. 

Basically atheism has little to say about existence except there is small evidence of a purpose-driven, history involved deity -- certainly not enough to justify it.  The old materialism is "there is only matter and the void." We now know that is untenable.

I watched a fascinating lecture yesterday from Australia which ended with a cartoon she drew showing the scientists on one end showing neurons and neurochemicals and so on doing marvelous things and on the other end showing mind and economics and society and literature and law and music and so on, separated by a big question mark.

That is the difference between an atheist and a theist -- not that the atheist has answers but that they are willing to say they don't know and see no need or reason to insert a divinity into the issues.

Personal afterlife

I tend to suspect the Hindus and Buddhists are closer to reality when it comes to an afterlife than the Western teachings.   My main problem with the western view is that it is all or nothing -- one fewer sin and it's heaven; one less and its hell -- forever.  Makes no sense at all.

Of course being reborn doesn't do one much good either -- you are dead -- the new baby has to deal with your bad karma or is lucky if it is good.

The thing is, we are sentient -- we are minds.  The mind is not the brain or any other part of our body, but somehow a product of our life -- largely our brain.  This is something science cannot answer.  They can point out that certain regions of the brain or certain chemicals lead to certain mental experiences, but what is the link?  That is the "hard problem." 

So the universe is space/time, energy, mind.  Not much mind in whatever manifestation of existence we are in, as far as we can tell with today's knowledge, but just as we really cannot pin down the nature of space/time nor the nature of energy (we can measure them and make predictions a lot of the time, but we have no hint of their essence) I would say as much about mind.

There is little in this speculation, though, that would lead us to think there is a personal afterlife.

Pantheism

I have pretty much the same problems with a pantheistic concept of God as with any other, and really don't see much difference.  The ideas of omniscience and omnipotence to my mind already imply a sort of pantheism -- God is everywhere as the book of Jonah tried to show.  My complaints about suffering remain the same.

Now if what is being talked about is not a god (the word pantheism implies a god but words don't have to mean what they are derived from) but instead a generalized force of ethics and sentience and awareness that we partake of, and maybe rejoin at some point as the Transcendentalists had it, then pantheism is a flavor of atheism.   Forces are not gods -- gods are beings with personality and objectives and emotions and all that.  As I have said, this reminds me of Taoism, except there no attempt is made to understand it all.

Pantheism as a theist notion carries the same problems as other theist notions such as the need for evidence that is not produced, the problem of suffering, the absence of any discernible presence of such a being in either history or physics, and so on.

Religions persist in spite of modern knowledge

Yes mankind would be better off without religion, but that is not likely.  Religions have tricks to keep themselves going, and those with the best tricks last longest.  If only people could see the tricks involved in ideas like faith and loyalty when applied to myths, but once one has been indoctrinated (usually as a child), only some have the personality traits enabling them to escape, and indoctrination is a form of addiction, not easy to break from and very easy to find excuses for not wanting to break from.  

Why don't gays die out?

A comment on this gay business: my understanding is that at least for male homosexuals the tendency is inherited in the female line, perhaps even on the Y chromosome (although of course the idea of a gay gene is too simple).  If that is the case, even if gay men don't reproduce, it would have no effect.

I would agree that strictly gay men almost certainly don't have babies, unless they do it medically, and most won't.  That may be evidence that a "strictly" gay man is much more rare than imagined.

Another possibility is that gayness provides some unrelated survival benefit, such as better survival rates in the womb and in childhood, and maybe even in finding a wife.  For gay women, it has been so long that men dominate that they just go ahead and have babies, until recently at least.  

Sources of knowledge

I think maybe we can imagine four ways of obtaining knowledge.  First is to be born with it (evolution supplying us or something like that.  Problem is evolution is only interested in propagating our genes so the information we are born with may have survival value but not much else, and to a large extent this will be things we know but don't know we know.

Then there is standard deduction -- starting with things we already know and deducing further knowledge from it.  The problems here are well known -- the logic may be wrong or the things we "already know" may be wrong.

