I do not claim that the evidence supports atheism. It is a faith, just as religions are faiths. Those with no faith are agnostics.
Howeever, I think it is proven beyond all doubt that there is no God who is Benevolent, Omnipotent, and Omniscient. The world is not ideal. St Augustine says there must be evil because there must be free will, because agents without free will lack something or other. I don't believe we have free will. But in any case, Hurricane Katrina sure didn't have free will. Things which clearly don't have free will act in a way which is morally wrong. Any God that might exist has no excuse for earthquakes and such.
For decades, I have lived off the fact that some behavioral economist put my name on 4 of their articles, so I must focus on this omniscience business. Could God be benevolent and omnipotent but ignorant and confused ? Give me a break. I don't believe in rational expectations any more than I believe in God, but the most idiotic and irrational deity has to understand that earthquakes hurt living things and that rocks don't enjoy the relief of their tension.
OK so we have to look at benevolence and omnipotence. Oddly, I actually believe in a benevolent God. I call him The moral Law (his friend call him morla). This is the embodiment of all that is good. Unfortunately, the moral law is not omnipotent or indeed potent at all. It tries to tell us what we should do, but can't get the words out because it (sadly) has no tongue (or lips or teeth or lungs or voice box).It sreams things which should be obvious (such as don't vote for Trump you moron) but its screams are silent.
Sometimes (such as on the morning of November 9 2016) I wonder if their might be two deities. The totally utterlessly powerless moral law and the Omipotent Nasty Bastard Who is Just Fucking with us. Now I must admit that This Divine Asshole has a Sense of Humor. If I wanted to Humiliate the USA, I wouldn't havde done such a Bang Up Fucking Impressive Job.
This means, that, if I had a religion, I would be Manichaen.
Their view as I understand it from Gibbon and just making it the fuck up is that there are two extemely powerful beings Ohrmazad (who forgives spelling errors) and Ahriman (who is gonna get me even if I spell His Name Right cause he got no clue about incentives).
Ohrmizad is very good. The Other Guy is a bad Guy Who created this vale of tears while Ohrmizad wasn't looking. This theology reconciles the idea that there is a benevolent deity with the plain fact that shit fucked up and bullshit.
In my view, the Creator of the Universe (who might be the One God if we are unlucky) has a Sick and Twisted Sense of Humor. I think that He created us to find the ultimate abyss of idiocy. Our purpose is to become so idiotic that it is not conceivable (even for an Omniscient but Really Nasty God) to think of anything more idiotic.
I fear that once we have achieved utter idiocy, the Universew will have serve His Purpose and cease to exist. So to those who ask me if I am worried about having a hangover tomorrow, I say, what makes you think there will be a tomorrow. Can you describe a possible idiocy which hasn't occurred some time since November 7 2016 ? If you can, I'll plan for the future. But I can't, so I will have another drink.
Your definition of atheist and agnostic is quite different from that of say PZ Myers. I have no horse in this race (what the correct definition is) but having different definitions does make communication difficult.
ReplyDeleteAs for there being no micro-managing creator (which seems to be what religionists are arguing for) I always regard the existence of mosquitos as being adequate proof.
ReplyDeleteI have a friend whose birthday was on November 9. I wished him happy birthday and told him that drink was appropriate for all sorts of reasons.
ReplyDeleteWe need to turn our attention to practicing random (and not so random) acts of resistance.
I know you and I have similar views of Bill Clinton's signing into law the demise of welfare. That was almost nothing compared to what's coming.
I was not raised to believe in god. I did not raise my daughter to believe in god, but I did send her to a Jewish school through 8th grade as an alternative to religious-dominated public schools where we live (Salt Lake City). I don't know how anyone who believes in god could have voted for Trump. But many who profess to did.
P.S. PZ Myers defines atheism as not believing in any God, which is not the same thing as believing there are not any Gods. This means of course that it is possible to be both an atheist and an agnostic (meaning not claiming to know) at the same time.
ReplyDeleteI like PZM's definition, given above. It is also one of three possible definitions given in Wikipedia, and seems the most linguistically sensible to me: a-theist should mean not a theist (just as asymmetry means not having symmetry), and a theist is someone who believes in a personal god, so an atheist is soemone who does not have a belief in a personal god.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me the notion of a god, such as the Christian god who supposed can read the minds of all 7+ billion human beings simultaneously and all the time, in violation of known physics, would require that this universe be a simulation, and the god a hacker who can hex-edit the data of the simulation to produce conditions (miracles) which the code of the simulation could never produce by itself. I can concede this as some sort of implausible, remote possibility, despite being an atheist. Can you not? I grant that such a simulation is also impossible under the laws and resources of this universe, so I have to postulate a higher-order universe with different laws to run the simulation in. This is not something I believe in (hence my continued atheism) but I can't completely rule it out. Anyway, thanks for the post. And forgivist thou my typos as I forgive your typos.
P.S. I see from Pew exit-polling results that the strong majority of white Christians voted for Trump, without which he would not have been elected. This fact does tend to lessen my agnosticism to a negligible amount, at least as far as Christianity is concerned.
ReplyDeleteManichean or Zoroastrian?
ReplyDeleteIn Christian theology, is Satan a theist or an atheist?
ReplyDelete