Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

It's been a long process. I'm still discovering beliefs that need examination.

I think the hardest part about losing one's religious beliefs is that the differing belief systems become a barrier the relating to family and friends. And how can one avoid coming across as a know-it-all when talking with folks who are ignorant of science?

I don't see any way that science is incompatible with god. If science shows that something is false (eg. the age of the earth) then it is false. Science cannot disprove the existence of god by the very nature of what god is (outside of this reality). Science can show a need for a god or a multiverse, but it can't prove or disprove it.

You make it sound like people who learn about science automatically abandon a belief in the supernatural. There is some comfort to be had in believing that this physical world is the extent of reality, but that doesn't make it true.

I beg to disagree. It is incompatible with the New World Neo-Protestant Christian (Baptist etc) worldview. Most Old-World Churches (Catholic and the church I was raised in, Eastern Orthodox) fully accept scientific discoveries, including evolution. They do not hold the Bible (especially Genesis) to be literally true. Fundamentalist Christians do, they are defined by this. For example, the story of creation from Genesis is understood as a metaphor: the seven days are not literally days, but epochs etc. The metaphor is undestood to have been created to avoid confusing the ancient people. The Creationism debate in the US is watched with disbelief and smirks - don't they have worthier stuff to debate? - and is believed to stem from bigotry and plain anti-intellectual bias. Of course, we Old Worlders (especially Eastern Europeans) have a strong elitist (in the US sense) intelectual bias, like the US East coast. Calling someone ignorant is a very strong insult.

> a scientific worldview demands evidence and falsifiable claims and a christian one demands the opposite, faith.

Christianity has looked for proof since its inception. The Holy Books are nothing more than written testimonies of witnesses (By today's cynical standards, quite weak evidence). All theologians since have looked for logical proofs. Unfortunately, they have not found one. But it would be hasty to ignore the tradition of Christian theology's search for it.

I agree that some christian sects are more open minded about science than others, but at the end of the day, it's the scientific worldview that doesn't lend itself to the christian worldview, not the other way around.

A very influential book for me: A Common Faith by John Dewey - a pragmatic philosopher with a realistic approach and hope.

The real problem, to me, is one of literalism vs. metaphor. I read the Old and New Testaments for insight but not history or science. Some would find that appalling. Others appealing. The choice is mine and ours to believe what we want.

I think in a way the existence of god would be very depressing, because it would make everything meaningless.

Perhaps this is contained in the definition "God", perhaps this is why religious types are always on about "holiness" (which I have gathered mostly means "internally consistent") .

They spoiled it for us.

But if you're serious^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrational in your inquiry, you'll come to discover that, like Santa Claus, God does not exist, at which point you will also reject the inquiry. All of it.

The simulation argument, linked to recently here, I believe, has much the same features without the religious baggage: there is no experiment you can do which will provide direct evidence that you are, or are not, in a simulation. In the extreme case, the simulators could just stop the sim, back up, and change the outcome of the experiment (or just your perception of the outcome), and continue on.

However, it might still be important to your future survival whether you act as though you are or are not in one, in either case.

Still, there are some definitions you might offer for God that I'd agree with. And your conclusion would be to reject the existence. Mine would be to ask for better a definition.

"Overly simplistic" is nearly the opposite of the problem. We want our first principles to be simple -- the fewer axioms, the better. By contrast, a god is something mind-bogglingly complex, far more complex than the universe itself. That makes it a thoroughly unsatisfactory explanation.

On topic, I do wish folks down-voting me throughout this thread would explain why. I started posting because I'm very interested in the question but lack an answer. Down-voting me only proves the point and necessitating the very question!

1. I'm not looking for a satisfactory answer. I'm looking for the answer that is most plausible. I go where evidence leads me. In this case, there is as much evidence for god as there is for unicorns. This is not sufficient to dismiss the concept of god entirely, but it should at least give you pause.

2. I have debated religious people for hours and hours. I don't know any atheist who hasn't seriously evaluated his beliefs. My position is very close to the one of Richard Dawkins. Read his books (especially Selfish Gene and The God Delusion). The last book is not as confrontational as the title suggests. Dawkins has done a few programmes for the BBC, you can easily find them online.

3. There doesn't -need- to be an answer. When a problem is very complex, it is always better to honestly admit you don't know than to make something up that sounds nice or gives comfort.

4. You can't expect people to explain their position again and again on forums like these. Reading books is a far more efficient way to understand alternative points of view. Only when you have -specific- questions does it make sense to challenge people online.

Usefulness of the God model depends on the context. Therefore it does not make sense to discuss such things without a context.

If this thread is any indication, then actually, you can expect people to explain their position again and again. The tough thing is getting them to stop.

/me is guilty as charged...

Some people choose ideologies. There must be an evolutionary explanation for religion somewhere.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.emacs/topics

Instead, we're drinking tea in the middle of the brier patch.

I was actually thinking the opposite. I come here for news and articles relating to technology start ups, and this thread shows how far off track hacker news has gotten.

Site guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This discussion, however, is pure fluff. I equate it to the videos of pratfalls and cute animal pictures that the guidelines admonish against.

It's not that I don't appreciate this sort of discussion. I like the openness of asking these questions. It's just that I can go to any corner of the internet with a forum and see most of the same.

They say you're not supposed to discuss religion and politics, I'd personally prefer to keep to this guide, and we don't see much of politics here.

That advice is for situations where you need to "just get along", but it's an actively harmful stance if you're trying to seek truth, understand reality, fight regressive politics, etc.

Fuck the man

By that, specifically, I mean that a mysterious ethereal social convention is not a good reason for me to do or not do something, especially on the internet.

Being an atheist in no mean requires that you remain an atheist forever. Scientists have believed, at many times, in things that we now know are not strictly correct. Once evidence arrives and experiments are performed, scientific consensus changes.

I would venture to guess that most scientists especially are agnostic because it fits the scientific method better - we can not presume to know what we cannot measure, and all that.

Atheism is the idea that we know that there is know higher power. Any scientist has to know that it is impossible to have that absolute knowledge because we have no tests to prove or disprove the hypothesis.

Conversely, I think that intellectually honest believers have a similar but opposite belief. Although, as a nonbeliever myself, I have a hard time putting myself in their shoes, or my brain inside their skulls, so maybe I'm mistaken here.

Look at the digg survey this article links to: there's no option for "agnostic". Did the agnostics choose "atheist" or "other"? Either way, they're hidden.

Look at the photo spread: it lists "Famous Agnostics/Atheists", as if they're the same thing, but at least half are arguably agnostic:

- Darwin: self-described agnostic; claimed he had "never been an athiest"

- Einstein: "My position concerning God is that of an agnostic."

- Edison: apparently a lifelong agnostic

- Gates: can't find a clear statement, but said in an interview "I don't know if there's a god or not"

Look at the article itself: there's no mention of agnosticism at all. They're simply using a photo of a famous agnostic to bolster an argument about atheism.

I believe that a lot of us who are (and rightfully claim to be) agnostic are being labeled "atheist" by people who don't know or care.

I think an agnostic is somebody who doesn't know whether god exists, but considers it a 50/50 situation. Both sides are equally plausible. A fence-sitter, if you will. An atheist thinks extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that the evidence for god doesn't stack up. Therefore atheists are forced to conclude there probably is no god. Or simply said: there is no god. Even though we all admit we may be wrong.

In fact, I'm pretty sure not a single person reading HN is an atheist by your definition. Even Richard Dawkins is an agnostic by your definition. I can only conclude that your definition does't make sense.