Then there is induction.  If we see something happen over and over with no counter-examples, we infer that it is a rule of the universe.  Of course this is what science does, but we all do it too.  It has the standard problem that it may be we just haven't yet found the counter-examples.  It is collections of such rules about a related subject that scientists call "theory."

Finally there is the way most of us get our knowledge -- by getting it from an authority on the subject.  Experts know more than we do so when we want to know something we go to them.  I think in this general category there is also getting special revelations from supernatural beings or from ancient writings.  This makes clear the problem with this method of learning -- we have to chose our experts carefully.

Is Hitler in Hell?

You don't and can't pretend to know the full story of anyone, no matter how evil, even the icon of evil, Adolph Hitler. He had a childhood, he grew up in a certain culture, he had certain genes. All these things gave him beliefs on which he acted sincerely and devotedly. He was certainly not the only anti-Semite of his times, and we are all people of our times. Sincerity and devotion often lead to great harms in the world.

It can also be argued that he was mentally disturbed in certain ways. We do not criminally punish the insane.

I am an atheist, so don't have the problem of a god dispensing justice and weighing our soul and if it is just a little too evil we go to Hell otherwise we go to Heaven (and the vast majority of people no doubt are very much on the edge).

I do, however, think we have an afterlife, or at least suspect it, given considerations of the likelihood of our being in an illusionary world rather than a real one, and when we die we go up a level to greater reality. This is a probabilistic argument recently expressed in some popular movies (where it is called virtual reality), rather stupid ones, but it seems probable, and would present a chance for what Asians call karma to do its thing -- when you do harmful things you make yourself slightly more evil, and vice versa, and this gets reflected in the more real existence to come. There is no judgment involved -- it is all rather automatic or even mechanical, and came into existence through people like us (but more advanced and probably better and smarter) creating sub-realities. Maybe it has always existed.

The good life

I think you could say I'm a philosopher.  Probably not a very good one, at least by modern notions of what this takes, and certainly not very original, since I've had the repeated experience of finding my best ideas and insights have always been thought of before.

I think it is because I'm interested most of all in what is a good life.  This is not easy -- it is not happiness, nor comfort, nor respect, nor ethical ("right") behavior.  It is none of these and it is all of these.  One can argue that each of these require all the others, that one cannot be happy nor comfortable nor respected nor doing the right things if one doesn't have the others too.

Nor of course, in these terms, is a good life possible.  It can only be approximated, or approached, maybe closely if one is a living paragon of cheerfulness, good health, high position and moral rectitude, but what do we do if we aren't?

I think we all think about these things, and when we are lacking we try to do better, or at least make excuses.  A poor man can be proud of his poverty, especially if life offers him no better chance, and a stupid person (they exist by the droves) can look down on intelligence and make himself feel better watching mindless entertainments.

Who is to say either is a better life?

Still, I think the greatest joys are of a more refined sort -- thinking about the great questions, seeing what others thought, trying to figure out what they meant by a lot of what they said (after all they are famous and great philosophers so what they said has to mean something).

Similarly, I now know that being healthy and vigorous and all that has a lot to do with one's joy in life, one's respect, and so on.  However I will leave it up for the most part to the doctors, just being reasonably informed and a bit skeptical is as far as I go, as well as doing what the doctor tells me to do.

There are many other joys -- art, music, and so on, and then there are circus performances.  One chooses what one enjoys, although I'm a bit of a snob and if something is boring or not really funny or just blood for its own sake, I would rather not.

Respect is an interesting thing, and we all want it.  There are a million ways to get it and a million people judging us all the time.  Some say we should ignore this -- that it is what we think of ourselves and not what others think of us that is important.  They should read Confucius.

