philosophy, argumentSeveral people here have been asking for a proper response to (common) theist arguments. I wonder whether there are questions which cannot be handled properly even though the interlocutor is logical and sincerly interested in the discussion.
Not every question has a proper answer, right?
So what are the most difficult questions for atheists? I mean the questions which bring the least convincing answers (from the best atheist answers).
There are many questions a theist may ask or answers a theist may doubt that can be resoundingly answered, such as the age of our planet and how natural selection and evolution explains the origin of species.
However, there are plenty of questions whose answers are either unknown or whose answers are disturbing or distressing. Here are some of this flavor:
How/why does existence exist? Where did all the “stuff” in the universe come from? How did the universe transition from nothing into something, and what prompted it? What existed before the beginning of time?
How did organic material go from molecules to life? We understand the building blocks of life and can assemble molecules together in intricate ways, but (to my knowledge) we have been unable to build life from scratch in the laboratory. Yes, we can build up DNA synthetically and inject it into an existing cell and have it take off, but we do not know how to put together molecules to build a living cell in the first place.
If there is no God what is the purpose of life/why am I here/what will happen when I die? I don’t know how an atheist can answer these questions without making a theist squirm. No one likes to think that their existence is by happenstance, that there is no underlying purpose or reason for their existence, and that when they die that’s curtains, folks.
There are also questions whose answers are hard, if not impossible, to grasp by the human mind. We are hard-wired to think in terms familiar to us and that are important to our existence. Five goats, 100 grains of seed, three children, ten years ago, etc. Once you start talking about cosmic scales it’s difficult for even the most open and learned minds to comprehend. For example, if you were drawing our solar system to scale on a sheet of paper and made the planet Earth the size of the period here - . - you would need a sheet of paper nearly a mile long in order to capture the distance between Earth and Pluto. That just blows my mind… and that’s not even talking about distances between stars, or the distance from Earth to the center of the galaxy, or the distance between galaxies!
To be honest, I have yet to hear one, other than the God in the Gaps stuff. There are certainly holes in our scientific understanding of the universe, but they are closing at an ever increasing rate. I suppose at this point the biggest unsolved quazi-theological question would be “If the Universe has a beginning, how did it begin?” There are some serious hypothesizes on this matter, but there isn’t a definitive answer.
The next biggest would likely be the nature of consciousness. What is the process of consciousness? Can it be replicated or improved?
Once again, these aren’t problems for an atheistic world-view, as we do not claim to have all of the answers, but only believe that one day, we are very likely to know them.
Here’s my attempt: “If you were in an aeroplane about to crash, and everyone around you was calling out to God, would you join in?”
Related questions (that I first thought of) were: why do you believe what you do?” and “what is the core reason for your atheism?”
Any questions on the topic of metaphysics are very hard by the virtue of being impossible, really.
“Which quantum interpretation is right?” - well, that’s a meaningless question, they’re all equivalent interpretations. “But which one represents how our universe actually works?” - sorry, but we just can’t say; it’s fundamentally impossible.
So questions like “how is it that we exist”, or “what does it mean for us to exist” are very hard for atheists, because IMO they belong to metaphysics and are unanswerable.
While not often (ever?) used. Schrodinger’s Cat is a pretty difficulty argument for a “Maximal Observer” or at least “souls”.
At least one take on it is.
The other take is where science gets the idea that there are multiple universes, one for each and every quantum possibility.
Occam’s Razor can be used here to suggest that the simplest answer to the problem is that there is some kind of Maximal Observer. Not a billion-trillion-zillion alternate realities that are parallel to us.
It really takes a physicist to explain away this issue. And even some great scientists over state it. Most recently, Michio Kaku. (however I can’t seem to find a video of it, can anyone help?)
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