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Topic: atheist cat (Read 1279 times) |
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Silnaika
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Dead silence shall return.
  
 
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Re:atheist cat
« Reply #2 on: 2009-12-04 08:34:15 » |
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Religious people try to convert other non religious people, but non religious people even try to convert religious believer. Eventually, no one really knows who is right...yet.
If everything did start with a big bang, how did that big bang happen? and who made it happen? Lots of things can explode, but new species and univeries, etc, isn't created by them.
Its like that athiest cat in the picture thinking it is 'futile' because the other cat believes in something the ahiest ccat doesn't. Everyone doesn't have to agree on everything, but they will know the truth soon enough.
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A dead world is a free world.
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Hermit
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Prime example of a practically perfect person
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Re:atheist cat
« Reply #3 on: 2009-12-05 00:50:33 » |
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[Luci4]
Religious people try to convert other non religious people, but non religious people even try to convert religious believer. Eventually, no one really knows who is right...yet.
If everything did start with a big bang, how did that big bang happen? and who made it happen? Lots of things can explode, but new species and univeries, etc, isn't created by them.
[Hermit]
As much as we know anything, we know that the Big Bang happened.
(Courtesy Walter Watts
Quote from: Walter Watts on 2009-09-27 20:53:03 | Another great "Aha! moment" |
).
We know that the big bang instantiated space-time, and in the absence of space-time to speak of causation is futile as there was no "before" and no "after" as we comprehend it, and in fact space-time occurred significantly after the big bang (Refer
Quote from: Hermit on 2009-07-20 22:50:41 | Consensus Prehistoric Time-line |
). We hypothesize that the big bang was instantiated as a gravitational fluctuation in the background flux, that this happens all the time, and that this explanation is sufficient to account for the Big Bang, therefore, through Ockham's Razor, we accept this hypothesis as a working theory in the absence of evidence requiring a more complex explanation. Given that this formed our Universe, which is, by definition, the only Universe we can access (bar via Hawking radiation perhaps), we know that this is all that is required to instantiate at least one Universe.
From the Miller/Urey Experiment we know that all that is required to produce amino acids (the building blocks of life) is basic physics, sufficient material and energy, and time. The Universe is a big, energy dense environment which has been around for 13.7 billion (109) years -- more than sufficient time to instantiate life in many places. Which is why we find signs of life everywhere we look, including in meteorites and asteroids.
So, given that we can instantiate the building blocks of life using tiny quantities of material, energy and time, and have built self-evolving electronic circuits, proving that complexity can result from basic structures and simple rules, we do not need to accept fantastical explanations involving things no man has ever experienced to explain where we came from or why we are the way we are.
Do so for fun if you must, but always remember what Hypatia had to say about this. "All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final. Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrong is better than not to think at all! Fable should be taught as fable, myth as myth, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truth is horrifying! Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for truth -- even more so, since a superstition is intangible you can't get at it, but truth is a point of view, and is so changeable!" Hypatia of Alexandria 370-415 C.E. To this you can perhaps add Joseph Campbell's (1904-1987) "For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen sustained themselves against their enemies in the days when the serpent could still talk."
[Luci4] Its like that athiest cat in the picture thinking it is 'futile' because the other cat believes in something the ahiest ccat doesn't. Everyone doesn't have to agree on everything, but they will know the truth soon enough.
[Hermit] How are they going to learn if they cannot or will not study, or if their minds are filled with "irrationally held truths" which, as Thomas H. Huxley (1825 - 1895) observed, "may be more harmful than reasoned errors"?
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:atheist cat
« Reply #4 on: 2009-12-05 01:48:15 » |
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Quote from: Luci4 on 2009-12-04 08:34:15 | If everything did start with a big bang, how did that big bang happen? and who made it happen? |
[Blunderov] "Who"? There does not seem to be any good reason to posit a personality as being the agency behind the causation of this universe.
Here "at the still point of the turning of the world" (to malapropriate Eliot) we must needs enter into the shadowy realm of metaphysics. At least there is a form of this mode of enquiry which has the great virtue of being consistent with everything that is known about mathematics namely String Theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology
In short, there are mathematical reasons to suppose that our universe was sparked by the collision of two Branes. There are no reasons at all to suppose that somebody "did it".
Best Regards.
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