Reply to Why don't you believe in God?

Forum Index » Religion

Reply to "Why don't you believe in God?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote: 
Anonymous wrote: 
If you don't believe in God, do you believe in souls? Do you think you have a soul?

I don't believe in souls or think that I have a soul. Souls are a religious concept - no evidence of their actual existence.

There is no "evidence" for love, either, but I'm guessing you believe in that. [/quote

Actual PP here. There is evidence for love. Emotions can be observed using brain scans.

No, love can't be seen on a brain scan. The brain's reponse to love can be seen on a brain scan. Big difference. Kind of like a lightbulb shows electricity. Giving off light is just a symptom of electricity. The brain's reaction to love is just a symptom.

You'll want to show why that "brain's response" isn't "love", but rather a symptom. That's like arguing there's no such thing as "blue": only wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and brain responses. [/quote]

What is arguing that?  There is no way to prove that what I see as "blue" is the same thing you see as "blue." We can prove that blue = certain wavelengths and that eveyone can look at something and agree it is blue, we can't know what the other is seeing.  We just can't.l

On a lighter note, this is often why I think there is "a lid for every pot" in the dating world.  There are plenty of people out there who are dating and even married who I think are h i d e o u s.  But someone else looked at them and thought "woah, gotta get me some of that." That is pretty good proof that we don't all see the same things.  [/quote]

And yet, we know that there is some objective phenomenon out there that maps to "blue".  That's because, notwithstanding a small percentage of humans with a physical condition, people largely agree about the color "blue".  This is actually pretty obvious.  If you and I are looking at something blue, and a third guy comes along and we ask what color it is, without a hint, he'll say blue.  So it's nowhere near as ambiguous as you make it seem.

Anyway, this whole "you can't put a microscope on 'love'" is a bit of a distraction.  You can't put a microscope on fun, disappointment, or ennui, either.  Do they exist?  They're not evidence of the ineffable mysteries of the cosmos.  Again, they're poetic license applied to emotional states.  Hooray for those states!  Still not evidence god exists, though.[/quote]
Oh, you can say that about blue.  [b]But then you would flunk introductory philosophy.[/b]  We can't prove that our representation of reality is objective.  Even if we both say "blue", that does not mean that our mental representation is the same.[/quote]

Possibly.  Of course, once you get past introductory philosophy, this kind of sophistry becomes less and less useful.  In short, it doesn't matter whether or not our mental representation is "the same".  The experience of "blue" is obviously similar enough.

Folks who appeal to Philosophy 101 with Freshman dorm claims about how all representations of reality are subjective love the color argument.  But why is is that those who propose the swapped colors idea always do so for experiences that lie on a one dimensional scale? What is so holy about shuffling colors inside a spectrum? Why not shuffle all sorts of experiences arbitrarily? Maybe your internal experience of redness is the same as my experience of a low piano note. Maybe your internal experience of watching a soccer game is the same as my experience of watching basketball. Or the same as my experience of wrapping Christmas presents. I hope that this sounds incoherent to you and that you can move step-by-step backwards to the swapped colors idea.

The swapped spectrum idea is a glorious mix of guts and timidity. While it boldly denies the physical worlds relevance to what we feel inside, it meekly limits itself to a one-dimensional spectrum, and to the electromagnetic one to boot. The sonic spectrum is too tied to physical events like shaking and vibrations for us to give the idea of a swapped sonic spectrum any creedence, and if one tries to carry the idea beyond the one dimensional spectrum, it rapidly decays into absurdity[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics