Atheist Discussion

Hello everyone,

I would love to put forward a theistic argument and I am looking for honest, intellectually sound rebuttals. Can you refute this argument logically? What are flaws in the argumentation? Which premises or conclusions do you find unconvincing and why? What alternative explanations, backed by evidence, can you propose?

Here goes the argument, bear with me by reading ALL OF IT before engaging, please:


Introduction: For most people, it is a given that love is not only real, but essential to human experience and existence. However, explaining why that is so is not very straightforward. How can love be explained and does that explanation point to theism or atheism?

ARGUMENT:
A) For most people, love (in all its forms) is the most important thing in the world
B) It's tricky to explain the existence and importance of love on naturalism
C) The Christian story clicks well with people's experiece of love as a powerful and important thing.
D) Therefore, the existence of love (by the likelyhood principle) supports Christian theism over atheistic naturalism.

Let me flesh this out a little bit: (You don't need to agree with Christian doctrine to grant Point C, but have a look to see if you think this point internally coherent on the super-hypothetical assumption that God exists, for argument's sake. Does this Christian description give a good context for the nature and importance of love as we perceive it in society and individually?

POINT C) Why it's not illogical for a Christian to say that love is real and that it is the most important thing:
- According to Christianity, God is love (1 John 4:7). Thus, God’s character would explain the nature of love: it is other-centered, self-giving, and serving as evidenced by the doctrine of the Trinity (three divine persons united in love).
-According to Christianity, humans exist to be loved and to love (1 John 4:16), which would explain why love feelsso meaningful.
-Christians believe love is eternal: the Trinity would show love to be prior to nature (there was love between Father, Son, Spirit before the universe began) and the doctrine of heaven would show that love does not end when people die. It goes on forever.
-Human sin would explain how love both points to God in its beaut when it's at its best, as well as how we fail at it.
-Love is the highest moral duty in the Bible (Mark 12:30-31) which would ground our human sense that love is an 'ought' (something we should be doing/living) as it would provide a law-giver who gives authority to the perceived moral law (or etihical principle) of love.

Let me flesh out the naturalistic position as well and forgive me if I got something wrong. Obviously these views don't apply to all atheists, but I'm trying to paint a view of naturalism/materliasm leaning on the work of Richard Dawkins, among others:

POINT B)
-Reductive materialism can explain love only as a chemical process. Why does it feel like it's so much more? There' no other chemical process we dream, write, make songs and movies, are willing to die for, etc. like love.
-If love is only an illusion to help us work together to ensure survival (Michael Ruse) then we can't really say that love is real, yet it is such a basic experience.
-Evolutionary biology casts love as the passing on of genes for the survival of the species. According to Richard Dawkins, romantic love is only an evolutionary illusion.
-Naturalism cannot truly account for altruism (selfless love) as it is not beneficial for survival
-Love doesn’t have any objective meaning, since naturalism can only explain subjective meaning. (Without God there is no grand narrative that gives purpose or direction to the universe. Instead the universe just is, and one day it will cease to be in the heat-death of the universe
-Since there is no intentionality in how nature evolves, we cannot say we are (as humans) made for love.
-What we experience as love is only a random byproduct of an unguided process.
-Love can only amount to an emergent property on materialism. It comes after nature. The end of the natural also means the end of love. Death ends all love. Only memory lives on, until the heat death of the universe, then nothing will remain
-Naturalism can only determine how loving/unloving behavior impacts survival, but it cannot explain the pain and suffering of corrupted love, since it cannot judge it as morally wrong, but only less conducive to survival.
-Naturalism is only descriptive, not prescriptive and it cannot  explain love as a moral duty beyond survival-conducive behavior. There is no love-law-giver and love has, thus, no authority.

TRYING TO REFUTE MYSELF:

-Could altrusim be explained the kinship or reciprocity principles, which show that even selfless love could be evolutuionary advantageous and, thus, don't need a divine grounding? Can we still call this behavior love if it turns out the be selfish (even if the benefits are only reaped later or indirectly)?

-Romantic and monogamous relationships are evolutionary advantageous and don't need a grounding in God, even though passing on genes would work better in polygamous or polyamorous contexts as Richard Dawkins attests.


Conclusion: For those who believe that love is most real, and most important, for those who have a notion that love provides uniquely appealing answers to existential questions (like why are we here? what is the meaning of life? why is love so special and so important?) the Argument from Love provides tentative reasons to believe in the Triune God, especially in contrast to its naturalistic alternatives.


Thanks for reading this through! Can you please include the word or emoji 'HEART' in your response, so that I know you have read through the entire thing (congrats on your endurance, haha) and I can, thus, take your response very seriously? Thanks!

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]A) For most people, love (in all its forms) is the most important thing in the world
B) It's tricky to explain the existence and importance of love on naturalism
C) The Christian story clicks well with people's experiece of love as a powerful and important thing.
D) Therefore, the existence of love (by the likelyhood principle) supports Christian theism over atheistic naturalism.

Unfortunately, you fail on every level. Before we go into details, please let me ask an important question: You are a sock of whom? I am asking because there was someone recently whose style matches yours surprisingly well.

