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Also, in your example, converting in prison does result in a material benefit for the criminal. It opens a whole new set of doors for support and relief from their current circumstances. They have hit on a dead end in one set of actions and decided on another with more promise.
Exactly...but imagine someone trying to convince themselves that it doesn't result in material benefit and doing it anyway. They're pretending to act on "pure will" in spite of material conditions.
You caused me to not get any work done for the past 20 minutes Monica. I'd been researching this and it seems all is theory and none at all is fact. There are also a half dozen or so different camps and/or classifications and most are combinations of each other.
Teh Google strikes again!
Your opinion is Pure Will and mine is Free Willy.
I don't think we're getting anywhere with this either. Tie?
I believe Smacky got arrested for that once in Vegas.
And some of us still wonder why the Brits laughed when that movie came out...
ima skip this free-will / predeterminism nonsense ( of course thinking involves physical acts and are tied to physical and chemical processes, but it is a mistake to reduce the concept of Thought to understanding it as a series of discrete physical acts. experiences are stored neurologically, but they are much more then neural impulses. they were genuine experiences and they shape your future interactions and experiences more than the physical processes involved in thinking do -- predetermination is just obnoxious on its face) and go back to what MM said:
"I've always thought that if there was nothing after this life, that makes what we accomplish a whole lot more impressive. Doesn't our time here become more valuable, and therefore, everything we do that much more valuable? "
i think that is an excellent point and for me, really may be the most important concept in the whole god debate. i believe that proposition should be liberating, though some folks, as illustrated by roguey, think it debases our existence because it deprives life of a "metaphysical" meaning.
and it does, but...that is a good thing. the whole notion of "metaphysics" is a slander, IMHO. lemme splain: smart folks have made the observation that western thought is largely under the sway of platonic-christian notions of the Ideal. that is, we tend to have an idea that there is an external arbiter of the real, the pure, the ideal...and that Ideal exists outside of our experiences here on this rock. we have habituated a way of comparing things in our experiences to things in the Ideal world, which is a comparison that never works in the favor of things in this world -- things that turn out to matter most...because...they are real...not...imaginary.
but the Ideal world is a construct. and it is a prison-house. most organized religions have a way of favoring the next life to the life here on earth...christianity especially...from what i've seen.
next...
when serious men began to outgrow the notion of God, some of them experienced a crisis of dissenchantment from their previously held idea of a purpose-laden wonderland overseen by a omnipotent super-hero and they became despondent...confronted now with a "purposeless" and impersonal existence on a merely natural, and therefore (theoretically) knowable...rock...floating in space. free of the "metaphysical" (bah, i hate that BS word), some became nihilists...
what's the purpose? they WHINED.
what's purpose: that is the real question. my answer is: A GD construct. purpose is a construct of the human mind; its a bi-product of our propensity to organize and categorize all experiences so that we can learn from them. it is why we thrived on this planet for as long as we have. purpose and utility comingle. purpose and reason comingle.
but purpose and "existence" shouldn't. in this sense, purpose is "Ideal." and its bull$hit...
most religions say, "no...life in this fashion...living w/out meaning...no, this isn't good enough for us. no, this life is base, rude, harsh and beneath us. Worse: its fleeting." and so they invent a place that is the opposite of this life. and then they use this IDEAL world to slander the present world.
next, they take refuge in the notion of eternal existence to cope w/mortality. as though the idea of eternal life was really somehow favorable to a mortal existence. as though death and life were incompatible ideas...were not two sides of the same coin.
i'm only talking about religious...er...cosmology. i don't deny the other aspects of religion that seem to me more genuine. ideas like community, socialization and morality.
Last edited by stinkfingers on Sat Jul 14, 2007 4:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Okay, I've been itching to chime in on this topic, and here is what I have to say.
When mankind first came onto this earth (whether by evolution or God, you choice), his intelligence let him think past the ordinary animal mind, & question the universe. Why is it that there is day and night? Why is it that there are rains, fires? How did this all begin? Since man was new to the universe, he didn't know what to think, because the proper observations & logic hasn't been used yet. So man made God, an all powerful being that controlled everything. We trusted him to drag his firey charriot across the sky. We thought that it was the angers or sadnesses of God that made the fires burn or the rain fall. We thought that it was him who made us, made the universe, all because we didn't know the true nature of things.
As time progressed, so did intelligence, as we learned what caused day & night (earth's roatation), we learned how to predict rains & learned what chemical processes made fire. We learned that it was gravity that held the celestial bodies in their perfect orbits. We are learning (or at least theorizing) how this universe was created.
So with all this, where does God come in? What are his powers? Now that science and logic have risen and that we've solved the mysteries, God has no powers. It is the mathematics and principle laws of the universe that governs the cosmos. I believe in no God, because it is the mechanics of science, not God, that governs all.
ice i see your points and i can agree with the general sentiment...but it seems by the wording of the first paragraph that you may be assuming that mankind "came" to be the earth in his present state...not in a state of evolving physically and intellectually. a minor point...but it takes me to my next point. intelligence and human understanding as a whole is constantly evolving and expanding (which you do say elsewhere)...which is why science as a field of knowledge is growing...but science is a field of knowledge with explanatory power...it isn't the thing that it explains. that is, science is a method for explicating say...gravity, and not gravity itself. science can't be substituted for "God."
though i'm not sure that's what you were saying...just seeking clarification. also...some religious folks will make the argument that you are trying to substitute science for god, a thing that doesn't make any sense at all.
When I said "came," that doesn't exclude the possibility that man "came' through evolution. And what I'm getting at is that God was just a replacement of unknown science. It's more like God replaced science temporarily due to man's adolescence and lack of knowledge.
If we could find a way to predict when the seemingly random quantum events occur, and we knew the position and velocity of every particle in the observable universe, we could in principle predict exactly what you will do for the rest of your life and what will happen throughout the entire universe for the rest of eternity.
Here's the catch on this whole science thing. Has our science really had that much time to evolve in a few thousand years?
Where will be in terms of science in a million years and over 100 times our present existence on Earth. I find it impossible to currently denounce the existence of God through our remedial knowledge of science. We're smart yes, but we've not had the time to be geniuses.
Nobody finds it ironic just how different we are from other living organisms? Crocodiles have been around for millions of years and I don't see any cruising to the store for some chicken in a Pinto. These differences simply cannot be pushed aside via science.
Lastly, simple Amoebas divides via binary fission and we're not surprised. Yet we're unable to believe that over billions of years a lifeform evolved creating an image of itself.
Tell me there's no God in a few million years and I'll be more willing to listen.
My questions are simple, yes. They can even be considered childish. I do feel that our knowledge of our surroundings are equally simplistic and that we as a species are children, infants at best.
