As Jerry Coyne in ” Seeing and Believing’ and someone in a recent issue of Skeptic magazine notes, there was no plan for our arrival and no other being was likely to arrive in our stead, had we not arrived. And one begs the question in all teleological arguments- fromreason, fine-tuning, design and probability that divinity had us in mind. So divinity had us in mind reveals that it had us in mind?
And the argument from pareidolia reveals that theists see divinity and design as people see Yeshua in a tortilla- not there.
So here we have two naturalist [positive atheist] arguments agaisnt the existence of God.
Then there is Hume’s dysteological one from imperfections; here we should require theists to anawe Hime without resorint to theodicy, the series of cop-out of His nonchalance to all animal suffering.
And @ Talk Reason, Amiel Rossow, notes in his essay on Kenneth Miller, that the latter takes out the front door -ID – only to bring it back as teleology by the back one.
So , theistic evolution is an oxymoron!
We ignostics find that stating as Alexander Smoltcyk, German journalist, that He is neither a principle nor an entiy nor a person but the ultimate explanation, means that He has no way of implementing His being that explanation. Just more theological gobbedygook. All theology is a series of cop-outs for a mystery, surrounded by still other mysteries, as that ultimate explanation , yet signifiying nothing whatsoever! So, he affirms ignosticism! Keith Parsons notes that to use Him is to ‘ hide our ignrance behind a theological fig leaf.” And ” [o]ccult power, wielded by a tanscendent being in an incsrutable manner for unfalthomable purposes does not seem to be any sort of a good explanation.”
Advanced theology , therefore, just means more obscurantism for God did it! So, PZ Myers’s coutier’s reply reveals the obscurantism of advanced theology.
…. out of order, meant at the botom…
Fr. Griggs took three courses in philosphy and has read in philosophy of religion; he is a mere lay polemicist, dabbling in philosphy and theology. Uner the nicknames naturalist griggsy, ratioanlist griggsy, skeptic griggsy, sceptique griggsy esceptico griggsy , griggs1947, lord griggs and lord griggs1947, he advances the naturalist/ rationalist evangel world over in several languages as Googling one of those names would show. He takes on advanced theologians unlike the mighty Dawkins!
Fr. Griggs rests in his Socratic ignorance and humble naturalism. Religion is mythinformation. Reason saves, not that dead Galilean!
We new atheists- we rock!
…back to the essay…

Together, the ignostic-Ockham reveal either that He is otiose or else He is needlessly redundant, advanced theologian, Alister McGrath, Dawkins’s nemesis, notwithstanding.
So, advanced theology and errancy mean the same as fundamentalism- rubbish1!Errantists rationalize their fables: they find metaphors in the hard passages as Fr. Leo Booth notes. What is the metaphor then for the genocide?
Not only do the fables not tell us how the heavens go, they are useless to tell us how to get to Heaven! One begs the question of Heaven!
We naturalists have other positive arguments against Him- the problem of Heaven , the evidential argument from evil, the hiddenness problem, the presumptions of empiricism,naturalism, rationalism and skepticism and the covenant morallity for humanity- the presumption of humanism.
We no more need Him as the sufficient reason than we need gremlins in addition to mechanics to explain mechanical failure, demons to explain my schzotypy and double depression and Newton notwithstanding, angels in addition to his laws to explain the planetary movemnents.

An omniscient God would by definition know everything about the future. He would therefore know that old Uncle Joe is going to die tomorrow morning. Yet he couldn’t change Uncle Joe’s fate without being wrong about his knowledge of the future. Omniscience would make him limited in power.

On the other hand, an omnipotent God could change the future at will. Since he can change everything, he doesn’t know the future with a 100% accuracy. Being all powerful would prevent him from being omniscient.

The Christian concept of God is self-contradictory.

Keep up the great work!

AngelVamp
http://www.vampiretemple.com

Yes, I just read this question on a “curious” article that appeared today at the NYT (click for the full article), entitled “Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus”…

What might be of some interest to you is, a few of the experiences some of his volunteers had while partaking in the DMT study, relate to coming into contact with a creating force.

I won’t elaborate any furthure. I do however, suggest if you are going to take a peak at his work, do read some of his interviews, before reading his book, DMT, The Spirit Molecule. This type of scientific inquiry is usually berift with lunatics, he is not one.

The information might add another aspect to your blog on ” The Physics of Hallucinations” or “The God Conumdrum”.

I think you will find him cautious and level headed in his attempts to explain what he found.

I hope you all realize that I’ve not written in to your great physics blogsite to engage in controversy but to seek more understanding. There’s the great difference between science and philosophy (theory and epistemology are my philosophical fields), which creates a lot of problems for all of us. And there’s the frequent great lack of comprehension between people of science and faith.

My website isn’t polemical. It’s seeking to explain how different the ways of knowing are, by starting with the Greeks who invented the “ways of knowing,” a term I use because it is so unfamliar in our own period and helps us think in fresh ways. The best stuff on my website isn’t in the posts, but in the Sessions from my lit theory course that I’m posting over on the Pages. I’ll continue to publish more of the sessions as time goes on. Session one deals with language, art, and representation (or mimesis) and with theory, in a rapid-fire overview. It’s intense.

Session Two deals with the Classical Greek Thought-world, and how Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle started Western educattion by theorizing “the arts and sciences” as ways of knowing…. Basically, the possibility of human knowing begins for them with the presence of order in the world, but it is various KINDS of order, each requiring its own discipline to come to know it….

Okay, so you’ve been invited. Now I will cease to advertise!

