The Atheism Poll

[Dovey]

Ha ha you read Vice...

edit: 1340 is a terrible movie

[rchapman75]

Christ, two pages (50 & 51, though I can't imagine any of the following FOURTEEN PAGES offered anything more than people shouting the exact same arguments past each other at ever increasing volumes) of this turgid nonsense reminded me why I stopped reading it in the first place... how have you all managed to keep this ridiculousness going for 68 pages? What kind of masochists are you?

[enframed]

What kind of masochists are you?

The godless kind.

[subprime]

I love the word turgid.

[dabrasha]

What kind of masochists are you?

The godless kind.

Haven't heard much from the village atheists since Hitchens died.

Strange trend, all that publishing and shouting.

[subprime]

I've been an atheist since I was like seven and I only learned about hitchens / dawkins when I was 16 or 17. They have had zero impact on my life.

[Anthony Flack]

Is it wrong that I feel rather pleased to see this forum has polled 81% atheist? I don't think so. I think it just indicates I'm in the right place. Everywhere that's full of rational and intelligent people tends to poll heavily atheist. No offense to the religious, but that's just the way that smart people skew.

I'm just gonna jump in straight from page 1 to page 68, ok? So apologies if I'm covering old ground here.

That atheism/agnosticism thing seems to crop up a lot. As far as I'm concerned, any proposition that is unfalsifiable is effectively NULL. Not a little bit maybe, not you never know... if it's unfalsifiable, it's irrelevant. In an infinite sea of possibilities, the chance that an unfalsifiable proposition is true, is one over infinity. Somebody once said to me, I can't be 100% certain that there's no God, I'm just ninety-nine point nine recurring percent sure. Right. And what is the value of 99.99 recurring? Precisely.

You wanna talk about higher powers? I think there is one: math. Math is The Truth. It's the one thing that humans and intelligent aliens are sure to agree on. We've looked deep into the structure of matter and we've found it's all a bunch of nothing. Nothing, split apart to create little pockets of positive nothing and negative nothing. Which interact according to a few simple rules, to form... all this. Life, the universe and everything. Interference patterns formed by overlapping sine waves.

Everything we know about the structure of the universe can be written on the back on an envelope. Those little equations are almost sufficient to explain all the complexity we see around us. And I say "almost", only because they are, as it stands, slightly incomplete. But don't underestimate the amount of emergent complexity that's hiding away in a recursive algorithm. You could build an entire theoretical universe out of those equations.

It all falls out of the natural patterns formed by math. The complexity of the universe is inherent in the structure of structure itself. Rules produce patterns.

There's nothing reductive about this. Nothing that reduces the awe and wonder of the world. The rules may be simple, but the patterns they form are infinitely complex and varied. I think that's about as close to a real God as we're gonna get.

[scntfc]

Is it wrong that I feel rather pleased to see this forum has polled 81% atheist? I don't think so. I think it just indicates I'm in the right place. Everywhere that's full of rational and intelligent people tends to poll heavily atheist. No offense to the religious, but that's just the way that smart people skew.

I'm just gonna jump in straight from page 1 to page 68, ok? So apologies if I'm covering old ground here.

That atheism/agnosticism thing seems to crop up a lot. As far as I'm concerned, any proposition that is unfalsifiable is effectively NULL. Not a little bit maybe, not you never know... if it's unfalsifiable, it's irrelevant. In an infinite sea of possibilities, the chance that an unfalsifiable proposition is true, is one over infinity. Somebody once said to me, I can't be 100% certain that there's no God, I'm just ninety-nine point nine recurring percent sure. Right. And what is the value of 99.99 recurring? Precisely.

You wanna talk about higher powers? I think there is one: math. Math is The Truth. It's the one thing that humans and intelligent aliens are sure to agree on. We've looked deep into the structure of matter and we've found it's all a bunch of nothing. Nothing, split apart to create little pockets of positive nothing and negative nothing. Which interact according to a few simple rules, to form... all this. Life, the universe and everything. Interference patterns formed by overlapping sine waves.

Everything we know about the structure of the universe can be written on the back on an envelope. Those little equations are almost sufficient to explain all the complexity we see around us. And I say "almost", only because they are, as it stands, slightly incomplete. But don't underestimate the amount of emergent complexity that's hiding away in a recursive algorithm. You could build an entire theoretical universe out of those equations.

It all falls out of the natural patterns formed by math. The complexity of the universe is inherent in the structure of structure itself. Rules produce patterns.

There's nothing reductive about this. Nothing that reduces the awe and wonder of the world. The rules may be simple, but the patterns they form are infinitely complex and varied. I think that's about as close to a real God as we're gonna get.

+1 to all of this. and, have we got a thread for you...
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=58820

[subprime]

Saw an interesting quote in a neil degrasse tyson thing wondering about whether there will be some form of learning beyond math, where we might meet an alien species and they'll say something to the effect of "oh, math? Yeah, we used to do that, now we do ______". Obviously this thing is beyond us right now because we have no idea of other ways of learning, but it might be out there.

Additionally, we don't necesarily know that the rules of the universe are constant. We don't know that the laws haven't changed in some way over the course of time, or even within seperate parts of the universe.

oh also: dumbest shit youll read all day

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/pat-robertso ... -hate-god/

[Anthony Flack]

Philosophy of math, huh?

Yeah, this is my kind of forum all right.

Additionally, we don't necesarily know that the rules of the universe are constant. We don't know that the laws haven't changed in some way over the course of time, or even within seperate parts of the universe.

Sure. And different rules produce different outcomes. We could conceive of a different universe, with different rules. What remains constant though, is the relationship between rules and outcomes. The Mandelbrot set is still the Mandelbrot set, no matter what universe you're in.

Whether you want to call it math, or something deeper than that... it's a technical distinction really. We have formalised mathematical rules to help us analyse problems, but underneath that all, the "deep math" is still there, in the structure of relationships.

[subprime]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYeN66CS ... ure=relmfu

Thing on string theory vaguely related to this.

[Anthony Flack]

I am reading through the philosophy of math thread, and find it both hilarious and awesome that you guys have already discussed this.