why I'm an atheist...

[FortunaMaximus]

It is a philosophical term. You're right about that, and I probably should have defined that more clearly.

However, it is an optimistic view, and when applied to extremely long timescales, this growth isn't necessary to combat entropy. What comes out of this growth may be the maturity and know-how necessary to resolve or violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I find the Second Law to be a personal insult, as I do death. So, instead of getting angry at those two processes which combat, on one hand, a human life, and on the other hand, the life within the Universe...

At times, I find myself thinking on immense timescales and outlining projection models for the eventual fate of humanity, not in centuries or millennia, but across megayears.

Of course accuracy suffers, but over those timespans, being off by a century or an eon where some developmental branches are concerned, is fairly insignificant.

So much of day to day life is mundane and prone to interpretation. And it may be the fact I live a relatively simple life, free of capitalist competition and politics. Life, for me, is never boring. The establishments of society and what you have to endure to make your mark in a meritocracy simply consumes too much time.

Linksurfing Wiki after entering extropy, I found this:

[ QUOTE ]
People’s freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed: Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not popular perception. Account for both the costs of the restrictions themselves, and those of opportunities foregone. Favor measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high expectation value. Protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress.

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Fairly simplistic, perhaps, and self-evident as that statement is (Proactionary Principle) this would seem to be the ideal setting for science.

[Zag]

Nothin' like a good, old-fashioned, religion fight. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] I'd like to throw in a few random thoughts that I haven't seen offered yet. Although I consider myself to be between agnostic and atheist, much of what I say supports the theists.

Re an O3 God allowing evil to happen on this world: Remember that, according to most religions, the time spent on this world is an infinitismal fraction of your overall time. Any suffering that happens here is unimportant in the grand scheme. But interfering in any way would be to remove to possiblity of free will. (Of course, then, how do you explain his interfering in the past, according to every holy book in the world?) So calling him degenerate just because he is more concerned with freedom than with alleving a trivial amount of suffering is disingenuous.

In any case, an omnipotent, omniscient God is inconsistent with free will. When he put the first bunch of quarks into motion, He could have known the exact consequences, all the way down to exactly how every person is going to live his life. Enter Heisenberg!! (as in, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) The only way an omniscient diety could create beings with free will is if there are things that are fundamentally unknowable, such that even an omniscient being doesn't know them. Frankly, it's brilliant!

People who try to come up with "scientific" evidence of something as stupid as creationism really burn my behind. If you say, "Because of my faith, I choose to believe this in spite of the evidence," then I have no problem with it. But don't use the word "science."

In the early part of the last century, scientists still believed that the universe had existed forever and would exist forever. When they came up with the Big Bang theory, all the Bible and Torah-wielding fundamentalists should have stood up and declared loudly, "See? We were right!!" The fact that they didn't demonstrates them to be idiots and dangerous idealogues.

Looking at evolution strictly genetically, along with probability analysis makes for a compelling argument that there was some external entity guiding the DNA recombination -- the level of complexity in the DNA of the higher mammals shouldn't have been able to happen in the amount of time the Earth has been around. On the other hand, less than 10% of your DNA actually does anything, so most of the complexity is just chaos.

On the other, other hand, some evolutionary steps are pretty hard to see how they could have happened, other than because they were a stepping stone to intelligence. For instance, why are humans the only non-aquatic mammals not covered with hair? Because the deity wanted to force them to evolve enough intelligence to make clothing? (i.e. they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and realized that they were naked.)

[IronUnkind]

[ QUOTE ]
At times, I find myself thinking on immense timescales and outlining projection models for the eventual fate of humanity, not in centuries or millennia, but across megayears.

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This is also gangbusters at parties!

[FortunaMaximus]

<chuckles> Depends on the party.