A) For some its not
B) Tricky or not, if it can be explained by naturalism, we are done. You want to claim "it never will be..."?...well thats a logical fallacy
C) It does not matter what "clicks well" with peoples experience. What matters if your claims can either be factually demonstrated (if your agument is sound) or if your argument is valid in structure, that means "it does not contain logical fallacies", which it does.
D) Your best argument (and i suppose you just gave us your best one) for the existence of your god, for an event that so far has never been confirmed, once is "likelihood"?????

What god are we talking about? The christian one? If so, why should likelihood be better than....anything in your scripture? Are you a theist because of likelihood or because of what you learned by scripture? If its the latter, why are you trying to convince others with other arguments than those that convinced yourself? Please tell me you arent a theist because of ....love.

I submit that for most people eating is the most important thing in the world.

Your first premise fails.

Welcome to the forum. Please introduce yourself here.

Thanks

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]Hello everyone,

I would love to put forward a theistic argument and I am looking for honest, intellectually sound rebuttals. Can you refute this argument logically? What are flaws in the argumentation? Which premises or conclusions do you find unconvincing and why? What alternative explanations, backed by evidence, can you propose?

Here goes the argument, bear with me by reading ALL OF IT before engaging, please:


Introduction: For most people, it is a given that love is not only real, but essential to human experience and existence. However, explaining why that is so is not very straightforward. How can love be explained and does that explanation point to theism or atheism?

ARGUMENT:
A) For most people, love (in all its forms) is the most important thing in the world

What is love!  (I had to)

People disagree about the importance, and particularly the relative importance, of love.  Between you and me it's true enough to accept as a starting premise.

Quote:B) It's tricky to explain the existence and importance of love on naturalism

I'm not sure what you mean by tricky - or that anything is trickier than explaining something in a supernatural way would be.  We know that the tide comes in and goes out because of a relationship between the earth and the moon - the behavior of large bodies of water under gravitational and rotational stress.  That's a natural explanation for the tides.  Try a supernatural explanation.  Love has similar explanations in a naturalist sense.  I see down below that you're at least aware that there is a natural explanation for love.  A complex biochemical reaction occurring in animals with higher level neural organization with clear survival benefits through natural and kin selection.  Now....try a supernatural explanation.

Quote:C) The Christian story clicks well with people's experiece of love as a powerful and important thing.

"Clicks well"?  Well, not to me...but more fundamentally, would it matter if it did?  Cutting straight to the heart of the matter, are you certain that the story "clicks well" insomuch as it does because it's true....or could it be that the story "clicks well" because we wrote it, in part, to narrativize our natural experience of love (among other things like projection, expectation, transactional, etc).  

Quote:D) Therefore, the existence of love (by the likelyhood principle) supports Christian theism over atheistic naturalism.

Even if we assumed every premise as written...and there's good reason not to, this is still a nonseq.  It can be simplified and that might make it easier to see at a glance.  

Love exists, love is not natural, therefore god exists.

Quote:Let me flesh this out a little bit: (You don't need to agree with Christian doctrine to grant Point C, but have a look to see if you think this point internally coherent on the super-hypothetical assumption that God exists, for argument's sake. Does this Christian description give a good context for the nature and importance of love as we perceive it in society and individually?

I suppose it serves as a lesson in love gone wrong?  A lost of things not to do or be.  I think that you're underestimating the need to accept christian doctrine, and a specifically permissive and loving christian doctrine, in order for this to even seem like it would matter to the conclusion.  Plenty of things "click well" with our varied and various experience of love, in all of it's forms.   If you saw a hateful god, would you then conclude that god (or love) did not exist?  Bluntly, is this assertion and it;s inference determinitive - or merely prejudicial?

Quote:POINT C) Why it's not illogical for a Christian to say that love is real and that it is the most important thing:
- According to Christianity, God is love (1 John 4:7). Thus, God’s character would explain the nature of love: it is other-centered, self-giving, and serving as evidenced by the doctrine of the Trinity (three divine persons united in love).
-According to Christianity, humans exist to be loved and to love (1 John 4:16), which would explain why love feelsso meaningful.
-Christians believe love is eternal: the Trinity would show love to be prior to nature (there was love between Father, Son, Spirit before the universe began) and the doctrine of heaven would show that love does not end when people die. It goes on forever.
-Human sin would explain how love both points to God in its beaut when it's at its best,  as well as how we fail at it.
-Love is the highest moral duty in the Bible (Mark 12:30-31) which would ground our human sense that love is an 'ought' (something we should be doing/living) as it would provide a law-giver who gives authority to the perceived moral law (or etihical principle) of love.

Let me flesh out the naturalistic position as well and forgive me if I got something wrong. Obviously these views don't apply to all atheists, but I'm trying to paint a view of naturalism/materliasm leaning on the work of Richard Dawkins, among others:

Do you think a christian needs to..or even does..practically, refer to any part of any scripture when they decide that love is real and important?  Or might they have the brute fact of their own lived experience?  Is the fact that someone else said something was important actually a reason to logically conclude that it's important in the first place?

Quote:POINT B)
-Reductive materialism can explain love only as a chemical process. Why does it feel like it's so much more? There' no other chemical process we dream, write, make songs and movies, are willing to die for, etc. like love.

Sure there are.  In the naturalist explanation all of the things we do any of that for are all..at the bottom of the well....chemical processes.

