Via 3quarksdaily, here is Richard Skinner (“poet, writer, qualified therapist and performer”) elaborating on Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously. I would argue that they should take him seriously because much of what he says is true, but that’s not Skinner’s take.
Skinner suggests that Dawkins is arguing against a straw-man notion of God (stop me if you’ve heard this before). According to the straw man, God is some thing, or some person, or some something, of an essentially supernatural character, with a lot of influence over what happens in the universe, and in particular the ability to sidestep the laws of nature to which the rest of us are beholden. That’s a hopelessly simplistic and unsophisticated notion, apparently; not at all what careful theologians actually have in mind.
Nevertheless, Dawkins and his defenders typically reply, it’s precisely the notion of God that nearly all non-theologians — that is to say, the overwhelming majority of religious believers, at least in the Western world — actually believe in. Not just the most fanatic fundamentalists; that’s the God that the average person is worshipping in Church on Sunday. And, to his credit, Skinner grants this point. That, apparently, is why Christians should take Dawkins seriously — because all too often even thoughtful Christians take the easy way out, and conceptualize God as something much more tangible than He really is.
At this point, an optimist would hope to be informed, in precise language, exactly what “God” really does mean to the sophisticated believer. Something better than Terry Eagleton’s “the condition of possibility.” But no! We more or less get exactly that:
Philosophers and theologians over the centuries, grappling with what is meant by ‘God’, have resorted to a different type of language, making statements such as “God is ultimate reality”; or “God is the ground of our being”, or “God is the precondition that anything at all could exist”, and so forth. In theological discourse, they can be very helpful concepts, but the trouble with them is that if you’re not a philosopher or theologian, you feel your eyes glazing over – God has become a philosophical concept rather than a living presence.
The trouble is not that such sophisticated formulations make our eyes glaze over; the trouble is that they don’t mean anything. And I will tell you precisely what I mean by that. Consider two possible views of reality. One view, “atheism,” is completely materialistic — it describes reality as just a bunch of stuff obeying some equations, for as long as the universe exists, and that’s absolutely all there is. In the other view, God exists. What I would like to know is: what is the difference? What is the meaningful, operational, this-is-why-I-should-care difference between being a sophisticated believer and just being an atheist?
I can imagine two possibilities. One is that you sincerely can’t imagine a universe without the existence of God; that God is a logical necessity. But I have no trouble imagining a universe that exists all by itself, just obeying the laws of nature. So I would have to conclude, in that case, that you were simply attaching the meaningless label “God” to some other aspect of the universe, such as the fact that it exists. The other possibility is that there is actually some difference between the universe-with-God and the materialist universe. So what is it? How could I tell? What is it about the existence of God that has some effect on the universe? I’m not trying to spring some sort of logical trap; I sincerely want to know. Phrases like “God is ultimate reality” are either tautological or meaningless; I would like to have a specific, clear understanding of what it means to believe in God in the sophisticated non-straw-man sense.
Richard Skinner doesn’t give us that. In fact, he takes precisely the opposite lesson from these considerations: the correct tack for believers is to refuse to say what they mean by “God”!
So, if our understanding of God can be encapsulated in a nice, neat definition; a nice, neat God hypothesis; a nice, neat image; a nice, neat set of instructions – if, in other words, our understanding of God does approximate to a Dawkins version, then we are in danger of creating another golden calf. The alternative, the non-golden-calf route, is to sit light to definitions, hypotheses and images, and allow God to be God.
It’s a strategy, I suppose. Not an intellectually honest one, but one that can help you wriggle out of a lot of uncomfortable debates.
I’m a big believer that good-faith disagreements focus on the strong arguments of the opposite side, rather than setting up straw men. So please let me in on the non-straw-man position. If anyone can tell me once and for all what the correct and precise and sophisticated and non-vacuous meaning of “God” is, I promise to stick to disbelieving in that rather than any straw men.
Update: This discussion has done an even better job than I had anticipated in confirming my belief that the “sophisticated” notion of God is simply a category mistake. Some people clearly think of God in a way perfectly consistent with the supposed Dawkinsian straw man, which is fine on its own terms. Others take refuge in the Skinneresque stance that we can’t say what we mean when we talk about God, which I continue to think is simply intellectually dishonest.