[elstunar]

I don't know if this has been covered at all in this thread cuz i haven't read it all, it may be a bit OT. Anyways, I was just thinking the other day how do atheists account for the existence of the universe or existence of anything at all for that matter? To me, it seems as though the universe MUST have had a beginning at some point in time. And thus, "rewinding" time and simply going back further and further should lead one to a beginning point at which our universe with all the laws that embody it was created. Is there any other alternative to believe that the universe was NOT created? I don't really have a lot of knowledge on this subject, I was just wondering what the atheist rationale was concerning this. Just hoping maybe some of you could appease my curiosity. Thx.

[Utah]

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To me, it seems as though the universe MUST have had a beginning at some point in time.

[/ QUOTE ]Your perception of time and movement may be completely different then their true nature. We already know time is not static and is dependant on speed. Additionally, we know that the human mind warps itself as not all relatively equal timeframes (e.g., 60 minutes) are perceived to be of the same duration by the brain.

Barbour wrote a weak ass book called, <u>The End of Time</u> However, he did raise an interesting point in that movement may not exist outside of our perception.

Some will say, "well time is a dimension". However, I find that weak and incomplete. I read a very interesting article I think last month talking about how even laws of the universe may not exist - ie, there are no fundamentals. Rather, the human mind simply searches for symmetry. After all, a law really is simply a state of symmerty (it looks indentical no matter which way you look at it).

[revots33]

[ QUOTE ]
To me, it seems as though the universe MUST have had a beginning at some point in time. And thus, "rewinding" time and simply going back further and further should lead one to a beginning point at which our universe with all the laws that embody it was created. Is there any other alternative to believe that the universe was NOT created?

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Well Quentin Smith argues that the universe created itself.

[kurto]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't know if this has been covered at all in this thread cuz i haven't read it all, it may be a bit OT. Anyways, I was just thinking the other day how do atheists account for the existence of the universe or existence of anything at all for that matter? To me, it seems as though the universe MUST have had a beginning at some point in time. And thus, "rewinding" time and simply going back further and further should lead one to a beginning point at which our universe with all the laws that embody it was created. Is there any other alternative to believe that the universe was NOT created? I don't really have a lot of knowledge on this subject, I was just wondering what the atheist rationale was concerning this. Just hoping maybe some of you could appease my curiosity. Thx.

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Note- Atheists don't even have to have an answer yet. They simply believe that making up a God simply to answer the question is silly. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[John21]

[ QUOTE ]
However, it is an optimistic view, and when applied to extremely long timescales, this growth isn't necessary to combat entropy. What comes out of this growth may be the maturity and know-how necessary to resolve or violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.


[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting. I wonder if DNA could be an 'agent/function' of extropy.

If we consider DNA as a form of intelligence, we can look at our own use of intelligence to circumvent different laws of nature.

A crude example, but hopefully it will make my point:
In the progress of shipbuilding, wood was used instead of steel, because wood floats in water and steel sinks. But through observation we learned the "Law" of floatation to be that anything could float which, bulk for bulk, is lighter than the mass of liquid displaced by it. So now we make steel float by the very same law by which it sinks.

Intelligence didn't change the law, it merely provided conditions which do not spontaneously occur in nature.

So could it be possible that DNA acquired the intelligence to not change the 2nd law of thermal dynamics, but to provide conditions to make life float instead of sink ? In a very rough sense, making matter grow/live by the very law in which it decays/dies.

(I know it's a stretch to call DNA - intelligence. But I think it's fair to say that it is organized information - which could be a definition of intelligence.)

[Zag]

It is ridiculous to say that "because the universe has a beginning, someONE must have created it." It is more ridiculous to say that there was someone hanging around in the (non-)universe to do the creating than it is to say that the universe just appeared out of nothing. In fact, we know that elemental particles appear and disappear in vacuums all the time. Usually they exist for only picoseconds, but occasionally they last longer.

Given an infinite number of potential universes, on some of them enough matter spontaneously appeared and remained to create a universe supportive of life. What about all those others? Well, there isn't anybody on those others wondering why they never existed.