Quote:-If love is only an illusion to help us work together to ensure survival (Michael Ruse) then we can't really say that love is real, yet it is such a basic experience.

OFC we can.  Laying aside that I disagree with this notion..illusions are still real.  A magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat is not pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but they are exploiting the very real faults with our sense apparatus and creating that expereince in the natural world.

Quote:-Evolutionary biology casts love as the passing on of genes for the survival of the species. According to Richard Dawkins, romantic love is only an evolutionary illusion.

That's one of it's natural functions, sure. 

Quote:-Naturalism cannot truly account for altruism (selfless love) as it is not beneficial for survival

It absolutely can - though I have to point out that there's disagreement on whether there is such a thing as "true altruism".  The winning strategy for the prisoners dilemma is tit-for- tat with a cooperative opening.   

Quote:-Love doesn’t have any objective meaning, since naturalism can only explain subjective meaning. (Without God there is no grand narrative that gives purpose or direction to the universe. Instead the universe just is, and one day it will cease to be in the heat-death of the universe

So much to unpack here - these two assertions are downright pregnant, and very possibly false.

Quote:-Since there is no intentionality in how nature evolves, we cannot say we are (as humans) made for love.

In the same way that a puddle is made for the hole.  We seem intentional, though, don't we?  We can make ourselves more or less amenable to love and to being loved.  We can circumscribe love and determine when others conform to our expectations.  We say things like "fall in love" alot - which works well enough for a meet cute..but what about the lifetime after?  Are we not building love, and building a community of love?

Quote:-What we experience as love is only a random byproduct of an unguided process.

Selection is not random.  

Quote:-Love can only amount to an emergent property on materialism. It comes after nature. The end of the natural also means the end of love. Death ends all love. Only memory lives on, until the heat death of the universe, then nothing will remain

It does seem like there would be no love absent creatures capable of it.  Nature doesn't have to end.  If this world were covered with nothing but ants there would be tons of nature and no love.  Confounding matters...some people think ants are lovable....so we have a world full of nature, lacking love, but chock full of potential for love.

Quote:-Naturalism can only determine how loving/unloving behavior impacts survival, but it cannot explain the pain and suffering of corrupted love, since it cannot judge it as morally wrong, but only less conducive to survival.

More pregnant assertions.  This one is certainly false.  Nature can absolutely judge, no matter what the metaethical reality may be..and we know this..because we do judge.

Quote:-Naturalism is only descriptive, not prescriptive and it cannot  explain love as a moral duty beyond survival-conducive behavior. There is no love-law-giver and love has, thus, no authority.

This would only matter if the only real and/or valid morality makers were not facts of a matter..like whether or not love actually existed...but..instead, some subjective deontology, and only one subjects subjective deontology.

...and now...try a supernatural explanation for any of that.  Are any of these questions determinitive?  I disagree with you, strongly, on what naturalism can explain...and also about what love is - but suppose that nature couldn't explain any of it.  And suppose it was all an illusion?  What's the kicker here?  That if this were true..it would be bad.  That's an appeal to negative consequences.  Sometimes bad things™ are true.

Quote:TRYING TO REFUTE MYSELF:

-Could altrusim be explained the kinship or reciprocity principles, which show that even selfless love could be evolutuionary advantageous and, thus, don't need a divine grounding? Can we still call this behavior love if it turns out the be selfish (even if the benefits are only reaped later or indirectly)?

-Romantic and monogamous relationships are evolutionary advantageous and don't need a grounding in God, even though passing on genes would work better in polygamous or polyamorous contexts as Richard Dawkins attests.

You might want to ask yourself why you think the choices are "natural grounding" and "divine grounding" to begin with.  Are these the only categories and are these things different things and are these things all amenable to investigation by just one or the other of these categories?  

For example..if..as you repeatedly insist, love is purely subjective -and- a god existed that created us all and blah blah blah..then the reason that love is important boils down to a subjective deontology. However, we don't need gods for subjective deontologies, and subjectively speaking, every subjective deontology is as true as any other - even directly antithetical ones. No subjective deontology has any grounding in reality, none of it is "real" in the only sense that could distinguish between them. The question of whether or not love is important..in subjective metaphysics with or without a god is yes and no, at the same time, and trivially so.

Just food for thought. I personally think that we live in a world with subjective and objective content, love straddles them, and to the extent that gods exist and have delivered a subjective deontology and it's accurately reflected in theistic beliefs...that gods opinion on this and every other matter can be (and often is) utterly wrong. Both as a matter of fact, and morally speaking, supposing there's a difference.

Quote:Conclusion: For those who believe that love is most real, and most important, for those who have a notion that love provides uniquely appealing answers to existential questions (like why are we here? what is the meaning of life? why is love so special and so important?) the Argument from Love provides tentative reasons to believe in the Triune God, especially in contrast to its naturalistic alternatives.


Thanks for reading this through! Can you please include the word or emoji 'HEART' in your response, so that I know you have read through the entire thing (congrats on your endurance, haha) and I can, thus, take your response very seriously? Thanks!

Now it's not just a god, but a triune god.  I must have missed the importance of the number three in all of that.

I don't think you gave a fair shake to "naturalistic alternatives" - and I don't think it even makes sense to call them alternatives until you provide some...any...god explanation whatsoever.  Worse, you've got a nonseq on your hands.  No amount of quibbling about the content of the assertions can fix that.

