Atheists...

[Zetetic11235]

"The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.

Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher.

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and æsthetics are one.)

The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form "thou shalt . . ." is: And what if I do not do it? But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least thse consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the qustion. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself.
(And this is clear also that the reward must be something acceptable, and the punishment something unacceptable.)
Of the will as the subject of the ethical we cannot speak.
And the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.

If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

As in death, too, the world does not change, but ceases.

Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.
The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
(It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved.)

How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.

The facts all belong only to the task and not to its performance.

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.
The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it would doubt where a question cannot be asked.
For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be asnwered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.

The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other -- he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy -- but it would be the only strictly correct method.
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. "

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

[boagie]

Monkey see monkey do!!!

[Zetetic11235]

If only it were so.

[krazy kaju]

God never existed.

The normal argument for God's existence usually goes along the lines "everything has a cause so God had to have caused this universe." I, however, find that extremely naive. If everything has a cause, wouldn't whatever caused the universe have a cause, then that cause would have a cause, ad infinitum?

So either God was created by something else or the universe was created by a non-God entity. Science already supports the notion of a "multiverse" or string theory where there are many different dimensions that give "birth" to other dimensions, creating new universes. I personally find this much more likely as it is based in the physical world that we have proof of, not the spiritual world that there is no proof for.

[boagie]

krazy kaju

It is perhaps the comedy of comedies that there is on going dialogue between the atheist and the believer, one should know at least from experience that the believer did not get to be a believer through reason, there is I believe a desparate need in some individuals to believe, and no amount of proof will ever be adequate turn him away from his desire for certainty.

[krazy kaju]

^ So sad but so true.

[Didymos Thomas]

And we roll over the same old ground.

As Kant pointed out long ago, you cannot rational prove God, nor can you rationally disprove God. God is beyond logic.

No proof could turn a believer away from God because no proof can be given against God. Meanwhile, the desire for a logically provable God has long since passed mankind; we no longer see Aristotle as the highest point in philosophy.

All of life is not reduceable to logos. And I've yet to see one compelling argument against the value of mythos. The only objection to mythos I have seen are the logical objections - which miss the point entirely.

[Holiday20310401]

I seem to think that God is acausal, so in that the universe, time's "beginningness" was random. Why not?

But I still don't believe in God.

[boagie]

Thomas,

Same old ground, those whom believe are in violation of logic as much as those whom deny the existence of god, but, I am in violation as are you for not believing in every god that was ever conjured by the imagination. This is a silly debate, you do not believe in Zeus, you are an atheist Thomas, and who is on first.

[Didymos Thomas]

those whom believe are in violation of logic as much as those whom deny the existence of god

Neither is in violation of logic. Both have a belief about something outside the bounds of logic.

I am in violation as are you for not believing in every god that was ever conjured by the imagination. This is a silly debate, you do not believe in Zeus

I do not deny the existence of Zeus. Zeus, and the Greek myth, just are not relevant to me in the way other faith traditions are relevant to me.

I can read Homer and find value, even spiritual value. The Greek myth is not devoid of value, and still manages to speak to the human condition.

you are an atheist Thomas

Depends on what you mean by 'atheist'.