Tag: atheists

  • That Thing Called Free Will

    It occurred to me tonight that it is entirely in the interests of atheists to discount, or at least attempt to disprove the reality of free will. In the absence of free will, it’s easy to argue that our actions and decisions are nothing more than elaborate sequences of instinctive behaviour hard wired into our brains. The more we experience, the greater our ability to present individuality because of the increased variables that influence our behaviour.

    However, such a theory falls far short of explaining the reason why we are able to actively and consciously choose between multiple outcomes of equal benefit. It also fails to address the reason behind us being able to consciously act against our instinctive responses. In fact, in the absence of free will, can we even claim to be conscious beings? Being conscious, being aware, being lucid all imply that there is an intelligence that allows us to acquire, grasp, and process information, and then do something meaningful, or at the least, something deliberate with that information. Even choosing not to act when action is prompted is further proof of this free will that we have.

    In considering all this, I find it somewhat amusing that many, especially atheists who pride themselves in being scientifically grounded, find it necessary to first prove that we have free will through scientific means despite the evidence that we live out on a daily basis that confirms our ability to choose independent of instinct.

    It reminds me of the ridiculous approach that we take towards life and health these days. For centuries we’ve known that chicken soup is healthy and aids in our recovery from cold or flu symptoms. Yet it was denounced by the ‘scientifically adept’ community of health professionals because no scientist took the time to understand and therefore prove the benefit that it provides. Don’t believe me? Read this. Yet if I were to take every atheist and scientist seriously, I’d have to discard the wisdom of the ages that was not grounded in scientific research, and wait patiently for them to come up with remedies that actually deal with the root causes of illnesses rather than their creative ways of dealing with the symptoms instead.

    Atheists, in all my discussions with them to date, have proven to be extremely myopic in their view of the world. They insist that their independence of religious dogma (which can also be argued to be a false notion of theirs) raises them above the ‘sheep’ that subscribe to theistic scriptures and principles. If I were to take the example of the chicken soup a step further, such a simple matter that took scientists possibly millennia to figure out benefited millions of people in the meantime. How? Through simple observation and common sense. So to apply this to the concept of creation, and therefore a creator, why should I abandon my belief system in there being a god until such time as some scientist in a distant time and place is able to confirm what I knew all along through simple observation and common sense?

    It simply doesn’t make sense, does it? The atheistic mind set that is. Abandon all knowledge unless scientifically proven and acquired, and collaborate with your peers to determine what is best for society because morality has no divine basis. The argument is so flawed that it’s almost entirely ludicrous.

    Oh, in my ramblings I forgot to make the point I started out trying to make. Why is it convenient for atheists to discount free will? Simple. If we have free will, it implies intelligent design. Intelligent design implies intelligent creation. And, you guessed it, intelligent creation implies an intelligent creator. It all flies in the face of the parts of the theories of evolution that suggests that we simply evolved into intelligent beings after originating from a single celled amoeba, or some crock like that. Even that single celled amoeba has a specific function and purpose, and I challenge any atheist to explain what cause an amoeba to be an amoeba. And when they explain that, I’d like to hear them explain what causes the cause of the amoeba to be an amoeba to be the cause of the cause of the amoeba. See how ridiculous infinite regression and the insane theories of causality can be?

    Yet atheists fancy themselves as being the only intelligent free thinking beings around. I beg to differ.

  • A Time Not So Long Ago

    There was a time when I considered engagement with others as being tantamount to the meaning and purpose of my life. I don’t any more, which is unsettling because as much as I don’t seem to yearn for it, I miss it as well. Ambivalence has never enjoyed my patronage because the indecision and discomfort it brings is repulsive.

    I always pride myself on being decisive, yet with age often comes many life experiences that either spawn wisdom or regret, and often both. In acquiring these assets, I often find that knowing more than before only highlights the abyss of ignorance that stares at me while I indulge in the seemingly noble endeavour of engaging with the hope of understanding.

    Understanding is an outcome that seldom accompanies debate these days. Perhaps my pointless circular debates with atheists have eroded my jadedness to the point of disillusion or perhaps even despair. Despair at the realisation that despite my greatest aspirations, or my most sincere efforts or intentions, arrogance will always triumph over knowledge. Arrogance breeds ignorance, and therefore it stands to reason that by extension, ignorance, in the end, will also obliterate knowledge.