Challenge: find me an atheist who fits your definition.

You'll find none.

The very definition of Athiesm is to deny the existence of a god or a higher power.

As soon as you admit there is a real possibility that there may be a god or a higher power; bam, you're an agnostic.

Which is the crux of my point - the definition of Atheist is often misused, as in this article. There are far more Agnostics than Atheists, it's just that Atheism gets used more frequently.

This page discussing the differences far more eloquently than I ever could:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/intro.html

I made the argument earlier in this thread that not only do we have no tests to prove or disprove theism, we cannot have any such tests, because theism and atheism are statements about what's beyond our (philosophical) universe. Any god you can formulate a test for isn't really God-the-Creator-of-All in the first place.

So, belief in God, or the lack thereof, is just an assumption. This assumption will influence your actions, of course, and belief or the absence of it may well be beneficial or harmful. Either you live your life as if God exists, or you don't. If you don't, you might as well call yourself an atheist... and that's why I do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

And largely an exercise in classification. Still, it's handy knowledge to have, should you enjoy that sort of thing.

This is why you should not comment before your first coffee of the day.

Some people find it impossible to accept or not accept all manner of things, but whether or not you accept or do not accept something does not change whether or not that something is true.

Using newton's models we have figured out how (and why) planets orbit the sun, why objects fall equally quickly in a vacuum, etc. The scientific method has nothing to do with finding absolute answers. Still we're able to accomplish remarkable things simply by testing what works and what doesn't. Man on moon. Proves pretty conclusively that it's not about having ultimate answers, it's about having a model of the world that's so awesome you can stick people on a giant rocket and hurl them into space without anything going boom.

For every answer a scientist gives you you can answer a more specific question, until the scientist answers; "I don't know". Always. The ultimate answer is always "don't know". But every decade or so we have one extra answer in the chain of knowledge before we have to admit we don't know.

long story short, gravity is the curvature of spacetime. objects of mass cause the curvature, and the curvature in turn causes objects to move locally along geodesics (shortest-distance paths), which causes the curvature to shift

when you throw a ball and it's moving through a parabola, that curve taken with time in a riemannian space is actually the straightest line possible from one end of the throw to the other

this is Einstein's magnum opus General Relativity

The problem with gravity is that, as a daily experience, it fades out into uninteresting routine (except perhaps for rocket scientists and other specialists.)

This is why I believe in God: based on some unusual personal experiences that made it difficult to reject the supernatural, I came to the conclusion at one point that, in fact, consciousness is not an illusion, and that there is no such thing as randomness, and that our course along the quantum "tree" is chosen by some being for a purpose (or purposes). This doesn't mean that we live in a deterministic world, but that we live in a physical one that is constantly taking "pushes" from a spiritual beings. This seems supernatural and unlikely, but if we believe that the spirit (consciousness) is not an illusion, then we accept that a complex physical system, the brain, can be affected by a spiritual entity, human consciousness, and so it doesn't seem implausible that there are other spiritual beings among us, doing things like rigging the seemingly "random" collisions of particles so that 10^-20000 improbabilities (life) actually happen. This, coupled with the direct experience of mystics, makes it likely that there are vastly superior spiritual beings in existence, which could be construed as gods or facets of God.

"Human consciousness" doesn't need to be something metaphysical. The brain is basically a big petri dish. Chemical reactions everywhere. Our understanding of it is poor, but we're making lots of progress. We know which regions serve which purpose, and we can make people laugh or cry by sticking electrodes in somebody's head during brain surgery. We can see people enjoying music, by watching electrical activity, and we can see how brains of savants differ from ours. The more we learn, the less of a mystery the brain becomes. But we still have 95% to explain.

As you make computer programs more complex you realize that sooner or later you have to start meta-programming. Only by making a program introspect itself or the system around it can you give it additional functionality. Windows Vista is a good example - it's all about processing watching other processes work. Watching memory patterns, to improve cache efficiency. Monitoring which programs are run often. Watching which clusters on the hard drive are suspiciously unresponsive. Meta. Meta meta meta.

Windows Vista is conscious in the sense that it feels when programs are unresponsive, or when the system has trouble shutting down. And it will try to take measures to fix it. Isn't this just basic consciousness? Nothing spiritual about it. And when you can explain consciousness by just saying it's a function of complexity of a brain we have a pretty plausible answer.

Does your cell phone have consciousness? Yes, but very little. Less than an ant, probably.

How about babies? Yes, but only as much consciousness as a cat.

How about a rock? Yes, about as much consciousness as a "Hello World" program. That's simply no consciousness at all.

Consciousness doesn't need to be a binary switch. A spark that people get at some point. A "soul" doesn't explain anything.

You probably don't agree with the way I frame my answers. So what's do you think the difference is between the capacity for introspection (think about self) and consciousness?

I disagree. Experiences are not always under your control and therefore you can't always repeat them even if they are true. This is true in relationships with other humans and it seems likely that it would also be true with a personal god.

Let's say your girlfriend does something nice for you and you feel like you love her for it. Let's say she then dumps you for hottie that doesn't even know how to code and never talks to you again. You can't repeat that experience with her because her free choice made it possible. That doesn't mean that the experience was fake, it just means that it is outside of your control.

I'm sure there are some wholes in that logic, but hopefully it was able to shed some extra light on the subject.

I was talking about paranormal experiences I've had, such as the ability to predict dates and details of major events. I don't believe that anyone (certainly not me) is "psychic" and I can't reproduce this at will, but there have been enough paranormal events in my life that I cannot ignore the likelihood of a conscious will directing the things we consider "random".

In October 2005, I predicted that I'd meet a girl at a very specific place (a particular coffeeshop) on a specific date, four months into the future, and had a rough vision of her appearance, knew her ethnicity and about six other details about her, all of which turned out to be correct. This ended up leading to a relationship that lasted over two years. There could be a "self-fulfilling prophecy" at work, but the mind-boggling number of details that matched leads me to find it unlikely. Although I cannot possibly explain why, I've had 5 or 6 occurrences like this (and a couple that didn't come true). I've also had limited success in drawing on past lives to develop talents that I never thought I had, although I haven't seen enough strength in this department to rule out non-paranormal explanations.

Frankly, my opinion is that "the paranormal" almost certainly exists, although 99% of it is complete bunk, and the remaining 1% is nearly impossible to control or contain.

More like 99.99 % to explain, but we are working on it (neuroscientist here.)

As for consciousness: the ghost in the machine. That is, one can explain the machine with and without it -- the ghost is just one's perception of the other self, one's generalization and oversimplification of the other self.

what's more reasonable from a survival point of view, that that cut you just received on your left arm from a knife show up in some sort of terminator-like HUD...

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[DAMAGE TO LEFT ARM]

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[AVOID RECURRENCE IF POSSIBLE]

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or that you are made to "feel" the cut as intrinsic to you? which are you more likely to heed? that's basically what i think consciousness arises from -- the need to internalize sensations so that you respect them. so that you respect the fact that some maniac with a knife just took a slice at your arm, or that your fingers are burning on the stove while you're standing there being absent minded and you NEED TO GET YOUR FINGERS OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW

a HUD would be very poor for that sort of thing. i see consciousness as the best solution

    10^-20000 improbabilities

Wait, I know what you're going to say to that. You're going to say that Newton et al. don't count because they lived before Darwin. The theory of natural selection, you say, was the first non-religious explanation of life that smart people could believe. Before that, everyone just defaulted to religion because there was no better theory available.

