Starboy

Greetings Ed,

I agree I do not see atheism as providing a rational explanation for existence of the universe, or morality or for anything else. Nor do I expect it to, since my kind of atheism is a-theism. What I use to inform my worldview is science. What do you use?

Starboy

Ed

Well I am back from vacation, sorry I took so long to respond. No, all things do not necessarily require a creator or cause. According to basic laws of logic regarding causality, something can be a cause without being an effect and therefore not require a cause. This is what God is. But most of the scientific evidence points to the universe being an effect and therefore requiring a cause. And the Christian God fits the characteristics for that cause.

Vorkosigan

Your first statement is untrue, but we'll assume it's true for the nonce. As far as anyone knows, any god and supernatural cause fits the characteristics.

tommyc

Laws of Logic regarding causality?
and what would they be exactly? I didn't know there were any "Laws of Logic". Please correct me if I am wrong.

tommyc

What evidence do you have that leads you to believe that God requires no cause, and that the universe does?

[Edited to be less patronizing]

[ August 05, 2002: Message edited by: tommyc ]</p>

Jack the Bodiless

All you're saying here is "there may be a First Cause".
This is what some people claim that God is. It is also what some people claim the Big Bang is.
...Except, of course, that it doesn't. Just about every claim relating to God's world-creating activities in Genesis has been shown to be baloney. We live in a world that wasn't created in the "Christian" fashion and has characteristics incompatible with an omnimax creator (imperfection, evil etc).

But I digress...

The title of this thread is "The serious problems of atheism as a worldview?". So far, no actual problem with "atheistic worldviews" has been presented.

diana

Thanks for that, Admiral. I've always wondered the same thing. In the same sense that it makes no nevermind to me if my grandmother shagged the milkman, I could give a flying fig where "all this" came from. None of it has the slightest bit of bearing on me and you right now.

Having said that, the most rational explanation for the existence of the universe I've ever heard is the simplest: that it has always existed. To postulate that some god--that we can't see or experience in any way--"always existed" and *poof* created it from nothing introduces complications that are unnecessary to explain the phenomenon. (Unless you're afraid to die, egotistical enough to believe you will somehow "go on" after death, and desperate to introduce "reasons" why your god exists, in which case it will suddenly seem far more "rational" to you to bring your unknowable god into the equasion.)

Seems to me, anyway.

d

Stephen T-B

Religious folk talk about their worldview meaning they’ve an explanation for what we are here for, where we come from and where we are going.
Ed knows the answer to these questions, and no doubt many more.
He also knows when to stop probing those answers, which is why he is able to continue believing them.
There’s something to do with simplicity v. complexity here: religion offers simple answers, but I am now convinced that the complex system of which we are part will always defy Human understanding. Man will NEVER know the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, and for me that is an immensely attractive idea. So my world view as an atheist / rationalist (if it can be called that) embraces complexity.
Ed’s world view - or should I say temperament? - rejects it.

Gooch's dad

Ed,

Besides your unsupported nonsense about 'laws of logic' and uncaused causes, I'll say this about your 'rational explanation for the existence of the universe'--

You haven't explained anything. To say 'God did it' has absolutely zero explanatory power. Let me use my favorite analogy.

Your teenager brings home a problem from their science class, and asks you for help: "Dad, how does electricity work to make a light bulb light?". What if your answer were "It works because I go and turn on the light switch, and the light bulb lights up."

Is that actually an explanation of electricity? No, you've simply said that some being turns a switch and it happens. That is exactly how you're trying to explain how the universe is rational.

So you have explained absolutely nothing. Thanks for playing, try again.

Jamie_L

Although we've departed from an earlier tangent, I'll go back to it briefly:

Atheism isn't a worldview because it makes no claims about anything other than the existence of god. As a worldview it would be problematic because it makes no claims, one way or the other, about the world.

To get on my soap-box: when many attack "atheism" as a worldview, they are really attacking metaphysical naturalism. It is reasonable to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of metaphysical naturalism as a worldview, because it is, in fact, a worldview.

So is that what the quote in the OP was getting at? The failings of naturalism as a worldview? If so, lets use the right terminology.

It makes no more sense to say "atheism has serious problems as a worldview" than it does to say "mathematics has serious problems as a cake recipe."

Jamie