The flipside is we’d have to believe all the bad shit was planned. The Crusades, Pilate, Hitler, Stalin, Jimmy Fallon…
Yep.
1 Like
Is that what you truly believe? I’m not necessarily agreeing nor disagreeing with you since I don’t really think about these things, but I just want to know your real perspective.
What do you mean by living like they have free will?
Thinking they are making their own decisions?
But assess what goes into that.
We are a collection of experiences that have been imprinted on a bunch neurons in our skull.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
I did not choose the 46 chromosomes I inherited from my parents.
Those chromosomes are the template that dictates my predispositions. It’s the baseline for what my personality will be like. What my behaviour will be like. If I like to smoke tobacco. If I like coriander. How I cope with stress. Etc.
Everything else is just that computers response to one experience after another.
Which if you were sufficiently able to breakdown the components of the computer you could easily predict ever single response.
It is exactly like the comparison DT made to the pool table.
Our consciousness. The brain in our head. Undisturbed by the environment it is a pool table with millions of pool balls.
But instead of being hit by the cue ball once. It is hit by hundreds maybe even thousands of cue balls such that it looks like chaos.
The cue balls being all the experiences with have from our five senses.
It looks like chaos. It looks random.
But it really isn’t.
How does one live like they don’t have free will?
You would never be able to tell. Plus it does not feel as though you are not making your own decisions.
Hence the illusion.
I don’t think we have free will.
But I don’t care.
The illusion is sufficient that I need only think about it when the topic comes up on Tnation.
2 Likes
Hey, hold on, I’m just throwing out ideas in my head that I mostly pulled out of my ass at the spur of the moment for the sake of conversation. I’ve not even really thought any of them through yet lol.
And to be honest, I’m more inclined to believe in free will. This isn’t based on logic, but rather, faith in religion so I can’t really debate this part.
1 Like
That is basically what I think.
1 Like
Ah shucks, I haven’t really settled on soteriology, so I don’t know. Just adopting a Calvinist view for the sake of this discussion.
I think many Calvinists would say these things are natural to depraved physical man. They’re just going to happen one way or another, but without any ultimate purpose at the end. And, that being totally depraved we all, on our own, would deserve the same fate. Total annihilation, even. If, anything, his plan has restrained the full extent of evil we’d otherwise carry out on each other. That in this way, there is a plan and purpose to suffering.
That doesn’t come near to doing it justice.
John Piper, Tim Keller, the late RC Sproul, James White. All good Calvinists to read or listen to.
1 Like
This both terrified and mesmerized me at the same time when I first saw it several years ago.
I understand that theists are going to say this cannot possibly have come about randomly without a God while atheists are going to say the opposite but let’s just admire this shit FWIW.
I did. Pulled the ol snatcheroo. My mind was extremely advanced during my first trimester, so much so that I had the will/supernatural ability to pick whether I’d be born with a penis or not. I also chose to be of short stature and riddled with chronic pain.
1 Like
Terrifying is an understatement.
This scope and sheer magnitude is incomprehensible to the human mind.
It reminds me of something Richard Dawkins said in The God Delusion. Something about how humans minds have evolved to perceive the middle world. We struggle to grasp the universe on the microscope and atomic level and we struggle to grasp the universe on galactic level.
1 Like
The universe is supposedly 93 billion light years in diameter, with one light year being almost 6 trillion miles. Our entire SOLAR SYSTEM is less than a “tiny speck”(the term people normally use to describe humans when speaking about religion) in comparison. It’s a tiny speck of a tiny speck of a tiny speck of a… you get the point. If that doesn’t blow one’s mind, nothing will.
After I watched the GIF you posted I looked up the largest star at the end, Canis Majoris.
Apparently it would take 16 hours traveling at the speed of light to travel around the circumference of it.
Versus the 14.5 seconds it would take to do that on our sun.
1 Like
This is all without even taking Quantum Theory into consideration.
From my POV, it increases my faith in religion since I don’t really take the bible at face value(that’s all I’m gonna say). For atheists I guess it shows the opposite and I don’t think that would be an unreasonable conclusion from a logical perspective.
(random fly by post lol)
Joni Mitchell wrote these lyrics in frickin’ 1969! (the song Woodstock):
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
Watch this series if you can (spoiler alert -modern day physicists agree LOL), I’m bad at science, this is the only type of “interpretation” I understand:
https://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/how-the-universe-works/
1 Like
Yeah I know next to nothing about quantum theory. My education mainly focused on biological systems with an emphasis on molecular physiology. I did really well in physics. As far as Newtonian physics goes. But that is middle world. Very easy to grasp conceptually.
The smallest scale I ever was exposed to was atomic theory. In undergraduate chemistry. Learning about orbits and electron configuration.
In religion or in an entity we might label as god?
That is interesting because the more experience I’ve had the more I’ve grown to appreciate the “face value” of religion. In my opinion its the only thing of any value from it.
Its not necessarily a factual true book. It does not provide a good explanation of naturally occurring phenomena. But of course it would not be. It was written by people thousands of years ago.
I’ve harped on about this plenty but it is important because of the story it says about our history and our value systems. I will defer to any of the number of videos put out by Jordan Peterson. He does a great job.
1 Like
I know balls about any of this shit myself other than it exists and is recognized by science. I only studied physics up to secondary level.
Not gonna discuss my personal beliefs, just gonna say religion.
Agreed. The only thing that I do not accept is when religious people say that atheists TODAY will fuck up society since all these values and systems have been set up and maintained for thousands of years.
Whose to say. Only time will tell.
We are running an experiment right now. As we deviate from what has been the standard for a substantial amount of time now.
Some have alleged that there are events in the past that might suggest it will fuck up society.
Off the top of my head. One lady discussed how the normalization of androgynous gender identity in society often preceded societal collapse. She went on to cite several examples.
Could be bullshit. I am not an expert. But it is an interesting notion.
1 Like
I don’t know myself. My study of biology is also only up to secondary level.
What I think is that religion will never go away even with the increase in atheism, and the atheists will not want to deviate too far from the norm simply for the sake of stability since our standards of living in the First World is currently so high.
EDIT:
The rise of communism in other countries was during times when the poor were REALLY poor and it was the socialist dictatorships that were created that tried to eradicate religion to maintain allegiance to the State, not the people giving up religion prior to the revolutions to embrace communism.
People need it for hope to deal with death, loss and despair. Even the rich Chinese people who aren’t really religious pay good money for fortune tellers every year to help them make decisions for the coming year.
This normalization of gender stuff is more towards the social science area. I don’t have much respect for social science. Just my opinion, though.
2 Likes
Why should a deity be antrophocentric? You devise basic laws - aka physics - run the simulation/process/whatever and if there’s some progress in terms of intelligent life on a speck of dust somewhere you drop by and you just observe or maybe nudge in a specific direction here and there.
I don’t know and I don’t like thinking about this stuff lol. Faith in religion to me isn’t logical and none of this makes me more of a believer although I know it will do so for lots of other religious people.
EDIT:
I should add that what I meant was that would increase my faith since I’ve already a believer, not decrease it. It wouldn’t turn me into a believer if I didn’t have faith in the first place.
1 Like