It's a nice idea, but I don't buy it. When I became an atheist as a teenager, I wasn't thinking about evolution; I didn't even have the foggiest understanding of Darwin's theories. I've encountered many other atheists who don't. Obviously, evolution is not usually what causes people to reject religion.

I think the real difference is that, in Newton's time, it was fashionable for smart people to be religious, whereas in our time it's fashionable for smart people to be atheist. Evolution was just the fashion's tipping point.

Specifically, Darwin caused a few very smart people to change their minds about religion, and the greater bulk of somewhat smart people (who desperately wanted to seem like very smart people) followed suit. Now anyone who wants to be considered smart will reject religion out of conformance.

Basically, people will believe anything as long as their being wrong has no noticeable impact on their lives. Intelligence has little to do with it. And the moral of this story is not that you are all conformist sheep, but that it doesn't matter. If Isaac Newton struck out on the big questions, then you probably will too. Just stop trying to answer impossible questions, and go live your life.

Also, I like to distinguish between deliberate atheists (like myself) and people who are atheists by default. Some people are apathetic about philosophical questions and will say they don't believe in God simply because they weren't brought up with any religion.

Citation?

Don't you mean paganism, rather than atheism? And by pagan I mean the jumble of indigenous beliefs that you get with a pre-literate people, freely mixing local superstitions and the official religion (in this case Christianity).

That there is god is for the theist to prove and not the atheist to disprove. What anyone who is rational chooses to believe is the sum total of his knowledge and his experience. You have lumped smart people as characterless by calling them conformist. So either you are a charlatan theist trying to get in a word sideways or someone who is truly and hopelessly wrong.

Also, I don't see what your ad hominems contribute to this discussion.

"I don't know if God is testing me or something, but none of the smart nice guys I meet are even willing to hear the word of our Lord."

Coming late to this game, I'm still surprised by this attitude in CS circles. To me, an atheist has refused to see the problem in defining one simple term: "God". Rejecting one definition (after a half-hearted explication) doesn't solve anything except by ignoring further inquiry.

As a neuroscientist, I know that finite matter gives rise to visions of the infinite. To me, that itself is an awe-inspiring moment for which I have no rational basis. Call it what you will (even delusion) but the challenge is to explain it away when no explanation seems adequate.

Of course, solving for "God" need not be tied to a particular faith. On it's own, it's a personal undertaking where rejecting an understanding in being atheist is certainly one's right. But replace the loaded term "God" with something else, say "Nature" or "Infinite" or "Universe" or even "Matter", and I can't see how one doesn't tumble back to a more humble position.

No, the lazy choice is to have the visions of the infinite you mention and instead of trying to understand them, simply to describe them in terms of whatever traditional concepts are floating around in your culture-- which in this case are at best 99% anthropomorphizing fable, and often consciously designed to enslave you.

Ironically, in the modern West the relationship between church and state has been almost entirely severed. Christianity is now mostly harmless. The truly dangerous religions are the civic/nationalistic religions. Instead of pledging to God, we pledge to the flag. Instead of wearing crosses we wear lapel pins. We even get to elect a high priest every four years ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY&feature=relat... ). And unlike Christianity, nationalism has conscription and nuclear bombs. The history of the 20th century shows that dropping the "God" label did not get rid of religion, it made religion far more insidious and dangerous.

Unless state religion causes Christianity (unlikely, IMO), that leaves us with two possibilities: either Christianity causes state religion, or they are both just different faces of the same mentality. In either case, your assertion that "Christianity is now mostly harmless" is wrong.

   No, the lazy choice is to have the visions of the infinite
   you mention and instead of trying to understand them,
   simply to describe them in terms of whatever traditional
   concepts are floating around in your culture.

The lazy is on you, it seems, for making all kinds of straw man arguments here. Surely 99% of belief in God is based on culture and anthropology, but 99% is not 100%. You do the topic a disservice to say that it is.

Personally? I find it funny when people say they're an atheist. "How do you know what not to believe in?" is my first question, and usually that shuts them down. You see, atheism is a response to those traditional cultural ideas of religion (and the history of how they have evolved), not to the real concept of a God. To the atheist, God, santa clause, the christian church, the easter bunny, etc -- it's all the same thing. Stuff you can't prove. They haven't grown to understand where the definitional fault lines are.

That's lazy.

There are an infinite number of things we can believe in. This makes it necessary to come up with a rational framework based on what we know to make probabilistic inferences. This is basically an argument handled as such:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

I don't want to come off as attacking faith or your beliefs, either. I know what it is like to believe and to not believe so I can respect your experience even though I don't share it.

You are answering in the positive -- how you know _what_ to believe in. That is not the question, and the two are not logical opposites of one another.

Let's try a thought experiment, shall we? Let's say you and I meet on a train.

If I told you my barn was red, would you believe me? You might or might not. We might have a discussion about science and how we know things. I'm sure we could come to some sort of understanding about levels of proof and this and that.

Why is that? Because reasoning and logic work inside of a web of meanings that we call language. That's what science is built on. It's both part of everyday knowledge and part of advanced reasoning.

We are dealing with concrete things: nouns with meanings, lists of things, perceptions and the relationship of formal systems, empiricality and positivism. But what happens if I introduce an item without common meaning? Perhaps things without any meaning at all. Let's say you are a caveman and I am from the year 4000.

I say "I have something that you do not understand. It is so outside your understanding such that that I cannot describe it to you inside of our limited window of conversation. I cannot even begin to describe the generics of the things that lead to those concepts"

Now you're perfectly capable of saying "I don't believe that. I only believe things that have a strict order (not realizing, of course, that all of "common sense" is tenuous at best. Read up)"

That's cool. Nothing wrong with that. But it does not impact the veracity of my statement. In fact, without language, reason, observation, theory, and reproduction, _you're unable to make any conclusions about my statement one way or another_. Things outside our web of understanding exist in a place where we can make no conclusions one way or another.

All I am saying is that there is a class of such statements. There always have been, and there always will be. Most of these statements -- perhaps 99.99999% of them -- are eventually dealt with as our experiential and smenatic toolbox expands. God, to me, is the set of those true statements that we are unable to understand.

Now I'm not talking about reasoning in common language and logical space -- I think science probably forms the interface between the true and unknowable and the true and knowable. In that sense, science and religion are like yin and yang -- one is simply the thing the other is not (and likewise, one is contained inside the other)

Looking back over written history, we can see the wonderful dialectic of reason and faith. One can look at this as the war of reason over superstition, or one can look at it as the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not. Same thing, different viewpoint.

Isn't that basically just a restatement of the whole non-overlapping magisteria argument? Ie, Science talks about things we know, and religion talks about all the things that are also true, but unprovable.

Some assumptions there that should definitely not be accepted at face value:

1. Science is about talking.

2. Religion says true things.

3. It is reasonable to accept these things as true despite being unprovable.

Science is not: a body of information, a group of people, a way of speaking, or the use of technology. Science is a method of analyzing the unknown, which boils down to a simple rule: Theories are verified by evidence.

Yes, any sufficiently complicated axiomatic system will contain unprovable true statements. But we're not living in an axiomatic system, we're living in the universe, where the technical term for the class of statements which are fundamentally and forever unverifiable is "meaningless". That's why Einstein's theories, while elegant and useful, were not accepted until they made a risky prediction that came true. To paraphrase Popper, if a theory makes no risky predictions, then it might be an interesting story, but that's all it is.

Another way to put this is that the meaning of a proposition is the difference between two hypothetical universes, alike in every way, except that in one (A), the proposition is false, and in the other (B), it is true, and the necessary differences implied by this. This isn't all that crazy; whenever you start a statement with "That means...", this is what you're mentally doing, calculating the delta between the world with and the world without.

