Fully discussing the arguments for God and their refutations, together with the volumes and volumes of commentary and meta-commentary that they continue to generate, brings to mind the predicament of Tristram Shandy. He was the fictional fellow who took two years to write the history of the first two days of his life. [105]
Define God in a sufficiently nebulous way as beauty, love, mysterious complexity, or the ethereal taste of strawberry Shortcake, and most atheists become theists. [131]
In fact, ordinary language breaks down when we contemplate these matters. The phrase “beginning of time,” for example, can’t rely on the same presuppositions that “beginning of the movie” can. Before a movie there’s popcorn-buying and coming attractions; there isn’t any popcorn-buying, coming attractions, or anything else before the universe. [192]
Leaving aside the issues of independence, fitness landscapes, and randomness (all analogies are limited), I offer another example. We have a deck of cards before us. There are almost 1068 - a 1 with 68 zeros after it - orderings of the fifty-two cards in the deck. Any of the fifty-two cards might be first, any of the remaining fifty-one second, any of the remaining fifty third, and so on. This is a humongous number, but it’s not hard to devise even everyday situations that give rise to much larger numbers. Now, if we shuffle this deck of cards for a long time and then examine the particular ordering of the cards that happens to result, we would be justified in concluding that the probability of this particular ordering of the cards having occurred is approximately one chance in 1068. This probability certainly qualifies as minuscule.
Still, we would not be justified in concluding that the shuffles could not have possibly resulted in this particular ordering because its a priori probability is so very tiny. Some ordering had to result from the shuffling, and this one did. Nor, of course, would we be justified in concluding that the whole process of moving from one ordering to another via shuffles is so wildly improbable as to be practically impossible. [323]
If a recover from a disease is considered a miraculous case of divine intervention, to what do we attribute the contracting of the disease in the first place? [1030]
If God is either unable or unwilling to stop the killer, what good is He? It seems that the usual response to this is that we don't understand His ways, but if this is true, once again you must ask why introduce Him in the first place? Is there such a shortage of things we don’t understand that we need to manufacture another? [1448]
We use logic to progress from the patently obvious axioms suggested to us by everyday practices to much less manifest propositions on to sometimes quite counterintuitive theorems and factoids, say about the Fibonacci sequence. (Since it seems that every popular book that touches on religion must include the obligatory mention of the Fibonacci sequence, I shall not let its complete irrelevance here prevent me from irrelevantly mentioning it as well.) [1511]
An atheist or agnostic who acts morally simply because it is the right thing to do is, in a sense, more moral than someone who is trying to avoid everlasting torment or, as is the case with martyrs, to achieve eternal bliss. He or she is making the moral choice without benefit of Pascal’s divine bribe. This choice is all the more impressive when an atheist or agnostic sacrifices his or her life, for example, to rescue a drowning child, aware that there’ll be no heavenly reward for this lifesaving valor. The contrast with acts motivated by calculated expected value or uncalculated unexpected fear (or, worse, fearlessness) is stark. [1607]
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