Atheists don't need faith

[EdithSimcox]

Atheists don't need faith

Lots of interesting things here including:

• nearly half of us are non-religious but less than a fifth are atheist...
• atheists need "simply more than can be proved by logic and science"

Any thoughts? A view I've often seen expressed on MN is that logic and science are the end of the subject.

I said - CLEARLY - that it is a matter of logic more than physics.

Logically, it IS a matter of sheer ridiculousness for anyone to look at our universe and think it was made for us.

That has nothing to do with physics, does it?!

The physics involved is all to with with the values of forces and what happens if they are weaker/stronger and so on. Where scientists differ on this matter it is for them to sort out...not me. And, quite obviously, not you either.

You, conversely, in every post you've made, have had to back down from the previous one because you've been shown to be logically and scientifically in error.

I wouldn't mind so much if you hadn't done exactly this same thing before. Come on to a thread to take issue with me specifically on the basis that you're a "theoretical physicist" and been shown up as someone really quite clueless.

Now you're embarrassed and trying to claw back some dignity. Stop digging....you blew it. Again.

And now I'm done.

As far as I'm aware, we've haven't had any prior interaction. The only other mumsnet thread I can find involving both me and the word "physics" is a discussion of []www.mumsnet.com/Talk/property/1887049-cooker-hoods cooker hoods]].

Oops, link fail. www.mumsnet.com/Talk/property/1887049-cooker-hoods

"The proposition that a creator exists is a possible explanation for the fact that physicists need to finely-tune their models to give universes like the one we see"

Complete nonsense. If your theory doesn't provide exact answers, that means your theory needs to be improved. Not that there is a God falsifying the results of your experiments!

Newton's theories didn't completely fit what we observe of the universe. Einstein filled in some of

Einstein filled in some of the gaps. Others fill add/modify parts to fill in more, changing our understanding of the universe.

There is no place at all anywhere in this process for a deity. I am flabbergasted that you can call yourself a physicist and make that frankly nonsensical claim: If a theory doesn't explain everything, that might be because there is a God. Huh?

Einstein actually said something prescient in the context of the current debate.

What I am really interested in knowing is whether God could have created the world in a different way.

The answer from string theory appears to be that ‘God’ could! So we have to bring in the anthropic principle to rationalize being in this world rather than another.

String theory provides an embarras de richesses and the possibility of a vast array of different worlds.

Not all string theorists are on board with the anthropic multiverse. David Gross describes it as not testable in principle, some speculative suggestions notwithstanding. (As a string theorist, he does think string theory is testable in principle.) Sean Carroll, on the other hand, who is supportive of the multiverse idea, posits the removal of the falsifiability criterion in the identification of a legitimate scientific theory – explanatory power might be sufficient in itself.

This would be a major departure from the way science is conventionally conceived.

Maybe that’s just how it is and we have to get used to such limitations.

But I think even if I were a string theorist I would at least want to find some way of paring down the complexity and sheer flexibility of it all. Selection criteria provided by a novel insight - independent of the anthropic principle - to whittle down the myriad vacua and attendant worlds of string theory would be welcome.

The ideas of Copernicus and Kepler allowed the increasingly convoluted theory of epicycles to be simplified and ultimately replaced, providing a good example of the process mentioned by contortionist.

Perhaps we are due another fundamental shift in our way of thinking.

And talking of epicycles, I'd rather like to sign off with another Einstein quote I'm fond of - despite being an atheist:

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses"—cannot hear the music of the spheres.

It might be worth noting, if we are going to talk about Einstein quotes, that he did not believe in an Abrahamic (or even just anthropomorphic) God and called such beliefs childish IIRC. He was at best an agnostic

His use of the term "God" as in his famous "God doesn't play dice" re quantum mechanics was not because he actually thought there was a God.

Absolutely Cote, he thought Christianity primitive, yet spoke of Jesus as ‘the luminous figure of the Nazarene’. He was able to separate the moral teachings from the story of a divine saviour.

He did not wish to identify himself with atheism.

His God was the God of Spinoza.

A fascinating combination!

I don't find it that extraordinary, tbh.

If you say God is nature, then it's not that hard to "believe" in it and marvel at its beauty, order, etc.

Since Spinoza wrote to a friend, 'As to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken', it is not entirely clear to me what his conception was.

I have often seen it written that he equated nature and God, but his position seems to have been more nuanced than that.

He certainly was not a religious person though.

Yes, it says so at the top of the Wikipedia page, but his view did indeed equate God with nature/universe/the order of things etc including human beings as part of it all.

It is quite clear from Einstein's extensive archive of letters that he doesn't believe in all that Spinoza believed in, his conviction of determinism in particular. Spinoza took an idea and embellished it into a nice but impossibly detailed story with the understanding of its time (17th Century). When Einstein was asked his views on God, religion, etc he sometimes flat out said that he is an agnostic and other times that he doesn't believe in an Abrahamic God who judges people and expects them to behave in a certain way.

You also have to think about the times he lived in and how he escaped persecution in Germany for being Jewish, then finding refuge in the US, which is quite a religious place. He may have had his reasons for not being terribly forthright in dismissing God & religion, although he did say in his letters that he found the God story of Abrahamic religions naive and childish.

I think this excerpt from a letter of his is interesting. He seems to be endorsing a 'transcendental outlook'. He also writes that he wouldn't try to persuade others that their conventional religious beliefs were wrong, even although he himself thought those beliefs childish.

He recognised that those beliefs, however primitive, were fulfilling a need.

We followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul as it reveals itself in man and animal. It is a different question whether belief in a personal God should be contested. Freud endorsed this view in his latest publication. I myself would never engage in such a task. For such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook of life, and I wonder whether one can ever successfully render to the majority of mankind a more sublime means in order to satisfy its metaphysical needs.

He recognised that those beliefs, however primitive, were fulfilling a need.
The need is for knowledge, which for some they find 'knowledge' though faith. I fill this need for knowledge though verifiable, evidence based sources, not faith. The word faith implies that it is not infact fact.

The point is that all humans form values and principals on the basis of faith. Humanist principals are no more empirical than theistic ones. We accept we a mind and free will and that certain acts or states of being are unethical without there being any scientific evidence for these assumptions.

Philosopher John Gray makes the point that enlightenment humanism is a Judaeo-Christian inheritance. It just substitutes soul for mind and holds that human beings are uniquely rational creatures. The idea of progress is also a development of the Christian narrative of fall, redemption and salvation. In reality, history is not a linear trajectory of progress. Tell liberals this and they react like fundamentalist Christians who are told their God does not exist.