    Another pointless post contemplating the purpose of life, the meaning of engaging with others, the goals of existence, and the irony of life. I feel clichéd. I feel as if my ability to contribute, to fight, to persuade, or even to influence, has been almost entirely expensed. That old familiar forgotten feeling of mental and emotional exhaustion lends its stench to my being again tonight.

    It appears I am becoming a bitter old soul after all. The brittleness of my being is all I  am able to share.

     

  • Atheists and Me

    It’s disappointing, yet almost unsurprising to note that the very same behaviour atheists accuse theists of, they’re guilty of themselves. I was recently invited into a closed group on Facebook with the assurance that it was a mature environment in which constructive and objective debates are held to test the various views of either side in order to seek to understand each other better. Again, unsurprisingly, the kind of attacks and arrogance that I encountered on other blog sites prevailed there as well.

    There are few, and I mean few that actually do try to present a well considered view of various issues and despite how lengthy the debates can be at times, they stick to the point, and don’t turn it into a mud slinging match in their efforts to try to bully the theist into agreement or submission. It appears that the lack of maturity that atheists are quick to criticise in theists is just as common place amongst their own ranks. Their insistence on not subscribing to a formal structure or singular view of their atheistic philosophy is starting to appear as extremely convenient because it allows the perpetual graceful exit that suggests that they’re not organised religion, and they have no dogma.

    Engage with any number of atheists and the dogma disguised as science is quick to show through. The assumed arrogance and selective qualifications of their statements is forced as the only reasonable approach to the subject when issues like infinite regression and impossible-to-prove theories are highlighted. There’s a stubborn claim that science is all that matters, but a quick deflection when questioned about how science deals with spirituality, or the spiritual needs of their communities. Blatant assumptions are made about the ideology of the first man/woman that set foot on this earth despite there being no proof to confirm it either way. So claims that we are inherently atheistic are supposed to be believed and accepted without question by theists, although atheist have no way of proving this. We’re supposed to accept blindly that infinite regression questions based on their own theories of causality do not apply beyond the current time and universe constructs, even though there is no objective authoritative source to confirm this, which makes it just another theory.

    Authoritative source is dismissed when asked to present one, since such a thing does not exist. The absence of this resulting in personal biases and theories being the order of the day appear to be accepted as factually accurate amongst their ranks, although there are very few that are willing to acknowledge that this glaring gap in their rationale does suggest that there must be a cause that set the creation of this universe in motion. What that cause is, or what form it takes, is entirely open to conjecture for obvious reasons.

    So the sum total of my experiences to date is that the very same extremism, rigidity, blind faith and dogma that atheists claim plagues religion is very much rampant in their own circles. Trying to find a middle ground, at this point, appears to be a pointless endeavour. But I am the anal optimist, so I will persevere for a while longer before I decide if throwing in the towel is as inconsequential as persevering in my efforts to understand the rationale of the atheistic mind set. In fact, I don’t think it’s an attempt to understand the rationale, because I’m already quite convinced that that is as flawed as any argument a theist can present to prove the existence of God. If it was possible to prove the existence of God, we would not need faith to believe in God because the proof would render faith irrelevant. Unfortunately this is a point that many theists and atheists alike fail to understand.

    The fact remains that atheists cannot, with hard evidence, disprove the existence of God, and theists cannot prove it either. But until they get past this blatantly obvious fact, and set aside the arrogance that accompanies such a debate, not much progress will be made in finding mutual understanding, respect or common ground between the two.

  • Random thoughts about creation and manipulation

    I believe that this earth is a closed system. Nothing can be depleted or destroyed to the point where it is not recoverable. Everything alters their state subject to the manipulation that it is subjected to, but that altered state either makes it usable or unusable. If unusable, appropriate manipulation can be brought to bear on it that will recover it into a usable state once again. 

    Therefore, our ability to deplete natural resources is in fact only limited to our inability to recover what we’ve altered. I disagree with the premise that the earth will be incapable of sustaining life in years to come because it will be over populated. It can never be over populated but it can be, and is abused. It’s our abuse of the resources at our disposal that leads to the massive disparity in quality of life between nations and geographical locations. 

    The greater our ability to responsibly balance how we consume, the greater will be our ability to restore and sustain the availability of resources that we have at our disposal. Even the conception and birth of a baby is a result of resources in some form or another being consumed. The mother, through the nourishment that she provides her body, influences the quality of foetal life, as well as the subsequent birth. Just because it is all a result of extremely complex chemical reactions does not imply that something is being created out of nothing. 