Take the statement "God exists." If there is not, and can never be, any observable difference between universes A and B, then that statement has no meaning, and we shouldn't even bother talking about it when we could be petting cats or folding socks.

But that's not the case, for most values of "God" that people talk about. A universe designed intentionally by a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent fairy would very likely be very different from the one that fell together by random chance, in ways very much NOT outside our web of understanding.

the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not

We don't get our morality from religion. If we did, then how would christian parents know that they're not supposed to stone their children? (It's not the law, either, because those laws were made mostly by christians, so how did the lawmakers know that stoning ought to be immoral?)

The common response is, It's not all meant to be taken literally, but if that's the case, how do you know which parts to take literally, unless you get your moral sense from somewhere else?

To the extent that truth exists and can be found, science--that is, making up logically coherent stories and then testing those stories against evidence--is the way to find it.

I include in that the very real human need for morality and the experiences commonly described as spirituality. If those types of experiences are valuable and psychologically useful, great; let's investigate and study them. There is a wealth of literature in the Buddhist tradition doing just that. (Buddhism has some warts, but it's always struck me as the least irrational religion, overall.)

The non-overlapping magisteria argument basically amounts to filling in any gaps in our knowledge with the sticky goo of religion to make ourselves feel better until science can come along and clean up the mess. But doesn't that just add friction to the progress of understanding? Is it really so torturous to just admit we don't know something, and live with it, letting it spur us on to more investigation?

Gee - Isaac. Now we're getting into what science is? LOL Now the water is REALLY going to get deep. What's science is a non-trivial question.

I'd like to point out that this format is really prohibitive. Most of the people we're talking about wrote entire books covering some of these issues. To reduce it to a few word bites is going to be a huge undertaking. I want to apologize in advance for mucking up my own argument.

Popper is definitely the man. As you point out, science is nothing if not bold. But Popper was not into the metaphysical -- in fact, just the opposite. The whole late 19th and early 20th century philosophy of science movement was based on "where does science end and pseudo-science begin?" I believe this to be a different, but orthogonal and interesting, debate. If anything, by the time we get to Kuhn we finally realize that the scientific method has built-in limitations -- a discovery which I believe supports my thesis.

I'll agree that my definition of God is meaningless in the strictness terms. Oddly enough, however, language allows us to describe and converse to some degree about this while having a common understanding. So "meaningless" in this case is only in the most formal of terms. Once again, because it is meaningless, the argument holds true -- no conclusion can be reached one way or another.

I never spoke of intelligent design, benevolence, etc -- so not sure where you are going with that. Seems like a non-sequiter. Likewise, I also did not make the case that we get morality from religion. I simply stated that a God-belief may be as genetically useful as rationalism. This is simply because I observe both to be universally prevalent in the species.

And with your question of how to find morality, ie, "it's not all supposed to be taken literally" I have no idea what you are talking about. Myth? Supposedly holy scriptures? I never made any sort of claim about any of that. Confusing religion with a discussion on God doesn't do either subject much good.

"To the extent truth exists and can be found, science... is the way to find it" -- hey I'm all for relying on inductive reason, hypothesis, and experimentation to construct more and more complicated models which have greater and greater fidelity to reality. I believe that's the only chance we have as a species to conquer major problems and progress beyond the caves and to the stars. But "truth" is an emotionally laden term both sides use. How about "it just works"? I think once you use the magic word "truth", you've started smoking crack, no matter what side of this discussion you are on. My opinion only.

Love Buddhism, from what I know about it. Wonderful ideas in there. Wish I knew more.

Yeah the sticky goo of religion between hard science is definitely not what I am talking about. I think this view misunderstands science (by believing it to be firm ground when it is always provisional) and religion (by believing it to be gooey) I'm happy to conclude my argument with God simply being the unknowable, not the unknown. I think I make my case by restricting the discussion in this way. I've got no problem discussing the non-overlapping magesteria argument, but the argument is not mine and I think there are a lot of holes in it.

I suspect that no deep satisfaction will really be had here. But it's been enjoyable and entertaining, that's for sure.

language allows us to describe and converse to some degree about this while having a common understanding.

That's a neat thing about language and the power of the human brain, for sure. We can probe into the unknown to make stories, and then reason about the world in which those stories would be true, and then test to see whether or not we live in that world or not. Sometimes, it takes quite a long time to figure out if there would be any differences to be tested.

But "truth" is an emotionally laden term both sides use. How about "it just works"?

And so instrumentalism enters the discussion... We ARE getting into deep waters here!

And with your question of how to find morality, ie, "it's not all supposed to be taken literally" I have no idea what you are talking about.

I was referring to your comment about the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not. I don't consider morality a "part of God-belief", but apparently you don't either, so I seem to have misunderstood where you were going with that. My bad.

I simply stated that a God-belief may be as genetically useful as rationalism.

What if God-belief was an emergent property resulting from other beneficial traits, but not itself beneficial at all?

For example, our mucous membranes, social customs, and fondness for living indoors are all---themselves---very beneficial traits. However, together, they make us very susceptible to the common cold, which is definitely not beneficial to us at all.

Likewise, our agent-fixation, our creativity, and our way of passing wisdom on to our children are all beneficial behaviors, but together, they open the door for bugs to creep into the system. Science is our unit-test framework :)

Love Buddhism, from what I know about it. Wonderful ideas in there. Wish I knew more.

Nothing stopping you :)

The science of spirituality is a very interesting subject, which has sadly been stymied in the west by the success of Yahweh. For centuries, to avoid being persecuted, scientists have had to avoid any subjects that might impede upon religion's "magisterium". If the two do not overlap, it is only because religion has been so aggressive and successful in defending its turf.

In regards to Buddhism, I'm happy with where I am right now. But it does seem that Buddhism would be a good "fit" for me. I've always been a Great Pumpkin man -- hate to leave it without good cause.

"Science is our unit-test framework" -- more like our design review. Living would be the unit-test. Society might be more like a system test. (E-gads, an extended metaphor! Would be fun to chase that one down :) )

As far as Judaism and the various sequels (I won't use the Y word as it offends those of faith), beats me why they are so popular. Intuitively I would think it's because they offer more to the species than they take away in the competitive market of creative narratives to existence -- sort of the same reason start-ups do well because they offer a unique and worthwhile value proposition to their users. But that's just idle speculation. I always had a weak spot for Hegel's historicism and dielectric as a way to understand the role of person, religion, and society. But these ideas went _way_ off the rails later with Marx and others, as you know. Popper had a field day with them, yet I feel there's value to be had here. Seems like a lot of great thinkers get a glimmer of an insight, then spend the rest of their careers taking it too dang far.

Great discussion. Thanks!

Read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. He spends a good chunk of the book analyzing some of the human traits that make us susceptible to religion, as well as the evolutionary advantages of each.

I'd guess it had to do with the level of dedication among followers. When ideologies clash, the one with more fervent believers tends to roll over the others.

It usually goes something like this:

T; Do you believe in god?

A: Define 'god'

T: <some description involving unverifiable supernatural beings>

A: No. I do not believe that.

No one gets shut down.

"They haven't grown to understand where the definitional fault lines are."

Nice ad hominem there. Talk about lazy.

T: Do you believe in God? A: I believe through inductive reasoning that there are things we do not understand. I believe it is critically important to know this. I also believe this always to be the case. You can call this continuing lack of knowledge "a hole", part of the implications of Godel's theorem -- whatever. I find no problem with those who choose the word "God"

See how much more fun this is with two players?

Well, you were the one saying you ask that question of others, and then you gave a fairly dismissive account of how others answer. Basically, you played both parts.

I simply offered an alternative to how those sorts of conversations go when I'm the one being asked. You know, giving you an actual person so you don't have to play both parts. It's more fun that way.

If you want to use a very particular definition of "god" to frame the discussion in your favor, that's great. But we both know that when most people are talking about god and atheism and belief they are not obliquely referring to Godel anything.

I understand that you and others confuse God, religion, and social justice. I'll posit that they are all related in some fashion outside the scope of this discussion. But that common confusion is a colloquial discussion (What is commonly meant when one says something) not a semantic and epistemological one.

You seem to be saying here that, for you, "God" is the unknown -- not the unknowable, which is a fairly common belief, but the unknown. This is a novel viewpoint for me. Does this mean that knowledge, as and when it is grasped by the human mind, moves from the realm of the exalted to the secular? Is there more "God" in the world of an infant than ours?

In other comments you seem to refer to the more conventional notion of the unknowable, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding.

It is not clear what you mean by "God" to start with. Clearly it's more than just an alias for the unknown (or unknowable?). In another comment, you refer to "the real concept of a God". What is the real concept of a God? How did you arrive at it, conclude that it is the real concept of God, and integrate it into your philosophy?

Yes, when I say unknown, I mean unknowable. I use them interchangeably for brevity at times. I believe the proof is on sound footing when the term "unknowable" is used. "Unknown" has a lot of issues, and the argument is left in the "who knows" category.

I started a couple of years ago to study proof and anti-proofs on the existence of God. Very interesting subject, and I enjoyed the reading and listening a lot. I had a simple question: was there a common thread that appeared in all types of God discussions that was not along the lines of a big, scary, invisible man-in-the-sky? Something that mostly ran the same through the Greeks, Romans, Hindus, etc? Is it possible to use the word God in a clear, unambiguous manner?

I'm currently convinced that there is, and I've shared it with you guys, mainly because as hackers I figured you appreciate the "hack". But I try to remain open that I've screwed the pooch in some fashion in my studies. Happy to be proven wrong as well. Have at it.

It's interesting that what I'm saying ties into some of the more interesting math and physics work on today, mostly the idea of a computational substrate to the universe and the question of whether we are living in a simulation.

You've also brought up the personal aspect of belief and how, for instance, it applies to infants. Hey -- beats me. That wasn't my initial goals. The implications could be very fascinating.

As far as my personal speculation goes past this definition, I'm inclined to both the computational universe and simulation arguments, both of which I think lead to some sort of intelligence "out there". (Or something we could at least describe as working in a planned manner to accomplish pre-determined goals). So in my personal belief system I have an intelligent God who exists outside of our ability to really get a grip on him/her/it/etc.

But that's about it. I don't think you can take the God argument any further and still have a common format for discussion -- there are no further commonalities that I can find. Some folks have the far-away God, some the man-in-my-head God -- it's all over the place. Not only can you go no further, I think it is impossible to do so without destroying the theory so far, ie, the more attributes you give to an unkowable thing, the less unknowable it is. (Hence my difficulty actually describing what I mean by intelligent)

Looked at it this way, atheists are like those cavemen denying that things could exist for which they are unable to describe or reason about -- it's just silly. One could use the words provincial or childish -- no harm is meant using them but they're not spot on either. Really religious people, on the other hand, are like those folks who dream up entire fantasies around the unknown, and they do not distinguish between the unknown and the unknowable. Just as bad, in my opinion. But ironically enough, looked at another way, both sides are tremendously good.

But both behaviors seem to have evolutionary roots. Perhaps a survival trait. One trait can work with complex interactions between known concepts. Another trait can work in an almost random manner when no information is present. As you can see, because we're talking about how the species interacts with both the unknown and unknowable, the discussion about religion and God are joined -- but it's a completely new direction for the discussion. When try to have a religion discussion and a God discussion at the same time, we get these cartoon answers for complex questions.

It's in fact a very poor ad hominem, a non-existent ad hominem in my opinion, and if it was read that way, it was read that way in error.

Just to argue the point, how do you define supernatural? Where do you draw the line between natural-yet-incomprehensible-phenomena and that-which-is-only-imagination?

There is some ground between being religious and being an atheist. Being an atheist implies some degree of faith. The question whether there is a God cannot be answered within our current knowledge (and it may pretty well remain so until the end of our universe). An atheist firmly believes the answer is "no". An agnostic acknowledges we are unable to answer the question. Maybe in a million years, maybe never. Interestingly, the only answer science can give to questions like these is on the lines of "we can neither prove nor disprove this hypothesis".

As I use to joke, I lack the faith required to be an atheist. ;-)

I think we are really playing with words here. You are absolutely sure God does not exist, but I cannot make the required leap of faith that being a true atheist implies and, thus, I can only call myself agnostic. Still, I am pretty sure He (or She, or It) doesn't exist.

As you well pointed out, I am not absolutely sure of anything that cannot be proved with a sound mathematical demonstration. That's about all the faith I have.

And I place it _very_ carefully ;-)

I used to think that it is just as arrogant to be an atheist as it is to be religious. Both sides have no proof. I considered myself to be agnostic as all we can confidently say is that "we don't know".

But I changed my label on reading jmc's words.

[edit: on reading other parts of this discussion, I see that jmc has already been quoted. However I'll let this post be, as it is still a reply to the parent.]

The JMC God exists outside our space-time continuum, since before the Universe and is said to have caused its formation and to interact with it in some way or the other, sometimes violating causality. Good luck trying to shape that into a testable hypothesis ;-) I won't bother with it until someone cooks up a decent one.

So, as only a true agnostic can say, I don't care if God exists or not. It's not a question I can answer.

Great thought provoking reply.

Personally, I don't have trouble concluding that the God theories of current religions are wrong (looking at the contradictions, absurd stories, in-built benefits for preacher class etc). Could there be some other non-religious God? "I don't care" is a good approach.

JMC = 'John McCarthy' as well as 'Jewish-Muslim-Christian' (all Abrahamic religions)? Whoa! My brain explodes!!! :-)

I'm playing a different game with pi. Produced by the brain as a shorthand or discovered within the fabric of the universe? Number theory, to me, is either a grand unveiling or just another language.

As someone smarter than me once put it: "It's not that I believe in no gods, it's just that I don't believe in gods."

Christians and other believers have this most extra-ordinary theory: that there is an all-powerful creator who created everything, who sees everything, and has everything under control. They offer not one shred of proof, then muse out loud about the "faith" required not to believe in their absurd hypothesis.

I'd love to believe in gods of some kind -- it's not easy to accept the inevitability of your own annihilation -- but nobody has ever given me sufficient reason to deviate from the more sensible position of non-belief.

It seems this person is agnostic rather than an atheist. As I put previously, an atheist believes "the God question" (that cannot be answered at all) actually has an answer and the answer is "no". An agnostic acknowledges we cannot answer the God question. As for the werewolf question, it is easier to create testable hypothesis that could and most probably would be proven false.

And, of course, even if you can prove false every "evidence" every religion says it provides, that would not answer the God question. It would only prove religions didn't get it right.

The God question cannot be answered with science and, so, it cannot be really answered. We are not discussing science here. We are discussing semantics.

BTW, I would be quite astonished if God did, indeed, exist. And somewhat happy. It's pretty dry here in no-faith-land.

What a very sad way to look at life.

Being agnostic is NOT a middle ground between theism and atheism. The break down is like this: 1) A god exists. 2) A god does not exist.

