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| Why DO you believe in God? |
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| 425 Chaotic Requisition |
Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 1:08 pm Post subject: Why DO you believe in God? |
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 The Doctor
Joined: 18 Jun 2007 Posts: 3207 Location: Somewhere, nowhere.
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After seeing that other thread about not believing in God, I challenge every single religious person here to explain to me why and only why you believe in God. How you came to and why you so defend that belief so strongly?
Atheists/agnostics etc are free to give their opinion as to why they think a person believes in God, be it positive or negative. _________________ "Laugh at life or it will laugh at you". - SVRDW. |
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| Theoryofrelativity |
Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 1:15 pm Post subject: Re: Why DO you believe in God? |
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 Forum Professor

Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 1166
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| 425 Chaotic Requisition wrote: |
After seeing that other thread about not believing in God, I challenge every single religious person here to explain to me why and only why you believe in God. How you came to and why you so defend that belief so strongly?
Atheists/agnostics etc are free to give their opinion as to why they think a person believes in God, be it positive or negative. |
Awareness of an interfering presence(s) in my life, I call this presence GOD, but as far as I know this is MY GOD, may not relate to anyone else or might relate to everything else, no way of knowing. _________________ 'Time is the space between birth and death' by me. |
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| 425 Chaotic Requisition |
Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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 The Doctor
Joined: 18 Jun 2007 Posts: 3207 Location: Somewhere, nowhere.
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Ah. Now that is interesting, I agree to that to the most extent. I believe Divine intervention takes place all the time. Being in this quote: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all". So who is your God? _________________ "Laugh at life or it will laugh at you". - SVRDW. |
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| arkofnoah |
Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 8:01 pm Post subject: |
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 Forum Freshman

Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 88
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| Theoryofrelativity wrote: |
| may not relate to anyone else or might relate to everything else |
To me this sounds a bit like agnostic theism, where you acknowledge the fact that existence of God is unknown or inherently unknowable but you still choose to believe in God, based on faith alone.
And this raise the point on faith. IMO faith is the only valid standpoint, at least as of now, that one can argue for their belief in God. In fact faith is a prerequisite for Christian theology to be true:
1. Christian theology teaches that people are saved by faith in the Christian God (i.e., trust in the empirically unprovable).
2. But, if the Christian God's existence can be proven, either empirically or logically, to that extent faith becomes unnecessary or irrelevant.
3. Therefore, if Christian theology is true, no immediate proof of the Christian God's existence is possible.
So it's really quite a waste of time trying to prove the Christian God exists by logical method (Intelligent Design, YEC, or maybe even information entity, etc), since it undermines the whole sola fide idea of Christianity. You are destroying your God by trying to prove him empirically. _________________
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| Pong |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:09 am Post subject: |
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Forum Professor

Joined: 08 Apr 2008 Posts: 1256
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Thank you ArkOfNoah for heading that off. I agree. It pains me to see a believer rationalizing God just as it pains me to see one in love dissecting the relationship, as in "everything I do is logical and motivated by self interest" and so forth.
Faith is more than sufficient. |
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| mitchellmckain |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:53 am Post subject: |
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 Forum Professor

