No Evidence For God, Why Still Believe?

The light is on
The light is not on
The light is on and not on
The light is neither on nor not on

The only way a light can be on and not on is if there are two lights.

One way that a light can be neither on nor not on is if the light did not exist, or zero lights.

One side is heads
One side is not heads
One side is both heads and not heads
One side is neither heads nor not heads

One side is neither heads nor tails???

The only way that works is to split perspectives and realize that there is no coin, but if we do that, then 1,2,and 3 fail because if there is no coin, then one side of nothing cannot be heads.

This exercise does not help me “realize” anything since I already know “things” do not exist and yet I still have trouble seeing the value in the tetralemma.

This guy made an interpretation: treeleaf.org/forums/showthr … Tetralemma

[i]AKEMI:Tomatoes are delicious.
BENJI: I’d rather eat shit than tomatoes.
CHIKO: Raw tomatoes make me gag, but pizza without tomato sauce is yeuch.
DAI: Tomatoes? I could take them or leave them.

GORO: Trump is the devil.
HIRO: Trump is our saviour.
IZUMI: Trump has his good points and his bad points.
JUNDO: I look at Trump and I see nothing bad and nothing good.[/i]

I have read that thread, slept on it, and my conclusion is the tetralemma should be abandoned in favor of some sensible analogies to illustrate that things do not exist.

I don’t have any problem with objects being a collection of properties, but there must be a subject to have an object and endow those properties.

I would hope that extraordinary claims warrant extraordinary evidence.

There must be at least one thing. The universe is the only atom, the a-tomos, the non-cuttable.

Reification is thingification, which is making a thing out of no thing, so have you considered that you’ve made a thing out of a someone (brahman)? Or maybe I should ask what you think the universe is, where it came from, what is fundamental reality if not brahman?

This seems more like personification rather than reification, but let’s just forget the Abrahamic god just like we have forgotten Zeus. I want to know if the universe is a bunch of sterile junk or if it is indeed alive.

Yes because water does not fight, it yields.

I still think the word you’re looking for is personification. It’s more survivally advantageous to assume there is a tiger making the grass move than the wind.

Yes, I’m confident all the religions have been perverted. Alan Watts believed in brahman. He described himself as a mix of buddhism and hinduism. He said you can either compliment the universe or you can seek to put it down.

It’s not instinctual for me to label people.

To paraphrase Kant, the Universe came from “you” and collectively with humanity. It is a long story to explain, so I won’t go into that.
Note my thread on 'You Are a Co-Creator of Reality"
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=193726

The principle of causation is inherent and made instinctual in human beings.
Thus for everything that is ‘effect’, there must be a ‘cause’ or ‘fundamental essence’.
The Hindu traced the ultimate essence to Brahman, i.e. the reification of that essence. It is not personification or anthropomorphization.
When science traced the fundamental of material to energy long ago, the Hindus related Brahman with ‘energy’ i.e. which is pervasive within reality.
Now that Science has dug deeper into quarks, then Brahman must something like quarks or whatever that is the final particle.

That ‘there must be something rather than nothing’ is purely a psychological issue that manifest into psycho-linguistic, i.e. ending with the reification of Brahman.

What is critical is we need to understand and acknowledge such a psychological state [use it optimally], but we should not be a slave to it to the extreme of killing in the name of God.

Then how do you reconcile the fact that I am alive and conscious and so are you and lots of other lifeforms if the universe itself does not also contain that property?

You would have to believe that dumb-junk arranged in specific combinations resulted in smart people.

Hydrogen - a colorless, odorless gas that, given enough time, turns into people!

That doesn’t seem silly? So I don’t understand how you could discard the Brahman concept which so nicely explains that dilemma.

What are the consequences to you if you ignore that ‘fact’ i.e. the universe is alive like you and me?

If you reflect deeply, the only consequence is ‘you’ will feel uneasy with it, i.e. psychologically while reality will go on as it does.
You are indeed psychologically compelled [subliminally] to believe it.
But if you understand the psychological mechanism behind such a belief and is able to dissolve it, the only thing is a change in your psychological state, a freer one on top of that.