I smell a sock

There is too much wrong here for me to detail unless you want to pay an hourly rate for tutelage.

However I will make a couple of quick comments.

1. That you are incredulous as to whether nature can explain love is not an argument. You repeatedly conflate what we want (love) with what nature wants (fitness). It's entirely possible that we have evolved to want things that increase fitness. An example is fatty foods. Prior to civilization, acquiring fatty foods increased our fitness because they provided more calories and thus could sustain us longer. Thus those individuals who preferred fatty foods had an edge in terms of survival. Thus the desire for fatty foods was selected for because it increased survival. The story with love is much the same. Homo sapiens sapiens gives birth to young that are not able to survive on their own at birth and require a long period of raising and shepherding them before they are ready to live independently. The longer the parents or caregivers cooperated to raise their offspring, the more successful the offspring would be once they left the nest. Thus the desire to stay together and care for offspring was selected for. The genes themselves do not do the selecting. They simply provide the raw material upon which selection operates. Thus your understanding of evolution is simply not accurate.

2. There are two steps on the Christian side of things. First, to describe a valuable thing that exists (love) and then attribute the existence of that desirable thing to God (an inference). I am required to acknowledge the first part as it's a fact that love exists and can be described. I have not been given any reason why I should be required to grant step two, attributing this good thing to God. That primitive worshippers of God attributed this good thing to God is not in and of itself a reason why I should do likewise. And there's nothing remarkable about them attributing the good thing to God as it need not be true for them to claim it, and attributing the good to God is pretty natural, whether or not God exists. For example, most people would say that bacon is a good thing. If I attribute the existence of bacon to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while I'm sure that you'll acknowledge the existence of bacon, you won't necessarily accede to my attributing it to my favorite god.

3. Other religions provide alternative accounts of love and your argument is completely silent on them. For example, as a secular Hindu, I see Bhakti yoga, the path of loving the godhead, as a legitimate and proven path for acquiring Krishna consciousness and ultimately moksa. Thus there is an extremely practical and divine aspect t to love which has nothing whatsoever to do with Christian explanations of love. You appear to have concentrated upon naturalism because you have mistaken atheism as requiring a belief in materialism, but there is nothing about atheism that requires such, and in focusing on what is essentially a mistake, you've ignored all the other religions and cultures that offer their own explanations for the existence of love. This is an example of the misapplication of the law of the excluded middle, namely in only considering two potential explanations when more than two explanations exist. This alone is enough to render your argument invalid and thus is fatal to your conclusion.

I HEART SHEEP.

-as commentary - consider all of the fronts this line of argumentation opens up if/when you decide to try to repair the argument. You may want to save yourself the trouble. We see the confusion, insinuation, or conflation throughout with the idea that things which have no natural explanation (or, allegedly, anyway) being illusory. Not real. Are we sure that a person who believes in a supernatural god wants to make too much noise with such assertions?

If god has no natural explanation- does that make god illusory? If god is not natural, does that mean god is not real?

The same gaps open up in appeals to consequence. If god being real would be bad...should we, then, believe the converse? That god does not exist?

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]Hello everyone,

...

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Here goes the argument, bear with me by reading ALL OF IT before engaging, please:

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I don't love you enough to bother. I don't even love you enough to tell you to go fuck yourself.

I don't know what you said after your title. But I do know this:

There is no HATE like christian love.

and:

For me to believe in god, I would have to forget everything I know.

There.

Now,

take that an... shove it up your ass.

There.

-- I love you.

(09-10-2024, 04:28 PM)Rhythmcs Wrote: [ -> ]

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]ARGUMENT:
A) For most people, love (in all its forms) is the most important thing in the world

What is love!  (I had to)

Jesus, don' hurt me.... Don' hurt me.... No mo'.......

Point A is opinion and unsupported, I didn't need to read further.

G'day PleaseProveMeWrong, and welcome to the forum.         

I'm a lifelong atheist, and have been in and out of
love numerous times over those decades, and the
notion of a mythical supernatural entity somehow
affecting or failing to affect that state of mind is,
to put it simply, absurd.

Unfortunately, everything is wrong with your contention,
and I don't have the time or inclination to contest the
various claims you've made.  Additionally, you've failed
to give us your definition of the word "god" that you've
used several times.  So... what is it?

I'm an ignostic, so God or gods have—literally—no meaning
to me as definable terms.  They're nothing more than words
I've seen countless times in the Abrahamic bible, the Quran,
the Tanakh, or the Vedas et al.

Your principle tenet that "For most people, love is the most
important thing in the world" is of course immediately without
any viable evidence.  There are millions of people the world
over that don't or never have experienced the emotion we call
love.

There's also clinical condition known as alexithymia, or
emotional blindness, which is a neuropsychological phenomenon
characterised by significant challenges in recognising, expressing,
sourcing, and describing one's emotions.  Alexithymia occurs in
approximately 10% of the general population.
 —[Taylor GJ, Bagby RM, Parker JD, 1997.]

Incidentally, you need to know right from the start that there is
absolutely NO point, and no worth, in citing biblical scripture in order
to support any or all claims you make on these forums.

