The Atheist Afterlife: p17-36Today's post covers pages 17-36 of The Atheist Afterlife, by David Staume.
The Secret Life Of ChaosJust a short one today: you heard of The Secret Life of Chaos yet?
If we say that "simple things give rise to biology and intelligence" then the premise that any designer God capable of designing MEST must be at least as complex as MEST seems fatally undermined. It is not required that explanations be at least as complex as the things they cause and reality contradicts that premise as well (TENS, Grand Canyon, etc.). If we deny the believer the luxury of defining God as "simple" we must either provide sufficient warrant for doing so, or stand rightly accused of special pleading.
What do you think?
*MEST = matter, energy, space, time
Phenomena / Consciousness ChartI made a chart to help visualize and clarify key concepts in our current discussion on consciousness. By no means is this chart intended to be exhaustive, but I think we’ve covered the basic categories of so-called AMP (anomalous mental phenomena), alternatively delta phenomena or psi. A red X indicates an alleged point of incoherence or contradiction between the respective phenomena (represented by rows) and model of consciousness (represented by columns). A green checkmark indicates an alleged point of coherence or support for the respective model of consciousness.
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Why Aren’t Less Science Students Atheist?After all, the general trend of science has been to reveal that things are exponentially bigger, infinitesimally smaller and vastly more complex than what was once beyond our weirdest and wildest dreams, right? I mean come on, beer galaxies? Really? Point is, there's always been far more to reality than we imagine. Instead of producing insurmountable discontinuities, the horizons of human knowledge and objective reality tend to expand astronomically. We used to think this world was all there was. We were wrong. We used to think this solar system was all there was. We were wrong. Some of us think that this universe and this existence are all there is. Especially in light of emerging evidence combined with past tradition, isn't there a reasonable chance that they, too, are wrong?