The only on-topic replies I can see that don’t fall into either of those camps are ones that point to some feature of the world which would exist just as well in a purely materialistic conception, and say “I call that `God.'” To which I can only reply, you’re welcome to call it whatever you like, but it makes no difference whatsoever. Might as well just admit that you’re an atheist.
Which some people do, of course. I once invited as a guest speaker Father William Buckley, a Jesuit priest who is one of the world’s experts in the history of atheism. After giving an interesting talk on the spirituality of contemplation, he said to me “You don’t think I believe in G-O-D `God,’ do you?” I confessed that I had, but now I know better.
For people in this camp, I think their real mistake is to take a stance or feeling they have toward the world and interpret in conventionally religious language. Letting all that go is both more philosophically precise and ultimately more liberating.
Blake: consciousness is special because of the having of qualitative feelings, sensations, not just conceptualizations and information (*to us*.) Some rather dishonest philosophers (“feigners of anesthesia”) deny or evade this, but it’s the primary fact of life (not anything about “the material universe” or our supposed constraint by a specific program – science – designed to find out certain kinds of things about the workings of the world, not be a uniform program for knowledge or speculation or philosophizing entire.)
What he is saying is that God is beyond rational discourse. Then you say “can you explain that to me in the terms of rational discourse”, and the answer is of course “no”, and you have a wonderful case of two people talking past each other.
For what it is worth, modern atheistic philosophy does know non-(words/things/concepts) that can not be given a definition of the form you ask for.
Andrew quotes 1 John 4:20.
Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
But what about Luke 14:26?
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
You can tell this bothers people, because in some more recent translations, “hate” gets changed into “love to a lesser degree”. For example, the Good News Bible says, “Whoever comes to me cannot be my disciple unless he loves me more than he loves his father and his mother, his wife and his children, his brothers, and his sisters and himself as well.” But the Greek word miseo really does mean “hate”, and in every verse where it appears, it clearly indicates the exact opposite of love. Should Luke 16:13 also be retconned to say that we must love Mammon a little less than we love God?
Greg Egan says,
This is why I describe quantum mechanics as Loki playing dice with the Universe. Come on, Loki may be subtle, but he’s not malicious, right?
Let’s take 19th century deterministic physical theory – the ‘clockwork universe’ model – as a starting point. The religious establishment rebelled against that because it left “no room for God” other than as some kind of supreme original architect.
Then along came quantum theory, relativity and chaos and now we have the probabilistic – statistical model of the universe. Stephen Hawking pointed out that even if we do ever come up with a grand unified theory of everything, the equations will be chaotic and will be of little use for many predictive purposes, right?
Einstein didn’t like this too much, thus the famous “God doesn’t play dice with the Universe” statement.
So, in the current view of things, “God” could go around interfering with probabilistic outcomes for specific events – and you’d never be able to tell the difference. The same goes for Maxwell’s Demon – a little demon that is somehow able to acquire information about the world without interacting with it, and then is able to alter conditions to affect outcomes.
Which can all be summed up as: “If God played dice with the Universe, he’d win.” Thus, believing in God is not any different from believing in Maxwell’s Demon – it’s an untestable hypothesis. Thus, for the question posed by Sean – “What is the difference between “God exists” and “God does not exist”?” – the answer seems to be: nothing.
You can attribute any given probabilistic outcome to the laws of chance, to God, to Maxwell’s Demon – it doesn’t really matter. If you look at a large number of outcomes, you find they follow certain rules, and it you like you can attribute those rules to nature or to God or to whatever you like – and you can keep checking to make sure the rules are obeyed, and you might even find circumstances where you have to revise the rules. Thus, Dawkin’s fixation on the issue seems like a waste of time and effort.
For most people though, religious belief is an attempt to find meaning in what they view as a cold, impersonal world where death is the inevitable outcome.
However, look at a growing plant – isn’t that meaningful all by itself? A solar energy converter constructed using an internal evolved genetic blueprint that creates incredible (and still not completely understood) complexity out of sunlight and simple elements and molecules? Then we’ve got the universe itself to look at – I mean, go and take a long, long look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field shot. Think about that for a while. It’s a lot more fascinating than religion, isn’t it? What’s out there?
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Sean,
You are not going to get a good answer to this question. People believing in god has no clear idea what god is or means. This is of course because god does not exist. It’s like asking small children to describe Santa. You are going to get all kinds of stories.