Joined: 06 Oct 2005 Posts: 1888 Location: Salt Lake City, UTAH, USA
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| Pong wrote: |
Thank you ArkOfNoah for heading that off. I agree. It pains me to see a believer rationalizing God just as it pains me to see one in love dissecting the relationship, as in "everything I do is logical and motivated by self interest" and so forth.
Faith is more than sufficient. |
One can recognize the limitations of rationality without this attitude of throwing the baby out with the bathwater - that is what people do with religion and it is really a symptom of childish impatience and immaturity. Just because you cannot think of any immediate way of explaining what you believe does not mean that you have to belittle the efforts of others with plattitudes like "faith is more than sufficient".
Faith is sufficient FOR YOU. Congratulations. We are all happy for you. If you have no use for reason and rational thinking in your life, well... it is your life to live how you choose. But all I can say is Thank God, everyone in the world is not like you, for I have no wish to live in the dark ages. Is this a personal attack on you? PLEASE! Knowing my own flaws, weaknesses and failures far better than I could possibly know yours, the nightmare that the world would be if everyone was like me, is abundantly clear to me. The point is that we are all different, thank God.
I would not have bothered to answer the OP's challenge except that your rather insipid response has aggrivated me to the point of where I want to show those who do have a use for reason in their life, how it can be done. So here is my answer to the OP:
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I know that God exists in precisely the same way that I know that any person exists. An atheist who equates human beings to a biological species might find this incomprehensible, but I do not share their rather peculiar prejudices. Persons are not visible things I can point to like bug. I can point to a body, but the person I know and believe exists is not just a variety of meat, but a personality with dreams, desires, ideas and feelings. And these are not things that I can see. They are a matter of the interpretation of my senses. And so I know that these persons exist because like all my knowledge it is a principle by which I make sense of the sensory data that my brain receives from the world. Acting or living as if there really were no persons behind these behaviors of bodies, as the psychopath does, is not an existence that makes any sense to me.
But my knowledge of God is absolutely no different from this. This knowledge of God may not be to explain the behavior of a body that I can see, but I find that I cannot make sense of all that which I experience in life without this person whom I call God. I can see Him with greatest clarity in a person named Jesus who lived and died as a man 2000 years ago but continues to live in a personal relationship with me as He has lived in a personal relationship with Christians for these last 2000 years. But regardless, God is a person whom I have lived with and He is no less real than my wife and children. To treat them as just so much meat would be no less rational than to think that there is no God. _________________ See my physics of spaceflight simulator at http://www.relspace.astahost.com |
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| (Q) |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 7:44 am Post subject: |
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 Forum Professor

Joined: 12 May 2005 Posts: 1377
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| mitchellmckain wrote: |
| I can see Him with greatest clarity in a person named Jesus who lived and died as a man 2000 years ago but continues to live in a personal relationship with me as He has lived in a personal relationship with Christians for these last 2000 years. But regardless, God is a person whom I have lived with and He is no less real than my wife and children. To treat them as just so much meat would be no less rational than to think that there is no God. |
Jimmy Stewart had a similar relationship with a tall rabbit. He too, believed it 'no less real' than anyone else.
All you had to say was that you WANT to believe in sky daddies, Mitchell, which has nothing to do with reality. _________________ I may have no understanding of the current theory of evolution. But that's because science keeps changing it. A few weeks ago I read in the newspaper that it had once again been adjusted & just the other day I discovered a new book called "The New Theory of Evolution" ~~Steven Titchenell : W.V.B.I.G. President. |
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| arkofnoah |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:32 am Post subject: |
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 Forum Freshman

Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 88
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| mitchellmckain wrote: |
| Persons are not visible things I can point to like bug. I can point to a body, but the person I know and believe exists is not just a variety of meat, but a personality with dreams, desires, ideas and feelings. And these are not things that I can see... |
From what I understand, you seem to be classifying "dreams, desires, ideas and feelings" to be things that are transcendent from the physical or biological aspects of a person.
What are your reason for doing so? Do you come to that deduction by logical "rational" means, or are these just based on "faithful" beliefs?
From a reductionist point of view, which I hold, personality is just a result of the interactions of all the neurological activities in your brain. Consciousness cannot exists without the brain, ie there is neither soul nor spirit. Nothing is extraordinary enough to wow anyone here.
So yes, every person is just a variety of meat and chemicals, and in time persons will become visible things we can point to like bugs. _________________
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| mitchellmckain |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 3:50 pm Post subject: |
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 Forum Professor