Hi, I’m not a scientist but I do love love science. I’m an old lit professor out of Jennifer Ouelette’s past, who got directed to Sean’s great website. I read Sean’s review with great interest, because I am a theist. I’ve been fascinated by this whole discussion and I really, really care about science and faith. I taught an honors seminar in science-and-faith for many years in which the science students sometimes spoke about the anguish they felt at having to keep their deep commitment to science and their faith in separate compartments. This was because their faith communities were intolerant. But now I see that it could just as well be that their scientific communities could be so intolerant.
Now I don’t mean to say you folks are “intolerant,” because I’m so struck by the open and humanistic tone of the posts, and especially by the give-and-take of the conversation. But, and this is a big “but,” I had thought that the animosity between the scientific ways of knowing and other ways, even mystical ways, was waning in our post-modern period, and I think that would be a very good thing. It’s as though you don’t know that breezy dismissals of faith as mere illusion or seritonin highs and so forth, can be just of painful and damaging as Fundamentalist attacks on and misunderstandings of how science works. I’m struck by how much most of you agree — and agree as scientists, quite clearly — that science and “reason” go against the God hypothesis. That was Sean’s opening thesis and I simply find it extremely surprising. (Especially since I totally agree with Sean that the muffin joke is funny!)
I think what Ellis was getting at by criticizing Dawkins’ lack of “philosophy” was that Dawkins and almost everyone in this thread are taking for granted a basically Anglo-American intellectual tradition based on scientific realism in the good-old British empiricist tradition. Now I think the good old church of England does an amazing amount of good around the world, but I’m not so sure about British empriricism! It’s really true that we all in this thread know a lot about some things and a lot less about others.
But questions like “God” are important questions, and people should talk about them — way to go, Sean — and they should radically disagree. What’s perplexing me is the lack of radical disagreement. Everyone, even Bob, seems to assume that there’s a kind of reason that scientists use all the time and it goes against God and Bob’s experience is just a “personal” experience, not like reason, which is public and objective. But these are all Enlightenment oppositions — reason and religion, objective and subjective, public and private.
I am not trying just to make a compassionate case that Bob’s “personal experience” should be respected and not denigrated. I’m saying that we’ve spent way too long in North America thinking that scientific ways of knowing are the only ones with true discoursive communities and evidentiary standards and validity-testing. What I’m saying is that in disciplines like philosophy and theology — in other than the Anglo-American rationalist-empiricist tradition — have produced perspectives on “truth” and “coming to know” that can differentiate, I think, between what scientific ways of knowing try to know and what other ways of knowing may try to know. Religious and mystical ways of knowing can be very taxing, arduous, discoursive, communal, and deeply tested over centuries and longer.
I am curious about two things — and I really want to know what you think.
1) What would be lost be adopting an agnostic stance toward religious ways of knowing, just as we do for culturally different practices and peoples? Okay, I know, I know. Scientists feel attacked and threated by Fundamentalists. But believe me, they feel just as threatened and endangered by the intellectual elites (as they see it) which have denied ordinary people any wisdom for several hundred years. But does it help anything to maintain the fortess mentality, on either side? Plus the fact that you rule out the pleasure of knowing the third group of people like me, who are charming and fun to know! The people for whom both science and God are the reason they get up in the morning with joy and hope.
2) Isn’t it still true these days to say of current science what science — let’s say physics — use to say — that it started with methodological reductionism (a good thing)and ruled out questions of metaphysics, esp. origin and purpose, in advance? So does it seem to you that science has changed and become a broader and deeper way of knowing, perfectly able to not only tackle but answer these kinds of questions? Doesn’t it seem to you that there are belief-structures operating in your reasoning that are based on your experience in your way of knowing and how it has shaped you and ought to be taken as such by you and others. Rather than on some obvious, irrefutable reasonableness in how you think, I mean.
Okay, I lied, I have a 3) You all sound so chipper and confident. For me, it was utter anguish and existential pain for myself and the human race and the whole planet, along with guilt ands helplessness, that was the arena in which God started to be compelling to me. It’s been Lent and the readings in the Old Testament again and again have said that God’s promise of mercy and justice and peace for all the nations is more astonishing and more counter-intuitive than anything else in the universe. It’s supposed to be a surprise, a relief, and a consolation. But I don’t want to argue pros and cons about that. I’m more interested in asking about whether science deals with the weight of experiences of evil, despair, guilt, joy, love, ecstacy. And if it doesn’t or if it dismisses them, then have they no evidentiary weight at all, perhaps for other ways of knowing, which could be respected?

The universe very well could just have come into being due to physical laws. The opposite may be true. One could equally write a book called, ‘The Science Delusion’, if arguing over the origin of the universe. Until then, why are we forming opinions? Presumably, so humanity can be more accurately informed to make decisions for its betterment. If the greater good of humanity is the object, only such delusions, based on faith both in science and religion, that achieve or aim for the opposite, should be opposed.

To say God doesn’t exist because of what people believe is foolish. God is not changed for better or worse by what people do in His name, humanity is. God, if He exists, is evidently beyond our collective comprehension. (So, I could add, is the physical principle behind the universe’s self-creation.) Therefore, a religion cannot communicate certainly and permanently the truths inherent in this hypothetical God. A religion that could would be too good for people; we would all fall short. And uncertainty is a uniquely human fate. The animals are below it; God, if He exists, is above it. Surely the rectitude of our beliefs and the need of other people to agree and conform to it matter less than ending the suffering that is caused by people in God’s name. Neither religion or the idea of God need opposing so much as all ignorance that causes ill.

The holiday season is typically a time when most of us over-consume in almost every category possible. I am certainly no exception to this. From dinners with friends, to the chocolate tucked away in every nook and cranny of the house, I certainly ate …