Originally posted by element771
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One difference I noticed myself with how this plays out in practice is the comprehensibility (or lack of it) in departmental seminars. Anyone off the street or any university student could sit in on a seminar being given by a philosophy academic about their latest research and have a pretty good chance of understanding most of the seminar. Whereas if a professor from physics were to sit in on a chemistry academic's seminar the chances are fairly good they really would struggle to follow the talk, because they lacked the huge amount of specialized knowledge that are involved in scientific fields.
I have no problem with the purpose of the book. I don't have any major problem with his science.
I am not entirely sure that I consider him to be a proper scientist. I know that people will have a stroke when I say that but he publishes books instead of peer reviewed manuscripts. Is that a proper scientist?
I have a real problem about how he uses science as a philosophy. What I mean by that is that he thinks that science is inherently atheistic. In one sense, I agree as science is based on a methodological naturalism. On the other hand, to claim that science naturally leads to atheism is a ridiculous claim.
Knock yourself out if you want to be an atheist but if you are going to be an atheist, it should be based on sound arguments and not the ones put forth in TGD.
1. I don't find any of the various common philosophical arguments for the existence of God compelling.
2. I think the problem of naturally-occurring pain and suffering (disease, earthquakes etc) makes it highly probable that a very-powerful very-benevolent God does not exist.
3. I think the major monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) have serious internal problems with their holy books, e.g. containing lots of errors, teaching lots of bad things (Genocide of the amelekites, pro-slavery, "Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!", anti-homosexuality, etc)
4. I've never come across any claim that a miracle occurred that I found sufficiently evidenced to be convincing. And I think that the modern information age (youtube, mass media, cellphones etc) seems to indicate a distinct lack of well-attested miracles occur worldwide. And while theologians can try to explain this away (God wants to leave room for doubt/faith etc), historically these religious faiths didn't seem to think God was nearly so reticent about miracles (e.g. Moses parting the dead sea in front of Israelites, Jesus healing people in front of their relatives or his disciples, the Catholic church claiming all kinds of miracles from the prayers of saints etc), but as our abilities to record evidence accurately have improved claims of miracles have steadily disappeared.
5. I think science has had a great deal of success explaining things that were previously attributed to God, and that the repeated successes of non-theistic explanations over theist ones in explaining everything from the nature of the stars to the origin of life on earth show we should probably be highly skeptical of what few if any (the nature of consciousness and the origin of the universe perhaps) things are still commonly explained by reference to God, and that we are probably justified in believing by induction that science will probably eventually have a decent non-theistic explanation of such things.
I've probably left something out, but that will do as a sample. Those are reasons why I personally am an atheist, quite aside from anything that is or isn't in TGD. I guess you can give some comment about whether you think those are sound reasons or not if you want.
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