I’ve yet to get an atheist to say whether theism or solipsism is the more odious.
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Even those whose favorite word it has become? ; - )
I’m not too familiar with that, other than maybe how phenomenologists say that philosophy is an infinite task.
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For me, theism is much preferred over the use of solipsism in post-modernism. When someone thinks they have an out by saying, “Well, reality is whatever I say it is”, then discussion isn’t worth pursuing. If someone says they believe in a deity I just nod and am thankful that I live in a world where people can believe as they want.
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Ignorance is the assumption that no matter the absence of support (for natural creation of life), one continues to assume that it happened in that fashion. Ignorance is steadfastly refusing to accept alternatives to a hypothesis that fails repeatedly.
That’s stubbornness.
I don’t know how life started. No one knows how life started. That’s the state of ignorance we are starting from.
If someone states that life could not start through natural means then they bear the burden of proof to demonstrate why life could not start through natural means. Likewise for anyone else who proposes how life did or did not start.
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Solipsism is something that only a fool would seek to prove to another. As a possibility, it’s probably debatable.
You didn’t answer how you see it if you had to choose for yourself.
I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.
You spoke about it for what other people believe.
What reality would be more undesirable in your point of view?
A real world where people believed in deities would be preferable to living in a simulation where people believed in deities. That’s my preference.
What does this have to do with anything?
My God! It showed that a simple mixture of H2, NH3, CH4, and H2O subjected to electric discharges could result in the production of some aa’s. That is (almost) nothing in comparison to what constitutes the complexities of life. Equating the formation of a building block with the spontaneous formation of a living cell is profoundly ignorant. It’s like finding a grain of sand and assuming that a computer chip is not far behind…and must be able to assemble spontaneously.
I might add a quote from the esteemed Harold Urey himself:
“[A]ll of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.”
Indeed it is hard to imagine.
You are not answering the question, which goes back to my initial comment.
Talk about logical fallacies! You are saying that if one theory of two possibilities cannot be proven, then the alternative must be true. That is the most superficial form of logic one can use.
Exactly. A massive success. Before the Miller-Urey experiment there were many in the scientific community who stated that abiogenesis was impossible because complex biomolecules could only be produced by life. The experiment disproved this idea. Again, massive success.
Miller and Urey were not trying to create life in the experiment.
I am not part of that We. I don’t know how life started. I don’t have faith that life started naturally.
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That’s not logical. It has absolutely nothing to do with statistics. Here we deterministically are.
God done it isn’t reasonable or logical. You’re pushing the fallacy of incredulity.
Given the lack of any evidence on either side there is no default answer that we’re just stuck with. Maybe one of the traditional creation stories is correct or maybe the natural account is simply beyond our reach for the time being. But what we don’t yet understand doesn’t oblige any and everyone to double down on supernatural agency. Of course it can encourage those eager for that to be the answer to declare victory but it would require a failure of reason or of character to do so.
If there is never a general understanding of abiogenesis that is as compelling as there is for evolution now, there would never be sufficient reason for a well educated and honest person to conclude God must have done it. It would simply remain a mystery. Calling the mystery God isn’t on par with providing an explanation that relates the onset of life with everything else we know about our world. Categorizing origins as the strange and mysterious handiwork of God is merely raising the white flag of any search for a natural account. It would never be an adequate alternative.
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That happens. There are also those who will not consider what’s possible to begin with.
And by the way, it’s not encouraging when a PhD mathematician claims it’s logically possible to form an infinite set through successive addition. It was as if he or she thought that by asserting it strongly enough, it would make me go away.
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I wanted to be sure you didn’t miss the point that simulation theories with other people are not a close parallel to solipsism.
Solipsism might be compared to a dream or simulation you are having, and it’s one I have thought could be unconsciously caused by what it is to suffer being alone.
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On that we agree.
Boy, talk about illogical! So you think it logical that somehow storage molecules of nucleides formed from a soup/vent, then had the enzymes necessary to produce the many proteins necessary for life, and somehow a membrane that we have yet to see synthesized, even by a living cell. Now that’s logic, isn’t it?