The Fall is so incoherent on so many levels. Firstly, modern science tells us that the story is utterly ridiculous, but it also has a gaping epistemilogical flaw on God's part, because monotheistic theology contains the notion of God-determined predestiny (in Islam this is called Al Qadar). Therefore, God created them knowing full well what he had in mind ie that they would reject him, but it doesn't matter because the Iranaen theodicy collapses here considering that Adam and Eve were created without Evil thus they had no way of knowing the serpent was tempting them. Furthermore, the concept is contradictory to the classical theist description of God because as you can imagine, daming your creations for all eternity because one of your descendents ate and apple is an irrational physcosis of the highest degree.

Yes that's true, when I have 'wow' moments I experience them without even thinking of a god and I bet they're pretty much the same ecstatic experiences for me as they are for you.

I think that God is a projection of the human mind because He has a human-like personality (as described in the bible). We humans have evolved an acute ability to simulate other humans' minds (because we must live within a network of other humans to survive). We spend our days with a constant babble of conversational fragments echoing in our heads, glimses of simulations of possible futures in our personal relationships with family and friends, our brains are so powerful they can easily run simulations of many people at once (in our unconscious) in many permutations. This is how we are able to second-guess one another, how we do the right thing by one another how we anticipate eachother's needs. However we can't turn it off; our people-simulating abilities are always running. People derive understanding by casting themselves into the position of the system being studied. When we are children the most powerful people in the universe are our parents and almost everything in life is controlled by them. When we grow up our parents become more like friends but perhaps we never quite loose the child's feeling of a parental figure being in control of things. I think that's why God is also a Father - he's basically a functional projection of your dad but with the personality of the believer.

You read science and think "Wow, God can do all this?", you are essentially plugging god in as the answer when you do not understand or when science has not been able to explain something. That is, the god of the gaps, plugging god in where ever there is ignorance or lack of data. There is nothing wrong with saying "I don't know" instead of using an utter non-answer.

Ok, two things

Sugarfree: Babies will not die with out "loving" touch.  If you want to say it cite where you found this information.  Babies will not develop into socially well adjusted adults without touch and speech and a myriad of other things.  I didn't even need to read the rest of your argument, you began it by stating a lie as truth.

And..

Just because so many people have thought there is some form of higher power for most history does not make it right.  In fact, you probably think that 99% of those people are completely off base in their assertions about the nature, definition and particulars of god.  Do you really think a weak argument from majority is going to win you followers here? 

Wow that's the best argument for ignorance I've ever heard...oh wait... no it's not. it's yesterday's played out argument for ignorance with some babble in front of it.

The actual argument for ignorance is argumentum ad ignorantiam , ("appeal to ignorance”) . An adage regarding this fallacy from the Philosophy of Science is that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence": Not having evidence for something is not proof that something is not or cannot be true, it is simply lack of evidence and nothing more. An important aspect of the ad ignorantiam argument is establishing the burden of proof. While this concept is often discussed it is important to realize that establishing the burden of proof is important in other arenas as well. 

All logic follows from presuppositions not provable but are assumed as true. God cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, but science is not the only path to knowledge.

I like babble. Besides, all this has been played in the past.

There was a time when doctors thought that infant formula was superior to breast milk. They were wrong about that. Mothers were told to "not spoil their babies and to let them cry". Later, doctors realized that infants wither and die without human touch. What about all those Soviet children that were left on their own, crying in their cribs without proper attention? Now these children, who were adopted into this country have all sorts of horrendous emotional problems and learning disabilities. Babies need nurturing and it is not spoiling them to provide it. Spoiling means "ruining" and you cannot ruin a child with love and affection, you ruin him by abandoning him and ignoring his needs.

http://www.shirleys-wellness-cafe.com/infant.htm

In a Harvard Medical School study of an overcrowded orphanage in Romania, researchers found that babies who lay for hours without physical human contact suffered stunted growth and had abnormal levels of cortisol.

http://whalonlab.msu.edu/Student_Webpages/Babies/The%20Sense%20of%20Touch.htm

Touch is the earliest sense to develop in a fetus, and infants who enjoy touch in abundance grow faster, cry less and have higher IQ scores later in life. The reverse also holds: untouched infants do not merely fail to thrive — they die. Into the beginning of the 20th century, some American orphans were rarely touched, and they deteriorated for no clear medical reason. Nearly 100 percent of them died.

http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000969.html

Mjolnin.

I literally meant it as an argument for ignorance.  If humans followed your logic we would all be ignorant. 

Pouncing... 

If the God who made the universe loves you so much then why are you almost totally insignificant with respect to that universe? You lack any power or influence, and you may be snuffed out at any moment by any number of random events. Going further, our entire civilization could be destroyed at any time by any one of several cosmological events. I take much greater care with the safety of my kids.  

