God doesn't seem to exist!

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The entropy of a system can decrease if the entropy of the surroundings increases sufficiently to balance it out. This means that localised areas of low entropy are perfectly possible. This is regularly observed in laboratories.

There are loads!

Buddhists are the most obvious, but many atheists believe in ghosts, healing crystals, homoeopathy, life after death, reincarnation, "chi", fate, "good/bad luck" (e.g. breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks), and so forth.

Jannisy you beat me to it. I did not think an example was really needed, but clearly David does not see geo chemistry as an increase in complexity. Or maybe he thinks all the molecules have always existed. There are many other examples, but if he wont accept chemical bonding as an example of non biological complexity caused by the addition of energy then there really is no point carrying on any further discussion with the man.

Guilty as charged your honour however you still posted a massive strawman.

Regarding my looking into the possibility of a spiritual realm. I have, and after quote a while believing in spirits, and "Mother Nature" I came to the conclusion it was all fantasy driven by ego. I am much happier now, when confronted by sometching mysterious to declare that I don't know. What I do know is this, it is very clear that much that was unexplained and assumed to be related to the world of mysticism is now understood to be firmly rooted in the natural world, and much that we still don't understand have plausible hypotheses which show them to be of mundane source. What I don't understand is that in light of all this, people seem to be flocking to all sorts of mysticism, I can only presume this is because they cannot cope with the idea that life has no purpose other than life itself. Like I said I find this belief that we are more than earthly life to be somewhat egotistical.

Arthur, I am not going to try and explain the difference my faith has made to my life. However, the benefits have been considerable. It maybe that certain aspects of what is termed mysticism can have a natural explanation. For example Jon Kabat-Zinn has taken Buddhist meditation to use in a secular manner. This is as effective for depression as medication. However, I think this would still suggest a Dualist nature of mankind. My own experience has taken me far beyond that and I'm not sure there would be any point trying to explain.

Think about the simple experiment where ink is placed in a jar of glycerine and spun until so dilute it disappears . completely. Bohm's Implicate Order may explain that reversing the spin will cause the ink to appear again. I would take this to be similar to the Plato's Cave version of reality. I am talking about an experience which goes way beyond that. I do not expect you to put this together with the natural mind. Please do not think this is some kind of arrogance asI believe it is something available to anybody who really wants it.

The only issue I have with meditation and Tai Chi is that I do not do more of them. However the benefits of this kind of exercise are clearly mundane, and any "spiritual' experience is purely speculative. When a person decides to search for supernatural explanations before they look for Natural ones, the most idiotically implausible suddenly becomes not only plausible, but probable. The human mind is capable of weaving the most intricate visions and explanations for things. Which is pretty much why our knowledge of the natural world, hardly moved from the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, until we started to challenge our subjective beliefs by testing them against nature.

Its really great that you find joy in your beliefs, but please don't present them as anything more than that.

You're not even slightly deterred by constraints of reality or truth are you?

Have such experiments produced life? No, they haven't, so my claim that thus far they have not is accurate. As for the future, well... who knows?



The precursors to life are not the same thing as life itself. A recently deceased person has all of the basic chemical 'ingredients' that are required for them to be alive, and there may even be some residual cellular activity still going on if they died within the last few minutes, but they are still dead nevertheless. When someone actually does manage to produce something that truly is alive, only then should we celebrate and open the champagne bottle.



'...on the verge of...' - such faith. By the way, you don't need to give me a synopsis of the early days of scientific discovery, for I am quite familiar with it already.



How can you not see the clear difference between being sceptical of a claim and dismissing a claim? Materialists like to pontificate about how in the end all will be shown to be just physics and chemistry (ex. in your quote above about the production of artificial life just being 'a matter of time' because we are 'on the verge of' it), but I have very serious doubts about this. A.I. proponents like to tell us ad nauseum that artificial intelligence will make humanity obsolete by the year 2030 or whatever, and they tend to use the very same arguments that others of their ilk do. They, like you, often forget that there are limitations that constrain the scientific method (ex. keeping explanations confined to within what science can actually deal with - i.e. purely physical processes and phenomena, repeatability of experiments, falsifiability et cetera) for its own good. The rules, the methodology are there for very good reasons, and as a method of enquiry it has worked, and continues to work, as it was and is meant to within the constraints that are placed upon it.

However, and having said all of the above, one must acknowledge that it is nothing more than an act of faith to think that, due to the past successes of science, everything will eventually be explicable in terms of material 'stuff', or fields of force. Consciousness, by its very nature, isn't like anything else that is found within nature, and yet we have people who honestly believe that everything that a person is can be found out by dissecting them, removing their brain, and just looking at that misshaped clump of matter (which is analogous to an attempt to understand how mobile phones work by simply taking one apart, and believing that EM signals are just 'woo'). By the way, and in order to pre-empt any mention of it, lifeforms are not machines, the similarities between them being only superficial (ex. machines cannot grow or reproduce, nor are they self-aware or have free will).



