It has nothing to do with need but desire. Humans often choose what they desire. Your untestable, unproven theory of temporal constancy aside. You believe with the same amount of faith that I do that all of our actions in live are predetermined by chemical sequences.
No, actually, there are heaps of evidence for what we believe.
If you believe choice is an illusion you are essentially arguing predetermination. If predetermination is the case then laws, justice, good and evil are rendered moot because everyone is slave to the inanimate processes of their brain. Crimes become unpunishable, so following your model to its logical, if a man kills your entire family and sets fire to your house, he cannot be prosecuted because if you were to rewind time, he would in every instance murder your family and set fire to your house.
Non sequitur. I see two spectacular failures in your reasoning:
1) The "inanimate processes" that we are are configured in such a way that they care about their survival. Therefore, the system they will come up with will include laws, justice, good and evil. You're trying to say that there is no "reason" to have these things and I have to admit I'm dumbfounded. "Inanimate processes" don't need fucking reasons, they do what they do and that's all there is to it. Laws, justice, good and evil will occur because that is an obvious consequence of the processes we are looking at. Your last example is particularly incomprehensible. Justice isn't really about responsibility, it is about regulating the system to reduce the amount of crimes. We prosecute "inanimate processes" which correspond to a well-defined idea of malfunction. In other words, we prosecute the man and we put him in prison because he is fucking defective. Nothing else matters and have ever mattered.
2) You're saying that if we were mere biological machines, there would be no reason to have laws, justice, good or evil. I conclusively debunked this in 1). But despite this, what strikes me is that in order for this to happen, the machines would need to be aware that they are machines and furthermore that it is all pointless. Your argument is thus completely inapplicable to machines that believe they have a soul. And that's precisely what we have here :) In other words, you like to argue that a godless society is terrible and would not work... yet this has absolutely no bearing on what is or isn't actually the case. It remains perfectly possible (and even probable) that we need to believe in God but in fact there is no God and we're just a bunch of foolish machines.
But really, your statement is a non sequitur festival.
Are your experiences predetermined? If you rewind time to your birth, will you go through exactly the same sequences of events through your entire life? You have no way of knowing because it is impossible to answer because it is impossible to do. You merely have an unproven, untested theory for how you want the world to be: Simple, concrete, explainable in the most mundane and determined terms. The logical conclusion of your world, if true, is that law and order are simply formalities. There is no justice in a world of predetermination.
Non sequitur again... law and order have absolutely nothing to do with whether the world is predetermined or not. Think pragmatically - a predetermined system which is "programmed" for survival would want to get rid of any elements that threaten the equilibrium. Hence, law and order. That's all there is to it. What is so hard to understand about that?
Even without predetermination, the world isn't any more interesting. There are two types of basic processes: determined processes and random processes. Any process ever is a combination of determinism and randomness. This covers all possible situations. All of them, ever. There simply is no hole left to peg and that is a mathematical fact.
There is only one species on planet earth even capable of performing these tasks. Genetics are too complex for humanity to handle, and it is arrogant and irresponsible to suggest otherwise. Tinkering with humanity like it is a toy that only needs more study is the kind of thinking that produces true monstrosities. The difference between a mad scientist and a murderer is the murderer recognizes he is spilling blood and doesn't care, the mad scientist questions the intrinsic value of humanity and deems himself God over it.
I think what you are afraid most is that humanity will indeed understand genetics well enough to prove you wrong on all counts once and for all. My "faith" that we will come to that point is reasonable extrapolation from the great progress we've made in the past century. In that sense I think it's much more substantiated than your "faith" that we won't.
The quest for a "theory of everything" is a fools game. You have to be a programmer to think of everything in terms of machines. There are some things that are simply beyond human limitations, but fools still seek to discover them because they want the world to be a place where every single thing is explainable in human terms. They do not have the restraint to know there are some things better left unknown and some things that are patently unknowable.
Like what? I'm all for caution and of course it's not feasible to know and understand everything. But then you tell me you believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnibenevolent God with oddly anthropomorphic traits and then you shroud it in such mystery that it is stated with certainty that trying to understand him is futile. At least when I believe things it's because they satisfy my intellect, not because they satisfy my emotions. And when I don't understand something, at least I fucking try and whatever I come up with can't be worse than your cop-out.
You can remove an engine from a car, and I daresay that because it is missing a key component it will not be faster than humans anymore. Wonderful how scientists cannot distinguish between human beings and machines anymore.
This doesn't even have anything to do with what I said. I was talking about the brain, a biological machine, being responsible for our sense of right and wrong. Case in point: remove part of it and poof! morality gone. If we had a soul, why would that happen?
