How to explain there's another way of looking at it ?

This discussion is about a common mistake that new atheists make, trying to reconvert back nice girls in their life to atheism. It is one thing telling your girlfriend that you are a non-believer and another to make her see things your way.
My opinion is don't push it especially with girls. After all you wouldn't want her to teach religion to you.


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20/04/2004

Ron

how to explain there's another way to look at it ?

hi,

this girl i know (who's really cool), believes in god, which is fine with me, but she even said she believes in the adam & eve story, which i find so far fetched myself...

now, of course, she has all right to believe whatever she wants to believe, but how do i explain to her what's so unlikely about what she believes and why my atheist view on things would be something she should look into..

what arguments can i use ?

now again, i don't wanna "convert" her or anything, but i do want her to see another perspective and not believe what she believes without questioning it.

any advise ? any strong arguments ?

20/04/2004

Louis

What do you think is so far fetched about the adam and eve story?

remeber god refuses to prove his own existance so there is no real way to prove he doesn't exist. I suggest you ignore it and just talk about other things.

Unless she is trying to convert you, but even then, why bother? You aren't going to change her mind.

20/04/2004

Ron

smart thinking :)

and i'll try to get her to read this article: http://www.godlessgeeks.com/WhyAtheism.htm

it's great :)

20/04/2004

any advise ?

My advice is "Don't go there". You'll rue the day! Might as well go ahead and start rueing.

Also, you don't need to use the leading space before ? (and ! if you do that). :P

20/04/2004

Ron

i don't need to, i choose to :)

20/04/2004

Scott

I would simply tell her the truth - that I think religion is silly. Very matter of fact and non-threatening, non-challening. Smile. Laugh. Look slightly embarassed. But above all be totally honest. There's not need for wordy debates. I mean the basic idea here doesn't require a lot of exposition. We believe in things for which there is evidence... not in fairy tale, mythological, magical, pretend things like Adam and Eve. It's really quite intuitive and even relgious people "get it"... they either have sealed up their minds against the truth or they haven't. Not usually a lot you can do besides just "witness" with your own beliefs.

I'd like to believe, though, that there are "believers" out there that would be so stunned and captivated by the straightforward and honestly stated atheist position that they would find themselves enboldened to think about things a little more... and maybe even come around to our side over time.

20/04/2004

Chad-Michael

Gather a few atheist friends, dress in orange robes, and when she's at home sitting on the couch with a friend, burst in the door and yell, "No one expects the Atheist Inquisition!"

20/04/2004

Ron

[quote]I'd like to believe, though, that there are "believers" out there that would be so stunned and captivated by the straightforward and honestly stated atheist position that they would find themselves enboldened to think about things a little more... and maybe even come around to our side over time.[/quote]

exactly, believers are not that informed.. i mean, even i don't know exactly how life can suddenly exist.. i do know it's simply a matter of chemistry and physics. this completely evaporates the "miracle of life", which i think is no miracle at all, just a fortunate coincidence.

Some replies on this page have been deleted or are under review.

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21/04/2004

Ron

god and evidence

a quote from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God "for proves denies faith and without faith I am nothing".
"But," says Man, "the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own argument you don't. QED"
"Oh, dear", says God, "I hadn't thought of that", and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

21/04/2004

Cath

At the risk of thread-crossing, Kip, there's a huge difference between belief and worship. And also between belief and blind faith. Sometimes people confuse these and that makes arguments difficult at times. It is imaginable that one might believe in a god but not worship it.

I neither believe in nor worship any gods. I do believe, on the evidence, that dinosaurs are extinct, that there is sand on the beaches in Spain, and there is life on some other planet somewhere in the universe. But none of those beliefs involve worship or blind faith.

I also believe that Kip's name is not legally Kip, but is probably Christopher. I believe that less strongly than I believe the one about the sand. It's not like an evangelist's "I BELIEVE!!!!". Perhaps that's where the confusion comes from.

23/04/2004

Cath

Kip, not Christopher?