Joined: 06 Oct 2005 Posts: 1888 Location: Salt Lake City, UTAH, USA
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| (Q) wrote: |
All you had to say was that you WANT to believe in sky daddies, Mitchell, which has nothing to do with reality. |
Boo hoo. Q is picking on me! I want my sky daddy...
Really! It is quite amazing that Q never gets tired of this stupid rhetoric.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
From what I understand, you seem to be classifying "dreams, desires, ideas and feelings" to be things that are transcendent from the physical or biological aspects of a person.
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Transcendant? Not sure what you could possibly mean by that word so I shall simply substitute the word "apart". No I do not understand these things to be apart from the the physical aspect of a person. Yes I do understand these things to be apart from the biological aspect of a person in that these are derived from an inheritance that is nowhere to be found in the biological inheritance of DNA. DNA cannot pass on information that is acquired by the individual organism (no inheritance of acquired characteristics), BUT human beings do pass on an inheritance of information by other means and this is the substance of a non-biological but completely physical form of life called the human mind.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
What are your reason for doing so? Do you come to that deduction by logical "rational" means, or are these just based on "faithful" beliefs?
From a reductionist point of view, which I hold, personality is just a result of the interactions of all the neurological activities in your brain.
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What are your reasons for believing this? Do you come to that deduction by logical "rational" means, or are these just based on "faithful" beliefs?
| arkofnoah wrote: |
Consciousness cannot exists without the brain, ie there is neither soul nor spirit. Nothing is extraordinary enough to wow anyone here.
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You cannot exist without the earth and sun. You cannot exist without oxygen and water and other biolgical organisms that create and provide the substances that your bodily maintenaince requires. The earth ecosphere is a single interdependent living organism and when we poison it, we poison ourselves because we are a part of it. Yet I am willing to bet that despite of this dependence you still live your life as if you had a distinct identity apart from the earth.
It could indeed be the case that your life is governed completely by biological functions and that what many people call the mind is in your case simply an function of your body. I certainly cannot deny that you know yourself better than I could. But I most certainly know that this is not the case in my life or the life of many human beings that I have known. I know that myself and these people do things that are not motivated by any biological function but by the reasons of living organisms, which although dependent on the nervous system the way that our bodies are dependent on the earth, nevertheless do things for reasons that cannot be found anywhere in their DNA or biology alone. But this does not mean that the mind is not a physical entity.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
So yes, every person is just a variety of meat and chemicals, and in time persons will become visible things we can point to like bugs.
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If you believe that your are cattle and meat then perhaps you are, but you can be sure that I shall be very careful whenever possible to do what I can to make sure that psychopaths who think like that are not given any responsibilities in the human community. _________________ See my physics of spaceflight simulator at http://www.relspace.astahost.com
Last edited by mitchellmckain on Tue Jun 24, 2008 9:06 am; edited 1 time in total |
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| Theoryofrelativity |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 4:31 pm Post subject: |
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 Forum Professor

Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 1166
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| arkofnoah wrote: |
| Theoryofrelativity wrote: |
| may not relate to anyone else or might relate to everything else |
To me this sounds a bit like agnostic theism, where you acknowledge the fact that existence of God is unknown or inherently unknowable but you still choose to believe in God, based on faith alone.
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You lot can be so irritating, you SEE what you want to see. I said nothing about faith. What I said was this:
| Theoryofrelativity wrote: |
Awareness of an interfering presence(s) in my life, . |
THUS I believe based on my EXPERIENCE/awareness of an interfering force.
Thus not faith related.  _________________ 'Time is the space between birth and death' by me. |
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| mitchellmckain |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 10:56 pm Post subject: |
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 Forum Professor

