Many Americans Say the Democratic Party Does Not Share Their Priorities

[superrific]

I am going to concede this as a standoff, because I don't know how to find any percentages, but all the religious people and most of the religious public doctrine I have seen points to things like the efficacy of prayer and god's providence as real world evidence. They take it that way and I do not, as contra temps research on prayer not doing anything and the basic data of most religious people being more often poor and suffering (complex nexus of stuff there, in America, and worldwide, but anyway).

Long years ago, long in two respects, I read through all his works. To me, most of the reading was like trying to jog through mud, but I get his stance. I don't think that path leads to success in human realms, and the subjective focus defies societal benefits of the awareness of other perspectives on actual, workable and tested means of improving things for people. The idea of a leap of faith in personal choice is bound up with forgetting ethical acts that objective research can demonstrate helps our species as a whole. I could go on but enough said, I think there.

It does not. This is a major error. You can read what I wrote again, but atheism is the lack of one single belief. An atheist can (possibly) doubt or hate science, they can have dozens or hundreds of other metaphysical beliefs but simply lack the specific god belief. The a- prefix means a lack, not a privileging stance on anything else. In the seventies a missionary to the Amazon discovered the Pirahas tribe, who had zero notions of any god or gods, or even of an afterlife. They were atheists, zero theism, and did not arrive at atheism in the way that I did, or the way that most atheists in Western society do, which is to find ourselves in the stance due to valuing facts, evidence and logic. Atheism is nothing other than the lack of one single belief, however the lack arises.

One cannot prove a negative. I can't disprove my invented notion above of flying arctic giraffes (they could be invisible, etc.) One can provide a provisional rule-out in science research, as I wrote about, but that is not proving in a permanent way.

These assertions are separate and mostly beyond anything but cultural invention that is designed to be free from objective analysis. When I use the general term universe, I am attempting to discuss all that exists. These "outside" all that exists propositions seem to me like a nonstarter for any discussion. It's to me like saying, "I have my own view of a square, and my view is it is a circle." Okay, I cannot do a thing with this in conversation.

1. I don't recognize the version of atheism you're presenting here. In ordinary conversation, atheism refers to the belief that God does not exist. That's my understanding. Maybe your version of atheism is also recognized. I'm not going to argue about it, as this might just be terminology.

2. Using the term "universe" to describe "all that exists" begs a lot of questions. You're attempting to use a definition to wipe away actual philosophical quandaries. For instance, the first cause problem is a thorn for every theory of the cosmos. Pretty much, the options are: 1) accept that something outside the universe exists and is responsible for it; or 2) deny that causation is a fundamental concept of the universe. I'd go with the second choice anyway, so I wouldn't have to decide on the first -- but it's also true that causality is a really important part of how humans think. Quantum mechanics is something of a rejoinder and it tends (in my view) to model the universe in a way that de-emphasizes causality, but still.

Let's assume the universe is expanding for the moment (which it probably is). What does that mean? For a physicist, it refers to the observable fact that galaxies are moving away from each other. But does it mean that there's a coordinate point in space that exists now that didn't exist before? And if so, what was "there" before? The second question suggests that the first question is best answered in the negative, and various cosmologies usually account for this problem by saying that the coordinate was there all along; it was just "closer" in some sense to the other particles than it is now. But that theory breaks down at the singularity of the Big Bang, meaning that we can't have any insight as to whether there is something "beyond."

3. You are right that there can be no scientific conversation about God. I guess that's ultimately my point. And if scientific conversation is what you're interested in -- I mean, there are way more scientists these days than theologians. Saying you don't to want to have any other conversation isn't exactly saying there's nothing to talk about; it's saying that you don't know how to talk about it, which isn't the same thing.

That's why I think the stuff about "you can't prove a negative" is mistaken. You can't prove a positive about God either, which again is different than saying God doesn't exist. Assume God exists, and tell me what would be different about the universe if so. Nothing (at least on some theories of God). So science makes no prediction about God at all. That leaves the god-denier left with Occam's Razor or some other hermeneutic principle, neither of which are actually scientific or grounded in anything at all. The god-denier and the theist are situated in the same place.