Kip, that's exactly why I used the analogy of your name, to point out that "belief" can be based on general principles, and is subject to revision. I now believe that your name is Kip. I'm still not 100% certain, because you could be lying. But I believe you, even though I've never met you or your parents or seen your birth cetificate. Do you think I should not believe you?

My point is that "belief" can be a provisional conclusion, with full awareness that further evidence may change that. Your 99.999% would seem to qualify to me as a common-sense belief, though not an evangelical Belief. I have a feeling that we would need to go and found (or join?) an epistemology group to hammer this out. If we really wanted to.

Meanwhile, I believe I'll have a cup of tea and some lunch.

23/04/2004

Befe

Why don't you just find a smarter girl. You may like this one now, but eventually she would drive you crazy: she's simply too stupid. Don't waste time; life is short.

Some replies on this page have been deleted or are under review.

showing 21-21 of 21 

24/04/2004

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733870/qid%3D1029423076/sr%3D12-1/103-0635351-8745463]

Seems relevant.

Looks like the back up idea is getting better quality-wise.

10 new religions

Another old thread based upon Pascal's Wager :

05/04/2004

Justin

10 new religions

Hi, I've started 10 new religions for those interested in Pascals wager.

Religion 1. In order not to go to hell, you must eat exactly one banana a day.

Religion 2. In order not to go to hell, you must eat exactly two bananas a day.

.
.
.

Religion 10. In order not to go to hell, you must eat exactly ten bananas a day.

Unfortunately if you choose randomly, the odds of you going to hell are 90%, and the odds of getting into heaven are 10%.

In addition, at any time in the future, I reserve the right to add additional constraints that may or may not conflict with your previous dogma, such as eating any bananas at all will damn you to hell.

Not everyone is a winner, but good luck everyone!

05/04/2004

St. Chris

But...what about all those poor Eskimos who've never even heard of bananas?

05/04/2004

Matt

Maybe it's time to launch an Arctic Banana Crusade. Convert the pagans to the church of Chiquita now!

05/04/2004

Chad

Great. Now I've got the Banana Boat Song caught in my head. I hate your religion.

05/04/2004

St. Chris

Day-O!

No, for me it's the banana song from Sesame Street, a much more agreeable little ditty.

Tell me, my friend, did you ever see
Banana growing on banana tree?
Well, you may see seven or you may see three
But you'll never see one alone. Count:

Chorus:
One banana, two banana
One for me and one for you banana
Count three or four or even more banana
'Cause banana can't grow alone

Well, this banana, she's a pretty sight
She wear a yellow dress in the bright sunlight
She got her friends and neighbors to the left and right
'Cause banana can't grow alone. Just count:

(Chorus)

Well, I think banana is like you and me
Needing friends and neighbors and a family
Let us take a lesson from banana tree
'Cause banana can't grow alone. Everybody sing!

(Chorus x2)

How can you not love a religion with Muppets?

05/04/2004

Dan

How can you not love a religion with Calypso?

No doubt the muppets do make religion more appealing. Or maybe it's the calypso. I find the books of Bokonon from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle pretty appealing, no muppets there, but the teachings are all in calypso rhythm:

Bokonon asks us to sing with him:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.

Books of Bokonon[http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html]

Of course Bokonon is up front about things that most religions try to suppress:

I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.

05/04/2004

Chad

I can dislike these types of religions thusly:

AAAH. It's stuck in my head. I can't think of anything else. Mental functions ... ceasing. Losign abliyt ot tyep.

*vacant stare* *drool*

11/04/2004

Chad-Michael

Mormon Python's Flying Circus

Speaking of Mormons, have you ever taken them up on their free copy of the book of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints? I did, just because it was free and so I could delight in saying, Thanks, but no I don't want to talk to you now.

I never made it far into the Book of Mormon, the supposed third testament to the Bible. It's freaking ridiculous! I'd subscribe to the Church of Chiquita and blindly sacrifice my first-born child to the Great Peel before being sucked into that Monty Python-esqe language written by someone who nibbled on the wrong damned mushrooms.

