i ve bcom fan of dr zakir naik irf president coz i think that his answers are scientifically correct but when he switchon to allah, i dont take him in much consideration.. my question iz, do u beleive in his talkz? may b not everythin but still plz put some light on his lectures,his talks..

Sorry, but I know close to nothing about Zakir Naik, so I can’t comment on his talks. If you (or another reader) would like to enlighten me, I’m happy to learn.

Don’t believe in a God, but I do not answer to any tag like Atheist. Religion is rather like a hobby or pasttime, except some of those who practise it are so ‘mad’ that they believe they should force their values on the rest of us. If you don’t follow a sport like football are you are an afootballist? No, simply not interested! So why do we who are not into a religion have to assume some badge, if we do then we elevate religious beliefs to a more credible position than they deserve.

And another along the same lines…

Don’t know what’s so special about not worrying about weird outlandish things that it has even a separate name? I noticed that the label “religious” is not preferred by them but they take it as some kind of default that needs no name because everybody is like that anyway. Sorry but the “default” position is childhood, parents, powerlessness. Not that.

Add, hopefully, scientific morality taught be grown-ups when necessary.

I have received many e-mails from people who think that the word “atheist” should be avoided (or should not exist) because they think that having a word for lack of belief grants special status to religious thought. My feeling is that since the area of thought we refer to as “religion” exists and is discussed, there is nothing wrong with having words to describe people’s position on religion.

It’s true that we don’t have a word for someone who is not interested in football, but being not interested in football isn’t a position generally considered within the context of a discussion of football. Atheism, on the other hand, is a specific philosophical position with respect to religion, perhaps in the same way that “skeptic” is a specific philosophical position with respect to the supernatural.

This may be a trivial point, but English has many words that refer to a negative state of belief or behavior. For example, apolitical, amoral, anarchy, and apathy.

I just browsed your site. Very funny stuff. As a Christian, I don’t think it does anyone any good to argue. I think we should let people make up their own minds about things. Great site.

I agree that people should be able to make up their own minds. At the same time, I think that intelligent discussion and the sharing of ideas is an important part of the groundwork necessary before one’s mind is made up.

Even so, I agree that arguing is generally pointless. Have a discussion or keep your peace.

I asked a straight forward question about free will and you’re your answer was Blah Blah Blah. If you don’t think that people have free will then why should anyone be responsible for their actions? If I hit you it’s because I had no choice so you can’t blame me.

Sure I can. In fact, in a purely deterministic universe I would have no choice but to blame you.

Looking at this less flippantly, if a car malfunctions, we don’t blame the car but we do go ahead and get it fixed. In a purely deterministic world, holding people responsible for their actions is simply a way to try to either fix a faulty thought process or protect the rest of society from someone who’s thought processes are harmful to others.

Consider the case of someone who has a neurological condition that causes him to lash out at anyone who blinks. Let’s say that we can run a brain scan and see that this is because the person has a physical disorder. Such a person can harm others through no choice of his own. Do we blame the person for causing harm? No, but we don’t just let him go around harming others, either. We seek medical treatment or, lacking that, find ways to isolate the individual so he cannot do harm.

So, with this example in mind, we should be able to agree that we can ethically take action against someone who harms others whether or not they have free will.

You might argue that the person who inadvertently lashes out is not treated in the same way as someone who lashes out purposefully. That’s generally true, but in that case we are either trying to get someone to modify a thought process that they have conscious control over or (as in the previous case) isolating someone so he cannot do harm.

We can argue about what the word “blame” means, but in the end there is sufficient justification for punishing certain actions whether or not free will exists.

If atheism is true and everything is based on cause and effect then how can there be free will? For there to be free will there has to be a soul that isn’t based on natural actions.

Free will is an extremely difficult concept, in part because it is so hard to define. Generally, people will say that free will is the ability to make choices that are not determined by prior causes (or by an act of God, but I see no need to go there). But I’d say that, in practice, such definitions are really much vaguer than they appear.