Headpunch said:
Good job, Brain. You figured it out. I am, in fact, saying that "good", "evil", and "perfect" are essentially meaningless. If God defined killing as "good", what would make me leave my religion? After all, what I am doing is "perfect" by God's standards, and there certainly isn't a higher set. In case you didn't realize this, I am not a Christian because it is "compatible" with my human nature. It's usually contrary to my human nature, in fact. The whole premise is chilling, I understand, but the problem with your style of arguing is that you presume to understand my thought patterns.
What I am saying is that there is no incentive to do anything that is "perfect" by God's standard. If killing people was "good", wouldn't it be fair to assume that heaven might not exactly correspond to the idea you have of it? Coming from a God who loves murder, it'd probably be a gorefest. You obey God because you expect a reward. If his concept of "good", "evil" and "perfect" don't correspond to yours, what makes you think his concept of "reward" is anything you'd want? Let's put it another way: if God just swapped the meanings of the words "good" and "evil", would you do "good" because you need to do whatever the
word "good" is defined as? Or would you do "evil" because it corresponds to your ideals of good and then end up in hell where Satan does all sorts of "evil" things to you?
Mr_Goodbar said:
A small question directed at atheists; doesn't it take faith to be an atheist? It seems that faith is derided by most atheists, but it takes faith to believe that all that is real can be fully perceived and known by humans. Unless you acknowledge that there could be some higher spiritual reality, I don't see how it can't be faith to be assured in oneself without proof. I'm not trying to insult atheists, I just wanna see what their take on this would be.
It has to do with Occam's Razor, mostly. The truth is that nothing can be known for sure, but that not everything has the same probability. In general, you want to explain a phenomenon in the simplest way possible, because there are very strong arguments, both mathematical and intuitive, that simpler theories are more probable. For example, if I ask you to complete this sequence:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ?
You would probably answer 6, but in fact if you posit y = (x-1)(x-2)(x-3)(x-4)(x-5)+x, it works out to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 too, but then it jumps to 120, not 6. But you still answer 6 because y=x is a much simpler theory. The same goes for science and whether the supernatural exists or not. If there exist things that we cannot perceive or know in any way, regardless of what they are, we don't see a difference, and it is simpler, hence more probable, to assume that there is nothing.
God is a very complex entity, therefore a very complex explanation, if you compare it with the current state of the art in science. It does not really explain anything that cannot be explained much more precisely by simpler means. To add insult to injury, if something "supernatural" existed, there is absolutely no logical requirement for it to be sentient or anything resembling a God, which means that God does not only have to compete with naturalistic explanations, it has to compete with a near-infinity of oddball non-naturalistic theories.
In a nutshell, "faith" is belief in something that is improbable, either because it does not really explain anything, or because what it explains is explained better by something simpler. Belief in something probable is not faith. That is why believing in Santa Claus is faith, but believing Santa Claus does not exist isn't. And that is why believing in God is faith, whereas atheism requires no faith (unless you say that God does not exist with 100% certainty, but then you're just wrong). Therefore, the burden of proof is on the believer. It just always is. Positive claims require evidence because the sheer number of possibilities makes it so that they are systemically less probable than the negative claims.
Note: it also depends on the type of proposition. The prior that "something is green" is higher than the prior that "nothing is green", because given a limited number of colors and the large number of objects that exist, the number of possibilities where something is green is greater than the number of possibilities where nothing is green. There are many indirect factors to take into account too: if you tell me you ate reindeer yesterday, the rational belief is to believe you because of strong evidence that people don't usually lie about these things. However, if you tell me absolutely nothing about yourself and I
have to express a belief, it would be faith to believe you ate reindeer, but not faith to believe you did not. Of course, I have to be aware that there is a chance that you did eat reindeer and my belief is wrong, but it is still not faith, just a reasonable estimate, just like it is not faith to believe God does not exist when there is no evidence that he does.
And even if there was some minor evidence, such as Jesus existing, it seems overwhelmingly more probable to me that Jesus was not divine, did not do anything supernatural and "sinned" a couple times, like everybody else. To take evidence for Jesus and infer the truth of the whole Bible from this is a recipe for disaster - for example, there is zero evidence that God really is all-loving and does not just pretend because he's a narcissist, much to the contrary. I believe the Big Bang occurred because it explains a great amount of observations for which God does not provide the slightest hint. Whatever I do not know, I do not know and I trust science to eventually find out answers. I would not say that it is faith, because science is known to deliver. And if it doesn't deliver, I don't see how religion could possibly fare better.