It just might be a one-shot deal

Part 2 of answering to answering these questions from Dr. Michael L. Brown

Dr. Brown's questions are:

1. Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?
2. Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?
5. Have You Questioned Your Atheism?
6. Are You Materialistic?
7. Would You Be Willing to Follow God?

This afternoon's offering is #1 - Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?

Both.

I grew up in a nominally Christian household, but my father was Lutheran by family tradition, and a non-participant in practice. My mother was Episcopalian by choice, so we children assumed that the Episcopal church was our flavor of Christianity. I did not have a fervent belief in God or Jesus until around age 21, when I became Born Again and joined a Four Square Pentecostal church. I aspired to be the best Christian I could be, and started by reading the New Testament word-for-word. So far, so good ... Jesus was the man. 

The next step was to get the background that (I assumed) only the Old Testament could give me, so I read that word-for-word as well. This is where the trouble starts. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins (of whom I was not familiar until 25 years later), Yahweh was a reprehensible character, and his actions absolutely betrayed what fellow believers told me I should believe about him. How could Jesus represent this cosmic dick? It was time for a quick reassurance that Jesus was good, and that Yahweh was not that relevant to one's place in the world and potential salvation. So I reread the New Testament.

After reading NT, then OT, then NT again in fairly quick succession (8-12 months?), I stepped away to get perspective. Far away. It would be another ten years before I would reconsider my rapid conversion, then deconversion. 

In brief, Round 2 was circa 1985, and included another reading of OT, then NT in fairly crisp order. I may have had a little outside study - it would have been only about who wrote the Bible, and when, but it did not reaffirm my earlier faith that God exists and that Jesus would save my soul.

Round 3 was mid-1990's, and occurred after I had gotten married. Same result as mid-90's, added by more internetz to highlight some of the issues (problems) such as the Synoptic Problem. I don't know that my wife ever knew about any of this until the last 10 or 15 years. She, btw, was never a believer, but neither did she consider herself an atheist. She just saw no reason for belief.

Round 4 was circa 2011, OT then NT again, and included an on-line Bible study group of both atheists and believers. I also took on-line courses (Yale videos, Great Courses CDs) and still more independent roaming the internetz.

That is it for me. There will be no more agonizing re-appraisal of religious beliefs. The idea that this is a physical universe behaving in accordance with observed "laws", and contains nothing supernatural, does not trouble me. To quote the great philosopher Frank Zappa, "it just might be a one-shot deal".

I can be wrong about some or all of this, but I don't think so. I don't see a reason to waste time on worry.

Questions about atheism.

 I ran across a tweet in my Twitter "Thinkers" list that got me thinking. Darn the luck!

A response by @RealAtheology (here)  to some questions by @DrMichaelLBrown got my blood going, and serves as an excuse to continue the train of thought that I left at the station in 2016 (here)

Dr. Brown's questions are:

1. Is Your Atheism Based on Study or Experience?
2. Do You Have Purpose and Destiny?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Can Science Explain the Origin of Life?
5. Have You Questioned Your Atheism?
6. Are You Materialistic?
7. Would You Be Willing to Follow God?

Although no one asked my opinion, I'll consider question 3 to be "Does God Exist?", and touch on the others in another post soon.

Since I can't say definitely that God does or does not exist, I'll consider it as a evaluation of my belief that the proposition "God Exists" is true.

First, I use the term "belief" as meaning "a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing". Specifically "a state of mind in which confidence is placed in some thing" ... the "thing" being the proposition that God exists.

Assuming that absolute knowledge is not possible, and that absolute certainty is thereby not possible, I end up establishing a credence value in the range 0.01 to 0.99, much as you might see a probability value expressed for some scientific topic. Mind you, I don't do this every day. Ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the time, "credence" and "probability" are just not things that pop into my head.

So, about that credence.

For this post, I presume God to be the omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omnipotent creator of the universe and judge of all mankind. Let's examine only what the "creator of the universe" part means. First, if I accept that Genesis is notionally worthwhile as a starting point, God exists before the world does. That presents us with a puzzle, since we have to presume there is a realm occupied by God in order to perform the work of creating the heavens, the earth and all of creation. Taken literally, Genesis 1:1 through 1:31 doesn't reflect what humanity knows to be the case. What do we do?

It's here that I might estimate whether Genesis through verse 31 has a high likelihood of being true. It's helpful to have some other benchmark that can be used for comparison, so that, for example, claim A.1 can be said to be more or less likely than competing claim B.1.

Let A.1 be "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.". Then let B.1 be "The universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature."

Claim A.1 has as a prerequisite that there be a thing called God, while B.1 requires that there be space-time, matter and energy, and the physical laws that describe the interaction, structure and behavior of these. Right off the bat, we are presented with the bare assertion that God exists, in order to get to Genesis 1:1, the creation of the heavens and the earth. Likewise, the believer should ask, why is the pre-existence of "space-time, matter and energy...etc"  any more plausible? In both cases, you need a starting point.

At this point, you could make the claim that God is a simpler proposition than "space-time, matter and energy, and the physical laws that describe the interaction, structure and behavior of these" - thus Occam's Razor tells us God is a better starting point. But that's a gross over-simplification of God.

If we're being fair, claim B.1's prerequisites are also at question. Where did they come from? The main Big Bang models (the expansion of space; particle horizons; thermalization) do not make claims as to the provenance of the Big Bang prerequisites, but they can be observed and measured so that we can verify that they pertain in all cases. Can we put God on that same footing? Let's try.

Given that the prerequisites for claim B.1 are assumed to be real because they can always be verified under close examination, can we then make the claim that "God is assumed to be real because it can always be verified under close examination?"

This is where we run into a problem. For someone that conceives of reality as space-time, matter, energy and physical laws that describe them - no corresponding description of God - that I can find - is testable and would yield a confirmation. It sounds labored and dismissive to say, but proponents of God's existence never walk over to a window and point to God  directly. They never point to a flower and say God made that, and here's how. They never hop into a car and drive you to an institute of higher education and sho off the observations that could lead us to verify God's existence. Yet, you can go to a biologist and ask them to describe how the flower germinates and blooms, how it propagates for reproduction so that its species can persist. They can describe the chemistry that is required to perform these activities, or can defer to chemists who can explain the chemical activities in detail. The chemists can refer to the physics that describe how chemicals come to be, and cosmologists can then describe how the elements and molecules, monomers and polymers come to be so that chemical processes can take place. Cosmologists can also describe how the structures of the universe - stars, galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids etc. - come into existence. All of this can be traced back to a hot dense state in the universe some 13.8 billion years ago. 

So you can "net it out" by comparing the two claims and how well they explain the features and behavior of the universe. Claim A.1 relies on God, whose existence is more or less proposed in the Hebrew Bible, and assumed to be true by Hebrews, Christians and Muslims. God is assumed to be responsible for, or a participant in the narrative put forth in the Old and New Testaments and the Koran. You can somewhat infer what God is and what his leanings are by the writings in these books, but it is neither accurate, precise nor consistent in the way that a description of a chemical process (derived from claim B.1 and its results) is.

On this basis alone, I feel that God - as described in the Bible - very likely does not exist.

Hello World - 2022 version

I've spent more than six years not blogging. Is "not blogging" an activity that one can be said to spend time on?

One of the things I noticed this morning (Monday, 9/26/22) is how good it made me feel to consider a topic, draft an outline, and fill it out so that it says (what I hope is...) what I intended when I first conceived it. I'm a little rusty, but we'll see how it turns out.

Post #2 in this decade ... coming up shortly.