Joined: 06 Oct 2005 Posts: 1888 Location: Salt Lake City, UTAH, USA
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| Theoryofrelativity wrote: |
THUS I believe based on my EXPERIENCE/awareness of an interfering force.
Thus not faith related.
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99.9% of what we call knowledge is based on faith. No I am not using the word "faith" as a synonym for religion but in regards to the kinds of things we put our faith in. Knowledge is based on faith because when you call something knowledge if you think that means it partakes of certainty in any absolute sense then you are just willfully deluding yourself. Therefore what it really means to call some conclusion, "knowledge" is only that you have chosen to make this conclusion the basis of how you live your life. Science, for example, is based on a faith that the evidence does not lie to us - it presumes that there are no demons running around aranging the evidence to fool us.
Other than that, there is only the pretenses the people like to make that their "knowledge" is somehow different/better and I think the reason is quite clearly because they feel threatened by claims to knowledge by others that are contrary to their own claims. _________________ See my physics of spaceflight simulator at http://www.relspace.astahost.com |
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| Pong |
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 11:40 pm Post subject: |
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Forum Professor

Joined: 08 Apr 2008 Posts: 1256
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| mitchellmckain wrote: |
| Pong wrote: |
Thank you ArkOfNoah for heading that off. I agree. It pains me to see a believer rationalizing God just as it pains me to see one in love dissecting the relationship, as in "everything I do is logical and motivated by self interest" and so forth.
Faith is more than sufficient. |
One can recognize the limitations of rationality without this attitude of throwing the baby out with the bathwater - that is what people do with religion and it is really a symptom of childish impatience and immaturity. Just because you cannot think of any immediate way of explaining what you believe does not mean that you have to belittle the efforts of others with plattitudes like "faith is more than sufficient".
Faith is sufficient FOR YOU. Congratulations. We are all happy for you. If you have no use for reason and rational thinking in your life, well... it is your life to live how you choose. But all I can say is Thank God, everyone in the world is not like you, for I have no wish to live in the dark ages. Is this a personal attack on you? PLEASE! |
No, that was all in your head, your bad day I suppose, looking for expression. You happened to light on my post.
I didn't suggest we throw reason aside. However, in love, religion, a few other things as well, rationalizing one's own motives or condition to the point of detached dissection is not healthy, in my opinion. That's all I've said: i.e. don't feel obliged (by typical atheist attack vector) to robotize love of God. Of course it is good to make sense of love too, when that does not detract from loving. |
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| KALSTER |
Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 2:19 am Post subject: |
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 Forum Cosmic Wizard

Joined: 08 Sep 2007 Posts: 2120 Location: South Africa
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I disagree with the idea that if emotions and personhood are the results of biological processes then they are meaningless, illusion, fake. Just because strong parallels can be drawn between the emotional and identity aspects of humans and other animals does NOT make them any less real. Does having an idea of how and for what purpose something exists take away from the reality of it? NO! Love, compassion, understanding, etc. are true and real and beautiful. _________________ "Gullibility kills" - Carl Sagan |
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| arkofnoah |
Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 2:47 am Post subject: |
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 Forum Freshman

Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 88
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| mitchellmckain wrote: |
| No I do not understand these things to be apart from the the physical aspect of a person. Yes I do understand these things to be apart from the biological aspect of a person in that these are derived from an inheritance that is nowhere to be found in the biological inheritance of DNA. DNA cannot pass on information that is acquired by the individual organism (no inheritance of acquired characteristics), BUT human being do pass on an inheritance of information by other means and this is the substance of a non-biological but completely physical form of life called the human mind. |
This says nothing about human mind not being biological. Firstly memory, personality, desires, dreams are not information stored in DNA but rather arrangements of neuron in the brain, so obviously it doesn't get passed down-
which is still biological.
Secondly, desires such as lust can be easily explained by changes in hormonal levels (oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, to name a few) from response to stimuli. It is fully grounded in evolutionary theory to explain mate-seeking and child-rearing behavior. Dreams can be explained as reorganization of memory circuits in the brain. Jealousy, anger, depression all has a biological explanation.
So, really, it says nothing about human mind being non-biological.
| Quote: |
| arkofnoah wrote: |
What are your reason for doing so? Do you come to that deduction by logical "rational" means, or are these just based on "faithful" beliefs?
From a reductionist point of view, which I hold, personality is just a result of the interactions of all the neurological activities in your brain. |
What are your reasons for believing this? Do you come to that deduction by logical "rational" means, or are these just based on "faithful" beliefs? |
Simple application of Occam's Razor yields that conclusion.
My belief is that what we perceive is true. That's my faith, and in fact its prerequisite for logic to be true because it is dependent upon the reliability of human perception and deduction. If you're arguing that Christianity is based on more than just faith, then you must also hold the same faith as I do in this aspect.
What we cannot perceive is therefore uncertain, and no conclusive deduction should be drawn, as in the case of existence of god. What we can perceive, such as personality being simply the interactions of neurological activities in our brain, is therefore certain.
We don't need to incur God in the explanation of human mind if we can explain it with science, which incurs the least amount of assumptions.
| Quote: |
You cannot exist without the earth and sun. You cannot exist without oxygen and water and other biolgical organism that create and provide the substances that your bodily maintenaince requires. The earth ecosphere is a single interdependent living organism and when we poison it, we poison ourselves because we are a part of it. Yet I am willing to bet that despite of this dependence you still live your life as if you had a distinct identity apart from the earth.
It could indeed be the case that your life is governed completely by biological functions and that what many people call the mind is in your case simply an function of your body. I certainly cannot deny that you know yourself better than I could. But I most certainly know that this is not the case in my life or the life of many human being that I have known. I know that myself and these people do things that are not motivated by any biological function but by the reasons of living organisms, which although dependent on the nervous system the way that our bodies are dependent on the earth, nevertheless do things for reasons that cannot be found anywhere in their DNA or biology alone. But this does not mean that the mind is not a physical entity. |
This also says nothing about human mind being a separate entity from the brain. The "people" on the "earth" simply refers to neurons whose interactions collectively form the memory, personality, dreams. Damage to the brain simply disrupts these neurons or the interactions between them.
And the reason that we do things against our instinct is that often instinct makes us blind mice. We take risks because such risks may well earn us a nice mammoth meal, in spite of it putting us in the danger of being stomped to death alive. It enables us to think out of the box so that we can invent new things, to discover fire, to send man to the moon, to basically ensure our evolutionary advantage. Human minds evolved so that we can handle new situations instead of just dwelling on our past experiences. It is just how we evolved, how we adapt, and this is all coded in our DNA. That's how psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics works because human behavior is not as unpredictable as you think once you look deeper into it.
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| If you believe that your are cattle and meat then perhaps you are, but you can be sure that I shall be very careful whenever possible to do what I can to make sure that psychopaths who think like that are not given any responsibilities in the human community. |
Oh wow tell me that "psychopaths who think like that" is not an ad hominem. Funny how you make me sound like I don't have any moral values. The difference between you and I is just that you need a god to tell you what to believe in, while I decide what to belief in myself.
But dude, I still love you, but not because god tell me to.  _________________
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| mitchellmckain |
Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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 Forum Professor