(09-10-2024, 05:21 PM)AutisticWill Wrote: [ -> ]

(09-10-2024, 04:28 PM)Rhythmcs Wrote: [ -> ]What is love!  (I had to)

Jesus, don' hurt me.... Don' hurt me.... No mo'.......

You guys do know its a german production, yes?

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]Hello everyone,

I would love to put forward a theistic argument and I am looking for honest, intellectually sound rebuttals. Can you refute this argument logically? What are flaws in the argumentation? Which premises or conclusions do you find unconvincing and why? What alternative explanations, backed by evidence, can you propose?

Here goes the argument, bear with me by reading ALL OF IT before engaging, please:


Introduction: For most people, it is a given that love is not only real, but essential to human experience and existence. However, explaining why that is so is not very straightforward. How can love be explained and does that explanation point to theism or atheism?

Going off of context, I take your meaning of the words theism and atheism here to be, respectively, the proposition that in fact at least one god exists versus the proposition that in fact no god exists.  Be warned that there's a semantic minefield near here, because when people categorize themselves as theists or atheists it is usually along similar but significantly different definitions: the state of being convinced that at least one god exists versus the state of not being convinced that at least one god exists.  I'll play along with what I think your meaning to be when it comes to abstract propositions, but please try not to characterize the positions that this or that person actually holds based on whether they call themselves a theist or atheist until you actually check.

Also, I'd suggest reducing your expectations here in two different ways.  First, allow the possibility that an explanation of love would not be indicative of one over the other, instead fitting in with both scenarios just as easily.  Second, allow for the possibility that a full naturalistic explanation might not yet be fully within our grasp, nor may it be within our grasp for a very long time if ever, and that it not being within our grasp wouldn't point specifically towards theism.  Not doing so is the God of the Gaps fallacy, which is responsible for the mistake (to list one of many, many examples of this sort of error) that Christendom made regarding astronomy.  It took centuries for humanity to explain the movement of the planets (including sun and moon, which were classed as planets at the time) in naturalistic terms, and that extended but ultimately temporary ignorance was taken by Christian theology as proof that God existed and was ordering the movement of the celestial bodies as a direct act of divine will.  Motions of the planets became deliberate signs from God meant as signals to humanity, and each sunrise was seen as a direct miracle of divine providence.  When more scientifically-minded people (many of whom were also Christians) began putting together a less supernatural explanation, it was seen as a direct attack on Christianity.  Cue people being burnt at the stake.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]ARGUMENT:
A) For most people, love (in all its forms) is the most important thing in the world
B) It's tricky to explain the existence and importance of love on naturalism
C) The Christian story clicks well with people's experiece of love as a powerful and important thing.
D) Therefore, the existence of love (by the likelyhood principle) supports Christian theism over atheistic naturalism.

Is this the likelihood principle you're referring to?  If not, then what is?  If so, you're going to have to do a lot of statistical legwork to even define terms clearly enough to employ it, and also a lot of rhetorical legwork with technical mathematical jargon to argue that it points in the direction you'd like.  Even if you could accomplish this, most audiences won't be able to follow it.

Also, we now have, instead of the alternatives of the abstract propositions of theism and atheism, specifically Christian theism vs atheistic naturalism.  This is no longer a dichotomy.  This substitution calls to mind the sort of rhetorical sleight of hand that I've come to associate with the most dishonest of religious apologists.  (After a moment's thought, I'll revise that to a second-tier dishonesty.  Still very bad, but some religious apologists go so far beyond this that a new category of awful has to be defined just for them.)  I'll give you time to expand upon this, but be warned that some very big red flags just went up.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]Let me flesh this out a little bit: (You don't need to agree with Christian doctrine to grant Point C, but have a look to see if you think this point internally coherent on the super-hypothetical assumption that God exists, for argument's sake. Does this Christian description give a good context for the nature and importance of love as we perceive it in society and individually?

POINT C) Why it's not illogical for a Christian to say that love is real and that it is the most important thing:
- According to Christianity, God is love (1 John 4:7). Thus, God’s character would explain the nature of love: it is other-centered, self-giving, and serving as evidenced by the doctrine of the Trinity (three divine persons united in love).
-According to Christianity, humans exist to be loved and to love (1 John 4:16), which would explain why love feelsso meaningful.
-Christians believe love is eternal: the Trinity would show love to be prior to nature (there was love between Father, Son, Spirit before the universe began) and the doctrine of heaven would show that love does not end when people die. It goes on forever.
-Human sin would explain how love both points to God in its beaut when it's at its best,  as well as how we fail at it.
-Love is the highest moral duty in the Bible (Mark 12:30-31) which would ground our human sense that love is an 'ought' (something we should be doing/living) as it would provide a law-giver who gives authority to the perceived moral law (or etihical principle) of love.

Out of charity, I will for the sake of argument temporarily grant you that Christianity meshes fairly comfortably with the experience of love.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]Let me flesh out the naturalistic position as well and forgive me if I got something wrong. Obviously these views don't apply to all atheists, but I'm trying to paint a view of naturalism/materliasm leaning on the work of Richard Dawkins, among others:

Not knowing which others you're leaning on, and not having made anything like an extensive study of Dawkins (I read only one book of his, something like 15 years ago), I likely can't comment upon whether you are making an accurate representation of what those individuals believe.  But I will comment on whether it is an accurate representation of naturalistic (and now we're roping materialism into this somehow?) models explaining the emotion of love.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]POINT B)
-Reductive materialism can explain love only as a chemical process. Why does it feel like it's so much more? There' no other chemical process we dream, write, make songs and movies, are willing to die for, etc. like love.