Theists accept #1 and reject #2. Atheists reject #1 and can either accept or reject #2.

Gnosticism (for the purpose of this discussion) deals with what you claim to know. A gnostic claims knowledge about the truth of an assertion. An agnostic (literally "without knowledge") does not claim to have such knowledge.

The term "atheist" is very similar to the legal term "not-guilty". Declaring a person "not-guilty" does not mean they are "innocent". It simply means that there is insufficient evidence to declare them "guilty". Saying that an atheist must "prove" that no gods exist is like saying that you must prove your innocence in a court of law. Rejecting an assertion because it lacks supporting evidence does not require proving the opposite assertion.

Gnosticism is a religion in its own right and agnosticism generally always applies to questions of religious significance.

Literally, "gnostic" and "agnostic" refer to what you claim, or do not claim, to know. Given the general muddle of terms--"agnostic", "agnostic theist", "agnostic atheist", etc--I tend to find it more helpful to separate out the terms into core meanings. I believe doing so more clearly displays the positions, as you can plot the Atheism <-> Theism axis against the Agnostic <-> Gnostic axis. I would argue that this separation of claims-of-knowledge vs claims-of-god(s) is clearer than the simple Atheist <-> Agnostic <-> Theist positioning.

Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to worship'.

--Dawkins

  A: I believe that when you die, your energy goes back out into the world, and becomes a part of everything.
  P: Yeah, that's why you get cold.  Entropy.

Aquinas called God "Pure substance through pure act". It's very hard not to see a definition of matter and energy there and given by a "Saint".

Dawkins here is insisting on a definition for which his professional training gives no special insight. So why should he be recognized as some "expert"?

He doesn't have to be. The argument stands on its own: you can define "God" to be whatever you want, but the definition that you advance approaches tautology.

Sure, "God" could be whatever you want it to be. But that's exactly the point. It's a personal relationship (or lack thereof) defined by you. And no amount of science can take that away. If anything, the failures of modern physics (and soon neuroscience too) deepens my appreciation for the religious perspective.

  And who stands outside time and space to define the tautology? 

There is no fundamental understanding regarding the concept of "outside time and space", because our knowledge of them both derives from experience. To have some understanding of 'outside', you would have to have received that information a priori. That would mean that everyone had received that information, however.

Since, we can readily determine that the difference between believers and non-believers is a matter of experience. The difference between the two has nothing to do with "outside" either time and space, because that "outside" is not experiencable (at this point in time).

No it wouldn't. Perhaps I'm just special.

a priori knowledge is knowledge gained without experience. There is no reason it has to be universal.

edit:

This should not be taken that I'm implying that believers are ranting prophets. Just a query as to how you propose to tell the difference.

My advice would be to look at the person. If the man seems rational and honest, then maybe there is something to it. Then again, maybe not. It's really up to you.

Really, its arbitrary. Just make up your mind.

Since I understand you're a neuroscientist by training, what do you mean by "and soon neuroscience too"?

It's not obvious to me that consciousness can explain itself.

To paraphrase Dawkins' speech to the University of Kentucky,

The thing about being an atheist is that you don't think that "theology" is a subject at all. You're not an expert in fairies, but I'll bet you have no problem not believing in those.

Actually, since Dawkins is an expert in Ethology, the evolution of animal behavior, he is in fact uniquely qualified to talk about religion, as that is among the most odd, fascinating, paradoxical, and complex behaviors that evolution has yet produced. In The God Delusion, he outlines many of the factors of the human animal that make us particularly susceptible to religion.

Theologists are the ones not qualified to analyze religion.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't mean anything.

"visions of the infintite" = can mean many things that approach that limit = Pi = recursion of indefinite length = time "before" matter = the number of possible synaptic connections ...

What makes them interesting "visions" - to me - is our intellect can just about get our fingers those concepts and then...indeed, I know not the bounds of this inquiry

And studying semantic memory in the brain, I have no idea where a concept like "infinity" comes from. Sure it might come from the brain? It must! Right? Right!? :)

Our having a concept of infinity has no metaphysical significance. All our definitions are phrased negatively, by what it's not:

Infinite: That which has no limit. From the Latin 'infinitas', meaning 'unboundedness'.

Try and see if you can define infinity by what it is rather than what it isn't.

If you're saying that infinity is not directly realizable in what we perceive, then I agree. But this has little to do with how it's defined (or even its metaphysical significance); positive and negative definitions are for all intents and purposes equivalent.

Seriously, I'm not trying to proselytize nor argue. I just find atheism to be an untenable position. It's an attempt to say something while really saying nothing. Problem is, I know the same can be said of theism. But I think the latter is that much more compelling because it starts and ends with one question - "God" - that we can pose to ourselves. Where the answer leads is up to us to decide.

For example, the number 0.33333 is infinite if you write it this way. If you use another representation (1/3) then it isn't. Similarly, you can use a computer program that generates the digits of pi as a representation of pi.

But replace the loaded term "God" with something else, say "Nature" or "Infinite" or "Universe" or even "Matter", and I can't see how one doesn't tumble back to a more humble position.

Well, obviously I believe in "nature" and "universe" and "matter". But praying to these things is silly, because they don't have minds and can't hear you.

That's not what "God" means. What "God" means, to the majority of english speakers at least, is some form of magical super-fairy who created the universe and loves you. And no, I don't believe in magic or super-fairies, and I am not convinced that the universe's has a creator, and if it does, I'm further not convinced that said creator would necessarily be loving, or even have emotions as you and I conceive them.

The slippery definition is a common tactic. You can't just redefine the term until it's something we all agree on, and then pretend that you're still talking about the same thing that we were disagreeing with. Either God is a magical ghost, or it's nature. If it's nature, then let's stop pretending that this is about deities and theism, and admit that we're just using poetic terms to talk about physics, declare that praying accomplishes no more than any other kind of meditative activity, and stop treating "religion" as any more special than sports or soap operas.

I'd be ok with that.

You're insisting on a set of concepts that never worked for me. So I gave them up. It's still weird for me that this thread is filled with this common response, among folks very comfortable writing their own definitions on a daily basis, but this subject area provokes resistance but not reformation.

By "Nature", where does that end for you? This planet? Or the solar system? The universe? Or the "metaverse"? There have been Christian theologians who can be read as naturalistic pantheists. See Charles Hartshorne. Good luck ascribing classical concepts to him, for instance.

If that is what you mean by "prayer" and "god", then you shouldn't use those terms, for the same reason that you don't call firetrucks "lampshades" and asprin "peanut butter".

I suspect that those concepts never worked for you because they don't work, period. Giving them up is called being an atheist. Why not just own that?

In the broadest sense, nature is what exists on a material level. If you assume a priori, as Hume did, that all things that exist do so on a material and sensible level, then sure, that is a fine definition of 'nature.' But that's an assumption that, right or wrong, not everyone makes, so it isn't correct to say that.

On a material level... So, what exists on a non-material level?

The existence of information implies that it has some representation in some medium. Scramble the representation, and the information is gone. Qv, the files on my hard drive that time I used a magnetized screwdriver to put it in a new case, or the speaking ability of old alcoholics.

Pretty smart people sometimes get confused by different levels of analysis and then start saying absurd things. We can talk about semiconductors or registers or instructions or lines of code or functions or programs. It's not that each one of these conversations are the same, but they do imply one another. When we talk about an abstraction like "purple" or "justice" or "motherly", we're implying all the real world examples (past, present, and future) of these abstractions, and focusing on what they have in common.