Carl
Neil,
Fortunately, some part of ourselves surviving our deaths [i]is[/i] testable, as it makes a very specific prediction. The relates directly back to my previous statement on getting drunk. Specifically, what it means is that if there is a part of ourselves that survives our deaths, then that part of ourselves must necessarily also survive any damage to our bodies. If it doesn’t survive that damage, then it certainly can’t survive our death.
Now, then, we would need some determination as to what it would mean for us to survive our own death. What, exactly, would survive? Well, there are two components, really, our memories and our personality. For this survival of a piece of ourselves to have any meaning at all, then some portion of either our memories or our personality would have to survive. But our memory can be lost when the brain is damaged in the wrong places. And our personality can be altered, in a myriad of ways, due to the introduction of chemicals (i.e. getting drunk), or due to damage to any number of locations in the brain. So no, because there is no component of ourselves that is immune to such damage, there is no component of ourselves that can possibly survive our own demise.
Well, then, we can get drunk. Ergo consciousness is naturalistic, as deviations in consciousness can be imposed via physical means.
A response to this from my viewpoint is that nervous systems, and alcohol, and the effect of the latter on the former, all have non-spatiotemporal reality (their quantum reality?) that is turned into spatiotemporal reality in the act of perception. Which is to say that no experiment (leaving out mystical disciplines) can distinguish between the two viewpoints, so both viewpoints are metaphysical, not two competing scientific theories. But the choice of which viewpoint one adopts does have consequences, which is the point relative to this post.
Greg Egan, earlier, said:
I recently heard of a word that might be what you’re looking for: “numinous”. As far as I know, there’s no real religious connotation to it, and it’s a pretty neat sounding word anyway.
I’ve seen it used as a noun before too, so instead of a careless atheist saying “God” they could say “the numinous”.
Where does consciousness go when you sleep, then?
This is getting a bit off-topic, but let me just say this: Some might turn that around and say, “where does the universe go when you sleep or die?” Positivism can lead you down a strange path: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640
The argument “consciousness is special because you always have it until you don’t” is not particularly persuasive.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s “special” – I think “suspicious” is a better word. It seems to underly everything that is known or can be known about reality. It is a box from which there is no escape. You can never be someone else. Which may lead you to ask to the why-am-I-me question, i.e. why should reality be experienced as you, and not as someone or something else? Stand on a hilltop on a starry night and imagine all the other consciousnesses that must be out there in the vastness of the universe. And yet, the universe seems to have a preference for viewing itself through your eyes? Why?
consciousness is special because of the having of qualitative feelings, sensations
This is another thing that bothers me. I’m not sure that qualia can be reduced to math or physics, which are purely descriptive in nature. Information about your consciousness, received through your consciousness, is not equivalent to the actual experience of your consciousness. I believe others (Wigner?) have also made this point.
[recovered from spam filter — sean]
What is the difference between “God exists” and “God does not exist”?
Dear Sean,
Perhaps some insight (although not a precise answer to your question) can be found in the very well written and thoughtful treatise by Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution.
In special, the last chapter of that book deals with the “affirmation of something” as compared to its negation (a nice point of view worthy of mentioning that is also useful to your post “Why is there something rather than nothing?”). Bergson argues that those are not as symmetric as they would appear (specially when seen from a purely mathematical point of view). Rather, negation is a second degree affirmation, not the opposite of it, or the absence of it. So the point is, perhaps your question does not embody two absolute and opposite conditions, and therefore cannot be given a unique or even meaninful answer distinguishing those conditions.
It was a pleasure for me to find Bergson’s book. It’s simply brilliant. Yes, one could have arguments against some of his points, but there is no way to deny that his arguments are quite subtle, original and important to address.
I wrote previously about whether I was looking for God, in reply to a commenter. I would have to re-write it in accordance the novel insights that the reading of Bergson gave me (when I wrote that post, I had not read Bergson’s book). But in any case, I believe you will not find a reasonable answer to your question easily.
Best regards,
Christine
God, to my mind is a mathematical calculation.
See update above.
Hi Jason Dick, interesting argument.
So basically all stem cell research and promises of cures, even to brain damage or loss of ‘memory’ – are irrelevant. The proverbial cow dung or pie in the sky.
Are you suggesting the best way to assure ‘death’ of the criminal mind or any ‘evil’ mind would be a bullet in the head, are you suggesting that anyone who dies burnt in a fire (or is cremated) can’t possibly pass into the afterlife.