Meanwhile it is all the same in reality, i.e. you will eat, sleep, work, etc. but with one less burden, i.e. Chop Wood Carry Water.
http://www.zendirt.com/chop-wood-carry-water/59/

Note my explanation above, discarding the Brahman concept is based on refined psychological introspection and practices to develop the relevant state of mind to sustain it.

The consequence is that I will need to figure out how life came from nonlife.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtqtKnWriCM[/youtube]

At 16:50, he says:

“Now all this is perfectly idiotic. If you would think that the idea of the universe as being the creation of a benevolent old gentleman, although he’s not so benevolent he takes a sort of “this hurts me more than it hurts you” sort of attitude… uh, you can have that on the one hand and if that becomes uncomfortable, you can exchange it for its opposite: the idea that the ultimate reality doesn’t have any intelligence at all. At least that gets rid of the ole bogie in the sky, but in exchange for a picture of the world that is completely stupid. Now these ideas don’t make any sense… especially the last one… because you cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of an unintelligent universe.”

How do you suppose intelligent organisms came from an unintelligent universe?

I’m psychologically compelled to believe 1+1=2 and therefore that should be reason to dismiss it?

You have the extra burden of deciding how life came from nonlife. I have one less burden than you do.

All you’ve done is avoid the question. Why would you abandon a sensible theory of the universe for one that doesn’t make any sense? So far the only reason you have given me is that the sensible solution was too sensible and because it was sensible, it was therefore wrong.

What are the consequences to you if you ignore the above question?
If you ignore the above question and your answer, you will not have the onus to prove the impossible, i.e. God exists.

There is no psychological compulsion on you to believe 1+1=2 as you have recognized you can do away with [dismiss] it when dealing with lumps of clay, drop of water, and the likes.

There is no burden on me to decide how life came from non-life.
What is fact is life emerged and one has to deal with it at the present.

It make more sense [empirically] to accept life emerged and one has to deal with it.

How can you say the idea of God is sensible when it is non-sense, i.e. based on crude reasoning rather than empirical sense.

If I ignored the question then being on a philosophy forum would be pointless, but I intend to document your continued avoidance of the question: How do you suppose intelligent organisms came from an unintelligent universe?

So your recommendation is:

Then what compels me to believe it if not psychological compulsions?

I suppose ignoring the burden makes it seem like it’s not there.

Emerged? Can you prove that? If life emerged, that means it came from something that wasn’t life, so substantiate your claim and stop dodging the question.

Within the philosophy forum rules (which I suppose do not apply here in the religion section):

2.2 Arguments should be made in good faith: no trolling. If a moderator sees a poster presenting an argument and dismissing any counterpoints without engaging them, or suspects someone of presenting arguments purely for the sake of inflaming debate or annoying other posters, a warning may be issued. ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopi … 1&t=175550

I’m not suggesting that such a rule be enforced in this instance, but merely drawing your attention to your ethics regarding refusal to address my question.

I want to know why you forsook the brahman concept for a lifeless collection of nuts and bolts if you have no idea how those nuts and bolts turned into people. Why forsake a sensible concept for an insolvable problem and then suggest ignoring the problem as a solution? And why come on a philosophy forum if you’re so void of curiosity such that you can so easily ignore philosophical problems underpinning your own philosophy? And if you haven’t solved your own problems, why are you proselytizing your philosophy?

Substantiate your claim that life emerged and your claim that such emergence is empirical.

Because life cannot come from nothing. If life had a beginning, then whatever engendered it would therefore be a simpler/higher/different form of life. There could never have been a time when the life property (whatever that is) was not inherent to the universe or else life would have come from nonlife and that’s like suggesting “color” came from “shape” somehow.

or ‘how does experiencing arise in matter?’ We can understand how complex phenomena might arise out of simpler phenomena. But how does interiority arise? One of the assumptions, generally not defended but simply accepted apriori, is that experiencing (consciousness) is a byproduct of complexity (or some forms of it). But we have no proof or even the slightest evidence of this. Another way to couch the issue and to ask your question is 'Why did you decide that the default is not alive, not experiencing, not conscious? In the law we have a presumption of innocence (and of sanity, for that matter=? For most scientists there is a presumption of not being alive, not being conscious, with life seen as the exception. This default has no demonstration.

