The Prager/Zindler debate on the existence of the Jewish god.
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Dennis Prager and Frank Zindler debated the existence of the Jewish god at the recent American Atheist convention in Minneapolis. Frank did a superlative job of undermining the flimsy rationale for the existence of this god. I would like to offer a few more nails in its coffin.
Prager defined his god as nonphysical – beyond this world. If completely nonphysical how then did this god create, interact with and dominate the physical universe?
Prager said that although religion cannot explain evil, atheism cannot explain the rest of the world. But it can. It’s called science and it explains great portions of the extant universe.
Prager said that so what if his god cannot be defined or measured neither can happiness love or pornography. Happiness and love however can be and are being measured and quantified just like any other aspect of conscious emotion by self report correlated with behavior, autonomic and hormonal variables. The last time I looked the dictionary defined pornography as anything that is created explicitly to cause sexual excitement or arousal.
Prager says happiness according to science is simply the amount of serotonin in the brain. This reveals a profound naivete of neuroscience. The brain circuits underlying emotion utilize serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine plus many more neurotransmitters, are distributed throughout diverse nuclei in the brain, are highly complex and have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. Serotonin level – ha ha!
Prager says that both Communism and Nazism were based on atheism. Then how come the Nazis killed millions of their brother atheist Communists and vice versa? And how come old fashioned Communism, which was dogmatic, authoritarian and oblivious of evidence, has more in common with religion than with rational atheism? And how come no Communist ever wrote an atheist tract like those written by Dawkins et al? Although old fashioned Communism talked atheism they did not walk atheism.
Prager said that Judaism was and is an unmitigated blessing to the world which has only brought great good to humankind. Then how come it brought a contempt for women (see the orthodox Jewish morning prayer “thank god I am not a woman&rdquo
. And how come Judaism contains institutional bigotry in that it commands Jews to treat other Jews with more respect and dignity than gentiles?
Eric Stone, PhD
Chappaqua, NY 10514
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Is it just me, or are these debates getting more and more one-sided? Honestly, it's like slaughter.
"Yes, but my invisible friend says -"
"I'm sorry, your invisible friend?"
"Yeah, my ... why are you laughing?"
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
It always boils down to the same damn thing:
'Of course my God has no physical evidence for his existence: he's non-physical?'
'Oh? And how, then, could we even be able to know of God's existence?'
'It's a matter of having faith - like you do, in science!'
'...*sigh*....'
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
The mere assertion that "science" can explain the world is a leap of faith. What explains how science can determine laws of science? There is no law without a law giver. Science can not prove the law of logic but they exist. A brute claim that science is the skeleton key to all knowledge is the height of hubris. In regards to Serotonin and happiness Eric merely states that the process is highly complex and evolved over millions of years. The high complexity would hint at a design and the point is totally obviated. The words that he typed and mere electrical signals from his brain to his fingers. They have not real meaning other that what humans invest them with. An atheist is forced into reductionism; seeing every thing as determined by glandular secretions or electrical impulses. Carl Sagan once said that humans are just billions of atoms floating in space. If that is the case I can take a gun and rearrange his atoms. There is no right or wrong. To just state the science is determining why our brains think in moral categories is a complete non sequter. When a lion kills a zebra there are no moral questions being raised by the animals? Likewise if we are the products of time plus matter plus chance I might not like the holocaust but it was neither right nor wrong. In regard to Judaism, yes the idea stated in the prayer is bigoted. But that sentiment if found nowhere in the Torah. I'll restate Einstein maxim: The problem with scientists is that they make terrible philosophers.BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
So what? How does this affect the truth value of the claim in question? You're appealing to consequence instead of validity.
I beg to differ. I can switch between them without trouble. Watch. It's like a coin trick:
As a scientist:
People who are not fascinated by biology are strange
...and, Presto!
As a philosopher:
Does incoherence/meaningless lead to strong atheism, or non-cognitivism?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
A scientific law is a description of how things work, not a legal law.