Ridiculous, I tell you!

Praise the Peel.

Some replies on this page have been deleted or are under review.

The case of Sun god

The remains of an illuminating but mutilated discussion from atheists:

16/02/2004

Dave

If I worship the sun, am I really an atheist?

I love the sun. I believe in the Sun. The Sun is not a god -- the Sun is way better than a god. I don't need no steenken god when I got the Sun.

So, am I an atheist? I'd like to think so, since that god bullshit is the biggest load of crap I've ever heard.

17/02/2004

Jon

I believe the ancient Egyptian god Ra[http://www.gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/egypt/ra.htm] is your deity of choice.

17/02/2004

Anonymous

Technically atheism is defined as "Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods". So believing the universe is a god is not atheism, and worshipping the sun as a non-god could be.

But the dictionary also mentions immorality under the atheism definition, and I take serious issue with that one...

22/03/2004

Kiki

since you stated that "God is BS". I think you are an atheist ;)

Some replies on this page have been deleted or are under review.

P.S.
My own feelings about the sun are pretty warm.

More interesting here

Another old topic ....

John

More interesting here

It's quite interesting to see the general makeup of the Orkut community. Most who are active can click on just a few friend links and quickly feel like 'yeah, i know most of these people'.

What will be interesting is how this will change as Orkut grows in popularity and, possibly, becomes much more homogeneous.

Right now it seems to be made up, primarily, of atheists and game developers.

So, here's my question. I am an atheist, like many here. I'm also a big believer in evolution as well as artificial life research and emergent behaviour in complex systems.

However, I'm also a big believer in the 'put up or shut up' philosophy.

Most of us in game development have a very strong engineering attitude. We make shit work, and while we respect the ideas that come out of academia we have little respect for their work ethic.

That lengthy preamble aside, I have a problem with academia and artifiial life. I see an awful lot of talk and very little action.

The premise is put forth. It sounds good but the actual implementation is missing! A few weak demos that explore the boundaries of mathematical space do not a truly complex system make.

To date must demonstration applications of evolutionary based models in action amount to little more than a heuristic applied to culling mathematical space. Sometimes you get some decent looking demos, but evolving something that feels truly original or 'new' is really lacking.

I'm waiting to actually see a demo that experiences puncuated equilibrium in the sense that I am shocked and amazed when I seem to get more information out of the system than was put into it.

There is this idea of the law of thermodynamics where you can't get more energy out of a system than you put into it. And, that rule holds true quite well. However, equating energy with complexity is not quite so simple.

In most cases when energy is injected into a system the end result is less information not more. In short, you blow shit up and you don't expect DNA!

12/03/2004

John

continued

...so that's really my point here. When you read the published works in academia on artificial life research it comes off with a a very pedantic tone implying that emergent behaviour 'just happens' with very little effort or energy.

However, to date, no one has actually produced any compelling results. A few flocking boid demos just don't cut it. Demos which apply a human created heuristic to explore the extent of mathematical space don't cut it either.

So, what is the problem? Is the premise flawed or is the problem that the simulations don't operate in an environment that is sufficiently rich to approach the complexity of the natural world?

If we have more powerful simluation tools will our artificial life simulations suddenly blossum? Or, will we only be exploring richer mathematics but not achieving anything akin to the 'spark of life'?

How does a giant explosion, the big bang, lead to complexity of information? Normally when I blow shit up it becomes less complex, not the other way around?

Is there even a mystery here at all?

I throw this challenge down. No artificial life researcher is allowed to write one more paper about how 'complex behaviour naturally arises from a set of simple rules' without reproducing something of equal complexity from similar initial condtions.

The simple demos seem to produce simple results. The complex demos seem to reflect the complexity of the software that was invested into by the by creative mind of the author rather than anything uniquely produced by the system itself.

