h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"why keep the meme alive?"

Why keep smallpox alive?

P7:

Well, if we can't *prove* it doesn't exist, then (at our present state of knowledge) we must admit that it *might* exist, no matter how *improbable* we think it might be, yes?



There is no *conclusive* evidence, no, but there is evidence. If one person *believes* in God, this is evidence, although I admit it's hardly what you'd call conclusive! Slightly more reasonable: it is not obvious that the universe, rich and complex as it is, just appeared randomly. So there *might* be some agency that created it, or influenced its creation such that it came to be what we see around us. Again, this is not conclusive, but it is evidence, wouldn't you say?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

<> PC

I'd say that the universe just *IS*. We have no idea how it originated (if we look beyond the big bang, that is), so there is no evidence at all, just a huge amount of probabilities of what could have caused it (if it needs a cause). A 'god' would be one of these many possibilities, but so would giant pink beetles.

A couple of things...

PC said, "Well, if we can't *prove* it doesn't exist, then (at our present state of knowledge) we must admit that it *might* exist, no matter how *improbable* we think it might be, yes?"

As devil's advocate I'd like to ask for contextual definitions of proof, existance, "it", and probability as they relate to each other vis a vis metascale cosmology.

(I do this merely to point out that the problem is a bit more complex than the "what do we call people who don't believe in Santa Claus" motif can carry us).

Then Pedro7 had this to say:

"I'd say that the universe just *IS*."

Ah, what do you mean by universe? And by "is"? What if "it" isn't? It seems your simple statement is actually assuming quite a lot of ontological authority considering it represents the viewpoint of a hormonally insane monkey living at the bottom of a gravity well filtering everything through five senses which evolved to allow him to hunt and pick berries.

Perhaps you mean to imply that physical reality is "just a bunch of molecules", which was a thing early enlightenment proponents used to say a lot in order get the goat of theists. In some sense, it is a reasonable viewpoint, just as the notion of "God" was once a reasonable viewpoint. It is also astoundingly passe 19th century science, and ignores the efforts of Einstein et all to move the discussion forward.

Atheists of the "just a bunch of molecules" stripe strike me as very similar to theists of the "big invisible hominid" stripe, attempting on no good authority and with no particular skill to argue that their personal intuition vis-a-vis the presence or absense of a guiding presence in their lives somehow constitutes a cosmological absolute, and that they would somehow know better than Einstein, Bohm, Hawking, or any of those guys what reality is actually all about.

"We have no idea how it originated (if we look beyond the big bang, that is),"

Of course not. We have no idea what "it" is.

" so there is no evidence at all, just a huge amount of probabilities of what could have caused it (if it needs a cause)."

Surely if that applies to the "big picture" of cosmology, it would apply to everyday life as well in some sense? All of science is a method of asking questions of nature and attempting to interpret the answers, which invariably only make sense in a bootstrapped context. Hence the need to keep our absolutism to a minimum. "What goes up must come down" is certainly predictive in most cases, but it's hardly a "truth".

A 'god' would be one of these many possibilities, but so would giant pink beetles."

I'll repeat that Tolstoy quote I'm fond of. "It is a terrible thing to see a man who has the universe in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits playing with a toy called God." If you think about it carefully, it's not just theists that are guilty of this.

Excellent post TG.

<>

I'll assume all the authority you want here. I can't give any philosophical proof that I exist (although Descartes could..) other than my own experience, basically.

As for "just a bunch of molecules" , well yeah, until anyone can give a good reason to suppose anything else.

Let's assume for a minute that we had a coherent explanation of how our universe came to be, no more mysteries about the big bang. I'm certain, that, even then, we'll never know 'why there is something rather than nothing'. THIS existence is, I suppose, what I referred to above. It just *IS*.


<< so there is no evidence at all, just a huge amount of probabilities of what could have caused it (if it needs a cause)."

Surely if that applies to the "big picture" of cosmology, it would apply to everyday life as well in some sense? All of science is a method of asking questions of nature and attempting to interpret the answers, which invariably only make sense in a bootstrapped context. Hence the need to keep our absolutism to a minimum. "What goes up must come down" is certainly predictive in most cases, but it's hardly a "truth".>>

I'm not getting what you mean here, could you explain it again. What I think you mean is that rules for queries *within* the universe (eg spacetime etc. as we know it) are the same as those for queries *about* the universe (or existence). If so, I'm not sure the rules are the same, but I won't say any more until I understand what you meant.

PC:

In other words, I said ."it is not obvious that the universe just *IS*".

P7:

There's no answer to that, then, is there?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Fair points, TG. ... I think! You're certainly right that this is not a trivial issue. Perhaps the most important is that the answer to the question "Does God exist?" is not "yes" or "no", and even "maybe" is misleading. The real answer is: this question is not answerable.

The question is the same as "Does gravity exist?", which is also unanswerable. Gravity is a feature of a 'map', in this case the scientific world-model. There is no way to tell if gravity exists in the real world, hence 'the question is unanswerable'.