Of course the prime mover in all this is Socrates, as we get him from Plato.  The most important thing in life is to do what is right.  The thing is Socrates did not know what is right and I won't pretend I have anything on him.  All Socrates really knew is that what most people think is right is wrong, or, at least not defensible.  We see this today too -- people who would let others suffer and die rather than let them immigrate, or even just people who don't want to let others immigrate because they are different.  Men who think men are better than women and vice versa.  People who say things like lying or stealing or an abortion or whatever, regardless of the circumstances, are wrong.  I could go on and on.

Still sometimes (fortunately usually just in theoretical scenarios), there are cases where the right and wrong of something stumps me.  I've already posted about this a few time, so just a brief summary -- first, there is never an absolute right or wrong.  Second, one must consider harms and helps.  Third, one must not use sentient beings as means to ends.  Fourth, one must apply mindful compassion (not just, "Is this compassionate," but do I understand why it is or is not compassionate, not just how I feel.

Of course no doubt I get it wrong all the time, and I then must deal with my mistakes as honestly and rightly as I can.

More about personal immortality without God

From the feedback I'm getting people must think I've gone off the deep end, and maybe I have, but it seems to me, with modern inflationary theory and so on, that the universe and all of existence must be either infinite or so damn big we will never know the difference.  Indeed, our present cosmos originating from our own personal big bang may have been infinite for all we know -- all we have access to is the part from which the light has had time to reach us, and we know what really was there was many, many orders of magnitude more, if not unending.  In all that, there are bound to be gazillions of "virtual" existences out there doing all sorts of things, so that the probability that we are in one becomes a virtual certainty.

I don't much credit claims of evidence for this sort of thing -- it's like claims for flying saucers -- if they are that smart and want to stay out of sight, subject over.

A word about the religionists response, for which, frankly, I have no respect.  This is not a last ditch conversion hidden in science jargon.  It is just common sense given what we know.  There need be no deity doing this.  Just smart people like us taking care of ourselves and our existence.  It may be true that they would seem like deities to us, but seeming like a deity doesn't make one a deity.

Good and bad of religion

It is easy for a relatively intelligent person who has not undergone indoctrination to see that all "faith" (not just religious faith) is mistaken and generally wrong and often harmful. One can have opinions if they are based on valid and repeated experience, even opinions that approach belief, but never should one allow actual belief, where one has made an emotional commitment to something.

Religions make a virtue of faith, but this is seriously wrong. It is in fact a vice -- an easy way to excuse believing things one would like to believe even though there is insufficient evidence. One should only have opinions (where one can readily change one's mind without experiencing guilt or fear) when the evidence warrants it.

All that said, I do not oppose religion completely. Many of the things religions do are good. The present Pope, for example (as opposed to some of his unfortunate predecessors) seems to have a relatively open mind and is a preacher of love and tolerance and downplays doctrine. The same can be said of the Dalai Lama. Many Muslim clerics preach the same message, although unfortunately it seems most do not and many are sources of hate and intolerance. Any religion that teaches that it alone is true is likely to be this way -- in fact such a teaching makes a religion more a force for harm than for good.

Kidney Infection and thoughts of death, part 2

Continued from previous post

I'm an atheist, and a rather dogmatic one.  There is not only no reason to believe in God or gods, but there are good reasons not to.  No proofs, of course, but when one is talking about rational, thought-out views, there is no proof.  That is for those who want to believe and use faith as an excuse.

However, I do think we survive death, as individuals.  This is but one life in a long series of lives in an uncountable number of universes.

There is and can be no evidence for this.  Recovered memories are logically either frauds or wishful thinking.  So is deja vu.  The previous lives would not be in any way connected with this universe.

It is just logical.  We have to live in layer after lawyer of false universes -- illusions that we invent for ourselves to give us life after life after life.  Of course for the most part, or maybe for many parts, we have no memory, as that is what makes them interesting and helpful.

The idea is in some ways ancient and some ways quite modern, and there are many variations on the theme. I tend to prefer to keep it simple. We live a life, gain its experiences (the whole point of living), then die, unplug the machine, and then spend some time in whatever live this is and then go off and plug ourselves into another machine. (Of course the machine bit is all metaphor). So, it is possible to be an atheist and nevertheless thing we live after death.