Not everyone who expresses doubts about the current naturalistic paradigm is a Biblical creationist. One of the very few true constants of nature, one that we can be 100% sure about, is the reality of change over time. Processes occur, events happen, people (and even stars) are born, grow old and then die, and nothing remains the same for very long. Even our own bodies are not the same ones we had just seven years ago, and yet - strangely enough - we would not consider the person we were back then to be a stranger simply because our physical body, the one we had then, no longer exists. Obviously something remains constant throughout our lives. Before you ask, yes, I DO believe we have souls, a life force, or call it what you will. We have free will too. To me that's as plain as day, but I still say the Bible is bunk, so try not to place me among those people.

Yes, exactly! Why do so many (deliberately?) confuse the philosophical arguments for the reality of a necessary and transcendent something that is required to account for what we know, and the silly, anthropomorphic and childish Big Daddy of the Bible?

You can be brutally honest if you want to. Brutal honesty is often required, especially in discussions about God with atheists who insist that if you don't agree with them then you must be a flat-Earth creationist, like they're the only two options possible.

You used the expression 'the human mind'. As I understand it, there are many atheists (ex. Susan Blackmore, D. Dennett) who would argue that the mind is merely a delusion, that it doesn't actually exist, and they say they believe this because, well... brains are real because they are clearly material, but because the mind is immaterial it therefore doesn't exist because it can't exist. It goes against their rigid, fundamentalist paradigm to believe in the reality of minds.



Oh boy - the irony of this statement!

Yes, Arthur Dent, please don't present your beliefs as anything more than that. Many people like to think that what they happen to believe is true is synonymous with what is actually true, but this is rarely the case.

So how does free will work then? Perhaps you yourself do still accept the notion of free will, but I have heard many, many atheists over the years say they simply cannot accept the idea due to the fact that they also believe that everything is predetermined, physical, subject to the law of cause and effect and that, even if we like to think we have free will, we actually don't.



Baggage? No, there's no hostility here. Why must we drop the 'materialism label'? Has the label become obsolete? Has it become an embarrassment, or a hindrance?



I use the word 'material' but you prefer 'natural', but aren't the two terms considered to be synonymous for most practical purposes? What would you consider to be natural, but not material or the consequence of material entities, processes or phenomena?



Yes, I agree, free will is real. Many - not all, but many - of the more vocal atheists though would disagree with us about this.

'Grebels', can you see what you have done here? You agree that we need to get rid of the cultural baggage that is associated with the concept of God, but then you go on about Jesus and the Bible! Jesus, the Bible and all of that is cultural baggage, of the sort we need to do away with and transcend.

Like I said, I have yet to meet them

Anyway, isn't it the case that if you were to ask someone who believed in crystals, life after death and the others you list here, they would almost certainly say something like, 'That's right, I don't believe in God, but I do believe in a transcendent Spirit that animates the natural order'? I have met many of these 'New Age' types, but I take a statement like this (and they are usually more than happy to talk about what they believe to be true, whilst telling me with a straight face that they don't believe in absolute truths because 'all is relative') to signify they believe in God, but they just don't call it that because that is just so... you know, Christian, and a Christian is not something to be these days. It's now socially unacceptable to be a white, male Christian, because apparently they are 'the oppressors' or something.

Reincarnation comes from Hinduism, and in order to be a Hindu you have to believe in the gods. Many Buddhists don't believe in one God but many, like the Hindus, so that takes them even further away from atheism, even though being a Buddhist does not require that you accept that idea.

Yes, I have to confess to never having had what I could honestly term a 'spiritual experience' (although a couple of strange events remain unsolved to this day). I don't think that it is all fantasy driven by ego, but a lot of it is unfortunately, and there are many unscrupulous hucksters out there (ex. John Edward) who will stoop so low as to do it for what the New Testament calls 'filthy lucre'. It pays to be constantly on guard against fraud, misperception, misidentification (ex. flying saucers) and the willingness to believe because it apparently feels good to do so.

Now you are being fallacious and absurd. I have at all times used the terms possible, plausible, evidence points to etc. yesI have stated that I think we will produce life in the lab. I also stated that I could be wrong. So that covers the the bit about your fallacious nature.

It is absurd to suggest a strongly held belief, (what is it you said about the existence of souls being as clear as day) that has absolutely no empirical evidence to back it up, is in the same category as conjecture based upon a large volume of evidence. The difference between you and I is that I present the evidence and my understanding of it in an intellectually honest manner, if you disagree with his statement so how. Judging by the above post of yours and other fallacious statements you have made you do not.

Basically it would seem yet another exercise in futility to discuss anything further with you.

Absurdity is a philosophical/logical thing that you repeatedly insist is not acceptable as "evidence" because it is not "empirical". Furthermore, an intellect that determines, or discerns, logic and thus absurdity, is also a metaphysical stuff that you claim doesn't exist because it is not empirical either.

Arty, you've already reached the bottom of the pit you've dug yourself into because your arms aren't long enough to dig any deeper.