Do You Believe In Anything Spiritual ?

[modeller]

I am an Atheist but I don't have anything that, I know of, in common with other Atheists . I know several non religionists who don't believe in any specific religion but nevertheless believe in the concept of a God.

[Khandro]

naomi; Exactly!

[naomi24]

... and the answer is ....?

[Khandro]

why!!!?

[naomi24]

That's not an answer.

[Khandro]

n. I don't think you are a moron, but what is it you don't understand about the question, "Why is there anything?"

[naomi24]

I understand the question, Khandro, but I assumed you were going to tell us the answer.

[Khandro]

That naomi, is an assumption too far, but it doesn't invalidate the question.

[Khandro]

Returning to the OP. This 30 minute programme on BBC Radio 4 extra on iPlayer - 'Great Lives' on Albert Einstein, (00:30 Fri. 3 June) is rather apposite, particularly his closing quotation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007728l

[naomi24]

Khandro, The question is unanswerable, and I don't think Einstein was asking 'Why?' anyway, but 'How'? To save everyone having to listen to the whole programme, I'll post the quote from him.

“The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.”

[Khandro]

n. Good of you to post it - how did you get it, memorise it?
//I don't think Einstein was asking 'Why?' anyway, but 'How'?//

I think you misunderstand; he was saying "why?", he said the most riveting (my word) thing to happen when he was a boy was being shown a compass by his father and he saw it indicated a deeper pattern in nature.

Like Newton asking - the 'outrageous' question no one had before; WHY do apples fall to the ground, why don't they go skywards? leading to his finding gravity.

[mibn2cweus]

The answer to the question "Why?" is implicit in any act of reason. It is in fact the capacity to reason that enables us to both ask and answer the question. Reason is the reason, for everything, apart from which all existence would remain meaningless, for it is with the very comprehension of meaning than anything, no less so the existence of a universe which gave rise to beings with the capacity to reason, becomes meaningful.

[naomi24]

Khandro, I didn’t memorise it. I memorised a bit of it and swiped the whole from the internet. No, Khandro, he wasn’t saying ‘Why?’ He was saying ‘How?’ He didn’t want to know why it’s all there – he wanted to know how it is all there – and Newton’s question ‘Why?’ equates to ‘How?’ too – and he answered it, so don’t confuse the two – even if it does suit you to do so.

[Khandro]

It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton's first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:


"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."

naomi, please stop arguing, he said to Stukely, "WHY" !!!

[Hypognosis]

But Newton was still, essentially contemplating the mechanics of gravity. In conventional Newtonian mechanics, objects transfer forces by making contact with one another. Friction makes moving things slow down and grind to a halt.

Here, with the apple, he observed both "action at a distance" and acceleration, where friction should be acting against the apples motion (it does, but air doesn't generate much friction, at low speeds).

Working out *how* the apple falls when there is no impetus on it (a person with a stick, knocking the branch, say) is (was) the puzzle.

In the end, Newton only managed to describe - quantify - gravity (with a side order of calculus). It took Einstein to come up with this warped space-time concept.

[Khandro]

Hypo; //Working out *how* the apple falls when there is no impetus on it (a person with a stick, knocking the branch, say) is (was) the puzzle.//

No, that wasn't the puzzle at all, he knew, as did everyone how it fell, it fell perpendicularly from high to the ground and if the branch had been above a well it would have kept on going.
How it left the tree was because it was ripe and the stem released it aided by the wind perhaps. How is basic stuff.

Please re-read Stukeley's direct quote above, - his question was, why?

This is my final submission on this topic.

[Hypognosis]

@Khandro

Your previous position, before this sidetrack, was "why… the universe?" I missed my opportunity to come back with "well, why not?"

Why does everything have to have a reason? Why won't you accept randomness, serendipity, sheer luck?

Einy said "God does not play dice with the universe". It was one of his suckier quotes and I still hate it. A brilliant mind but a God-botherer, all the same.

Probably why he's your appeal to authority of choice. Must be eight times, this year.

//This is my final submission on this topic.//

Thanks for the free hit.
:-P

[naomi24]

Khandro, //naomi, please stop arguing, he said to Stukely, "WHY" !!!//

If you don’t want to hear arguments that disagree with your own, don’t ask questions.

[beso]

Hypognosis//Einy said "God does not play dice with the universe". It was one of his suckier quotes and I still hate it. A brilliant mind but a God-botherer, all the same. //

Not really. He sometimes put stuff into a godly context but he was not really religious. Certainly not a "god botherer" as such since he did say, "The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve."

[Hypognosis]

Thanks, beso, that puts my mind more at ease.

I wonder what "personal god" means (or meant, at the time)? I thought "personal Jesus"es (plural?) was a late 20th century thing.

[idiosyncrasy]

Cloverjo//I've been to a spiritualist church, while I still vaguely believed in stuff like that. My time there convinced me it was all a load of bunkum. //

Agree wholeheartedly