Hi! I'm an #atheist #humanist and #skeptic looking to respectfully engage online here with people I disagree with. And maybe people who agree with me too!
I don't believe in #god , and in fact I'm pretty sure no such thing exists, but I'm willing to consider the alternatives and change my mind.
Are you a #christian who believes in #jesus , or any other #religion , and want to explore whether or not you have good reasons to think that it's true? I'm happy to have that conversation!
I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong. Are you?
@lack picking up the gauntlet: I am a pantheistic agnostic. I unironically believe that hard atheism is a heretical branch of Christianity.
@b_chocolatey I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I usually associate the phrase "hard atheism" to mean "the positive belief that there is no God or gods". Do you mean something different?
@lack if you ignore the improbability of literalist young-earth creationism and the miraculous described in the #Bible, you will find that it’s actually quite difficult to really rule out the existence of both a creator God and lesser “gods”, souls, ghosts, spirit ancestors. You are left both with the origins-of-the-Big-Bang problem (why is there something rather than nothing?) and the consciousness problem (why can I feel sensation, memory, reasoning, desire, fear, hate, love? Mechanical contraptions can’t have any of this)
@b_chocolatey
I'm curious why you rule them in!
I agree that there are interesting questions that we don't fully understand, and some that maybe we will never actually understand. But I think it's okay to just say "we don't know" when we don't know.
Why do you think God or gods or souls are good answers to these questions?
@lack To be good at atheism, you have to not only making a convincing case that there is no God who wished for the Big Bang to occur, but you also have to make a good non-supernatural explanation of all sentient life, including the smallest ant. Otherwise that ant is a god.
@b_chocolatey Why does an atheist need to do any of that? Why is the default position "It's God unless you can prove it is not"?
I approach it differently. I take all these questions and start with "I don't know what the cause is until I learn more". Maybe I'll learn that the cause is a God. Maybe I'll learn the cause is physical. Maybe something else. Maybe I will never know. But the fact that I don't know doesn't mean you are right to claim that gods are the answers, does it?
@lack It’s easy to imagine oneself as an invisible, airy force-field looking out of one’s eyes and moving one’s legs. It is very difficult to imagine one’s self as the sum total of electrified eye-cells and brain-cells and leg-cells. Otherwise I would be no different than an alarm clock, or an internal combustion engine - and I am a person. I have feelings.
@b_chocolatey
I think I see what you mean.
But if something is hard to imagine, does that make it false? If it leads to a conclusion we don't like, does that make it false?
Are these good reasons for concluding that the "self" is not or cannot be a physical thing?