"Justice" doesn't exist apart from just things, any more than "purple" exists apart from the typical human experience of purple light. There's no sense in looking for Plato's Ideal Forms; you won't find them, no matter how many caves you turn around in.

I would argue that, when we talk about "nature", we are referring to all that exists, but that's not enough to know how to use the term, which is why you find that flip definition unsatisfactory. We're specifically focusing on the level of analysis that involves fundamental properties of things. Since things are the sum of their properties (in other words, "things are what they are"), "nature" is what is, "natural" properly means "consistent with a thing's fundamental properties", and "supernatural" is "imaginary and not real."

God isn't natural, therefor, God doesn't exist. Quid erat demonstratum.

And that's why geeks are atheists ;)

In all seriousness, I actually think that this is what people usually mean when they use the terms "nature" and "supernatural". They sometimes bundle in the assumption that supernatural things can exist (which is a contradiction) and that humans are somehow magical non-animal creatures and not a part of nature (which is silly.)

But that's an assumption that, right or wrong, not everyone makes, so it isn't correct to say that.

If the assumption is right, then the people who don't make it are incorrect, aren't they? They might mean something vague and undefined when they say nature (in fact, I'm quite sure most do), but that doesn't mean that the soup of contradictions most people carry around in their heads is even slightly valid or worth worrying about.

I would argue that "nature" is a matter of perspective. If the universe is a simulation, for example, the set of things in that simulation and the set of rules that apply to them to us constitute nature. You could define nature to also include the machine that runs that simulation and the universe in which it exists, but I don't think at that point the term "nature" is very useful. To this outer world, the term "supernatural" would apply, relative to the people in the simulation.

This outer world would be capable of interfering with the simulation in ways that violate the rules that normally govern it (this was mentioned here[powerpoint]: http://www.mit.edu/%7Ehooman/ComputersAndGod.ppt), and those interferences could be called supernatural; or perhaps since they've still occurred inside the simulation, they are "natural" but "paranormal". Replace "simulation" and "outer world" with "physical world" and 'spiritual planes' if those terms float your boat. I'm just playing with semantics here, but so are you:

God isn't natural, therefor, God doesn't exist.

This doesn't refute the idea of God, it just shows that some definitions of "God" and of "nature" are incompatible and may need to be revised.

When people speak of supernatural things, they do not generally mean that something is defying its own essence. What they do generally mean is that is defies what we understand to be the essence of physical matter. Our understanding of it is based on our experience thereof. So, something which is supernatural, defies classification through experiential knowledge.

We can also speak can also speak of supernatural as a sort of non-material existence, by which I don't mean Plato's forms, necessarily, but entities that exist that are not governed by the laws that visible matter is governed. Such an entity has not been widely experienced (otherwise our physics would take it into account,) and is possibly non-experienciable, so one might debate the merits of discussing it as there is clearly no reason to assume it exists. However, one cannot simply define it away.

St. Anselm in middle ages attempted to define 'God' as existing, arrived at what we now call the Ontological proof of his existence. The 'proof' was so laughable that nearly all of the Scholastics rejected it out of hand and even went out of there way to refute it. Now you seem to be presenting me with the ontological disproof. It's a little ridiculous.

  God would be more perfect if he could create the whole universe without even bothering to exist.
  God is completely perfect.
  Therefor, God doesn't exist.
  QED.

If it can't handle a perfect sandwich, what hope does it have with a perfect deity?

You're right, I am conflating definitions somewhat. Arguments get squished when typed quickly into a little textarea.

My point is that people don't just mean that "supernatural" is "that which we haven't observed and thus don't understand." There is an implication that we can't understand supernatural things using theories and evidence, which is crazy. (Be careful using the word "visible" in this context. Plenty of matter isn't visible, but I doubt anyone would call electrons supernatural. I think you mean visible in the not-just-visual sense, yes?)

What does it mean to say that something exists, but has no effect on any part of the universe, no aspects that can ever be observed in any way, that leaves no footprint that can ever be detected? I think we call those kinds of things "imaginary".

The inflexibility of thought is what doesn't work for us. But that wasn't a reason to stop learning. We just searched a bit harder for folks to learn from. Now we're satisfied by the result even as the learning is incomplete.

I consider my life rich with meaning and spiritual satisfaction. I relish my place in this species, my instincts and my awareness of them. My scant century-or-so of life is a limited quantity, and that motivates me to use it to live and love and push for everything I can achieve.

Not only is my life 100% godless, I try to be free of superstition of all kinds. (No Santa, no tooth fairy, no magic dreams, no esp, no ghosts, etc.)

Superstition, in my opinion, is mental clutter that obscures spirituality.

Really? What's "spirituality" then?

By this definition, you could just as easily be a pantheist (or panentheist). But that's up to you to decide.

Beyond that, yes, you're probably right: a broader definition of god would probably lead to less people calling themselves atheist. I'm not sure how you would go about expanding the definition, it seems like any religion which says "this is what god is" will have a natural advantage over one which says "god is whatever you like", since people are better at coming together over things which they share, rather than things they agree not to share.

   Why bother with redefining someone else's term for your own use?

It's easier to understand creationism than physics.

Second, there are many geeks (like one client I have who is finishing up his studies at Cambridge this year) who are of one faith or another.

The guy who wrote the first silicon compiler (lets you lay out chip designs without having to do it manually) - fundamentalist Christian. Many Apple geeks - Buddhist. etc.

From (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article673663.ece) Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.

For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

“I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way,” he says.

Collins was an atheist until the age of 27, when as a young doctor he was impressed by the strength that faith gave to some of his most critical patients.

“They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance,” he said. “That was interesting, puzzling and unsettling.”

His epiphany came when he went hiking through the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. He said: “It was a beautiful afternoon and suddenly the remarkable beauty of creation around me was so overwhelming, I felt, ‘I cannot resist this another moment’.”

Collins believes that science cannot be used to refute the existence of God because it is confined to the “natural” world. In this light he believes miracles are a real possibility. “If one is willing to accept the existence of God or some supernatural force outside nature then it is not a logical problem to admit that, occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion,” he says.

As for me, know that I respect your opinion. My life experiences are different than your life experiences. For me, God is very real. I find when I remember to pray sincerely in the morning, I can recognize God’s hand throughout the day. The things I see are usually small things but sometimes they are not small at all.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060815_sam_harris_lang...

What is your opinion on his interpretation?

(Don't know why you got down-voted.)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar...

Seriously, though... despite the fact that some UUs are indeed atheists, most of them (including many of the atheists) would disagree with this statement.

See how silly that sounds? Atheism is not nor will it ever be a religion.

You know this feeling when, after stumbling and falling over a chair, you punish the poor piece of furniture as if it were alive? Or see a car crash about to occur and think to yourself, oh please, let's this not happen? Imagining self-consciousness around you, a natural human trait, leads to the invention of tree spirits, thunderstorm spirits, etc., all the way up to god.

And of course the concept of god (or any other Powerful Force orthogonal to human well-being) is very beneficial to those in power, to rationalize their decisions to the masses. So yes, it would be invented, and pretty soon.

The question becomes whether or not we can assign names to things we cannot reason about. Human language and psychology are great things. I believe we can and I believe it is necessary. To say there is an intelligent prime mover at some level beyond our understanding is only far-out in one word: intelligent. I would argue as a baby species we're nowhere close to having a rational definition for intelligent. It's obvious there are complex levels of understanding to the universe that we do not grok.