Kidney infection and thoughts of death

I recently had a kidney infection, involving loss of bladder control, inability to move without tremendous effort (and needing to be carried about), and a good deal of metal depression and confusion.

When one's kidneys are not doing their job, poisons they should filter out of the blood accumulate and all sorts of things manifest.

Now I'm only 72, and I don't consider that old.  It is long in the tooth, to be sure, but I don't think I even begin to look my age, except of course my beard is grey (salt and pepper).  I had figured I was good for at least another couple decades.

Well that changed my mind.  Modern medicine saved me and with a few antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and I don't know what all, I was up and about in a day.  I have however had a setback and we did it all a second time.  Makes me wonder, of course.  (Continued next post).

We believe in causation

We believe in causation -- that is, that everything that happens has a cause, or to put it the negative way, nothing that happens can happen without a cause. People this is just a belief. In our world it seems to be the case, but we can't prove it. All sorts of things happen that are mysteries to us. We assume they had a cause but maybe they didn't.

We do know, at least the scientists know and we are wise to accept their long-held consensus, that at the atomic and sub-atomic level this is not quite the case. Given a single uranium atom, we know that at some point it will decay, but without cause. It will just happen. We can't say it is random either because if we have a large collection of uranium atoms, we can predict very exactly how many will decay each second -- just not which ones.

 

The city-state or polis as the ideal form of government

I've been meaning to post something about political philosophy (defined as speculation on what makes for the best government).  Today I would like to promote the city-state.

A city-state, or "polis" from the Greek, but I would like to use a regular English plural (polises) constitutes a central city, close-by other cities and suburbs, and the surrounding countryside.

There are two problems with this form of organization, neither of which would exist if designed right.  The first is that they constantly war with each other (actually not so -- history records the wars and so presents a distorted view of almost continuous warfare, but actually the polis is generally not aggressive.

The other problem is more serious -- empire builders and egoistic Napoleons come along and ruin it.  This is why they are so few.

But look at Singapore and Hong Kong (although sadly in the second case the imperialists are slowly destroying it).

If the whole world were to consist of nothing but such entities, and if they were all set up as functional republics (who almost never go to war with each other -- it is the tyrants of the world where you see invasions and so on), the governments, being far closer to the public, and being such that practically everyone knows the leaders, is just bound to result in better government.

Of course institutions are needed to keep tyrants out of power (legitimate power-sharing checks and balances) and somehow the existing nations need to be broken into smaller units.  That last one is a mouthful -- getting the cities set up as independent and then keeping them so.

I suppose (of course I do it occurs to me) that states like Sparta must be prevented, so some sort of international body chosen by the cities and maintaining basic laws and with resources to enforce them, would therefore be unavoidable.

Freedom of religion

I think the promotion of freedom of religion is a good thing in general, but with laws preventing any disturbance of the peace, any violence, and preventing child indoctrination, which is, from my own experience I know, one of the worst forms of child abuse. It puts young people with smarts and the ability to see the real world as it is through many years of fear and doubt and guilt until they either throw if all off or give in and become milk toast for the preacher's income.

Religion, however, should also not have special protection. It should be wrapped up with freedom of opinion and belief as only one aspect of this broader ideal.

Free prostitution and the Golden Rule

That the Golden Rule and things like that came from men is okay with me. It is less than perfect, but good enough for a guide 99 percent of the time. It also has a practicality to it, in that doing good things for people tends to lead to their doing good things for us.

I don't think for a moment these things come from God, as if they did we would have to follow them much more closely than anyone does in reality. Think about it -- if we must do to others what we would like them to do to us, we would give away or merchandise if we were a merchant, lend to anyone without interest if we were a bank, never send anyone to prison or even arrest them if we were a policeman, and even give our services freely if we were a prostitute.

God's laws (which for this reason don't exist) require strict adherence. We can bend man's laws to fit with reality.