View Single Post
  #165  
Old 10-17-2007, 06:35 PM
vhawk01 vhawk01 is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: GHoFFANMWYD
Posts: 9,098
Default Re: why does this forum care so much about religion

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Is our existence pointless and random without God? Yeah, I think it is.

[/ QUOTE ]

Without intention, it is per se, you don't have to 'think' that it is. If you fling a 6 deck shoe of cards out a 10 story window, and on the ground you see that 40 or 50 cards have, by outrageous chance, formed a little house of cards, does that house of cards have any purpose or a point?

The mystery to me is - where they hell did the cards come from? Will we ever know for certain?

I think most people have some kind of feeling, or 'sense' that existence is not pointless. What ever this 'feeling' is, it has manifested itself through the eons as 'faith' in something 'behind' existence, informing existence. Of course humans being what they are, imperfect, have used this faith, like fire, to varying degrees of both good and bad ends.

[/ QUOTE ]

Humans may very well have this "sense," whatever it is. I just have no reason why you'd think that means anything. Humans have a sense that objects moving towards them are dangerous until proven otherwise. This is a survival mechanism, and it is often wrong. Humans have a sense that those blotchy eraser marks on the chalkboard kind of look like a man's face. This is because facial recognition, as part of our general pattern recognition, is very important. But the eraser marks are NOT a face. IOW, human beings have a whole lot of senses that are just adaptations, general rules of thumb that are often wrong but that solve certain types of problems.

It takes very little imagination to think of reasons we might all have a sense that we are fundamentally important in the universe.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't recall stating that I thought it 'meant' something. However, while I'm also inclined to think that it is probably just adaptation with regard to evolutionary biology, I'm not prepared to say I'm certain of it.

[/ QUOTE ]

I didn't say you did. If we are going to be nitty, I just said I don't understand why you WOULD say that. If you did. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] But I was making a more general point that arguments from obviousness or whatever the opposite of the argument from incredulity (and actually its just a different form of the argument from incredulity) are very common and very fallacious. Many people will take your observation and then conclude that this "sense" or "feeling" cant just be random and that it must mean something. Which of course it probably does, just not what they want it to.
Reply With Quote