Q: If atheism is true then it would seem that materialism – physical matter is all that exists – is also true. If that is so, is it possible for there to be free will?They've both too quickly gone from materialism to determinisim. One doesn't imply the other. All physical processes do not repeat in the same way everytime. Not all chemical reactions produce the same end products every time. The same weather systems don't track accross the midwest every June.
Materialism would seem to imply that everything functions in a purely mechanical way, with molecules simply interacting according to the laws of physics, and that would seem to leave no room for free will....
A: ...Free will implies a supernatural force affecting the brain which isn’t beholden either to deterministic classical mechanics or to quite possibly random quantum mechanics, and for which there is no evidence.
More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical - if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.I believe in a universal truth: a universal physical reality that is best discovered by experiments, a universal mathematical reality discovered by though, and that is consistent. But, I also realize that in my attempt to get closer to the truth, I am inevitably biased by my experience and the universe of ideas that I have considered. Not only that, it's impossible to do every experiment, and to consider every idea, so I will never be sure of anything, or even sure of my uncertainty.
Imagine Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address without reference to "the judgments of the Lord." Or King's I Have a Dream speech without references to "all of God's children." Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.
keratacon: We emerge from nothing and to nothing we go back. We've got 80 years on this Earth if we're lucky. It's a "moral imperative to make the most of it"I hate this sentiment. Moral imperative to make the most of it? How in Nothing's name do you figure that?! We come from nothing and go to nothing. There is no greater moral imperative to live a rich, fulfilling, interconnected life as there is to go the 19th floor balcony and jump off. That oh-so-worldly bullshit perspective of "Gotta make the most of it!" is as addlepated and misinformed as any unthinking Christian perspective.
Hear, Israel! Being is our god, Being is One!--Deut. 6:4posted by No Robots at 9:49 PM on October 13, 2010
And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.and I couldn't agree more.
The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. But the masses are slowmoving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.--guess who?posted by No Robots at 9:29 AM on October 14, 2010
I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. [He was speaking of quantum mechanics and the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God. —Albert Einsteinposted by esprit de l'escalier at 12:14 PM on October 14, 2010
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."I am going to continue calling myself an atheist, even though I believe in something Albert Einstein occasionally refered to as God.
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
I therefore conclude, that the resurrection of Christ from the dead was in reality spiritual, and that to the faithful alone, according to their understanding, it was revealed that Christ was endowed with eternity, and had risen from the dead (using dead in the sense in which Christ said, “let the dead bury their dead”1 ), giving by His life and death a matchless example of holiness.--Letter 23 to OldenburgWith Spinoza there is no dichotomy between spiritual/intellectual godlessness and the essence of Judaism/Christianity, nor is there any recourse to miracles or the supernatural. He thus provides contemporary Christians with the opportunity to establish their position on rationalist grounds, and contemporary atheists with the opportunity to escape the pitfalls of absolutized materialism. Christians can claim atheism as their own, and atheists can claim Christ as their own.
[A] man who can by pure intuition comprehend ideas which are neither contained in nor deducible from the foundations of our natural knowledge, must necessarily possess a mind far superior to those of his fellow men, nor do I believe that any have been so endowed save Christ. To Him the ordinances of God leading men to salvation were revealed directly without words or visions, so that God manifested Himself to the Apostles through the mind of Christ as He formerly did to Moses through the supernatural voice. In this sense the voice of Christ, like the voice which Moses heard, may be called the voice of God, and it may be said that the wisdom of God (,i.e. wisdom more than human) took upon itself in Christ human nature, and that Christ was the way of salvation. I must at this juncture declare that those doctrines which certain churches put forward concerning Christ, I neither affirm nor deny, for I freely confess that I do not understand them.—SpinozaEckhart is indeed completely godless. He says, "Wäre ich nicht, so wäre auch Gott nicht." (If I were not, God also would not be.) What Eckhart says using mystical language is identical to what Spinoza says using philosophical language.
How infinitely less absurd Christianity would have been if it had only listened to the Judaizing Anti-trinitarianism (which was suppressed form the 4th century on, since the Council of Nicaea); how much more it could have had of Christ! For all the work of purifying Christianity is nothing other than a de-hallowing of the Holy Spirit, a throwing out of what this pernicious pagan has brought in, a smoothing out of the Trinity, of those three dreadful creases which had been introduced into the unity of Jahve by paganism. It is a return to better things in Gnosticism, Arianism, Unitarianism, a return to the unity of Jahve, to prophetic Judaism.... If Christianity is to become what it wants to be, it must renounce the desire to know anything that pure Judaism in Christ neither knows nor wishes to know: it must renounce symbols, dogmas, articles of faith, liturgy, worship; it must want to know nothing of creation, the Fall, redemption and justification, heaven and hell, the incarnation of God, the Three Persons of the Godhead, the single Personality of God; it must not hold on to a single item of religion's superstition. If Christianity is to come about, Christ must be the Master, revealing to the heathen that they are but men (Ps. 9:21).—Brunner, Our Christ, p. 373-4.posted by No Robots at 12:33 PM on October 15, 2010
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