Joined: 06 Oct 2005 Posts: 1888 Location: Salt Lake City, UTAH, USA
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| arkofnoah wrote: |
This says nothing about human mind not being biological. Firstly memory, personality, desires, dreams are not information stored in DNA but rather arrangements of neuron in the brain, so obviously it doesn't get passed down-
which is still biological.
Secondly, desires such as lust can be easily explained by changes in hormonal levels (oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, to name a few) from response to stimuli. It is fully grounded in evolutionary theory to explain mate-seeking and child-rearing behavior. Dreams can be explained as reorganization of memory circuits in the brain. Jealousy, anger, depression all has a biological explanation.
So, really, it says nothing about human mind being non-biological.
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You are missing the point completely. You can explain things in many different ways. I could explain a book in terms of the molecular structure of ink and paper and the processes by which the paper and ink is made and the process by which the book is printed, but only an idiot would think that this is what the book is about or where its content came from. The human mind is biological only in the sense that a book is paper and ink. But in another sense the the paper and ink has nothing to do with the book at all, for not only does what we read does not come from these things at all but the book can actually be expressed in a different medium.
You may indeed be nothing more than "ink and paper" (i.e. meat) without which or in a different medium there would be nothing left that could be identified as you, but I know that this is not true in my case or in the case of many acquaintances. As for the rest of your ink and paper explanations of things, I am a scientists and so I expect such explanations but they are really beside the point. No matter how much I may depend upon this biological structure which I inhabit (or in which I am expressed if you prefer), it is not who I am.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
Simple application of Occam's Razor yields that conclusion.
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Simple misuse actually. I don't think you really grasp the meaning of "all else being equal". This is why the vastly more complex theories of General Relativity and Quantum Field theory are correct, because they are not all equal to the simpler theories that preceeded them. Different consquences and predicitons of different theories means they are not in the least bit equal and thus cannot be compared using Occam's Razor. I think you confuse the simplicity criterion of Ocaams Razor with forcing a complex multidimensional reality to fit into some simple minded one dimensional ideological characterization. Yours is a metaphysical assumption that you choose to make that what science describes is all that is real, much as the Marxists tried to boil economics, politics and history into a value based on labor alone. Maybe this works for your life at this moment, or at least you imagine that it does, but it does not work for mine. My life does not fit into your simple minded ideology.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
My belief is that what we perceive is true. That's my faith, and in fact its prerequisite for logic to be true because it is dependent upon the reliability of human perception and deduction. If you're arguing that Christianity is based on more than just faith, then you must also hold the same faith as I do in this aspect.
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Boy! That is too simple minded to even work for science, which often concludes that what we percieve to be misleading. With that approach we would be stuck with the physics of Aristotle. Perception is a mental process by which the raw data of our senses is interpreted by means of belief. Science gets around this barrier by only accepting that which is observer independent. It is a very effect of method for discovering unexpected things about the world we live in because it side steps the prejudices/expectations imposed by what we believe. However it is only logical that this results in a blind spot when it comes to understanding the observer himself and to presume that what it sees is all that is real is an a priori assumption that only the objective is real. I reject this presumption along with the metaphycal naturalist faith that only what science describes is real.
I on the other hand, as a scientist, am only a methodological naturalist putting my faith in the methods of science as an extremely valuable tool in uncovering the truth about things, but that is not the same thing as an irrational philosophical faith that it uncovers the whole truth about everything.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
What we cannot perceive is therefore uncertain, and no conclusive deduction should be drawn, as in the case of existence of god. What we can perceive, such as personality being simply the interactions of neurological activities in our brain, is therefore certain.
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Seeing is believing might be a good philosophy for some menial occupations but it is definitely not a viable philosophy for a scientist who learns to uncover the truth about things quite indirectly, using reason to expand their awareness beyond the limitations of the senses.
As for God, it is rather clear that despite many personal experiences, when pursuing the observer independent methodology of science that there is nothing to make God an appropriate topic of scienctific investigations and thus the determination of the founders of science to seek some explanation for observable phenomena other than God is entirely consistent with this.
"Simply the interactions of neurological activities in our brain"??? LOL LOL LOL LOL Likewise biological life on this planet is "simply" the interactions of organic chemicals on the planet earth. What is inadequate about this explanation? Hmmm? Could it be that interacting organic chemicals neither implies nor describes life on this planet any more than "interactions of neurological activities" implies or describes personality? An epileptic fit is an interaction of neurological activities but this is not personality. You have to do the work to develop a little more intellectual sophistication than this if you want to understand such things, for this really does not amount to much of an improvement over "Goddidit" type explanations.
