The OP:Please note that off-topic posts will be removed without further notice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vautrin
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The OP:Please note that off-topic posts will be removed without further notice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vautrin
well, that's how I thought 'atheists' are, however, in any or all cases God does have a role in their lives...without whose mention the definition of an Atheist is not completeQuote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
I'd say modern science, which originated after the Renaissance, exposed philosophy as drivel. Now from my understanding, science up until that point was inextricable from philosophy. What we call, for instance, physics nowadays was still known in Newton's time as 'philosophy of nature'. I think science emerging as an autonomous field led the way to make philosophy redundant.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vautrin
On the other hand, the philosophy of Newton's time wasn't exactly the noble and useful philosophy of Socrates or Aristotles, which sought to explain the world through observation and experiment and invented syllogisms. It was better called Christian theology, devoted to the nature of God and closed to the physical world. It was the philosophy of Saint Augustine, Boethius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Rousseau - supposedly erudite men who filled countless pages about abstractions.
I find most philosophy after the Greeks and before the 20th century drivel. It operated on the assumption that Christian dogma was infallible, beautiful and natural. Philosophy dared not look at the world with objective eyes because all that mattered was in the bible; philosophers' roles was to reiterate, recapitulate, not question, its knowledge.
The 20th century philosophy of Mary Midgley, Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, John Rawls, George Steiner, Isaiah Berlin, etc. is infinitely more fascinating because: a) they're people clearly grounded on Earth; c) they have scientific approaches and draw knowledge from many fields of thinking; and c) they offer insight into the real world and not, for instance, the angelic hierarchy or the music of the spheres.
Marrying philosophy with science is the need of the day? But can we? is the question that intrigues all of us no matter where we are rooted, rationally, empirically, religiously, scientifically, theistically, atheistically, theologically, mythologically, spiritually, materialistically. We cannot fully be earthbound the way Russell and the legion following him. I am torn between the two extremes- God exist and God does not exist. So was and is Stephen Hawking, the physicist with his latest findings in the Grand Design. Of course the design is grand no matter it hailed out of chaos or consciousness in point of fact. I do not think science ever can solve this mystery.
Atheist, you sound a bit incensed and that makes you irrational in point of fact. You are THE atheist, the ideal atheist who can conclusively put forth the idea of theism and atheism, not even Stephen Hawking, the illustrious physicist could conclude in his famous book "the theory of everything"! This is a delusion – the atheism – delusion. Forgive me for my poor English!Quote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
Even Einstein was not against the idea of Impersonal God! You can keep on arguing through volumes of your squabbles over the matter.
Since English is not my mother tongue, coming from different cultures, for give me for any abusiveness in my language. This is limited to your particular post or opinion only.
Alright I didn't feel like reading 12 pages so I'm basically referring to the first post and I apologize if these views have already been espoused.
I don't quite know how to answer this question because I don't know exactly what it is asking but.... I would say philosophy is valuable fora few reasons.
1) It is interesting above anything else and so is entertaining but in a different way than say straight literature, or paintings, or music, or movies. So I think it enriches that tradition of understanding/entertainment.
2) I think there are some very cool philosophy of mind concepts that basically seem to be completely insoluble but give one interesting perspectives and things to think about, and I think particularly in the point that there are things that are unknowable but the us, at least with the nervous system we currently have. Things about qualia, the self and its continuity, personal identity, consciousness etc... are all pretty cool, and basically need to be addressed especially with the potential advent of AI, downloading your mind onto a computer, teleportation etc...
3) Morality is another pretty difficult question that philosophy seems to perennially address. And there are some very sticky things there in which it is difficult to come away with a wholly unified view, but which are very applicable to decisions etc... that we make every day. Animal treatment comes to mind. Advanced AI problems here as well. Abortion again.
Those are just things I think are interesting and important.
I'm sure Political Philosophy has some good stuff too though I haven't read much of it.
Basically if you are enjoying reading it I don't think its rubbish. If it is enriching your "soul" and demolishing and reconstituting your mental schemas I think it is not rubbish.