NOTE: we *can* say that, if the real world does not have 'gravity', it has something that acts in a very similar way. But that isn't the same thing at all.

There are, if you like, two Gods. One is a component of a religious 'map', and the other is (potentially) a component of the real world. That the first exists is beyond doubt, yes? But the second? There's no way we can tell, just like gravity.

Also just like gravity, we can say that if there is no God in the real world, then that world has some component that acts in the same way as the religious map describes God and Her acts. [This component *could* be random chance, in this case.... ]

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

I think you're right, P.C., to the extent that the first response to any query about the existence of "God" should be "what do you mean by 'God'?" As I've pointed out often, the term is originally a norse gutteral word for "loud noise in the sky." It was meant to be uttered as a syllable of reverence during furious thunderstorms. (Crash, Boom... GHODD!!)

I think the conversational threads I've been responding to here can be best served by a reiteration of my standard rant on Critical Rationalism (or rigorous intellectual agnosticism as I referred to it earlier). I should just plug the Guide entry I wrote on it (the link can be found on the FFFF page I think) but suffice to say that the Critical Rationalist eschews "truth" and "falsehood", which it considers dogmatic, in favour of "relative meaning" of a particular perceptual model, which it considers pragmatic. Pragmatism, of course, means "truth is what works."

This approach, I think, seems a bit stupid to people like Blatherskite the Mugwump vis-a-vis application to really far-fetched ideas like "God wants you to eat crackers and drink wine on Sundays". I can only offer as a comparison the easily corrupted ideology that freedom of speech is desirable. A commitment to free speech requires tolerance even for hatemongers and loudmouth idiots, with recognition that the temptation to silence this or that jackass leads to a slippery slope of book and witch burnings. Likewise, a commitment to pragmatic and rational thought means a level of tolerance for even apparently useless ideas, for once we give in to the temptation to declare ourselves arbiters of "truth" and "falsehood" then we become fideists, and eventually limit our ability to see things as clearly.

The other point to remember is that even seemingly stupid ideas have at least some intrinsic value. I might not see a lot of value in a model of reality that presupposes an angry war god as the alpha and omega of universal being, but then again I'm not a scared 15 year old living in a desert and sharpening my spear preparing for a Philistine invasion. I bet if I were, it would sound a bit better. Telling ourselves lies is sometimes the best way to get through stressful circumstances. "Psyching yourself up" before a sports match is a good example of this. Saying "I love you." is another. Our brains aren't calculators, and we need to accomodate emotional and chemical needs it has. If some schizophrenic guy finds comfort and relief from his personal affliction through prayer, who am I to tell him there's noone listening to him? We all have moms or grandmas, right? Ever go home for Thanksgiving one year and say, "Sorry Grandma, but you've lived a lie your whole life, your Christian God is dead dead dead and you're a small-minded dumbass for living 80+ years without realising this."? No, you probably haven't. Nor do you respect her less for having raised 8 kids during the Depression by means of her capacity for self-delusion.

Dear Twophlag Gargleblap,

What a joy to find you - alive and well. I have spent the last two hours chasing you around. I read your marvellous writing on the King of the Belgins and the Belgin Congo. You stopped so suddenly in 1950, and that is when I actually began to know about it.

I would love to talk to you about it. You write so well and clearly about the quite horrific goings on and how the territory was acquired. It is of course, still providing a great deal of horror for the people living there now. There is still a lot of gold there. I have written to you on another thread and told you about a French sociologist who did an assessment of the state of the Belgian Congo in about 1910, and then one about the British South Africa Colony (the original name of Rhodesia which later became Zimbabwe) in about 1911. For the life of me I cannot remember his name, but I do know that he went to the Armistice talks in 1919, and also to the conference in San Francisco in 1950 when UNO was formed. His assessments do not make happy reading and certainly make one realise why Equatorial Afirican is in the state it is in.

I have enjoyed trying to find you and I do hope that you will reply. I am intrigued by someone who is called "echo someone or other" and who apprently is rewriting your entry - and wishes to discues with you who shall be responsible for it!!. There are a lot of decisions being taken about it and some very learned people being very appreciative about Your original manuscript. I think that you should claim it as your original work which it surely is seeing as how you wrote in in 2000.

I am temporarily obliged to call myself GenJoanofac, having been AlsoRan1 for the last four years. I cannot get onto my homepage and I refuse to lose all the friends that I have made over the last few years. So I am either going to find my old persona or give up and finish my biography on a missionary who went to South AFrica over fifty years before Stanley met Livingstone!!. (I did not realise Stanley had such a role to play in getting people interested in equatorial Africa.!!.) My knowledge is dismal.

Very sincerely, - and keep well and please write.

Also Ran Lschooloffish:
temp known as GenJoanofac.

Hi Twophlag Gargleblap

First-off my apologies for not replying sooner, however I am working away from home at the moment and internet access is patchy.

Secondly, would you care to produce an edited guide entry asnd/or glossary on many of the words you used. These old druid still thinks a 'meme' is a statement made by most 8 year olds, i.e. 'me, me, me, me, me!'

Nevertheless I shall try and address some of your thoughts.

