Ed on religion

Drew263 wrote:

I understand your point. I'm only saying, don't call me a moron for having faith and I won't call you a moron for not. Fair?

Big Man wrote:

And at last, evilrabbit, you didnt answer my question : Do you think it is a coincidence that the big bang theory popped up in the very epoche when the A-bomb was invented?

Big Man wrote:

Plus: I dont understand people contributing to this thread saying how little sense it makes to argue, to ask these questions. It makes sense to me. So what is your point in posting? (Its almost like on this stupid antsmarching.org forum, those people hurt my brain)

imissyoualready wrote:

Definitely not calling you a moron. My only point about religion is this:

Religion satisfies, too easily, the human need to know "why" and "how". "Why" and "how" are the same questions that motivate science. My opinion is just that the "why" and "how" as answered by the recognized (mostly ancient) faiths are wrong. I still want to know the answer to both questions. It's just my opinion that they are, as yet, unanswered by anything that I've seen. Hence, "religion is the opiate of the masses", as stated by Ben Franklin. It fills the void in us that would normally inspire us to explore, learn, grow and create. To me, it's a giant crutch for mankind's fragile ego. God forbid we not be the most important entities in the universe.

EvilRabbit wrote:

Finally, has anyone noticed that the believers can't spell?

Sub-par educations I guess.

Crazy Breed wrote:

World's most famous philosophical Atheist changes mind
11/06/07

When Professor Antony Flew, the world's most famous "philosophical atheist", announced in 2004 that he had changed his mind, it caused something of a theological earthquake. The aftershocks were amplified because it was further reported that he was persuaded by intelligent design.


Now he has published a book, There is a God, setting out his new position. He does not pull his punches: Richard Dawkins is engaged in an exercise of "popular mystification", he says. He also now believes that the presumption of proof is on the atheists to make their case.

He deploys a parable to capture something of what's at stake. Consider a satellite phone washed up on the shores of an island and found by a lost tribe. The tribe have had no contact with modern civilisation and have no idea what it is. However, they discover that some combinations of key punches lead to what sound like human voices being heard through the device. The proto-scientists of the tribe get to work on it and find that if they damage the phone in various ways that the voices cease. They conclude that the voices are an epiphenomenon of the phone's mechanism. A debate then ensues between the scientists and the priests of the tribe - the priests arguing that it could be that the phone is communicating with some other place. The scientists are not convinced.

Flew's new creed, in a nutshell, is that the universe was brought into existence by a superior mind - an infinite intelligence - as were the intricate laws of nature; and that life and reproduction originate in God. Contemporary science produces three reasons for thinking this: first, that nature obeys rational laws; second, that life emerged from lifeless matter; third, the very existence of the natural world itself. He still does not believe in an afterlife for humankind.

Three scientific puzzles have been particularly important in his change of mind: how did the laws of nature come to be; how did life come to be from non-life; how did the universe come into existence? Put together, these lead him to believe that the design argument for the existence of God can be formulated clearly. To put it another way, the universe is "reason incarnate", that incarnation being of divine reason - or as Flew has it: "The laws of nature pose a problem for the atheist because they are a voice of rationality heard through the mechanisms of matter." The universe as the mind of God makes sense of that.

Consider one issue, the so-called fine tuning of the universe. This is the observation that various fundamental constants have to be "set" to an unimaginable degree of accuracy for order and life to have emerged. One response is to propose the existence of a multiverse, which is essentially to say that somewhere all combinations of the constants have been tried out, we just happen to live in the place where they are right, as we inevitably would. Flew rejects this since saying everything is possible explains nothing, does not answer why everything is possible, and is a massively complex proposal to say the least. Intelligence behind the fine tuning, the laws and the existence of the universe is far simpler.

He also examines the current biological theories for the origins of life. Flew finds them unconvincing since, first they require the universe to have existed for far, far longer than it has; second they still don't explain how life can have emerged from lifeless matter. The deep philosophical question is how mindless matter can produce life, some of it conscious, with intrinsic ends and self-replicating tendencies. Putting it down to chance simply misses the point.

Further, there is good reason to think that all such issues simply fall outside the remit of science alone. Science presumes laws and so cannot ask how the laws came into being. When it does, it conjures up more laws, and so on, and so on. Flew recalls Einstein's comment that the man of science is a poor philosopher.

Incidentally, Intelligent Design, as advocated by conservative evangelicals, is not addressed head-on in There is a God. I suspect Flew wouldn't have much time for it as an alternative to Darwinism: divine intelligence, for him, is an issue where natural selection falls short, notably at the origins of life.

Needless to say, this is only to skim the arguments that Flew presents in his book, though he explores intricacies with admirable clarity. He is keen to point out throughout that the conclusion he has reached now should not be seen as a conversion. This is a wholly rational discovery of the divine for him - natural theology not revealed theology, in the traditional terms. Or as Flew says, he is just continuing to follow the evidence where it leads, as he has done across a lifetime considering the arguments about theism.

He says the book is his "last will and testament": he is a deist. The conclusion can provide only limited comfort to believers since his is the God of the philosophers, not Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. What is the case now, though, is that as he was once the chief architect of profound challenges to believers, he now does the same against atheism. His position echoes that of Einstein (who he goes to some length to "reclaim" from Dawkins in The God Delusion). Einstein said: "My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.'"