Any atheists here?

Post Reply New Topic

Please offer justification for how that's possible.

I don't know how it is possible. This stuff is speculation and way over my head. A species could create a universe using the mold of its own universe. From the book I am reading:

"There are a number of famous and finely balanced coincidences relating to the values of the natural constants; and if these coincidences did not exist then neither could we. As yet, we do not know whether these coincidences are just lucky outcomes of all (or a wide range of) possibilities, or whether there is one and only one possible combination of values for the constants of Nature that is logically self-consistent. If other values of the constants are possible, and early investigations of candidate superstring 'Theories of Everything' imply that they are, then the values of constants might be tuneable if universes could be 'created' experimentally from vacuum fluctuations. Any civilization that was technologically advanced enough to do this might tune the constants to be a little more conducive to the evolution of life than they found them to be in their own universe. After many generations of tuning by successive advanced civilizations, we might expect the constants to possess finely tuned values that were close to optimal with respect to the conditions that are needed to allow life to arise and evolve successfully. The fact that our own Universe possesses what
some regard as a suspiciously good fine tuning might even be regarded as evidence that this successive tuning of long-lived universes by advanced
inhabitants has been going on for many cosmic histories already. Unfortunately, this amusing idea cannot explain why the constants were such as to allow life to originate long before the ability to tune baby universes existed. It requires us to believe that life was fortunate to find the universe so hospitable, or that life is virtually inevitable, for a huge range of values of the constants of Nature, in which case it is hard to understand why the Type civilization would go to great lengths to tune the constants. But maybe great lengths are unneeded. The British cosmologist Fred Hoyle once responded to his discovery of the remarkably fortuitous location of energy levels in the carbon and oxygen nuclei, without which our existence might well be impossible, by offering the following bold opinion: I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw
the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars. If this is so, then any apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme. If not then we
are back again at a monstrous sequence of accidents. A similar teleological suspicion is found in Freeman Dyson's reaction to further coincidences about the strengths of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces, which prevent nuclear reactions consuming the material of the stars so rapidly
that life-supporting environments disappear long before evolution can produce biological complexity: As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.
We should stress that the ideas of Smolin and Harrison are extremely speculative, but they provide examples from our own limited imaginations of
some ways in which a Type civilization might go about influencing the fabric of the Universe in the far future."

Prove it topic

Mathematics and logic are not synonymous.

And maybe we need a sort of Cosmic Mirror to see outside of ourselves, though this mirror would have to be very sophisticated.

Ambiguity is part of mathematics and is also part of the universe. Maybe this is the "something" that is simply not there, a dynamic that is not a particle/wave that can be measured. Dark Matter? Let us keep "looking."

An atheist is like looking at a flower and saying it doesn't really exist because I don't beleive because I'm an atheist and so there.

For me, it's more than atheism, it's nihilism. Morality of all kinds is simply a human invention. For the same reason, I cannot respect governments. Both control massive amounts of people with fear. Fear of burning forever or fear of going to jail. I understand how a government is helpful, I just wish people could see past it. They are programmed from a young age to accept these rules.

hmmm, perhaps that would be more suitable to believers more than to atheists, although it can work both ways. The question is, what makes people believe this and that, and reject this and that? I believe it has something to do with the psychology and personality of each individual, why few people are more susceptible than others to some things and why the opossite?

An atheist does not believe in this god or that because there is no empirical evidence showing that this god or that exists.

Anyone looking at a flower and seeing a flower will most likely agree that there is a flower. God is not like that.

ruveyn

If you can show me evidence for the existence of the "flower" then I will believe in it.

I think you start at the wrong end:

The first question must be: "What is that, what we describe as a 'flower'?" (or anything else, a metal, water, etc. pp.)

Our mind has a concept of "flower" as the combination of certain attributes, which in synthesis brings us to the conclusion, that, because all of this attributes are present, that the object, which causes sensual phenomena, has to be of the kind of objects, we call flower.

So the statement "This is a flower." is less a statement about the object itself, but about the categories we order and synthesise or model of reality in reaction the sensations we receive. Nevertheless: It is still a reaction to sensual experiences.

The idea of the existence of a god is not a reaction to sensual experiences and is therefore of an other quality than the idea of the existence of flowers. Therefore your question misses the point.

Atta boy, ruveyn.

"An atheist is like a person looking at a flower and saying that it doesn't really exist because he doesn't believe(in the existence of the flower) because he is an atheist (and so there?)"

Or, instead of converting "I" to "he", you could in some way mark that the words are his.
Feel free to double-correct me.

Angry, incoherent, much?

I agree with ruveyn. We can see the flower, feel it, smell it (maybe), taste it. It is there, and there is no denying that, because you can see/feel/smell/taste it and u KNOW it's there. Can we see God? No? We cant smell his stinky armpits either. I don't understand how you're comparing a flower and God...if I SAW God I wouldn't say "I don't believe because" etc.

What if God reveals Himself to you all the time but you simply don't notice?
Who says God has to manifest as something fantastic or miraculous or supernatural?

In which case we have no way to know if God exists or not. At least knowing by normal means (by way of the senses).

ruveyn

well, it depends on the nature of the flower, if the object in question is being debated wether it is actually a flower or something else, then we would get a problem on getting a consensus on that one, even if it is labeled as 'flower' in the meantime, there will be those who would refuse to believe so and there will be those who would, and there will be those who would just prefer to call it 'flower' no matter what that actually is.

Anyway, evidence may work for many atheists, but there are people who are arrogants, and usually they wouldn't accept things wether they have evidence or not, in many areas, even though evidence might simply just question a given view, some decide to strongly stick with it.

I ask the same to you but regarding unicorns.