The God Delusion
Channel: Sam Vaknin's Musings
Date: 04/10/2022

Reading "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist"

p.132 mind mine, p. 154 parsimony Occam’s, p. 155 multiple solutions to same puzzle (=environment)

A. Kant: we cannot know the real world
CA. Kant said that we cannot know the world as it is, but never denied its reality.

Ornery agnostic: god is not knowable or provable. Not atheist (faith that there is no god).

Reason works, hence my trust in reason when it comes to reality.
Trust and faith should not be confused: the former is evidence-based, the latter is axiomatic.

So, I trust religion because it seems to work in society and psychology, it is a psychosocial regulator. 

I reject it because of my values: I prefer chaotic and dangerous reality to structured and safe delusional disorder.

Delusions and fantasies resemble rationality but are bounded by something other than rationality (e.g. god), they are not self-referential, iterative, or recursive like rationality. 

A. Big bang: why is there something rather than nothing? Beginnings (of the Universe, of life) present a challenge to science: ex nihilo creation.

A. Anthropic argument
CA. Dying homeless does not imply a designed weather

A. Life never arose spontaneously, it contains a message in the DNA (specified complexity and irreducible complexity – both debunked)
CA. Complexity and evolution are spontaneous, over time negentropy (localized increase in order); current, complexity endpoint.
Not all info is a message. 
Most info is mindless, natural, does not imply intelligence. 
All messages are accessible to intelligence, but not all hail from intelligence (Fibonacci). Pareidolia and apophenia.
Intelligence is inferior to non-intelligence, not superior (grandiose Bible). The distinction itself may be spurious, anthropocentric, and reflects human limitations.
Design is not the same as intelligence. 
Info emerges from irregularity, not from order (=not from design).

A. Every becoming has a cause
CA. Antecedents are not causes (correlation vs. causation).
What caused god to create everything and us? It assumes an internal process. This is anthropomorphism: god cannot want or love unless he is imperfect.

A. Naturalism and spirituality are mutually exclusive
CA. Spirituality is how we experience and structure material processes and objects.

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