Neither incensed nor irrational - I would have thought the grinning emoticon would have given that away.Quote:
Originally Posted by blazeofglory
Also, you need to note that my argument is about the meaning of the word "atheist", not whether god/s actually exist.
Einstein and Hawking both had an eye on public opinion, which in the largest market for books in English - USA - is anti-atheist.Quote:
Originally Posted by blazeofglory
I'm quite convinced Einstein used "god" metaphorically, especially after seeing his personal letters on the subject of the christian one.
Hawking states that there is no need to inject god into the equation.
We're left arguing Spinoza's "god" which is a kind of Monty Python-esque default god for people who don't want to admit to atheism.
I've never seen any point in it myself - what use is a god who doesn't actually do anything?
Nothing abusive there - you need to try harder!Quote:
Originally Posted by blazeofglory
:D
Hawking has recently restated his support for atheism, and he's definitely always been a supporter of maintaining science secular and apart from commenting on political and religious matters. Since his book he has restated that he believes without a doubt that the universe would have originated the way it has simply as a product of the laws of physics, and that no God is necessary to explain the origin of our universe as is.
Atheism is a faith just like any religion let me show youQuote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
Atheism = faith that there is no god
As it is not known weather there is a god or not
Now you may say I am wrong and atheism is merely
Atheist = without belief in god/s.
So it is not a faith. But then I might say religion is not a faith as it is simply
Deist = without belief of absence of god/s.
I am moving this derail and your post to the thread specifically set up for that purpose:Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=54929
I don't think it works that way. I don't believe in the Easter Bunny, but that doesn't make me a member of the abunnyist religion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
I expected resentment from you. You proved me wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
Philosophy drivel? Nonsense! We cannot escape philosophy, it plants the seeds that grows into a garden of solutions, universally accepted or not. It is applied in everything do and understand. Even answers that are considered scientifically "factual" are not universally accepted. Every book you open, you are naturally invited into the author's philosophy, even if it contains some commonly known facts, not everyone accepts them.
Evolution began as a philosophy, as did relativity; all science begins as a philosophy until it is further rationally investigated as 'proof.' Where would we be today without the Age of Enlightenment or the revolutions? Would slavery and segregation still exist? It is our common philosophy of morals that has eradicated much of the 'evils' we have faced throughout history, even if some of these eradications were done with 'evil' (such as wars).The concept of 'right' and 'wrong' is only commonly understood, not universally. The whole world and everyone's way of living is primarily based on conjectures, I know everyone wants to be able to look at something and get a direct and concrete answer, but there may not be an answer without the question first.
Philosophy is only as good as what's practical. If you can apply what works and simply understand the rest, then philosophy isn't drivel at all.
I have no intention of reviving this ironically long thread, but I'd like to say something for the record:
Some might remember that I had a discussion in this thread with 'The Atheist', me supporting philosophy and him bashing it. After starting the book 'The Moral Landscape' by Sam Harris, I have come to realize that I was wrong. Probably not for the very same reasons the Atheist advocated, but still.
As Hawking said, "Philosophy is dead." The useful 'philosophy' (i.e. Singer's 'Practical Ethics' or Dennett's 'Consciousness Explained') better fits the category of science, for it comes to conclusions by means of rational analysis and experimental data.
There still remains a case for 'Philosophy of Science' and 'Epistemology', but since these subjects are dominated by postmodernism, produce confusion, and promote ignorance instead of answers, I come to the above stated conclusion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/bo...ewanted=1&_r=1Quote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
NYT October 1, 2010
Science Knows Best
By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH
THE MORAL LANDSCAPE
How Science Can Determine Human Values
By Sam Harris
291 pp. Free Press. $26.99
Sam Harris heads the youth wing of the New Atheists. “The End of Faith,” his blistering take-no-*prisoners attack on the irrationality of religions, found him many fans and, not surprisingly, a great body of detractors. In “Letter to a Christian Nation,” a follow-up prompted by the responses of Christians unhappy with his first book, he set out, he said, “to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms,” and so acquired, no doubt, more friends and more enemies. Certainly both books have had a wide and animated readership.