If free will exists, then there must be a non-deterministic mechanism by which decisions are made. We’ll call this the soul. How would the soul make decisions? Its decisions aren’t random, so they much be the result of some non-random process. But how can there be a non-random process without cause and effect? If the soul is pure thought (whatever that might be), it still makes decisions based on various inputs and preferences, and it may well be that the same decision would always be arrived at given the same inputs and preferences. If the soul were truly able to make decisions without cause and effect, then I would assume that it could make completely random decisions if it so desired, and humans show a marked inability to do that.

Let’s look at this from another direction. Free will is, in a nutshell, the ability to act unpredictably. You would rather cross a bridge than jump off of it, but if you have free will you could jump off the bridge. Or could you? Do you really think it’s possible that you might decide to jump off a bridge for no reason whatsoever? If not, then the phrase “I could jump off the bridge” stops being helpful in the search for free will. What you are really saying is, “If I had a reason to, I could jump off this bridge.” But if you have a reason to jump off the bridge — even if it’s a dump reason — then you are making a decision under different circumstances than when you made the decision to cross the bridge.

In a nutshell, saying “I feel like crossing this bridge now, but if the situation were different I would jump off it” isn’t much an expression of free will.

So what do I think free will is?

At this point, I don’t think we know enough about how the human mind works to do more than make educated guesses. However, we do know many relevant facts:

1) We are self aware, but we are not completely self aware. That is, we do not have complete knowledge of our own workings (you can’t sense your glands working, for example).

2) Decision making is at least in part related to the brain. Damage to the brain can impact the decision-making process.

3) Human decision making is flawed. There are a number of documented “cognitive illusions” — mistakes in reasoning that pretty much everyone makes.

4) We may not be conscious of all of our motivations.

5) We are not in control of all of our actions. Even voluntary actions can become reflexes over time.

6) People sometimes lose control.

None of these make me confident that we are in any position to judge whether or not free will exists, and none of them seem to point toward a soul or any other non-material decision-making part of humanity.

But does it feel like we have free will? It sure does, but that doesn’t mean anything. Our ability to sense some of our own thoughts — our self awareness — gives us the ability to accomplish great things. But the fact that we are self aware does not imply that we know anything about how our mind works. For all we know, if we built a computer that had the power of a human brain it might think it was self aware and had free will even though — in theory, at least — we could sit down and calculate all of its decisions ahead of time.

Similarly, it’s possible that if there were a thousand duplicate universes you would make all the same decisions in every one of those universes, and in every one of those universes you’d think that you had free will because you could have chosen differently.

So, in a nutshell, if you want to prove something supernatural exists based on humans having free will, you’re going to have to define free will rigorously and prove that it exists first.

The prayer is a half-joke. I really said it and had a feeling, and then burped. If the man claimed that he did it, without duress, then we should use the death penalty. He wants to die, that much is obvious, or he is covering up for someone, which I consider duress if he did it for that person. I also examine my beliefs all of the time. In a sense. I wonder how we came to be, how matter came to be, how our specific primordial soup that engendered Earths life came to be. I have no doubt that there is no deity. All the “evidence” I have been shown compounds my belief. If there is one, then it sucks for me. How often do you update your blog? Some times you respond quickly, and other times it take forever for a response. Hope you have had a great year.

Thanks for the clarification. I think we are in agreement that, as the years go by, the evidence for the existence of deities isn’t getting any better.

I also agree with you that I sometimes take forever (as in months) to respond to correspondence. I get piles of it and it takes a long time to write thoughtful responses. I’ve changed the way this blog works so that even when I do big bursts of responses, they appear on the blog as a steady stream over time. I’m hoping this makes it easier for you and my other readers to keep up (and to keep interested). Let me know what you think.

