Enjoy.

Now you’re talking my language. I’m not of the Atheism that says “there is no God,” I’m more of the type who thinks god is a personal manifestation.

Cheers, Quaker. Good discussion.

Second.

Believe me, I know.

Try telling that to the vast majority of people. They are (wrongly) going to look at you like YOU’RE the crazy one. But I understand your point – at least I think I do.

I wonder if we understand each other at this point. I think so.

Cheers, Quaker. Good discussion.

Smaller every day, yet still far greater than the universe we can explain.

if this was their mindset, there wouldn’t be more than a single religion.

And in my estimation there is just one religion. Unfortunately, we have a mulitiplicity of failed expositions of it.

That is fascinating.

I would like to point out, for the record, that if this is what theists did, that I too would have no problem with it. However, this isn’t what they typically do – if this was their mindset, there wouldn’t be more than a single religion. Things like Christianity and Shintoism and Hinduism would cease to exist, if believers in “God” were simply acknowledging and naming the unknown.

I’d also like to point out that your line of reasoning sounds remarkably similar to thoughts I had years ago that led me to dismiss the notion of free will. But this is perhaps another rabbit hole…

Not to take this already-too-long thread down a different rabbit hole, but I think Mr. Lizard and Mr. Squirrel actually do a little better than those mundane preoccupations. Unlike Mr. Descartes, I don’t think “consciousness” is the same as perception of “self.”

Sort of. An ordered universe is real. Consciousness of that universe is real. But I think anyone who looks for a creator “God” that exists external to either is looking in the wrong place.

I think anyone who tries to define man or man’s consciousness as external to that universe makes the same mistake. There are properties of the universe–natural properties, not supernatural–that are unexplained by current science. The possibility that they may one day be explained does not make them any less mysterious or mind-shattering. That someone chooses to label those properties “God” means nothing to me.

but we digress.

Your typical Buddhist doesn’t believe in Yaweh. The Buddah himself did not proclaim himself a god. He did not teach anything about a creator or the source of creation.

Are Buddhists also athiests? Is Buddhism not religion?
There’s exactly as much evidence for reincarnation and nirvana as for Satan, angels, and heaven: none. Clearly, Buddhism is a religion; the question is, is it also atheist?

Well let’s be careful not to conflate the two common uses of the word ‘atheism.’ In one use, atheism means, literally, not-theism: the lack of belief in a deity, and under this definition, yes, Buddhists would be considered atheists.

But there’s another, more vernacular definition of ‘atheism’ which implies a skeptical, disbelieving, rational materialism, and under this definition, then no, Buddhists would not be ‘atheist’.

I suppose there’s no rule that says you have to be entirely rational to be an atheist; probably a non-negligible fraction of the people who believe in the loch ness monster or UFOs would consider themselves atheist, even though there’s no concrete evidence for believing in those two myths either (although they’re a lot more believable than most or possibly all religions, if you ask me – UFOs are at least not self-contradictory!).

If you wanted to, you could fairly say that Buddhism is an atheist religion, but I hope if you do, you take care to clarify what definition of ‘atheist’ you’re using, because lots of people are going to misinterpret you if you don’t.

Now see? There you go again.

Are you talking about Yaweh of the Old Testament? OK. But still there are some questions to which you answer “I don’t know,” and those questions are substantial.

At the VERY least, I am ruling out Yawweh, Jesus’s dad, Allah, The Great Old Ones, and also whatever creation myths the Egyptians, Mayans, Incas, Hopi, etc etc etc etc have ever come up with. Any religious creation claim stronger than Thomas Jefferson-like deism is patently absurd, and no more intellectually defensible than flat-earth creationism.

When I say that “God did it!” could never be the answer (to the fine-tuning question, and others), I mean that it can never be an intellectually satisfying explanation. It’s just what someone says when they’ve given up looking for a real answer. It is, literally, a Deus Ex Machina escape from the “I don’t know” dead-end, and the sign of shabby reasoning.

If you accept “God did it” as the explanation for anything unknown, then if you are intellectually honest with yourself, you have to accept it as the answer to everything unknown, because you have no grounds on which to dismiss it in the one case but not in the other.

Or, to put it more succinctly: miracles aren’t science, aren’t reliable, and never can be, by definition.

Not better, no. Just different.

If you remove the eye do you also remove the world it perceives?
Objection. Relevance. What does vision have to do with conciousness? Does a lizard contemplate his place in the cosmos? Does a squirrel think he’d do better if he had a better job?

It’s not hard. One of the many functions of the brain is to give rise to consciousness, much like the eye’s function is to give visual information about the world. Cognitive scientists are studying this phenomenon right now.

In no way does your example somehow refute my argument that we cannot know the nature of the supernatural.

What I said is anything but ignorant

mambochicken23, if you honestly believe calling all Christians unreasonable and illogical isn’t ignorant…then you need to seriously redefine your idea of ignorance.

If you remove the eye do you also remove the world it perceives?