So in 4 thousand years, when humans look back on us and laugh, so what? Were the Romans wrong in believing Zeus threw lightning bolts? I would argue they were not: some force existed that caused electrical discharges from the sky. By learning more about Zeus, humans simply took part of the meaning of "Zeus" and replaced it with various theories. (Which continue to be worked to this day, I might add)

We will never complete this exercise. There will always be holes in what we understand. And using our creativity and intellect to tell stories about what must be out there? It's the definition of human.

So yes, Virginia, there is a God. For some he is a personal, close advisor. For some he is simply a thing to be denied until time of dire stress. But he's been there, and will remain there, for millennium. Every time a scientist takes a deep-field shot from the Hubble for a picture of the "face of God", every time a MLK rises up to change society for the better, every time a child wonders where their dead parents "went to" -- God remains.

You can cling to your provisional theories as being the source of truth or you can accept the uncertainty of it all and grow up. Atheism is the ultimate negative statement "there is no such thing as I cannot define" and therefore, at the end of the day, is the most non-rational belief of all - in my opinion, of course.

No, it's just concluding, as JMC puts it, "the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."

I would encourage you guys to listen to some discussion and arguments around proofs-of-God. The Teaching Company has a couple of great lecture series. Take some time and learn. The worst people to teach are those who think they have nothing to learn.

We can't make a conclusion one way or another given common terms and understanding. The question is really about how we deal with things outside of our ability to reason about them, not werewolves, santa clause, or any of that other nonsense.

I wonder how many have you studied any of this since university? I thought about it, and I got tired of hearing the same old arguments, so I reached out and kept reaching until I got it. To me this seems like one of those questions people are just happy repeating something they heard a long time ago while not looking at the subject with a fresh eye every so often.

Hey -- my opinion only. But it looks lazy to me.

If someone accuses you of being self-righteous or condescending, don't let him or her find this.

Quite frankly, I haven't heard much of a rebuttal so far. You are correct in that I should have drawn the point home sharper in the above text.

Your belief in a "Personal god" is only equivalent to others believing in a gift of virgins and flying spaghetti monsters. - my opinion of course.

For my part, and despite what the avalanche of comments on this thread says to the contrary, I'll assert that it's hard to find an argument more boring and petulant than this one. "Geeks" are people who like to take things apart and build them back up again, and vice versa. That is the only thing they have in common. Unless you'd like me to make fun of your grimy pony tail and Star Trek ears.

Specifically, a God, meaning some kind of conscious all-knowing, all-powerful entity that exists somehow "beyond" time, would have to be a thing of organized complexity.

And organized complexity does not just "exist beyond time."

Somehow, this kind of organized complexity has to come in to being. No, it does not "just exist."

We do know one process for bringing organized complexity into being, and that is evolution.

So far, it's the only process we know about for creating organized complexity on the scale required for consciousness and intelligence.

We don't know of any other processes that can do this.

That doesn't prove that there aren't other ways. But.

You tell me. If God knows everything, where did he/it get that knowledge?

If God "just exists", explain: how is that possible?

Your non-explanation, to me, proves nothing.

Rather than saying "I can't prove leprechauns exist, so therefore you must accept that they might exist" I am very content to say "I do not believe that leprechauns exist." Period. End of story.

Same with God. No reason to believe. Even Pascal's wager is flawed, because you lose so much by living your life according to faith, that it is not worth it, especially considering how unlikely it is that a complete perfect all-knowing all-powerful intelligence would just spring into being beyond time.

That all said, reason should absolutely be used to examine faith. If your reason forces you to reject a faith, who's to say you must then reject all faith? Sure, you may decide to at any point. But it need not be the end of inquiry.

One fact that will always blow my mind for which I don't anticipate a fully rational explication: Right now we're all communicating across a tiny rock in the middle of nowhere. Yet we have the rational means (linguistic, mathematic, scientific) to ponder the depth and extent of our own existence. Call me a theist, but I don't see how that's possible based on strictly finite matter. An evolutionary biologist may spin a story, but it doesn't make it so. So too might an ancient book. Use reason to explore and understand the diversity of faith. In the process I can't see how you won't deepen your own understanding of both.

EDIT: If you disagree, say why you disagree even as I don't think I've said anything controversial here. I know some science. I know faith less. This thread is interesting to me exactly because of the seeming prevalence of atheist programmers for which I have no insight into why.

Maybe the ability to "ponder the depth and extent of our own existence" isn't really such a big deal after all. As humans we tend to exalt the things that separate us from other species on this planet without much analysis as to why those traits should be exalted. What if such "pondering" is just the brain's way of filling in idle time with junk to fool us that something is there, such as when it fills in areas of low resolution in our visual field to fool us into seeing a full picture?

The concepts of "ponder", "depth", and "existence" originate within the human brain, as does the very concept of "concept".

I'm not saying your statement is wrong, really. Just pointing out that you're making a big assumption that the act of pondering existence and the like are some kind of mystical thing.

Or there is faith, related to a broader range of hopes and beliefs. For instance, I have faith in the resilience of our sciences. I have belief that Einstein was right and that, when we reach a fundamental understanding of the most basic forces of the universe, that general relativity will still hold sway.

But, on a more relevant note, I find Theology absolutely fascinating. Collectively, the vast majority of the planet on which we reside believe in something which is untestable, unknowable and incomprehensible.

They ascribe attribute and act in mannerisms of which, if directed at other areas of focus, are called dementia, yet somehow, when used with heavily weighted terms such as 'God', become somehow acceptable.

Anyway, that's all I will say on the matter, before pg gets on my case about being vastly and shockingly off-topic for here :]

As for practical applications, I find that particular versions of faith apply to its focus. The scientific faith I share with you but I don't expect an infinite march forward. Just because a question can be addressed with data doesn't mean the answer lies somewhere in there (see brain imaging and consciousness).

Religious faith for me simply means a faith that I can better the life I'm living and make a positive impact on this world and its people. But I know I'll fail in many important ways. Some would call that "sin" and I was raised Jewish.

I have technological faith that Apple will soon produce an iPhone I have to have. But Google's search won't always find what you need to know. And I don't think technology can solve all of our problems.

I think most atheists feel something like this as well (we may not choose to call it "faith"). If this is all that "religious faith" means to you, then I would argue you're not particularly religious. Of course religion can be defined in various ways, but to call a belief system "religion" that has no concept of an omniscient, omnipotent Creator who has any sort of direct influence on peoples' lives so dilutes the meaning of that word that you're left with a tautology -- religion means whatever you feel about things that can't be explained by science.

Atheism just seems weird to me - a rejection without further effort. I think there's enough diversity of belief in theology, that one can learn alot without being nihilistic.

No, that's just reasoning. Godel's theorem is about the limitations of what you can build upon those axioms.

I'm not sure those limitations even matter much. What use is being able to prove "this statement is unprovable"?

I agree, and I think most geeks I know fall into the category of people who question bullshit often.

here's another one for you, why don't geeks believe in casplak?

It's the russel's teapot problem. People who talk about god are using a word with no referent.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240

i have no real opinion whether it will happen or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead

In a religious culture, it's hard to find anyone more religious than an atheist. The reason for that, I think, is that you have to make a choice to be an atheist when it's not the default.

500 years from now, we'll still have no scientific evidence either way regarding the existence of God, and there will be millions of people on each side of the debate. However, empirical reincarnation research (e.g. the work of Ian Stevenson) can be done, and early results are promising. It's not enough, at this very early stage, to "prove" that reincarnation occurs after death, but it could provide a lot of interesting insights into what we are as humans, using methodology that scientifically-minded hackers would approve.

(Plus, back then, science and industry had yet to give a stunning demonstration of the power of human reason over nature.)