Hmm, that reminds me how some people in the dark ages used to think decapitation was the best way to ensure no one could come back to haunt you. Or the old myth that if you had any part of your body missing (except the foreskin, and perhaps your teeth too) you could not enter heaven.
I don’t think you have demonstrated that there is nothing survives death, any more than anyone 50 years ago demonstrated that neutrinos do NOT exist. And the whole idea of CERN and the LHC is to find stuff we cannot currently find or measure – things which nevertheless may or may not be ‘predicted’ by theory.
Now, I am not suggesting that anything CAN or does survive death, or what form it takes. I AM suggesting you cannot prove nothing survives death, or that you cannot prove that suddenly you do not go into a parallel universe, or even a parallel state (call it heaven, nirvana, or cuckoo land) on some distant galaxy, almost or even at the speed of light – the actual time it takes to get there, whether millions or billions of light years, seemingly irrelevant to the equation.
And of course Sean could argue, that even if there is an afterlife, it is still not proof of God – because the afterlife could simply be Nature’s Way – and Cosmic Karma is as predictable as Particle Physics. Who knows?
Maybe what happens after death is as irrelevant as what was there before the big bang, to the observable universe. But I am increasingly of the persuasion that the ‘observable’ universe is only the ‘visible’ portion (and possibly a very small portion) of the whole universe delimited by the Cosmic Event Horizon, there is no falling off the edge of the flat universe at the cosmic event horizon. But hey I too, am free to believe or disbelieve what I will – am I not?
Wow, 64 comments and not one mention of Shiva or Thor, Vishnu or Viracocha., Aphrodite or Xi Wang Mu. Interesting that so many who profess their deep faith in their “god” can so comfortably reject another’s expression of faith in her/his own (and please don’t be so silly as to suggest that these are just other names for “your god, they definitely are not).
As for the discussion on consciousness, reviewing some of the contemporary, extensive, philosophical discussions might be valuable, if one is seriously interested.
PS – lol to your update.
Indeed it must be quite liberating (if not comforting) for the old & the dying to know that their disease ridden or decay-ed bodies have simply reached the end of their particulate journey. And their lives whether they are remembered or not, was meaningless and to all intents with no more purpose than any other group of atoms wondering aimlessly or with purpose, around the universe simply obeying the laws of physics as described mathematically (mathematics a language constructed and comprehensible to the human Mind).
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.
SPYDER, I have not suggested I have any particular God or that other gods may or may not be different manifestations of the same god, though string theory would mathematically postulate that to be possible.
Quasar9,
Technically, we can’t prove that that reality isn’t an illusion, that we aren’t Boltmann brains who just popped into existence, had a single thought, and popped right back out of existence again. That’s why I don’t ever talk about proof (as I’m not a mathematician). But the problem is, the sheer variety of changes one can make to a person’s personality through physical changes to the brain just ensures that it makes no sense whatsoever that there is a component of ourselves that is survives our death.
Consider this situation:
Imagine that you are heterosexual, and there is a particular form of brain injury that will cause you to become homosexual.
Now imagine that there is another person that was born homosexual, while there is a similar brain injury that would cause that person to become heterosexual.
With these two cases, what survives death? The homosexual personality, or the heterosexual personality? Consider, after all, that objectively speaking, there is no preference between the two points of view (the rest of the universe really doesn’t care whether your sexual desires are conducive to you having children or not). And yet the change could be affected by a physical change in the brain, and furthermore this is an aspect of ourselves which we consider an integral part of our personal identity. So no, I don’t see how the idea of life after death is in any way coherent, and thus just can’t be correct.
But this really just underscores the catch-22 that theists are in, along with others who believe in various supernatural. Either you place your beliefs in something that is empirically testable, and in so doing put your beliefs on the line, or you define your beliefs in such a way that, even in principle, they could never be tested, and in so doing make your beliefs functionally identical to those of the materialist. I think Sean is spot-on when he describes these “high-minded” ideas of god as category errors. But what’s worse is when a person claims to have a “high-minded” idea of god, and then starts making claims about the nature of reality that are testable, such as whether or not we survive our own deaths.