There's also electrical elements in the neurology.  You're being sloppy in your descriptions here. But that doesn't affect your main point, so I'll move on.

In what way does it feel like more than a chemical (and electrical, and probably some other things I don't know about because I haven't studied neuroscience) process?  By what referant?  On what basis are you implying that x level of feeling is what we'd expect from a merely... dammit, I need a different word than chemical now.  Natural, let's go with that.  On what basis are you implying that x level of feeling is what we can expect from a merely natural process, and anything beyond that must be supernatural?

I'd point out that some of the most intense emotional experiences come from drugs, whether alcohol or heroin or LSD or others.  (Disclaimer:  I've led a very boring life and I have no direct experience with these.  I also have not directly experienced anyone else's emotions.  In both cases I have to go off of the reports of others.)  LSD in particular is described as producing experiences that feel outright spiritual.  It is produced in chemistry labs (even if they're often of the disreputable sort) and is, in fact, a chemical.  On what basis would I assume that powerful emotions require something more than natural elements?

Also, you're identifying that the most frequent subject of art (and mathematically speaking there would have to be a most-frequent, unless there was a tie), pointing out that nothing else is as frequently the subject of art as it (hence, the most frequent), and... then demanding a supernatural explanation for that?  I don't follow.  If you're just emphasizing the point that the feeling of love is important to us, that's fine, but you seem to be taking it further.  Why does most-frequent have to equate with supernatural?

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-If love is only an illusion to help us work together to ensure survival (Michael Ruse) then we can't really say that love is real, yet it is such a basic experience.

I'm not familiar with the works of Michael Ruse, so I can't comment on how well you're representing him.  But I would dispute the characterization of love as an illusion being representative of naturalistic thinking.  Love is an experience.  It might be entirely internal to a mind, the way that we'd expect any thought or emotion to be.  How does that make it illusory?  It's not like a delusion or a mirage, where some flaw in our minds or perceptions leads to us constructing mental model of the outside world which vastly diverges from reality.  Love isn't a mental model of the outside world at all.  I'm... really not getting what you're getting at with this love-isn't-real thing.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-Evolutionary biology casts love as the passing on of genes for the survival of the species. According to Richard Dawkins, romantic love is only an evolutionary illusion.

Our minds are shaped by evolution (which, yes, is governed by survival pressures) into things which have the capacity and predilection for love.  That doesn't make the love unreal, any more than our bones having the capacity and predilection to produce red blood cells make the blood they produce unreal.  But that doesn't mean that love, or blood, must be something inexplicable outside of naturalism.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-Naturalism cannot truly account for altruism (selfless love) as it is not beneficial for survival

Yes, it definitely can, if in no other way than it can account for moths flying towards flames.

Moths have an impulse to travel towards light (usually moonlight) in a way that is, most of the time, beneficial to survival of the genes.  Sometimes, when the moth encounters firelight instead of moonlight, that impulse does not benefit survival.  Taken on average, the impulse provides a net benefit, hence why it is evolutionarily favored.

Similarly, the impulse towards helping people around us could be explained as something which, on net, tends to improve our genetic survival.  Humans are a communal species, whether those communities are tiny tribes or vast empires, and we are generally dependent upon the humans around us for our own survival and the survival of our progeny.  The impulse to help others around us can in this way, even at the cost of our own lives, can carry a survival advantage for our genes, even if in some particular instances it doesn't work out that way.  So long as the impulse tends to on net benefit the survival of the genes it will be evolutionary favored.

There are more ways to account for it than the moth-and-flames model, and many of them can be true simultaneously, but the moth-and-flame model alone suffices as an explanation.

... also, even if you could show that the evolutionary model failed to explain how love works, that wouldn't automatically make a god the explanation.  Your side doesn't get the privilege of being right by default.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-Love doesn’t have any objective meaning, since naturalism can only explain subjective meaning. (Without God there is no grand narrative that gives purpose or direction to the universe. Instead the universe just is, and one day it will cease to be in the heat-death of the universe

You're giving me a thousand tiny irrelevant errors to quibble about and I shouldn't take the bait but.... GRAH!  Heat-death wouldn't be the end of the universe, any more than the battery dying in your phone would be the end of your phone.  There, I said it, now on to the relevant stuff.

No, love wouldn't provide objective meaning.  Why would it?  Emotions like love are the sort of thing we usually equate with subjectivity.

In what way would love not having objective meaning imply that a god must exist?  How are those two logically connected at all?

Also, why would we think objective meaning existed?  If we want that, and it's not there, then the universe isn't exactly as we'd wish it to be.  In another startling, breaking story: fire is hot.  Can you demonstrate the actual existence of objective meaning?  If not, why rest an argument upon that premise?

Also, the universe's purpose being defined in terms of the intentions and values and goals of a single subject, even a divine one, would by the definition of the words be subjective rather than objective.  The purpose wouldn't be innate within the object itself (in this case the universe), but instead be a feature of how some subject (in this case God) viewed it.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-Since there is no intentionality in how nature evolves, we cannot say we are (as humans) made for love.

