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Posts
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I’m assuming that Richard Dawkins doesn’t frequent JC
but ya never know.
I’m going to restart the old faith thread but am saying nothing controversial on this first post in the hope that the thread isn’t deleted – Martin???*
However, I’m not sure whether to start this today, at the end of the week, or Monday/Tuesday at the beginning of a week. I’m not around tomorrow.
Maybe there is no longer interest?
We’ll see.
*waits patiently for this thread to start…….
I hate those facebook-type photoshop pictures posted by drac above.
How to reduce puzzling problems into a cliché and surround it with a background of colours which persuade at the subliminal level.
The atheist ones usually tend to be in all black surrounds, with a colour photo of some deeply wise thinker like Dawkins or AC Grayling or that dead smart-aleck Christopher Hitchins. Some a-hole from the British Humanist Association tends to be responsible for this design.
“The less you think, the more you believe”. Surrounded by a photo of Dawkins against a background of rays of sunlight. Straight out of the 18th century Enlightenment. Hmm..Sounds good till you think about it.
First substitute imagine for believe, and then watch a Jean Cocteau movie (Beauty and the Beast – Cocteau, not Disney – or Orpheus) and the limitations of the cliché become obvious.
A dessicated Enlightenment mind tries to separate thinking and belief into different categories.
You can’t separate thinking from belief any more than you can separate thinking and belief from imagination.
Imagination, belief, knowledge are all different aspects of thinking. One aspect isn’t any more important – or certain – than any other except in the Humanist universe.
So there.
Me mind’s been all fuzzy after a day in London, so give me a few minutes as it comes together again and starts to think more fully. Will post in a few minutes – I hope.
Right.
# 1 I’m setting aside the Bible or any other Holy Book in trying to think about God. I’m sticking to science – in particular a science whihc tries to reason about the origins fo the cosmos.
Dawkins sticks to evolution, coz it’s what he feels nice about, and uses our current knowledge of how long ago life evolved, and the process of evolution, to lay to waste the creation myths of Genesis and other stories abounding in the Near East/Asia Minor region a couple of thousand years and more past.
Big deal! The Roman Catholic Church rejects the Creation myth as unscientific, too.
Dawkins, though, has the limited mind of the True Believer. The only real believers in God the Creator are the dogmatic fundamentalists for whom every word of the Bible is literal truth.
You can have so much fun with these people by pointing out problems from word 1. There are actually two creation stories in Genesis (as any Catholic Commentary will tell you) and the four gospel writers can’t even agree on the inscription written on the Cross on which Jesus hung and died. And that’s for starters.
In short the fundies are easy meat, Aunt Sallies on which to prove your cleverness, and Dawkins can’t really handle any others. He’s a DNA man, not much more when it comes to being authoritative..
So – let’s start with science.
#2 in a minute, and then I’ll wait for responses.
#2 – I am not a scientist, not a cosmologist, but the following is simple enough for even me to grasp after reading a small number of books (by eminent scientists like Jeremiah Ostriker’s Heart of Darkness)
Scientists have been making striking discoveries about the origins of the cosmos for the last century, since Einstein discovered that space and time are elusive – they both curve, which is hard for our minds to handle at first.
For many years there were two competing ideas about the nature of our cosmose whihc pointed to different origins.
There was the Big Bang – the idea that the cosmos had a beginning, and that space and time had a beginning. Before that point – a millisecond (that’s my way of putting it, it was infinitesimally shorter than a millisecond) – there was no space and no time. This is something we cannot imagine, but we can believe it.
The other was called the Steady State theory. This was the idea that the cosmos is as it has always been and always will be. There is no beginning in space or time – there has always been space and time, and there will be no end of space or time.
The Church took a firm stand on this (I’m not talking about the fundies). In the early 1950s, Pope Pius XII stated that the Church held to the Big Bang theory, and that atheists held to the Steady State approach.
This should be qualified. You have no need to be a Christian to hold to the first. But it is more true to say that the Big Bang was much more compatible with a theist approach to God, and Steady State with an atheist approach.
Since the 1970s, it has been accepted that the Big Bang is the likely event, since the Steady State approach has been disproved by astrophysicists*.
As with any scientific discussion, nothing is settled. A lot of scientists are now thinking in terms of a possible big bounce – where our cosmos started with a big bang, will reach a limit to expansion, and then will return to its origins before space and time, only to re-start the big Bang. In short there may have been any number of Big bangs before the one which created out cosmos.
But the Big Bounce, whatever the outcome of scientific work in the future, doesn’t get away from a possibility so startling that we can’t get our heads around it. Time and Space came into existence at a point – prior to that point there was no time, no space.
I use the term prior here to express what cannot be expressed. prior doesn’t mean ‘before’, as the was no before.
So atheist arguments that God doesn’t exist have been trumped by Christians (as long ago at least as Aquinas, but actually St John in the New Testament and even Job).
God doesn’t exist, say Christians – God couldn’t exist. God created existence.
That last sentence doesn’t end discussion, but let’s leave it there for the moment.
*there is a very good history of teh conflict between Big Bang and Steady State called Cosmology and Controversy, by Helge Kragh I have this, but I’ve not read it yet, but it seems to be accepted as the definitive account.
I am not a scientist, not a cosmologist,
Ok so that rules out Science. Are you trying to tell us that you’re an atheist?
I hate those facebook-type photoshop pictures posted by drac above.
I don’t really like Dawkins, so it was mocking him more than anything.
There was the Big Bang – the idea that the cosmos had a beginning, and that space and time had a beginning. Before that point – a millisecond (that’s my way of putting it, it was infinitesimally shorter than a millisecond) – there was no space and no time. This is something we cannot imagine, but we can believe it.
I don’t actually believe in the Big Bang theory, at least as currently know laws of physics describe it. Saying there was no space, and no time isn’t entirely accurate however, it would be better to say that space was infinitely dense, and time moved infinitely slowly. The time aspect is my main problem with this theory. I have never seen an explanation of how the initial expansion could be triggered in an environment where time is frozen, nothing should ever be able to change.
The other was called the Steady State theory. This was the idea that the cosmos is as it has always been and always will be. There is no beginning in space or time – there has always been space and time, and there will be no end of space or time.
As far as i’m aware of, entropy still exists in a steady state universe, which means that eventually energy and mass will be become evenly distributed thoughout space, possibly in pockets seperated by the expansion constant. After this i’m not really sure that time applies in any practical sense as nothing will never be able to happen.
Drac, I’ll answer I’ve not forgotten you, but I want to give it a couple of days to see how this thread unfolds, if it does unfold.
I am not a scientist, not a cosmologist,
Ok so that rules out Science. Are you trying to tell us that you’re an atheist?
huh?
I’m saying that atheism is not upheld by science.
I’m not a scientist or cosmologist, but I’m not going to rely on any kind of holy writ to explain my case, but on my simplified understanding of cosmology, culled fomr popular books written by astrophysicists like Ostriker.
You seem to get the wrong end of the stick, St Alfie..
. The atheist ones usually tend to be in all black surrounds, with a colour photo of some deeply wise thinker like Dawkins or AC Grayling or that dead smart-aleck Christopher Hitchins. Some a-hole from the British Humanist Association tends to be responsible for this design. “The less you think, the more you believe”.
It’s actually those that believe in a book of myth which constitutes religion possibly in the shape of a bible or Quran which are in the metaphorical black surrounds of a closed mind. The only logical conclusion to come to unless provided with solid evidence of something is to doubt it’s existence unless proven otherwise.
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