“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
— John Lennon
Hi Jason Dick,
I have deliberately attempted to avoid the word God, since that clearly opens up the whole other can of worms of ‘which’ god, or ‘whose’ god we are talking about, or to answer Sean’s question: Which or what god to disbelieve in.
As to your argument, I do understand where you are coming from.
You are not the same ‘persona’ that was in your mother’s womb, nor the same ‘persona’ that crawled, wore nappies and learnt to walk & talk. Nor the same ‘persona’ that grew up to be the various people you have been or become in your adult life. You may choose to become or believe something totally different tomorrow than you are today. And aside from the mental state, you have also undergone all the normal physical changes and the natural multi cell deaths that the body undergoes at its various phases of growth, change and decay. And yet all the while I presume there is a thread that you hold onto that is you, or you identify as you. Clearly like actors we play different roles throughout our life (son, brother, father, uncle, …) but there is something that we generally hang onto that we identify as I.
That may be something very personal (based on personal experiences), which others cannot ever wholly know or see – and in some cases may be based on experiences or memories which we may even wish to forget.
And of course as you point out, there are those who either thru disease, trauma or injury have lost some part of themselves (some or all their memories), and there is also the onset of alzheimers, which would posit that if there is degeneration of the brain, there is increasing difficulty in identifying ourselves, never mind recognising others. Mind you these are things which medical science and medical research genuinely hope to be able to ‘prevent’ and even ‘repair’ whether it is possible or not, remains to be ‘seen’.
But returning to my point – we cannot possitively discount that there is more to the human being than the physical (ie: what we know to date) any more than we can discount that there is more to the universe that we do not know, than we really care to admit. After all we like to know things, ironic really since any knowledge no matter how absolute, is simply ‘temporal’ knowledge that can so casually be mislodged or lost by a careless blow to the head.
But no matter how liberating Sean suggests dismissing that there is anything more to us – what you see is what you get – I would find it irrational to dismiss that there is or may be a Spirit (soul or Onion call it what you will) that contains or can contain the sum total of our experiences & memories, good and bad. Those we may wish to hold onto or even those we’d wish to forget, those we’d like to hold onto but can’t prevent losing, since there is nothing that categorically can prove there is nothing after death – until we pass that particular stage or phase. As to what comes out the other side, I shall not speculate further here – since clearly I could only possibly ever hope at best to speculate on what may or may not be.
You need to recognise, that just as Sean can justify the universe by what we ‘know’ what is observable & measurable – there are ‘physical’ things we cannot quite observe or measure yet. Things we theorize or speculate about, whether it be Strings, Dark Energy or Gravitons… which may turn out to be true and exist (or not) and lead us onto further things we do not know.
But my original argument in reply to Sean was
If there is life after death, then that would be something that would change the universe we know (as we know it). I did not presume to be able to prove it.
As fundies seem to be less of a baleful influence on education and legislation in the UK than the US (although muslims are increasingly vociferous), we can generally afford to take a less combative and more dispassionate stance on religion.
What querulous atheists forget, or sweep under the carpet, is the huge evolutionary advantage religion has had, from the dawn of mankind to the present day. Dawkins of all people, as a biologist (I think?), should at least concede that, although not having read his book I don’t know whether he did.
Despite the veneer of civilization, under the skin we’re all the same hairy-assed dark-souled savages, whose instinct honed over literally millions of years is to accept and look up to one boss, and however this is sublimated today in various forms of hero worship, or even abstract ideas, the same applies now as much as ever.
One advantage of religion is to render that boss a nebulous mysterious entity rather than a person. Yes, maybe sovereigns and chief priests and so forth have claimed to rule by divine right; but they know and everyone knows that all, including the ruler, are answerable to this higher power. The problem with atheists is that in the absence of a God they presume to take on the role of God themselves!
Yes, I’d concede that religious societies haven’t always been on their best behaviour, as in the Crusades for example. But look at the French Revolution, or Stalinist Russia, or the Chinese revolution, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all the work of idealistic atheists, and bathed in the blood of countless millions, far more than any religious wars.
Sean, few are anywhere near as educated and trained in logical thought as yourself or the average poster here, and if everyone suddenly turned atheist, as you appear to wish, I guarantee you’d be on your knees before a statue of the Virgin Mary, begging her to intercede in stopping the horrors that would ensue!
