My general thoughts/views

So Duncan; what are you general thoughts/views?

Well that’s a good question.  (If you can be bothered to read all this then I owe you a pint!)

I hope to either make this clear in the following post or leave you questioning your own existence.  And what I mean by that is I want you to think about what I’m saying, if only because I’m a little inebriated right now, I’ve been discussing these topics in depth and I’m not exceptionally good at summarising my thoughts into anything concise that people can digest.

Now let’s get to the point here.

I have been engaged in a discussion (a very engaging discussion I’ll have you know; hence the aforementioned engagement) about religion and philosophy and such*.

Anywho; the point is that some of my housemates an I (after pissing out the window and comparing with them the length and girth of my membrum virile) were talking in a general sense and we got onto the subject of religion and ultimately philosophy.  So now I’m going to give you my opinion on the whole matter

I’m not sure many of my peers are aware of this, but I think about philosophy in general pretty much all the time.  It’s basically the reason I study physics (that and the the inspiration of one Dr. Phil Plait AKA the bad astronomer [new book out soon ] AKA the president of the JREF).  Anyway, I think I’m behaving in my usual rambling way so I’ll attempt to get to the point.

The discussion concerned religion primarily.  I can’t think how the discussion began, but when drink is involved this is inevitably what the subject moves on to.  Anyway we discussed what we thought were the implications and teachings of many different religions.  Now here are my thoughts.  I’m an Atheist (check out the scarlet A on the blogroll on the right), I have been for a few years, but I haven’t always been.  I’ve been through a lot over the years and I’m still relatively young.  But at some point fairly recently I committed myself to the path of scientific discovery, critical thinking and so on.  Anyway, the point I’m so arduously trying to reach is that from a purely scientific perspective there is no reason to accept any faith whatsoever.  If i was raised as anything it was a christian, but i wouldn’t call myself one, nor would i say anyone in my immediate family belongs to that particular faith.  But I grew up in what was essentially a christian dominated society.  This had an affect on me.

When I was very young I can remember being taught (In school no less)  about the christian faith.  Now I was young and easily persuaded as one might imagine.  Therefore I believed pretty much everything I was being told.   Anyway, it was many years later that I began to think for myself.  I had been perfectly willing to accept whatever I was being told by an authority figure because I didn’t know any better.

So essentially what I’m trying to say is that I’ve rejected all kinds of religion based on a lack of evidence.  It’s essentially the Russel’s teapot argument.  All I’m saying is that there’s no proof of any god that I’m aware of and if there were, I’d sign up right now.  Basically the best position I can take as a scientist is to say “I don’t know, but since there is no evidence to back-up the original assertion, I must assume that the assertion is incorrect”.  In other words, if a scientist devises an experiment to test whether or not god exists.  His hypothesis is “god exists” his experiment sets out to provide evidence for this assertion.  If no evidence is found for the existence of god, the scientist must reject the hypothesis and accept the null hypothesis (ie god doesn’t exist).  Any argument which contradicts this idea of evidence and/or experimentation in unfalsifiable and cannot be accepted as proof of god’s existence.  This very roughly sums up the scientific method and is essentially my main argument for not belonging to any religion.  Of course, if the evidence were to show that it was all true after all then I’d sign up without hesitation.  And I suspect a lot of other doubters would do the same.

Assuming you’re still with me, this bring us neatly to the next conversation piece.  Do I exist?  Do you exist?  How can anyone know the answer to these questions?  Based on the current level of consciousness we are capable of achieving I would say we are not capable of answering these questions.  But I would also say that the questions themselves are irrelevant.  The question of whether or not I (or you) exist makes no demands of the real (ie testable) world.  Therefore whatever i perceive to be real (whether real or not) is real within my own conscious construct.  And since all I can possibly know exists within this construct, surely the best I can possibly do is to assume what i perceive as real to be so.  The only productive viewpoint I can take (whether in my own construct or in the actual real world [whatever that is]) is to assume that i exist and move on to more important matters.

In other words, to quote René Descartes “cogito ergo sum”… “I think therefore I am”.

*The discussion was so engaging I have actually created a new topic of philosophy on this blog! Although since it is usually relegated to ‘drunk talk’,  I doubt this topic will be utilised much at all.  Perhaps that is a reflection of my optimism in suggesting that I wont’ be drunk frequently enough to discuss these topics.  But i suspect there will be ample opportunity for this sort of thing.