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Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibal will be a cannibal, of the crusades a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prayers & Queries June 17, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Atheist Culture, Prayer , add a comment

(On the Subjective Value of Non-Existent Beings)

When I bend my knee meekly
and throw up a thoughtless prayer
to a God greater than me
I feel better immediately.

But it works regardless who I supplicate
with my fevered wishes.
I can pray to the moon
just as effectively;
moreso, actually
since the moon is so beautiful
and moves through the cloudy darkness in such majesty.

Or Mars, or Marduk, or Minerva
Aten, Aphrodite, Athena
it doesn’t matter the god I pray to (more…)

Does Life Have Meaning? June 12, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Meaning & Value, Naturalism , 19 comments

Perhaps the most popular objection to naturalism is the claim that without a God life is meaningless. Let’s take a look at it. This is actually a two-part claim

  1. under a natural world view life has no meaning
  2. God provides meaning to life

But right away we notice something strange about this: it implies that we must obtain our meaning from something outside of us, namely God; and yet apparently there is no need for God to obtain meaning from something outside of himself. There is an unspoken assumption here that God is inherently meaningful. Or else the assumption is that God doesn’t have a need to be meaningful.

Why wouldn’t either of those options apply not just to God but to us as well? (more…)

Time & Change June 10, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Cosmological , 2 comments

Time is a function of change — if there were no change there would be and could be no time. Time in fact is only a way of measuring change by comparing it to a standard clock (a standard clock is something which changes in an extremely regular way). Since time is the result of a comparison of change to a standard clock, time can only exist if (1) a standard clock exists, (2) a change to be compared to the clock exists, and (3) a being capable of doing the comparison exists. This is a matter of logical necessity from the definition of time.

It follows that time only comes into existence once all three conditions are met. The most limiting condition is the 3rd, the existence of a being capable of doing the comparison, and I say this because 1 and 2 are known to come into existence billions of years before 3 comes into existence.

When Stephen Hawking and other cosmologists talk about time coming into existence with the big bang, they pretend that there is a scientist like them, a being capable of doing the comparison which creates time, right back there at the beginning of our universe looking on. That of course is a conceit. Since time is a comparison, it can only exist in a mind. Unless one is a theist (Hawking and most other cosmologists are not), one has to admit that time cannot exist until the evolution of organisms with minds capable of doing the right sort of comparison.

The scientific conceit is that we are right there at the big bang, looking on. (more…)

Contingency and Necessity June 9, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Cosmological , add a comment

Theists say something created everything out of nothing. But was this something, this God, itself part of the nothing or part of the everything? If part of nothing, it is nothing. If not part of everything, isn’t it also nothing? On the other hand, if it is part of everything it cannot be the creator of everything since that would require creating itself. If something can create itself then everything can create itself, and there remains no way to distinguish something from everything.

Theists counter by maintaining that the something, God, is unlike everything in one very important respect. It differs from everything in that God is a “necessary being” while everything else is “contingent”. Contingent here refers to things which interact in a causal chain with other things. A creates B, B creates C, C creates D in this interaction of cause and effect. Thus A, B, C and D are “contingent”. But if A is contingent then something must have created A.

Ah, but if A is God then nothing created A. The causal chain is broken by saying that A is a “necessary” being — which means, simply, uncaused. God’s existence doesn’t require the existence of anything else.

But is this anything other than a word game? (more…)

Teach the Controversy June 6, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Evolution & ID, Naturalism , add a comment

One thing advocates of teaching Intelligent Design (ID) in school like to say is why not expose kids to both sides and “teach the controversy.” I’m actually very sympathetic to this approach. The goal of education is to learn how to reason and evaluate evidence on your own, not merely have your head loaded up dogmatically with “facts.”

However, there’s no scientific controversy between evolution and ID; therefore no appropriate way to present the controversy in science class. ID relies on abandoning the scientific method and declaring that despite all the scientific evidence, evolution (at least macro-evolution) does not occur.

There is a controversy, of course. But it’s not a scientific controversy. (more…)

Can General Atheism be Proved? June 3, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments, Supernaturalism , 1 comment so far

In Agnosticism Revisited and the Case for Atheism I argued that being agnostic about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic Creator isn’t justifiable. I used the Argument from Perfection (a version of the Problem of Evil) to demonstrate that belief in a perfect creator isn’t sustainable and therefore people who are not agnostic about imperfect gods and goddesses have even less basis to be agnostic about the monotheistic deity at the heart of Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Instead they should be atheist.

However that article received a comment from Max, an agnostic, which deserves serious attention. Although agreeing that I did “a good job pointing out the irreconcilable difficulties in a particular concept of God,” one which “embodies specific attributes,” Max argued that I “left the basic idea of god untouched.”

Although Max doesn’t “believe in Allah, or Jesus, or any and all specific mythic representations of god,” he is still agnostic rather than atheist since he doesn’t “disbelieve in the very idea of god.” In fact, Max wrote,

You did not present an argument at this level. Nor will you ever, since the concept of god in abstract of a specific mythic tradition is a completely non-falsifiable proposition, and thus cannot be affirmed or denied by any rational means.

He fleshed this objection out at the end of his comment this way:

If you argue against the existence of god, must you not pin that argument on some imagined attribute(s) of god. The problem is that as soon as you imagine god’s attributes you cease talking about the idea of god, and start talking about some specific imagined representation of god. You can disprove a billion representations without ever even addressing the concept of god itself.

Although Max left his comment over a year ago, I never got around to replying. I’m rectifying that now. (more…)