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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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The world was created so people could eat rainbow sherbet. Most people think numbers, like 42, play a direct role in the creation of consciousness, which is the source of all original inquiry, but such inquiry is wholly unnecessary since the discovery of rainbow sherbet. All bow to it.
1:39 seconds in and I had to stop! Life is too short. As Hitchens says (paraphrase) "Religion is our first attempt to understand the world. Therefore, because it is the first, it is the worst!".
If philosophy is our second attempt to understand nature it is our second worst.
Last I checked, science and mathematics are pretty old too.
The difference is that science and mathematics stand up to logical analysis.
But they are ultimately based on at least some philosophical assumptions, so at least some philosophy must be true and legitimate for science to be legitimate.
Mathematics isn't based on philosophy. It starts with counting things. There's no philosophy involved in 2+2 =4 , even though people like you often try to make it 5. to say that science is based on philosophy is like saying that early science fiction led to the development of TV, mobile phones and space flight. It may sometimes look like that, but those things would have been invented anyway. A philosopher back in ancient Greece, about 300BC postulated that the reason you can cut an apple with a knife is because all matter is made of small particles and the knife blade can pass between those particles. He called them atoms. But that wasn't the reason that, centuries later, scientists developed atomic theory. That would have occurred even without the philosopher.
I know you say you do not want to paraphrase this Dumb Ox, but an hour long youtube video? It feels like work to watch all that. I could have 10 different interesting well typed out debates in the time it takes to watch that one video passively.
Also, if it takes an hour for someone to build and defend their point of view, when to me the counter argument is simple and takes 30 seconds to explain and defend, there is an issue there that points to the problem on the side of the hour long argument.
There's only an issue if the counter argument is actually good, which there hasn't been one made yet here and in other posts I don't think there have been many good rebuttles to similiar lines of argument.
P.s lesson to it on your way to work or something.
@ Dumb Ox
You wrote "P.s lesson to it on your way to work or something."
Don't you mean P.S.....LISTEN to it on your way to work or something.
I "lessened" to it as soon as I clicked on the site you posted. It is nothing more than rubbish and everyone should "lesson" to it.
I swear Dumb Ox, you find more BULLSHIT on the net than anyone I have ever seen. The problem is that you BELIEVE it!
If it is possible a First Mover exists, it is possible for there to be more than one First Mover.
No, not when you iron out what a first mover would be like. He speaks about that in the talk.
The prime mover could be a Cheshire Cat.
That cheshire cat grin in Alice in Wonderland haunts my dreams. (In the animated 1951 disney movie anyways.)
Certainly more scary to me then major religion's various god ideas.
@Chimp3
Yeah. If you look closely you can see the grin on it's face.
If a first mover is required, then a first mover mover is required. Any attempt to avoid that is just special pleading, almost by definition.
From my understanding on the argument from motion, if everything the moves is moved by another indefinitely, we'd have an infinite regress problem. Therefore, there had to be an "unmoved mover".
Kinda like a train that's very long. You'd look at one box car and ask what's moving that? The box car before it. Well, what's moving that? The box car before it and so on and so forth. If this goes on even infinitely, you still wouldn't have an explanation for why the box cars are moving at all until you introduce the idea of an unmoved mover. In this case, a locomotive to explain the motion of all these box cars.
So what?
-----------------------------------------------------
Why would motion need an explanation?
How exactly does the locomotive explain motion?
Since when are locomotives unmoved?
Can you give an example of an unmoved mover?
Ultimately the only unmoved mover or first cause is God. But a locomotive is analogous to a first mover in the sense that it gives a rational and proximate explanation for a chain of causes. So, to deny a first cause ultimately is essinetially the same as denying an analogous first cause when assessing the proximate cause of a chain of motion or causation.
What atheists do to get out of the cosmological argument is to say why can't it go on to infinity so there doesn't need to be a first cause? The thing is is that even if the chain of causes is infinite, something needs to have causation of itself and hence existence of itself to make any sense. It is the same thing as someone saying train cars that move do not need a locomotive because the train cars are infinitely many.
Begging the question.
Not in the context of the rest of my post and the audio linked to.
Dumb ox, you said, "Ultimately the only unmoved mover or first cause is God."
Did you come by this via faith?
By reason
Jon
How can something be unmoved and move?
I think there's a misunderstanding on unmoved and I can see why. Unmoved may mean two things:
- Not moving (no motion)
- Not being moved by anything other than itself.
I mean the second one. Think, the locomotive that pulls all the train cars. Hope this clears this up.
What you're suggesting violates momentum conservation.
This of course is an analogy, Nyar. You can argue that the the locomotive doesn't move itself. The fuel powers the engine to move the train's wheels which then pull the first box car, and so on and so forth. Also, the fuel isn't the ultimate cause of the motion of the train. We'd have to go to why this fuel has the potential to make the train move, etc.
Allow me to introduce another analogy. Consider a frictionless billiard table and you see that all the balls are moving and bumping into each other non stop. This goes on for days and months and years. You can do two things:
1. do nothing and accept that this is the case - not very scientific
2. wonder what caused the balls to be moving the way they are and come to a conclusion that someone probably hit the cue ball (or any other ball for that matter) - a first cause of this event.
it is much simpler. The locomotive can only move if the locomotive and something else's movement cancel each other perfectly. Notice: that will never lead to an unmoved mover or a first mover.
An unmoved mover is not a physical being made of matter. It is immaterial, so your comparing apples to oranges.
I couldn't agree more. But I'm not the one who started this ridiculous comparison between an unmoved mover and a locomotive; I'm the one who has been complaining about it. So perhaps you should direct your comment to someone else.
Also by postulated that the unmoved mover is immaterial you are returning to your question begging.
The point of the comparison is to show that infinite regress is not a legitimate explanation of motion or a chain of causes. In that it does quite good.
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