Interestingly we can see a progression within science, against great internal resistance, from white men are sentient and other humans are less so, with animals as machines and no one even mentions plants. To the current scientific consensus, where animals are seen as conscious intentional being and now plant intelligence and even choice is coming in to the mainstream. The bias is being overcome. From a pantheist perspective the bias is seen as 1) less likely to be the right default and 2) problematically counterintuitive - as you have been arguing.

Rupert Sheldrake is a wonderful scientist who has found many of these not justified (yet) defaults in mainstream science. To me it seems much more likely that interiority is universal and that the bias of humans being special is still causing tremendous unscientific resistance to now proven phenomena within science, but also to real rational evaluation of the default dead unintelligent universe with life as a rare scum on dead matter as the exception.

My cuo buono is: how does it serve people to have the defaults they have. I mean, why leave that type of criticism to the atheists?
How does it serve a group to see everything as machine-like, modular, and mainly dead?

Monsanto provides a great case study for that religion.

Excellent comments; keep em coming!

I’ll have to remember that word: interiority.

Exactly! It makes no sense to me that life is a function of complexity. It makes so little sense that I previously conjured a spirit to explain the missing “lifeness” because there is no way “experience” can be a result of a deterministic process of falling dominoes, and since I hadn’t yet considered that life is “interior”/inherent to the universe, a spirit was my only alternative (and a consequence of my indoctrination).

As far as I can tell, his reasoning is that to believe the default is alive is a mental illness; therefore the default cannot be alive. He calls it “reify”, which is to make something out of nothing or to make a thing within a continuum. So he says that because we have a natural tendency to reify, that god cannot exist since we must assume that we’ve reified god from nothing (I don’t know why we must assume that).

But I don’t think he’s seeing that he’s reified nonlife from life, or has cut a “thing” from a continuum and created a division that doesn’t actually exist. So the same mental illness argument applies.

There are fashions in science and philosophy. One must be trendy!

Yes, did we come into the world or come out of it? If we came in, then from where did we come? If we came out, then the ingredients were already here.
It’s important to point out that life could never have had a beginning or else it would have come from nonlife, or nothing, like color could somehow come from shape.

So they feel justified in kicking the universe around. To have a sense of self apart from everything else. Otherwise we may have too much reverence if we saw life in everything.

I used to be that way even though I wasn’t atheist and I believed I had a spirit which set me apart from all this junk. But now I see it’s a consequence of the self/other and the more oneness you have with the universe, the less of a self you’ll feel simply because there is less other to engender self. Since people love to identify themselves, they’re going to relentlessly cling to their junkyards :wink:

LOL yeah I see what you mean.

Serendipity, you might like Ken Wilber. I have problems with his Buddhism, but that’s me.

You don’t have to give up on spirit. I use interiority to deal with the materialist paradigm drones.

Another fun line of argument with determinists is to challenge the possibiliity of an utterly determined creature, that is, them for example, being rational. And if it was rational, the determinist was rational, how could he know it, I mean, he would have to - is determined to - think his arguments made sense. Getting that addictive ‘my argument just made sense quale’ should be ignored by a determinist if he, in this case, really believes in determinism. Once he hears that argument he should be forever in doubt. Not that he will be, but he should be, as a believing determinist. 1) I know I am completely determined. 2) I know my arguments will seem right to me 3) I cannot know if it is because they are right or for some other reason that compels me, utterly, to believe they are right. The arguments seem right, but that’s just a quale.

But then a determinist can’t help but contradict himself, ha, ha.

Cool I’ll check him out. The main problem I have with buddhism is if we do not exist, then why did the buddha come back to eliminate suffering? If the key to the ending of suffering is to realize that there is no one to suffer, then there is no suffering to end.

Well what I mean is that I hadn’t considered that a spirit could be native to the universe instead of given by a monarchical god who is separate from the universe, so my only choices at the time was either to believe in that type of god or to believe the dead universe somehow created life.

The way I think of spirit is like the spirit of the great outdoors, the spirit of fun, the spirit of the wild.

Like the song Fred Bear:

[i]There I was back in the wild again.
I felt right at home, where I belong.
I had the feeling, coming over me again.
Just like it happened so many times before. eh.
The Spirit of the Woods is like an old good friend.
Makes me feel warm and good inside.
I knew his name and it was good to see him again.
Cause in the wind he’s still alive.