Not in the sense of someone specifically designing us for that particular purpose, no, we couldn't say it.

... well, okay, you could, but it wouldn't be factually correct to say it.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-What we experience as love is only a random byproduct of an unguided process.
-Love can only amount to an emergent property on materialism. It comes after nature. The end of the natural also means the end of love. Death ends all love. Only memory lives on, until the heat death of the universe, then nothing will remain

So?  Love is what it is.  Why should its origins matter more than what it is?  Why should we value how it came to be more than we value the fact that it exists?  And why should we expect love to still be around if everyone who might be capable of feeling love is dead?

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-Naturalism can only determine how loving/unloving behavior impacts survival, but it cannot explain the pain and suffering of corrupted love, since it cannot judge it as morally wrong, but only less conducive to survival.
-Naturalism is only descriptive, not prescriptive and it cannot  explain love as a moral duty beyond survival-conducive behavior. There is no love-law-giver and love has, thus, no authority.

And now you're trying to cast love as a moral standard?

.... and resting it on a premise that morality is authority-based?

What?

... okay, you haven't actually presented a case for that and so I can't respond to it.  I'll just give you feedback for its place in your overall argument.  Roping the moral argument into this would require a whole lot of legwork to establish, so much so that it makes no sense to tack it on at the tail end of an already-long argument.  Split it off into its discussion to have at a later date.  (Just don't start another thread on it for, say, a week.  Forum convention favors focusing on one topic at a time, and rapid-firing a bunch of threads off in a short span of time can get you banned for spamming.)

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]TRYING TO REFUTE MYSELF:

-Could altrusim be explained the kinship or reciprocity principles, which show that even selfless love could be evolutuionary advantageous and, thus, don't need a divine grounding? Can we still call this behavior love if it turns out the be selfish (even if the benefits are only reaped later or indirectly)?

Mostly addressed this already, but if you're going to insist that altruism is something that can't unintentionally come back as a genetic survival benefit at a later date, you're setting the bar very high to demonstrate that any examples of that sort of altruism exist, and you need examples of it for the argument to work.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]-Romantic and monogamous relationships are evolutionary advantageous and don't need a grounding in God, even though passing on genes would work better in polygamous or polyamorous contexts as Richard Dawkins attests.

I won't touch on polyamory.  But for polygamy... Work better for whom?  Not for the women involved, whose children would on average have fewer providers or less-focused providers and thus poorer odds of survival.  Not for the majority of males, who wouldn't get to pass their genes on at all.  In any event, we don't expect the perfect adaptation to the challenge of genetic survival from evolution.  Just a workable one.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]Conclusion: For those who believe that love is most real, and most important, for those who have a notion that love provides uniquely appealing answers to existential questions (like why are we here? what is the meaning of life? why is love so special and so important?) the Argument from Love provides tentative reasons to believe in the Triune God, especially in contrast to its naturalistic alternatives.

Um.... no?  How do any of the things you've been trying to say coalesce together into this conclusion?

Okay, we've reached the end of your argument.  That temporary charity in which I granted you that valuing love meshed well with Christian theism is now hereby revoked.

You've been arguing in terms of a fairly abstract creator-god who somehow bestowed meaning and purpose into the universe and our emotions.  But let's look at the god of Christian theism, specifically.  This god, we are told...

* Cursed the entirety of humanity to an existence of suffering based entirely upon the (supposedly) bad actions of two individuals.  And don't give me that inherited sin argument, we're talking about an omnipotent god here.  Sin wouldn't pass from parent to child if God preferred that it didn't.
* Wiped out almost the entirety of humanity in a vast flood (and drowning is an extremely painful way to die) in a temper tantrum over some vaguely defined wickedness.
* Among many other plagues upon the entire nation, killed every firstborn child of Egypt for the disobedience of a single ruler... a ruler whose heart God hardened so as to perpetuate that disobedience longer than it otherwise would have continued.
* Set the Israelites upon genocidal rampage after genocidal rampage, putting men, women, and children to the sword for no crime other than being part of the wrong nation.
* Inflicted several days of suffering, and ultimately death, upon the baby of a king as punishment for that king's adultery and betrayal of the woman's husband.
* Consigns to an eternity of indescribable suffering any person who does not believe that a fairly unusual tale of a particular individual being divine, dying, and resurrecting actually transpired.

This list is extremely abbreviated, as I'm sure my fellow forum-goers will happily expand upon.  But let's just examine one more point.

The highlight of this god's interactions with humanity, so we are told, is sending his son to live and die as a human as a blood sacrifice for the salvation of humanity.  But this is supposedly an omnipotent god.  He could have achieved the salvation of humanity with a figurative snap of his omnipotent fingers, WITHOUT his (supposedly) beloved son having to experience a premature, torturous, bloody death.

Now imagine that you're this God, and you're faced with this choice.  You need to see to the salvation of humanity.  Do you...

(A) Consign your beloved son to torture and execution and so save humanity, rather than snap your fingers and so save humanity, or...
(B) Snap your fingers and so save humanity, rather than consign your beloved son to torture and execution and so save humanity?

I can see an option C or D or E being in the mix.  But tell me in which possible scenario, assuming you actually loved your son, would you choose option A over option B?  John 3:16 shouldn't read "For God so loved the world".  It should read "For God so hated Jesus".