As an atheist I am fundamentally a skeptic at heart, and colour me skeptical of these Alife researchers until they 'put up or shut up.'

12/03/2004

John

missing the point...

the premise from acedimia is that it's "all quite simple". "Simple rules produce complex behaviour". "Poof".

If it's so freaking simple, why can't they produce something other than a paper to pad their CV?

It's a reasonable question.

As I said, I actually believe the premise has merit becuase I believe the universe operates this way. I believe the universe operates this way because it meets my observations and personal experience.

The post was relevant to the discusion of atheism in this sense.

You can't get something from nothing.

You can't blow shit up and get DNA. It doesn't work that way.

The sum is more than it's parts.

The universe is and of itself a highly, highly, complex system. I think that's rather obvious since you exist within it and bother to question this bad boy. The Universe is god and is clearly responsible for everything that is, has been, and ever will be.

Why a researcher can't write a piece of software that can produce a decent looking anthill is beyond me.

12/03/2004

Oran

In defense of artificial life

I guess I'm an engineer who wants to be an academic, but I also want money now. Maybe I don't know the lit as well as you, but....

Have you seen avida? Perhaps it doesn't quite live up to your standard of getting a lot of complexity from a very simple system, but it’s interesting. It's an alife program with a virtual world of simple computers with a simple machine language. Organisms are programs that can propagate themselves, and programs are killed periodically for being unfit. Some things that are counted towards fitness are (a) how well they compute some reasonably simple function(s) and (b) how short the code is. The funny thing is, if you ask a programmer to come up with the shortest possible program to compute these function(s), it turns out that avida can produce shorter programs than programmers! OK, it's really not a practical tool for programmers. But it does let us look into the "physics" of life and evolution, if there are such physical laws.

And it turns out that what you might call punctuated equilibrium happens in the form of rare but revolutionary changes that rapidly spread and replace any programs without it. During the early phases, there is a rapid growth in diversity, but as the new approach is perfected by incremental improvements of small mutations, the population eventually comes to an equilibrium again... until bam, a scientist invents something that obsoletes the dominant engineering framework... er, what was I saying?

....There are some practical IP packet routing strategies in "swarm intelligence" using ant-like behavior....

Also, IMHO, boids are not artificial life -- not even "swarm intelligence" -- because they don't really try to do anything substantial that a slightly smarter boid couldn't do. What they are is a model of flocking behavior that may or may not be useful for behavioral biologists or game developers.

12/03/2004

John

Thanks Oran!

Thanks for the reference Oran, I'll check that out. Sounds very cool.

12/03/2004

> "Simple rules produce complex behaviour"

I've found that to be quite true.

But 99% of the time, the "complex behavior" is a bug.

12/03/2004

St. Chris

I'm still puzzled why this discussion isn't in, say, the Artificial Life forum -- but then, I don't hang out there, so it's cool to get a little of it dropped in my lap.

John wrote:
the premise from acedimia is that it's "all quite simple". "Simple rules produce complex behaviour". "Poof".

Well, yeah, if eleven billion years is "poof" to you. Or are the premises in a-life research irrelevant to physical science? Am I missing some nuance because I'm not in the field?

John again:
You can't get something from nothing.

You can't blow shit up and get DNA. It doesn't work that way.

Big Bang -> us. No?

John once more:
The Universe is god and is clearly responsible for everything that is, has been, and ever will be.

Waitwaitwait. Can you clarify your use of "god" there? Do you mean simply that the Universe is self-originated and self-governing? If you apply the g-word in that case, you seem to be advocating scientific pantheism -- which is a very nice philosophy, but isn't atheism.

I am interested in what you're saying, John. I just want to make sure I understand your terms.

Some replies on this page have been deleted or are under review.

P.S.
It took some six years but artificial life has been created. Craig Venter unveiled synthetic life in 2010. He had a precursor talk at ted.com. Wikipedia has an informative entry on the subject. Also exists an entry specifically on Craig's field. The public is only slowly waking up to the achievement.