Posted by Jim (206.79.177.145) on March 06, 2002 at 14:42:26:
In Reply to: Re: Question of the Week posted by thor on March 06, 2002 at 01:03:51:
Yeah, well at least I can capitalize!
Empiricism vs. atheism vs empirical atheists: okay, gotcha. Agreed.
I think the disagreement runs a little deeper then the semantic issue, though I think it's wearing the semantics hat. What would you call the force of nature if not God or an 8/8 green creature? Mysterium tremendum?
If we don't understand the universe, and we don't, then we're left to wonder as to its nature. And at this point, it becomes truly unclear as to whether there is some consciousness or pattern behind it all. We know enough to know that we don't know. Nothing adds up. This isn't an acceptable answer, so there must be more to learn.
"as soon as you expand your definition of god to include anything that contradicts reality or that is beyond the scope of human experience, i must then disagree"
But that's not what I'm doing, I'm just saying that you can't always tell what the puzzle's picture is until you have all the pieces, and within that lies the unknown possibility of God.
"don't the miracles of life and existence, the beauty of physics and natural order within chaos indicate that there is something behind it all, some driving force? some vague thing that we will call god though we are too ignorant of its nature to truly know what it is?"
Sure... exactly even. How do you know that this isn't going to turn out to basically be God?
By making assumptions the other way you limit what your mind can sense. I don't mean this in the hippie sense, but rather the philosophical sense. Religion has been contorted by the powerful into a tool that forces minds to conform to an aritrary set of rules in order to cash in on supposed everlasting life, but it wasn't always so.
I think religion started as a crude attempt to interface with a higher order of magnitude. It wasn't raining and you were dying of thirst, so you, perhaps in a dehydrated, delirious state, attriubted a whimsical personality to the rain and begged for water. It rained and you became a shaman. Sometimes I beg my car to start.
While this was misguided, it was probably the first step toward science-- the idea that cause and consequence could be discovered inductively, in this case, literally handed down from above.
Hmm... having a tough time bringing this all together. I guess what I'm tyring to say is the more we personify the universe, the more likely we are to be successful in it, because we only reach out when there is something we hope that we can eventually touch. Though I'm starting to sound like and AT&T commercial, that's why I don't think it's a good idea to completely eliminate God from our philosophy; it comes in handy sometimes.