On 26 Feb 2015, at 02:24, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
> A genuine sceptic (and a genuine scientist) is agnostic about
what the final science may turn out to be, if we ever get there.
Who are these strawmen scientists who think our current theories are
the final word on the nature of reality?
> What Mr Steinhart is saying is that "skeptical atheists" as he
calls them are making a metaphysical assumption about the nature of
reality - which is, precisely, an act of faith.
Skeptical means having doubts, so I'm having a little difficulty
understanding how having doubts about God or about anything else is
a act of faith unless you've redefined the word "faith" so from it's
original meaning that it means everything, which of course is
equivalent to meaning nothing. By the way, redefining common words
so that there mean next to nothing is what passes for philosophy
these days.
But it's true, technically I'm an agnostic in that I can't prove the
nonexistence of God, but people who go to great pains to point out
that they're a agnostic not a atheist seem a little silly to me
because, judging from the equal respect they give to both believers
and atheists, they incorrectly think both viewpoints are equally
rational. I am certainly not that sort of agnostic, not even
technically.
This is what Isaac Asimov had to say in his autobiography and I
agree with every word:
"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.
I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was
intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it
assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say
one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a
creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an
atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist,
but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my
time."
There is another quote from Asimov that I quite like:
"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever
conceived."
Which confirms again how much the atheist needs the bible. They really
needs to believe that theology is only the Aristotelian
reinterpretation of the Abramanic religion, so that they can mock God,
pretend it does not exists, and keep the real question under the rug.
Fro the greek, the existence of God is a quasi-triviality, because
God, by definition, is the reality that we search. Then the real
question is what is the nature of God? A person? A physical thing? A
mathematical thing? A first principle, etc.
In fact the first question is "Is there a physical universe" (in the
Aristotelian sense). The platonist said "no", like, note, the first
jews, christians, and muslims. Only-Aristotelism came later.
UDA answers this question in the following way: IF we are machine,
THEN there is no physical universe (in the aristotelian sense). Non-
platonism is just not a possible option for the mechanist.
In the aristotelian frame, comp is super-atheist: there is no creator
and no creation.
In the platonist frame, I am a believer. I have faith that there is
some unifying scheme. If not I would not be a researcher. And with
computationalism, any universal system give an unifying ontology, and
all gives the same physics and the same theology. The physics is
testable, so the comp faith can be tested. It is not blind faith.
Bruno
John K Clark
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