"A statement that presupposes some sort of belief system. Let's codify it."

Why? My experiences are fairly subjective by anyone's yardstick so why do we need to codify them?

"I have to wonder if you're maybe a bit honked off to see a complex and cherished set of ideas passed off as just a bit of extra chafe in the meme pool. Actually, I'm not really sure what your argument is. Can you clarify it?"

I'm not honked off at all, and I shall try and conceive a fuller answer to this this weekend, time permitting.

"Wouldn't that be like classifying all animals solely according to the number of legs or eyes they have?"

No it would be like classifying them as:
- Likely to attempt to eat you.
- Likely to make good eating.
- Likely to object violently to being eaten.
- Likely to stampede if spooked.

As far as I am aware my belief-set does me no damage whatsoever, though I am prepared to be enlightened if you can think of any such. As for 'may contain nuts' that is equally applicable to any church, temple, science campus or laboratory you could care to name

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\
(Contains nuts and spices)

Hello. Hello, Math; hello, TG.


If I may interrupt... It seems to me, Matholwch, that perhaps you aren't understanding Twophlag in the same way that I am. I don't see at work here an over-analytic mania for categorizing and pinning to a board that which is organic and which defies labelling. True, some kind of ossification is inherent in any imposed framework, but I was getting a very different vibe from Twophlag's original suggestion. The spirit in which I took it was more of a "hey, let's stop using the same words for different objects. Rather than conflating the beliefs of George W Bush and Mother Theresa by calling them both 'Christianity', let's acknowledge that different beasts really are different beasts." Is it divisive to call the fundamentalist and mystical stripes of a given faith different things? Perhaps; perhaps not.

Maybe I'm misrepresenting TG, and maybe I'm misunderstanding Math's objection - in either case, my apologies.



Descending into comfortable allegory, it makes sense to me, to classify animals as you suggest, Math. It also makes sense to me to go ahead and develop a rich vocabulary for talking about all the different animals we see; my experience of the world is improved by having different words for different birds: the names help a poor language-using academic like me revel in the biodiversity around me. (Ooh, look, a Northern Flicker! ) Do you reject the distinction between a magpie and a starling, just because they're both edible?

If one were to advocate a cessation of all discussion of religion, as occurs here at the FFFF, on the grounds that everyone ought to be pursuing their own spiritual path, rather than talking about the spiritual pursuits of others... well, that would be one thing, and I'd disagree, on some grounds or another, but I don't think that's what anyone here is advocating. As long as we're going to discuss religion and religions as they exist in the world, we might as well allow for our vocabulary to improve as our understanding increases.



Some... years ago here, when someone called "Colonel Sellers" was in charge , I proposed a definition of Christianity that was actually four or five definitions, in a list. They included the Christianity of a born-again fundamentalist, the Christianity of a cloistered monk, the Christianity of St Paul, the Christianity of a "twice a year" semi-practising modern-day mainstream protestant, and the Christianity of an insane heretic mystic with some kind of theory about Judas Iscariot. I suggested that, instead of making claims about Christianity, we make specific claims about the specific varieties of Chritianity about which specific claims were true...

Neither Christians nor anti-Christians seemed very excited about what I had to say. It seems that it's harder to say "Christianity sucks" or "Christianity is the way" when someone's pointing out to you that the term "Christianity" is multiply defined, and your utterance is meaningless until you do some homework.

Some say the devil is in the details; some say God is in the details. I'm beginning to think that neither one is happy with too much detailed scrutiny, lest the dichotomies which give both concepts power be shown to consist almost entirely of gray area, dust and ashes.

Now I think I've pushed right past the point I was trying to make, so I'll undelurk again, before I undermine my own post right out of relevance...


GTB

*clap*

Bravo GT.

Ditto.

And congratulations on the birth of the term 'undelurk'! Somehow it has entertaining overtones of decloaking, as Romulans are wont to do. Or maybe that's just me.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

I expect imminent confirmation that God exists, and that He was present in this world yesterday. I was catching up on h2g2 threads when a surprise storm gave rise to the closest lightning strike I've ever encountered. I was out of the room, cleaning up the mess the puppies had left in the bathroom , when my wife called out "Your computer just popped like a light bulb and now it's turned off."

So that was the end of that. The PC is dead, quite thoroughly dead. And now I'm going to phone Norwich Union, who provide my contents insurance. I expect they will confirm the actual presence of God in Stockport yesterday, performing one of his 'acts' on my computer. But who knows - they may even pay out, which would *definitely* prove there is a God.

Looked at like that, I can hardly lose, can i?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

You'd think the Big G would have better things to do than fry someone's computer wouldn't you?

Hope you get a good outcome, P-c

Noggin

Thanks, Noggin!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Now I have proof positive: the insurance company agreed to replace my PC! C'mon you atheists - admit defeat.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Hang on P-c, isn't htis proof of the non-existence of God. After all, insurance companies explicitly say that they don't insure against acts of God, right?

You think an insurance company would pay out without divine intervention of some sort? I rest my case.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

'Tis the devil's work!