1. Religion is not incompatible with Science: 'Non-Overlapping Magisteria'

Comment #116528 by Alyosha on January 26, 2008 at 5:40 pm

Here's a question that concerns me:

If science can show religion to be absurd, might science education in public schools be construed as a state sponsored attack on religion?

I wonder if I'm tempted by the rule of non-overlapping magisteria partly because it allows me to avoid debating that question.

2. Religion is not incompatible with Science: 'Non-Overlapping Magisteria'

Comment #116526 by Alyosha on January 26, 2008 at 5:36 pm

The rule of non-overlapping magisteria might work as long as your God doesn't ever do anything that might affect the physical world. As soon as He does then that phenomenon, being physical, falls within the magisterium of science.

3. Richard Dawkins talks about The Out Campaign and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Comment #116359 by Alyosha on January 26, 2008 at 10:04 am

JamieR,

What's the link to the video you watched?

4. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. were atheists, and they were terrible! Answer that!

Comment #114757 by Alyosha on January 22, 2008 at 6:03 pm

They have also never been in my kitchen.

5. How can the Earth be so perfectly suited for life by coincidence?

Comment #113864 by Alyosha on January 20, 2008 at 7:55 pm

The world isn't suited for life. Life, as we know it, is suited for the world.

Next!

6. What does atheism say about the purpose (or the meaning) of life?

Comment #113862 by Alyosha on January 20, 2008 at 7:46 pm

Words have meaning. It's confusion to talk of the meaning of life. As far as the word 'purpose' goes, what's the difference between an object having a purpose and an object having an intended use or function? To say that your life has purpose is to imply that it is the product of some level of intension. Why can't that intension just come from you?

7. What are your qualifications to question religion anyway? Just who are you?

Comment #113860 by Alyosha on January 20, 2008 at 7:35 pm

I'd be tempted to counter with a question:

What are your qualifications to tell me I can't?

8. People who've experienced God KNOW that God exists

Comment #113856 by Alyosha on January 20, 2008 at 7:26 pm

They might have had an experience, but what is it about the experience that makes them so certain that they were expereincing a God? And if a God, then which God?

I haven't read many of them but, as you might have guessed, I also like sidfaiwu's comment.

9. What is the role of free will to an atheist?

Comment #113758 by Alyosha on January 20, 2008 at 12:57 pm

It could be that our language has developed in part around the way we experience decision making, and that this freewill language has permeated our moral and legal discourse, providing a medium by which we come to agree, when we can, on how to distribute praise and blame. Indeed, the language of praise and blame, which incites people to assume the existence of freewill, might merely be the result of our 'languifying' our emotional responses of gratitude and indignation.

Participation in this language game does not imply that our experiences of decision making are actually experiences of our ultimate freedom of will. It does, however, incite people to make that assumption. When I have pointed out for people that the existence of freewill might be merely assumed, they have had trouble seeing how their corresponding language game could survive. I think they argue for freewill partly because they intuit (right or wrong) that their language tools would be incomplete without the language of freewill.

I think the theist might rebel also because she intuits a connection between the existence of God and that of freewill. After all, for them God is the soul of the universe. God thinks, God decides, God acts. So too we think, decide, and act. If our experience of our decisions is an illusion, if, for example, we are just biological computers unable to predict the results of our own calculations, then there is no part of us that is independent of the physical world and thus there are no metaphysical souls. Without souls, we have little hope for affecting a metaphysical God. What's more, our individual souls, as examples of unmoved movers, have been good evidence for the possibility of the Ultimate Unmoved Mover. And so if we have no freewill, then we have no soul. If we have no soul, then there is less hope of God.