Sure, but what’s wrong with that? I pick the point that interests me. And then you descend into a polemical rant. “Cesspool”? Really?
And conveniently most of them are known only to you. I would be interested in evidence that Dawkins and/or Coyne are atheists because of “some element of the will”.
You must refresh my memory on that one.
I completely agree that Dawkins and Coyne are hostile to religion. So am I, in fact. But your claim was that they said “religion is the worst thing in the world”. Was that just hyperbole? And what does that have to do with willful rejection of God?
Yes, they do get a real benefit from denying that God exists. They get a good life free of unnecessary guilt, regret, remorse, shame, and fear that religion puts on them. Instead they can be freethinking moral individuals with a life full of purpose and meaning. It is way better way to live the only life that you have.
That’s ironic given it’s exactly what you’ve just done.
No, you said “In fact, on the question whether Paul wrote Hebrews, I have no preference”. Not " I have no preference at all regarding the scholars who write about Hebrews". That’s what I was responding to; your comment that you have no preference on the question of whether Paul wrote Hebrews. You can’t even remember what you wrote.
No, you just said it still had a place. You didn’t say that the two can be used together. You said narratology broke the monopoly on academic Biblical studies.
I want to see you say it.
These are typical weasel words from you. The issue is not about anyone demanding you conform to majority of opinion, the issue is you refusing to accept the consensus of properly qualified experts, and failing to justify your refusal. Scientific consensus isn’t significant by virtue of mere numbers; it’s significant by virtue of the process by which it has been formed.
As I noted before, this is the position of the fundamentalist auto-didact. You think you have the ability to survey any academic field and accurately conclude for yourself whether a consensus in that field is valid. This is the height of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
No that is not the way it should be. That is not rational thinking. The fact is you reject anything you don’t like, especially if it disagrees with your theology. Your standpoint is not rational.
Uh-oh, you hit on a pet peeve of mine. I’m sorry ahead of time for what follows…
Re: “purpose and meaning”
This does not follow logically in a no-God universe scenario.
For our lives/existence to have purpose/meaning suggests that our creation was deliberately intended with a given goal/purpose in mind. We humans don’t show up until billions of years after the cause-effect chain of events that resulted in our existence was already set into motion. So we cannot, after having been created and having no involvement in our creation, come along so late in the game and assign purpose/meaning to our existence retroactively. That doesn’t follow.
Or, in the words of Dawkins … “The is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have a universe that’s not deliberately created AND have a life with purpose/meaning. You just have to accept that our existence is pure happenstance with no purpose or meaning at all if there is no deliberate creator.
A forthright answer to your question starts with my amazement that @Eddie says “he personally knows lots of them”. As you have surmised, I thought I was just being diplomatic in acknowledging the theoretical likelihood that if you can think of a crazy theological stance… there must be someone who embraces it! I missed that part of the thread where Eddie mentioned knowing “lots”… and I’m a little surprised that he could possibly meet so many “proclaimed atheists” who Believe God Exists But Denies God. Did you two discuss whether that is actually Atheism? It sounds like Oppositional Theism to me… or something as simple as a Bronze Age army, fully convinced Edom has its own God… and they were going to invade Edom to take the land away from Edom’s God! That certainly isn’t Atheism!
Based on that information, my posting was much more important than I realized. I had initially thought Eddie was being uncharacteristically precise in how he expressed a viewpoint, and that you were being customarily overly scrupulous in interpreting exactly what he wrote. And so I wanted to highlight what I presumed Eddie’s real point would sound if written exactly for the presumed point.
Now I find I actually have to go through the entire thread (ugh… 227 postings so far)… so see what exactly is at stake between you two (at least for the purpose of this thread).
For practical purposes, I just don’t even worry about people who SAY they believe God exists but they Deny Him. Even if Eddie “knows lots of them”… I can’t believe they represent a significant part of Society or of Culture. So I guess it is worth my time to find out how these people ever got into the thread to begin with.
To further knit-pick your statement, we have to also take “freethinking” and “morality” off of the atheist’s table.
Morality should be pretty obvious. If there’s no God then there is no good or evil, there’s only what happens.
Freethinking, on the other hand, might not be so obvious. But, basically, if there is no spiritual element of the self, no soul, but just the physical elements of our biological make-up, then there is no “free” behavior of any kind. There’s only the action/reaction of cause/effect. Free will/ free thought is not possible. We can be nothing more than mechanized biological machines.
With a “soul”, or a spiritual self, there is an element that is not physical and is therefore not beholden to physical law/determinism. It is an element that is “free” to act as it wills.
Without God we can be nothing more than passive observers and cannot be active players in the goings-on of life.
Yes, I can. I am doing it. I am living my life with purpose and meaning in a Universe which has no purpose and meaning. Life processes on Earth have no purpose and meaning but that doesn’t mean that I can’t have purpose and meaning in MY life.
oh no you don’t. Morality is independent of religion. Today’s secular morality is derived from our inherent biological evolution to be empathetic, our powerful cognitive ability to reason, and our evolved culture and societies.
It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s inaccurate. Technically, if your parents conceived you for a particular purpose, then your existence would have a purpose. Their purpose.
It kind of makes your innards flex when someone tells you your life has no meaning or purpose. It offends us. Like Dawkins put it, it’s “one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn”. Wonder how that little personality quirk evolved.
I’m not talking about religion. Yes, we as humans attempt to define morality. It’s a subjective concept. But objectively, apart from the human psychological experience, there is no morality.
Sure, but my parent’s are deceased now. So my purpose is for my kids now and perhaps in the future my grand kids. And you are misinterpreting what Dawkins is saying. He is saying that nothing in nature is good nor evil. It is up to each one of us to define what is good and what is evil. I do that instinctively based on my life experiences and my own reasoning.
Yes, morality is subjective and ever changing. I am free to live according to my own sense of morality within the confines of my society’s laws and norms.
Only if there is a God and a soul. Otherwise, you can only be under the illusion you’re living free and according to your own sense of things. Matter doesn’t decide how to behave. It only behaves according to natural law. You can only be what’s been set into motion long before you were conscious of it.
You’ve mixed up two of the groups I was talking about. Regarding the ones that I said I knew personally, I wrote:
“Among others, most of my lifelong friends, whose minds I think I know better than you do, are cases of #3.”
Group number 3 is not the group that includes “willful” atheists. Most of the “willful” atheists are found in Group #1 – and even for Group #1, I don’t claim that all of its members are motivated by willfulness, and still less by selfishness or inclinations to vice. I don’t even claim that for the majority of its members.
Further, there is a distinction between those who might prefer atheism so that they can live a libertine lifestyle (which I think accounts for only a small fraction of atheists, at least of the more educated ones), and those who prefer atheism because they don’t like the theistic idea of God for other reasons. For example, they might hate the idea of a God who allows evil and suffering to exist in the world, and reject all theistic religion because of that. They might hate the idea of a God who performs miracles, and reject theistic religion because of that.
As for examples of letting one’s preferences determine whether or not one will believe in God, I already gave the example of Thomas Nagel, who is up front about his prejudice in his book. But it’s hardly to be expected that the majority of celebrated public atheists will say out loud: “Yeah, I admit that my atheism springs only in part from evidential considerations, and is largely shaped by my personal dislike of traditional notions of God.” I expect such frankness from philosophers such as Nagel (and it wouldn’t surprise me if the philosopher Ruse has said similar things, though I don’t know that he has), but the pretense that one’s beliefs about God are purely shaped by reason and scientific evidence, and have no roots in any personal animus, I find much more common in aggressive public champions of “science.”