I was reading a book on astronomical phsics, when reading a section about black holes and theoretical matter, i was hit with a much more reasonable creation theory then the big bang.Blackholes have a small area around them that has a force of gravity so great, i can basically, clone particles by ripping them appart (this is extreamly rare tough)

Lets assume all laws of physics that are in effect now have been in efect for all of time.

now at the beggining, which really shouldnt be called that, since it would have an intraceable point in time, due to a theory of mine that time is connected to matter…

anywho, there was a big vacume, a force an infinite amount larger than that around a black hole, that would create an amazing amount of…. “inverted gravity” lets call it, and this created 1 particle…. say gold, and due to differing “atmospherical” pressure, the next particle to be created was…. hydrogen, and so on, this continues till there is an amount of matter to of-set the absense “vacume” so basically, instead of the big bang, there was a big …. slide of particles.

few things my theory also bases on:
2nd law of thermodynamics
Black hole theoreticle physics
and the assumption were not living in something like the matrix

i would love to here a reply from you….and for me to actually state this arrgument to a thiest… ( yes i know, dont impose athiesm onto others, but i cant help but contradict)

also, you migt like to watch some Dr.who…

talk to you sometime …. in the future….or not….

In terms of black holes, you are talking about Hawking radiation, yes? If so, I think your characterization is a little inaccurate, but I think I understand what you are trying to say.

It’s hard for me to comment on your theory without a lot more information, but it seems like it ends up asking more questions than it answers. Your proposal seems very similar to some older theories of the universe in which a central “matter factory” is constantly churning out matter, the main difference being that your factory eventually shuts off.

The problem is that the universe doesn’t seem to show evidence for such an origin, but it does show a lot of evidence to support the theory of an initial explosion. I also don’t see how gold, for example, would be created by a gravity field such as the one you propose — gold is made of many particles, and it seems to me that such a field would produce only single particles. There is also the question of where this force went when it was done creating matter, and what specific chain of events caused it to stop creating.

I encourage you to keep working on your theory. Continue your research and see what questions can and cannot be answered. Even if you turn out to be incorrect, the investigation will be quite valuable!

Given that nobody thinks they are teaching their child ignorance, I can only conclude that the Titan believes that  it is outsiders who get to judge when ignorance is being taught to a child. Many atheists believe that all religion is the result of ignorance, so it seems that this paper is saying that teaching religion to children should be considered to be child abuse by some atheists.

I don’t think that’s a very supportable position. However, I did write to the paper to ask them to clarify. If I get a reply, I’ll share it with you.

Jesus is my savior

Thanks for sharing!

Hello. Iv’e been reading your site for a bit and I thought you might find this interesting:

“So to understand this question of death, we must be rid of fear which invents the various theories of afterlife or immortality or reincarnation. So we say, those in the East say, that there is reincarnation, there is a rebirth, a constant renewal going on and on and on-the soul, the so-called soul. Now please listen carefully. Is there such a thing? We like to think there is such a thing, because it gives us pleasure, because that is something which we have set beyond thought, beyond words, beyond; it is something eternal, spiritual, that can never die, and so thought clings to it. But is there such a thing, as a soul, which is something beyond time, something beyond thought, something which is not invented by man, something which is beyond the nature of man, something which is not put together by the cunning mind? Because the mind sees such enormous uncertainty, confusion, nothing permanent in life-nothing. Your relationship to your wife, your husband, your job-nothing is permanent. And so the mind invents a something which is permanent, which it calls the soul. But since the mind can think about it, thought can think about it; as thought can think about it, it is still within the field of time-naturally. If I can think about something, it is part of my thought. And my thought is the result of time, of experience, of knowledge. So, the soul is still within the field of time… So the idea of a continuity of a soul which will be reborn over and over and over again has no meaning because it is the invention of a mind that is frightened, of a mind that wants, that seeks a duration through permanency, that wants certainty, because in that there is hope.”

His name is Jiddu Krishnamurti and he tends to go on about things such as reality, spirituality and especialy the mind.

He often has more questions than answers but it’s the kind of stuff that can occasionally make your mind rip it’s insides out and study it.

This quote does’nt do him full justice, but you get the drift…

That’s interesting stuff — I hadn’t read anything by this author before. I don’t know whether or not he(?) is correct about the origin of the concept of a soul, since I think the origin might be in the desire to explain what it is that makes flesh alive (and this would mesh with a wide variety of religious beliefs, including those that believe that non-humans have spirits). I also disagree with the reasoning used to reach his conclusion about the impossibility of reincarnation. Even so, this gives me much to think about. Thank you for sharing it with me!