The inheritance of information is a much more fruitful basis for understanding the nature of living things. Biological life passes on an inheritance of information using DNA, but human mental life passes on an inheritance of information using language. It is this difference which distinguishes the human mind as a form of life apart from the biological in a very concrete manner.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
We don't need to incur God in the explanation of human mind if we can explain it with science, which incurs the least amount of assumptions.
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It is only your faith doctrine that the purpose of God and religion is that of some primitive science to explain natural phenonmenon and this is an ideological blindness of yours because whether you can see it or not, that is not the primary role of God and religion in the lives of religious people. The fact is that, despite whatever irrational dogmas you may cling to, religions people created science and there continues to be scientists that are relgious and believe in God, precisely because this faith doctrine of yours about the purpose of God and religion is nonsense.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
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This also says nothing about human mind being a separate entity from the brain. The "people" on the "earth" simply refers to neurons whose interactions collectively form the memory, personality, dreams. Damage to the brain simply disrupts these neurons or the interactions between them.
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huh? You mean like the way damage to the earth (large meteor hit for example) would disrupt the interactions of organic chemicals on the earth that we associate with life?
| arkofnoah wrote: |
And the reason that we do things against our instinct is that often instinct makes us blind mice. We take risks because such risks may well earn us a nice mammoth meal, in spite of it putting us in the danger of being stomped to death alive.
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Right! As I said such motivations may indeed be a sufficient explanation of your life so that you can indeed conclude that your mind is nothing more than a function of your brain in the service of your biology. Indeed I would say that this is a good explanation of why the evolution of such capabilities in the Bonobo monkeys and our species is entirely consistent with the theory of evolution. And it is quite possible that this is all that is going on in the brains of some members of our species for there is nothing necessary in the formation of life. It spontaneous and self-motivated -- existing and doing things for its own reasons. But whatever may be going on in your brain, my mind is alive forming structures like ideas, reasons, and motivations for its own reasons quite apart from any biological purposes. And thus I know that however I may depend on my body/brain for existence just as depend on the earth and sun, I am not my body/brain.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
It enables us to think out of the box so that we can invent new things, to discover fire, to send man to the moon, to basically ensure our evolutionary advantage. Human minds evolved so that we can handle new situations instead of just dwelling on our past experiences. It is just how we evolved, how we adapt, and this is all coded in our DNA. That's how psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics works because human behavior is not as unpredictable as you think once you look deeper into it.
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What?!? There would be no science of psychology if our behavior were unpredictable in the sense of being random. No what the psychologist/psychiatrist does is uncover the mental structures like beliefs and habits of thought by which the mind works and does explains human behavior. Though to tell the whole story psychology has bifurcated to include biochemical studies because it an increasing understanding of biochemistry has uncovered biochemical causes for some types of disfunction. But to conclude that the fact that biochemistry effects the mind means that the mind is no more than biochemical interactions in the brain, is just as stupid as saying that the fact that earthquates effects living things means that living things must be vibrations of the earths crust.
| arkofnoah wrote: |
Oh wow tell me that "psychopaths who think like that" is not an ad hominem. Funny how you make me sound like I don't have any moral values. The difference between you and I is just that you need a god to tell you what to believe in, while I decide what to belief in myself.
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No it is not ad hominem. I do not say that you are a psychopath but only that I am unable to distinguish your claims from those of a psychopath. That you do not see any reality of persons beyond being meat, I quite clearly understand may not be a psychological condition in your case but only your personal choice to adopt the philosophy appropriate to a psychopath.
What makes you think that a psychopath has no moral values? Ever watch that TV show called "Dexter"?
| arkofnoah wrote: |
The difference between you and I is just that you need a god to tell you what to believe in, while I decide what to belief in myself.
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Apparently one difference between you and me is that you talk like you believe in psychic powers and that you have these powers and are thus capable of telling me what I need and how I think. It is quite obvious to me however that you don't have any such powers, because these things you claim to know are completely wrong. I decide what to believe myself without a need, as I percieve you to have, to think up reasons why my beliefs are somehow superior to yours. _________________ See my physics of spaceflight simulator at http://www.relspace.astahost.com |
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