We’re not alone when we’re in the great outdoors
We got his spirit We got his soul
He will guide our steps and our arrows home
The restless spirit still roams
Oh Fred Bear
Walk with me down the trails again.
Take me back, back where I belong.
Fred Bear
I’m glad to have you at my side my friend
And I’ll join you in the big hunt before too long[/i]

(If some of our teenage thrill seekers really want to go out and get a thrill.
Let them go up into the northwest and let them tangle with a Grizzly bear
Or Polar bear or brown bear and get that effect that will cleanse the soul.)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyNYzcXAPf4[/youtube]

Spirit is wind or breath, which seems to be an effect with no cause. I remember being <5 yrs old and looking out the window during a storm and thinking the trees were making the ruckus.

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

I used to believe computers could never be conscious since it’s just a glorified set of deterministic switches, like dominoes, and I couldn’t see how that would result in a feeling of experience, but now I’m not so sure because if spirit is in the atom, then a computer is more than switches.

I think it boils down to every effect needing a cause, but if the causes can never be known, then it’s as if events do not have causes and randomness exists. Freewill and spirit is somehow mixed up in that I think.

I have to remember that anytime there is a trap that I can’t get out of, such as the freewill problem, it means I and the trap are one and there is no trap or anyone to get out of it. Trying to peer into my own inner workings is a trap with no exit because a subject cannot be an object to itself and therefore the fundamental deterministic variables can never be known.

Right, I get that and in discussions with atheists that kind of false dilemma is so apriori-ily jamming into the unconscious of the discussion it takes a huge project to even open the discussion.

It has now almost become taboo to speak of spirit, even in philosophical contexts. You rapidly get labelled a dualist and there seems to be this consensus that 1) that is the only possible option (that, for example, there cannot be a spectrum in the one substance with spirit at one end and physical things on the other) and 2) we are so, like, way past dualism, if you mention it you are, like, so uncool. Oh, you are a dualist, so you are wrong, nuff said.

That we have particles and waves as part of physicalism does not make it a dualism, even though it would have a couple of hundred years ago.

Sure, I think we may be able to make conscious entities. Perhaps they will be in agony all the time. Perhaps…and so on.

Given the epistemological consequences of assuming that you can only believe what you believe - which one must believe if one is a determinist - then it seems like agnositicism should be the rule for them. People tend to think that if it makes sense on the page/screen then we can then know our beliefs are correct. The problem is ALL KNOWLEDGE is in situ. I wake up. I remember things correctly or not. And in this muddled deeply embedded experiencing, I determine (have already assumed) what is true, what is not, what might be, how likely, how one knows and so on. We are not on the page, we are (seemingly) fallible beings experiencing our way forward.

Yup, I’ve been there, but can’t get past being labeled and categorized for the conversation to open up.

What’s wrong with dualism?

I think the waves act like particles, but are not particles. Probably they are highly directional waves due to very high frequency.

I don’t believe we can’t control what we believe. No amount of effort and determination can make someone believe what they don’t. If knowledge comes to light that changes our beliefs, that was largely out of our control as well.

There is no rule because determinism justifies every position - “I have no control. I can’t not believe what I believe.”

I think we might be saying the same thing. At least the quote you have there is what I am saying.

Did I read it wrong? :confusion-confused:

You seemed to be saying that agnosticism can be or ought to be preferentially selected by determinists.

.Ah, ok, I get the issue. Yes, that is what I was saying.

And yes, what you are saying above could be argued by a determinist, but they can no longer say they are rational. None of them will want to admit that they cannot know whether their conclusions were rationally arrived at. I would love it if they did. It would be so sweet and honest. I know determinism is the case even though this means I cannot know if I arrived at that conclusion rationally, though it sure seems like it.

Either something determines an effect or the effect is causeless. That is our options.

The best argument for freewill is to say that the causes of the effect cannot be known within this universe and therefore, they may as well be regarded as causeless events (randomness).

This may all be true, but to be a determinist undermines your ability to claim you know you arrived at this belief rationally. I think that is likely also true for believing in free will. That’s why I do not claim to believe in either FW or D or that I can know either is true or not or whether some other option is available.