    What exists, exists. How we manipulate that will determine how many beautiful or disgusting permutations of the combination of our resources can yield subject to our limited intellectual and physical abilities. The more we grow to understand this world and everything it contains, the greater our ability to influence its form and function. But we must never forget that we are nothing but manipulators of what already exists, and therefore we should not delude ourselves about our capabilities. 

    This realisation, for me, further establishes my views about the atheist philosophies compared to that of the theists, who are now more fashionably called creationists. Man has never, and will never create something out of nothing. Nor are we able to truly grasp what nothing is, because it will always be thought of in the context of the absence of something. And as we know, the absence of one thing creates a condition in which something else is manifested. Think about it. All we do all day is alter the state of things. Things that already exist. 

    The search for the beginning of creation will never end, because every single time we think we arrived at the smallest particle known to man, we fail to conclusively answer a simple question. What causes that particle to assume the characteristics and properties that it does? There is always more, and the only thing that limits how much we understand of how much more there is, is our limited knowledge and our limited abilities to delve deeper than we already have.

  • Another tiring post

    cynicallyjaded:

    The day that science creates something out of nothing is the day that I will seriously reconsider my position about atheism. As long as man is manipulating what is already in existence, and as long as we always find more questions with every mystery that we solve, I’ll always marvel at the intelligence, form, function and ‘interconnectedness’ of this universe. We’re tiny and almost entirely insignificant specks of life that exist in this massive space, and we have barely scratched the surface of the true wonders of just the human body, yet we’re arrogant enough to believe that our theories about what might have occurred billions of years ago substantiated by assumed interpretations of our current state is authority enough to declare that we’re here because of a fluke of ‘stuff’ interacting and evolving over billions of years to eventually result in intelligent life that has reason and logic, and choice and emotions, and wisdom and beauty and so much more…

    The entire subject is the biggest brain fuck you could ever get. We assumed that the speed of light was unbreakable for decades…and then, quite by accident, we break it, but yet we continue in our arrogance to assume that we understand well enough to make absolute statements about what is and what isn’t true about life, death, this universe, and everything that exists within it, and in the process proclaim that there could not possibly be intelligence behind it all…it’s simply astounding the lengths we would go to just to obtain a level of peace so that we don’t have to accept our impotence and insignificance when faced with the grand design.

    After reading an article last week about atheists presenting questions specifically to Christians about scientific facts that the writer believed to be at odds with religion, I was prompted to search for this post that I wrote late last year. Given the use of language, it was obviously something that was proving to be an annoyance at the time, given how many posts I wrote about atheism and theism at the time.

    The one thing that struck me about this article that I read was that in almost every single debate brought on by atheists, they assume that the only view they need to challenge is that of Christianity, when in fact Islam is just as strongly positioned against atheism as any other religion. But more often than not, and this is played out in the mainstream media on a daily basis, the general awareness of the true aspects of Islam escapes most non-Muslims which is why there is this general misconception that Christianity is probably the only monotheistic religion other than Judaism. This although Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world with a large portion of its growth from reversions rather than procreation.

  • tick-tock-turnip:

  • Another tiring post

    The day that science creates something out of nothing is the day that I will seriously reconsider my position about atheism. As long as man is manipulating what is already in existence, and as long as we always find more questions with every mystery that we solve, I’ll always marvel at the intelligence, form, function and ‘interconnectedness’ of this universe. We’re tiny and almost entirely insignificant specks of life that exist in this massive space, and we have barely scratched the surface of the true wonders of just the human body, yet we’re arrogant enough to believe that our theories about what might have occurred billions of years ago substantiated by assumed interpretations of our current state is authority enough to declare that we’re here because of a fluke of ‘stuff’ interacting and evolving over billions of years to eventually result in intelligent life that has reason and logic, and choice and emotions, and wisdom and beauty and so much more…

    The entire subject is the biggest brain fuck you could ever get. We assumed that the speed of light was unbreakable for decades…and then, quite by accident, we break it, but yet we continue in our arrogance to assume that we understand well enough to make absolute statements about what is and what isn’t true about life, death, this universe, and everything that exists within it, and in the process proclaim that there could not possibly be intelligence behind it all…it’s simply astounding the lengths we would go to just to obtain a level of peace so that we don’t have to accept our impotence and insignificance when faced with the grand design.