So the fact that we ask questions means there is a certain answer? There are two sources for human curiousity: 1) an evolutionary adaptation which keeps us exploring for new sources of food/shelter and b) a natural offshoot of our consciousness' constant monitoring of our subconscious brain activity. We ask "why do I think that?" because consciousness is a feedback loop which allows us to differentiate between ourselves an our surroundings. 

The growth of the Muslim faith has nothing to do with religious "seeking" and everything to do with politics. It's about being in with the right group to get ahead in these backward societies.

You just provided an excellent argument against God. If there is one God, and he wants us to know him, why is there so much disagreement about who/what he is? Is God incapable of proving his own existence?

Babies need to be touched in order for their brains to develop properly, yes. This is part and parcel of our identity as social animals and may also be connected to the development of consciousness which is, as I've mentioned, a seperating of the individual from his surroundings. A baby's need for touch is a purely developmental, biological phenomenon for which there is ample explanation in science.

Babies have no way of knowing whether the person touching them loves them or not, outside of regular, non-supernatural cues like body language and voice tone. Yes, if a baby is never shown love through these cues, s/he will grow up developmentally stunted. Again, our brains are made to develop as part of a social family group, and will not mature properly if we are removed from that environment. 

Babies do not pick up telepathic messages of love from parents, and you have no evidence to suggest that they do. The fact that babies need love is a function of social and evolutionary biology. it has nothing to do with God.

There is no evidence anywhere of a human "need" for God. The idea of God is ubiquitous througout history, yes. This does not mean that there was an innate need, only that many people found it profitable to propagate this idea. Many, many people have become inordinately fixated on the idea of God, yes. However most people are not. God exists in most people's lives in terms of a church community that they belong to. Their real attachment is to the community, not to an imaginary person they never hear from. Millions of people have lived happily ever after without believing in God at all. They are called atheists. 

Beta endorphins are naturally produced in our brains when we are happy. Are you saying that people need to be happy? Yep, they sure do. Are you saying that we have to have either God or drugs to be happy? Well, then I'm not sure how you'd explain me, since I'm neither high on God or drugs yet have a full load of beta endorphins and feel quite happy.

Hey, there's a theory! Maybe people have an innate need to prove theists wrong!

This whole line of reasoning is rather unproductive, I'm afraid, since just showing that people need this or that doesn't mean that this or that exists. I'm quite comfortable with the theory that most people are idiots and wrong about most things, including their own needs. 

I think the Genesis story (or at least the one you describe, the second story), while obviously not being one of historical or scientific truth does have some truths that it can reveal to us.

Firstly, in evolutionary terms, this story seems coherent to me (I do not mean to say that God started evolution in the Garden of Eden or anything like this, simply that metaphorically it works).  I think we would agree that animals are incapable of being "moral" (at least as far as humans are) because they do not have the mental faculties to conceive of morality in the same way that we do.  In the course of human evolution there was a point that we did not have the mental capacity to be moral.  Now once humans had developed to the point that they were in fact capable of being moral creatures (I do not know what point this is) they could make a choice between good and evil.  Once they had the ability to think rationally they were responsible for the actions that they took and Satan (evil choices, evil force, whatever you want to conceive of him as) was able to influence them.  The ability of humans to think rationally allows them to "fall".

Secondly, in each person's personal development s/he reaches a point that s/he can discern what is right and what is wrong.  Infants, for example, do not consider their options and reason out choices and therefore we do not hold them to the same moral standards as adults.  There is a point in each person's life when s/he is no longer innocent and the story of the "fall" tells us that.

I think that God is a projection of the human mind because He has a human-like personality (as described in the bible)

Saying that God is a projection of the human mind is a rather odd thing for a theist to say because that essentially means that we created him, or we made him up. That is the definition of projectionalism. I find it difficult to grasp the logic that God has a human-like mind because my understanding of the contradiction of "theological epistemology" is that God is not physical ie not composed of matter but rather "spirit" whatever that means. However, to the very best of my knowledge about neurology, and "emotion" or "personality" or any sentience whatsoever has a very first requisite of being based on an information processing machine. In humans, this machine is the parallel computing function of 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion ions that flow between them. The most basic information processor (presumably God would be the ultimate information processer as he is omniscient) would at very least be based on thermal gradient distribution of parallel-aligned protons and electrons. But God does not even have that. 

 Err, I said that (see top of thread) - and I'm not a theist.

I was pointing to how parochial the god of the bible is, how human he seems to be and I suggest that this humanness is because he is a projection of ourselves "into the sky".

