cpwm17
cpwm17's JournalWhat is this free will that you speak of?
We are the products of our genetics and environment, neither of which we have any choice at birth. After that, we think and act based on how our brains have developed in our environment. We don't design our own brains, so our conscious selves don't ultimately control our actions and thoughts. If you believe in a god, then this god is responsible for who we are.
Free will is an illusion. We don't understand how our brains work or how they come to their conclusions. Our heads are black boxes.
We experience inputs into our brains and we experience outputs from our brains. What our brains actually do, we can't know. We experience feelings associated with our thoughts and action. This gives us the illusion that our conscious selves actually made the decision. But our feelings only drive our thoughts and actions by forcing our (outside of conscious) brains to act.
Even when you use sequential logic, ultimately your thoughts come out of your black box.
There is no free will. That is just an excuse for this imaginary god for not being able to see the future and the flaws in creation. God says, the buck don't stop here.
It's not a crazy conspiracy theory,
it's just the basic corruption that dominates Washington DC. (I don't do crazy: Oswald did it, I support GMO's, truthers are kooks, an invisible man in the sky doesn't control the Universe, etc)
Most politicians don't care about any particular agenda. Most of them do at any particular moment what they believe will get them reelected. In the Bush administration, the Neocons set the agenda, with their targets of Iraq, Syria, Libya. and Iran, all nations that are enemies of the terrorists that committed 9-11. Neocons are open about their agenda to destroy those nations for the benefit of Israel. It's not a secret.
9-11 was a fortuitous gift to the Neocons, though a major terrorist attack was highly predictable due to US human rights abuses and atrocities in the ME that we had been committing for decades. I wasn't the least bit surprised on 9-11.
The Neocons are conspiracy kooks, and US foreign policy is what you get when conspiracy kooks get power in government. They were able to scam the US public to support an unprovoked attack against a random Muslim majority nation because they are part of a nefarious "axis of evil." Iraq was part of some great Muslim conspiracy.
The Neocons set the agenda, and now that they got the predictable results, most politicians are now doing what they think needs to be done with the current facts on the ground, which gives us permanent war.
Many politicians are also open about their threats against Iran for the benefit of Israel. We are supporting the terrorists against Syria because the Israel supporters care more about weakening Assad's power than the kooks that want to create a theocracy in Syria and Al Qaeda that attacked the US.
Washington DC is much more complicated than I can write in a few paragraphs, since there are so many agendas, but this is an important element of our war agenda.
Your god pushes the question of the beginning infinitely back in time with a magical being,
unless you believe your god had a creator. Then where did your god's creator come from?
You have the same problem of original creation, and you've created a much worse problem: how did this almost infinitely purposefully-complex critter get here?
My starting point is dumb matter and energy. Your starting point is an almost infinitely purposefully-complex critter with magical powers. We also have no evidence for your invisible magic-critter – or however you define your god.
No matter what view of reality you believe in, whether scientific or not, there is a reality that exists that didn't create itself. The scientific view is to simplify things down to their basic processes going back in time: the more complex comes from the less complex. The religious view is the complex is explained by the even more complex, which is explained by magic.
It's the burden of the theists to demonstrate the signatures of god in nature,
and if they can't, then the default position is there is no god.
Science works since much of nature can be understood. Nature can be understood since there are patterns in nature. Nature isn't infinitely complicated since it isn't driven by the whims of a higher power. If it were, science couldn't work.
From a human perspective, nature is far from perfect. People are born with birth defects. Animals eat other animals, causing great suffering. There have been a number of major extinction events in the history of the Earth. These, and many more examples, are the signature of a world operating without a higher power.
Our Universe didn't come from literally nothing. Nothing doesn't exist. The Big Bang came from an existing physics in some realm that it is currently impossible to understand. I think it is very likely that we live in one of a huge number of universes that came from the same realm and by similar physics that created our Universe, since nature doesn't make things in ones and a multiverse does a good job of explaining much about our existence. There could also very well be other realms beyond that, unrelated to ours with realities unlike our own.
A reality with a starting point with a god is almost infinitely less likely than a reality with a starting point of dumb matter and energy. A god would be almost infinitely more complicated with purposeful design. Dumb matter and energy doesn't necessarily have purposeful design.
The design of life on Earth came from 4,000,000,000 years of evolution. But this God would have magically gotten its purposeful design from nothing. We also have direct evidence of dumb matter and energy, but we have no evidence for any god.
Consciousness is the product of brain processes, evolved over millions of years to allow complex animated beings. Consciousness isn't a thing. It is very likely that there are numerous other places beyond Earth with conscious beings, and likely in other universes outside our own.
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Name: PaulGender: Male
Hometown: Florida
Home country: USA
Member since: Wed Mar 31, 2010, 03:20 PM
Number of posts: 3,829