His new book, “The Moral Landscape,” aims to meet head-on a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against religion: that the scientific worldview he favors has nothing to say on moral questions. That claim often keeps company with the thesis, elaborated by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion have “nonoverlapping magisteria.” The authority of science and the authority of religion cover different domains, Gould thought, and the methods of each are inappropriate for the study of the other’s problems. Religion deals with questions about what Harris calls “meaning, morality and life’s larger purpose,” questions that have no scientific answers.
Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, holds the opposite view. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That’s because truths about morality and meaning must “relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and science alone — especially neuroscience, his field — can uncover those facts. So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what is necessary for humans to flourish, why not go to the sciences that study conscious mental life?
Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science — the right values being ones that promote well-being. “Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health,” he writes, “it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.”
But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.
In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what’s wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?
It’s not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path.
That’s the case even with something as basic as what’s meant by well-being. Harris often writes as if all that matters is our conscious experience. Yet he also insists that truth is an important value. So does it count against your well-being if your happiness is based on an illusion — say, the false belief that your wife loves you? Or is subjective experience all that matters, in which case a situation in which the husband is fooled, and the wife gets pleasure from fooling him, is morally preferable to one in which she acknowledges the truth? Harris never articulates his central claim clearly enough to let us know where he would come down. But if he thinks that well-being has an objective component, one wants to know how science revealed this fact.
Harris was a philosophy major at Stanford, but he is inclined to scant most of what philosophers have had to say about well-being. There is, for example, a movement in contemporary philosophy and economics known as “the capabilities approach,” which takes seriously the question of identifying the components of well-being and measuring them. But neither of the two leading exponents of this approach — the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum — gets a mention in the book.
The most compelling strand in “The Moral Landscape” is its unspooling diatribe against relativism. Harris insists that there are correct answers to all questions of right and wrong, regardless of anyone’s culture or religion. And, though some questions may escape our inquiries, many can be answered by science; none, he appears to think, can be answered without it.
You might suppose, reading this book, that this anti-relativism was controversial among philosophers. So it may be worth pointing out that a recent survey of a large proportion of the world’s academic philosophers revealed that they are more than twice as likely to favor moral realism — the view that there are moral facts — than to favor moral anti-realism. Two thirds of them, it turns out, are also what we call cognitivists, believing that many (and perhaps all) moral claims are either true or false. And Harris himself concedes that few philosophers “have ever answered to the name of ‘moral relativist.’ ” Given that, he might have spent more time with some of the many arguments against relativism that philosophers have offered. If he had, he might have noticed that you can hold that there are moral truths that can be rationally investigated without holding that the experimental sciences provide the right methods for doing so.
Still, there’s plenty of interest in “The Moral Landscape.” Harris draws our attention to the fact that “science increasingly allows us to identify aspects of our minds that cause us to deviate from norms of factual and moral reasoning.” And when he stays closest to neuroscience, he says much that is interesting and important: about the limits of functional magnetic resonance imaging as a tool for studying brain function; about the current understanding of psychopaths (whose brains display “significantly less activity in regions of the brain that generally respond to emotional stimuli”); about the similarities in the ways in which moral and nonmoral belief seem to be handled in the brain. I found myself wishing for less of the polemic against religion, which recurs often and takes up one entire chapter — he has had two bites of that apple already, and will soon be reduced to gnawing at the core — and I wanted more of the illumination that comes from our increasing understanding of neuroscience.
Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what we can and cannot expect from it, and a real contribution to the old project of a “naturalized ethics” would have required a fuller engagement with its contradictions and complications. Instead, the landscape that the book calls to mind is that of a city a few days after a snowstorm. A marvelously clear avenue stretches before us, but the looming banks to either side betray how much has been unceremoniously swept aside.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is the author of “Experiments in Ethics” and “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.”
sorry no url as recvd this in an email only