Note how we humans tend to anthropommorphize everything, we think of our cars as somehow having personalities, we see emotions in the weather, we see a face in the moon.

sugarfree - it's true that people (and babies) can die through neglect and for want of love. Love is a necessity, it is the social magnetism which bonds our network together.

Without love, parents would have no motivation to care for their children and those children would grow to be ill-equipped for life. But we are descended from people who loved and were loved. Evolution has tuned our emotions with many feedback loops which keep us fit to survive this planet and eachother. Love is part of a social feedback loop which rewards us for various behaviours (care, kindness) towards immediate family members first, then others. Romantic love rewards us for finding a mate and remodels our personalities for a while, reproduction being our primary ancestral function. But we fall out of love too if the feedback is wrong and move on to find someone more suitable.

Love is, like all the emotions, a feeling induced by chemicals in the brain (oxytocin, vasopressin, maybe) in response to various stimuli. Those stimuli are not entirely hard-coded and can be partially modified during our lives. Some people are actually more capable of love, more loving in general, and this may reflect the rates of production of various chemicals in their brains due to their particular genetic configuration.

It's obvious that, being part of a network and dependent on it, we must try to extend our love as far as we can because in the network "what goes around comes around" ("love thy neighbour...&quot.

I understand that animals have traits, like the pack mentality, that allow them to operate so that they benefit others in their group.  You do, however, admit that they are operating off of genetic instinct and therefore are not making decisions in the same, rational, way humans do.

Human societies today changing faster than genetics would compel them to seems to support my point here, the point being that humans can now think through their morality whereas they could not previously. I'm not exactly sure what you mean with the neuroplastic point, could you explain that more? However, I would say that humans are influenced a great deal by their societies, this is pretty clear. So, do you base your morality off of the society that you live in? I imagine, as an atheist, you were brought up in an evironment that was not favorable to you becoming an atheist, but that you reasoned through your position to come to your beliefs. (Forgive me if you were raised an atheist.) Now while morality cannot be derived completely from logic, are there not moral precepts that we think true and think about logically? Does that not seperate us from animals?

Murder has been considered wrong throughout human history? Even if it has, it has not been followed. If it's such a clear, genetic, subconscious, instinct that killing is bad, why all the wars? I think if anything the huge numbers of wars, murders, and what you would probably consider to be anti-instinctual (is that a word?) actions would point to the fact that we do not always follow this genetic morality. I think that "choice" is the right word because as humans we can choose to be less than human, we can reject these principles and do things like murder. What we conceptualize as "good" and "evil" does shift throughout history, but is this evidence in itself that what is "good" and what is "evil" changes? (I assume that as an atheist, you believe that good and evil exist only as human mental constructs and therefore do change with whichever people exist, but I don't know. I think that this theory of morality has serious flaws in that it points to there being no reason other than self-interest to be moral.)

If we can think rationally and then choose to be less than human, then we can fall from our humanity.

Well if humans are entirely a result of their genetics and society, as you state, then humans do get their "evil" traits from their ancestors.  We could also say that God allows humans to choose good and evil and have their lives mean something. I do not know what the punishment of seeing good and evil is. It is the same choice that lets people turn towards God that allows them to turn away from Him. Plus, I know that there are parts of the Old Testament that do not seem rational, moral, etc. especially with respect to the actions that God takes.  However, if you look at the society that the writers of the stories lived in, then you can see part of why they conceptualized God the way they did. I think there is still truth that you can glean from the Genesis story, whether you choose to ignore these truths is your choice.

'm not exactly sure what you mean with the neuroplastic point, could you explain that more?

There is a whole body of research supporting the notion that personal ethics is the cumulative effect of life experience and societal codes,this is heavily influenced by neuroplasticity.

When a baby is born, his brain is an unconnected jumble of wires. There are so many neurons, about 1000 times the amount that an adult has. As he develops motor function and speech through repeated trial and error, the neurons start connecting with each other and different areas of the brain. And as neurons overlap and enmesh, the baser instincts separate from the ancient primitive limbic brain are burned deeper and deeper, literally, as they are enmeshed under thick tangles of neurons undergoing synaptogenesis synapse formation. This is the same way that a child learns language, motor skills, and morality.

So, do you base your morality off of the society that you live in? 

 To some degree it is quite instinctive. If you had been born in Saudi Arabia, you would undoubtably be a Muslim under pain of death, you would probably think nuking Israel was acceptable and that gouging out someone's eye as punishment is just (under Sharia, it is). However, as the memetic relationships become quite complex, whole sub-cultures tend to diverge. This depends on the freedom of a society. In a highly controlling Orwellian society like North Korea or Iran, this will not exist, but in Western democracies it will. It depends how you define society.