Is love consistent with the abstract proposition of the general notion of a god?  Maybe.

Is it consistent with Christian theism, specifically?  FUCK no.  If Christian theism says some things that do sound consistent with love, that's just an example of Christian theism being inconsistent.

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for reading this through! Can you please include the word or emoji 'HEART' in your response, so that I know you have read through the entire thing (congrats on your endurance, haha) and I can, thus, take your response very seriously? Thanks!

The heart is a glorified meat-pump.  It keeps our brains alive so that we can experience love, and the elements of the brain which govern its operations will tend to speed it up when we experience love.  Other than that, it has nothing to do with love at all.  You're equating the wrong organ with love.

(09-10-2024, 06:04 PM)SYZ Wrote: [ -> ]G'day PleaseProveMeWrong, and welcome to the forum.         

I'm a lifelong atheist, and have been in and out of
love numerous times over those decades, and the
notion of a mythical supernatural entity somehow
affecting or failing to affect that state of mind is,
to put it simply, absurd.

Unfortunately, everything is wrong with your contention,
and I don't have the time or inclination to contest the
various claims you've made.  Additionally, you've failed
to give us your definition of the word "god" that you've
used several times.  So... what is it?

I'm an ignostic, so God or gods have—literally—no meaning
to me as definable terms.  They're nothing more than words
I've seen countless times in the Abrahamic bible, the Quran,
the Tanakh, or the Vedas et al.

Your principle tenet that "For most people, love is the most
important thing in the world" is of course immediately without
any viable evidence.  There are millions of people the world
over that don't or never have experienced the emotion we call
love.

There's also clinical condition known as alexithymia, or
emotional blindness, which is a neuropsychological phenomenon
characterised by significant challenges in recognising, expressing,
sourcing, and describing one's emotions.  Alexithymia occurs in
approximately 10% of the general population.
 —[Taylor GJ, Bagby RM, Parker JD, 1997.]

Incidentally, you need to know right from the start that there is
absolutely NO point, and no worth, in citing biblical scripture in order
to support any or all claims you make on these forums.

I didn't read a word of this, and I know for a fact it is better than anything Xavier has to say.

Hi Xavier. Go fuck yourself. I love you.

Love you SYZed. Do something pleasant for yourself toniiiiiiiight  

(09-10-2024, 01:37 PM)PleaseProveMeWrong Wrote: [ -> ]B) It's tricky to explain the existence and importance of love on naturalism

What's tricky about it?  Seems like a pretty obvious evolutionary advantage in species where it exists.

(09-10-2024, 08:27 PM)AutisticWill Wrote: [ -> ]Love you SYZed. Do something pleasant for yourself toniiiiiiiight  

Hmmm... Toblerone chocolate sounds good! Like an entire 360 gram bar LOL.

(Or would God find this sinful ha ha?)   

(09-10-2024, 03:58 PM)Minimalist Wrote: [ -> ]I submit that for most people eating is the most important thing in the world.

Your first premise fails.

Breathing might carry a bit more urgency.  

Can banana prove god?

(09-10-2024, 09:37 PM)Edible crust Wrote: [ -> ]Can banana prove god?

Yes.

He can shove it up his ass, hit his prostate, and feel the love.



...



What are you people looking at me for?

I guess I don't ~mean~ to be so vulgar; I just have no patience with this bullshit. I gave Xavier the benefit of the credit the first time around; he didn't consume anything I gave him; he spammed the forum with his naked apologetics -- and it was not sexy.

Then again....

What if this new troll is NOT Xavier?

That would especially underscore just how much these people are not worth our time!

Now that this poster has been thoroughly spanked, will we hear from him again?

If so, Mr. Theist, which specific sect of Christianity are you involved with? What makes you think this was some slam dunk of an argument? Did you see it on a YouTube? Besides love, what other emotions are best explained by god…anger, frustration, sympathy, longing?

Have you considered all the hormones involved with our emotions? Estrogen, testosterone, oxytocin…

Finally, can you identify the exact difference between liking someone and loving them? Can you like someone but not love them or love someone but not like them? Is this also God’s doing?

(09-10-2024, 10:47 PM)pattylt Wrote: [ -> ]Now that this poster has been thoroughly spanked, will we hear from him again?

If so, Mr. Theist, which specific sect of Christianity are you involved with?  What makes you think this was some slam dunk of an argument?  Did you see it on a YouTube?  Besides love, what other emotions are best explained by god…anger, frustration, sympathy, longing?

Have you considered all the hormones involved with our emotions?  Estrogen, testosterone, oxytocin…

Finally, can you identify the exact difference between liking someone and loving them?  Can you like someone but not love them or love someone but not like them?  Is this also God’s doing?

That is MORE nuance than is in THE ENTIRE BIBLE -- canonical, non-canonical, heretical, apocrypha, Ethiopian recension, you name it. Book of Morman........ Jesus Christ. One RANDOM 21st century atheist makeing ONE RANDOM comment just blew away THE WHOLE FUCKING BIBLE.

     How sad, alas, in times, as these, are we;
     That Make-Corruption lasts,
     And Thoughtfulness, perishing, cease-be.

I don't think this is Xavier.  The writing patterns feel off and the condescension isn't there.