In any case, we live surrounded by lies and deceptions great and small. Why bother to wear clothes if the weather is not inclement? It would be more rational to save wear and tear and the effort of washing clothes to walk around stark bollock naked where practical. Also, why this insistence that everyone matters? In truth, hardly anyone matters a fig in the grand scheme of things, even distinguished scientists. If any of us dropped dead tomorrow, someone else would take our place, and any achievements we might have made could be made by others.
The point is, what is one more white lie (even if as an atheist you believe it so) if it makes the vast majority of believers feel and act as better people. Hell, if chanting round a mouldy old tree stump, as our druid ancestors did, improves one’s spirit and outlook, I’d go and join them.
Apologies for length of this post, and hopefully it makes some sense. Truth is I’m as pissed as a mattress, having polished off several G&Ts, and will probably regret it tomorrow. 😉
Jacob (#59) wrote:
I’m personally allergic to this word, but other people’s mileage might vary. There’s an Australian atheist radio broadcaster who uses it a lot, but I’ve also heard members of the Woo crowd using it to distinguish their refined feelings from those of Evil Reductionist Scientists.
Dictionary definitions include “1. having to do with a numen 2. arousing elevated or religious feelings.” (A “numen” is “a deity; a divine power or spirit”). So I suppose there’s just room for a non-religious meaning in the “elevated feelings” half of meaning 2. It would be nice to have something with less baggage, but I can’t think of any good candidates myself.
Haludza (#43) wrote:
It probably did, but we’ve well and truly lost it now. I could cope with surfers and skaters in the 1980s who initially were at least using it for things that genuinely impressed them, but I was recently told by a customer service officer at a finance company that the fact that I’d sent him a fax was “awesome”. I don’t think he was actually in awe of either the technology, or the content of my fax.
Jason Dick,
It is worth bringing up issues of our changing personality making it hard to say what should survived death. However, your argument above that brain damage in effect disproves survival is fallacious. If the brain is damaged, then the “program” running on *that machine* is impaired while that “machine” is running at all. That doesn’t keep the “program” from running on a completely different “machine”, which was my point (and which is testable, if enough of you can survive to think, “Wow, I’m still around somehow.”)
As for what version of your changing personality should survive, well that depends on how the system works (how it was “built”, no apologies …) But consider this: why do you consider your “self” to survive the changes in your personality over time? Why does it matter to worry about your own experiences years from now, when your mental processes will be different? Maybe the idea of “process” is not good enough, and there is a persisting unstructured whole behind the changes of the mind. That whole might not even be individualized, in the sense of being the same “one” behind each person (not n monads per n sentient beings.) This is the great insight of many Eastern religious traditions, and I have experienced it (quite beautiful) even though I am not sure it is true.
Finally, talk about God interfering in the world (whether overtly or through quantum cracks) is not the most important question, but rather concerning the why of the world, the grounding of existence (versus mere Platonism), and its being life-friendly in terms of both laws and experiential realness. Sorry, but thinking this particular world could just “exist” self-sufficiently without deeper cause is like thinking the number 23 among all numbers just happens to be made into “real” brass numerals somewhere. And if they all exist, its chaos.
I suppose this is repetitious, but I’ll try keeping it simple. As John Ramsden point out, the general concept of God is of a top down authority figure, but absolute isn’t apex, it’s basis. So the spiritual absolute would be the essence of awareness, not an ideal form of it. What is to say that it isn’t the same element of being peering out of all life and evolution is multiplying complexity? As individuals, we are constructs in the first place and our sense of individuality is a function of mental focus. Because we view a potential deity as top down in order to maintain social and civic order, we assume it is intentional, but if it is bottom up, raw awareness, then it is aspirational, which is a good description of conscious behavior.
Currently humanity is top predator in the eco-system, but if life on this planet amounts to a single organism, then humanity has the potential to be its central nervous system.
Atheism is a form of reductionism, but life is wholistic.
But Neil, in this case the program is the machine. There is no difference. This makes the whole idea of an immutable soul nonsensical.
Also bear in mind, Quasar9, that I am not trying to prove anything. That is impossible. I’m merely trying to show that you need to make up completely unevidenced (and indeed, unevidenceable) entities that don’t make sense when examined in order to support the idea of life after death. That makes life after death exceedingly unlikely to be correct.
Finally, as Sean argues quite well, talking about God as the “grounding of existence” or the “why of the world” is completely meaningless. Might as just drop the word entirely.