I imagine, as an atheist, you were brought up in an evironment that was not favorable to you becoming an atheist, but that you reasoned through your position to come to your beliefs. (Forgive me if you were raised an atheist.)

 I had the fortune to be born with complete freedom of religion, and I grew up in Hong Kong, where there is no social stigma attached to not believing in God, or believing in God. My family is of Jewish bloodline, but yes, in tracing my lineage I find my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents were all atheists.

I am in the middle of a debate about the same thing with someone else and this is what I wrote:

The social zeitgeist progress drives towards humanism, at least how I consider progress. What we actually see, thusly, is not that ethical codes are supplied, but rather become malleable. What this means is that in a society whose foundation is rationalism, humanism should logically follow because it is a logical system of metaphysical ethics. Therefore it does not command or "tell" someone anything. It merely encourages rational thought and respect for human beings. From this, a strong ethical foundation can be built by an individual without society "telling" him/her what to believe. That’s ethics. Morality is somewhat different, and is much more grounded in neurology and neuroplasticity than societal pressure. I feel we should carefully distinguish between the two.

 ow while morality cannot be derived completely from logic, are there not moral precepts that we think true and think about logically? Does that not seperate us from animals?

 Yes. Morality is partially grounded in instinct, partially in experience, and hopefully, partially in logic.

Murder has been considered wrong throughout human history? 

That was unclear. I meant that throughout the history of human civilization, unsanctioned murder was considered a criminal act, for obvious reasons that if it was not, society would certinaly descend into savage barbarism. Even if jurisprudence was ghastly and war was abound, within a social framework or memeplex, murder has always been considered criminal, even if the punishment for it was, well, death.

 I think if anything the huge numbers of wars, murders, and what you would probably consider to be anti-instinctual (is that a word?)

No, it's not a word LOL. Actually, murder is a human instinct. From the early rise of man, before societies when humans operated in kin like knit-packs and family groups, murder was a useful tool for extinguishing other clans with which you were in conflict. However, within a single clan, murder was held in deep contempt and the punishment for it was death. (This is highly instinctive because in genetics you have a very strong instinct to protect your genetic lineage, which includes your kin and your siblings.

Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, argues the same thing. He says that human society breaks free from evolutionary instinct because social codes adapt much faster than genes for survival.

 I think that "choice" is the right word because as humans we can choose to be less than human, we can reject these principles and do things like murder.

Instinctively, murder is not inhuman, that is societal. That was the observation I drew about "human history", namely that as soon as humans organized themselves into complex society, they enforced rules contradictory to their nature. That was what I meant. I'm sorry if it was unclear.

 What we conceptualize as "good" and "evil" does shift throughout history, but is this evidence in itself that what is "good" and what is "evil" changes? (I assume that as an atheist, you believe that good and evil exist only as human mental constructs and therefore do change with whichever people exist, but I don't know. I think that this theory of morality has serious flaws in that it points to there being no reason other than self-interest to be moral.)

It's not flawed. There is no reason to suppose that good and evil are any more than human constructs. Why is it flawed?

 If we can think rationally and then choose to be less than human, then we can fall from our humanity.

 That's more clear. However, I don't think that has anything to do with the fall story, because the fall story indicates that humans were originally perfect, which is clearly not true, and then they rejected God's law, again not true, and then he damned the whole race for all eternity, which is nonsense.

 Well if humans are entirely a result of their genetics and society, as you state, then humans do get their "evil" traits from their ancestors.

That's not very clear. And it doesn't link to the fall. The fall is about people being punished for what their ancestors did.

 We could also say that God allows humans to choose good and evil and have their lives mean something.

I don't follow the second part of the sentence.

  Plus, I know that there are parts of the Old Testament that do not seem rational, moral, etc. especially with respect to the actions that God takes.  However, if you look at the society that the writers of the stories lived in, then you can see part of why they conceptualized God the way they did.

Yes, I have read the torah, and found Yahweh to be the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. But all this proves is how much "good" and "evil" changes over time. In the time of the Old Testament, it was completely OK to obey a command to sacrifice a child under command, and for some reason this story is considered loving (I wonder how loving it is to cause such ghastly physcological trauma to a child), and to slaughter a large number of innocent people to prove a point (tenth plague) and to inflict terrible suffering on a good man to prove a point (Job) and to hand your daughter over for rape (Sodom and Gomorrah).

If a man followed the OT for morality today, he would be criminally insane.

 . I think there is still truth that you can glean from the Genesis story, whether you choose to ignore these truths is your choice.

Don't follow this. You're implying the truth is metaphorical, a fable with a lesson. You can only ignore a truth if it is tangible.